APRIL 1999

 

Theatrical Space
Lowell Edmunds, Rutgers University, NJ, USA

The following inevitably refers to my divisions of theatrical space, refined since my book on Sophocles OC. My further thoughts can be found in the form of an outline, no more than two screens-long on most computers, at: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~edmunds.

What was fundamental in ancient Greek tragedy and is it recoverable in a modern performance? These two questions have guided many of the contributions to this seminar. Today, I comment on a certain aspect of space in ancient Greek tragedy that I think is fundamental and that can and should be recovered. This aspect is the relation of off- to on-stage space. True,the original space can never be recovered (Toph Marshall), i.e., the theater space and the physical stage space, and neither, therefore, can David Wiles' "ritual circle of the community around a surrogate altar." But the dramatic space (space created by language) must somehow be recovered in any performance.

In the most general terms, the relation of the two sides of dramatic space is the relation, in any given tragedy, between that tragedy and the myth that lies behind it: what happened THEN and THERE (myth) is presented HERE and NOW (tragic performance). This dynamic is reduplicated, in the performance, in reported events: SHORTLY BEFORE and THERE appear, in words, HERE and NOW (on stage). In Soph. OT (the best case, many would say), THEN and THERE become the matter of a revelation that proceeds relentlessly through the course of the play. Heidegger saw in this revelation a prime instance of the pre-Platonic metaphysics of aletheia, "that which does not escape," that which comes into unconcealment.

Such an experience of this dynamic is no longer possible when the performance is unable (for whatever reason) to envisage any domain beyond the psychology of the characters and the capacity of the actors to project that psychology. At this point, I can link my position to the seminar's discussion of the mask, which Wiles called "the defining convention of the form." In this regard, Greg McCart's record of experiments with Medea 46-626 (Feb. 1998) is most helpful. When the scene is played with masks, he found, "The actor embodied the text, even danced the text. The consequence of this was to force the spectator to read the mask and the body in performance and this foregrounded the story rather than the psychologies of the characters." The foregrounding of the story brings me back to the notion of the THEN and THERE appearing HERE and NOW as a fundamental dynamic. I think that such a notion is not incompatible with Michael Walton's "strangeness." Certainly not incompatible with Katerina Zacharia's strictures, which were music to my ears.

The present-day director's belatedness can be turned to his or her advantage. The dynamic of performance that I have defined can now take a new form: what was performed long ago THEN and THERE is now re-performed on this stage in New York (or wherever) HERE and NOW.

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RESPONSES TO TOPIC

David Wiles, Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK

Lowell and I have had several previous conversations about theatre semiotics. It's good to resume. To report first from the front: I think there is increasing unease within the theatre studies community about semiotics. This is basically because semiotics postulates a detached decoding spectator, where so many practitioners now want to postulate an interactive model of the performance process. I'm less clear what the alternatives now are, and continue searching.

I have real difficulties with the idea that you cannot recover the original performing space, but can recover a thing called 'dramatic space' embracing an on-stage/off-stage distinction. Surely any reader has to visualize a specific actual space, in order to create the distinctions you are thinking of? The term 'on-stage' already has a semantic loading that implies a thing called a stage, and convenient wings. We need a model that deals with a situation where an entering character is visible to half the audience, and apprehended by the other half because they sense the reactions of the half that can see. It seems to me that semiotics has trouble with this kind of dynamic.

I'm not clear about your distinction between 'the myth' and 'any given tragedy'. What is your attitude towards the structuralist line which holds that the 'mythos' of any given play is one in a long line of tellings and there is no authentic thing bck there we can ever call 'the myth'?

On to your major distinction THERE/THEN versus HERE/NOW. Vernant's line that C5th dramatists played off contemporary reality against Homeric reality makes good sense to me. The idea that this distinction articulates the plot structure also makes sense, but seems equally true of any naturalist play by Ibsen, or anything in the traditions of New Comedy. Surely this is a feature of the 'well-made play' as distinct from the epic play?

I'm not clear what you are saying about contemporary performance. It seemed to me that Greg McCart was  following the line first mapped out by John Jones in his Aristotle book and arguing that masks foreground the action at the expense of character. I'm sure this is right. I couldn't entirely grasp how this relates to your argument?

Any modern performance of a classic (eg Shakespeare) must negotiate a relationship between THERE/THEN and HERE/NOW. But what relationship? Hall's Oresteia in the Olivier theatre set up relationships with Homeric Mycenae, Classical Athens, Anglo-Saxon culture, designer fashions of the 1970's, an idealized first performance at Epidaurus, etc. There are so many different options, with different ethical and aesthetic implications. Which do you want to champion?

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, UK

Many thanks to Lowell for provoking us to think about the relationship between the different parts of this seminar.

 To start with, I have a query - if we accept that the ancient theatre space and the physical stage space cannot be recovered ( and by implication the community and its responses are also not recoverable) then in what sense can it be appropriate to talk of the recovery of the space created by language? Would it be better to use words like (re)construction, transplantation, re-creation (to mark various stages of the spectrum, moving towards invention) and to address the relationship between performers and audience? It seems to me that the Greeks were dealing with myth in a very fluid way that bridged the 'then and there' and 'here and now' in different ways in different contexts and that any modern performance has to take account of that dynamic.

Furthermore, even an 'archaeological' type of  reconstruction of ancient performance has to recognise that it is misleading and reductionist to collapse those two elements of ancient performance into one another just to create a fixed 'then and there'. Surely the contribution of modern performance is to add a third element in that it creates its own 'here and now' which has to interact both with the outline of the myth and with the way in which the tragedian played with it. The tensions or faultlines in the Greek source text/performance often spark off the most interesting aspects of modern productions and again lead to another level of fluidity in realising the 'here and now'. And of course there is debate about how 'here and now' may be constituted. I'm thinking, for example, of the way in which recent productions of Sophocles' Electra have provoked arguments about  naturalism vs 'contemporization' (Bosnia in the Donmar Warehouse staging with Zoe Wannamaker) vs psychological realism (Electra/Ophelia in the Compass Theatre Company's staging with Jane Montgomery).

All sides in that sort of debate, I suspect, are making assumptions about the nature of audience activity. This makes me unhappy about too rigid a division between the notions of the audience as, on the one hand, detached 'sign spotters' and on the other hand inhabitants of 'reflexive space', i.e. critically self aware of their relationship to their own cultural environment which may include, but is not framed by, their awareness of the ancient myth and its reception in Greek tragedy. (The term 'reflexive' is borrowed from Rush Rehm's paper delivered at our January conference on the theatre.I've added my own gloss for the purposes of this discussion.) Isn't it then the case that dramatic space is framed, communicated and understood by a combination of factors - language, acting styles, music, design, choreography and body language etc? To give a very simple example, the recent Actors of Dionysus  Hippolytus (Steiner Theatre, London) combined verbal silence and suspension of physical activity with a recording of waves breaking on the sea shore as a prelude to the speech in which Theseus learns of Hippolytus' fate when the Bull rises from the sea. I suspect that we need a greater (empirical?) awareness of how modern audiences (as individuals and as groups) respond to word and signs and of how that response is activated by what the members of the audience themselves bring. This would include not just moral and aesthetic starting points but also simple factors like knowledge/expectations of the Greek play and the outline of the myth.Is there really such a thing as the innocent eye and ear? Does anyone know of any research being carried out with audiences?

Greg McCart, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Lowell Edmunds' comment that the foregrounding of the story in the performance of tragedy is connected with the notion of THEN and THERE appearing HERE and NOW as a fundamental dynamic prompts me to record observations which derive from my own work with facsimiles of the comic and tragic mask both indoors and outdoors. 

David Wiles' argument for the mask as the key to understanding classical Greek theatre performance in the March seminar is relevant here.  My experience has led me to conclude that masks 'work' more effectively in outdoor performance than they do in indoor performance.  I suspect that this has a lot to do with audience/spectator focus.  The controlled environment of the indoor theatre (the arrangement of the seating, use of lighting, set construction, make-up and so on) makes the relationship between actor and spectator more intimate, even in large theatres.  Outdoors, such focus is impossible to achieve, especially in daytime performance.  Many other elements of the environment 'distract' from or complement the focus.  In indoor performance, the focus on the mask is intense.  In outdoor performance, the focus on the mask is diffuse. It is also my experience as director and actor in masked performance that both the tragic and comic mask demand athletic performance because spectators 'read' the mask as one component of physical performance.  This contributes to the notion of story-telling supplanting the psychology of the characters. And so, although I believe David Wiles is right in naming the mask as the key to understanding tragic performance, it is the mask in association with other elements.  And they are, I believe, athletic performance in an expansive outdoor setting in daytime conditions (where electric lighting cannot control focus or influence the environment).  When we respect these elements as well as the mask, we might make some inroads into understanding the theatrical impact of ancient Greek conventions of performance and thereby facilitate Edmunds' THEN and THERE in the HERE and NOW.

On another point, I agree wholeheartedly with Marianne McDonald, on the basis of my experience in working with mask with professional and student actors, that contemporary actors in the Western tradition, unlike those in Noh, for example,  lack the skills to use mask effectively.  The main reason for this is that mask is a minor component in actor-training (if it is included at all) in most conventional actor-training courses.

Nurit Yaari, Tel Aviv University, Israel

In response to Edmund Lowell's contribution on theatrical space I would like to raise several points for further discussion. 

1.     Regarding Lowell's divisions of theatrical space: while analyzing the dramatic (fictional) space it is important to add that theater and stage spaces are represented not only in spoken words. In the theater, these spaces can be referred to by movements and actions. And although the dramatic space is always represented in the text's words, these words contain also indications for actions and  movements rhythm and sound.

2.     I agree that the original space can never be recovered and that it emphasizes our inability to arrive at an exact reconstruction (of the theatrical space, the stage space or the performances), however, dramatic space can be recovered from the plays and when read in the light of studies on the cultural attitudes as well as  religious and socio-political attitudes to space in the Athenian polis, I believe we can get closer to the understanding of what was fundamental in ancient Greek tragedy and transform it into our modern performances of the Greek plays.

3.     The transformation of THERE and THEN into a HERE and NOW is one of the most important features of  the theater as an art of the "present" in its double sense. As tragedy is first and foremost theater, it is clear that this transformation is present in the three space units of the theater: dramatic (fictional) space, stage space and in the theatrical (architectural) space. I agree that in OT this transformation serves as  the central image of both action and mise-en-sc?ne, but I believe that the organization of space is a prominent component of each dramatist/director's artistic techniques.

4.     The division off stage/on stage does not represent only the doubling of There and Then vs. HERE and NOW. There are scenes in which the HERE is divided into two (e.g. murder scenes) and the action is duplicated by an interplay between inside and outside, between the revealed and the concealed.   

5.     I find that the crucial point in the production of Greek tragedy on the Modern stages is the transformation of dramatic (fictional) space, defined in each tragedy according to the dramatist's symbolization of the actual space conventions of his time. Dramatic space contains not only words or indications to characters and places but also cultural attitudes, ideas, beliefs. Therefore, when a Greek tragedy is transformed into the space of a modern stage, these attitudes should be 'translated' by the performative components of the production: stage-design, actors body, movement, mise-en-scene, accessories sound and lights into a stage space that provokes meaning to the modern spectators. By reflecting on their  cultural attitudes.

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Final Response from Topic Leader Lowell Edmunds

Here is my response to the responses. First, some general considerations.

Semiotics of theater, like any literary theory, has to abstract from the totality of its object in order to achieve results. One of the things from which semiotics of theater abstracts is audience or individual response. But, in my mind at least, other approaches are not ruled out by the one I happen to like.

There is a difference between theory and the immediate experience of the theater-goer. The theoretician, when he or she watches a play, is no longer (I hope) a theoretician, a "decoding spectator," "sign-spotter."

I don't know if I ever, even when I was two years-old, believed that recovery of the past, historical authenticity, was possible, and I am sorry if I have given the impression that I now so believe. There is no remembering without forgetting. (For some already epigonal remarks, with their own forgetting, and references see G. Nagy, Homeric Questions126.)

Responses to David Wiles:

‘I have real difficulties with the idea that you cannot recover the original performing space, but can recover a thing called 'dramatic space' embracing an on-stage/off-stage distinction. Surely any reader has to visualize a specific actual space, in order to create the distinctions you are thinking of?’
I am not using the "I don’t understand" ploy. I really don't understand the second of these sentences in relation to the first. If I take the second sentence by itself, my reply is: yes. If I take the first sentence by itself, my reply is: what I call "dramatic space" is recovered from the texts of the tragedies, not from the original performing space, which has disappeared.

Even extant ancient theaters were all transformed even in ancient times and give no clue to fundamental questions of performance, e.g., a raised stage in the fifth-century theater.

‘The term 'on-stage' already has a semantic loading that implies a thing called a stage, and convenient wings.’
But stage is distinctly secondary to space in my conception. I have used "stage" as shorthand for the space, whatever it may be, in which "A represents or plays the role of X while S watches" (Erika Fischer-Lichte).

‘We need a model that deals with a situation where an entering character is visible to half the audience, and apprehended by the other half because they sense the reactions of the half that can see. It seems to me that semiotics has trouble with this kind of dynamic.’
No matter when or to whom a character becomes visible, the fact remains that he or she has come from somewhere invisible, which is only reported verbally. So the distinction between my II.A ("Immediate") and II.B ("Diegetic") is fundamental. (I am referring to the outline on my web page.)

‘I'm not clear about your distinction between 'the myth' and 'any given tragedy'. What is your attitude towards the structuralist line which holds that the 'mythos' of any given play is one in a long line of tellings and there is no authentic thing back there we can ever call 'the myth'?’
My position is unchanged since the 1970s and has recently been restated in my contribution on myth to Powell and Morris, ed., New Companion to Homer: a myth is a set of variants.  But there must be a recurring nucleus of narrative motifs or there would be nothing to talk about and Levi-Strauss would not have been able to publish his interpretation of the Oedipus myth.

‘On to your major distinction THERE/THEN versus HERE/NOW. Vernant's line that C5th dramatists played off contemporary reality against Homeric reality makes good sense to me. The idea that this distinction articulates the plot structure also makes sense, but seems equally true of any naturalist play by Ibsen, or anything in the traditions of New Comedy. Surely this is a feature of the 'well-made play' as distinct from the epic play?’
The difference between Ibsen and the traditions of New Comedy, on the one hand, and tragedy, on the other, is myth. Nora, Ellida, Hedda Gabler – they did not have previous existences in epic, oral storytelling, and other plays.

‘I'm not clear what you are saying about contemporary performance. It seemed to me that Greg McCart was following the line first mapped out by John Jones in his Aristotle book and arguing that masks foreground the action at the expense of character. I'm sure this is right. I couldn't entirely grasp how this relates to your argument’?
A director pays more or less attention to the myth - tragedy, THERE/THEN - HERE/NOW dynamic, depending on the director. Paying less usually means concentrating on superficial emotional effects. The mask is a brake on this approach (not that it will always be possible to use masks; cf. Greg McCart again below).

 ‘Any modern performance of a classic (eg Shakespeare) must negotiate a relationship between THERE/THEN and HERE/NOW. But what relationship? Which do you want to champion?’
I champion whichever one moves me most, and that depends upon directors and actors. I am not a director or an actor.

Responses to Lorna Hardwick

To start with, I have a query - if we accept that the ancient theatre space and the physical stage space cannot be recovered (and by implication the community and its responses are also not recoverable) then in what sense can it be appropriate to talk of the recovery of the space created by language? Would it be better to use words like (re)construction, transplantation, re-creation (to mark various stages of the spectrum, moving towards invention) and to address the relationship between performers and audience?
When I refer to space created by language I am thinking of things like the grove of the Eumenides in Soph. OC. Nearly every Greek tragedy has this kind of space.

It seems to me that the Greeks were dealing with myth in a very fluid way that bridged the 'then and there' and 'here and now' in different ways in different contexts and that any modern performance has to take account of that dynamic.
I agree. The difference, for example between Aesch. and Eur. in this respect is considerable. Furthermore, even an 'archaeological' type of reconstruction of ancient performance has to recognise that it is misleading and reductionist to collapse those two elements of ancient performance into one another just to create a fixed 'then and there'. The THERE/THEN is not fixed, as I see it, but is really the ancient spectator's "intertextual encyclopedia" (Eco's phrase) under the relevant entry (Iphigeneia, Oedipus, or who- or whatever), which is likely to have included a lot of information.

Surely the contribution of modern performance is to add a third element in that it creates its own 'here and now' which has to interact both with the outline of the myth and with the way in which the tragedian played with it.
An excellent formulation.

All sides in that sort of debate, I suspect, are making assumptions about the nature of audience activity. This makes me unhappy about too rigid a division between the notions of the audience as, on the one hand, detached 'sign spotters' and on the other hand inhabitants of 'reflexive space', i.e critically self aware of their relationship to their own cultural environment which may include, but is not framed by, their awareness of the ancient myth and its reception in Greek tragedy. (The term 'reflexive' is borrowed from Rush Rehm's paper delivered at our January conference on the theatre.)
As I said above, I would not want to conflate the theoretical activity of semiotics with the experience of the audience. I have criticized Ubersfeld on this point.

Isn't it then the case that dramatic space is framed, communicated and understood by a combination of factors - language, acting styles, music, design, choreography and body language etc?
In the ch. "Theorizing Theatrical Space" in my book on OC, I tried to relativize Isacharoff's hierarchy of codes, which put the linguistic at the top. Non-verbal codes, I tried to show, can overrule verbal ones. So I am in agreement about the combination of factors. The outline on my web page concerns only the verbal and acoustic.

I suspect that we need a greater (empirical?) awareness of how modern audiences (as individuals and as groups) respond to word and signs and of how that response is activated by what the members of the audience themselves bring. This would include not just moral and aesthetic starting points but also simple factors like knowledge/expectations of the Greek play and the outline of the myth. Is there really such a thing as the innocent eye and ear? Does anyone know of any research being carried out with audiences?
Here I am of no use. I am in the audience.