Theatre as Voyeurism

The Pleasures of Watching

G. Rodosthenous

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137478818
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Theatre as Voyeurism (re)defines voyeurism as an 'exchange' between performers and audience members, privileging pleasure (erotic and aesthetic) as a crucial factor in contemporary theatre. This intriguing group of essays focuses on artists such as Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Ann Liv Young, Olivier Dubois and Punchdrunk.

Part I

Voyeurism and Directing the Gaze

1

Always Looking Back at the Voyeur: Jan Fabre’s Extreme Acts on Stage

Laurens De Vos

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud has identified scopophilia as the pleasure of looking (see Freud 1974 VII: 157). While actors and actresses are often said to secretly and unconsciously exult in a societally accepted form of exhibitionism, spectators take the role of voyeurs, indulging in different forms of scopophilia. It is worthwhile having a look at this comparison by outlining the contours of voyeurism, for even if this phenomenon unconsciously grounds the spectator’s pleasure of looking in a more Aristotelian theatre tradition of plays with a dramatic narrative, performed on a stage separated by the so-called fourth wall from the spectators who are sitting in a dark auditorium, contemporary postdramatic theatre has changed the conditions of the relation between actors and audience inasmuch that a new contract may not follow the same rules.

In this chapter, I will look at the postdramatic theatre of Jan Fabre and trace in his performances the game he plays, as a director, with the audience’s voyeuristic inclinations. I contend that while theatre is not fit to live up to the ‘standards’ of a fully voyeuristic situation, Fabre does address the voyeur in each spectator and then subverts this position. Fabre’s most enticing and breathtaking performance so far is probably Je suis sang (I am Blood) (2001) and I tend to see it as the most sublime example that exceeds the well-ordered world of language and takes us to a mystical world in which the audience’s look is directed towards and away from their phantasms. Therefore, in this chapter, I will mainly focus on this production in order to situate Fabre’s theatre work, and refer to other performances where they may further illuminate my analysis.

Duchamp and the seclusion of the voyeur

What exactly is voyeurism? Surely, it must be something other than a person watching another person, nor can it find its habitat in the mutual consensus to look at each other. One of the more illuminating descriptions of voyeurism is given by Jean-Paul Sartre, who, in his Being and Nothingness, situates voyeurism in the image of a man looking through a keyhole. ‘I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness’ (Sartre 2003: 283). One of the finest illustrations of the principle of voyeurism in modern art is Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés, which he began shortly after the publication of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and which was exposed to the public only after the artist’s death in 1968. It shows a wooden wall with several holes through which visitors can peep, behind which they will discover a nude, partly hidden, reclining woman in a landscape, her legs spread and her vulva exposed to the voyeur, or rather almost offered, as it is the most foregrounded point. In her left hand she holds up a gas lamp.

If we consider Duchamp’s Etant donnés and Sartre’s peephole anecdote as prototypical for the voyeur’s activity, what primarily seems to be necessary for the voyeuristic act to succeed is a certain degree of seclusion. ‘I am alone’, Sartre writes, and the keyhole, just big enough for my eye/my I, ascertains this condition. Furthermore, the image of the keyhole presupposes the notion of secretion. This secretive aspect is definitely bound up with the gaze as a means to exercise power over someone. I indulge in the knowledge of seeing without being seen, of being the master having full control over the slave.

Although intricately connected with the feeling of power, this mode of seeing is different, then, from the ‘Panopticon’ composition. Michel Foucault’s discussion of this architectural structure in Discipline and Punish illuminates the ingenuity of this surveillance system in a prison. From a central tower with wide windows around which a peripheric building is divided into separate cells, each and every prisoner at each and every moment realizes that he might be watched by the supervisor in the tower, even if he is not. The fact is that he can never be sure when he is being kept an eye on, and when not, for Venetian blinds cover the windows of the tower, allowing the guard to look out and preventing the inmates from looking in. ‘The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen’ (Foucault 1995: 202–3).

Foucault describes this optical relation having recourse to the metaphor of the theatre. Indeed, it is tempting to compare the watching supervisor in the tower with the spectator in a theatre auditorium, and the inmates in their cells with the performers knowing that someone is looking at them. ‘They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (Foucault 1995: 200). And yet, the comparison hides from view similar objections to ascribing to the theatre spectator voyeuristic motives. What is crucial, after all, in the field of visibility that Foucault has revealed in the panopticon structure is the hierarchical difference between the all-seeing supervisor as the subject within this field and the inmate as the object of the seeing activity, captive of the look of the other. However, these roles do not apply to the theatre. To claim that actors find themselves subjected to the look of the spectators is obviously true, but it misses the whole point of what theatre is about, and that is the mutual exchange of energy between the auditorium and the stage, between the spectator and the performer. In other words, the former’s look is always cast back by the gaze of the object being looked at. Subjectivity can only emerge in the scopic field if my look is returned and thus acknowledges my own presence. Additionally, contemporary theatre increasingly interacts with the audience, acknowledging this interrelationship as an intricate part of the theatrical experience. Productions in which the fourth wall comes out unscathed are becoming very rare indeed. Last but not least, theatre has always been a social activity where people attend a production not merely for artistic or aesthetic reasons, but to make an impression themselves as well. Watching a play without being seen by others for a lot of people would be much less fun. Therefore, the assumption that the audience is nothing more than a witness does not seem to stand the test.

Therefore, unlike the supervisor in his tower, who is far from the counterpart of the spectator in a theatre, the audience share a clearer parallel with the inmates in the cells precisely in their mutual knowledge that they are being watched. This is why the theatre cannot be called a voyeuristic structure as we have defined it drawing upon the examples given by Sartre and Duchamp. After all, the voyeur’s goal is to see without being seen, and in this sense, it is the solitary supervisor whose shoe would fit. Voyeurism cannot be separated from its secretive nature, for due to the voyeur’s absorption into the object being looked at his self-awareness disappears and makes room for a certain transcendence: ‘there is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them’ (Sartre 2003: 283). Sartre connects self-awareness with the feeling of being the object of the Other’s gaze: ‘I see myself because somebody sees me’ (2003: 284). This idea will later be confirmed by Jacques Lacan, who in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis claims that one’s look is always returned; one cannot look without being looked at. Lacan, therefore, situates the manifestation of the loss of the self in the scopic field, as the subject is determined by the external source of the gaze of the Other. However, this loss and the implementation of the lack allow one to become a subject in the first place, capable of self-reflection. This fits in with Sartre’s statement that one can only see when being seen.

During voyeuristic acts, which necessitate the complete absence of the ‘Other’ and the seclusion of the watcher, this process of self-reflection is suspended. Contrary to the ‘normal’ scopic register in which the gaze is always returned, this scheme is momentarily deconstructed into a one-way direction of looking, offering the certainty to the voyeur that the object of his look is completely unaware of his look. This is why Sartre also speaks of the often neglected ambiguity of keyholes and the like through which the voyeur looks; these serve as ‘both instruments and obstacles’ (Sartre 2003: 283).

In this sense, then, the darkened auditorium of the theatre, concomitant with the fourth wall (not coincidentally, the terminology alludes to the same peeping inclination as a door’s keyhole), provides an admirable attempt to reconstruct an imaginary transparent wall that can be considered an instrumentalized obstacle, although, for reasons I have outlined in the previous paragraphs, it can never entirely live up to the standards of seclusion and transcendence that voyeurism necessitates.

Figure 1.1 I am Blood by Jan Fabre (Photo: Wonge Bergmann)

In this perspective, in the voyeuristic act of looking the human lack is temporarily bracketed in the phantasm of the suspension of desire. The voyeur wants to blend into the scene he is watching in which he recognizes the fulfilment of his desire. Strictly speaking, therefore, the looking subject, marked by a sense of self-awareness through the scopic exchange, stops being a subject in the voyeuristic act but rather becomes the object due to a lack of self-recognition.

Je suis sang: transcendence ...

The Flemish theatre maker, sculptor, drawer and video artist Jan Fabre has been working on an impressive oeuvre that constitutes a universe that draws on the ambiguity between seeing and being seen and the issue of how to deal with being a divided subject, in which also the audience is compromised. In what follows, I will map out how Fabre questions the notion of the divided subject, representing his performances as laboratories where the search for the self is being examined.

From the onset I am Blood emphasizes the incantatory nature of language, as what is happening on stage is directed by the leading actress as a kind of sorceress or shaman, wearing a black wedding dress and walking in circles around her world with a book on her head. During the performance she recites – hissing like a snake – solemn verses in Latin. Her litany consists of fragments borrowed from the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the thirteenth-century Franciscan Jacopo da Milano and the Bible. Moreover, towards the end of the production, in a final act of becoming liquid, one after another she mentions the different veins with their Latin names that she is about to cut. The apparently endless and repetitive list shifts the emphasis from the signification of the words to their sounds, thus altering the state of mind of the audience and making them participants in a ritual.

Obviously, in creating this kind of ritualistic tableau, Fabre is indebted to Antonin Artaud. The combination of an incomprehensible stream of words with a physically exhausting performance that explores the limits of the body is the essence of his Theatre of Cruelty. While Artaud has recourse to all kind of neologisms that are meaningless as much as poly-interpretable, Fabre uses Latin declamations which fulfil the same role. Both build up their performances with animalistic howls, screams and yelling. Words that are recognized as belonging to a human language (often Fabre’s texts are made up of several languages, as, for instance, in his 2009 production Orgy of Tolerance, where English was larded with fragments in Dutch, French and Croatian) lose their significance. The DNA of language is disentangled and isolated in separate strings, the combination of which becomes, therefore, unreadable. About one of Fabre’s early works, The Interview that Dies, Emil Hrvatin writes: ‘Communication has shifted to the level of elementary materials of the discourse, to the level of the words where communication between characters is no longer possible’ (Hrvatin 1994: 133). It is a conclusion that holds true for Fabre’s other work too, testifying to a strong thematic perpetuation in his work.

Figure 1.2 I am Blood by Jan Fabre (Photo: Wonge Bergmann)

Like Artaud, Fabre wants to liberate man from the linguistic carcass in which he is imprisoned. This is where the much used metaphor of the beetle fits in: it has to throw off its shell and expose the moist and fleshy body within. The body is the central site where the suffocating and restrictive limits of language can be bypassed. By eliminating the organization of the body as part of a structuring system of other bodies in a coded society, Artaud as well as Fabre try to find ‘a body without organs’. Organs, after all, are a body’s grammar. As they control the digestive system, they are responsible for the corporeal organization. Analogous to the way the organs in a body need externally administered food to digest, the mind, functioning metaphorically like the stomach, absorbs external linguistic elements to shape words and sentences. We are fed with words and grammar and secrete the same substance moulded in one or another shape. Nailing us down within the law of creation, organs, just like words, bring the flux of forces to an end, a stream that ultimately dries up in comprehensible preconceptions and solidifying forms. Without function or organs, the body can liberate itself from all automatisms and obtain the freedom to establish a new world of chaos. Hence, he must get rid of all bodily organizational principles and corporeal fluids (see De Vos 2011: 44...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Staring at the Forbidden: Legitimizing Voyeurism
• Part I Voyeurism and Directing the Gaze
• Part II Voyeurism in Space
• Part III Voyeurism and Acts of Watching
• Part IV Voyeurism and Exhibiting the Body
• Part V Voyeurism and Naked Bodies
• Index