Ibsen in Performance

The establishment of the Centre for Ibsen Studies took place at roughly the same historical juncture as the consolidation of performance studies as an academic discipline. The first edition of Marvin Carlson’s (1996) foundational textbook, Performance Studies: A Critical Introduction, appeared in 1996, while CIS officially opened in 1992. In addition to his status as one of the leading figures in theater and performance studies, Carlson is well-versed in Ibsen, having published several articles on his plays in major journals (Carlson 1974, 1985, 2004) and written numerous performance reviews for the Ibsen Society of America’s Ibsen News and Comment. Nonetheless, he faced something of an uphill battle in convincing established Ibsen scholars of the value of studying performance, and it took a new generation of scholars to fully embrace it.

While it is well beyond the scope of this article to present a comprehensive overview of performance studies as a discipline, it is important to acknowledge the interdisciplinary origins of the field in the 1960s, when elements of cultural anthropology, sociology, and theater studies came together to create a new, interdisciplinary way of thinking about performance as something much broader than the artistic staging of literary works in theaters.¹ Later, perspectives from psychology and linguistics increased the theoretical frames and methodological tools available to scholars seeking to understand performative aspects of human behavior. For more than half a century, our understanding of “performance” has evolved to encompass the exploration of a virtually limitless range of performative human behavior, including religious practices, touristic behaviors, gender, and political discourse.

Even though this discipline may appear to range far afield from the study of Ibsen’s plays per se, it has in fact been invaluable in exploring his global impact. Scholars have been able to apply interdisciplinary performance studies methods and theories in their analyses of the highly specific local contexts in which Ibsen’s plays are performed around the world. Rather than interpreting Ibsen’s works as aesthetic literary objects, the emphasis is on how these works are activated, adapted, and interpreted in widely varying cultural and social contexts. Performance studies allows scholars to investigate how these plays are leveraged to produce meaning—be it social criticism, new aesthetic forms, or something else entirely—for specific audiences connected to particular times and places. Performance is first and foremost understood as a form of mutual communication between audiences and performers. Crucially, this has opened up Ibsen studies to the perspectives of theater practitioners themselves, and in recent years the field has seen important contributions from within the theater itself, as it were.

This is not, however, to say that there was no research on Ibsen and stage performance before the rise of performance studies (or, for that matter, before the establishment of the Centre for Ibsen Studies). The Norwegian theater historian Roderick Rudler, who wrote numerous essays on Ibsen’s own theater productions and theater criticism, deserves special mention in this context. It is, perhaps, symptomatic of the longstanding dominance of literary approaches to Ibsen that Rudler’s work from the 1960s and 1970s is so little known. Nor does it help that the majority of his research examined Ibsen’s much maligned early years as a theater practitioner in the 1850s. But Rudler writes lucidly about the importance of actors in shaping innovations in performance culture (Rudler 1961a), on scenography and stage painters (Rudler 1961b), and the importance of the tableau vivant as a form of theatrical entertainment (Rudler 1965), among many other topics that are highly relevant in the context of performance studies today. Rudler’s methods were primarily archival, with little or no trace of theoretical orientation, which further marginalized his work from the performance studies boom into which it otherwise naturally would have fit. Nonetheless, historical Ibsen performances have experienced something of a revival in recent years, providing insights into Ibsen’s development as a dramatist (e.g. Hyldig 2010; Gjervan 2011; Dingstad 2016).

PERFORMANCE STUDIES AND THEATER STUDIES

It is worth taking a step back to consider the intersections between theater studies and performance studies. Erika Fischer-Lichte, for a long time the leading figure in European theater studies, wrote an incisive article about the future of theater studies in 2001, in which she defines the field in the following manner:

Theatre studies as an academic discipline was founded in a programmatic way, as a discipline devoted not to text, but, rather, to performance. Since its very origins, it has been understood as an “interdisciplinary” subject within which many other fields of study intersect and merge: art history, musicology, literature studies, cultural history, communication and media sciences, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, economics, and law. Whether it is defined and practised as cultural studies, as media studies, or as art studies, the study of theatre constitutes, by definition, an interdisciplinary field. (Fischer-Lichte 2001, 52)

Clearly theater studies and performance studies intersect in many meaningful ways.² Fischer-Lichte’s division of theater studies into three categories—“cultural studies,” “media studies,” and “art studies”—gives an indication of where that intersection occurs. She writes that “[c]onsidering theatre studies as cultural studies entails viewing theatre as a particular genre of cultural performance, to be investigated in the context of and in relation to the different genres of cultural performance, which in their sum total constitute this particular culture” (Fischer-Lichte 2001, 52). One of the most important strategic decisions made at the Centre for Ibsen Studies was the appointment of Fischer-Lichte to a twenty percent “Professor II” position (2008–2017). Together with theater historian Jon Nygaard, who joined the CIS staff in 2005, her expertise and enthusiasm increased the attention paid to Ibsen’s works in performance to a degree not previously seen at CIS or in the field as a whole.

We see a notable example of the intersection between theater studies and performance studies in one of the earliest major analyses of Ibsen’s works in performance, Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker’s Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays from 1989 (Marker and Marker 1989). Fredrick J. Marker had already held a key position in the field of theater studies as the editor of the journal Modern Drama before this book came out. As Carlson points out, Marker subtly expanded the scope of the journal beyond mere textual analysis to include “theatre” in his understanding of “modern drama” when he took over in 1972 (Carlson 2007, 491). In Ibsen’s Lively Art, Marker and Marker trace the European performance histories of six Ibsen plays, with examples from the stages of Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and France, using methods not dissimilar to those of Rudler. Along with an even earlier volume of essays edited by Jytte Wiingaard and entitled Henrik Ibsen i scenisk belysning (Jytte 1978; Henrik Ibsen in light of the stage), this book offers analyses of specific milestone performances while at the same time providing insight into a new discipline as it was taking shape.

In retrospect, one might argue that what was needed to unleash the full potential of performance studies and push Ibsen studies in a new direction was one or two truly dramatic moments that clearly demonstrated the creative and interpretive power of performance. One such moment was the American director Robert Wilson’s 2005 staging of Peer Gynt. This postmodern production was so different from any version of the play ever seen before in Norway that it virtually begged for analysis in its own right, and indeed it garnered the attention of one of the world’s leading theater and performance studies scholars, Maria Shevtsova, among many others (Shevtsova 2007; see also Andersen 2007 and Nygaard 2009). Here, the interpretive potential of stage performance was so undeniably on display that it was no longer possible to dismiss its value as a subject of study. As Shevtsova points out, Wilson strives for a theater “where sound and word, image and movement and everything else required for performance took its rightful place” and that for Wilson the text itself, “understood in terms of character, narrative, dialogue and semantic meaning, was not a privileged entity” (Shevtsova 2006, 111). She went on to analyze other Ibsen productions by Wilson as well (2007). One might also argue that the 2006 Bentein Baardson staging of Peer Gynt in Egypt, with its overt juxtapositioning of different cultures and languages, served as a similarly productive catalyst; there was so much that was provocative about this production in this specific time and place that the necessity of performance studies methods was undeniable, generating thoughtful critiques by Frode Helland, who had just taken over as the director of CIS at the time, that relied on careful analysis of aspects of the scenography, setting, audience, and language of performance (Helland 2007, 2009).

More recent theater and performance studies have shown us that the creative processes and experiences of theater practitioners and scholarly investigations of Ibsen can mutually inform each other in productive ways. Theater director Thomas Ostermeier provided an especially insightful glimpse behind the scenes, as it were, in his 2010 CIS Annual Ibsen Lecture, which was published in Ibsen Studies that same year. Bored with the Freudian approaches that dominated the famed German “Regietheater” of the 1970s through the 1990s, Ostermeier identifies the economic pressures that work in and through the characters in the social dramas as a more dynamic approach to staging Ibsen in the face of the neoliberalism of the twenty-first century. There is, moreover, an undeniable irony in the fact that the Norwegian state has invested heavily in Ibsen as a cultural export and tool in its efforts to promote the so-called Norwegian values of democracy and gender equality through soft diplomacy.

Ostermeier’s approach to Ibsen’s plays parallels Franco Moretti’s seminal article on “Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism,” published the same year as the German director’s lecture (Moretti 2010). Moretti reads Ibsen’s social plays as unique representations of the “grey area,” a world in which the bourgeois characters are trapped in their own social constructions. Characters that represent traditional virtues of honesty are depicted as impotent in their interactions with megalomaniacal and manipulative capitalists, who tend to triumph within social structures based on lies and deceit in the plays. In Ostermeier’s stage interpretations, Ibsen’s fictional world is one in which traditional values, love, and ethics have become secondary to money; people blinded by abstract monetary values destroy each other on the altar of capitalism. He writes that “what is interesting to me as a director is to have a writer who shows how human beings with all their emotions try to survive with their souls intact in a completely materialistic and rationalized world, where only the power of money rules” (Ostermeier 2010, 71). The perspectives of theater director and literary critic meet here and correspond in ways that breathe new life and contemporary relevance into Ibsen’s dramas.

In another CIS Annual Ibsen Lecture from 2019, British dramatist Samuel Adamson discussed Nora as a queer icon. Adamson’s emphasis on the queer potential of Ibsen’s works points at an underdeveloped avenue for Ibsen studies, one that has been repeatedly explored in stage performances, but only to a limited extent in the scholarly literature—with Jenny Björklund’s “Playing with Pistols: Female Masculinity in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler” (Björklund 2016), Julia Jarcho’s “Cold Theory, Cruel Theater: Staging the Death Drive with Lee Edelman and Hedda Gabler” (Jarcho 2017), and Olivia N. Gunn’s Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants: Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen’s Late Plays (Gunn 2020) as notable exceptions. By engaging in an even broader dialogue with theater practitioners, Ibsen studies can be shaped by and contribute to performances of his plays in dynamic and unexpected ways. We see a clear example of this in Adamson, who freely acknowledged the influence of A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (Holledge et al. 2016) on his own critically acclaimed Ibsen-inspired play, Wife (2019).

In “The Ibsen-Labs Experiment: Five Rehearsal Rooms in Search of The Lady from the Sea” (2016), theater scholar Julie Holledge examines the culturally embedded interpretive processes that take place before a play is ever staged, in the exploration of the characters by actors in rehearsal. As with Fischer-Lichte, the Center for Ibsen Studies made a strategic decision to hire Holledge in a twenty percent “Professor II” position (2011–2020). This appointment has had equally decisive repercussions, centering the importance of theater practitioners, local contexts, and the mutually communicative nature of performance, and, moreover, prompting a concerted effort to move Ibsen studies beyond Europe. We see a strong recent example of her legacy in an article by Agnete G. Haaland (2022) published in Ibsen Studies in 2022. Haaland draws on her own notes and diaries to take us behind the scenes of Wu Xiaojiang’s 1998 staging of A Doll’s House at China National Experimental Theatre in Beijing, in which she, as the only European actor in the cast, played the role of Nora. These articles by Holledge and Haaland demonstrate the potential for Ibsen studies of what one in the German academic tradition might refer to as Werkstattbericht, a workshop or rehearsal report, for providing new experiential and methodological insights into Ibsen’s works.

IBSEN BETWEEN CULTURES

A large research project, Ibsen Between Cultures, which was led by Helland, housed at CIS, and funded by the Research Council of Norway (2008–2013), was a true game changer in the development of Ibsen performance studies during the last two decades. Strongly inspired by Fischer-Lichte’s idea of “interweaving performance cultures” (fully realized in 2014, but first launched in an article from 2008), it rejected an implicit dichotomy between East and West that had up until then influenced post-colonially oriented performance studies of Ibsen. A key influence was Rustom Bharucha, who insisted upon the importance of local contexts of performance, rather than the differences and changes spurred by the intercultural performance event. Ibsen Between Cultures aimed at demonstrating how theatrical traditions from, for instance, Bangladesh, China, or India developed an understanding of Ibsenian dramaturgy and embedded it within their respective canons, but on their own terms, creating dramatic artworks that are indebted to Ibsen and at the same time create new meaning as fully independent artifacts (Bharucha 2000).

Ibsen Between Cultures echoed the impetus toward global perspectives mentioned in the article on reception studies in this issue, but from a more radical and oppositional standpoint. In more than one way, the project was a day of reckoning with a dismissive, but widespread view of international performance culture within the field of Ibsen studies. This attitude is neatly encapsulated in a comment from Knut Brynhildsvoll and Atle Kittang, two major figures at CIS and in the field as whole, in their preface to an issue of Ibsen Studies from 2004. Commenting on the different versions of A Doll’s House recently staged at the International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, they write:

As far as this debate is concerned, one can discern regionally varying accentuations. While in parts of the world where traditionally there is discrimination against women, people are first and foremost concerned with content and message, […] there seems in Western countries to be an increasing tendency to focus attention on the aesthetic means and structural devices through which Ibsen communicates his content. (Brynhildsvoll and Kittang 2004, 121–122)

This statement is problematic for a number of reasons. In the first place, it disregards the specificities of individual cultures, homogenizing other “parts of the world” as something essentially different from “Western countries,” inherently plagued with “discrimination against women” in ways that “Western countries” ostensibly are not. Second, it presupposes that only Western directors and actors are interested in challenging and engaging with Ibsen’s texts through new and experimental mises-en-scènes. Third, it establishes a fictive distinction between form and content, according to which certain theater cultures appropriate Ibsen instrumentally for exclusively political reasons, with no regard for aesthetics and cultural expression.

These are precisely the disciplinary dead angles that Ibsen Between Cultures set out to challenge by taking engagements with Ibsen in international performance culture seriously, as the research outputs from the project team members themselves demonstrate. The first scholarly publication to arise out of the project, the anthology Global Ibsen: Performing Multiple Modernities (Fischer-Lichte et al. 2011) laid the foundation for this new development in the field, presenting case studies of Ibsen performances in South Africa, the USA, Australia, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Great Britain, Egypt, Israel, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, China and Russia. Between 2012 and 2014, three doctoral dissertations linked to the project either broke entirely new ground by studying performance cultures that had hitherto not been investigated by Ibsen scholars, or nuanced the established narrative by engaging critically with case studies from previously researched cultural contexts.

Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman’s doctoral dissertation, “Sambu Mitra’s A Doll’s House: Putul Khela in Bengal” (Ahsanuzzaman 2012) takes a 1958 Bengali adaptation of Ibsen’s play as a point of departure for both introducing a new audience to and studying the history of theater and drama in Bengal. Having established the context of this enterprise—unknown to the vast majority of Ibsen scholars—Ahsanuzzaman proceeds to study the translation, first staging, and rich performance afterlife of this adaptation, showing how Bengali theater culture developed an Ibsen of its own, which in turn informed other South Asian receptions of Ibsen.

Such developments were studied further by Sabiha Huq, who in her doctoral dissertation, “The Nation Speaks through the Global: Transformations of Peer Gynt in South Asia and in a Norwegian Valley” (Huq 2014), concentrated on two stagings of Peer Gynt in India and Bangladesh, comparing them to the production history of Peer Gynt in Norway. Together with Ahsanuzzaman’s dissertation, Huq’s contribution was crucial in showing how South Asian theater cultures capitalized on their own decades-long Ibsen tradition—inherited through British colonialism and linked to a discourse of modernity—and developed a living theater culture in which Ibsen played a key role.

The focus on South Asia in these two dissertations was extended through longstanding collaboration between CIS and the Centre for Asian Theatre in Dhaka, led by scholar and director Kamaluddin Nilu. This partnership resulted in a number of events that put Bangladesh on the map for Ibsen studies, culminating in the largest Ibsen festival ever held outside Norway, with twenty-two different productions, an art exhibition, and a conference (Helland and Holledge 2016, 17). Nilu has also published a number of studies on contemporary performances of Ibsen in South Asia, strongly contributing to the development of the field (Nilu 2008, 2010, 2014); notably this includes critical reflections on his own work as a director, as seen in his recently published NativePeer: A Transcultural Adaptation of Peer Gynt (2023). This two-part book, which builds on an article originally published in Ibsen Studies (Nilu 2021), contains both Nilu’s own play text and his reflections on the process of transcreation, with a focus on performance in specific local settings in south Asia.

Another main geographical area of study within Ibsen between Cultures was China, epitomized by the third doctoral dissertation in the project, Liyang Xia’s “Heart Higher than the Sky: Reinventing Chinese Femininity through Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler” (Xia 2012). Xia engages with earlier research on Ibsen in China and concentrates on the reframing of Ibsen’s plays in the context of the Chinese Yeuju Opera tradition. Xia shows that placing Hedda Gabler in an undefined era in ancient China and adapting the play to the expressivity and specificity of this form of musical theater in an adaptation known as Heart Higher than the Sky complicated and nuanced the narrative of Ibsen’s reception in China, which had hitherto mostly been focused on modernity and the development of the country in the (post-)Mao era.

Xia builds on the work of, among others, Kwok-kan Tam, a long-time partner on many projects at the Centre for Ibsen Studies. He has played a key role in researching Ibsen in performance in China, having contributed a number of books, including Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentation in Stage Performance and Film (Tam 2019) and the foundational Ibsen in China 1908–1997: A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (Tam 2001). Chengzhou He, who completed his doctoral dissertation on Ibsen at the Centre for Ibsen Studies in 2004 and is another important partner for the center, has in recent years also begun investigating Ibsen in performance, contributing a number of studies including the book World Drama and Intercultural Performance: Western Plays on the Contemporary Chinese Stage (He 2011) and articles on specific Chinese stage performances (He 2009, 2016). Xia, who is now an associate professor at CIS, has continued to expand her re-assessment of Ibsen in Chinese performance through more recent articles (e.g. Xia 2018, 2021). The work of Tam, He, and Xia, together with studies by other scholars published in the wake of the international Ibsen symposium in Shanghai (2006) and the International Ibsen Conference in Shanghai and Nanjing (2009), have established China as one of the most vital academic areas for the study of Ibsen in performance.

Ibsen Between Cultures project leader Helland’s own monograph, Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power (Helland 2015), deserves special attention. Originally trained as a scholar of Scandinavian literature, Helland epitomizes the paradigm shift in Ibsen studies that has caused literary scholars to reposition themselves in order to understand the implications and developments related to contemporary drama and interweaving theater cultures that comprise the “Ibsen phenomenon” today. Through case studies related not only to stage performance, but also to censorship, political discourses, ideology criticism, and film studies, Helland showcases the diversity and critical potential of Ibsen’s plays when they are read, adapted, and staged in Germany, Turkey, Chile, Iran, China, Zimbabwe, and Egypt. Helland’s monograph also sums up the process of scholarly exchange and mutual learning that Ibsen Between Cultures represented for the involved partners. Through substantial publications on non-Western phenomena in English, as well as guest performances organized by the project, European and especially Norwegian scholars and readers became aware of dramatic traditions that had hitherto been inaccessible because of languages barriers. Conversely, their Asian and African colleagues could engage directly with Norwegian perspectives on Ibsen’s works, which had previously largely been filtered through English translations and Anglo-American scholarship. This fruitful cultural exchange was perhaps the most important and long-lasting result of Ibsen Between Cultures.

While the project came to an official end with the publication of Helland and Holledge’s anthology, Ibsen Between Cultures (Helland and Holledge 2016), which collected contributions from the project’s main participants, its legacy lives on in the growing number of recent performance studies of Ibsen’s works in widely varying contexts, such as recent work by Gunn. We see a particularly thoughtful example of the power of performance to engage with pressing contemporary questions of identity, inclusion, and exclusion in Yury Urnov’s 2017 production of Hedda Gabler in the United States. In this staging, the actor embodying the role of Hedda Tesman, Britney Frazier, is a woman of color, and, moreover, the character refuses to take her own life, instead leaving the performance space in a stunning gesture. Gunn presents a nuanced reading of race and performativity in this production that is embedded in her own experience of participating as an audience member, providing the field with a model for how one might position oneself as a participant-observer when studying performances of Ibsen’s plays going forward (Gunn 2021).

CONCLUSION

It is no accident that courses entitled “Ibsen between Cultures” and “Ibsen in Performance” have become cornerstones of the master’s program in Ibsen Studies offered at CIS. In fact, a program of study focusing on Ibsen that does not fully integrate these perspectives would be difficult to defend today. Nor is it an accident that CIS developed its relational, event-based database, IbsenStage, in tandem with the Ibsen Between Cultures project. This database, which was cloned from the Australian performance database, AusStage (led for many years by Holledge), contains metadata regarding the contributors, venues, and organizations involved in staging Ibsen’s works around the world, from the very first performance in 1850 to today; with over 25,000 recorded productions, it serves as an archive of the ways in which Ibsen’s works have been interpreted in thousands of local contexts. It is a constantly expanding testimonial to the continued relevance of Ibsen, and it has become the foundation for new computational approaches to Ibsen, as discussed in detail in the article on digital humanities in this issue.

While one might well argue that the “performative turn” that took place across the humanities would inevitably have impacted Ibsen studies sooner or later, there is no question that CIS made a number of strategic decisions that sped up the process and established the parameters for a generation of Ibsen scholars. These decisions were met with some skepticism from scholars who maintained the primacy of literary approaches, as seen in the example taken from Brynhildsvoll and Kittang. Recent issues of Ibsen Studies suggest, however, that the field of performance studies has become a fully integrated and respected approach to Ibsen, unquestionably on par with studies grounded in literary, reception, adaptation, and digital methods (e.g. Fischer-Lichte 2007; Holledge 2008; Hyldig 2011; Tompkins 2013; Janss 2017; Qi 2017; Burç 2018; Nyhus 2020; Räthel 2020; Druta 2021). Performance studies approaches have clearly created entirely new avenues for exploring the cultural impact of Ibsen, strengthening the traditionally marginalized field of theater studies and identifying a seemingly endless source of renewal for the field, as long as Ibsen’s plays continue to be performed in interesting ways. It offers a rich body of scholarship to supplement and amplify reception studies, as well as a fruitful comparative framework for contextualizing adaptation studies and literary studies as well.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ellen Rees

Ellen Rees, Professor of Nordic Literature at University of Oslo. [email protected]

Giuliano D’Amico

Giuliano d’Amico, Associate Professor, Centre for Ibsen Studies at University of Oslo. [email protected]

Thor Holt

Thor Holt, Associate Professor, Centre for Ibsen Studies at University of Oslo. [email protected]

Notes

1 For an overview of the decades-long battles over the academic status of drama and whether it was primarily to be studied as literature or as theater—or, more recently, as performance—see Shannon Jackson’s Professing Performance: Theater in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Jackson 2004).

2 The field of performance studies has developed differently in Europe and North America, and the Centre for Ibsen Studies largely follows the German tradition where “Theatre Studies from the outset was founded and theorized as Performance Studies” (Fischer-Lichte et al. 2014, iix). This differs from the American tradition, where performance studies tend to explore non-theatrical performance informed by methodologies from ethnography. This entails a broader range of cultural expressions, from dance to performances of everyday life, from rituals to social media. Performance theorist Richard Schechner, for instance, has conceptualized performance studies as different from theater studies with the concept of performance as “twice-behaved behavior,” which refers to a broad range of behavior that can be repeated and is rehearsed (Schechner 1985).