Theatre, Body and Pleasure

Simon Shepherd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136406324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Breaking new ground in the study of performance theory, this maverick and powerful project from renowned Renaissance scholar and queer theorist Simon Shepherd presents a unique take on theory and the physical reality of theatre.

Examining a range of material, Theatre, Body, Pleasure addresses a significant gap in the literary and drama studies arenas and explores the interplay of bodily value, the art of bodies and the physical responses to that art. It explains first how the body makes meaning and carries value. Then it describes the relationships between time and space and body.

The book's features include:

* large historical range, from medieval to postmodern
* case studies offering close readings of written texts
* examples of how to 'read for the body', exploring written text as a 'discipline' of the body
* breadth of cultural reference, from stage plays through to dance culture
* a range of theoretical approaches, including dance analysis and phenomenology

Writing in accessible prose, Shepherd introduces new ways of analyzing dramatic text and has produced a book which is part theatre history, part dramatic criticism and part theatrical tour de force. Students of drama, theatre and performance studies and cultural studies will find this an absolute must read.

Part I

Body and script

As an art of bodies, theatrical performance both depends on and presents ‘body work’. In the Introduction we saw how the body work of performance consists of two main elements. First, the body is prepared for performance, worked up to it by formal or informal regimes. Second, the preparation of the performing body is undertaken within a context of assumptions about ‘body’ in society and thus has a relationship – conscious or not, critical or not – with what are perceived to be dominant norms. Thus, by way of summary, the body work done by theatre consists of the construction of a particular sort of body which inevitably promotes a particular scheme of value.

In the case of preparation for performance of a written script there is a specific additional agency that contributes to shaping the body. This is the text itself. It has its effects at various levels. In the most general terms, a performer's awareness of the genre of the play will begin the process of preparing the body: it expects, for example, to hold itself differently in tragedy from farce, to have a different rhythm (see Chapter 4). In more specific terms, it organises what the body does on stage, whether it walks, jumps through hoops, giggles. In its speaking of a text the body is worked on in two ways. Most literally, that text controls breathing patterns and the way in which the body must hold itself in order to sustain vocal delivery. Less obviously it links voice into gesture. As Paul Zumthor puts it:

Like the voice, gesture projects the body into the space of the performance, attempts to conquer this and to saturate it with its movement. The spoken word does not exist, like the written, simply in a verbal context. It necessarily belongs in the course of an existential situation … whose totality is brought into play by the bodies of the participants.

(Zumthor 1994: 224–5)

The written text of a play usually survives where evidence of physical preparation methods does not. While the written text will always have an effect on the bodies which deliver it, it has a varying relationship with the other methods that prepare those bodies. Some scripts emerge out of shared assumptions about norms of production. Other scripts seek to challenge or disrupt established norms. Some are written within company settings; others by autonomous authors.

Much of this first part of the book is concerned with the business of reading written texts specifically as an engine for producing bodies. The opening of Chapter 1 explores the issues here. It should be noted, however, that I am not proposing an entry route which will enable the staging of approximations to original performance (whatever that was). Let's remember that the script, as instruction for body work, is formulated within the context of bodies that are all culturally produced, both by physical regimes (diet, exercise, manners) and discursive ones (politeness, fashion, beauty). It is one discipline of the body among others. That context is always physically lost to later generations. While the occasion of performance has as its raw material the gathering together of bodies, the phenomenological interrelationship of these bodies is, again, not outside history. Average size and age of bodies differ according to period. So too the impact of bodily closeness will alter, not only in respect of the customary smells and dirt of surrounding bodies but also in respect of assumed norms about, say, the relationship between bodies and built environments (habitual room occupancy rates, size of buildings in proportion to bodies, accessibility and ordering of public space). Again, where the felt presence of bodies to each other is constituted from such elements, this will be irrecoverable.

My project of reading for the body here has the aim of arriving at some suggestions as to how theatre proposes, or installs, schemes of bodily value. The first case study, of Wycherley's The Country Wife in Chapter 1, concentrates on written script as a discipline of the body, suggesting its range of physical possibility and sketching in the value attached to bodily modes. From here follows an overview discussion of the status of ‘body’ and ‘script’ in analytical and theoretical accounts of acting and performance.

The second case study, in Chapter 2, The Tempest, aims to show how written text shapes a performing body in order to establish schemes of bodily value. Here production of the body is less dependent perhaps on the activity of vocalising script but emerges instead from assumptions about the performance modes and vocabularies of different genres. The play suggests, mobilises, more than one physical regime. The effect is that, while some bodies are seen to be quotations of theatrical modes, other bodies are simply natural.

The third case study, in Chapter 3, is concerned with that element of a play which is often referred to as ‘business’. As such it moves to the very edges of the written script, since business seems to exist in the gaps between the lines. The chapter thus seeks to extend the ways I am engaging with the written text. In the two previous chapters bodily presentation was deliberately loaded with significance. In the business of this chapter bodies are caught up into apparently trivial routines. Consequently audience pleasure is positioned not within the embrace of orderliness but in escape from it. This invocation of pleasure in turn looks forward to the concerns of the next part of the book, which interests itself more explicitly in the audience and its physical pleasures.

1 Script as a discipline of the body

A body exists prior to the dramatic script it enacts. That script disciplines and shapes it. Within that shaping the individual body insists on its own characteristics.

The relationship between body and script is the main subject of this chapter. In an attempt to explore the detail of script's work on body there is a lengthy close analysis of one play. That analysis is prefaced and followed by commentary on the body–script relationship and its implications.

To begin with, then, let's see how the relationship of body and script has been formulated by various theorists.

The body and ‘the body’

Body/script: both an opposition and a mutual dependence. The relationship has usually been tilted to one element or the other. Those working with actors' bodies have altered or ignored words; those working with the words have had only a generalised idea of the physical entity that they cue. Where textual analysis invokes bodily activity it tends to privilege that which adds to the message implicit in the words. Indeed the fashion for semiotics in the 1970s and 1980s enabled almost everything to be considered as message-bearing. The shift to a richer, and more subtle, understanding of body/script came from the newer interest in phenomenology.

Thus, as a phenomenologist, Stanton Garner takes issue with deconstructionist work on Beckett's plays which, he feels, disregards the drama. For him, the ‘signifying (or representational) body is the construction of a theorizing act that brackets the living body and its phenomenal fields in an act of objectifying abstraction’ (1994: 45). He demonstrates how the texts of a dramatist such as Beckett put pressure on the body and our assumptions about it. But even here, in this more subtle account of the relationship, body/ script begins to tilt towards one of its elements. When Garner speaks of the living body on stage asserting a ‘physiological irreducibility’ (1994: 44), one of those same deconstructionists might argue that we are now at the opposite pole from theory and abstraction and are faced instead by biology as irreducible, as essence. It is necessary to recall that, as an art of living bodies, drama does not just assume biology but contributes – as indeed Garner implies elsewhere – to constructing and moulding it.

That whiff of irreducible biology, even in work which is as brilliant as Garner's, shows how tough it is to retain a firm grasp on the properly dialectical nature of the body/script relationship, the union of opposites. It is one instance of a wider philosophical discussion of the relationship between material body and the systems and discourses of culture. By way of summary of the issue Bryan Turner suggests:

To reject Cartesianism, it is not necessary to deny the corporeal nature of human existence and consciousness. To accept the corporeality of human life, it is not necessary to deny the fact that the nature of the human body is also an effect of cultural, historical activity.

(Turner 1996: 74)

But it's a very slippery dialectic. As Judith Butler notes, even the master-theorist of the interlockings of body and discursive regimes, Foucault himself, slips into an evocation of a sort of natural body which escapes the disciplines of power: ‘he refers [in the History of Sexuality] to “bucolic” and “innocent” pleasures of intergenerational sexual exchange that exist prior to the imposition of various regulative strategies’ (1990: 97; see also Grosz 1995: 217–19).¹ And then Butler herself has been criticised for confusing person and role, for giving overmuch weight to interpellation and abstract structures. As Elizabeth Grosz says, ‘It is not adequate to simply dismiss the category of nature outright, to completely retranscribe it without residue into the cultural: this in itself is the monist, or logocentric, gesture par excellence.’ The dialectic has to be strategically preserved: ‘In the face of social constructionism, the body's tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be invoked; but in opposition to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism, it is the body as cultural product that must be stressed’ (1994: 21, 23–4).

Grosz's language here emerges out of political debates about sexuality and gender in the mid–1980s. Crudely put, an essentialist position would suggest that, say, a woman is more nurturing and inclined to peace than a man because of her female nature; a social constructionist would say that she had learnt these values historically through her positioning, for example, in family and labour market. The urgency of the political debates of that period was one of the mechanisms that pushed theorisations about ‘the body’ into the limelight.

Those inverted commas have had to appear. They mark the fact that ‘the body’ became a reference point to anchor, first off, political debate and then a series of cultural and literary commentaries. Used in this way it became a sort of fetish, offering apparent connections with the real while being abstracted from its own materiality and history. Writing at the end of the 1980s Michael Feher summarised:

the history of the human body is not so much the history of its representations as of its modes of construction. For the history of its representations always refers to a real body considered to be ‘without history’ … whereas the history of its modes of construction can … turn the body into a thoroughly historicized and completely problematic issue.

(Feher 1989: 11)

His use of the word ‘construction’ refers not to Grosz's social constructionism but to the body's materiality.

In exploring the relations of body and script we regularly bump into the opposition which Feher identifies, that between representation and material construction. This is fairly deeply embedded in academic work. The editors of the 1993 collection, Reading the Social Body, make a virtue of it: ‘These essays fall into two categories: some treat the social construction of bodies that have actually existed at some point in human history, and others discuss the representation of bodies in various artistic contexts’ (Burroughs and Ehrenreich 1993: 5). On the one hand there are those who deal with the ‘actually’ existing – sociology which writes about ageing, diet, sport; theatre anthropology and intercultural performer training. On the other hand there are literary and cultural commentators who deal with representations in written, graphic, filmed texts – texts which use inscriptions to make reference to the body, but a body which has no actual lived history and presence.

Nature and culture, representation and construction: there are two sets of binaries. To these a third can be added: theatre and performance. Developing from the ‘body art’ traditions sketched in the Introduction, performance (previously known as performance art) came of intellectual age during those political debates around nature and culture. Within the polemic which was generated in order to define the emergent form, theatre was seen to belong with the business of representing, and fictionalising, the body. Performance stripped away theatricality, exposing spectators – or participants – to the actuality of the performer's body.

We return to this binary at the end of the chapter. It needs to appear in the narrative here, however, because of its possible role in shaping the circumstances which inform this chapter. At the start of this section, I noted, implicitly, that there did not seem to be a substantial body of critical work which reflected, in an appropriately subtle way, on the body/script relationship. At a time when the issues of representation and construction, nature and culture, were being picked up in academic overviews of ‘the body’, one might have expected that one of the leading arts of the body, theatre, might have intellectually benefited. But it is also precisely at this moment that theatre is ousted from the leading edge of the discussion by the newer form that is performance.

By contrast, in another performance mode that has risen to intellectual dominance, dance, the analysis of the relationship between body and script (here being choreography and score) has been foregrounded. For example, in her essay on ‘Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music’ in The Royal to the Republican Body, musicologist Susan McClary argues that while French music favoured moving the physical body ‘at the expense of inwardness’, Italian music mapped interiority: ‘each divides up and shapes human bodily experience in its own way’ (1998: 97). Or, again, discussing the dancer Martha Graham, Mark Franko shows how her early piece Frontier explored the relationship between American space and the individual body, articulating through choreography her own problematic status as woman and radical (Franko 1995: 54).

Missing from The Royal to the Republican Body, however, are any essays on the body scripted by dramatic text. And, apart from an essay on – significantly enough – closet (that's to say, de-bodied) drama, the same omission marks Reading the Social Body. And all three volumes of Feher's Fragments for a History of the Human Body. Where, in the minor explosion of histories of the body, is the body scripted by and for theatre? This form, written expressly for the body, seems to have no relevance in studies of ‘the body’.

Body/script

The absence was filled, in part, from within drama/literature studies. In an essay published in 1999, and later included in the book Author's Pen and Actor's Voice, Robert Weimann approaches the issue within the framework of Shakespearean theatre. Specifically concerned with modes of acting in relation to script, he argues that there was permeability between the ‘learned’ and the ‘common’, ‘between representational acting and presentational playing’. Opposing attempts to privilege either the author's text or the stage practice, he rejects the ‘either/or’ and suggests that we ‘come to terms with the ways in which the performed play thrives on the mutual engagement of text and bodies’ (1999: 420).

While some would say that it is only in literary studies that this suggestion might sound at all novel, Weimann's treatment of the relationship is subtle. Even within a very sophisticated argument, however, body/script remains a slippery entity. At a crucial juncture Weimann seems to simplify the relationship. This can be seen clearly when he emphasises the materiality of performance: ‘playing in the presence of spectators is an expense of irreducible physical energy’ (mmm – we have met ‘irreducible’ before …). Performance is never just a ‘medium’, relaying the signifiers ‘given in the words of the text’, but an ‘agency in its own right’, drawing on ‘a unique and irreplaceable source of living strength that is inseparable from the transaction itself’ (1999: 427). While this is a proper insistence on productive effort, I think it simplifies at each binary pole. Energy may be irreducible, but it is not undifferentiated in its application and exhibition (the singer and acrobat both spend energy, but against different resistances). This expenditure of energy is also culturally valorised – some people, for example, find it necessary to avoid sweat. And, while what has come down to us from the early modern period may be verbal texts, words comprise only one ‘text’ in the theatre. There are also visual and sound designs, and there is choreography. Words can perhaps be relayed, but a movement text ends up being inhabited.² So there are real problems with making a separation between body and verbal text. As Susan Foster says, ‘verbal discourse cannot speak for bodily discourse, but must enter into “dialogue” with that bodily discourse’ (1998: 186–7). There is a need for a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: theatrically imagined bodies
• Part I Body and script
• Part II In time and space
• Part III Beyond integrity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index