The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner's Broad Spectrum (Studies in International Performance)

Studies in International Performance Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors) VIOLENCE PERFORMED Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS Christopher Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Matthew Isaac Cohen PERFORMING OTHERNESS Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952 Susan Leigh Foster WORLDING DANCE Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Helena Grehan PERFORMANCE, ETHICS AND SPECTATORSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (editors) THE RISE OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES Rethinking Richard Schecher’s Broad Spectrum Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (editors) PERFORMANCE, EXILE AND ‘AMERICA’ Ola Johansson COMMUNITY THEATRE AND AIDS

Sonja Arsham Kuftinec THEATRE, FACILITATION, AND NATION FORMATION IN THE BALKANS AND MIDDLE EAST Carol Martin (editor) THE DRAMATURGY OF THE REAL ON THE WORLD STAGE Alan Read THEATRE, INTIMACY & ENGAGEMENT The Last Human Venue Shannon Steen RACIAL GEOMETRIES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC, ASIAN PACIFIC AND AMERICAN THEATRE Joanne Tompkins UNSETTLING SPACE Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre S. E. Wilmer NATIONAL THEATRES IN A CHANGING EUROPE Evan Darwin Winet INDONESIAN POSTCOLONIAL THEATRE Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces Forthcoming titles: Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT

Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–4456–6 (hardback) 978–1–4039–4457–3 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Rise of Performance Studies Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum Edited by

James M. Harding and

Cindy Rosenthal

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © James Martin Harding & Cindy Rosenthal 2011 All other chapters © contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24291–3

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

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Series Editors’ Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: The Rise of Performance Studies James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal

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Part 1 Performance/Theatre/Studies 1 Performance Studies and the Enhancement of Theatre Studies Marvin Carlson

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2 In Defense of the String Quartet: An Open Letter to Richard Schechner Stephen Bottoms

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3 Experimenting with an Unfinished Discipline: Richard Schechner, the Avant-Garde and Performance Studies James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal

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Part 2 Performance Studies Genealogies 4 Wayang Studies? Paul Rae

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5 Today I Am a Field: Performance Studies Comes of Age Henry Bial

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6 Richard Schechner and Performance Studies in China Yu Jiancun and Peng Yongwen

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7 Australian Performance Studies Marginally Off Centre Peter Eckersall

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Part 3 Working with Richard 8 Reactuals: From Personal to Critical and Back Rebecca Schneider

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9 Fanning the Flames: Richard Schechner’s TDR Mariellen R. Sandford

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10 Liminal Richard: Approaches to Performance Studies John Emigh v

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11 The Broadest Spectrum of Pluralities: Performance Studies, Theatre Practices, Theatre Histories, and Beyond Phillip Zarrilli

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Part 4 Practicing Performance: Schechner among the Performers 12 Richard Schechner Judith Malina

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13 Joan MacIntosh: Interview, July 2008 Cindy Rosenthal

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14 Elizabeth LeCompte: Interview, June 2008 Cindy Rosenthal

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15 For Richard Anna Deavere Smith

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16 Performing Against the Backdrop of the War on Terror Guillermo Gómez-Peña

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Part 5 Engaging Dialogue: Schechner as Critical Interlocutor 17 Trauma as Durational Performance Diana Taylor

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18 Medical Clowning and Performance Theory Atay Citron

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19 Restored Restored Behavior or the Emperor of California Roll: 1989–90 Japanese Imperial Rites of Funeral and Enthronement Takahashi Yuichiro

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20 “Deep Play, Dark Play”: Framing the Limit(less) Joseph Roach

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Index

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Figures 1 The Performance Group in India touring Mother Courage and Her Children: Yvette with soldier (Photograph by Pablo Bartholomew, courtesy of Princeton University Library, Richard Schechner Papers and The Drama Review Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.)

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2 The Performance Group in India touring Mother Courage and Her Children: Yvette with two soldiers (Photograph by Pablo Bartholomew, courtesy of Princeton University Library, Richard Schechner Papers and The Drama Review Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.)

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3 Survivor’s drawing of torture chamber at Villa Grimaldi

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4 Illustration from 1908 of clowns in hospital

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5 “Dream Doctor” Herzel Ziyoni at work at the Ha’emek Medical Center (Photograph courtesy of Herzel Ziyoni)

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Series Editors’ Preface The “Studies in International Performance” series was initiated in 2004 on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research, by Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, successive Presidents of the Federation. Their aim was, and still is, to call on performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social, and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency of national paradigms in performance scholarship, but also in order to engage in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies (especially when conceived across more than two terms) can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories, and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of national orthodoxies of art criticism and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship this Series aims to make a significant contribution to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation. Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton International Federation for Theatre Research Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale

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Acknowledgments The editors of this collection encountered Richard Schechner along two different paths. One of us met Richard first as a student in his classes at NYU. The other met Richard as a reader of his scholarly writings. What our journeys along these different paths have in common is that they are both marked by a deep appreciation for the many ways that Richard’s work as an artist and intellectual has influenced our own work. That common appreciation led to this project, and the contents of this collection indicate that we are hardly unique in the appreciation that we feel for the amazing range of intellectual and scholarly accomplishments that have punctuated Schechner’s career. As is the case with any project of this nature, there are many individuals to whom we are indebted. First and foremost among these are our contributors who worked quickly and magnificently at every stage of the collection’s evolution. But we also want to extend a special note of appreciation to Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton for their tireless support of this project at Palgrave Macmillan. We want to thank our editor Paula Kennedy for the support that she has shown us as well. Last, but hardly least, we are hugely grateful to our families – Friederike Eigler and Lukas and Daniel; and Emanuel Levy and Anya and Adin – for the time they have allowed us to do our work. We both want to extend an especially deep sense of gratitude to our respective spouses, Friederike and Emanuel, whose support and counsel was invaluable to us as we saw this project to completion. James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal

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Notes on Contributors Henry Bial received his PhD in Performance Studies from New York University in 2001. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Michigan, 2005), editor of The Performance Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004; second edition 2007), co-editor (with Scott Magelssen) of Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (Michigan, 2010), and co-editor (with Carol Martin) of Brecht Sourcebook (Routledge, 2000). Henry Bial is currently Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre at the University of Kansas. Stephen Bottoms is the Wole Soyinka Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. His books include Performing Masculinity (with Diane Torr; Michigan, 2009), Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island (with Matthew Goulish, Routledge 2007), Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (Michigan, 2004), and The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge,1998). Steve is also a theatre director and sometime performance artist. Marvin Carlson is the Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of 13 books and over 100 articles in theatre history, theatre theory, and dramatic literature. His work has been translated into 14 languages. The Haunted Stage (Michigan, 2001) received the Joseph Calloway Prize. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. Atay Citron is an independent theatre director, Chair of the Theatre Department at the University of Haifa and Artistic Director of the Bat-Yam International Street Theatre Festival. He served as artistic director of the Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre (2001–04) and as principal of the School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem (1993–2000). He holds a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. Peter Eckersall teaches Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. His research interests include contemporary Japanese theatre and culture, experimental performance, and dramaturgy. His publications include Theorising the Angura Space: Avant-garde performance and politics in Japan 1960–2000 (Brill Academic, 2006) and the forthcoming Kawamura Takeshi’s Nippon Wars and Other Plays (Seagull Press in 2011). Eckersall co-edits the journal Performance Paradigm and is the dramaturg for the performance group Not Yet It’s Difficult (NYID) as well as a founding member of the company. NYID’s contemporary performance and media works are widely known in Australia, Asia, and Europe. x

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John Emigh is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, where he taught and directed from 1967 to 2009. He received his BA from Amherst College and MFA and PhD degrees from Tulane University. He is the author of Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre (University of Pennsylvania, 1996), was founding Chairperson of the Association for Asian Performance, has served on the governing boards of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and Performance Studies international, and in 2005 directed PSi’s conference and festival at Brown: Becoming Uncomfortable. He has directed over 75 plays in university and professional theatres and has performed one-person shows based on Balinese topeng throughout the United States and Asia. In 2009 he was presented ATHE’s Career Achievement Award in Academic Theatre. Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist/writer who resides in San Francisco, where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. Born and raised in Mexico City, he came to the United States in 1978 to study Post-Studio Art at Cal Arts. His pioneering work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography, cultural theory, and radical pedagogy explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the boy, “extreme culture,” and new technologies. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the United States, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review. He is an active member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. James Harding is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. He is a former Editor of Theatre Survey. He is the author of Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (Michigan, 2010) and Adorno and a Writing of the Ruins: Essays on AngloAmerican Literature and Culture (SUNY, 1997). His other books include Not the Other Avant-Garde: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (co-edited with John Rouse, Michigan, 2006), Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies (co-edited with Cindy Rosenthal, Michigan, 2006), and Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Michigan, 2000). He has just finished a new monograph entitled Theories of Avant-Garde Performance. Elizabeth LeCompte was born in New Jersey in 1944. She received a BS in Fine Arts from Skidmore College and holds honorary degrees from the New School and CalArts. She is a founding member of The Wooster Group and has directed all its productions since the company’s beginning in 1975. LeCompte is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Judith Malina founded The Living Theatre in 1947, along with Julian Beck, as an alternative to the commercial theater. Since then she and her company

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have staged nearly a hundred productions in 28 countries and in eight languages. After Beck’s death in 1985, company member Hanon Reznikov codirected the Living with Malina until Reznikov’s passing in 2008. One of the world’s most respected and influential directors, Malina has been unfailingly dedicated to defining theatre as a tool for non-violent social change. She has been awarded many honors, most recently the Cultural Order of Merit in Brazil, The Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Foundation, and the Edwin Booth Award from the City University of New York. Joan MacIntosh has been a leading actress in the American theatre since 1967. She was one of the founding members of The Performance Group, and performed with the group in Dionysus in 69 (OBIE), Makbeth, Commune (OBIE for Distinguished Performance), The Tooth of Crime (OBIE), The Beard, Mother Courage and her Children, The Marilyn Project, Sakonnet Point, and Seneca’s Oedipus, in New York and on tour of the United States, Europe, and Asia. After leaving The Performance Group, she continued acting and teaching acting around the world. She won a Drama Desk Award for Request Concert, in 1981, a Drama League Award for her performance in More Stately Mansions, directed by Ivo van Hove at The New York Theatre Workshop, and the Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award for the same performance. In 2007, she won the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress, as Agrippina in Racine’s Britannicus, directed by Robert Woodruff at the A.R.T. She is a Fox Fellow; and has also been awarded the John D. Rockefeller III Fund for travel and study of theatre in Southeast Asia; a USIA Grant for leading workshops in South Africa; and the Spencer Cherashore Fellowship, 2000–01. Joan MacIntosh is on the faculty at Yale University, and is currently writing a book about her experiences in the experimental theatre of the 1960s–1970s. Peng Yongwen graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2006 with a PhD in Performance Studies, after years as a television broadcaster and editor. At the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at STA, he currently teaches courses in educational drama and social performance studies. His research areas include applied theatre, experiential training, and drama therapy. He is an Editor of TDR/ China. Paul Rae is Assistant Professor in the Theatre Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore, and co-artistic director (with Kaylene Tan) of spell#7 performance (www.spell7.net). His research interests include performance theory and contemporary theatre in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Theatre & Human Rights (Palgrave, 2009), and has published articles in TDR, Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, and Theatre Research International. Recent and forthcoming book chapters appear in Transnational Performance in Southeast Asia (Cambridge Scholars, 2011), Translation

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in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories (St Jerome, 2010), Contesting Performance: Emerging Sites of Research (Palgrave 2010), Performance and the Contemporary City: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Palgrave, 2010), and Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). In 2004, he was the coordinator for the tenth annual conference of Performance Studies international (PSi), in Singapore. Joseph Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University. He has chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. His most recent book is It (Michigan, 2007), a study of charismatic celebrity. His other books and articles include Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia, 1996), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA and the Calloway Prize from NYU, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Michigan, 1993), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, Discourse, Theater, Text and Performance Quarterly, and others. Cindy Rosenthal is Professor of Drama and Dance at Hofstra University. She co-edited Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and their Legacies (Michigan, 2006) with James Harding, and Living on Third Street: Plays of the Living Theatre 1989–1992 (Autonomedia, 2008) with Hanon Reznikov. Current projects include Ellen Stewart’s La Mama – The First Fifty Years: An Illustrated Oral History, a monograph analyzing Ellen Stewart’s life and work through oral histories and poster art (Michigan, forthcoming). She is also a performer and a director. Mariellen R. Sandford has worked with Richard Schechner as Associate Editor of TDR since 1985. She co-edited, with T. Nikki Cesare, the Winter 2010 special issue of TDR on new theatre ensembles and is also a freelance book editor. Rebecca Schneider, Chair of the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, teaches performance studies, theater studies, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997). She recently published her second book titled Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge, 2011). She has co-edited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to 20th-Century Directing. She is a contributing editor to TDR: The Drama Review and co-editor with David Krasner of the book series “Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance” with University of Michigan Press. Schneider has published essays in several anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, and the essay “Solo Solo Solo”

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in After Criticism. As a “performing theorist,” she has collaborated with artists at such sites as the British Museum in London and the Mobile Academy in Berlin. Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, and teacher. She is said to have created a new form of theatre. She has also been a part of several mainstream movie and television projects, notably the television series The West Wing. She is currently a professor at New York University. She is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue. Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of several awardwinning books, including The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003). She is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Yu Jiancun, Associate Professor of Literature, is a nationally recognized scholar of British and American Literature, especially drama and theatre. His major works published in China include textbooks, English dictionaries, monographs, book chapters, and essays including “The Origin, Current Situation and Future Trends in Performance Studies.” Yu Jiancun serves as an Editor of TDR/ China (Shanghai Theatre Academy). His teaching experience spans 26 years at such institutions as Shanghai University and Jishou University (now Jishou Medical College, then Jishou Health School) in Hunan Province. He serves as the Advisor for Graduate Students at Shanghai University. Takahashi Yuichiro is Professor of Performance Studies and Transnational Studies at Dokkyo University. As a graduate student in Japan, he was doing research on US theatre in the 1960s. When he landed in New York and met Richard Schechner for the first time, however, his interest began to drift from theatre to performance and to what can be considered “as performance”. He is now in the process of editing The Performance Studies Reader, the first of its kind to be published in the Japanese language. Phillip Zarrilli is internationally known for training actors in psychophysical processes through Asian martial arts and yoga, and as a director. His books include, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach After Stanislavski (Routledge, 2009), Theatre Histories (co-author Routledge, 2006), Kathakali Dance-Drama (Routledge, 2000), When The Body Becomes All Eyes (Oxford, 1998), and Acting Reconsidered (Routledge, 2002, 2nd edn). He is Professor of Performance Practice at Exeter University (UK).

Introduction: The Rise of Performance Studies James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal

Conceptualized as part retrospective and part theoretical inquiry, The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum is deeply indebted to the work of Richard Schechner. At one level, the essays in this anthology investigate how, over the last quarter-century, an increasingly complex understanding of theatrical practice has encouraged the kind of retheorizing of performance as a concept that has given rise to performance studies as a distinct area of cultural inquiry. But while the paths from the concept of theatre to that of performance are multiple, few scholars have positioned their work more consistently, controversially or consequently than Richard Schechner has within the pivotal debates that have defined performance studies. Indeed, there is hardly an aspect of performance studies that does not bear his imprint in some form. Now in his mid-seventies, Schechner remains one of the most active and significant figures in the discipline, and the scope of his contributions to performance studies not only spans some four decades worth of work; it encompasses Schechner’s work as a theorist, editor, teacher, and director as well. The working thesis of this collection is thus that any consideration of the emergence of performance studies as a discipline would be incomplete without a thorough assessment not only of how, as an individual practitioner/scholar, Schechner has negotiated the path from theatre to performance, but also of how those negotiations have generated some of the most influential, if not defining, statements in the field of performance studies itself. The collective sense among the contributors, in short, is that a book assessing Richard Schechner’s contributions to performance studies is long overdue. The breadth of Schechner’s work is matched only by the diverse ways that this has influenced individual scholars and practitioners around the world. The variety of contributions in the book directly relates to that influence, and this is in no small part due to the fact that his books have been translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, French, Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, and Bulgarian. It is not 1

2 The Rise of Performance Studies

just the sheer quantity of languages represented here that reflects the wide audience for Schechner’s performance scholarship and practice. Generations of spectators and participants across the globe have had first-hand experience of Schechner’s work as a director and as a workshop leader. In order to give readers some sense of this side of Schechner as well, we have sought contributions that, either individually or collectively, address the range of Schechner’s artistic and intellectual activities. Considering the depth of Schechner’s impact on the field, our goal as editors not only has been to include an internationally diverse group of scholars and artists, but also to include a stylistically diverse collection of writings that demonstrate the different ways that Schechner’s work has impacted scholars and artists. Important contributions in this regard include Atay Citron’s account of how medical practitioners have used performance studies in the development of new methodologies for handling hospital patients in Israel. From a cultural perspective, we would also emphasize the importance of Peng Yongwen and Yu Jiancun’s analysis of Chinese critics’ and spectators’ responses to Schechner’s production of Hamlet: That is the Question in Shanghai, as well as Takahashi Yuichiro’s retheorizing of the notion of restored behavior in relation to Japanese culture. There are essays from scholars such as Stephen Bottoms and Paul Rae who engage Schechner in debate, and also responses from artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña who contributed performance texts dedicated to Schechner. Anna Deavere Smith’s personal reflection imagines her relationship with Schechner as familial. What the chapters in this collection tell us is that Schechner elicits very different kinds of responses from different individuals – based in part on the context, history, and dynamic of the connection between the writer and Schechner. Some of the scholarly essays in the volume are quite personal, expressing the point of view of a scholar writing to and/or about a mentor. Some reflect the perspectives of one colleague writing about another. Rebecca Schneider’s, Henry Bial’s, John Emigh’s and Phillip Zarrilli’s essays include negotiating personal relationships with Schechner that impacted their choices and their development as scholars, practitioners, and teachers. When he submitted his essay to the volume, Emigh wrote a note explaining, “Given my 45-year relationship with Richard I found it necessary and effective to adopt an even more personal voice in writing this essay than for many others I have written. Since that voice is more personal, I am, no doubt, more attached to the essay than usual.”1 Personal attachments aside, what Emigh’s comments call attention to is the frequency with which the personal and the critical can converge and indeed coexist in the practice of what performance studies scholars often refer to as performative writing – a point that Rebecca Schneider addresses in her essay as well. If nothing else, the variety of essays in this collection indicate that over the course of five decades, there have been many Richard Schechners. He has demonstrated a rare ability and willingness to evolve, and if one wants

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to understand the diversity of responses his work has elicited, then it is essential to understand who he has been, who he has become, and who he might yet prove to be. Whether one speaks of many “Schechners” or simply of the many sides of a complex scholar-practitioner, Schechner has demonstrated a seemingly inexhaustible commitment to forging a new and hybrid model for theatre and performance scholars in the academy. This commitment radiates through his prodigious accomplishments as a scholar, an editor, a teacher, and as a practitioner.

Richard Schechner: a chronological overview Born and raised in New Jersey in a middle-class Jewish suburban milieu, Richard Schechner received his BA in English from Cornell University where he edited and wrote theatre reviews for The Cornell Daily Sun. He graduated with honors in 1956. During the summers of 1957, 1958 and 1961, Schechner directed experimental theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts where he was cofounder and co-artistic director of the East End Players. The time Schechner spent in Provincetown was of great importance to him – important enough, it is worth noting, that in the summer of 2009 he returned to Provincetown and visited the house belonging to Mary Vorse, a one-time suffragist and a member of the Provincetown Players from whom Schechner had rented a room 51 years earlier.2 The value that Schechner places on this period in his life is understandable. In his work with the East End Players, Schechner directed a 1958 production of his own play, Blessing the Fleet, a realistic drama about fishermen in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1961, a review of his production of Ionesco’s “The Lesson” stated: “At all times it puts the action right next to you. You do not feel you are just looking at it; you feel you are visiting in it – usually when you wish you were safely in a back row.”3 It is hard to miss the way that these comments foreshadow the experiences that spectators have recounted time and again about Schechner’s environmental theatre performances later in the decade. Schechner completed an MA in English at the University of Iowa in 1958 where he submitted another original play, Briseis and the Sergeant, as his thesis. This was a fantasy about a young woman (Aeneas’s lover in The Iliad) who becomes involved with a sergeant from a modern war. The play was later directed at Tulane University, by faculty member and designer Hank Hendrickson.4 Tulane University was to play a pivotal role in Schechner’s career, but not until Schechner had finished a stint in the military. Given Schechner’s commitment to peace activism, it may come as a surprise to many that once he had competed his MA, he asked to be drafted into the army immediately. Schechner spent the next two years in the First Armored Division of the Strategic Army Corp and was stationed in Louisiana and Texas. During this time he continued to write and direct plays, but the significance of this period had much to do with the conscious choice that

4 The Rise of Performance Studies

Schechner made to use military service as a way to break out of his upper middle class (and mostly Jewish) background. He had the opportunity to train as an officer, but chose instead to serve as an enlisted man – a choice that placed him within a community that in terms of class, culture, and location was radically different from what he had known in the early part of his life. Since this choice brought him to the South, Schechner gathered first-hand knowledge of the civil rights movement that he had only really been able to support in the abstract while he was a student at Cornell. Schechner describes his time in the army in the deep South as a springboard to the crucial work that followed. While his military service brought him into contact with people whom he would not have met otherwise, it also led him to New Orleans, to Tulane University, to the cultural milieu of the civil rights movement, and to the Free Southern Theater.5 After he was discharged from the army in 1960, Schechner began his PhD in Theatre at Tulane University. During this time, he spent eight months in Paris conducting research before completing a dissertation on Ionesco in 1962. It is worth noting that with his dissertation, Schechner displayed a tendency that has been a hallmark of his entire career. His dissertation followed his having earlier directed Ionesco’s work in Provincetown, and, as was the case with his dissertation, Schechner has repeatedly drawn significant connections between his performance practice and his scholarly endeavors. At Tulane, those endeavors were quickly expanding in ways that profoundly affected the subsequent development of performance studies as an emergent discipline. Having completed his dissertation, Schechner was offered a position on the faculty at Tulane. The offer included an invitation to be the editor of The Tulane Drama Review, which under Schechner’s leadership would ultimately become TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. As a Northerner coming to the South in the early 1960s, Schechner was thrust into a crucial battleground of the civil rights movement. His political consciousness intensified as did his own commitments to civil rights and anti-war activism. Schechner notes that this activism was crucial to his evolution as an artist, and in this respect, it is not difficult to recognize a parallel between his socio-political commitments to changing the status-quo and his dwindling interest in conventional theatre. Indeed, several contributors to this volume have noted (see especially Harding and Rosenthal, Emigh, and Sandford) that the New Orleans period was pivotal in Schechner’s development as a practitioner, teacher, scholar, and editor. Shortly after becoming a member of the faculty at Tulane, Schechner was invited to become a producing director of the Free Southern Theater (1963–66), which was directly connected to the African-American freedom movement. He was also one of three founding directors of the New Orleans Group (1965–67). Around this time, Schechner also became involved with anti-Vietnam War activism and, in conjunction with the New Orleans Group, began experimenting with Happenings and guerrilla theatre.

Introduction

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In 1967, Schechner left Tulane University (he was one of five faculty who resigned in a dispute with the administration) and accepted a position as full professor at NYU. This move roughly coincided with his departure from the Free Southern Theater. Although he left much behind in New Orleans as he began anew in New York, one important thing that he took with him was The Tulane Drama Review, which now became The Drama Review. In his early years at NYU, Schechner continued to move The Drama Review as well as his own theatrical practice toward works that emphasized avantgarde and experimental performance. Crucial in this regard were interviews that Schechner published with key figures of the period, including Allan Kaprow, John Cage, and Judith Malina and Julian Beck (whom he famously interviewed through a megaphone while they were occupying their theatre in the midst of a conflict with the IRS), and Jerzy Grotowski, whose workshop at New York University Schechner attended during his first semester as a member of the faculty. During that first year at NYU, Schechner also founded The Performance Group and with this radical collective – which included Joan MacIntosh and later, Elizabeth LeCompte, both contributors to this volume – he developed a psycho-physical acting technique and further refined the strategies of environmental theatre he had begun to develop with the New Orleans Group. The Performance Group achieved international recognition in 1968 with its highly controversial and now legendary production of Dionysus in 69. This production, which many view to be the quintessential environmental theatre piece, exploded the boundaries between performers and spectators. But Schechner’s work with The Performance Group included other significant accomplishments as well. The Performance Group produced eight other environmental theatre works including the group-devised Commune (1970–72), Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime (1972–74) and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage (1975–77) at the Performing Garage in Soho, New York. The company also toured extensively in Europe and throughout India (see Harding and Rosenthal’s essay and the interviews with MacIntosh and LeCompte for multiple, differing vantage points on this period). Beginning in the early 1970s, Schechner’s investigations and analysis of the extensive interrelationships between theatre theory and practice and the social sciences profoundly impacted his teaching, scholarship, editorial, and performance work. This new emphasis on ritual and theatre anthropology, and especially the interconnections and distinctions between “social drama” and “aesthetic drama,” evolved through Schechner’s fruitful collaborations with his friend, the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner whom Schechner first met in 1977, although at the time of their meeting Schechner was already familiar with Turner’s work. The impact that these two theorists had on one another and on the development of performance studies as a discipline is too substantial to discuss in depth here, but it was significant enough that scholars like Peggy Phelan and Jon McKenzie have cited

6 The Rise of Performance Studies

Schechner and Turner as the joint fathers of performance studies. Suffice it to say that Schechner became increasingly interested in research and writing about intercultural rituals and non-Western forms, especially non-text based performance events, such as the coming of age rituals he and MacIntosh witnessed on their visit to Papua New Guinea in 1971. The work in India had a particularly profound impact on Schechner, beginning with his first trip in 1971. It was there he studied Hatha Yoga and converted to Hinduism in 1976. As the cultural and international scope of Schechner’s interests continued to expand, the work of The Performance Group went in different directions. After touring Mother Courage in India, Performance Group members Elizabeth LeCompte, Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter and others returned to the United States and began to work independently on new projects in the Performing Garage. In 1980 LeCompte became the director of the company, which was renamed the Wooster Group. Schechner moved on, having set the stage through his work with The Performance Group for the emergence of the Wooster Group, which many critics argue is the most important avant-garde theatre in the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century. By this time, Schechner was actively teaching performance theory at NYU and was among the faculty members who successfully advocated that the Graduate Drama Department be renamed the Department of Performance Studies (1980). At the time of this change, Schechner had already published Performance Theory (1976) and was working on the essays that became the chapters of his pivotal study Between Theater and Anthropology (1985). These books followed his classic studies like Environmental Theater (1973), which documented his work with the New Orleans Group and The Performance Group. Although Schechner was not to found another theatre company until 1991 when he founded East Coast Artists, he continued to direct intercultural/international works such as Richard’s Lear (see Phillip Zarrilli’s essay in this book), a Hindi version of The Cherry Orchard in India (1983), and Sun Huizhu’s Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan (Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains, 1989) at the Shanghai Peoples Art Theater. Schechner also directed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in South Africa (1992) as well as a production of the Contemporary Legend Theater’s Oresteia in Taiwan (1994). Throughout this entire period Schechner attended international conferences, lectured, and led workshops in places like China, India, and Japan, further cultivating interest in the emerging discipline of performance studies. Although each of the above-mentioned productions that Schechner directed are significant in their own right, his production of Sun Huizhu’s Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan (Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains) in 1989 merits a special note. This piece, which Schechner co-directed with Stephen Chan, was staged during the intense period of democracy activism most commonly associated with the events of Tiananmen Square. The piece itself, which was written by one of Schechner’s former students at NYU

Introduction

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(Sun Huizhu), was probably the last piece produced in China that offered a political critique of the Cultural Revolution. As the historical events of 1989 unfolded, Schechner was evacuated from Shanghai.6 The advent of the 1990s was marked by the first international performance studies conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the NYU department in 1990. Schechner was instrumental in forging connections between performance studies departments internationally and in the creation of PSi, a world-wide organization devoted exclusively to performance studies that held its first conference in 1995, also at NYU. In terms of his work in the theatre, Schechner drew widely from diverse sources that included his knowledge of Indian theatre, his interest in neurobiology and even his lifelong fascination with sports and sports figures, developing what in a revised edition of Performance Theory he called “rasaesthetics.” This led to workshops on the rasaboxes, an integral training technique used by East Coast Artists. Schechner directed the company’s productions of Faust/Gastronome (1993) based on Goethe’s Faust, their version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters that contained a provocative mix of theatrical styles and periods (1995–97), Hamlet (1999), and YocastaS (2003) and YocastaS Redux (2005), which Schechner co-wrote with Saviana Stanescu. Since 2005, Schechner has been an Honorary Professor at the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies in Shanghai where he has directed several productions (all in Chinese) including Hamlet: That is the Question (2007), one of the topics discussed in Peng Yongwen and Yu Jiancun’s essay in this volume. Although Peng Yongwen and Yu Jiancun downplay the issue in their own account of Schechner’s adaptation of Hamlet, one of the more crucial aspects of that production was Schechner’s decision to cast Hamlet and Horatio as lovers. This relationship was overlooked by the Chinese press, who, interestingly enough, made no mention of the kiss on the mouth at Hamlet and Horatio’s first meeting. In 2009 Schechner received an Honorary Doctorate from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts and directed Lian Amaris’s Swimming to Spalding at Here in New York City. Schechner is a University Professor at Tisch School of the Arts, Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, and Editor of TDR. Schechner continues to write, edit, direct, lecture, conduct workshops, teach, and inspire.

The structure of this book Although as editors we cannot claim to provide a comprehensive representation of the multiple ways that Richard Schechner has influenced the field of performance studies, we have structured the book to address five key areas of that influence – areas that also highlight crucial dimensions of an exemplary career. In conceiving of the book’s structure and editing its contents we pay tribute to and honor Schechner and his work. Honor that is honest has to

8 The Rise of Performance Studies

find a balance between the celebratory and the critical. Being honest about that balance, however, necessitates a recognition that the balancing point itself is subjective and shifts from person to person. Regardless of where individual readers might place that balance, we believe not only that readers of this collection will find the celebratory and the critical to be placed in a constructive dialogue, but also that this dialogue will leave readers with significant opportunities to discuss Schechner’s legacy further. It is a legacy that warrants far more assessment than we could provide here. Since Schechner himself has been instrumental in negotiating the transition from theatre to performance studies as well as exploring the conceptual spaces between the two, the opening section of the book considers Schechner’s work in its relation to this fundamental transition. Part 1, “Performance/Theatre/Studies,” opens with Marvin Carlson’s account of how in the 1960s and 1970s the growing interest in global performance manifestations eclipsed traditional Western theatre models of research and helped to position Schechner as the most visible spokesperson for an alternative paradigm that foresaw performance studies’ development as a discipline. Chapter 2 in this section is written as an “open letter” to Schechner by Stephen Bottoms, in which Bottoms takes issue with Schechner’s tendency to conceptualize models of performance studies in stark formulations that encourage questionable binaries between performance and drama. Part 1 ends with our own contribution to this collection, a study examining the ways in which Schechner’s enduring commitment to the avant-garde (both as a scholar and practitioner) has shaped, at times problematically, his conception of the evolving field of performance studies. If the opening section of the collection considers the transition from theatre to performance studies, Part 2, “Performance Studies Genealogies,” engages in a critical dialogue that, from a global perspective, considers the significance of Schechner’s work while simultaneously resisting linear notions of the origins of performance studies as a field of inquiry. The section opens with Chapter 4, a study by Paul Rae, in which he circumvents Western categorizations and, as an alternative to the broad spectrum approach, contextualizes performance as part of a multi-faceted framework inspired by the Indonesian puppet art, “Wayang.” Rae’s study is followed by Chapter 5 from Henry Bial that contextualizes performance studies within the framework of a cultural metaphor. Reflecting on Schechner’s work as a teacher and mentor, Bial likens the crucial breaks that gave performance studies independent standing as a discipline to the Jewish rite of passage into the complexities of adulthood. The third essay, Chapter 6, by Peng Yongwen and Yu Jiancun, offers a two-fold account of the impact of Schechner’s work in China. Their essay assesses the evolution of performance studies in China since the founding of the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy as well as the significance of Schechner’s recent production, Hamlet: That is the Question, in Shanghai. Peter Eckersall

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concludes Part 2 with Chapter 7, an essay that offers a detailed analysis of the trajectory of performance studies in Australia. These final two essays describe how the discipline of performance studies has been pressured and transformed by shifting national, cultural, and economic realities. Stepping back from the global concerns of the previous section, Part 3 of the book focuses on more local considerations, providing a critical forum for scholars whose understanding of Schechner’s work as a mentor, scholar, and practitioner is informed by their close personal interactions with him. Rebecca Schneider opens this section with Chapter 8, a theoretical essay that combines a critical discussion of performative writing with reflections on her personal interactions with Schechner as a young student and performer, and this combination then serves as the basis for a critical reassessment of Schechner’s notions of “Actuals.” Following Schneider’s essay, Mariellen Sandford in Chapter 9 provides an account of Schechner’s work as the incendiary editor of TDR in a contribution that tightly weaves recollections of working with Schechner as TDR’s Associate Editor with an important critical survey of the pivotal writings that he has published in the pages of TDR. John Emigh’s essay, which as Chapter 10 follows Sandford’s, returns us to Schechner’s early days at Tulane where Emigh was his student and where, as Emigh notes in his essay, Schechner formulated many of the foundational concepts that would evolve into the performance theories for which Schechner is now well known. Finally, Phillip Zarrilli who, reflecting on his own work as an international performance practitioner and scholar, in Chapter 11 assesses the significance of six formative contexts where he interacted with Schechner personally or with his writing. In Part 4 of the book attention turns to Schechner’s substantial connections with a variety of performing arts communities. The contributors here are but a small representation of the international artists whose work Schechner has supported as an editor and who view Schechner as a colleague and fellow artist. Neither The Living Theatre cofounder Judith Malina (Chapter 12) nor documentary theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith (Chapter 15) worked with Schechner as performers or collaborators, yet each recount interactions with Schechner and the role Schechner has played at important junctures in their lives. This section also includes two interviews with theatre artists that worked extensively with Schechner as members of The Performance Group, Joan MacIntosh (Chapter 13) and Elizabeth LeCompte (Chapter 14). Both provide rich accounts of what is arguably Schechner’s most famous work as a theatre practitioner. These interviews are followed in Chapter 16 by a series of brief texts by performance artist/cultural activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña that address the shift in performance contexts in the post-9/11 era. Gómez-Peña’s work has been published and featured frequently in TDR, under Schechner’s editorship. The final section of the book, Part 5, contains four essays by scholars whose work involves a critical dialogue with key concepts drawn from a wide

10 The Rise of Performance Studies

range of Schechner’s performance theories. In the first of these, Chapter 17, Diana Taylor explores the finer nuances of Schechner’s notion of “restored behaviour” while recounting a tour of a replica of Villa Grimaldi, Pinochet’s most infamous torture and extermination camp which was located on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile. The next two essays, Chapter 18 by Atay Citron and Chapter 19 by Takahashi Yuichiro, offer very different examples of how Schechner’s performance theories have shaped the understanding of performance practices in different cultural and historical contexts. In the concluding essay of the book, Joseph Roach examines the controversy that erupted around Aliza Shvarts, whose senior art project at Yale University created a media scandal because the project purportedly involved several deliberately induced abortions. Considering this scandal in light of Schechner’s performance theories, Roach argues in Chapter 20 that it exemplifies a movement from “deep play” to “dark play.” Clearly, the essays in this volume only touch upon the extensive influence that Schechner’s work has had on the development of performance studies as a discipline. If this anthology accomplishes nothing more than focusing attention on Schechner’s work as the discipline of performance studies begins to take stock of its own history, then it will have accomplished much. But it will have accomplished only part of its objective. To suggest the need to rethink Schechner’s “broad spectrum” is to acknowledge more generally that as a discipline performance studies has evolved to the point where it need no longer justify its existence through carefully constructed intellectual genealogies or pedigrees, but is now in a position to take stock of the historical significance of some of its primary players, and in the case of Richard Schechner, a galvanizing pioneer.

Notes 1. Email letter from Emigh to Harding and Rosenthal on 16 January 2010. 2. Schechner discussed his perspective on his experiences in Provincetown in two emails sent to Rosenthal, 24 June 2010. 3. Robinson, James M., “Stage Provides Ionesco Treat,” in Provincetown Advocate, 6 July 1961, 9. In box 152, folder 15. 1961: Theatre Groups: East End Players. From the Richard Schechner Papers, Princeton University Manuscript Division. 4. Schechner provided this information on Briseis and the Sergeant in an email exchange with Rosenthal on 24 June 2010. 5. Email with Rosenthal: 24 June 2010. 6. Email with Rosenthal: 2 July 2010.

Part 1 Performance/Theatre/Studies

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1 Performance Studies and the Enhancement of Theatre Studies Marvin Carlson

The academic discipline of theatre studies holds a fairly recent position among such disciplines, having been essentially created and developed during the past century. Much of that time it has been engaged in a struggle, sometimes benign and sometimes bitter, to establish and police its boundaries and on occasion, simply to justify its continued existence. Normally located within the broader field of the humanities, it generally held a lesser position among them, both in the size of its faculty and in the esteem in which its research was held. In large part this was due to the fact that creative work in general, not easily accommodating the standard scholarly methods of appraisal that had been developed elsewhere in the humanities, was thus often viewed as less rigorous, but even among the arts theatre generally held a lesser position. The long-standing Western anti-theatrical prejudice, not nearly so widespread nor so deeply embedded culturally in the case of the visual arts or music, also worked against the establishment of theatre as a fully respectable academic pursuit. Thus in pursuit of academic respectability, the discipline of theatre was under considerable pressure from the beginning to present itself as a “high” art, to place as much distance as possible between itself and less respectable “popular” forms, from the more amateur world of folk theatre in its many manifestations to the professional world of “show business.” Of course music and art also have only recently as academic disciplines learned, first to tolerate, and then to embrace their more popular and even commercial manifestations, but the struggle was particularly difficult in theatre because the field itself possessed a more questionable status. Equally important was the long connection in European culture, going all the way back to the Greeks, of studying theatre, often under the title of drama, as one of the major branches of literature. This, combined with the attraction of high culture, focused the attention of theatre studies primarily upon the most respected literary works in dramatic form, beginning with Greek drama and progressing through the English and Spanish renaissance, 13

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French neoclassicism, to Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, and the major modernist tradition. The few exceptions to this orientation were allowed because of their real or presumed relationship to the favored tradition. The English medieval theatre (and very little other medieval drama) was included because it could be seen as laying the foundations for Marlowe and Shakespeare, the Italian commedia dell’arte because it similarly provided a grounding for more respectable figures like Molière, Shakespeare, Marivaux, and Goldoni. The European theatrical tradition, especially from the Renaissance onward, provided the acknowledged or unacknowledged model, and the few theatrical manifestations considered worthy of attention from the rest of the world, most notably the classic Sanskrit drama and Japanese Kabuki and Noh, were those which could be most easily, if not always most accurately, read in accordance with Western models of dramatic action. When theatre studies began to emerge as a field of independent studies, first in European and then in American universities, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, its champions did not significantly challenge the high art bias of previous drama studies, the privileging of what eventually came to be called “the canon.” Generally speaking, they were still most interested in Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen, but their focus shifted from a study of the images, themes, characters, and structure of these plays, the traditional concerns of literary analysis, to a study of their conditions of performance, how they were acted, how they were staged, what sort of scenery and costuming they utilized, in what sort of physical space they were presented. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century concerns such as these dominated the new field of theatre studies, and often were the grounds upon which that field defended its borders from the rival fields of literary studies, who often were committed to the study of the same works. Both theatre and literary studies, however, along with a significant part of the European and American intellectual world, found this hitherto comfortable and frequently unchallenged intellectual world increasingly called into question in the latter part of the twentieth century. A variety of new perspectives on cultural processes and cultural studies emerged at this time, demanding a rethinking of some of the most fundamental European cultural assumptions. A number of these might be grouped together as challenging the already mentioned traditional Western canon, the grounding not only of theatre studies, but of literary studies in general and indeed of a significant part of the humanities. Throughout the development of Western literary and academic studies, a relatively small number of basic writings, almost exclusively European, and indeed largely from classic Greece and modern England, France, Germany, and perhaps Spain and Russia, almost exclusively created by men, made up the body of material with which any educated person was expected to have some acquaintance, and upon which most academic writing and research was based.

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As a significant part of cultural studies shifted in the late twentieth century from the study of the works in this received canon to examination of the dynamics and processes by which the canon had historically come into being and through which its authority was maintained, a new awareness grew that the canon, far from being the result of objective and immutable standards of abstract artistic excellence, had been constructed, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, in order to create or reinforce the supremacy of certain groups – a class, an ethnic group, a nation, a gender – and, moreover, that this structure was not only self-justifying but self-replicating. The characteristics of canonical works taken not only as evidence of their excellence but as standards for judging potential additions to the canon, creating an invariable if unacknowledged bias against works produced outside the cultural tradition of the canon itself. What this meant for theatre studies, as global awareness increased, was a growing challenge to find a way to relate positively and productively to theatrical works outside the Western tradition without imposing upon them the interpretive, and especially the evaluative, methodologies of that tradition. At the same time that theatre, and the other Western artistic traditions, were attempting to come to terms with the forces of global consciousness, the appearance of post-colonial perspectives, and the challenges these posed to traditional structures of value and methods of interpretation, another reorientation of equal importance was taking place within the world of Western art. In its simplest terms this involved a shift in the orientation of many artists and art theorists from a static to a dynamic view of art, sometimes spoken of as a shift in focus from product to process, or from art as object to art as event. Although these major shifts in perspective came from very different sources, some cultural, some political, some aesthetic, their almost simultaneous appearance in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s resulted in a virtual revolution in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, including, of course theatre, which was involved in all three of these areas of the study of human activity. The different aspects of this revolution also, naturally, not only affected traditional organization of scholarly disciplines and modes of study, but also worked in various combinations to produce effects that one or another would have been unlikely to achieve. They provided an unprecedented challenge to the field of theatre studies as it had developed in the course of the twentieth century, but, perhaps not surprisingly, they also suggested fresh perspectives and alternative analytical approaches that could respond effectively to these challenges. Since the vast majority of non-Western theatre falls outside the canonical, the high art model provided no way of discussing it, except as an inferior or more primitive form of what the West had more fully and artistically developed, or as a colorful and exotic cultural activity of interest perhaps to anthropologists but not to theatre scholars. Moreover, Western theatre

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study’s historical privileging of the literary text and the individual performance (particularly the original one) as the artistic object of study not only distorted or precluded significant study of much non-Western performance, but, more surprisingly, seriously limited serious study of the Western theatre itself. Such obvious and important theatrical manifestations as the fluidity of texts and interpretations from performance to performance, and even more from revival to revival, were strongly discouraged by a tradition that insisted upon analyzing a play as if it were an established literary text or a piece of sculpture. The role of the audience and the cultural and social context of a particular production were similarly de-emphasized or ignored. Popular plays or theatrical performances outside the canon which made no claims to high art were given relatively little or no attention except, in rare cases, when they could be considered as “sources” of more respectable literary drama. These limitations of traditional theatre study had become so obvious in the later twentieth century that the time had clearly arrived for a major reorientation of the field to respond to them. At that period, one of the most familiar models of cultural change was that described by Thomas Kuhn as a “paradigm shift,” when the inability of a widely accepted existing system of thought to accommodate new information or perspectives, led to a major intellectual reorientation of the entire system. Clearly by the 1960s and 1970s, the inability of traditional Western theatre models of research and critical appraisal to respond to the rising interest among theatre scholars in a vast new range of global and popular manifestations created a pressing need for a Kuhnian shift. The major mechanism for such a shift was the theory and practice introduced at this time by performance studies. Indeed, Richard Schechner, then the most visible spokesman for that new orientation, specifically called for a “Kuhnian shift” in theatre studies in his oftencited keynote address as the 1992 convention of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.1 Although many viewed Schechner’s analysis and recommendations at that time as extreme, even apocalyptic, a look back over the past 15 years shows how prescient in many respects his prediction was. While it still seems unlikely, as his address in certain passages implied, that theatre studies is on the brink of extinction, to be in some measure replaced by performance studies, it can also hardly be denied that the field of theatre studies has undergone something akin to the Kuhnian shift Schechner discussed and that the strategies and concepts of performance studies have been among the most instrumental agents in bringing about this change. The much debated question of the place of performance studies in today’s intellectual world is far too broad and complex for me to address here, nor do I propose to consider the highly significant and growing role of performance studies as a field of study in its own right, with programs and departments by this name now established around the world. My concern is with

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the much narrower, but still extremely important question of how, why, and to what extent an interest in performance has provided theatre studies with many desperately needed new attitudes, insights, and methodologies that allowed theatre to break out of the critical impasse it faced in the 1960s and 1970s, and therefore to develop as a discipline better equipped to fill its historical role in the new cultural and intellectual world of the twenty-first century. Although as the field of performance studies began to develop in the United States its first major centers were at New York and Northwestern Universities, awareness of this new orientation for most theatre scholars came out of New York University, primarily due to the work of Richard Schechner. Not only was Schechner a major theorist in his own right, but equally important, he was the editor of the widely read and highly influential Drama Review, which in the 1960s and 1970s was generally regarded as essential reading for anyone interested in the most important current trends in experimental theatre work and new theoretical approaches. It was primarily through Schechner’s essays and in the pages of TDR that performance studies first began to impact upon theatre studies. This process was a gradual one. Schechner became editor of what was then the Tulane Drama Review in 1962 and in his early years the journal, though strongly interested in experimental work, remained clearly in the Eurocentered, literary tradition. In the mid-1960s, however, the journal began to shift, with special attention given not to dramatists but to directors, first Stanislavsky, then Grotowski, which TDR introduced to America. The Winter 1965 issue concerned the “New Theatre,” and dealt with event forms like the happening, with chance replacing text, experience replacing message. Over the next several years TDR, which Schechner edited until 1969, increasingly turned to the social sciences for insights and methodologies that would open up a more performance oriented view of theatre. Gradually Schechner and others developed the concept of performance as a particular kind of activity very widespread in human society and central to the operations of that society. Schechner has often stressed the broadness of the performative spectrum, involving “actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, to healing (from shamanism to surgery) and to the various representations and constructions of actions in the media and the internet.”2 As Shannon Jackson has pointed out in her study of the disciplinary implications of the rise of performance studies, much of the rhetoric of the early years of this new orientation, especially that emanating from NYU, was concerned with separating performance from theatre studies. This was a distinction much less central at Northwestern, the other pioneer in performance studies, where the new discipline did not arise from a theatre program and so felt itself under less pressure to resist reabsorbing.

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This dynamic of separation expressed itself in a wide variety of ways, ranging from a reconfiguring of theatre studies as one among many separate subdivisions of performance studies, to a vision of theatre studies disappearing entirely, replaced by its more wide-ranging and relevant offspring. A generation later it can be seen that something quite different has in fact occurred. In a few institutions performance studies has indeed replaced or absorbed theatre studies, but much more common is a wide variety of blendings of the two, with a net result that theatre studies has not so much been eliminated by the arrival of performance studies, but profoundly altered by it. Performance has, in some aspects consciously, in others serendipitously, provided theatre studies with strategies and ways of thinking that have allowed theatre to productively confront the many serious challenges that were facing it as a discipline in the late twentieth century. I propose to focus on three areas within contemporary theatre studies that seem to me to have been particularly and positively affected by the rise of interest in performance studies: internationalism, democratization, and contextualization. To begin with perhaps the most obvious of these, internationalization, it is by no means insignificant that as early as 1963, in Schechner’s second year as editor of TDR and Theodore Hoffman’s first year as associate editor, the journal issued a seven-point “statement of goals,” among which was “A recognition that the best contemporary theatre is international.” This statement continued: “In an age which is learning to dissolve the fear of miscegenation, mastery of one’s own theatre means enthusiastic exposure to that of other countries.”3 At the time this statement largely meant moving outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition to examine figures like Artaud and Grotowski, but later issues steadily moved beyond the traditional Eurocentric theatre world to consider theatre elsewhere, most notably in Asia and Latin America. During the next 20 years, as Schechner was developing his concept of performance, his utilization of non-European material to test, broaden, and inspire his research and speculation appears almost everywhere in his writings. Rituals and other performance activity in New Guinea underlies much of his performance theory of the early 1970s and experiences in India during the next decade. Obviously few theatre scholars in the late twentieth century devoted themselves to the kind of broad-ranging geographical and theoretical projects carried out by Schechner, but his collections of essays and his reports in TDR provided evidence of his assertion that a better knowledge of theatre-related activities in other cultures would provide an opportunity for a more complete “mastery of one’s own theatre.” It is very likely that the increasing globalization of culture during this period would have forced a greater awareness of theatre practices around the world whether the field of performance studies had ever been developed or not, but without the insights and strategies developed within performance studies, there is a strong likelihood that the awareness and study of international theatre by theatre scholars would have

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developed in a very different direction. So long as theatre was defined as a cultural activity constructed and experienced according to European models (however varied those models might be), a vast amount of significant performance activity of potential interest to theatre scholars would remain outside their acknowledged domain of research. This is a problem created in large part by the success of the colonial enterprise. Wherever the great colonial empires spread, especially those of England, France, and Spain, which covered much of the globe, European patterns of culture, including the European model of theatre, were imposed. Still, today, in an area of non-European theatre that I find of particular interest, that of the Arab world, standard histories of Arab theatre, both in Arabic and English, normally begin with the assertion that Arabic theatre begins in Beirut in 1947 with the performance of al-Bakhil (The Miser), written by Marun al-Naqqash, a cultured businessman inspired by theatre he had witnessed on his travels to Italy. The fact that theatrical entertainments that do not follow European models of theatre – public storytelling, poetry reading, comic sketches, and various forms of puppet theatre, some of these extremely sophisticated – in fact are recorded for centuries before this has been often ignored. Variations of this situation can be found around the world. Thanks to the colonial project, it is possible for theatre scholars to consider themselves to be quite international, to study theatre from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, without ever leaving the comfortable and familiar frames of reference provided them by the European tradition, since many major works directly in that tradition may be found in all of these locations. A major contribution of performance studies has been to challenge this comfortable approach, to call attention to the fact that looking at performance more broadly opens up other related areas of cultural expression, often with a far richer and deeper tradition than that provided if one looks only at the often imposed colonialist performance models. The process of democratization involves another challenge to the traditional canon arising simultaneously with, and reinforced by, the rise of performance studies. While the development of a more international view of theatre opposed the privileging of Eurocentric drama and its methodologies, democratization opposed a particular aspect of Eurocentric drama studies, the division of drama itself into high and low forms. Thanks in significant measure to the influence of Lawrence Levine’s important 1988 study Highbrow/Lowbrow, the general operations of the cultural hierarchy in nineteenth-century American theatre are familiar to most theatre scholars, and the corollary to this is equally common, that plays and entertainments which ranked lower on this cultural ladder have, until very recently, been marginalized or omitted entirely from our histories, our anthologies, our classrooms, and most particularly our stages. One unfortunate side-effect of Levine’s important book, however, is that it leaves most readers with the impression that this cultural divide is a product

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of specifically nineteenth-century forces; indeed the book is significantly subtitled “The emergence of cultural hierarchy in nineteenth century America,” implying a lost golden age before this “emergence” in which hierarchy did not operate. Anyone familiar with cultural dynamics will find this highly troubling, and of course social hierarchies are deeply embedded in social consciousness itself and the theatre, a social operation at its most fundamental level, has always participated in there hierarchies. One need only consider the seating arrangements in almost every historical period to see clear evidence of this. Even the purportedly highly democratic auditorium of classic Greece privileged priests and other authorities and offered the most marginal seating at best to foreigners, women, and slaves. In more recent times even more fundamental than the division of audiences within theatres has been the division of theatres themselves, with certain houses offering “popular” theatre to less prestigious audiences and others more culturally honored fare to an audience that is, or considers itself to be, more elite. Inevitably it has been the plays offered by the elitist theatre that have survived in the canon and dominated future histories and scholarly studies, and this is not simply a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon. The offerings of folk and fair theatres from earlier eras have been equally neglected. This has been the case even when popular stages generated texts which were in no significant way different from the more respectable texts of the elitist theatres, such as the plays performed in modern boulevard and commercial theatres, or the puppet shows and farces of the earlier fairground theatres. Even further from the interests of traditional theatre scholars have been forms with even less claim to literary status – vaudeville and burlesque entertainments, variety shows, circuses. A few lonely champions advocating the serious study of such material began to appear among theatre scholars in the 1960s, when their efforts struck a responsive chord not only in the widespread anti-elitism and anti-establishment mode of the era, but also, more specifically, in the more open and responsible domain of performance studies. The work of several of Richard Schechner’s closest associates in the developing NYU program, most notably that of Brooks McNamara and from a different perspective, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, was instrumental in opening this major new area to serious theatre scholarship. When in 1966, largely due to the efforts of McNamara, the American Society for Theatre Research held for the first time a conference focusing on American popular entertainment, there was still much resistance among the membership to this presumed departure from high academic standards, but today, 30 years later, popular entertainment has become one of the most important areas of current theatre research. Performance studies’ contribution to a growing interest in contextualization, as with internationalism and democratization, was not so much a result of performance originating a new orientation, but rather of performance

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providing theoretical insights, strategies, and methodologies which were critical in aiding the more conservative field of traditional theatre studies to absorb and utilize this new orientation. During the 1970s, the rise of semiotics provided theatre scholars with an important new tool for more rigorous and controlled analysis. At first, however, and not surprisingly, theatre semiotics was employed primarily in the service of the existing system, that is, to the analysis of literary text and/or what came to be commonly called the performance text, the realization of the literary text on stage. Until its approach was modified by the rise of reception studies, semiotics essentially viewed these two texts as bits of communication created for a basically passive understanding. Reception not only moved away from this passive model, but also toward an interest not only in the activity but in the context of the audience itself. A short, but key book in articulating this shift was Gerald Hinkle’s 1979 Art as Event, which argued that critical understanding of the performing arts has traditionally been hampered by the application to them of strategies evolved in arts like literature. The major difference, of course, is performance, the recognition of which forces an analytical shift from an object in perception to an episode in experience.4 Although Hinkle was neither a semiotician nor a performance studies scholar, but a professor of philosophy working in the tradition of Whitehead, his utilization of a performance model suggests how performance consciousness had spread throughout the humanities by the end of the 1970s. Richard Schechner’s explanation of performance from his 1973 “Drama, Script, Theater and Performance,” clearly anticipates Hinkle’s use of this concept: “Drama is what the writer writes; the script is the interior map of a particular production; the theatre is the specific set of gestures performed by the performers in any given performance; the performance is the whole event, including audience and performers (technicians too, anyone who is there).”5 This shift in analytical perspective from theatrical performance as object to theatrical performance as event has been of incalculable importance in subsequent theatre studies. Not only has it stimulated a whole new generation of studies of theatrical audiences and their roles in the creation of the theatre experience, but it has led outward, through those audiences, to a more far-ranging and fully informed awareness of the many social, cultural, and physical forces which condition the experience of theatre. These of course go far beyond the traditional focus on the dramatic text or even on its stage realization, to consider the context of both, a context which is both physical (the performance space itself, its location and characteristics) and, even more important, social and cultural. It is through the medium of performance studies that theatre studies has developed some of its most productive recent research in the cultural and social context of theatre. Performance has often provided an opening for theatre studies to other major recent theoretical developments in the humanities, such as cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

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As I indicated earlier, I have made no attempt to even suggest the wideranging impact that modern performance studies has had on the intellectual map of the late twentieth century, a project that would far exceed both my own expertise and the appropriate length of this chapter. I hope, however, that I have been able to suggest something of the extent to which the development of performance studies has profoundly affected and enhanced the field of modern theatre studies, wherein most of my own research is conducted.

Notes 1. Richard Schechner, “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” The Drama Review 36.4 (1992): 7–10. 2. Schechner, “Foreword” to Teaching Performance Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2002, xi. 3. Schechner and Theodore Hoffmann, “TDR: 1963–?” TDR 8.2 (1963): 11. 4. Gerald Hinkle, Art as Event. Washington: University Press of America, 1979, 40. 5. Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theater and Performance,” in Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977, 44.

2 In Defense of the String Quartet: An Open Letter to Richard Schechner Stephen Bottoms

Dear Richard, First of all, may I say what a genuine honor and a privilege it is to have been asked to contribute to this volume – initially commissioned to celebrate your 75th birthday (Happy Birthday!) – and thus to this latest reconsideration of the performance studies paradigm that you were so instrumental in establishing. I must admit, though, to a degree of apprehension about the editors’ invitation, since I’ve little doubt that it has come about largely because of an essay I wrote a few years back, which was widely interpreted as an attack on you. Actually my concerns in that piece, “The Efficacy/ Effeminacy Braid,”1 were somewhat broader and less personal than many assumed, but as I have discovered, we all love a good intradisciplinary spat. Since the editors of this volume – and perhaps you yourself – would probably be disappointed if I didn’t continue to play the role of minor irritant, I will try to oblige. But if, in what follows, my tone seems a little combative, please understand that this is intended not as hostility, but as homage: this letter is intended in a spirit of playful, polemical provocation similar to that which you yourself have frequently employed. Again, moreover, my real target is somewhat broader than may initially be apparent. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the so-called “broad spectrum approach” to performance studies downplays to a counter-productive, and even destructive, degree the text-based drama paradigm on which academic theatre studies was founded. If that sounds a little retrograde of me, I hope to persuade you otherwise by the end of this letter. I’d like begin with the following, familiar scripture from what one bookjacket blurb calls “the gospel according to Richard Schechner”: “The fact is that theatre as we have known and practiced it – the staging of written dramas – will be the string quartet of the 21st century: a beloved but extremely limited genre, a subdivision of performance.”2 This statement, 23

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which you made in a keynote address to the 1992 conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (an address subsequently published as a TDR editorial), has become one of the most frequently quoted Schechnerisms around. Its beauty lies in its bluntness: it rehearses a familiar rhetorical point of yours (that theatre is merely a subdivision of performance, broadly conceived), and it hits home through disparaging analogy. Lovers of string quartets might miss initially the derogatory implication – but thankfully your next clause clarifies the point. And although it remains unclear why theatre, which can have any number of performers, is necessarily as “limited” a genre as one which must by definition feature only four musicians, the exactitude of the analogy is not really the point; its dismissiveness is. So forceful is your phrasing, though, that those who cite it often forget exactly what your point is, and recall it simply as an argument about “theatre” as against “performance” (whatever that distinction may be taken to entail). Your telling qualifier, which makes clear that this is an argument about “written dramas” – plays – and not about the entire history and practice of theatre as an art form, is often forgotten. Indeed, it appears that you yourself have forgotten this detail. In your first TDR editorial of the twentyfirst century you reference your own earlier remarks and confess that “I was wrong. Recently I have seen some powerful theatre.” You go on to cite, as evidence of this continuing vitality, “the work of such diverse directors, auteurs, and choreographers as Eugenio Barba, Elizabeth LeCompte, Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, Suzuki Tadashi, Ratan Thiyam, Ivo van Hove, Laurie Anderson, Robert LePage, Pina Bausch, and Jane Comfort.”3 The names of playwrights, the authors of “written dramas,” are conspicuous by their absence from this list – a fact which rather suggests that you hadn’t revised your opinion at all. Indeed, you continue, “the kind of theatre these people do goes far beyond ‘spoken drama.’” This reassuring put-down of the merely literary is followed, perhaps less predictably, by the suggestion that playscripts have nonetheless proved to be a useful resource for practitioners such as van Hove and the Wooster Group. The lesson of their unorthodox stagings of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, you argue, is that just as Shakespeare can be done in any style, so can Ibsen – and so can Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett (whatever his alleged “defenders” argue). Play texts of whatever kind are detached from their possible stagings and acting styles … . There is the text of plays; but there is also the text of behavior, of acting, of scenography, of blocking. Each of these is autonomous, and can be developed on its own and/or in relation to the others. 4 While I agree with you whole-heartedly on this point, it does appear to me slightly odd – when we consider these remarks in context – that you seem

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willing to grant artistic license, autonomy, and validity to every theatre artist except the playwright. You seem willing to allow that written dramas can, after all, be exciting and/or experimental, provided that we don’t stage them as their authors appear to have intended. If we seek to “defend” the validity of a text as it stands, then we are stick-in-the-mud retrogrades. Or perhaps violinists. Now, purely on the level of demonstrable cultural significance, I find it difficult to credit your implication that playwriting is simply quaint, oldfashioned, and irrelevant unless it is somehow “radicalized” in production. In 1992, when you first made the string quartet analogy, the world premieres of new American dramas included Tony Kushner’s completed, two-part Angels in America, David Mamet’s Oleanna, August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, to name but four off the top of my head.5 Each of these pieces, in radically different ways, addressed the very issues of multicultural co-existence in America that also animated your ATHE talk, and while they vary substantially in their political implications (I have personal problems with Mamet’s play, in particular), there is no question that each of them provoked substantial public debate, as well as being fine works of art in their own right. So why, exactly, should we regard playwrights as less relevant or dynamic in the making of new performances than “directors, auteurs, and choreographers”?

1 In theory On one level, of course, your comments represent a continuation of a long, avant-gardist tradition of suspicion toward dramatic conventions. As James Harding points out, “historically the theatrical avant-garde has consistently defined itself vis-à-vis a negation not only of text and mimesis but also of author-ship and author-ity.”6 And yet, also of course, historically the theatrical avant-garde has included a great many playwrights among its leading lights; playwrights as diverse as Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett (to name only the most screamingly obvious) whose concerns to subvert mimesis and query the role of the author you do not, I’m sure, need reminding of. So your blanking out of playwrights seems to me of a different order – one which represents a kind of willed blindness to their creative integrity as theatre artists. This much is also evident, I would suggest, in the documentation of your Performance Group production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime back in 1973. Even though your production was to be the New York premiere of his latest play, Shepard made no attempt to exert “author-ity” or interfere in your working process: the result was – as he wrote – “far from what I had in mind. But I never expected it to be any different.”7 Yet Shepard’s generosity toward you as a fellow artist was not, it seems to me, reciprocated in your disregard of his own intentions for the play. Discussing

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the production in Performance Theory, you argue that a playwright “sees” a play in the mind’s eye as s/he writes it, and that “the act of playwriting is a translation of this internal scening into dialog + stage directions. The stage directions are vestiges and/or amplifications of the internal scening. The whole scening process is, in my view, a scaffold that is best dismantled once the play takes shape as dialog.”8 In other words, ignore the stage directions and treat the writer purely as a supplier of spoken language, not as someone capable of conceiving a three-dimensional event in which that language is one component part. It’s an oddly “literary” view of the playwright’s role, in fact, coming from so performance-oriented a thinker. I’m not attempting to argue that productions should always slavishly follow a script to the last letter. Indeed, full-on deconstructions of canonical texts such as those created by the Wooster Group seem to me entirely legitimate, precisely because of the familiarity of those texts. But I also think, nevertheless (and especially in the case of premiere productions) that – to quote Shepard again – the writer’s “vision” is something “you really should look into rather than sweep it aside as being old-fashioned or even unimportant.”9 Respect for that vision, moreover, need not entail an abdication of creative autonomy on the part of director or performers: you don’t need me to tell you that play-texts can be staged and interpreted in a multitude of different ways, even while sticking to what is stated on the page. In the words of Anthony Kubiak, “the idea that play production is merely re-enactment or repetition of an ‘authorized’ playscript is finally quite naive.”10 Still, I can hear alarm bells going off in my head as I write this. The performance studies scholar within is already accusing me of textual imperialism, and waving Derrida’s statements about “the theological stage” at me: an author-creator … absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or meaning of the presentation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who … more or less directly represent the thought of the “creator.”11 It has always struck me that this passage has a certain tongue-in-cheek irony about it, in its own repetitive insistence on this “enslavement” to author-ity. Certainly, to take it merely at face value is to ignore the fact that this is Derrida’s representation – or characterization – of Artaud’s ideas, not an “original” argument of his own. I cringe (as perhaps do you, Richard) whenever this formulation of the theological stage is invoked to lend theoretical authority to reflexive prejudices against written drama, since anyone who has actually read the essay in which it appears knows that Derrida’s underlying

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point is that (and here I am necessarily reducing a complex argument to sound-bites) for all Artaud’s passion and desire, there is no non-theological stage to be had, no purely present performance in the moment, no escape from representation. Directors like you and me are always already as “theological” as playwrights, insofar that we orchestrate (write) the performance event in advance (i.e., “absent and from afar”). Indeed, any rehearsal or repetition of an event – any form of “restored behavior” – already constitutes re-presentation. “Repetition,” Derrida suggests, “gathers and maintains the past as truth, as ideality,” and thus “as soon as there is repetition, God is there, the present holds on to itself and reserves itself, that is to say, eludes itself.”12 Certainly, theatre and performance can attempt to highlight and question the processes of representation that they inevitably employ – to bite the hand of the God that feeds, if you will – but again, a playwright is just as capable of facilitating such self-critique as a director, performer, or choreographer.

2 In practice To your credit, Richard, you are not among those misusing theory to dismiss playwrights. Instead, it seems to me that your own challenges to unjustlyheld power relate less to the playwright-as-god myth than to a suspicion of the theatre industry more broadly. As you remarked in that 1992 ATHE talk – in furtherance of your point about written drama as “string quartet” – “elite live performance such as the so-called ‘legitimate theatre’ is shrinking relative to film and TV (even as popular entertainments are growing).”13 Your implication seems to be that this “legitimate” theatre is losing its legitimacy – that it is not entitled to the cultural status that it allegedly commands. Your use of the word “elite,” moreover, conjures up notions of power and exclusivity – although “expensive” would be a more accurate word, given that the theatres you allude to (presumably the commercial theatres on- and off-Broadway, and the not-for-profit regional theatre sector) remain demonstrably more popular than the experimental performance sector, which remains elitist in the truest sense of appealing to a small, informed, “integral” audience (the two of us included). In your 1994 introduction to Environmental Theater, you further charge “legitimate theatre” with being uniformly “pretentious, politically unexamined, badly done, and boring,” and conclude that “I prefer the effervescence of popular culture and the risk-taking of experimental performance to the Nyquil of so-called mainstream theater.”14 Thus we end up with the peculiarly imbalanced high/low geography of (NYU-model) performance studies, whereby “performance” represents both a vastly expanded field (a broad spectrum) of popular, traditional, and everyday performance behaviors and a narrowly defined field of

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experimental or avant-garde art. For the sake of clarity I will refer to these models as Performance with a big P and performance with a little p. Performance with a big P is deemed worthy of study because it is so wideranging that its concerns are popular, democratic, and relevant to everyone – unlike “legitimate theatre” which is “elitist,” “pretentious” and “shrinking” in cultural relevance. And yet, simultaneously, performance with a little p is deemed worthy of study because it subverts and challenges the “legitimacy” of “legitimate theatre.” The theatre (of written drama) thus turns out to be both culturally irrelevant and the dominant culture that must be challenged. Theatre becomes the excluded, erased, de-legitimated other on which you nonetheless depend for the metaphors that allow you to see the enveloping practices of everyday life as Performance. But wait. I’m letting my rhetoric fly away with me a little. I’m generalizing wildly, just as I’ve been suggesting that you have. So let me, instead, get down to historical brass-tacks. Let’s ask, first, has the “legitimate theatre” really tended to enshrine the written drama – and thus the authorial, authorized, “theological” power of the playwright – as its central, legitimating form? Well, yes and no. Yes, because theatre’s claim to the status of “art” has, indeed, traditionally rested on the shoulders of the playwright (at least in the West). And no, because (a) economic concerns have meant that mainstream theatre, at least in the United States and United Kingdom, has long been dominated not by the play but by the musical (an avowedly popular form which, for some reason, performance studies has yet to take to its heart), and because (b) for the same reasons of economic interest, very few playwrights have ever really had any significant power in dictating the terms of how a production is mounted. This reality dates back at least as far as the eighteenth century, when the playwrights of the day found themselves impotently railing against the power of actor-managers.15 In our own times, producers and directors have dominated. Take the case of Tennessee Williams, for example, a “canonical” playwright who, nevertheless – at the very height of his fame – was obliged by his director, Elia Kazan, to completely rewrite the final act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) for fear that the original version would be insufficiently satisfying to Broadway audiences. Or there’s the equally canonical Edward Albee, who co-founded the Playwrights’ Unit in 1963, in order to support and nurture the work of emerging playwrights through production. When Albee began to suspect, a few years later, that experimental writers were not being treated as positively by the Unit’s readers as he had intended, he submitted his own oneact play Box under a pseudonym. It was rejected out of hand. Shortly after that, he shut down the Playwrights’ Unit as unfit for purpose: its readers, he adjudged, were placing too much emphasis on finding properties that might ultimately prove commercially viable, and not enough on finding genuinely innovative theatre writers.

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There are any number of other examples that could be deployed to illustrate what I take to be an indisputable fact: namely that written drama, far from being supported and championed by “mainstream” theatre, has always had to struggle for its own legitimacy in that context. It is certainly the case that anodyne, middle-brow plays often end up being promoted because they seem like a “safer bet” to producers who have tickets to sell and/or subscriptions to collect. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that written drama and theatre, as a general rule, are “badly done and boring” – let alone that playwrights command more cultural authority than directors or producers. To imply as much is to confuse an art form with an economic apparatus. Indeed, as I attempted to demonstrate in my book Playing Underground,16 there existed in New York during the 1960s a thriving, experimental, playwritingdriven scene known popularly as the Off-Off-Broadway movement (in which Sam Shepard was a leading light). Notwithstanding the occasional off-Broadway transfer of a successful production, this low-to-no-budget “free theatre” scene was almost completely separate from the “mainstream,” and initially emerged precisely because commercial producers had become so riskaverse. Playwrights just wanted to put their work on, by any means necessary. It was this underground theatrical culture that provided the seedbed for the emergence of ensemble companies such as the Open Theatre and the Play-House of the Ridiculous, and later of auteur directors like Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. And yet most accounts of this period’s experimental theatre work willfully ignore the playwrights of Off-Off-Broadway. One key factor in this elision, I have argued elsewhere, was that TDR – the leading experimental theatre journal of the day, under your editorship – was developing a different agenda, which reflected your own interest in collaborative ensembles, and in “guru” directors such as Grotowski. “We were carving out a domain for ourselves, overthrowing the writers,” you later noted.17 As should by now be plain, I remain unconvinced that “the writers” were ever on the throne to begin with. Certainly, at that time, they didn’t command the mainstream, and (partly as a result of such performative rhetoric) they’ve been fairly rigorously excluded from membership of the avant-garde ever since. Moreover, one of the factors that finally killed the Off-Off-Broadway movement was the increasing “mainstreaming” of alternative theatre in the late 1960s – a trend in which you yourself were implicated. It was your own most famous ensemble-based production, Dionysus in 69 (1968), which first brought commercial values to bear on the alternative, downtown theatre scene. Despite the grungy, out-of-the-way, “found space” on Wooster Street in which it was performed, Dionysus was, as John Lahr observed at the time, “packaged as a cultural commodity like any other.”18

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Indeed, one could argue that it was precisely countercultural grunge that was being marketed here – alongside the time-honored appeal of sexual spectacle.19 With ticket prices ranging from $4 to $10 (comparable to those in commercial, off-Broadway theatres), the Performing Garage was a far cry from the alternative, Off-Off venues like La Mama or Judson Poets’ Theater, which at that time were still free to enter. It wasn’t until 1971 that La Mama finally began charging a flat $5 ticket charge, in response to pressures that you helped initiate. So you’ll understand, I hope, why I find your suspicion of “legitimate theatre” a little suspicious.

3 In universities But I’m digressing again. Let me get back to your 1992 ATHE talk, and acknowledge that it was not, substantively, concerned with the theatre industry itself. Rather, your oft-cited comment about string quartets appeared in the context of an argument, titled “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” which called for a reappraisal of the ways in which theatre is taught in American universities. In the academic context, at least, I can sympathize with your suggestion that text-based drama has traditionally been enshrined with a power and authority that needs to be questioned. The difficult realities of theatre-industry politics and economics faced every day by playwrights have rarely been much of a concern to academics, and the continuing influence of literature scholarship on the teaching of drama has ensured a lingering emphasis on the central importance of “the author” in relation to “the text.” It was, of course, assumptions such as this that you and others of your generation began to challenge in the 1960s and 1970s – although as an undergraduate in the 1980s, I was confronted with a curriculum still dominated by the questionable centrality of the author. By 1992, the impact of semiotic, poststructuralist, and feminist thinking had begun to undermine this traditionalist stance quite substantially. In effect, your ATHE intervention weighed in on the side of this newer, theoretically informed scholarship – arguing, indeed, for theatre departments to “rejoin – and reform – the humanities in a big way.”20 Again, your argument was heavily inflected by a reaction against commercialism: the humanities had to be “rejoined” because American theatre departments had become embroiled in the pretence of “professional training” – out of greed for the economic returns available to those promising to prepare starstruck young people for careers in a “shrinking” theatre industry already glutted with unemployed actors and directors. I don’t at all disagree with your diagnosis of this problem: it is fundamentally dishonest to train people for jobs that we know do not exist. But if, as you argued, theatre departments were subjecting students to “an impossible-to-accomplish mix of practical training, dramatic lit, and theatre history, producing graduates who are neither

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professionally trained nor academically educated,” then it is hard to see as an improvement your proposal that Theatre departments should become “performance departments.” Performance is about more than the enactment of Eurocentric drama. Performance engages intellectual, social, cultural, historical, and artistic life in a broad sense. Performance combines theory and practice … . American society is a riot of performances – rock concerts, discos, electioneering, wrestling, con games and stings, college and professional sports, vogueing, street theatre, parades, demonstrations, and a panoply of religious rituals. … These worlds of performance ought to be the subject of theorizing, fieldwork, and live classroom presentations.21 Let’s review that for a moment. Theatre departments are offering an impossible-to-accomplish mix of theory and practice, and so they should become performance departments with a vastly expanded, even more impossible-to-accomplish remit, also combining theory and practice. It’s not a proposal that would get through many teaching quality assurance mechanisms unscathed. Unsurprisingly, it is also not a proposal that has been widely taken up. For all the undoubted allure of regarding society at large as “a riot of performances,” the fact remains that today, in 2010, the vast majority of theatre or performance departments, however they choose to name themselves, are still predominantly concerned with examining self-consciously artistic practices. Performance with a big P, the “broad spectrum” approach, has not been widely taken up as the subject of our teaching, for the very good reasons that (a) it is altogether too big a can of worms to open very far, and (b) it is not what our students have asked to come and study (in this respect, at least, it seems wise to consider the relationship of supply and demand). It seems to me, also, that Performance with a big P has not been taken up very widely as the subject of scholarly research. There are exemplary exceptions to this general rule, to be sure – from Philip Auslander’s work on glam rock, to Tracy Davis’s on civil defense, to Jon McKenzie’s on organizational and technological performance management – but most of us studying theatre/performance professionally remain rather obstinately committed to the stage as art-form, however culturally irrelevant it might appear. What has changed markedly since 1992, however, is the degree of scholarly emphasis on performance with a little p. In your ATHE speech you asked rhetorically, “How many theatre departments deal effectively with performance art? How many teach Chekhov both in relation to Peter Stein’s orthodox and masterful Cherry Orchard and the Wooster Group’s Three Sisters (aka Brace Up!)?”22 Today, that passage could perhaps be rephrased as “How many theatre departments don’t teach performance art or the Wooster Group?”

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I can’t comment with much confidence on the American situation, where I dare say the professional theatre trainers still hold a lot of sway, but certainly here in the United Kingdom, it would be rare indeed to find a course that didn’t cover such concerns as a central part of its provision. In Britain, vocational theatre training has remained the reserve of conservatoires and drama schools, as distinct from universities, so there has been little to prevent academic theatre departments from moving whole-heartedly towards newer intellectual agendas.23 As a result, the conviction that – as you put it in 1992 – “performance is about more than the enactment of Eurocentric drama” is now so much of a given that the study of plays and playwrights has become increasingly unfashionable. I am generalizing here, obviously, but this judgment is not purely impressionistic. In 2007, I coordinated an international conference at the University of Leeds on the subject of “Performing Literatures” – as an attempt to ascertain the current disciplinary “state of play” between text and performance. Remarkably, of the 60 or so paper proposals that I received, less than half a dozen of them chose the discussion of specific play-texts as their central focus. There was much concern with theoretical matters of textuality, some concern with dramaturgy as an applied process, but the conference’s main focus ended up being heavily oriented toward discussion of “postdramatic theatre.”24 An even more telling “disciplinary snapshot” was provided a year later by my experience as a member of the national peer-review panel examining the “research outputs” of all our UK colleagues in “Drama, Dance and the Performing Arts,” for the government’s 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. During the course of the assessment process, I encountered vast swathes of work concerned with performance (little p) and experimental theatre practices, but comparatively speaking, very little work concerned with plays or playwriting.25 This impression, shared by other panelists, resulted in the following comment in the panel Chair’s summary statement: The areas of theatre history, and of dramatic literature and its performance, continue to be important in some departments … Generally, however, as a proportion of the overall research picture, the number of outputs in these areas is very considerably reduced since 2001. Conversely, over the period there has been a great increase in the range, breadth and diversity of research in experimental theatre practice and contemporary performance studies.26 While your 1992 pronouncement on string quartets was no doubt intended as a provocation to entrenched traditions and orthodoxies, in UK theatre departments we have now reached the point, for better or worse, where a

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reflexive disinterest in plays and playwriting seems to have become the new orthodoxy. Let me be clear: I’m not attempting to blame you, Richard, for disciplinary developments in the United Kingdom – although certainly you have been one of a number of very influential American voices informing British debates. But I suppose I am saying, “be careful what you wish for” – because it might not be quite what you anticipated. Certainly, in the United Kingdom, we need to begin questioning the magnified “elitism” of our obsessing over a tiny sector of experimental performance practice which has very little impact or purchase even on “mainstream theatre,” let alone British culture at large. Indeed, we have become so involuted that we can easily end up discussing long-standing ensemble companies such as Forced Entertainment as if they are “the establishment.” And yet, as a colleague of mine recently observed, there are leading figures at Britain’s National Theatre who have never even heard of Forced Entertainment – a fact which reflects not so much their own ignorance as the still relatively small audience base that the company plays to. I have been in Forced Entertainment audiences that consisted largely of students bussed in by their lecturers. And yes, mea culpa. As this last anecdote perhaps indicates, we have reached a point in the United Kingdom where the “legitimate” theatre and our university theatre departments have become largely separate, parallel worlds. In universities, we teach our students about forms of performance practice that have little relation to anything happening in the country’s major theatres. A student might, for example, become an accomplished exponent of experimental live art practice, but once outside the university will discover that there are even less livings to be made in this field than in regular acting. This student might well resort to re-entering higher education, in order to pursue “practice as research” at graduate level, and then eventually seek employment teaching what s/he has learned to another generation of students. And thus we end up in a spiraling feedback loop – with a self-perpetuating focus on practices that people outside of theatre departments are barely even aware exist. “I think what’s extraordinary,” remarked playwright Mark Ravenhill in a recent interview, is the extent to which we’ve developed such a total division between … what a lot of theatre academics value and study, and the practice that they teach, and what’s actually happening in British theatre practice. They are two totally different worlds with two different vocabularies and, on the whole, they exist completely independent of each other. Certainly the pragmatic, often rather dull British theatre would benefit

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from some of the thinking that is going on in some British universities. But British universities would benefit hugely from some understanding of the pragmatics of working in practice. There’s a need to build bridges, to look at how both sides can mutually enrich each other. There are some universities that you visit and the performance studies work becomes so abstracted and so divorced from practice outside of academia that it feels very sterile.27 I hope it does not seem overly rude, Richard, if I mention that your own textbook, Performance Studies: An Introduction, strikes me as a prime example of such theoretical sterility. In the index to its original, 2002 edition, there are only two references to “text.” One turns out to refer to text messaging with cell phones – which you describe as one of a number of recent technological developments in our everyday lives that demonstrates the new ubiquity of performance: “writing, speaking, and just about everything else is being transformed into performances.”28 Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t: the emergence of Facebook, Youtube and Twitter since 2002 might seem to underline your point, but are these electronic communication forms necessarily any more “performative” than the traditional forms they seem to be replacing – such as, well, letter-writing? And what do we really gain by regarding such communications as “performances,” other than a further generalization and dilution of our disciplinary focus? As Alan Read pointedly remarks in his recent book Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement, performance studies has “increasingly marginalized its operations by multiplying its objects of study without giving equal reconsideration to its efficacy as an interpretive strategy.”29 Coupled with this ever-broadening spectrum, we find in Performance Studies: An Introduction a concomitant refusal any longer to countenance the use of the word “text” – let alone others such as “plays” or “drama” – in conjunction with live performance. The other index reference for “text” leads us to a section in which you suggest dispensing with that word as a descriptor for the scripts or structures around which performance events are built. Arguing instead for such blueprints to be labeled “proto-performances” (or, delightfully, “proto-p”), you note that “terms such as ‘dramatic text’ and ‘performance text’ are commonly used, [but] I choose not to use them here because although ‘text’ can be understood dynamically, as an action, it remains linked to writing both in a specific literary sense and in its extended Derridean meaning.”30 You never explain why, exactly, these “links” should be considered a drawback, but the implication seems to be that “writing” is simply not “dynamic” enough, unless perhaps it comes to us as a text message. Otherwise, it remains too “literary” – and literature, like the string quartet, is just so nineteenth century. As for “writing in its extended Derridean meaning,” your objection here would seem to be that

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the Derridean usage is too all-encompassing. There is nothing outside the text, Derrida famously announced. Instead, you want to propose a world where there is nothing outside performance (“just about everything … is being transformed into performances”), so prior totalizing claims like Derrida’s need to be quietly sidelined. The avant-garde’s traditional suspicion of text has morphed into global conceptual domination. Except, of course, that it hasn’t, because the only people interested in such totalizing claims are those who already have an investment in performance studies as a subject area. Read is quite right to question the efficacy of such self-fulfilling interpretive strategies, despite the rhetoric of efficacy and “challenge” that seems de rigeur in so much performance studies theorizing (a phenomenon that Jon McKenzie drolly refers to as “the liminal norm”). With this in mind, Richard, I would like to propose that your “just about everything” approach should be quietly parked in a layby somewhere. In its stead, we might wheel out and dust off another, much more useful conceptual model that you proposed in your book Performance Theory, back in 1977. The “concentric circles” scheme outlined in your chapter “Drama, Script, Theater and Performance” is still applicable to a broad spectrum of performance practices, but demonstrates no awkwardness or embarrassment around notions of text, and openly foregrounds its reliance upon theatre practice for its conceptual basis. This scheme, if I may précis it briefly, reads performances in terms of ever-intensifying “heat” – with “the smallest, most intense (heated up) circle” being the “drama.” This “written text, score, scenario, instruction, plan or map” can be passed from age to age or culture to culture without person-to-person transmission of information. The circle that encompasses the drama is that of the “script” – the detailed outline for a specific, embodied performance, which needs to be communicated directly to performers by a director, conductor, stage manager or equivalent (“the transmitter is not a mere messenger”). Encompassing this ideal script is the “theatre,” which you describe as “what the performers actually do during production” – the live enactment on a given occasion of “the drama and/or script,” with all the temporal variance that such enactments are subject to. Finally, the outermost circle is “performance” – “the whole constellation of events” surrounding the “theatre” on a given night, including the conduct and reactions of spectators, front-of-house facilitators, and so forth.31 This model provides a helpful corrective to a problem that Alan Woods identified back in 1989, in his essay “Emphasizing the Avant-Garde: An Exploration in Theatre Historiography.” Woods questioned the construction of a twentieth-century performance history based myopically on avant-garde achievements at the expense of any adequate consideration of more popular theatrical forms. His argument might be summarized via the concentric circle model: for Woods, the prioritization of the avant-garde was

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achieved through an obsessive focus on “drama” and “script” – that is, with ideal performances as read by ideal spectators – rather than with the actual impact of actual performances upon real-world audiences. “The social function of theatre tends to be overlooked when historians emphasize the art form itself,” Woods wrote, “rather than the audience and the ways in which it uses the theatre.”32 It seems to me – and there is a nice linguistic irony here – that contemporary performance studies is still very largely preoccupied with “drama” and particularly “script,” while “theatre” and “performance” are frequently overlooked. (Hence Ravenhill’s sense that “the pragmatics of working in practice” have been somewhat forgotten.) You have given us the tools with which to reassess this situation, Richard, and so I hope we can begin to do so, collectively, and with some urgency. What exactly is the specific impact of a given “drama” (let’s say, The Bacchae of Euripides), when it becomes part of a particular “script” (let’s say, your Dionysus in 69), and is enacted as “theatre” in a specific time and place (let’s say, downtown New York in 1968), with all its attendant “performances” of ticket selling, program buying, and the rest? Of course, serious reconsideration of these combined factors might lead us back to something that looks oddly like “theatre history studies,” as terribly unfashionable as that sounds. Yet it is worth remembering that (to paraphrase Karl Marx) those who forget history are doomed to repeat it as farce. Perhaps I’m digressing again, but my point is essentially this: the weird prejudice against plays and playwrights currently apparent in performance studies is not only historically shortsighted and poorly theorized, but symptomatic of a more general social and historical shortsightedness in the discipline that may prove injurious to our long-term health. The enactment of written drama has survived as an art form since the days of Aeschylus, and it is not about to roll over and die in the twenty-first century just because a few academics are disappointed by some of its current incarnations. (So too was Aristotle, in his day.) So to return to Mark Ravenhill’s point, maybe we should stop sequestering ourselves in radically sterile ivory towers, and start trying to re-engage with the text-based theatre that most members of the public still assume we study. Maybe, if we feel it is not living up to its potential, we can help inspire debates that might improve it – that might help it become more culturally relevant. At the same time, though, we might learn a few things from it, if we looked at it properly. We might even find that some of those peculiar things called “plays” – that have somehow managed to battle their way through all the economic disincentives, and find an audience – are as engaging and provocative as any little p performance, even when performed as their authors envisage.

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Well Richard, I hope I’ve managed to communicate something of what I meant to say. Bob Dylan, as usual, puts it better: “may you stay forever young.” Until next time, Steve

Notes My thanks to James and Cindy for inviting me to contribute to this collection, and to Rebecca Schneider, Maria Delgado, and Maggie Gale for valuable conversations along the way. 1. Stephen Bottoms, “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy,” Theatre Topics 13.2 (2003). 2. See the back cover of the nineties re-issue of Environmental Theater (Schechner, 1994). Richard Schechner, “TDR Comment: A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” TDR 36.4 (1992): 8. 3. Richard Schechner, “TDR Comment: Theatre Alive in the New Millennium,” TDR 44.1 (2000): 5. 4. Schechner, “TDR Comment: Theatre Alive in the New Millennium”: 6. 5. Of course, some might quibble that Smith is a performance artist, not a playwright, but she herself probably would not. It’s a case which merely underlines the fatuousness of attempts to draw categorical distinctions between the two terms. 6. James M. Harding, Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, 4. 7. Quoted in Richard Schechner, Performance Theory. London and New York: Routledge, [1977] 1988, 76. 8. Schechner, Performance Theory, 77. 9. Schechner, Performance Theory, 76. 10. Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 14. 11. Jacques Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” [1978] trans. Alan Bass. Reprinted in Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1997, 43. 12. Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty”: 54–5. 13. Schechner, “TDR Comment: A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy”: 8. 14. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater [new and expanded edition]. New York: Applause, 1994, xvi–xvii. 15. See, for example, Richard Schoch, 2005. “‘A Supplement to Public Laws’: Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, and Hamlet, with alterations,” Theatre Journal 57.1 (2005): 21–32. 16. Stephen Bottoms, Playing Underground. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 17. Richard Schechner, “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde,” Performing Arts Journal 5.2 (1981): 55.

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18. John Lahr, “Getting By with No Help from Her Friends,” New York Free Press, January 30, 1969: n.p. 19. See Ellen McKay, “Toward a New Theatre History of Dionysus,” Theatre History Studies 26 (2006): 71–87. 20. Schechner, “TDR Comment: A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy”: 9. 21. Schechner, “TDR Comment: A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy”: 10. 22. Schechner, “TDR Comment: A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy”: 10. 23. Indeed, thanks to the Thatcher government’s abolition of tenure, and the higher education funding freezes it presided over in the 1980s – resulting in a whole “missing generation” of academic appointments – the discipline here is now populated and animated largely by people under the age of 45. 24. The latest neologism for little p performance: see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. The best papers from this conference were completed and collected in the “Performing Literatures” edition of Routledge’s Performance Research journal, 14.1 (March 2009), co-edited by Stephen Bottoms and Richard Gough. 25. It’s also notable, bearing out my earlier point, that I saw only a tiny handful of pieces that might be construed as researching Performance with a big P. 26. Christopher Baugh, “RAE2008 UOA 65 subject overview report.” Pdf. download from www.rae.ac.uk/pubs/2009/0v (page 6). 27. Mark Ravenhill, “A Challenge: Creating Collaborations Present and Future.” Interview with Maria M. Delgado for the consultation report, The Value of Arts and Humanities Research to Life in the UK. London: Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2008, 1. 28. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002, 4. 29. Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 31. 30. Schechner, Performance Studies, 192–3. 31. Schechner, Performance Theory, 72. 32. Alan Woods, “Emphasizing the Avant-Garde: An Exploration in Theatre Historiography,” Interpreting the Theatrical Past, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989, 171.

3 Experimenting with an Unfinished Discipline: Richard Schechner, the Avant-Garde and Performance Studies James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal

No theatre theorist has been more instrumental in developing modern performance theory or for exploring the relationships between practical and theoretical work in theatre research and in social science research than Richard Schechner. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2004

I Putting the beast in the belly The histories of American avant-garde performance are replete with examples of experimental artist-practitioners who have maintained close ties to the academy. But there are few figures who present a more compelling case than Richard Schechner. As a theatre practitioner, teacher, scholar, and theorist Schechner has spent almost half a century pushing the performance community (its practitioners and its scholars) in profoundly new directions. Few performance practitioners allied with the avant-garde have been more successful than Schechner in bridging the often competing terrains of the artistic and academic worlds, and one would be hard pressed to find anyone who has grappled longer or more thoroughly than Schechner with the question of whether a vanguard sensibility can transform the academy from within. Martin Puchner sheds some light on this very process by noting, for example, that Schechner’s experimental theatre work with The Performance Group “must be seen as part of a nexus of activities that include Schechner’s editorship of The Drama Review (TDR) – as well as the theoretical work that ultimately led to the full-fledged formulation of performance theory.”1 While Puchner’s comments focus primarily on how Schechner’s work in performance theory can illuminate his work in avant-garde theatre, the converse is arguably also true. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that Schechner’s work in the avant-garde has exercised a defining influence on his contribution to the formation of performance studies as a discipline. Evidence of this influence is plentiful. There are seeds of it even in how he has come to define the avant-garde, particularly the idea of the intercultural 39

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avant-garde that Schechner describes in The Future of Ritual when he argues: “Intercultural performances occur across an enormous range of venues, styles, and purposes. What is avant-garde is when the performance does not try to heal over rifts or fractures but further opens these for exploration.”2 It is hard not to notice in Schechner’s embrace of an intercultural avant-garde the broad cultural diversity of performances that are a mainstay of performance studies. Similarly, it is easy to see in his embrace of a vanguard exploration of rifts and fractures a foreshadowing of Shannon Jackson’s admonishment ten years later that performance studies scholars need to heed Gerald Graff’s call to “teach the conflicts.”3 Similar evidence of this influence can be found in virtually every chapter of Schechner’s book Performance Studies: An Introduction, where examples drawn from avant-garde artists from Alfred Jarry and John Cage to Anna Halprin and Coco Fusco repeatedly illustrate the notions of performance his book explores. But nowhere is the link between the avant-garde and performance studies better crystallized than in Schechner’s own bold assertion that “if performance studies were an art, it would be avant-garde,” an assertion that he supplements with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s description of the performance studies program at NYU as having taken its “lead from the historical avant-garde and contemporary art, which have long questioned boundaries between modalities and gone about blurring them.”4 Provocative though this association of performance studies with the avantgarde might be, its implications have never really been explored, except to the extent that Schechner’s career itself might be characterized as a profound exploration of the link between the avant-garde and what has become performance studies. But it is precisely that exploration which warrants critical examination. For in Schechner’s work the association of the avant-garde with performance studies is traceable back to the earliest days of his career as an academic and practitioner when he was first developing the notions of performance that would later prove to be so influential. It is there that this chapter finds its focus. It is there that one finds in Schechner’s early work with the Free Southern Theater and with The Performance Group cultural negotiations that, seen in retrospect, are deeply troubling for the connection that Schechner has long drawn between the avant-garde and performance studies.

II The Free Southern Theater: designating the experimental The link between the avant-garde and performance studies pushes us back to the earliest stages of Schechner’s career – well before the incredibly fecund dialogues between Schechner and Victor Turner at NYU, which were later to play such a crucial role in developing the anthropological currents of performance studies. As generative as Schechner’s work with Turner has been, the association of performance studies with the avant-garde invites

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us to look, for example, at Schechner’s first attempts to balance his work as a member of the Free Southern Theater (FST) with his academic responsibilities both as a beginning professor at Tulane University and as the newly minted editor of the Tulane Drama Review, which under his leadership would ultimately become TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. It is there that we find Schechner not only navigating the liminal spaces between the vanguard and the academy, but, at a theoretical level, also positioning the work of the FST within a vanguard that – initially at least – was specifically conceptualized as an alternative to an increasingly moribund mainstream theatre. In this respect, the FST’s vanguard status is but one example within a theoretical paradigm (a binary opposition privileging the avant-garde over mainstream theatre) that is a hallmark of Schechner’s early work as an editor and scholar and that is also structurally, indeed conceptually, related to the emerging notions of performance that would come to define Schechner’s contribution to performance studies. Yet, as an example, the FST is all the more important to these emerging notions of performance because the evolution of avant-garde sensibilities within the FST ultimately challenged Schechner’s conception of an avant-garde as such and did so in ways that radically challenge the association he has long drawn between performance studies and the avant-garde. The story of Schechner’s work with the FST is well known. In the winter of 1963, shortly after Monroe Lippman, the chair of Tulane University’s theatre department, had offered Schechner both a position at Tulane and the editorship of the Tulane Drama Review, Schechner received an additional invitation, this time from Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, and John O’Neal, the founding members of the FST. The three of them invited Schechner “initially as an advisor” to the newly formed theatre, but “within months [Schechner] joined O’Neal and Moses”5 as a producing director for the company. His most active work with the FST lasted until 1966 when the company began to gravitate more toward the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement and Schechner himself left Tulane in order to begin teaching at New York University in the fall of 1967. But a crucial component of that early history is Schechner’s own sense not only that he and the other members of the FST “were part of the Movement,” but also that they “were in the vanguard of the nonviolent strategy.”6 In no uncertain terms, locating the FST within the vanguard acknowledged both the path-breaking enactments of its political activism and the radical redefinition of theatre and its audiences that this activism entailed. Much of that redefinition literally involved taking theatre out of the white mainstream and bringing it to black communities that had no real connection with American theatre to speak of. Moreover, the FST brought a kind of theatre to black communities that addressed the racist foundations of US culture, and it did so as an integrated company traveling at considerable personal risk within a deeply (and violently) segregated South.7 Open

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resistance to the institutionalized racism of Southern culture also challenged the basic conventions of American theatre. Indeed, Gilbert Moses argued that initially “a large part of the excitement generated by the idea” of the FST was not merely that “it would be integration operating in the deep South” but more generally that it would be “integration operating in the mainly unintegrated American theater.”8 While the challenge to a largely unintegrated American theatre arguably positioned the FST within an important artistic vanguard, that position also bore direct correspondence to the dichotomy that Schechner used to establish the Tulane Drama Review as the premier journal for the study of avant-garde performance in the United States (a status that it still has and that intersects with TDR’s focus on performance studies). Nowhere is this correspondence more evident than in the “Preface” to The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, where Dent, Schechner, O’Neal, and Moses dismissed Broadway and regional theatre as “irrelevant to black lives.”9 That pointed dismissal overlapped with Schechner’s own dismissal of Broadway in the second, now famous, editorial that he penned as Editor of the Tulane Drama Review: “You choose Broadway and I’ll choose an experimental theatre. There are many roads to truth. But neither of us can choose both Broadway and an experimental theatre. That’s a contradiction in intention.”10 This same contradiction was only made clearer when the choice concerned what was relevant to black lives. Indeed, the choice was obvious when it was between a theatre that, at great personal risk, experimented with bringing political theatre to black communities, or the Broadway theatre that, at no risk to the status-quo, made little room for people of color on the stage, in the audience, or in the narratives it told. At a conceptual level, Schechner’s embrace of experimental theatre in those early years as Editor of the Tulane Drama Review established a functioning dichotomy that positioned the journal and Schechner’s own work in opposition not only to conventional notions of theatre but also to conventional scholarly approaches to theatre. In this respect, the choice of experimental theatre over Broadway broke a path for the kind of scholarship that would evolve into performance studies. Though other examples exist of what we might call “avant-garde/performance studies” scholarship, two are worthy of note here: the roundtable discussion with the key players in the FST that Schechner published in 1965 and the foundational essay “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” that Schechner first published in 1966. When citing his own “reasons for getting involved in the FST” during that roundtable discussion, not only does Schechner refer to classic signatures of the avant-garde like “the intersection between political and artistic forces,” not only does he implicitly link the FST with the avant-garde’s exploration of rifts and fractures by arguing that the “theatre is not a great leveler, but a great distinguisher,” but he also asserts his “belief that theatre is the most universal of the arts.”11 In this latter assertion, Schechner subtly touches

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upon the notions of performance that he would introduce the following summer in his seminal essay “Approaches to Theory/Criticism.” There, in a discussion of “public performance activities of men,” Schechner pauses to provide readers with one of his earliest definitions of “performance” as a broad category. The first version of “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” is certainly remarkable for taking as its point of departure a polemical break with long established trends in theatre scholarship – a break that specifically challenges influential early twentieth-century Cambridge scholars who speculated that the origin of theatre (tragedy and comedy) was to be found in a common Primal Ritual. Rather than offering an alternative theory of origin, Schechner proposes what he characterizes as five autonomous types of “public performances” that are horizontally related rather than vertically (in other words, none derived from the other while each nonetheless shares characteristics with the others).12 Although this alternative to the Cambridge thesis of origin marks the emergence of “performance” as a distinct category for scholarly analysis and study in Schechner’s work, the context of this emergence is as striking in its use of examples from the avant-garde. Schechner draws heavily on works from the theatre of the absurd and the “‘new theatre’ of the Happenings, Events, Activities, Film, Theatre, and so forth”13 – in short, from a broad swath of avant-garde currents. Indeed, the essay is peppered with references to the Happenings and to figures from the avant-garde like Artaud, Cage, Kaprow, and Halprin (and Grotowski even makes his way into the opening passage of the version of the essay that Schechner later published in Public Domain14). While the link between Schechner’s notion of performance and his substantial scholarly commitment to the avant-garde remains a constant in his work from “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” (1966) to Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002, 2006), the sense of the avant-garde that emerges in “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” also coincided with a turning point in his affiliation with the FST that culminated in his resignation as chairman of the FST’s board. (Schechner had already earlier resigned as producing director after concluding that his other responsibilities had rendered him an “armchair revolutionary”15 while others were taking genuine personal risks touring Purlie Victorious and Waiting for Godot.) That turning point was in part an outgrowth of the factional divisions that erupted within the group toward the end of 1965, divisions that members of the FST associated specifically with what they called “the black-white question”16 and that Schechner attributed, among other things, to the profound impact that the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X had on the movement in the South and on individual members of the FST like Gilbert Moses and Denise Nicholas.17 The “black-white question” proved to be divisive within the group, and there is certainly much to debate about the racial tensions associated with the question that provoked resignations from performers and Board

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members and that fueled the FST’s movement toward an all-black theatre. But, seen from a historical perspective, one of the more interesting consequences of the racially charged divisions within the FST is that they expose the problematic legacy of the vanguard itself – at least as it was conceptualized at the time by Schechner who, reflecting toward the end of the sixties on his own resignation as chairman of the FST’s board, said he had been “ready to quit anyway” since at the time he “was becoming interested in happenings and environmental theater and … thought the FST was necessary but square.”18 Schechner’s is an odd explanation. From its founding, the FST was one of the most politically innovative and courageous theatres in the country, and by the mid-1960s it was gravitating toward the Black Arts Movement, which gave rise to one of the decade’s most compelling avant-garde aesthetics. Coming at the time that Schechner’s comments did, the image of the Happenings as hip and the FST as square is thus striking in terms of the cultural prerogatives it reinforces – particularly if one considers that a longstanding criticism of the Happenings is that they catered largely to white audiences. Moreover, the “squaring” of the FST in Schechner’s explanation of his resignation was not an isolated comment. It followed a crucial letter from Schechner to John O’Neal in March of 1966 that in no uncertain terms was dismissive of the FST’s emergent black political aesthetic and that accused the FST of having lost its experimental/avant-garde verve. Schechner wrote O’Neal: For me the FST should be (how horrible that moral “should” reads!) an experimental theater: its art forms should be as audacious as its social setting. But the FST is just another little theater, black instead of white or taffy or brown or what-have-you. … But no artistic audacity. No experimentation with forms. And as a little theater the FST is not particularly successful.19 What is surprising about Schechner’s comments to O’Neal is how little validity they grant to a boldly experimental decision within the FST to give up “an aesthetic based in the integration project of the civil rights movement, in favor of the goals of black subjecthood of the Black Arts Movement.”20 Indeed, this was a decision that one might literally and legitimately characterize as a decision to be a theatre that “distinguishes” rather than “levels.” More important still, the FST’s decision to favor the goals of the Black Arts movement raises fundamental questions about what constitutes an avant-garde and about who has the authority to convey the designation “avant-garde” regardless of whether “avant-garde” or the related term “experimental theatre” is used in the designation. Ironically enough, the answers to such questions might partially be distilled from the conceptual

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models for performance that surface in Schechner’s essay “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” – specifically the contrast between the “vertical” and “horizontal” that is pivotal in Schechner’s critique of the Cambridge scholars who speculated that theatre could be traced back to a Primal Ritual. While Schechner speaks in that article of five types of public performances that are “horizontally” rather than “vertically” related, the example of the FST suggests the need to conceptualize the history of the avant-garde horizontally as well. In other words, it behooves us to speak not of the avant-garde but of concurrent – potentially related but also potentially irreconcilable – avant-gardes. It behooves us to see in the example of the FST’s break toward the Black Arts movement the traces not of becoming “square,” but of an avant-garde still resonant enough to trouble the link that Schechner has long drawn between the vanguard and performance studies. And this is not merely a question of style.21 The consideration of such possibilities coincides with a more general scholarly trend of rethinking the basic theoretical and historiographical paradigms through which scholars conceptualize the avant-garde. Whether that trend presses for an expanded horizontal definition of the avant-garde or a fundamental cultural realignment of what one deems avant-garde, the implications for Schechner’s association of performance studies with the vanguard are the same. Despite the clean linearity implied by the term “avant-garde” and despite the logical progression implied in associating performance studies with the avant-garde, the association allies the former with a tradition whose first and most enduring performative22 moment among scholars (from Michael Kirby, to Christopher Innes and Günter Berghaus to name only a few) has been the presumption of a genealogy that ought to be questioned. To associate performance studies with the avant-garde is thus to suggest a continuum where the presumed point of origin is a scholarly ideological construct that has a long history of reinforcing white normative standards and of keeping its valued meanings within a white Western paradigm. To associate performance studies with the avant-garde is, in short, to subjugate the former to the questionable genealogies of the latter. Yet, if, as Shannon Jackson has argued, “the history of a discipline changes depending upon where one decides to begin,”23 then every history of the discipline is a bit of an experiment, and the crucial question about any beginning (beyond the mere question of plausibility) is what the selected beginning offers in terms of the critical perspective it yields. It is with this question in mind that we can turn to the wherefore of Schechner’s association of performance studies with the histories of the avant-garde. At one level, of course, the association highlights what one might call performance studies’ radical chic. But the real advantage that Schechner has gained through the association is to position performance studies within the sphere of the experimental – making it a permanent work-in-progress and suggesting an infinitely adjustable dynamic of trial and error. Some experiments

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succeed, others involve mistakes, and some do a little bit of both like Schechner’s endeavors with the FST. It is precisely with such a notion of experimentation that Schechner, Dent, and Moses opened The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater. The opening lines to their Preface read: “The FST is not finished – washed up; nor is it finished – a fully realized project. The FST has suffered its beginnings, made its mistakes, had its triumphs, gone through many changes. And it is all unfinished, all incomplete. Theater continues.”24 The operative assumption in the association that Schechner posits is arguably that such descriptions are equally applicable to performance studies as well. The advantage of associating performance studies with the avant-garde, then, is that it situates performance studies’ diverse cultural projects within a frame of the always still provisional where the flashpoints of cultural exchange remain open to renegotiation and revision: to trial and error and trial again. Indeed, such renegotiations occur between a wide variety of cultures and communities.

III The experimental imperative: PS and its spectators Within the avant-garde, one of the key sites of these renegotiations has been the traditional separation of audience and performers, and Schechner’s own work, both as a practitioner and theorist, has consistently advocated a radical rethinking of the audience and its role in performance events. This same advocacy is implied in the explanation that he gave for resigning his position as chair of the FST’s board (e.g., he had become “interested in Happenings and environmental performance studies”). Given the link that Schechner has drawn between the avant-garde and performance studies, there is potentially much to be gained from a consideration of how the question of audience in Schechner’s work within the avant-garde sheds light on our understanding of performance studies’ audience. Perhaps the most famous example of this rethinking in Schechner’s own work occurs in his classic Environmental Theater, where he discusses at length the strategies he employed while directing The Performance Group. The broad redefinition of theatrical space in Environmental Theater may be the book’s most enduring contribution to theatre history, but if the book foreshadows the link connecting experimental theatre to performance studies, then that foreshadowing centers on the audience. Commenting specifically on Dionysus in 69, Schechner notes: “Audience participation expands the field of what a performance is, because audience participation takes place precisely at the point where the performance breaks down and becomes a social event.”25 As a social event, it also falls within the broad spectrum of performance studies – particularly within the realm of performance studies that emerged from Schechner’s intense interest in Victor Turner’s anthropological model of “social drama.”26 Indeed, Schechner’s arguments in Environmental Theater literally serve as the backdrop to his subsequent work a decade later

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in pivotal performance studies texts like Between Theatre and Anthropology where, contesting the traditional distinction between ritual and theatre, Schechner argues that in “transformative performances” spectators tend to “have a stake” in seeing that performances succeed. He supplements this argument by suggesting that within the American avant-garde a desire to address the lack of a shared stake in the potential transformative power of the theatrical experience motivated “the experiments of the sixties and seventies” – specifically those that he pursued with TPG.27 With regard to Schechner’s experiments with audience participation in his work as a practitioner – experiments that have taken a wide variety of forms beyond that for which his production of Dionysus in 69 is most famous – the results tend to be most relevant for performance studies when they are most decidedly problematic. Two specific examples come to mind, and both are very different, from Dionysus in 69. The first goes back again to Schechner’s affiliation with the FST and to a noted disparity between the theatre’s selected repertoire and the audiences for whom they performed. The second, as we will see momentarily, centers on TPG’s trip to India in 1976 where they performed Mother Courage and Her Children. At one level, the first instance is the more complicated because it centers partially on the FST’s production of Martin Duberman’s In White America, which became a mainstay in the company’s repertoire, and which, it is important to note, Schechner did not direct (John O’Neal was the director). While this production needs to be contextualized in its relation to other FST productions like Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious (which Schechner did direct), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Bertolt Brecht’s Señora Carrara’s Rifles, the significance of the FST’s production of In White America is two-fold. First of all, as Elizabeth Sutherland noted in 1964, the production was originally intended “as an experiment: to find out how Mississippi Negroes … would react” to a play that Martin Duberman himself had described as being “addressed to white liberals – not to Mississippi Negroes.”28 In this respect, the production falls not just within the broad category of the experimental but specifically within a category of the experimental where the stakes that spectators have in the performance are of fundamental significance to the assessment of the work and, ultimately, of the FST’s own sense of direction. Schechner was very much a part of this latter assessment, particularly in the spring of 1966 when intense and often antagonistic debates within the FST erupted. Gilbert Moses and Schechner later described the debates as “a fantastic period of disintegration and soulsearching” where “the central conflict was the black-white thing”29 and where, according to Thomas Dent, Moses and Schechner were “the main antagonists.”30 In many respects, the debates centered on questions of whether FST productions like In White America really addressed their audiences and whether they were representative of the kind of theatre and values that the FST

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ought to reinforce. But the debates had really begun earlier. By November of 1965, Moses Gilbert was arguing that In White America had already served its purpose and that with their productions of In White America and Señora Carrara’s Rifles, the FST was no longer addressing itself to its audience, but rather “to some academic and white standard” that they “should not concern … [themselves] with.” Moreover, he argued that the FST should take a decidedly “non-integrationist direction,” and, in a political gesture aimed at highlighting oppression in the black community, he suggested that the FST be renamed “The Third World Theater.”31 These were not mere rhetorical gestures. They were fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the FST and its audiences, and concerned at a level intense enough that in a 1967 letter to John O’Neal, Moses stated bluntly, “I think Richard and I want two kinds of theater.” Inasmuch as Schechner’s interests at the time of Moses’s letter were shifting, by his own account, toward environmental theatre, one might think that the differences to which Moses referred were between a theatre that enveloped the audience and one that maintained a traditional division between performers and spectators. Although Moses was not suggesting anything that resembled the kind of environmental theatre that would make Schechner and TPG famous, by 1967 he was arguing that he saw “reason only for: … a theater in which the community participates”32 – a theatre in short for, from, and by black communities. In the vision of that theatre, Moses called for a fundamental inversion of the FST’s priorities. He sought an orientation that would live up to the name “The Third World Theater” by catering neither to white audiences nor to white liberal conceptions of integration – conceptions that, under the aura of diversity ultimately kept the structures of white authority intact. As O’Neal himself argued: “The word ‘integration’ assumes the status quo – white on top, black at the bottom.”33 Moses pushed this same conclusion further, not only rejecting the subtle reaffirmation of the status quo in the original integration project of the FST but also adapting a profoundly antiimperialist idea to the needs of a newly focused FST: Before that theater is built which uses white and black actors indiscriminately, a theater for … [the] black community is necessary. I’m not saying that the FST should not use white actors or actresses, but I am saying that they should be used when we have a play that we want to do that requires them, instead of having to do a play using white actors because they are a part of the FST.34 Some forty years after Moses penned this argument in his letter to O’Neal, one matter that is genuinely worthy of consideration is the extent to which Moses’s anti-imperialist sentiments might suggest an orientation

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for performance studies that would radically shift its structures of cultural authority with regard to its leading voices, with regard to the make-up of its audiences and with regard to the terms by which those audiences have a say in the direction that performance studies takes in the future. What, we might ask, would be the consequence of transcribing a slightly altered version of Moses’s comments into one of performance studies’ more enduring debates? In the debate that centers around the question of whether as a discipline performance studies is imperialist, for example, what effect would his comments have if they read: “I’m not saying that … [performance studies] should not use white … [or first world scholars], but I am saying that they should be used when we have … [a topic] that requires them, instead of … [finding topics that legitimize first world scholars] because they are a part of” the field of performance studies? At the most basic level, such a transcription raises questions about the structures of cultural authority that not only govern whose voice is heard but that also govern the socio-political values those voices reinforce. Placed within this new context, Moses’s comments offer a compelling perspective on one of performance studies’ fundamental debates. It is worth rehearsing some of that debate. Back in the late 1990s, for example, Peggy Phelan grappled with unspecified accusations that performance studies practices “some of the very colonialist and empire-extending arts it had critiqued so aggressively.”35 Less than a decade later, the issue resurfaced, and Jon McKenzie formulated arguments similar to those of Phelan’s. McKenzie suggests that the anthropological approach taken by Schechner and others at NYU has meant that the program at Tisch “has been global from the get-go” and that “the combined effect of a broadly defined object field and wide geographical horizon has helped produce the perception in some of an underlying colonizing project.”36 Schechner himself entered into the debate not long after Janelle Reinelt, responding partially to McKenzie, expressed “serious doubts about the specific term ‘performance studies’ because of its tendency to be presented and received as primarily an Anglo-American disciplinary formation and because of the charges of imperialism that are sometimes laid at its door.”37 Schechner countered that “to call performance studies imperialist is to disregard the discipline’s instrumentality in engaging and including performance practices, scholars, and theories from all over the world.” “Clearly,” he argued, “problems and challenges exist – but dealing with these … is what PS does.”38 Most important of all, Schechner argued that performance studies is a “discipline-in-process,”39 and in this respect its cultural endeavors are experimental and, like live theatre, “unfinishable.”40 In no uncertain terms, Schechner’s response to the charges of imperialism is a full, compelling embrace of the always-provisional, ever-experimental, and openly negotiable: performance studies as an experimental performance.

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As appealing as the notion of a “discipline-in-progress” approach may be, Gilbert Moses’s interest in changing the FST to the Third World Theater suggests that the question of whether performance studies is imperialist is somewhat of a ruse. The issue is not whether performance studies is literally complicit in what Schechner calls a subtle ideological project of “enforcing its codes and values against and over the will and desire of subjugated peoples.”41 The more pressing issue is the question of audience: the question to whom performance studies is ultimately addressed. In this regard, it is worth noting that Schechner’s notion of performance studies as a “discipline-inprogress,” while linked in one respect to the concept of the experimental, is tailored rhetorically, in another respect, to what William Sonnega characterizes as the value structures of a “white liberal audience”42 – an audience, in other words, that is predisposed to see the problems and challenges that Schechner mentions as navigable obstacles on a path moving progressively forward rather than to see them as indicative of the kinds of results that performance studies repeatedly produces. Whatever forward, path-breaking movement is suggested by Schechner’s notion of a “discipline-in-progress” or by his association of performance studies with the avant-garde, the question of audience is thus a preface to the related question: whether as a field of inquiry performance studies subtly reinforces in the accomplishments it celebrates the Western, liberal (and largely white) normative values it takes as a point of departure when characterized as a “discipline-in-progress.”

IV

Mother Courage’s journey through India

This troubling aspect of the question of audience has long simmered in Schechner’s work as a practitioner, and if it played out initially in situations like the FST’s production of In White America, it resurfaced again in TPG’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children, which premiered to much acclaim in New York in 1975 and then toured in northern India in 1976 “with shows in New Delhi, Luknow, Calcutta (now Kolkata), Sinjole (a village near Calcutta), Bhopal, and Bombay (now Mumbai).”43 In New York, Stefan Brecht counted Schechner’s innovative production of Mother Courage among “the 3 best performances of plays … [of his father’s] other than by the Berliner Ensemble,”44 and critics like Bonnie Marranca praised Schechner for his use of “environmental theatre concepts” that resulted in “a production faithful in spirit to Brecht, and committed to experimentation as the avant-garde should be.”45 That commitment to experimentation resulted in a literal unpacking of Mother Courage’s wagon. In New York, “the whole garage was conceived to be the wagon,” and Schechner told Paul Ryder Ryan: “Wagons in America are identified with pioneers … and with traveling and going places. In choosing to have a store rather than a wagon, we created what we thought was an American image of a wagon.”46 As Schechner noted, furthermore, in the

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program for the New York production, TPG chose not to use “a naturalistic rolling wagon” but rather conceptualized the wagon as the entire performance space because they “wanted to explore a variety of spatial relations.”47 What the explorations actually meant had much to do with the audience itself. Once in India, Schechner, preparing notes for a meeting with the other members of TPG, recorded his thoughts “about what kind of theatre” he wanted, and they included a very clear interest in “how to involve the audience at every level and still keep professional standards” and how to “experiment with the whole range of what performance is – getting to, doing, going from – and to have performers and audience conscious of and participating in this whole range.”48 Arguably, it was not a matter of coincidence that these thoughts about theatre and TPG’s production of Mother Courage occurred in India. Within TPG, the production of Mother Courage and the trip to India had some linkage from the very beginning. Schechner recalls that the decision to do Mother Courage coincided with the decision for the group to travel to India. At a conceptual level there were connections as well that specifically related to Schechner’s more general interest in audience participation. As TPG developed the piece, spectators were welcome at “open rehearsals,” and Schechner notes that Mother Courage “thus developed under the public eye.” But even after the production was mounted, Mother Courage remained an evolving work-in-progress where spectators in both New York and in India mingled with the actors, and, famously, in a meal that was shared with the audience after Scene Three, audience members had the opportunity to “share their reactions, make suggestions and through their very behavior help test the production as it” further developed.49 Although this kind of audience participation was fundamentally different from the level of participation allowed in Dionysus in 69 (where audience participation led, for example, to unpredictable and now legendary results like Pentheus being kidnapped by a group of students attending the show50), the reactions, the suggestions and the behavior of audience members at Mother Courage generally helped the work evolve. In this respect, Schechner notes, “the creative work … never ended.” Though the structure remained the same, changes were made in New York “and in India too changes were made.”51 So within this never ending process, the audiences in India thus left their conceptual mark on the production as well. Unlike the changes in New York, however, the changes in India were largely the consequence of differences in class and culture – differences that also underscored the disparity between the personal rapport that Schechner had with specific Indian colleagues and the disconnect that often emerged between TPG and its Indian audiences. The foundation for the trip itself had been laid in 1971 when Schechner along with Joan MacIntosh made a trip to India, where they established what became life-long friendships with a number of individual theatre practitioners and scholars like Shyamonand Jalan and Dr Suresh Awasthi (whose

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lectures on Indian traditional theatre and modern theatre they had attended in Calcutta52 and whose idea it was to bring TPG to India53). As MacIntosh notes in the interview conducted for this volume, the friends they made in 1971 were instrumental in arranging TPG’s tour of Mother Courage and in providing “housing and accommodations” for the group while they traveled in India. As to the accommodations themselves, it would appear that the narrative account of them varies depending upon who does the telling, and the variations subtly map out the rough contours of the otherwise largely invisible and problematic terrain of cultural authority that governed not only what Schechner understood as audience participation, but also what qualified as an acceptable reaction or suggestion. Indeed, those variations strike at the very notion of what constitutes an audience as such and thus also at the site – the site of audience participation – where Schechner argues that “performance breaks down and becomes a social event.” Class distinctions regulated much of that terrain. MacIntosh commented in her notebook that the Bombay audience “was a wealthy crowd by and large.”54 Schechner and the other members of TPG noted that “the biggest shortcomings of the tour” centered on the fact that they “didn’t play to ordinary people in the cities” and that even when “ordinary people” or “the poor” would show up for the performance, they either “held back” at the invitation to see the show for free, or, according to Schechner, simply “couldn’t follow the play.”55 At one level, this meant that, whether they liked it or not, TPG repeatedly catered to a select audience – select enough, in fact, that at one point a Bengali director told Schechner that in their responses the audience was “being polite” and that “the only reason they didn’t bust up the show” was because TPG was “white.”56 At another level, this also meant that profoundly significant cultural reactions to TPG’s production were potentially buried beneath the judgment: “couldn’t follow the play.” The class dynamics of those reactions, which have everything to do with TPG’s production as a cultural event, carried over into their day-to-day affairs. Class issues shade the discussion of TPG’s accommodations as well. MacIntosh recalls that, though accommodations were often simple, members of the group were “treated like royalty” by the families that opened their homes to them: “We were all welcomed generously and fed and housed very well.” MacIntosh’s experiences, of course, coincided with Schechner’s since the two of them were married and traveling together at the time. But those experiences were not uniform within the group. Elizabeth LeCompte, by contrast, remembers in an interview also included in this volume: “we were all farmed out to different people – I remember living with people who wouldn’t allow me to eat at their family table.” Far from being treated as royalty, LeCompte was treated as a kind of outcast, and her explanation of the treatment she received is telling. LeCompte’s experiences were tied directly to reactions to the group’s performance of Mother Courage. She explains: “I was playing the whore [Yvette]. So, I was told that they thought I really was a whore.”

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Read in isolation, LeCompte’s observation might initially suggest a rather quaint, if somewhat awkward, inability among her hosts to distinguish between the role she played on the stage and the person she was as their guest. Reviews of the production, however, suggest that a much more complicated cultural dynamic was at play in the treatment that LeCompte received – one that marked profound cultural differences between TPG and its Indian audiences rather than one that separated those who could and could not distinguish between a character and a performer. Writing for the Theater Bulletin in March of 1976, Dipendu Cakrabarty argued, for example, that “the worst part of Mother Courage was the sex scene of Yvette’s (a prostitute). This need not have been shown so vividly is what Statesman and a lot of other papers said.” Cakrabarty explained further that “many regard[ed]” the scene in which LeCompte played the central role as Yvette the prostitute “as an attack on modesty.”57 Inasmuch as LeCompte – as a performer – was at the center of what was perceived to be an attack, she – not the character she played – bore responsibility (as did the other performers as well). In this respect, the issues at play in the treatment she received arguably had less to do with confusion about the character she played in Brecht’s drama than with what she was willing to do in public as a performer. Indeed, the perception of her performance as “an attack on modesty,” which is but one variation of the strong cultural reactions provoked by LeCompte’s performance of Yvette under Schechner’s direction, illuminates much more than the individual treatment that she received from her hosts. Acknowledging the legitimacy of those cultural reactions illuminates the structures of authority that regulated what Schechner considered to be acceptable audience participation and reaction at the site where “performance breaks down and becomes a social event.” Nowhere did those structures become more evident than in what Schechner calls the “sex problem” that haunted TPG’s performances of Mother Courage from Delhi to Calcutta. The “sex problem” crystallized in reactions to two decisions regarding the production: first, the decision to have LeCompte/Yvette perform a stylized simulation of intercourse with three soldiers in Scene Three,58 and second, the decision to have costume changes occur in a room that was left deliberately visible to the audience and that thus allowed audience members to observe performers like LeCompte partially disrobed59 (In fact, one critic in an unsigned review in the Hindi paper Vishvamitra claimed that “in full view of the audience, and in full illumination” both male and female “actors strip[ped] down completely and change[d].”60) Although the simulated intercourse involved no nudity and though it is unlikely that LeCompte or any other actor fully disrobed in the changing room,61 reactions to these aspects of the performance took on a life of their own. Indeed, those reactions arguably mark the moment when the performance – not conceptually, but literally, broke down and became a social event. The unscripted spontaneity of that event exposed a telling cultural flashpoint.

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Even critics like Kavita Napgal, who generally praised the performance for capturing “the Brechtian spirit” and for taking “theatre closer to what it is meant to be,” hesitated before the “excessive sex display” and argued that it was the “closest thing to a skin show for Indian audiences.”62 Photographs of the Indian production give some indication of why reactions to this segment of the performance were so strong. The photos bespeak a highly suggestive performance. They range from images of LeCompte on her back, her skirt hiked and legs spread in the air with a soldier atop her in the missionary position (Figure 1) to images of her on her hands and knees pretending to give one soldier a blow job while a second soldier simulates sex with her from behind (Figure 2). Such images provoked more than a feeling of “an attack on modesty.” In Calcutta, Ave Lawyer wrote in the Junior Statesman, that “apart from the more passive degrees of appreciation or dislike,” the responses from the audience “ranged from the actively indignant to the unabashedly prurient.” Lawyer noted that prior to the Calcutta performance, the Hindi press (presumably the unsigned review in Vishvamitra) had already drawn public attention to the scenes with Yvette and the soldiers, “exaggerating the play’s sole sexual encounter” and thereby “inspir[ing] many deluded readers to

Figure 1 The Performance Group in India touring Mother Courage and Her Children: Yvette with soldier (Photograph by Pablo Bartholomew, courtesy of Princeton University Library, Richard Schechner Papers and The Drama Review Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.)

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Figure 2 The Performance Group in India touring Mother Courage and Her Children: Yvette with two soldiers (Photograph by Pablo Bartholomew, courtesy of Princeton University Library, Richard Schechner Papers and The Drama Review Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.)

besiege the theatre gates.”63 Exaggerated or not, the promise of a sexually charged performance opened the door to salacious reactions that had their own performative life, one that spilled out into the street and served as a harsh reminder that not every moment when a performance breaks down and becomes a social event is a necessarily positive or desirable one. Reactions to the production even preceded its actual performance. Local men fought in the streets to see what they had concluded to be a prurient spectacle. Women, drawing the same conclusion about the production, “stayed away.”64 Tension between performers and the audience not only mounted, but that tension actually changed the performance. In her notebook, MacIntosh recorded her own frustration with the public’s fixation on the scene with Yvette and the soldiers, and that frustration bled over into her performance: “Bhopal. Yesterday intense rage which I liberated in the show. Slamming things around, yelling at the goons who came to the show to see sex. I was so enraged yesterday.”65 In Calcutta, Schechner personally intervened, adding a performance of his own. The critic Bindu Batra had noted that Schechner was always a part of the performances, explaining in a review written for the National Herald, first that environmental theatre seeks “to create an unorthodox relationship

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with the audience and provoke it into participation” and second that, like his actors, Schechner also sought such a relationship with his audiences, asking them during performances “to move and make room for certain scenes of the play.” The object, Batra added, was “to involve the spectators in the execution of the production.”66 But in Calcutta, Schechner shifted tactics, seeking not the audience’s involvement but their partial departure. Frustrated with the undue attention that the scene with Yvette was receiving, Schechner addressed the male-dominated audience in Calcutta during the interval and told them: “The sex scene is over, so if that’s what you came for, eat your supper and go.”67 Ave Lawyer reported that “a sheepish stream of about 100-strong trickled into the night,”68 and Dipendu Cakrabarty concluded that “Calcutta is fortunate enough not to have seen The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 because this involves actual body contact with the audience.”69 Beneath the surface, the “sex problem” arguably was less the fault of what Schechner characterized generally as “a repressive sexual censorship” than it was a reflection of a struggle over textual and cultural authority. At the most basic level, that struggle cast Schechner on one side, asserting that “MC is not a sex show”70 and Indian audiences on the other, unable perhaps to define what a sex show is but recognizing what would qualify as one – or what, at the very least, would approximate a “skin show” – in their own eyes. Yet the situation was arguably more complicated than this difference in interpretation might suggest. A month earlier, when TPG was in Delhi, they had already had a vigorous debate about the scene where Yvette services the soldiers. The debate started when M. N. Kapur (the Principal at the Modern School where they were performing and one of their sponsors) told them not only that the school’s governing board was concerned about the scene but also that reactions to the scene were distorting their production: “some people came to MC just to see it, others stayed away because of it.” In the debate that followed, the members of TPG decided that it was more important to show their Indian audiences “how Americans” stage MC than it was “to show how Indians would stage MC.” They did not want to tailor their production for Indian audiences. Significantly, it was Schechner who, in the debate, inclined toward making “some modification in the scene” out of respect for Kapur, and the only reason Schechner did not insist was because Kapur finally told him not to change anything and to “do what is right for your work.”71 Assuming that Schechner’s recollection of the particulars of that debate in Delhi is accurate, one might legitimately question whether the choice that the members of TPG made (between “how Americans stage MC” and “how Indians would stage MC”) was a choice that really addressed the issue raised by reactions to the scene with Yvette and the soldiers. Arguably, the issue had less to do with an American or Indian staging of MC than it did with the cultural dynamics of the audience and its reactions to whatever staging was

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decided upon. In this respect, the very idea of “how Americans stage MC” was overly restrictive – particularly with regard to a work of environmental theatre whose ideal conception, to follow Schechner, was “to involve the audience at every level” and “to have performers and audience conscious of and participating” in the “getting to, doing [and the] going from” of performance. The issue was not a choice between an American or Indian staging of MC. Acknowledged or not, the issue was always how TPG might stage MC in a manner that was sensitive to the need to negotiate a balance between TPG’s own professional standards and the complex cultural dynamics of their Indian audiences. Framing the choice as they did, TPG brushed aside the crucial consideration of the extent to which their decision was, in effect, demanding that Indian audiences behave like American audiences. The controversy over the sexually charged scene with Yvette and the soldiers was the flashpoint of that demand.72 Against the backdrop of their decision, TPG found themselves torn between the deep appreciation of their work, on the one hand, by critics like the one writing for the Times of India in Bombay (where they performed a couple of weeks after leaving Calcutta) and increasingly organized opposition from the audiences in Calcutta. Whereas the Bombay Times of India exclaimed that the production was “Fantastic!” and that “Never before has a Bombay audience been exposed to such an enriching theatrical experience,” back in Calcutta the final performance was met with demonstrations that accused Schechner of betraying Brecht by privileging overly sexualized imagery. Demonstrators carried signs that proclaimed, among other things, “Schechner Has No Right to Destroy Brecht’s Epic Theatre,” “Brecht Dealt with War, Schechner Deals with Orgasm,” and “Brecht Spoke of Reality and Struggle, Schechner Deals with Gags, Stunts and Sexual Perversion.”73 Responding to those demonstrations, Schechner asks whether it matters if TPG is or is not “true to Brecht” and he questions the rigidity of arguments assuming that because TPG “didn’t do Brecht as Brecht would have done it … [they] therefore … did it wrong.”74 Arguments like these find a ready echo in the poststructuralist readings of performance that W. B. Worthen formulates in his discussions of Victor Turner’s later collaborations with Schechner in the performance/anthropology workshop that they conducted at the Performing Garage75 and that Turner recounts in From Ritual to Theatre. Following a logic not unlike that articulated by Schechner in his defense of TPG’s production of Mother Courage, Worthen is particularly troubled, for example, by Turner’s concern that the enactments of Ndembu rituals by students in the workshop might “have seemed highly artificial” or “inauthentic.”76 Worthen questions Turner’s concern because, rather than conceptualizing performance as a broad spectrum, this concern ultimately reduces performance to a subservient mechanism of “fidelity” that presumably obtains legitimacy only insofar as it becomes “the faithful vehicle of … [an] immanent, authorized work”77 – regardless

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of whether that work is a literary text or a cultural ritual and, more significantly, of whether the work comes from the West or the East.

V Performance studies: at the crossroads of the experimental and intercultural Juxtaposing Schechner’s defense of TPG’s production of Mother Courage and Worthen’s critique of Turner’s concern with fidelity and authenticity in ritual (re)enactments arguably brings us to a central mechanism in the link that Schechner draws between the avant-garde and performance studies. It is not difficult to see in Schechner’s defense of taking experimental, interpretative license with dramatic literature an operative logic that finds its double in the tropes of critical theory and academic discourse. Indeed, with regard to textual and cultural authority, there is little that distinguishes Worthen’s critique of Turner from the arguments that Schechner, as an experimental performance practitioner, formulates when he shifts from the particulars of TPG’s production of Mother Courage to a more general statement about the relation of text to performance. “I have long taken the position,” he argues, “that a text is a skeleton, an outline, a plan, a map” and “that the body, picture, structure, and territory of a play can be actualized only in performance, at the immediate and unique encounter of performers and spectators.”78 At a conceptual/theoretical level, this general statement provides a powerful rebuttal to those who would impose a strict notion of textual authority upon the performance of Brecht’s works.79 Yet the context of its articulation situates Schechner’s embrace of the “unique encounter of performers and spectators” at a troubling crossroads of intercultural exchange not only where Schechner’s association of performance studies with the avant-garde hinges upon a notion of the experimental but also where the very concept of the experimental derives from the conviction, which he and Worthen share, that all cultural texts are but rough guidelines for an indeterminate range of potential options. Not coincidentally, this logic of experimentation licensed by a broad sense of textual and cultural indeterminacy is subtly rehearsed again in the now famous call for the establishment of performance studies departments that Schechner made in a keynote panel address at the 1992 Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference. In the published version of that address Schechner argues that “it is not only a question of studying different cultures from a scholarly perspective, but of seeing and doing rituals, dramas, celebrations, and festivals from Africa, Asia, Europe, Native America, and Latin America.”80 The doing described here, he explicitly calls “experimental work,”81 and there is little talk of anything that might be construed as a commitment to the possibility of authenticity or the pretense of fidelity to any of the cultural models of performance that Schechner mentions. Instead, the emphasis follows the dynamic of what Schechner, in his

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defense of TPG’s production of Mother Courage calls the “unique encounter of performers and spectators.” It resides within the “fertile rifts” and within the creatively energetic “eruptions” of an “interculturalism” conceptualized as a never settled “arena of struggle,”82 negotiation, and exchange. In this respect, the dynamics of what Schechner conceptualizes as the intercultural avant-garde and what he conceptualizes as the interculturalism of performance studies are one and the same. Ideally, the rifts and eruptions of such intercultural exchanges – whether defined as avant-garde or performance studies – would occur within a venue capable of neutralizing the hierarchies of power that mediate interactions within the global economies. That is, to follow Schechner, what performance studies attempts to facilitate. But this is not the legacy of the historical avantgarde, and whether it becomes the legacy of performance studies is still open to debate. If Schechner’s arguments about TPG’s production of Mother Courage are instructive about the chasm separating the ideal from its practical realization, then the challenge that remains within Schechner’s notion of performance studies is to find a mechanism that will both cultivate new audiences and actually empower them – whatever actually empowering them may mean in a given cultural and historical moment. For all its embrace of spectators and of their license, Schechner’s defense of TPG’s production of Mother Courage steps dangerously close to a kind of special pleading that lends itself to easy replication in performance studies as well. The issue here is not the argument about the “unique encounter of performers and spectators,” but the consequence of its selective application. Indeed, Schechner grants himself an interpretive liberty that his emphatic assertion “MC is not a sex show” denied his audience, and the consequence of that denial is the missed opportunity to explore the implications of profoundly important, popular notions of performance that, for example, gave little regard to the role that Elizabeth LeCompte assumed within the plot of Brecht’s drama and focused instead on what she as an individual performer was willing to do before the body politic. This missed opportunity is all the more significant when one considers how closely the disregard of plot in favor of a focus on the performer’s presence resembles what Victor Turner describes as Schechner’s interest in “poiesis, rather than mimesis: [in] making not faking.”83 With regard to performance studies itself – at least as it has been conceived by Schechner – the distinction between making and faking is not so much a distinction between the authentic and its counterfeit as it is an embrace of the immediacy of doing. That embrace involves a choice between an engaged, always incomplete, process of becoming and the pretense of having arrived. It is a choice between an exploration of the inexhaustible potential varieties of performative experience on the one hand, and the questionable prescriptive defense of authoritative interpretations of cultural performances on the other. To choose the former is to step into the experimental. But even the experimental has its governing presumptions. The characterization of

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performance studies as avant-garde conceptualizes performance studies as a project of forward progressive movement. Schechner has clearly cast his lot with this conception, and in doing so he has indisputably moved the entire profession forward. As Schechner would say, “Onwards…”

Notes 1. Martin Puchner, “The Performance Group: Between Theater and Theory,” in Restaging the Sixties, ed. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 314. 2. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual. New York: Routledge, 1993, 17. 3. Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 11. 4. Richard Schechner, Introduction to Performance Studies, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2006, 3–4. 5. Cindy Rosenthal, “The Free Southern Theater: Historical Overview,” in Restaging the Sixties, ed. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 263. 6. Richard Schechner, “The FST and Me,” in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, ed. Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner and Gilbert Moses. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, 211. 7. In the South in the early 1960s, a theatre that advocated and literally enacted integration was not without serious risks, even at times necessitating security measures like escorts from the Deacons for Defense and Justice (an armed selfdefense group of African Americans associated with the Civil Rights movement). 8. Gilbert Moses, in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, ed. Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner and Gilbert Moses. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, 9. 9. Thomas Dent, Richard Schechner, et. al., The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, xi. 10. Richard Schechner, “Intentions, Problems, Proposals,” Tulane Drama Review 7.4 (1963): 21. 11. Cited in Gilbert Moses et. al., “Dialog: The Free Southern Theater” [1965], in A Sourcebook of African-American Performance, ed. Anna Bean. New York: Routledge, 1999, 104. 12. Richard Shechner, “Approaches to Theory/Criticism,” Tulane Drama Review 10.4 (1966): 26–7. 13. Schechner, “Approaches to Theory/Criticism”: 26. 14. Richard Schechner, Public Domain. New York: Avon, 1969, 55. 15. Richard Schechner, “The FST and Me,” included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 217. 16. John O’Neal, “Letter to Gilbert Moses and Richard Schecher,” 15 February 1966, in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 99. 17. Richard Schechner, “The FST and Me,” included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 220. 18. Richard Schechner, “The FST and Me,” included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 222. 19. Richard Schechner, “Letter to John O’Neal,” 28 March 1966, in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 105. 20. Annemarie Bean, “The Free Southern Theater: Mythology and the Moving between Movements,” in Restaging the Sixties, 272.

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21. In The Future of Ritual, Schechner posits the notion of five avant-gardes, but reduces the differences to a question of style. 22. The point of reference here is J. L. Austin’s notion of performatives. 23. Jackson, Professing Performance, 10. 24. The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, xi. 25. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater [1973]. New York: Applause Books, 1994, 40. 26. For more in the notion of “social drama,” see Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982, 61–88. 27. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, 131, 148. 28. Elizabeth Sutherland’s article “Theater of the Meaningful,” originally published in The Nation on 19 October 1964, is included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 24–9. The cited passages are from page 25. 29. Moses and Schechner, The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 97. 30. Thomas Dent, The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 104. 31. Gilbert Moses, “Letter to John O’Neal,” 14 November 1965, included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 93. 32. Gilbert Moses, “Letter to John O’Neal,” March 1967, included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 100. 33. John O’Neal, “Dialog: The Free Southern Theater”: 110. 34. Gilbert Moses, “Letter to John O’Neal,” March 1967, included in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 101. 35. Peggy Phelan, “Introduction: the Ends of Performance,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York University Press, 1998, 5. 36. Jon McKenzie, “Comment: Is Performance Studies Imperialist?” TDR 50.4 (2006): 6. 37. Janelle Reinelt, “Comment: Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 2,” TDR 51.3 (2007): 8. 38. Richard Schechner, “Performance Studies without End,” TDR 51.4 (2007): 8. 39. Schechner, “Performance Studies without End”: 8. 40. Richard Schechner, “Theatre in the 21st Century,” TDR 41.2 (1997): 5. 41. Schechner, “Performance Studies without End”: 8. 42. William Sonnega, “Beyond a Liberal Audience,” in African American Performance and Theater History, ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 82. 43. Richard Schechner, email to authors, 21 August 2009. 44. Stefan Brecht, letter to Richard Schechner, 22 June 1975. Located in the Richard Schechner Collection in the Special Collections Library, Princeton University. Box 167, Folder 3. 45. Bonnie Marranca, “Mother Courage Re-Opens,” Soho Weekly News, 11 December 1975. Located in the Richard Schechner Collection in the Special Collections Library, Princeton University. Box 167, Folder 3. 46. Paul Ryder Ryan, “The Performance Group in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children,” TDR 19.2 (1975): 80. 47. Program for Mother Courage and Her Children, Saturday, 27 June and Sunday, 28 June 1975. Located in the Richard Schechner Collection in the Special Collections Library, Princeton University. Box 167, Folder 1. 48. Richard Schechner, “The Performance Group in India: February – April 1976,” in Over, Under and Around: Essays in Performance and Culture. Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2004, 90. 49. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 79.

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50. Schechner, Environmental Theater, 41. 51. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 80. 52. Richard Schechner, “Letter from Calcutta,” in Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramila. Calcutta: Seagull Press, 1983, 9. 53. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 80. 54. Joan MacIntosh, Excerpt from her notebook, included in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library at Princeton University, Box 167, Folder 3. 55. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 89, 86. 56. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 89. 57. Dipendu Cakrabarty, “Performance Group’s Mother Courage: A Valuable Experience,” Theater Bulletin (March 1976): 2. The review is included in the reviews of the Indian production of TPG’s Mother Courage in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library at Princeton University, Box 169, Folder 7. 58. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 83. 59. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 87. 60. This comment was printed in a review that, because it was clipped from a newspaper, is both undated and no longer identifies the newspaper where it was originally published. The clipping is included in the reviews of the Indian production of TPG’s Mother Courage in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library at Princeton University, Box 169, Folder 7. The attribution of the review to the paper Vishvamitra comes from Schechner who mentions the same review in “The Performance Group in India”: 87. 61. Schechner has long maintained that there was no nudity in the production. He has been consistent in this assertion, and among the many reviews of the performances in India, only the unsigned review in Vishvamitra suggests otherwise. 62. Kavita Nagpal, “Brecht’s War,” Hindustan Times, Delhi, 17 February 1976. Located in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library at Princeton University, Box 169, Folder 7. 63. Ave Lawyer, Junior Statesman, Calcutta, 1 May 1976. Located in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library, Princeton University, Box 169, Folder 7. 64. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 87. 65. Joan MacIntosh, Excerpt from her notebook (28 March 1976), included in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library at Princeton University, Box 167, Folder 3. 66. Bindu Batra, National Herald, 22 February 1976. The review is located in the Richard Schechner Collection at the Special Collections Library at Princeton University, Box 169, Folder 7. 67. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 87. 68. Ave Lawyer, Junior Statesman, 1 May 1976. 69. Dipendu Cakrabarty, “Performance Group’s Mother Courage: A Valuable Experience,” Theater Bulletin (March 1976): 2. 70. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 89. 71. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 83. 72. Though Paul Ryder Ryan, it is worth noting, included a photo of Yvette servicing the soldiers, he obviously did not consider its sexual connotations of significance since he never even mentioned the scene in his lengthy account of the New York production.

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73. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 92. 74. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 93–4. 75. This was actually an NYU course that met at the Performing Garage and, as Schechner recalled in email correspondence, the instructors included not only Victor Turner and Schechner, but also Edith Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, and, for part of the workshop, Erving Goffman as well (email correspondence with the authors, 21 August 2009). Turner’s account cites Alexander Alland and Goffman among those who participated (From Theatre to Ritual, 90). 76. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 96. Cited in Worthen, “Disciplines of the Text: Sites of Performance,” in The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Bial. New York: Routledge, 2007, 18. 77. Worthen, “Disciplines of the Text”: 18–19. 78. Schechner, “The Performance Group in India”: 93. 79. At the same conceptual/theoretical level, particularly with regard to the overlap that Schechner’s arguments on the skeletal nature of texts have with Worthen’s critique of Turner, Schechner’s general arguments on textuality arguably also provide a compelling response to more recent critics like David Mason who, in a rather strikingly prescriptive and essentialist reading of the Natyasastra (the Sanskrit manual for performers, directors, playwrights and theatre architects), has criticized Schechner’s use of Natyasastra in the formulation of the theories and practical exercises that Schechner associates with what he calls “Rasaesthetics.” What Mason overlooks is that Schechner’s own reading of the Natyasastra derives as much from the interpretative license he takes as an experimental practitioner as it does from his own vast knowledge as a theatre historian and performance theorist. See David Mason, “Rasa, ‘Rasaethetics’ and Dramatic Theory as Performance Packaging,” Theatre Research International 31.1 (2006): 69–83, and also Richard Schechner, “Rasaesthetics,” Performance Theory, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2003, 333–67. 80. Richard Schechner, “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” TDR 36.4 (1992): 9. 81. Schechner, “A New Paradigm”: 9. 82. Schechner, “A New Paradigm”: 7–8. 83. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 93.

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Part 2 Performance Studies Genealogies

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4 Wayang Studies? Paul Rae

It was all very hush-hush until it happened, and even then, most of us remained in the dark. I, for one, had no inkling that on 16 November 2006 the President and First Lady of the United States of America were visiting my hometown of Singapore, until it was over. Nor would the visit have been of more than passing interest to me, were it not for the means of its reporting once it had, indeed, passed. In direct contrast to the secrecy that preceded George W. and Laura Bush’s Singapore stopover (while en route to a meeting of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders in Hanoi), press coverage in the aftermath was copious. Glancing over that coverage the next day, I was struck by the fact that, despite and because of staying little more than 24 hours in Singapore, the Bushes occasioned a broad spectrum of performances. These included: a courtesy call on Acting President J. Y. Pillai; a trip to the Asian Civilizations Museum, where the Bushes observed a medley of “ethnic” dances by elementary school children, and joined in with a gamelan recital; a children’s reading session by Mrs Bush at the National Library; talks with Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, photo-op included; and a policy speech by Mr Bush on an elaborately dressed stage in a theatre at the National University of Singapore. In the speech, Bush spoke of “the long affection between the people of our two nations,” and reaffirmed America’s commitment to helping “build more hopeful societies throughout this vital part of the world.” He ended with the benediction “May God bless the people of Singapore.”1 The sentiment is unlikely to have been appreciated outside the theatre, where a handful of protestors defied Singapore’s strict laws on public assembly to jeer the presidential motorcade. A noticeably larger number of security personnel contained their movements and documented their actions. Such were the events that received coverage at the time. And indeed, now that the trip and its resulting rush of soundbites and images are over – a mere blip in a presidency whose more consequential moments are themselves rapidly fading into the historical distance, obscured by a fog of 67

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unintended consequences – it is traces of these events that remain. As of this writing (September 2010), an assiduous internaut can reconstruct the visit in reasonably short order from the news reports, blog postings, archives, and sundry informational gewgaws that linger in the nether regions of the Net. A performance studies scholar should have little difficulty threading together the political, diplomatic, and cultural performances and performatives that present themselves as a result. But there’s the rub. To the extent that such images give themselves to be seen, some circumspection is in order. This especially from the performance studies scholar, who, let’s be frank, is otherwise a professional dupe, methodologically predisposed to stare at the tip of the pointing finger, never knowingly turning down an invitation to see – and subsequently state – the obvious. That the discipline of performance studies rings as much with cries of “oooh, sparkly things!” as it does the stentorian refrain of “twice-behaved behavior” is no doubt part of its charm. I, for one, count it my great good fortune that I get to study such fun stuff and to share it with my students, and I thank Richard Schechner for his part in providing me with the opportunity. But when George Bush breezes into Singapore trailing a track record of incompetence, belligerence, and abuse, and proves himself such an adept of the broad spectrum, I cannot help but feel I may be missing a trick. Someone or something invites us to attend to it, and for all the ensuing reflexivity and hermeneutic gymnastics our discipline drills into us, what is consistently overlooked is the impulsive enthusiasm of our original RSVP: “I’d be delighted!” Does any other object of study flatter its interpreters as solicitously as performance, which is at once so generous in sharing its fairy dust, and so hungry for exegesis? And is any research paradigm as well-fitted as the broad spectrum approach for providing both the means and authority for said interpreters to respond in kind? In this chapter, I will explore one way of addressing these questions. I begin by considering an important strand in the development of the broad-spectrum approach, paying particular attention to features that would be smoothed over as specific ideas became subject, in Jon McKenzie’s useful phrase, to a “movement of generalization.”2 Of particular interest to me in light of Bush’s APEC trip, is the relevance of the political, economic, and cultural emergence of certain Asian nations to these developments. As that emergence has come in recent years to precipitate a shift in the balance of global power, I argue, aspects of the broad spectrum approach must, in turn, be re-thought. The “Wayang Studies” of my title names a thought experiment that I conduct in order to consider what such changes might entail.

From “cultural performance” to the broad spectrum I’d like to start by revisiting a seminal series of writings by anthropologist Milton Singer on the subject of “cultural performance.” It was in a

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1955 article, “The Pattern of Indian Civilization: A Preliminary Report of a Methodological Field Study,” that Singer first re-purposed the term “cultural performance” in order to include (alongside plays, concerts, and lectures) “also prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those things we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the ‘cultural’ and the artistic.” Such events, he suggested, shared a set of defining characteristics concerning “a place and occasion of performance,” and, insofar as they were held by participants and observers alike to encapsulate the larger culture, they constituted the anthropologist’s “ultimate units of observation.”3 Singer would go on to restate, expand, and refine these ideas repeatedly over the course of his 40-year career,4 and he was not alone in such reiterations. Richard Schechner placed Singer among his pantheon of precursors in an early defense of the broad spectrum approach,5 and When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972) is excerpted in Philip Auslander’s four-volume edited collection Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies.6 John MacAloon7 and Marvin Carlson8 discuss Singer in their respective narratives of the development of the field; references that, along with Schechner’s, are themselves accounted for in Jon McKenzie’s metanarrative of the development of the field in Perform or Else.9 So much for, as McKenzie might call it, the citational network.10 What is interesting in the current context is which aspects of Singer’s ideas have been downplayed or overlooked in such narratives. Marvin Carlson is no doubt right to state of Singer that “his view of performance as a discrete concretization of cultural assumptions significantly contributed to what might be categorized as the conservative interpretation of performance’s role in culture.”11 Indeed, at first glance, a contemporary reader can only look askance at Singer’s methodological naivety, civilizational discourse, speculative generalizations, elitism, ahistoricism, romanticization of folk life, colonial-era racializations, and rhetorical use of orientalist tropes.12 To leave the assessment at that, however, would not only be an ahistorical error in its own right, but would overlook the extent to which Singer’s writings are riven with discontinuities and contradictions. These are indicative, I suggest, of the particular moment at which he was conducting his fieldwork and formulating his ideas; something that becomes more apparent when one takes into account the various glosses and elaborations that Singer subsequently added to his more frequently cited initial insights. Singer arrived in India for his first fieldwork trip in 1954, less than a decade after the end of World War II (1939–45); a cataclysmic event that in turn hastened Indian Independence (1947), the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, and the attendant upheavals and violence of Partition. From a contemporary perspective, Singer’s omission of such events and their colonial backdrop from his analysis seems incongruous; a downplaying of difference, discord, and discrimination in favor of what he variously refers to as a “living and historic civilization” and the “Great Tradition of Sanskritic Hinduism.”13

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However, what we may be inclined to interpret as the imposition of a normative, homogenizing world view appears, from Singer’s perspective, to have been anything but. His focus on “cultural performances” was a methodological corrective to the emphasis of his sometime mentor, Robert Redfield, on social structure. For Singer, their embodied, aesthetic, and relational qualities provided a material means of mediating between the contextual studies of earlier anthropologists, and the textual exegesis of literary and linguistic scholars. His conceptual focus on civilization, though it owed a debt to Redfield’s characterization of “a compound structure of ‘great traditions’ and ‘little traditions’”14 was equally informed by Nehru’s 1946 analysis of India’s cultural and historical right to independence, Discovery of India, and by his own critique of Western orientalists’ “well-intentioned effort to entomb a living civilization”15 through comparison with the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Taking these various characteristics together, Singer argued that observing the cultural performances of a “primary civilization”16 enabled him to assess patterns of both continuity and change in a rapidly industrializing metropolitan environment characterized by shifting networks of association, new political formations, urban development, and aspects of what would later come to be described as “reflexive modernity.” Moreover, while we should probably be wary of the image he presents of himself in an early account as an anthropological innocent whose “Eureka!” moment comes when asked by his objects of study to photograph the performances he is watching, reflexivity is an important theme in Singer’s writing. His preface to Traditional India: Structure and Change (1959) included some astute comments about the role of Independence and the imperatives of nation building in assigning cultural value and legitimacy to certain practices, according to the ways in which both internal and external changes were requiring newly self-conscious Indian nationals “to restate themselves to themselves.”17 But Singer was also aware of the challenge that this posed to him as a researcher, and throughout his writing, he explored and articulated the potential for an explicitly comparative anthropology, a project whose roots might be traced back to the institutional circumstances of his initial research. As he would later explain, “[t]he idea of guiding the relations among nations by ‘a conversation of cultures’ and ‘a civilization of the dialogue’ emerged as a worldwide ideal after the Second World War.”18 Accordingly, the development of a Southern Asian Studies Program at the University of Chicago, where he was based, coincided with a push towards comparative area studies in the United States that was supported by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, as part of a general remit to improve intercultural understanding. In consequence, it is perhaps as the account of a series of post-war intercultural encounters (with all the problems and complications entailed by such interculturalism) that Singer’s oeuvre is best understood by performance studies scholars.

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Even this brief survey of the multi-faceted circumstances under which Singer developed his ideas should indicate that there is a certain irony to the isolation of “cultural performance” as his enduring legacy. For today it has, itself, taken on the status of Singer’s ultimate unit of theorization, presumed to encapsulate the rhetorical and methodological structure of the “conservative interpretation” of performance, even by those who would view that same conservatism with skepticism. However, if we now turn our attention to Richard Schechner’s brief TDR Comment, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach” (1988), we can see that the correspondences with Singer’s project are themselves multi-faceted. The most obvious debt lies in Schechner’s claim that nations improve relations by exchanging performing artists because performances “express particular cultural traits,” and that as a result “[e]xciting, robustly intellectual world-civilizational courses” can be built around studying a range of performance practices.19 However, while the article is best-known for its “broad spectrum” argument, it is also striking that, like Singer’s writings, it contains a number of apparent discontinuities and anomalies that are indicative of the circumstances in which it was formulated. Schechner begins by noting that he has been traveling a lot – “India, China, Ann Arbor, Texas, Chicago” – before going on to make his “broad spectrum” argument alongside a now somewhat forgotten case for the importance of a working relationship “to exist between those who are training theatre workers and professionals in the field.”20 Indeed, the comment served as a culmination of sorts of a series on nationwide training and employment prospects for the journal’s younger readership.21 Thus was a methodological argument developed against a backdrop of foreign travel, and presented first and foremost as a practical solution to a pressing concern with the condition of the performing arts industry and with the future of performance study within the university. The result is somewhat muddled. In particular, the corralling of personal odyssey (“[i]n my travels I met too many students who were sullen or angry”), market analysis (oversupply of theatre-makers, the necessity of stimulating demand for performance scholars in other sectors), diverse points of comparison (from populous Asian nations to a Midwestern metropolis and a university town), polemic (the attack on “academic inertia”), and paradigm shift (“the happy alternative is to expand our vision of what performance is”) seems rather too neat, and begs as many questions as it answers.22 What the preceding discussion of Singer indicates, however, is that, given his frames of reference, a certain lack of coherence in Schechner’s argument is unsurprising. For just as Singer was struggling to develop a methodological approach that could account for both continuity and change in a new-minted Indian nation undergoing rapid, if uneven, modernization, so, several decades on, Schechner was responding to the consequences of that same multifarious process, as both India and China geared up for a fresh

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set of changes: entry into a globalizing economy soon to be accelerated by the demise of the Soviet Union, and the declared “end” of the Cold War. Moreover, where Singer proposed that “cultural performances” provided an important resource for both driving and meeting the socio-economic challenges of post-colonial modernity, Schechner argued that “performance studies” might serve a similar function in an age of globalized postmodernity. In both cases, the arguments were made in a spirit of comparative enquiry with a view to improved intercultural understanding. More than half a century on from Singer’s article, and two decades on from Schechner’s, it is clear that many of the same variables remain in play, albeit in changed configurations. When George Bush came to Singapore in November 2006, it was as a lame duck President both at home and abroad. He was smarting from a drubbing in midterm elections held only a week before, which had seen Democrats take control of the House of Representatives and the Senate from his Republican Party. His country’s international standing and moral authority had been severely weakened by his botched prosecution of the so-called “War on Terror.” East Asian governments were looking for reassurance that the United States would resort neither to economic protectionism nor diplomatic isolationism. But with an eye on the longer term, they were also trying to work out the likely complexion of a multi-polar world; one whose emergence was hastened, but not caused, by the Bush administration’s actions. What do such developments have to do with performance studies (at least, the kind that primarily concerns us here)? As we have seen, both Singer and Schechner proposed ways of interpreting performance practices in light of changing geopolitical and economic circumstances, even as their analyses were subject to the discombobulating effects of those same changes. We can be sure that any contemporary reformulation of the broad-spectrum approach will serve in turn as both agent and product of the growing (if irregular) social, economic, cultural, and ecological interconnectedness commonly abbreviated under the term “globalization.” And while the full implications of any such ideas will therefore remain obscure to us, the inevitability of their emergence does throw into relief aspects of what preceded them. For instance, we can note the enduring influence of the national framework within which both Singer and Schechner developed their international outlook on the interpretation of performance. Certainly, the ensuing interest among scholars in international perspectives, as well as international interest in performance studies, is not to be sniffed at. However, one need only survey the contents pages of the textbooks, readers, and edited volumes whose publication over the past decade has consolidated performance studies as a discipline, to appreciate how much the production and reception of core knowledge about the field remains centered in and on the United States.23 There are, of course, many other sites of scholarly activity. However,

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a properly international performance studies does not currently exist, and while a number of recent initiatives signal a shift in this direction,24 a quantitative change in who studies what, or in where such studies happen and how their outcomes are circulated, will not be sufficient to bring it about alone. To speak of the “rise” of performance studies, when all around us are investigating and debating the far vaster, rapid, and more intensive “rise” of China, “Chindia,” CAFTA (the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area), and so on, seems premature, to say the least. To describe as “broad” a research paradigm that fails to account for the distinctive ways in which such developments will impact on the function, meaning, and effects of “performance” is a misnomer. Beyond designating or studying diverse practices “as” performance, what is increasingly important in a world of pluralizing, interconnected modernities is understanding the role performance plays in materializing and mediating the relationships between such practices.

Wayang Studies? What do I mean by this? As already noted, taking a broad-spectrum approach to Bush’s November 2006 visit to Singapore enables us to identify sufficient commonality between a number of his activities, as to describe it as a series of performances and performative acts. Given the brief window of time in which they occurred, we can further note that the significance of such performances lay in the diverse public opportunities they provided for Bush to reiterate his broader message: the United States’ continued political and economic engagement with the Asia-Pacific region. From here, the enquiry could lead us in a number of different directions. Each event could be subject to closer analysis on its own terms. Alternatively, we could develop the theme of performance and secrecy by speculating on the relationship between Bush’s public engagements, and the private diplomatic, corporate and security briefings with which they were no doubt interspersed. Here, however, I would like to try and remain as close as possible to the “broad spectrum” in the scope of my concerns, while introducing a term that enables a degree of interpretive mobility within the spectrum not otherwise available to us. “Wayang” is best known as a Javanese word, and is most commonly associated – sometimes synonymously – with wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry. The conflation is indicative both of the enduring significance of wayang kulit in Javanese culture and the Indonesian national imaginary more generally, as well as the expansiveness and associative richness of the term itself. As Zoetmulder explains it, “wayang” has its roots in the Old Javanese words both for “performance” (wayang) and “shadow” (wawayang), and is related to the terms for “imagining,” “giving shape to,” and “picturing in one’s mind” (kawayang, amayang-mayang, winayang-wayang).25 This complexity remains today. “Wayang” is often translated as “figure” and/or “shadow,”

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but, depending on the context, it can refer to performances, puppets, characters, or to the larger tradition (which includes numerous puppet and puppet-related forms). The fact that singular and plural uses of the word are not distinguished may primarily be a point of grammar, but from an Anglophone perspective, at least, it also signals how deeply imbricated is the part within the whole, and vice versa. This embeddedness has a number of consequences for criticism and interpretation. For the wayang scholar Jan Mrázek, it means that the specificities of distinct performances and the actuality of the event have received insufficient critical attention.26 However, as Ward Keeler notes, “[t]he tradition fascinates people, but most individual performances do not,”27 and even Mrázek concedes that part of the appeal of wayang performances is that they are good to think and write with.28 To an extent, this is because of the richness and complexity of the forms, and of the expansive narratives they draw upon; characteristics that enable wayang to be adapted to changing times, without conforming to any one imperative of the zeitgeist. But it is also because the performances themselves rarely take place in isolation, instead providing the focal point for a number of related social, aesthetic, and sometimes political activities. In turn, these relations extend far beyond the time and place of the event, be it into discursive and representational realms ranging from everyday speech to the mass media, and from personal reflections to national debates to tourist advertisements, or into transnational networks of cultural influence and exchange.29 The sizeable, diverse, and sometimes contentious corpus of scholarship that has grown up and continues to develop around wayang in all its forms is, of course, one more instance of how those specific practices and experiences extend into – and are in turn informed by – a different medium, with its attendant epistemological particularities. Even Mrázek’s complaint that too often “the relation of performance to imagination and the representations and interpretations of wayang is itself misrepresented or concealed”30 must now do double duty as both demystifying corrective and, at least in the case of this chapter, a further layer of concealment. For while, as a theatregoer (amongst other things), I am sympathetic to the argument Mrázek is making, as a performance studies scholar, I am just as intrigued by the argument he is having. “Too much has been written about Indonesian puppet theatre,”31 he haughtily declares, by which he means: not enough has been thought about Indonesian puppet theatre. Fair enough. But if we take that proliferation of writing, along with all the circulating objects, images, ideas, and affects that also spin off from the wayang experience, not (or not only) as a debased simulacrum of the form, but as an effect of its scope, adaptability, and durability, we could say that Mrázek makes an intriguing counter-argument for a “movement of generalization” almost in spite of himself. Let us imagine, then, that a new research paradigm can be developed, and for the sake of our thought experiment, let us call it “Wayang Studies.”

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By way of a preliminary sketch, let us abstract two key characteristics: (1) It is sufficiently detailed and attentive to singular experience as to allow for the clear differentiation of unique performance events, both on their own terms, and the one from the other; (2) It is sufficiently relational as to trace the associative network in which such performances are embedded, and whose continued and ever-bifurcating existence they sustain. As such, it is similar to the broad-spectrum approach in its scope and ambition, but the accounts it presents are more intensively wrought, and the interrelations it describes are, wherever possible, continuous.32 Now, far be it for me, located as I am on the periphery of our new field, to determine its syllabus: I’d rather leave that to the international panel of experts whose work has already done so much to outline its contours. However, assuming our putative curriculum committee is willing to follow the associations of “wayang” wherever they may lead, then sooner or later they will come knocking on my door at the National University of Singapore, and this is what I shall tell them: In Singapore, the association of “wayang” with wayang kulit and related traditions largely derives from Indonesia and Malaysia, since today, despite its geographical location and a sizeable ethnic Malay minority, the forms are not presented with any regularity in the Republic.33 Instead, in an intriguing example of the intercultural mobility of the idea of wayang (independent of its practice), the term refers most commonly to Chinese Street Opera. These popular entertainments were introduced into Singapore shortly after the mass migration of Chinese coolies began in the 1820s. The earliest known use of the term is from an 1887 postcard, but, given the high levels of illiteracy at the time among the laborers who watched wayang, it is fair to assume that the term was in oral circulation before then.34 That being the case, it is apt that this borrowing should refer to a performance form that takes place outdoors on temporary stages. Although it recounts traditional folk tales in regional Chinese dialects, including Hokkien and Teochew, one can envisage a situation where the term entered the wider lexicon when audience members were called upon to explain the event to otherwise perplexed non-Chinese passers-by. A colorful and clamorous form, the heyday of wayang is long past now, but while once-thriving finger- and string-puppet versions are almost obsolete, a number of opera companies continue to perform, particularly at Buddhist and Taoist temples and on significant occasions in the lunar calendar, in order to entertain the gods.35 This decline in the popularity of the wayang tradition notwithstanding, a secondary meaning of the term has since entered popular parlance and Anglophone public discourse, and is today arguably the more prominent meaning, carrying several related but subtly different inflections. On rare occasions, it is used as a metaphorical derivation from wayang kulit, to indicate the presence of “invisible” forces “pulling the strings” (sic.) behind the main show.36 The more common usage, however, is less dramaturgically involved, and refers to any situation

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that appears dramatic or theatrical, or that the speaker wishes pejoratively to designate as such. A third, rather more knowing, association, describes the necessary observation of formality and convention as a means of showing deference or “giving face” in social situations and at public events.37 It is in light of such associations that we can revisit aspects of George Bush’s Singapore trip in 2006, with a view both to a more diversified understanding of what he did, as well as a more expansive sense of what it meant, than the broad-spectrum approach affords in and of itself. Of particular interest here are the widely circulated images of George and Laura Bush first observing, and subsequently joining in, the performance by Gamelan Asmaradana at the Asian Civilizations Museum on 16 November. On the face of it – which is more or less how we are invited to view the images – this is a pro-forma photo-op in the Singerian mould: visiting dignitary watches performance as “elementary constituent of the [national] culture” and “ultimate unit of [diplomatic] observation.” Depending on your priorities, they provide either a visual prompt to elaborate on the “bigger picture” of Bush’s Asia trip (as in most press coverage), or an opportunity for ridicule (as in John Stewart’s “moment of Zen” segment on that night’s Daily Show [2006])38; depending on your politics, they either reconfirm your faith in Bush’s people-oriented folksiness, or reinforce your conviction that he was a buffoon unfit for public office, and out of his depth on the world stage. Taking a “wayang studies” approach reveals a rather more variegated picture. One can only wonder at the delicate political calculations by which the Singapore and US authorities settled on Gamelan Asmaradana as offering an exemplary cultural performance. As I have already indicated, any performance that makes explicit reference to the wayang kulit tradition is atypical in Singapore. This gives rise to two related observations. First, it should be noted that an Indonesian gamelan orchestra made up largely of ethnic Chinese members dressed in Malay-identifying batik in the Asian Civilizations Museum is atypical in a rather distinctive way. For although most Singaporeans would be hard-pressed to explain in what ways the Republic’s only professional gamelan ensemble (founded in 2002) gives form or voice to their own national imaginary, I would argue that the selection was a canny one. Economically, politically, and sometimes culturally, Singapore is both hub of and gateway to the surrounding region for international institutions, multinational corporations, and the transcontinental tourist trade alike. As such, when presenting the city-state to the outside world, its publicists tend to set it apart somewhat from its immediate geographical neighbors. They do so by emphasizing either its national particularities, its highly globalized cultural sensibilities, or, on occasion, both at the same time.39 In contrast, I would argue that the temporary cultural alignment with the Malay world afforded by the gamelan performance enabled Singapore to burnish its regional credentials, and Bush to lay some

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sympathetic public relations groundwork in advance of the contentious stopover he would make in Indonesia four days later. The second distinctive feature of the gamelan performance relates to the fact that such cultural performances are part and parcel of VIP visits the world over not only because they give the visitor something to look at, but also the opportunity to be looked at looking at something. Indeed, given the vast disparity between the number of people who watched the performance, and the number who would subsequently see them watching it, this latter aspect may be the more significant. This especially when wayang is involved, since it draws our attention to the dramaturgy of the event. At its grandest, this concerns the relationship between objects, people, and figures, and how these act upon each other throughout the human life-course, against a backdrop of larger cosmic forces. More prosaically in the George Bush example, it underscores the extent to which he was himself staged by the performance he was ostensibly observing. After all, these apparently innocuous entertainments are a public relations minefield for dignitaries. There is something fundamentally absurd about feigning polite interest, while rigorously selected, screened, and rehearsed locals strut and fret their five minutes upon the stage before you with all the effort they can muster. Exchanging appreciative comments with your spouse or seeking semiotic enlightenment from your host is one way of diffusing the build-up of unreciprocated performance energies that your straight-backed propriety in the King’s seat otherwise creates. Participation is another. On the mean streets of England, they are called “have-a-go heroes,” those plucky citizens who intervene unbidden into the public affray, often at considerable risk to their person. A similar appellation could be bestowed upon George Bush in Singapore. After all, from an aesthetic perspective, only the most craven toady could find his 15 seconds of gamelan fame anything but excruciating. In still images, he kneels at the saron with such waxen stiffness that he looks like he has been Photoshopped in. On film, he hammers out a ditty of such obviously Western provenance, and with such tight-lipped resolve, it is tempting to read into the display an entire parable of imperialist hubris. This makes the broad smiles and warm applause of the performersturned-onlookers appear all the more obsequious. But what, really, are they applauding? Certainly not any hitherto unrecognized presidential proclivity for the intricacies of the seven-tone scale. On the contrary, what is praiseworthy in Bush’s actions is his willingness to risk some dignity – to “take one for the team” in service of the Asia-Pacific ecumene. In playing the claque, the momentarily unmalleted members of Gamelan Asmaradana reciprocate the gesture, not only sparing Bush’s blushes, but doing their part to recoup his outlay of social capital by authenticating the event as a wayang in all its self-advertising but unremarked superficiality. These theatrics would find their rhetorical corollary in the speech Bush delivered later the same day, which underscored the use of Singapore as both

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stage and staging-post from which to address the wider region. Noting that “[i]n many ways, Singapore’s transformation from a small trading outpost to a confident and prosperous leader is the story of Asia,” Bush enumerated no less than four examples of how Asia was “like” Singapore, before segueing into the observation that “The United States has long recognized that it is in our interests to help expand hope and opportunity throughout Asia.”40 What followed was a tour d’horizon, or, more properly, a tour de la region, during which, some saber-rattling about North Korea notwithstanding, Bush said remarkably little of substance. It was the oratorical equivalent of his gamelan playing, but that, too, was the point: the diplomatic performative resides more in the fact that certain things are said or done, than that they have any substantive meaning (or aesthetic value) in and of themselves. The university setting of the speech reinforced this idea that there was more to the saying than the said. As with Barack Obama’s speech “to the Muslim world” at Cairo University three years later, and by contrast with an address to parliament, say, the presence of supposedly disinterested academics lends a degree of independent legitimacy to the event and intellectual credibility to its content. As these words resonate down through the halls of learning, they call for interpretation of their meanings and reflection on their consequences, rather than either blind acceptance or outright rejection. So here I duly sit, in my office, straining to catch the few faint echoes of Bush’s address that still eddy around my institution, the nation it serves, and the world it is charged with interpreting. Already, those echoes are hard to catch beneath the more recent and resonant tones of Barack Obama, who visited Singapore in November 2009 for that year’s APEC leader’s meeting. Obama arrived from Tokyo, where he gave a speech describing himself as “America’s first Pacific President.”41 It remains to be seen what, if anything, the consequences of this will be. If nothing else, however, the rhetoric signaled a more conciliatory and cooperative tone in international relations than had prevailed under Bush. And well it might, given the debt that the United States now owed to the advanced economies of East Asia for their role in staving off the collapse of its financial system in late 2008, and in underwriting its subsequent recovery. Obama’s arrival in Asia was delayed by a day, in order for him to attend a memorial service for the 13 army personnel allegedly shot by army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood military base on 5 November. Hasan had reportedly expressed concern at the role of the US military in the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the prospect of his own deployment. Later, in March 2010, and then again in June, Obama would postpone a much-anticipated trip to Indonesia in order to push through his health-care reform plans, and to deal with the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Gulf Coast, respectively. Unique in themselves, the unforeseen necessity of all three delays may also be taken as indicative of the complexity of the task that faces Obama at the time of writing, as he seeks

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not only to recalibrate America’s international relations, but to balance that process with his domestic obligations, many of which are themselves consequences of global processes. Accordingly, in his Tokyo speech, he recognized a changed future for the United States. Alongside favorable comments about his hosts and about multilateral organizations, he welcomed “China’s effort to play a greater role on the world stage,” and noted that “[c]ultivating spheres of cooperation – not competing spheres of influence – will lead to progress in the Asia Pacific.”42

Conclusion Whether or not we buy either the sentiment or the commitment, the analysis seems about right, and in this chapter, I have explored the possible consequences of such a change for the broad-spectrum approach to performance studies. As a metaphor, the broad spectrum spatializes and arranges diverse cultural practices along a continuum. Certain qualities or characteristics are thereby privileged not only within the compass of each specific practice, but as the common denominator and point of comparison across and between practices. As the richness of the current field of performance studies demonstrates, this is a suggestive and enabling approach, whose characteristic openness is due in part to Singer’s investigations of post-colonial nationalism, and Schechner’s responses to an incipient globalization. However, if there is a common denominator and point of comparison across and between the recent crop of core readings in the discipline, it remains the nation, specifically the once “indispensable” United States. In the present geopolitical climate, this can have a distorting effect on how performance practices are understood, as well as how the field of performance studies is defined. My “thought experiment” in Wayang Studies has sought to indicate one possible direction for future development. In proposing greater differentiation within the analysis of a performance, and closer attention to the network of relations in which it takes place and to which it contributes, I am suggesting that we think afresh about some of the most fundamental questions we ask of any event or practice: what is it doing to me? Who is doing it, and why? What does it mean, and for whom? Where does it happen, and how? In view of the prospect that America may yet become, as Milton Singer once wrote of India, “a nation like other nations … less fascinating to the rest of the world, but … also … less of an ‘image’ and more of a reality in that world,”43 the answers to these questions will be many and varied. Understanding the relationships between the presentation of George Bush’s gamelan encounter in diverse media, its atypicality as an instance of Singapore cultural performance, its connection to other performances, and its address to local, regional, international, and domestic audiences, requires

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a multi-faceted approach. Meanwhile, identifying where the event figured amongst non-performative factors and considerations, and how it fed into academic knowledge production, requires an appreciation of what (with apologies to Jacques Rancière) we might call the distribution of the performable, and how it changes according to location and circumstance.44 In retrospect, Bush’s visit to Singapore marked a distinctive moment in the rebalancing of power between the United States and parts of Asia. Bush was weak, but Asian nations needed the United States. By post-credit crunch 2009, a politically stronger Barack Obama nevertheless came to APEC on more even terms, at least with his country’s major trading partners. And while his stated focus on “regional security, economic recovery, and nonproliferation”45 may not be foremost in the minds of most performance studies scholars, the inevitable questions that will arise in the coming decades about where and how performance is used both to mediate these and related priorities and to explore and express their social, cultural, and aesthetic consequences, should be indication enough of how multi-dimensional the “broad spectrum” will need to become if it is to retain any interpretive currency. To study performance practices and events in the Asian region today is to be acutely aware of how they intersect with trade, diplomacy, politics, and policy; how they feed consumption, aspiration, belief, and belonging; how people cultivate themselves and interact with others. None of this is specific to the region, let alone essential in any culturalist sense. But it is pronounced. And who else but a performance studies scholar could appreciate the range of implications in Barack Obama’s otherwise innocuous comment to an Indonesian television interviewer, made in the run-up to his aborted trip to the country in March 2010, that “I used to love the Mahabharata, used to love Ramayana, used to love wayang – and I still do”?46

Notes 1. George W. Bush, “Speech by U.S. President George W. Bush at the University Cultural Centre Theatre, National University of Singapore, 16 November 2006.” Available online at http://app.mfa.gov.sg/pr/read_content.asp?View,5859 (accessed January 2010). 2. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 20. 3. Milton Singer, “The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization: A Preliminary Report of a Methodological Field Study,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 15.1 (1955): 27. 4. See Singer, “Preface,” in Traditional India: Structure and Change, ed. Milton Singer. Philadelphia: The American Folklore Society, 1959, ix–xxii; When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972, 39–80; Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, 155–88; Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991, 24–41.

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5. Richard Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach,” TDR 32.3 (1988): 7. 6. Philip Auslander, ed., Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 1. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 57–71. 7. John MacAloon, ed., Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issue, 1984, 1–18. 8. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 13–14. 9. McKenzie, Perform, or Else, 33–8. 10. McKenzie, Perform, or Else, 34. 11. Carlson, Performance, 14. 12. Indicative examples of these characteristics would include the following: for methodological naivety, his benign interpretation of being asked to photograph cultural performances in India, and his assumption of parity of intention and interpretation between himself and his interlocutors in what to “exhibit to outsiders, as well as to themselves” (Traditional India, xiii); for speculative generalizations, “Indians, and perhaps all peoples …” (Traditional India, xii), “In the Madras area, and India generally I suspect …” (“The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization”: 27), and “These adaptations have something to say, the author believes, about the structure and change of Indian civilization and perhaps of other civilizations as well” (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, xiv); for elitism, his enthusiastic characterization of his brahminical informants as “leading representatives of the great tradition of sanskritic Hinduism” (“The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization”: 26); for romanticization, “The nobility of these ordinary people … the women’s colorful grace, the dignified faces and bearing of the men, the slow rhythms of a folk-like culture …” (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, xiii); for colonial-era racializations, his dedifferentiating use of the term “Indian” as a cultural/racial descriptor, rather than a national identity in phrases such as “the Indian scene,” “Indian culture as a whole” (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 69), “the experience of Indians themselves” and even “my Indian friends” (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 71); and for a rhetorical use of orientalist tropes: “… I was interested in charting the topography of Indian culture, its general terrain and its different mountains, valleys, and river sources” (“The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization”: 25). Some examples of his ahistoricism and civilizational discourse are discussed in the text above, but his focus on “the underlying unity and continuity of Indian civilization itself” (Traditional India, ix) stands as a representative example of both. 13. Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, xi, xiii. 14. Singer, Man’s Glassy Essence, 163. 15. Singer, Man’s Glassy Essence, 28. 16. Singer, Man’s Glassy Essence, 68. 17. Singer, Traditional India: Structure and Change, ix. 18. Singer, Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures, 17. 19. Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach”: 5. 20. Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach”: 4. 21. See Richard Schechner, “So You Wanna Be an Actor, a Dancer, a Performance Artist?” TDR 31.1 (1987): 4–6; Richard Schechner, “The College Connection,” TDR 31.4 (1987): 4–7; and Richard Schechner and Vince Renzi, “So You Wanna Be a Teacher?” TDR 31.2 (1987): 4–21. 22. Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach”: 4, 5, 6.

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23. I make this observation not in a spirit of ideological dispute, but simply as a statement of fact. In the publications in question, the combined percentage of editors and contributors based or born in the United States ranges, as far as I can ascertain, from 70–80 in the case of Philip Auslander’s Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003), Henry Bial’s Performance Studies Reader (2007), and Tracy Davis’s Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008); to 90–100 in Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer’s Teaching Performance Studies (2002), Erin Striff’s Performance Studies (2003), Judith Hamera’s Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies (2006), D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera’s SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies (2006), and Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach’s Critical Theory and Performance (2007). 24. Recent publications on the discipline that have an explicitly internationalist agenda include the “On Performatics” issue of Performance Research (13.2, 2008), and the collection Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (2010), ed. Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Publishing initiatives include Palgrave Macmillan’s “Studies in International Performance” series, edited by Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, Seagull Books’ “Enactments” series, edited by Carol Martin and Richard Schechner, and the decision to devolve editorship of TDR on a rotating basis to a number of individuals at different institutions, including William Huizhu Sun at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Underscoring the complicated interrelations of economic and academic factors that are one of the themes of this chapter, Schechner explained with characteristic candor that “it wasn’t the appetite for a bold new editorial program that prompted the consortium. It was financial necessity. During the financial crisis of 2008/09, Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts told me that the school was going to severely cut back NYU support for TDR … . To cut to the chase: the financial crisis helped me find a way to solve TDR’s money problem while enhancing TDR editorially.” (Richard Schechner, “Broadening the Broad Spectrum,” TDR 54.3 (2010): 8.) The Euro-American provenance of most of these initiatives – and of the present author – signals how much more is to be done before a more evenly distributed internationalism can prevail, if at all. 25. P. J. Zoetmulder, Old Javanese-English Dictionary Part II: P–Y. s.-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, 2230. (My thanks to Jennifer Lindsay for directing me to this resource.) 26. “[P]erhaps we … need to demystify what is ‘wayang’ in some scholarly and popular writing, Western and Indonesian, that is too far remote from the experience and the resonances of a wayang performance, writing that creates an image of ‘wayang’ that has little to do with wayang performances as they take place in Indonesia today, that does not attempt to return to them” ( Jan Mrázek, “An Introduction: One Perspective on a Variety of Perspectives,” Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia: New Approaches to Performance Events, ed. Jan Mrázek. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2002, 6). 27. Ward Keeler, Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, 15. 28. Jan Mrázek, “An Introduction: One Perspective on a Variety of Perspectives”: 3. 29. Diverse recent English language discussions of these associations can be found in Andrew N. Weintraub’s Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java (2004), Ghulam-Sarwar Yusof’s Panggung Ini: Essays on Traditional Malay Theatre (2005: 91–139), Jan Mrázek’s Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit (2005), Leon Rubin and I Nyoman Sedana’s

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30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

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Performance in Bali (2007: 16–50), and Matthew Isaac Cohen’s “Contemporary Wayang in Global Contexts” (Asian Theatre Journal 24.2 (2007): 338–69). Jan Mrázek, “An Introduction: One Perspective on a Variety of Perspectives”: 4. Jan Mrázek, “An Introduction: One Perspective on a Variety of Perspectives”: 4. The word “continuous” is an oblique nod to Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The methodological approaches outlined in that book coincide closely with some of the ideas I am thinking through here, although I have not yet had the opportunity to explore their implications in detail. In any case, while Latour’s call for a redefinition of sociology as “the tracing of associations” (5) may be somewhat polemical, we might note that relational and associative thinking would be more or less par for the course in Wayang Studies. In Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves, Ward Keeler derives his methodological framework from “considering an art form in light of the relationships its performance occasions” (17); an approach that Andrew N. Weintraub adapts and extends in his study of wayang golek, Power Plays, in order to account for “cultural technologies” that encompass both live performances and their “mass mediation” (Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java. Athens, Ohio and Singapore: Ohio University Research in International Studies and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004, 15). More fundamentally, the idea that one is defined by one’s (variable) position within a network of familial and social relations is pronounced in a number of East and Southeast Asian cultures and languages. The island-city-state of Singapore is located off the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia, with the nearest islands of Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago only 45 kilometers to the south. According to the colonial-era racial classifications that prevail in official Singapore discourse, approximately 14 percent of the population is designated “Malay.” In recognition of the island’s pre-colonial status as part of the Riau-Johor Sultanate, the national language of Singapore is Malay, though it is not widely spoken by the other ethnic groups. The postcard claim is made by wayang enthusiast Paul van der Veer in his book Da Xi: Chinese Street Opera in Singapore (2008: 49). However, since it is unreferenced, it is hard to verify independently. The term also remains in use to describe the less well-known performances of the hybrid Chinese-Malay Peranakan tradition. See, for instance, the website of the company Main Wayang at http://www.mainwayang.com/ In 1999, government minister George Yeo likened civil society involvement in local politics to a situation where “[i]nvisible dalangs pull strings and make things happen on the wayang stage.” The statement was cited somewhat reprovingly by commentator Chua Mui Hoong in her 2008 Straits Times article “Move politics beyond a spectator sport” (1 August 2008: 33). Perhaps the most notorious use of the term in recent times occurred during the 2006 General Election, and concerned opposition candidate James Gomez. Having claimed that he had submitted his “minority certificate” (which is linked to a kind of positive discrimination system for so-called “Group Representation Constituencies”) to the Elections Department, he brushed off subsequent revelations that he hadn’t, by describing his actions as a “wayang.” The aim, he suggested, was to make the media and his opponents believe he may be running in a constituency other than the one he was expected to contest. This led ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) politicians to dub his Worker’s Party (commonly abbreviated to WP) the “Wayang Party.” For the remainder of the campaign, they characterized the WP as lacking in substance, and repeatedly sought to discredit

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38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

Performance Studies Genealogies Gomez as a liar. As expected, the PAP won the election handsomely, but postelection analysis suggested that it overplayed “Gomezgate,” at the cost of some votes (“5 factors that stirred the ground,” Straits Times, 20 May 2006: S8). Daily Show, “Daily Show Moment of Zen,” 16 November, 2006. Available online at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-november-16-2006/moment-ofzen---president-bush-visits-singapore (accessed January 2010). This latter strategy was certainly the case at APEC 2009, which was hosted by Singapore. There, delegates were treated to an evening performance that combined representative performance forms of the three main “races” – lion dancing (“Chinese”), dikir barat (“Malay”), and bharatanatyam (“Indian”) – with a classical violin recital, contemporary dance, and a children’s choir. George W. Bush, “Speech by U.S. President George W Bush at the University Cultural Centre Theatre, National University of Singapore, 16 November 2006.” Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Barack Obama at Suntory Hall,” (2009) at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obamasuntory-hall (accessed April 2010). Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Barack Obama at Suntory Hall.” Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 36. For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, “[p]olitics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which denies the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals” ( Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity, 2009, 25). More careful work remains to be done to assess how the “distribution of the performable” would relate to the “distribution of the sensible,” both in terms of the latter’s nuanced incorporation of aesthetics, and of its obvious significance for the cultural dimension of geopolitics. Suffice to note here that in the Asian region, where international assertiveness and economic success stories go hand in glove with glaring income disparities under a range of political systems, the question of what counts as a performance, who counts as a performer, and how this informs political recognition, is a charged one. “Mr Obama, who last met Mr Lee [Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore] in Washington in 2007, thanked him for the ‘tremendous role’ Singapore had played as the chair of Apec and as host of the inaugural Asian-US leaders’ meeting. Said [White House National Security spokesman] Mr. Hammer: ‘With Singapore, the US has developed an open and inclusive framework of cooperation on pressing issues, including regional security, economic recovery, and non-proliferation. The United States welcomes Singapore as a partner in building a more prosperous and secure region’” (Teo Cheng Wee, “Obama invites PM to N-Summit,” The Straits Times, 16 November 2009: A3). RCTI 2010. “Obama Eksklusif,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KQIWVw2 RPA&feature=related (accessed March 2010).

5 Today I Am a Field: Performance Studies Comes of Age Henry Bial

Performance studies’ origin narratives have been well rehearsed. In seminars, at conferences, in the pages of TDR and other journals, the legend grows: the Tale of the Young Ones from New Orleans, When Richard Met Victor, The Performance Studies Turn. Elements of these stories appear in the pages of this very volume, and this is only fitting. They are an essential and important part of understanding performance studies’ past, present, and future. But this chapter tells a different story. This is the story of our field’s gawky, geeky adolescence and its transition from that awkward state to a seat at the Grownups’ Table. This is the story of (you should excuse the expression) performance studies’ bar mitzvah. I am not claiming that the events described in the following pages are literally rituals, nor that the academy necessarily functions as a ritualized society in anything but the loosest of terms. The rite of passage here is a metaphor, or to be more precise, an interpretive framework, that has a rich and complicated history within performance studies. In Arnold van Gennep’s coinage, transitions in an individual’s social status are marked by ritual action, and that action follows a distinct three-stage pattern: the preliminal, liminal, and postliminal. The first part of this definition has had the most profound influence on the field, in that it offers a clear and easy to recognize case of performance that transforms the social reality. Before the ritual, the participants hold one status; after the ritual, they hold another. The boy becomes a man, the novice becomes an initiate, and so on. This is the efficacy that forms one half of Schechner’s efficacy/entertainment dyad. Hence while there are other types of ritual that are recognizable under the general heading of performance, the rite of passage best illustrates the differences between ritual and other types of performance. Van Gennep’s essentially structuralist rendering of the three stage sequence of ritual begat Victor Turner’s emphasis on liminality and the sense of communitas that such liminality can engender. Turner saw the liminality at the center of the ritual process as functioning within, as Catherine Bell puts it, “a more 85

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fundamental dialectic between the social order (structure) and a period of social disorder and liminality (anti-structure) … .”1 Ritual, then, provides a means for a society to balance the need to maintain order and stasis with the need to respond to new and potentially disruptive conditions. Understood in these terms, performance is not only efficacious, it is also necessary. As the most common origin narrative (you didn’t think we could escape it entirely?) has it, Turner’s vision of the positive promise of performance inspired Schechner and other theatre people to focus their critical attention on the liminal aspects of aesthetic performance. Though theatre, dance, and related disciplines already encompassed notions of contingency, betwixt-and-between, and doubled consciousness (consider the Stanislavskian “as if”), the emphasis on the liminal meant that this part of the performance event began, in many analyses, to take precedence over all others. Where a previous generation of theatre scholars saw, for example, radical restagings of classic plays as proof of the Western canon’s ability to endure, those influenced by the “performance studies turn” saw the same productions as evidence of performance’s potential to transgress or resist the very structures that produced the canon. Moving beyond the footlights, the tactical use of the “as performance” analytic lens has allowed scholars to explore performances in which the balance between structure and anti-structure tilts more heavily toward transgression and resistance. Though our terminology, under the influence of literary theory, gender studies, post-coloniality, and other discourses, has moved away from van Gennep’s and Turner’s explicitly anthropological terms (Turner’s distinction between “liminal” and “liminoid,” for example, has fallen by the wayside), performance studies still orients around those sites where the structure/anti-structure dialectic is most clearly visible, where uncertainty is a virtue, where (as the title of the fifth Performance Studies Conference had it) “Here Be Dragons.” As Jon McKenzie writes, “What is performance? What is Performance Studies? ‘Liminality’ is perhaps the most concise and accurate response to both of these questions.”2 It seems only appropriate, then, that the story of performance studies in recent years be structured as a rite of passage. It is here that I must beg the reader’s indulgence, for as a participant ethnographer in the evolution of performance studies over the last decade and a half, I can hardly tell the field’s story without reference to my own. And if Richard Schechner seems to occupy a distinctly un-marginal position in the field’s narrative, as the rabbi at this particular bar mitzvah, it is because as teacher, collaborator, and mentor he has filled a similar role for me. As disciplinary history, this approach has its limitations. Just as the bar mitzvah ritual is inherently transnational, practiced by Jews around the world, so too performance studies’ coming of age has been performed in many locales, from Aberystwyth to Seoul, Sydney to Paris, Copenhagen to Tel Aviv, and beyond. The practitioners of each ritual balance the needs and practices of their local communities

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with the (often conflicting) dictates of a diasporic global community. The Manhattan bat mitzvah cannot fully represent its Johannesburg counterpart. Nevertheless, in the academy as in religion, local upheavals often have global implications. In a transnational community, how could it be otherwise? And judging from the frequency with which I am asked, at conferences, in symposia, and elsewhere on multiple continents, to describe, defend, or debate the experience of being a graduate student in performance studies, particularly at New York University, particularly in the 1990s, I trust that my admittedly local observations may prove of some value to those who would understand how the field has come to its current state of maturity. In van Gennep’s description of ritual, the preliminal phase of the rite of passage is marked by separation. From what “society” did performance studies separate? Was the separation voluntary or compelled? How was it accomplished? The origin narrative sketched by Schechner in Performance Studies: An Introduction points to three signal events: the renaming of NYU’s Graduate Drama Department as the Department of Performance Studies (1980), a conference titled Performance Studies international (1990), and the foundation of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Performance Studies Focus Group (1993).3 Each of these moves follows accepted academic convention. That is to say, the Euro-American system of higher education has procedures in place by which to rename departments, announce conferences, and inaugurate scholarly societies. Each is clearly a voluntary act of separation, though the “from whom” is a little more complicated. In changing its name, the NYU department proclaimed its separation from the field of “drama” – a move we might read as consistent with the growing emphasis on liminality and anti-structure, as well as a clear attempt to expand the horizon of possible research objects. In Schechner’s 1973 formulation of “Drama, Script, Theater and Performance,” the “drama” is understood as the most fixed and narrowly defined of the four terms, while “performance” is the most unstable and expansive.4 The modifying term “Studies” indicates an emphasis on analysis rather than on practical training, effecting a separation from the conservatory model of drama as well as a gesture of affiliation toward area and cultural studies models (East Asian studies, women’s studies, African-American studies, etc.) coming into existence around this time. The further modifier “international” in the title of the 1990 conference enacts a different gesture of affiliation, in this case with an imagined global community.5 The creation of the Performance Studies Focus Group doesn’t really fit in this context, because it does not effect separation from the field of theatre in higher education as much as it inscribes a space for performance studies within it, a subject to which I shall return. I suggest that a more significant moment in understanding the separation of performance studies from theatre is Schechner’s 1992 address to the ATHE opening session, subsequently published in TDR as “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” and

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its attendant aftermath.6 Framed as a call to action, the essay argues for the extension of NYU’s (and, by now, Northwestern University’s) reinvention of the field of theatre as a whole: “The new paradigm is ‘performance,’ not theatre. Theatre departments should become ‘performance departments.’”7 Lest we think the renaming merely semantic or symbolic, Schechner makes clear bringing about the new order will require large-scale changes in personnel, as well as orientation and training. Schechner’s call for “creative repudiation,” while it may loosely be called revolutionary, is more aptly understood as a strategic declaration of intent to separate from the “parent” discipline. Or to put it another way, it’s less “Allons enfants de la patrie” and more “I don’t want to be a rabbi; I want to be a jazz singer.” While theatre studies was obviously not ignorant or indifferent to the performance studies project prior to this moment, “A New Paradigm,” seemed to crystallize things, provoking a response from what we might call (not without irony) the forces of structure, as it became clear that performance studies was bidding for equal, if not superior, status to theatre studies. In a 1993 Theatre Journal essay, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” Jill Dolan (herself a graduate of NYU’s performance studies program) made clear that while she was committed “to studying performance under the rubric of theatre studies,” she felt that Schechner’s call for theatre departments to reinvent themselves as performance studies departments was misplaced.8 Dolan argues that as theatre studies is the discipline most responsible for producing the interpretive framework called “performance,” theatre is the most institutionally and intellectually appropriate home for performance studies work. Strikingly for our purposes, Dolan’s geographic metaphor of the field here intertwines with a coming-of-age metaphor, as she writes almost wistfully of “some theatre scholars’ eagerness to quit their own territory,” noting, “the seductiveness of relocating away from home, or of eliding the specific contribution of theatre studies to the performative … .”9 There is still a way, though, for this particular wayward child to return “home” for the benefit of the larger community. For Dolan, this would be accomplished through an explicitly political engagement with the ways that power circulates through cultural meanings. “A politically aligned performance studies,” she writes, “could invigorate theatre studies without eviscerating it.”10 This response, which today seems prescient, was nevertheless seen by many in performance studies as less than supportive. Other responses were both more pointed and more polemical, as illustrated by theatre critic Richard Hornby’s “Against Performance Theory,” originally delivered at the 1994 ATHE conference, and subsequently published in TheaterWeek.11 Hornby writes, “[T]here is a growing tendency toward ‘performance studies’ in American theater departments, which is not an extension of traditional literary and historical study, but a rejection of it.”12 Speaking for many like-minded colleagues, Hornby makes clear that

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this rejection is mutual: “Unless performance theory recognizes the existence of traditional Euro-American theater generally, and the playscript in particular, it will never have any lasting value.”13 Understanding this history as a rite of passage, we can see in retrospect that this act of mutual rejection is necessary to achieve preliminal separation. It is not enough to take an oppositional stance. The dialectic of structure and anti-structure requires that the opposition be recognized as such, and that the offending party be expelled from the community. The rite of passage framework also allows us to see, in retrospect, that this response from the existing society takes a conventional form, and that the conventions of academic discourse (particularly in the era of the “culture wars”) necessitate the attendant forecasts of doom, as well as the accusatory tone in which Hornby cites Richard Schechner as “Exhibit A” and The Drama Review as “Exhibit B” in his recitation of the crime performance studies has committed against the Western theatre studies.14 The threat that the new participant represents to the established order must be made clear, in order to justify the procedures of purification and redress that the ritual process demands. Looking back, then, we might mark this period from “A New Paradigm” (1992) to the First Annual Performance Studies Conference (1995) as the end of the field’s preliminal phase, and the attendant move into liminality. Though I’ve sketched this retrospection clinically, at the time the whole affair felt intensely personal, as it often appears to those participating in such rituals. Here, I should mention that these quotations from Hornby are drawn from the copy of TheaterWeek that I purchased at a newsstand across the street from NYU’s Department of Performance Studies, approximately one month after beginning my graduate studies in that department. For my fellow novices and me, the experience of seeing our teacher and the most visible figure of our graduate program pilloried in print was simultaneously jarring and inspiring. On the one hand, the recognition of the controversy surrounding our endeavor served to heighten exponentially the anxiety attendant on any would-be initiate; were we seeking entrance to a community of outcasts? On the other, the explicit rejection of “most theatre departments”15 carried with it the lure and excitement of the forbidden. Though we were in many ways learning to conform to existing norms of scholarly practice (archival research, paper writing, close reading of texts), we were also breaking rules, crossing boundaries, exploring. This sense of adventure, flavored strongly with the sense that we were getting away with something, was encouraged by our teachers as well as the many other scholars who then set the field’s agenda. If some of us occasionally regretted not choosing a more traditional theatre program, we more often expressed sorrow that we had missed those heady early years about which our professors and other scholars in the field spoke with justifiable pride. What must it have been like, we wondered, to be present at the start? To stand up to the

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old guard? To stake out a new field of intellectual inquiry? Though we were comparably naive about such institutional vagaries as tenure and promotion, outcomes assessment, or the already established crisis in academic publishing, we understood that our teachers had earned their right to tell war stories through a combination of talent and chutzpah that we ourselves could only imagine. It was hardly coincidental that these years in which we indulged in a kind of imaginary loss, a nostalgia for that which we had never personally experienced, were cotemporaneous with similar movements in the arts, in politics, and in the culture around us. Among the many phenomena we experienced as though After the Fall were Broadway theatre, National Endowment for the Arts funding, socialism as a viable political position, the pre-Disney Times Square, the pre-De Niro Soho. Even the sites such as LaMama and PS 122 that continued to resonate with new and innovative work and ideas were haunted by a lingering “you should have been here when” that they couldn’t quite manage to shake. Meanwhile, the specter of the AIDS epidemic cast its shadow over every aspect of the field, in the plays of (among others) Tony Kushner, the performance art of (among others) Ron Athey, and the deafening silence of those whom the disease had already claimed. The must-read among my peers was Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked (1993), with Phelan’s terrifying, illuminating, and exhilarating formulation that performance is that which disappears. For Phelan, performance – especially performance art centered on the body in pain – teaches us “to learn to value what is lost, to learn not the meaning but the value of that which cannot be reproduced or seen (again).”16 And yet, our education in that time and place, as exemplified by Schechner, but manifest equally in the writing and teach˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o, Dwight ing of Phelan, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ngu Conquergood, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Eugenio Barba, Marvin Carlson, and so many others was relentlessly forward-looking. Sure as we were that we dwelt on the East of Eden, we nonetheless focused our attention further eastward, toward a utopian space that would exist “at the margin,” in the “creases between,” or (forgive us) “outside the box.” Trapped as we were between nostalgia for a lost innocence and hope for a utopian future, the one bit of theoretical jargon we all understood perfectly was “liminal.” In the ritual sequence I’m describing, the first annual performance studies conference, titled, “The Future of the Field,” marks the shift into a period of liminal transition. Though others can (and have) identified other turning points in the discipline’s narrative, this conference offered the first public and communally recognized declaration of the field’s intent to stand on its own amongst more established disciplines. The epithet “First Annual” announces the intent to stand independent from the numerous disciplinary organizations – ATHE, ASTR, SCA, MLA, AFS, and the like – where performance studies work might be displayed. “The Future of the Field” functions as a performative utterance, calling into social reality both the field and

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its future, much as a bar mitzvah boy (at least in the modern American stereotype) declares, at the start of his first public oration in the synagogue, “Today I am a man.” As befits a rite of passage, the mood of the conference was liminal, processual, and multi-real. Dwight Conquergood, then chair of Northwestern’s performance studies department, set the tone in his keynote address: “Instead of a stable, monolithic paradigm of performance studies, I prefer to think of a caravan: a heterogenous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move.”17 This sense of forward motion went beyond the controlled chaos that accompanies any large academic gathering – several hundred participants, a mélange of plenaries, breakout sessions, performances, and business meetings. There was the sense that something extraordinary was happening. In a special section of TDR devoted to recapping the event, participants described the event as “upbeat and celebratory,” “fascinating and diverse,” “potentially historic,” and “the best conference I ever attended.” In my own “field notes” on the event, I find this passage: People who remember talking to me during the conference will remember that I was very upbeat, even elated, about the whole experience. I experienced an optimism, a hope, and a thrill – a freedom that comes from risk … But in exposing ourselves to risk, we also expose ourselves to the incredible potential of an emerging discipline. Reading this passage at a distance of 13 years,18 I recognize the unmistakable signs of communitas: the affective feeling of being connected to the larger community. For me, this was a spontaneous communitas, liberating and euphoric. For others, no doubt, the feeling was more akin to a normative communitas, a feeling of being connected to a group they were not entirely sure they wanted to join. This sense that performance studies’ liminality was other than liberating is evidenced in comments made about a lack of racial diversity among the participants, about undue attention paid to “faddish” topics and academic “stars,” about a seemingly hermetic view of the field that was too limited to the United States in general and to the NYUNorthwestern University axis in particular.19 Nearly every comment could be (and was) justified by the experience of the commenter. That a significant percentage of the responses to the conference concerned the mechanics of the event – how it was organized, who was admitted to what event, what may or may not have been said or done in the heat of the moment – should not, in retrospect, have been surprising. After all, in ritual, ordinary actions and objects take on extraordinary symbolic importance. Of course seating arrangements were seen by some to represent the field’s priorities. Of course the process by which rooms and presentations were scheduled betrayed a hidden power structure. Of course the gossip in the corridors, the food at the receptions, and the wardrobe choices of the

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participants were portents of a future alternatively glorious and ominous. How could it be otherwise? Strangely, though, no scholar utilized ritual as a frame through which to analyze the conference, either during the event or afterward. Perhaps this was because, for some scholars, ritual studies was the past, not the future of the field. As Phelan writes in her introduction to The Ends of Performance, an anthology inspired in part by the conference, “Theirs [Turner’s and Schechner’s] was the work that first framed the field for me, but it was other work that sustained me and … can sustain the field in the next century.”20 Perhaps it was because, despite all the scholarly assertions of ritual’s importance, we still clung to a vestige of the enlightened secularist notion that (empty) “ritual” stands opposed to “real” action. Philip Auslander’s characterization of many participants as exhibiting “evangelical fervor” hints strongly in this direction.21 But most likely, we could not see the ritual frame because we were still inside it. As any bar mitzvah boy can tell you, it’s a nice party, but it’s not the end of the story. In contemporary America, the bar mitzvah marks the beginning, rather than the end of the passage to adulthood. Or as Schechner wrote in introducing TDR’s coverage of the conference, “Titling a conference ‘The Future of the Field’ is asking for trouble.”22 In the years that followed, we would find out just what kind of trouble. For the field, having staked its claim, would now have to answer for it both within and without. To the degree that this claim was based, in a very real way, on the celebration of liminality, the field’s own betwixt and between state vis-à-vis conventional scholarly disciplines presented a number of challenges. To return to one example cited earlier, the Performance Studies Focus Group of ATHE, hailed as a step forward for the field when it was founded just a few years earlier, now seemed misguided. Why pretend that performance studies is a subfield of theatre when we actually believe the reverse is true? The answer – that a standing rather than ad hoc presence at the largest annual gathering of theatre faculty in the world was a strategic necessity for the continued employment, promotion, and tenure of performance studies scholars, the vast majority of whom are employed by college and university theatre departments – had the virtue of being “true,” but lacked the transgressive communitas of “The Future of the Field.” At the same time, conversations began almost immediately about how best to institutionalize performance studies, leading to the formation in 1997 of Performance Studies international, intended “to promote communication and exchange among scholars and practitioners working in the field of performance.”23 For those graduate students and junior faculty who were privy to the deliberations over PSFG and PSi, even the bureaucratic stages of the field’s development (the drafting of mission statements and bylaws, the determination of voting procedures, rotation of conference sites, etc.) were tinged with liminality and communitas. We were still within the ritual frame, and to us the ordinary was extraordinary. But while we embraced the

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field’s liminal indeterminacy – a frequent complaint heard in meetings was “why can’t we leave it open?”– our interactions with “outsiders” taught us that our counterparts in (among others) theatre, speech communications, religion, and literature held different points of view. I will describe these encounters with other fields in some detail, because they also illustrate another way in which performance studies’ transitional period fits the liminal model: through inversion of traditional roles. The heightened (some would say extreme) emphasis on new paradigms and new ways of doing cultural work meant that graduate students enjoyed a status much higher than might be the case elsewhere. This was true in all areas of academic life. In scholarship, graduate students working in performance studies were routinely encouraged to (and did) publish early and often.24 In teaching, such students, especially those working on identity-based performance analysis, found themselves in demand (at least as adjuncts) to teach courses that students wanted but which existing faculty did not cover. In professional service, the inversion of roles was even more common. Students helped plan the conferences, edit the journals, and build the web sites, not just as paid labor, but as collaborators. The founding officers of both PSi and PSFG included several students, and students remained involved in organizational leadership roles throughout the 1990s. So when we encountered faculty from, for example, theatre studies at conferences or in job interviews, we were treated much like politicians from backwater districts or attachés from small nations. Diplomatic protocol demanded that we be treated with respect, even as the authority that issued our credentials was suspect. Some would-be colleagues were frankly and openly hostile to performance studies. The first conference paper I ever presented was singled out from the podium by the keynote speaker as an example of performance studies’ methodological flaws and how this pointed to a general decline in the state of theatre scholarship.25 Was it a great paper? Probably not. But was it a threat to the discipline? Yet the negative attention was oddly flattering, in the way that, as Deb Margolin has written, being accused of killing Christ can be flattering to an adolescent Jew who lives in fear of neighborhood bullies.26 And like that libel, the charge of being party to a conspiracy to murder theatre studies was one I heard on many occasions. More commonly, we would encounter colleagues who shared Dolan’s view that performance studies was of value, but not substantially different enough from theatre to warrant all the fuss. As one past-president of ASTR put it in a symposium at the University of Maryland, “Isn’t performance studies simply what we used to call good theatre studies?”27 Conversely, some of our colleagues turned out to be – you should excuse the expression – fellow travelers. Many were products of the performance studies programs at NYU and Northwestern, but many others were simply those who had read the work of Schechner and others and found the case for performance studies to be compelling. Though they

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shared, in some cases, intellectual perspectives on the field, the emerging constellation of “PS people” seemed delineated as much by the degree to which people had experienced the communitas of the field’s liminality. Or to put it another way, PS people not only knew the jargon, they knew the experience. They would recount having heard this paper or that lecture with the same sense of retrospective awe that seems to overcome certain music fans. It was not unusual to hear two PS people comparing notes on various PSi conferences as earnestly as Grateful Dead fans might debate the merits of particularly notorious concerts. Which do you prefer: Aberystwyth or Arizona? If you listened carefully, you might even hear someone say, as a means of establishing their bona fides, “I was doing performance studies before it was cool.” Sic transit gloria mundi. The rite of passage is successful only when it is complete. Eventually, the bar mitzvah boy must assume the responsibilities of adulthood. The publication of Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002) marks, in this history, the conclusion of performance studies’ liminal phase and the beginnings of its postliminal or incorporation phase. In this stage of the ritual, the initiate is welcomed back into the society with his or her new status now acknowledged. At present this phase of performance studies’ development is still ongoing, and probably will be for many years to come. Schechner’s textbook, however, is testament to the field’s place among other recognized disciplines. In the functional parlance of the Euro-American university, we now have a tangible, measurable course of study. Moreover, to the degree that the text is clearly identified as introductory, it opens a space for advanced curricula that build upon and expand its insights and knowledge. Thus though not the first text to survey the field of performance, Performance Studies: An Introduction makes the strongest case to date for the field qua field. The production of the textbook, to which I was a party as a research and editorial assistant, was itself a rite of passage. From its early stages of development, all of us were aware that the project would require finding a way to reframe performance studies’ oppositional multiplicity – and Schechner’s unique writing style – within the bounds that higher education would recognize as a “textbook.” The author himself seemed aware that this process marked a transition for both himself and the field. As he noted at the 1999 PSi Conference in Wales, where he discussed the textbook-in-progress as part of a roundtable on approaches to teaching performance studies, “It’s sobering to realize that you are no longer Oedipus, but have become Laius.”28 As the bar mitzvah boy might work with his tutor, we were aided by those who had greater experience with this particular rite, in this case Moira Taylor, Senior Textbook Development Editor for Routledge, as well as many scholars who reviewed the manuscript at various stages. Nevertheless, the goal of a fielddefining text often seemed as improbable as it was necessary. The resultant text, like any postliminal initiate, bears the marks of this transitional ordeal. Though tightly structured along the lines necessary for

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a class text, Performance Studies: An Introduction also contains within it a significant anti-structural strain, harnessing together disparate ideas, associations and voices into a narrative that seems at once clear and paradoxical. This is most evident in the ubiquitous “boxes” that, as Schechner writes, “offer alternative opinions and interruptions [… and] open the conversation in ways I might not be able to reach.”29 One of the early inspirations for the book’s layout was the Talmud, in which the main text is arranged at the center of the page, while various commentaries, notes, textual emendations, and cross-references are arranged around the margins. In Jewish tradition, this serves to institutionalize a culture of learned debate and reasoned disagreement. To the degree that Schechner’s textbook sets the standard for the field, we might indulge the utopian hope that performance studies can similarly honor multiplicity. Toward that end, following Performance Studies: An Introduction have come other books which continue the process of the field’s incorporation. Many of these are edited collections such as Erin Striff’s Performance Studies (2003), my own The Performance Studies Reader (2004), and D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera’s The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies (2006). Others are in various stages of development. In some ways, the present collection belongs on the list, too. As with Schechner’s boxes, the multivocal nature of these volumes reflects both a desire to hang on to the sense of communitas that characterized the field’s transitional period. Having taken an oppositional stance to the unmarked and exclusionary authorial voice of other fields’ textbooks, we have gone the other way, preferring to err, if at all, on the side of inclusion. One illustration of this desire is the fact that most of these collections include chapters that reflect critically on the way the field has evolved. This shows in part how performance studies as a discipline mirrors the reflexivity or self-awareness that characterizes many of the performances it studies. Viewed as part of the incorporation phase of a rite of passage, however, the repeated citation of the field’s intellectual history emerges as a necessary ritual. By emphasizing the points of connection with prior disciplinary moves, performance studies contains within it both the oppositional liminality that marks its origin and the means for reconciliation with the larger society. Ongoing attention by scholars such as Marvin Carlson, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Joseph Roach, Shannon Jackson, Stephen Bottoms, and others to performance’s disciplinary genealogies serves a similar purpose. One of the luxuries of adulthood is the opportunity to reflect critically on one’s formative years As both van Gennep and Turner recognized, neither societies nor individuals ever outgrow the need for rites of passage. Periods of perceived stability are continually punctuated by periods of crisis, in which rituals can help to bridge divisions and maintain the social order. In other words, the process I’ve described here is not (and in a sense can never be) complete. PSi is now a thriving organization, and a few more academic departments have become

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departments of performance studies (or added “and Performance Studies” to their titles), but the field as a stand-alone enterprise is still limited in its penetration of higher education. More secure is performance studies’ status as a recognized subfield, comparable to theatre history, rhetoric, or dramatic criticism. Even at that level, rites of passage similar to the one I’ve described continue to play out on a local scale at their own pace, as conditions and personnel dictate. Meanwhile, it also seems that theatre studies, in higher education at least, has come to be marked by its encounter with performance, much in the way that Dolan foresaw in 1993. ASTR’s recently revised mission statement now reads, “The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) is a U.S.-based professional organization that fosters scholarship on worldwide theatre and performance, both historical and contemporary.”30 ATHE’s logo now bears the tagline “Performance in Theory & Practice.”31 While few if any of the world’s theatre departments have gotten “out of the theatre business,” the acceptance of “the performance business” is looking more and more like a done deal. Indeed, the field of theatre and drama, from which performance studies once declared its independence, is no longer the structure-bound society it appeared to be in the past. Consider that in 2008, ATHE honored Schechner with its Career Achievement Award. There is still work to be done, still passages and transitions in our future, but perhaps a new metaphor is in order. No longer the bar mitzvah boy, performance studies just might be the prodigal son.

Notes 1. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 40. 2. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else. London: Routledge, 2001, 50. 3. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002, 16. That these events span exactly 13 years is serendipity, not beshert (destiny). 4. Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theatre and Performance,” The Drama Review 17, 3 (Sep. 1973): 5-36. 5. The “international” component of the field has been, and continues to be, hotly contested. The use of the lowercase “i” in the name of the ongoing organization, Performance Studies international, signals the need to internationalize the field more completely. 6. Richard Schechner, “TDR Comment: A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” TDR 36:4 (T136) (Autumn 1992): 7–10. 7. Schechner, “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy”: 9. 8. Jill Dolan, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the Performative,” Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 417–41. Quote from p. 424. 9. Dolan, “Geographies of Learning ”: 422. 10. Dolan, “Geographies of Learning ”: 430. 11. Richard Hornby, “Against Performance Theory,” TheatreWeek 8, 11 (17 October 1994): 31–7. 12. Hornby, “Against Performance Theory”: 34. 13. Hornby, “Against Performance Theory”: 37.

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14. Hornby, “Against Performance Theory”: 34, 36. 15. Schechner, “A New Paradigm”: 9. 16. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993, 152. 17. Dwight Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies on the Move,” TDR 39, 4 (T148) (Fall 1995): 140. 18. Again, the interval is merely (I think) coincidental. 19. The special section on the conference appeared in TDR 39, 4 (T148) (Fall 1995): 137–87. For ease of reading, and because I don’t feel the identities of the writers are essential to the point I’m making, I have omitted citations for the individual comments in this paragraph. 20. Peggy Phelan, “Introduction,” in Phelan and Jill Lane, eds, The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998, 4. 21. Philip Auslander, “Evangelical Fervor,” TDR 39, 4 (T148) (Fall 1995): 178–83. 22. Richard Schechner, “TDR Comment: “The Future of the Field,” TDR 39, 4 (T148) (Fall 1995): 7. 23. PSi official web site, at www.psi-web.org/texts/mission.html 24. This encouragement to publish was also driven by the recognition that, for many of us, a strong record of publication would be necessary to overcome the antiperformance studies prejudices of faculty at institutions to which we would one day apply for jobs. 25. The conference was the 1995 Australasian Drama Studies Association conference in Armidale, New South Wales. 26. Deb Margolin, “O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms,” in Lynda Hart, ed., Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo. London: Cassell, 1999, 141. 27. I do not recall the name or exact date of this symposium, which was organized by Cynthia Wimmer, then a PhD student in Theatre at Maryland. 28. The quote, from memory, may not be exact. 29. Schechner, Performance Studies, 1. 30. ASTR official web site, www.astr.org 31. ATHE official web site, www.athe.org

6 Richard Schechner and Performance Studies in China Yu Jiancun and Peng Yongwen

I Introduction: performance studies as an intercultural phenomenon As a global phenomenon, performance studies is constantly evolving, and from the very beginning of its emergence as a discipline, it has embraced an intercultural sensibility. Conceptually, it does not belong to any individual nation or culture, and one of its strengths is that different nations and different cultures have interpreted performance studies differently. As Richard Schechner has noted: “Different cultures collide and fuse with each other. That is what we called ‘intercultural performance.’”1 Schechner’s work and his professional activities not only convey performance studies’ intercultural sensibility; that work encourages this sensibility as well. We as performance studies scholars in China have felt that encouragement. But before going into a discussion of how Schechner’s work as a scholar and theatre practitioner has influenced the emergence of performance studies in China, we would like to explain our own particular relationship to the field of performance studies and our specific relationship to Richard Schechner. As performance studies scholars, we are both affiliated with the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where a number of scholars and professors are interested in Richard Schechner’s work and his theories. Both of us are students of Sun Huizhu (or William Sun as he is known in the United States), who is the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s Vice-President, and who in practical terms played the pivotal role in building the field of performance studies in China. Sun Huizhu is himself a student of Schechner’s and in 1990 completed a PhD in Performance Studies under Schechner’s supervision at NYU. Sun is also currently one of the two members of the Shanghai Theatre Academy faculty who are affiliated with the Tisch School of the Arts special program in China, and he is a contributing editor of TDR. Under Sun’s direction, both of us wrote our dissertations on Schechner, and continue to do research on his work. Sun has also been instrumental in arranging opportunities, especially for Yu Jiancun, to meet with Schechner and to 98

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maintain contact with him through internet technologies. Yu Jiancun’s research tends to emphasize the theoretical aspects of Schechner’s work, whereas Peng Yongwen’s research emphasizes the more practical dimension. Currently, Yu Jiancun teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in British and American Literature and Drama at Shanghai University, and Peng Yongwen works in the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Since Sun Huizhu was a student of Schechner’s, his theories and practice not only reflect his contribution to Schechner’s notion of performance studies, but also show the development of Schechner’s ideas in China. (So too does our own research and work on performance studies.) In China, performance studies combines aspects of Psychology, Behavioral Studies, Economics, Politics, Management, Philosophy, Pedagogical Studies, Anthropology, History, and Literary Studies. This is similar to performance studies in the United States, but in China the emphasis is specifically on the study of social performance. Here it follows groundbreaking work by Sun in his book Social Performance Studies (2009), which was published by China’s prestigious Commercial Press in Beijing. This is the first book-length study of China’s social performance studies. In other work, Sun blends his theory of social performance studies with considerations of traditional Chinese culture and society, and as a theatre practitioner, Sun has staged productions in Shanghai and Taiwan that blend modern social elements with traditional Chinese culture. Whatever its current emphases in the United States, Europe, or China, this academic discipline has strong ties to New York University where Schechner played an instrumental role in inviting psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and theatre scholars to found NYU’s Department of Performance Studies in 1980. Beyond his own individual research and scholarly pursuits in performance studies, Schechner has also broadened the focus of TDR. As its Editor, he has repositioned performance studies as TDR’s primary concern. That is why The Drama Review has two titles: 1. The Drama Review; 2. The Journal of Performance Studies. This shift in TDR’s emphasis has coincided with the full and vigorous emergence of performance studies as a cultural field of inquiry. Since the 1990s, performance studies symposia have been held around the world, and they have not only intensified research in the field, but also enlarged the scope of its interests. Schechner has been instrumental in China and India as well, although here we will discuss how his work concerns China today.

II Schechner, Shanghai Theatre Academy and the emergence of performance studies in China Besides expanding the range of material included in TDR, Schechner has been involved directly and practically in the wide dissemination of

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performance studies as a field of study. Frequently lecturing internationally, Schechner has come to China numerous times where in his lectures he has advocated for an embrace of performance studies. Schechner first came to the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1988 when he gave a lecture on performance studies that attracted the attention of many teachers and students, but since performance studies was not yet well understood, the lecture had little noticeable impact or effect. Although Schechner first visited Shanghai in 1988, it was in July of 1984 that his name first appeared in China. A Chinese translation of Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre was published in 1984. In a chapter of the book Schechner and Theodore Hoffman interviewed Grotowski. Wei Shi translated Towards a Poor Theatre into Chinese – although he did not translate the name “Schechner” as Xiekena,” (the accepted translation today) but as “Shishinuoer.” In 1987, an essay entitled “Richard Schechner and his Environmental Theatre” by Wen Jiasheng was published in the Shanghai artists’ newspaper Artists in Shanghai. In the same year, Sun Huizhu published an essay, “Richard Schechner and his Theatre Anthropology,” which drew the attention of artists to Schechner’s theories. Schechner’s book Environmental Theater was translated by Cao Lusheng of the Shanghai Theatre Academy and published by China Theatre Publishing House in May 2001. It was during Schechner’s fifth visit to China in 2005 that Sun Huizhu (Vice-President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy) established the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at STA. The Schechner Center, which formally opened on 21 March 2005, focuses on social performance studies (what one might call performance studies with Chinese characteristics). It also translates and publishes a Chinese edition of TDR. With the opening of the Schechner Center, the actual physical locations as well as the actual content of performance studies expanded. During his 2005 trip, Schechner gave talks at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and also at Beijing University, where he was introduced by Wu Zhipan, Deputy President of the university. Many newspapers reported on his lectures with headlines like “Richard Schechner, A Leader in Theatre, Gave a Lecture at Beijing University” and “Schechner Was Embraced by Beijing University – the World Famous Theatre Theorist Gave a Lecture in Beijing.”2 The municipality of Shanghai attaches great importance to the Schechner Center and at the opening ceremony, the Deputy Mayor, Yang Xiaodu, met with Schechner and his wife, Carol Martin, a professor at NYU and a theatre and performance studies scholar. The Center takes social performance as the focal point of its research, but it also facilitates research on ritual and experimental theatre. At the opening of the Schechner Center, Schechner gave a lecture entitled “The Past, Present, and Future of Performance Studies.” In this lecture, he divided performance studies into five categories: aesthetic performance, social performance, public performance, ritual performance, and play.

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At the same time, he talked about his expectation that performance studies in China would lead to new categories and developments. He asked, what will performance studies be like in China? The answer to this question is directly related to Sun Huizhu’s bold rethinking of Schechner’s theory. Whereas Schechner’s theories move far beyond artistic performance, they tend to pay more attention to pre-modern rituals and postmodern performance art. Sun Huizhu focuses on the increasingly urban forms of social performance in the rapidly modernizing China. Indeed, the contribution to performance studies made by Sun Huizhu is such that he opened a new research field in China. In 1999, when Sun Huizhu returned to China from the United States, he introduced performance studies to Chinese scholars. He published an article entitled “Performance Matters: An Introduction to Social Performance Studies.”3 More articles followed in other academic journals. For example, “Performance Studies and Social Performance: Philosophical Foundations and Practical Ramifications” in Theatre Arts, 4 “Social Performance Studies and Harmonious Society” in Liberation Daily, 5 and “Social Performance: Between the Real and the Virtual” in the Journal of Shanghai University. 6 Sun Huizhu not only set the direction of performance studies in China, but also highlighted its Chinese characteristics. Sun thinks that performance studies should work in concert with the realities of Chinese society and thereby develop its own way, which leads to social performance studies. This is a logical course since China places great importance on the development of social spaces like cities and during the past 30 years China’s great achievements have been in economy and urbanization. Sun recognizes this feature of the era, and shifted scholarly focus from traditional performance and postmodernism to the study of social performance with Chinese characteristics, such as how people perform their professions – in business, medicine, law, and so on. This aspect of performance studies has been examined by performance studies scholars Joseph Roach, Shannon Jackson, and Jon McKenzie in the United States, among others. Obviously, social performance thus conceptualized is derived from Schechner’s notions of performance studies, but it also displays Sun’s creativity in performance theory with regard to the developing trends of performance studies in China. In 2004, the first Masters Program in social performance studies began at Shanghai Theatre Academy. In 2005, the PhD program in performance studies began. As fields of research, performance studies and social performance studies have evolved quickly. After three or four years, the research focus extended into such areas as social performance and the practice of law, education, business management, public service, literature, and drama. This research has yielded fascinating results, especially with regard to the exploration of social performance in dramatic texts – that is, a combination of social performance theory with dramatic literature. This combination not only provides a new perspective for criticism of dramatic

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literature, but also for how one conducts research on dramatic literature in general. Along these lines, Yu Jiancun published “Willy Loman and His Social Performance – Arthur Miller’s Ideas of Social Performance Studies in The Death of Salesman” in the Journal of Shanghai University7 and similar works like “Politics and Social Performance – a Study of King Lear from the Aspect of Social Performance” in the Journal of Sichuan International Studies University.8 These articles followed a series of studies that combined various theories of performance studies with an exploration of specific dramatic works – essays like Yu Jiancun’s “The Manifestation of Performance Studies in Hamlet,” which was published in Shakespeare Our Contemporary: Contexts, Intertexts & Perspectives by Fudan University Press (2005) and another essay by Yu Jiancun, published in 2008, “The Origin, the Present Situation and the Future Trend of Performance Studies” in the fourth issue of The Chinese Theatre, which is the key journal of the Chinese Dramatists’ Association. Moreover, in September 2007 the Chinese edition of Performance Studies Series (TDR/China) was inaugurated with Sun Huizhu as its editor. This series not only introduces recent research trends in performance studies from around the world, but also provides a platform for Chinese scholars. The series is at the forefront of the development of performance studies as well as being a symbol of Chinese Social performance studies. In China, performance studies has attracted the interest of many prestigious Chinese universities, such as Nanjing University, Beijing University, Shanghai University, Shanghai Normal University, Yunan College of Performing Arts (Yunan province), and Chinese Traditional Opera College (Beijing). But, unlike the Shanghai Theatre Academy, they have not yet established performance studies as an independent discipline. Nonetheless, scholars at these universities and colleges have shown real interest in performance studies and are doing research in this exciting field. In the essays that they have written about performance studies, they have brought new understanding to the field, which, in turn, they have incorporated into their teaching and are passing on to their students. Moreover, scholars from these universities are active participants in the international symposia on performance studies that Sun Huizhu has organized at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. There scholars from a wide range of universities and colleges have had genuine opportunities to debate issues and problems pertaining to performance studies and especially to social performance studies in China. Social problems have accompanied China’s rapid economic growth in recent years, affecting relationships such as those between doctors and patients, between labor and management, between government officials and ordinary citizens, to name a few. It is worth considering what significant role social performance studies might potentially play in helping different sections of the government address these problems. For example, doctors should know how to perform in front of patients in order to establish a harmonious relationship with them. Similarly, government officials should

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have some training in performance for their work, especially when they have to take part, for example, in speech competitions for promotions. In such instances, performance studies proves to be more than just a discipline for Chinese students to learn; it is a concept that has the potential to change some traditional Chinese ideas and thereby help to build a more harmonious society. In this regard, the Shanghai Theatre Academy is at the forefront of performance studies in China today, and Sun Huizhu is opening new paths for performance studies in China, both theoretically and practically.

III Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question at the Shanghai Theatre Academy: symbolic devices and cultural perspectives In addition to the profoundly important role that Richard Schechner has played in the emergence of performance studies in China, his influence has been felt within the realms of theatrical practice as well. Besides coming to China as a scholar, Schechner has also come as a director. In October 2007, Shanghai Theatre Academy held its International Experimental Theatre Festival, which was followed by a symposium held on October 21 at the Academy that attracted hundreds of teachers and students from academic institutions around the nation. Those in attendance offered a wide range of presentations, and there was an enthusiastic and vigorous exchange of opinions and ideas. Indeed, at the symposium, Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question was one of the works that was widely discussed. Generally speaking, the discussion split along two lines. Among those who were critical of Schechner’s production of Hamlet: That is the Question, Lv Xiaoping from Nanjing University is a good example. He held that Schechner’s use of multimedia in Hamlet: That is the Question was not particularly innovative and such a strategy had already been used in the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore, he argued that there was a lack of aesthetic context in Schechner’s production and that the production amounted to more of a game rather than art.9 On the other hand, Gui Ying from Zhejiang University offered a positive assessment. She gave high praise to Schechner’s work, noting his contributions to environmental theatre. She argued that his production of Hamlet: That is the Question confronted her with the “unpredictability of theater.”10 Moreover, “it is not only the unpredictability of theater,”11 that she saw in Schechner’s production, “but also a confrontation with theater as such.”12 She maintained that Schechner’s production of Hamlet: That is the Question endowed the theatre with excitement and vitality through a compelling strategy: the use of experimental theatre as a construction of social emotion.13 Our own sense is that Schechner’s works are always positioned between art and philosophy. Although from period to period his ideas may vary, one constant throughout his career has been the notion that cultural boundaries can be crossed and that, whatever the conflicts, different cultures can

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be fused. Similarly, the justification for doing a classical work like Hamlet needs to be found in a connection between present realities and the temporal contexts of the work itself. The notions of intercultural boundaries and of transgressing temporal restrictions are in line with Schechner’s insistence that “containment is the enemy.”14 Indeed, for Schechner, putting together a production involves acts of transgression that fuse the culture of the work with that of the local culture in which the production is staged, acts that thus construct a shared sense of time. Schechner’s production of Hamlet: That is the Question in Shanghai was consistent with such tendencies. First of all, he transplanted Hamlet from the English world to the Chinese, and keeping his audience in mind, he cultivated intercultural perspectives, creatively deploying rich symbolism. For example, he placed the story of murder and betrayal against the backdrop of a stage that was clean and white – complete with mops that symbolically and literally were there to clean up the mess left by Shakespeare’s drama. When we entered the theatre, we were surprised to discover the whole stage bathed in white. Not only was the stage white, the audience sections were as well. In fact, the whole theatre appeared to be spotlessly white. This provoked our imaginations: Isn’t Hamlet a story about revenge within the royal family? Why, then, did the director opt for such whiteness? What significance did he want to convey? In the DVD edition of the play, Schechner offered some answers in a preface: “My Hamlet is different.” The pure whiteness provided a deliberate point of conflict with the play’s moments of revenge and murder. What appears to be a pure and sacred site turns out to be a place full of betrayal, revenge, and murder. The purity on the surface is in ironic contrast to a dark inner world. The message here is unmistakable. Schechner wants to convey a simple reality. The royal family has nothing to do with purity, and he has laid bare the cruelty of their power struggle. As an artist, Schechner is not only insightful but also political. He has always maintained a clear sense of politics in his long career as a scholar, director, and teacher. As far back as the 1960s and 1970s, Schechner was already thinking about political activism and theatre through the methods he used both to create new spaces for performance and to redefine existing spaces of performance. The heavy use of the color white in his production of Hamlet: That is the Question placed this same political sensibility in an intercultural context. Indeed, it highlighted the royal palace as a site of corruption and dirt, which by extension also suggested that the world of politics is corrupt and dirty and in need of cleaning – and it is in need of cleaning on a daily basis. What better object is there to represent this need than a common mop? Because a palace is spacious, one or two people cannot accomplish the cleaning alone. It requires coordinated, collective action by a group of people, and Schechner implicitly extended this symbol beyond the theatre. He not only cleaned the palace with mops, but also symbolically communicated a call for “all hands on deck.” All actors who took part in the

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play had to join in the group cleaning of the palace. Zheng Xing who played Claudius the King was no exception. Why did Schechner choose ordinary cleaning tools like mops as props to create atmosphere and to illuminate the plot? In an interview, Ni Hao, who played the part of Polonius, offered an anecdote that suggests an answer. One day when Ni Hao arrived at the theatre earlier than the other actors, he took a mop and began cleaning the floor since Schechner had asked that the floor be cleaned every day. Observing Ni Hao, Schechner found a moment of inspiration and asked everyone to pick up a mop and to take part in the cleaning. Claudius was no exception. Initially, some actors were reluctant to follow the request. They questioned the acceptability of this obvious and brief “extension of life,”15 suggesting that mopping was not something of artistic value. Although Ni Hao knew that Schechner’s inspiration came from his own cleaning gestures, he found it troubling that, however much the other actors might have questioned Schechner’s new idea, nearly all of them ultimately complied with his request. He attributed this to servility and said “if it had been a Chinese director, the actors would have laughed at him.”16 Ni Hao speculated that the actors chose not to resist Schechner’s ideas out of politeness to someone from abroad. But when the interpreter briefly communicated the actors’ reluctance to Schechner, he reacted strongly. Not only did he reject the actors’ criticism; he also stated emphatically that the mop would be part of the production both in China and elsewhere. The struggle over the mop ultimately resulted in a victory for Schechner’s production. In fact, mops appear four times in his production of Hamlet: That is the Question. One good example is when Hamlet recites his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy. As the lights turn dim, all of the actors sweep the dark palace. Another example is at the climax of the play. The actors sweep the stage directly before the final tragedy in order to bring people out of their gloom. A tragedy is about to happen. What the world needs is the means to sweep it off. At the basic level of appearance, this is the function of the mop. But, in fact, it also satirizes the dirtiness of political struggles for power. Ni Hao’s sweeping that morning was but a catalyst that facilitated the expression of Schechner’s deeper understanding of Hamlet. In addition to the political satire, the mop also serves additional functions within the production. In the play, Hamlet sends a gift to Ophelia, and Schechner decided to use the mop to serve as Hamlet’s precious gift. This imbued the mop with a rich ambiguity. Here it is not clear what the mop signifies. Is it a barrier between lovers or a cheaply prized love? Or does it suggest the need to cleanse their love of a corrupting evil? Obviously, the mop carries all of these possibilities and more. Indeed, Schechner colored this particular mop in red – the color that symbolizes good luck in China – and thereby added an intercultural layer to the mop’s significance as well. Last but not least, the final use of the mop occurs after the play ends when all the props, except the

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mops themselves, are removed from the stage. Is this a coincidence? As is the case with Schechner’s abundant use of the color white, the significance of his use of the mops lies in the open-ended intensity of the ideas that it generates and in its exemplification of intercultural negotiations. More than two months after the performance ended, Yu Jiancun interviewed Ni Hao by telephone once again.17 The performer who previously had been so critical of the idea of using the mop had now changed his mind. He was no longer dismissive or contemptuous of the idea. On the contrary, he believed the mop to have had an almost magical role in the production. “The use of mops is not bad,” he said. “There is something special about it.” When we asked about the reaction of other actors, he said that after having been quite disheartened initially, they too now admitted that the mops had a special charm. Obviously, early reluctance and skepticism gradually gave way to acceptance and appreciation. In addition to his use of the mops and to the opposition he constructed between the whiteness of the palace and the darkness of politics, Schechner also constructed an opposition between the throne and a tomb in his production. This too proved controversial. Liu Minghou, for example, was critical of this stage design. After seeing the production, she commented: “A tomb is under the throne. It is the first time I have encountered a combination of reality with illusion in Hamlet.”18 Clearly, placing the throne on top of a tomb is a novel idea. No one would expect to find a tomb under a throne. No one would expect that a throne is the way to death. Neither would it necessarily occur to anyone that this construct is a portrait of the old King and Claudius. Though they are blood brothers, power tempts them into bloodthirstiness. This point is underscored by the fact that Claudius’s guard holds a shovel instead of a sword. It is no mere coincidence that King Claudius stays with a grave-digger and that the grave-digger is prepared at any moment to bury the king. The display is rich in implication. The throne is implicated in the tragedies of history. Many people lose their lives in struggling for the throne. The throne on the tomb thus is more than a simple signal about King Claudius. Like the white adopted in the palace, its significance reverberates beyond its immediate context. The throne on the tomb suggests a larger truth of which the fate of the people in the palace is merely an example – a truth realized by Shakespeare and staged by Schechner. Human mortality is a basic fact. Regardless of wealth or position, everyone must die. Yet a king’s death is different. Earthly conflict defines a king’s character, and this is conveyed in the understanding that Schechner displayed in equating the tomb and the throne. What is the significance of combat? It pulls one down into the tomb, and there is always someone waiting beside the throne to prepare for the king’s funeral. But here Schechner is not only showing the significance of combat. He also questions it. He thus displays a profound understanding of the world and life as

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well as a deep understanding of tragedy. Yet, in that an American transmits this understanding to Chinese audiences, that understanding ultimately is marked with intercultural significance – a significance that is located at the site where Schechner’s direction and the audience meet. It is there at the intercultural meeting point and not in his use of these symbolic devices alone that the creativity of Schechner’s production resides. At a technical level, Schechner also employed a number of creative devices in his production of Hamlet: That is the Question. Sun Huizhu noted that in addition to the actual performance of the play, Schechner’s production included an “unprecedented” use of “four cameras working at the same time with a program director.” “No one has done this before,” he added, “neither the Chinese, nor the Americans.” And then he asked a simple but important question: “What is the significance of this method?”19 Sun highlighted a fundamental point about Schechner’s work. As a theatre visionary, Schechner uses his unique talents to break old frameworks in order to build new ones. The use of the cameras in Hamlet: That is the Question is an example of his talents. As the four cameras are running, a program director simultaneously edits their images and thereby controls what is projected on the two screens that Schechner has hung on the theatre’s walls. While it is true, as Lv Xiaoping argued, that 30 to 40 years ago some directors had already incorporated film into their productions, Schechner’s use of film in Hamlet: That is the Question is different. He believes that the justification for producing a classical work of theatre has less to do with using the work in order to connect with a piece of history than with finding the means to connect the work with the present. His allegiance is thus not to the original story of a classical drama, and he does not see his task as that of providing a copy of the playwright’s work. He believes that any production reflects its own historical context and the director’s ideas. Both of these, in turn, are reflected in the strategies and mechanisms of the production. In this media-driven time period, it is thus appropriate to employ media devices in Hamlet. Responding to this particular approach, Sun Huizhu observed that it leaves no difference between the stage and the backstage, and Shi Hao likened the camera shots to a “spy glass,” noting that “all the characters are supervised.”20 In this respect, Schechner’s production arguably highlights the lack of privacy in the world. The presence of cameras situates the performance in the present, and his direction of Hamlet epitomizes the present. Of course, there are other strategies for situating a work in the present. But Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question highlights the influence of the present on the production. When a work is transplanted from one culture to another, it too will be influenced by that new culture and by the interpretations that come from that culture. According to Schechner, the allopathic qualities of culture can revitalize a work. This is in part because the sympathetic reception of a work by people of a different culture is largely the result of their being able to find

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what they want in the work – which, in turn, transforms the work into a cultural intersection. In this respect, Schechner is himself a strong advocate for intercultural approaches. When he produced Hamlet: That is the Question on a Chinese stage, one of his primary concerns centered on the question of how to incorporate Chinese elements into the play. In terms of the general conception, Schechner felt that asking children to play parts in Hamlet: That is the Question would underscore the contrast between innocence (the innocence of children) and the dark struggle for power in the royal family. But this general conception took on an important intercultural dimension because the children who played those parts were in fact a group of children from the Beijing Opera. The stars of Schechner’s production thus provided a key intercultural focal point. The members of the Beijing Opera within Schechner’s production (a play, so to speak, within a play) exemplified his beliefs that it is possible to integrate cultures in theatre and that every theatre production is marked by the cultural site where it is performed. Even the character of Ophelia exemplified Schechner’s notions of intercultural production and of situating a work in the present. In Shakespeare’s play, Ophelia is characterized as a weak, sensitive, and passive woman: a representation of gentleness in the coarseness of a male-dominated world. But Schechner reinterpreted Ophelia, giving her characteristics of women today, and in the intercultural contexts of his production this generated significant debate. Liu Minghou, for example, questioned Schechner’s interpretation, asking “How could she be mad? She is so strong, so passionate, and so modern. In fact, she is far removed from Shakespeare’s original Ophelia.” Liu Minghou concluded that Schechner’s “Ophelia is more like Antigone.”21 For Liu, Schechner’s interpretation of Ophelia did not make sense. But Liu does not seem to have realized that Schechner was not attempting to give us Shakespeare’s Ophelia, but rather a contemporary Ophelia with characteristics of women today. Indeed, Schechner’s depiction trumps male prerogatives: unscrupulously grabbing Hamlet’s crotch, Schechner’s Ophelia demonstrates power, and in an age of increasing gender equality this demonstration shows that women have more rights. Expression of sexuality is one example of those rights. Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question was marked by other expressions of sexuality that distinguished its characters and character relationships. In his production Hamlet and Horatio were played as lovers – a relationship that was made abundantly clear when the two kissed each other on the mouth at their first meeting on the stage. Before rehearsals began, when Schechner told Sun that he planned to use actual physical love between Hamlet and Horatio in his Hamlet, Sun was worried and hoped that Schechner would change his mind. But Schechner insisted. Indeed, he has suggested that this relationship is absolutely crucial to understanding his production.22 Despite the fact that there was no mention in the press of Schechner’s use of homosexuality in his production, Schechner has argued that the homosexual love

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between Hamlet and Horatio “determines the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, Hamlet and Claudius, and to some degree Hamlet and the Ghost and Hamlet and Gertrude.” From the very beginning of his work on the production, it was, he notes, “the most important underlying character trait of [his] Hamlet” and explains why Hamlet “does not fit into the overtly hyper heterosexual world that Claudius imposes.” The homosexuality not only tells audiences how to understand “Hamlet and Horatio kissing full on the mouth,” but also “Horatio cradling Hamlet at his death,” as well as “the gender play/sex play among Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.”23 What is the “Question?” “The ‘question’ concerns Hamlet’s sexual orientation, his perceived ‘fitness’ to be a king in Claudius’s eyes, etc.”24 Perhaps in 2007 most audience members in Shanghai were already familiar with the topic of homosexuality, and not sensitive to it, which is why the press had no specific response to this aspect of Schechner’s production. Envisioned from a distinctly American perspective that drew both from Chinese cultural traditions and from contemporary cultural sources, Schechner produced a very new Hamlet, where issues of homosexuality are still very much an issue for audiences of all cultures. His production reflected a keen aesthetic sensibility and a commitment to intercultural experience. But it also provoked intense intercultural debates.

IV Schechner’s Tomorrow He’ll be Out of the Mountains in Shanghai and The Oresteia in Taiwan: revolutionary and controversial theatre In May 1989 Schechner was invited by the Shanghai People’s Art Theatre (now named the Shanghai Theatre Art Center) to direct Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan (Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains), written by Sun Huizhu. Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan is a story about the Cultural Revolution, a mistaken political movement launched by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 that ended in 1976. The main character is Qin Sidong, one of the Red Guard (who vehemently enforced the Cultural Revolution). Just like other young people at that time, Qin joins the political movement and criticizes and denounces people, two of whom commit suicide. But Qin does not know this because he is sent to a small village in the provinces. While in the village, Qin scores very high in a law examination. Because of his high score, Qin is selected as the assistant president of the law court in the province’s capital city. When he learns of his promotion, Qin confidently announces that he will work for justice in society. But when he finds out that he himself is responsible for the deaths of two people, Qin is deeply troubled. How can he work for justice when his own actions led to injustice? On the other hand, when the villagers learn that Qin will become the assistant president of the provincial capital’s law court, many of them give him their complaints in the hope that he will redress these injustices. Qin is faced with a dilemma. Whether he

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goes to the city or stays in the mountains, both are far from perfect. At long last, he bitterly chooses to stay in the village because Cha Huazi, his girlfriend, is afraid that, if Qin goes to the city, he will abandon her. But the villagers, wishing to use Qin to their own advantage, make him the center of a ritual that will send him off to the city. Ironically, in carrying Qin in a sedan chair, celebrating him and his promotion, they are forcing him out of the village. May and June 1989 were significant in China. The political and economic reforms brought wealth as well as corruption to China. Schechner arrived on 17 May and left for the United States after a brief rehearsal period of just over 20 days. Schechner did not finish directing Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains. The co-director, Stephen Chan (Chen Zaili) from Hong Kong (still a British colony at that point in time), took over the play’s direction. The production ceased being performed on 29 June 1989. Schechner regrets that he left China before the production was complete. The fact is, the Chinese authorities during the events of May–June 1989 – nearly as intense in Shanghai as in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square – stopped Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains from continuing to its formal opening. Schechner mentioned this experience on several occasions when he was invited to give speeches in Shanghai, most notably in his speech, “The Artist and Social Responsibility” at the Shanghai Theatre Art Center in 2005. He said that he had directed Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains before and during the turmoil in 1989 in China. Leaving before the production was complete was something he was ashamed about and regretted. But at the time, not only his wife, but also Sun Huizhu who was in the United States at the time, and David Oppenheim, Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, all urged Schechner to accept the US State Department’s offer to bring him back from Shanghai to New York. They felt that it was dangerous for Schechner to remain in China at the time. In retrospect, Schechner said he felt he made a stupid decision to leave Shanghai without finishing directing Sun’s play. The first preview of Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains was on 18 June 1989. Although the production never formally opened, it aroused heated discussions. The journal Drama published a series of commentaries on Schechner’s work, and The Shanghai People’s Art Theatre also held a special symposium on the play. These discussions were published in 1989 in the twelfth issue of Drama. In some cases, the play evoked extreme reactions, both positive and negative. In general, there were more negative comments about the play than positive ones. The fundamental principles of environmental theatre include the idea that the director should consider how to break the traditional relationship between audience and actors. In Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains, the spatial relationship between the actors and audience was new to Chinese spectators. Audience members sometimes joined the actors – as part of a dance and party in the first act and after being forcefully selected

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as victims of the humiliation practiced on certain intellectuals and others during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) in the second act. The audience participation brought a shocking sense of freshness and novelty to the spectators and artists who came to enjoy the play. During the play’s three acts there were two main performance areas. One was on the lawn of the Shanghai People’s Art Theatre; the other was in the theatre itself, where performance of the play began. It appeared as if the production would be an ordinary huaju (spoken drama, a modern play). But once the play started, the story-teller narrator led the audience to the grassy field in front of the People’s Art Theatre where actors playing the roles of educated youth sent from the cities to rural areas (a common practice during the Cultural Revolution) were having a drinking and dancing party with disco music. Actors invited the audience to join in the party. Not many spectators joined, although the actors did their best to persuade them. The audience seemed most impressed by a scene in the second act where the Red Guards taunt a capitalist roader (a Chinese who at the time was thought to be sympathetic to capitalism). Marching onto the stage, Red Guards held high the banner of the Cultural Revolution. They waved “little red books” of Mao Zedong’s sayings – books that were ubiquitous in those days – as they sang “rebellion songs.” Then an actor said in the manner of the Red Guards: “Listen, pay attention for a few minutes, otherwise we will arrest you.”25 Faced with this situation, individual spectators felt nervous, afraid of being the one “arrested.” Only when the Red Guards selected someone, did the rest of the audience watch the performance calmly. As for picking out a capitalist roader from the audience, spectators were informed before entering the theatre that this would happen. Different audience members have different memories and reactions to this scene. People old enough to have experienced this situation during the Cultural Revolution had very complex feelings while witnessing this scene. The environmental theatre staging evoked more profound feelings for them than for those in the audience who had no such experiences. It was reported that an older spectator who had experienced this situation during the Cultural Revolution died shortly after having been selected and arrested by the Red Guards in the performance. Many people thought his death was directly connected with Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains. This story indicates how strongly the Red Guards’ episode in the play evoked the Cultural Revolution and its excesses. As Su Leci wrote, “Although we are watching theater, we have a burden in our heart and we feel very afraid.”26 People who were arrested by the actors/Red Guards were held tightly and exhibited to the public. Red Guards hung accusing posters on the arrested, forced them to wear a dunce cap, and shouted slogans at them, to expose their political attitudes. This scene as staged by Schechner was compelling. The audience was “thrown into” audience participation. They were forced to be actors. However, regardless of the exciting disco in the first act or

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the Red Guards’ scene in the second act, the audience was hesitant about participating. In the disco-dancing section, only a few spectators were involved. Of course, sometimes professional artists in the theatre – and many came to see the production – took the initiative. These actors jumped in, meeting the urgent needs of the production. However, in most cases, the audience was “forced” to participate. Spectators tried to escape, especially in the scene where the Red Guards arrested the capitalist roaders. From our perspective, most spectators felt that Schechner’s audience participation was impossible to achieve, especially in China. A fierce debate over environmental theatre began. Many people believe that audience participation in China is theoretically possible, but not workable in practice because the national identity and habits of Chinese audiences are not open to this kind of action. Liu Qing concluded that “this new path may be a dead end. In this regard, it is a wonderful ‘fraud,’ a ‘Utopia.’”27 Liu Qing completely rejected the possibility of audience participation in environmental theatre. Although Schechner’s Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains was controversial, it stirred a theatrical revolution in China. Qian Jianping said in his “Expectations from Lawn to Theater,”28 that Schechner’s concept of environmental theatre is revolutionary if compared to traditional theories about theatre. In large part, people could not accept Schechner’s production because of the historical and cultural setting in China at that time. Another reason is that his production did not meet the spectators’ and artists’ expectations. Zhang Yunian held that reflections about the production should not be made in terms of technique, but from the perspective of cultural values. Experimentation is useful and positive, even if it challenges and creates problems. We cannot decide – even after all these years – whether the play was successful or not, but the progressive ideas it introduced to modern Chinese theatre made Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains significant. It is better to have a generous attitude towards the production, even if it was a flash in the pan.29 Zhang had a strongly positive opinion about it which had a major impact at the time. No matter how Schechner directed his production, or how he applied his theories and the environmental theatre elements in his play, his thinking and experimentation should surely be seen as having a positive impact. His explorations of space and audience participation were proactive and revolutionary. Although some audiences and artists at that time had negative opinions about Schechner’s production, they still found much that was positive in terms of technical and cultural achievements. The minimal audience participation is a typical phenomenon in China, and the overall failure of spectators to participate was largely determined by historical, cultural, and social factors. In 1995, Schechner was invited by Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theatre to direct Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. The production was staged for

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two nights only on a hillside in Da’An Park, Taipei, before approximately 2500 spectators on each performance. Inside a band shell, Schechner worked with Chris Muller from New York and Taiwanese designers and technicians to construct a Greek-style amphitheatre, replete with a skene and orchestra. Our analysis of the production is based on multiple viewings of a DVD recording of the production and reading several essays about it. We were strongly aware of the production’s intercultural characteristics. An essay, “Environmental Theatre and Intercultural Performance,”30 written by Zhou Huiling and published in Performance Art in 1995, provides a useful cultural orientation to Schechner’s Oresteia. Yang Huijun’s “Give Oresteia a Chance”31 is also an important commentary on this production. Schechner insists on interculturalism; in his Oresteia, through the integration of various cultures. In addition to actors from the Contemporary Legend Theatre, others came from the Taiwan National Light Theatre. Still other actors were selected by Schechner himself. The most obvious feature of Beijing Opera lies in its integration of multiple elements and stylization, including literature, music, dance, visual art, martial arts, and even acrobatics. It is a highly standardized genre of performance. Even within the context of Chinese culture, Beijing Opera is a multicultural art form mixing various performance genres. In the Taiwan Oresteia, literary problems were solved by Zhong Mingde, Dean of Theatre at the Taipei National University of the Arts and a former student of Schechner’s, and by Wei Haimin the leading actress who played Clytemnestra. Most of the music used in the Oresteia is similar to the style of Beijing Opera, but some Western musical instruments, notably a cello, were added to it as well. Wei Haimin, who follows Mei Langfang’s style of singing and acting, joined forces with the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s founder Wu Hsing-kuo, who played the roles of Agamemnon and Orestes. In Schechner’s production, Beijing Opera is the most important stylistic element, but Glenn Miller’s “Big Band” style was also included. Most actions and movements are from the Beijing Opera. For example, when Agamemnon lifts his leg and holds this position before stepping onto the purple carpet, this action is typical of Beijing Opera. Throughout the production the style of walking and moving, dances, postures, gestures, and facial expressions have a strong flavor of Beijing Opera. However, this production was controversial. Some spectators of, and actors from, the Beijing Opera could not accept it. They thought that the style of performing was very different from traditional Beijing Opera, which was, in many cases, an intentional choice. The costumes, in particular, were extremely intercultural and were shocking to some spectators at first sight. For example, Agamemnon’s costume was based on Aztec armor while Clytemnestra’s costumes were a combination of Beijing Opera’s flowing gowns with “high-style” fashion from Hong Kong. The “chou,” or clown actor, had a red nose referencing a Western clown. Cassandra’s dress and

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accessories – and the grotesque costumes and masks of the Furies – were unique in color and form. All of these were far from traditional for Beijing Opera. The Furies actually were reminiscent of Balinese theatre with large headwear and huge, naked breasts (made of fabric). Chinese audiences found these kinds of innovations hard to accept – although crowds of young people flocked to Da’An Park and seemed to very much enjoy The Oresteia. Schechner’s use of Aztec and Balinese elements, as well as the integration of the cello, were important to his interpretation of The Oresteia. Incorporating different styles and periods of costumes was also an important reflection of Schechner’s thought. The costumes for The Orestiea were designed by Tim Yip. Of all the artistic design elements, the costumes were most striking in their fusion of Eastern and Western cultural elements. There are no counterparts to this in traditional Beijing Opera, and so design elements in Schechner’s production were very different. For example, headdresses are very important in Beijing Opera. Even female characters from the lower classes in society are decorated with exquisite headdresses. Because of Schechner’s practice of intercultural fusion, his production created controversy in Taiwan at the time. The last scene of the production was the most striking of all. Athena was no longer dressed in a period costume, but in modern clothes – in a sleek, black, evening gown. She held a microphone and performed in the style of a television personality. She spoke Taiwanese, rather than the formal language of Beijing Opera. Her performance contributed to the modern interpretation of Schechner’s Oresteia. Also impressive and provocative was the interpretation of the role of Athena, who, in order to gain the the jury’s vote in the trial of Orestes, bribes them. Vengeance is connected with bribery, which leads the audience to a completely new understanding of the character, as if she is an ordinary, common person, who must use bribery to achieve her goals. Schechner justified this scene in light of his understanding of modern life. But some in the audience questioned whether what they were seeing was still Beijing Opera. The title of Yang Huijun’s essay is “Give Oresteia a Chance,” which illustrates her openness towards this intercultural production. She writes in her essay: “It is because of ‘No-purity,’ that it is ‘real.’”32 Schechner’s Oresteia integrated Beijing Opera, Greek tragedy, environmental theatre, and popular games in the United States in the 1960s. Such fusion could neither be traditional opera, nor pure Greek tragedy, nor environmental theatre. This “no-purity” aroused controversy , but it is Schechner’s signature style. Although Schechner advocates following some of the principles of Beijing Opera, he stresses that he does not want to duplicate it. Beijing Opera can be used as the foundation or a through line, but other cultural forms should be combined and fused with it, and then a new intercultural work will be born out of this fusion. In other words, the more impure it is, the more real it is.

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Of course, it would be illogical to have an intercultural production with elements of only one culture. The true nature of interculturalism is that no work is based on a single pure form. Because The Oresteia moved from Greece to China, it would inevitably be marked with both Chinese characteristics and characteristics of other cultures. The Oresteia should not be dismissed because of this. Schechner sticks to the principles of interculturalism and achieves them. Fusion in intercultural works is not a simple patching and Schechner spared no efforts in his production. He mixed cultural elements of Beijing Opera with cultural elements from Greece, Bali, and contemporary Taiwan to create a truly unique work. No wonder his Oresteia shocked actors and audiences both in the process of its creation and in the result seen in Da’An Park in October 1995.

V Conclusion: effective social performances In China, “Social Performance Studies” has a special significance because of the term “social” and its implied reference to the workings of society. With its emphasis on social performance, performance studies in China is thus concerned not only with theoretical inquiries but also with actual development and training in social practice as well. Social performance studies has both theoretical and practical components. How does one become a good lawyer, a good doctor, or a good teacher? How does one conduct business effectively? Such questions are the subject of research in social performance, but they also set the goals that the training social performance studies provides. Indeed, we could argue that social performance studies helps its students succeed in communication and in putting their ideas into practice. Just as Sun pointed out in his article “Social Performance Studies and Harmonious Society”: China has changed a lot in the last ten to twenty years. Democratization in politics, adoption of a market economy, and popularization of the media, all have expanded the range of social performances. People in cities learn how to perform for others whether the performance is a graduate student being interviewed or a vender selling vegetables. Similarly, by demystifying judicial practice, lawyers learn how to perform in public … . The key point of social performance … is how to define a role according to social context and rules … and to study how to perform it well … . Politicians pay more and more attention to their image since it affects the degree of support that they receive from the mass media and from the public. A business could not popularize its goods without sales promotions performed well. Many traditional festivals such as holidays and temple fairs attract corporate sponsors and support of government institutions. With regard to the context of such activities, Social Performance

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Studies has the potential to define and refine social roles that are based upon practice and analysis.33 It is obvious that both the theory and practice of social performance studies serve a social function and have practical applications. But whatever the achievements that the Chinese have obtained through performance studies, whatever the future social performance studies in China will have, they have, and will be, connected with Schechner’s theories and practical discoveries. They are influenced by Schechner’s vision, and are achievements thus situated within an intercultural context. Beyond the direct effect that he has had, it must also be acknowledged that performance studies in China – social performance founded by Sun Huizhu – has reacted to Schechner and not without effect. Although Schechner consistently focuses on non-conventional performances like rural rituals and exceptional urban performances such as political demonstrations, TDR has become increasingly interested in more urban performances. In this respect, social performance studies may have influenced him in the last decade as well. Examining recent trends in the kinds of articles appearing in TDR, we have noted how frequently the journal is publishing research focusing on city performances. Sun has also observed a shift in Schechner’s interests over the last decade, and has noted that he now “shows great interest in social performance.”34 Just as Schechner’s work as a performance theorist and a theatre practitioner has affected the emergence of performance studies in China, so too have the Chinese features of social performance studies affected Schechner’s interests. Sun Huizhu’s notions of social performance studies have great academic appeal in China, and it will be interesting to see what kind of impact those notions will have on the direction that performance studies takes internationally. Intercultural exchanges have affected the development of virtually every area of inquiry; Chinese social performance studies is no exception.

Notes 1. From the lecture “What is Performance Studies?” given by Richard Schechner at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2004, which was published in Theatre Arts: The Journal of Shanghai Theatre Academy 5 (2004). 2. From Beijing Evening News, 25 March 2005. 3. In Theatre Arts 3 (1999): 12–16. 4. In Theatre Arts 3 (2005): 55–9. 5. Liberation Daily, 2 April 2006. 6. In the Journal of Shanghai University 1 (2008): 58–63. 7. Journal of Shanghai University 1 (2008): 70–4. 8. In the Journal of Shanghai University 5 (2008): 34–8. 9. Lv Xiaoping from Nanjing University said this in a symposium held at Shanghai Theatre Academy on 21 October 2007 after the performance of Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question.

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10. Gui Ying from Zhejiang University said this at the symposium on Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question. 11. Gui Ying, symposium on Schechner’s Hamlet. 12. Gui Ying, symposium on Schechner’s Hamlet. 13. Gui Ying, symposium on Schechner’s Hamlet. 14. The title of Richard Schechner’s interview with Julian Beck and Judith Malina published in TDR 13.3 (Spring 1969): 24–44. 15. Gui Ying, Symposium on Schechner’s Hamlet. 16. Xitang Town, Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province, China, 21 October 2007. 17. 25 December 2007. 18. Liu Minghou said this in a symposium held at Shanghai Theatre Academy on 21 October 2007 after the performance of Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question. 19. Sun Huizhu said this in a symposium held at Shanghai Theatre Academy on 21 October 2007 after the performance of Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question. 20. Shi Hao said this in a symposium held at Shanghai Theatre Academy on 21 October 2007 after the performance of Schechner’s Hamlet: That is the Question. 21. Liu Minghou, symposium on Schechner’s Hamlet. 22. Email from Schechner to the authors, 3 July 2010. 23. Email from Schechner to the authors, 3 July 2010. 24. Email from Schechner to the authors, 3 July 2010. 25. Schechner’s Symposium discussion in Drama 12 (1989): 15. 26. Schechner’s Symposium discussion in Drama 12 (1989): 15. 27. Liu Qing, “After Watching Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains,” Drama 7-8 (1989): 10. 28. Qian Jianping, in Drama 7–8 (1989): 20. 29. Zhang Yunian, in Drama 1 (1990): 8. 30. Zhou Huiling, “Environmental Theatre and Intercultural Performance,” Performance Art 37 (Taiwan): 22–8. 31. Yang Huijun, “Give Oresteia a Chance,” Performance Art 37 (Taiwan): 84. 32. Yang Huijun, “Give Oresteia a Chance”: 84. 33. Liberation Daily, 4 April 2006. 34. 25 April 2006, Shanghai Theatre Academy.

7 Australian Performance Studies Marginally Off Centre Peter Eckersall

When is a performance a performance? How long does a strip of behavior have to be before it can be said to be performable in the ritual or aesthetic sense? When strips of are taken from one context and played in another is it a different kind of performance …?1 Performance studies (PS) explores transformative and transforming dimensions of human experience including those seen in the performing arts, social rituals, power, and everyday life practices. How PS is enabled in and by different contexts and locations is an important aspect of the discipline as a whole. This chapter discusses the influence of Richard Schechner’s work on the discipline of performance studies in contemporary Australia. Performance studies is indebted to theoretical work, teaching and artistic practices by Schechner. However, as the following example shows, demonstrating the performative transforming experience of PS is easier than locating precisely the place of Schechner in the field. The question of what it means to hold influence (or even assert control) over the substance of a discipline when that field of knowledge is transforming is a difficult one. In other words, taking from Schechner’s writings, how far do the strips of behavior/behaviour extend? At the very least, in this instance, the spelling changes; but so do many other things about PS. Neminuwarlin Performance Group’s exciting community production of “Fire, Fire Burning Bright: Marnem, Marnem Dililib Benuwarrenj”2 staged a history of the colonial war against aboriginal peoples in nineteenth-century Australia. Performed in a mix of epic staging, elliptical storylines, and dance, one scene featured two old fellows in “white-face” playing colonial policemen. The already freewheeling performance took on a moment of inspired playfulness as the performers staged the irony of their racialized history. Playing bumbling cops roaming the desert plains looking for aboriginal criminals and speaking in vernacular, one said to the other: “dem black bastards.” The other laughed. The actors reveled in the irony of the moment 118

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and the momentum of the play was interrupted. More like stand-up comedy, they began to repeat the line, each time finishing with a flourish of laughter and back-slapping. I remember enjoying this inspired moment of political volatility and dramaturgical crisis: A kind of local crisis of identity and history told though the medium of restored behavior – mutation, transformation, agitation. One way of reading this is to think about how it is “marginally off-centre,” a doubly inflected post-colonial condition that is both against the dominant centers of power and increasingly institutionalized and normalized within them.3 In developing this reading, we can note that the actors playing these parts were not full-time actors lending their skills to any and every role but community elders. Their “playing back” to colonial racism and institutionalized oppression was an embodied political gesture and their right to speak as elder indigenous men spoke of their personal histories and cultural custodianship. At the same time, this subversive performance unfolded in an international arts festival where perceived notions of cultural authenticity and performances from the margins have high cultural capital, but little political effect.4 Hence, we can say that the two dimensions of being marginally off-centre are in flux: while the “event” is “safely” ensconced in an arts festival contained by the cultural apparatus of the performing arts, the “performance” gives rise to eruptions in the political-aesthetic domain. Wavering between various political-aesthetic possibilities for art, and then countering them in the cultural “marketplace” is likely a feature of the social role of art in advanced economies everywhere. However, this state of affairs is enlivened in Australia by the composite of postmodern, post-colonial, centre-periphery discourses and tensions that permeate our cultural history. To take “Fire, Fire” as an exemplar in relation to questions of contemporary performance and the growth of performance studies in Australia, one can likewise dwell fruitfully in the margins. “Fire Fire” has paradigmatic qualities of irony, humor, and a sense of cultural displacement, qualities often seen in Australian performance. The example of the race trope reversal shows performance studies strategies being used in a public forum to address difficult questions and signifies the sense of unease that permeates Australian society in respect of cultural politics and race. The example of “Fire, Fire” shows how performance uses ideas from cultural politics to foster interest in contingent forms of knowledge and an understanding of cultural experience that is conceptual, contextual, and disputed. I argue here that questions about Richard Schechner’s influence on Australian performance studies display a comparable cultural reasoning. His impact on the rise of PS globally fosters the need to consider his theoretical model in specific instances. Nor is this simply a question of developing a more complex understanding of local trends. A sense of how the local space is historically contingent is also needed. Thus, following the logic of the example above from “Fire, Fire,” Schechner’s status as an international

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figure (especially American) fosters a kind of habitual unease and strategic reversal. Performance studies is not imperialistic, but any sense of cultural hegemony (however unlikely that PS is cast in this role) invokes a desire to reverse the flow of ideas and their implicit power. In catalyzing resistance, ironically, we enter the PS frame more fully in the sense that a conceptual and contextual reasoning of PS is invoked by fostering a sense of resistance to its implicit status as a form of knowledge-power. Hence, a circularity, or flow of ideas and practices in PS come into play. This chapter aims to show how Schechner’s influence is best understood in these terms and is rightly explored both in a larger confluence of ideas and in relation to socio-political trends in Australia. The larger forum of ideas relates to how Schechner’s model of PS always involves a sense of the political. PS is an activist form of knowledge functioning in relation to generally transformative artistic and cultural practices. At the same time, even when these practices have wide applications in the world, their expressions and sites of activity are more often local. PS practices are therefore translocal; they discover and explore cultural experiences that are activated in local contexts. Thus, Schechner’s conception of PS functions in relation to its local constitution and is understood as a translocal logic of performance studies.

Performance studies and neo-liberalism As in other advanced economies, PS in Australia has developed in a university environment of reduced funding and the politicization of the university system. In Australia, universities have gone from receiving 100 percent government funding and offering fee-free higher education in the 1970s to receiving only 25–30 percent of their income from government grants. The introduction of various levels of fees for local and international students now underpins the sector. According to a 2007 OECD report, “Australia’s public spending on higher education was among the lowest of the 34 developed countries covered … with only Russia, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Korea and Chile spending less in public funds on their institutions as a proportion of their economic output.”5 Ironically, performance studies programs have been established in this market-driven educational economy, but their longterm viability has been challenged by the very same economic framework. Internationally, scholars note how cultural and intellectual knowledge production has become increasingly commodifed. For example, Japan’s only major in performance studies, taught at Dokkyo University, was recently restructured to offer studies in tourism. At the University of Melbourne, where I am employed, our financially successful major in theatre and performance studies was closed, subsequently becoming part of a streamlined generalist degree. Critics argue that one of the reasons for the trend towards the introduction of generalist Bachelor of Arts degrees is to facilitate the growth of full-fee paying specialist Master of Arts programs. Undoubtedly,

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economic, pedagogic, and ideological motivations are mixed-up in university restructures, where even popular financially viable programs are sometimes closed so as to emphasize centralized, managerial curriculum models. As Jon McKenzie has argued in the context of the American university system, performance studies relates not only to artistic and cultural production but is a new measure of power: “knowledge is power, with knowledge increasingly understood to mean information and power conceived in terms of productive potential.”6 This is a deeply ironic situation and lends a certain ambiguity and even cynicism to working in performance studies. Arguably, more people are working productively in fields of artistic production, criticism, and performance theory than ever before. But this transformation has been accompanied by managerialism and privatization. All aspects of social life, including the everyday materials and field of performance studies, have also become more materialist and privatized in Australia, in similar fashion to the operational performance optics observed by McKenzie in the United States. This experience is shared among leading scholars and practitioners in the field in Europe as well. For example, Heike Roms’s unease about the tenuous and ideological formation of knowledge in her teaching in the University of Wales is matched by similar comments by Gay McAuley about performance studies at the University of Sydney.7 A sense of shared discomfort lies in the fact that while performance studies is a radically questioning discipline in the contemporary university, it is also under a constant managerial imperative to ‘perform’ and to inculcate an ideology that supports the privatization of the knowledge. The important question here, though, is one of identifying the possibilities of performance studies. How far can PS’s “broad-spectrum” approach continue to function in neo-liberal educational-ideological contexts? Can Schechner’s insistence on PS as a radical practice survive in the “new” university? To attempt to answer these questions here it is necessary to think about how PS came to the Australian academy.

PS history in the academy Experimental theatre programs taught in the 1970s at institutions including Rusden State College, in outer suburban Melbourne,8 the University of NSW in Sydney and Flinders University in Adelaide introduced some of the artistic practices associated with the emerging field of performance studies. Although not yet clearly defined, PS ideas began to infuse these theory-practice teaching programs. Their contribution to the development of PS has been overlooked in scholarship and will be discussed below. This will be followed by analysis of how the disciplinary field of performance studies was developed more systematically at Sydney University9 and the University of Melbourne during the 1980s, where scholars drew on Schechner and Turner’s writings on PS and were further influenced by semiotics and cultural theory.

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It is difficult to measure the exact influence of Schechner’s work on theatre programs in the 1970s where his work was part of wider counter-culture and experimental discourses coming to Australia through publications such as TDR, the media, and through workshops conducted by visiting artists. To take the example of Rusden (where I studied in the late 1970s), students were introduced to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre and its Double and took classes in Grotowski-inspired body training. We read Schechner’s Environmental Theater (1973); its chapters on “Space,” “Nakedness,” “Performer,” and “Shaman” give an account of the experimental performance processes of his work with the Performance Group. Exercises in the book called for improvisations, adaptation, and spontaneity in theatre and called for a theatre of revelation and transformation; a theatre towards discovering the underlying dynamics of performance. Such theatre was about uncovering the essence of human experience: This act of spiritual nakedness is all there is to performing. This act of dis/covery is not character work in the orthodox sense. But neither is it unlike character work. … The action of the play is arrived at through a cyclic process in which the performer’s responses are the basis for the work; the performer’s own self is exteriorized and transformed into the scenic givens of the production.10 Students read this alongside Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966), Albert Hunt’s Hopes for Great Happenings (1976), and Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (1936). Kaprow’s teaching that: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct as possible”11 presaged PS’s embodied and political understanding of the everyday. At Flinders University in Adelaide in 1974, actor and lecturer Tom Considine remembers that Schechner’s Public Domain (1969) was set as reading in the section of the course titled “Basic Conventions of Performance and Modern Media.” Teaching took a “scattergun approach,” with diverse influences coming into the program although essays from TDR and what Considine calls a “structuralist approach” to theatre studies were principal orientations. He explains a structural analysis of performance, adopting the terminology of space, time, ritual, and game – much like Schechner’s reordering of the elements of drama in his Environmental Theater. As Considine remembers, this was terminology associated with the work of both Michael Kirby and Schechner. Although Kirby came to disagree with Schechner about the methodology of performance studies (Kirby focusing on documentation, Schechner on critique), they were both involved in early TDR publications and notably co-edited a 1965 special issue on Happenings. This interest in Schechner’s work, in the writings of Artaud and Grotowski, and in experimental notions of performance like those associated with

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Happenings, all suggest an overlap between the United States, performance trends in Europe, and places like Australia. Shared idiosyncratic references to Eastern mysticism, Yoga, Tai Chi, and Jungian psychology alongside questions about dramaturgy and the experience of bodies in space are evident. The idea of vulnerability and “spiritual nakedness” was a valued experience of transformation and part of a vocabulary of experimental theatre from the period. As Considine remembers these experimental times in Australia’s university life, “the Flinders’s program was not called performance studies, but Schechner was the text … (there was) a Schechner feel.”12 Experimental teaching programs declined after the 1970s and arts training became more professionalized and specialist. Meanwhile, cultural theory was transforming scholarly critique of the arts. Mainly using postmodern and poststructural cultural theory, an emergent field of performance studies was beginning.

The rise of theoretical perspectives Gay McAuley, performance studies scholar at Sydney University, notes how their program developed “a range of mythologies that would enable [the scholars in the program] to engage at a serious analytical level with the whole production/performance/reception process in a variety of aesthetic performance practices.”13 The program is known for inviting artists to make work in situ, thus, allowing scholars to “observe, document, and analyse … creative processes and performances.”14 McAuley’s work connects performance studies with the study of creative processes and is therefore less connected to the sociological and political methods of PS proposed by Schechner. Current head of the program, Ian Maxwell, takes a different approach, noting that research “set[s] out from the premise that performance is not limited to those forms traditionally marked as being ‘artistic’ … . We examine how cultural performances are linked to everyday interactions.”15 Although, when compared to McAuley, this is more akin to Schechner’s understanding of performance studies, what is more interesting is the way that each of these approaches point to diverging influences in the formation of performance studies as it is practiced by scholars in Australia. Semiotic perspectives aiming to read processes of how performance is made vie with work on everyday social practices. One can see how (broadly speaking) semiotics and cultural theory formed the basis of PS theory in the early days, in contrast to the Schechner avant-garde “feel” of performance training. This contrast is most apparent in the work of the Melbourne-based scholars, who also developed an interest in performance studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Performance studies at the University of Melbourne was led by Hector MacLean, Norman Price, Glenn D’Cruz, and Denise Varney. Varney suggests that the training of the staff involved in Classics, English, experimental theatre, and European languages gave their approach a primary interest

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in cultural theory and theatre semiotics. She remembers them all reading Keir Elam, Susan Melrose, and Patrice Pavis as important sources of ideas in their work.16 Internationally, cultural theory and postmodernism were being debated in the arts. Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published in 1991, enabled new critiques of performance and society. Patrice Pavis’s work on theatre semiotics was also well developed and his Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre was first published in 1982. Pavis visited the University in 1989 and 1990 giving workshops on reading practices that, as Varney puts it, “might open the text to a fluid and analytical reading of the theatrical mise en scène.”17 Melbourne-based scholars worked on performance in the contexts of postcolonial theory, German studies, postmodernism, experimental practices, and gender studies. The first performance studies conference in Australia took place in 1991. On the theme of “Performance and its Discourses” it was convened by theorists at Melbourne, with a follow-up conference in Sydney in 1993. The Melbourne Performance Research Group (MPRG) was also formed and produced a themed publication on the topic of “Thinking about Performing Thinking” for the journal Antithesis.18 While contributions were varied, we can see early work by scholars debating the formation of the field. For example, Rachel Fensham’s twin essays on public space and performance19 document the work of the environmental performance group Primary Source. Using Michel de Certeau’s work on the everyday, Fensham’s study showed how outdoor processional artworks by Primary Source transformed public space. Interestingly, her work predates Schechner’s seminal essay “The Street is the Stage,”20 thus suggesting that PS developments were sometimes parallel to the American scene. What was striking about all of the other contributions in the volume, however, was their focus on theatre; Brecht’s gestus, dramaturgy, and Kafka were discussed. This suggests a field in transition and while the essays were “articulating in theorized language what happens in live performance,”21 the question of how PS differs from theatre studies was yet to be resolved. Significantly, according to Varney, contemporary performance makers interested in performance studies in Melbourne were “interested in aesthetics rather than cultural practices.”22 Indicative here is the work of the scholar, actor, and performance maker Mark Minchinton, who established a performance studies program at Victoria University in the 1990s. Minchinton was a member of the MPRG and completed his PhD on experimental 1970–80s Australian performance makers Jenny Kemp, Richard Murphett, and Rex Cramphorn.23 He was involved in practices that understood performance as a kind of embodied knowledge. At Victoria University, he established the first PhD based on practice-based performance in Australia. Minchinton’s central focus on artistic processes and aesthetics finds grounds in Australian feminist and environmental politics, and in indigenous cultural studies,

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as well as postmodern dance theory. His work attempts to subvert the notion of critical distance by using performance as a form of embodied situated knowledge. Minchinton was an early advocate of the gestalt of performance studies into a practice-as-theory approach, something that is now more common in academies around the world.

Writing and research on performance studies Indicative performance studies research internationally mainly dates from the mid-1990s. For example, Marvin Carlson’s Performance: A Critical Introduction (Routledge) was published in 1996, the same year that the Wales-based journal Performance Research began. Performance Studies international (PSi) was founded in 1997. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane’s influential anthology of essays The Ends of Performance (New York University Press) dates from 1998 and Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge), from 1993. While all of these works draw on long gestating scholarship, there is a sense that the discipline is being formed in the 1990s. Only Schechner’s landmark Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press) published in 1985 precedes the appearance of these texts. Moreover, his The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (Routledge), where he substantively develops the sociological dimension of performance studies was published in 1995. Publication of Australian performance studies research points to a similar situation. From the publication of MPRG papers, noted above, it has grown substantially in the last 15 years in ways that are analogous to the international scene. In 2001, a special issue on “Performance Studies in Australia” was published in Australasian Drama Studies, edited by Gay McAuley, Glenn D’Cruz, and Alison Richards.24 Their editorial wryly comments on the continuing “centrality of theatre practice as a paradigm,”25 a point reinforced by the journal’s continuing identification with theatre studies. Performance studies is not presented as a unified field in the issue, instead, giving voice to a series of disagreements about the status of PS among the editorial team, McAuley quoted Schechner’s “intergen[e]ric, interdisciplinary, intercultural … unstable” definition of performance studies.26 She also argued strongly that performance studies “has to deal seriously with theatre,”27 a point developed by Ian Maxwell in his essay, which includes discussion of the Sydney University program’s focus on analyzing theatre practices. Maxwell’s reading of the development of the field in Australia was framed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. His essay emphasized the importance of critical reflexivity, proposing “that the construction of the object of our analysis and the terms of our engagement with it must themselves be subjected to systematic analysis.”28 This statement is helpful, for while it identifies why performance studies in Australia inflects in so many ways, it also stresses the importance of investing PS with the problematic dimensions of cultural

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politics and other political contexts. For many scholars, notions of critical reflexivity are important in performance studies as a way of thinking about PS and its translocal dimensions. Glenn D’Cruz’s essay in the ADS issue is a case in point. As a survey of the field, he prefaces his essay with a summary of Schechner’s keynote address on the “disciplinary fundamentals” of performance studies, delivered at the 1999 PSi conference at the University of Wales, in Aberystwyth.29 Schechner’s paper sought to explore the challenges of PS in the context of what he considered to be an emergent cultural studies approach that risked conflating the two fields. Schechner’s talk broached the need to revisit “fundamental characteristics” of PS not to banish cultural studies, but to reflect on the unique qualities of performance. D’Cruz was critical of Schechner’s approach and sought instead to emphasize the common ground shared between the two fields. This is an important point of departure for Australian performance studies. As we have seen, one important aspect of it has forged connections with practices at least nominally associated with cultural studies. Thus, Australian PS includes discussions about new media and performance art,30 gender and the body,31 interculturalism and globalization,32 and ethics and the spectator.33 Schechner’s work on ritual and theorizing the gestalt of performative acts has likely been amplified and transformed by these contrasting approaches that are interdisciplinary and foster discussions about performance and its political and cultural dimensions. Recent journals and publishing in the field confirm a trend towards interdisciplinary research in Australian performance studies. Two journals, Performance Paradigm and About Performance, now specifically focus on these contrasting and evolving dimensions of PS research. Performance Paradigm, (edited by Edward Scheer, Helena Grehan, and myself)34 aims to publish performance studies research with an internationalregional orientation. It is published on-line annually and specifically invites contributions from scholars and artists in the Asia-Pacific region while also publishing the contemporary research in the international field. The editors share an understanding that performance studies in the region is underrepresented but do not seek to promote regional debates or assert a regional status. In contrast to Schechner’s highlighting focus on Asia in his writings, ‘Performance Paradigm’ seeks to locate Asian practices alongside other cultural forms; difference is normalized in the journal in ways that the editors hope are productive and unexceptional. Issues are themed around the idea of performance studies as interdisciplinary practice – in transition, interconnecting, and multidimensional. To this end, many of the issues have been shaped by ideas of something ending. This is not intended to create an historical emphasis in the journal, but rather to explore how these moments draw together and coalesce around the production of the new. Performance Paradigm is consciously exploring issues of performance and social and

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political life as well, and the idea of something coming to an end-point or being in transition is manifest in the analysis of the interactions between art and culture, and art and social change. Past issues of Performance Paradigm have aimed to be agenda setting by focusing on Media, Performance and Technology (2005), Japanese Performance and the Ends of 1960s (2006), Ethics, Politics and War (2007), Emergences (2008), and After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory (2009). About Performance “is concerned in the broadest possible way with the phenomenon of performance and the processes involved in its production and reception.”35 The journal publishes themed issues and is strongly connected to the analysis of various kinds of performance and arts practices. Recent issues have focused on politics, community, and social change (2009), photography and live performance (2008), and site-based practices (2007). The issue “Body Weather in Central Australia” (2003) exemplifies the journal’s commitment to documenting and debating artistic processes. In this instance, the performer Tess Dequincy, whose work is connected with butoh and the body weather training of Tanaka Min, collaborated with scholars and indigenous women on a project about performance in the context of the cultural-spatial experience of central Australia. Body weather training fosters a close-knit psychophysical relationship between performer and environment. The intensity of work is enlivened in this instance by the space that is hot, remote, and politically contested. With essays on theatre and refugees, indigenous performance, and political theory and the arts, further writing on the meanings of Australian space is featured in their recent issue “Playing Politics” (2009). Comparable trends are also evident in Peta Tait’s Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance.36 While the journals discussed above focus on performance and media, place, and culture; Tait’s book is specifically about researching bodies and embodiment. Body Show/s: “presents phenomenological discussions of sensory body to body liveness.”37 Cognate ideas of “citings” (signs of social identity), “sightings”(viewing of performance bodily representing social contexts) and “sitings” (bodies in architectural, social, and virtual space) are used to organize the volume.38 Essays investigate avant-garde theatre, contemporary dance, performance art, circus, sport, dance-parties, and new media performance. Like Tracy Warr and Amelia Jones’s anthology The Artist’s Body (Phaidon, 2000), Tait’s book broaches questions of cultural politics and how bodies in art and performance have become signs for political experience. It makes connections between theories of the body and interdisciplinary arts practices. Several chapters explore a muscular physicality as a defining characteristic of Australian work. Indeed, sports as body-culture and the popular imaginary idea of an outdoor Australian lifestyle or “beach culture” lend an ideological aspect to corporeal performance that is noted. Thus, while the book crucially explores the felt dimensions of the body in the moment of performance, it also addresses

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significant ongoing political and cultural questions about bodies in Australia. Body Show/s closely links the dynamics of performance with critical analysis and documentation. Recent publishing shows how performance studies has perhaps come full circle in Australia and experimental performance is once again interacting with performance studies theory. Schechner calls this activity the “explaining, showing, doing” aspect of performance studies.39 While there are too many examples of this trend to summarize, we see a movement in Australian performance studies towards a higher degree of critical interaction between the performance scene and the critical apparatus of performance studies. Thus, for example, Helena Grehan participated in debates about intercultural theatre in the Singapore Flying Circus Project.40 Her recent work on ethics and performance opens new pathways to think about audiences and the politics of production and reception of contemporary art.41 David Williams,42 Paul Dwyer,43 and I44 have combined critical and theoretical perspectives on performance with analysis of creative processes. Dwyer’s work is particularly noteworthy for its performative writing and combination of artistic and critically reflexive perspectives. In functioning as fieldwork documentation of his family history living in colonial Papua New Guinea, Dwyer’s work combines performance writing and historical analysis. Another intercultural project called “Journey to Con-fusion” (1999–2005) placed scholars including Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham with artists from Australia and Japan in long-term creative and intellectual dialogue about the politics and representation of power in an age of globalization. The subsequent performances by Not Yet It’s Difficult and Gekidan Kaitaisha were debated and contextualized in performance studies writing.45 Broadly speaking, these examples show how interventionist scholarly practices can be grounded in experiences of making, viewing, and thinking about performance. Crucially, these practices are realized more fully when wider contextual meanings and possibilities of performance as cultural and political practice are made clear and are evident in the works that are produced. Like the performance of “Fire, Fire,” these ideas and forms are not only under review by theorists, but constitute disciplinary practices and forms of knowledge in their own right. Schechner should not have worried about the collapsing border between cultural and performance studies; in Australia the field developed from both quarters and finds resolution somewhere between them.

Performance studies and life crisis ritual In closing, I want to consider how Schechner’s theory of ritual in performance studies has been used here in recent times. Ritual remains at the heart of Schechner’s project as a fundamental aspect of human behavior that is ‘restored’ and remade in performance. It is increasingly difficult to accept the potential of ritual theory, when, for example, reality television shows

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such as Survivor seem to enact such a bad version of Schechner’s ideas (ritual practices observed and transgressed, liminal space transformed, tribal codes, and so on). So how does ritual performance theory apply to the contemporary scene in Australia, or elsewhere? What chance does it have? Edward Scheer’s work draws on Victor Turner’s notion of “life crisis ritual” – work that fosters Schechner’s understanding of ritual social and performance practices. Scheer employs this notion to considering the work of performance artist Mike Parr. Parr’s (1945–) work explores disturbances in the human body and the evisceration of flesh as a commentary on the human condition. His solo performance works, a feature of his artistic practice since 1971, are characterized by self-harming, ethical confrontation, duration, and use of audiovisual media.46 Scheer borrows Bonnie Marranca’s notion of a “catastrophic imagination”47 as a way of signaling the dystopia of Australian culture featured in the ritualized premeditated wounding of the body in Parr’s work. Such an ethical-political life crisis enactment is evident in Parr’s 2005 work “Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic,” a work staged as a protest against the Australian government’s immoral treatment of asylum seekers in the aftermath of Australia’s support for US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. As Scheer writes: In Kingdom Come, Parr wanted to recreate the effects of the endless reiteration of this imagery from another time as it enters the media loop. His use of countless repetitions of shock and image … replicates the way that these images circulate in the media with maximum intensity and maximum frequency that eventually decay into banality.48 I use this example because it connects performance studies with one of the more troubling political challenges of our time. Performance and its analysis are composite sides of a “catastrophic imagination,” repetitious shocks embodied in ritual performances, able to expresses condemnation of immoral power-plays by the state; plays that are made in our name. As Scheer argues, “Performance art develops what Victor Turner calls ‘life crisis rituals’ in response to drastically changing social and personal conditions … artists are driven to imagine and perform rituals which can also transcribe the crisis of the time, embody it and make it liveable. This is the function of performance art … .”49 This is an important and well-made point, but what does it say about the imprint of Schechner’s work in Australia? Fundamentally, we see that Scheer’s theorizations of Parr’s performances utilizes a principle theme in performance studies developed by Turner and Schechner. However, the question broached here is not only when is a performance a performance? – posed at the beginning of this essay – but when is a performance an intervention? When is it at the tipping-point of resistance, or broaching something

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that speaks back to power? As Scheer’s analysis makes clear, the most important thing is the moment when the relations change, when something breaks in a way that makes visible the mechanism of its production. This is the very essence of performance studies. A constant fascination for Schechner is to examine how performance activates moments where the public domain is transformed. Many of the works discussed above also led to moments of change and the possibility for intervention. They are not necessarily closely modeled on Schechner’s understanding of actual performances, or his analysis of daily life; trends and ideas have changed and the intercultural field looks different from the margins. As I have suggested, Schechner’s world view sometimes sits awkwardly in the frontier spaces of PS. But I also show that the notion of performance studies as interactive, embodied, and sensory knowledge holds – a notion that Schechner helped establish in his early writings and throughout his career. It is not only questions of transmission or influence that are important but also the activation of a sense of flow, the capacity to shift ideas into fresh contexts and to embody cultural experience in meaningful ways. Ideas and events in performance have become mixed and are experienced differently not only in the Australian context, but their meaning changes in different places and at times throughout the recent history of PS everywhere. This means that questions about Schechner’s influence on the field productively reside not so much in single instances where his ideas are cited or become self-evident, but in how the field evolves. Schechner writes about performance studies as an avant-garde and participatory field: “The world no longer appeared as a book to be read but as a performance to participate in.”50 Most important, then, is the capacity for performance studies to remake itself as needs be and to foster radical imagination. This is something that Schechner has argued for and something that PS in Australia had always been looking to find.

Notes 1. Richard Schechner, “Magnitudes of Performance,” in By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel. Cambridge and New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1990, 43. 2. MIAF, Fire, Fire Burning Bright: Marnem, Marnem Dililib Benuwarrenj, commissioned for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, 2002. 3. Deepika Bahri, “Marginally Off-Centre: Postcolonialism in the Teaching Machine,” College English 59.3 (1997): 277–8. 4. The performance in 2002 took place in the midst of a long period of conservative leadership in Australia where right-wing governments were consistently returned to power on a platform of policies that included a strongly racialized atmosphere. 5. Harriet Alexander, “University funding among lowest in OECD,” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 September 2007, http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/universityfunding-among-lowest-in-oecd/2007/09/18/1189881513646.html (accessed 23 April 2010).

Australian Performance Studies Marginally Off Centre 131 6. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 15. 7. Gay McAuley, “Interdisciplinary Field or Emerging Discipline?: Performance Studies at the University of Sydney,” Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research, ed. Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 37–50. Also Heike Roms, “The Practice Turn: Performance and the British Academy,” Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research, ed. Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51–70. 8. Peter Eckersall and Yoni Prior, “Lineages, Training, Techniques and Tradition: Rethinking the place of Rusden in Melbourne’s contemporary theatre,” Australasian Drama Studies 53 (2008): 58–73. 9. McAuley, “Interdisciplinary Field or Emerging Discipline?”: 37–50. 10. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973, 126. 11. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966, 188. 12. Tom Considine, interview with author, January 2010. 13. Gay McAuley, “Interdisciplinary Field or Emerging Discipline?”: 45. 14. Gay McAuley, “Interdisciplinary Field or Emerging Discipline?”: 45. 15. Ian Maxwell, “What is Performance Studies at the University of Sydney?” in Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2006, 9. 16. Denise Varney, unpublished communication with author, January 2010. 17. Denise Varney, unpublished communication with author, January 2010. 18. Antithesis 4.2 (1991). 19. Rachel Fensham, “Performing the City 1 & 2,” Antithesis 4.2 (1991): 6–34. 20. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 21. Denise Varney, unpublished communication with author, January 2010. 22. Denise Varney, unpublished communication with author, January 2010. 23. Mark Minchinton, “Towards a Minor Theatre? Theatre-making Processes in Three Australian Theatre Groups and Their Directors.” PhD manuscript, University of Melbourne. 1996. 24. Established in 1982, ADS has a national focus on theatre research (with an appended additional focus on performance studies formally now acknowledged). “Performance Studies in Australia” was published in Australasian Drama Studies 39 (2001), ed. Gay McAuley, Glenn D’Cruz, and Alison Richards. 25. “Performance Studies in Australia”: 4. 26. “Performance Studies in Australia”: 7. 27. “Performance Studies in Australia”: 17. 28. Ian Maxwell, “Learning through Crisis,” Australasian Drama Studies 39 (2001): 45. 29. Glenn D’Cruz, “Performance Studies in Australia Today: A Survey of the Field,” Australasian Drama Studies 39 (2001): 20–42. 30. Edward Scheer, “Australia’s Post-Olympics Apocalypse?” PAJ 88 (2008): 42–56. 31. Peta Tait (ed), Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. See also Denise Varney, unpublished communication with author, January 2010. 32. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. See also“Toil and Traffic: Australian Appropriations of the Suzuki Method,” Australasian Drama Studies 39 (2001):76–91. See also Peter Eckersall, Tadashi Uchino, and Naoto Moriyama

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33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Performance Studies Genealogies (eds), Alternatives: Debating theatre culture in the age of con-fusion. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004. Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. The journal is on line at www.performanceparadigm.net. It is published by the University of NSW and Performance Paradigm. It has a registered readership of 500 plus and is an “A” ranked journal as measured by the national government research agency. About Performance is published by Sydney University’s Department of Performance Studies. See: www.arts.usyd.edu.au/performance/research/publications. It is an “A” ranked journal as measured by the national government research agency. Peta Tait (ed.), Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Tait, Body Show/s, 2. Tait, Body Show/s, 1–2. Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 28. Helena Grehan, “Questioning the Relationship between Consumption and Exchange: TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project,” positions 12.2 (2004): 565–86. Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. David Williams, “Politicians and War: Selling Iraq in the Culture War,” Performance Paradigm 3 (2007). On-line journal: http://www.performanceparadigm.net/ Paul Dwyer, “Theatre as Post-Operative Follow-up: The Bougainville Photoplay Project,” About Performance 10 (2010): 141–62. Peter Eckersall, “Unmaking ‘Blowback’” – Accumulation and disarticulation in NYID’s rehearsal process,” in Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, ed. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Peter Eckersall, Tadashi Uchino, and Naoto Moriyama (eds), Alternatives: Debating theatre culture in the age of con-fusion. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004. Edward Scheer, “Australia’s Post-Olympics Apocalypse?” PAJ 88 (2008): 42. Scheer, “Australia’s Post-Olympics Apocalypse?”: 42. Scheer, “Australia’s Post-Olympics Apocalypse?”: 54–5. Edward Scheer, “Performance Art, Life Crisis Rituals,” RealTime issue #44, August– September 2001: 29. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge 2002, 2nd edn 2006, 19.

Part 3 Working with Richard

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8 Reactuals: From Personal to Critical and Back Rebecca Schneider

The tracks of this chapter have been interestingly forth and back and forth again. When invited to contribute to this collection, I readily agreed – then balked. Richard Schechner has been, in some profound ways, my friend and mentor at the same time that “Richard Schechner” is the set of signatory letters attached to the books that line the shelves of those who profess some “relation” to performance studies. My process of thinking through Richard Schechner’s legacy, and therefore this writing, could not be straightforward. My engagement with Schechner’s thought, his teaching, his ideas, and his example has, for me, been deeply cross-routed, or chiasmatic: the so-called “life of the mind” has been profoundly interlaced with what we often still call “personal life” (as if these things were ever really fully distinguishable). Given that we read in the midst of living in relation, and given that reading and thinking bear relationality and structure modes of belonging beyond the pages (and wages) we “make” as scholars – given these things – thinking back over Schechner’s life work made it impossible for me to fully separate the rubrics: “life” and “work.” Indeed, Schechner’s work invited me, as so much of his writing against the grain of rigid epistemological ruts has done, to critically and creatively jump into the cracks in distinctions – or to weave between them – as “between” theatre and anthropology, or “from ritual to theatre and back” again. Whether we know a thinker personally or not, we read while living. So, it is not here Schechner’s life that I remember in thinking back through his writing in order to write this chapter, but my own. After all, I encountered Schechner’s work in the midst of a life. There is a profoundly porous exchange between thought and action, life and work, mind and body, theory and practice, discourse and “actuals.” Here, then, in the shape of a critical essay, I also offer a significant number of churned up memories: some of them the memories of intellectual ideas as events, and others the memories of personal events as ideas. When I first sent in my chapter as a draft, the editors loved it – then balked. It was, reader’s reports had suggested, too messy, too personal. And 135

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while indeed they were not wrong – it was messy, it was personal – it seemed an interesting problematic had arisen in the cracks of writing on Richard as a scholar (suggestive of an analytical remove) and writing of him as a director (suggestive of the hard labor of affect). Because I had met Richard working in the theatre – where one is always putting one’s body and one’s voice and one’s mind in the form and shape of another’s – affective engagement was always projected as part of the work, intended to work together with a Brechtian, alienated criticality, whether scholarly or performancebased. And, in any case, performance studies has long worked to trouble the distinction between the modes of thinking and doing, as well as following feminist and critical theory and practice as part of the heart of the emergent discipline: the interweave between the personal and the political. Make no mistake: the warp of feminism’s “personal is political” is vexed, historied, caught between the aggrandized traumas of those whose lives can be considered grievable in the public (on the one hand), and the still too ready dismissal of sentiment and emotion as always already feminized and therefore non-analytical (on the other hand).1 It is into the vex that this chapter lurches, dragging a somewhat unlikely patriarch: Richard Schechner. Indeed, when the slip and slide of the personal and affective gets into historiography and/or is presented as “analysis,” people still get nervous. And not incorrectly. The body and memory and the queasy realm of emotion still cause concern to certain investments in how we tell time, how the past is narrated, approached, and understood. In an essay noting the dangers of physically engaged, live re-enactment for historical scholarship, for instance, Vanessa Agnew argues that putting one’s body in the place of the past in order to understand the past – as if trying to look through the realm of personal experience at something one did not personally experience – can be accused of “eclipsing the past with its own theatricality.” In her formulation, as in others’, history can be overrun by the error-ridden embarrassment of the live body (here indicated as “theatricality”) re-enacting the past in the present.2 Alexander Cook agrees, erecting, as if unproblematic, the classic mind/body split to suggest re-enactment’s “persistent tendency to privilege a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment.”3 By this account, touch (“visceral”), and affective engagement (“emotional”4), are in distinction to the “analytical.” In marked contrast to this view, recent scholars in queer historiography, such as Carolyn Dinshaw, Chris Nealon, Louise Fradenberg, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Dana Luciano, Heather Love, and Judith Halberstam build on materialist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, and poststructural theories to argue for an inquiry and analysis that challenges received modern Western conventions of temporal linearity (conventions Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “modern historical consciousness” and Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen call “secular time”). Such scholars argue for the value of crossing disparate and multiple historical moments to explore the ways that

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past, present, and future occur and recur backward or even out of sequence or in a complex cross-hatch not only of reference but of affective assemblage and investment.5 In league with this turn – the queer historiographic turn into the vex to explore affective (and, for Eve Sokofsky Sedgwick, performative) engagement6 – I here offer a fractured set of memories involving Richard that irrupt amidst the (safer?) stuff of critical thought. The stories are not so much out of sequence as out of place, and, in fact, they are moving backward in time and may, indeed, be “backward” stories as they involve “backward” life issues such as childbirth, pennilessness, and even (horrors) puberty. The stories engage affectively around instances of the influence of Richard Schechner in my life and work and remark on the many different shapes that encounter can take across a life between actress and director, student and teacher, and, ultimately, between friends. Running through it all are the very first practices I learned from Richard: the odd practices of theatre – the standing in for others, the enacting different times and places, the efforts to wrestle with the materiality of absent others, the shapes that the mind can take when crossing the stage. Shape-shifting, after all, is what theatre does: it takes a rock or a bottle or a boot or a person and, placing it on stage, wills it to change: it’s a skull, or a vase, a handkerchief, an altar, a character – theatre makes things stand in for things other than they are, and the body (like a story) is not a limit for what moves between participants. Theatre makes things seem as if other until, with the strong wash of repetition and the tango of will and submission, seeming is becoming. With Schechner’s verve, theatre itself can succumb to its own re-making. Theatre can be posed as if ritual until, by virtue of the wash of argument, it becomes ritual. Ritual may be read as theatre, until we see the theatre in ritual. And back again. This moving us between and among ideas until ideas cross-fertilize is the movement of theatre artist as scholar. And, scholar as (and here’s a rub for many): clown, fool, mime, surrogate, effigy, shaman, priest, actress. One of the inspirations of the disciplinary crossings of performance studies (between theatre and anthropology, between theatre and literary studies, between theatre and psychoanalysis, between theatre and folklore, between everyday life and back) is the deep investment in the theatricality of between-ness, or liminality. Schechner’s influence on Victor Turner, and Turner’s on Schechner, became legendary almost immediately. Schechner’s writings in the late 1960s and across the 1970s were full of bravado and innovation. He was fast becoming famous for his diagrams and models. His declarations, too, were broad and bold such that well before it was de rigueur he could proclaim The End of Humanism.7 By 2000 he had long been disparaging “the cult of playwriting” and the tyranny of text.8 Surprising though it may seem with hindsight, it was easy for many theatre scholars to resent him, and I remember standing uncomfortably in an elevator with random conference-goers at an Association for Theatre in Higher Education

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conference in l989 or l990 listening to a tweed be-jacketed, aging academic lambaste Schechner with the kind of hatred usually reserved for unmitigated evil. I wondered: What had Schechner done to this college professor? The answer was simple. He had posed a sea swell of arguments impossible to smartly quell. But the “rub” was that he had done so with fighting words like “cult” and he had done so being barefoot at academic meetings and wearing red suspenders and not caring very much what most people thought, or whether most people had inched their way into the academy on the coattails of dramatic texts that literature departments could accept as viable for study. Now Schechner claimed that such theatre scholars were cultists, not pioneers. It was an outrage of the usual avant-garde variety. For indeed, perhaps bravado and “experimental theatre” breed each other, and perhaps Schechner was bringing the flavor of the twentieth-century bad boy manifesto into scholarship, just as he was bringing academic inquiry into the rehearsal space, or using rehearsal itself as academic inquiry. The fact that seemed to irk many in the late l970s through to the early l990s was that he produced such an impressive and prolific amount of text, almost always (with his fabulous brand of irony) against text. One of the legacies of Schechner’s insistence that the rehearsal room is a research environment and the research environment is theatrical is that his students were encouraged in the avant-garde arts of flagrancy. Though no one could quite get away with Schechner’s own level of the flagrant (what John Emigh would call the adolescent), we adopted whole-heartedly the art of daring to rub against the grain of established hierarchies in modes of thought or practice that distinguished embodied acts from metaphysical argument. Of course, the courage to be flagrant was also, at times, the courage to be inane. What place does a fool or a mime or an acrobat have in the academy? Even in 2010 it is arguably still the fact that when you mix anything from a proper discipline or clearly defined medium with theatre or, better, theatricality, you risk a challenge to the discrete borders of that discipline or that medium. For association with theatre is still, for many artists and academicians, a risk. That against which proper art has long liked to define itself, theatre is a whipping boy, considered backward or vestigial. As film-maker Jacques Rivette said to film-maker Jean Renoir in an interview from l975: “You could be accused of returning us to the state of theatre.”9 Schechner himself, who at the time was completing the work that would be collected as Essays on Performance Theory – a ground-breaking collection of essays in which he would find theatre in everything – might have been accused of the same thing. And yet, in some ways paradoxically, just as Schechner found theatre everywhere in his scholarship, the practice of theatre that interested him (at least in the West) was theatre that resisted the habits of its own play-centric conventions. The “theatre” that Schechner appreciated, and the theatre he

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founded (The Performance Group) was itself theatre as against theatre, even as Schechner was (re)turning us, and everything around us, to the state of theatre. Of course, and famously, to aid the distinction required for theatre as against theatre, Schechner privileged the word “performance.” It bears reminding that when Schechner was campaigning for performance studies as against the “cult” of playwriting and the dramatic investments of theatre studies in the West, antitheatricalism was still in full swing, motivating not just the art world but much of the theatre world as well.10 Schechner himself, in the l970s and l980s, wanted to make (theatre) work that was “authentic” or “actual” – as against that old crusty clown, the imitated. So even while he expanded the terrain of theatre to ritual and the everyday, Schechner himself was seriously wary of theatre’s returns – its relation to “re-” as imitation, fake, posed, conventional. The question of returns vis à vis theatre is vital. The question of whether and in what way performance reactualizes an event on which it stands, or actualizes something new, was at the base of Schechner’s early work and took important tumbles of thought across his career. In his l970 essay “Actuals,” republished in Essays on Performance Theory in l977 and then in subsequent editions in l988 and again in 2003, Schechner articulated the drive in performance art as against a theatrical drive. Theatricality, for him then, smacked of imitation whereas performance engaged the “actual.” He wrote: The avant-garde from the Italian Futurists through the Dadaists, surrealists, and on to practitioners of earth art and other kinds of avant-gardists, introduces us to the idea that art is not a way of imitating reality or expressing states of mind. At the heart of what Kaprow calls a mystery is the simple but altogether upsetting idea of art as an event – an “actual.”11 That this approach to the “actual” was articulated as in distinction to imitation (imitation long considered the debauched aspect of theatricality) should be no surprise, and it has recently spurred accusations of antitheatricality leveled at Schechner himself.12 In l970 Schechner found this avant-garde drive toward the actual (or non-imitative) in Grotowski’s theatre as well as in Kaprow’s performance art – and indeed he employed a long citation from a conversation he had with Grotowski actor Ryszard Cieslak to aid his articulation of the way in which performance can deliver the past neither imitated nor cited nor even signified but radically present, “here and now” – or, as he also put it, “living now.”13 Such delivery of the past makes for a curious temporality that invites further thought. Interestingly, and in line with the chronophobia and related drive for essentialism of the l960s, in l970 Schechner followed Grotowski and attempted in “Actuals,” to dismiss

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the way in which repetition may be a vital part of bringing an event or an act or a sentence or a gesture indicated by a prior script or story or event to actuality (again) in the theatre.14 He wrote: This special way of handling experience and jumping the gap between past and present, individual and group, inner and outer, I call “actualizing” (perhaps no better than Eliade’s “reactualizing,” but at least shorter).15 Paying close attention we can see that Schechner clowns here, making a joke at the level of a parenthetical – but it is a serious parenthetical that will have repercussions in his later work. Here, in l970, Schechner effectively dismissed the extender “re-” as inconsequential or superfluous. And yet we might argue with hindsight that dropping the “re-” from reactualization makes a huge amount of difference. With “re-” intact, reactualization bears the sense of citation. Mircea Eliade, whom Schechner cited at length in the l970 essay, used the term re-actualization to signal the way in which ceremonial ritual, composed in repetition, could return participants to a prior moment – a prior moment that is, in a sense, ongoing or incomplete. In Eliade’s sacred-time of reactualization, “then” could be both then and “here and now.”16 Time could begin again both as same and different (both then and now), like a work-in-progress – each time new and different as it had been new and different before – or in Eliade’s words, “as it appeared ab origine, in illo tempore.”17 Fabulously, and in line with his tendency to move in-between – in one direction and back again – in his later work, notably Between Theater and Anthropology, Schechner allows for double and triple time to resonate more fully in the “actual.” In Between he returns the “re-” to articulation. Between Theater and Anthropology is, after all, where he offers the theory of performance as “restored behavior.” In l985 he wrote: Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. … Restored behavior is the main characteristic of performance. … The performers get in touch with, recover, remember, or even invent these strips of behavior and then rebehave them according to these strips, either by being absorbed into them (playing the role, going into trance) or by existing side by side with them (Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt). … Symbolic and reflexive behavior is the hardening into theater of social, religious, aesthetic, medical, and educational process. Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is “twice-behaved behavior.”18 In this text, the “actual” and its access in performance (re)gains complexity – grows haunted (and, surprisingly perhaps, filmic – as if he were returning us

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to a state of film after having returned us, previously, to theatre). Here, in l985, re-stored behavior is, also, actualization.19 Returning the “re-” to articulation, Schechner is nevertheless smart to the implications, and he works hard to unpack what this return of the “re-” might mean for “history.” While he is careful to underscore that he considers exact replication of historical performances, and historical events, to be impossible (writing in Between Theater and Anthropology that “contextual and historical circumstances make even the exact replication of a scored/notated original different than that original”), nevertheless he suggests that history can be accessed because “history is not what happened but what has been encoded and transmitted.”20 If this is the case, then, indeed, re-enactments do touch history. And yet, here’s a rub: Schechner insists that this touching of history is essentially bogus: “It is not possible to get back to what was.”21 The tension in the fact that “what was done” was already a matter of the enactment of codes and performatives (in J. L. Austin’s sense) – that “what was” was itself already composed in restoration – should mean that to do restoration is to do what was because what was was already restored. What does this mean? If our everyday acts – our most common incidents as well as our most grand events – are, as Schechner argues in Between Theater and Anthropology, always in some relation to performance and in some reiterative negotiation with what Judith Butler has termed “sedimented acts”22 – then Schechner’s dismissal of the ability to “get back to what was” bears troubling. If the past was already self-different by virtue of being composed in restoration, then, in the dizzying toss and tumble that always attends mimesis, the fact that restoration renders an event different really only renders it the same as it originally was: different.23 So to touch historical events, even to “get back to what was,” with restored behavior should be possible as history itself was so composed. Clearly, however, the actuality of this touch is a dizzying proposition that Schechner chooses, with an assertive preference for linear and progressive time, to shunt to the “not possible” category. Here is where his earlier investment in the “actual” as the antithesis of imitation and repetition, and his excision of the “re-” as superfluous rather than constitutive, continues to reverberate. The question of theatre’s returns – the question of whether it is possible for time to return in repetition as against the assumption of time’s linear march – is also tied up in Schechner’s investment in performance’s so-called disappearance. As early as l965, an investment in ephemerality became a cornerstone of his concept of performance.24 Having been schooled in the rub, I’ve often attempted to think against this grain in Richard’s own thought. Having flagrancy in my toolbox, bequeathed to me as a student of Schechner’s, one of my own most brazen projects resulted in an essay titled “What I Can’t Recall.”25 For that essay I set out with the plan to write about a performance I had forgotten, to see what remained in and through forgetting – that is, to see what remained in and of disappearance. This is,

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on the surface, an inane endeavor. But I was interested to see what remained of performance without recourse to documentation of any kind. I wondered what it would be like to start with the supposition that performance does not disappear. Rather, I was interested in the way a live event accrued to itself with time, carried on the afterlife of flotsam and jetsam, strutting and fretting on the street or in the home long after any curtains might have come down in the theatre or worn off in the cool down of actors backstage. The altered shapes of aftermath may not be recognizable as remain, and so may seem like disappearance, but as against this seeming I decided to start with the supposition that performance could both be ongoing or incomplete and recur not only through the recognizable material fragments that give it evidence – playbills, photos, memoirs – but in and through the bits and pieces that actually escape legitimate account – that is, the opposite of the playbill, the video, the photograph – the anti-matter of forgetting. So, for that essay, I did not start with a playbill, or an image, or an anecdote, a locatable historical event, or even the name of a play: I just sat in my chair and asked: Where did the forgotten go? What performance do I not recall? As I recounted in that essay, when I sat in my chair a performance did slowly suggest itself to me. I recalled myself on the street in New York, and took myself on a journey of recall from there, to see what I might stumble upon. But the bits and pieces that slowly took the shape of an evening at the theatre past were not, in the scheme of things, just any show. What came to be recounted were the before- and after-effects of a production of Faust directed by Richard Schechner in the mid-l990s. I had apparently forgotten about this particular Schechner theatre event, actually titled Faust/ Gastronome, but that forgetting was part and parcel of a deeper memory machinery – in the way one “forgets” the steps in learning to ride a bike while one is in fact riding a bike. As is recounted in such performance studies manuals as Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember or Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” one forgets in order to ride.26 And in fact, such a hubristic endeavor as that particular essay could not have happened without the influence of Richard Schechner (nor, one could argue, of the scholar Faust). But this influence of Schechner was something I’d forgotten at the time of writing. And of course perhaps almost everything I write falls into that category, if I forget correctly. So, I have decided to offer, here, a set of anecdotal, affective, and minor details of memory of my work and life with Richard Schecher. Though I did not study feminist theory with Richard, it was in performance studies at New York University in l987 or ’88 that I (re-)encountered the feminist saw: the personal is political. And it was in his program that, under the tutelage of Peggy Phelan, I took seriously the arguments of Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail, on the fecund feminist implications in the minor tale, the stray particle, or, as psychoanalysis might privilege, the seemingly innocuous slip.27 What I present here, then, are perhaps minor but decided memories – not forgotten but sedimented in the personal fabric of my life. These are

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memories that, like the knowledge of bike riding, have become me. In fact, the then and now of Eliade’s reactualization, with the re- intact, suggests the way that the personal then of my learning through Schechner can never be divorced from the now of my political practices. The now is not not then, and not entirely now, but forged in the alternation (to use a word from Bataille) between “re-” and “actualization.” Offering some account of those rubbings may be as inconsequential as broken bits of bottles, containers, vases, urns, and other houses for holes that have lost their singular edges defining inside and outside. But, collecting detritus and arranging the bits for (re-)engagement continues to inform the archive as well as the repertoire, and perhaps the spaces between.

Memories four, five and six I’ve written a paper for a course on “Play” taught by Schechner at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies where I am a graduate student. My daughter has just turned four. I think it is the spring of l987. The paper I’ve written (the first I ever wrote on a computer) gets a B. I am crushed. I work to rewrite it, but my second attempt merits merely a B plus. Schechner tells me that my writing is full of jargon. Also, I have no idea how to make a proper footnote. He reads a sentence aloud and just looks at me. I struggle not to tear up, but he doesn’t stop. “‘Symbolic Order’? Don’t throw jargon at me without telling me, at every step, what you mean by it.” He goes on: “Don’t assume I have swallowed Lacan. Don’t assume anyone has. Write it to me. Write it to me. Write it to me. And …” (in my mind he slams the table) – “DO NOT assume that I am you nor the least like you nor that I know your mind. No one does. Even someone who thinks they know what Lacan means by ‘Symbolic Order’ doesn’t know what YOU mean by it. Assume our non-identity and then write to me.” I blubber something about how I need to rely on phrases well established by precedent theorists in order to move our discourse along. I muster my inner anti-Orwell to claim that if we use the same common words as some mythic Common Man we never get out of our homage to that Man and his Limits. Schechner counters: “BUT IT’S UNREADABLE!” And then he says: “Write it to me like you really want me to understand!” I go away and try again, but I don’t succeed for a long time. Eventually, with a pat on the back, Richard tells me my interview with Holly Hughes will be published in TDR: The Drama Review. (I’ll have to go back and reread that interview to see if I slipped “Symbolic Order” in behind his back – it’s possible that I did, since I was the proofreader of the issue.)28 Later that spring, I was working with TDR’s Associate Editor, Mariellen Sandford. By now I was deeply invested in thinking through feminist theory. I was working closely with Phelan and learning inordinate amounts from her. Everything I read in those days I filtered through what I learned from Peggy (and in many ways that is still the case). So, when Richard came into the TDR office with an article by Grotowski titled “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un”

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(You Are Someone’s Son) that he wanted TDR to publish, Mariellen and I looked at each other. Are you someone’s son, I asked? No. Are you? No, we said to each other, we are not anyone’s sons. We asked Richard if we could change the title and language throughout the essay to something gender neutral. It’s OK with me, but ask Jerzy, he said. We asked Jerzy. Jerzy absolutely refused. We told Richard that we thought we should put an editor’s note disclaiming the gender bias of the essay. Richard said no. “BUT IT’S UNREADABLE,” I declared. Then I said, full of the restored behavioral chutzpah I’d imitated from the teacher, that I could not continue to work at the journal if we could not publish a disclaimer, in the form of an asterisk and editor’s note, after the title. OK, said Richard, you have your asterisk. That asterisk is precious to me and a very small measure of what, in the long run, was Richard’s enormous support. The text it indicates reads: “The rhetoric of this article is Grotowski’s. All references to gender are his.”29 Later, in the mid-2000s, while sharing breakfast at a Performance Studies international conference, Richard will look up from his pancake to tell me that theory is dead. What he will mean is that poststructuralism is dead. I will say: “who says?” I’ll say: “Whatever kept the dead from speaking eloquently and with impact? Do you hear me?” I will say passionately. “I’m saying it to you.” He will smile. “It’s still dead,” he’ll say, full of life.

Memory three In a moment of complete personal crisis in l982, I find myself six weeks pregnant nine months after graduating from college. I had moved to New York City, and was in touch with Richard – sometimes babysitting for his son Sam to make extra money while waitressing and auditioning and, occasionally, performing. I bring this personal problem to Richard who says to me: “you can do anything you want to do.” He says: “Do not make any decisions based on a prediction of doom. Be brave either way. Keep the baby or do not. But decide based on the premise that everything can be possible.” This was inane advice from any practical standpoint, given my status as single, 22, and flat broke. I would not necessarily have had the bravado to give such advice to someone in my situation. I am not saying that the advice was good or bad, but it was brave. And I grasped onto it. And in that respect, I have Richard to thank – not for my ultimate decision, but for that early lesson in chutzpah. We do the best we can when we are sinking or swimming. We rely, at times, on elders and teachers to be open to holding a hand out in life, as well as in an ocean of ideas.

Memory two In l979, the week before the summer session of intensives were about to begin at Connecticut College, Estelle Parson canceled. My professor, Linda

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Herr, promptly reassigned me to the avant-garde and told me she would never speak with me again if I missed this opportunity. I had spent the spring semester before that summer basically between two books: The Bible in one class, and The Bride and The Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde by Calvin Tomkins in another.30 One text was overly familiar to a minister’s daughter from a small town. The Tomkins, however, was wildly confusing and I had no idea how to find it inspiring. Gethsemane still seemed closer than Paris or Manhattan. Professor Herr’s insistence had confused me as well, but I’d chosen to go to Connecticut College because a woman ran the theatre department and the school offered a dance major so, against my hesitations, I chose to respect her advice. Richard arrived in New London with Ron Vawter, Spalding Gray, Steven Borst, and other members of The Performance Group. He also arrived with the text of Genet’s The Balcony, which we were going to mount at the end of six weeks. By the end of the first week he had people out of their clothing, panting Grotowski exercises, and … manipulating … the play script. Some evenings, Gray would present material from his lectures on personal memories of Rhode Island. Other evenings we had deep and astounding group discussions about Genet, about the Theatre, about the State, about history, fascism, prostitution, religion, censorship, revolution, madness, and art. At the end of the second week, the play had been cast. To my amazement, I would be playing Irma, the madam of the whorehouse, at all of twenty. I was also asked to stand on a very tall pedestal at various moments between scenes, stark naked, singing Kyrie Eleison (Lord Have Mercy). Not as Irma, but as Rebecca. Now, all of this provoked a kind of gathering of self for me like none other I had experienced to that date. I had to think, and think deeply, about what I thought the boundaries of theatre to be. I was not at all sure those boundaries included me, naked, singing a prayer on a pedestal. It might include Irma, naked, inside the safety of a proscenium arch (or a makeshift frame that Richard was employing at various sites throughout a large room). But did it really include me as me being me praying naked? My parents would be coming to the show. My Classics professor might be there. Did that matter? Who was I as an actress? What were my limits? I was also having trouble acting as Irma. I would fall back time and again on posturing, forcing an ingénue’s idea of naturalism into the whorehouse/ theatre until Richard took me aside one day for a private rehearsal. There, in a cramped space behind the set, he had me repeat over and over a simple line of Irma’s. I’d start the line and he’d stop me mid-sentence and say sternly: “No, say it to me.” I’d start again and he’d stop me: “No, say it to me.” This went on for what seemed like hours but maybe was about 20 minutes, which is a very, very long time. No, say it to me. No, say it to me. No, say it to me. Finally I was frustrated and exhausted. I shouted the line as if to say “Fuck You” (except I didn’t swear), looking him straight in the eye.

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I thought I’d be re-cast then and there. Instead, he said “Good.” And that was the end of our rehearsal. At the same time, I’d begun to bow out of the evenings in order to read everything I could find by or on Genet. I was looking for something in the author’s intention that might allow me to validate for myself the naked Kyrie. I could find nothing. My nudity on the pedestal had nothing to do with Genet and was not called for by the text. I decided I could not justify my participation in that aspect of the performance. So, I constructed a complex sophomoric argument about Genet, the author’s intent, and the limits of propriety between authors, directors, and actors. With trepidation, I asked Richard to meet with me privately to discuss my concerns. We went for a beer at Mr. G’s downtown. Nervous in the extreme, I launched into a long, overly rehearsed argument about character, the person of the actor, what I understood The Balcony to be about, and the rights of the director. Richard listened patiently for a full 20 minutes (a very long time) until I finished, my last line being: “And so, I refuse to stand naked on your pedestal, singing the Kyrie.” There was a pause. I expected Richard to come back and patronize me about how play texts are meant to be played (with), to be altered by a director, to be interpreted and embodied, and skewed in the toss and tumble of liveness. How scenes could be inserted at will. How the cracks between scenes where naked Kyries might occur were the libidinal rights of those of us who put the plays on our bodies, who re-act. Instead Richard just smiles, a big and generous smile, and he says with great glee: “That’s fine! I just thought it was kinky!” I loved him then because the last thing I had expected was honesty. I learned that honesty, above all, is his finest asset. He will be honest, whether you like what you hear or not. Blatant, even. Utterly, frankly. And he can change his mind from there to back again. I liked what I heard because it was true. It was kinky. And, anyway, I’d already accepted the very counter-argument I’d expected him to deliver, even if I didn’t realize it yet. That summer, I did not sing the Kyrie in the nude. I did not sing the Kyrie at all. Inside the rickety frame, as Irma, I changed my clothes when the text called for it. And when I spoke, I spoke to Vawter or Borst who were there in the smaller room when we respected the frame, and to those who were in the bigger room beyond the frame when we broke it. Which we did. Repeatedly.

Memory one It is l969 or ’70 or ’72. I am 9 or 10 or 11 or 12. I live with my parents and siblings in Western Massachusetts. My father, a Methodist Minister, is struggling to complete a dissertation in theology from Boston University with full-on dyslexia in the days before spell check. He writes his sermons on

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“Self, Other, and God” and asks with passion for a “Radical New Covenant” and an end to the war in Vietnam. On the way to piano lessons he trains me to think about the difference between Subject and Object, Self and Other, and we argue about the spaces between. My parents are the Christian Left, not only against the war, but also passionately against sex before marriage, or, for that matter, swearing. My mother has an MA in Religious Education from the Pacific School of Religion because in the l950s they would not ordain women. She is also a writer of plays, poems, and libretti and she struggles with feeling stifled by the confines of mid-century womanhood, marriage, and motherhood. She writes to save her life, studies Virginia Woolf, starts hanging out with feminists. Also, and perhaps not in that order, she goes back to school for an MFA in theatre from the University of Massachusetts. When Mom goes back to school for her MFA, my parents divide my Dad’s large office in the basement into two offices, partitioned by a bookcase. On my father’s side are all the dense theology and philosophy texts: Barthes, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Heidegger, Marx, Hegel, Kant, Aristotle, Plato. My mother’s side begins to fill up with another kind of text with titles like The Theatre and its Double and Towards a Poor Theatre. One day on my mother’s shelf I find a journal with a picture on the front that arouses me to my core. I cannot stop looking at it. The volume is an issue of The Drama Review, Volume 13, Number 1, l968. There are words I don’t know that read, “Kott Arrabal Grotowski Bentley Halprin Lebel Barba Ridiculous Theatre.” But mostly there’s a picture of a young woman, naked, accepting a communion wafer into her mouth from a man’s hand above her. You can see the cuff of his robe, but the rest of his body remains off camera. She is up to her knees in sand. She seems to be rising but may be sinking. I take the book into my hands. I still remember the feel of it and the sense that something, here, was both overly alien and overly familiar. Then, as if it were all too much to countenance at puberty, I decide I preferred my father’s side of the office with the large, pictureless tomes, the lack of personal affect, and the scholarly absence (or omission) of mess. I put the journal back on the shelf. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost without the naked woman would suffice for the time being. But I never forgot the startling honesty of what that picture admitted to the scene. Like it or not, it evidenced a libidinality (whether kinky or violent, abusive or enabling or both) that was carefully screened in other scenes of ritual and theatre I’d been raised to know. Foolishly, or naively, I didn’t realize until well after I’d worked with him in Connecticut, that Richard Schechner was TDR and that the cover I’d seen was from his journal. In fact, I only saw that cover again when I’d accepted a position at NYU with a Research Assistantship assigned to TDR. There the issue re-actualized, bequeathed to me casually by residing on the shelf above my desk at the TDR office in New York.

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Among many other things, I began to wonder about what comes first and what comes second. What when is when, and when and why does when (re-)actualize? These questions were almost enough to make we want to stand naked on a pedestal and sing Kyrie Eleison. Almost … but not quite. Afterword Perhaps, after all, I am someone’s son. Or, perhaps there is much more to say about what it means to be someone’s daughter. Or, perhaps, as Richard told me in l981, regarding progeny all things are possible. If I’ve learned anything from RS, it is about words that begin with “re-” … like repetition and rehearsal and responsibility and reverence and representation and real. Like revision. So, perhaps we can revise our asterisks: All delimiting references to others and any personal properties of progeny and progenitors are ours to see change if, with the ebullience of brilliant editorship, we remain open to question, again, and again, and again.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

See Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: Introduction to Intimacy,” Critical Inquiry. Special Issue (Winter, 1998): 281–8. Vanessa Agnew, “Introduction: What is Reenactment?” Criticism 46.3 (Summer 2004): 335. See also Vanessa Agnew, “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and Its Work in the Present,” Rethinking History 11.3 (2007): 299–312. Alexander Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” Criticism 46.3 (2004): 490. By this account, touch, and affective engagement generally, cannot be “analytical.” For some scholars, such as Brian Massumi after Gilles Deleuze, affect is autonomous versus relational and does not imply the emotional. But for others, such as Sarah Ahmed, relationality and “emotion” are important to thinking through affect and affective histories. Massumi, Parables For The Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press; 2002. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge, 2004. Some examples include: Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexual Communities Pre- and Post-Modern (l999); Chris Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (2001); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (2005); Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History (2000), and “Time Binds, or Erotohistory,” Social Text (2005); Louise Fradenberg and Carla Frecerro, “Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” Premodern Sexualities (1996); and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2009). See the special issue of GLQ on “Queer Temporalities” ed. Elizabeth Freeman (GLQ 13, nos 2–3, 2007). Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Time of History and the Times of the Gods,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke, l997, 35–60). “Secular time”: Pellegrini and Jakobsen, “Dreaming Secularism,” in “World Secularisms at the Millennium,” Social Text (2000), and “Times Like These,” Secularisms (2008). The affective turn in queer theory, and the turn to dragging history affectively, is fundamentally

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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engaged in rigorous thinking about the vexed line between personal and public, as well as the vexed line between then and now. Indeed, there has been something of an “affective turn” in scholarship, coming close on the heels of the “performative turn.” In many ways, both the performative turn and the affective turn would be unimaginable without careful attention paid by performance studies scholars to performance-based aspects of everyday life, the serious work of embodied practices, and explorations in performative writing that slap seemingly distanced discursive practices against seemingly present embodied, personal, and lived experiences. Patricia Clough is often cited for crafting the phrase “affective turn” and she links the turn to Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, but the phrase appeared much earlier in feminist work by Kathleen Woodward, Lauren Berlant, and Linda Nicholson. Patricia Clough (ed.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke University Press, 2007. On the precedent feminist terrain for the turn, see Kristyn Gorton, “Theorizing Emotion and Affect: Feminist Engagements,” Feminist Theory 8:3: 333–48. For work linking the affective turn to performativity see Eve Sokofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. Richard Schechner, The End of Humanism. Performing Arts Journal Publication, l982. Richard Schechner, “Mainstream Theatre and Performance Studies,” TDR: The Drama Review 44.2 (Summer, 2000): 6. On the “turf war” between performance studies and theatre studies, see the special section “Rethinking Our Field: A Forum,” in Theater 31.2 (2001). Jacques Rivette, Interview with Jean Renoir, Stage and Screen: Three Films by Jean Renoir. DVD (Criterion) 2004. Schechner, Richard, Essays on Performance Theory. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977. See Martin Pucher, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2002. Richard Schechner, “Actuals: A Look into Performance Theory,” in The Rarer Action: Essays in Honor of Frances Ferguson, ed. Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler. New Brunswick: Routledge University Press, l970, 97–135, p. 99. I cite the original here. The passage was only slightly edited in subsequent editions in Performance Theory to add “happenings” to the list of avant-gardes. For his account of the word “actual,” see also Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), l985, 115 fn. 4. See Stephen J. Bottoms, “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance. Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy,” Theatre Topics 13.2 (2003): 173–87. Schechner, “Actuals” 1970: 115–16. See Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Grotowski provides an excellent example of the drive for essentialism in the “Poor Theatre” that so impressed Schechner. For Grotowski, the essential would result from “eliminating whatever proved superfluous.” See Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon & Schuster, l968, 19. Schechner, “Actuals” 1970: 103. This sentence remains unedited across the editions, appearing the same in 2003. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation. New York: Harper & Row, l965, 6. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt), 68–72. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l985, 35–6.

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19. Schechner footnotes his earlier work on “actuals” on page 50 of Between Theatre and Anthropology but is careful to let his sense of “actual” not extend to “actual” history. He writes that an event to be restored has “either been forgotten, never was, or is overlaid with so much secondary stuff that its actuality-in-history is lost” (50). This is slightly confusing, when he has admitted on the same page that history is “what has been constructed out of events” (50). Would not “actualityin-history” already be an actuality in repetition? Restored behavior is actual, and actuality is, then, composed in and through the fore and aft of repetition. 20. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 50. 21. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 51. 22. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre History 40 (1988): 519–38. Repr. in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, 270–82, p. 274. 23. Margaret Thompson Drewal, who completed her dissertation under the advisement of Richard Schechner at New York University, has written brilliantly on the paradoxical nature of this point in regard to performance theory and Yoruban ritual. See Yoruban Ritual. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, l992. 24. In l965 Schechner began to craft a definition of theatre as a tangle between permanence (drama) and ephemerality (performance), privileging ephemerality in the claim that theatre has “no originals.” See Richard Schechner, “Theatre Criticism,” The Tulane Drama Review 9: 3 (1965): 22, 24. This would be an influential line of inquiry in the development of performance studies, at least in its New York University manifestation in the l980s, and it would influence a great deal of scholarship. In l968 Marcia Siegel, who would join the NYU faculty in the l980s, wrote that “dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point. … It is an event that disappears in the very act of materializing.” See Marcia B. Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1968, 1. By l974 Schechner wrote of theatre as “evanescent,” saying that “it is an event characterized by ephemerality and immediacy.” See Richard Schechner, “TDR Comment: A Critical Evaluation of Kirby’s Criticism of Criticism,” The Drama Review: TDR 18.4 (1974): 118. Performance studies was officially launched at NYU in l984. By l985 ephemerality was a veritable mantra applied to performance. Schechner wrote: “Performance originals disappear as fast as they are made. No notation, no reconstruction, no film or videotape recording can keep them. … One of the chief jobs challenging performance scholars is the making of a vocabulary and methodology that deal with performance in its immediacy and evanescence.” See Between Theatre and Anthropology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l985, 50. In l993 Peggy Phelan, then an Assistant Professor in Schechner’s department, took Schechner’s call and ran with it, making famous the claim that performance “becomes itself” through disappearance. See Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993, 146. For a critique of this position, see Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6.2 (2001), and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, New York: Routledge, 2011. 25. Rebecca Schneider, “What I Can’t Recall,” in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt. New York: Routledge, 2006. 26. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l997, 57–124.

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27. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Routledge, l987. 28. Rebecca Schneider, “Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist,” TDR 33.1 (1989): 171–83. 29. Jerzy Grotowski. “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un” (You Are Someone’s Son), The Drama Review: TDR 31.3 (1987): 30–41. Unfortunately, when the essay was republished in The Grotowski Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, l997), editors Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford did away with the asterisked editor’s note. But see Chapter 4 of my book Performing Remains for an account of how Elizabeth LeCompte revived the asterisk issue in her Wooster Group production Poor Theater (2011). 30. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde. New York: Penguin, l968.

9 Fanning the Flames: Richard Schechner’s TDR Mariellen R. Sandford

As a boy growing up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s and 1940s, Richard Schechner found he had a thing for fire. He talks about imagining houses going up in flames (most likely, he says, sparked by news of the War) and standing in the basement of his home, staring into the oil-burner furnace, lost in the fantasy that the whole world – except him – was burning. His inferno fascination escalated to the point where he and a friend actually set a fire in an abandoned lot. His friend ran away, but Richard just stood and watched. Stood and watched until the fire trucks came to put it out. Until he was caught. The punishment? He had to do service hours at a firehouse to learn fire safety. What he learned instead was that firefighters loved fire every bit as much as he did – except of course their work was to put them out.1 While pyromania was not in his future, Schechner has been known to ignite the occasional flame throughout his career as a director, teacher, writer, and editor. Were his early days as an arsonist predictive of a life of crime? Clearly not. I think they anticipated an attraction to danger and a passion for initiating change, a need to grab attention and shake up habitual ways of thinking. From the moment he first opened his mouth in TDR, Richard Schechner has been lighting fires under people and institutions. In his inaugural TDR Comment – a section of the journal Schechner established for opinion pieces by the editors and open to the field – Schechner slams Edward Albee for being a “phony.” 2 It is the kind of brash proclamation we have come to expect from Richard, and while bold and audacious given that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf marked Albee’s “coronation”3 as Broadway theatre royalty, it is not yet the kind of heartfelt challenge or sweeping pronouncement about TDR, the state of the academy, or the future of theatre that he will pen over the next nearly half-century. This comes with the next issue, Schechner’s fourth as editor. In “Intentions, Problems, Proposals” Schechner takes on the “commodity theatre,” setting TDR on its course of challenging convention and complacency. He assigns this same charge to universities, complaining that they too have opted for commercial 152

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success over artistic significance and learning: “University theatres, like the commodity theatre, emphasize the cast, not the company; their goal is to succeed, not experiment.”4 But most telling in this early editorial, Schechner offers as “the most exciting theatre of this New York season” the New York Pro Musica production of The Play of Daniel at St George’s Episcopal Church during Christmas week. He sees reflected in this “twelfth-century musical drama” a belief in “the efficacy of the theatrical act, in its holy truth.”5 It was not the kind of experimentation he was calling for in professional and university theatre, but Schechner’s response to the piece is evidence of a perspective that considers the potential of performance to impact lives, widens the horizon to look at the theatrical and performative outside of conventional theatre venues, on the margins of the art world, beyond our own communities, and far from our own cultures. Schechner’s “broad spectrum” approach to the study of performance has changed the way scholars, spectators, and practitioners look at everything from the deer dance and Easter Passion Play of the Arizona Yaqui to the Ramlila of Ramnagar to Kazuo Ohno, Annie Sprinkle, Ron Athey, and the Wooster Group – all of which Richard Schechner has written about over the years. His 1988 TDR Comment, “Performance Studies: A Broad Spectrum Approach” is a call to “expand our vision of what performance is, to study it not only as art but as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural processes.”6 This two-fold project – to include as our objects of study not just theatre and dance, but “a broad spectrum of activities including at the very least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports, popular entertainments, and performance in everyday life”;7 and to look at those objects not only from an art-historical perspective but in a socio-political context – has been the mission of both Schechner and TDR under his leadership. Schechner’s history with TDR is by now well known. As a PhD student at Tulane University in 1960, he was asked by TDR Founding Editor Robert Corrigan to join the office staff of the Tulane Drama Review. He didn’t last long. As he’s the first to admit, Richard’s not very good at office underling work.8 But he is on the masthead of two issues as editorial assistant (T12 and T13), the first of which includes his debut academic article, “The Bacchae: A City Sacrificed to a Jealous God.”9 While in Paris finishing his dissertation research in the spring of 1962, Schechner got a letter from Monroe Lippman, the chair of Tulane’s theatre department, inviting him to fill Corrigan’s spot both on the faculty – Corrigan was leaving for Carnegie Tech – and as editor of TDR. Schechner adjusted the scope of his dissertation (adding “Aspects of” to the title – “The Theatre of Eugene Ionesco” – as he tells the story), wrote the introduction and conclusion, and returned to Tulane to take on both the teaching position and the editorship that fall.10 Four issues after his second appearance on the masthead as editorial assistant, Schechner is listed as Editor of TDR.

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In 1967 Schechner and TDR moved to New York, where Corrigan had recently set up NYU’s School of the Arts. He continued as editor of TDR into 1969, when he resigned to spend more time with his company, The Performance Group. In 1985, I got a call from Richard: he was returning to his position as editor and wanted me to run the office. “I need to know by tomorrow morning,” he said. He’s quick with decisions; I like to ponder, although this time the answer came easily. I had been his TA in NYU’s Department of Performance Studies and we worked well together, which some still find surprising (iconoclasts aren’t for everyone). We moved into the TDR office in August of that year, and the first issue under Schechner’s second tenure as editor came out in the spring of 1986. The challenge Schechner set for himself and for TDR in his re-introductory TDR Comment was – and still is – ennobling: Can a magazine save the world? Or at least not make it worse? Not such a preposterous question, because I feel we need to measure our actions – whatever they are – against the background of ethics, values, and effects. And I passionately believe that performance in all its dimensions is important to the world developing in the late 20th century.11 With this issue, TDR would return to the project Schechner had been working on for over a decade, earlier revealed in the pages of the Theatre and Social Sciences issue, which he guest edited in 1973, while Michael Kirby was editor. In his introduction to the issue, Schechner calls for an ongoing pursuit of “points of contact among such apparently diverse fields as psychology, sociology, anthropology, psychotherapy, communication theory, ethnology, and performance.”12 It is by now a well-known list. TDR, he writes, was an appropriate place for this discussion. Under Kirby it had been “concerned with the avant-garde and with concrete historical antecedents to the avantgarde.”13 While some would argue that Schechner was throwing out theatre with the bathwater,14 theatre was never out of the mix; it was just now part of a bigger picture. The goal always was a conversation among disciplines, among artists, among scholars, and perhaps most importantly, a conversation between scholars and artists. This is clear from the beginning, when he talks about a “convergence” and stresses the impact it would have on the performing arts: I believe that the convergence of the social sciences and the performing arts, and the creation of performance theory, is an antecedent to an avant-garde movement just taking shape. This movement will be more iconographic than iconoclastic; more conservative than prodigal; and more based on sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling. The movement will be radical not in the political sense of the late sixties, but in the manner in which it attempts to go to the roots.15

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He seems to be looking toward the “integrative” and conceptual work of artists who would continue to be discussed on the pages of TDR, such as Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Critical Art Ensemble, Rabih Mrouè; and scholars such as Peggy Phelan, Shannon Jackson, and E. Patrick Johnson whose experiments in writing and performance reflect their cross-disciplinary projects. The time is now for practitioners to know theory and theorists to make performances. I do not see experiment coming in a flash of something “new” in the old-fashioned sense of the historical avant-garde. But I do see it coming out of the long-term process of developing integrative thinking and action at all levels of human behavior. This is a kind of continuous experiment, analogous to what goes on in the sciences. And I believe that performance is the best model we have of open-ended, categorically unfinished, integrative thinking and action.16 Schechner saw this conversation as the hope of both the theatre and the academy, art and scholarship. He has participated in both throughout his life, beginning with writing theatre reviews at Cornell University and the University of Iowa in the 1950s; as artistic director of East End Players in Provincetown in the summers of 1958 and 1961;17and with his first teaching position at Tulane. It is a conversation that continues in performance studies departments around the world, all part of the “categorically unfinished” field he pioneered, as well as among the hundreds – probably thousands – of students he has taught. As a teacher for nearly 50 years, Schechner has mentored both scholars and artists. It is through his students that he has continued to question and challenge his own artistic and theoretical work. It keeps him young, he has said. Many of them now teach and produce work throughout the world, including Sun Huizhu who as Vice-President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy writes plays, directs, and teaches; director Ong Keng Sen of Singapore who presents and facilitates intercultural and interdisciplinary performances around the world; and Rebecca Schneider, currently Associate Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and a “performing theorist.”18 Many, many others have been taught by Schechner through his writing and through the work of the countless artists and scholars he has made available on the pages of TDR: In 1986 and by pure chance, I found 12 numbers of a specialized review on performing arts; all were signed by TDR … . I found them in a small bookstore in Beirut. I bought them for a very low price as they were used issues. At that time, I was still studying theatre at the Lebanese University. The country was besieged by civil war(s); and it was too difficult for students and artists to go out the country and at the same time it was too dangerous for any artist or theatre maker to visit us. We were, in a way,

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culturally isolated from the outside. And for many years, the 12 TDR issues were one of my very few windows to the world out of Lebanon … [;] they gave me the possibility to think and dream.19 I began reading TDR in Texas when I was in college; it was practically my only link to a wide world of theatre no one was teaching at that time. TDR changed my life … . It changed the way I thought about the theater event.20 I was first assigned an issue of TDR to read when I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s. I now, in turn, regularly assign articles from the journal to my own students … .21 My own memories of my “first time” are a little sketchy. I “borrowed” my first TDRs as an undergrad from the same teacher who lent me Brook’s Orghast at Persepolis (I still have it), Towards a Poor Theatre (I’m sure I returned it), and Schechner’s Environmental Theater (I got my own). Like writer/director Rabih Mroué, producer Mark Russell, scholar Tracy C. Davis, and scores of others who wrote letters of support for our NEA grant application, TDR was my way into a world of performance beyond the spring musical. It offered a new perspective for those of us who had a visceral attraction to theatre but an intellectual need for something more. This bent led me to NYU and eventually to my job as Associate Editor of TDR. Richard Schechner was late for my first class with him. Not late for the class, late for the semester. His GAs had covered the first few sessions of his Ritual and Theatre class. He blustered into the room and sat – in his characteristic crosslegged fashion – opposite the wide-open semicircle of grad students. He’d been in India. I was impressed, and nervous, and he was clearly not happy to be back in the United States. “Name a ritual.” So began my baptism by fire. He went from one to the next. Some declined to answer; I said “bar mitzvah.” “Have you ever been to a bar mitzvah?” “No” (I was in Catholic school during the bat- and bar mitzvah years). He glared up and down the row: “Don’t ever talk about anything you haven’t experienced.” Those may not have been his exact words, but the point was clear. What I saw a hint of that day was Schechner’s commitment to honest, thorough scholarship and to primary research. In his T26 TDR Comment, which introduces the second of a two-part series on “Stanislavski in America,” Schechner sets his readers straight from the get-go: the issues are “richer in raw material than critical evaluation. Actors, directors, and teachers have spoken for themselves.”22 As he has so often since, Schechner gets the words right from the horses’ mouths, with much of the issue comprising his interviews with the key players. This insistence on primary research, on theory at the service of the object and not the other way around, has been a keystone of Schechner’s mandate both as a teacher and at TDR.

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A challenge thrown down in this same issue is one that will recur in TDR throughout Schechner’s career: the challenge to the academy. In an admittedly limited survey of acting programs (“Stanislavski at School”), Schechner questions the validity of the way theatre training programs are structured at the university level: How can we be training competent actors if we require them to spend half of their time in liberal arts classes, and the other half learning sometimes contradictory methods from faculty who have a range of ability and professional experience? “Training is so isolated, haphazard, and contradictory that it is hard to discuss it, almost impossible to evaluate it with anything but blanket condemnation.”23 In his second stint as TDR editor Schechner confronts the academy again in the winter 1987 issue of TDR,24 calling on universities to bring in artists to work with students, as teachers not as visiting divas: “leading artists work regularly and systematically on campuses. Their presence must not be regarded by the permanent faculty as a passing thunderstorm to be endured; nor must the artists think of themselves as traitors to their real lives, on campus just to earn needed bucks.”25 He didn’t let up. In the summer 1995 issue he aims at nothing less than “Transforming Theatre Departments.” The problem Schechner addresses here is the overload of college training programs. He recounts talking to a class of actors-in-training: “I read to them a few ads from American Theatre where theatre departments promise ‘professional’ or ‘preprofessional’ training. I wondered how long law or medical schools would get away with offering training to students who soon after graduation found out that their degrees did not give them a good chance of landing remunerative employment.”26 The challenge to theatre departments: be honest with students and prepare them for what really lies ahead, and include in your departments tracks for actors, scholars, popular entertainers, and educated theatre amateurs – without privileging or valuing any one path over the other. More than a dozen years later, the challenge is ongoing. Schechner’s call to theatre departments for equity and inclusion reflects his personal as well as his scholarly principles. These principles have been behind his persistent efforts to include many voices in the field and in TDR. As an editor he welcomes and encourages younger scholars, promoting the annual TDR Student Essay Contest and devoting more time than most to comments on submitted articles. In his own Performance Studies: An Introduction he acknowledges that the field is open for expansion and that his is not the only version of the PS story: The book you hold in your hand is “an” introduction to performance studies. There will be others, and that suits me just fine. The one overriding and underlying assumption of performance studies is that the field is open. There is no finality to performance studies, either theoretically or operationally. There are many voices, themes, opinions, methods, and subjects.27

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Schechner’s personal commitment to equity and inclusion can be traced to his long history of political engagement. His political passions were charged by his very personal and life-changing response to interviews he conducted as an undergraduate at Cornell University with Thurgood Marshall on Brown v Board of Education. He recalls coming down to Harlem from Ithaca to meet Marshall. Apparently fascinated that this “white kid from Cornell” was interested, Marshall threw his legs up on his desk and talked at length about the intricacies of the case.28 Schechner wrote three articles based on the interview for a series in the Cornell Daily Sun on the desegregation cases, which sparked his continued interest in and active involvement with the civil rights movement. With a letter of introduction from Marshall to the local NAACP, he went to Little Rock and was with the nine students just before they integrated Central High School, again as research for an article.29 In the early ’60s, Schechner was invited to join the Free Southern Theatre, a group “born out of the civil rights movement.”30 FST founders Doris Derby, John O’Neal, and Gilbert Moses “enlisted the support of white Tulane University professor and TDR editor Richard Schechner,”31 first as an advisor and later as one of the three producing directors (along with O’Neal and Moses). Later Schechner served briefly as chairman of the board. As TDR editor Schechner published a “Dialogue: The Free Southern Theatre” in the summer of 196532 and further articles on the FST in the 1968 Black Theatre issue of TDR, independently guest edited by Ed Bullins.33 TDR under Schechner will always lean toward politically motivated theatre and performance. There is a proven commitment, throughout the ’60s during his first tenure and again over the past quarter-century since Schechner returned to TDR. An ad in T39 for the Yippie Festival of Light in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention is evidence of a particularly proud episode in TDR’s history. Schechner tells of his acquaintance with Abbie Hoffman, who needed a New York office and a mailing address for organizing the event.34 The ad is an offer to send “information and scenarios,” with instructions to write to “Guerrilla Theatre/Festival ’68” at the TDR office, then located at 32 Washington Place. A transcript of Hoffman’s “Media Freaking,” recorded at Lincoln Park in Chicago on 27 August 1968, was published in the T44 Politics and Performance issue. (This is the same issue in which Schechner writes that he is turning over the editorship to Erika Munk, who is listed on the masthead as Editor for seven issues). A 2008 issue (52.1, T197) titled War and Other Bad Shit features articles on theatre in post-genocide Rwanda and a musical by North Korean gulag survivors, as well as performance texts about female interrogators in the War on Terror (Coco Fusco), the desperate measures of a widow in Afghanistan (Yasmine Beverly Rana), and the role of the artist in war-torn Lebanon (Lina Saneh and Rabih Mrouè). Throughout both terms as TDR editor Schechner has sought out and attracted articles on politically and socially engaged performance, and

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scholarship that questions its own political motivations and positions. This was recently made manifest in a discussion published over three issues, led by Jon McKenzie’s “Is Performance Studies Imperialist,”35 taken up by Janelle Reinelt,36 and continued by Schechner and others who responded to Schechner’s call for a forum.37 Over the years Schechner has repeated his call to colleagues for their positions and opinions on articles published in the magazine and debates raging in the field. Perhaps the greatest and strongest response to such a call to date was led by Schechner’s own outcry over Philip Auslander’s “plagiarism” (in quotes because scholarly debates regarding the use of the term and Auslander’s culpability are ongoing) in his “contribution” to the Routledge Theory 4 series. Schechner’s outrage over the sullying of a field he has worked to define and develop is palpable in his TDR Comment: [W]hat is at stake here is not a question of copyright law but of scholarly ethics and practice. What examples ought our senior scholars set for students and younger colleagues? What does this plagiarism say about our field if we just let it pass or sweep it under the rug? For performance studies, this is a matter we scholars and artists need to deal with, not something we should hand over to lawyers or, worse, hush up. … The Theory 4 series is very bad for performance studies.38 In his editorial he goes on to demand the withdrawal of the book by the publishers and declares his refusal to publish anything further with them, including one book currently under contract, unless they pulp Auslander’s book, which finally Routledge did. (Schechner plans to deliver his book to the publisher.) His immediate call to notables in the field received an overwhelming response – including from Judith Butler, Marvin Carlson, Jill Dolan, Peggy Phelan, Joe Roach, and Tracy C. Davis. As he discussed this very disturbing turn of events and what it says about corporate control of academic publishing and the potential “dumbing-down of performance studies,” it was obvious Richard Schechner was ready to light another fire. Ever the incendiary, Schechner has, since that first blaze held him so enthralled, continued to light fires, using his words to ignite and inflame. But words, says playwright and performer Deb Margolin, are just a sign, a sign of the fire within: I’m trying to think: What is language, anyway, what is speech? Does it just float, like smoke from fire, away from the speaker, signifying rather than being the thing that caused it? Is speech, like smoke, a byproduct of some burning rather than the burning itself?39 Schechner’s passions for truth and social justice, for experience, experiment, and self-expression, his intolerance for intolerance, and his fearless love of

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a good fight have guided his life’s work and are evident in the 129 issues of TDR he has edited to date. So many words, so much smoke, and where there’s smoke…

Notes 1. Personal video interview with author, 2008. 2. Richard Schechner, “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?” Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963): 9. 3. Schechner, “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?”: 7. 4. Richard Schechner, “Intentions, Problems, Proposals,” Tulane Drama Review 7. 4 (1963): 17. 5. Schechner, “Intentions, Problems, Proposals”: 6. 6. Richard Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach,” TDR 32.3(1988): 6. 7. Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach”: 4. 8. Personal video interview with author, 2008. 9. Richard Schechner, “The Bacchae: A City Sacrificed to a Jealous God,” Tulane Drama Review 5.4 (1961): 124–34. 10. See Richard Schechner, “Once More, with Feeling,” TDR 30.1(1986): 4–8, and personal video interview with author, 2008. 11. Schechner, “Once More, with Feeling”: 4. 12. Richard Schechner, “Performance and the Social Sciences: Introduction,” TDR 17.3 (1973): 3. 13. Schechner, “Performance and the Social Sciences: Introduction”: 4. 14. Richard Hornby, “Against Performance Theory,” Theatre Week, 17 October1994, 31–7, and Richard Hornby, Letter to the Editor. TDR 39.3 (T147) (1995): 11. 15. Schechner, “Performance and the Social Sciences: Introduction”: 4. 16. Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach”: 4. 17. Personal video interview with author, 2008. 18. Brown University, n.d. Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. http://www.brown. edu/Departments/Theatre_Speech_Dance/people/schneider.html (accessed 22 January 2010). 19. Rabih Mroué, Letter to TDR, 26 July 2008. 20. Mark Russell, Letter to TDR, 8 July 2008. 21. Tracy C. Davis, Letter to TDR, 30 June 2008. 22. Richard Schechner, “Twilight of the Gods,” Tulane Drama Review 9.2 (1964): 15. 23. Richard Schechner, “Stanislavski at School,” Tulane Drama Review 9.2 (1964): 198. 24. Richard Schechner, “The College Connection,” TDR 31.4 (1987): 7. 25. Schechner, “The College Connection”: 5. 26. Richard Schechner, “Transforming Theatre Departments,” TDR 39, 2 (1995): 8. 27. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2006, 1. 28. Personal video interview with author, 2008. 29. Personal email correspondence with author, 5 October 2008. 30. Cindy Rosenthal, “The Free Southern Theater: Historical Overview,” Restaging the Sixties, ed. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 263. 31. Rosenthal, “The Free Southern Theater: Historical Overview”: 263.

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32. Richard Schechner, “Dialogue: The Free Southern Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 9, 4 (T28) (1965): 63–76. 33. Richard Schechner, “White on Black.” TDR 12, 4(T40) (1968): 25–7. 34. Personal video interview with author, 2008. 35. Jon MacKenzie, “Is Performance Studies Imperialist,” TDR 50.4 (2006): 5–8. 36. Janelle Reinelt, “Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 2,” TDR 51.3 (2007): 7–16. 37. Richard Schechner, et. al., “Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 3: A Forum,” TDR 51, 4 (2007): 7–23. 38. Richard Schechner, “Plagiarism, Greed, and the Dumbing Down of Performance Studies,” TDR 53.1 (2009): 9. 39. Deb Margolin, “O Yes I Will (I will remember the spirit and texture of this conversation),” TDR 52.3 (2008): 185.

10 Liminal Richard: Approaches to Performance Studies John Emigh

Richard Schechner was teacher, mentor, neighbor, and friend to me while I studied at Tulane from 1964 to 1967. This makes me one of his first students and – since I procrastinated in writing my dissertation – I believe it also makes me the last of his charges to get a Tulane PhD in Theatre (or Dramatic Literature and Criticism as it was then significantly called). Richard has had a profound effect on the American Theatre, on the discourses of performance studies, and on many of those who contribute to these discourses. He also – both in ways I know and in ways to which I am no doubt oblivious – has had a profound effect upon my own life. This chapter is an attempt to resist a further slide into oblivion: to acknowledge debts, own love, and trace ideas. The hope is that in the process some light will be cast on the beginnings of performance studies – or at least on some of Richard’s early and seminal contributions to that still somewhat inchoate field. The approaches taken in an attempt to accomplish these goals will veer between anecdotal history and critical analysis, with “Schechner’s” early writings set beside the ways in which Richard conducted himself both inside and outside of the classroom during those mid-sixties years in New Orleans – a time full of social conflict, hope, and tragedy, and marked by critical and artistic ferment that proved formative for myself, for Richard, and, as it turned out, for performance studies. Ideas come from human beings in specific circumstances, exerting agency in specific ways. Over the years, it has become a central tenet of performance studies that it is important to know the ways in which ideas have been embodied – how they have been performed. And so, in my memories and in the words that follow, Richard’s long-ago performance as Richard shares space with, engenders, and, sometimes, dialectically engages with the redirection(s) of critical attention towards Performance that his writings and teachings have encouraged. Memories flood in. In August of 1964, I am driving down the Natchez Trace in Mississippi in 100 degree heat with a full beard, a pregnant wife, a leaky radiator, and Connecticut plates. We are bound for New Orleans, where I’ve 162

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been accepted into the MFA Directing Program at Tulane.1 In one bar where we stop to get water for the car, there is a record playing with the refrain, “Keep them niggers runnin’” At another, I’m offered a slobbered-on, handrolled cigarette and asked with an intent stare and slow drawl if it’s hot enough for me. After about 15 minutes of intense scrutiny about my views on the weather (and a few drags on the proffered cigarette), my companion nods and says, “You ken go on now, no-one’ll be followin’ you. This time.” We are very near where Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had been killed just two months before. We did indeed arrive in New Orleans and, while that city was not the rural South – there were more day-to-day encounters between people of various races than in most Northern cities – it was hardly a racial utopia. New Civil Rights laws were being enacted, but de facto segregation still held sway in most venues; one white friend who had entered a restaurant with a black acquaintance was dragged across the gravel, lacerating his back, locked up for a night, and then released. As the Vietnam War heated up, New Orleans, like the rest of the country, engaged in protests, demonstrations, and debates, and those who participated could expect their phones to be tapped and their comings and goings observed. During the years that Richard and I both lived in the city, Jim Garrison launched his investigation that linked CIA agents, Mafiosi, and members of the business and gay communities of New Orleans to the killing of John F. Kennedy. People in the rest of the country were convinced that Garrison was crazy, while most of the people I knew who lived in New Orleans figured that it all seemed plausible enough. Against this backdrop, there were more mundane concerns as well, and it had been these that propelled me towards the city. After pursuing majors in Political Science and English in college, I’d fallen out of love with New Criticism (not knowing that the whole edifice was about to crumble) and – after a year of travel in Spain and Morocco – had plunged into an obsessive relationship with theatre. An MFA program seemed the logical next step, and New Orleans’ history as the cradle of jazz and its Spanish colonial roots made it an appealing home to be in transit to – something. New Orleans seemed nicely betwixt and between Europe and America, North and South, Black and White: a limen (though I didn’t know that word yet). I wanted to direct more and write less, but there was a problem with this plan: Tulane’s directing program required a two-semester sequence in Dramatic Theory. The Tulane campus in 1964 was a hodgepodge of buildings lacking architectural coherence or a sense of permanence. It was, though, on a direct trolley line from Downtown New Orleans and the patios and balconies of the French Quarter. My then wife Allison and I rented an apartment with a shared balcony overlooking Preservation Hall on St Peter’s Street, in the heart of the Quarter. As an avid jazz fan and sometime saxophone player, this was like falling into heaven – a noisy heaven, to be sure, but we figured

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if we were going to live in New Orleans, why not total immersion? Our apartment was on the third floor. Severn Darden – the legendary improvisation guru who had co-founded Second City in Chicago – was temporarily staying on the second. He had been doing some workshops with the newly reconstituted Free Southern Theater. A few days after we moved in, Severn threw his own goodbye party. The company members – black and white – would be there, and our landlord urged us to attend. It would be a good chance to meet some of the folks doing theatre in and around town and get a sense of the possibilities of this new city. Arriving a bit late, with the party well in progress, we entered through the open door and were greeted by a slightly overweight, beaming, suspendered, mustachioed man coming towards us on all fours, tongue protruding, and barking and panting like a dog. There was laughter but no sense of great surprise in the room, and then the barking man scampered away, lifting his leg from time to time and pretending to pee on the furniture. Allison turned to me and asked “WHO IN THE WORLD IS THAT?!” I’d just met the man that afternoon. “That,” I said, “is the editor of The Tulane Drama Review and my professor in dramatic theory. His name is Richard Schechner.” Richard had assumed the editorship of TDR when Robert Corrigan – who had founded the Drama Review and had brought it with him from Carleton College – accepted the Deanship at Cal Arts and was refused permission to take it from Tulane. I got to know Corrigan in later years and the impression I received was that he named his precocious, brilliant, and unpredictable graduate student as editor knowing that one of two things would happen: either the magazine would go belly up under Richard’s direction, which would serve Tulane right, or it would be a brilliant success, which would please him greatly. By the end of Richard’s first period as editor, TDR had become the largest selling academic magazine in the world. Besides editing TDR, Richard – along with Gil Moses and John O’Neal – was one the producers and directors of the Free Southern Theater – a bi-racial company dedicated to bridging the Black-White divide. There was hope. It is Richard the teacher, though, that is of immediate concern in this narrative, since, from my vantage point, it was in the classrooms of Tulane that the initial steps towards a field of performance studies took place. As a teacher, Richard was engaging, provocative, irreverent, frequently brilliant, and, perhaps most important, not afraid to try out ideas and admit (though sometimes grudgingly) when they didn’t pan out. I suspect that everyone who has ever studied with Richard has made joking references to the diagrams and charts and lists that would appear on blackboards during class and sometimes emerged into print. But – and this is important – Richard understood that these diagrams did not have any truth-value in their own right. They were and are Richard’s way of thinking more precisely, which for him means more concretely and spatially. They provide a means to extract possible general principles out of a multitude of examples, to determine and

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test the shape of an idea and its applications. They are heuristic devices. Like scientific models, they gesture towards possible truths, but are not truths themselves. A class on dramatic theory with Richard in the 1960s would progress something like this: Can Aristotle’s ideal patterning of action be represented by the triangular pattern inherent in Hegelian dialectics? It seems implicit in The Poetics, so let’s test it. How would that work when applied to the action of Oedipus Rex? What about The Trojan Women? How and when in Aristotle does the attempt to become descriptive become proscriptive? How can such models be used to better understand (and counter) Aristotle’s preference for Sophocles over Euripides? Does this help us read Medea, The Bacchae, Hecuba? What about The Maids, Miss Julie, Mother Courage, The Three Sisters, Godot? When does one need a new model, and what would that look like? How have such implicit models been proposed, accepted, or challenged by Zola, by Artaud, by Hegel, by Brecht, by Beckett? Shifting topics, Kenneth Burke offers a pentad of “ratios” in his dramaturgical view of history. Turning the terms back to dramatic production itself, how do the manipulations of these ratios among scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose (Aristotle’s where, what, who, how, and why) vary from age to age, from playwright to playwright, and from work to work, and within works themselves? How is agency constructed differently, with greater or lesser import, in Oedipus, in Le Cid, in Ghosts, in Man Is Man? How is “scene” operative in relation to “agent” in these works, and to what effect? Shifting course again, Richard takes up some strands of thought from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with A Thousand Faces.2 The diagram-making gets more complicated and more improvisational now. Campbell sketches out the normative arc and the various stages in the ideal narrative of a heroic journey. A circular path is suggested, and, following what is implicit in Campbell, that circle could be divided into quadrants. What would happen if one would combine Campbell’s ideas with Northrop Frye’s work on the seasonal nature of genres?3 If Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter are designated as the quadrants, then the Spring quadrant may be dominated by the nurturing presence of a mother, the Summer quadrant by the emergence of the self and its desires, the Fall quadrant by the needs of the polity, and the Winter quadrant by the dead, or perhaps the gods. If the protagonist is thought to move (ideally) along the circumference, what events mark the change from one quadrant to another? Birth (and also rebirth in some cultural constructions) would be at the bottom of the wheel. Then, proceeding counterclockwise, rites of passage could mark the transition from Spring to Summer. Next, Marriage or Coronation symbolically marks the transition from Summer to Fall, and Death marks the transition from Fall to Winter. How does this circular model relate to Susanne Langer’s notions about tragedy and comedy as “significant forms” expressive of the patterning and experience of lived lives?4

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A path along the arc of this circle might represent the ideal hero’s path in Campbell, but how is this path followed or thwarted in dramatic constructions of narrative? Let’s test it out. Hamlet? He is denied his Summer quadrant. He has to grapple with a coronation denied and the affairs of a rotten state (concerns of the Fall quadrant), while being pulled and prodded by both his lingering attachment to his mother (in the Spring quadrant that provides a home before maturity) and by the demands of the dead (from the Winter quadrant) which draw Hamlet towards death: without marriage, without coronation. Neither Denmark nor Ophelia stand a chance. What about Macbeth? (There are no apologies for the taboo word.) Macbeth seizes the moment of a forced coronation while still ruled by the desires of selfhood (which belong in the Summer quadrant), lives uneasily and briefly in the Fall quadrant (with little time for affairs of state), and hurtles towards death. Gogo and Didi? The whole action of Godot takes place in the moment before the passage into death, between Fall and Winter, and that moment, like a black hole, pulls in the rest of the action, and, figuratively, the entire surface of the circle and the life events that it references. The circle (an extrapolation, never explicitly offered in Campbell’s own writings) has by now been traversed with multiple chalk lines indicating blockages, aberrant paths, misdirected lives, and engulfment. I spend so long on this example (one that Richard never used in publication and which probably combines material from more than one teaching session) because Richard’s use of structural models can have a very different effect in class than on a page. When such models appear in a book or article they can threaten to reduce complex perception to seemingly rigid and proscriptive schemas. In class, their use had the opposite effect. They were there to be challenged, modified, and tested. The progress from example to example was nowhere near as smooth as indicated in the account just given. The models themselves often arose out of discussion, and were tweaked, transformed, and sometimes erased in frustration as the class proceeded. Examples were not always predetermined by Richard, but would be tossed out, argued over, and subjected to change by members of the class. Discussions were vigorous, engaged, and not infrequently funny as conceptual boundaries were crossed and mischievous combinations made. Richard, of course, was at the center of it all, but (usually) wore his authority lightly. It was the rapidity of his thought that kept the class moving, and his confidence, sense of adventure, ability to transgress categorical boundaries, and willingness to follow false leads until they proved unproductive, then double back and sketch out alternative ways of thinking, that sustained this process from class to class and from week to week. This more conceptual and spatial way of thinking had great appeal and I was re-engaged with critical theory. Sometime during or immediately after the first semester, I either requested or was encouraged to pursue the PhD and MFA degrees simultaneously. I think this was my initiative, but it

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might well have been Richard’s. Over the years, I have aimed at, but rarely achieved, the level of engagement I remember from those classes. At times I have resorted to model-making inspired by Richard’s well-filled blackboards. In Masked Performance, I adapted, played with, and altered Richard’s model for the domains of theatre in order to use it in relation to Balinese practice.5 While some might have seen this as a critique of Richard’s work, he, I’m sure, recognized it as my homage to his way of teaching and thinking, which, while quick to look for general principles, always tested those principles against concrete examples, resisting stasis and authority. Those familiar with Richard’s later writings may be surprised not only at the focus on Western dramatic literature in the classroom memories rendered above, but also to find so few references to politics or even social structures. As I think back on the classes I took from Richard, there was surprisingly little political and social critique. Yet, Richard himself was directing Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious for the Free Southern Theater that first fall and, as co-producer, was working through multiple issues regarding the company’s membership, structure, social mission, and target audience as it toured Mississippi and Louisiana with a bi-racial company presenting Purlie, Waiting for Godot, and Martin Duberman’s In White America – sometimes with the Deacons for Defense providing armed protection against Klan activity. Later during my stay, he had to work through the discussion and pain of the FST again restructuring itself, this time as an all black group located in the neglected Desire Project, reviving Langston Hughes’s call for a theatre “for us, by us, about us, and near us.”6 And Richard was also active in the anti-war movement, serving frequently on debate panels and in teachins as that movement gathered steam. It wasn’t that any of Richard’s political and social activities were hidden. It was rather, I believe, that Richard chose to keep the study of knowledge and the social use of that knowledge somewhat separate. Though he was already braiding efficacy and entertainment in his life outside of the academy – and had no hesitation in examining the ways in which, say, Marxism affected Brecht’s writing and practice or the fact that a recent plague in Athens may have affected the reception and meaning of Oedipus Rex – pedagogy and social activism remained somewhat separate domains. He had not yet found a comfortable way to braid them together in the classroom, nor, perhaps, did he feel he had the right to do so. Still, there were occasional exceptions. One day in class, the discussion turned from Greek tragic theatre to contemporary plays and their immediate relation to community issues. Richard had with him a still-sealed manila envelope with a play received for TDR’s consideration. It was from a politically active playwright in New Orleans, Bob Head (who wrote under the name of Hed). With a mock grand gesture, Richard tossed the envelope onto the table and suggested there might be a play inside that would fill the need. Did anyone want to direct it? Bob Head’s Kill Viet Cong was a

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wordless scenario that succinctly and imaginatively referenced the horrors of war.7 As eventually staged, it featured a Vietnamese peasant in a grotesque, translucent “oriental” Mardi Gras mask and women in metallic gray outfits acting as dive-bombers. It wasn’t subtle, but it could be visually effective, was eminently stageable, and had the potential to serve as a catalyst for outrage and action. I volunteered to direct and in a few days we arranged costumes, cast, and rehearsed the play, and then presented it at an anti-war rally being held at the local YMCA. As we entered the building for the rally, all of us had our photo taken by a plainclothes policeman. We told him he had a scummy job. He said he was just being professional, “like a dentist.” (As the war progressed and it became common knowledge that phones were being tapped, friends would amuse themselves by leaving messages such as “The hamburgers are not yet done.”) Before the event began, Richard said he wished to give a particular welcome to the undercover FBI agents present, pointing out that they were recognizable by their shiny black shoes. There was laughter – except on the flushed but stony faces belonging to people with very shiny shoes. This was Richard as social clown, a role he plays well; but he was capable of abruptly shifting tone and tactics. Having himself recently served a two-year stint in the US Army, Richard was an eloquent proponent of a more humane and coherent US foreign policy, eschewing cheap shots and easy rhetoric, and standing up to both the rabid right and to Maoists and Spartacists who were calling for the rejection of all things American. In this and in other ways, Richard’s most important lessons were offered by personal example. My own time in New Orleans was marked by great personal loss for my wife and myself, occasioned by the death of an infant son during my first year of study. Richard was appropriately supportive, offering condolences and extensions. More important, though, he offered a model of someone who took great joy in his work, and did so despite absorbing some disappointments of his own during those days, including a failed marriage (with Helen Brown, a wonderful actress and one of my fellow graduate students) and the loss of an active role in the Free Southern Theater. A student once asked Richard what his views were on “Art for Art’s Sake.” His response was that he believed in many things for their own sake, and proceeded to give a list of enjoyable biological and social acts. Those who do not know Richard are sometimes put off by what they experience as flamboyant narcissism. What they miss is the joy and pleasure in thinking, working, and just plain being that Richard brings to every occasion – and the generosity and fundamental good will that lies behind his engagement with others. In the fall of 1965, Richard, for the first time (he insisted) in his young teaching career, asked students to enroll in a specific course. That course was listed as “Trends in Modern Theater” and, fond though I was of Richard and his teaching, I was inclined to pass it up for a seminar in Jacobean tragedy. Richard explained, though, that he had decided to throw out the syllabus

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and instead wanted to focus on how the study of theatre could be reshaped by attention to discourses emerging from other fields. His enthusiasm for the project was irresistible. It was in the context of this class that Richard took a tentative turn away from the study of Drama and towards the study of Performance. On the first day of class, Richard perched, yogi-style and barefooted, on the seminar table (not for the first time) and announced that the topic had been changed: he didn’t want to teach the assigned topic and we didn’t want to study it. There was no syllabus, and everyone in the class would receive an “A.” It was now up to us to earn it. The class would consist of an investigation of performance in human life, always with an eye towards how work written from various perspectives and in various fields of study could help us to rethink the nature of theatre. He had some topics to pursue and we brainstormed for others. I no longer have the list, but it included Animal Play, Performance of and in Everyday Life, Play in Relation to Childhood Development, Mathematical Game Theory, Anthropological Studies of Ritual, Art and Psychology, and much more. We were broken up into teams and asked to cull the library stacks for books that might possibly be of interest. It was like a grand intellectual treasure hunt. There was a great deal of material brought in that had no immediate application, but I still remember the excitement of discovering D. W. Winnecott’s Playing and Reality, Gregory Bateson’s recently published essay proposing a “Theory of Play,” and Johan Huizinga’s seminal Homo Ludens, as well as frustrations over some of the intellectual cul de sacs. I remember Richard’s fascination with Roger Callois’s work on games, discussions of Jansenist philosophy, working through Erving Goffman’s recently published The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, and finding ways to apply Eric Berne’s use of dramatistic models in Transactional Analysis (which were then taken up and turned back on theatrical process by Arthur Wagner in his Acting and Directing classes). It was the best, most exciting classroom I have ever been in – a revelation of what a university ought to be – and when, many years later, I decided to start investigating the ways in which the discourses and practices of cognitive neuroscience and performance might speak to each other, it was the experience of this class that I relied upon.8 One day, late in the semester, Richard wanted to try out some ideas about Ibsen’s relation to Kierkegaard’s writings that he had mulled over while still contemplating the announced course on Trends in Modern Theatre. I don’t remember the specifics, but several of us were convinced that Richard was misreading Kierkegaard, and we were (I think, or at least I thought) able to point out where the text of Fear and Trembling denied the specific connection Richard was advocating. The conversation became heated and – uncharacteristically – Richard picked up his books and stormed out of the classroom to his office down the hall, refusing to come out. I recall both exhilaration and embarrassment over our surprising Oedipal coup.

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The next week, Richard came into class and passed around a copy of the first draft of a new essay. It was brilliant – an extraordinary summary of everything we had been discussing in class for the past two years, with disparate trains of thought somehow now part of a complex argument about the continuum of Play, Games, Sports, Theatre, Ritual and the various ways that they take shape temporally and physically. It was, of course, filled with lists, charts, and diagrams, many of which had been rehearsed in class; and it was also studded with gracious footnotes to class members for their contributions, both general and specific. The point of telling this story is that, while Richard as a new professor could sometimes mimic the behavior of a brilliant adolescent – taking delight in testing boundaries and affronting authority while (on rare occasions) taking umbrage when he was challenged – Richard cared, and cared deeply, about truth (uncertain and tentative though it may be) and about the rigors of truth-telling. If he got it wrong sometimes, that was because (however casual the class might seem at times) he cared so very deeply about the effort of trying to get it right. The essay that Richard threw triumphantly upon the table that day has been published by now in at least three different forms. The “original” (though not the draft we were privileged to see) appeared as “Approaches to Theory/Criticism,” the lead essay in TDR 10.4, 1966. This version is notable in several ways given the developments of the last 44 years. Foremost among these is that it is still worth reading and contemplating, remarkably jargon free, and still contains fresh insights. For those now engaged in performance studies, however, it may be surprising how theatre-centric this first published version of the essay is. In a long footnote, Richard (or more properly “Schechner” now by the usual rules of critical discourse) acknowledges Erving Goffman’s study of performance as “a mode of behavior that may characterize any activity,” (27) but then he goes on to tailor a definition to serve a more focused set of objectives: “I choose to mean something much more limited by performance: the doing of an activity by an individual or group largely the pleasure of another individual or group. … In trying to manage the relationship between a general theory and its possible applications to an art form, I thought it best to center my definition of performance around certain acknowledged qualities of theatre, the most staple being the audience” (27). Play, games, sports, and ritual are brought into the picture because “performance” – in this admittedly narrowed, “smaller,” sense – is (frequently but not always) “part of the form” that these activities take (27). They are there because to engage their formal attributes in a “horizontal,” non-hierarchical way allows “Schechner” to step back and look at how theatrical events take shape.9 The idea was not to be parochial – “theatrical events” certainly included the “Happenings” that Richard himself was now experimenting with through his founding of the New Orleans Group with visual artist Franklin Adams and composer Paul Epstein: experiments which were to come to fruition as he moved towards an esthetic of

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“environmental theatre” – but Richard wanted to keep the subject focused and manageable. The key move here (a somewhat surprising one given the future of performance studies and Richard’s own contributions to the field) was to disengage “performed” activities (especially those most closely related to theatre) from their functionality. The article therefore begins with a disavowal of the evolutionary (ergo Aristotelian) “ritual to theatre” narrative of the Cambridge anthropologists. It ends with a consideration of various “models of play construction” as applied (with a full battery of schematic drawing, lists, and charts) to playwrights and theatre-makers as diverse as Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Weiss, and Chekhov. It is these lingering backward glances to dramatic literature that I had in mind when terming this first turn towards Performance as “tentative.” At the physical center of the article is a detour into the study of the formal structures of, and relations among, play, games, and rituals as other modes of performance that similarly involve “a special ordering of time,” “ a special value attached to objects,” a principle of “non-productivity,” and a distinct sets of “rules” that govern behavior now framed as “performance” (1966: 28); yet and still (as they say in New Orleans), the detour primarily serves to allow a closer look at specific formal strategies used in the making of plays – to more acutely observe their “triangular” and/or “open” structures. The essay, after all, is called “Approaches to Theory/Criticism.” It appeared in the Tulane Drama Review. And, as noted earlier, the PhD at Tulane was given in Dramatic Theory and Criticism – not in performance studies, or even in theatre. Labels matter, and though boundaries were being pushed, the containment walls were still able to push back. This was not (yet) performance studies. It was also (it is impossible to resist adding) not not performance studies. The next version of the article appeared as a chapter in Richard first book, Public Domain, in 1969.10 By that time, I had begun teaching and directing plays in the English Department at Brown (there was no Department of Theatre there yet). With the disbanding of the Tulane’s Graduate Theatre Program (five of seven tenured or tenure-track faculty members – everyone except for the tech/design staff – having resigned over a lack of resources for Theatre in the University’s future plans), Richard had also moved on to NYU, where he would eventually co-found the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, and where he renamed The Tulane Drama Review more simply, if less humbly, The Drama Review (still TDR). He had also by then founded the Performance Group – developing an approach to “environmental theatre” that drew from his experiments with space and audience interactions in the Happenings of the New Orleans Group, his admiration for Grotowski’s Poor Theatre work, and his fascination with the “open” and “triangular” structures of contemporary and classical dramaturgy. Theory and performance were working in parallel, sometimes with theory leading, and sometimes practice.

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Significantly, this next version of the essay is not merely an edit of the earlier article; it is a complete reworking of the material, now called “Approaches: Work-in-Progress.” Replacing the lengthy critique of the Cambridge anthropologists and the evolutionary “ritual to theatre” schema is a reformulation of the role of theory as “the middle link between analysis and action” and a call for “more effective interaction between theory and practice” (1969: 43). In keeping with Richard’s intensified performance activity, the centrality of “dramatic criticism” is now challenged: “As theatre reasserts its claim of independence from literature, a criticism will be forced into existence, which, as Artaud argued, assumes that theatre has its own language – and that this language is spatial, active, transformational” (44–5). Attention is pushed forward onto whatever will provide a platform for “the ‘real events’ of theatre” which are not “grammar, rhetoric, verbal imagery, and so on,” but “performers performing” (51). The admittedly theatre-centric working definition of “performance” is retained, though now offered “reluctantly” with an additional (if arguably redundant) proviso: “this activity [done by an individual or a group largely for the benefit of another individual or group] involves an overt doing and showing” (1969: 86). The names and works of various playwrights – with analyses now culled, reworked, and interspersed throughout the essay – are joined by the names or other practitioner/theorists: Stanislavksi, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, and Kaprow are brought into the argument as exemplary theatre workers and thinkers who have “mapped out structures of performance” (51, 55). Though it points towards performance, the revised essay still focuses on theoretical and critical strategies; it is a particular formulation of “structural criticism” that Richard is championing. While a fascination with the structural elements that characterize events is already at the heart of the first version of “Approaches” (and apparent in the example given of Richard’s classroom teaching), in this revision Richard/“Schechner” whole-heartedly embraces the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Lucien Goldmann, defining structure as “the arrangement of and relationships among actions, objects, discourses” and attending to “bundles of relationships” in which “the symbolic and the concrete are one” (1969: 47, 59). Though Lévi-Strauss is mentioned in passing in the original “Approaches” essay, here his view of structuralism becomes central to the argument. At Tulane, Richard once declared his intention to pursue a second PhD in Anthropology. He never did this, but in his rewrite of “Approaches” he also begins to move between theatre and anthropology (the title, of course, of a later book), citing not only a range of examples from Western dramatic literature and theatrical practices and from the (equally Western) sports, game, and play activities featured in the original article, but also engaging with the performed behavior of “non-literate” peoples – notably the molimo dances of the BaMbuti of the African Congo basin, as observed by Colin Turnbull.11

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With its faith in the methodologies of structural criticism and its focus still on theatre, this version of “Approaches” was still, arguably, not/not not performance studies, but it was edging a lot closer. And despite the advocacy for a structuralist methodology, there was a utopian aspect to this development. My copy of Public Domain: Essays on the Theater has this inscription, written after a rehearsal of Dionysus in 69 and a long evening trading memories and dreams: “John 1970 … Past 3 A.M. – perhaps the morning of Woodstock Nation.” Woodstock Nation proved a fleeting vision. For some of us, though, performance studies arrived as compensation. “Approaches” was understandably not included in Richard’s Essays on Performance Theory.12 By the time that volume was published in 1977, Richard had himself engaged in fieldwork in Asia and in Oceania and had established himself as a significant director through his work at the Performing Garage. “Approaches” reappears in the more recent collection of Richard’s essays, Performance Theory,13 but this time only the first part of the original version is included. Gone are the applications of structural models to Western plays, and gone, too, is the allegiance to structuralism as a methodology that would bridge theory and practice. The truncated essay is included, perhaps, as a prelude to performance studies – an historical marker on the path towards, if not a distinct “discipline,” at least a vibrant field of study. Before this path could become clear, however, Richard needed to meet Victor Turner. Though I have used Turner’s writings extensively (and once upon a time had the pleasure to teach his son Rory about his father’s work), I only met him once, and that just in passing. This was in Richard’s office at NYU. Richard jokingly remarked that he would love to become Victor Turner when he grew up. Turner replied, with a wonderful smile, that he would love to become Richard Schechner, if only he could stop being such a grown-up! Richard’s love-affair with structuralism was always doomed. In and out of the classroom, his sheer experiential joy in thinking and doing transcended “bundles of structures” and their interactions. Furthermore, Richard’s practices as a theatre-maker and editor gave clear evidence of his aspirations to find or found a theatre that served to make better lives and a better world. This utopian impulse, as well, could never quite be contained in all the models, charts, and lists. The Rabelaisian, Dionysian side of Richard has always been there, and excess is part and parcel of what those of us who love him love about him. Even while honing his structuralist models at Tulane, Richard was championing the work of an anarchic and startlingly obscene San Francisco playwright named Dennis Jasudowicz, who supposedly wrote his plays on reams of paper taken from men’s room dispensers.14 We used to debate whether or not Dennis (the Menace?) Jasudowicz (The Pseudo Wit?) was Richard’s elaborate alter ego and a hoax. He denied it – and I now believe his denials – but the appeal of this fantasy reveals the richly paradoxical nature

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of Richard’s simultaneous enthusiasm for the works of both Lévi-Strauss and Jasudowicz. Whatever Dennis Jasudowicz’s standing in the world, his writing was an affront to the containing walls of rigorous structures as well as to standards of decorum. When I arrived in Bali in 1974, I was told with shaking heads and (I think) appreciative laughter of a visiting scholar/ director before me, who, after seeing the stately and beautiful rites of passage in the Bali Aga (old Balinese) village of Tenganan, had reciprocated by giving a robust performance that involved the imitation of a peeing dog! It did not occur to me until writing this essay just how Victor Turner’s writings allowed Richard to take the next several steps on his journey. To go back to the variations on Hegelian dialectics that figure so prominently in the several versions of “Approaches,” no work could truly represent Richard’s thinking and doing unless the existence of both “structure” and “anti-structure” (key terms for Turner) was acknowledged and the tension between them engaged. This engagement, after all, was at the heart of The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 project, as well as Richard’s theoretical tinkering with opposed “triangular” and “open” theatrical models. Further, those moments that Turner so finely elucidated when a society got outside of its “bundles of structures” and societas yielded to anti-structural communitas dovetailed elegantly with so much that Richard had attempted to create on stage, as well as the ways in which he performed himself in and out of the classroom. Richard’s best work exists always in the tension between the determination of a razor sharp mind to see through the fog of experience in order to reveal structures and order and an equally strong attraction to anarchy, disorder, and mischief. The fascination with theatre as a “non-purposive” activity – bracketed apart from the quotidian existence of the workplace and the home – needed the knowledge that, ultimately, in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways, these performed gestures loop back to the “social dramas” of lived lives.15 A dialectical relation between structure and anti-structure, societas and communitas, chaos and rigor, mischief and work, entertainment and efficacy, is present in Richard’s scholarship and directing as in his life. In Richard’s now canonical essay, “From Ritual to Drama and Back,” the suggested “continuum” from “entertainment” to the “efficacious” has to give place to the metaphor of braiding, because, in Richard’s work and in his life, pleasure does not preclude utility.16 There is no true continuum here: neither artist nor scholar generates more of one by achieving less of the other. The programmatic structuralism of the early essays needed to make space for the Dilthean strain of phenomenological reflexivity that characterizes Turner’s thinking. The shift from Lévi-Straus to Turner was significant not only for Richard but for the inchoate field of performance studies. In Turner’s work, and in much of the more recent anthropological literature, the writer is more

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and more woven into the ethnographic writing, becoming a part of the story (Renato Rosaldo’s work constituting a good, if extreme, example). Ethnography and performance studies exist in a complex and fluid relationship, and performance studies has followed this arc in anthropology even as it has carved out its own territory. The influence extends beyond discourse. It was from his encounters with ethnographic writing that Dwight Conquergood (who was also a fine semiotician) brought performance as scholarship into the pedagogy of performance studies. While Richard didn’t start this tendency, he did encourage it later at NYU and at the Performing Garage. It was Richard who, as a director, took Brecht literally and allowed the actor to stand independent of the character in his New York production of Mother Courage. It was Richard who encouraged Spalding Gray in his anecdotal auto-performances. It has been Richard, as much as anyone, who has encouraged the inclusion of performance artists within performance studies. And, outside of class and by example, it was Richard who encouraged me to pursue multiple tracks as director/performer/scholar as part of the same lived life when we were together at Tulane and after. In the recent work on “Rasaesthetics,”17 Richard is again working in the tension between the rigid grid of a categorical system (this time from the Natyasastra) and the unleashing of unpredictable emotional experience in highly personal ways. One can view this activity as a return to the project of the Public Domain version of “Approaches,” now braided with Richard’s early fascination with Artaud, the aim being to find structures that support the unleashing of powerful and surprising affective behavior. Richard, like many of the theatre pieces he has admired and staged, may still live best in a state of liminal tension, unresolved, sparking across open structures that, finally, resist the closure of synthesis. At least, that is how he lives in my mind’s eye. Over the years, Richard has supported me in many ways: overseeing (long after we had both left Tulane) a dissertation on what went wrong with tragedy in the seventeenth century; exchanging (and sometimes publishing) notes on travel in India and New Guinea; commissioning, editing, and publishing my first writings about Balinese masked dance and theatre (topeng); and providing a New York venue at the Performing Garage for my attempts at translating my understanding of topeng back into “an overt doing or showing” – into the “real event” of a “performer performing.”18 He has done all of this, but the greatest gift has been the gift of his presence at a formative, liminal time in my own life, in his life, and the life of theatre and performance studies.

Notes 1.

Tulane’s MFA program in directing was in transition at the time (to nowhere as it turned out) but that gave me a chance to study acting and directing with Charlie

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Working with Richard Moore, Charles McGaw, and Arthur Wagner as they passed through, as well as with Tony Distler, Monroe Lippman, and Paul Hostetler, and others. While this chapter rightly focuses on Richard, I learned a great deal from all of these scholars and artists. There are other debts to pay. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Bollingen Series XVII. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008 [1949]. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Scribners Inc., 1953. See “The Domains of Topeng,” in John Emigh, Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, 171–206. Cf. “Drama, Script, Theater, and Performance,” in Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977, 36–62. This complex and fascinating history is documented in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater: A Documentary of the South’s Radical Black Theater with journals, letters, poetry and essays by those who built it, ed. Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Hed (Robert Head), Kill Viet Cong, TDR 10.4 (1966): 153. For an account of how this class was put together and managed, see John Emigh, “Performance Studies, Neuroscience, and the Limits of Culture,” in Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, eds, Teaching Performance Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, 261–78. While “Schechner” would be the customary way of referring to Richard as author here, since I am concerned in this essay with the interactions between Richard’s writings and the way he performed his life, and am writing history from a more personal vantage point, I will continue to use the first name. Richard Schechner, Public Domain: Essays on the Theatre. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. See Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People. New York: Simon & Schuster/Clarion Books: 1959. Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. See Dennis Jaseudowitz, Flea Street and Other Plays. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1967. See “Selective Inattention,” in Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 140–56, and Victor W. Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974, for the relationships found between “Social Dramas” and “Aesthetic Dramas.” See “From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the EfficacyEntertainment Dyad,” in Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 63–98, for the way in which this metaphor shifts in mid-course. “Rasaesthetics,” in Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, 333–67. See above, p. 167.

11 The Broadest Spectrum of Pluralities: Performance Studies, Theatre Practices, Theatre Histories, and Beyond Phillip Zarrilli

In this brief chapter, I discuss six formative contexts within which I have met, known, and interacted with Richard Schechner personally and/or his writing. It is a journey from a time before performance studies to the present moment in which performance studies as a field takes quite different shape in the United States and the United Kingdom.

First context – 1976: research in India before performance studies The subject of Ramlila, even Ramnagar Ramlila alone, is vast. I think of the story of Krishna’s mouth. I have seen this story danced in Bharatanatyam. Krishna’s mother fears that the little boy has put some dirt, something dangerous, in his mouth. She asks him to open his mouth. He refuses. She asks again and again, and finally he opens his mouth and she looks in. There, in amazement, bewilderment, even terror, she sees all the worlds.1 Richard Schechner and I met for the first time at a conference for Fulbright research scholars in New Delhi. Schechner and the Performance Group had just completed their tour of Mother Courage in India. Richard was staying on to conduct research on Ramlila in Ramnagar. Inspired by Grotowski and Barba, I was in India to conduct practice-based ethnographic research on kathakali dance-drama training within the Kerala context, and as a potential psychophysical source for training contemporary actors. As a young theatre director with an interdisciplinary background in philosophy and religious studies, we had a lot to talk about. Performance studies was in the making. Part of its making was the paucity of existing paradigms and models for conducting research on performance in South Asia that did not “fit” then limited Western notions of theatre and drama. Attempting to understand Ramlila or kathakali challenged every conceivable category assumed within theatre history, aesthetic and dramatic theory, and textual 177

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scholarship available to us at the time. The “text(s)” around which Ramlila and kathakali performances are elaborated did not “fit” received Western notions of “dramatic” texts. The conventions and contexts of both genres required new ways of thinking and talking about performance. Alternative perspectives were required. Any attempt to understand these performances could not be undertaken without drawing on a variety of tools and/or lenses from other disciplines, and/or the forging of new modes of analysis and methodological tools unique to what has become “performance studies.” Schechner aptly describes Ramlila as a “vast” subject. Connoisseur and linguist V. R. Prabodhachandran Nayar of Kerala described kathakali to me as “like a vast and deep ocean.”2 Attempting to chart any ocean is a daunting task. The researcher necessarily must examine the philosophical, religious, socio-cultural, political, economic, institutional, aesthetic, literary, structural, and performative elements and principles that constitute and situate that “performance” within a particular South Asian context. While Ramlila and kathakali are “traditional” genres, they each have a distinctive history that has never stood still. They are part of a complex network of relationships – a fabric that constitutes an ever-evolving “life” and set of experiences for the communities and institutions within which they are performed. To understand these networks you have to jump into the ocean head first – living, breathing, and participating to the degree allowable. Fortuitously for me, after the New Delhi conference, Schechner had been planning a trip to Kerala to visit the Kerala Kalamandalam (state arts school), where I was training in kathakali and conducting research, and to see several other Kerala traditions central to my research. American researcher, Wayne Ashley and K. K. N. Kurup at Calicut University, had arranged for Schechner to see a teyyam ritual performance as well as the Kerala martial art, kalarippayattu – the source of kathakali’s intensive regime of pre-performative psychophysical training and massage.3 As remarkable as it might seem today, in 1976 all of the kathakali teachers and staff at the Kalamandalam knew about kalarippayattu and named it as the source of their exercises and massage practices, but had never actually seen it because they were unaware it was still being practiced. Therefore, my kathakali teacher, M. P. Sankaran Namboodiri, and Vasudevan Namboodiripad, Secretary of the Kalamandalam, traveled with us on the bus to see kalarippayattu for the first time. It was a revelation for us all. Schechner’s intellectual promiscuity and curiosity were at work here. He wanted to experience a broad spectrum of global diverse practices in context, and his personal generosity meant he wanted to share such experiences as widely as possible. From my perspective researching kathakali, two features now central to performance studies as an emerging discipline were important about our trip to northern Kerala to see teyyam and kalarippayattu. First is the necessity of looking beyond any overtly “theatrical” genre like kathakali across a broad spectrum of human activities, such as ritual and martial arts, in order to place that genre in context. Second is in-depth analysis of how any specific

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practice, such as teyyam or kalarippayattu, constitutes a world of experience that is performative in its own right. As I have written at length, the complex history of kathakali is intimately bound up with the broadest spectrum of traditional practices in Kerala which influenced its aesthetic, training practices, modes of embodiment, theatrical conventions, costuming and make-up – from teyyam and mudiyettu ritual performances, to the staging of Sanskrit dramas in a temple context (kutiyattam), to kalarippayattu.

Second context – 1978–79: building performance studies, Schechner as editor After a year in Kerala, I returned to the United States to complete my PhD dissertation on “Kalarippayattu and the performing artist east and west” (1979). It had been an impossible task for those attempting to supervise me. At the time there were no models for how to conduct cross-cultural, practice-based research on performer training. I struggled with how to write about and represent kalarippayattu. As guest editor of a special issue of TDR on “Performance Theory: Southeast Asia Issue,” Schechner accepted my first fledgling, and not very eloquent, attempt to write an essay about kalarippayattu. I represented kalarippayattu as a Kerala martial art, as a source of training and stage combat for numerous genres of traditional dance and theatre in Kerala, and as a potential source for contemporary actor training.4 Suffering at the hands of Richard’s editorial pen was incredibly useful at that stage in my development as a writer. Via clarity and simplicity, he promotes complexity. Schechner subtitled the issue “Towards a Field Theory of Performance.” “What’s found [in the issue] is a sampling … with a method: steps toward a field theory of performance.”5 Methodologically my essay shared with those of John Emigh, Julie Taymor, Martha Ashton, Wayne Ashley, and Ron Jenkins the fact that we had all practiced and/or performed the genres about which we were writing. Schechner was starting to give shape to one version of what would become performance studies and some of the theories and methods that would inform it.

Third context – 1981: making theatre together, “Richard’s Lear” in Madison and Minneapolis Like a head-on auto crash, “Richard’s Lear” is fascinating. I’m not certain what I saw, but there seemed to be a lot of wreckage lying around when it was over.6 The lead line from Damien Jacques’s review of Richard Schechner’s 1981 production of Richard’s Lear, is an apt description of the impact Schechner created when we worked together on this production soon after Schechner left The Performance Group in 1980.

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When A. C. Scott was about to retire as Director of the AsianExperimental Theatre Program within the Theatre and Drama Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was appointed the new Director. I somehow convinced often skeptical (and in some cases fearful) colleagues to invite Schechner to write/create/direct one of his first productions after leaving the Performance Group – Richard’s Lear. Schechner was a New York “experimental” theatre director with “a reputation!” Would he bring complete, in your face “nudity” to the stage in this production in the mid-west? Would he “behave”? How would “our audiences” respond? Schechner and I secured NEH funding for the project. Richard’s Lear would be part of a summer season entitled, “The Other Side of Shakespeare.” To make the season “safe,” the season also included Boys from Syracuse and Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead. I secured dates for Richard’s Lear to tour to Minneapolis with the sponsorship of Walker Arts Center. There was a great deal of press interest in the project in Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis/St Paul. Schechner’s Richard’s Lear was in many ways a series of “head-on (auto) crashes” – between Richard III and King Lear, between Richard and Lear, between the Adult Richard and his Child Richard version of himself, between Goneril/Regan and Lear, between Lear’s three daughters and Richard, between Schechner and the mid-west, between the audience and their expectations. Running one hour and fifty minutes without interval in a specially created, raised skeletal environment filling every corner of the large black box theatre, many of the scenes were short – some with two or three lines. Physical actions took the place of narrative. As soon as Lear has given away his kingdom to Goneril and Regan, and the daughters have pledged their love to him, Lear literally leaps off his throne as punk rock music blares. “Unburthened” he can now “crawl toward death” in his own style. Lear’s Fools (Adult Fool and Child Fool) are his sounding boards, mocking him, goading him with their taunts. But they are also his revelers, a part of his entourage who burst into dance to punk rock music as they swarm over Goneril’s “castle” interrupting her latest encounter with Edmund. Goneril’s “Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires. Men so disordered, so deboshed, and bold, that this our court, infected with their manners, shows like a riotous inn …” is immediate.7 Adult Richard began the production caged in a pentagon-shaped heavy metal prison, constructed of welded steel and sharp-edged, heavy-gage wire set on rubber casters so that, on his command, he could be wheeled as close to the action as he wanted by Child Richard. Lear was played in a remarkably expressive old man’s mask by a woman, Debbie Holmes. Richard’s Lear opened in Madison, Wisconsin and ran to packed houses for a full month before touring to Minneapolis. Working with Schechner on

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Richard’s Lear was a completely selfish act. I wanted to experience the work process he had developed with The Performance Group from the inside, as an actor. It also gave us an opportunity to collaborate. Schechner brought several actors who had previously worked with him to join a core group of actors who had trained extensively with me in psychophysical process using kalarippayattu and taiqiquan for nine months prior to Schechner and the guest actors’ arrival. I worked with Schechner as Assistant Director, played Kent, and taught kalarippayattu sword and shield and dagger techniques for the several fight scenes in the production. The experience was formative for all involved. Schechner was exemplary in the studio. He was completely present to the actors as an ensemble, and to each actor as an individual. He modeled the kind of focus and commitment to process and studio work that I carry with me into the rehearsal space every time I have directed since. Schechner generated absolute commitment in the cast, and excitement among the audiences that crammed the environment he designed in the black-box theatre. Not surprisingly, critical response was polarized. A few critics found Richard’s Lear compelling; others disliked it. Some people walked out. But for many in the Madison audience in particular, with all the production’s excesses, it was the first time they had ever witnessed such an intense, compelling performance event. It was not theatre most of the audience had seen before. Therefore, many returned several times to re-experience Richard’s Lear. From his years of work with The Performance Group (1967–80) and the publication of his seminal book, Environmental Theater in 1973, to his subsequent directing, theatre and performance practices have always shaped Schechner’s vision of performance studies as well as my own: performance studies scholars … focus … on … what people do in the activity of their doing … artistic practice is a big part of the performance studies project … The relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral.8 Practitioners who choose to examine and reflect upon “the activity of their own doing” is arguably the simplest and best definition of what is today called “practice-led research” in the United Kingdom – a subject to which I will return in the final section of this chapter.

Fourth context – 1981–82: exploring the interdisciplinary study of ritual and performance, toward a performative model for curating conferences ‘By their performances shall ye know them’ So began a short statement written by Victor Turner in December 1980 addressed to the planning committee for the upcoming series of

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conferences on ritual and theatre held in 1981 and 1982 in Arizona and New York. These conferences – one on the Yaqui deer dance, one on Japanese performance, and one on the interrelation of a number of genres viewed from a global perspective ….9 Along with Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Lita Osmundsen, Richard Lanier, Martha Coigney, Jack Morrison, and Willa Appel, I was privileged to be a part of the planning committee for three extraordinary gatherings of artists and scholars from throughout the world to focus for days at a time on the relationships between ritual and performance, broadly considered. The first conference on Yaqui deer dancing was an intimate gathering of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners that took place between the Pascua Pueblo near Tucson and the Oracle Conference Center. The second conference on Japanese performance took place in New York and focused specifically on Tadashi Suzuki’s work while his company was at the Asian Society performing The Trojan Women. The concluding conference, an “International Symposium on Theatre and Ritual” was held in New York from 23 August to 1 September 1982 and included 48 performers and scholars who were present throughout the entire 12 days of activities – performances that ranged from the opening “welcoming ceremony” by Korean shaman (mudang) Kim Keum-Hwa at the Korean Cultural Center, to a storefront experimental performance downtown, to a Sunday morning Gospel service in Brooklyn, to the first performance of kutiyattam outside India on the stage of the Asia Society; demonstrations of techniques of performer training; and delivery of scholarly papers by an interdisciplinary group of scholars that included geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, French semiotician Paul Bouissac, anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, Sri Lankan literary/performance scholar Ranjini Obeysekere, and theatre director/theorist Herbert Blau, among many others. Schechner and Appel describe the ambition of the series of conferences as truly global – to bring together performers, scholars, directors, and choreographers from a wide cross-section of the world’s cultures. We wanted these people to interact not just “academically,” on the basis of prepared papers and formal responses, but through “lived experience.” We intended not only to see finished performances, and fragments thereof, but methods of training, and to explore the various ways performances were received in different cultures and contexts. We wanted to consider not only ‘pure’ performances – or idealized versions of traditional genres – but also tourist shows, hybrids, and genres in the midst of profound disturbance and/or transformation. We wanted contemporary Euro-American performance represented as well as genres from Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world. We attempted to include various kinds of performance – from sacred ritual to experimental theatre.10

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Inevitably, “the conferences were only partially successful in achieving these aims.”11 This set of conferences resulted in one major publication – By Means of Performance (1990). Arguably, even more important have been the publications and perspectives directly or indirectly inspired by the conferences. The conferences produced an alternative paradigm and structure for interdisciplinary inquiry about performance(s). They did not follow a strictly formal, “academic” model. Scholars and performers not only shared ideas and perspectives in formal paper presentations, but more importantly shared meals, bus trips, training/workshop sessions, and the wide variety of performance activities noted above. The conferences themselves were curated as performance events in their own right and participation was encouraged if not required. The legacy of curating conferences as performance events has, indirectly, been most consistently realized in the ongoing work of the Wales-based organization, the Centre for Performance Research. Artistic Director Richard Gough and Executive Producer Judie Christie have master-minded themed and/or focused a series of conferences – most notably their “Points of Contact” and “Past Masters” series. Their recent publication of Performance Cosmology (2006) reflects in its structure and aesthetic the type of indirect, performative “logics” at work behind CPR’s events and publications. Another example is the 15-month program of practice-led research, “The Changing Body” organized during 2005–6 with the Drama Department at Exeter University.12 Rather than being led by research papers, the organizational principle employed was to open up issues of “the changing body” via practical workshop/seminars, in which master practitioners were to focus on key elements and principles within a “moment of practice” central to that approach to embodiment. The program of work concluded with four intensive practical workshops as a prelude to a three-day international symposium (2–8 January 2006). Special guests included an array of professionals working with different approaches to “the body in performance” – Michael Chekhov technique (David Zinder), Japanese butoh (Fran Barbe), bodyawareness work inspired by Elsa Gindler (Eva Schmale), Sanford Meisner work (Scott Williams), environment-sensitive movement work (Sandra Reeve), Asian martial arts and yoga (Phillip Zarrilli), active analysis in the late work of Stanislavski (Bella Merlin) among others. The symposium only included two public lectures – keynote addresses delivered by two noted American philosophers (Drew Leder and Shigenori Nagatomo) whose work has been central to rethinking issues of embodiment relevant to practice. Plenary panels with specialists from sports science, philosophy, dance/ choreographer, as well as theatre provided reflection on the intersections and meeting points between the practice-led sessions. Publications of the symposium included a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review ‘On Acting’ (edited by Zarrilli and Merlin, 2007), but more importantly Peter Hulton’s series of DVDs documenting the work of each practitioner and housed within the Exeter Digital Archive.

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Fifth context: pluralities and publications Some time in 1985 or early 1986, Richard Schechner called me with an unusual invitation. That the invitation was unusual did not surprise me. Richard is always full of surprises – whether intellectual, creative/artistic, or institutional. In this case it was an “institutional” surprise. Would I consider, he asked, coming to NYU’s Graduate Department of Performance Studies for a year of teaching, as well as to serve as “Acting Chair” while Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was on research leave? “Chairing” is not an activity I particularly enjoy. I would much rather be in the studio or seminar room. But “acting” as a Chair would be better than “being” one permanently. So I agreed. I spent the 1986–87 academic year teaching in the (recently renamed) Graduate Department of Performance Studies. The year at NYU teaching and interacting with Schechner, Michael Kirby, Brooks McNamara, Marcia Siegel, Kate Davy, and Peggy Phelan, among others, was stimulating. Here were many different voices, each speaking from its own unique perspective about “performance.”13 From the time Schechner and I met in India, pluralities were present to us both. I recognized very quickly that both kathakali and kalarippayattu were complex pluralities. Each was practiced in multiple styles according to different lineages and genealogies. Each lineage/style had its own history. Both had recent incarnations that were not part of a history that some “traditionalists” recognized or wanted discussed. Writing about either tradition meant writing complex histories in which “change” is fundamentally present. As early as the writing of my first book, The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance, Structure (1984), I discussed kathakali metaphorically as a “complex,” that is, a set of histories, techniques, and structures which collectively identified this as a genre or “tradition” of performance unique to Kerala, India. In my books on kathakali (1984, 2000) as well as in my indepth ethnographic study of kalarippayattu (1998), I provide an historical account that seeks to provide some sense of the ways in which these traditions are a constant process of historical, socio-cultural, and performative (re)negotiation within Kerala, the larger Indian context, as well as within the current transnational flows of consumer culture. It was this sense of the pluralities always present to us that I incorporated when editing and introducing the multiple theories and interculturally diverse approaches to acting gathered in Acting (Re)Considered. An even more daunting task was co-authoring with Carol Sorgenfrei, Bruce McConachie, and Gary Jay Williams a new, innovative theatre history textbook intended to challenge Oscar Brockett’s singular title, Theatre History. I wanted the book to offer a global perspective on the plural histories of theatre and performance I had encountered first hand across cultures, and to ensure that readers would be introduced to a variety of key interpretive approaches used to write histories today. Multiples are central to performance studies

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as a field and to a new way of understanding theatre histories. As Simon Murray and John Keefe have recently argued in Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction: There are an increasing number of books … that explore, set out methodologies, and give history and outline to our understanding of theatre. What is noteworthy here is the increasing prevalence of the plural in such articulation of theory(ies), history(ies), practice(s). The impulse to acknowledge and indeed celebrate complexity is not a perverse desire to complicate for the sake of complication, far rather a recognition that histories, influences and theatre making are rarely ever simple and linear. To pretend that they are is alluring, but does little to take us towards an understanding of how theatre works in all its creative and frustrating “messiness.”14

Sixth context – 1998 into the future: performance studies, theatre practice and practice-led research in the United Kingdom In 1998 I moved to the United Kingdom where the disciplinary and institutional distinctions between what we call “theatre studies” and “performance studies” operative in the United States are not so clearly drawn. One of many reasons for this difference is that as departments of “drama” began to develop in the United Kingdom, their teaching was characterized by integrating practice with theoretical, dramatic, literary, and/or historical input as appropriate to the subject being interrogated. This mix of theory and practice differentiated university teaching of drama/theatre/performance in universities from “drama schools” (such as RADA, Central School of Speech and Drama, etc.) which was vocational in focus. Inquiry into and reflection upon the nature of a wide variety of practices and types of performance became the norm. The study of performance, most broadly considered, became part of the curriculum. Within the university drama department context in the United Kingdom, “theatre” and “performance” are virtually interchangeable terms. The integration of theory and practice within undergraduate as well as post-graduate taught programs led to the development of new “practicebased” PhD degrees. In addition to the written submission, the candidate also submits practice appropriate in scope and quantity to the research question(s) being addressed. Schechner’s perceptive statement that one aspect of performance studies is to “focus on … what people do in the activity of their doing”15 describes precisely the type of research undertaken for a PhD in performance practice. The type of practice open to interrogation is defined by the researcher. Integral to this type of research is “the relationship between studying performance and doing performance.”16

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Although the institutional sanctioning of this type of research in the United Kingdom is new, practice-based research and writing per se is not new. Like Schechner, John Emigh, Kathy Foley, and other scholar/practitioners, throughout my career I have integrated theory and practice as much as possible, writing reflexively about the practices I engage from “inside.” I have always described my research as examining the “relationship between the doer and the done” in order to leave as open as possible the nature of the practice being examined. An example of practice-based interdisciplinary research is a project undertaken between the Asian-Experimental Theatre Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Department of Southeast Asian Studies when we hosted Indonesian playwright/director Putu Wijaya as a Fulbright artist-in-residence. Putu directed the first English-language production of one of his plays, Geez! (translated by Michael Bodden). Ellen Rafferty edited a book-length case-study of the project, Putu Wijaya in Performance (1989). In a review John Emigh notes how: This book is a fitting tribute to the richness of Putu’s work and to the vital meeting of cultures that has taken place through his presence. The volume includes essays by theatre artists and scholars who have worked in Indonesia, who have worked in other Asian settings, and who are able to place Putu’s work in the context of contemporary Indonesian literature. It also records a particular attempt to bring his work to American audiences, complete with the translated and annotated performance of Geez! And the personal reflections of participants in that process. The result is an exemplary scholarly work that suitably complements an exemplary cultural exchange.17 Part of the “success” of Putu Wijaya in Performance as a book is that the raw edges of miscommunication that inevitably occur in cross-cultural work are not hidden. Assumptions Putu made about his working process clashed directly with “normative” methods of producing theatre in the United States at the time. The essays in the book reflect upon the underlying implicit and explicit “theories” that inform Putu’s practice as Balinese/Indonesian theatre-maker, emphasizing how these are different from mainstream assumptions about making theatre. Citing Faye C. Fei’s book, Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance (1999), Schechner observed how “Western theories have penetrated the rest of the world” but what is needed now “is having other [non-Western] theories penetrate the West.”18 Cross-cultural projects like Geez! allow Balinese/Indonesian principles of performance to interpenetrate Western theories and practices. My recently published book, Psychophysical Acting is subtitled “an intercultural approach after Stanislavski” (2009) to reflect the interpenetration and interweaving of perspectives on acting drawn across

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cultures. I provide an account of how non-Western perspectives illuminate dimensions of acting process in ways that the now dominant paradigm of psychology cannot. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to turn my attention to two examples of recent PhDs in which practice was submitted. They both make an important contribution to research on theatre practice within the larger field of performance studies. The first exemplifies the use of non-Western theories to analyze acting as a practice. Jeung-sook Yoo begins her PhD thesis, “Toward a Korean Language and Psychophysical Process of Approaching Acting and Actor Training” as follows: As an individual brought up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Seoul, I have been exposed to and assimilated aspects of traditional Korean culture, and simultaneously received an education and training largely derived from Western paradigms. When training as an actor at the Korean Academy of Performing Arts (March–November, 1994) I experienced both contemporary Western actor training methods and several traditional Korean modes of training and performance either as part of the official programme of study or undertaken later on my own initiative – voice training in Pansori and practice of DahnHak – a form of Korean meditation discipline. This environment affected me, as a contemporary Korean actor, to search for a way to reconcile my ‘Korean-ness’ with my equally important contemporary sensibilities … [In this thesis] I attempt to develop and articulate a theory and practice of contemporary acting and actor training from a Korean perspective by utilizing the principles and practices based primarily on DahnHak.19 Developed by Seung-Heun Lee in the 1980s, central to both the philosophy and the practice of DahnHak are certain key traditional principles including ki, Tao, Te, and Kungfu, among others. Yoo’s thesis involved a philosophical and linguistic examination of these key traditional principles that inform how the body, mind, their relationship, and experience inside a practice are understood and explained from a Korean perspective, as well as practical research. Yoo’s practical research examined these principles at work as they inform both DahnHak, and the practice of acting viewed from inside a Korean perspective. The actual practice submitted and analyzed in the thesis included two projects in which Yoo acted – Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Ota Shogo’s The Water Station – and her work with actors as a director on selected scenes from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in both the United Kingdom and in Korea. Yoo’s thesis provides a linguistic and philosophical exegesis of key principles informing Korean assumptions about the body-mind relationship and experience that inform processes of acting. She utilizes these modes of

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analysis as critical tools to discuss acting in non-psychological or behavioral terms. Yoo has published one section of the thesis – an analysis of her process of acting in a production of Ota Shogo’s The Water Station (2007). Her thesis is an in-depth examination of how a set of Korean principles that are nonWestern and not based on psychology can be used to understand, articulate, and inform the practice of acting. It repositions acting theory and practice between her dual identities as both “Korean” and contemporary cosmopolitan culture. Another quite different example of practice-based PhD is Sandra Reeve’s recently submitted thesis, “The Ecological Body” (2008). Reeve explains how, Approaching my fifties, I felt the need to investigate, contextualize and articulate the movement practice I had developed and worked with throughout my life. Called Move into Life, within this practice I move between the roles of teacher, facilitator/director, movement artist and movement therapist … In the practice … a kinaesthetic awareness of environment through movement is as important as the expression of moving body itself. My approach moves … towards a systemic and dynamic style of movement training, which is deliberately self-reflexive.20 Move into Life already existed as an environmental movement practice. It was my deep trust in this approach to movement and a need to investigate more deeply how it could contribute to movement education, performance and therapy that led me to undertake a Practice as Research PhD. It was my intention to learn how to articulate key principles and elements of this somatic practice through a new ecological paradigm.21 For Reeve, “an ecological approach presumes patterns of interdependence and interconnectivity at every turn.”22 Using a series of ecological lenses drawn from the work of Bateson (1971, 1979), Gibson (1979), Ingold (2000), and Connerton (1989) among others, Reeve provides a rich, textured, layered account of “an ecological body.” For Reeve, such a body is an immanent, co-creating, moving body: a body constantly becoming within a changing environment, where the body and the spaces in between and around the bodies are experienced as equally dynamic. Body and environment … co-create each other through mutual influence and interactional shaping. The body-in-movement, as a relational body, sets up different practices through habit according to its intentions, perceptual life, experiences and cultural preferences.”23 Challenging notions of a “fixed individual essentialist self,”24 Reeve’s research is informed by a set of key practices which have informed her

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evolving notions of the “self” and its relationship to the distinctive professional practice she has developed – early work with Jerzy Grotowski and his actors, sustained training with well-known Javanese movement artist, Suprapto Suryodarmo (Amerta Movement), training as a registered movement psychotherapist, and training in the Buddhist practice of “A Way of Mindfulness” (Satipatthana) with John Garrie Roshi. Reeve’s PhD research allowed her the opportunity to become an articulate practitioner, able to contextualize, historicize, and illuminate the complex domains which her practice encompasses. These examples of practice-based research in the United Kingdom reflect the relationship between theorist and practitioner central to Schechner’s version of performance studies. I want to conclude with an extensive quotation from Schechner excerpted from an interview conducted by Richard Gough in 2004. Schechner explained how: I’m a theorist-practitioner, yes. I was practicing theatre before I was involved in performance studies. I’ve been practicing theatre all my life, more or less … I don’t think of theatre and Performance Studies inside myself as in any kind of conflict; they are like sleeping and eating: I like to sleep but I also like to eat. I don’t think they’re the same thing, but they’re not in conflict with each other, each in its own place. … [T]heatre’s about physical practice … [and] theory … [is] epiphenomenal. In other words, it is secondary. Theories come from practice and are then confirmed by practice. So, theories are like the bridge between two more solid islands. So you have some practice, you need to explain it, so you construct a theory, but then further practice has to confirm it. … I know that I do theorize a lot, but I theorize on the basis of concrete experiences, and I test my theories against those experiences. … The study of theatre ought to be part of what Performance Studies is. It’s a broad spectrum. My claim is not that theatre should be thrown out of it but that other things should be brought into it. … [Those] who do not know practice, who have not experienced it, are in a certain sense restricted because they haven’t had the experience of really dealing with things in a one-to-one correspondence, as they happen. Part of the problem of theorists, of theory untethered from practice, is you can make too big a leap.25 As part of the pluralities that constitute performance studies as a field, practice-based research and performance can help keep some of our theoretical feet grounded.

Notes 1. Richard Schechner, Performative Circumstances from The Avant Garde to Ramlila. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983, 238.

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2. Philip B. Zarrilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. London: Routledge, 2000, 1. 3. Zarrilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama, and also Zarrilli, When “the body becomes all eyes”: Paradigms and practices of power in kalarippayattu, a south Indian martial art. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, and Zarrilli, “From Martial Art to Performance: Kalarippayattu and Performance in Kerala,” Parts 1 and 2, Sangeet Natak 81/2 (1986): 5–41 and 83: 14–45. 4. Philip B. Zarrilli, “Kalarippayattu, Martial Art of Kerala,” The Drama Review 23.2 (1979): 113–24. 5. Richard Schechner, “Introduction: Towards a Field Theory of Performance,” The Drama Review 23.2 (1979): 2. 6. Damien Jacques, “A collision with ‘Lear,’” The Milwaukee Journal, 19 July 1981, Part 2: 5. 7. Philip B. Zarrilli, “Richard Schechner’s Richard’s Lear,” The Drama Review 25.4 (1981): 95. 8. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002, 1. 9. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (eds), By Means of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 1. 10. Schechner and Appel, By Means of Performance, 2. 11. Schechner and Appel, By Means of Performance, 2. 12. The planning committee included Peter Hulton, Jerri Daboo, Rebecca Loukes, and Phillip Zarrilli. 13. See the later definitions of performance studies by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Diana Taylor, and Peggy Phelan, in Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 6–9. 14. Simon Murray and John Keefe., Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2007, 2. 15. Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 1. 16. Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 1. 17. See www.ukzn.ac.za/cca/CCAarchive/TOW/TOW2003bio6a.htm 18. Richard Schechner, “Towards Tomorrow? Restoring Disciplinary Limits and Rehearsals in Time? Richard Schechner interviewed by Richard Gough,” in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough, and Daniel Watt. London: Routledge, 2006, 240. 19. Jeung-Sook Yoo, “Toward a Korean Language and Psychophysical Process of Approaching Acting and Actor Training,” unpublished PhD Thesis, Drama Department, University of Exeter (UK), 2008, 9–11. 20. Sandra Reeve, “The Ecological Body,” unpublished PhD thesis, Drama Department, University of Exeter (UK), 2008. 21. Reeve, “The Ecological Body”: 14. 22. Reeve, “The Ecological Body”: 18. 23. Reeve, “The Ecological Body”: 25. 24. Reeve, “The Ecological Body”: 65. 25. Schechner, “Towards Tomorrow”: 230–2.

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12 Richard Schechner Judith Malina

Why is Richard Schechner considered the pre-eminent philosopher of innovative theatre of modern times? How did he come to stand the theatre on its head and turn topsy-turvy all the precepts of received theatrical wisdom? Observing, as well as being part of, the avant-garde theatre of this century I would say that he plays and has played a unique role in the formation of what we consider to be theatre. He has explored by various paths the unknown territory from what theatre was, to what theatre is yet to be. Avant-garde is unfortunately a military term, but it describes accurately that piercing formation, mysteriously arrow-shaped, with which pioneers push forward from the known to the unknown. I feel his significance especially – because I regard him as both comrade and teacher on the often complex path to political theatre that my teacher Erwin Piscator instilled in me. Richard Schechner was first a teacher, then a writer/ philosopher and only then a director of plays and the producer of The Performance Group. It has been a marvelous series of perpetual surprises. He shows us how to study the masters of our art – he shows us how to reject the dross, he blows away the nonsense and says, “Here’s where it’s at.” But by then, of course, it isn’t there anymore. He prepares us for the change – having spoken of action he takes action. He created The Performance Group precisely as a testing-ground, a Petri dish – an enclave of safe/unsafe experimentations. One of the concepts he was investigating was that of the group – or what I like to call, referential to some historical experiments – The Collective. And he battled for the integrity of the group against the difficulties of overcoming the learned competitive forms – and in The Living Theatre we have come to know how hard it is to overcome the old ways, and become the true Collective Creation. On 19 October 1964 when I stood in the third-floor window on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue – the old Hecht’s Department store, which The Living Theatre had made its home – I looked down on a demonstration 193

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of friends who were chanting: “Help save The Living Theatre!,” and around our building were police barricades, cops, a couple of equestrian cops, and Richard Schechner with a rolled-up paper megaphone asking to interview us – Julian Beck and I, there three stories above the sidewalk as the Feds were trying to (and eventually did) close the theatre on trumped-up charges of owing taxes. Schechner asked through his megaphone: “How do The Brig [about the Marine Corps, on account of which we were being closed] and The Connection [our most popular work, about drugs and jazz], plays so seemingly dissimilar, relate to the idea of your theatre?” I said: “I don’t think they are so dissimilar. Both plays relate to desperate life situations [I was standing in a window sill surrounded by police. I was certainly about to be arrested]. I think they both relate to the work of a theatre trying to move us from where the theatre is now to what the theatre is to become.” Richard Schechner’s long study of environmental theatre – of theatre that can exist in a crisis – could even be that crisis, can hardly find a better example: street theatre/ political theatre/ personal commitment/the involvement of the community (they were pulling up food to us in baskets while we were besieged by the police)/ a political motive/ a play about the abuses of the military that was being shut down… These are some of the key points in environmental theatre – Richard Schechner is their prophet. We were taking his direction. To believe in participatory theatre is to believe in people and their capacity to be creative – Julian Beck often said that “Everyone is a sublime artist, and those of us who work in the arts have the task of releasing the sublime artist in everyone.” Richard Schechner believed in participatory theatre – he believed that people, unrehearsed and undirected could create theatre. When The Living Theater made a play to explore this premise we called it Paradise Now; and Richard Schechner was present at the opening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We began the Paradise play in the scene we call Outside the Gates of Paradise and proceeded up the revolutionary ladder, until Julian Beck called out “The theatre is in the streets.” Outside the gates, we protested against the Prohibitions, assaulting the audience with our complaints: “You can’t live if you don’t have money!” “I don’t know how to stop the war!” “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana!” “I’m not allowed to take my clothes off!” Richard Schechner was in an aisle seat and was angered (as many were) by the scene. He protested, not against the prohibitions, but against us – The Living Theatre. He wanted to show that even though we are not allowed to, we could still take our clothes off – and defiantly he stripped off his clothes (to much applause, it was 1968!) and sat down in his seat stark naked: He was living participatory theatre. Life magazine gave “the naked theatre goer” a full-page picture; but more important than that, was the lesson that one can dare to participate in a theatrical event.

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We admire the integrity of Richard Schechner’s pursuit of such goals. We honor him for his superb works of theatre art. But for all those who have been privileged to work with him and study with him, the intensity of his presence and the warmth with which he confronts each of us, tough or tender, but always eye to eye. For that we love him.

13 Joan MacIntosh: Interview, July 2008 Cindy Rosenthal

When did you first meet Richard Schechner? Richard and I both arrived in NY in the fall of 1967. I first saw him in early September when I went to NYU for a meeting about the scholarship I had received for the MFA program in Acting. Actually, a year before, one of my teachers at Beaver College had given me a Tulane Drama Review [Spring 1964] to read about The Living Theatre, in which Richard had interviewed Judith Malina, and reading that interview had completely changed my life. The world they spoke of was what I was looking for. “There must be more of that kind of theatre out there,” I thought. Anyway, the day I came to NYU to meet about my scholarship I first saw Richard, not knowing who he was. He had just arrived from Tulane and was lying on the floor of his empty office cubicle talking on the phone, propped up by an elbow, legs up in a kind of lotus position. Our eyes met. “Who is this man,” I thought. And then, on the first day of class, I saw him in the elevator. It was raining and he was wearing a raincoat, which I later learned was Robert W. Corrigan’s, and it was much too big for him. He had this long hair, which was wet, and a bushy mustache, and a potbelly. He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I thought he was some kind of pervert. Then the elevator door opened, we walked into the same classroom, he went up to the podium, and he said, “Good evening, class.” The class was Performance Theory and Textual Analysis. He was a fantastic, inspiring teacher, with a great knowledge of his subject and an equally great sense of humor. We were reading the works of authors Eric Berne, Van Gennep, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcuse, Freud, Kaprow, just to name a few, and one night we saw Margaret Mead’s film, Trance and Dance in Bali. I remember the night we saw that film I said to myself, “Oh my God, I’m falling in love with this man.” Then one night Richard came into class, and said that his cat had had kittens and would anyone like one. I raised my hand. And I went to his apartment, saw the kittens, we went out to din196

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ner, and… we became lovers and moved in together almost immediately. My memory is that right from the beginning we were overflowing with conversation, and ideas of how to create a great theatre. The model I knew best was Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble – for how theatre could politically relate to the world. Richard is 11 years older than I am, so there was some gap in our experience, but we were really deeply connected with each other – on every level – personally, intellectually, politically, theatrically. When Jerzy Grotowski came to NYU that fall – that was the catalyst. He spoke of a depth of work I had only dreamed about – and had never heard anyone talk of actually doing. I wasn’t allowed to be in the workshop he gave, because it was just for the second-year acting students and invited faculty. I was in the first-year acting class. I was able to go to all his lectures, though. Richard did take the workshop, and it became clear that we would use Grotowski’s exercises as the foundation of our company, in addition to exercises that Richard had developed in previous work. Up until the point that I met Richard I’d had no formal acting training. I had done plays in high school and college, and I had an intuitive sense; I was talented, but I had no training. But from the beginning, at NYU, when I was getting training in the Stanislavski technique, I was also getting training in Grotowski’s work. I’ve always had one foot in both worlds and feel very blessed because of it. I’ve been teaching acting for over 40 years, and for me, it’s still and always about the body. And although I was at the beginning of my life as a woman and an artist at that time, I had a strong feeling for the kind of theatre I wanted to create, and I had the inspiration and drive to make it happen. In fact, I always felt we co-founded The Performance Group together. We were a great team. What do you think Richard would say – if you presented this idea that you co-founded the group with him? I don’t know. He’d probably disagree. Richard was the leader of the Group, he ran the first workshops, he got it going and held it together, he was the first and only director for years, and his name was on the lease of the Performing Garage, and I think it was he who took out the loan to buy the place. He also used some of his own money to finance our work, when it was needed. At the same time, as his woman I was there every step of the way, from our first shared visions of creating a great theatre, down to the last detail of execution, and through every crisis and change. I was his partner in every sense of the word. You could say that I was his loyal and supportive wife, partner, and helpmate in everything, and that my input was perhaps less tangible, but also essential to the group’s inception and ongoing life. In that way, I suppose our roles were very traditional, in terms of “man and wife.” So, perhaps both are true. Richard was the driving force behind

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The Performance Group, the leader, who articulated the vision of the Group and wrote about it: he was a charismatic man and he had the experience and contacts – and a “name.” I brought my vision, artistry, commitment, drive, and sensitivity to the needs of others. I hung in through all the difficult times. My own personal experience was that I co-founded The Performance Group with Richard. That’s all. It’s my experience. Certainly, by the time we were creating our productions, we respected and valued each other’s gifts and contributions as director and actress respectively and equally, as no other. So, Richard worked with Grotowski and Ryszard Cieslak for a month at NYU, and on 15 November 1967, he held the first evening of auditions for our workshop. We used a room at NYU’s Second Avenue space. I remember being in a coffee shop, talking with some of my fellow students at NYU in the acting program as I was about to go up to the workshop. And whether I felt guilty or magnanimous at the time, I said, “Why don’t you come with me?” And they did, and they became members of the company: Bill Shephard, Pat McDermott, Ciel Smith. We did a number of these audition workshops, which involved doing physical work, based on the Plastiques and Corporals of Grotowski, as well as improvisations that Richard would lead. In our work we would later call the Grotowski exercises “Association Exercises.” They were different from Grotowski’s and were designed to be done individually as well as in couples. I took copious notes about these exercises in our workshops and rehearsals. But then I had to leave The Performance Group for a few months. At the NYU midterm evaluations, I had performed a scene from Waiting for Godot with Bill Glasscoe, a directing student. When it was over, the faculty informed me that my work had been “horrendous.” They said that I had great promise – but “what was I doing wasting my time with Richard Schechner?” They called him a “Svengali.” I had to choose whether I wanted to continue at school in the acting program, or do the workshop with Richard. I couldn’t do both. Olympia Dukakis was one of my acting teachers at the time, and a mentor. She’s still a very dear friend of mine. She helped me sort things out. I chose to stay in school, learn everything I could about acting, and bring it back to The Performance Group. The Group rehearsed on a couple of weeknights and Saturdays, and I went to those sessions, but I only watched, and took notes. Two things occurred, which I’ve now begun to realize were very important in the larger picture. Because I was sitting out, I wrote very full descriptions of the improvisations Richard led, some of which will be in the book I am writing about those years. But also because I was watching, I began, unbeknownst to me, my journey as a teacher. My notes were filled with – “if only this person did such and such it would really have made that moment work” – I guess you were also learning about directing – Exactly, yes! Anyway, at the end of the spring, I officially chose to leave the MFA program and I fully joined The Performance Group. I may have

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started to work on evening rehearsals of Dionysus in 69 before that, I can’t remember. I wasn’t “supposed to” as I’d made the promise to NYU, but I must have done, when I wasn’t in a production at school. Recently, talking with Richard about it, we both agreed that I would have to have begun to rehearse with the Group earlier than I’d remembered all these years. There were only two weeks between the end of that spring semester and the opening of Dionysus in 69, on June 6th 1968. Ciel and I were put into the show. As I remember it, it went smoothly. The following year I did stay at NYU, transferring to the MA program, but I never finished the degree. I was in love with the work that was happening in the Group. But I didn’t learn a way of talking about the work until Makbeth. My acting technique was an amalgam of what I had learned with Olympia, Lloyd Richards, and Peter Kass at NYU, from Grotowski, and from Richard in The Performance Group. We would begin each day’s rehearsal with two hours of warm-up exercises and improvisations. Did you help evolve the warm-ups with The Performance Group, or was that Richard – or was it the collective’s work? In the beginning Richard presented the exercises and taught us how to do them. We all were in agreement – or at least I was in agreement with him – that the work was profoundly spiritual and revelatory. Through absolute and total commitment I/we would fully engage in the exercises, surpassing our known limitations, not pushing ourselves, but not not pushing ourselves, and moving through blocks and resistance to ever deeper and more intimate, uniquely personal expression. The work was exhausting on every level, and that was the idea: to “exhaust your bank account,” to keep going even when you felt like stopping, or thought you’d gone as far as your known identity could go, that is, to give all your energy, not holding anything back. The most amazing discoveries would be made from within that would eventually find astonishing form in physical gesture. The phrase of Grotowski’s was: “via negativa,” or “not to do not to do,” which I understood to mean that you don’t “not do.” The work was not about forcing something to happen, nor was it about passively waiting for inspiration, but about full surrender, and going for it without reservation. Something about “via negativa” took all the judgment and desire for results out of the work for me and let it be a deep exploration and surprising new journey each day. No expectations, no resistance, just GO, and end up in new inner territory as a result. I recently did some of Richard’s rasabox work at NYU – Carol Martin suggested I try it – and I could absolutely feel the beginnings of Richard’s work in the theatre in the rasaboxes. Though I was new to them, I felt right at home. I hadn’t been there with Richard for the evolution of the rasaboxes in his work; however, I felt the deep river of psychophysical investigation reaching all the way back to the intense physical work we did in The Performance Group with the

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Association Exercises that Richard had developed from the exercises he learned from Jerzy Grotowski and Ryszard Cieslak at NYU in November of 1967. And of course I felt the deep roots in Indian culture and performance from our journeys there in 1971 and 1976, and Richard’s subsequent visits. What I loved about the rasaboxes work, and what resonated with my earlier work with Richard, was their physical intensity, the total commitment and concentration demanded, the game structure that included different points of entry and focus, going deeply into oneself, and the way in which that surrender brought me to greater and greater awareness of self and its expression. That is, like our work with the psychophysical Association Exercises, when I went inside a rasabox and fully committed myself to exploring its “nature,” in my physical body, that is, Sringara (desire, pleasure, love), Hasya (jester, humor, laughter), Karuna (compassion, pity, anguish, grief ), Raudra (anger, rage), Vira (energy, vigor), Bhayanaka (fear, terror, shame), Bibhatsa (disgust, contempt), Adbhuta (surprise, wonder), and Shanta (Bliss), I took a deep journey through familiar life patterns into new and unexpected territories of experience and expression. This had a deep psychological and emotional effect on me as I surrendered to going all the way “inside” a particular rasa. In short, I felt the roots of the rasaboxes in our work with the Association Exercises, as well as in our trips to India and immersion in Indian culture. For me, the rasaboxes represent the greater sophistication and specificity in Richard’s ongoing multicultural investigation of the performer as sacred revelation. Back to our work in the early days of The Performance Group, Richard would introduce the Plastiques and Corporal exercises of Grotowski’s and then we would work with them and gradually they morphed into our own exercises. Some were yoga based – the headstands and balance exercises. Richard also proposed and led a lot of improvisations to develop the themes of The Bacchae (which of course became our Dionysus in 69) once it was chosen for our first production. Some versions of these improvisations are described in his book Environmental Theater. I’ll have more in my book, as well. We would explore in nonverbal, non-linear ways, the lives, activities, and hierarchies of communities, as well as murder, death, and rebirth. The work was communal, primal, archetypal, and intense. It was life changing – and of the times as well. We were exploring each other and the themes of The Bacchae in ways that expanded our perceptions and experience beyond the known mental or socially “accepted.” We explored sensually, discovering mind in body. This kind of work is with me still – it’s inseparable from what I do. It’s always in the room. Do Richard’s writings about the work – his reports and analyses – still jive with your own memories of what it was, and how it happened? Is this true to your sense of the work?

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Yes. Absolutely. We just had two very different perspectives and experiences. He was the initiator, director, observer, theoretician, and scholar who was pulling together threads from other cultures with his own impulses and ideas and exploring these connections by proposing the theatrical exploration that I would actually do. I was the performer of the work. I was doing it, living it, experiencing it, and being deeply affected, transformed, and opened by it. I carried this into all my subsequent work in The Performance Group. How I would talk about it would be very different from Richard, and yet, not different. For me, it was very visceral. It was body, heart, gut enactment – I was living out the theory, thereby testing and refining it. Can we talk about the India trip now, which you mentioned earlier? What was its impact on you? And what, specifically do you remember or do you think now of its impact on Richard? There were actually two trips. In short, they were life changing for us both. Richard and I first went to India in the fall of 1971. We were both awarded grants from The JDR 3rd Fund ( John D. Rockefeller third), by its director, Porter A. McCray, because he was so impressed with our work in Dionysus in 69. The grants were for study of the performance arts in India, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Japan. Why India? I can’t remember exactly what Richard’s impetus was. For me, it was Grotowski, and the kathakali exercises that came to him from India via Eugenio Barba, and became part of his actor training. I also wanted to study traditional dance and singing in India. And Grotowski had had a transformative enlightenment experience with Sweet Mother, or The Mother, the consort of Sri Aurobindo, in Pondicherry, India, on one of his trips there. Grotowski told us we had to go there and meet her. We did. It was a profound experience. We visited the ashram in Pondicherry for several days, and I believe on the second day we had Darshan (Sanskrit for “sight”) or, an “audience” with The Mother. Simply put, Darshan, in the Hindu tradition, is the event of receiving sacred blessing from a holy one. In this case, Richard and I waited on a very long line of devotees for several hours, as each person, one at a time, entered the room where The Mother sat, and knelt down at her feet to receive the blessing, or Darshan, from her. She was 94 at the time and could barely sit up, but I will always remember the light that emanated from her body and her blue eyes, as well as its impact on me. Looking into her eyes as she held my head with her hands was like looking into the Infinite Void, the Absolute, the Silence, the Vastness itself, God: impossible to name or describe. I can only say words that point in the direction of the experience. Both Richard and I were deeply moved by our

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encounters with The Mother. We actually thought about giving up everything, living there, and being part of the ashram’s effort to build Auroville, which had been founded on February 28, 1968, based on the vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. You can Google Auroville to get a fuller sense of what it was and is, but here’s a quote from their website that begins to define it: “Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all needs, all politics, and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.” I remember walking along the oceanfront with Richard and discussing whether or not to stay there indefinitely. The leaders of the ashram were urging us to do so. In the end, we didn’t, obviously, but that visit was a spiritual opening for both of us. And it was the first time I had encountered so fully the awareness that the next great evolution of humankind would happen in consciousness. The Mother was instructing her devotees in the ways of becoming a “Supramental Being.” I have since read a number of her books and have been deeply affected by them. However, Richard and I hadn’t thought we’d gone to India for spiritual reasons. We had just come from the tour of Commune in Poland. We had performed in Wroclaw, under the auspices of The Polish Laboratory Theatre, to an overflowing and wildly enthusiastic audience. There was actually a riot of people demanding to get into the show. And it was amazing to hang out with Grotowski’s company in their hometown! After Wroclaw, Richard and I took a leave from the Group to go to India, and The Performance Group members continued on the tour to other cities in Poland, returning to NY after the tour to work on their own. In India, Richard and I lived in Madras for three months, where we were both learning drumming (Mridhangam), Richard learned yoga, and I learned South Indian Carnatic singing and Bharata Natyam. Before we got to Madras, we’d seen very bad British-style proscenium theatre in Calcutta. We knew, through Grotowski and Barba, about the folk forms and kathakali, and we were looking for other kinds of contemporary and ancient theatre forms, (and actually saw lots of folk theatre on our second trip through India for all of 1976.) We made some very good friends on the first trip in 1971, who helped us arrange our tour of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in India for the 1976 trip, and who provided housing and accommodation for all of us on that tour all throughout India. The theatre community in India was very tight. We also met E. Alkazi, who was the head of the National School of Drama in New Delhi at the time. He and his partner of over 50 years, Uma Anand, are still dear friends of mine. So many wonderful friends, still. Badal Sircar, and Chetna and Shyamanand Jalan in Calcutta, Suresh and Indujah Awasthi in New Delhi, and Veer Bhadra Meeshra, now honorifically called Mahantjii, an engineer and head of the Sankat Mochan Temple in Varanasi, who began the Sankat Mochan Foundation in 1982 to clean up the Ganges River. Richard is also still actively in touch with everyone.

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In addition to India, during our visit to Asia in 1971 we went to several other countries to learn and study their practices of ceremony and theatre. That was the purpose of the trip. We also taught some workshops in our work and demonstrated our work to theatre artists. We went to Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia: Java and Bali, Australia, Papua New Guinea in the Highlands and along the Sepik River, Hong Kong, and Japan. In Bali, theatre and ceremony were an integral part of everyday life. On every street corner there was a shrine to the gods. People made art out of life and there was no separation between the two. And then there were the extraordinarily beautiful classical performances – the Balinese and Javanese music and dance. In general there was an awareness of the spiritual in everything, and devotion in the practice of theatre, dance, and the arts – it was all one. Papua New Guinea was a mind-blowing experience for Richard and me. Richard had read and introduced me to a book by Kenneth E. Read – The High Valley, about Read’s experiences in the Highlands. When we arrived to visit the villages we’d read about, we were introduced to a lovely couple, Peter and Margaret Thoday, of the Goroka Teachers College, who loaned us their car to drive to those same villages, where we experienced ceremony and ritual again, as an everyday part of life. Richard and I were thinking about, talking together about, writing about in our journals, and influenced by, all the same things and experiences we were having. We took them in differently and processed them differently, as two different people naturally would. We were married at this point, and I often struggled with my identity. I was a “liberated” white woman from the West living in Asia. In some of the countries, the men and women stayed in groups of their own gender throughout the day, and I can remember many times feeling out of place and drifting between the groups of men and women, not belonging to either. Perhaps if we’d had our son Sam with us at the time, it would have given me a definition as wife and mother, and a deeper entry into the communities of women. But he wasn’t conceived until the second India trip! It was different, of course, when we were performing or demonstrating our work. Then we were both artists, and that identity is universal and transcends all cultural boundaries. I don’t think Richard experienced this estrangement. Cultural, perhaps, yes, but as a writer, as the editor of The Drama Review, as a director, and as a powerful, charismatic American man, he had a cache that I didn’t. Were you reading the same things as Richard – Victor Turner, for instance, at this time? Was Richard reading Victor Turner in India? I don’t remember. We told each other about everything we were reading and shared whatever we could. Back to Papua New Guinea: after the Highlands, we journeyed to the Sepik River and followed the path of Margaret Mead’s trip to all the villages along

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the river. In every one they had constructed a bamboo house for her and we stayed in all of those houses, too! We hired a canoe driver named Alponse, a dear man, and he brought us to each village, where we were enthusiastically welcomed and honored. Part of my reason to take this trip was to answer the question – “Why am I a theatre artist? Why does it matter?” In Papua New Guinea I got my answer. There were two worlds in PNG at the time – the colonial Australian one, and the Native one. Occasionally, we enjoyed comfy beds, and lamb chops and red wine freshly flown in from England to the Australian outposts in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, but most of the time we preferred to be always in the native world. Pidgin English, the trade language at the time, was not difficult to learn and speak. We practiced it with each other, and spoke it quite well. In the villages we lived in native bamboo houses, just like everyone else in the tribe. There was such incredible unselfconscious hospitality. One night at 2 a.m., in a village on the Sepik, we were awakened by a young boy. We were sleeping in our sleeping bags, under our mosquito netting and he shined a flashlight on us and said “Come on Mister and Missus! You come!” I remember seeing these huge furry insects on the top of the mosquito netting. We went with him through the dark and arrived at another house. It was on stilts, because of the potential of river flooding – all the homes there were. This one was large and beautifully appointed. It seemed as if most of the inhabitants of the village were in this house and they wanted us to sing our songs and then they would sing their songs – an exchange. One I remember that we sang, that was one of Richard’s favorites which he had taught me, was “Tramp on the Street,” an American Appalachian Mountain song, a religious ballad that Richard knew by heart. I can sing some now for you but it will make me cry. I see Richard singing it. [she sings] He was some mother’s darlin He was some mother’s son, Once he was fair, and once he was young She rocked him her baby Her little darling to sleep Then she left him to die Like a tramp on the street. That’s all I remember. It’s a great song. I sang it in Commune. Sorry for crying. We took turns singing songs back and forth, and it went on for hours that night. Amazing. They wouldn’t let us stop! So, I don’t know if the word got out, down the river, but we would arrive at places and we would be welcomed in to see secret ceremonies and dances and masks that even anthropologists couldn’t get to see. As we went along we would continue to

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share our performances and songs, back and forth. It was so much fun! We got a number of masks and musical instruments that we collected and had shipped back home. I don’t recall where they ended up – I’m sure Richard knows. There was a coming of age ceremony that we got to see. Richard had his tape recorder. I remember doing a WBAI radio show in NYC where we shared this – the music and the description of the ceremonies. I’m sure all of this is at Princeton, in Richard’s archives. I was the photographer on the trip. Richard has the pictures – I assume they’re at Princeton too. It was a deep, rich time in Papua New Guinea. So going back to my initial question – “Why was I doing theatre?”– I realized that theatre is the most essential thing and I wanted to be engaged in it. People huddled together around a fire for warmth at night, singing songs to each other to keep the ghosts away and make sense of things. Telling stories to entertain each other. Communicating from the heart, across cultural barriers. For Richard, I think the experiences of this trip were seminal. Witnessing all these live ceremonies and rituals that he had been reading about and thinking about – putting that together with his own questions about why do theatre in the US, and about where to lead The Performance Group. And, later, I believe this fed his creation of Performance Studies at NYU. The Birth Ritual in Dionysus in 69, for example, had been based on Richard’s research on the Asmat Indians – it’s a ritual they use to invite new members into the community. Can you talk about the impact on Richard’s work, and on your work with The Performance Group, when you got back? It’s hard to pick out specifics. There was such a total transformation in the ways we looked at everything in life and art. That first trip certainly changed the way we looked at theatre. It reinforced some of what we had learned from Grotowski – the sense that we were a theatre laboratory, and that we were exploring relationships with the audience. And breaking out of the box with actor training. The work we saw in Asia certainly influenced Mother Courage. The notion of time: the longer length of the play. The audience fully lit, and seated around the room in the midst of the actors, the action. Stopping in the middle and having a meal. Part of our group upstairs made fresh bread and soup every day, which everyone at the performance would eat every night during the intermission. I was a 30-year-old woman, and I was playing Mother Courage, a 50-year-old woman. But then Brecht isn’t naturalistic. The play is written so brilliantly – she’s talking so volubly in the beginning, but by the end she can barely squeak out anything. She’s much older by then and has endured extreme loss, grief, and hardship. The character and the immense effort of the performance were one. I didn’t have to worry about age, as I got exhausted from the actual effort of performing, it was a relief to “age” into saying less and less. All the plays after our first trip to India – The Marilyn Project, Mother Courage, The Tooth of Crime, also continued

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a tradition begun with Dionysus in 69, Makbeth, and Commune. They were all environmental. And all of the Asian drama we saw was environmental. The best example of environmental theatre from India is the Ramlila, across the river from Varanasi, which is staged every year for a month on the actual site where the epic took place. Can you define that term for me? Sure. Well, I have my own definition. An environmental piece of theatre is one in which an environment is discovered, created, for that specific production. Each production, depending on the play, and what arises out of it, can have a very different environment. When we rehearsed Dionysus in 69 we used to go into these abandoned loft buildings – there was literally a sea of abandoned warehouses all over Soho, that are worth millions and millions of dollars now. At one point in rehearsal we divided into groups and went up to the rooftops of these buildings – my group might be on the roof of a building on Wooster and Grand, and the other group would be on the rooftop of a building on Mercer and Spring, and we would call to each other as the Maenads of Cithaeron, from rooftop to rooftop. There was nobody there but us. We rehearsed Makbeth in a field in the former Yugoslavia, and the witches (we called them Dark Powers) hung out in real caves and on the banks of real streams. Somehow these “onsite” rehearsals found their way back into the Performing Garage in the environmental design for the show. From my perspective, environmental theatre is about evolving the right environment for a particular production – not using the same environment for every show, or trying to reinvent every production to fit into the same proscenium box set. Environmental design is 360 degrees, with performance space overlapping audience space. Each performance finds its own audience relationship. Anyway, we wanted to go back to India, and by the time we worked it out with our friends in India we were doing Mother Courage and Her Children with the Group, and the idea was to bring Mother Courage to India. Performing Mother Courage in India was fantastic. It was really hard work, but it was fantastic. The reception we got was extraordinary. Audiences identified with her struggle to survive. Richard and I stayed in India for the whole year of 1976; in fact, he stayed a month longer than I did. “We” became pregnant with Sam in December of 1976, in either Hong Kong or Japan – and then I came back to do another workshop with Andre Gregory, a dear friend and director of The Manhattan Project, and Richard stayed in Japan. Back in the old days all the members of these experimental companies were close friends; we had parties together and talked passionately about how to make great theatre, and collaborated when we could. In India we played Mother Courage in cities, towns, and in the countryside – and it was like bringing folk theatre back to the source. People who saw the work in India still talk

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about it. We never performed the piece in a theatre; we found spaces to put it into, environments, if you will. It was the Garage design transposed – so in New Delhi, for example, we performed in a school gym. There was scaffolding around the space and the audience could sit on the scaffolding or sit on the ground and the performance moved through the audience. That was our version of the wagon. In Bombay, and in the village of Sinjole, West Bengal, we performed out doors. Richard and I stayed after the tour and saw many folk performances – kathakali, chhau, and many others. Did members of the company want to join you on this after-tour experience? What happened to the rest of the company after Mother Courage? I think everyone really wanted to go off on their own. For some period of time Jim Clayburgh, who was one of our set designers and the technical director for the tour, and his girlfriend Kass Self, and Leeny Sack, who played Katrin in Mother Courage, and Richard and I went to Bihar State –-it was April and 114 degrees in the shade. We went there to study chhau dance together. We worked with an extraordinary master called Guru Kedar Sahoo. What were your accommodations like on the tour? When we were in New Delhi we stayed in a lodge together. We all got very sick with bronchitis at the beginning of the tour from the dust in the air. Throughout India, we stayed in people’s homes, mostly middle class or well to do. When we performed in Sinjole, we slept on the mud floors of different families’ modest homes. Were you treated well? Yes. Very well. I felt like “visiting royalty.” People loved my Mother Courage, and treated me with great generosity and respect. My experience was that families gave the Group members all they had, even when they didn’t have anything, or much of anything. And what was the response to your performances? Tremendous. They responded to the physicality of it, the energy and the spectacle. Our audiences were mostly artists and intellectuals, and middle, upper-middle, and upper classes. In India these designations are named differently. Except for our performance in Sinjole where no one in the audience spoke anything but Bengali, all of our audiences either spoke or understood English. Mira Nair, the Indian film-maker, was a teenager in school when we were there, and she came to the Delhi performances. She told me later that she had saved her lunch money every day to pay for tickets, and saw

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the play many times. She told us it inspired her to be an artist and to be the kind of film-maker she is. So, the tour ended in March and then in April Richard and I went to study chhau and we watched many all-night performances of chhau. I remember watching them, eating, going to sleep, and then waking up and watching them some more. Richard and I traveled a lot in India after our tour, taking third-class trains and buses wherever we went, so we could feel the land and her people. We lived for a month on a rice paddy in Kerala while Richard studied kathakali at the Kalamandalam there. Meanwhile, I wrote very long letters to friends of our travels that they saved for me, in order to record everything. I still have them all. I hope to publish them one day. There was an ant colony in our little house in Kerala and I spent an inordinate amount of time watching the ant colony industriously do their thing and I wrote about it. I took long walks through the countryside. After Kerala, we lived in Calcutta with our friends Shyamanand and Chetna Jalan. While in Calcutta, Richard wrote, we both studied yoga, and I did volunteer work with Mother Teresa. The first place I worked with her was Nirmal Hriday, or “The Home for the Dying Destitute.” I would arrive at 7 a.m. every morning and I would hose out the vomit and shit and piss on the floor from the previous night, bathe the women patients, give them their medications, and help them eat breakfast. Afterwards, I would sit with them, listening and talking, and singing to and with them. Later on I was assigned to Prem Dan, Mother Teresa’s halfway house, and finally, the children’s orphanage. My moments there are as vivid to me today as they were then, and I’m deeply grateful for the experience, and the amazingly courageous people that I met. It was a watershed experience for me. Eventually I had to stop working with Mother Teresa because I contracted bacillary dysentery at the orphanage. We were set to travel soon, though, so I would have had to leave soon anyway. How did this work with Mother Teresa come about? I had met a man named Andre Gregory at a party – I was drawn to him because he had the same name as our friend Andre Gregory in the States – and he put me in touch with The Sisters of Mercy. I had told him I wanted to do something, to give back; I had spent so much time in India. That’s a whole other subject – my feelings of guilt about being a wealthy white person amidst all the poverty at the time in India, and my feeling of impotence in the face of it. I think Richard was able to handle it better. On the first trip I stopped eating and got very thin. I think I was trying unconsciously to belong. It was the Bangladesh War, and there were 10 million refugees living alongside the road from the airport to Calcutta the night we arrived. It was overwhelming for me, shattering. Anyway, on our second trip I wanted to give back. So I worked with Mother Teresa.

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And then we went to the Ramlila that was staged in Ramnagar by the Maharajah there, just across the Ganges from Varanasi. We met an amazing human being, whom I mentioned earlier, Veer Bhadra Mishra, who was an engineer and also the spiritual head of Sankat Mochan Temple, sacred to Hanuman, the beloved Monkey God of the Ramayana. We lived in the temple guest quarters, surrounded by hundreds of monkeys. Devotees chanting, and monkeys stealing our breakfast bananas! Mishra’s home was adjacent to the temple and we would all take the boat across each night to the Ramlila. Talk about environmental theatre! The performances were every night for 31 days and everyone came from all over India to see them, plus the people from the town itself – Saddhus, business people, families with children – and they would pile onto these boats and go across the river and every night the performance would start around sundown and it would take place in a different location. The Ramayana had actually occurred in these environs where the Ramlila took place. So every performance was enacted on the site where it originally happened in the Ramayana. We were there for most of it, but not for all of the thirty-one days (of September and October). There was a celebratory as well as sacred atmosphere: there were hundreds of food wallahs. The children of the village of Ramnagar played Rama and Sita each year in the most elaborate and extraordinary costumes and makeup. Richard and I would often go early and watch all the preparations for the performance that night, including the make-up artists, who would paint beautiful designs on the faces and hands of Rama and Sita. The audience knew the text, often by heart, and they recited along with the performers. The performances would begin at sundown, as I said, and go on for hours and hours. There was no sense of collapsing time. And as honored guests we were offered elephants to ride from place to place. So we sometimes rode on the top of elephants from one scene’s site to the next, and sometimes we walked with everyone else. The performances were very dramatic, and very spectacular. For example, they built and painted an enormous and very tall scaffold structure that was the evil demon, Ravana, and they set that on fire when the demon was vanquished. On any given night a scene might take place on someone’s porch, or on a little street. And then the next scene would take place in the forest. The audience would move from scene to scene, and then wait until everyone had gathered around, before the next scene would begin. And this, by the way, is what happened in The Tooth of Crime. The set had been built to resemble a house because of the house in Performance, the movie with Mick Jagger as an aging rock star holed up in his mansion, that I believe had inspired Sam Shephard to write Tooth. Our designer, Jerry Rojo, created windows in the “house” that the audience could look through into the action. When we did the first performance while in residence during the summer of 1972 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, we were on a huge proscenium stage. We invited the audience to come up on stage with

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us to get closer to the action, but when they came onstage, all 500 of them, they couldn’t see the scenes. So Spalding, who played Hoss, the aging rock star of the play, said, “Okay, everybody come over here,” and we waited until everyone gathered closely around and then we did that scene. The whole play became like that. And there it was in the Ramlila, four years later. I have to interject something here. I am so grateful for my years with Richard – and the wonderful life that we had, and our theatre work, and our travels and all that I experienced and learned. I remember Richard and I talked a lot in 1976 in India about our next project – how we had to make it deeply human, and the passion, and the spectacle. But while we were having this experience and developing something very primal – what became Oedipus – we performed it on dirt and made the Garage space into an amphitheatre, using face and body masks – part of that came from seeing the Indian work – while we were in India soaking all that up, and making our plans, Liz and Spalding were in New York, and they were definitely going in a different direction, artistically. The beginning of the end of The Performance Group was upon us, though we didn’t realize it. Sakonnet Point… I was actually in Sakonnet Point in one of its early incarnations and I loved it. There was a split in the aesthetic of the Group. After Oedipus, I left the group. I needed to explore my own thing. What was that? What were you seeking, or what did you want to let go of? If there hadn’t been the aesthetic split that was emerging, things would have been different. I might have stayed. It was probably the natural growth of the organism: branches grow from the tree trunk. I wanted to grow and experience my autonomy as an artist outside the group, not to leave it, but to have the freedom to do work outside and then return. That became impossible for a number of reasons. Richard’s and my marriage came to a very painful and difficult end. Leeny Sack eventually left the group, Steven Borst died of AIDS. And there was the gradual divergence in the aesthetics of Liz and Richard that eventually caused Richard to leave the Group. Richard had trained Liz as his assistant director on Commune and then she developed her own aesthetic as director. At the end of the tour of Mother Courage, there was a long meeting in Juhu Beach on the outskirts of Bombay (Mumbai.) I wish I had a recording of that meeting. I remember it being very emotional, and very upsetting. Steve was there, and Ron Vawter, and Richard and me and Jim Griffiths and Leeny and Liz and Spalding, and Jim Clayburgh. Everyone who had worked on Mother Courage was there, along with their significant other. This was in March before all of Richard’s and

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my traveling around India. I think we Group members feared then that we were splitting apart – breaking apart. There were bad feelings and real confusions at that point. There was also that aesthetic split: humanism and passion on the one hand and irony and deconstruction on the other. Further, it was my understanding and I believe, Richard’s, that we made an agreement at that meeting that if we did split up we would all share in the proceeds of the Performing Garage, and it would be prorated by how many years each of us had put in. However, we didn’t write anything down. We made a “gentleman’s agreement.” But years later when it came up legally, all those folks that were now occupying the Garage denied any validity in that agreement. There was nothing we could do because we had nothing in writing. Interestingly enough, we’re all still friends. We’ve been through so much together, we’ll never stop being friends. One thing we haven’t really talked about, but in mentioning Ciel Smith earlier, and Liz, the question of sexual politics in the group comes to mind. Can you speak about how that played out, from your perspective? It’s a big question. It was often confusing and hard for me to sort out, and I don’t think I was ever at peace with my position of being Richard’s wife and also a member of the company. I always felt in-between. I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t have wanted it – it couldn’t have been any other way. Although I was aligned with Richard artistically, and I loved him and supported him, I was also a performer, so if there was a conflict between the performers and Richard, I felt always in the middle. I often played the role of peacemaker, negotiator, trying to make it all okay. Also, I was very talented, and I knew it, but I was often embarrassed to be singled out: I wanted to be acknowledged as a great actress, but at the same time I wanted to be just like everyone else. Definitely left over from my family of origin where I felt terribly guilty that I was blessed with so many gifts. I received an OBIE Award for Distinguished Performance in Commune, our original ensemble piece. Even though I played the central role, I was in a knot about that. I was thrilled about it, but felt embarrassed because I was singled out. I feared recriminations. At the OBIE ceremony, when I gave my acceptance speech, I was so anxious and embarrassed that in a gesture of generosity and sharing, I blithely tossed the framed award towards the table where all the members of the Group were sitting, and it hit Spalding on the head. It was just awful. I was often afraid that people were jealous of me and envious of my being with Richard, or thought I got special favors, which I really don’t think happened. Richard and I were pretty scrupulous about that. As a professor at NYU he earned more money than anyone else in the Group and I got to enjoy that, making us unequal with the other members. Sometimes I didn’t take a salary because I was living with Richard. That was hard sometimes.

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Richard bent over backwards to be fair in matching people with roles. Later, it was the whole group determining casting. The guys had big roles in Tooth of Crime, and then in Mother Courage it was the women’s turn. But in Dionysus in 69 Richard got around giving me the role of Agave, the one major female part in the play, and causing Ciel to be jealous and angry, by giving the role to both of us, and part of Dionysus’s curse to us at the end of the play was that we would go to our graves never knowing which of us played Agave. When we worked on Makbeth he gave Lady Makbeth to Ciel – I think largely because he was terrified of what she’d do or say if he didn’t give it to her. I remember her being on a rampage at the time. I played one of the Dark Powers. And I was sometimes paranoid that people in the Group were talking about me behind my back. I feared it mostly in relation to the women: that they would think I was getting preferential treatment from the leader, my husband the director. It was so confusing for me as a young woman, when all the traditional roles were being questioned and challenged, and I hadn’t found my place in all that. We were clear about ending the war in Vietnam, but we weren’t clear about gender roles. I sometimes felt angry and resentful that I wasn’t getting my due, and then embarrassed when I did. I never felt that I claimed my place and said, “I’m the director’s wife and I’m also a great actress, so deal with it. I deserve to play the female lead.” I couldn’t do it. I was too insecure, too embarrassed. I was afraid of the envy of others. I wanted to be liked. I was never shy about letting my full power come out onstage though. Final words? The conversation – and I mean the Conversation with a capital C that Richard and I had during our whole relationship. I’m deeply grateful for it. We made great work together, and I am very proud of that. Thank you for everything we shared together, Richard. Happy 75th Birthday!

14 Elizabeth LeCompte: Interview, June 2008 Cindy Rosenthal

I read in an article published recently in The New Yorker (“Experimental Journey; Onward and Upward with the Arts,” Jane Kramer. Sept. 17, 2007) that you began with The Performance Group as a designer. No. No. Richard just asked me to help him out, so I took notes. I was his assistant on some level. But I wasn’t even his assistant director, because I didn’t know a thing about theatre; I was a visual artist at the time. Then in 1970 he asked me to assistant direct Commune. Do you remember how that came about? I would come to rehearsals with Spalding [Gray] and watch but I was working elsewhere; I had a bookstore upstate New York in Saratoga Springs. So, I would come down to buy books for the store and I would come to rehearsals when Spalding was being worked into Makbeth. Richard hired me to take notes and to help put together Commune for no other reason than that we got along. I think we both liked each other very much. And we still do. Have you seen him at all, recently? Yeah, just about a month ago, before we left on tour. What was great about him, for me, was that he gave me carte blanche. Even though we were sort of at odds. What were some of your responsibilities, assisting Richard on Commune? He told me to find everything I could about the Manson clan because the trial had just happened. So, I went and got all the papers I could – The Times, there was a Herald Tribune at the time, The Post, and The Daily News. I still remember him looking at me and saying, “You got stuff from The Post and 213

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you believe this?” So, I just worked taking notes, watching him, and learning what I could from him. I think he was very open about letting people he trusted give to the process. I also learned from him about leading a group. I watched how he dealt with power. Especially around sexual politics… I think one of the things he loved about the theatre was that he could have all these young women that were so attracted to him and he could be the great –uhm Director? It wasn’t even director. Master, psychiatrist, father figure. So, I knew him like that, but he was always extremely generous. He was not a mean person, ever… I think I adjusted the way I made a group from watching him. This was really important for me. I also liked his eclecticism. Although he wouldn’t take the New York Post, at the time – and I would, I would take that now – he would take a lot of things in and let them sit next to each other and not worry about whether they worked or not. For an intellectual, which he is, he was extremely open about the sources for the work. In Commune we took from popular sources and combined them with sources from history. For instance, we included beautiful songs from the American songbook vocabulary. Songs I had known as a child. From a folk tradition? Yes. And they were new to him. I had grown up with them, but to see him take them and put them in the center of a piece that had references to Shakespeare, to My Lai, to all kinds of different traditions. He was open to putting them all together. I’m not saying that it worked, because I think if I saw Commune today I’d say “Oh my God.” But it was such an open and wonderful free feeling about how to make work. Earlier you were talking about power relations in the group, and how Richard dealt or didn’t deal with sexual politics – can you say more about that? Richard liked women. He was always very open to women having powerful positions. He was very giving to me. He encouraged me all along. He wasn’t patriarchal. He never talked down to me. He shared with me equally. That’s what I liked. He was generous. Were he and Joan [MacIntosh] a kind of central couple in the group? Yes, and I think that made it difficult for the other women performers. It was sort of like a parental situation. Like he was the king. He lived differently;

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he had more money. And more prestige. It was a kind of a student-professor situation. That was very difficult for some people in the group. Do you remember anything significant about the process of The Performance Group’s Marilyn Project? Elsewhere you’ve stated that this production signified a parting of the ways between you and Richard, in terms of acting technique, or the working process. [See “Always Starting New: Elizabeth LeCompte,” by Lenora Champagne, TDR 25.3 (Fall 1981).] I remember feeling that much earlier. I was always interested in “real” behavior, in “real” action – he was more conventional, more Strasbergoriented, than I was. There were so many other things coming in at the time that I was open to. Did you ever study acting in that way? No. I became more interested in what made me watch someone on stage. Spalding and I began to think differently from Richard about how you could be on the stage – but it wasn’t against Richard. It was just adding on to it. I don’t think that was a real problem for us. With The Marilyn Project Lee Strasberg came to see it, and he said I was terrible. I think he was right. I was terrible. I was never a good actor. But I had a sense of doing things – not inhabiting them. I was always outside – like a director. One might describe that as a kind of Brechtian performance, or acting technique. Well, I didn’t know that. I was just trying desperately to feel comfortable on the stage. Though I must admit, looking back on it, who knows what I was actually trying to do. Joan was always my favorite performer. She was wonderful. In the work, I would probably take people towards a more abstract idea than Richard would. Did you want to work with Joan on the new material you were developing with Spalding? What became of Sakonnet Point? Yes, but when we first started working on Sakonnet Point, Joan had broken her leg in Tennessee and couldn’t perform at all. The Performance Group work was suspended, and Spalding and I took that time to develop Sakonnet Point. Then when we worked on Rumstick Road Joan was with Richard in India. They stayed for a year; Spalding and I only stayed for six months. Ron Vawter also came back early. With the people who came back early, we started to work on Rumstick. So, by the time we had made two pieces Joan wasn’t in the mix. For Richard, the India trip seemed very important. This anthology looks at the emergence of performance studies as a discipline, and it also concerns the evolution

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of Richard’s ideas about and experience of global theatre. The India trip was in 1976. What do you remember about it? It was horrendous. The conditions… for us – How did the trip come about? Richard got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. It was a wonderful experience, but it was very tough. I remember staying in a… we were all farmed out to different people – I remember living with people who wouldn’t allow me to eat at their family table. They would bring the food to my little room. It was like a servant’s quarters. I got very sick several times. And then – I mean it was fantastic. I thank Richard for this. I can laugh at it now. I guess I was about 29 or 30. I had never been to that part of the world before. But there was culture shock there beyond anything I’ve experienced. Was this because of a class issue? Absolutely. I was playing the whore [Yvette in Mother Courage]. So, I was told that they thought I really was a whore. When Richard and Joan left for South India I tried to get some of the people to put me up – because I had no money – and they wouldn’t have me in their houses. I was trying to find a Yoga teacher there. And Richard? He was in Kerala, staying with people who were involved in theatre and academics. We were on our own. So, Richard had organized the tour, arranged all the performance sites and dates. Did he attend all the performances? Yes, yes. But it was one of those things where each place was different. Everyone who took us in was different. Some of the people and places, he knew; some he didn’t know so well. Richard’s experience in India clearly changed the way he thought about things pertaining to theatre and performance. Were your experiences so separate from his that you were not able to see what was happening to him, and what the experience meant to him, at the time? I didn’t notice that. I would see how he would work – his theatre work – and I would see his writing, and I felt the two had nothing to do with each other.

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One was pragmatic – about getting a piece up. The other was theoretical. So, I would argue with him. He’d write the books, he’d give them to me and I’d go “Richard, this is great. But it has nothing to do with how you’re conducting the rehearsals and making work.” I saw this schism. At the time I thought he was living a lie. But now I realize that he was living his artistic self in his books, not in his theatre work. In his writing and his thinking he was being creative; it didn’t need to coincide with anything he was doing when he was making theatre. His theatre work seemed to me more conventional than his writing. I was judgmental of him. I was young – at the time I thought he was fooling people. But now I realize – that his creativity was in his thinking. The fact that it couldn’t be perfectly worked out in his practice was not a bad thing. Richard is attributed with being the first to name, and with The Performance Group, the first to experiment with environmental theatre. Yeah. What’s that? I would laugh at that. Okay. Theatre in the round? Those were some of the things – I would just have to laugh. He was just trying to stretch his mind in different ways. But I wasn’t thinking from or about theatre – I wasn’t thinking from any kind of theoretical place. I was just looking at what was. I was an extreme realist. That all seemed like a lot of gobbledy gook and what we’re really doing is just standing in front of people and talking. I think he and I were always different in that way. When he wrote about The Performance Group, I didn’t recognize what I was experiencing with the Group. But I realized I was seeing differently than he was. And now, looking back on it – of course we didn’t see anything the same. I was going in such a different direction. When I first knew him – 1969–70 – he was already doing graphs in his books – pie charts about performances – he was already talking about Victor Turner then. I was with the company when Grotowski came over [second visit to the United States, 1969]. Richard got me tickets to see The Constant Prince. Everybody knew about Grotowski then; at the bookstore we were selling his book, Towards a Poor Theatre. I was interested in him. When I saw The Constant Prince I wasn’t thinking I would be a theatre person; I was there for the experience. It had an emotional impact on me, and a formal impact. What I noticed about Grotowski was how well trained the actors were. I was like – these people have a vocal thing – they have a technique that we’re not really dealing with here. Richard was interested in the psychophysical thing, More in the psycho than the physical. When Richard returned from the India trip we were talking about earlier, it’s clear that he was very interested in the interconnections between theatre and anthropology, theatre and ritual. When you began working with Spalding using family history in the Trilogy, it seemed as if you were interested in a kind of ethnography,

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or ethnographic process in building performance, especially the ways in which you were gathering materials, conducting research. Do you feel that the India trip inspired you or led you to this work in some way? My first answer is no. When I came back from India I just wanted to embrace everything that was mine. I had such a terrible – no wonderful – shock from India. I remember going to this record shop in Amsterdam and listening to Irish folk music for hours – just to get back to something that I felt comfortable with. I went back to my art history roots and looked at early Renaissance Italian and Netherlandish painting. Also, Spalding was having a breakdown. It had been very difficult in India, and he was knocked off his center. I was just thinking about keeping Spalding alive. I thought if I could just get him back onstage, get him working on something, it would be better. We started Rumstick right away. I went with him and recorded everything. It was his impulse to do it. I went along. Ron came back and Libby Howes was there. There was a small group of us. There was no money, but we had the space in the Garage during the day. I think Richard was interested in our continuing working while he was in India, keeping the space going, so that when he and Joan returned, the company would be intact. We were kind of set loose for six months. And by the time he came back – look what you had done! In your mind’s eye – do you think of theatre as separate from performance? Do you have a broad definition of performance that is different from theatre? No, I never even think about it. That’s why Richard and I get along. I have no categories that way. Although I like reading about it, I enjoy his writing now – I think it’s great. When I saw a shift in Richard and his work, I saw him going toward something more like regular theatre, with performers that you might see on Broadway. He was moving toward more traditional narrative work that at the time wasn’t so interesting to Spalding and me. And, one of the major differences or shifts in the work from The Performance Group to The Wooster Group was in technology. Richard had been working with ideas that were presented by Grotowski in his book Towards a Poor Theatre – though I actually thought Grotowski was very rich in technique, in the technique they were using. And I saw The Wooster Group’s technique as technological. But Richard and I never fought about that. It was just a natural thing for me to do because I was a photographer. I never said, “Well I’m this and you’re that.” Can you say more about Richard’s process at the time, and how or what you learned from him, working together?

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The only thing I remember was that I always felt he wasn’t interested in the process. He liked writing about the process, but when we actually got in he was impatient. But what was good for me with him was when he would say, “C’mon, where’s the action?” We were a good combination. He taught me always – you can do all these things, take all the time in the world, but finally, at the end, where’s the action? I still see that in his work. His productions became more theatrical and I was going off more toward performance art. And I love movement. I wasn’t trained as a dancer, but I’ve always had an interest in dance. I’m an artist – I don’t think of myself as a theatre artist. I’m just trying to make something about my life and the life of people I’m living/working with, something that has some relevance to us, something that gives us joy. For me, it’s pretty simple. Is there something specific you’d like to say about the legacy of Richard Schechner, that your work with The Wooster Group has expanded on – Sure, the group. It’s about making a group. To make a group of people who don’t necessarily all agree on things, or who don’t have the same political or social ideas, but that all want to make something, and that thing is bigger than what or who they are individually. I think it was huge for me to be able to watch him – his relationship to me, as an artist, was very collegial, not patronizing. He was always very giving. And his legacy for me was his openness to people coming in and influencing the work and not judging – The fact that he let Spalding bloom in Mother Courage. Spalding didn’t want to play a major role and he let him play the idiot, Swiss Cheese. And then in Commune, Spalding didn’t want to take his clothes off and do all the things that Richard wanted him to do, and Richard gave him a role that was like the Buddha. Richard has a feeling for people that lets them find their places. And then, with Tooth of Crime, Richard wasn’t that interested in the script, and Spalding and I said, oh this is good, and he went with it. He’s just very open. A wonderful teacher and a great guy to work with – the best.

15 For Richard Anna Deavere Smith

Late fall 1976 Where’d I find the book? I can’t remember. Did I order it full price and new? How did I afford it? Did I get it in a used book store in San Francisco? Did someone hand it to me in New Orleans? I can’t remember. I was poring over the book, sitting at the kitchen table in my Little Italy fifth-floor walk up apartment at Mulberry and Prince in New York City – bathtub in the kitchen – rent $120 – my share $60 – a month. I was told Little Italy was the safest neighborhood in town. The Mafia kept the petty hoodlums out. My block smelled of blood. There was a place across the street, a low squat building, but long. Live chickens were there until they were killed, daily. When I came out the front door in the morning, I’d see the people lined up outside waiting to pick out a live chicken and have it killed. There were a lot of chickens. It was kind of like a small factory. Once I went over there, picked out my live chicken and waited while they took it in the back, killed it, and gave it to me in a brown bag lined with plastic. I was surprised how hot the freshly killed chicken was. New York was still a scary place at the time. I had just moved from San Francisco. I was surprised to learn that I had to go to a locksmith and buy a special lock, a Medeco lock. There was also a bar that went across the door on the inside. New Yorkers were in the habit of locking themselves in. That suited my situation. I was on an imposed lockdown. I was determined to finish my thesis. Writing a thesis had nothing to do with getting a degree and getting a job (I didn’t really know what kind of job I wanted), I was merely trying to make sense out of a lot of pieces. I had just been through a transformative time – that had felt almost explosive. I changed my knowledge base and my world view. A Baltimorean, I had gone to San Francisco looking for a social movement. The would be social architects had packed up and gone back to the mainstream. Perhaps a few diehards had styled their beards, gotten haircuts, gone tweed, and gotten jobs at Berkeley or SF State or moved to even more remote places. But it was 220

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the very moment when people were packing up their teepees, closing down their communes, flattening out their afros, and putting their bras back on. I decided to study theatre. It seemed to be a human laboratory where I could watch change on an individual basis. I went to a big conservatory, part of a then plush theatre with a big budget at the time. It was considered to be the big game in town. It was a classical theatre – European classics and American classics – Shakespeare, Molière, Rostand, Ibsen, Chekhov, Miller, Williams, Inge, Albee. The head of the place had been an opera director: a flamboyant genius named Bill Ball. He didn’t look particularly flamboyant on first sight. He wore a uniform of tan gabardine slacks and a matching elegant jersey. He had a harem of stunning boys and the ability to hush any room with a story. I was intrigued by the account of the time he and one of my acting teachers, Bob Six Levitt (Ethel Merman’s son), had spent a whole day in his office tossing a trapeze back and forth. One of his great works had come out of that. On the other hand, he did not shy away from spectacle. On opening night of Julius Caesar, which had been a couple years before my time, I’m told there was an elephant at the cast party. Big names passed through when they were out on the “coast,” and we sat at their feet soaking in the wisdom – “conservatory hour” it was called. I’m talking Williams, Miller, Peter Brook with his entourage, Andre Gregory, and two Ethels – Ethel Merman, and Vivian Vance who played Ethel on “I Love Lucy.” I was a sponge then. Absorb absorb absorb. Up before dawn. Reading. Class. Rehearsal. Reading. By my third year, teaching teaching teaching. When I became a member of the company (then 50 people) – night after night after night, in the theatre, either on the stage doing my small walk-on parts with a couple lines, or in the back of the second balcony watching plays over and over and over again, looking for slight adjustments in performances, in gestures, in vocal tones. Taking every tack to learn the craft that was brand new to me. I had not studied theatre in college. Home after the show. Reading again. Up early. I created experiments. I directed plays in my third year. I always felt there was so much to learn, music to go hear, museums to roam, basically I was redoing the interior of my mind. Drinking coffees with my mentors. 1. My yoga teacher. 2. My Shakespeare teacher – a genius who was fully caffeinated and couldn’t talk fast enough to get all the words out as she linked Shakespeare to Guatemala, or Cuba – or the time we went over to Berkeley to see the Scandinavian cartoon which was a history of the world. It was all new and I did not know enough to figure out who was who and what it all meant and how it fit into what? I did not even have a frame for it all. I just absorbed it and hoped that my system would eventually spit out what it did not need and keep what it did. But my system wasn’t spitting anything out for those first couple of years. It started with basic acting: scene studies, psychological realism, scansion in Shakespeare, circus technique, wearing corsets – playing a whore in The Threepenny Opera on the big stage with the actors in the company – and exploded its way out from there.

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The weekday schedule was demanding. You could have found me most Sundays in the basement of City Lights Bookstore which stands on a perfect corner - not quite Chinatown, not quite Little Italy, not quite Nob Hill, not quite the bay, teetering on the first edge of North Beach. The used books were in the basement. There was a small corner, almost never occupied by another customer, with shelves of plays that no one brought up at school: off-Broadway plays and off-off-Broadway plays, angry black plays, Jack Gelber’s “The Cuban Thing” (a play that edged up against reality too much for the taste of some and its detractors literally set off a bomb in the theatre on opening night) and so on. I had to educate myself about the theatre of the sixties. That theatre was not explored at all in my school. So I leafed through as much as I could, read as much as I could. On those Sundays, I began to size up the diet at school as conservative. It was very white and of a certain generation – Albee being the youngest among them: Tennessee Williams was around in sunglasses and looking very grey while they worked on a new play of his. Miller was handsome and tall and polite as he walked through the halls. I was as sparkly eyed as everyone else about it, but I knew I was only seeing part of the picture. Sam Shepard, O – Lan Shepherd and others were breaking chairs and syntax over at the Magic Theater, but Shepherd had not yet scorched any acreage. The basement was also the home of the beat poets’ volumes. (Now at City Lights they have a whole floor on the top of the building with a nice window and everything.) Many copies of Ginsburg’s “Howl,” beat-up Jack Kerouac paperbacks. It must have been there in that basement along with the beat poets, in a bookstore not so far from the café where Ginsburg’s “Howl” was first read, that I came across a black and white image of Richard Schechner, and the Performing Garage. Maybe it was in a used version of TDR. He looked so familiar. San Francisco had been changing since before I arrived. And the last gasps of the counter-culture wafted out like patchouli oil over the Golden Gate Bridge. And yet the city was still full of theatre – real life theatre. Gay bars, gay parades, gay revolution, gay baths put a claim on the identity of the city. They were in their heyday with no suspicion that they would be visited by an unwelcome guest: AIDS. Before real estate went over the top, there were the simple but large restaurants down by the bay where the longshoremen and sailors ate a large breakfast for very little money. I wandered the streets whenever I could break away from the strict regime of the theatre. San Francisco was mysterious. There were days that for all the theatre, the place was quiet, sleepy, and conservative. The nights were quiet, and got quiet early – nothing but the foghorns. I became more interested in the theatre of life than the theatre I was seeing on stage. I checked out other parts of the West: The desert. Gold Country. Nevada. Slot Machines in Reno. The mountains near Tahoe. Cowboys. Ski bums. Forest rangers. I learned how to talk to strangers. Or more importantly how to listen to them. And the ocean.

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Of course. The Pacific. The end. Yuppies and BMWs started to dribble into town, fancy boutiques were popping up one by one – replacing the small corner grocery stores that gave you credit without asking many questions. It was time to go. But not so fast. Where to? Who told me about the Free Southern Theater? It had been created as a vehicle for the civil rights movement and was based in New Orleans. Maybe I learned about it from Buriel Clay, a light hearted, bear of a black man who had been a resident playwright at ACT, my school. And the place didn’t have many black people, until I and another two people started a black actor’s workshop. Clay, as he was called, had a bounce in his walk. He was killed in a car crash about six years after I’d known him in SF. But it was folks like Clay, who even with a passing phrase or two began to open my eyes to still more options. Should I go to New York? Should I go to New Orleans? Maybe Tennessee Williams had had more of an effect than I knew. Greyhound had a special. $150 would get you across the country and back. I decided to cross the country. I’d go the southern route and stop in New Orleans. I’d go up the east coast and stop in New York, and I’d come back across the north and see big sky country, finish out my last year of school, and know what to do with my life. Was it in New Orleans that I got the book – The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater? New Orleans was a steam bath in August. I had been there a few days before I went over to the Free Southern Theater to see a show. I wanted to get caught up in the magic of the place first. I stayed at the Y until the roaches got to me. A rich friend back in SF who had grown up in Louisiana got me a deal in a guest house run by friends, right on the Desire streetcar line. When I walked on the river at night, I was fresh meat for the mosquitoes. I lasted about ten minutes. I decided I best leave the pursuit of the magic of New Orleans aside and get to my purpose – the theatre. After the show, I introduced myself to John O’Neal, who was running the theatre at the time. I didn’t say very much about myself – I just told him how much I liked the show and how intrigued I was about his theatre. He asked me where I was headed after New Orleans. I told him I was on my way to New York. He said that he and a guy called Chakula were driving to a theatre conference in Florida, and offered me a ride that far. I could go to the conference with them, stay for as much of it as I liked and they’d put me on a bus to go the rest of the way to New York. We drove all night. We talked the whole time. I went to the theatre conference, a black theatre conference, but left it thinking this idea of Black theatre, Black social theatre, which had some of its roots in Black “revolutionary theatre” was over too, just like the hippies in San Francisco. A year later, in New York, I was trying to make sense of the experiences and ideas I had collected over the past five years. The one book that started to weave it all together was The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater. I was surprised to find Richard’s journals in there. I had identified

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him down in the basement of City Lights Bookstore, as one of the aristocracy of the New York alternative theatre. Schechner’s language bounced off the page. Who was this white man talking directly – sometimes bluntly – to black people? His writings lacked self-consciousness – seemingly free of that worry of saying the wrong thing around blacks. Who was this white guy in the midst of these articulate, confident black men: John O’Neal, Gil Moses, Denise Nicholas? I was taken with his urban sense – his having grown up in Newark. I felt like I knew him. I was struck by his confidence – and my experience reading his journals and those of John O’Neal, Gil Moses, Denise Nicholas, handsome Tom Dent, started to organize my thought. All of the disparate ideas I had about acting techniques, about the point of theatre, about communities where theatre could be made, were wrapping around the idea of a theatre with a purpose, words with a purpose, words spoken with the intention of real action, in real life. Could the language of theatre have a direct relationship to life, could the action that is inherent in the spoken word of the theatre intervene with actions in life? I bought a bunch of used copies of TDR from the Strand bookstore, and tried to further educate myself up out of the foundation I had been given (Shakespeare, Molière, Rostand, Inge, Miller, Williams, Coward, Odets, Chekhov, Ibsen, Wilde for that matter). Of course I also read about the black theatre movement, read about attempts to make an African AfricanAmerican Theatre, Paul Carter Harrison – I read more Hansberry, went to see Chaikin’s work – Adrienne Kennedy, started moving my way around the New York scene of Meredith Monk, minimalist music, and so forth. I finished the thesis, and started to create my life in New York. But Schechner had been one of the first steps out beyond Miller, Williams, Inge, Coward. Schechner was also one of the first bridges in a segregated theatre. It was the moment when I encountered him on pages of The Free Southern Theatre by the Free Southern Theater, where I didn’t expect to see him, and pages where I would have thought he did not belong. My own work has an element of going where I would be unexpected, or where some would say I don’t belong. The first time I saw Richard Schechner in person was not standing in the back of a theatre, before a play of his started, or while introducing a play. It was at a faculty meeting. The School of the Arts at NYU was a much smaller place than it is now, a place with a wooden feel in the East Village. My thesis made its way into the hands of a couple of well-placed men in the world of acting teachers – Alan Schneider for one – who was then at Juilliard, the man who had introduced Beckett to America. He told someone about me who told someone about me, and I ended up going down to NYU from time to time to talk to a sometimes tough-tongued Ted Hoffman. Ted introduced me to Michael Miller, then head of the school, and I got a couple teaching gigs in as an adjunct at NYU. I taught in the basement of one of the buildings of the 700 block off Broadway while they were still constructing what is now

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Tisch as we know it. As I got on the elevator to go down to the large room in the basement, I’d see the entire full-time faculty going up. I started going to the big university-wide faculty meetings – just to have a feel of the “community.” (Obviously, a large university-wide faculty meeting is not the place to get that feel.) It was at one of those large universitywide faculty meetings that I first saw Richard Schechner in person. He and Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimlett got up to speak. It was theatre, pure theatre. The otherwise dry drone of the event suddenly opened up. I was thrilled by the confidence with which they dominated the room. The sheer volume with which they spoke. They were not talking, they were announcing themselves and their ideas. They were a perfect duo. They were clowns in the pure sense, the elite of performers – the ones who speak truth to power. They had an idea, a fully energized idea – an idea in motion. I figured they must have rehearsed. When they finished, no one applauded. I was surprised. It was an extraordinary performance. If I had been at the level of clown myself, I would have applauded. But I did not have the courage. I simply made my way out to the RR subway without so much as asking them for an autograph. I felt as though I’d seen them both in person before. But I hadn’t. That’s what charisma is. I didn’t see Richard again until I was at a theatre conference. It seems to me he sat on top of the podium when he spoke. Is that possible? I must have imagined that – though he often sits with his legs crossed in the chair “Indian style.” He had an entourage – it seemed. In those days I could not imagine approaching him, and yet I always felt as if I knew him. But, again, that may just be what charisma is. About six years later, I was invited to come to a conference in Italy that Richard had put together. I made a theatre piece in which I interviewed several of the participants in the conference – and performed them. Richard was one of the “characters.” When I interviewed Richard, as you might imagine, he had a lot to say. There’s one part of the interview where the words moved out of his mouth at a steady pace, but everything slowed down for me. He was giving an example of an actress who is going to play Medea. At first she is excited about having been cast, arriving the first day, ready to go. As rehearsal goes on, the job becomes more and more difficult. She’s not doing very well. The director is not pleased with the work. She knows she’s not Medea. She’s beside herself. She’s losing her wits. She’s not Medea, and she’s not herself. She’s the “not not.” “Which is a positive,” Richard said quickly and moved on to make another point, and on to lay out other theories, other stories, for another 30 minutes or so. That simple group of phrases “She’s not Medea, and she’s not herself. She’s the ‘not not.’ Which is a positive” best describes what I am trying to do with my work. As an actress I am not aspiring to be this one thing or that one thing. It seems to me that negotiating the “not not” is inevitable. It’s the

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pursuit that makes acting what it is, that makes theatre what it is. We are in pursuit of another reality, and make a solid reality which is only a stand in for the reality which is a not not. We are always evolving. Although I have always held Richard in such high esteem, it was interesting to me that when I finally met with him, and sat with him, I was comfortable with him. Even in my first sit-down conversation with him, in a small café on Waverly, and he talked about directing August Wilson abroad, I felt as though I’d known him for a long time. One reason I was comfortable with Richard is that he always seemed familiar. I’ve had many conversations with Richard. Many of his stories are about places and ideas that are unfamiliar. So it’s not the content – it’s not his spoken narrative that is familiar. He is familiar. There’s something about his face. One day I saw it, Richard looks like my father.

16 Performing Against the Backdrop of the War on Terror Guillermo Gómez-Peña

In the late 1980s Richard Schechner asked me to write a text from a Chicano/ Mexicano perspective for the pages of TDR. With this piece I began my longterm association with the TDR intellectual community. Through the journal I was able to connect with thinkers and practitioners from all over the world. For over 20 years, TDR has published an eclectic array of my performance work including essays, chronicles of projects, conversations, and many performance scripts. And never has Richard or his collaborators rejected or censored any of my writings. Even the most racy and controversial texts (which other magazines would have a problem with) appeared in TDR. Throughout these years, Richard has become my padrino (godfather in Spanish), which is to say something more than just a mentor; someone who advises me when I lose my political compass, and who politely scolds me when I don’t exercise enough rigor or when I am repeating myself. And he has performed this role for many artists and thinkers. I definitely can say that without his wisdom, openness and madness, I wouldn’t be where I am, doing what I do. With this in mind, I wish to dedicate the following performance texts to him. These pieces I wrote while touring a United States under the cloud of war and censorship created by the Bush administration. Hopefully, the spirit of these texts reflects what I have learned from Ricardo: to always be bold, critical, committed, and connected to the pulse of the times; to speak up and talk back. This is precisely how I got to become a full citizen. * * *

We are here because you were there During a recent debate I had with a radical nativist, he asked me to provide him with a strong reason why the US. should not entirely close its borders with Mexico. My answer was as follows: 227

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“To me, the ‘problem’ is not immigration, but immigration hysteria. Immigration is a by-product of globalization and as such it is irreversible. One-third of mankind now lives outside our homeland and away from our original culture and language. The existing nation-states are dysfunctional and outdated. And the legal structures that contain them do not respond to the new complexities of the times.” His response to my answer was: “I don’t understand a word of what you are saying. The fact is that the aliens are here illegally.” Hmm… I held my tongue and continued in the same Chicano-cool-monotone I use when I’m angry: “To me immigration is not a legal issue but a humanistic and ethical one. No human being is ‘illegal,’ period. All human beings, with or without documents, belong to human kind, our kind, and if they require our help, we are obliged to provide it. It’s called being human – a concept you may find quite ‘alien’ and ‘foreign’ in itself. In this context, nationality becomes secondary. Their pain is ours, and so is their fate.” “What do you mean by that?” he asked contentiously. “Just as I became an immigrant one day, you yourself might become one in the future. We are all potential immigrants carnal.” He looked at me with disgust and after a long pause, he said, “Don’t give me this ‘carnal’ shit. You people are determined to destroy us. What have we done to you?” At that point I realized there was not much space for intellectual negotiation with him. His arguments were strictly emotional. He was fighting for his life, his inner country, and his sense of belonging to an imaginary world, a pre-contact White America that never was. He was the real alien, lost in a multiracial and multicultural foreign planet where border culture and hybridity are the norm. I felt compassion for him. I tried once more to engage him in a serious dialogue: “You know, in response to your question of what have we done to you: immigration to the United States is the direct result of the economic and political behavior of the United States toward other countries. We are here precisely because you were there. Most immigrants, including myself, are unconsciously searching for the source of our despair. And I think I found it just now, located in your historical amnesia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

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I stood up and offered him my right hand. He was visibly afraid of my accent, my brown skin, my eye-liner and my poetry. In his eyes I was a gigantic, rabid Chihuahua morphing in and out of Godzilla with a mariachi hat. He left the radio studio even more convinced that “we,” were the source of all the social and economic ills of “his” USA. Shit! Is there a way out of this historical stalemate? Any opinions? * * *

A letter to the Language Border Patrol The following letter is dedicated to Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington and Tom Tancredo. (I look at the roof of the theatre) Dear “English Only” legislators, nativist politicos, and hordes of militant monolingual Americans: I write to you in hopes of making you aware of some fundamental contradictions in your cultural behavior and political ideas; and to help you be more consistent with your claims. I write to you in English so there won’t be any misunderstandings. And as I write I will exercise both the first Chicano commandment: “talk back,” and my most elemental logic, por lo tanto… If you are congruent with your militant belief in monolingualism, and with your obsession to criminalize the Spanish language, then you should begin to find new names for the following US cities: San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Amarillo, El Paso, Alamosa, Pueblo, Orlando, Calexico, and several thousand others. And what about states like California? Should we name it “Kalifornia,” con K, in honor of its Austrian emperor? And Colorado, “Red?”; Nevada, “Snowed or Ice cream?”; Texas, “Tiles?”; Montana, “Mountain?”; and Florida, “Full or flowers” or “Flourished?” For Nuevo Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, do you have any suggestions? Shouldn’t we ask the Native Americans; the only true Americans? America, by the way, is a misspelled Italian name. You will soon have to punish companies using “illegal” names like Goya, Del Monte, Taco Bell, and Frito Lay, not to mention all the automobile

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manufacturers who nickname their cars Monte Carlo, El Camino, El Dorado, or Bronco. By the way, sports teams like the Broncos, the Astros, and the Padres, must be re-baptized ipso facto, I mean right away, since “ipso-facto” is a Latin term. “Dangerous” concerts and recordings by Cristina Aguilera, Ricky Martin, J-LO, Shakira, Il Divo and the elders from the Buena Vista Social Club must be forbidden. You may also need to subject yourself and your family to hypnosis in order to unlearn words like avocado, tomato, tamal, tortilla, taco, tostada, chili (con o sin carne), and sangria. No worries, you can rename your taco salad “wetback’s delight” to remind you of the good ol’ days when political correctness hadn’t ruined all your fun. Don’t forget adobe (and Adobe Photoshop), incognito (which spells “incógnito” by the way), incommunicado, hammock, barbecue, and “hasta la vista” to name a few. No more piñatas for your children either. And as for tequila, starting next month, your fraternities and bars can no longer serve “margaritas.” Please, only American beer… bourbon… and moonshine. Ah, se me olvidaba, you will need to hire a translator for your gardener, maid, construction workers, and your parent’s caretaker; otherwise… they will rob you blind. But most important, you should get yourself an IQ test… in English Only, don’t forget. If your IQ comes out low, don’t get discouraged. You can learn some foreign languages to exercise the vast unused part of your brain. I may be able to teach you some Spanish in exchange for some access to the mainstream media where I can debate you in English. Sería un intercambio justo; I mean, “fair deal,” que no? * * *

Border interrogation House lights please! HOUSE & STAGE LIGHTS Dear foreign audience. Before we continue, I’d like to ask you some basic questions which are at the core of American identity. I’ve been asked myself each of these questions at least 100 times. No big deal. May I?

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I GRAB MEGAPHONE INQUISITIVE W MEGAPHONE How many of you consider yourselves pure blooded “whites”? What about “people of color”? And the rest? Que son transparentes? Any “undocumented immigrants” in the audience? People who once were illegal perhaps… besides me? (I raise my own hand) What about people who married an “illegal alien” to help them get their green card? (If so) hey that’s transnational solidarity Any people who have hired undocumented migrants for domestic or artistic purposes besides (hosting organization)? Yessss! To do what exactly? How much did you pay them? Thanks for your sincerity (miss or mister). By the way, did you ever suspect them of any form of criminal behavior? You know, the gardener or the nanny Belonging to a dormant cell… or to the Tijuana Cartel Has anyone here ever reported a “suspicious” foreigner to your local Homeland Security office? No one? What an enlightened community Cause I did, last week I saw these 2 guys in my building in San Francisco They looked like they were from Iowa or Texas I was scared! But let’s return to the script, and get a bit more personal, ok? People who have had kinky sex with a so called “illegal alien” in the last month? See, that’s political! Can you please describe their genitals in detail? Just kidding! What about sex with an alien, I mean abduction? No one? Now on a different subject matter, intercultural fetishes, Have any of you ever fantasized about being from another race or culture? Black, Indian? Mexican? French? Arab? Which one? (Audience answers) Why? (Audience answers) Thanks for your candor. Now, let’s reverse the gaze,

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Would anyone like to ask me a question, any question, as irreverent or indiscreet as it may be? (Audience asks/ I answer in nahuatl) * * *

God bless the entire world Why are American politicians constantly invoking God? Are we the only Christian democracy left on the planet? Per ipsum ecu nipsum eti nipsum Per omnia saecula saeculeros Dear contemporaries: God bless… Mexico God bless… Afghanistan God bless… Iraq God bless… Pakistan God bless… Venezuela God bless… Bolivia God bless… Colombia God bless… Cuba God bless… Iran God bless… North Korea God bless… China God bless… Sri Lanka God bless… Cambodia God bless… Palestine God bless… Sudan God bless… France God bless… let’s see God bless… Canada God bless… Iceland God bless… Fiji God bless… the Bahamas God bless… Aruba God bless… (I wait for someone to answer. Audience members continue to add names of countries they wish to be blessed) God bless… (After 8 or 10 more names are added to the list)

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Oh, and we had almost forgotten God bless... America too… the continent, I mean God bless all of us here occupying this pinche planet spinning out of control praying for perfect tits, a big dick & personal salvation Alleluia! Why didn’t anyone question my patriarchal use of the convention “God bless…?” I’m sorry for inconveniencing your mind I’m just a nanabush, a fancy dancer tightrope walking coyote; nothing more; nothing less & my only privilege here is to be allowed to cross the many forbidden borders that exist between my mouth and your fears.

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Part 5 Engaging Dialogue: Schechner as Critical Interlocutor

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17 Trauma as Durational Performance Diana Taylor

Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed: they are independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. They have a life of their own. The original “truth” or “source” of the behavior may be lost, ignored, or contradicted – even while this truth or source is apparently being honored … . Originating as a process, used in the process of rehearsal to make a new process, a performance, the strips of behavior are not themselves a process but things, items, “material.” Restored behavior can be of long duration. Richard Schechner, “The Restoration of Behavior”1 Pedro Matta, a tall, strong man walked up to us when we arrived at the unassuming side entrance to Villa Grimaldi, a former torture and extermination camp on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. He is a survivor who twice a month or so gives a guided visit to people who want to know about the site. He says hello to Soledad Fallabella and Alejandro Gruman, colleagues of mine in Chile who thought, given my work with human rights groups in Argentina, that I would be interested in meeting Matta.2 He greets me and hands me the English version of a book he has written: A Walk Through a 20th Century Torture Center: Villa Grimaldi, A Visitor’s Guide. I tell him that I am from Mexico and speak Spanish. “Ah,” he says focusing on me, “Taylor, I just assumed…” The four of us walk into the compound. I hold the booklet and my camera – Alejandro holds my digital tape recorder. I’ve come prepared for my “visit.” The site is expansive. It looks like a ruin or a construction site, there’s some old rubble and signs of new building – a transitional space, part past, part future. In several ways it’s hard to get a sense of where we’re standing. A sign at the entrance, Parque Por la Paz Villa Grimaldi, informs visitors that 237

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4500 people were tortured here and 226 people were disappeared and killed between 1973 and 1979. Another peace park in the tradition of Hiroshima to Virginia Tech, I think to myself, that tries to neutralize violence by renaming it. I take a photograph of the sign that reminds us that we’re in a memorial and that this tragic history belongs to all of us. Like many memory sites, it asks us to behave respectfully so that it might remain and continue to instruct. But how does one behave in a former torture center? And what does the place propose to teach? Lesson One, clearly, is that this place is “our” responsibility in more ways than one. “This way, please.” Matta, a formal man, leads us into the emptied space. He walks us over to the small model of the torture camp to help us visualize the architectural arrangement of a place now gone: Cuartel Terranova (barrack “new land”). The mock-up is laid out, like a coffin, under a large plastic sunshade. As in many historically important sites – the Templo Mayor in Mexico City comes to mind – the model offers a quick bird’s-eye view of the place. The difference here is that what we see in the model is no longer there. Even though we are present, standing in the former detention camp, we will not (mercifully) experience it “in person.” Rather, the space we visit is one that we cannot see and never really know. So, one might ask, what is the purpose of the visit? What can we experience by being physically in a death camp once the indicators have disappeared? Does the space itself convey the event? Little beside the sign at the entrance explains the who, whys, whats, and whens. My photographs might illustrate what this place is, not what it was. Still, we are here in person with Matta, who takes us through the recorrido (or “walk through”). Matta speaks in Spanish; it makes a difference. He seems to relax a little, though his voice is very strained and he clears his throat often. The compound, originally a beautiful nineteenth-century villa used for upper-class parties and weekend affairs, was taken over by DINA, Augusto Pinochet’s special forces to interrogate the people detained by the military during the massive round-ups.3 So many people were detained that many ordinary civilian spaces were transformed into makeshift detention centers. Villa Grimaldi was one of the most infamous. In the late 1980s, one of the generals sold it to a construction company to tear down and replace with a housing project. Survivors and human rights activists could not stop the demolition, but after much heated contestation they did secure the space as a memory site and peace park in 1995.4 Matta, among others, has spent a great deal of time, money, and energy to make sure that the space remains a permanent reminder of what the Pinochet government did to its people. Three epochs, with three histories, overlap on this space. The irony of course is that Terranova gives the lie to both the elegant, civilized pre- and the recuperative post-. The miniature camp positions us as spectators. We stand above it, looking down on its organizational structure. Well, the rendition actually. With the

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actual site destroyed, the replica materializes memory. The main entrance to our top left allowed passage for vehicles that delivered the hooded captives up to the main building. Matta’s language and our imaginations populate the emptied space. He points to the tiny copy of the building that served as the center of military operations, right here, exactly where we’re now standing; then the small buildings that run along the perimeter to the left where the prisoners were divided up, separated, and blindfolded – men there, women there. Miniature drawings made by survivors line the periphery – hooded prisoners pushed by guards with rifles for their 30 seconds at the latrines; a hall of small, locked cells guarded by an armed man; a close-up drawing of the inside of one of the cells, in which a half-dozen shackled and hooded men are squeezed in tightly; an empty torture chamber with a bare metal bunk bed equipped with leather straps, a chair with straps for arms and feet, a table with instruments (Figure 3). The objects reference behaviors. We know exactly what happened there/here. Matta points to other structures on the model. It is clear that the model gives him a sense of control too – control over the terror. He is explicit about the violence, and very clear in his condemnation of the CIA’s role in the Chilean crisis. He looks at me and remembers I am not that audience – an audience but not that audience.

Figure 3

Survivor’s drawing of torture chamber at Villa Grimaldi

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Looking down at the model, everything is visible through his recounting. We stand on the site of the main building, usurping the military’s place. Looking offers me the strange fantasy of seeing or grasping the “whole,” the fiction that I can understand systemic criminal violence even as we position ourselves simultaneously in and above the fray. We are permitted to identify without identifying. This happened there, back then, to them, by them… . We are not implicated except to the degree that we can understand the information being transmitted to us by the mock-up and Matta, our guide. The encounter, at this point, is about representation and explication. The model, made by survivors, stages the evidence – here, this happened. The mock-up or “fake” gives others at least a glimpse of the “truth” of Terranova. I take photographs, wondering how the tenuous “evidentiary” power of the photograph might extend the evidentiary claim of the model camp. We know what happened at Villa Grimaldi, of course, but is there anything that Matta (or I, with my camera) can do to make visible the criminal violence? We look up and around at the “place itself.” There’s not much to see of the former camp. The remains of a few original structures and replicas of isolation cells and a tower dot the compound, emptied though not empty – empty of something palpable in its absence. No history. No one responsible. Just mock-ups of very bad practice. The meaning lies in the friction between the empty place and the story Matta tells. As opposed to glorious ancient ruins in which narration brings buildings to life, here the objects have been re-constructed and placed to enhance the narration. With the camp demolished, Matta informs and points out, but he does not seem to connect personally or emotionally to what he describes. Yet the disconnect between Matta’s formal, matter-of-fact rendition and the terrifying things he relates prompts me into filling the gaps. Following Matta from place to place, it becomes clear to me that the little I actually do see intensifies what I imagine happened here. My mind’s eye – my very own staging area – internalizes the violence, fills the gaps. Matta walks us towards the original entryway – the massive iron-gate now permanently sealed as if to shut out the possibility of further violence. From this vantage point, it is clear that another layer has been added to the space. A wash of decorative tiles, chips of the original ceramic found at the site, form a huge arrow-like shape on the ground pointing away from the gate towards the new “peace fountain” (“symbol of life and hope” according to Matta’s booklet) and a large performance pavilion. The architecture participates in the rehabilitation of the site, moving from past to future. Matta ignores that for the moment – he is still in the torture camp, not in this peace park. This is not the time for reconciliation. His traumatic story, like his past, weighs down all possibility of future. He continues his recorrido through the torture camp.5 Matta speaks impersonally, in the third person, about the role of torture in Chile – one half-million people tortured and 5000 killed out of a population

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of eight million. I do the math… . There were far more tortures and fewer murders in Chile than Argentina. He speaks about the development of torture as a tool of the state from its early experimental phase to the highly precise and tested practice it became. Pinochet chose to break rather than eliminate his “enemies” – the population of ghosts, or individuals destroyed by torture, thrown back into society would be a warning for others. Matta’s tone is controlled and reserved. He is giving historical information, not personal testimony, as he outlines the daily workings of the camp, the transformation of language as words were outlawed. “Crimenes,” “desaparecidos,” and “dictadura” (“crimes,” “disappeared,” and “dictatorship”) were replaced by “excesos,” “presuntos,” and “gobierno militar” (“excesses,” “presumed,” “military government”). As we walk, he describes what happened where and I notice that he keeps his eyes on the ground, a habit born of peering down from under the blindfold he was forced to wear. The shift is gradual – he begins to re-enact ever so subtly as he retells. I feel compelled to register the moment – I take a photograph as if I could capture the move inwards, into the dark space in which we stand but cannot see. He moves deeper into the death camp – here, pointing at an empty spot: “Usually unconscious, the victim was taken off the parrilla (metal bed frame), and if male, dragged here.”6 Maybe the lens will grasp what I cannot grasp. Looking down, I see the colored shards of ceramic tiles and stones that now mark the places where buildings once stood and the paths where victims were pushed to the latrine or torture chambers. As we follow, we too know our way by keeping our eyes on the ground: “Sala de tortura.” “Celdas para mujeres detenidas.” Gradually, his pronouns change – they tortured them becomes they tortured us. He brings us in closer. His performance animates the space and keeps it alive. His body connects me to what Pinochet wanted to disappear, not just the place but the trauma. Matta’s presence performs the claim, embodies it, le da cuerpo. He has survived to tell. Being in place with him communicates a very different sense of the crimes than looking down on the model. Glorious ruins – like Machu Pichu and Chichen Itza – conjure up sites of ancient power and glory, mysterious and romanticized pasts, unique tourist destinations, places where “we” (not of that place, not of that time) can perform the unimaginable – keep the past intact as past even as we move through it. Dark ruins like Villa Grimaldi bring time right up close. Now. Here. And in many parts of the world, as we speak. I can’t think past that, rooted as I am to place suddenly restored as practice. I too am part of this scenario now; I have accompanied him here. My chest hurts. My throat tightens. My “unarmed” eyes look straight down, mimetically rather than reflectively, through his down-turned eyes.7 I do not see really; I imagine. I presenciar; I presence (as active verb). I participate not in the events, but in his recounting of the events. My presencing offers me no sense of control, no fiction of understanding. He walks, he sits, he tells. When he gets to

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the memorial wall marked with the names of the dead (built 20 years after the violent events) he breaks down and cries. He cries for those who died, but also for those that survived. “Torture,” he says, “destroys the human being. And I am no exception. I was destroyed through torture.” This is the climax of the tour. The past and the present come together in this admission. Torture works into the future; it forecloses the very possibility of future. The torture site is transitional but torture itself is transformative – it turns societies into terrifying places and people into zombies.8 After Matta leaves the memorial wall his tone shifts again. He has moved out of the death space. Now he is more personal and informal in his interaction with us. We talk about how other survivors have dealt with their trauma, about similarities and differences with other torture centers and detention camps. He says he needs to come back, even though it makes him sick. Afterwards he goes home, he says, drinks a liter of fruit juice and goes to bed. We continue to walk, past the replica of the water tower where the high-value prisoners were isolated, past the “sala de la memoria” (memory room) – the small buildings that originally served as the photograph and silkscreen rooms. At the pool he tells one of the most chilling accounts told to him by a collaborator. At the memory tree, he touches the names of the dead that hang from the branches, like leaves. Different commemorative art pieces remind us that “El olvido esta lleno de memoria” (forgetting is full of memory). After we leave the site, we invite Matta to lunch at a nearby restaurant that he recommends. He tells us about his arrest in 1975 for being a student activist, his time as a political prisoner in Villa Grimaldi, his exile to the United States in 1976 and his work as a private detective in San Francisco until he returned to Chile in 1991. He used his investigative skills to gather as much information as possible about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, to identify the prisoners who passed through there, and name the torturers stationed there. One day, he says, he was having lunch in this same restaurant after one of the visits to Villa Grimaldi when an ex-torturer walked in and sat at a nearby table with his family. They were having such a good time. They looked at each other and Matta got up and walked away. Later Soledad tells me that Matta does the visit the same way every time – stands in the same spot, recounts the same events, cries at the Memorial Wall. Some commentators find this odd, as if the routine makes the emotion suspect. Are the tears for real? Every time? At the very same point in the tour? Is there something put on about the performance? Or maybe what bothers some is simply that the tour is a performance – an example of what Richard Schechner has called “restoration of behavior” – strips of behavior that are re-enacted, reiterated, and repeated “never for the first time?” I agree that the tour is a performance – more interesting for me, though, is what kind of performance is it?

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Of all the compelling questions raised by Villa Grimaldi this for me is the most compelling: is the “never for the first time” of performance the same as the “never for the first time” of trauma? Trauma, I have written elsewhere, is known by the nature of its repeats. It is never for the first time.9 The difficulty in separating out “trauma” from “post-traumatic stress” signals the central role of reiteration, and the repeat. Not all blows or wounds create trauma – we speak of trauma only when they produce the characteristic aftershock. Trauma, like performance, is always in the present. Here. Now. Does the restoration of behavior model illuminate the embodied eruptions, repetitions, and flashbacks that are trauma? Or does Schechner’s emphasis that “the behavior is separate from those who are behaving”10 actually put it at odds with trauma theory that stresses that trauma cannot be separated from the “I” who lives it? Transmitted to others, yes, but not separated. Matta may transmit information, even transmit affect to us through his scripted tour of the torture camp, but what does that say about his affect? Is it part of the show? Is Matta a professional trauma survivor? Am I his witness? His audience? A voyeur of trauma tourism? What kind of scenario is this? Does it help to think of the walk through as a multi-layered performance in which (like the space itself) several things happen at the same time? To understand this scenario, we need to separate the routine from the affect. The routine – the walk through Villa Grimaldi – offers a clear example of “restoration of behavior.” Matta is, as he’s told us, our “guide” of this clearly orchestrated tour. Every move follows the outline of the book he has written; every place is about practice: “Here the torture began … .” Matta explains. It’s the same every time. He wants us to understand what took place there. In that way, the tour is about transmitting information to “us.” Anyone, theoretically, could lead that tour. The routine is separable from Matta. Yet, the routine takes on several added dimensions when performed by Matta. For any guide, the routine serves a mnemonic function – people can remember certain events by associating them with place.11 But for a survivor of torture, going back to the site, the recorrido is a memory path – through the act of walking, the body remembers. Memory always entails re-enactment, even in our mind’s eye. Neuroscientists suggest that these paths are physiological as well as material, fixed in the brain as a specifically patterned circuit of neurons. Being in a situation can automatically provoke certain behaviors unless other memory tracks are laid down to replace them.12 A change in Matta’s routine might well change the affect. Like other survivors, I believe, Matta is both a traumatized victim and a witness to trauma. Trauma too is a durational performance, characterized by the nature of its repeats. For Matta, the experience does not last two hours – it has lasted years, since he was disappeared by the armed forces. His reiterated acts of walking, of showing, of telling, of leading people down

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the paths characterize trauma and the trauma-driven actions to channel and alleviate it. For him, as for the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the ritualized tour offers both personal consolation and revenge. Memory is a tool and a political project – an honoring of those who are gone, and a reminder to those who will listen that the victimizers have gotten away with murder. His tour, like the Mother’s march, bears witness to a society in ruins in which judicial systems cannot bring perpetrators to justice. Yet the walk-through, like the march, also makes visible the memory paths that maintain another topography of place and practice, not of terror but of resistance – the will not only to live but also to keep memory alive. I can understand what Matta is doing here better than I can understand what I am doing here. What does Matta’s performance want of me as audience or as witness? What does it mean about witnessing and the quality of being in place? He needs others (in this case, me) to complete the task of witness, to keep those memory paths fresh and create more human rights activists. To witness, a transitive verb, defines both the act and the person carrying it out; the verb precedes the noun – it is through the act of witnessing that we become a witness. Identity relies on the action. We are both the subject and the product of our acts. Matta is the witness for those who are no longer alive to tell; he is the witness to himself as he tells of his own ordeal; he is a witness in the juridical sense – having brought charges against the Pinochet dictatorship. He is also the object of my witnessing – he needs me to acknowledge what he and others went through in Villa Grimaldi. The transitivity of “witness” ties us together – that’s one reason he’s keen to gauge the nature of his audience. Trauma-driven activism (like trauma itself) cannot simply be told or known; it needs to be repeated and externalized through embodied practice. But why do I need him? I wonder about aura and worry about voyeurism and (dark) tourism. Is Matta my close-up – bringing unspeakable violence up as close as possible? If so, to what end? This too is multi-layered in the ways that the personal, interpersonal, social and political come together. Walking through Villa Grimaldi with Matta, the over-size issues of human rights violations and crimes against humanity – too large and general on one level – take on an immediate and embodied form. In this spot where we are now standing, other people brutalized and killed their fellow citizens. Matta was one of those brutalized. I knew that of course, but standing there with him, I know it differently. Additionally, and on another level, the corporeal proximity to atrocity allows me a place to feel my own experiences of criminal violence in an openly public political context. Matta’s pain activates mine – different in many ways, but not in one essential way: In our everyday lives, we have no way of dealing with violent acts that shatters the limits of our understanding. Therapy offers some people comfort – but for others, this brutally emptied space of mourning and remembrance is more appropriate. We all live in proximity to criminal violence – and though some have felt

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it more personally than others, this violence is never just personal. If we focus only on the trauma we risk evacuating the politics. Standing there, together, bringing the buildings and routines back to life, we bear witness not just to loss, but to a system of power relations, hierarchies, and values that not only allowed but required the disappearance of certain members of the population. The questions posed by these dark ruins may not be unrelated to the ones prompted by other, more glorious ruins. Like the Mesoamerican pyramids, these too make visible the bare bones of current social structures that normally exceed the eye. A topography of the zone around Chichen Itza, for example, would expose the entire area as a network of ancient cities, although some lie under bramble, and not all of them charge admission. With dark ruins too there’s a lot more underground than meets the eye. There were 800 torture centers in Chile under Pinochet. If so many civic and public places like villas and gyms and department stores and schools were used for criminal violence, how do we know that the whole city did not function as a clandestine torture center? The scale of the violations is stunning. The ubiquity of the practice spills over and contaminates social life. The guided tour through Villa Grimaldi gives us an intensely condensed experience within the compound walls. But here, within the camp, we know that the violence only appears isolated and bracketed from everything that surrounds it, accentuating the knowledge that criminal violence has spread so uncontrollably that no walls can contain it and no guide can explain it. We might control a site and put a fence around it, but the city, the country, the southern cone, the hemisphere has been networked for violence – and beyond too, of course, and not just because the United States has taken to out-sourcing torture. Is the dark ruin sickening because it situates us in such concrete proximity to atrocity? Because, by participating, we internalize the violence? Or because the ubiquitous practice situates all of us in such constant proximity to the dark ruin that is our society? Perhaps here too we might need to separate affect from actions such as walking tours. Matta’s trauma is his, inseparable from who he is. Yet his explanation of the causes is transmissible. We share the walk through. And as I follow him deeper down the paths, his experience resonates with me in part because I actually do always know what happened here/there and accept that this, like many other sites, is my responsibility. Although I will not accept the responsibility for torturing or killing other human beings, I do participate in a political project that depends on making certain populations disappear – be it through the criminalization of poverty, for example, or mental illness. I am constantly warned to keep vigil, to “say something” if I “see something.” My tax dollars pay for Gitmo. For me, the emotional charge of the visit comes from the friction of place and the practice – inseparable, though at times disavowed. Something has been restored through the tour that brings several of my worlds into direct

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contact. As the multi-tiered space itself invites, I recognize the layers and layers of political and corporeal practices that have created these places, the histories I bring to them, and the emotions that get triggered as we walk through them in our own ways. I experience the tour as performance, and as trauma, and I know it’s never for the first, or last, time. Matta, the booklet tells us, “feels a strong desire to transform history into memory.” He makes the past alive through the performance of his recorrido. Yet trauma keeps the past alive in Matta as well – the future is not an option for him as long as Terranova grips him in that place. The “future” in fact might be a very different project. In the best of all possible worlds, the future would mean turning this memory into history, the testimonial walkthrough into evidence, Matta’s personal admonition into legally binding indictments against perpetrators, and visitors into witnesses, human rights activists, and voters. Someone else, maybe someone who has never been tortured, would lead the tour. But that future is predicated on a past in which trauma has been transcended or resolved. That future is nowhere in sight even though the arrow points us towards the fountain symbolizing “life and hope.” The tour does not offer us the end of trauma or the end of performance. Looking downwards we make our way through this transitional space between remembrance and future project.

Notes 1. This chapter is dedicated to Richard Schechner – whose work has enriched my scholarship, and whose friendship has enriched my life. An earlier, quite different version of this chapter appears in Telling Ruins in Latin America, ed. Vicky Unruh and Michael Lazzara (Palgrave Macmillian, 2008). The epigraph is from Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, 35. 2. The research that came out of that project was published (in part) in Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 3. DINA stands for Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (National Intelligence Directorate). 4. Teresa Meade, in “Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile’s ‘Sitios de Memoria’ and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death” writes that Villa Grimaldi was the “only ‘memorial’ of torture in Latin America” when it was built in 1995. Now “Parque de la Memoria” and ESMA in Buenos Aires also function as memorials. (Radical History Review, 79 (2001): 123–39). At http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ radical_history_review/v079/79.1meade.html (accessed 24 October 2008). 5. See Michael J. Lazzara’s Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006, for an excellent analysis of Pedro Matta’s tour and Villa Grimaldi. 6. Pedro Alejandro Matta, Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile: A Visitor’s Guide. Selfpublished, 13. 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1968, 225.

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8. Marcial Godoy-Anativia, “The Body as Sanctuary Space: Towards a Somatic Topography of Torture” (unpublished manuscript, 1997). 9. “Trauma Driven Performance.” Correspondents at Large section of PMLA’s Special Issue on Human Rights, ed. Domna Stanton. 21.5 (October 2006): 1674–7. 10. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 36. 11. See Thomas A. Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among an Andean People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 12. See Vittorio Gallese, “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron System and its Role in Interpersonal Relations.” At http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/pubs/ pdffiles/Gallese/Gallese-Eagle-Migone%202007.pdf (accessed 25 October 2008).

18 Medical Clowning and Performance Theory Atay Citron

I consider myself privileged for having been among the first students who attended Richard Schechner’s Performance Theory class at the Department of Graduate Drama, New York University in the spring semester, 1980. Later that year, the department’s name was changed to the Department of Performance Studies. Twenty-five years later, as chair of the Theatre Department at the University of Haifa, I was asked to create a new program for a group of medical clowns, who had been working in hospitals throughout Israel. With the assistance of colleagues from the departments of Nursing (Dr Michal Granot’s name should be mentioned in particular), Social Work and Sociology and Anthropology, I devised the first full academic program for medical clowns. Nineteen members of this group, which is known as Dream Doctors, started their third and final year of studies in October 2008. They are expected to graduate in the summer of 2009, and those who qualify will continue to study toward their MA and the Diploma of Certified Drama Therapists. Leaders of the Magi Foundation, which initiated this group and sponsored the academic studies of its members, envision medical clowning as a new, legitimate profession in the public health system, similar to physical and occupational therapy. I believe that to a large extent, it was my graduate education in performance studies and in performance theory in particular that prepared me for the task of devising the medical clowns’ academic program. In this piece, I attempt to put what I recently learned about medical clowning in the Performance Theory context. This is only a beginning – some preliminary thoughts and ideas, impressions and questions. * * *

Medical clowning, ritual clowning For most people in the West, the 1998 movie Patch Adams first suggested the provocative option of humor and clowning in the hygienic, orderly, 248

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and solemn hospital. The movie, which was based on Adams’s 1993 autobiographical book, related the difficulties encountered by Robin Williams (as Adams) when he attempted to inject humor into the conservative and hierarchical doctrine of Western medicine. When the movie came out, spectators were ready for it. The holistic approach, homeopathy, and other methods of traditional medicine (defined in the West as “Alternative”) that had been considered esoteric, even dubious earlier, were largely accepted at this time, even by health insurance organizations and public clinics. The actual Patch Adams story took place in the early 1970s, however, when the presence of a red nose in the hospital was perceived as a threat to the authority of rational, “scientific medicine.” The Patch Adams story is therefore a story of rebellion; a refusal to accept a dogma that identifies a good healing process with solemnity. This refusal challenges the alienated, technical approach of white-coat medicine by suggesting that medical personnel can be personal, warm, caring and –God forbid! – even funny. Patients do not suffer only from illness or their wounds, this doctrine proposes, but also from anxiety, self-doubt, helplessness, and boredom. Such suffering must be treated in some way, and the recovery from it is closely related to the recovery from the somatic ailment. Was clowning in the medical system such a novelty as it appeared to be at the time? A 1908 cover illustration of the supplement to the Parisian Le Petit Journal shows two clowns performing a stunt in a children’s ward of a London hospital. It is hard to believe that this clowns’ performance was a single occurrence. More probable is the assumption that the journal was reporting a new phenomenon. There is, however, little documentation of clowns’ involvement in hospital life in the first five decades of the twentieth century. In the 1960s the idea of employing humor in the healing process began to sprout. In Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins described his pioneering and successful self-treatment by extensive watching of comic films.1 In 1978, Raymond Moody published his Laugh After Laugh: The Healing Power of Humor.2 Twenty years later, Steven M. Sultanoff demonstrated how laughter minimizes the risk of cardiovascular disease and published his findings in a journal titled Therapeutic Humor.3 If humor was cautiously beginning to be perceived as potentially relevant to the healing process, the acceptance of clowns by the medical system required a conceptual change. After all, clowns and hospital staff belonged to quite different, even opposite, social categories. Clowns were part of the entertainment business, and not necessarily its most highly esteemed employees. Performing in “marginal” venues such as circus, cabaret, street fairs, and private parties, they were commenting on life by means of parody and satire, whereas hospital personnel – professionally trained physicians and nurses – were deeply involved in coping with serious, critical issues of life.

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Figure 4

Illustration from 1908 of clowns in hospital

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Change had to occur on both ends. Western medicine began to tolerate, and later even to cautiously accept various East Asian healing methods, herbal therapy, and other alternative techniques. This gradual (and limited) openness to traditional healing approaches of other cultures was combined with a growing awareness of the importance of the patient’s general well being. At about the same time, the concept of the “Modern Circus” developed in Europe. Young circus artists, sensitive to animal rights and eager to change the brassy character of the circus, created a new form of a single-ring “art circus” that was devoid of animal acts and theatrical in nature. Virtuoso physical theatre, acrobatics, and clowning became the focus of this modern circus, which often had a dramatic plot. In many cases, community work and performances in the periphery were also part of the agenda. One such circus, the Big Apple Circus, established itself in New York City in the early 1980s, and in 1986 it opened its clown care unit under the direction of the circus’s co-founder, Michael Christensen. The unit consisted of professional clowns that had been trained in hospital procedures and began to perform as “clown doctors” in pediatric wards. As the unit grew and developed, similar organizations were beginning to operate in Canada, Brazil, Australia, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and other European countries. “Clown doctors,” “Fools for Health,” “Red Noses,” and “Dream Doctors” are a few titles of the various groups. In a recent paper on the subject, Yosef Borenstein proposes the general term “Therapeutic Clowns” to describe the vocation.4 As clowns were beginning to work in hospital wards, research scientists began to evaluate their contributions to the patients’ healing process. A. J. Smerling and colleagues examined pre-operative anxiety in 292 pediatric patients, showing that the group exposed to treatment by medical clowns showed significantly lower levels of anxiety in comparison with the control group.5 Laura Vagnoli and her colleagues reaffirmed those results, reporting lower levels of anxiety among the parents as well as their children who had been visited by the clowns.6 Irena Vlckova and colleagues concluded that over 90 percent of the patients (and their parents) hospitalized at the Children’s Faculty Hospital in Brno, Slovakia, thought that visits by medical clowns improved their emotional condition.7 Ethnographic literature offers ample data on the affinity of healing and clowning in non-Western civilizations. In his comprehensive study of clowning, John Towsen notes that ritual clowns were found in 40 different cultures around the globe. “Much of the humor of the ceremonial clown,” he writes, “tends to be therapeutic, and may even include curing functions.”8 In many cultures, fools, clowns, and tricksters possess magical powers that allow them to engage in acts of healing. The trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians, for example, follows the transformation of the fool into a hero, a healer and preserver of the heritage. It is the clown’s tendency to mock decorum and to excel in behavior that is contrary to all the norms and values of the society in which he lives that endows him with special healing

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abilities. In the ritual context of his performance, profanity, physical caricature, inverted speech, even blasphemy and the (temporary) destruction of social taboos, are funny precisely because they demonstrate his complete knowledge of the sacred value system and his ability to juggle with it in a titillating way. With his ludicrous costume, often with make-up or a mask, the clown stands apart from the rest of the community and, while being hilarious, is also potentially dangerous and frightening, for he might expose hidden secrets, hypocrisy, and pretense, and lampoon anybody, especially the most respected, powerful members of the community. Among the Arizona and New Mexico Zuni people, members of the Newekwe clown society function both as jesters and as healers. In communal ceremonies, they are known for their outrageous behavior: they run around wildly, their bodies smeared with ashes, tossing bean bags and excrement into the crowd and soaking one another with buckets of dirty water or urine. Sometimes, with a bear’s paw on one hand and a wolf’s snout on their nose, they parody the masked performers that represent the ancestors in a sacred dance. They eat trash, insects, and excrement, apparently in order to immune themselves against the dangers of the potent medicines they handle. They drink filthy water, perform their activities in reverse and use inverted speech. They lampoon the medicine man and force him to adopt their rules of reversal. When he invites them to come and assist him in a healing rite, for example, he must ask them to leave, instead. As healers, the Newekwe clowns have the exclusive right to handle the extreme “hot” and “cold” drugs, which they rub into the painful area or spit into the patient’s mouth. They also dance and sing over the sick person, so it is the combination of their powers as healers and as performers that makes them unique. As Kimberly A. Christen puts it, “The Newekwe show the balance between their power to heal and their power to shock and entertain during performances in which they do both.”9 William Mitchell, who edited a collection of essays on clowning in Oceania, argues that clowning has important socio-cultural functions because it is a critical process. It is critical, he explains, both in the sense of its censorious pronouncements about others and in the sense of its ability to initiate change at a decisive juncture in human affairs. In either case, the work of the clown is avowedly political. The clown is passionately opinionated about the human condition and, via parody and burlesque, breaks the frames of proper behavior to instruct, criticize, and transform.10 The power to transform by means of social critique is certainly present in the history of the European clown and its ancestor, the fool. Unlike their counterparts in the South Pacific islands and North America, however, European fools were not actively involved in healing. Whether in the monastery, in church or at their king’s court, European jesters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were, however, acting foolishly in ways similar to those of the Newekwe. According to descriptions, the Feast of the Ass, which

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later developed into the Feast of Fools, was a perfect rite of reversal, full of transvestitism, sexual and scatological humor, both verbal and physical. Sometimes, the fools leading those festivals were “natural,” that is, imbeciles or dwarfs, hunchbacks, or others who suffered from physical deformity. While being repulsive, they were also considered extraordinarily potent, as they had been associated with Death (himself thought of as a fool) and therefore associated with the spirit world and with magic. These associations remained with the fool when he became “artificial,” that is, playing the part and in costume. The fool was also associated with animals (the ass, the fox, the cock) and therefore with a certain kind of animalistic sensuality and naive ignorance of norms of behavior, social structure, and sacred values. The presence of this contrary character was undoubtedly important, for in spite of many attempts by both church and royalty to abolish it altogether, it remained very much alive until the sixteenth century. In the English mummers’ plays, the fool often played the part of the comedic doctor.11 Some of the stock characters or archetypes of the Commedia in its various incarnations were born out of the paradigmatic Fool. In Molière’s plays, they are either the pompous, phony doctor or the hypochondriac. But these dramatic characters are already far removed from the ritual context in which the fool functioned. The clown found himself, in the ring or on the stage, associated with entertainment rather than with ritual. It would take many years for him to reinvent himself as clown doctor.

Hospitalization as a transformative process – the liminoid A sick or injured person who seeks medical help in a hospital is placed in what Turner would call a liminoid position – a transitional phase that resembles the liminal in rites of passage in indigenous societies.12 A health crisis brings the ailing person to the emergency room, where he (or she) is questioned, examined, and diagnosed. If they are to be hospitalized, they will be separated from the world outside and will subject themselves to the rules, regulations, and norms of the health institution (which the Danish film-maker Lars von Trier so aptly defined as The Kingdom).13 A variety of activities (or healing rites) that will be performed on the patient during hospitalization is aimed at transforming him (or her) from a state defined as “sick” (or ailing) to a state defined as “healthy” (or recovered). The body of the patient – their somatic being – is the focus of attention in this transformative process. Signals such as body temperature, pulse, blood pressure, and so on will be checked frequently and recorded in the medical chart. This chart, which accompanies the patient throughout the process, will often include cryptic information, which the patient cannot understand or interpret unassisted. Clinical definitions, blood counts and other lab results, X ray or MRI images are recorded in codes known to the medical staff, not to the patient (or their family). Hence, he or she is put in an inferior position

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of scarce knowledge and limited understanding that, in addition to his or her initial suffering, may induce a condition of helplessness. With their medical chart attached to a bed that is pushed by an orderly through corridors to elevators to additional corridors, the patient is being gradually separated from daily routines and from the rest of society. By the time they are admitted to a ward, they will be stripped of individual identity, status symbols, and social affiliations. Although nobody loses their name entirely, the patient will be often referred to as the carrier of a certain disease, or as the pre-operative patient, or as the patient by the door, the old one, the fat one, and so on. Their hospital gown is a uniform which marks their affiliation with other patients in a similar condition. They are all equals and peers now, even if in the world outside they have little in common. They are placed in the same space for the same reason. They had been assigned a room, which they usually share with other patients, whom they had not met previously. Now they eat together (often the same food), sleep together (lights are turned off at a fixed time for everybody), see and hear each other in pain, use the same bathroom. Their personal space is limited to a bed, which defines their state of being, and to narrow strips on three sides of that bed, that may be used by the medical staff and by visitors. Their beds and night tables look identical. Their uniform routine differs significantly from the one they followed outside and resembles in many ways the ordeal of the initiates in traditional rites of passage. This routine consists mainly of periodical check-ups and treatments, for which the patients often have to expose their bodies to the medical staff. Some of these procedures are unpleasant, even painful. Some will leave their bodies scarred forever. Their diet changes according to medical dictates. It may consist of little food, or none at all for some time. Like the initiates in rites of passage, patients are expected to be obedient, to cooperate with the “medicine men” – the figures of authority who presumably know what’s best for them. Finally, their admission and release from the ward is formally possible only with the signature of one of these specialists in a white coat. Once this signature is obtained, however, the patients are considered “transformed,” or recovered.

Dream Doctors and their healing techniques The data in the present chapter is based on my observations of the Dream Doctors at work in a hospital, the reports they post on their internet forum, and conversations with them, especially with Herzel Ziyoni, who initiated and developed (with Micky Bash) the pilot program of working with chronic adult patients at the hematology ward, the dialysis center, and the ambulatory oncology center at Ha’Emek Medical Center, Afula, Israel. Ziyoni is co-author of a paper on the work of medical clowns with adult patients. The piece was published in an Israeli medical journal in January 2008, but the

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data had been collected in 2004, when medical clowning was a relatively new discipline, especially in adult wards.14 The main finding of that paper is that the medical clown is uncertain and confused about his role, about the methods and techniques he should use with the patients and about his position in the medical space. This confusion, the authors found, was shared by the medical personnel and created a difficulty in coping with the challenges. On the positive side, it broadened the clown’s ability to make contact and to assist the medical staff. Four years later, Herzel and his colleagues have gained much experience and self confidence. Their role as medical clowns appears clearer today, even if its definition remains complex. In a recent publication of the Theatre department at the University of Haifa, this role was defined as follows: Medical clowning is an interdisciplinary therapeutic method that has developed in recent years and is aimed at assisting the patient through humor, folly, fantasy, games of pretense and other techniques. The objective of this method is to empower the patient and to help overcome anxieties, frustration and difficulties encountered by the patient and his family during hospitalization. This interactive method brings joy and relief to the patient, so that he/she develops a sense of control over his/ her condition and is able to better cooperate with those who are responsible for his/her recovery.15 Even with such a clear definition, what remains is a paradoxical figure that is characterized by confusion – a representative of the system and a subversive agent of chaos at the same time. On the one hand, the clown is affiliated with the medical staff. He has permission to walk into the patients’ rooms and engage them in silly shenanigans. The medical staff may even cooperate in this mischief, to signal that laughter is acceptable, even desired, in the process of healing. On the other hand, the clown, as an outsider, is the ally of the patient. Together, they conspire against the painful routine and its representatives. It is hard and perhaps unnecessary to settle this contradiction, which may be the source of the clown’s flexibility and improvisational power. Like other clowns, medical clowns use a variety of techniques to arouse laughter, high spirits and good moods. They do not necessarily analyze and categorize the techniques they use, but they recognize their distinctive qualities and functions. The fundamental structure defining all of these techniques is Interaction. Within this framework, one can identify parody, playfulness, reversal of order, chaos and fantasy. Interaction The interactive nature of the medical clown’s act seems to distinguish it from any other clown’s act. Whereas circus, cabaret, or street theatre clowns

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perform in a ring or on a stage, facing a crowd, the medical clown’s arena is that narrow strip near the patient’s bed. The “crowd” consists of the patient, one or two members of the patient’s family (especially in the case of pediatric patients), and an occasional staff member (there are exceptions, of course, and they will be addressed later). The physical proximity of the clown to his/her “spectators” creates intimacy and calls for undertone and suggestion, rather than exaggeration and grandeur. The act depends, therefore, very much on the patient’s response to the initial stimulus. I have witnessed a very talented clown, named Yaron (Sancho) Goshen, attempting, with great difficulty, to lure an adolescent female patient into silly interaction. There were several obstacles in that case: for lack of space in the ward, the girl’s bed was placed in the corridor, which is a public domain. A patient – especially a teenager – is more self-conscious in a public space and, therefore, less likely to respond in a silly manner. The patient’s father, who was sitting on the edge of his daughter’s bed, was obviously ambivalent about Sancho’s attempts. He did get up and walk a few steps away, as if to allow for an interaction to develop, but his daughter was turning around, away from Sancho, to get her father’s approval. Sancho tried engaging the girl in several ways and from surprising positions. He kept disappearing behind the white screen that was supposed to give the patient some privacy, then popped out from behind it like Jack in the Box. The patient’s reaction was a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. It was obvious that she appreciated the effort, but would not make the extra step necessary for the birth of an interactive event (it is reasonable to assume that my presence there – distant and silent as it was – did not help much to encourage her to interact with the clown). It was only after Sancho started playing with a wheelchair that was nearby that the girl seemed to warm up towards him. She agreed to be pushed in it and to participate in visiting other patients in the ward, as if she and Sancho were a team. She was timid throughout, but there was no doubt about her increased degree of cooperation. Medical clowning techniques vary and depend not only on the personal temperament, talent, and intuition of each individual clown, but also on the various schools of thought that exist. In Israel, for example, the issue of working alone or in pairs splits the medical clowns’ community in two. The supporters of the pair-team approach argue that the challenges that a clown faces should not be faced alone. The clown encounters chronic and terminal disease, depression, and pain. He needs to be able to share his experiences with a partner. He needs to be able to rely on a partner. In solitude, he is too vulnerable and might be hurt or prove ineffective. Opponents to this approach admit that there are obvious advantages to working in pairs (and they sometimes do that), but there is also a serious disadvantage: “with a partner,” Herzel explains, “you are not really open to interaction with the patient. You interact with your partner instead, and you may miss

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the important, tender points.”16 The patient, in a position of passive spectatorship, is less inclined to engage in adventurous, meaningful interaction, and so is the clown. To illustrate this, Herzel recounts how he played the romantic suitor to a woman who had had a double mastectomy. Dancing and serenading her in gibberish that fused Spanish and Italian sounds, he acted the perfect Latino lover and felt how, in response, she began to glow. Herzel concludes, “I would have never tried it, had I been working with my partner, Micky, at the time. This kind of act is a one-on-one act. It calls for mutual consent, for trust and a desire to transform.” With the clown appearing regularly at the ward (twice a week, from morning till early afternoon), many chronic patients expect his visit as the pleasant part of their routine. Some, Herzel relates, prepare for his visit by collecting jokes they can tell him. “They keep their best jokes for me,” he says. “I stand there, not saying one word, and they make each other laugh by telling jokes.” After some sessions, interaction may be initiated by the patient. Such is the case with N, a middle-aged female dialysis patient, who turns on the ring tone of her mobile phone as soon as she notices Herzel coming in. The ring tone is of Middle Eastern orchestral dance music – a very popular tune – and by playing it, the patient signals to the clown that she expects him to dance. Herzel reacts in a wild parody of undulating, erotic belly dancing, as if he were the patient’s puppet. She is in control. She is empowered. She watches him dance, with a huge smile on her face. He flirts with her and she responds, batting her eyelashes. Here, the patient activates the clown. Important partners in this comic interaction are staff members on duty. Doctors, nurses, kitchen, and cleaning staff, all know the medical clowns by now. With the cleaning personnel, the clowns developed a greeting exchange that is based on “bonjorno” and develops into Italian-sounding gibberish. Earlier, in 2004, frictions were not uncommon, and in more than one discussion, the clowns were asked to tone down their presence, to respect the hospital rules, and so on. Having met with the hospital’s general manager, however, it seemed that the ice was broken. The manager invited the four clowns to a staff meeting at the beginning of the year. She told them that the feedback she was getting about their work was excellent and she would like to hear their plans and objectives for the coming year. When they walked out of her office, they saw the hospital’s department heads waiting for their meeting with the general manager. They realized they had been accepted. It is clear in this case that the staff is happy to cooperate with the clowns. Herzel recalls a senior doctor chasing him once with a syringe full of water, squirting and shouting throughout the ward. “He was becoming a clown,” says Herzel, “and when the staff takes part in my clowning, it works miracles on the patients because they see authority turned upside down.”

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Parody As doctors are at the top of the social pyramid in the hospital microcosm, it is almost a duty for the clown to lampoon them. Mock check-ups, especially the taking of temperature and pulse are routine gags. Pretend consultations and mock emergency operations are also common. On one occasion, Herzel recalls arriving in the pediatric ward and hearing a child crying loudly. He explains that in such situations, the clown must be careful, as his presence might sometimes make things worse. While listening to the sobbing, he patiently wrote down a sort of notation of the crying sounds, then took out his soap bubbles and explained to the child that they were radioactive; they should not touch his body. The child was still crying until one bubble exploded on his face. At that point, Herzel made a decision to create a mock radioactive emergency. Running to the door, he loudly announced the emergency to everybody in the ward, breaking the hospital decorum of speaking in a low voice. He added, shouting, that he had everything under control. He then ran back to the child’s bedside and wiped his face with too many paper towels. By that time, the child started laughing. Parody is not limited to the reality of hospital life, however. Often, as Herzel relates, it has to do with the patient’s professional world. P was in charge of the dairy farm in his kibbutz before he was hospitalized at Ha’Emek Medical Center. Herzel teased him about that. “I bet you cannot milk a cow,” he said, blowing into a latex surgical glove to simulate a cow’s udders. The patient took up the challenge and demonstrated how to milk a cow, with Herzel playing the cow, placing the inflated glove first on his belly, then close to his backside, with everybody around applauding and laughing. Playfulness When you open your mouth wide and stick out your tongue, saying “Ah,” following the doctor’s orders, you realize that you must perform well and efficiently. The doctor is gathering important data from parts inside your body that are normally hidden from sight. Your responsibility is to facilitate this examination by opening up to the doctor’s penetrating gaze. The same physical act can be performed, however, to express contempt, to tease, or to provoke another person humorously. With the clown, you can play a double game: stick out your tongue, lampooning the familiar check-up routine, and at the same time, grimace and make funny sounds, which you would never dare make during the normal procedure. The clown would most probably stick out his own tongue in response– a thing the doctor would never do, unless his name is Patch Adams. This tongue-sticking dialogue could develop in several playful ways: whose tongue is the longest and reaches closest to the nose, or who contorts his face in the funniest way while sticking out his tongue, or who produces the craziest sounds to accompany the

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tongue-sticking, or a simple, repetitious action-reaction routine. In all cases, the clown and the patient perform a comic critique of the clinical examination. This is a “licensed” critique, since the clown, as we pointed out, is both an insider and outsider. This critique can empower the patient and, particularly, it can mentally prepare him for the next check-up. For if in the next one, the patient already recognizes a playful potential (that will be executed later, during the session with the clown), it will be easier for him. An excellent example of the usefulness of inventing games is the case of Sancho and the MRI. Adults are usually told that lying absolutely still is a must for this expensive procedure. With children, it is more difficult. Although it is not painful in any way, the cylinder in which the patient must lie motionless for some time can induce claustrophobia and the loud hum of the magnet may be frightening. At Ha’Emek Medical Center, the injection of a sedative was the common solution to the problem. Sedated, the child would be motionless for the entire procedure. Drugging a child has its dangers, however, and it became redundant from the day Sancho began his involvement in that examination. In several children’s games, being still or freezing in the midst of motion are favorite challenges that reward the child with physical pleasure and a sense of control. Using this, the clown invents playful rules that are known only to him and to the child patient. The child wishes to win this game by lying perfectly still, despite the oppressive space and the frightening noise. Naturally, when he comes out a winner, he receives a prize from the clown and, together, they go to the nurses’ station to give back the unused syringe. A useful observation made by a few of the Dream Doctors is that whereas the medical staff focuses on the sick and dysfunctional aspects of the patient, the clowns focus on the healthy, positive elements. They often have to look for them, stimulate and discover them, as they may be invisible in the presence of the ailment. “I always look for the power within the patient,” Herzel says, demonstrating this with the story of the musician who had been diagnosed with cancer. Since the day he had received that diagnosis, he told Herzel, he stopped playing his favorite instruments – the fiddle and the oud (a Middle Eastern string instrument, similar to the lute). Herzel responded by saying that he, too, played and began playing an imaginary oud, holding it in his hands and producing the sound with his tongue. The patient was obviously amused and appreciative of the clown’s ability to accurately mimic the sound of the string instrument. It was a surprise, however, that following that entertaining session, he decided to start playing again – a decision that apparently marked a significant improvement in his mood and general well being. Playfulness works well with mentally challenged patients, Herzel discovered. With an Alzheimer patient, who used to be a captain in the Soviet army during World War II, he developed a special game: Herzel would come in, riding an imaginary horse. Both men would draw imaginary pistols and

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shoot at each other. “We play together,” Herzel explains, “Both of us are doing total theatre.” Since the patient did not remember having played the game before, they repeated the same act every time – twice a week for six months. Whereas Herzel would change the act slightly, in order not to bore himself, the patient was quite happy to repeat it in exactly the same way. Chaos and reversal of order Hospitals must appear organized, clean, and efficient. Clowns stand for the opposite. They come to the ward and disrupt the order, and when they leave, this order appears more necessary than ever. Herzel and his partner, Micky, announce their arrival in the hospital by sounding the trumpet (Figure 5). Herzel picks an empty bed and lies on it, blowing his long horn, while Micky pushes the bed, taking Herzel on a noisy trip around the hospital. By now, everybody knows that the clowns have arrived. Herzel decides that he is the best opera singer in the world. He sings a few arias and promotes himself among the appreciative patients. Each patient gets a percussion instrument, and in an instant – to the amazement of the department head – the ward turns into a huge orchestra hall and a musical performance begins.

Figure 5 “Dream Doctor” Herzel Ziyoni at work at the Ha’emek Medical Center (Photograph courtesy of Herzel Ziyoni)

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Fantasy Leaving the hospital behind, clowns and patients take imaginary trips together. Beds turn into ships or airplanes, even clouds or giant birds. Children take these trips quite easily. They tell the clowns where they wish to be, and within a second, they are there. With adults the preparations for the voyage may take longer, but the experience can be as intense. Herzel used to work with a 30-year old woman with cancer. He followed her from one ward to another for two years, as she was getting different kinds of treatment. During that time, they developed a method of going on fantasy tours together. Herzel would blow the oukarina, imitating the sounds of different birds. The patient would listen and choose a destination for the trip – a place where she wanted to be. Herzel would then play the characters in that place. The fantasy would usually take place in the rain forest, but in that given location, everything was improvised. After a few months, the patient also bought an oukarina and the two would create some elaborate fantasies. In some cases, Herzel observes, they played in a secretive manner. In other cases, they performed grand theatre for the enjoyment of others. When it became clear that the disease had reached a terminal state and the patient was released from the hospital to die at her own home, Herzel felt that he could not conform with the norm that limits the work of the clown to the hospital facility. Having played with her for two years, he felt that he had to visit her at home, as she was his friend and needed him. In that phase, she was getting morphine, but the fantasy trips with the clown remained a kind of consolation for her. Using gibberish is a very common technique for this purpose. By talking in an invented, nonsense language, the clown seems to pretend that he is “not from here,” but rather from another country or another reality altogether. When the patient reacts to this suggestion – by laughing, even if he does not understand the “dialect,” or by responding somehow – he approves of the idea of leaving the reality of the hospital. The patient and the clown are now allies who share the same language, known to them alone (with children, one parent or both may participate). This secret language, and the silly acts associated with it, can be used as a subversive instrument against the superiority of the medical staff that seems “to know best.” Vulnerability This is not a technique, but rather an important quality inherent in the clown as a character, or in some types of clowns. The clown that falls or gets slapped repeatedly, the clown who is afraid of silly things, the clown who naively attempts to perform grand, impossible acts when he cannot successfully complete the simplest, most mundane undertaking, such as tying his shoe laces – this clown is vulnerable and his vulnerability is the source of our pleasure when we watch him.

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In the hierarchical structure of the hospital, nothing can be more valuable to the patient than a person lower than him/her in status; a person who might be ignorant about the rules and regulations of the place, incapable of going through the basic routines, and so on. If this person is also eager to learn, enthusiastic about making new contacts, and charming in his/ her silliness, the patient can become his tutor and mentor in the hospital “kingdom.” This empowering process is funny and pleasurable and therefore most rewarding. “It is important for the patient to see a person who may be lower than him in status,” comments Herzel when he recalls an interaction with a patient who tended to curse and to threaten everybody with physical violence. This man was big and powerful, and the clown would be terrorized by his screaming and foul language. Shaking intensely, he would stand as far as possible from the man and react to his threats. This unusual reaction (most people would reprimand the patient, or call the security guard) would cause laughter and turn the real aggression of the patient into a charade. He would continue with his threats, but this time, with the objective of terrorizing the clown in the new game they invented. * * * Herzel, Sancho, and 17 other Dream Doctors are about to complete their course of academic studies at the University of Haifa. As they are all professional, experienced clowns, who had graduated from various theatre schools and acting conservatories, it was not necessary to teach them clowning. The practical aspect of the program’s curriculum consisted of classes in improvisation, movement and dance, dramatization of autobiographical materials, puppet theatre, musical therapy, and costume design. Among the theoretical courses were titles such as History of Medicine, Introduction to Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Narrative Medicine. During their studies at the university, the Dream Doctors continued their work in various hospitals, while some of their teachers and lecturers began to be actively involved in their work, either as consultants or as researchers. One Dream Doctor, Shoshi – a woman in her mid-thirties – became an expert on detecting sexual harassment cases in hospitalized girls. Herzel and his partner Micky were pioneers in the adult wards, working with chronic patients at the dialysis center and the ambulatory oncology center. Two other members – Dudi and Jerome – have been part of medical delegations that work with AIDS and tuberculosis patients in refugee camps in Africa. In the next few years, medical clowning may not only become a legitimate profession, but also a general discipline from which new specialties will emerge. This depends, to an extent, on the development of training programs and on further research in the field.

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Notes 1. Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. New York: W. W. Norton, 1964. 2. Raymond Moody, Laugh After Laugh: The Healing Power of Humor. Jacksonville, FL: Headwaters Press, 1978. 3. S. Sultanoff , “Humor and Wellness: Melding the Present and the Future, Humor and Heart Disease,” Therapeutic Humor 12 (1998): 1–2. 4. Y. Bornstein, “The Impact of Medical Clowns on Hospitalized Patients,” Harefuah 147 (2008): 30–2. 5. A. J. Smerling, E. Scolnick, E. Bagiella, et al., “Preoperative Clown Therapy for Pediatric Patients,” Anesthesia & Analgesia 88 (1999). 6. L. Vagnoli et al., “Clown Doctors as Treatment for Preoperative Anxiety in Children: A Randomized, Prospective Study,” Pediatrics 116.4 (2005): 1013. 7. This work was done for Rote Nasen (Red Noses), Clown doctors International – a Vienna-based organization that coordinates the work and training of medical clowns in six central European countries – and it is posted on the web site, http://www.rotenasen.at/ 8. John H. Towsen, Clowns. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1976, 13. 9. Kimberly A. Christen, Clown and Trickster: An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture. Denver, Co: ABC-CLIO, 1998, 71–2, 155–6. 10. William E. Mitchell (ed.), Clowning as Critical Practice: Performance Humor in the South Pacific. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, viii. In this volume, Mitchell offers a beautiful description of the Niyel Festival of the Wape people of Papua New Guinea. This festival celebrates a system in which the association of clowning and healing is most fundamental. 11. Fool, Europe – entry in Christen, Clowns and Tricksters, 53. 12. I believe that the continuum Liminal-Liminoid is best explained in two of Turner’s essays: “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality,” in Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello. Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1977, 33–58, and “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, Ritual,” in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, 20–60. 13. This interpretation relates mostly to countries (such as Canada, England, France, and other West, North, and Central European countries) that have socialized medicine. In such countries, most of the population enjoys the services of public hospitals that are paid for by the state’s medical insurance plan. 14. R. Scheyer, O. Nuttman-Shwartz, and H. Ziyoni, “The Definition of the Medical Clown’s Role with Adult Patients,” Harefua 147.1 (2008): 25–9, 95. 15. Publicity brochure (in Hebrew), Theatre Department, the University of Haifa, 2008. 16. This quote and the ones that follow are from an interview with Herzel Ziyoni, conducted by the author on 6 August 2008, at his home in Pardes Hanna.

19 Restored Restored Behavior or the Emperor of California Roll: 1989–90 Japanese Imperial Rites of Funeral and Enthronement Takahashi Yuichiro Restored restored behavior Among Richard Schechner’s contributions to the development of performance studies, the concept of “Restoration of Behavior,” explored in Between Theater and Anthropology1 is significant because it opens up ways to think about how memories and identities, both individual and collective, embodied and discursive, are constituted through repetitive performances. From the notion that all behavior is restored, Schechner goes on to suggest that if our daily lives are a continuous series of restored behavior, framed theatrical performances can be viewed as “restored restored behavior.”2 Taking a cue from the idea that doubly restored staged performance provides a heightened mode of experience, I intend to apply the notion of “Restored Behavior” to ritual performances observed in the Japanese Imperial Court. The regime change that brought about the demise of the centuries-old feudal Shogunate government in 1868 placed the Emperor at the symbolic center of power. Rituals, which by then, had become half-forgotten, were restored with much public fanfare. The theatricalization of the Imperial Court, achieved in part through reiteration of ritual performances throughout the geographical space within the emerging empire, successfully infused the sense of being an organic part of a homogeneous nation in the minds of the newly fashioned Japanese Imperial subjects. What fascinates and intrigues me at the same time is that rituals restored at the end of the nineteenth century were once again “restored” after the Emperor renounced his sovereignty following Japan’s surrender in 1945. In this chapter, I will attempt to analyze, using Schechner’s concept of “Restoration of Behavior,” the nature and the implications of the ritual ceremonies of the Japanese Imperial Family, the performance of which remains integral to their continued existence. From the death of Emperor Hirohito in January 1989, until the enthronement of his son in November 1990, a series of ritual and secular performances took place in and around the 264

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Imperial Palace. Under the constitutional separation of the Church and State, some were observed as functions of the state and some as private ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family. While the former were fully televised, the latter were only partially made visible, as if to preserve the aura that surrounds the Emperor. I argue that the Emperor, if he is still functional, functions by concealment and revelation, by going back and forth between the two demarcated spaces of visibility and invisibility. The year 1868 is considered a turning point in Japanese history. It ushered in modernization (read Westernization) that would eventually transform Japan into a minor colonial power. Modernization was achieved, in a strangely atavistic way, through the “restoration” of direct Imperial rule. The political leaders at the time wished to recycle the authority of the Emperor for their project of nation-building. By the century’s end, a loose bundle of animistic beliefs and practices was unified into “State Shinto,” a supra-religious regime legitimizing Imperial rule. Thus the 1889 constitution positioned the Emperor as being “sacred and inviolable (Ito ¯).” As Shinto was foregrounded, the Imperial Family shied away from Buddhism. In 1870, two years into the restoration, the third anniversary of the death of the father of Emperor Meiji was observed in Shinto style, although he had a Buddhist funeral. Weddings and other celebrations in the Imperial Family were made into elaborate Shinto rituals. When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, a series of rituals was “restored” according to the tenets of (by this time firmly established) State Shinto.

“Adaptation Disorder” of the Princess My interests in ritual performances of the Imperial Family grew in response to the attention-grabbing reports made by the tabloid press of an “adaptation disorder” of the Crown Princess. In his 2006 press interview, the Crown Prince suggested that it would take longer for his wife to resume participation in Kyuchu-Saishi (translated on the Imperial Household Agency’s web site as ‘ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family’) than for her to return to official duties.3 I must confess that “ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family” was an expression that I came across for the first time in my life. Princess Masako, daughter of a former Japanese ambassador to the United Nations, a Harvard graduate who joined the Japanese diplomatic service following in her father’s footsteps, married into the Imperial Family in 1993. Charming and intelligent, the Princess instantly became a popular icon. Some envisioned in her a new female role in the still male-dominated Imperial Family. But she was not as happy as some people supposed her to be. Ben Hills, former Sydney Morning Herald Tokyo correspondent who authored Princess Masako (2006), subtitled his book “Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne.” Masako, who had grown up outside the Chrysanthemum Curtains,

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had a hard time adjusting herself to the unique manners and customs of the Imperial Family, the origin of which, in mythology, goes back 125 generations to the legendary first emperor. The stress-ridden Princess was diagnosed as having adaptation disorder. She began to cancel her public appearances. As her husband’s remarks indicated, the princess’s perturbed mental condition was likely to have been caused by the pressure to perform “ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family.”

Ritual Ceremonies of the Imperial Family Not an Imperial watcher, I had been unaware that rituals special to the Imperial Family were taking place at the shrines deep inside the palace grounds.4 Roland Barthes once described Tokyo as a capital with a void at its center. According to Barthes, “[t]he entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen.”5 I sense an air of secrecy that surrounds the Imperial Family. The shrines, a slightly larger one in the center for the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu, another for the Imperial ancestors, and the last for the myriad of deities reflecting the pantheistic aspect of the Shinto religion, do not appear on the map of the palace posted on the Imperial Household Agency’s web site. Every year I see on TV the Emperor and his family standing cheerfully on the balcony of the palace, delivering their New Year’s message to the flag-waving crowd on 2 January. I have not been taught, however, what rituals are performed inside the palace during the New Year holidays. People are kept in the dark as to the Imperial Family’s personal faith. But if they have a faith, it must be Shinto. The Emperor, after all, is believed by some to be the direct descendent of the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu. Of interest is the fact that the Emperor has continued to perform ritual ceremonies even after he renounced his divine status. On the day when the current US-imposed constitution took effect, Emperor Hirohito (1901–1989) performed a ritual at the Shrine of Amaterasu, as his grandfather did before him on the day he promulgated the Imperial Constitution. Hirohito’s act was “in contradiction to the spirit of the new constitution.”6 In the ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family, the Emperor offers his prayers, conveys his gratitude, and reports what is happening to his great ancestor Amaterasu, to his ancestral spirits, and to other Shinto gods. Annually scheduled rites include the anniversaries of the death of the legendary first emperor, of the deaths of the Emperor’s immediate predecessors. Ad-hoc rites, such as those in which he prays for a safe journey abroad, are also performed. While important rituals are performed by the Emperor himself, the head of his staff in charge of rituals officiates at others. Rituals are carried out every single day of the year. He sends a chamberlain every morning to the shrines to offer a prayer to Amaterasu. Food is also served

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to Amaterasu every day. Female staff from his ritual department offer rice, fish, and sake to the goddess as if she were present on site, saying something like “let me offer a slice of such and such fish.”7 Three times a month, on the first, the tenth, and the twentieth, the food offering becomes more elaborate. The Emperor attends the ceremony himself on the first of every month. Niinamesai, considered the most important of the ritual ceremonies, is yet another version of food offering. On the evening of 22 November, the Emperor invites Amaterasu and other gods to a feast of newly harvested rice and specially prepared dishes for the occasion, entertains them for the night, and sends them back to heaven after another meal shared in the wee hours of the morning. Shinto, as practiced by the Imperial Family, is unique in that it employs no priests or mediators. The Emperor is the king, the priest, and the supplicant at the same time. The Emperor, the Empress, the Crown Prince, and the Crown Princess, apart from the staff from his ritual department, are the only people allowed inside the shrine buildings in the Palace grounds. Other members of the family, who have obligations to attend the rituals, do so in the courtyard outside. Those who go inside, including the Emperor, must perform a purification rite. As Shinto abhors pollution, and as the rituals discussed here concern matters between the Sun-Goddess and the Emperor, purification is not a token gesture. Ritual bathing must be performed following strict procedures. Women having their period are denied access to the rituals as they are considered “polluted.” To perform all these rituals faultlessly, I suppose one needs to possess strong faith. If you did not grow up inside the Chrysanthemum Curtains, you must either depend on your will-power to distill the belief system into you or put on a make-belief performance. Hara quotes from the diary of Hirohito’s younger brother written in 1936, shortly after he began attending the rituals as an adult member of the family.8 Prince Takamatsu, having grown up in a separate palace from his elder brother’s, had few opportunities to associate himself with the rituals of the Imperial Family. In the diary, he expresses discomfort in his inability to reconcile Shinto with what he calls the “materialistic” education that he had received in school.

Ritual ceremonies as “restoration of behavior” It is significant that nearly all of the rituals of the Imperial Family were additions made after the regime change of 1868. They were either restored or invented by the government, which eagerly sought to publicize its own image. In the preceding regime, people had little knowledge of the Emperor while the Shogun was the de facto ruler. State Shinto inculcated the belief that all Japanese were children of the living god, whose universal obligation was to revere the Emperor and to sacrifice their lives to defend him and his empire. This brand of new Shinto was, through ritual practices, performatively

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sedimented into the minds and the bodies of the Japanese. Ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family became the models of numerous ceremonies iterated throughout the land of the rising sun. Among the rituals that the Emperor performs today, only a few date back to the pre-1868 period. 9 The origins of the rest are shrouded in myth. The process of (re)creating rituals from a distant past or from a non-existent origin is what Richard Schechner describes as “restored behavior.” Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; … The original “truth” or “source” of the behavior may be lost, ignored, or contradicted – even while this truth or source is apparently being honored and observed.10 An analogous notion is Eric Hobsbawm’s “invented tradition,” which, by seeking “to inculcate values and norms of behavior by repetitions, automatically implies continuity with the past.” 11 Hobsbawm emphasizes the relevance of invented traditions to “another historical innovation,” which is the “nation.”12 It was in the project of creating a unified nation that the ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family were restored.

The promulgation of the 1889 Constitution To illustrate, let us consider the proceedings of the day in 1889 on which Japan’s first constitution (known as the Meiji Imperial Constitution) was promulgated. The event exemplified “restored behavior” because it sought to recreate an imagined past (direct rule by the Emperor). At the center was the Emperor, who emerged from the invisibility of an enclosed sanctuary and moved, via the official space of the palace, into a public space of the parade where he was made visible to everyone. It is tempting to compare the appearance of the Emperor in private and public spheres to the notion of the king’s two bodies: the “body natural” and the “body politic” proposed by Ernest Kantorowicz.13 I would argue, however, that the Japanese Emperor, by performing in different spatial environments, yet retaining a single body, manifested the idea of a divine king reigning over his people. His “public” performances were “restored” to strengthen the myth of his divine origin. The day’s proceedings were in three parts. The first part was performed in the shrines dedicated to Amaterasu and to other imperial ancestors. Alone, in his formal Japanese attire, the Emperor offered an oath or prayer called tsugebumi. He told his ancestral gods that the form of his government would not change, but “in parallel with the advance of civilization,” he thought it expedient to establish a constitution. The tsugebumi, written in ornate and archaic Japanese can be considered another form of “restoration.” It began

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with the sentence: “We, the Successor to the prosperous Throne of Our Predecessors, do humbly and solemnly swear to the Imperial Founder of Our House and to Our other Imperial Ancestors that, in pursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the Earth, We shall maintain and secure from decline the ancient form of the government.”14 In the second and the third parts, his attire was changed from Japanese to Western, from ritual to secular. He appeared in the uniform of the Commander in Chief of his Imperial Army. The space chosen for the second part was the Throne Room of the palace. Although the palace, completed just in time for the promulgation, was Japanese in architecture, the interior of the most important space, the Throne Room, had Western features incorporated along with the furniture imported from Germany.15 There, surrounded by his ministers and generals, the diplomatic corps, and a few select reporters, the Emperor stood in front of his throne (a Western-style chair) and declared the promulgation of the constitution. It was only from the sacred body of the Emperor that Japan’s constitution could come into being. In the third part, the event moved for the first time outside the palace in the form of a parade, exposing the body of the Emperor to public view. In the middle of the parade, the Emperor and the Empress sat in a horse-drawn carriage imported from the United Kingdom. The parade ended at a military drill field where the Emperor reviewed his troops. The first part of the day began in the sacred space of worship where the Emperor remained hidden. The next part, the promulgation, took place in the stately, but secular Throne Room. It was in this official space that his body was presented to the view of a privileged few. In the third part, the space used was the streets outside the palace, where his body was seen by the public. The gaze, however, worked reciprocally. People saw the Emperor, and the Emperor saw his people. The Emperor’s gaze cast upon the people turned them into his subjects. By extending his gaze, like the soldiers he reviewed afterwards, the Emperor fashioned a uniform, homogenous nation. The day ended with the Emperor returning to the invisible space of the palace where nothing could be seen behind the foliage. The palace, I would argue, was not an empty space such as Barthes talked about. It was a spiritually charged topos. The Emperor moved to and fro between the invisible space of communion with the gods and the visible space of the state where he gazed and was gazed at.

Hirohito’s funeral, Akihito’s enthronement Skip 100 years to 7 January 1989, when Meiji’s grandson Hirohito died at the age of 87. After a long period of wake that lasted nearly fifty nights and was observed by the Imperial Family members and a prominent few with special invitation, the funeral service was performed on 24 February. To avoid the

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pollution associated with death, the funeral was held outside the palace in Shinjuku-Gyoen, public gardens once owned by the Imperial Family, where the funeral of Hirohito’s father was also carried out. In the funerary rite, Akihito read his tsugebumi (oath/prayer) praising the career of his father and expressing his sorrow. After that, Shinto symbols such as a torii gate were removed from the altar to make way for a secular state ceremony. The Prime Minister, the Speakers of the two Houses of the Diet, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, representing the administrative, the legislative, and the judicial branches of the government read eulogies. Respects were paid by foreign dignitaries including George H. W. Bush (who was US President at the time) and the Duke of Edinburgh who, in consideration for the anti-Japanese sentiment among British war veterans, made a bow, not to Hirohito’s coffin, but to his son. An extended wake, men in old-fashioned costume who carried the coffin, a ritual centered on the Emperor’s reading of tsugebumi, and a burial at dusk,16 observed by the Imperial Family members only; what seemed to me as quaint was explained as traditional. For a long time, it had been customary for Japanese Emperors to have a Buddhist funeral. A Shinto funeral goes back only to that of Emperor Meiji, Hirohito’s grandfather. Hirohito’s funeral, however, had to be different from his two predecessors because the laws that governed the funeral and the accession of the Emperor, made in time for Meiji’s death, were annulled in 1946. In the main, however, Hirohito’s funeral was no different from his father’s. The hearse changed from an ox-drawn carriage to an automobile. The new Emperor wore a morning coat instead of Japanese garb. Most importantly, to comply with the separation of Church and State, lines were drawn between the religious rites of the Imperial Family and the secular functions of the state. The rite in which Hirohito’s coffin was placed in the hearse belonged to the former. The motorcade to the funeral belonged to the latter. The first part of the funeral in which the new emperor read his tsugebumi, oath/prayer, was the former. The second part of the funeral in which the assembled paid their respects, was the latter. The day, however, proceeded without visible breaks between the two. Hirohito’s funeral was a succession of continuous events. It was a restoration of a restoration made in 1912 for the funeral of his grandfather. After one year’s mourning, the new Emperor resumed the ritual ceremonies of his family. In November the following year, the time came for him to publicly declare his enthronement and to observe his first annual food offering ritual to Amaterasu. The enthronement took place on 12 November 1990. The media, in general, emphasized the tradition that went back to time immemorial. Commentaries were centered around paraphernalia, such as the style and the color of the clothes worn by the Emperor and the Empress, the thrones, which were like large covered podiums on which they stood, and the designs that appeared on decorative banners, and so on.

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While their ancient origins were explained in detail, very little was said on how selectively and strategically they were used, and how they were combined with more recent inventions. Attempts at divulgating “restored” aspects of the event were few. Emperor Akihito, in “traditional attire that only the Japanese Emperor was allowed to wear,” mounted the throne, still hidden behind the curtains. As the curtains were drawn open to reveal his (once sacred) body, he proclaimed himself to be the new Emperor. He needed no outside authority to be enthroned. The Emperor, as his father and grandfather had done (in contradiction to the spirit of the present-day constitution), visited the Shrine of Amaterasu in the Palace grounds earlier the same day, to report to the Goddess what he was about to do. Later, during the ceremony, when he proclaimed himself to be the Emperor, the Prime Minister, as his predecessors had done (but honoring the spirit of democracy), led the applause of “banzai,” not from the courtyard below as a humble subject, but on the floor of the palace. Foreign guests, this time including Charles (one notch up from his father who attended Hirohito’s funeral) and Diana representing Buckingham Palace, were excused from joining the applause.17 In terms of space, the movement of the Emperor on the day of the enthronement repeated the same three-tier structure of his great-grandfather Meiji on the day he promulgated the constitution. The first phase of the enthronement began in the shrines inside the palace where nobody could see him. Then he moved to the official space of the palace, where he declared his succession in front of the select audience. In the third phase, he moved outside the palace in a parade, exposing his body for anybody there to see. The further he moved, the more visible he became. Power, which was latent in the invisibility of the shrines, was made manifest by his appearance in ceremonious performances.

Controversies surrounding Daijo ¯ sai Other things, however, were not done until later, when the enthronement was over and foreign guests were safely on their way home. The succession of the Japanese Emperor required yet another, controversial, ritual to be completed. I mentioned above that Niinamesai, the ritual in which the Emperor shares newly harvested food with Amaterasu and other gods, is considered the most important of the rituals of the Imperial Family. The first Niinamesai that the Emperor performs after the enthronement is called Daijo¯sai. Whereas the annual Niinamesai is performed at the shrines inside the palace, Daijo¯sai requires construction of two wooden buildings, to be taken down only when the ritual is over. Details of what transpires inside are not disclosed. But the interior plans of the buildings, which have been known to the public for decades, have spawned a number of speculations. Attention is focused on the bedding placed in both buildings. Some believe

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that the Emperor performs a sacred intercourse. The theory put forward by folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu is oft-quoted. He thinks that the Emperor waits there for the “imperial spirit” to enter his body. There seems to be no doubt that some kind of communion takes place. Daijo¯sai, initiated by Emperor Jito ¯ in 673, is yet another example of “restored behavior.” It had not been observed for more than two centuries, due probably to the poor financial state of the Imperial Family, until it was restored in 1687. Despite the left-wing protests, Daijo¯sai was carried out on the night of 22 November, 11 days after the enthronement. The Emperor, who had received a strict purification rite, went into one building, did something, came out, and went into another, presumably repeating the same process, in a ritual that ended before dawn. An infrared TV camera placed outside caught the figure of the Emperor dressed in white going in, but no more could be seen. Some 700 invited guests, including the Prime Minister, watched from the outside. But as for other viewers in front of their TV screens, they saw the Emperor going in, and nothing more. No non-Japanese were invited.

Emperor of the California Roll (in place of a conclusion) Ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family are now confined within the circle of his family members. But until the end of World War II, they were also matters of state. The tsugebumi (oath/prayer), read by the Emperor in front of his gods on the day of the promulgation of the Meiji Imperial Constitution, was published with the text of the constitution. On public holidays, the days on which the Emperor performed rituals, ceremonies toward the same end were held simultaneously outside of the palace, especially at schools. On some occasions people were forced to make a deep bow in the direction of the palace at the moment when the Emperor was supposed to be performing a ritual action. The space of the nation was made homogeneous and the time synchronized by being linked to the Emperor’s rituals. Japan was a theatre state with the Emperor playing the leading role. It seems strange that the rituals restored towards the end of the nineteenth century to legitimize Imperial rule were restored again for the rites of succession of the present Emperor. The Emperor is supposed to have renounced divinity to become “the symbol of the state and the unity of the people (Article 1)” under the 1946 constitution. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the allied forces that occupied Japan, in an attempt to demythify the Emperor, ordered a name change. Niinamesai became Labor Thanksgiving Day. What was Emperor Meiji’s Birthday is now called Culture Day. The majority of the people seem to enjoy these legal holidays without much regard for the Emperor. The Emperor, however, unnoticed, at the shrines deep inside the palace, has continued performing rituals, as if time

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has stopped. It is both schism and continuity that characterize the Japanese Imperial Family. Akihito, the current holder of the throne, heed my advice. You seem to take rituals seriously. I hear that you consider the performance of them as the raison d’être of your house.18 You appear to pray earnestly to Amaterasu for the peace and prosperity of the people that you symbolize. The thought of you praying to Amaterasu, and doing so in the invisible and auratic space inaccessible to us makes me uneasy. I don’t want you to pray to Amaterasu for me. I accuse you of hubris if you think you can unify the nation by performing rituals. The great invention of the California Roll was to make a sushi roll inside/ out. A regular roll covered all over by black seaweed looks ominous. But a California Roll is bright as the Californian sun. Its ingredients are visible from the outside. Like the California Roll, the visibility of our Emperor has increased in the decades after World War II. He makes more public appearances. What was once hidden is now visible through the media. But it is still necessary to penetrate the layers of black seaweed, which remain invisible from the outside, to get to the center of a California Roll. The center, though not empty, remains a mystery.

Notes 1. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985, 35–116. 2. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn. New York and London: Routledge, 2006, 34–8. 3. “We cherish the ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family, but I think Princess Masako will take part in these ceremonies after she becomes able to carry out her usual official duties.” http://www.kunaicho.go.jp/koutaishi/denkakaiken-h18-01. html (accessed 20 July 2008). 4. I asked my third- and fourth-year seminar students, most of whom are around 21 or 22, if they had ever heard of the ritual ceremonies of the Imperial Family. No one had. It would be fair to assume the understanding of the average Japanese to be not much different from those of myself and my students. 5. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982, 30. 6. Takeshi Hara, Showa Tenno¯. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008, 169. 7. Hiroshi Takahashi, Sho¯cho¯ Tenno¯. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987, 177. 8. Hara, Showa Tenno¯, 36–7. 9. See Takahashi, Sho¯cho¯ Tenno¯, 193, and Shigeyoshi Murakami, Kokka Shinto¯. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980, 150. 10. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 35. 11. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 1. 12. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”: 13.

274 Schechner as Critical Interlocutor 13. Ernest Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 7. 14. The text of the tsugebumi was appended to the constitution. The use of royal “We” in English translation corresponds to Japanese “chin,” the nominative case used only by the Emperor. See Hirobumi Ito¯, Commentaries on the constitution of the empire of Japan. [1889], trans. Ito¯ Miyoji. Tokyo: Igirisu-horitsu gakko. http:// history.hanover.edu/texts/1889con.html/ (accessed 11 August 2008). 15. T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996, 77. 16. Nobody gets buried in Japan nowadays. People are cremated. Municipalities, including that of Tokyo, have regulations banning burial. To many of us, Hirohito’s funeral presented a rare spectacle. When people die, funerals are arranged within a few days of their death, usually Buddhist in style. After the funeral, the body is taken to a public crematorium, where the bones are picked up, and later placed in an urn to be buried underneath a tombstone. 17. The applause, or rather the shout, meaning “ten thousand years” is a Japanese version of “Long Live the King.” It originated in the Chinese court. However, pronounced in the Japanese way as banzai, the applause came to be associated with the Japanese Emperor, and later, towards the end of World War II, with the suicidal attacks of the Emperor’s soldiers. The banzai applause is said to have been initiated in 1889 to greet the Emperor as he came out of the palace after the promulgation (Reijiro Wakatsuki, Meiji, Taisho, Showa Seikai Hishi: Kofuan Kaikoki. Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1983, 26–7). 18. Takeshi Hara, “Kyuchu Saishi no Haishi mo Kento Subeki Toki ga Kita,” Gendai (May 2008): 42–9.

20 “Deep Play, Dark Play”: Framing the Limit(less) Joseph Roach

She really did do it. Or did she really? And if she did, was she really serious? Whatever Aliza Shvarts (Yale College, ’08) did or did not do, she went from unheralded undergraduate to notorious provocateur in one news cycle. The tidal wave of e-traffic that hit the Yale server in mid-April, 2008 – protesting what she told a reporter from the student paper she was doing but hadn’t quite finished with yet – was unsurpassed in volume and rivaled in invective only by the 2006 response when the university offered special-student admission to Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, formerly deputy foreign secretary (that is, public-relations flack) for the Taliban. Before the Yale Daily News web site crashed, one critic compared Aliza Shvarts, valedictorian of her high-school class and college-senior art major, unfavorably to Adolph Eichmann, another favorably to Damien Hirst. Still another suggested that she might be “the first great conceptual artist of the internet age,” while someone purporting to be from Cal-Arts dismissed her as the perpetrator of a crass publicity stunt, which they had done there first (and better) anyway.1 Before she had done all of what she said she was going to do, however, her Art School Dean disavowed it to the press, “If I had known about this, I would not have approved it.” Her College Dean, previously on record as an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression, added, “I am appalled.”2 What did she do? Dancing on the edge is what Aliza Shvarts did. She taunted the academy, the media, and especially the right-wing bloggers with the most provocative kind of act – an unverifiable one, which involved her sex. The facts – to the extent that the facts can be known – are easy enough to gather, but difficult to present without preconceptual spin. Let me put my cards on the table by starting with a disclaimer: I had no knowledge of this project before it became public, but as a member of the Yale faculty I had delivered the university-wide DeVane Lectures in 2007. My subject was performance, including performance art and examples of some of its more notorious ordeals – Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), Marina Abramovic´’s Rhythms (1973–75) and The House with an Open View (2002), and Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2002–3). 275

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As Shvarts did or claimed to have done, these artists put their bodies on the line in performances of endurance or self-injury, offering them as the art medium and the art object, with varying levels of risk: Burden had himself shot in the arm with a .22 caliber rifle; Abramovic´ lay down in a ring of fire; Fraser had 60 minutes of (unprotected?) sex on camera with the first patron to pay her $20,000 fee. In presenting these historical materials, I let students know that while I would never approve a student performance in which the artists proposed to risk harming themselves, American universities, including Yale, routinely approved and encouraged contact sports that are known to cause bodily harm and sometimes crippling injury to the student athletes. Unusually among the Ivies, Yale has been teaching Art as an academic subject almost as long as it has been playing football, but sometimes the university responds to artists who test the limits (as artists will sometimes do, especially if they’re any good or when they’re 20) as if the subject had just arrived in the curriculum yesterday. As someone I overheard on campus dismissively put it in the roiling aftermath, “Arts, Shvarts.” What Aliza Shvarts did may or may not have put her health at risk; it certainly exposed her person to the sanctimonious fury and disgusted reproach of the 24/7 chatterers, some of her fellow students, and a few top administrators to boot. High on the risk chart for what she did was failing to graduate, but higher still was being turned into a mass-mediated avatar of a witch and getting herself burned at the cyber-stake, potentially fixing what the first line of her obituary will say, no matter what else she does in life or how long she lives. “Devil and Woman at Yale,” “She is a Serial Killer,” and “Aliza Shvarts is a Monster” were among the banners that official spokespersons, bloggers, and editorialists, all putatively responsible adults, readily put their names to.3 The first of those screeds at least plays wittily on the late William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951), which definitively expresses the high-Tory apocalyptic view that everything in America is going to hell sooner rather than later, starting with Old Campus. The “Monster” headline, self-consciously proffered by Rod Dreher, who identifies himself on his blog as an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News (“Now just sit back and watch the whining about how mean I am to describe [Aliza Shvarts] as a monster”’), went so far as to say that even to have thought about what she said she was going to do made her monstrous.4 Dreher at least signed his name to his hyperbole: some of the anonymous postings about Aliza Shvarts defy quotation or even description. What did she do, really? In partial fulfillment of the requirements for her art major in Yale College, which is based on courses taken in the professional School of Art, Shvarts proposed an installation piece as her senior project. She had the prior approval of her advisor and the assent of the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art. The art work, which was finally censored by the Dean of Yale College and the Dean of the Art School before it could be installed, consisted of the following elements, according to the testimony of the artist as quoted

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277

in (and corroborated by) press accounts.5 Repeatedly over the course of the previous year, Shvarts inseminated herself, using a needleless syringe containing donor sperm. She called the anonymous donors “fabricators,” and they agreed to prior screening for STDs. At the end of each of her 28-day cycles, she dosed herself with an abortifacient, thus inducing miscarriages (if she had in fact conceived) or menstruation (if she had not). She kept a video log of these monthly procedures, and she collected specimens of the resulting products – blood, tissue, and zygotes, if any – for frozen storage and later use. Diagrams of her proposed installation showed that she planned to construct a cube made of PVC pipe and suspend it from the ceiling of the gallery. The pipes were to be swathed in multiple layers of plastic sheeting covered with Vaseline, which was to have been infused with her bodily effluents. The outer layer of plastic was to have provided a surface on which the video clips of the artist experiencing her “possible miscarriages” would be projected: they showed her in a bathtub, wearing headphones, otherwise alternately clothed and naked, systematically “removing blood from her body and collecting it in disposable cups.”6 In the outrage that followed the announcement of the project, I thought of Richard Schechner right away. I thought of him not just because I tend to engage in imaginary conversations with him whenever the cultural intensity of a performance threatens to incite community polarization and moral panic, as this one most certainly seemed to be doing. Whether or not the Shvarts project was more of the same-old same-old for the hipsters on the performance-art scene, the “Yale Abortion-Art Scandal,” which served up just the kind of thing that Fox News loves to flog whenever the day’s other news looks bad for the Republicans (second-only to “Blond Girl Still Missing”), became a Turnerian Social Drama locally as well as a media carnival nationally. The breaking story coincided not only with “Bulldog Days,” the week when all the accepted students of next year’s prospective freshman class are invited to campus to be wooed away from Harvard and Princeton, but also with the inaugural visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United States. Noting how quickly the stakes were escalating for a neophyte’s school project, I thought of Richard, but not principally because of his fully adult bad-boy history as a director-provocateur (though it was in the back of my mind): commissioned to create a site-specific performance for the lawyers of the American Civil Liberties Union, I seemed to recall, he persuaded them to permit themselves to be locked into small rooms and interrogated “harshly” in the name of “performance art”; later he incorporated self-styled “Multimedia Whore” Annie Sprinkle into his Prometheus Project BEFORE she became a cervix-baring, feminist icon. Nor did I think of Richard at that moment as the editorial controversialist who had formerly pitted Holly Hughes against Sue-Ellen Case or Bill Worthen against me in the arena of TDR, as if he were an impresario of Balinese cockfighting, and we the clueless, bellicose birds. All of that was present in my mind but not pre-eminent.

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Rather, I thought of him mainly because his fecund, restlessly diverse, and prolific cogitation on performance returns again and again (but never willingly the same way twice) to the core motives I perceived to be driving L’affaire Aliza Shvarts: frame, matrix, liminality, transgression, and play – particularly “deep play” and its boundary-transgressing intensifier, “dark play.” The nexus that unites these performance-behaviors is the on-going thought-experiment (call it, “performance studies”) that looks for the cultural and social limit of things and marks it, so much the better that it may be knowingly tested on the margins by words and deeds in order to discover what lies at the center.7 Distilling an ongoing life’s work in Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Richard Schechner devotes a substantial chapter to “Play.” Play, if we start by thinking of it as the opposite of work but then hone in closer on the thing itself, is still defined contradictorily; that is, “liminally” – hovering at a mental and emotional threshold between the special and the commonplace. In most cases, play means both heightening one’s consciousness about participating in a leisured activity while at the same time losing oneself in it. One cannot be at play without the self-reflexive acknowledgment of being at play, whether that is playing poker, playing possum, or playing the field. One cannot take the moral measure of others without some way of knowing when they’re playing, whether that means playing a joke, playing it safe, or playing for keeps. In a generative essay in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), Gregory Bateson points out how much of human (and no small amount of animal) behavior is rendered meaningful by “metacommunication” – signals that frame other signals and permit them to be interpreted correctly. “Framing” is an easier way of saying what Bateson means by metacommunicaton: giving the special signs that cue the interlocutor into the mood, tone, and above all, the purpose or the place of the message, distinguishing the map from the territory, the guidepost from the path. The inability to decode such signals and thus to understand the appropriate frame is a symptom and perhaps the fundamental condition of autism. In the case of play, these signals may be anticipatory, alerting other parties to what’s coming, as in the sly wink that says “This is play”; or they may come after the fact, as when the palliative “I was just kidding” signals “That was play.” In his elegant exegesis of framing behavior, Bateson invokes the Fall of Man from Grace and the Error of our First Parents: eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is when we discover to our disillusionment that our signals are just signals. He gives the example of perfume. But without such signals, social life would be nearly impossible for man or beast. Citing the example of sham combat among dogs, Bateson points out that there must be a way for them to signal, “This is play”: the “playful nip” is not a bite; threat (posturing) is not combat; histrionics are neither combat nor threat.8 And those sharp little puppy teeth giving you a nip on your ear is not a bite, even though it can sure feel

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that way. Animals somehow must know this, or there would be hell to pay at the local dog park every morning. Not all play, however, is for puppies. Some of it is deeper than that, and some a lot darker. Clifford Geertz took the phrase deep play from Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher who defined it as gaming for stakes so high as to defy any possible justification by appeal to rational utility. Geertz found a rich ethnographic site of deep play, which he described thickly and famously, in the aforementioned Balinese cockfight, where excessive wagers (betting big on which of the birds can tear an opponent to bloody bits first) insult rational utility but flatter the testosterone-stoked vanity of the players. “It is in large part because the marginal disutility of loss is so great at the higher levels of betting,” Geertz writes, “that to engage in such betting is to lay one’s public self, allusively and metaphorically, through the medium of one’s cock, on the line.”9 Dark play goes a step beyond this, cock or no cock, because even if the stakes of deep play are out of sight, the rules remain clearly in view. Not so with dark play. Schechner defines it as play that “subverts order, dissolves frames, and breaks its own rules – so much so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed, as in spying, doubleagentry, con games, and stings.” Playing darkly, even more than playing deeply, “emphasizes risk, deception, and sheer thrill.”10 Risk and thrill also characterize deep play, but it is the element of deception that distinguishes dark play. What dark play means in practice is that not all parties know the rules of the game that they’re playing, or even that they’re playing a game. Code-switching, sleight of hand, or outright mendacity mock normal metacommunicative assurances. The framing signal that cues in dark play may not even be a signal at all, but a scarcely detectable glint in the eye of the secretly empowered. According to Richard Schechner, dark play can best be described by expressions like “playing with fire,” “playing fast and loose with the rules,” or “getting away with murder,” and he tapes his field-note interviews to provide an example of one woman’s dangerously abandoned yet intensely self-reflexive performance of dark play. For her, dark play means dancing on the edge in the most literal sense: I was sixteen years old and on vacation at Yosemite with my father. I climbed out over the guardrail to get a better view of the waterfall. When I realized that my father was crying for me to come back, I went to the very edge and did an arabesque. I continued balancing on one leg until he got onto his knees, crying, begging for me to come back. Ten years later, in the Sierra Nevada range, I repeated the same act in front of my husband who shouted at me to think of our daughter as a motherless child. My initial inspiration for dancing on the edge was in both cases the thrill of the beauty and the danger of the dance. My father’s and husband’s anxiety sharpened the experience for me – the further I got away from them the closer I came to communion with some Other.11

280 Schechner as Critical Interlocutor

Few parents or spouses could be expected to pick up gamely on the rules of this game, even though every one of them, the willing or the unwilling, would probably notice right away that moving toward the self-imperiled player caused her to edge closer to the un-nameable “Other.” My performance-studies students found this narrative disturbing, which didn’t displease me at all, but they also found it absorbing and revelatory, especially when we explored how risky play seemed normal enough to many of them, after they had thought about it for awhile, because so many of their fathers and brothers and some of their mothers and sisters did mountainclimbing, hang-gliding, sky-diving, or the like. But the metacommunicative codes of reassuring jauntiness that typify such activity don’t operate in the case of the Yosemite cliff dancer, who leaned further and further toward the darkness without a safety rope for herself or a signal to her loved ones, except to let them know by her deafness to their entreaties that she floated somewhere beyond their reach and needed, for an unspecified duration, which might possibly become an eternity, to remain there. With an almost audible sigh of relief, Helaine Klasky, Yale’s highly professional Director of Public Affairs, who had been buffeted by Hurricane Aliza, a Category 5 media storm, issued a mollifying press release on 17 April 2008. She announced authoritatively that Shvarts’s senior project was merely “performance.” Based on information that Shvarts was reported to have disclosed to unnamed senior officials, Klasky wanted to set the record straight: “The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”12 The idea that the artist wanted to convey by means of this “creative fiction” was that no one, not even the woman who experienced them, could tell the difference between a period and a miscarriage, and that no sex organ was “meant” for reproduction or for any other fated purpose. But the physical installation illustrating this point was going to be a sham (a.k.a. “performance art”). To put an end to any possible ambiguity, Klasky added, “Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”13 But, crisis averted – no bloody fetuses, no turkey basters, no problem. A most intractable problem with this demarche quickly emerged, however: Aliza Shvarts was having none of it. No sooner had the Klasky press release hit the wires (to use a quaint term from an outmoded technology; see also, “hit the fan”) than Shvarts publicly repudiated it as “ultimately inaccurate.”14 The artist, wary of being (mis)represented by a spurious clarification, reclaimed the ambiguity of her project and wouldn’t let go of it. The press, suspicious of being jerked around, went ballistic. Rod Dreher, gloating over the confusion that he perceived to be overtaking the otherwise mighty “culture of death” at Yale, opined: “Whether you really will be watching Aliza Shvarts kill her unborn children, or you will be watching Aliza Shvarts pretend to kill her unborn children, you will be watching Aliza Shvarts deny her

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humanity and present herself as a barbarian, to barbarians.”15 The Deans, stung by what they seemed to regard as a deception and betrayal, laid down the law: the artist must stipulate in writing that the show’s effects were fake or the show won’t go on. Dean Robert Storr of the Art School, after first affirming his belief in freedom of expression and in the legality of abortion, next read the riot act to his art major: “That said [the metacommunicative boilerplate of liberality], Yale does not encourage or condone projects that would involve unknown health risks to the student. Nor does it believe that open discourse and inquiry can exist in an educational and creative community when an individual exercises these rights but evades full intellectual accountability for the strong response he or she may provoke.”16 In terms of intellectual accountability, the project had been advised for two semesters by Pia Lindman, a Lecturer in the School of Art with interests in performance art and public media and works exhibited at MOMA and the Luxe Gallery. In terms of open discussion, trying to be heard above the din but also trying to be heard unfiltered, to the extent that it was ever possible for her to be heard unfiltered on this subject, Shvarts had already laid out her philosophical case in an op-ed in the YDN. Walking to the edge of the precipice, she boldly struck an arabesque: “ambiguity” was of the essence, she reasoned, the raison d’être of her project, as it was of her experience as a woman, living in her body in this society: The piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge in the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative [of the “fabricators,” the syringe, and abortifacient], as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as an independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse … . For me the most poignant aspect of this representation – the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed this far) – is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading. This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming – the act of ascribing a word to something physical – is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period” to that blood.17 She argued that this was the project that had been explicitly approved and that this was the project she had every right to install. To be compelled to specify what exactly was in the Vaseline extender would remove the act of conception from the viewer and assign it to the Deans.

282 Schechner as Critical Interlocutor

No soap. Yale College Dean Peter Salovey, who, quoting the revered Woodward Report on academic freedom, had once passionately urged Yale College students to join it in affirming “the special responsibility for a university community to uphold its members’ rights ‘to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable,’”18 dropped the hammer on Aliza Shvarts’s right to perform the ambiguous. She wouldn’t sign their paper, so the Deans pulled the plug on her show. She played darkly but she played well. As she stood at the dangerous edge on one foot, she posed a question about where the limits were located, and she compelled her community to answer, trashing its own exalted rhetoric and revealing its conception of free expression as anything but limitless – “Look behind you, Aliza.” The principle of challenging the unchallengeable did not survive its first test in the face of the new electronic mob – “We Report, You Decide” – in full cry after its “Monster” of the week. Come to think of it, though, I haven’t seen the Taliban guy around anymore either. The concern expressed for Aliza Shvarts’s health was legitimate, and probably should have been a deal-breaker from the beginning, but I recently watched Mike McLeod, brave Yale running back, sent plunging futilely into the Harvard line play after play on a broken foot so bad that each time he hobbled back to the huddle in obvious pain the crowd murmured in sympathy and started yelling at the coach – until Mike took himself out of the game. He’s a hero still, but Aliza, True Blue, didn’t head for the sidelines until she was benched. Those who might find “deep play” and “dark play” unsettling or even offensive concepts when applied to the arts might consider how much they figure in the “normal” activities of a society founded on all kinds of risk. Which brings us back to Richard, never risk-averse himself, who’s been known to play deeply and even darkly from time to time. Such as when, on a bluff and a dare, he left a sure thing at Tulane and moved with the TDR letterhead to a night school in Greenwich Village with no endowment to speak of, but a heavy investment in the word Drama. Whenever the grand narratives of the birth of performance studies are shared these days, someone will snort at the story of “two men,” Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, “giving birth.” To advance the idea of one man doing it is even more offensive, I’m sure. But tricky as conception is to assign and as much as it will remain in the eyes of the beholder and with all due deference to Turner and BKG and Northwestern University and a number of other therefrom-the-get-go fabricators and nurturers, all very fertile I’m sure, he really did do it. Didn’t he?

Notes 1. Yale Daily News, 21 April 2008; Dimensions Art Blog @ Yale (accessed 18 September 2008); Warren Ellis.com (accessed 18 September 2008).

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2. YDN, 21 April 2008. 3. Revolution 21’s Blog for the People by Favog (accessed 23 September 2008); “She is a Serial Killer,” attributed to Wanda Franz, President of the National Right to Life Committee by FOXNews.com (accessed 23 September 2008); Rod Dreher, Crunchy Con on Beliefnet (accessed 22 September 2008). 4. Rod Dreher, Crunchy Con on Beliefnet (accessed 23 September 2008). 5. YDN, 18 April 2008. 6. YDN, 21 April 2008. 7. Jon McKenzie has argued that this definition of performance studies describes its early phase, now to be supplemented or replaced by a broader understanding of performance as the mainstream rather than the margin of social productions; see Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001, passim. 8. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. 180–83. 9. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973, 434. 10. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2006, 119. 11. Qtd. in Schechner, Performance Studies, 119. 12. YDN, 17 April 2008. 13. YDN, 17 April 2008. 14. YDN, 17 April 2008. 15. Crunchy Con on beliefnet (accessed 23 September 2008). 16. YDN, 21 April 2008. 17. YDN, 18 April 2008 (emphasis added). 18. Chase Olivarius-McAllister, “For Hypocritical Response, Salovey Should Resign Office,” YDN, 21 April 2008.

Index Page numbers shown in italics refer to figures. About Performance, 126, 132n35 “Body Weather in Central Australia,” 127 House with an Open View, 275 “Playing Politics,” 127 Abramovic´, Marina Rhythms, 275, 276 Adams, Franklin, 170, 249, 258 Adams, Patch, 249, 258 see also Patch Adams (film) ADS, see under Australasian Drama Studies Aeschylus, 36, 171 Oresteia, 112 AFS, 90 Agnew, Vanessa, 136 Ahmed, Sarah, 148n4 Akihito, Emperor, 269, 270, 271, 273 Albee, Edward, 28, 221, 222 Box, 28 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, 152 Aliza, Hurricane, 280 Alland, Alexander, 63n75 Amaris, Lian Swimming to Spalding, 7 Amaterasu, 266–7, 268, 270, 273 Shrine of, 266, 271 American Civil Liberties Union, 277 American Society for Theatre Research, 20, 90, 93, 96 American Theatre, 157 Anand, Uma, 202 Anderson, Laurie, 24 Antithesis, 124 APEC, see under Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Appel, Willa, 182 By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, 183, 190 Aristotle, 36, 147 The Poetics, 165 Artaud, Antonin, 18, 26, 27, 43, 165, 172, 175

Theatre and its Double, 122 Ashley, Wayne, 178, 179 Ashton, Martha, 179 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, 67, 68, 78, 80, 84n38 Asian Civilizations Museum, 67, 76 Asian Society, 182 Asmaradana, Gamelan, 76, 77 Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 16, 25, 90, 96, 137 1992 conference, 24, 27, 30, 31, 58, 92 1994 conference, 88 Performance Studies Focus Group, 87, 92 ASTR, see under American Society for Theatre Research ATHE, see under Association for Theatre in Higher Education Athey, Ron, 90, 153 Aurobindo, Sri, 201, 202 Auslander, Philip, 31, 92, 159 Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 69, 82n23 Austin, J. L., 141, 199 Australasian Drama Studies, 125, 126, 131n24 Australasian Drama Studies Association, 97n25 The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 43 Awasthi, Indujah, 202 Awasthi, Suresh, 51, 202 Ball, Bill, 221 Barba, Eugenio, 24, 90, 177, 201, 202 Barbe, Fran, 183 Barthes, Roland, 147, 266, 269 Bash, Micky, 254 Bateson, Gregory, 188 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 278 “Theory of Play,” 169 Batra, Bindu, 55, 56 Bausch, Pina, 24

284

Index Beaver College, 196 Beck, Julian, 5, 117n14, 194 Beckett, Samuel, 24, 25, 165, 171, 224 Waiting for Godot, 43, 47, 167, 187, 198 Beijing Opera, 108, 113, 114, 115 Beijing University, 100, 102 Bell, Catherine, 85 Benedict XVI, Pope, 277 Berghaus, Günter, 45 Berlant, Lauren, 148n5 Berliner Ensemble, 50, 197 Berne, Eric, 196 Transactional Analysis, 169 Bharata Natyam, 177, 202 Bial, Henry, 2, 8, 85 The Performance Studies Reader, 82n23, 95 Big Apple Circus, 251 Black Arts Movement, 41, 44, 45 Blau, Herbert, 182 Bodden, Michael Geez!, 186 Bogart, Anne, 24 Borenstein, Yosef, 251 Borst, Steven, 145, 146, 210 Bottoms, Stephen, 2, 8, 23, 95 “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/ Theatre Studies Dichotomy,” 23 Playing Underground, 29 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125 Brecht, Bertolt, 25, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 124, 136, 167, 171, 172, 175, 205, 215 Berliner Ensemble, 50, 197 Man Is Man, 165 Mother Courage and Her Children, 5, 6, 47, 50–9, 62n57, 62n60, 165, 175, 177, 202, 205, 206–7, 210, 212, 219 Señora Carrara’s Rifles, 47, 48 The Threepenny Opera, 221 Verfremdungseffekt, 140 Brockett, Oscar Theatre History, 184 Brook, Peter, 172, 221 Orghast at Persepolis, 156 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 194 Brown, Helen, 168 Brown University, 155, 171 Brown v Board of Education, 158

285

Buckley, William F. God and Man at Yale, 276 Burden, Chris, 276 Shoot, 275 Burke, Kenneth, 165 Bush, George H. W., 270 Bush, George W., 67, 68, 72, 73, 76–7, 78, 79, 80, 227 Bush, Laura, 67, 76 Butler, Judith, 141, 159 Cage, John, 5, 40, 43 Cakrabarty, Dipendu, 53, 56 Calicut University, 178 Callois, Roger, 169 Cambridge University, 43, 45, 171, 172 Campbell, Joseph The Hero with A Thousand Faces, 165–6 Campbell, Mary Schmidt, 82n24 Carleton College, 164 Carlson, Marvin, 8, 13, 39, 69, 90, 95 Performance: A Critical Introduction, 39, 81, 125 Case, Sue-Ellen, 277 Central School of Speech and Drama, 185 Centre for Performance Research, 183 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 136 Chan, Stephen Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan (Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains), 6, 110 Chaney, James, 163 Charles, Prince of Wales, 271 Chekhov, Anton, 31, 171, 221, 224 Three Sisters, 7 Chekhov, Michael, 183 The Cherry Orchard, 6, 31 China Theatre Publishing House, 100 Chinese Street Opera, 75 The Chinese Theatre, 102 Chinese Traditional Opera College (Beijing), 102 Christen, Kimberly, 252 Christensen, Michael, 251 Christie, Judie, 183 Chrysanthemum Curtains, 265, 267 Cieslak, Ryszard, 139, 198, 200 Citron, Atay, 2, 10, 248 City Lights Bookstore, 222, 224 Clay, Buriel, 223

286

Index

Clayburgh, Jim, 207 Mother Courage, 210 Clough, Patricia, 148n5 Clown Doctors International, 251, 263n7 Coigney, Martha, 182 Cold War, 72 Comfort, Jane, 24 Commercial Press, 99 Connecticut College, 144, 145 Connerton, Paul, 188 How Societies Remember, 142 Conquergood, Dwight, 90, 91, 175 Contemporary Legend Theatre Oresteia, 6, 109–15 Contemporary Theatre Review, 183 Cook, Alexander, 136 Corneille, Pierre Le Cid, 165 The Cornell Daily Sun, 3, 158 Cornell University, 3, 4, 155, 158 Corrigan, Robert W., 153, 154, 164, 196 Cousins, Norman Anatomy of an Illness, 249 Coward, Noel, 224 Cramphorn, Rex, 124 Critical Art Ensemble, 155 Crown Prince, 265, 267 Crown Princess, 265, 267 Cultural Revolution, 7, 109, 111 Daboo, Jerri, 190 The Daily News, 213 Dallas Morning News, 276 Darden, Severn, 164 Davis, Ossie Purlie Victorious, 43, 47, 167 Davis, Tracy C., 31, 156, 159 Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, 82 de Certeau, Michel, 124 Deleuze, Gilles, 148nn4–5 Dent, Thomas, 224 The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 42, 46, 47 Derby, Doris, 41, 158 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 27, 35, 37 Desire Project, 167 Diana, Princess of Wales, 271 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 136

Getting Medieval: Sexual Communities Pre- and Post-Modern, 148n5 Distler, Tony, 175n1 Dokkyo University, 120 Dolan, Jill, 93, 96, 159 “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” 88 Drama, 110, 282 “Drama, Dance and the Performing Arts,” 32 The Drama Review (TDR), 4, 5, 17, 39, 42, 89, 96, 99, 143, 147, 153, 164, 171, 203 see also TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies; The Tulane Drama Review Dream Doctors, 248, 251, 254–63 Dreher, Rod, 276, 280 Drewal, Margaret Thompson, 150n23 Duberman, Martin In White America, 47, 167 Dudi, 262 Dukakis, Olympia, 198 Dwyer, Paul “Journey to Con-fusion,” 128 Dylan, Bob, 37 East Coast Artists, 6 Faust/Gastronome, 7, 142 Hamlet, 7 YocastaS, 7 YocastaS Redux, 7 East End Players, 155 Blessing the Fleet, 3 Eckersall, Peter, 8, 118, 131n8, 131n32, 132n44, 132n45 Ecological Body 188, 190 Edinburgh, Duke of, 270 Elam, Keir, 124 Eliade, Mircea, 140, 143 Emigh, Allison, 163, 164 Emigh, John, 2, 4, 9, 138, 162, 179, 186 Masked Performance, 167 Emperor, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274n14, 274n17 Empress, 267, 269, 270 The Ends of Performance, 92, 101, 125 Epstein, Paul, 170

Index Euripides, 171 The Bacchae, 36, 165, 200 Hecuba, 165 Medea, 165 The Trojan Women, 165, 182 Exeter University “The Changing Body,” 183 Digital Archive, 183 Fallabella, Soledad, 237 Feast of Ass, 252 Feast of Fools, 253 Fei, Faye C. Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance, 186 Fensham, Rachel, 124, 128 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 95 Flinders University, 121, 122, 123 Foley, Kathy, 186 Foreman, Richard, 29, 155 Fox News, 277 Fradenberg, Louise, 136, 148n5 Fraser, Andrea Untitled, 275, 276 Freccero, Carla, 136 Free Southern Theater (FST), 4, 5, 40–6, 47, 48, 50, 158, 160, 161, 164, 167, 168, 223 Freeman, Elizabeth, 136 Freud, Sigmund, 196 Frye, Northrop, 165 FST, see Free Southern Theater Fudan University Press, 102 Fusco, Coco, 40, 158 Future of Ritual 40, 60, 125, 131 “Future of the Field,” 90, 92 Garrison, Jim, 163 Gastronome, see Faust Geertz, Clifford, 279 Gelber, Jack “The Cuban Thing,” 222 Genet, Jean The Balcony, 145, 146, 171 Ghosts, 165 Gibson, James, 188 Gindler, Elsa, 183 Glasscoe, Bill Waiting for Godot, 198 Goffman, Erving, 63n75, 170

287

The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, 169 Goldmann, Lucien, 172 Goldoni, Carlo, 14 Gomez, James, 83n37 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 2, 9, 90, 227 Goodman, Andrew, 163 Goroka Teachers College, 203 Gorton, Kristyn, 148n5 Gough, Richard, 183, 189, 190 Grateful Dead, 94 Gray, Spalding, 145, 211, 213, 217, 218 Commune, 219 Makbeth, 213 Mother Courage, 6, 175, 210, 219 Sakonnet Point, 215 The Tooth of Crime, 210 Gregory, Andre, 208, 221 The Manhattan Project, 206 Grehan, Helena, 128 Performance Paradigm, 126 Grotowski, Jerzy, 17, 18, 29, 43, 122, 139, 144, 145, 172, 177, 189, 197, 199, 201, 202, 205, 218 Association Exercises, 198, 200 The Constant Prince, 217 New York University, 5 Towards a Poor Theatre, 100, 147, 149n14, 156, 171, 217 “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un,” 143, 151n29 Gruman, Alejandro, 237 Haimin, Wei, 113 Halberstam, Judith, 136 In a Queer Time and Place, 148 Halprin, Anna, 40, 43 Hamera, Judith Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies, 82n23 SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, 82n23, 95 Hao, Ni, 107 Hamlet: That is the Question, 105–6 Hao, Shi Hamlet: That is the Question, 107, 117n20 Harding, James M., 1, 4, 5, 10n1, 25, 39, 60n1, 60n5

288

Index

Harrison, Paul Carter, 224 Hasan, Nidal Malik, 78 Hashemi, Sayed Rahmatullah, 275 Ha’Emek Medical Center, 254, 258, 259 Head (Hed), Bob Kill Viet Cong, 167 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 147, 165, 174 Heidegger, Marin, 147 Hendrickson, Hank, 3 Herald Tribune, 213 Herr, Linda, 144, 201 Hills, Ben Princess Masako, 265 Hinkle, Gerald Art as Event, 21 Hirohito, Emperor, 264, 266, 267 funeral, 269–71, 274n16 Hirst, Damien, 275 Hoffman, Abbie “Media Freaking,” 158 Hobsbawm, Eric, 268 Hoffman, Theodore, 18, 224 Towards a Poor Theatre, 100 Homer The Iliad, 3 Hornby, Richard, 88, 89 “Against Performance Theory,” 88 Hostetler, Paul, 175n1 Howes, Libby, 218 Hsing-kuo, Wu, 113 Hughes, Holly, 143, 277 Hughes, Langston, 167 Huijun, Yang, Give Oresteia a Chance, 113, 114 Huiling, Zhou Environmental Theatre and Intercultural Performance, 113 Huizhu, (William) Sun, 82n24, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 116, 117n19, 155 Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan (Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains), 6–7, 109, 110 “Performance Matters: An Introduction to Social Performance Studies,” 101 “Richard Schechner and his Theatre Anthropology,” 100 Huizinga, Johan

Homo Ludens, 169 Hulton, Peter, 183, 190n12 Hunt, Albert Hopes for Great Happenings, 122 Ibsen, Henrik, 14, 24, 169, 221, 224 Imperial Family, 264, 265 ritual ceremonies of, 266–8, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273nn3–4 Imperial Household Agency, 265, 266 Inge, William, 221, 224 Ingold, Tim, 188 Innes, Christopher, 45 International Experimental Theatre Festival, 103 Ionesco, Eugene, 4, 171 The Bald Soprano, 187 “The Lesson,” 3 Jackson, Shannon, 17, 40, 45, 95, 101, 155 Jagger, Mick, 209 Jakobsen, Janet, 136 Jalan, Chetna, 208 Jalan, Shyamonand, 51, 202, 208 Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 124 Jarry, Alfred, 40 Jasudowicz, Dennis, 173–4 Jenkins, Ron, 179 Jerome, 262 Jiancun, Yu, 2, 7, 8, 98, 99, 106 “The Manifestation of Performance Studies in Hamlet,” 102 “The Origin, the Present Situation and the Future Trend of Performance Studies,” 102 “Willy Loman and His Social Performance – Arthur Miller’s Ideas of Social Performance Studies in The Death of Salesman,” 102 Jianping, Qian “Expectations from Lawn to Theater,” 112 Jiasheng, Wen “Richard Schechner and his Environmental Theater,” 100 Johnson, E. Patrick, 155 Jones, Amelia

Index The Artist’s Body, 127 Journal of Shanghai University, 101, 102 Journal of Sichuan International Studies University “Politics and Social Performance,” 102 Kaitaisha, Gekidan, 128 Kant, Immanuel, 147, 268, 274 Kantorowicz, Ernest, 268 Kaprow, Allan, 5, 43, 139, 172, 196 Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, 122 Kapur, M. N., 56 Kass, Peter, 199 Kazan, Elia Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 28 Keefe, John Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, 185 Keeler, Ward Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves, 74, 83n32 Kemp, Jenny, 124 Kennedy, Adrienne, 224 Kennedy, John F., 163, 224 Kerala Kalamandalam, 178, 208 Keum-Hwa, Kim, 182 Kierkegaard, Sören Fear and Trembling, 169 King Lear, 180 Kirby, Michael, 45, 122, 184 TDR, 154 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 40, 90, 184, 190n13 Klasky, Helaine, 280 Korean Academy of Performing Arts, 187 Korean Cultural Center, 182 Kubiak, Anthony, 26 Ku Klux Klan, 167 Kurup, K. K. N., 178 Kushner, Tony, 90 Angels in America, 25 La Mama, 30 Lahr, John, 29 Lane, Jill The Ends of Performance, 92, 125 Langer, Susanne, 165 Langfang, Mei, 113 Lanier, Richard, 182

289

Latour, Bruno Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory, 83n32 Lawyer, Ave, 56 Junior Statesman, 54 Le Petit Journal, 249 Lebanese University, 155 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 5, 9, 24, 213 Mother Courage, 6, 52–4, 59 Leder, Drew, 183 Lee, Seung-Heun, 187 LePage, Robert, 24 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 172, 174 Levine, Lawrence Highbrow/Lowbrow, 19 Levitt, Bob Six, 221 Life, 194 Lindman, Pia, 281 Lindsay, Jennifer, 82n25 Lippman, Monroe, 41, 153, 175n1 Living Theatre, The, 9, 193–4, 196 Loong, Lee Hsien, 67, 84n44 Loukes, Rebecca, 190n12 Love, Heather, 136 Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, 148n5 Luciano, Dana, 136 Lusheng, Cao, 100 MacAloon, John, 69 MacIntosh, Joan, 5, 6, 9, 51, 52, 55, 62n54, 62n65, 214 MacLean, Hector, 123 Madison, D. Soyini SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, 82n23, 95 Magic Theater, 222 Mahantjii, 202 The Maids, 165 Malina, Judith, 5, 9, 117n14, 193, 196 Mamet, David Oleanna, 25 Marshall, Thurgood, 158 Marcuse, Herbert, 196 Marivaux, Pierre de, 14 Marlowe, Christopher, 14 Marranca, Bonnie, 50, 129 Martin, Carol, 100, 199 Martin, Ricky, 230 Marx, Karl, 36, 147, 167

290

Index

Masako, Princess, 265, 273 Mason, David, 63n79 Massumi, Brian, 148nn4–5 Matta, Pedro, 238–46 A Walk Through a 20th Century Torture Center: Villa Grimaldi, A Visitor’s Guide, 237 Maxwell, Ian, 123, 125, 131 McAuley, Gay, 121, 123 “Performance Studies in Australia,” 125 McConachie, Bruce, 184 McCray, Porter A., 201 McDermott, Pat, 198 McGaw, Charles, 175n1 McKenzie, Jon, 5, 31, 35, 49, 68, 86, 101, 283n7 Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research, 82n24 “Is Performance Studies Imperialist,” 61nn36–7, 159 Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, 69 McNamara, Brooks, 20, 184 Mead, Margaret, 203 Trance and Dance in Bali, 196 Meade, Teresa “Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile’s ‘Sitios de Memoria’ and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death,” 246 Meeshra, Veer Bhadra, 202 Meiji, Emperor, 265, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274 Meiji Imperial Constitution, 268, 272 Meisner, Sanford, 183 Melbourne Performance Research Group (MPRG), 124, 125 Melrose, Susan, 124 Merlin, Bella, 183 Merman, Ethel, 221 Miller, Arthur, 221, 222, 224 Death of Salesman, 102 Miller, Glenn, 113 Miller, Michael, 224 Min, Tanaka, 127 Minchinton, Mark, 124–5, 131 Mingde, Zhong, 113 Minghou, Liu, 106, 108, 117n18, 117n21 Mishra, Veer Bhadra, 209

Mitchell, William, 252, 263n10 MLA (Modern Language Association), 90 Molière, 14, 221, 224, 253 Monk, Meredith, 224 Moody, Raymond Laugh After Laugh: The Healing Power of Humor, 249 Moore, Charlie, 175n1 Morrison, Jack, 182 Moses, Gilbert, 49, 224 Free Southern Theater, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 158, 164 The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 42, 46 Mother Teresa, 208 Mrouè, Rabih, 155, 156, 158 Mrázek, Jan, 74 “An Introduction: One Perspective on a Variety of Perspectives,” 82n26 Muller, Chris, 113 Munk, Erika, 158 Murphett, Richard, 124 Murray, Simon Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, 185 Myerhoff, Barbara, 63n75, 182 NAACP, 158 Nagatomo, Shigenori, 183 Nair, Mira, 207 Namboodiri, M. P. Sankaran, 178 Namboodiripad, Vasudevan, 178 Nanjing University, 102, 103, 116n9 Napgal, Kavita, 54 Naqqash, Marun alal-Bakhil (The Miser), 19 National Herald, 55 National Light Theatre, 113 National School of Drama, 202 National Theatre, 33 National University of Singapore, 67, 75 Natyasastra, 63n79, 175 Nayar, V. R. Prabodhachandran, 178 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 90, 156 Nealon, Chris, 136 Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall, 148 NEH, 180 Nehru, Jawaharlal

Index Discovery of India, 70 Neminuwarlin Performance Group, 118 New Orleans Group, The, 4, 5, 6, 170, 171 New York Post, 214 New York Pro Musica The Play of Daniel, 153 New Yorker, The, 213 Newekwe, 252 New York University (NYU), 5, 17, 41, 91, 142, 150nn23–4, 196 Department of Graduate Drama, 248 Department of Performance Studies, 6, 7, 20, 27, 40, 49, 63n75, 82n24, 87, 88, 89, 93, 98, 99, 100, 132n35, 143, 147, 150n24, 154, 156, 171, 173, 175, 184, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 205, 211, 248 School of the Arts, 154, 224 Nicholas, Denise, 43, 224 Nicholson, Linda The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, 148n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 142 Niinamesai, 267, 271, 272 Northwestern University, 17, 88, 91, 282 Obama, Barack, 78, 80, 84n44 Obeysekere, Ranjini, 182 Odets, Clifford, 224 Ohno, Kazuo, 153 Open Theatre, 29 Oppenheim, David, 110 Osmundsen, Lita, 182 Palgrave Macmillan “Studies in International Performance,” 82n24 PAP, see People’s Action Party Paradise Now, 194 Parr, Mike “Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic,” 129 Parson, Estelle, 144 Patch Adams (film), 248 Pavis, Patrice Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre, 124 Pellegrini, Ann, 136

291

People’s Action Party (PAP), 83n37 Performance Art, 113 Performance Cosmology, 183 Performance Group, The, 9, 39, 40, 122, 139, 145,154, 171, 179, 180, 181, 193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205, 210, 213, 217, 218 The Bacchae, 200 Commune, 5, 202, 204, 206, 210, 211, 213, 214, 219 Dionysus in 69, 5, 29, 36, 46, 47, 51, 56, 173, 174, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206, 212 “Fire, Fire Burning Bright: Marnem, Marnem Dililib Benuwarrenj,” 118, 119, 128 The Marilyn Project, 205, 215 Makbeth, 199 Mother Courage and Her Children, 5, 6, 54, 55, 56–7, 59, 177, 205 The Tooth of Crime, 5, 25 Performance Paradigm, 132n34 Performance Paradigm, 126–7, 132n34 After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory, 127 Emergences, 127 Ethics, Politics and War, 127 Media, Performance and Technology, 127 Performance Research, 38n24, 82n24, 125, 183 Performance Studies Conference, 89, 124 “Here Be Dragons,” 86 Performance Studies Focus Group, 87, 92 Performance Studies international, 87 Performance Studies Reader, 82n23, 95 Performance Studies Series, 102 Performance: A Critical Introduction 39, 81, 125 Performing Garage, 5, 6, 30, 57, 63n75, 173, 175, 197, 206, 211, 222 Phelan, Peggy, 5, 49, 142, 143, 150n24, 155, 159 The Ends of Performance, 92, 125 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 90, 125 Pillai, J. Y., 67 Pinochet, Augusto, 10, 23–8, 241, 244, 245 Pinter, Harold, 24 Pirandello, Luigi, 25 Piscator, Erwin, 193

292

Index

Plato, 147 Play-House of the Ridiculous, 29 The Polish Laboratory Theatre, 202 Post, The, 213 Prem Dan, 208 Price, Norman, 123 Primary Source, 124 Prometheus Project, 277 Provincetown Players, 3 PSFG, 92, 93 PSi, 7, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97n23, 125, 126 RADA, 76, 77, 185 Rae, Paul, 2, 8, 67 Rafferty, Ellen Putu Wijaya in Performance, 186 Ramayana, 80, 209 Ramlila, 153, 177, 178, 206, 209, 210 Rancière, Jacques, 80, 84n43 Ravenhill, Mark, 33, 36 Read, Alan Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue, 34, 35 Read, Kenneth E. The High Valley, 203 Red Guards, 111, 112 Reeve, Sandra, 183, 189 Move into Life, 188 Reinelt, Janelle, 49, 161 Critical Theory and Performance, 82n23 “Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 2,” 159 “Studies in International Performance,” 82n24 Renoir, Jean, 138 Research Assessment Exercise, 32 Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies, 7, 8, 99, 100 Richards, Alison, 125 Richards, Lloyd, 199 Roach, Joseph, 10, 95, 101, 159, 275 Critical Theory and Performance, 82n23 Rockefeller, John D., 201 Rockefeller Foundation, 70, 216 Rojo, Jerry, 209 Roms, Heike, 121 Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research, 82n24 Rosaldo, Renato, 175

Rosenthal, Cindy, 1, 4, 5, 10n1, 10n2, 10n5, 10n6, 39, 60n1, 60n5, 160n30, 160n31, 196, 213 Roshi, John Garrie, 189 Rostand, Edmond, 221, 224 Rote Nasen (Red Noses), 263n7 Rusden State College, 121 Russell, Mark, 156 Ryan, Paul Ryder, 50, 62n72 Sack, Leeny, 207, 210 Saddhus, 209 Sahoo, Guru Kedar, 207 Salovey, Peter, 282 Sancho, 256, 259, 262 Sandford, Mariellen R., 4, 9, 143, 152 Saneh, Lina, 158 Sankat Mochan Foundation, 202 Sankat Mochan Temple, 202, 209 Satipatthana, 189 SCA, 90 Schechner, Richard “Actuals: A Look into Performance Theory,” 9, 139, 149n11 Between Theater and Anthropology, 6, 125, 140, 141, 246n1, 264 Blessing the Fleet, 3 Boys from Syracuse, 180 Briseis and the Sergeant, 3 By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, 183, 190 chronological overview, 3–7 “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” 30, 87–8, 89 “Drama, Script, Theater and Performance,” 21, 22n5, 35, 87, 176n5 The End of Humanism, 137 Environmental Theater, 6, 27, 37n2, 46, 100, 122, 156, 181, 200 Essays on Performance Theory, 138, 139, 173 The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, 42, 46, 223 Hamlet, 7 Hamlet: That is the Question, 2, 7, 8, 103–9 “Intentions, Problems, Proposals,” 152 Julius Caesar, 221 “The Lesson,” 3

Index Makbeth, 199, 206, 212, 213 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 6 Oresteia, 6 “The Past, Present, and Future of Performance Studies,” 100 “Performance Studies: A Broad Spectrum Approach,” 71 Performance Studies: An Introduction, 34, 40, 43, 87, 94, 95, 157, 278 Performance Theory, 6, 7, 26, 35, 37n7, 149n11, 173 Public Domain: Essays on Theatre, 43, 122, 171, 175 “Restoration of Behavior,” 237, 264 Richard’s Lear, 6, 179–81 “Stanislavski at School,” 157 “Stanislavski in America,” 156 “Transforming Theatre Departments,” 157 see also East Coast Artists; East End Players; the New Orleans Group; The Performance Group Scheer, Edward, 126, 129–30, 132 Schmale, Eva, 183 Schneider, Alan, 224 Schneider, Rebecca, 2, 9, 37, 135, 155 Kyrie Eleison (Lord Have Mercy), 145, 146, 148 “Performance Remains,” 150n24 Schor, Naomi Reading in Detail, 142 Schwerner, Michael, 163 Scott, A. C., 180 Second World War, 70 Sedgwick, Eve Sokofsky, 137, 149n6 Self, 147 Self, Kass, 207 Sen, Ong Keng, 155 Shakespeare, William, 14, 24, 102, 104, 106, 108, 171, 214, 221, 224 King Lear, 180 Richard III, 180 Shanghai Peoples Art Theater, 6 Shanghai Theatre Art Center, 109, 110 Shanghai Theatre Academy, 8, 82n24, 98, 116n1, 116n9, 117nn18–20, 155 and the emergence of performance studies in China, 99–103 symbolic devices and cultural perspectives, 103–9

293

Shepard, Sam, 26, 29, 222 The Tooth of Crime, 5, 25 Shi, Wei Towards a Poor Theatre, 100 Shinobu, Orikuchi, 272 Shogo, Ota The Water Station, 187, 188 Shvarts, Aliza, 10, 275–7, 280, 281, 282 L’affaire, 278 Siegel, Marcia, 150n24, 184 Singapore Flying Circus Project, 128 Singer, Milton, 68–72, 76, 79 “The Pattern of Indian Civilization: A Preliminary Report of a Methodological Field Study,” 69 Traditional India: Structure and Change, 70, 81n12 When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 69 Sircar, Badal, 202 The Sisters of Mercy, 208 Smerling, A. J., 251, 263 Smith, Anna Deavere, 2, 9, 37n5, 220 Fires in the Mirror, 25 Smith, Ciel, 198, 211 Sonnega, William, 50, 61 Sophocles Oedipus, 165, 210 Oedipus Rex, 165, 167 Sorgenfrei, Carol, 184 Sprinkle, Annie, 153, 277 Stanescu, Saviana, 7 Stanislavski, Constantin, 86, 160, 183, 197 An Actor Prepares, 122 Statesman, 53 Stein, Peter, 170, 251, 263 Cherry Orchard, 31 Stewart, John, 76 Storr, Robert, 281 Strategic Army Corp, 3 Striff, Erin Performance Studies, 82n23, 95 Strindberg, August Miss Julie, 165 Suryodarmo, Suprapto Amerta Movement, 189 Sutherland, Elizabeth, 47 Sydney Morning Herald, 265 Sydney University, 121, 123, 125, 132n35

294

Index

Tadashi, Suzuki, 24, 132 The Trojan Women, 182 Taipei National University of the Arts, 113 Tait, Peta Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, 127, 128 Takamatsu, Prince, 267 Taylor, Diana, 10, 237 Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War, 246 Taylor, Moira, 94 Taymor, Julie, 179 TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, 4, 7, 9, 17, 18, 24, 29, 39, 41, 42, 71, 82n24, 85, 87, 91, 92, 98, 99, 100, 116, 122, 143, 144, 147, 152– 61, 164, 167, 170, 171, 222, 224, 227, 277, 282 “Performance Theory: Southeast Asia Issue,” 179 “War and Other Bad Shit,” 158 Theater Bulletin, 53 TheaterWeek, 88, 89 Theatre Arts: The Journal of Shanghai Theatre Academy, 155, 160 “Performance Studies and Social Performance: Philosophical Foundations and Practical Ramifications,” 101 “What is Performance Studies?” 116n1 Theatre Journal, 88 Therapeutic Humor, 249 Thiong’o, Ngu ˜g ˜ı wa, 90 Thiyam, Ratan, 24 Thoday, Margaret, 203 Tillich, Paul, 147 Times of India, 57 Tisch School of the Arts, 7, 82n24, 98, 110, 225 Tomkins, Calvin The Bride and The Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, 145 Towsen, John, 251 “Tramp on the Street,” 204 Trier, Lars von The Kingdom, 253 Tulane University, 3, 4, 5, 9, 41, 153, 155, 158, 162, 164, 172, 173, 196, 282

Graduate Theatre Program, 171 MFA Directing Program, 163, 175 The Tulane Drama Review, 4, 5, 17, 41, 42, 153, 164, 171, 196 Turnbull Colin, 172 Turner, Victor, 5, 6, 40, 46, 58, 59, 63n75, 63n79, 85, 86, 92, 95, 121, 129, 137, 173, 174, 181, 182, 203, 217, 253, 277, 282 “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality,” 263n12 From Ritual to Theatre, 57 “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, Ritual,” 263n12 University of British Columbia, 209 University of Chicago Southern Asian Studies Program, 70 University of Haifa, 248, 255, 262 University of Iowa, 3, 155 University of Maryland, 93 University of Melbourne, 120, 121, 123, 124 University of NSW, 121 University of Sydney, 121, 131 University of Wales, 121, 126 University of Wisconsin-Madison Boys from Syracuse, 180 “The Other Side of Shakespeare,” 180 Richard’s Lear, 180 Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead, 180 US State Department 110 Vagnoli, Laura, 251 Van der Veer, Paul Da Xi, 83n34 Van Gennep, Arnold, 85, 86, 87, 95 Van Hove, Ivo, 24 Vance, Vivian, 221 Varney, Denise, 123, 124, 128 Vawter, Ron, 6, 145, 146, 210, 215 Victoria University, 124 Villa Grimaldi, 10, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246nn4–5 Vishvamitra, 53, 54, 62nn60–1 Vlckova, Irena, 251 Von Trier, Lars, 253 Vorse, Mary, 3

Index Wagner, Arthur, 169, 175n1 Walker Arts Center, 180 Warr, Tracy, 127 Wayang, 8, 67–84 Wayang Party, 83n37 Weintraub, Andrew N. Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java, 82, 83n32 Weiss, Peter, 171 Whitehead, Alfred North, 21 Wijaya, Putu Geez!, 186 Wilde, Oscar, 224 Williams, David, 128 Williams, Gary Jay, 184 Williams, Robin, 249 Williams, Scott, 183 Williams, Tennessee, 24, 221, 222, 223, 224 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 28 Wilson, August, 226 Two Trains Running, 25 Wilson, Robert, 24, 29 Wimmer, Cynthia, 97n27 Teaching Performance Studies, 82n23 Winnebago Indians, 251 Winnecott, D. W. Playing and Reality, 169 Woods, Alan, “Emphasizing the Avant-Garde: An Exploration in Theatre Historiography,” 35–6 Woodstock Nation, 173 Woodward, Kathleen, 148n5 Woodward Report, 282 Wooster Group, 6, 24, 26, 153, 155, 218, 219

295

Brace Up!, 31 Rumstick Road, 215, 218 Sakonnet Point, 210, 215 Three Sisters, 31 World War II, 69, 70, 259, 272, 273, 274n17 see also Second World War Worthen, W. B., 57, 58, 63n79, 277 Xiaodu, Yang, 100 Xiaoping, Lv, 103, 107, 116n9 Xing, Zheng, 105 Yale Daily News, 275 Yale University, 10, 275, 276, 280, 281, 282 Ying, Gui, 103, 117n10 Yip, Tim, 114, 158 Yippie Festival of Light, 158 YMCA, 168 Yongwen, Peng, 2, 7, 8, 98, 99 Yoo, Jeung-sook, 187, 188 Yuichiro, Takahashi, 2, 10, 264 Yunan College, 102 Zaili, Chen, 110 Zarrilli, Phillip, 2, 6, 9, 177, 183, 190 Boys from Syracuse, 180 The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance, Structure, 184 Psychophysical Acting, 186 Zedong, Mao, 109, 111 Zhejiang University, 103, 117n10 Zinder, David, 183 Ziyoni, Herzel, 254–62, 263n16 Zola, Émile, 165 Zuni, 252