Paul writes:
It was when my mum told me she was taking my dad to Belgium to see Cirque du Soleil for his birthday that I realized something was afoot. My parents live in Southeast England. She's a solicitor, and he's an air traffic control consultant. Beyond the annual panto when my siblings and I were young, and the odd West End show after we left home, they'd never been big on the theatre. I was nonplussed. I thought I was the one who schlepped for art.
At home in Somerset, sorting through old letters, I find an airmail envelope addressed to me, Post Restante, GPO, New Delhi, India, postmarked August, 1992. A familiar scrawl covers the tissue-thin sheets of paper: Paul's handwriting hasn't changed. Nineteen year old Paul has been to the Avignon theatre festival. He has seen a Richard III which has made it worthwhile. Meanwhile, backpacking me is traveling the 2,500 kilometres from Kashmir to Kerala by train to make sure I catch some Kathakali. With the benefit of hindsight it was bad, staged just for tourists; but then again, I am no less a tourist now.
This was normal for theatre nuts growing up in smalltown Somerset, and, as the ‘Travellers' Tales’ that ticker-tape through this journal demonstrate, we were far from alone. But now, it was my parents who were running away to the circus, and I had to workout how that was normal, too.
First, Said writes that one of the four stages ‘common to the way any idea or theory travels’ is that ‘there is a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence’(227). In tandem with the image of contexts exerting pressure in passage, the choice of ‘transversed’ over the more obvious ‘traversed’ establishes the point as one of Said's most materially-aware. That ‘ns’ gets in the way, trips our tongues, and reminds us that an idea does not simply originate at point A, then take root at point B: it travels both in and through a medium, an environment. It is always on the move and in place: features separable only at the point of arrival, whereupon the porridgy process of transversing can be back-formed into the narrative of a journey – an airy traversal whose subsequent inevitability it likely did not have at the time. Numerous contributions to ‘On the Road’ reflect on this. Many responses to the original Call for Papers detailed specific journeys and their material conditions. We designated these submissions ‘Excursions,’ and within the issue, they constitute a series of focused case studies. Some, like Simon Piasecki's and Victoria Hunter's, dwell on promenade performance as a means of ‘thickening’ the experience of movement, while Sally Mackey considers the heightened forms of sociality that such experiences bring about in workshop contexts.
Of the more extended essays, or ‘Itineraries,’ several reflect more expansively on the central theme by suggesting how performances mark the materiality of journies experienced elsewhere. Doug Hundley surveys theatrical strategies by which ‘Dominicanyork’ artists are assessing the personal, social and economic consequences of mass mobility between the Dominican Republic and NewYork. Joanne ‘Bob’Whalley and Lee Miller consider gallery works and archival materials that document journeys they never saw: in the imaginative reconstruction of these events, they suggest, a performative dimension to the work is activated that may not have been previously apparent. Meanwhile, Phil Smith and, in their artists' pages, Stephen Hodge and Dan Belasco Rogers, detail experiences that combine the thickening and the marking of journeys: Smith by tracing how a two-decade career of touring performance gradually converged with both the form and content of those performances, and Hodge and Belasco Rogers in tracing walks to, away from, and around theatre as both practice and question.
A second instructive feature of Said's ‘traveling theory’ is the ambiguity inherent in the phrase itself. True, we infer common-sensically that ‘traveling theory’ is theory that travels. But this doesn't account for the oddness of the phrase. After all, theory has no agency: theorists do. So defining ‘traveling’ here adjectivally (as in ‘traveling iron’) doesn't quite encompass all the associations of the term. For that, we need, aptly enough, a transitive verb – as valid for our own phrase as Said's. ‘Traveling performance’ refers both to performance that travels and that is traveled. Yet this suggests a paradox. For although ‘mobility’ is increasingly an object of study in its own right, it defies objectification more readily and comprehensively than most. Moreover, if the object is in question, so must be the subject. If, as Said writes, unexamined theory, ‘transfixes both its users and what it is used on’ (241), then accounting for mobility must unfix both subjects and objects of study in ways that require different kinds of theorizing. Not that there is an agreed way of doing so. ‘Traveling performance’ is process, event, relation, and this has implications both for what is researched, and how it is documented and written about.
As so often with artistic and critical developments it behoves us to ask whether they are indeed as novel as they appear, and to consider possible precedents. Given the prevalence of the historical figure, in the West and elsewhere, of the itinerant ‘traveling player,’ of the origins of numerous theatre forms in mobile pageants, and of the diverse conventions for enacting the extensivity of travel on the delimited space of the stage, the question seems almost moot. The details of such histories are easily forgotten, however, as several articles remind us. Minty Donald's ‘Excursion’ on a site-specific project at Glasgow's Tramway describes how the venue's multiple identities as former terminus and present-day arts venue have been made to resonate against each other. Kyle Gillette takes up the theme of rail locomotion (as, tangentially, does Ray Langenbach), and explores both its connection both to Einstein's theory of relativity, and to modernist avant-garde aesthetics. Meanwhile, Margaret Werry and Rebekah Kowal underscore the intercultural dimension that such travels invariably entail. The former conducts a detailed, multi-perspectival analysis of performative and translational diplomacy, as ceremonially enacted in 1908 by the visiting US Atlantic Fleet in New Zealand; the latter responds to the travel diaries and performances of the African-American choreographer Pearl Primus, by posing questions about the relationship between movement, diaspora, and the authenticity of ‘roots’. The continuing difficulties freighting such engagements are echoed by Nigel Watson's account of an evidently problematic applied theatre project in Lesotho. Finally in this connection, Paige McGinley essays a performative historiography of the recent past in considering cultural responses to Hurricane Katrina. In a variety of soundtracks, she hears a refusal simply to ‘move on,’ identifying instead a politics of melancholia which resists the recession of memory with the flood's waters.
A second consequence of ‘traveling performance’ is that it underscores how much, for all their discussion of unstable significations, decentredness and ‘radical’ inbetweenness, many current critical frameworks conceive performance not as mutable, processual event, but as a localized, static object, whose defining features are identified, isolated and immobilized for the duration of the enquiry. Semiotic approaches parse the constituent elements of the performance the better to decode them, as does intercultural performance theory, much of which conceals a continuing debt to ‘source’ and ‘target’ binaries from translation studies; cultural materialism remains in hock to reductive descriptions of performances and their conditions of production as texts to be read; identity-politics based critiques pre-empt analysis by fixing the subject both within and by discourse and ideology; ‘site-specificity’, ‘mapping’, ‘situatedness’, and ‘positionality’ speak for themselves, as does the nominalising trend that makes of ‘the Body’ such an object of critical desire.Footnote1 Even ‘border theory’, predicated on movement, privileges – for politically laudable but analytically distorting reasons – restraint, impediment, impasse.
Even setting such critical frameworks aside, individual performances tend to be treated in analysis as exemplary of their every iteration. In so far as most spectators see performances only once, this is accurate. But for the disciplines of theatre and performance studies to be restricted to that experience – and for scholars to satisfy themselves with being, as Susan Melrose puts it, expert ‘spectator-contemplator[s]’ (Citation2006: 133) – seems terribly limiting. Opportunities for artists, audiences and researchers to travel are increasing dramatically. Reflecting (on) this requires a wide-ranging enquiry into what the creative and professional life of the twenty-first century traveling player tells us about the relationships between authenticity, originality, sites, sights, spaces, places, languages, translations, transports, training, funding, touring, tourism, taboos, environments, and ecologies, to name but a few.
One answer is suggested by the range of perspectives on the performance event represented in this journal. Cindy Rehm documented a journey across America by commemorating the earlier work of numerous performance artists, while Ute Ritschel provides an ebullient curator's-eye view on festivals requiring that both spectators and artists be on the move. Martin Welton characterises the theatrical get-in as a process re-sensing of one place in another: and describes a European Union-era journey that postscripts Phil Smith's descriptions of hawking experimental theatre behind a then-corroding Iron Curtain. In Joe Kelleher's case, a funny thing happened on the way to the theatre: cue reflections on the tenuousness of both the theatre and the city's attempts to offer themselves to the spectator as anything more than representations. Finally, one further declension from the performance event, PA Skantze identifies the circulations of knowledge and generosity in pedagogical contexts, and the responsibilities this entails for both educators and researchers.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the increased mobility of artists (and a tendency to make a practice of that mobility) makes their work ever more difficult to analyse authoritatively. This is underscored by our inclusion of Singaporean director's Ong Keng Sen's speech ‘Desiring Mobility’, given at the end of the European Year of Workers' Mobility 2006. Ong's vision of artists' mobility features in his intercultural theatre works (Global Soul (2003), Diaspora (2006)), and challenges some of the core assumptions of materialist understandings of travel in an age of globalization. But how the earthbound critic meets or rebuts those challenges is only partially about finding more inventive ways to measure representations of travel against the reality of the travels that produced them. Moreover, there is a risk of misrecognising effects for causes. As Sally Ann Ness's critique of ‘macro’ interpretations of global mobility suggests, paying attention only to networks and itineraries tends to infer that their points of intersection are, themselves, static. By this token, the site of performance pauses that world long enough for a snapshot of travel to be imaged. But hubs are also humming with movement – and performance venues are often places where mobility intensifies. The Chorus in Romeo and Juliet famously finger the theatre's ambulatory qualities when they introduce ‘the two hours' traffic of our stage.’ ‘Traffic,’ perhaps not entirely coincidentally, is also the title of the first chapter of playwright Michael Frayn's The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe Citation(2006). Frayn begins his exploration of theories of everything by reminding us that ‘our most fundamental traffic with the world around us is our perception of it’ (23):
Our eyes, and all the neurological software that supports them are evolved to see movement. Even if the subject doesn't move, the eye does – continuously. The image on the retina fades almost immediately if it is not perpetually refreshed, and to keep it there at all the eye moves as restlessly as the electron around the nucleus, scanning and re-scanning the scene hundreds of times a second (12).
This rescanned ‘scene’ is a subtle nod to the theatre, onewe'd like to amplify vigourously in claiming performance in general, and theatre in particular, by dint of the focused co-presence it entails, as a sort of social laboratory for the perception of motion. This is most immediately a concern of dance, but here we would stress the word ‘social’ in the preceding sentence, and say that our interest lies not only in movement as isolated or privileged, but as it emerges alongside and braided into all the other phenomenal and significatory processes that make up the performance event. Ray Langenbach explores this territory in his associative mediations on ‘persistence of vision.’ Triggered by a glitch on his lap-top that proliferated thousands of individual images from Eadweard Muybridge's famous ‘animal locomotion’ films, Langenbach's analysis establishes a provocative set of associations between technology, mobility, perception, ethnicity, and the work and figure of the transient performance artist in contemporary capitalist culture. It is our hope that the journal as a whole proliferates further sets of associations between many of the same components.
Paul writes:
When my parents came to visit in Singapore, I naturally wanted to be hospitable. In the past, I had taken them to the theatre. Now, they turned the tables: ‘We're taking you to the theatre. We booked the tickets in England.’ It was Cirque du Soleil. I thought it was diverting enough – they were unimpressed. ‘Not as good as in Brussels,’ they said. This, apparently, is normal.
Notes
1 For a discussion of this latter point, see Melrose Citation(2006): 132–4.
REFERENCES
- Frayn , Michael . 2006 . The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe , London : Faber and Faber .
- Melrose , Susan . 2006 . “ ‘Who Knows – and who cares – about performance mastery’ ” . In A Performance Cosmology: Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past , Edited by: Christie , Judie , Gough , Richard and Watt , Daniel . 132 – 139 . London and New York : Routledge .
- Said , Edward W. 1983 . The World, the Text and the Critic , Cambridge , Massachusetts : Harvard University Press .