What is the Theatre?

Christian Biet, Christophe Triau, Jason Allen-Paisant, Joanne Brueton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429793066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

What is the Theatre? is one of the most coherent and systematic descriptions and analyses of the theatre yet compiled. Theatre is, above all, spectacle. It is a fleeting performance, delivered by actors and intended for spectators. It is a work of the body, an exercise of voice and gesture addressed to an audience, most often in a specific location and with a unique setting. This entertainment event rests on the delivery of a thing promised and expected – a particular and unique performance witnessed by spectators who have come to the site of the performance for this very reason. To witness theatre is to take into account the performance, but it is also to take into account the printed text as readable object and a written proposition.

In this book, Christian Biet and Christophe Triau focus on the practical, theoretical and historical positions that the spectator and the reader have had in relation to the locations that they frequent and the texts that they handle. They adopt two approaches: analysing the spectacle in its theatrical and historical context in an attempt to seek out the principles and paradigms of approaching the theatre experience on one hand, and analysing the dramaturgy of a production in order to establish lines of interpretation and how to read, represent and stage a text, on the other. This approach allows us to better understand the ties that link those who participate in the theatre to the practitioners who create theatrical entertainment.

Part I

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GO TO THE THEATRE?

Theatrica refers to the science of games, of theatre, where it was the custom of the people to gather to play; not that the theatre was the only place where one played, but it was more renowned than others. In fact, games took place in the theatre, or underneath the porticos, in gymnasia, in amphitheatres, in arenas, during banquets, or even at shrines. At the theatre, action was recounted in verse, using characters, masks and figurines. Under the porticos, Choruses were directed and people danced. In gymnasia, wrestling was practised; in amphitheatres, there was running and horse racing. Boxers fought in the arenas. During banquets, music was made with rhythms, instruments and songs, and people played dice. At shrines, during rites, praises were sung to the gods. These games were considered legitimate activities because the natural warmth of the body thrives on well-balanced movement, and because joy refreshes the soul. But there is another reason that is even more plausible: given that people needed to gather from time to time to play, the Ancient Greeks sought out specific places for this purpose to prevent people from gathering in dubious places where illicit, even criminal acts, would be perpetrated.

(Hugues de Saint-Victor, 1096?–1141)¹

“Going to the theatre” is the social and repeated experience of being together with others, the experience of participating in a community and in its story, and the personal experience of being one among others, and therefore alone, with one’s own narrative. It is all these things at once. On the one hand, the spectator participates in an event peculiar to the society and to the link that this event creates among all its partners – in a sort of ceremony, therefore; on the other hand, she has taken the decision to be alone for an encounter with an Other, to isolate herself, to be face to face with this Other. As such, the performance she is witnessing (or in which she participates) is an expression of both the shared and the particular: it serves to reveal what she has in common with the world (humanity, inhumanity, passions, social behaviours, etc.) and to underscore her otherness (the fact that she is not the way she sees others represented, the fact that she thinks differently from others, both those on the stage and those around her, to be at a distance from them). This principle of simultaneity is essential, since it underscores what and who the spectator truly is: a social individual. And this principle engages her in several antithetical ways so that she must choose, or decide not to choose, one of them, based on what is being offered to her, where she is or the attitude that she decides to adopt.

Together with others or one among many?

Whether it is being together or alone among others, going to the theatre always means seeing what one does not ordinarily see in the world by oneself. This is due to arrangement proposed by others and in which one chooses to participate, or not. It means witnessing the unmasking of what is hidden, or imaginary, or what one does not normally see, due to a lack of time, means or special effort. It also means seeing someone separate themselves (for a moment or for the whole performance) from others, to be watched and listened to in a way that is different from what one might glean if this person had stayed among them. What the spectators then hear and see is a text that is acted or performed, that is organised in a specific manner distinct from the organisation, enunciation and speech of the day to day. It is a performance exhibited in a specific place and that establishes itself as essentially different from habitual modes of social action and speech.

Seeing theatre is therefore, literally, seeing something else from what one sees outside the theatre. But at the same time, these specificities must give the spectator the impression that they bear, more or less, a resemblance to the everyday life. In other words, the spectator must understand that they are similar to those who, nonetheless, are clearly and irreducibly different from them. Seeing theatre is therefore seeing in another way what one sees outside the theatre, or what one sees about others and about oneself. Thus, what the theatre unveils, thanks to, or through, the work of others – generally, the practitioners – is a figurative idea of a world, of the world, or a “representation” of the world, or of what the world can be, that one will consider (or not consider) legitimate or accurate, and that one will question, by oneself or among other people. The theatre is also a portrayal of the self, a figurative proposition of what one is, and that must also be debated or validated during and after the “session”. Thus, the spectator has a normative expectation, while also expecting to be surprised by something: interested in seeing and hearing something, or something about someone or about themselves, which they ought not to have seen and that is perhaps not useful to have seen or heard. Finally, to go to the theatre is to escape the world and oneself in a spirit of entertainment, which allows for the creation of a space between the real world and that imaginary escape.

Thus, the person who goes to the theatre is one who simultaneously wishes to be joined to others, to be alone, to see the world as it is, to see the world as it is not ordinarily seen, to see both the resemblance and the difference between themselves and others, to see themselves as never before, to encounter both the expected and the surprising, and also to escape all of that, with (or without) the intention of entering a different world, which is substituted for the real world, for the self, for the session and for reality. All of that rests on a single, ephemeral event, which can be repeated, but never repeated and executed in an identical fashion, since at each performance (or at each representation) the conditions of action and reception change insofar as neither the audience, nor the acting, nor the layout of the location, nor the circumstances, can be strictly identical. Consequently, the practitioners and the audience are simultaneously aware that the performance has already taken place, but that it is new and living and thus different from the previous performance and from the next. We shall see further on that the position of reader is different, hybrid and that the reader is both in an imaginary scenic world of his own creation, as well as immersed in the act of reading, interpreting a text by simultaneously observing its physical structure and its layers of signification.

Theatre and performance

While the meaning of this expression “going to the theatre” has changed over time, and particularly over the last thirty years, we generally accept the idea that “going to the theatre” is an act that, in principle, consists of going to a place intended for this purpose, with a room and a stage, in a building that is conspicuously called a theatre. But, we also have to admit that it can also mean to go to a performance put on in the street, in a field of sunflowers (Gilgamesh, directed by Pascal Rambert in Avignon, 2001), in a quarry (The Mahabharata, directed by Peter Brook in Avignon, 1985), in a public square, in an abandoned hangar, in a kind of abandoned hotel (Kafka-Théâtre complet, by André Engel in Strasburg, 1979) or in any other space that was not designed specifically for any kind of performance. Indeed, theatre is first and foremost a place where one sees and hears bodies during a set amount of time, a place where bodies (the bodies of players, or rather of those being watched) make manifest to other bodies (the bodies of the watchers) words, discursive and physical signs. In this place, and in front of spectators who also are able to act, or who, indeed, can also be watched, the watched-players are in movement, speak, sing within a space constituting a system and that contains objects (a set, costumes, accessories) that themselves encapsulate a set of interactive relationships with all animate bodies present. This multiplicity of imbricated places and spaces is one intriguing aspect of the theatre. This present and this presence exert fascination and allow for the existence of a set of aesthetic, social, cognitive, sensorial and other practices and this is the complex organic mechanism that we seek to analyse here.

We shall therefore contend first of all with a present performance. Performance will thus denote the manifestation of a bodily action (gestures, voice, movement) in the framework of a specific place designed for observation. It is therefore in this specific place that the actor, or the performer, will play or carry out his practice, thanks to a set of conventions, which form the basis of the practice of both watched and watcher. We will thus take as point of departure Richard Schechner’s minimalist definition of performance,² which distinguishes being (the existence of a body or of a thing in itself) from doing (the activity of that thing and of that body that exists). We will also call upon the concept of performance as “showing doing” (that which makes this activity so visible, organised, valorised), whereas the study of the performing arts will be to explain the activity of “showing doing” itself. Performance, from this point of view, will be considered as the event, the ostensible artistic manifestation in which the act (or the gesture of execution), whatever it is, has value for itself for the duration of time dedicated to the social exercise of theatre, gives rise to a distinct aesthetic and axiological judgement, is determined by a specific action and is also linked to multiple practices, to differing statuses (actors, author, practitioner and audience) and differing stakes.

Therein lies the basic definition of the performance and the performer: not just doing, but showing what one does, placing oneself in a place that immediately invites the partners in this unique communicatory relationship to involve themselves in a specific system of interaction that consists, first and foremost, in watching and listening to the activities that one shows that one is doing. Consequently, performance does not necessarily imply that there is a role to play, a dramatic space to form, but that there simply is a present action offering itself as an object to be contemplated. In that regard, the performer can be an actor, as well as a dancer, a singer, a painter, a narrator, etc., who manifests a staged presence in a special framework, distinct from (and located in) the general framework of the session. The performer is thus there for what he is doing and the performance is there to exist as a watched event. And if we look away for a moment from the theatre as a genre with all its unique conventions, the performer could very well be a sportsman, a priest, a politician or any other body that shows itself to be acting in front of another body. As such, the domain of performance includes theatre as a particular genre and exceeds it. And because the genre and the conventions are socially and aesthetically recognised by the partners in the relationship, because the places and times of performances are clearly distinct, it is hard to confuse (or one tries not to confuse) the type of performance of a head of state, a pope or Zidane with that of an actor on a stage (even if one might find resemblances between them, depending on the way things are staged, the attitudes of audiences, or the intentions of different actors).

Thus, we distinguish the term “performance” and “perform” from “representation”, “actor” and “role”. Yet they are not opposed, nor do we seek to oppose them. Indeed, the representation of a role by an actor is a (Western) instantiation of performance. Our argument is, rather, that performance contains the possibility of representation. We might also add that while working in contemporary theatre is about assessing an event in which the performer is defined by the activity that he shows to those who watch him, working in classical theatre involves taking into account the printed text as well as its performance. By establishing another methodological paradigm, by replacing the study of the text with the study of the theatrical session (which, temporally and spatially, reframes the theatre’s performance as a function of its audience) and by substituting the “scientific” mode of observation of the object (the literary text) for an investigation into the relations between performance and text (which does not nullify the text but encapsulates it within a larger framework), we seem to be able to gain clarity. Additionally, one is able to better account for the theatre’s specificity historically speaking and to promote a dynamic dramaturgical approach to the contemporary staging of the theatre of the past. Indeed, if we speak of performance for the theatre that we witness in the twenty-first century, of theatricality, of bodies, of acting styles, of staging and of communication between audience, actors, the fiction represented and the text on which the whole dynamic often rests, it is perfectly legitimate to ask the same questions of the so-called “classic” texts with respect to the time when they were staged (and thus, also, with respect to the moment when they shall be staged again). Thus, it is by taking into account the session as a theatrical event, in other words the spectacle, the mimesis (which exists in relation to the real and not in servile imitation of it), the text and the material context of the spectacle (the practical production, the audiences, the reception and the physical architecture), that we shall find ourselves at the heart of the object that is theatre.

Nevertheless, when we consider recent contemporary theatre, we move away from a neutral notion of performance (which includes all that constitutes a spectacle, including the way bodies move and develop in space and the specificity of place as an observed space) to a current understanding of performance as having to exclude the idea of representation since, quite consciously, one is not playing the role of another nor is the set there just to represent another world. This is so much the case that the performer becomes only someone who acts and speaks, sings, dances, visibly, in an ephemeral time and in a particular place, all in their own name. The performer thus stages their own subjectivity through all the artifice available to them, offering their presence and addressing the bodies of those who watch, hear and, more rarely, feel and touch them. It is in this way that performers and spectators are both included in a phenomenon crystallised in the interaction between seeing, acting and conceiving, whose objective is, as Hans-Thies Lehmann calls it in Postdramatic Theatre,³ a “synthesis” that brings together these different practices in a more or less coherent, structured and homogenous whole fashioned from perspectives and actions occurring within a specific space and time. The only exception to this is that, unlike in dramatic theatre, this space and time is no longer isolated and placed in representation, but appear generally devoid of causality, without hierarchy and caught in the very moment of the event.

However, if we understand performance in a way in which the staging can completely withdraw from mimesis if it does not convey a dramatic universe, does not postulate any other reference than that of the stage itself or consists only of a ostensible realisation of a gesture or an act, then theatre is still unable to rid itself of the question of representation, which is so anchored in the minds and conventions of Western spectators. If contemporary theatre performance can emphasise that the simple mobilisation of a body on a bare stage has no other apparent intention than to make this act visible, to the point where there is no longer any “elsewhere” represented – so no other space than the place of action – then it certainly has difficulty persuading its spectators to believe this. Western spectators are so used to thinking about moving bodies as representational, that they constantly look for information that proves a mimetic link to the real world. Of course, we imagine that this situation also applies to the reception of abstract painting, or of contemporary music, and one might suppose that, for a moment, the spectator, guided by the performance, may give up on trying to deploy a mimetic system at all costs (especially since it is deceptive and leads them nowhere). However, one must admit that this performance, which seeks to be only pure action onstage, would then function not only in counterpoint to the mimetic system, but also within a practical and theoretical critical reflection on the nature of what a spectacle is. Hence performance exists, not in the relationship between an imaginary referential reality and its representation, but in the analogous and meta-theatrical relationship between the action presented and the principle of representation itself. We will return to this question, of course, but will merely make these remarks for now, as we consider the different experiments that have contributed to the development of radical non-mimetic performance (such as those of the happenings, of the American avant-garde theatre, or of Bob Wilson, whose aesthetic is a truly abstract one backed up by choreography), and to the idea that theatre functions by practically exploiting the instability of the mimetic relationship, and also its uncertainty. The claim of reproducing another world totally (or exactly) is thus displaced, in favour of an attempt at evaluating the pertinence of possible analogies, or at introducing within the analogical principle distortions, which produce meanings. And it is thanks to these symbolic distortions, and to the theoretical and practical consideration of the mimetic and analogical relationship (i.e. the questioning of the dynamics of representation and of the referential system), that the theatre plays, and includes the spectators in this play, inviting them to doubt what they see and to reflect on the pertinence, lack of pertinence or impertinence of the mimetic system as it is displayed.

In sum, the dynamics of the Western theatre are most often suggestive of an underlying, but central, question: how does this concrete place, with physical and actual bodies, at a given ephemeral moment, transform itself into a dramatic space that one believes in, whereas everyone knows that this dramatic space is a mental construct, and fictional? How do bodies that act, speak and move also become other representative entities and function as roles and become ch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Cross Section of the Opéra Garnier
• Introduction
• Points of View
• Part I What Does it Mean to Go to the Theatre?
• Part II the Evolution of Material and Representational Spaces
• Part III How to Act at the Theatre? How the Theatrical Space Functions
• Part IV Time, Rhythm, Tempo
• Part V the Body, the Actor’s Play and Illusion
• Part VI the Reader of Theatre Texts
• Part VII Staging: Traditions, Concerns
• Conclusion
• Index