Introduction

It is increasingly recognized by scholars, from a number of different disciplines, that we are, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, living in a new age of ruin gazing comparable to the fever for decay and dilapidation that so consumed observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 Everywhere we turn today, or so it seems, we are bombarded with images of wreckage.

But how to account for this recent resurgence in the eighteenth-century term ‘Ruinenlust’ (‘ruinlust’) (Macauley 1953: 453)? And what are the reasons for its contemporary appeal? Although the complexity needed to unpack these questions exceeds the limits of this introduction, it is surely no coincidence that the new fascination with ruins should arise at a moment of profound ontological and epistemological uncertainty, a period in which the temporal horizons that defined Modernity in the West are under threat as a result of human-induced climate change, economic transformation and ‘crisis’, terrorist attacks, a quasi-permanent state of global warfare, digital technologies, and renewed fears about nuclear destruction. As in the equally turbulent eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ruin, on account of its vertiginous and intermediate temporality – its ability to include both past and future in its dilated but crumbling present – offers itself as a compelling figure for representing, and perhaps even managing, the anxiety involved in what a number of theorists have called the ‘contemporary’, an untimely experience of the present that plunges the now into ‘darkness’ (Agamben 2009: 53)

Within this purview, and at a time when many theorists and artists seem to be especially drawn to the ruins and remnants of mid-twentieth-century modernism (housing estates, tower blocks, future-ologies), what can theatre and performance scholarship bring to the ever burgeoning literature on ruins (Dillon 2011, 2013)? Or to pose the question more directly, how may these disciplines, in terms of both theory and practice, simultaneously complement and deviate from extant thought on ruins and ruination? Equally importantly, for every encounter takes place between (at least) two parties, it seems crucial to look the other way, too, and to consider what ruin theory may offer theatre and performance studies in return.

For those aware of and interested in the current literature on ruins, the dual ambition for this issue of Performance Research may seem, at least initially, a little curious, perhaps even bizarre. For of all of the research carried out on ruins and ruination in recent years, the work of theatre and performance scholars, with the notable exception of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (2001) and, more recently, NVA (2011), has been conspicuous by its absence. There is nothing, for instance, in current performance theory to compare with the longstanding work of geographers, archaeologists, architects, art historians and literary scholars in the field. The same may be said for contemporary practitioners. Unlike their counterparts in fine art, photography and film, theatre-makers, for all their recent interest in site-based work, tend to be more concerned with producing historical, phenomenological and (increasingly) new materialist experiences of space and place than they are in engaging with ruins per se.2 To date, little attention has been paid to how we may perform in ruins or indeed in how they may perform on us. What does a dramaturgy of ruins look like, for instance? In what ways does the vertiginous temporality of the ruin impact on the bodies of actors and spectators? And, just as crucially, what is to be gained for theatre and performance if we approach them, by analogy, as ruins?

The reasons for this disparity in disciplinary approach can be traced to the aesthetic genealogy that ties film and photography to the picturesque – a mode of representation that came into being in the eighteenth century. As the German art historian and theorist Wolfgang Kemp explains in ‘Images in decay: Photography in the picturesque tradition’ (1990), the picturesque's concern to develop a newly refined sense of aesthetic taste rooted in an appreciation of the often neglected and abandoned details of everyday life itself, is – and remains – at the very heart of the photographic imagination. And if we extend Kemp's insights to contemporary visual and sculptural practice, too, then we may say that artists such as Jane and Louise Wilson, Cyprian Gaillard, Rachel Whiteread, Keith Coventry and Tacita Dean are also contemporary inheritors of this picturesque concern with ruination and rubble.

Kemp's genealogy of decay tempers any desire that one may feel to castigate theatre and performance scholars for not engaging with ruins to the same extent as their colleagues in art history. For not only is visual art able to draw on a long tradition of ruin gazing, but the diverse media of film, painting, photography and poetry, particularly in their traditional modes of reception, lend themselves to the same lyrical mode of contemplation that Jacques Diderot in 1767 described as integral to a ‘poetics of ruins’:

In this vast, solitary, deserted sanctuary I fear nothing. I'm isolated from all life's difficulties

No one hurries me along and no one is within earshot; I can speak to myself out loud, give voice to my afflictions and shed tears without restraint. (Diderot 1995: 199)

As the most collective of the arts, theatre has little of the solitary sanctuary about it. Indeed, if anything, its raison d'être is premised on the rejection of the lonely observer so beloved of Diderot. In Peter Szondi's celebrated definition of modern drama, for instance, there is no space for introspection or interiority (1987: 1). Rather, for Szondi, theatre is an art of social interaction and thus essentially intersubjective. Even in the current vogue for one-to-one performance, theatre and performance remain essentially public arts, rooted in what Erika Fischer-Lichte describes as ‘the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators’ (2008: 38). However, to conclude from this that theatre and performance have little to add to ruin theory is to miss the point somewhat, especially when one reflects on the role accorded affect, presentness and phenomenality in post-dramatic theatre aesthetics.

But where to start this work of revision? Perhaps with an anecdote from the French ethnographer Marc Augé.

In Le Temps en ruines (2003), Augé offers an insightful reading of a strange slip-of-memory described by Sigmund Freud when visiting the Acropolis in Athens for the first time in 1904. Looking back on his experience in a letter to his friend Romain Rolland in 1936, Freud describes how, on actually seeing the ruins, he suddenly remembered that as a schoolboy he had doubted their very existence. For Freud, the presence of the ruins activated a repressed memory that seemed both to project him backwards in time and also to place reality itself – the status of the present – in crisis. Differently from Freud, who in an act of self-analysis, believed that his uncanny experience was a symptom of Oedipal guilt (2003: 31), Augé argues that Freud's perception was troubled by the ruin's capacity to disturb linear notions of time. In Augé's analysis, the material presence of the ruin, its thereness, provoked a vertiginous encounter with ‘pure time’, which, as he says, ‘disputes the more learned and normative representations of history’ (32, my translation). In the vicinity of the ruin – and Brian Dillon makes a similar point when he talks of how ruins ‘set [us] adrift in time’ (2011: 11) – perceiving subjects are liberated from the constraints of punctuality and sequentiality. And what they find in this collapse of history and clock time, Augé remarks, is a sense of time as flux and flow, a ‘non-datable’ temporality that knows neither beginning nor end (9).3

Augé's interpretation of Freud's experience at the Acropolis discloses an intimate, if as yet unexplored, relationship between theatre and ruins rooted in a mutual sense of performativity. Irrespective of whether they are experienced as live or recorded events, theatre and performance, like ruins, are essentially durational in character, and impose their own temporality on spectators. Likewise (and again like ruins), they both insist upon a phenomenal encounter in the here and now – in what we may term ‘presentness’. In this context, the word ‘presentness’ has little in common with what Jacques Derrida critiques as ‘a metaphysics of self-presence’. Rather, as I use it, presentness is intimately connected to duration, and designates a mode of temporal submission, in which spectators are constrained to give themselves up to the specific passage of the performance work as it moves through space and through time.4 Expressed differently, we may say that theatre and performance spatialize time and temporalize space. We cannot walk away from a performance in the same way that one may walk away from the more fixed forms of sculpture, painting or written poetry. Whether live, documented and/or articulated through electronic media, performance is always, to some extent, a dynamically temporal affair, a machine for capturing, expressing and transmitting affect from one spatio-temporal moment to another. Hence, its similarity to the ruin, which – and this bears repeating – it resembles on account of its form as opposed to any figurative desire it may have to produce images of ruins as content.

To be clear then: theatre and performance are not, like photography, painting and film, conducive to our understanding of ruins, because of their ‘indexical’ quality – what Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida terms as photography's ability to affirm ‘that something has been’ (1993: 85), and what the French film theorist André Bazin referred to ‘as cinema's objectivity in time’ (1967: 140).5 Rather their usefulness – can we even say their ‘truth’? – resides elsewhere: that is, in their ability to exist, analogically, as processes of ruination in and by themselves.6 As David Wiles puts it, ‘plays are neither in time nor about time, but are of time’ (2014: 3, emphasis in original). In order to unfold this sense of temporal ‘of-ness’ a little further (3), it is instructive to consider, for a moment, the US composer William Basinki's four volume work The Disintegration Loops (2000–3), a suite of music that quite literally consumed itself as the fragile magnetic tape, storing the musical data, crumbled in the very moment that Basinski was transferring it from an analogue to digital format. Theatre and performance partake in a similar act of performative decomposition, burning themselves up in the present to exist as memory traces in the minds and bodies of those who experienced their fulgurant passage – or else existing as uncanny documents, spectral presences of an event that can be repeated but that remains irrecoverable.

This reference to ghosts only serves to underline the affinity that exists between theatre and performance and ruins and ruination. For, if the ruin, as Walter Benjamin has famously argued in The Arcades Project (2002), has the potential to exist as a dialectical image by haunting the present with an abandoned future, then theatre, too, as several critics have pointed out, is equally ‘hauntological’ (Derrida 1994: 10).7 In his 1958 essay ‘The tightrope walker’, Jean Genet urges the performer to ‘surrender himself to Death’ (2003: 72). Through this renunciation or transformation, the actor becomes a silhouette of his former self, moving on the stage in the same way that a ghost may exist in the liminal or intermediate space that parallels physical reality. By abandoning the domain of the living, the actor is, for Genet, a hauntological machine, conjuring ghosts from the past and projecting them into a future that is always still to come. It is no surprise, then, to find that the ambition of the prostitute Warda in Genet's Les Paravents (The Screens), (1966), his epic play about death, ruination and decay, is to exist as a ruin, ‘a perfect whore, a simple skeleton draped in gilded gowns’ (1987: 131). In this willed dereliction of self, Warda makes the metatheatrical realization that to be an actor is to accept a temporality that the living do their utmost to repress: the sense in which one is always already a ruin in the very midst of life itself.

Warda's agonistic insight troubles our conventional understanding of ruins and performance. For here, the ruin is not a broken remnant of what was once a perfect original, and whose current state of disrepair is simply the result of a failure in maintenance (be that practical, ethical or ontological); rather, the ruin, like performance, is something that is already ruined in advance, an object that unfolds itself in the tense of the future anterior, the time of the will have been. Such a ruinous tense is central to the future of performance, the very thing that allows it, somewhat perversely, to live again. For without this crack in its foundation, this hole in its architecture, there would be nothing to incite the desire of performers and spectators to come.

The ruinous desire that theatre embodies, its inability to come to an end, offers a radical challenge to the chronophobia that can sometimes dominate contemporary engagements with the archive. In its vertiginous temporality, theatre pre-dates what Bernard Stiegler calls ‘industrial temporal objects’ (2014: 17) – those technological products that were developed in the nineteenth century (photography, film, records). In the extent to which these media, as a result of their hyper- industrialization in the digitalized twenty-first century, tend to be used as prostheses for memory, devices for the creation of millions of personal archives, stored on hard drives that remain largely unconsulted, they have impacted, disastrously, on our capacity to remember, perhaps even to live. In Archive Fever: A Freudian impression, for instance, Derrida points out that archives are not simply technologies of power, but apparatuses of death itself: ‘Arca, this time in Latin, is the chest, “the art of acacia wood”, which contains the stone Tablets; but arca is also the cupboard, the coffin, the prison cell’ (1998: 23).

By insisting on their own ruinous temporality, theatre and performance are able to infect the technologies of ‘archive fever’ – film, photography and even writing – with a performativity that is still too often denied them.8 In doing so, theatre and performance have the potential to cultivate different forms of living in and with time, precisely because they have committed themselves, madly and necessarily, to transience and forgetting. But care needs to be taken here. In this dialectic of ruination, the point is not to invert the logic of Michael Fried (1967) by seeking to argue for – and thus somehow impossibly safeguard – the ‘medium specificity’ of theatre and performance; on the contrary, the less defensive move is to look for those moments of encounter where theatre and performance simultaneously ruin and are ruined by other art forms. Through this porous negotiation, theatre and performance may gain as much from engaging with other art forms as other art forms may learn from them. This edition of Performance Research is motivated by a desire to set that ‘double ruination’ in motion, to think about theatre and performance as both artistic practices and ways of being in time that other media are able to experiment with and articulate on their own terms and through their own processes.

In tentative response to the questions driving this issue, and in anticipation of the essays to come, it seems plausible to say that theatre's contribution to today's discourses on ruins and ruination resides in its simultaneous ability to disclose and embody the inherent theatricality of the ruin itself, the way in which the ruin's temporality is a reminder of both transience and permanence. This, of course, rebounds on theatre and performance scholarship, too, and offers alternative ways of thinking through the relationship between theatre's immediacy and memory, its lives and afterlives. In this respect, this issue of Performance Research, like Samuel Beckett in his 1946 text ‘The capital of the ruins’, sees hope in destruction, ‘an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’ (1995: 278). For all of the essays wager on a new future for theatre and performance studies that would seek to complicate and expand their temporal potentialities and possibilities by ‘thinking against the dominant arrangements of time and history’ (Freeman 2010: xi). In an era when the relentless tempos and rhythms of hyper-industrialized capital are ‘erasing memory traces’ in an hyper-accelerated frenzy for acquisition and control (Rosa 2014: 94), the motivation behind that wager is decidedly political. Hence the affinities between this volume and the work of scholars such as Osborne (1995), Jameson (2005), Taylor (2003), Muñoz (2009) and Schneider (2011), all of whom, in their different ways, are cognizant of the need for anachronism, for going back to the future.

The edition is composed of four different sections. In the first, Theatres of Ruination, Mike Pearson, in ‘The Lesson of Anatomy 1974/2014’, reflects on his recent restaging of The Lesson of Anatomy: The Life, obsessions and fantasies of Antonin Artaud, an assemblage of Antonin Artaud's texts that he first performed in a joint production between Cardiff Laboratory for Theatrical Research and Le Théâtre du Double at the Sherman Arena Theatre, Cardiff in 1974. Juxtaposing Steve Allison's photographs from the original performance with Russ Basford's images from the 2014 ‘re-do’, Pearson poses a series of profound theatrical, archaeological and ontological questions about how performers are able to conjure a multiplicity of historical ghosts by embracing a physical archive, stored in bodies patined with age and ruined by time. Timmy De Laet and Edith Cassiers approach the relationship between theatre and ruination slightly differently. In ‘The Regenerative Ruination of Romeo Castellucci’, they analyze how ruination and demolition function as integral elements in Castellucci's dramaturgical thinking and artistic process. As they see it, ruination, for Castellucci, is more than a simple passion for destruction; rather, it is best viewed as a source of becoming and transformation, offering the possibility for existing differently – that is, creatively – in both theatre and in life itself. Whereas Pearson and De Laet and Cassiers concentrate on ruination as process, a way of making theatre, Katie Beswick ‘s ‘Ruin Lust and the Council Estate: Nostalgia and ruin in Arinze Kene's God's Property’ looks at how the discourse on ruins can allow us to think about the council estate in Kene's play as a dialectical image or ‘paradoxical site’ that combines nostalgia with a historical critique of racism.

The second section – Performing in Ruins – expands the concept of ruination from theatre to performance. In his essay ‘Terremoto: Utopia, memory, and the unfinished in Sicily’, David Williams concentrates on the extraordinary utopian plans to transform the fourteenth- century town of Gibellina in Western Sicily into an art and garden community after it was destroyed by a large earthquake in 1968. Although Williams charts a history of failure – many of the artworks commissioned for the town now appear to be dangerously close to being ruins themselves – he nevertheless finds hope in what he describes as ‘an ambiguous, provisional, slowly unfolding work-in-progress’. Also focusing on Italy, but this time Venice, Nicolas Whybrow in ‘Watermarked: ‘Venice really lives up to its postcard beauty’' examines the dangerous and ambivalent performativity inherent in postcards of the city. In a playful meditation on Alfredo Jaar's installation for the Chilean Pavilion in 2013, Whybrow speculates, ironically, on how the huge numbers of tourists who come to Venice pose an environmental hazard to the city. Contextualized within a history of global warming and increased flood risk, Whybrow argues that it is now difficult to ascertain the temporal status of postcards. Do they serve as indexical images of what is or melancholic remnants of what was? In their essay ‘The Ruin in Question’ – the first of two pieces on the incredible ruin of St Peters Seminary in Cardross, Scotland – Hayden Lorimer and Simon Murray pose a series of questions to the ruin, based on Elinor's Fuch's celebrated essay ‘Visit to a small planet: Question to ask a play’ (2004). In this way, they seek to explore the dramaturgy of the ruined site, investigating how the crumbling materiality of St Peters acts on bodies and imaginations today, teasing out its potentials and affordances for future performances. A related quest is adumbrated by Phil Smith in ‘Sites of Dereliction: Beginnings and Allies of Performance’, a text that looks back at Smith's changing engagement with ruins as places for site-based performance over the past fifteen years or so. Concentrating on three ruin sites in Devon, Smith contends that his practice is now attuned to the vibrant materiality of ruins as opposed to seeing them, as he once did, as dumb matter, merely awaiting the enlivening touch of the performance maker. Benedict Anderson continues this concern with performing ruins in ‘Trümmer Geographies: Teufelsberg as a site of forgetting’ by sketching out a possible performance proposal for Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), Berlin's highest hill, and a site that was built from 1946 to 1966 from the rubble of the city pulverized during the Second World War. The final two essays in this section – Laurie Beth Clark's ‘Ruined Landscapes and Residual Architecture: Affect and palimpsest in trauma tourism’ and Silke Arnold de Simine's ‘The Ruin as Memorial – The memorial as ruin’ – explore a more expanded definition of what it means to perform in ruins by investigating, on the one hand, the ruins of dark tourist sites, and, on the other, the performance of ruins as memorials. Drawing on a wide-range of examples, these essays, in their different ways, serve as timely reminders of the ethical complexities and political ambiguities inherent in ruined sites that have been officially designated as places of trauma and remembrances, lieux de mémoire.

Reiterating the point made earlier in this introduction about ruination and media, the section Ruining Images highlights the performativity of filmic and photographic engagements with ruins. In ‘St Peter's Seminary, Cardross: The ruin of modernism’, David Archibald and Johnny Rodger compare and contrast Scottish film-maker Murray Grigor's two experimental films about the working life and, ultimately, abandonment of St Peter's Seminary. Unlike Lorimer and Murray who concentrate on how we may perform in the ruins of St Peter's today, Archibald and Rodger are more concerned with how Grigor's films, when screened simultaneously, create a sense of ghostly untimeliness for viewers, leaving them in an uncanny space in which the demise of the building seems to have always already been anticipated in a way that is perhaps intimately connected with the death of modernity itself. Carl Lavery's ‘A Future for Hashima: pornography, representation, and time’ is similarly interested in the temporality of images; in it, Lavery argues for a mode of representation that would not fix the ruin, but, on the contrary, would exist, by an analogy, as a kind of ruin itself. Lavery does this by contrasting photographs of ‘ruin porn’ with Return to Battleship Island (2013), Lee Hassall's dynamic 30-minute film about the industrial ruins of Hashima Island in Japan, which, along with Detroit, is one of the ‘Meccas’ of contemporary ruin tourism. The photographer Ian Wiblin's essay ‘Photography, Performance, Ruin: Performing photography in site of architecture’ is close to Lavery's text, but with one major difference. Whereas Lavery concentrates on how still and moving images perform on audiences, Wiblin stresses the performance of the photographer himself, juxtaposing Robert Smithson's and Walter Benjamin's writing on ruins with his own attempt to photograph the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street, London. Fiona Anderson's text ‘Cruising the Queer Ruins of New York's Abandoned Waterfront’ is equally interested in the performativity of images. Through a detailed consideration of photographs, drawings and writings by a number of New York-based artists in the 1970s and 1980s, she is able to show how their images of derelict factories and warehouse disrupt any simplistic temptation that we may feel to see their obsession with ruins as a premonition of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis of the 1980s. Instead of focusing on the homophobia inherent in moralizing narratives of inevitable decay, Anderson highlights the pleasures that the contemporary observer can obtain by ‘cruising’ these ruins again, responding to them as invitations to live differently in the future by queering the apparent fixity of the past. Dominic Paterson's essay ‘Ruins Recast: appropriated and fabricated ruins in the work of Scott Myles’ continues this section's mediation on the ruinous quality of images by underlining the subversive potential in Scott Myles' Potlatch (2014), a week-long performance piece that allowed shoppers in Galeries Lafayette, a famous Parisian department store, to purchase commodities that had been gift-wrapped in Bible paper and then stamped with twelve photographic images taken of Guy Debord's home in Champot. Reading Myles's intervention through the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Douglas Crimp and Giorgio Agamben, Paterson proposes, in an argument that has affinities with Lavery's analysis of Lee Hassall's film Return to Battleship Island, that Potlatch effects a détournement that critiques the desire that many contemporary artists have to fetishize ruins.

In the first two essays of the final section Writing Ruins, Eleanor Bowen and Esther Belvis Pons offer two autobiographical accounts of how ruins impose their own ethics and politics of memory and mourning. In her text and image piece ‘These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruin’, Bowen offers a series of personal and theoretical reflections on the temporality of ruins, and uses their capacity to fray the edges of the present in order to retrace the ‘scattered DNA’ of her father's archive. Like Bowen, Esther Belvis Pons also negotiates the entangled connections and obligations that an encounter with ruins can provoke. In ‘Genet's Cycle of Ruins’, she describes how the presence of a vacant lot in her neighbourhood near to Les Rambles in Barcelona provoked what can only be termed a form of political awakening, in which an entangled encounter with the writings of Jean Genet and Roberto Esposito allowed her to rethink her ideas on propriety, decay and abjection. The ethical and political possibilities of ruins are apparent, too, in Sharon Mazer's personal account of the devastation caused by the two earthquakes that hit Christchurch, New Zealand on 4 September 2010 and 22 February 2011. In ‘Quake City’, Mazer bemoans how the generosity and creativity that so characterized the initial responses of the citizens of Christchurch to their ruined city has been forgotten through the institutionalization of official processes of memorialization, such as the exhibition ‘Quake City’ that was installed in the Canterbury Museum in 2013. In an unsolicited but oblique response to Mazer's article, the final contribution from Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, ‘Ruin Hermeneutics’ seeks to disclose the spatio-temporal fissuring inherent in representation itself. Reminding us of writing's material history as tablet or stone, and stressing the generative power of dust and fragments, Sleigh-Johnson posits writing as a form of political performance, a ruin that resists capitalism's desire to colonize space and time by refusing to remain still. In this respect her essay highlights, yet again, the stakes involved in approaching ruins and ruination through the lenses of theatre and performance. For not only does theatre exist as a privileged metaphor for the ruin (and vice versa), it has the capacity to perform its own analogous act of ruination, which, as all of the essays in this volume attest, is found in its vertiginous ability to open up new possibilities for existing differently on the earth, allowing us to transform ourselves into what Boris Groys has termed ‘comrades of time’ (2009).

Notes

1. See Edensor (2005), Trigg (2006), DeSilvey (2006), Hatherley (2010), Hell and Schönle (2010), Dillon (2011, 2013), Mellor (2011), Murphy (2012), DeSilvey and Edensor (2013), Stoler (2013), Keiller (2013), Viney (2014), Göbel (2015) and Olsen and Pétursdóttir (2014).

2. A forthcoming book by Simon Murray in Deirdre Heddon and Sally Mackey's series Performing Landscapes (Palgrave) will provide the first in-depth exploration of theatre that takes place in ruins.

3. While the ruin, for Augé, ultimately replaces ‘the journey through history with an experience of pure time’ (2003: 38, my translation), this does not negate, in any absolutist sense, historical time altogether. On the contrary, the strange, almost inhuman temporality of the ruin is, Augé proposes, the very thing that may create a new sense of history by breaking with fixed patterns of understanding the past.

4. My understanding of presentness is close here to that of Fischer-Lichte (2008: 38–74) and Lehmann (2006: 141–4).

5. See, in this context, Von Moltke's essay ‘Ruin cinema’ (2010).

6. In this hyperbolic statement, ‘truth’ equates to ‘difference’.

7. See Carlson (2001), Lavery (2009) and Luckhurst and Morin (2014).

8. One thinks here of Gill's collection Time and the Image (2000), Green and Lowry's Stillness and Time: Photography and the moving image (2006) and Barker's Time and the Digital: Connecting technology, aesthetics, and a process philosophy of time (2012).