Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance

Chapter One

Locating Theatrical Reality

Introduction

This chapter outlines some of the key difficulties associated with untangling the relationship between form and reception in the most apparently simple forms of theatre. In order to introduce my themes, I will begin by analysing one of the simplest available definitions of theatre, first presented by the British theatre director Peter Brook in 1968 (Brook 1990:11). I will then discuss two case study examples of performance before linking my analysis of Brook’s definition and the performances to critical material that explores human experiences of embodiment, space and place. Through introducing these specific case studies alongside a cross-disciplinary way of thinking about theatrical space, I hope that this chapter will serve as a foundation for the book’s examination of the interdependent relationship between scenography and acting within the spectator’s experience of theatre.

Traversing seemingly empty spaces

In 1968, Peter Brook published a now-famous (and somewhat controversial) definition of the act of theatre. Drawing together his interests in Shakespearean theatre, spirituality and twentieth-century avant-garde performance practice, Brook provided a spatial and embodied account of the theatre event:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

(Brook 1990:11)

Implied in Brook’s consciously reductive definition of theatre as one person watching another walk across the ‘empty’ space is the belief that the act of walking is being offered up for the spectator’s consideration. Rather than pointing towards nascent notions of performativity, the opening paragraph of The Empty Space implicitly establishes theatre as a framing device for empathetic engagement.

Often glossed over in the repetition and problematizing of Brook’s words is the fact that ‘[he] take[s] an empty space and call[s] it a bare stage’ (Brook 1990:11). The fact that Brook actively selects a space implies that it is the movement from everyday life into the liminal¹ space of performance that establishes the performer’s body as a site for feeling and agency. The performer is framed as a subject who thinks, feels and demands empathy. He stands onstage with something to say, presenting the spectator with feelings or gestures to share and consider. However, contained within this reality is a paradox. To consciously shape the process of encounter within an aesthetic framework is to affect the relationship between performer and spectator. The performer is not simply a subject for empathy − he is a particular subject for empathy. As such, he becomes a potential symbol or metaphor within an aesthetic framework. The performing body is established as dialectical. The man who walks across a space that has been specifically labelled a ‘stage’ becomes an aesthetic object as well as an experiencing subject. As Alan Read has noted, the aesthetics of theatrical space rest on the complex intersection between the natural and the social (Read 2009:15).

The dialectical body created within Brook’s definition emerges from the implicit way that he splits the concept of theatrical space into two related categories. The first category refers to space as a concrete, rational dimension − the place of materiality that we might traverse. The second is space as the product of complex social and aesthetic interrelation − the empathetic and social networks of meaning and understanding that emerge when two people meet. Brook must have understood that these categories of space interact in our everyday life and are, in pragmatic terms, inseparable; however, both his writings and his practice demonstrate that he also seemed to know that their integration becomes particularly potent in the theatre.

Although Brook wrote his definition of the act of theatre over forty years ago, I believe that the understanding of theatre space he implies (one defined by the integration of social, aesthetic and material space) can be used to articulate and understand the construction of meaning within a wide range of performance texts. Within this book, I will argue that it is the interrelation between different forms of space that enables the creative possibilities associated with theatrical performance. Indeed, through analysing the different kinds of space implied by Brook’s definition, I believe that we can unpick some of the problems associated with the dialectical, and sometimes paradoxical, nature of theatre as a medium that incorporates both material and imagined realities.

In the following chapters, I will explore how different processes of performance transform our perception of bodies (both animate and inanimate) in space, while questioning how such processes of transformation enable spectators and theatre makers to establish meaning in performance. I will draw on a range of theoretical material, attempting to integrate both phenomenological and structural perspectives with the ultimate aim of illustrating the complexity of lived experience within the liminal and heterotopian spaces of performance. However, before moving on to this material I wish to provide two practical examples of the dialectical interplay between the material and the imagined within theatrical performance. Both of the examples incorporate elements of scenography and performance that highlight specific aesthetic paradoxes, while also echoing the issues established by that famous walk across empty space imagined by Brook in 1968. I hope that these examples will suitably prepare the ground for the discussion that is to come.

Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló’s Paso Doble

Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló’s performance, Paso Doble (first presented at the 2006 Avignon Festival²), takes place in a scenographic environment constructed from two huge slabs of wet clay. One slab creates the floor, while the other forms the back wall for the performance. Throughout the performance, Nadj and Barceló sculpt and shape these slabs – at times gently moulding, at times attacking and destroying. They dig holes, make small figures and carve images like those found in ancient cave paintings, creating a kinetic scenic space that is both mutable and monumental.

Nadj and Barceló seem to avoid conventional theatrical representation. There is no explicit narrative or characterization. They wear predetermined and aesthetically significant costumes, but the clothes would not necessarily prompt a second glance in the street or foyer of the theatre. The actions are clearly planned and considered, but the process of sculpting the clay has an improvisational quality. The actions seem to stand first and foremost for themselves. Meaning is not established through signification; instead, it seems to be grounded in the affective impact of the performers’ actions on the spectators’ experience.

Paso Doble establishes the performers’ bodies as a site for empathy and shared affect through an apparent rejection of representation. The performers express vitality over and above narrative, character and theme. The performance is rooted in the pragmatic materiality of Brook’s definition. The bodies are explicitly real, as is the clay. In the absence of a coherent story or mimetic context, the spectators are invited to imagine the physical weight of the tools, the impact that they make in the clay and the literal transformation of objects in space. The process being shared is anchored in the transmission of vital experience through use of an affective dramaturgical framework. The work invites spectators to become attuned to qualitative shifts in physicality – developing awareness of the changes in intensity, effort and shape that define their affective experience of events.

Figure 1: Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló in Paso Doble (2006) © Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

This reading is dependent on the ideas of the late American psychiatrist Daniel Stern (2010), whose work I will discuss in more detail later in this book. In his analysis, Stern contends that our sense of meaning is shaped and informed by the way in which the art object shapes our felt experience. He promotes the idea of the vitality affect, drawing attention to the process of attending to qualitative changes in feeling.

Stern notes:

The time-based arts, namely music, dance, theatre and cinema move us by the expressions of vitality that resonate within us.

(2010:3−4)

Stern contends that the quality of our attention is shaped by the experience of constant dynamic shifts. Focusing on the ‘dynamic pentad of movement, time, force, space and intention’ (2010:6), he notes that our engagement with feeling and affect is rooted in a qualitative attendance to physical variation and difference. This process of attending to shifts in feeling is a tremendously important part of our everyday experience; however, most significantly for my analysis, the orchestration of such shifts in feeling is used by theatre artists as a means to organize and manipulate the spectator’s sensory experience of events onstage. We can look at almost any piece of art and assess the ways in which it shapes and manipulates variations in rhythm, intensity, effort and shape.

Paso Doble highlights such variation by diminishing the importance of narrative, character and, to some extent, meaning. This engagement with dynamic variation within a temporal and spatial framework, such as that found within the theatre, does not deny the signification of meaning through symbol, metaphor and sign; however, Stern’s approach points to the importance of the concrete materiality of art, where, first and foremost, things stand as themselves.

Stern’s experiential understanding of time-based arts like theatre might not, at first, seem to be radical; however, I believe that his advocacy of the primacy of vital experience within art enables us to understand some essential paradoxes within theatre. For example, it might be a failing associated with my tendency towards literal understanding, but I would argue that the clay in Paso Doble functions within an ostensive mode of signification. The clay is being presented as clay, rather than being used within the scenography to establish an imagined location. This might seem to be a banal observation, but it seems curious that the placement of the natural material does not suggest a natural environment. There is no sense in Nadj and Barceló’s choreography that the performers are occupying an explicitly fictional space; and yet neither does the literalness of the clay draw attention to the artifice of the theatrical context. The reality of the clay does not disrupt the theatricality of the performance space. Instead, it brings monumental and elemental qualities to the performers’ movements. The performers’ bodies somehow become equivalents of the clay. Perhaps due to our pre-cognitive, affective response to the monumentality of the slabs in the theatre space, the bodies onstage take on an uncanny quality.

The vital reality of the interplay between the performers and clay within the aesthetic context of theatrical space serves to create a paradoxical mode of signification in which the performance stands as both a felt reality and a symbolic text. Nadj and Barceló construct a theatrical space that problematizes the affective quality of reality onstage, encouraging the spectator to aestheticize and interpret the material as a sign. The production invites the spectator to cross-reference the affective, material reality of the set and performers’ bodies with reference to the aesthetic and liminal context in which they appear, thus rendering them potent and uncanny as theatrical signs. The scenography and dramaturgy employed by Nadj and Barceló draws the spectator’s imagination back and forth over a threshold that blurs the distinction between material and metaphor. Through inviting an affective and empathetic response to bodies in space within a context defined by aesthetic norms of theatre, the spectator’s imaginative engagement with the performers’ materiality and subjectivity is transformed – enabling a reflexive oscillation between the perception of materiality and the cognitive understanding of its symbolic significance within an aesthetic context.

Problematizing the ‘real’ in performance

At this point, it seems wise to ask whether this process of blurring reality and symbolism in liminal space is as simple as my analysis of Nadj and Barceló’s work suggests. In analysing Paso Doble, and thinking about materiality within performance − specifically the materiality of elements such as clay, water or fire − I was reminded of critical responses to a production that serves to illustrate the problematic interrelations between the real and the symbolic onstage.

In 2000, Jonathan Kent directed The Tempest in London’s Almeida Theatre. The production was noted for the use of large amounts of water streaming from the fly-tower during the storm sequence, as well as a pool in which Ariel swam. Of particular interest to the current discussion is the fact that many reviews noted that the storm and the scenic representation of the island were spectacular and imaginative.³ It is, of course, somewhat ironic that the decision to represent a rainstorm by dropping water onto the stage was described as imaginative. While it can certainly be a spectacular technical feat to employ water as a scenic device within a theatre, it is surely the least imaginative theatrical device a designer might conceive of to signify a rainstorm. This irony, however, suggests a broader truth. The employment of reality within performance establishes a friction within the process of signification that creates uncanny effects. The liminal spaces of performance establish frameworks for engaging with meaning and representation that force the spectator to recontextualize his engagement with affect − creating a strange feedback loop that both resists and enforces our experience of the real.

While such an analysis seems compelling when thinking about the ways that theatre integrates the material and the imagined within its conventional modes of representation, there is nonetheless something too neat about the notion that a theatre maker needs simply to include monumental, natural or industrial elements in performance in order to fire the spectator’s imagination. Such simple analysis rejects the importance of craft or artistry – forcing us to lose sight of the theatre maker’s skill in manipulating and orchestrating affect and thought in the body and imagination of the spectator. Therefore, in order to explore the role of the theatre maker in constructing a world where the material is bound to the metaphorical, I want to introduce a second case study – a case study that walks the fine line between the literal and the illusory.

Pep Bou’s Clar de Llunes

The Spanish performer Pep Bou could be categorized somewhere between a magician and a mime artist. He is an entertainer in the vaudeville tradition, specializing in blowing bubbles. As such, he lacks the ambiguity potentially associated with the work of Nadj and Barceló; work which blends dance, physical theatre and fine art. There is a naively clownish quality to his onstage persona – a calm sense of wonder that accompanies the virtuosic skill he brings to the art of blowing bubbles. Bou is a master of his art and yet, at times, he also appears as an excited onlooker, marvelling at the beauty of the bubbles floating across the stage.

As in Nadj and Barceló’s Paso Doble, Bou’s piece Clar de Llunes (presented at the 2008 London International Mime Festival) starts with an incredibly simple proposition (blowing bubbles to the accompaniment of music); however, the work builds in order to create a theatrical reality that is rich in complexity. Bou and his accompanying pianist, Jordi Maso, begin in silhouette. Their projected images move and shift as pink and blue lighting bounces from the film of soapy liquid stretched across a large frame located mid-stage. Bou blows a bubble by exhaling cigarette smoke. Maso bursts it, releasing smoke into the air. A playful and dreamlike theatrical world is quickly constructed through incredibly simple, yet skilfully arranged, means.

The performance develops by presenting a series of vignettes. Bou surrounds himself with enormous bubbles to the accompaniment of Maso’s delicate renditions of Debussy and other Impressionist piano works. He blows bubbles that arrange themselves like crystal spheres around his feet. He fills bubbles with smoke that once burst gently send white clouds across the stage. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment comes when Bou looks at his own image reflected in the surface of a bubble that is stretched across a large wooden frame. His reflection shifts and bends, lagging half a second behind his gestures as the film of liquid moves in response to the gentle gusts of air his movements create.

Figure 2: Pep Bou in Clar de Llunes (2008) © Robert Ramos.

The curious feature of Clar de Llunes is that the performance establishes a highly theatrical sense of place, utilizing scenographic devices to wonderful effect. The world onstage seems otherworldly, incorporating a black floor and background to offset the luminosity of the bubbles. The bubbles are enhanced by the use of blue and pink lighting, echoing the colours that swirl in their transparent surfaces. When I saw the performance, the space and performance seemed imbued with a sense of joy and wonder. Yet, despite the apparent magic of the piece there, Bou’s work was striking with regard to the seeming absence of illusion. Instead of employing artifice, Bou manufactured a sense of theatricality by mastering the reality of his materials, transforming the theatre space into a seemingly magical world through the (aesthetically) simple means of his virtuosity.

There is an irony or paradox here. In most instances, theatre employs fiction or illusion to imbue a material space with imaginary qualities. Most frequently, artists attempt to transform the reality of the theatre space into something new by harnessing the spectators’ imaginations − creating a sense of place that is both related to the material reality of the theatre space and to the signified imagined world of the performance. Conventionally, theatrical space is associated with a threshold experience, where the reality of objects and bodies onstage are reframed as signs that stand for something that is absent. In contrast to this, Clar de Llunes uses the theatre space to sensitize spectators to the inherent, natural qualities of material objects in space. The traditional process of transformation found within theatre, where materials and bodies are transformed through suggestion and imagination, is overturned. Bou draws on the spectators’ learned understanding of the theatre space (as a place of transformation and metaphor) to reframe their engagement with real objects – encouraging them to reflect on the potential beauty of the bubbles’ reality as mutable objects that are neither liquid nor solid.

Of course, Bou’s mastery of bubbles is extraordinary; but such mastery seems to be entirely at the service of demonstrating the marvellous qualities of his base materials. He shows the audience what a bubble can be: how it moves, how it responds to changes in light, how it floats and falls. The level of Bou’s virtuosity invokes an uncanny sense of magic while demonstrating the physical reality of the objects onstage. This sense is enforced by a persona that, although faintly clown-like, presents Bou as unremarkable: a man as naively thrilled by the behaviour of the bubbles as the audience.

The distinction between using structures of performance to draw attention to qualities of real objects and bodies, as opposed to suggesting and invoking the imagined through the careful arrangement of reality, might seem a subtle one; however, I believe that it allows us to see from the corner of our eye one of the key complexities of theatrical performance. Theatre has, at least since Aristotle, been analysed as a means of invoking imagined realities through the careful arrangement of narrative and scenic space. However, little attention seems to have been paid to the reflexive qualities of such processes. The liminal space of theatrical performance should not only be understood to promote