STANFORD DRAMA ELECTRONIC FORUM

FORUM ONE

The Interaction of Text and Visual Image in Performance

Volker's question is a most interesting one. It points to a phenomenon I've long been aware of but have never really been able to account for. Schiller's review of Egmont complains of the pageant ending--the vision from prison--which he dubs "operatic." But whatever one calls this sort of thing, one should be able to ground it historically. Is there any other body of drama in which one can find anything similar? Are the showy death scenes in Shakespeare at all comparable? Can one make anything out of Schiller's word "operatic"? Is the phenomenon linkable with the increasing passivity of dramatic heroes that starts about then and becomes more and more discernible after Weimar classicism? All I have is questions, but questions are a necessary first step toward answers.

TO THE STANFORD DRAMA ELECTRONIC FORUM:

My response, to Volker's question, as Professor Lindenberger's, constructs a series of questions. Thinking about the apotheosis of Helen in Faust II, conceived, as you say, in pictorial terms, wouldn't it be possible to consider that in the theater similar events often are represented as phenomena that are observed "off-stage?" I think, for example, of the ways in which in Oedipus' apotheosis takes place in narrative rather than enactment and deliberately obscures its spatial details. Also, Polyeucte's dazzling apotheosis is narrated rather than represented on stage; and Solness's ironic (at least in part) ascent is perceived by the figures on the stage, but not the spectators. The Assumption of the Virgin, however, is a conventional subject of painting, as in Titian, Correggio, Masolino, Fiorentino. Framing the "assump- tion" of Helen as a pictorial image rather than as a narrative image and using the organizational conceits of painting must, in some ways, convey an implicit narrative of its own which educated or experienced audiences would comprehend at a performance of Faust II. In one sense, doesn't the visual representation, even though mediated through an ironic use of symbols, rob the event of the less concrete representation in language that it would receive in narrative recitation. More bang, but less ambiguity, for the buck. In current terms, isn't the spectacle "emptier" than a verbalized representation would be?

To members of the forum:

This is more in the way of a response to Prof. Lindenberger's question about "other bodies of drama" in which the hero might assume a "static" or "pictorial" atemporality than a specific comment on the Weimar examples, but I thought immediately of two contemporary scenes. First, the title scene from Genet's The Balcony where the main characters actualize their assumed identities through the pictorial agency of self-presentation (Genet: "They simply show themselves.") Second, the death of Marat in Weiss's Marat/Sade where the murdered figure assumes the exact pose of David's classical painting. In each case, the pictorial repre- sentation seems to function both within the narrative structure and also to surpass that structure, becoming a kind of commentary on the mode of dramatic action in which it is encased. I don't know what connection these instances might have to the earlier examples, but I thought I'd pass them on.

Like Rob's my response is more of a related example of "pictorial atemporality" than a specific comment on Volker's question. At the moment I'm directing a play that seems to do just the reverse of what Volker describes: The Winter's Tale. The climactic moment of the play is the reintroduction of a character from the spatial world to the temporal, as Hermione's statue comes to life. It's not uncommon in English Renaissance drama for a character to enter the temporal, linguistic world of a scene only after a period of stasis and/or silence: Hamlet and Epicoene come immediately to mind. But I can't think of many instances from any drama where an artistic representation, an object, becomes a "living" character. One of the interesting things about the statue scene, of course, is the way the other characters "temporalize" the statue/actor by giving it "living" attributes" through speech before it "comes to life": "Would you not deem it breathed?" "The fixture of her eye hath motion in it" "What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?" While it may seem that Shakespeare is apologizing for the unsteadiness of his boy actor or winking at us that Hermione is really alive, the effect in practice seems to be the reverse: by protracting the discussion of the statue's lifelikeness for some minutes, the scene makes the audience more and more willing to accept the actor as a statue.

Addendum to my earlier note:

The other obvious instance, besides Hermione, of a move from spatial to temporal existance, from icon to speaking character, is the Commendatore in the Tirso de Molina/Mozart-da Ponte/Pushkin versions of the Don Juan story; though in the first of these, it doesn't occur visibly onstage (we see the statue, then the living Don Gonzalo-as-statue. It's noteworthy that in this case we get the movement in both directions: from temporality to stasis and back.

To The Members of the Forum:

I am going to avoid Volker's question with yet another example of the collision of pictorial atemporality and spatial narrativity. Pirandello in Enrico IV presents this aesthetic with customary complications. In an attempt to cure Henry (once "truly" mad now simply assuming the signs of the insane) the psychiatrist suggests that Henry's nephew and the daughter of Countess Matilda (Henry's former lover) dress in the costumes of the "old Henry" and Matilda and stand in place of their portraits painted twenty years ago. (Synopses of the Pirandellian text are treacherous). The psychiatrist's plan is to force Henry to acknowledge the gap between the image he has constructed of his self (locked in an atemporality of the image) and his "actual" self (existing, theoretically, both temporally and spatially) thereby enacting a cure as Henry resituates himself in the "real". Pirandello's text reads the cure as more insane than the insanity of Henry suggesting that ALL images (temporal or spatial) are manufactured, unstable and forever shifting. Could it be that the earlier texts that Volker cites are suggesting similar notions? Is this a challenge to Charles' assertion that the spectacle is emptier than a representation through language?

To complicate the discussion of pictorial atemporality and spatial narrativity further, how does one position the aesthetic of some contemporary theatre (Foreman, Bausch, Wooster Group) that locates its narrativity through its pictorial atemporality. The binary opposition between the movement-image and the time-image (to borrow terms from Deleuze's Cinema I and Cinema II) is no longer enacted by the performance. The image of character and action in a work by Foreman is nothing more or less than an image of character and action. The images are manipulated not by the rules of dramatic/temporal/subjective narrativity but driven by the "picture", the image of the stage. It is, if nothing else, an intriguing juxtaposition against Faust II.

TO MEMBERS OF THE FORUM:

I am intrigued by Matthew's assertion that some contemporary theatre "locates its narrativity through its pictorial atemporality." I'm not sure how this works. To give another example (still straying far from Volker's original material, but at least returning this time to Germany, and in a way to death as well) I would cite the stage directions of H. Muller's Hamlet-Machine which specify "Photograph of the author" and then several lines later "tearing of the author's photograph." In this instance, the (literally) pictorial image breaks whatever "narra- tive" the text has established, but then that iconoclastic move is itself disrupted by the (symbolic) destruction of the "story- teller" himself. And all of this is of course contained within a dramatic text that mandates in way exactly how these disruptions are to occur. This reads to me as a kind of Mobius strip of nar- rativity and anti-narrativity. I guess one can claim that the stage picture itself becomes the icon that lifts us out of a nar- rative mode (a Brechtian idea),but just how in the contemporary (or other) theatre we get a case where narrativity is reasserted through the pictorial is not clear to me.

1. If I am reading Causey's comment correctly, Matthew is pointing out that our distinction between visual (spatial) and linguistic images reflects a false dichotomy in theory. An image is an image is an image. In that sense, any attempt to read more complexity into the verbal plays into the modernist interior/exterior notion and the sense that through time, narrative images accumulate into a fuller, more detailed, more potentially referential communicative instrument.

2. What can we do, however, with Professor Lindenberger's suggestion that the practice Volker marks may be tied into the representation of the tragic hero as more passive that begins with Weimar classicism? In this sense, what do we do with the conventional display of bodies in Greek tragedy: the revelation of the bodies of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus, the show of Pentheus reassembled body in the Bacchae, even the visual mark of Oedipus's blinding--I'm thinking here of the ways in which death or suffering is "written" on the bodies of the protagonists that become the representations of victims rather than agents.

3. The peculiar compounding of the pictorial and the representation of "living" figures in Pirandello's Enrico IV puts a spin on the issue, doesn't it. Here, we have pictorial images that attempt to freeze time (stop the narrative) but are, we learn, not "historical" but part of a masquerade, stopping time within the mode of the false. The "cure" consists of the revelation of the passage of time in which the "original" figures can see their duplication in a younger generation in which time does seem arrested but in which the discrepancy is made acute; but the stataic atemporal, as Causey, notes is as "true" as the fluid, dynamic narrative of "life." The age of Mathida and Henry, unsucccessfully masked with dye and make-up, is written (or, more specifically painted) on their bodies.

4. Our interesting difficulty with these issues demonstrates to me that we have yet (even with Mitchell) learned to deal as well as we should with the interaction in our performance and theoretical work between the textual and the visual, between our uses of the pictorial (brought to the foreground in Volker's question by the reference to an actual type of painting) in relation to our uses of narrative. I hate to end, as I so often do, in reference to Beckett, but how can I not? In the late prose and drama, we have rather simple visual pictures that speaking/listening grounds in a narrative and, at the same time, questions and un-authorizes itself and the picture, revealing both as constructions produced by the processes of reading or spectating.

Thanks to all the participants for an interesting introduction to the STANFORD DRAMA ELECTRONIC FORUM. Watch your screen for the next installment...

While we have initiated the STANFORD DRAMA ELECTRONIC FORUM with a question issued from HOME BASE, the FORUM is eager to receive questions from further fields.

After the summary to the first chapter of the FORUM, Volker adds an interesting comment to the discussion that he initiated that I would like to share with the Forum.