Editorial: Performing Literatures

This edition of Performance Research, and most of its individual contents, arise directly from a conference of the same name – Performing Literatures – which I co-ordinated at the University of Leeds between 29 June and 1 July 2007. It will be helpful, by way of contextualization, to quote from the Call for Papers which initially attracted the attention of the contributors (or at least, those not directly invited), and indeed of this journal's editor, Richard Gough, who proposed this edition:

In the university context, most drama and theatre departments emerged historically from moments in which performance-oriented scholars broke away from their ‘parent’ literature departments. Arguably, though, that separation is still regularly being re-performed: many theatre and performance people continue to insist that they are ‘postdramatic’ or even ‘anti-textual’. Yet the literary text has never gone away – and indeed many ‘non-textbased’ performance practitioners have found themselves increasingly drawn back to the creation or appropriation of texts as the basis for new theatre.

Equally, there is increasing recognition of the fact that, given their ephemerality, many performances only become available to a wider public through their mediation as literature, whether in artists’ documentation or in critical and historical appraisals … From another perspective entirely, the theatrical-theoretical language of ‘performativity’ has radically altered understandings of the ways in which texts do things with words and enact themselves through language and context … These are just some of the issues that we hope Performing Literatures will begin to explore through dialogue between scholars and artists from varying backgrounds.

Admittedly, I had spread the remit pretty wide. My thinking in doing so, and indeed my originating impulse for organizing the conference, was to try to generate an interdisciplinary dialogue between performance and literature scholars – in part to help me make sense of my own institutional position. As of 2005, I had found myself occupying Leeds’ Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies. Yet the Workshop Theatre of which I was now Director is a component part of the School of English here, and this institutional link with Literature felt destabilizing for someone nurtured exclusively in the field of Theatre Studies (I don't even have an English ‘A’ Level). Perhaps, I thought, a conference to reassess these relations would help me figure out where I now stood.

In the event, the conference turned out to be a great deal less interdisciplinary than I had hoped. The response to the call from English scholars other than my Leeds colleagues was pretty minimal, no doubt in part because of the inept bias toward my own discipline in the Call itself. (‘Meanwhile, within literary studies,’ I had written, ‘scholars have maintained important interests in performance which have not always been understood or appreciated by theatre people.’ Obviously that was bound to get them banging down the door.) Instead, though, the conference turned out to be a fascinating intra-disciplinary snapshot of the state of theatre and performance scholarship in the UK and beyond.

Most striking to me was the fact that, despite the seemingly very open terms of the call, there was a clear orientation in most of the responses towards work on contemporary performance, particularly in response to my invocation of the new buzzword ‘postdramatic’ (Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre had been published in English in 2006, shortly before the call went out.) It is this emphasis which makes Performance Research an ideal organ for the dissemination of some of the key papers extending from the conference. Significantly, though, very few proposals were concerned primarily with play-based, dramatic theatre, let alone the theatre-historical strand identified in the call. There was much concern at the conference with theoretical matters of textuality, some concern with dramaturgy as an applied process, but of the sixty or so paper proposals that I received, less than half a dozen of them chose the discussion of particular play-texts (or their performance) as their central focus.

I wondered at the time if this apparent ‘imbalance’ in response was simply some butterfly-effect result of my phrasing in the Call. In 2008, however, a much wider disciplinary perspective was provided by my experience with the UK's government's Research Assessment Exercise – as a member of the national peerreview panel for Drama, Dance and the Performing Arts. During the course of the assessment process, I encountered vast swathes of research concerned with performance and ‘non-text-based’ theatre, but comparatively speaking, very little work concerned with literary drama or playwriting. This experience, shared by other panel members, resulted in our chair, Christopher Baugh, drafting the following passage in his summary report to the field:

The areas of theatre history, and of dramatic literature and its performance, continue to be important in some departments … Generally, however, as a proportion of the overall research picture, the number of outputs in these areas is very considerably reduced since 2001. Conversely, over the period there has been a great increase in the range, breadth and diversity of research in experimental theatre practice and contemporary performance studies … At their best these approaches have generated much outstanding and world-leading research. However, in weaker submissions there is evidence that the potential of performance study has been limited by inadequate rigour, especially in terms of historicizing and contextualizing the analytical apparatus or subject matter.

It seems that, in UK theatre and performance studies at least, our attempts to emphasize the centrality of the live performance event in our research have resulted in a situation whereby a largely reflexive disinterest in dramatic literature and theatre history has become the new orthodoxy. As a result, the academic field seems to be becoming further and further detached from the mainstream theatre industry and more and more wedded to a still-marginal field of alternative performance. The margin has moved to the academic centre; the ‘liminal’ has become the ‘norm’ (as Jon McKenzie anticipated). Yet in the process, have some of us perhaps begun to lose touch with the rigour that the old-school practices of ‘close reading’ and ‘historical contextualization’ have traditionally instilled? Is a reappraisal of our mounting antipathy towards the textual now due?

Certainly, the essays that follow consistently suggest that such a rethink is necessary. Most of the contributors – scholars and practitioners alike – speak from identification positions located firmly within the zones of ‘experimental theatre practice and contemporary performance studies’, yet in different ways and to different degrees each one of them calls for the reexamination of certain widely held assumptions which may, on reflection, be lacking in rigour. Together, these essays form a remarkably coherent body of criss-crossing concerns and reference points. In a bid to impose a rather arbitrary structure for their sequencing, I have divided them into two broadly distinct halves, which consciously mirror and bleed into each other. The first set of contributions, which I'm mentally grouping under the heading ‘ghostdramatic’, is largely concerned with reappraising the function of the dramatic text and the way it continues to haunt supposedly postdramatic performances. Hans-Thies Lehmann looms large as a point of reference among many of these pieces, not only as an influential thinker but also as one to be questioned. Dan Rebellato, for example, challenges the assumption (key to so many dismissals of the dramatic) that drama works to embroil its audiences in illusion. Instead, he argues persuasively that drama works through the deployment of metaphor – a suggestion that seems to blur or even erase the line conventionally distinguishing it from less explicitly fiction-based performance forms, which also frequently rely on metaphorical relationships to ‘the real’. Andrew Quick's concerns in his essay are closely related, except that he sees ‘illusion’ in a less pejorative light – and as a necessary (though problematized) component in all forms of performance – since accessing a ‘real’ beyond representation is no more possible for us than it was for the shadowfocused inhabitants of Plato's Cave. For Quick, moreover, the dramatic text continues to function as a ghost presence in contemporary performance, just as Old Hamlet haunts his son, and just as Richard Burton haunts the Wooster Group's own recent revision of Hamlet.

Carl Lavery reverses this notion of ghosting by proposing that script materials for performance – whether in the form of finished plays or more fragmentary trace texts – can be productively used by critics as ‘an architecture for conjuring ghosts’, as ‘post-scripts’ to unlock memories and understandings of ephemeral, physical performances that may have disappeared into the past (his key example is Lone Twin Theatre's devised piece Alice Bell). Karen Jürs-Munby then plays yet another variation on the text/ performance relationship by examining a range of productions of plays by Austrian ‘postdramatist’ Elfriede Jelinek. Jürs-Munby's discussion, which features valuable Englishlanguage renderings of debates being conducted in the German-speaking world, explores some of the ways in which the destabilized playscript may also be seen to destabilize questions of ‘authorship’ surrounding the performances arising from it.

based) performance. The first ‘half’ of our layout rounds out with two essays that query both the viability and desirability of Lehmann's dramatic/postdramatic binary, by analysing the work of British playwrights whose work problematizes that divide in significant ways. Liz Tomlin argues that, in the UK context, Lehmann's work (albeit perhaps unintentionally) unhelpfully maps onto the too-familiar rhetorical and institutional distinctions so often drawn between ‘text-based’ and ‘non-text-based’ theatre. Her analysis of Martin Crimp's recent play The City deftly challenges the logic of these distinctions, as does her discussion of her own practical experiences as a performance-writer working across these divided camps. My own essay on actor/writer Tim Crouch – whose play An Oak Tree was performed as the centre-piece of our Leeds conference – queries Lehmann's invocations of art theory in Postdramatic Theatre, which he uses to justify a repulsion away from drama. Conversely, I argue that Crouch's adoption of strategies drawn from conceptual art works to blur, or perhaps bridge, the supposed divide between (literary) drama and (art-based) performance.

The hinge point in the middle of this edition's structure is the photo essay by a smith (the company/artist name for Norwegian-based UK artist Andy Smith, who is also co-director of Crouch's plays). Smith renders for the page a talk he gave at the Performing Literatures conference about his 2006 project The Ibsen Hut, in which he engaged Norwegians in conversation about what Ibsen means to them. Rather than being set on a plinth as cultural icon, lofty and separate from ‘reality’, the playwright is rendered here as a ghost of the domestic landscape, a measure of the ordinariness of ordinary Norwegians (just as Shakespeare is, perhaps, for the English). This leads perfectly into Matthew Goulish's essay, ‘The Strain of the Ordinary’, which examines threads of an American avant-garde playwriting tradition, in which writers have sought to apprehend – or rather to circle around – the simple joys of everyday existence. Like the Rebellato essay that it parallels at the start of our first half, Goulish is centrally concerned with metaphor – with what he calls ‘the theatre of the example’ – and with an awareness that the ordinary/real ceases to be ordinary/real as soon as it is framed or staged as an example of itself. How, then, to approach simplicity? Goulish attempts it via King Lear.

The second set of essays that Goulish heads up are, in my mind at least, grouped under the heading ‘language games’. Several of these pieces reflect on the recent prominence of verbal play, of lists and narratives, within the erroneouslyidentified field of ‘non-text-based’ performance. Goulish himself does not follow this line of enquiry, writing instead about playwriting (and thus linking back to our first half just as, in writing about contemporary art, my own piece perhaps links forward to the second), but his essay is a prime example of another kind of language game – of the essay itself as ‘performative writing’. The essays by Alan Read and Terry O'Connor, also in this section, are further, wonderful examples of this elusive genre. O'Connor's text, which sits next to Goulish's just as it did at the conference (in a happy union of Goat Island and Forced Entertainment), embodies what it speaks about – the sense of instability, inadequacy and excess in language that has been central to the Sheffield-based company's aesthetic since its inception. ‘I'm not so good with words,’ she writes: ‘I'm more used to performing the difficulty around them.’ It's a point that links Forced Entertainment to modern literature, just as much as it separates them. Tellingly, the company figures as prominently in this second set of essays as Lehmann does in the first.

Beth Hoffmann's essay on genealogies of ‘live art’ provides an American's eye-view on a peculiarly British formulation. She digs back into the history of 1960s theatre-world arguments to propose that the objective of ‘breaking theatre’ (a phrase of Tim Etchells's) has long been the only point of agreement between practitioners in this wildly diverse field, and that, paradoxically, ‘live art’ has more to do with (anti-) theatre than with any cohesive agenda extending from the visual arts. Hoffmann's argument, perhaps, mirrors Quick's on the ghosts of the dramatic, and it echoes Tomlin's in calling for a reappraisal of the ‘rhetorical habits and practices of distinction that underwrote the aesthetic and historiographical split’ between theatre and live art. At this juncture, she argues, these divisions have become mutually disabling. Cathy Turner's essay further reinforces this conviction, but in providing a dramaturg's perspective on the UK's divided theatre/performance culture, she also tentatively suggests that certain ‘convergent practices’ may now be beginning to bridge the gulf. One manifestation of this, she argues, is the preoccupation of many recent plays and performance pieces with the act of storytelling, the process of rendering past events as unstable narratives in the ‘now’ of performance. She also points out that such narrative games can function to help us question the stories we are habitually told about, for example, the binarized East/West world we (present-ly) inhabit. Cormac Power picks up a similar thread in his essay: just as Turner takes Forced Entertainment's And on the Thousandth Night as her key example, Power takes their more recent piece The World in Pictures as his, arguing that its peculiarly messy take on telling the story of the history of the world pushes spectators towards an awareness not only of their physical presence in the theatre, but also of their presence – and eventual absence – in the unknowable time-line of history. Both Turner and Power draw attention to some of the ways in which text/language can function both to complicate and to extrapolate our consciousness of the present moment of performance.

The final essay in this collection, Alan Read's ‘The Obtuse Angle’, might be read as a performative illustration of that an ancient dramatic text, Oedipus Rex, as his starting (and finishing) point, Read takes his reader on a circuitous journey up hill and down dale – crossing territories, histories, philosophies, political systems and animal species as he goes (Goulish starts with an immobile donkey; Read with endlessly mobile sheep). His essay conjures a breathtaking sense of the potential range and diversity of performance study, but also of the continuing value of the dramatic and literary in conceptualizing and contextualizing such enquiries.

The contents of this edition, though largely UK-centric, are book-ended by two sharply contrasting American contributions. We lead off, as did the conference, with Shannon Jackson's keynote address on alternative genealogies of Performance Studies. She points out that, while Richard Schechner's NYU brand is by far the most familiar and widely propagated, the US also boasts another, longer-standing PS tradition, rooted in the study of speech and rhetoric. The Schechnerian model – based in a movement away from traditional, literary-based Theatre Studies – has developed a near-pathological aversion to the textual. In his Performance Studies: An Introduction, Schechner barely even mentions the word ‘text’ – and when he does, it is to propose avoiding its use in relation to performance, since ‘it remains linked to writing … in a specific literary sense’. Why this should be a problem, he never explains (instead he argues that the scripts or stimuli prompting performance events should be labelled ‘protoperformances’ [see Schechner 2002: 192–3]). To Jackson, such arbitrary prejudices are selfdisabling for the field – and she demonstrates how the rhetorical PS tradition in which she was raised is founded on an exploration of performed literature rather than on a rejection of it. Her gorgeous evocation of a workshop example, working around a poem by Grace Paley, emphasizes how this tradition's concern with the ‘addressive relations’ between speaker and spoken-to can be both textually nuanced and politically charged.

At the other end of this volume, we print the performance text of Penny Arcade's monologuebased group show New York Values, which was first staged in the East Village only months after 9/11. This text contrasts sharply with Jackson's in being the work not of a self-reflexive academic, but of an outsider artist. It's also the only piece in this volume that has no direct connection to the Performing Literatures conference, and I have attempted to contextualize its presence here in a short preface to the text itself. In relation to Jackson's argument, though, Arcade's rhetoric is significant in its condemnation of the way that academia in general – and NYU in particular – has sought to colonize and replicate traditions of radical performance-making (to adopt a ‘liminal norm’) but has in the process simply tamed them for the fee-paying consumerist machine. In mourning New York's vanishing creative community of ‘writers, painters, poets, photographers, filmmakers, musicians’ – who once upon a time all fed off each other's creative energies – Arcade's performance challenges us to rethink the artificial boundaries we have erected between, for example, literature, theatre and performance. Might these boundaries, in the end, reflect and perpetuate nothing more than the arbitrary machinations of institutional divide and rule?

There are many acknowledgements due for an edition like this, but space is limited, so I'd just like to thank Richard Gough for his sure hand as co-editor and general wise adviser on this issue and also Sandra Laureri for her ever diligent work behind the scenes. Acknowledgement is also due to the British Academy and to the University of Leeds for their financial support for the original Performing Literatures conference.