Post-Cinematic Theatre and Performance

P. Woycicki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375490
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

A cinema without cameras, without actors, without screen frames and without narratives almost seems like an antithetical impossibility of what is usually expected from a cinematic spectacle. This book defines an emergent field of post-cinematic theatre and performance, challenging our assumptions and expectations about theatre and film.

1

The Post-Cinematic Landscape

In recent years an increasing number of contemporary theatre works have employed a variety of mixed media and film techniques to enhance, but also potentially disturb, the perception of the worlds they create. The general term ‘intermedial theatre’ or ‘multimedia theatre’ may apply to these pieces, which range from multi-million-dollar mainstream Broadway shows and high profile opera stagings to radical avant-garde endeavours. Despite the variety of forms and aesthetics, as Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt suggest, the general form of intermedial theatre can be defined through one of its significant features, ‘the incorporation of digital technology into theatre practice, and the presence of other media within theatre productions’ (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006b: 11). In that sense, intermedial theatre is essentially a hybrid art form encompassing theatre, film, live performance, computer generated virtual realities, communication technologies and so on. As a result, there is a blurring of generic boundaries at play which can crucially be associated with a ‘self-conscious reflexivity that displays the devices of performance in performance’ (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006b: 11) – a process of re-perception and reconstruction through performance occurs (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006b: 12). Thus there is more at stake here than technological innovation, since intermediality is not only a technological phenomenon but also concerns a hybridity of forms and conventions, resulting in styles that inspire different modes of perception. Therefore intermedial practices have the potential to radically change our perceptions of performance and interrogate their cultural and political foundations, even though not all necessarily seek to do so (for example, Reel to Real (2010), which will be discussed below).

This phenomenon has been accompanied by a wealth of scholarship on the subject of intermediality. Most notably, Chapple and Kattenbelt’s Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006), Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance (2007), Greg Giesekam’s Staging the Screen (2007), Nick Kaye’s Multi-Media Video Installation Performance (2007), Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Performance Interventions) (2011) and Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer’s Multimedia Performance (2012) amongst others. These publications cover a very wide range of performance practices and critical approaches, yielding invaluable insights on the nature of intermediality which this book will draw upon. However, the focus here is on a subgroup of intermedial practices that I will call post-cinematic, and that critically addresses cinematic codes and conventions. In the light of the global influence of cinematic culture this focus can offer a valuable perspective on theatre’s interinvolvement with film.¹ It also enables more specific insights to be gained by looking at the interinvolvement of theatre and film as a deconstruction of culturally dominant cinematic conventions. The chapters below explore the ways in which cinema operates within our contemporary culture, examining its effects on the audience’s perceptual habits and expectations and asking what is politically, ethically and philosophically at stake in the deconstruction of these conventions. They also elaborate on the deconstructive intermedial strategies that are specifically sourced from and influenced by cinematic traditions.

Our notion of cinema – but also to an extent the broader cultural landscape – is heavily influenced by realist cinematic conventions. By means of perspectivist structuring and pleasure laden aesthetic forms, these conventions in turn calibrate our sensitivities and expectations and guide our perceptions, often inducing a passive mode of spectatorship, limiting audiences’ ability to respond and making them prone to be affected by particular ideological perspectives and political agendas. Following Jean Baudrillard’s argument from Simulacra and Simulation, one could even argue that popular cinema effectuates a deterrence of the real, where simulations precede and thus articulate in advance our perceptions of reality (Baudrillard 1994). In that sense, behind the aesthetic structures of cinema, there are political agendas determining how things should be perceived. Despite this lure, fixation and the spell of realism, we live in a post-cinematic age which can partly be characterised by a heightened awareness of cinematic modes of operation. However this awareness is not always stimulated and foregrounded, whereas post-cinematic theatre, I shall argue, has the capacity of doing that, essentially through its deconstructive intermedial strategies.

But can all intermedial theatre that uses film in cinematic ways automatically be defined as post-cinematic? Let us consider an intermedial piece called Reel to Real (2010), performed at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival. The piece was directed and choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and produced by the Broadway Asia International, LLC and the Beijing Huairou State Owned Assets Management Company, Beijing Rouyuan Cultural Media Co. Ltd, in order to celebrate the creation of their Film, Theatre and Multimedia Arts studio complex – a Chinese version of Hollywood. Reel to Real is an intermedial musical based around scenes from famous Hollywood musicals, which are loosely tied together by a simple story line. The story line follows the characters Jack and Jill whose father, head of a major Hollywood studio corporation, sends them on a journey around the world, full of ‘quests’ and twists and turns of plot, in order to find out which one of them will be the most worthy successor in his business. After their travels, having seen the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel tower, Notre Dame and so on, having fought and had many arguments which reflected their rugged ‘American’ competitive individualism, Jack and Jill finally face the Great Wall of China. It is ultimately this great divide which brings them together and the father decides to make them both his successors, in the spirit of equality and cooperation. From an ideological and political perspective, the show was easily interpreted as promoting Chinese culture and the values of the Chinese political system, superficially set, as they were, in opposition to American culture and values; superficially and ironically since the current economic and political system of China is firmly anchored in its own version of Western capitalism. For instance, the Chinese producers of this multi-million-dollar venture made it clear that at least 20 per cent of the images and video material should promote Chinese tourist locations. The show did that quite explicitly and indeed the ideological ‘reel’ of the tourist advertisement would – in the case of the great majority of the audience – precede any ‘real’ experience of a trip to China. It is also an instance of cultural colonisation, ironically in this case, of Hollywood, appropriating Hollywood means and aesthetics. This show could easily be labelled as a cinematic intermedial piece, but not as a post-cinematic piece in the way I have defined it. This is because it essentially indulged in the dominant cinematic culture as opposed to developing a critical reflexive stance. In terms of intermedial aesthetics, for the most part the makers took great care to blend the film and live action and to offer a single cohesive perspective on the simplistic story. The musical clips were not addressed critically and apart from a few ironic jokes and parodies of stereotypical characters the show was essentially a celebratory medley of Hollywood musicals. For the most part, the choreography doubled the action on screen, making it virtually redundant. Film animations were mainly used as a method of enhancing scenes, as a virtual backdrop or wallpaper. Furthermore there was a ‘concealed’ (albeit blatantly obvious) political agenda behind the performance. Unlike the pieces which will be discussed below, Reel to Real did not deconstruct cinematic conventions in such a way as to emancipate the spectators to critically reflect on the way in which cinema can induce ideological perspectives and political agendas. Instead it provided a light, dazzling spectacle full of beautifully crafted, immersively cinematic stage effects.

But is it enough to offer such a critique? Is this spellbinding effect not a wider cultural phenomenon stemming from a century of realist cinema tradition? The conventions and aesthetic structures of realist cinema have become so culturally dominant and associated with all kinds of pleasures and harmonies that they must have re-calibrated our sensitivities but also modes of perception. These immersive, often affect-laden aesthetic journeys have become an incentive to concur with any argument a piece like that may propose and make the audience accord with whatever political agendas and ideological perspectives they offer. The case of Reel to Real speaks for itself, in the sense that it barely conceals a cultural/tourist promotion of China and that it could also be read as superficially and ironically evoking the superiority of Chinese ‘communist’ values over the individualist American capitalist mentality.

One could argue that there is nothing wrong with yielding to cinematic illusions that are reflective of a global cinematisation of culture. After all, it is only a bit of entertainment and we all need it after a hard day’s work – the separation of work and entertainment obviously being part of the movie-going culture. But does yielding to this cultural dominance of cinema in ways that suspend critical thought not carry any dangers? What interests me here is what is politically and culturally at stake, and how post-cinematic theatre and film can interrogate and perhaps exhibit a form of resistance to this dominant cinematisation through deconstructive intermedial practice. The deconstructive nature of these works opens up possibilities for interpretation and foregrounds what Hans-Thies Lehmann describes as a ‘politics of perception’ (Lehmann 2006: 186). This is a politics that deals not with political content or ‘messages’ but rather with an awareness of the political and ideological factors underlying perception. It is a form of awareness and self-conscious reflexivity that arguably inspires a more active spectatorship but that is usually lost, concealed and discriminated against within the design of a mainstream realist cinematic experience.

The overall structure of this project is as follows. This introductory chapter will mainly comprise of an articulation of post-cinematic theatre as a subset of intermedial practices and an elaboration on Lehmann’s notion of the ‘politics of perception’, also referred to as an aesthetics of ‘response-ability’ (Lehmann 2006: 186) (as translated by Karen Jürs-Munby: Verantwortung in the original). The first section will trace the background and some of the cultural influences surrounding post-cinematic theatre. It will contend that we live in a culture that is progressively saturated with cinematic forms and conventions and that the notion of post-cinema, which defines post-cinematic theatre, is a cultural reaction to this cinematisation both in art practice and theory, one that is marked by a shift towards a heightened awareness of cinematic modes of operation and their influences on cultural perceptions. Despite the plethora and variety of film forms that emerged in the twentieth century, contemporary cinema culture on the whole remains dominated by aesthetics and conventions rooted in classical realist cinema stemming from early mainstream Hollywood and Soviet montage traditions. Thus post-cinema will be defined as a contemporary critical and reflexive trend in mainly avant-garde culture, aimed at interrogating and deconstructing dominant cinematic conventions and the expectations associated with them. This discussion benefits from the introduction of some critical theories, mainly from film studies’ ‘post-theory’, that have critiqued these developments in mainstream cinema and analysed their effects on the way ideology and social relations were and are being constructed through cinematic works.

The next section of the chapter elaborates on some of the general aesthetic strategies that are essentially concerned with the deconstruction of realist cinematic conventions. This section will introduce an overview of post-cinematic aesthetics, hence locating post-cinematic theatre in the broader post-cinematic artistic landscape. It will also draw a parallel between post-cinematic theatre and Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre, since both are concerned with a reaction against culturally and institutionally dominant conventions and aesthetics. These affinities will become useful and relevant during the analysis of the specific case studies and will provide interesting insights for the discussions that will follow. The third section introduces and defines the concept of the ‘politics of perception’, in order to clarify the nature of the political resistance that the post-cinematic pieces in question offer. The final section takes a brief look at the history of critical discourses that dealt with the intermediality of film and theatre, ranging from the early debates to more contemporary approaches.

The case studies chapters deal with post-cinematic works from the late 1980s to the present day and argue that these pieces exhibit a cultural and political resistance to realist cinematic conventions, emancipating the audience by offering them a broader spectrum of perceptual choices. I will look closely at the following post-cinematic theatre pieces: Robert Lepage’s Elsinore and The Andersen Project, Station House Opera’s Roadmetal Sweetbread and A Mare’s Nest and the Wooster Group’s House/Lights and Hamlet, Katie Mitchell’s Wunschkonzert, Imitating the Dog’s Hotel Methuselah and Duncan Speakman’s cinematic sound walk As If It Were The Last Time. All of them are fairly recent post-cinematic pieces, and they exhibit the post-cinematic trend of deconstructing cinematic culture, whilst at the same time being heavily influenced by it. They also deal with various aspects of the ‘cinematic apparatus’ and employ an array of different intermedial strategies, interinvolving film and theatre to challenge the audience’s perceptions and expectations associated with cinema. The final chapter deals not with a piece of theatre but with a film, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, which could be categorised as a Brechtian,² post-cinematic film. Like the theatre pieces Dogville uses an intermedial strategy of interinvolvement of theatrical and filmic aesthetics to deconstruct and challenge realist expectations. Even though Dogville is not a theatre piece it draws upon theatre’s deconstructive political potential. Hence the theatrical aesthetic used in the film is not naturalistic but Brechtian, one that is historically associated with the notion of challenging political perceptions.

An array of post-structuralist approaches comes into play in the analysis of the ways in which intermedial strategies in post-cinematic theatre deconstruct cinematic conventions. Here, these will include theories by Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Lévinas, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière and Jacques Derrida, each of which can be related to specific case studies. The value of post-structuralist theory here lies in the fact that to a great extent the perceptual experiences of realist cinema are organised through discursive conventions and aesthetic structures. Thus these post-structuralist theories will be used to articulate what is perceptually at stake in the aesthetics of disorientation, undecidability, multiplicity and aporias that emerge in the post-cinematic pieces. They will be also used to explore what is at stake in this deconstruction of cinematic conventions from different angles: political agendas, ethical perceptions, perspectivist approaches to narratives, moral frameworks, each of which will be dealt with specifically in the case studies.

The shows discussed are all ones with which I am familiar and inevitably my interpretations of audiences’ and spectators’ experiences will reflect the perspective of my own experiences. This is obviously a subjective and speculative approach, yet it will serve the argument since it is concerned with demonstrating different possibilities of reading and interpretation resulting from deconstruction effects as opposed to claiming determinate audience experiences. However there will always be a degree of subjectivity and speculation because cinematic culture affects everyone differently, and while a lot of its influences on the way we perceive culture and our expectations associated with it are to an extent shared, there will always be variances of response even to the most conventional of films. Thus my argumentative methodology will be primarily concerned with a spectrum of perceptual freedom and the claim that post-cinematic pieces essentially broaden this spectrum for an audience, in contradistinction and possibly in reaction to realist cinematic conventions which work towards narrowing this spectrum down.

Chapter 2 looks at Robert Lepage’s Elsinore (1996) and The Andersen Project (2006). The point of departure for the discussion is Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of classical film montage and cinematic metaphor. In particular his notion of the image of movement and his critique of Edward Muybridge’s famous movement studies, which Lepage deliberately references in Elsinore in order to effectuate a deconstruction of cinematic montage. To supplement the theoretical approach Colin MacCabe’s (1985) discursive critique of Eisenstein helps us to explore the ways in which the post-cinematic aesthetic of Elsinore jars the possibility of an ideologically cohesive cinematic meta-discourse, thus stimulating the audience to become more active in the process of meaning making, exemplifying Lehmann’s aesthetic of ‘response-ability’ or ‘politics of perception’. The Andersen Project is discussed in the light of the notion of the mediaphoric body, in relation to Eisenstein’s interpretation of the Laocoön. The Andersen Project presents us with mediaphors of ‘impossible’ bodies, where the tensions between the different constituents of these pseudo-metaphors (mediaphors) deconstruct the ‘integral’ nature of classical metaphors as postulated by Eisenstein.

The third chapter looks at Station House Opera’s Roadmetal Sweetbread and A Mare’s Nest. Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of mainstream realist cinema in his essay ‘Acinema’ offers the theoretical context, where he argues that through ‘pleasure’-bound montage aesthetics and representations realist cinema effectuates a capitalist philosophy of reproducing ideological constructs. However, these post-cinematic pieces have the potential to go beyond ‘pleasure’-bound representations, by playing upon the tension between pleasure and what Lyotard defines as jouissance. This experience of jouissance can have a key role in deconstructing the formulaic ‘pleasures’ of realist film and revealing enjoyment beyond the standard social and cultural ramifications implicit in it. By foregr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Post-Cinematic Landscape
• 2 Décalage and Mediaphors in Robert Lepage’s Elsinore and The Andersen Project
• 3 Acinematic Montage in Roadmetal Sweet-bread and A Mare’s Nest
• 4 Guilty Pleasures and Intermedial Archaeologies in the Wooster Group’s House/Lights and Hamlet
• 5 The Ethics of Perception in Wunschkonzert
• 6 Disorienting Landscapes in Hotel Methuselah
• 7 Pedipulating ‘Footage’ in Duncan Speakman’s As If It Were The Last Time
• 8 Landscapes and Aporias in Lars von Trier’s Dogville
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index