sarma

Time and Contestation

In the first week of last November the University of Toronto, through its Theater Program department, held the international conference 'W.hy Theater: Choices for the New Century' in what seems to be another example of current preoccupations in theater studies - how to consider and problematize a reconfiguration of theater in a symbolic moment of temporal 'change'.

I know that some readers will already object that the title of the conference is all but problematic, and particularly as a methodological departure. It certainly seems to carry a tone a bit more programmatic than other recent formulations of the kind, as exemplified in the excellent issue of Yale University's journal 'Theater' dedicated to theater and Utopia. I can also foresee other objections to the conference's title: its troubling gesture towards a certain millenarianism (a gesture not particularly generative and culturally inclusive); or the almost irrepressible response from theater lovers when confronted with "Why Theater?" - most of them shoot back, "Why not?" and end the conversation there. And certainly, to ask, "Why Theater?" reinforces and recycles what seems to be an already tired idea - that the theater is something that is in a constant state of peril, that if it doesn't make the right 'choices' today, it will disappear tomorrow and forever. Finally, to think that one can articulate 'choices for the theater' in response to the 'challenges' of a new century (whatever that 'new century' means) seems not only a rather overwhelming task for a four-day conference, but it seems to oversimplify the way theatrical 'choices' are actually generated.

With all that said I would nevertheless urge the skeptical reader to beat with me a little Ionger and with the 'Why Theater' conference, for despite what has been said above I would now like to entertain the idea that it was precisely the collusion of this sequence of problematic tropes that served as a generative pretext for a highly provocative exchange of ideas, texts, stories and theatrical practices having in view the predicament of our times facing the uncertainty of the future. In this sense, discussions on the theater as being-in-a-state-of-peril became less whining, or a boring and empty litany of complaints (as fat as I can recall, this alarmism seems to be permanently present in discourses on theater -and less in the power of theatrical experiences in our century) and more a strategic theoretical move. A necessary move, made in order to identify the contours of theater as that which precisely participates in an ontology of crisis.

This is what Marvin Carlson, in his remarks on the opening session of the conference, called the "paradoxical structure of the theater: that of being essentially contested". Thus, theater's being is a being-in-crisis, and theatrical crisis is a permanent crisis - but this theatrical crisis is generative rather than nihilistic, it is powerful rather than an ominous imminent failure. For theatrical failure is not the failure of theater but the failure to achieve theater.

That being said, the question"Why Theater?", if it wants to generate more than the not unreasonable "Why not?" must be posed in the following terms: what does it mean to be an art from that is, as Carlson suggested, "essentially contested", essentially always in crisis? I would suggest that this peculiar being-in-crisis institutes theater as a practice of temporal troubles and as a site for spatial ambiguities; theater would be that embodiment of words, sounds, motions and desire which stands neither within time nor outside time but in an always contested site which establishes and disposes a spatial and temporal moment for different logics of being- in-time to inhabit. This troublesome time and this ambiguous space are essentially theatrical and contested because they are always already vanishing. They rehearse a symbolic space that is not the one of death, for theater's vanishing leaves traces, marks, stains ready for reappropriation and revisiting, but is a space of ambiguous and contested position regarding the realm of the living. Theater's faith is the faith of Antigone.

Perhaps because theater exists in this privileged and uncertain relationship with time, the chronological normativity implied in the formulation "new century" was precisely that which was not debated throughout the conference. Rather, the conference participants focused mainly on theater's convulsive present condition and on the identification of the desired conditions for theater's continuing being in presence. Form be essentially contested leads inevitably to another important question that could not be evaded at the conference: what does it mean to practice, advocate, theorize and celebrate theater in the predicament of late capitalism? (Which is a question that derails the violent artificiality of the calendar).

To think how to continue the presence of theater is to consider how to balance its inclusion in a logic of capital circulation, which is to say, how to include theater in a logic of a certain time/space organization that thrives in a blinding and dulling acceleration, as David suggests in his extraordinary book 'The Condition of Postmodernity'. In late capitalism the circulation of theater emerges as problematic movement, a counterpoint regarding the circulation of capital and goods between nations. For theater circulates bodies; and bodies contain and disseminate new ideas and unusual gestures. That is the essence and the promise of theater's peculiar transcultural movement - its most innocent presence has the potential for a radical revolution.

In this logic, the economy of theater requires a thinking-over of the question of cultural nomadism - which is a more important political as well as theatrical problem than the question of capital circulation.

Theater for whom?

Most tellingly, the majority of presentations seemed to suggest that the quest for a theatrical culture in a post-modern, post-colonial, late-capitalist, video-oriented globalization should supplement the question "Why theater?" with the question "Theater for whom?"

Dennis Kennedy suggested this supplemental question and "theater for whom?" proved to be a common theme throughout the four days of working sessions. Rightly so, it seems to me. For to ask, "theater for whom?" entails not only sociology or a statistics of the theatrical audience but, more importantly, it (re)opens a problem that has received less attention in recent years namely, the problem of an anthropological or cultural approach to the relationship between audience reception and the performance's content or (characteristically theoretically old-fashioned) "message".

To reconsider the perception/emission divided in a theatrical context in contemporaneity is to entertain the problems posed by an increasing internationalization of the theater. It is to consider the phenomena of intercultural theatrical practices (as defined by Bonnie Marranca, see B. Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, eds, interculturalism and and Performance, 1991) in a multicultural context. Marvin Carlson cogently outlines the problems of contemporary intemationalism in his paper 'International Theater Today: Problems and Perspectives'. Carlson made the point that "international theater is not new in the theatrical tradition" but that contemporaneity both "complexifies and globalizes" this nomadic tradition. After identifying three types of international theater, i.e., the international touring of a production; the presence of several different nationalities within a single production (a tradition from 19th-century opera) and "the modern pilgrimage theater- such as Theatre du Soleil, the early Brecht etc.- Carlson proposed that in our current globalization the question of the 'local' theater versus the 'international' theater becomes essentially an opposition of dramaturgical emphasis on what he called the 'drama' (i.e, the performative aspects of theater).

In a remarkable conclusion, Carlson explains that the multi-lingual predicament of the theater today challenges theater in its transcultural mobility. For Carlson, theater must "move easily" and in order to do so is deconstructing the idea of 'drama' as text-oriented dramaturgy, and re placing it with a more 'performative' structure, privileging the visual and the choreographic. In order to move easily and transculturally, theater has been turning into movement. Carlson's examples of this shift are quite suggestive regarding the uses of movement and choreography in theatrical practices - Pina Bausch, Johann Kresnik, Reza Abdoh, Jan Fabre, La Fura del Baus. Is choreography, then, theater's new gesture?

On Dramaturgy

What are the theatrical forms for our global predicament? What is the impact on theater of an audience that increasingly relates to acting and staging via the audiovisual, the telematic? And what of an 'international theater' and the language it must find in order to circulate cultures? AII these questions, formulated explicitly and implicitly throughout the discussions, seem to call for a new dramaturgy for the theater to come.

The shape of political contours of such a dramaturgy is nevertheless a site for contention - as is the figure and role of the dramaturge.

In his view Dennis Kennedy suggested that the question of audience reception in a post-modern context of "soft-world order" (Baudrillard) is particularly urgent in the multicultural socio- scape of post-modernity. In his paper 'Theater in Crisis', Kennedy proposed that a fragmented, fractal world must be historically contextualized by the elision of the dichotomy 'bourgeois theater versus the avant-garde'. For Kennedy, it is possible to say that this opposition of a theater that strives to preserve culture (i.e., bourgeois) to one that aims at renovating culture (i.e., the avant-garde) no Ionger operates. Kennedy claims that this fact results precisely from a profound "psychic change in the spectator", a change provoked in the spectator's ability to practice a certain "deconstruction". Kennedy's provocative thesis is that this new ability to deconstruct derives from an increasing "habituation" to widely available film, video, computer, television and telematic techniques. According to him, the fact that the 'normal' spectator can seperate his or her VCR in order to rewind, review, fast-forward, zoom, accelerate, slow down or pause the flow of a visual narrative endows the spectator of contemporaneity with a "spontaneity” to deconstruct" -not only the presence of the actor but also the very idea of authorship. Kennedy bolsters his reasoning by stating that particularly in cyberspace, characterized as "that space that does not exist at all", the separation between actor and spectator is erased. With all this said, what Kennedy wants to know is if "theater can be something more than a step in the info-bahn?"

Personally, I find Kennedy's use of the term 'deconstruction' skewed. To say that today's audience knows how to deconstruct authorial voice or performative presence by the means of a VCR command seems problematic. Deconstruction is an intellectual practice embedded in an ideological reconfiguration of a certain order, or law; a reconfiguration that in itself is not at all transparent and ready to use. And the orders of today are the commodification of image and the demand, the institutionalization of a certain pervasive instantaneous spontaneity (as exemplified by the obsession with immediate responses in political polis, the practice of 'flaming' in cyberspace, the racist reaction towards the Unknown). This kind of spontaneity is one which I find highly problematic and which Artaud, in his post script to 'Manifesto for a Theatre that Faited', Iocates as one of the pathologies of modernity: "an abnormal facility that has entered into human relations which does not allow our thoughts to take root." (3:159). To Kennedy's arguments I would reply that images can indeed be manipulated by the touch of a VCR remote control button, but that the possibilities for that manipulation are already programmed into the electronic commodity. The questions then must be, What is the intellectual purpose of this manipulation? What revolutionary act or thought does it entail? Does this dismantling of the video-recorded continuum in any way deconstruct out own living habits?

These are political questions that beg further dramaturgic discussion. In an interesting session on the contemporary German scene (or rather its Berlin version) the presentations by Ute Scharfenberg on the Berliner Ensemble after 'reunification' and by Siegfried Wilzopolski on the Volksbühne raised the question of instantaneity and spontaneity versus a temporally extended and controlled dramaturgy.

In her discussion of Heiner Müller's project of continuing Brecht's legacy by criticizing Brecht, Scharfenberg quotes Müller in a statement that echoes my earlier citation from Artaud: "Since the political changes in Germany," Müller says, "there is no thinking in Germany any more." According to Scharfenberg, the observation of this nervousness in German society, a nervousness that denies people the time to ratiocinate, led Heiner Müller to state that the role of the theater must be "not to react but to design new realities" - instead of instantaneous reaction, the Artaudian time for "thoughts to take root."

Siegfried Wilzopolski, dramaturge at the Volksbühne, presented an opposite dramaturgic (and political) project in the same session. Wilzopolski described the Volksbühne's project under Frank Castorf as precisely one that privileges spontaneity and self-expression. In this sense it is a reactionary theater, privileging instantaneous reaction rather than timely reflection (one can also see the workings of this ethics and aesthetics in Johann Kresnik's dance theater).

In these two dramaturgic approaches to political theatre one finds a conflictual management of time as a theatrical device, a contestation of temporality and its political implications. Is one better than the other? Do they serve or rather disserve the community? My own view is that although reaction has its uses and charm, its ethics are highly problematic at the present political moment in Europe. I have had the chance elsewhere to criticize the uses of spontaneity and instantaneous reaction in Kresnik's dramaturgy, but will just repeat that, in a time of resurgent intolerance, certain gestures tend to produce father than lessen terror. It was Benjamin who warned us of the links between offering the opportunity for (but not the right of) self-expression and the program of Fascist intolerance.

On Theatrical Remembrance

Given the increasing dislocation of bodies in contemporaneity, one must learn how to rehearse rather than react to the encounter with the Other. Julia Kristeva made this point in her lecture 'Le Théâtre du Livre' , which preceded Bob Wilson's masterclass on the third day of the conference.

Kristeva identified the cultural moment we live in as one of the death of the psychic sacred. This death leads to the most dreadful pathology of contemporaneity: "The modern man [sic] does not know how to speak (and perform) his conflicts" and most particularly the conflict of facing the Other. Kristeva called for a "theater of intelligence", a theater that revolutionizes by means of a return; precisely a return to memory.

Memory, then, emerges as a troublesome and ambiguous but highly generative and generous space/time- in this sense memory participates in the generative crisis of theater.