Theatre or Performance or Untitled Event?
Some Comments on the Conceptualization of the Object of Our Studies
There has been an ongoing argument at U.S. conferences as well as in drama j ournals, theatre j ournals, and performing arts j ournals as to whether we are engaged in drama studies, theatre studies, or performance studies. This debate can be seen as a scholarly discussion about the "real" object of our studies or perhaps about the supposed object or even the recommended object of our research and our teaching.
My perspective on this controversy is European. For a European (and I am just one European, not the European), this whole upheaval about drama, theatre, and performance looks bewildering, strange, almost exotic. But the implications of this hot issue are quite complex and highly relevant from a global view of our common field.
The whole controversy can also be understood as an institutional power struggle, as William B. Worthen has suggested in an article in the Drama Review {TDK), where he writes: "Stage vs. page, literature vs. theatre, text vs. performance: these simple oppositions have less to do with the relationship between writing and enactment than with power, with the ways in which we authorize performance, ground its significance."1 Pierre Bourdieu would probably describe the situation in terms of a struggle for a dominant position in the academic field — by expanding the borders of the field, old positions have to be redefined and new power relations are established. Bourdieu might also say that this is the habitus of academics: to cover their ambitions to gain influence and power with scholarly arguments instead of an open political rhetoric.2 My engagement in this struggle is not focused primarily on the power
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play and only to some degree on U.S. educational politics. I am interested in the various descriptions of the field itself: the objects of our studies, scattered about both in the center of the field and along its periphery — along the fences, so to speak.
In this sense, the issue at stake is far from being an American issue. First of all, a look at the lists of subscribers to any of the more prominent U.S. journals in our field — such as Performing Arts Journal, Drama Review, and Theatre Journal— will easily expose the fact that these journals are spread all over the world. They are read and discussed at many universities outside the United States and therefore widely influential. U.S. conferences are likewise attended by many scholars from all parts of the world, and most of them are very impressed by the standard of the discussions.
This is my second point: I readily want to admit that North American scholarship is vital, expansive, and, most of the time, interesting. The level of theorizing studies is impressive and based on solid scholarly work. We meet refreshing new attitudes toward academic writing as well as a dedication and enthusiasm which are contagious. Furthermore — and this is especially interesting from a European point of view — it is noteworthy that the main sources of this revitalizing theoretical thinking come from European philosophy, once its central texts have been translated into English. The larger part of the poststructuralist canon originates from European languages, like French (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu, Kristeva, Cixous); or German (Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, Wittgenstein); or East European (Ingarden, Bahktin, etc.). It is true that U.S. scholars have appropriated these philosophical ideas more openly than many of my European colleagues. In that sense, we Europeans have to blame ourselves when we were less attentive to these sources of inspiration, although some of us might have written about these issues in "small" languages, which are rarely read outside the borders of our own countries.
There are, in other words, good reasons to observe the U.S. scholarly scene closely. My point of view in the theatre/performance controversy concentrates on the arguments used in the debate. I would like to comment on how these terms (i.e., theatre and performance) are conceptualized, used, and understood by Americans and how these concepts compare to the situation in those parts of Europe with which I am most familiar, namely northern Europe, Scandinavia, the German- and Dutch-speaking countries, and, to a lesser extent, France and Italy.
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The fact that many of us use the English language as a means of scholarly communication easily creates confusion about the meaning of the same words. We all know that words as well the concepts they are meant to express are highly dependent on the context in which they occur.
The word "performance" is just one example of how confusing the English language is. For me — and probably for many of my European colleagues — the word "performance" is thought of as equivalent to the German Aufführung, the Scandinavian föreställning, the French representation, or the Italian rappresenta^ione. All these terms relate to a theatrical presentation in front of an audience, an event defined in time and space. A performance should be distinguished from a "mise-en-scene" or a "production," which could be described as the result of a rehearsal process, a collective competence, so to speak, which can only materialize in a number of performances. In this sense we also understand the term "performance analysis" as a scholarly approach to a (mosdy live) theatrical presentation, starting from and consciously using the scholar's own experience of that performance. Performance analysis is, of course, not limited to spoken drama, but can be applied to any kind of theatrical event, be it opera or musical, dance or pantomime, puppet theatre or Happenings. Performance analysis can also be applied to performance art.
"Performance art" is not the art of performance, however. Rather, it constitutes a specific genre, emanating from the 1960s as a follow-up to the Happenings. I am using this term according to such handbooks as RoseLee Goldberg's Performance Art or Marvin Carlson's Performance. Carlson's title indicates a new tendency in the use of this term. By omitting the word "art," the term "performance" has assumed a new significance, meaning both a specific genre, formerly called performance art, and a unique theatrical event, as in the case of performance analysis. Etymologic ally, the word "performance" originates from the Latin per formam, meaning "through form" — something is expressed through a certain form. In English dictionaries, performance is related not only to a performance on stage, but also to the performance of a car or an athlete, the playing of musical instruments, and other accomplishments. The linguistic aspects of performance will not solve our problems of mutual understanding. Some of these meanings might be interesting for our discussion later on, but more directly influential in our context is the
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notion of performance as a description of certain aspects of culture in the anthropological sense.
A concept of "cultural performance" was introduced in the 19 5 os by Milton Singer and later popularized by Victor Turner and Richard Schechner.3 Singer's idea of cultural performance was developed in opposition to the prevailing notion that cultural expressions consist of artifacts, namely, documents and monuments. For Singer, celebrations such as holidays, weddings, mourning processions, festivals, and temple dances were as much articulations of a culture as the "dead" artifacts. Erika Fischer-Lichte also points out the fact that Singer's pioneering view was historically paralleled by Roland Barthes' distinction between the process of writing and the written text and John Austin's speech-act theory. When Victor Turner discussed Milton Singer's theory — among other things — we can also observe an interesting shift of terminology between two collections of Turner's articles, published in 1982 and 1987, respectively. The one from the beginning of the 1980s was entitled From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. The one from the second half of the 1980s is called The Anthropology of'Performance. The broad perspective which Victor Turner offered in these books is best summarized by the title of one of the articles: "Images and Reflections: Ritual, Drama, Carnival, Film and Spectacle in Cultural Performance."4 We also note that the word "theatre" is not included in this list.
While Turner had difficulties in defining the play elements in human behavior, Schechner has tried to locate play and playing not within the system of theatre, but within the framework of performance. Contrary to Jerzy Grotowski's search for universal modes of expressions or Eu-genio Barba's notion of pre-expressiveness, Schechner is well aware of the significance of the cultural context. For Schechner, interculturalism, not universalism, became the basis of performance studies, which in his view implies a paradigmatic shift away from theatre studies. Interculturalism became for him the bridge to a much wider understanding of that which is performative in human behavior.
The Controversy
Schechner presented his concept at a conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in Atlanta in 1992. "The new paradigm is 'performance,' not theatre," Schechner proclaimed, because
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"theatre as we have known and practiced it — the staging of written dramas —will be the string quartet of the 21st century: a beloved but extremely limited genre, a subdivision of performance."5 Schechner's criticism of the existing theatre departments is very harsh, since these schools produce "graduates who are neither professionally trained nor academically educated" (p. 8). Therefore, he says, '"Theatre departments should become 'Performance departments.' Performance is about more than the enactment of Eurocentric drama" (p. 9). The four main areas of performance studies are entertainment, education, ritual, and healing. Performance can be observed in "politics, medicine, sports, religion and everyday life." Schechner offers a catalogue of activities which should be included in performance studies; under the heading of popular entertainment, for example, he suggests: "rock concerts, discos, electioneering, wrestling, con games and stings, college and professional sports, vogue-ing, street theatre, parades, demonstrations, and a panoply of religious rituals ranging from staid old church services to hot gospel sings, to the rituals of Asian and African religions, to the practices of New Age Shamanism" (pp. c)f). In all of these human activities there are a great variety of performative elements worthy of study. Some scholars might, nevertheless, call these elements theatrical, depending on what implications they give the term "theatricality."
Schechner's speech in Atlanta, the formation of a performance studies "focus group" within ATHE, and the printed version of his speech in the winter issue of TDR were indeed a revelation for some and a provocation for others. Small wonder that Schechner's attack on theatre studies was followed by a great number of comments, not only at the ATHE conference, but also in writing. I have already mentioned Bill Worthen, former editor of Theatre Journal, who pointed out the political dimensions of the controversy: "Like many negotiations, boundary wars are as much a contest of authority and power as of 'truth' or 'method' "{TDR, 39). At the same time, Worthen was also questioning the novelty of the performance paradigm, since Schechner is "largely multiplying 'objects' of study (that is, merely expanding the turf [Bourdieu's field!]) under the banner of'intercultural' performance, rather than articulating the conceptual paradigm that would offer new modes of analysis and explanation, a new sense of what counts and of how it counts in the identification, analysis, and explanation of performance" (p. 21).
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Worthen's main argument is that a text — not least a drama text — is as fragile and undetermined as a performance. Therefore, texts constitute an object of studies as much as any kind of performance. Worthen does not want to abandon drama studies, especially since Schechner does not offer any real conceptual alternatives. In his conclusion he states: "New paradigms are often ghosted by their history in ways that are difficult to recognize, acknowledge and transform; to understand 'performance studies' through a simple opposition between text and performance is to remain captive to the spectral disciplines of the past" (p. 23).
Worthen's article — originally presented at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference in New Orleans — in turn provoked a number of reactions. Some voices, such as those of Joseph Roach and Phillip B. Zarrilli, were very polemic, questioning Worthen's — in their view — text-performance binary, defending interculturalism, and denying the "stabilities" of any kind of paradigms. In the ensuing issue of TDR,6 Jonathan Warman, on the other hand, presented what could be called an apology for "live, European-style theatre" (p. 7). By this he means "that form of performance which lives in the shadow of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Racine, Calderon, and their peers and executors, or which is created in direct reaction to, or against, such performances" (p. 8). He advocates new forms of theatre, but still emphasizes theatre, because, as the title of his article says, "Theatre Not Dead."
Jill Dolan, who had already taken up this issue in an article in Theatre Journaltin 1993, held a more conciliatory position in the controversy.7 She admits that "a focus on 'performance' per se, at conferences and in academic departments or programs, might not ensure radical contents and considerations, politically, methodologically, or disciplinarily" (p. 31). Instead of competing with each other or trying to replace each other, Dolan suggests that theatre studies and performance studies should be "seen as mutually empowering each other" (p. 32). If I understand her correctly, she still can see links between theatre and performance studies which her own feminist studies have established for her work.
Theatre: The Terminology
What kind of theatre does Schechner have in mind when he speaks about the Eurocentric string quartet of the twenty-first century? Let me
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quickly draw a sketch of the impressions I have gathered from my reading about the controversy
Speaking about theatre at U.S. universities seems to be equivalent to speaking about the production of spoken drama. Theatre is understood as text-based in the sense that the starting point for theatre is a drama text. Drama texts are almost exclusively texts for spoken drama. Opera libretti or dance scenarios are scarcely part of the curriculum. Dance is studied at special departments, and musical theatre is hardly taught anywhere. Dramatic texts for spoken drama are supposed to contain characters, which means that theatre also is character-based. Student actors are trained nearly exclusively to impersonate characters. They tend to treat characters almost as living human beings with a personal history, an individual psychology, and a distinguishable personality.
I call this description typical, meaning that this is a normal and widespread concept of theatre at U.S. universities. There are certainly colleges where such a narrow idea of theatre is not prevailing, but I think my picture of theatre as it is referred to in the theatre/performance debate is fairly accurate. Even from a European perspective this is a recognizable species of theatre. One will find it in almost every European city with a municipal or national theatre institution. Quite a few of the productions at these places are conservative and undynamic presentations, while others are very interesting. It is the kind of theatre in which directors such as Peter Zadek, Antoine Vitez, Robert Wilson, Heiner Miiller, and Ingmar Bergman are or have been working. These were the home environments of actors like Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, Laurence Olivier, Jean Vilar, Gerard Depardieu, and Jutta Lampe. The European notion of theatre as part of the nationally endowed culture — including music theatre and to some extent dance — is indeed different from America's concept of theatre. Furthermore, the same European authorities also subsidize music theatre and dance, which, especially in Germany, are often located in the same theatre building. U.S. theatre, in contrast, as we see it from the other side of the ocean, is not just a well-acted version of BBC domestic television dramas or Hollywood family series. We think of musicals —which are an original genre from the United States — and of Happenings and Performance Art, off-off Broadway experiments, stand-up comedies, Shakespeare-in-the-park and other open air events, and similar things. U.S. theatre is cer-
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tainly not restricted to spoken drama, but the theatre described as "legitimate theatre" has, roughly speaking, the same limitations as university theatres: the more or less realistic (reproduction of written dramas with decent characters engaged in an understandable plot. I think it is such a reductionist view of theatre which Schechner accuses theatre departments of employing.
The theatrical work of directors like Peter Stein, Ariane Mnouchkine, or Ingmar Bergman could probably be labeled "Eurocentric string quartets," or maybe we would prefer to see them as symphonies of European theatre. But the European notion of theatre — among politicians, spectators, or scholars — is, on the contrary, far from being restricted to the symphonic or chamber format.
At least for northern European scholars the term "theatre" does not designate any given genre of artistic activities. There are at least five major types of theatrical expressions which are conventionally looked upon as theatre: spoken drama, music theatre, dance theatre, mime/ pantomime, and puppet theatre. These types of theatre are not mutually exclusive (spoken drama can very well be presented as puppet theatre, and many operas contain sections for ballet, etc.) — nor is the list complete. Circus, cabarets, parades, and radio theatre are just a few examples that could be added. This broad understanding of theatre is of course a culturally conditioned concept. Not only does the picture of European theatre history include all these variations of theatrical activities, but it has also deeply influenced the scholarly approach to theatre, especially concerning the role of drama. The following two historical references might illustrate the significant difference between drama-oriented and performance-oriented approaches to early theatre studies.
Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz explicitly state in their book, The Living Stage: y\ History of World Theatre (1955) that "for almost two thousand years the theatre of Europe lay dead. Between 400 bc and close to 1600, no dramatist wrote a single great play. From Euripides to Lope de Vega, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, the stage was barren — when there was a stage."8 The pioneer of German theatre studies, Max Herrmann (referred to in the previous chapter), has expressed his attitude toward drama in an often quoted passage in which he dismisses drama studies altogether, except for the use of drama texts as historical sources.9 Herrmann's position, expressed already in 1914, is typical of the attitude
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of much central European theatre research throughout this century, and I see it as a strong opposition to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of drama studies.
Theatre: Three Concepts
So far I think I have distinguished at least three major categories of theatrical concepts: the American type of legitimate theatre, text- and character-based drama, quite influential within the educational system of colleges and universities; the European view of theatre, much wider than the American one, including a multitude of theatrical and semitheatrical genres; and last but not least performance, a category embracing "politics, medicine, sports, religion and everyday life," in Schechner's already quoted terms. Each of them most likely has virtues as well as defects.
The type of legitimate theatre (i.e., the spoken drama) reflects a common American understanding of theatre as an art form as opposed to the U.S. entertainment industry. In this sense, legitimate theatre qualifies (sometimes) for subsidies from the National Endowment for the Arts. Although a narrow concept, it is very clear, with a certain canon of plays, a historical approach to the text, a specific — mostly Stanislavskian — style of acting, a director at the center of critical attention, and an emphasis on content and interpretation. It is also obvious that the type of spoken drama discussed here has its origin in a specific period of European theatre history, roughly speaking, the postromantic era, from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. What is less frequently observed is that this period includes the most expansive years in European history — in economical, political, and cultural terms. This is the period during which the bourgeoisie gained power, formulated its ideology, and exported its ideas as eternal values to the rest of the world. During this age of increasing industrialization and deepening cultural colonization, especially around the turn of the century, the realist, drama-based theatre was exported to colonies as well as free countries outside Europe. It created such (hybrid) forms as the Shin Geki in Japan, the Huaju in China, the English-language drama in India and large parts of Africa (and also its French, Spanish, and Portuguese equivalents), and the Teatro Independiente movement of the 1930s in Argentina. There is, in other words, a colonial stench to legitimate theatre, which should
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not be neglected. It should also be clear that this type of theatre has been and still is a self-representation of the (white, Christian, educated) middle class.
The European concept of theatre is — I maintain — much wider, but also includes the American concept of legitimate theatre. In Europe we do not use such a line of demarcation between serious theatre and entertainment theatre — we have all read Bertolt Brecht and we know that serious thoughts need to be entertaining. Opera is serious, mostly, and so is modern dance, and many European theatre artists are even taking children's theatre seriously. Among scholars, the scope of theatrical activities has been considered very broad, and a number of topics — like Renaissance parades, Dadaist cabarets, or cross-dressing during any period of theatre history — might even qualify as performance studies. The main field of scholarly interest is, nevertheless, focused on a great variety of activities, which, in a broad sense, can be looked upon as theatrical modes of expression, but with limitations which are regularly debated.
Performance studies as a discipline does not seem to set any limits to what could be interesting as a field of inquiry. There are performative aspects to all kinds of human behavior. Some recent research has shown that such an approach can be fruitful in many areas. Just one example is the collection of articles published under the title Cruising the Performative, edited by Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan L. Foster. In this volume transvestism, tango, eighteenth-century elephants and Sea World whales, queer performativity, religious lyrics of devotion, and even the hyphen are points of departures for inspiring adventures in reading. This extremely open attitude has its risks as far as theatre studies is concerned, however. Schechner himself has noted a drop in the number of subscribers to TDR by 80 percent during the last twenty-five years. Richard Hornby, in a letter to the editor, found the reason obvious: "While hundreds of thousands of Americans are seriously interested in theatre, only specialists are interested in shamanism and the semiotics of figure skating."10 Is this comment to be taken seriously? I don't know, but the theatre/performance controversy seems to have many kinds of implications. There is, however, an overshadowing problem implicit in all of these concepts: all these categories are based on the exclusion or inclusion of certain genres. "What counts?" as Bill Worthen asked in his ar-
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ticle. What can still be considered as "theatre" and what not? How many genres can a European concept of theatre account for? Is there anything which might be excluded from performance studies?
For me, these are not very fruitful questions. The whole discussion becomes a quantitative enumeration of study areas, although everybody intended to bring up qualitative arguments. To avoid a power struggle about who is authorized to make distinctions — to put up fences in Bourdieu's field — we should rather reconsider the theoretical principles and the epistemologies of our studies.
Theoretical Reorientation
One thing is for sure: on both sides of the ocean — and probably along other shores, too — there is an enormous emphasis on the production side of theatre and performance. How are performances produced? What intentions were articulated or implicit, what aesthetic concepts did the creator — usually the director — have? How can we grasp the meaning of what are called "works of theatrical art"? I think these work-oriented approaches are dated and far too limited for a serious discussion of theoretical issues as well as for the discourse of intercultural perspectives.
This need for theoretical reorientation became obvious to me while I was engaged in my own section of the theatrical field, the garden where I once planted my flowers and grew my own vegetables: reception research. This is not the time and place to expand on the wonderful questions of methodologies and practicalities of audience and reception research, but I think that some of the results could be illuminating for the discussion here."
I was curious to find out why spectators like theatrical performances. The central point, the focus of attention, and the clearly decisive element for the spectator's overall evaluation of a theatrical performance is the acting. A spectator's value judgment of the entire performance is most directly influenced by what the spectator attributes to the performers. This is true regardless of the theatrical genre or the sociocultural background of the spectator (at least in Stockholm). I could only find two exceptions: classical operas — Mozart is always considered to be superb — and very young spectators, who for the most part will not express any judgments about the performers at all. Otherwise, a play, a
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musical, a modern opera, and a classical ballet are never considered to be better than the standards with which they are performed. This goes even for Shakespeare and Calderon! How something is performed is obviously more important than what is performed. There are a number of reasons which can explain the spectator's tendency to privilege the performer over the play. The only encounter which the spectator experiences direcdy is the acting. A spectator does not meet the director; nor does the script become visible as such — it exists only through the interpretation of the performer. Therefore, the fiction can hardly be judged higher than the formation it derives from. (It needs a very well trained spectator — like a scholar — to distinguish the play from the playing.) It is the live performer who is the main interest of the audience, as well as the gauge of judgment. Furthermore, I have noted that a spectator only shows interest in the content of a performance when s/he finds the quality of the acting sufficiently high. If the spectator is not pleased by the "how" of the performance, the "what" becomes secondary and at times even irrelevant. In other words, plot and characters, drama, and text are of litde interest unless the overall presentation is satisfying.
Following these observations, I would like to suggest a theoretical reconsideration of the conceptualization of theatre, rather than discarding theatre altogether in favor of a new and not always so clear paradigm of performance. It would be pretentious to offer a solution to these complex and much debated problems. What I would like to point out in conclusion are some distinctions which I have found useful while dealing with theoretical problems of theatre scholarship.
First of all it is necessary to develop systematic theories of the theatre. By systematic theories I mean exactly what Dietrich Steinbeck suggested thirty years ago: the study of the concepts and the terminologies we use when we speak and write about theatre.12 The risk is that we work with a number of conventional assumptions about theatre which are rarely reflected upon, although they are constantly in use. One could possibly talk about paradigms which are not made manifest as paradigms. Our forebears in theatre studies, for example, frequendy spoke about theatre as a "compound" work of art (meaning that theatre comprises literature, music, design, acting, technology, etc., which, considered together, establish the art of theatre). The spectator was found necessary, but had no real place in that concept. The spectator is still not accounted for,
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only "assumed" or "implied." All the emphasis is placed on the production and the meaning of text and performance. This might seem odd as a theory of theatre, but it has been practiced for almost a century.
If, for a moment, we neglect the existence of a text and the intentions of a director, we still have some kind of performer and some kind of a spectator. How can we describe such an encounter — not beyond specific genres, but within them! Are there really differences between experiencing an opera singer, a performance artist, a shaman, a goalkeeper, and an actor? And if there are differences, in what categories and in which terminology are we dealing with them? Maybe the meaning of "performance" as an accomplishment, like that of the aforementioned athlete, could be considered. I think the personal encounter between a performer (a specific person) and a spectator (also a specific person) has to be studied much more closely in terms of psychology, gender relations, class formations, genre expectations, and other contextual conditions.
We have to reconsider the entire theatrical event as the intersection of production and reception, or, when contemporary events are in question, of presentation and perception. This also brings up the question of fictionalization. The character is one of the paradigms of traditional theatre studies, but there is no character on stage — just a performer in costume; neither is the character only a product of the spectator's fantasy. The character is not explained by the "agreement" between performer and spectator or by the so-called framing that leads us to consider something "theatre." It is a much more complex interaction between those elements mentioned, but further systematic theoretical research is needed to develop a terminology which allows us to discuss these issues in terms like performativity, referentiality, theatricality, or liminality. There have been a number of interesting articles on these issues, from Josette Feral's ideas on theatricality in 1988 to Ian Watson's most recent contribution in New Theatre Quarterly entitled "Naming the Frame: The Role of the Pre-interpretative in Theatrical Reception."131 have tried to work on this issue myself for a while, and some of my considerations are collected in this book. I am not advocating some new form of essentialism (knowing full well that essentialism is out in this period of poststructural thinking). Instead of counting genres, which may be included or excluded from some type of studies, I suggest systematic inquiries into the concepts we apply. It is part of the epistemo-
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logical foundations of our discipline as well as the basis of the empirical work we accomplish. If something is essential to me, it is to give up the narrow production- and work-oriented perspectives and to bring into focus the contextual events as objects of our studies, the live interaction between stage and auditorium, or, more generally speaking, the specific doings of all participants in a performative or theatrical event, the effects of these doings, and their contexts. I agree with Schechner's view that as we should leave out the "Eurocentric string quartet" of playmaking and that our discipline first and foremost should be an integral part of the humanities. To abandon theatre as a concept altogether and to turn all our attention toward performance seems an unnecessary split to me. I think what is needed is a broader concept of theatre and a more thorough systematic investigation into the wide field of theatrical events.
I have been asking myself whether I have been trying to cover up a political position in the field of theatre and performance studies by introducing another scholarly argument. I am probably no different from anybody else who has been engaged in this controversy. I would, however, like to suggest another metaphor: I just wanted to open another gate in the fence, to let theatre studies out, to let performance studies in, to let ideas and theories flow in a more fruitful circuit. I don't believe in the closing of concepts: I believe in fruitful encounters.
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