STANFORD DRAMA ELECTRONIC FORUM

FORUM TWO

Presence and Absence: The "Real" and the Telepresent

Causey's arguments challenge the notion of the "aura" of the actor physically present before us. Much of our work, in both theory and praxis, has been based upon the aesthetic power of the phenomenon of the human actor who shares some space specific space and time with a body of spectators. While we have incorporated various media into our performances with some enthusiasm, in our imaginations we have continued to privilege the presence of the actor. However, in our theoretical work we increasingly agree that those attributes with which we invest the human figure with differentiating significance--gender, race, class, social "characteristics", moral or ethical values--are constructions produced by a certain cultural moment. And, as well, we think of a dramatic figure as a representation, an image of a series of conceptualizations that are clearly discrete from the human actor and are produced by the interaction of performing and spectating. If we use the human actor in some process of image production, in which the body (including voice, of course) participates in producing the compound image of the performance, what difference does it make if that body is present to us physically or present to us through some visual medium or through a combination of physical presence and media? If present to us through a combination of media and physical presence, what "special" significance, if any, does that physical presence constitute? Should we continue to celebrate the phenomenon of the actor performing before us at a time when other media offer more flexible ways of revealing the constructedness of human images and can offer keener instruments with which to challenge the processes of representation?

These are issues with which I'm grappling at the moment. I'm eager to read your thoughts.

Charles raises a number of fascinating issues with which I have been preoccupied for some time. To begin, I'd like to distinguish between two propositions upon which he explicitly predicates his question:

1. "attributes with which we invest the human figure with dif ferentiating significance... are constructions produced by a certain cultural moment";

2. "a dramatic figure" is "a representation, an image of a series of conceptualizations that are clearly discrete from the human actor and are produced by the interaction of performing and spectating."

Yes, the body on stage is (usually) a sign. But NO sign is JUST a sign. Any signifier -- whether paint on canvas, ink on a page, or light on a cathode-ray tube -- is in itself a real presence that shares a space specific space and time with its audience. Indeed, I believe that many of the performance practices that Matthew discusses (and employs) actually emphasize this fact. The Wooster Group's use of video monitors, for example, functions as much to materialize the video monitors as to de-materialize the "live" performers. In standard use, after all, a TV set tends to function transparently, effacing its own presence in conveying its absent narrative.

Does it make any difference the body itself functions as signifier in theatrical performances? Within a purely semiotic economy, the answer is no. Just any two dollar bills are interchangeable in the financial market, any two signifiers that convey the same meaning have precisely the same value in the semiotic market. Charles implicitly buys into such a semiotic economy when he suggests that the actor's body has significance only as a means of "image production."

I believe that the recent emphasis on "performativity" in current theory (e.g. Phelan and Judith Butler), far from being an exercise in naivete or or nostalgia, is a response to the impoverishment of the semiotic paradigm. The body on stage can not, ultimately, be reduced to the meaning it conveys. Just as (to quote Charles' summary of the previous forum) "an image is an image is an image," it's also true that "a body is a body is a body" -- even when it is on stage. In fact, recent advances in digital imaging technology may actually increase the potency of live performance by rendering increasingly unstable the assumption that a film or video image has any indexical link at all to a pre-filmic event.

Acknowledging the performative basis of the theater event has at least two important repercussions. First, it allows us to recognize the power of performance as a laboratory for social change. Augusto Boal's "forum theater" workshops with non-actors empowers members of various oppressed groups--such as exploited farm workers and abused spouses--by providing a time, place and structure for participants to adopt new roles and to rehearse new strategies for their own lives. Second, and to my mind more significantly, it allows us to conceive of the theater event itself as a transgressive or transformative act. For example at one point in Belle Reprieve, the lesbian performer Peggy Shaw sings Muddy Water's song "I'm a Man," with two gay male performers as her back-up singers. All three performers are playing the stereotypical role of "a Man," specifically as modeled on Brando's performance of Stanley Kowalski. But Bette Bourne, with his heavy makeup, green windbreaker and cap, is visibly alienated in the role, while Peggy Shaw, as a "butch" lesbian, embodies it with absolute authority. In other words, we see that Peggy Shaw is far more capable of EMBODYING THE ROLE of Stanley Kowalski than either of her two male backup singers. This is a fact about the performance, and not merely a fact about the fictional world that the performance represents. It is something that the performance demonstrates. Such performances exploit the radically anti-essentialist implications always inherent in the theater game. Theoretical models that drive a wedge between the performance event and the narrative event suppress these implications, thereby denying theater its ability to demonstrate--and not merely to assert or signify--the mutability of the games that determine how we see the real world, and our own place within it.

The post structuralist orientation to history suggests a "reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history" (Louis Montrose in The New Historicism). The latter refers to the notion that there is no access to the lived material reality of the past that is unmediated by textual traces. Materialist critics have countered this position with an insistence on traditional conceptions of history as the sum total of human actions or as the outcome of events that exist beyond texts and documents. They further argue against the reduction of politics to texts and look to reconstruct the context of material social relations that inform texts.

Recent historical plays enter this debate as they take up diverse conceptions of history and its varied representations as a field of play. They use the physical presence of the body to rematerialize history and juxtapose this presence against other representations that may appear as texts, traces, and codes. To this extent, I'd be tempted to say that such plays oppose the "aesthetic of de-materialization." In Howard Barker's The Power of the Dog, for example, the fragility of representation is stressed: photographic negatives break, images are doctored, films are not recorded but staged as plays, and so on. Representations of the historical moment (in this case, WWII) not only de-materialize the history, but are themselves de-materialized by circumstance, error, re-contextualization, and so on. By con- trast, one of the central images is of a hanged body, never far from view, which a soldier embraces, muttering "What a wonderful century." The stage is a place where material circumstance is always given its due, and in plays where traditional historical paradigms are challenged, this seems important.

One other note: Foucault's concern with the body as the site of power -- "molded by a great many distinct regimes" -- is also effectively demonstrated/exploited on stage. For example, the great scene in Churchill's Vinegar Tom where the discourse of witchcraft finally manifests itself on Joan's body when the witch-hunters forcibly disrobe and examine her with pinpricks.

In these instances the presence of the physical body stands in for larger materialities that figure into current discussions of power and history. When the human figure loses its aura as it enters into the realm of the reproducible, the stage loses its ability to signify the materiality of the past.