Towards a Dramaturgy of Appearance

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Notes

¹ The term of appearance is to be understood in the sense of a ‘court appearance’ and also in the sense of ‘theatrical appearance’. The French term comparution refers immediately to a judicial context and, in this point of view, is supposed to import the judicial question into the theatrical one. We here take up a notion that Jean-Christophe Bailly and Jean-Luc Nancy use in an altogether different context and adapt it to our own discourse. (See Bailly and Nancy 1991. In 2008 a first draft of this theoretical work was published in French, with Christophe Triau.)

² The ‘session’ (la séance in French) is the event itself, which can be extended to the preparation of the theatrical event and to the following moments of the show, to the practical reception of it. For a further definition, see Biet and Triau (2006).

³ In a way like what used to be called in film a ‘politique des auteurs’ (an authors' politics).

⁴ ‘So, that's popular theatre? It is, because it is too large, too long, too philosophical, too metaphysical, too poetic and because, beyond all the figures and all the ideas, the only idea which is worshipped is that of the theatre’ (Olivier Py, interview with Gilles Costaz 2000).

⁵ Easily identifiable here is a simplifying, yet widespread, interpretation of the last pages of Denis Guénoun's Le Théâtre est-il nécessaire? (1997).

⁶ Not exactly in the sense, though not devoid of interest in a reflection on theatrical aesthetics, used by Jean-Luc Nancy, either.