The expanding galaxy of performing arts: extending theories and questioning practices

Abstract

This paper introduces the Special Issue on the languages of performing arts and is therefore aimed at designing how the context of the latter can be illuminated by socio-semiotic and multimodal approaches to communication. In this Special Issue, performances and performing arts are described as multimodal semiotic acts that co-deploy a range of semiotic resources to produce and construct meanings across different cultures and ages. Seen as dynamic and interactive processes of meaning-making, their analysis calls for new and multidisciplinary frameworks which are collected in this Special Issue. The introduction gives an overview of these papers and discusses their range of diverse phenomena, both live and recorded, including theatre performances and films, art installations, opera, as well as reading out aloud. By outlining the significance and contribution of different disciplines and fields of studies to the broad area of performance studies, the chapter argues the case for innovative approaches that can extend theories and analyse aesthetic and performative practices in context. With the help of some case studies, it provides guidelines for the reading and interpretation of the several theoretical discussions and practical case studies presented to encourage further multidisciplinary research on these domains.

1. When fiction and reality become blurred

On 23 October 2002, 50 armed Chechen militants took 850 spectators hostage in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. Immersed as they were in a fictionalized world, the audience, at least for the first few minutes of the takeover, were convinced that what was happening was part of the play. Known as the “Moscow Theatre Hostage Crisis”, this siege had, in fact, been carefully planned and nothing could have been farther removed from fiction than the militants’ demands for Russian troops to be withdrawn from Chechnya. Somewhat ironically, the theatrical setting completely tricked the audience, distorting their perception of reality, and, in the process, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional.

A recent imaginative recreation of this fusion, and confusion, was presented in Interruption, a film directed by Zois (2016) that premiered in September 2015 at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. Set in a theatre in Athens, the film’s opening sequence appears to be a reference to the Moscow Theatre Hostage Crisis (cf. Dolnik and Pilch 2003), as a group of armed people interrupt the postmodern adaptation of the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies Oresteia and invite the audience to join the bewildered actors onstage. In the ensuing surreal atmosphere and ambivalent context, the audience appear not to be willing to admit that what is happening onstage, including a brutal murder, might – or might not – be real. This allows us to raise several questions about the epistemological boundaries of performance studies. What, in particular, is performance? Does it only involve traditional in praesentia: that is, the quality of acting out something live in front of an audience? Can we accept this narrow definition of performance or should we invoke wider notions, like the broad spectrum definition proposed by Schechner (1988a, 2010) which involves most aspects of human activity? How much light can a multimodal approach, involving the study of the interaction of language with other semiotic resources, throw on this issue, and which multimodal theories and practices can be brought together to this end?

Conceptualizing performance within and beyond the stage is a major theme in this issue and presupposes a recontextualization of traditional notions of theatre. Theatre, the most exemplary form of performing arts, provides a first striking example of the richness of resources and modes enacted in a play that suggest the viability of a multimodal semiotic approach for understanding the nature and impact of performance on society. For example, theatre stands somewhere between “convention” and “spectacle”, to use Helbo’s terms (1987, 15). Older examples testify to what happens when fiction breaks into the real world, the case with the first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830), when the conflict between Romanticists and Classicists erupted in violence (Pasco 1997). Likewise Daniel Auber’s opera Masaniello, or La Muette de Portici (1828), which triggered the Belgian Revolution in July 1830 (Slatin 1979). These extreme examples show that “staged” performances have the capacity to trigger social upheaval. Other instances where fiction and reality are mixed up include Orson Welles’ well-known radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938) which caused mayhem, and the more recent Italian mockumentary Amnésia by Matteo Caccia (2009, see Bonini 2011), a fictional radio drama which tests out listeners’ skills as regards to whether the storyteller Matteo, who claims to have lost his memory, is telling the truth or not. All these examples point to the dissolution of a clear-cut distinction between fiction and reality. So how can we pin down the notion of performance when the arena where it takes place is so slippery and deceitful?

A starting point for introducing this domain of enquiry into performance and performing arts is to adopt a multimodal semiotic perspective to specific kinds of performance. Before going into further details below, we emphasize here that we see any act of performing, similar to the acts of viewing these performances, as multimodal semiotic acts, that, on the one hand, use a variety of semiotic resources to produce meaning and communicate ideas, values, and beliefs and, on the other hand, construct meaning out of the dynamically unfolding interplay of semiotic patterns in performance.

On this basis, this Special Issue explores performances and performing arts as dynamic, interactive processes of multimodal semiosis, both in the Halliday (1978) sense of making meaning as an unfolding social practice, and with regard to the active process of interpretation in the traditional Peircean (1931–1958) sense. By taking into consideration both production- and reception-oriented approaches to performance, we see this focus on the meaning-making patterns as a necessary and fundamental basis for further interpretation and discussion of the texts and genres under consideration. We aim to demonstrate that a multimodal semiotic approach not only helps us find a more reliable way of providing a problem-oriented definition of the object of study for any discipline concerned with the notion and concept of performance, but also supports our aim of bridging the gaps between these disciplines and research areas and their variety of theoretical and methodological accounts.

In the following, therefore, we will expand on the multimodal social semiotic perspective on performance by taking a further look, first, into the notions and definitions of performance as well as the associated concept of performing arts by asking: How do we understand performances and how do we define them in the broad context of humanities? Socio-historical references to the origin and development of performance studies will help us expand traditional and contemporary theories and practices by shedding light on how multimodal analysis can be used to this end. We will therefore elaborate on the usefulness of multimodal social semiotic approaches for the analysis of performances theoretically and analytically through two case studies, and following this, we introduce the papers in this issue, each of which contributes to this approach.

2. Performance

The term performance is considered to be a major category for the exploration, description, and analysis of a wide range of social and cultural activities from standpoints that embrace many different disciplines including, as the papers in this volume demonstrate, philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, psychology, and sociology. In addition, other disciplines, such as history or anthropology, have increasingly focused on the role of performance within different cultures and societies, while attempting to borrow the already broad definition from neighbouring disciplines as well as adding their own views and perspectives. Both the dynamic debate and the on-going analysis of a multiplicity of instances of performance have established a complex, heterogeneous field of debates and exchanges that is continuously redefining its object of study and its theoretical and methodological specifications. Moreover, as documented in this volume, this shift has led to a profound reconsideration of the underlying semiotic frameworks of performance theorists in the last three decades (cf. McAuley 2003, 2007). However, categories and/or taxonomies are shaped within the broad research agendas of specific disciplines, and redesigning such categories is useful when remapping this fragmented territory.

Rather than giving a further definition of what we understand as performance, we approach this problematic field by describing patterns and regularities, as well as different extensions and differentiations of what is seen as having a performative force, being a performative act or, simply, what has been described as performing arts. The examples discussed at the beginning of our introduction have already indicated the problematic nature of performance and the use of the term for various forms of performed actions and experiences, including both intended and scripted acting in front of an audience as well as – in fact a very different view of – certain forms of unintended or spontaneous human behaviour, taken to be real, fictional, or imagined as real. As Schechner (1988a, [1988b] 2004, see also below) discusses, both actions and behaviours as well as artistic practices are the main objects of interest in performance studies, including all kinds of intended and often scripted work with resources such as language, image, gesture, sound, and music, not only in theatre, but also, in spontaneous situations in face-to-face or digital contexts. In addition to these live performances, more inclusive approaches to the study of performance also take into account recorded performances, such as recorded rehearsals or films (cf. Schechner [2002] 2013).

The history of performing arts can in fact shed light on far-ranging communicative and socio-semiotic phenomena across all stages of human history. The process of understanding, interpreting, and classifying performing arts has also relied heavily on the well-known and Euro-centred opposition between spoken and written language, thus contrasting improvised and/or ritualized forms of performance (e.g. folk narratives in the Òkó-speaking community in Nigeria, see Akerejola 2013) and steadfastly logocentric performances based on a written tradition that involves the transposition of a written text into a live or recorded performative event: the classic case being theatre and cinema. Many examples point to the merging between theatre and cinema as having always characterized the history of these two media, since the days of the Lumière brothers (Askari et al. 2015). We may quote, for instance, the “Fregoligraph” (c. 1898), which refers to the use of a screen projecting images that interacted with Fregoli’s live performances. He used it to hybridize what was happening live onstage with what was happening backstage, playing with the two media and interacting with them so as to surprise and amaze his audience by overtly disclosing, and thus downplaying, his tricks (Tabet 2015).

The corporeal presence of performers, their reciprocal interaction, and their direct forms of communication with a live audience evoke socio-semiotic discourses that frame historical, social, and philosophical questions, such as community building, a nation’s Weltanschauung, individual versus collective artistic agency, ideas of beauty, art and politics, and much more. Performing arts are in fact ingrained in the histories of communal, social, and individual identity building (see Zhang, Djonov, and Torr's and also McMurtrie and Murphy's contribution to this volume), as reflected in the development of social and political systems of government, which have been commented on, purposely avoided or critiqued, and reshaped by artists and performers, in the form of theatre plays or musical genres from ancient times to the present.

From a socio-historical standpoint, the development of performing arts in fact parallels social transformation in power relations between producers, performers, and their public. Probing into the complex social and historical development of performing arts would lead us too far off the beaten track, however. Nonetheless, it needs to be pointed out that the multiplicity of roles adopted by social participants tells us something about social shifts in the wake of seismic transitions. One example is the history of Western theatre which shifted away from Classical Greek tragedies, which had incorporated acting, dance, and music in front of an audience mirrored in the chorus, to later forms, such as those that would give rise to Morality Plays in the Middle Ages, when the Church played a key role in shaping art into an edifying mould of subservience and humility, rather than an aesthetic blend of art.

The role of the audience was also understood differently by Renaissance theatre-goers who frequently participated in performances, and later on, contributed to the canonization of the genre of opera, a typical aristocratic and bourgeois form of entertainment. Be it cathartic as in ancient Greece, edifying in Medieval Europe, introducing professionalism, hybridization, and improvisation as in Renaissance and Baroque theatre in Europe or entertaining during the Enlightenment in Central Europe, “art-for-art’s sake” or as a political manifestation during Romanticism and beyond, performance, as a broader definition of theatre, has a long standing tradition as the locus par excellence where social roles and power relations are negotiated.

However, it is in contemporary times that a major breakthrough has been accomplished in terms of producer–performer–spectator relations. Paraphrasing Benjamin’s ground-breaking study ([1936] 1968), the transformative and regenerative work of performing art in the age of mechanical and digital (see Ziarek 2005) reproduction has deeply affected its forms, practices, experiences, and aesthetic values. Ease of access to digital media has accelerated the process that has been amply documented in socio-semiotic and multimodal theories of communication and interaction, inaugurating what has been defined as a “participatory culture” (Delwiche and Henderson 2013). The culture of participation has paved the way for new texts and genres, such as blogs and vlogs, which thrive in the web-based phenomenon of “citizen journalism”. The practice of copying, pasting, and sharing, which in some ways revives older forms of literary composition, as is the case of chivalric romances typical of the Middle Ages and beyond, also heralds a new participatory performative culture. The rise of reality shows, such as “Big Brother”, points to the extremes that the “spectacle of the other” (Hall 1997) can reach, whereas the common citizen becomes the centre of attention of a more and more delocalized audience, tickling spectator’s voyeurism (Metz 1982). A more recent example is Ridley Scott’s experiment, initially released in 2011, Life in A Day, a crowdsourced documentary that includes clips selected from videos posted on YouTube and submitted for that project by “tubers”.

It is this multiplicity of practices that contribute to the complex process of representation and interpretation of performance that we aim to account for in this Special Issue. For a comprehensive and integrative exploration of performing arts, all the expressions, practices, and activities will be included in theoretical descriptions as well as practical analyses and case studies. The papers collected in this issue thus represent approaches that take this wide range of artefacts and contexts into account, all considered as performances in their broadest scope and focusing on specific instances in further detail in their analyses.

3. Performance studies and performing arts: theories and practices

Our reflection on performance and performing arts starts from the consideration that theories, practices, and reception are inextricably tied together. Schechner’s (1988a, [1988b] 2004) theorization, one of the first in this field and celebrated in many of the articles in this volume, holds that performance is distinct from its genres, such as theatre, dance, music, and performance art (a term essentially linked to twentieth century experimentations such as durational performances or art installations, as discussed in McMurtrie and Murphy in this volume), and that performance is:

a “broad spectrum” or “continuum” of human actions raging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, and on to healing (from shamanism to surgery), the media, and the internet. (Schechner [2002] 2013, 2–3)

Consistent with this view, performing arts can thus be analysed in terms of theoretical (e.g. avant-garde) or applied arts, with the latter constituting the majority, since they are typically audience-oriented applied practices. They are also eminently ephemeral and fluctuate between the volatile nature of live performance and the conservative nature of their related practices, such as routine rehearsals, traditions, academies, conservatories, and discipline legacies; for example, bel canto, virtuosity, ballet (see, for example, Sindoni and Rossi's contribution to this volume).

The question of practice is particularly relevant in the field of performing arts, as traditionally performers (actors, dancers, and musicians) struggle to master highly codified skills which they “act out”; that is, perform in live contexts. However, the tradition of valorizing virtuosity over improvisation, for example, can be detrimental to the development of experimentation and innovation in art (Arlander 2011). Experimentation and improvisation that originate uncodified and unpredictable events can be thought of as standing at one end of this continuum, which sees at the opposite end the presence of codified and patterned artistic behaviours that are explicitly within the agenda of tradition and virtuoso practice. All these expressions, practices, and activities lend themselves to socio-semiotic multimodal analysis and offer insights on research into art and performing arts.

Research in the field of performance tout court is problematic outside academia, even though practice is essentially at the very heart of performance. As has been argued by Arlander (2011, 321):

Research is considered distant to ordinary practice in many forms of theatre, dance and film. Though most choreographers and directors use experimentation extensively, and some form of background research by many film directors, the main focus is on expression and on reception.

Furthermore, the related question of ownership (i.e. Who owns a work of art? Who is responsible for it?) brings to the fore other relevant questions, such as the idea of encouraging the production of research by performing and visual artists to frame their own research questions, thus preventing their colonization by traditional academic outlets, or traditional academic agendas. Another related question deals with the topical issue of reproducibility in the digital age, given that its mediascape has continued to expand and colonize different forms of art.

Some key notions from the past help us in our understanding of performing arts today. For example, when it comes to performance, we must first recognize that it is impossible “within Western culture, to think ‘performance’ without thinking ‘theatre’, so deeply engrained is the idea of theatre in both performance and discourse about performance” (Auslander 1997, 4). The once dominant genre in performing arts, that is, dramatic or spoken-word theatre, now only represents a segment of the broader category known today as “theatre” and its related range of practices, such as the use of stage directions discussed by Moghaddam in this volume. The category of “performance” has thus incorporated a wealth of practices and events in the realms of visual and performing arts. In visual arts, “performance art” subverts and critiques the reification and commodification of artistic works by incorporating elements typical of theatre, such as live presence, embodiment, and synchronicity, while at the same time exhibiting its differences with theatre. In performing arts, the genres that Fuchs (1996) calls “performance theatre” expands the category of mainstream theatre practice by adding descriptive labels, such as “experimental”, “alternative”, and “physical” theatre (Carlson 1990, 1996; Goldberg 1988).

Although McAuley (2007) fully acknowledges the wide range of activities that can be grouped together under the label of “performance”, from the most complex, organized, and elaborate, to the simplest expressive practice, she nonetheless argues for a lowest common denominator; that is, the presence of an artist/performer and a public/spectator who views them. The interactional quality of performance is thus fulfilled in a semiotic space that absorbs both the act of performing and the act of viewing which at the very least tallies with the fact that the word “theatre” comes from ancient Greek “θέατρον”, that is, “theatron”, a place where we view.

While it is true that the act of viewing lies at the very heart of any kind of performance, we still need to explore how viewing has come to be a major category in multimodal studies that responds to socio-semiotic considerations, which is very much the common denominator in this Special Issue. Viewing living texts and interpreting them is the first heuristic move in our understanding of how multimodality can be applied as a model theory, as a field of inquiry, and as a methodological, descriptive tool that helps us to come to terms with these issues. First, however, we need to connect performance studies and multimodality and establish a dialogue between them.

4. Socio-semiotic and multimodal approaches

The seminal role that semiotics can play in the mapping of performance studies has already been recognized in ground-breaking discussions by early theorists and practitioners in the then bourgeoning field of performance studies, for example in the study by Helbo (1987), who, as early as 1970s and 1980s, discusses the epistemological shifts represented at that time by loosening the dependence on the Saussurean tradition. That not only early performance studies, but also their development into a broader field of analysis has been framed and in some cases revitalised by semiotic approaches is described in particular by Helbo himself in his contribution to this volume and further exemplified by several of the other papers and their respective theoretical basis. We leave the evaluation and discussion of this general concept of semiotic analysis to the authors of these papers and will not further elaborate on their work here.

However, in the wake of current epistemological shifts that question the boundaries of disciplines, we add to this semiotic perspective insights and advancements of an emerging field of application that is still developing its theoretical and methodological strength and has not yet gained full attention as a research discipline, though fascinating not only the humanities with its rapid developments: the field and concept of multimodal analysis. The range of application of studies of multimodality have begun to show their flourishing potentials in the 1990s and 2000s, when some pivotal works begun to circulate and systematically define their domains of enquiry, such as displayed art (O’Toole 2011), visual design (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), mathematics (O’Halloran 2005), web-based discourse (Baldry and Thibault 2006), multimodal documents (Bateman 2008), to name but the most ground-breaking. The initial theoretical impulse as prompted, for example, by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 2006, 3), was the simultaneous description and analysis of all kinds of semiotic resources included in an artefact or a performance, no longer focusing on language as the central mode of communication or giving primacy to one leading resource over others in a specific text or genre. Today, the notion of multimodality is extremely fashionable and has led to a range of theoretical, methodological, and analytical achievements across a multitude of disciplines (see an overview in Wildfeuer 2015, for example). It is now broadly understood as one of the most influential concepts of the semiotization of diverse forms of communications (Bucher 2007, 49), providing detailed frameworks for the examination of meaning construction within and across several modes. With its basic semiotic nature, it goes back not only to different schools of linguistics engaged with communicative modes other than language (van Leeuwen 2011, 50), but also intensively relates to the Peircean tradition of fundamentally differentiating individual sensory skills and impressions and examining the various dimensions of (verbal) signs in connection with other modalities (Peirce 1909, 8–10).

It was indeed this heuristic need of finding ways to explore ecological and aesthetic views of performances and the corresponding instances of art (similar to other multimodal situations) that has motivated this Special Issue. Furthermore, our own education and experiences in applying multimodal analysis to a variety of artefacts and situations in which communication takes place in a semiotically varied field of expression motivated us to also take into consideration multimodal performances as a possible object of study. As said above, we see performances similar to other communicative artefacts as, first and foremost, semiotic acts of expression, using a variety of semiotic resources to construct these expressions and meanings. It is thus helpful and interesting to find out how these resources work together in their interplay, how their coherence and structures create the expressive force of the performance and how these patterns and regularities can then be compared to other expressive text forms and situations. These questions, we think, will then also help evaluating and discussing instances of performances as the ones described at the beginning of our introduction, taking into consideration not only the various characters and referents of performing arts, but also blurring boundaries between fictional and non-fictional representations, for example.

Although it is rather unexplored which role the notion of multimodality as well as its multitude of analytical frameworks can play in theorizing, describing, and evaluating performances within the broad realm of performance studies, the theories and approaches elaborated within this discipline so far are indeed integral to the approach we describe above. They provide fundamental contextual layers for the inclusion of a multimodal semiotic approach and have been commented on, purposely avoided, or critiqued, and reshaped by artists and performers, for example in the form of theatre plays or musical genres, from Delphic Hymns of ancient Greece to contemporary gansta rap, electro-swing and indie rock.

The notion of performance, on the other hand, is also already anchored in the context of multimodal studies. In addressing, for example, the ensuing relationship that these studies have created with non-verbal studies (referring to the epistemological shift as defined by many disciplines in relationship with language and linguistics), Scollon and Scollon (2009, 171) argue that the latter are interested in active real-time performance by humans, while the former are also concerned with “the design of objects, the built environment, works of art and graphics, film, video, or interactive media productions”. It is thus a similarly broad spectrum of instances that multimodal analysis is able to address and analyse in detail – including most of the instances described above as falling under the notion of performances as well as the intersection of real-time performances of various kinds on the one hand and the design of (artistic) objects, environments, and media on the other hand.

From a multimodal perspective, these occurrences and every further instance of art are not observed in a vacuum, but exemplified in distinct case studies that are focused not on objects of contemplation (as is the case in theatre studies as an object-driven discipline; Auslander 2008), but as instantiations (in the Hallidayan meaning, see 1978) of performance(s), within the agenda of a paradigm-driven discipline, akin to performance studies. A discipline or research area such as multimodal performance studies then investigates how different social actors (auteur, artist, producer, performer, etc.) produce artwork (object, practice, event, display, etc.) and grapple with tradition (e.g. continuity and stability of codes vs. innovation and experimentation), also in relationship with other social actors, be they spectators or collaborators (e.g. audience, listeners, and co-artists) and/or providing other forms of professional or financial participation (e.g. producers, agents, directors, event organizers, etc.). In the following, we will give two examples of these case studies in order to describe the power and strength of a multimodal discourse analytical approach to the analysis of performances. We will then see more of these analytical discussions in the papers collected in this issue.

5. Towards multimodal performance studies

Auslander (2008) claims that performance studies are a paradigm-driven field, suggesting that the field adopts the concept of performance as the object of inquiry and main analytical concept. He argues that the primary question which lies at the core of the discipline is “What is performance?” and that the more contexts are taken into account and the more case studies to which they are applied, the better this question will be answered. In Auslander’s (2008) view, each answer becomes a theory of performance, that is, an understanding of performance that is used to make sense of different practices and forms of art:

Every theory frames and focuses our attention on some things while leaving other things outside the frame or out of focus. Thus, performance studies is always in search of new theories that might open up new ways of seeing and interpreting performance. (2008, 1)

This search for new theories accords well with our approach that proposes multimodal studies as an example of a set of theories that can complement socio-semiotic theories developed within the agenda of performance studies.

However, the basic acquisitions of performance studies over time which have developed tools of analysis that broaden our understanding of a wide repertoire of performing arts, such as theatre, ballet, music, dance, opera, circus, mime, and puppetry, to name just the most common, are included in the multimodal approach developed in this volume That is, every paper in this collection shares the belief that multimodality provides a perspective that brings together disparate genres, subgenres, and texts in a single arena, including the disparate fields of performance studies.

We have selected two case studies that show the kind of contribution that a multimodal approach can bring about, stimulating oriented research questions and providing models, such as transcription and annotation systems in order to come to terms with different kinds of performances. These two case studies involve (1) an ongoing practice of a durational performance artist (Johnson 2015) and (2) an exhibition of Austrian Actionists artists/performers in New York (Weiner 2015). Both examples may at first sight seem distant or at least peripheral from the traditional concerns of multimodal studies. However, they indicate directions in research that can be usefully applied within a multimodal framework of analysis, for example understanding whether and how the artist can engage with art-based research practice and whether the lack of synchronicity in performance (e.g. the time lag between when art is performed and when art is understood and appreciated) challenge the nature of performance itself. Other related research questions deal with who is the owner of the artefact, the role of reproducibility, and whether performance is a product or a process.

In the first example presented in our discussion, a durational artist is seen in the act of becoming a document (Johnson 2015). Durational performances are forms of endurance art, involving hardship, such as pain, mental suffering, or loneliness experienced by artists in time. This is nothing new, but endurance art has been also augmented by the pervasive presence of social networks and media sharing platforms. In this case, following Arlander (2011), Joy Johnson, a durational artist, will become and eventually be a multimodal document of endurance art. A recent example of this state of affairs in which the paradoxical relationship between process and product surfaces can be found in the durational performance staged by Joy Johnson over a period of two weeks in November 2015, in which she carried out the task (voluntarily distancing herself from Schechner’s (1988b) idea of performing a task), that is bulling (i.e. polishing in order to see one’s reflection) a pair of black boots so as to radically change her mental identity, thus experiencing the soldiers’ ritualized regime to see how discipline (Foucault 1975) turns them into war machines. The act of polishing one’s own boots until they reflect the image of the soldier is a pretty powerful picture of performance seen as identity change. But how can a researcher, or the artist-researcher, if this is the case, pin down and map this process?

The objects and documents created by the durational performance artist are also part of the semiotic space in which experience occurs, and Joy Johnson will only carry out the routine without external contacts, without sleeping, eating, or drinking but water for hydration purposes, but, significantly, posting pictures on Instagram, thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, videos on YouTube, and messages with WhatsApp. The challenging questions raised by the durational performer are: “Can the document be the performer? Is Instant replacing the live, and if so, can the digital App become ‘my’ digital self? Can the audience collaborate with me as they tweet, kik and whatsapp me?” (Johnson 2015).

In this sense, a socio-semiotic and multimodal approach can help mapping, transcribing, and annotating the range of different multimodal documents (including the performer’s body), analysing the ongoing process through a replicable model able to unpack the semiotic resources and texts produced and generated within the process. Body-as-performance is a living semiotic entity. It is both an intangible entity, and paradoxically living multimodal document, a domain of enquiry, a developing theory and an unfolding method, at the same time. But art can also be seen as representing social interactions, something that the durational performance aims to document. In addition, visual texts (e.g. pictures and drawings) and digital discourse (e.g. tweets, kiks, and WhatsApp messages) can be also analysed in multimodal terms, with the aim of discovering patterned and hierarchically organized meanings. The intersection of the real-time performances of various kinds and the design of (artistic) objects, environments, and media brings socio-semiotic and multimodal approaches together, thereby shedding light on how performing arts can be analysed and described from a different perspective, as in the tradition of pragmatics, used by Piazza's contribution to this volume to discuss how cinema borrows from stage traditions and theatre conventions. Furthermore, the ways in which people make sense of their own experiences of being in the world is explored, ranging from children’s efforts to handle standardised TV in absentia storytelling and parents’ in praesentia customised efforts, as discussed by Zhang, Djonov, and Torr (this volume), to handling changes in horror genres (novels, TV, and plays) that require sophisticated audience responses as described by Tan, Wignell, and O’Halloran's contribution to this volume. In each case, multimodal social semiotic analysis leads to greater understanding of the meaning-making patterns involved in the various social activities which constitute “performance” in the widest possible sense.

The second example, showing the diversity of the range of social activities and cultural practices that create radical conflicts in the experience of art, can also be interpreted as the coexistence of two apparent opposites, in this case in the exhibition space of the leading Swiss art gallery Hauser & Wirth in Manhattan Upper East Side in New York. In 2014, with its minimalist and softly decorated interiors, the gallery hosted the most transgressive and provocative of the European post-war avant-garde movement, that of Actionists. The “RITE OF PASSAGE: The Early Years of Vienna Actionism, 1960–1966” Exhibition, presented a display of the shocking materials used by the extremely controversial Austrian artists, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.

Actionists received critical acclaim in Vienna in 1966 as they experimented with their pictorial thinking in real time and space. As early precursors of performance art and body art, their work is still rather unexplored by academia, and Weiner (2015, 50) points out the contrast between the “fastidious luxury of a premier showroom for blue-chip art” and “the chaotic messes of paint, meat, and bodily fluids” typically featured in the Actionists’ works. However, this apparently irreconcilable contrast is in fact reconciled by “the seemingly limitless recuperative powers of late capitalist culture, or the types of repressive tolerance exerted by Western liberal-democracies” (Weiner 2015, 51). This pioneer and blasphemous art turned into an inert Upper East Side exhibition stands for a double identity paradox. The double paradox lies in the fleeting live quality of performative art (and of performance, by extension) and in its progressive (and inevitable?) domestication by means of normalization pressures exerted by late capitalist elites.

A critical and socio-semiotic approach may help unearth how artistic practices are never in a vacuum, and how ideological pressures impinge on discourse on art. However, how can we account for the way in which the urban environment is designed, constructed, and arranged? How can we tackle the multiplicity of multimodal documents that mark the (hi)story of artistic movements, documents that at first sight might seem ephemeral (e.g. brochures, leaflets, and exhibition captions)? From a multimodal perspective, the orchestration of these documents is fully significant for the whole meaning-making event.

The questions raised in this introduction are purposely left unanswered. The two case studies will not be further discussed in this Special Issue, as they were meant more as starting point when addressing the various strands of investigation that we assembled and brought together. From this perspective, socio-semiotic approaches may help unearth the contribution that different modes and resources play in meaning-making and semiosis of interpretation and communication. However, different resources need to be analysed when complex phenomena, such as performing arts, are at stake, even though research and scholarship tend to be traditionally enshrined in their epistemologies. Furthermore, every single semiotic resource involved in the process of communication both on the production level as well as on the reception level of making meaning would have to be analysed in full detail and with regard to their relationship(s) to other semiotic resources, to the specific context as well as the various social actors involved and recognized.

We will omit further details here in favour of the more general description that we have given so far as well as the individual case studies to be elaborated in the following papers. However, our own examples discussed in this introduction nevertheless show the rich potential of analytical questions to be addressed from the semiotic and multimodal perspective. In particular, we need to engage with the real social practices and their multifarious implications for the production, distribution, and consumption of such multimodal texts and events. These and other questions will be addressed in this issue and the individual papers, which we summarize in the following section.

6. The Special Issue

The articles collected in this Special Issue are inaugurated by Andre Helbo’s contribution which comes to our assistance when facing the previously mentioned questions. His paper points to the directions that semiotic studies should take to address the contemporary crisis in representation that can be associated with experiences and events in postmodern and postdramatic performance. Highlighting the relationship that we have also invoked in the discussion about multimodal semiotics and theatrical practices, Helbo addresses three fundamental issues: (1) the place of externality (including embodiment and theories of corporeity), (2) the role of the researcher and the related issues, such as forms of spectacularization of practices that are spectacularized in and through the scholar’s gaze, and (3) the role of semiotics in terms of universalizing vocation and the problems of reproducing subjectivity. In his conclusions, Helbo shows the need for models of an experiential semiotics that places the spectator at the centre of research, thus pointing to shifts in current debates in terms “of enunciation collective, of the observer’s position, of the distinction between observer-observed, listener-performer, of corporeity”.

Ideally drawing from Helbo’s suggestions, Nita Moghaddam deals with an understudied resource, that is, stage directions, to explore the relationship between the play world of the text, in and off stage. The interaction between what is real and what is not-real raised at the beginning of our introduction is brought to light in her analysis that blends the various resources inside and outside the theatrical text and confronts the readers of the dramatic text with a communicative semiosphere. Stage directions thus become the ideal bridge between what is already written in the text and what is potentially in performance, singling out the case of stage directions produced by the American playwright and director Sam Shepard. It is in this semiotic space, from virtual to real performance, that stage directions show their potential and usefulness for analysis.

As discussed above, the relationships between theatre and cinema (and opera) are inextricably tied. Roberta Piazza introduces this topic not by analysing how cinema borrows from stage tout court, but how cinema borrows from stage conventions taken from theatre mise-en-scène. For this purpose, Piazza presents two case studies, namely Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). Following Gauldreault’s claim about the common “monstrative” nature of theatre and cinema, Piazza argues that the two directors exploit typical elements from theatre to implicitly critique the typical realism of cinema. This critique is carried out, for example, by means of voice-overs and by using monstrative techniques, such as with the explicit use of indexical relations that she identifies with mismatches between what is shown and what is said.

Further exploring the boundaries between theatre and cinema, Maria Grazia Sindoni and Fabio Rossi explore opera as a multimodal genre, singling out as a case study a sextet from La Cenerentola by Gioachino Rossini. They aim to show how multimodal studies cast a wider net that brings a whole spectrum of semiotic modalities – music, singing, and voice – that jointly impact on the audience in an integrated way, overcoming the situation whereby opera’s music is analysed by musicologists, the libretto by literary critics, and singing by yet other professional categories.

The relationship between different media and resources is also taken further in the analysis by Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell, and Kay O’Halloran who study several forms of adaptations, from novel, to stage, to screen in the case of the The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. This case study epitomizes how the horror genre is the result of different forms of socio-semiotic transformations that orchestrate different modes and resources interpreted and understood differently by different audiences. In their conclusions, the authors open their view to wider questions, such as issues of how viewership is affected by these semiotic transformations and adaptations, alluding to the consequences for contemporary socio-cultural events and practices.

Linked to the latter is the topic discussed in the work by Kunkun Zhang, Emilia Djonov, and Jane Torr who adopt a critical multimodal stance that compares two very different and interesting kinds of audiences: children who listen to stories told by their parents, and children who listen to the same stories told by a presenter on a television programme. The practice of reading aloud books is a form of performance in the “broad spectrum definition”, often recalled in this introduction. As a form of oral performance, this brings back to mind typical discourses of orality, where community life and joy of participation were part of performance as well as the story as a plot told by the bard or storyteller. This is consistent with Zhang, Djonov, and Torr’s findings that identify differences between adult-child shared reading and its representation on television. Benefits and limitations of both modalities are accounted for with the aim of promoting early literacy skills and active engagement of children.

The potential for positive change of actively performing life-changing activities lies at the core of the article closing our collection. Robert McMurtrie and Aurora Murphy provide an ideal closure for our discussion by building on the premise that performance not only engages, entertains, diverts our attention from the evils of life, but also plays a powerful transforming role in our changing society. They report on how movement and interaction in and within the Spread the Love art installation can contribute to transforming what they call the script of rape, that is, scripted and pre-planned interaction that can be rewritten by systematically overturning social configurations of sexuality and gender. It is in the power of transformation – be it a transformation of resources, texts, and genres or individual, interpersonal, or social – that the editors wish to promote as a way of extending current theories.

Considering traditional and Western performing arts, complexity does not fade, even though descriptive models for the study of theatre, music, ballet abound. If we assume, for example, that music has traditionally been the focus of the study for opera, and movement for ballet, how can we approach the contributions of other less explored resources, such as voice, temporary or permanent body ornaments in what are purposely created and historically determined semiotic patterns? And also, how are such systems of prioritizing modes, resources, and practices validated or rejected in theory and in practice by individuals and communities? To this end, the articles collected in this Special Issue address the interplay between semiotic resources, such as speech, music, stage directions, lighting, proxemics, and kinesics in performing arts in different contexts, ages, and cultures, but they are ultimately considered as the ideal context where assumptions and heuristics about views of art and, consequently, views of the world can be tested out.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria Grazia Sindoni, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Messina. She has published four books and articles in national and international journals, and edited two books. Her main research interests include systemic-functional linguistics, multimodality, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, theories of semiosis of communication, and computer-mediated interaction.

Janina Wildfeuer is a Researcher in the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Science at Bremen University, Germany. Her areas of research include multimodal linguistics and media studies as well as discourse analysis and semiotics. She teaches classes in multimodal, interdisciplinary, and applied linguistics and analyses film, comics, and other multimodal documents within several projects exploring the notion of multimodal discourse.

Kay O’Halloran is Associate Professor in the School of Education, Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. Her areas of research include multimodal analysis, social semiotics, mathematics discourse, and the development of interactive digital media technologies and visualization techniques for multimodal and socio-cultural analytics.

ORCID

Maria Grazia Sindoni http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6220-2981

Janina Wildfeuer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1330-8800