The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Minou Arjomand, Ramona Mosse, Minou Arjomand, Ramona Mosse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135083878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Erika Fischer-Lichte's introduction to the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies is a strikingly authoritative and wide ranging guide to the study of theatre in all of its forms. Its three-part structure moves from the first steps in starting to think about performance, through to the diverse and interrelated concerns required of higher-level study:

Part 1 – Central Concepts for Theatre and Performance Research – introduces the language and key ideas that are used to discuss and think about theatre: concepts of performance; the emergence of meaning; and the theatrical event as an experience shared by actors and spectators. Part 1 contextualizes these concepts by tracing the history of Theatre and Performance Studies as a discipline.

Part 2 – Fields, Theories and Methods – looks at how to analyse a performance and how to conduct theatre-historiographical research. This section is concerned with the 'doing' of Theatre and Performance Studies: establishing and understanding different methodological approaches; using sources effectively; and building theoretical frameworks.

Part 3 – Pushing Boundaries – expands on the lessons of Parts 1 and 2 in order to engage with theatre and performance in a global context. Part 3 introduces the concept of 'interweaving performance cultures'; explores the interrelation of theatre with the other arts; and develops a transformative aesthetics of performance.

Case studies throughout the book root its theoretical discussion in theatrical practice. Focused accounts of plays, practitioners and performances map the development of Theatre and Performance Studies as an academic discipline, and of the theatre itself as an art form. This is the most comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the field available, written by one of its foremost scholars.

Part I

Central concepts of theatre and performance research

Chapter 1

The concept of theatre

The English word “theatre,” as in many other Indo-European languages (for example, German theater, French théâtre, Spanish and Italian teatro, and Russian teatr), derives from the Greek word theatron, which comes from thea (“show”) or theâsthai (“to look on”). The word theatron was used to describe a gathering place for celebratory, cultic, political, and athletic events. The arrangement of rows of seats and viewing platforms allowed spectators to watch the entrance of processions, dances with song and music, performances of tragedies and comedies, athletic competitions, and various acts of self-fashioning by the polis of Athens. The term was used in a general sense to denote a place for watching a wide variety of events.

In English, the term “theatre” was first used in the fourteenth century to designate an open space where people could watch spectacles of various sorts. The term referred to any open space for watching, i.e. natural as well as manmade spaces. Starting in the sixteenth century, the term “theatre” began to refer primarily to enclosed buildings, a definition that has prevailed to the present day. Around the same time as the term “theatre” came to be associated with designated, institutional performance spaces, theatre also came to be understood as drama; dramatic texts were studied at Oxford and Cambridge primarily for learning rhetoric and understanding classical antiquity (Carlson 1993).

The term “theatre” was introduced in German slightly later, around the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. The term was initially used as in the Latin theatrum to mean a space where something worth seeing occurs. The concept thus included any space for demonstration and ostentation, whether a place for public execution, an anatomical dissection, or an elevated location from which one could watch the actions on a battlefield. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the usage of the term became more specific, referring to performances of drama, opera, and ballets; in other words, to institutional art-theatre. Spectacles such as circuses, variety shows, stripteases, and colonial expositions that developed in the nineteenth century fell outside the category of “theatre” proper.

The historical avant-garde movement of the twentieth century (c. 1900–35) both narrowed and expanded the concept of theatre. The avant-garde understood theatre as an autonomous art rather than a medium for bringing the art of literature to an audience. They saw theatre as fundamentally different from the other arts because of the materials it uses—namely, the human body in space. At the same time, the avant-garde sought to close the gap between art and life, and to bring theatre into reality. To do so, the avant-garde expanded the concept of theatre once more to include any kind of exhibition, demonstration, or spectacle: the performances of circus artists, clowns, and entertainers; happenings avant la lettre that Dadaists and Surrealists staged on streets, in cafés, churches, and parliament; May Day celebrations, demonstrations, and sports festivals organized by trade unions and political parties; World Fairs; day-to-day encounters like the one Bertolt Brecht famously describes in his “Street Scene”—all could be termed theatre.¹ The concept of theatre thus radically expanded in the first decades of the twentieth century to include a plethora of activities that previously had not been understood as theatre. The rise of Fascism and Stalinism and the advent of the Second World War, however, brought the avant-garde’s expansive understanding of theatre to an end, and by mid-century, the term had returned to the more limited meaning it had had during the nineteenth century.

In the 1960s, theatre artists in Western cultures started to reflect seriously once more on the concept of theatre. Once again rejecting the established bourgeois literary theatre, practitioners such as the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski redefined theatre as that which “occurs between the audience and the actor” (Grotowski 1968). At the same time, there was an exodus from theatre buildings. Theatre began to be performed in streets and squares, parks and circus tents, store windows, former factories, bus depots, slaughterhouses, living rooms, even on the facades of sky-scrapers.

In Europe and the United States, “Free Groups” and performance ensembles came together that—partly as combined living and working communes—experimented with new forms of theatrical expression. Among other things, they propagated street theatre and looked to theatrical traditions of earlier centuries such as processions and spectacles with jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, fools, and clowns. They would blithely mix high and low art: classical or modern dance joined with music hall, circus, pantomime, and striptease. Individual performers created a wide range of one-man and one-woman shows. Artists, primarily coming from the visual arts or music such as Alan Kaprow, Herrmann Nitsch, Joseph Beuys, and John Cage, created new theatrical genres such as happenings, action art, and performance art.

Around the same time, both academic and popular writers showed a renewed interest in using theatre as a wide-ranging metaphor. Theatre’s metaphorical power goes back to antiquity. The concept was used to designate the world (theatrum mundi) as well as human life (theatrum vitae humanae). In the seventeenth century, this metaphor became commonplace. “Theatre” and “World,” or “Human Life,” seemed fundamentally related, and were understood in reference to one another. Life at the European courts was increasingly staged as a theatrical performance. Whether we think of the rigid court ceremonies common in the Madrid and Vienna courts, or the French ceremonies centered around the King’s lever—his morning rituals in which every step was prescribed—we see that the court turned into a stage and courtiers and royalty into actors. This phenomenon was particularly apparent during courtly festivals. Here, every festival space became a stage. Members of the court appeared as actors; the king or emperor played himself.

Theatre was not just used as a metaphor for life at court. Aside from its extensive use in theatre itself (for example in Shakespeare, Calderón, Gryphius, or Lohenstein), it found its way into a wide variety of tracts and treatises, including philosophical, scientific, technical, and geographical discourses. A multitude of publications flooded the European market that had the words “theatre” or “theatrum” in their titles, referring to the prevailing idea of theatre as a show place, or a place in which something worth knowing is put on view. Some examples are: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp 1570), Theatrum Virtutis et Honoris (Nuremberg 1606), Theatrum Chemicum (Argentorati 1613–61), Theatrum Florae (Paris 1622), Theatrum Insectorum (London 1634), Theatrum Europaeum (Frankfurt 1634–1738), Theatrum Machinarum (Nuremberg 1661), Theatrum Pacis (Nuremberg 1663–85). These books were metaphorically designated as show places, places where a subject was presented to the reflection of the reader. This usage also reveals the etymological connection between theatron (or theatrum in Latin) and theoria, both of which derive from thea (“show”).

In the 1970s, there was a comparable expansion in the metaphorical use of the term “theatre.” The metaphor of theatre was used more and more frequently in a variety of different cultural realms: by journalists and politicians, CEOs and trade unions, clergy and scientists. It was not only the term “theatre” that was used metaphorically, but also related terms such as the stage, masks, entrances, roles, and staging. Indeed, its usage has become ubiquitous. Take, for example, this series of headlines referring to the 2012 presidential elections in the United States: “Backstage with the Santorums,” “Gingrich Pulls Back Curtain on ‘Predatory’ Capitalism,” “The Curtain has Come Down on the Republican Party,” “Mitt Romney is Ready for his Starring Role,” “Obama Makes a Quiet Entrance into the 2012 Race,” and so on.

Likewise, the metaphorical use of the term “theatre” is often seen in academic contexts. In the humanities, more and more studies use the concept of theatre for a range of purposes. Michel Foucault opens his “Theatrum philosophicum,” Jean-François Lyotard observes “the philosophical and political stage,” Jean Baudrillard ruminates on the “stage of the body.” The sociologist Erving Goffman studies “the presentation of the self in everyday life” through the metaphor of “front stage” and “backstage” behavior. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz researches the “theatre-state” in Bali in the nineteenth century; the historian Hayden White illuminates “historical realism as tragedy”; Richard Sennett pursues the “shifts in roles on the stage and in the street” while the psychologist Joyce McDougall dissects the “theatre of the soul.” Even the physicist Heinz von Foerster speaks of “proscenium philosophy,” designating a specific view of the world, and explicitly references a specific concept of theatre. The list is endless.

Since the 1970s, theatre has turned into a key concept in the humanities and social sciences. One of the most pervasive concepts in much scholarly work over the past few decades is the term “theatricality.” It is used both for a variety of performances—for example, scholars writing about ritual describe rituals as “theatrical”—and for mise-en-scènes beyond the theatre.²

In the face of this expanded concept of theatre, it is crucial for scholars and students of Theatre and Performance Studies to define our concept of theatre and thus the subject of our field. If everything is theatre, and theatre can be approached from a wide variety of disciplines with a variety of research questions and methods, it raises the question why we need a separate discipline to study theatre at all. Unless we set specific boundaries for our concept of theatre, this question is difficult to answer. And until we answer the question, it does not make much sense to talk about the sub-fields, theories, and methods of Theatre and Performance Studies.

Theatre and Performance Studies differs from disciplines such as Philosophy, History, and Philology in so far as it has not been around for centuries. In fact, it was only established as a discipline in Western universities during the twentieth century. It is therefore to be expected that a discussion of how and why Theatre and Performance Studies developed is connected to the question of why we need Theatre and Performance Studies today.

Further Reading

On the “Theatrum Mundi”

Eggington, W. (2003) How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality and the Question of Modernity, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sennett, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man, New York: Knopf.

On Theatre and Science

Schramm, H., L. Schwarte, and J. Lazardig (eds.) (2005) Collection, Laboratory, Theatre: Scenes of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

On Theatricality

Davis, T. C. and T. Postlewait (ed.) (2003) Theatricality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Féral, J. (ed.) (2002) Theatricality, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fischer-Lichte, E. (ed.) (1995) “Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies,” Theatre Research International, 20/2: 85–118.

Fried, M. (1980) Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Puchner, M. (2002) Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Weber, S. (2004) Theatricality as Medium, New York: Fordham University Press.

Notes

1 In “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for Epic Theatre,” Brecht describes the model of acting and audience reception in Epic Theatre through the everyday example of a traffic accident. A witness who has seen the accident recounts what happened to a crowd of bystanders. In his critical account of the event, the witness at times imitates the drivers who caused the accident, but the bystanders are never tricked into thinking of the witness himself as a driver as they watch and listen to him. For Brecht, this critical approach to acting and audience reception was part of a political and aesthetic rejection of what he terms “Aristotelian theatre” (reprinted in Brecht 1964: 121–129).

2 As, for example, Michael Fried famously did in relation to the particular composition of painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Fried 1980).

Chapter 2

The history of the discipline

The academic discipline that comprises Theatre and Performance Studies has had a different history in different national contexts, and has often been connected to both innovations in theatre and broader political developments. The first country to develop the discipline of Theatre Studies as we think of it today was Germany. In German universities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, drama was taught in literature departments as the study of a particular genre of literary text (to some extent, this is still true of the way that drama is taught in many universities around the world). In the early twentieth century, however, Theatre Studies began to develop as its own discipline.

The most important figure in creating and molding this new field was Max Herrmann (1865–1942). Herrmann argued that the new discipline of Theatre Studies should focus not on literary texts but on performance, arguing that performance was the most important element of theatre. In 1918, Herrmann articulated a difference between drama and theatre that is central to the way Theatre Studies is now conceived not only in German-speaking but also in English-speaking countries. He wrote that theatre and drama are “fundamentally opposites … drama is a literary creation of one author, while theatre is the accomplishment of the public and those serving it” (Herrmann 1918).

Rather than focusing primarily on a literary text, and asking how that text was portrayed, and if the portrayal was appropriate, Herrmann emphasized the relationship between actors and audiences. He argued that a performance was a sort of game, in which everyone present participated. He even went so far as to argue that the actual creator of performing arts is the audience, and not the writer, performers, or director. Herrmann was interested not only in how spectators thought about what they saw, but also in the process of perception and their physical reactions.

Herrmann’s conception of performance and of the discipline of Theatre Studies can be connected to contemporary innovations in German theatre. Above all, Herrmann was inspired by the work of Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), whose productions turned away from the traditional proscenium stage. In productions such as Sumurun (1910), Oedipus Rex (1910), and the Oresteia (1911), Reinhardt collapsed the physical distance between actors and spectators. In each of these productions, actors would speak and act from among the audience. In addition to bringing the actors and audiences closer to one another, it individualized spectatorial experience: lacking a clearly controlled perspective, spectators had to decide which events to follow. In the pantomime Sumurun, for example, Reinhardt had a hanamichi (a wide catwalk, typical in Japanese Kabuki theatre) built to extend across the audience seating. Actors would perform scenes on the hanamichi, right in the middle of the audience, as other scenes were simultaneously performed on stage. It became impossible to see everything that was happening at any given time. Interspersing actors with spectators also ensured that spectators would see not only the actors, but the reactions of the other spectators as well. In these productions the emphasis was not on the fictive world as described in the text of the play, but rather on real bodies inhabiting real space.

While developing his concept of performance, Herrmann drew on Reinhardt’s productions; Herrmann, like Reinhardt, believed that the real bodies of the actors in the real space of the theatre were as important as the fictive world displayed on stage. For both, actors were not simply symbols of dramatic figures, but also real bodies. Herrmann’s interest in theatre as performance, and in the bodies of performers themselves, has been central to the way that Theatre Studies developed in German-speaking countries. Indeed, Herrmann’s juxtaposition between drama and theatre is at the heart of disciplinary debates that continue to this day. Because of Herrmann’s focus on the performance, Theatre Studies in Germany was founded as Performance Studies.

Other key figures for the development of the discipline include the Munich University professor Artur Kutscher (1878–1960), who focused on the mimic and expressive quality of performance and whose research extended to the non-literary folk and religious theatre traditions in Southern Germany and Europe. His “Kutscher-seminar” on theatre criticism drew many practical students of theatre, among them Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Another important opponent of subsuming theatre into the field of literary studies was Carl Niessen (1890–1969), the founder of the theatre museum in Cologne. Instead he wanted to connect the new discipline to anthropology. He sought to investigate all kinds of performances from various cultures and h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Author's preface
• Editors' preface
• Prologue Is everything theatre?
• Central concepts of theatre and performance research
• Chapter 1 The concept of theatre
• Chapter 2 The history of the discipline
• Chapter 3 The concept of performance
• Methodologies
• Chapter 4 Performance analysis
• Chapter 5 Theatre historiography
• Chapter 6 Theorizing theatre and performance
• Pushing boundaries
• Chapter 7 Interweaving performance cultures
• Chapter 8 Performing the arts
• Chapter 9 Cultural performances
• Epilogue Not everything is theatre
• Bibliography
• Index of names and performance groups
• Subject index
• Index of works