Is there a text in this performance?

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Notes

¹ Since the advent of semiotic approaches to theatre in France and Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, the mise-en-scène of any performance event has been read as a text. The performance analyst Eli Rozik provides a succinct definition of how text is generally configured in Theatre and Performance Studies today:

‘Text’ should be defined as the entire set of structured verbal and/or non-verbal signs/ sentences, meant to be read, interpreted and experienced by a reader, and understood in a wide sense to also include systems of signification and communication other than language. (2008: 34)

² It is interesting to note the influence of Walter Benjamin's essay ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’ on the thinking and practice of the artists listed above (1969: 83–109).

³ Pearson notes: ‘The traces left behind by performance are perhaps more susceptible to the approaches of contemporary archaeology than methods taken from textual analysis: the documentation of unwritten happening, attested through material trace, is an archaeological project’ (2001: 9; original bold typeface).

⁴ A very different notion of the archive is proposed by Rebecca Schneider. In a polemical essay, Schneider rejects Phelan's notion of ephemerality as performance's privileged modus operandi for the way in which it is ‘predetermined by a cultural habitation to the patrilineal, Westidentified (arguably white-cultural) logic of the Archive’ (2001: 100). Against this, Schneider calls for performance that ‘remains’ and ‘leaves residue’ (102)

⁵ This is not to say, however, that Phelan and Pavis ignore the written text outright in their work. In different context, they are quite happy to engage with it. But the central argument I have been making in this article still holds. For Pavis and Phelan, the written text is not to be consulted in performative writing and performance analysis.

⁶ In many of the best accounts of documentation and archiving in performance, little mention is made of the script, and the archaeological debris is generally composed of photographs, video recordings, drawings, interviews and artists note books. These are also the types of ‘bony remnants’ that Schneider takes issue with (2001: 102).

⁷ For Adorno, ‘the truth content’ of any work is found in its radical specificity, that is to say, in its unique capacity to articulate the truth that it alone can speak. This is why Adorno famously rejected Georg Lukác's Hegelian notion of the poetics of Realism. See Adorno (2007: 151–76) for a good discussion of this point.

⁸ I am not drawing an analogy with the live album here. Whereas the live album is a more or less faithful reconstruction of the original event, the postscript appeals to memory and is much less accurate in the effects it generates within the consciousness and body of the reader.

⁹ This is not a flippant remark. Lone Twin's performances and theatre pieces have been strongly influenced, thematically and dramaturgically, by the structural experiments of contemporary novelists. Writer and poet Michael Ondaajte has been especially important; his novel In the Skin of a Lion: A Novel (1987) played a key role in the devising of Alice Bell.

¹⁰ Lone Twin's interest in staging voice is longstanding but is perhaps best demonstrated in some of their most recent work which includes Town Crying (2007), Speeches (2008) and Newsboys (2008). In these performances, a solo performer engages in public speech in a town or city, often simply standing on a small, homemade husting.

¹¹ I have speculated elsewhere about the ontological and ethical tension inherent in the very name of the company (Lavery 2007). Is there a better figure for representing the subject's impossible but necessary relationship to Being (what Nancy calls the impersonal Self) than a lone twin?

¹² Although she might find my notion of the postscript a little to discrete or ‘bony’ for her taste, there is much in common between my thinking of the fleshy ghost and Rebecca's Schneider's critique of the logocentric archive as ‘a house’ that has no room for flesh. Whereas I see the postscript as a text haunted by a body, Schneider, in characteristically non-patriarchal fashion, sees archival remains as ‘absent flesh ghost[ing] bones’ (2001: 104). I would like to thank David Williams for drawing my attention to Schneider's essay.