Theatre/Archaeology

Mike Pearson, Michael Shanks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134648443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Theatre/Archaeology is a provocative challenge to disciplinary practice and intellectual boundaries. It brings together radical proposals in both archaeological and performance theory to generate a startlingly original and intriguing methodological framework.

1 THEATRE ARCHAEOLOGY

I want to say ‘He remembered’. But this was not ‘joined up’ thinking. Images, visions, half-thoughts swirled out of the snow exploding off one another like the blinding charges with which they tried to free the ‘Discovery’. Others just flashed and faded in the merciful haze of morphia in that land of mirage and optical illusion, of rigour, hallucination, heavenly portents and utter loneliness. And still others flickered faintly like the pictures of Mr. Ponting's cinematograph.

(Pearson/Brookes: Dead Men's Shoes 1997)

In the first phase of encounter, what we term ‘theatre archaeology’, archaeology proves stimulating and suggestive of alternative approaches to both performance documentation and theory, encouraging inscriptions of performance, and their interpretation, which might be fragmentary, partial, subjective, discursive. How do we document a performed event? Archaeological practice indicates not only ways in which we might work with the remains of past performance, creating contemporary meaning in the present, it also enables us to think provocatively about the ways in which we might create the documents of current work. Rather than pretending to be a final and complete account of things, a closure, the performance document, an equivalent of the dramatic text, might be in itself equally fragmentary, partial and encouraging of interpretation.

It may ultimately be more appropriate to discuss performance (particularly devised performance) through archaeological rather than literary means, with performance as a kind of prehistory of scripted drama, and to imagine the retrieval and recontextualisation of performance as constituting a theatre archaeology. The essential questions would then focus upon what is retrievable and how, and upon methods of recovery.

As our encounter begins a third time with two personal views of performance and archaeology, we necessarily commence in the first person singular.

Performance

Los Angeles: a memory

I must have moved, shivered, trembled, for in the photograph my left foot shows six toes. Hardly surprising, as we were cold and terrified, naked in performance for the first time, our bodies untrusting, not quite surrendered to the suspension harnesses, uneasy in our skins. And this was the premiere, shot through with excitement, anticipation, nervousness, foreboding, for we had practised so little.

Figure 4
Brith Gof: Los Angeles © Nick Cook

They'd hauled us up to the brewery ceiling on crude ropes and pulleys. The harnesses chaffed wherever they touched: shoulders, groin, back. The spectators had entered, unaware of our presence above them in the smoke. We began to descend, singly, to the pulsing soundtrack. Below us the sawdust circle, blank television screens, the water-tank. At first a certain freedom: to walk in air, to stretch out in all directions, to twist and turn. And then to hang upside-down! Looking down at them looking up at us. Not flying exactly but free of surface, of choreographic imperative, of the need to breathe hard, of sole responsibility for one's physical action, for here we were animated by others. We felt beautiful, weightless, angelic. And then the tank coming towards us. Heating the water with a central heating element had helped little. Mark was first in, shaking, quaking. I followed, frozen fingers desperately trying to unscrew and re-screw the rings that would connect us. Then a huge pull and we rose together linked like a pieta – in intimate contact, with the lightest of touches – without the need to support each other. And then it happened. A D-shaped ring carrying our joint weight turned suddenly from its flat side to a corner. In the air we dropped, about an inch. In our stomachs it felt like a mile, like the gear was collapsing, like death would come rushing up to meet us at any moment. Of course, no one noticed. How would they ever distinguish a mistake in such a new and alien environment? And we kept our composure, showed nothing. But I knew. For that was not only water running down my leg and dripping from my sixth toe!

Apologia

I ought to begin with a definition of performance, to profess allegiance perhaps to an extant theoretical model: ‘anthropology’ (Schechner 1969, 1973, 1977); ‘theatre anthropology’ (Barba 1982; Barba and Savarese 1991); ‘performativity’ (Butler 1990); ‘theatricality’ (Fischer-Lichte 1995). But performance remains for me elusive, always slightly beyond my grasp, at once a ‘doing and a thing done’ (Diamond 1996: 1); a special type of behaviour and an event; registers of artfulness (Finnegan 1992: 91–111) and a mode of cultural production; a kind of bodily engagement and a set of interactive contracts; a mode of communication and an encounter; a liminal or ‘in between’ space (cf. van Gennep 1960; Leach 1976) of contestation and change; a temporary autonomous zone and in our particular set of cultural circumstance, perhaps even a ‘third space of enunciation’ (Bhabha 1994: 37). Perhaps that's why I do it. Perhaps too that is why my practice is always at the edges, on the outskirts, on the borderlands of professional practice, of technologies, of personal and artistic identity, of conceptual and economic feasibility; on those boundaries where definitions are under constant renegotiation. I work in the slash between performance/everyday, in the space between performer and spectator, in the distinction between ability and disability, in the small print of the transactional conventions, in the brackets that mark off a strip of behaviour as performance. But I must reflect with caution. For as an effective modelling of human action and interaction, performance can appear to embody, and be susceptible to, any number of theoretical or philosophical stances. Look at a particular work and it is possible to perceive Giddens’ ‘seriality’ or Burke's ‘sublime’ being enacted, or to enact them on the back of it.

Performance for me increasingly constitutes a continuum of practices within which no one set is privileged over another. Artistic and political decisions are then made in response to the project at hand, in response to such questions as ‘What is necessary here?’, ‘What is possible here?’, ‘What is appropriate … or highly inappropriate here?'The single requirement is that I work within the public domain. But it is what I do. It exists for me primarily then as a palette of creative potentials, a discontinuous and interrupted practice of different modes of expression, of varying types and intensities. Theory then arises from, or cleaves to, that series of perceptions, procedures and pragmatics through which I orient my work. Such perceptions are inevitably at ground level, favouring approaches both micrological and phenomenological, and inevitably empirical.

Body: performance and personal engagement (me-performing)

I am nervous. I am aware of being in front of others, of having one chance to get it right. This state of acute self-awareness is characterised by a release of adrenaline which may lead to feelings of ‘fight’ or ‘flight’, to shaking, sweating, irrationality, forgetfulness, stage-fright. However, it may also result in heightened energy and lead to impulsive activity, to the achievement of irrevocable acts beyond social norms, to spontaneity, dynamism and ecstatic release in a state of increased physical and perceptual sensitivity without fear of repercussions. I have an ability, a propensity even, to engage in extra-daily activities: to undergo, to tolerate, to endure, to commit, to omit with differing degrees and qualities of energy; to confront and destroy my own cosmetic image; to allow the boundaries of my body to be transgressed; to be other than my socialisation and conditioning might pre-determine; to cast off those behaviours accumulated through habit and heredity which deems what is desirable under what circumstances, to be childlike, undignified, naked in front of strangers; to imagine an alternative body image for myself, increasing the expressive function of its various parts; to be physically composed/uncomposed, balanced/disbalanced, impulsive/lethargic; to muster my physical and vocal resources at will; to confront those muscular tensions, recurrent postures and obsessive behaviours through which one's fears and repressions – one's attitude – are reflected in the everyday body.

Under scrutiny, I can ensure a continuum of presence, the result of a personal strategy which holds me in the here-and-now and which allows my expressive functioning to be diverse and discontinuous. This is best revealed at thresholds – in the micro-second of engagement, of assembling resources, of the adoption of decorums and demeanours of concentration and application, in ‘A deep breath and here I go’ – or in moments of accident and injury when, of course, it disappears. I have significance in repose, though I need never acknowledge that I am being watched or modify my behaviour accordingly.

I can articulate my activity, employing rhetorical practices, physical and vocal, in combinations and ratios unusual, unacceptable or even impossible in everyday life. I can invest movements and action with more or less energy over more or less time than is normally required. I can increase and decrease their size, their extension. I can make them tense, repeat them, distort them, reverse them, displace them to another part of my body. I can allow movements to grow and flow from one to another. Or I can do a percentage of them. I can apply such articulations to any gestures without them ever being part of some exclusive stage language. But not all gestures, for certain movements have been selected, simplified and re-energised: my work is characterised by omission. I can order them, arrange them, elide them, juxtapose them, compose them, in relation to plane or surface, standing on the floor, lying on a bed: up, down, out, push from, land upon. Or volume: more difficult to orientate perhaps were I'm suspended, my body twisting, turning in free space, in relation to a rope, to a single line … This is enhanced by training and by rehearsal. My ability to achieve such articulation and the nature and quality of the resulting action may be mediated – limited or enhanced – by spatial restriction; by physical restraint; by the climate; by the surface – its texture, its hardness; by topography. There may be a (dramatic) tension between what I am attempting and what I manage to accomplish, between the strategic imperatives of plot and scenario and my tactical engagement. I am not just a neutral vessel of signification: I am experiencing as well as representing. ‘My body is that meaningful core which behaves like a general function, and which nevertheless exists, and is susceptible to disease. In it we learn to know that union of essence and existence …’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 147).

I can walk, bend, turn, fall, jump, kneel, spin, crawl, tremble…

For him, it is other (see p.182).When he was born, he was not breathing. This caused damage to the motor functioning areas of his brain. He is not mentally disabled and neither – as the small card which he carries round his neck when he goes out says – is he deaf. Ten years ago he would have been called a spastic. Today he is regarded as ‘having’, or ‘suffering from’, cerebral palsy. In current parlance he is ‘disabled’, not ‘handicapped’. He cannot stand unaided. Nevertheless, he generates tremendous pull and grip with his arms, and push with his legs. He refuses to use an electrically powered wheelchair, which he feels defines his status of reliance and instead uses a standard manual chair, which he operates by pushing himself backwards with one foot. He cannot turn the wheels with his hands. This is arduous. Yet he achieves a precision of turn, spin, reverse, effectively with one toe. He communicates by laboriously pointing to a given vocabulary of words on a board on his lap or to individual letters to spell out more complex words. He also speaks, in gurgling tones. His voice, with its broken rhythms and swooping articulations – on the breath, against the breath – demands our attention, demands that we listen and interpret. And that we relax, that we accept that there is meaning here. His is a language that one has to learn. As his lungs don't inflate or deflate greatly, the nuances are subtle and there is extreme brevity and clarity in his words. Which is why he likes verbal puns so much.

I stand within an envelope, a three-dimensional space which surrounds my body, its surface at the various furthest points of reach in all directions. This portable territory is my sphere of influence: it is here where I make my gestures, dance my dance, speak my text. The effective volume I can engage and influence will again alter with age – increasing, then decreasing – with environmental conditions and perhaps too with factors such as disability. My capacity to engage its full volume and indeed to enlarge it – stretching, extending, pushing out – may depend upon training, giving greater volume for expressive and interactive functioning. Any restriction, be it social or legal, I may experience as stress: in performance such conflict may result from scenographic constriction.

For him, it is other. His body is in a kind of rebellion with itself, suddenly jerking into spastic movement or channelling creative impulse into stereotyped gesture. His body is decided. Yet he works with the actions his body wants to make. So pull can become embrace, hold, grip, fight, tear. And push becomes caress, reject, threaten. His work requires a force of enormous will, directly experienced by those of us who hold and touch him in performance, as he organises the effort and imagines his physical goal. Of course, he doesn't make conventional signs, rather a hovering net of gestural hint and suggestion. But we know what he means: we experience him ‘as experiencing/as expressing/as signing’. Whilst it may be ambiguous in semiotic terms, it is fascinating and seductive. Occasionally, he can hitch a ride on the randomness, in a fury of physical abandon. At other times, he can achieve an awesome and terrible stillness. However, as we always joke, the one thing he can never do on stage is ‘die’. A dance of impulses: intended, random and spasmodic.

The mise-en-scène is a set of material conditions where I to go to work. Here the nature of the contracts – body to backdrop, body to object, body to body – and the physical and emotional experiences they conspire may be other than those of everyday life. Beyond questions of representation, the performer's relationship to the mise-en-scène is therefore above all ergonomic and phenomenological. And it may indeed be that the constructed environment of performance is active and that environmental conditions, the ecology of this special world – surface, climate, illumination, temperature – are much better or much worse perhaps than in everyday life, changing from moment to moment.

The designed or built environment of performance may greatly increase or decrease ergonomic problems (Dul and Weerdemeester 1993) and these may change from moment to moment, oscillating between acceptable, unacceptable and optimal. It may extend, limit, restrict or compromise four vectors of physical application: clearance – the head-room and leg-room of the body ellipse; reach – the volume of the workspace envelope; posture – the nature and number of connections of body to work space; and strength – the acceptable percentage of maximal strength in output or endurance (Pheasant 1986: 135f.). It may restrict my kinesic, proxemic and haptic abilities, capacities and potentials through increases in hazard, body stress, demand (energy expenditure) and overload (exhaustion): by the closure or limitation of sensory channels – as with blindfolding; the invasion of that personal space which is reserved for more or less exclusive use; by the arrangement of barriers, such as set or furniture. It may cause duress through increasing duration and limiting the potential adjustment of posture and reach. Environmental factors may include noise, which causes annoyance during thinking and communication; illumination with changes in brightness, reflection and shadow; climate changes in the temperature of air and surfaces, air velocity and relative humidity the effects of which may, or may not be mediated by clothing; vibration of whole body or hand–arm through shocks and jolts and the toxicity of liquids, gases, vapours, dusts and solids (Dul and Weerdemeester 1993: 71f.).

Performance might be a difficult, or even dangerous, place to work. Indeed, the substance of performance may be constituted as no more than me dealing with the ergonomic problems of the workspace. You watch my methods and organisation of effort, those planned and those informed by previous experience, my flexibility of response through improvisation and my use of tools, both designed and improvised. You watch the symptoms of my engagement: body and ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Theatre archaeology
• 2 Theatre and archaeology
• 3 Theatre/archaeology
• Afterword and acknowledgements
• Performances
• Bibliography
• Index