On Theatricality

A standard dictionary tends to define ‘theatrical’ in two ways. A first will declare that theatrical means ‘of or relating to theatre’, while a second declares it to mean ‘exaggerated or affected’, especially as such affectations might pertain to human behaviour. Both of these meanings are explored in the articles that make up this issue of Performance Research that takes theatricality its theme. Some authors explore the edges of what is traditionally called theatre, while others veer towards discussions of theatricality in terms of exaggeration, display and ‘showiness’ – or, alternatively, they contest such characterizations of theatricality. Crucially, all of the pieces here force their readers to consider – and reconsider – what ‘theatre’ is, or what it has been or can be. And hovering sometimes in the background but often in the foreground is the spectre of Michael Fried’s critique of theatricality, which first emerged in his ‘Art and objecthood’ essay of 1967 (1998 [1967]), a critique that has continued up to his most recent writings (2015, 2018).

Some of the articles published here emerged from a symposium held at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom in September 2017. The symposium was held as part of a research project on ‘Theatricality and Interrelations between Art, Film and Theatre’ that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2016–17. The articles gathered here tend to focus on aspects of performance and theatre, while another book to be published soon will concentrate on theatricality and its relations both with theatre and the other arts (film, painting, sculpture, installation, Internet art and so on). (That book will be called Theatricality and the Arts: Film, art, theatre.)

In the nineteen articles that follow there are four broad tendencies, and we will discuss these tendencies briefly in this Introduction. They are (1) Theatricality beyond traditional conceptions of theatre; (2) Theatricality and modes of self-performance; (3) Theoretical approaches to theatricality; and (4) Theatricality and the history of performance.

1. THEATRICALITY BEYOND TRADITIONAL CONCEPTIONS OF THEATRE

A number of articles here try to broaden the range of what might be considered theatrical by concentrating on what in a performance can be said to make that performance theatrical and thus make it a piece of theatre. In her provocation, Julia Peetz asks us to consider to what extent US Presidential displays and speeches can be considered forms of theatre. Especially pertinent is the contemporary setting of Peetz’s reflections, a feeling that in becoming theatrical, US politics – and politics more generally – has turned its back on the real conditions of existence. Lauren Beck explores what she calls ‘ototheatre’, a form of personal theatre based on sounds and sound cues. This form of theatre is at odds with traditional conceptions of theatre that involve performers on the one hand and spectators on the other. With ‘ototheatre’, the performer and spectator are one and the same. Konstantina Georgelou explores the ways that a lecture on quantum mechanics can be considered theatrical, and, furthermore, she asks what kind of theatre this might be. Each of these offers examples of instances that might not typically be denoted theatrical, but strong cases are here made for expanding our understanding of what can be called theatre. Two contributions challenge some traditional conceptions of theatre by invoking modes of disability: Laura Haughey and Denise Armstrong investigate the use of sign languages on stage in terms of the ways that such practices can open up a range of theatrical possibilities, while Jennifer Goddard traces the innovations and challenges of a theatre performance combining disabled and non-disabled performers in ways that seek to open up the shared spaces between performers and non-performers.

2. THEATRICALITY AND MODES OF SELF-PERFORMANCE

Some contributors share their reflections of turning their own experiences and memories into performances of one sort or another, while others investigate performers who are, in one way or another, performing ‘themselves’. Harry Robert Wilson, for example, analyses his own performance responses to a portion of video taken of him during his early childhood. He examines the ways in which he transformed his relationship to this footage so that it could become a theatrical performance. Elizabeth Kukjian examines work by Cynthia Hopkins via its attempts to piece together Hopkins’ relationship with and memories of her father and the unique ways in which this was performed. Bryony White examines works by Marina Abramović by invoking notions of the contractual relationship between performer and audience as indicative of theatricality, especially via the legal framework of the ‘trademark’.

3. THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO THEATRICALITY

A number of contributors offer reflections on theatricality primarily from a theoretical perspective. Significantly, perhaps – and for

reasons that are certainly unclear to us – these are all male contributors, and the themes tackled are theoretically acute. Nik Wakefield offers reflections on notions of absorption and theatricality as framed by Michael Fried in order to question the relationship between absorption and theatricality in various works by The Wooster Group and Robert Wilson. Swen Steinhäuser examines Fried’s arguments while incorporating some of Samuel Weber’s theses on theatricality. All of this is undertaken in the context of poststructuralist debates on temporality and iterability, presence and absence, as well as puppetry, and framed by concepts borrowed from Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and others. Discussions of performance works by Goat Island and Every house has a door are also incorporated into Steinhauser’s contribution. Goran Petrović-Lotina offers a political analysis of theatricality primarily by invoking the notion of hegemony as articulated by Antonio Gramsci, as well as by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In doing so, Petrović-Lotina argues for a contestation of spectatorial codes by emphasizing the possibilities of confrontation between a performance and an audience. Also arguing from an overtly political perspective, Simon Bowes begins to theorize a theatre of assembly or assemblage, particularly drawing on the notion of assemblage (agencement) as used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Mischa Twitchin balances a wide range of terms, including interactivity and immersion, presence and absence, distance and intimacy, all in the name of interrogating the fantasy of transparent immersion that is promoted as an overcoming of theatricality. Finally, from a theoretical perspective, Jack Belloli reflects on writings by sociologist Richard Sennett and anthropologist Tim Ingold to argue for a turn to ‘craft’ and ‘skill’ as markers of theatrical achievement. Much of this is viewed from a Friedian perspective, as Belloli explains some of the ways in which London-based Secret Theatre, in their production practices, have sought in various ways to restore a sense of conviction in theatrical processes and performances.

4. THEATRICALITY AND THE HISTORY OF PERFORMANCE

A number of writers tackle issues related to the history of theatrical production practices from within the context of reflecting on notions of theatricality. Soo Ryon Yoon examines some recent performance practices in South Korea. Theatricality is used in such performances as a specific tactic that directly questions official accounts and histories. As a result, Yoon claims that theatricality can be mobilized as a mode of political and social critique.

The focus of Sylvia Solakidi’s article is on Jan Fabre’s examination of his home country in his production of Belgium Rules/Belgium Rules, which was performed in 2017. Discussing different aspects of this four-hour performance work, Solakidi discusses the ways in which theatricality, as a repetitive act, provides a site of resistance to those forms of nationalism and national identities that rely on the linearity of historical time. Theatricality, she claims, which always incorporates acts of repetition, creates a political space where both theatricalization and historization are opened out to radical transformations. Emma Willis is similarly interested in the potential of radical transformation in her discussion of the ethical problem of the representation of real-world perpetrators of violence in both theatre and film. Drawing on Sam Weber’s thinking on theatricality, where the processes of theatrical production and presentation are revealed and narrativized, Willis identifies the metatheatrical as a form of ‘linked separation’, one that allows a nuanced interchange between the narratives of the perpetrator of violence and those that represent them on the stage and also, in this article, in film. Theatricality here becomes the site where the highly charged relationship between the represented and the representing can be teased out, exposing new ethical and political dimensions to both the historical and the theatrical. Serap Erincin charts some of the practices of The Wooster Group, especially in relation to their use of multimedia screens and other technological mechanisms that Erincin describes in terms of their intermedial relation to traditional stage practices. She notes some of the ways that our understanding of what counts as ‘theatrical’ has been transformed by such methods. Patricia Smyth, in the provocation that opens this special issue, mounts a strong historically based argument against Fried’s conception of theatricality. Smyth takes the specific case of painter Paul Delaroche (1797– 1856), a painter regarded by Fried as very much a theatrical artist. For critics and audiences at the time, however, Delaroche’s works were certainly not regarded as theatrical, Smyth argues. In her discussion, she also questions the appropriateness of Fried’s characterization of theatricality.

Despite our attempt to tie the word down at the beginning of this Introduction theatricality remains a slippery concept throughout this issue and the settled condition that an uncontested definition of the term might present, quite properly, always eludes the reader. It seems that what is staged within the following pages is fashioned by the challenge that the concept of theatricality presents to both critical thinking and also to the practice of making and reflecting on those elements of performance that are thought to be theatrical. Of course, all this consideration takes place within the shadow of what many thinkers have termed the anti-theatrical turn, which begins with Plato and perhaps reaches its zenith in Baudrillard’s claim that because theatre is everywhere, it is in fact nowhere (1990). According to Baudrillard, theatre is at the service of what he claims is an obscene construction of reality that is merely a pornographic play of appearance, one that is without depth, that lacks distance, one that constructs a reality that renders everything as transparent and, crucially, exchangeable. Theatre, for Baudrillard, was always based on particular spatial rules and social conventions: the machinic division of stage and audience, a division that once permitted our ability to believe in and commit to the power of illusion. Once everything becomes theatricalized illusion is seen to disappear, leaving what Baudrillard calls ‘the obscene form of anti-theatre, present everywhere’. And in this situation, he claims, we ‘are all actors and spectators; there is no more stage; the stage is everywhere; no more rules: everyone plays out his own drama, improvising his own fantasies’ (Baudrillard 1990: 63). If Baudrillard mourns the loss of theatre via it being absorbed into the quotidian, its extraordinariness reduced to the flatness of the everyday, he also hints that if we were able to return to the condition of theatre we might find a theatricality that resists the reduction, or even the disappearance, he claims has taken place. In short, the implication here is that rather than fleeing the environs of the stage in a vain attempt to encounter a reality in those encounters where risk, liveness, endurance and authenticity are privileged, we might discover something extraordinary, something real, in the artificiality of theatricality itself.

The following articles, it strikes us, each in complementary and sometimes contradictory ways, take up the challenge posed by the term ‘theatricality’ by turning to the condition of theatre, to the specificities of a practice rooted in theatre or its equivalents, to counter Baudrillard’s playful assertion that theatre has disappeared and by implication is now made obsolete. The following articles each make a striking claim for the cultural relevance and the political necessity for rethinking what constitutes theatricality.

They also ask how different and contesting forms of practice allow a reimagining of theatre’s place in understanding the complexity of our contemporary lives in which what constitutes the truth, fact, certainty and history seems under perpetual attack.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.