Unsafe Spectators and other musings

Once we unpack our respective observations on realism, it will be instructive to consider our roles in creating "unsafe spectators" . . . people who are not only willing, but desire to be challenged.  I think it's important to notice the effect of media on the viewing public . . . to the point where people are hesitant to applaud performances.

When Kim offered her response to my paper (as well as Kirsten's), I decided to add more on intention, which incidentally included the following observation on my student audience (see below):

In Performance and Cognition (2006), McConachie and Hart write, “ Unlike many Marxists, cognitivists define agency as an image schema in the mind that allows a subject to intend and cause a material change in the world.” Elsewhere in the volume, John Latterbie discusses “being in the moment” in terms of intentionality. He concludes that, even for actors who want to “empty their minds” in order to take in unexpected revelations, “they are recognizing, albeit in different terms, that the question, the frame of mind with which they enter the rehearsal space, is of tantamount importance to the gather of useful information.”

A complex combination of strategies – dramaturgical, visual, and social – must combine with one’s corporeal being in order to convey the desired message. The issue, then, belongs to the intended goal of the creators.
A case in point is engendered by Robert Gordon’s observation that, “Attempts by practitioners to perform Brecht’s plays routinely founder on the failure to understand the relationship between his dramaturgy and his theories of performance.” Recently, I sent my students to a college production of Mother Courage in an upper-middle class community. It fulfilled the “musical” slot of the season, utilizing the 800 seat Performing Arts Center stage for the production. Although valiantly performed as a “poor theatre” production, the cavernous stage and musical comedy application completely eviscerated any opportunity to bring the radical, even dangerous, ideas home. The students reported that they were bored by it; didn’t enjoy the music (!), and completely missed the message.
An article in Theatre Topics (Spring 2008) by Ilka Saal entitled “Making it Real: Theatre in Times of Virtual Warfare” juxtaposes two plays performed almost a decade apart, but, when taken together, demonstrate how differences in “intention” manifest the real. Saal identifies the first play, Sarah Kane’s Blasted (UK 1995), as Theatre of Cruelty, while the second, Jonathan Kalb’s Lehrstück: Gulliver’s Choice is unabashedly Brechtian in style. Without rehearsing her entire piece, it is instructive to our present discussion to offer many of her observations about the two productions. She presents both as efforts to overturn the real in order to cause a reaction in their observers. However, a 2005 production of Blasted, she reports, was so visceral that one-third of the audience members walked out rather than accept the assault presented onstage. The reality portrayed has become hyper-real, and thus unbearable.
Gulliver’s Choice, on the other hand, is more measured. Saal writes, “Kane’s visceral simulation of the loss of certainty, of ethics and logos, experienced in the liminal space of war is replaced in Kalb’s play with a detached conceptual argument aimed primarily at the cognitive engagement of performers and spectators.” But for both, Saal maintains that the aim of realism, instead of absorbing audiences into the narrative, acts to recuperate a numbed populace from the actual distancing performed by representation in the media. She concludes with a series of provocative questions that are germane to our discussion today. Among them, she asks, “…is postmodern theory perhaps too radical in its heightened skepticism of the ‘Real’?”

On the crabby spectator, or, realism and pedagogy, cont.

Two quick things in response to Roberta's stimulating post:

FIRST, I'm grabbed by Roberta's terrific suggestion (building on Kirsten's earlier comments) that the crabby spectator may, in fact, be the "ideal" spectator for unsafe realism. Theatre that pushes you so far beyond comfort and expectation - usually because expectation has been thwarted; because this performance doesn't look anything like the "realism" you've come to expect - that you feel somehow bound to respond, right then and there, forces spectators into collision with one another, as well as with the performers, and in that frisson, as Roberta suggests, debate and discussion are born. Or may be born; I'm not sure how to make this birth work in practice. Here's an example to help frame my uncertainty.

I had a noteworthy experience at Mitchell's recent _Women of Troy_ at the National in November, 2007. (And for those of you not working on Mitchell: can you tell Roberta and I are both working on Mitchell, A LOT?) That performance ends with a controversial coup de theatre, about the effects of which I was uncertain but the goals of which I appreciated. In the moment, though, a spectator several seats down from me had a very opposite, very visceral reaction. She jumped to her feet and pushed her way through the applauding crowd, loudly declaring her disgust. I briefly stood in her way when she tried to push past me, and told her I thought her rude not to salute the actors after what had been a tour de force performance. She told me she was too enraged to stay another minute. I moved and she pushed on. The thing is: I still don't know if she was angry because the production was so outside the norm; because the production fell prey to the norm in its final few minutes; or because she was having a personal reaction to what was a potentially very terrifying moment (a bomb blast on stage; her accent was Russian). I rather wish I'd been able to ask her, to really get the discussion going. Alas, she was too angry, and I too surprised at both myself and her, to make that happen.

The crabby spectator (or, to be a bit less glib, the angry spectator; the unsettled spectator) reminds me of my students: in the classroom they feel, eventually, quite free to react any number of ways, even in rage, to a performance. I appreciate performances that create that very same kind of effect: they poke at not just what we think, but at what we feel, about genre, about the codes of "good" theatre. In these mucky collisions and awkward encounters we are defining, in concert with the performers but also very much for ourselves, in the auditorium, what theatre is, what it could be. In the moment performance engages the crabby spectator, it begins to shift into a kind of activism. What kind of activism, of course, and whether or not that activism is productive - well, that's the problem. What happens AFTER the moment of visceral reaction? How do we turn that reaction into the debate and discussion it so promises?

SECOND, I'm intrigued by the conundrum with which Roberta ends her post. The performance scholars hated the production because they read it as "realist," while the audience apparently adored the production even though, for Roberta, it was in no way "realist". This question reminds me that one of the stakes of defining realism for the twenty-first century is very much social, very much about class: the intellectual elites use realism as one of a host of aesthetic markers by which they differentiate themselves from the entertainment-seeking masses, while the latter do same, in reverse. (Note the number of times reviewers have chastised Mitchell, for example, for thinking herself "too good" to use the whole Euripedes text/Chekhov text/whatever.) In terms of possible social efficacies, we might think of "unsafe" realism as a bend in the genre that seeks to push both of these realism-reliant groups beyond their respective uses of realism. We need to figure out how to push fans of "reality" entertainments (by which I mean what passes for realism on Broadway and in the West End, as well as Big Brother etc, its televisual counterpart) to think about how those entertainments actually function, but we also need to figure out how to get the scholarly realism-bashers to consider the limits of their position, to really think about WHY that position has been so very sacred to them.

FINALLY: Gainor has something to say about the moment in Margolin's essay for Krasner's anthology when she calls Split Britches a Method troupe that simply hasn't cleaned up enough. She uses this moment to query Diamond's reading of Split Britches as Brechtian - or rather, of their effects as Brechtian for feminist spectators. And here is where she (Gainor) troubles the distinction between reception and production in feminist theatre theory and scholarship. What are the consequences of remaining fixed to Brecht in our expectations of audience response, while the performers themselves describe their work as Method?

Some Positions for the Spectator

Hello All,

Thanks so much for your paper, Robin, and for your posts, Kirsten and Kim. I love this emerging discussion about the spectator of realist acting. Just a few thoughts to follow up on what's been said:

1) On Educating the Spectator: One reason I find this conversation important is that I feel that many academic audience members have been 'educated' or 'trained' to dismiss Stanislavskian and ESPECIALLY 'Method' acting in a very automatic manner. My research assistant, who is about to begin her PhD at Northwestern, tells me that when her fellow students ask her what our project is about and she says, "Realist acting," they often respond, "Ugh, that's so outdated, why would you bother??!!?" The modernist assassination of the father dies very hard. I think Robin's argument that this kneejerk dismissal is very often based on misunderstanding and generalization very convincing.

For this reason, I enjoyed reading Krasner's anthology, _Method Acting Reconsidered_, which Robin cites--particularly Deb Margolin's essay about her work with Split Britches. Those of us who work in gender theory are very used to using Split Britches' work as an example of queer theatre's rejection of realism (a rejection both celebrated and delightfully spoofed near the end of their _Belle Reprieve_). But Margolin startles us wonderfully by telling us that she met Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver at a Russian Stanislavskian actress' salon (!!) and by describing Split Britches as "method actors who didn't bother to clean up"--ie, like Mitchell, they used a Stanislavskian process and put it right up there onstage (in their case, openly performing autobiography alongside fiction) instead of effacing it. Here, as in the articles Kim mentions in her post, we see that radical political theatre is not necessarily as easily separated from Method and System practice as we think--we, as highly trained 'scholarly' spectators, are re-educated to see in a more complex, less generalizing way. This is a very important form of spectatorial education that must be encouraged, in my opinion, if performance studies is to move forward from a kind of post-structuralist orthodoxy that often divides it from the kinds of practitioners Robin so eloquently describes.

2) I love Kirsten's question about the spectator I shared Mitchell's _Iphigenia_: the lady who spent the whole show (and I do mean the WHOLE 2 hours) complaining audibly about the production. (The woman sitting next to me, who seemed to love it, turned around at one point and hissed, "Well, why don't you LEAVE, then???" She didn't.) I have never attended one of Mitchell's productions without encountering some degree of spectatorial anger, confusion, or boredom alongside the enthusiasm of other audience members. (In another example, the prompt book of Mitchell's 1998 _Uncle Vanya_ records an audience member yelling, "Speak UP!!" at Anastasia Hille as Yelena--even in the tiny Young Vic, Mitchell encouraged her actors to speak in such 'real' tones that at a few moments they became difficult to hear.) I don't think that these spectators need re-education, unlike the academics I describe above. I find their presence at these productions invigorating, even thrilling--instead of a staid event at which all can concur that they are watching "art" (as Robin says, often a code name for unadventurous and incompletely achieved realism), one finds oneself in the midst of a sporting event or a debate. I NEVER shout "bravo" at the end of shows (far too repressed), but I did at the end of _Iphigenia_--partially because I adored it, and partially because I wanted the lady behind me to realize that I disagreed with her. Audience engagement at work!

All spectators will not, and neither can nor should be trained to, embrace a performance such as Fiona Shaw's Medea (which Robin mentions) as "good". But such a performance will often push even those who hate it far enough out of their comfort zones that they are forced to articulate their own notions of "good" acting and "good" theatre more clearly. In the process, whether consciously or not, they engage in a kind of debate about the place of theatre in society. This, I think, is the kind of theatrical effect Brecht sought (to return to Leigh's paper).

3) I am fascinated to read Robin's upcoming commentary on _The Country Girl_ as "a particularly excellent example of poor realism masquerading as art." I saw a production of _Much Ado About Nothing_ at the National Theatre this winter, with Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker (actors I greatly admire), that struck me as just that. The audience ADORED it--or at least, so their applause and laughter expressed. A group of Shakespeare in Performance scholars I met with later that week almost universally hated it, and claimed that they did so because it was "too realist" and hence unfaithful to the style of Shakespeare's own theatre. Leaving aside the possibility (or not) of emulating that historical style, this conclusion bothered me as I honestly saw no moment in the production that suggested the risky engagement with erveryday human behaviour and emotion that Robin describes as _true_ Method or realist acting. WHY, then, did the audience so embrace this production? Why was realism the scapegoat for those academic audience members members who disliked it? And HOW can those of us who wish to argue for a more nuanced view distinguish between what Robin calls "poor" or safe realism and a truer version of "the real thing"?

Enough babble! Thank you so much for this engaging discussion, everyone!

Cheers,
Roberta

Thoughts for/from Robin

A lucky accident: I read Robin's paper just after exploring two terrific articles on Stanislavski, Method, and feminist work by Rhonda Blair and J. Ellen Gainor. (Both papers are in _Theatre Topics_ 12.2 (2002).) Blair and Gainor query the binary feminist work has set up between thinking and feeling, between Brecht and Stanislavsky, between critical, political theatre and naturalist mimesis. Blair is interested in reconfiguring Stanislavsky's heritage in the West, particularly in North America; she points to the intersections of his working method, especially the late method of physical actions, with advances in contemporary neuroscience. Gainor, on the other hand, offers a wonderfully critical history of feminist theatre work in the states, arguing that it grew up, particularly in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, specifically around a very specific *interpretation* of realist performance technique - that is to say, around a resistance to Stanislavsky as practiced and disseminated by Strasberg. This resistance has solidified into a critical commonplace that claims Stan is retrograde, while Brecht is the only political practitioner worth emulating. Gainor not only reassesses the terms of this (false) binary, but also asks us to think about why academic feminists often read as Brechtian what practitioners themselves call Method-based work. In other words, she challenges us to parse the relationship between production and reception, doing and watching, in our privileging of Brecht over Stanislavsky and Method.

Cut to Robin's paper. I was particularly moved, Robin, by how your characterization of "unsafe" Method work intersects with Julie's "foolish witness". You write: "The Method actor must 1) know what their objective is, 2) relate to that objective so that it is meaningful and justifiable to their own human quality, and 3) allow their body and psyche to do anything to get that need met even if it means risking embarrassment or pain" (12). According to Robin, the ideal Method performer is akin to Julie's foolish witness: both risk their bodies in processing new ideas, new meaning.

But what of the spectator to this performance? Does he or she need to take a similar risk? Does Method produce a foolish witness in the audience as well as on the stage? In response, Robin writes that "unsafe" Method is "Theatre that produces a discomfort for both the player and the audience. It may be seen as 'too real'. It is uncomfortable to witness. The audience may look away. It may become even too personal for both the practitioner and the audience" (6). This sounds a lot like my response to Katie Mitchell's work - and indeed, it sounds like the response Roberta witnessed when she saw _Iphigenia at Aulis_ live. Mitchell doesn't use Method, of course, per se; her practice is primarily Stanislavskian, with a heavy contemporary east-European influence. But I have characterized her work before as creating "too real" theatre, just as Robin calls proper Method work "too real".

As the theory-story goes, Brecht invites the contemplative spectator, while Stanislavsky-based practices (whether or not we include Method here - although I think, frankly, that it's implied for most Canadian and American academics writing against realism, as Gainor suggests) dumb spectatorship down. But Roberta's experience of Mitchell, Kirsten's of Williams, and Robin's of seeing physical theatre work alongside recent realisms, suggest the opposite: that in leaving us "cold", theatre that distances is a wonderful idea in theory that doesn't always get off the ground in practice. Meanwhile, getting not "sucked in," as the anti-realists would have it, but rather punched in the gut by realism provokes an immediate visceral reaction that, later, may coalesce into a genuinely thoughtful, even critical one. And this brings us to the end of Robin's paper, in which she compellingly calls for "an actor trained in physically-based practices and internal psychological methods" who "will demand that the audience participates in their theatre, with their hearts, their souls and their minds" (17). The best performances I have seen call for this combined spectatorial response, and it is one that accords well with Rhonda Blair's model of a mind-body acting practice based on contemporary neuroscience.

As Leigh as shown us, Brecht and Stanislavsky are not binary opposites, but critically interwoven. We need a practice, as Robin suggests, that takes account of this weave, that understands both production *and* reception as a mind-body process, a collision of visceral affect with intellectual uncertainty that may (potentially) create an exciting critical afterlife. Might we call this practice "too real" realism, or "unsafe" realism?

Realism and the audience II: a question of pedagogy?

Kirsten, your post of last Thursday on realism and audiences made me think instantly of your earlier post about realism and teaching. I think the two have much to say to each other, and to us as we work toward Denver. The more we talk here - about bodies, intentionality, audience uptake, audience unsettlement - the more I think about my students, and our classroom engagements with realism in theory and in practice. And I think I want to think about this in Denver, too: as you noted earlier, Kristen, and as I think I noted in a comment on your earlier post, training students as both actors/theatre workers AND audiences is an important means for us as researchers and educators to think through realism in practice, and to help develop realism's next practical afterlife.

A couple of things from your Thursday post caught my eye. Here they are:

"But what good does this unsettling do? If, as Roberta argues -- and I tend to agree -- Mitchell's use of realist technique challenged the audience to examine themselves and their current situation in relation to the text, did the disgruntled audience member take this necessary next step? Or was she just pissed off? It's a question that brings us back to Brecht -- Good Person may alienate audiences, but do they learn from that alienation, or just resent the production for making them uncomfortable (or bored)?

[...]

So, if we revise notions of the ideal spectator, might that revision include the spectator who is willing to be annoyed and uncomfortable, but then actively use that experience to go beyond the text? Is realism's "best" spectator the one who reads beyond and between the text (as, in fact, audiences do)? If realism is traditionally criticized for inviting audiences to take the text as a complete and authentic version of the world, then does revising our definition enable realism to be always already unsafe? I'd like to think so, and I'd like to think that this revision recognizes the multiple, "real" spectators who view realist texts and make multiple meanings from them."

I like these competing articulations of the realist spectator: the one who is supposed to be unsettled but is really just bored; the one who achieves unsettlement because she actively engages with the subtexts and paratexts of the work she is viewing, and brings those texts into collision with other theatrical and extratheatrical experiences she may have had. I like them in particular because they remind me of my students: of how we approach realism in the classroom, of what they bring to the discussion, what I teach them, what they teach me, and what emerges. Here's an example.

When I teach modern drama, we do two or three weeks on realism. We start with Stanislavsky and Ibsen, then move on to Brecht. I try to distinguish between the beginnings of psychological realism and the beginnings of what, for lack of a clearer term, I call "critical" realism in relation to Brechtian theory and practice. Then we start pulling these ideas apart, looking for points of convergence and divergence.

But they are second and third year English students. Acting is foreign to them. Stanislavsky, however much I challenge this conclusion, always turns into "Method" in their papers; Brecht and estrangement are really hard for them to grasp. To make Brecht make sense I use a clip from season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the infamous musical episode, Once More With Feeling. The show-stopper number at the end of the episode features Buffy singing + dancing for her death: in a compelling reversal of the typical musical convention where the heroine sings and dances for (her) life at show's end, before getting the guy/the prize, Buffy is struggling with emotional turmoil and wishes, apparently, to die. The number is a stunning mix of major/minor key transitions, odd tonal shifts, and awkward dancing mixed with MTV-perfect synched pop numbers, complete with backup dancers. Conventional musical expectation collides with the complexities of "real" emotion in performance, and beyond. It is very clever estrangement, Hollywood-style.

The students don't get this. They just think Sarah Michelle Gellar can't sing or dance. We work at making the sounds and images make sense through a Brechtian realist frame, and slowly I see the ideas of estrangement, of the gestus and of historicized performance, dawning on them.

Every Thursday, meanwhile, the students do scene-study performances for one another. Essential to this exercise is the talkback that accompanies each week's performance: more important than the performance itself is what students in the audience ask the company on "stage," and how the company prepares a response. And here is where "realism" begins taking on truly challenging new connotations: in the collision between students as an audience of peers, students as critics in training, and students trying to work out the theories from lecture on and through their own bodies.

The last time I taught modern drama, one of my favourite students, a young woman called Lauren who was a staunch Stanislavskian, heavily resisted Brecht (and really hated Buffy's singing and dancing). But she did so mostly thoughtfully. When time came for us to encounter heavily politicized realisms in the second half of term, she surprised the hell out of me, and out of the rest of the class, with two incredibly conventional-realist performances in two very difficult texts: Split Britches' _Dress Suits to Hire_ and Wilson's _Fences_. In both cases she prepared for her roles as she always had, as an actor devoted to Stan; in both cases the collision of her committed body, struggling through intensely political (both racial and sexual) material, with an audience of critics in training produced new resonances I had not thought possible. Playing _Fences_ "straight" instead of trying to politicize the fact that a group of white women were playing a group of black men (and a woman) yielded incredible discomfort in the audience: they pulled at the politics that the performance had thrown up for them viscerally, but had deliberately *not* polemicized for them avant la lettre. The performance left them unsettled and open; they asked the questions that helped them come to terms with what that unsettlement had meant, both personally and politically. Meanwhile, Lauren's forward sexuality as Deeluxe in _Dress Suits_ made every man in the audience uncomfortable, and enabled a conversation about the play's challenging sexuality that had not been possible in lecture. Again, hers was not the camp of Peggy Shaw; it was a young woman struggling with her own sexuality playing another such woman in the most psychologically realist style possible. But it provoked extraordinary discussion among a group of witnesses primed to talk through, around, and between the lines of what they were seeing and hearing.

All this makes me amend my earlier question about whether or not it's fair to "train" an audience to expect something particular. I think I'd like to suggest instead that it's not only fair, but ethically essential, for us to provide audiences with materials and opportunities for discussion that provoke a 360-degree kind of theatrical reading. Oprah has a book club; why does she not have a theatre club? Why do legions of middle-class women and men around North America think quality reading can be (some) work, but theatre is only "entertainment"? Changing this attitude requires a variety of pushes: it requires a good quality program, of the sort the Royal National in London or the Shaw and Stratford festivals in Ontario put out; it requires table talks, pre-show lectures, post-show talkbacks, chats with artists and academics and others; it requires ongoing para-theatrical events *about* contemporary performance practice of the kind London's Barbican is famous for hosting (as is the RNT). And it requires making these events broadly accessible, and not simply an elitist rehearsal of existing ideas for like-minded peers. (I'd personally like to see events where audience members are invited to be part of the presentation, talking with a variety of others, book-club style, about what they saw and heard in a performance.) In other words: it's not about training audiences to read a certain way; it's about training audiences to read performance as a complex cultural product that requires a variety of different kinds of engagement in a variety of difference venues.

Realism might be loosely defined as a performance style that is far more ethically, aesthetically, and representationally complex than it appears on the surface. Perhaps, then, its ideal spectator is one who understands that receiving realism requires a substantial amount of thought work on the part of all audience members.

Realism and the Audience

Thanks, Kim, for the questions about the audience. They really got me thinking. You ask "who is the spectator of realism, anyway? Is there an ideal realist spectator, as scholars have long suggested? Can we revise this ideal? Is that wise?"

AND
"Can we shift dominant critical attitudes toward realism - and perhaps provoke the kind of audience awareness that will prevent knee-jerk resistance to, and prompt more complex engagement with, work like Mitchell's ...
But then there's a bigger question: can we really train audiences not to expect conclusions? What's at stake even in the attempt to "train" audiences at all?"

I was first introduced to "realism is bad" through J. Dolan's Feminist Spectator as Critic; that book strongly argues that one of realism's biggest pitfalls is that it assumes the ideal spectator is one who shares in an ideological position that privileges white, male, middle-class values and behaviors. This critique, of course, draws heavily on feminist film theory (cf Mulvey, Doane). But of course, it's more complicated than that. Theatre audiences (and this is especially true of film because it's a mass media, and because it's repeatable), take up dozens of viewing positions, positions that may shift thru time (both historically and in the watching of the play or media text). So it's pretty much acknowledged that though realist texts assume an ideal audience, that ideal audience is always already fractured.

Lots of my own argument re: Williams rests on this assumption: the ideal audience is assumed to view her body as erotic spectacle, but audience members may also (and are even invited to) view it as physically challenging and powerful. But in the case of Mitchell's Iphigenia (at least in Roberta's reading), the ideal audience is unsettled and disturbed. The ideal audience member, then, might be the one who voiced her disapproval of the text.

But what good does this unsettling do? If, as Roberta argues -- and I tend to agree -- Mitchell's use of realist technique challenged the audience to examine themselves and their current situation in relation to the text, did the disgruntled audience member take this necessary next step? Or was she just pissed off? It's a question that brings us back to Brecht -- Good Person may alienate audiences, but do they learn from that alienation, or just resent the production for making them uncomfortable (or bored)?

And, if Williams' body-in-performance unsettles narratives of conservative, traditional femininity, how does the audience react? Do they watch her films for the counter-narratives (as so many queer theorists have suggested audiences watch texts like Xena or Dawson's Creek or The OC)? Do they watch the films but leave confused and angry? Do they reject the films as being dull and annoying because they can't reconcile the competing messages offered?

So, if we revise notions of the ideal spectator, might that revision include the spectator who is willing to be annoyed and uncomfortable, but then actively use that experience to go beyond the text? Is realism's "best" spectator the one who reads beyond and between the text (as, in fact, audiences do)? If realism is traditionally criticized for inviting audiences to take the text as a complete and authentic version of the world, then does revising our definition enable realism to be always already unsafe? I'd like to think so, and I'd like to think that this revision recognizes the multiple, "real" spectators who view realist texts and make multiple meanings from them.

Certainly, I know that my ideal spectator for EW's films (if not my ideal realist spectator) is the woman who enters the film looking for an escapist fantasy of romance in exotic locales and leaves with plans to develop her physical, moral, and intellectual strengths, the woman who understands that her body exists for her pleasure and power, and who experiences her body in new ways (and oh dear, now I'm into the body of the audience as well as the performer's body and the body in performance!!!).

I've got to stop now because I feel like I'm circling around without offering any conclusions, but I do want to come back to the question of training audiences.

Thoughts on the Body, Intentionality and Realism as Tactic

As I’ve been reading Julie’s, Leigh’s and Kirsten’s papers, my earlier questions about the body and Kim’s questions about intention continue to percolate in my mind. In all three papers, the ‘live’ body is so remarkably central: for Leigh, it is the force that ineluctably links Stanislavski, Vakhtangav, Meyerhold, and Brecht; Julie speaks of giving her students “embodied assignments”; and Kirsten in particular speaks eloquently of the unsettling signifying potential of the body in naturalism. I find all this tremendously interesting, particularly because I’ve also been re-reading Zarrilli’s introduction to the first section of Acting (Re)Considered, in which he sees most variants of Stanislavski’s System as susceptible to a mind-body dualism in which the mind is the guiding force (and in which, at their most extreme, the body is practically erased). I find that all of these papers, but most particularly Kirsten’s with its argument that the very body by which actor is identified with character can convey meanings “in excess of or contrast to the narrative,” really complicate such a reading.

How does this link in to Kim’s questions about intentionality and theory in her recent posts? Well, one thing I think we do need to take seriously is the gap between the way in which a performer such as Esther Williams might experience her body (based upon the evidence Kirsten puts forward) and the ways in which some critical theorists might read it. For many of the latter, her body is always already socially constructed; is separated from her controlling mind by the dominance of the mind-body dichotomy in Western thought; is thoroughly inscribed by patriarchal hegemony; etc etc. But Kirsten suggests that Williams’ own perceptions of her body were far more immediate and empowering. Which are we to ‘believe’?

I think here of Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed and her espousal of a differential politics of liberation in which one is able TACTICALLY to take up positions or ideologies that may at first sight seem mutually exclusive: different positions for different times, for different needs. I’m not sure that realism can ‘save’ performance scholarship (to take up Kim’s playful and provocative question), but I do think something is to be gained by considering realism/naturalism as a valuable TACTICAL position, both practically (some productions/cultural situations demand it) and theoretically. One doesn’t have to espouse Stanislavski 100% and in all situations, or to repudiate valid critiques of realist assumptions, in order to see that a) ‘realism’ offers many different possibilities and is not just one big unitary approach, b) that sometimes realism(s) contradict one another and produce very productive tensions and dissonances (the narratives of Williams’ films vs. the significations of her body?), and c) that these tensions can be put to strong political use, as in the case of Esther Williams as Kirsten describes it.

My apologies for the rambling and disjointed nature of this post; I’m in the midst of a family illness at the moment, am grabbing moments to write here and there, and would rather post now than wait to edit. Hope that something of use emerges!

Thanks again for the great papers, everyone—more as soon as I can.

The foolish witness and realist performance

I heard Julie's paper at the CATR conference in Vancouver in May; I asked her to send it to us because, at the time, it resonated with my/our current thinking about realism, safety, and risk. I just re-read the paper, and found the resonances remain. I've pulled some lines that gave me particular pause, in the hope they may resonate here with some of the earlier posts on this blog, and with the larger question they all raise for me: who is the spectator of realism, anyway? Is there an ideal realist spectator, as scholars have long suggested? Can we revise this ideal? Is that wise?

In Julie's words, then:

• "The possibility of the ethical stance in foolish witness comes from an insistence on active engagement based in availability and the willingness to step forward without certainty. The goal is relationship, not success or triumph."

• "I’m really interested in failure. The flop. The ridiculous." (I think to myself: what does it mean for a spectator, a formal witness to theatre, to fail?)

• "I explore foolishness and failure as a way of enacting not the prophetic hope of assurance but a relationship with the future, which escapes formal logic."

• "The students study Levinas and work from his challenge to pragmatically grapple with history, aesthetics and memory, and to become the 'I' capable of responding to the call of ethics. It is this insistence on 'yes' that characterizes the foolish witness, but this is not easy nor is it simple. Always we are confronted with our tendency to be overwhelmed, to collapse or at least hesitate under the weight of existence. The challenge for our class is to take seriously the imperative to refuse a despairing response to horror – including being overwhelmed by feeling, sentimental or otherwise – and to take instead the initiative to act justly." (I think here of Roberta's vivid description of Mitchell's performers, and of my own experience of watching them. How easy to be overwhelmed at such a spectacle of raw human complexity. How hard I found it to stay on track in the process of watching.)

• "But sometimes the fear of appropriation can become an excuse not to act, not to risk of engagement. Sometimes we can argue ourselves into a corner in the name of ethics or theory when our objections are really about the fear of making contact, of being rejected, of looking ridiculous."

And one more thing...

I almost forgot - the whole reason I sat down to post in the first place!

On the heels of Leigh and Roberta I wonder so very much about the relationship between process and outcome in contemporary realist practice, and in historical (for lack of a better word) realist acting theory. It seems to me that those of us (and for years this was me - I take my lumps!) who decry realism as anti-intellectual and apolitical focus exclusively on a certain kind of (very much assumed, I think) realist *outcome*: what I call in my post from earlier today the "money shot", when the psychological issues at stake in each character's performance come blazingly into focus for audience members. But both Leigh and Roberta suggest that, from realism's beginnings, the focus was as much, if not more, on process than on outcome (although Brecht stands out as a potential exception here). Can we shift dominant critical attitudes toward realism - and perhaps provoke the kind of audience awareness that will prevent knee-jerk resistance to, and prompt more complex engagement with, work like Mitchell's - by shifting our critical focus onto the *process* of realist work in performance? Here Mitchell seems very much a scholarly asset, as she puts onstage what is supposed to happen only offstage in realist practice.

But then there's a bigger question: can we really train audiences not to expect conclusions? What's at stake even in the attempt to "train" audiences at all?

On intentions, processes, and outcomes

Hi all,

I've just read Roberta's and Leigh's papers and am struck by the valuable resonances between the two. They've thrown up a number of questions for me, questions which are not fully formed and thus seem ripe for discussion on the blog.

First, some background thinking. Both Roberta and Leigh talk in compelling, though different, ways about the role intention plays in contemporary realist praxis. Roberta nicely nuances my own claim, in a recent article about Mitchell's Iphigenia at Aulis, that Mitchell is less interested in the "why" than in the "how" of certain psycho-physical states her actors represent on stage; instead, Roberta argues, Mitchell is compelled by both questions, but uses the "why" to guide the "how," rather than turning the discovery process that generates into a money shot for the audience, a big reveal of the "why" at some point in the performance itself. In other words: Mitchell and her actors work with very clear, very detailed intentions throughout the rehearsal and performance stages, but those intentions never translate into clearly readable signs. Instead, they muddle. Meanwhile, Leigh notes the extreme importance placed by Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vakhtangav and Brecht on intention: though each of these practitioners developed very different working methods, each began always with very basic questions about intention in mind. Leigh concludes: "any method stands in service to a lived response to stimulus both without and within ourselves. Whether creating distance or reflecting empathy, the actor is forever a 'realist.'”

Here are the questions that the above stuff raises for me.

1. "Intentionality" is one of the greatest bugbears of the poststructuralist generation. And yet both Roberta and Leigh suggest that, in performance practice, it is absolutely essential to the creation of complex, multi-vectored work - the kind of work we would probably call political, and subsequently read in a poststructuralist vein as such. Should we be recuperating "intention"? How can we talk about it in an effective way, use it to challenge the blind spots in existing post-structuralist thinking about performance outcomes?

2. Along similar lines, I'm struck also by the ways in which both of these papers approach their objects. Roberta is compelled not by acting theory, or critical theory of any kind, so much as she is compelled by the minute details of the performance to which her paper attends with an almost scientific eye. Leigh, meanwhile, returns to theory we thought we knew, bringing an eye for missed details and looking for places where the theories she discusses dovetail rather than diverge. In both cases I found myself wondering: how, with all of our existing theoretical baggage, did we manage to miss so much of what seems obvious in these papers? And the corollary: is realism itself a theory whose time as come? (Can realism save contemporary performance scholarship/performance theory?)

3. And again: what of the science of realism evident in both of these papers, and especially in their focus on practitioner intentions? Leigh invokes research on dance in Scientific American; Roberta nods at Mitchell's turn toward cognitive science, something that is also ongoing in performance theory circles (McConachie, Hart, Blair et al come to mind). In an age where science is once again lauded as that which will save the earth (end climate change; save lives from superbugs; make enough food for an exploding population; buoy the stock market; you name it), what are the stakes of turning to back biological science to explain the power of performance?

What About the Children!??!

Reading through the blog comments while working on my teaching and directing projects for next year, I am really interested to think about how we might teach the fruits of our seminar discussions.

When I teach my theatre history class, I focus the class on how modes of performance, performance technique, and performance training shift across historical periods and geographic contexts, contrasting Noh actors with Hippolyte Clairon's writings on acting, setting up 1950s Naturalism (in Williams et al) in opposition to Beckett's focus on physical action, etc. It's really teachable, and I think many of us find such structures useful as we teach theatre history or acting styles. But I've always known that it's more complicated than that, and it seems like the work we're doing here is to bring that complication to light.

And, student actors know it's more complicated than that. One might be directed to work in a Brechtian style, but might also look for moments of psychological connection, either surreptitiously or with the guidance of one's director. The difficulty actors and directors and teachers often have articulating their process, and the desire (especially strong among students, I think) to mystify the work of acting means that many develop their own practice by merging multiple techniques -- EW clearly developed a style that used her physical body as well as her own value system about the kinds of stories she wanted to tell as well as the studio training she'd received.

Another example: I took class with Phil Zarrilli and Billie Whitelaw (I did my grad work at Madison in the 1990s), and we focused on the physical body and the voice as we prepared monologues and scenes. Whitelaw kept saying "very little color, no color," and refused to address questions of what something meant or might mean, insisting that the fast, monotone delivery of the language and the precise execution of the stage directions provided the meaning to the audience. And then she performed some monologues, and it was clear that there were "psychological" underpinnings to her performance as we watched her prepare and then come down after the performance.

So, I'm wondering how important it is/will be to rethink the teaching narratives we've deployed as we continue to trouble the boundaries of realism. I'll want to talk about this in July.

On the physical body in realism (from Kim)

Hi all,

Further to Roberta's really helpful post, I wanted to add a couple of source notes.

Discussion of the relationship between Stanislavski practice and the physical body (via a nuanced understanding of his late "method of physical action") has been heating up, albeit often somewhat indirectly, for a little while now; I've just read two things that I suspect will be helpful for anyone wanting to think this through further.

First is Grotowski's "Reply to Stanislavsky" in the current issue of TDR, edited by Kris Salata and Lisa Wolford-Wylam. Salata translates this piece of writing (the issue contains several original pieces by Grotowski and others never before published in English), which includes Grotowski's comments on Stanislavski's very important influence on his own work. In the middle of the piece Grotowski makes a substantial commentary (nearly a page) on Stanislavski's method of physical actions, what many practitioners (especially in the US) think it means, and what he perceives it to mean. I found this commentary really illuminating. Later in the issue is an article by Salata on Grotowski's shift "from acting to doing," which makes an intriguing companion read.

Second is the Routledge collection titled _Performance and Cognition_, edited by Bruce McConachie and Elizabeth Hart and published a couple of years ago. In it, Rhonda Blair offers a smart, concise, and really useful article on using methods derived from cognitive science in the rehearsal hall. She explores the relationship between image schemas, the acting body in the moment of performance, imagination, and emotion, and argues that emotional recall, as we have previously understood it, is not at all the key to strong (realist) performance. Rather, thinking "cognitively", we need to explore ways to use the text of a play to generate emotional reactions in the present, and then to use our imaginations to transform those emotions into different kinds of feeling states within performative representation. Blair ultimately argues that this kind of an approach understands emotion as a mind-body process, and resists the actor-training commonplace that performers "get out of their heads" and disavow any kind of conscious, critical thought in the process of generating their characters. In other words, in the process Blair outlines, Stanislavski and Brecht very much collide.

Kim

On the physical body in realism (from Roberta)

First of all, everyone, sorry for my silence on this blog!! It’s been a bit of a rocky month due to illnesses in my family; I’ve also been traveling in England and had less e-mail access than I’d expected. I’m hoping that this week will be better and that I’ll be able to make a few postings here…

I’d like to start today with just a few thoughts on the first of our questions, that of the relationship between realist acting and the body of the actor. Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a ‘Stanislavski colloquium’ organized by the Barbican Centre in London, where we heard from Jean Benedetti, Bella Merlin (who was particularly illuminating), Philip Zarilli, Declan Donnellan and a number of other practitioners, students and teachers of Stanislavski. The event was inspired by the publication of the new Stanislavski edition/translation by Routledge (which sounds like a must-read!!). The one thing everyone kept coming back to was the idea that the popular notion of Stanislavski as all about psychology and internal process, as opposed to the body and physical process (as with, say, Meyerhold) was a very incomplete one and largely due to the West’s ignorance of his later writings. In different ways, pretty much everyone stressed Stanislavski’s obsession with psychophysical process and argued that we must understand the interdependence between body and psyche in Stanislavski’s System before we either use or critique it.

This seems to be an interesting avenue for us to pursue in our seminar. The idea of an absolute dichotomy between realism and ‘physical theatre’ has become something of a norm, not only in academia but in actor training (actors trained at the Lecoq School and those trained in the tradition of the Actors’ Studio may view one another with hostility, as I discovered when I directed just such a pair of actors in Love’s Labours Lost a few years ago). As Kim says, recent theory often sees the body as the “disavowed underbelly” of realism (“realism’s hysteria”). But the scholars and practitioners at the Barbican colloquium, like Leigh and Kirsten in their papers, argued that CONSCIOUS and detailed exploration of the physical body and its actions is in fact a cornerstone of realist acting and a primary source of its affective power. As one Russian practitioner and teacher emphasized, not only Stanislavski and Brecht but Stanislavski and Grotowski can be seen as part of a continuum of thought about the body rather than as adversaries.

Do we buy this argument? And if so, how could it change our understanding and practice of realist acting? How ‘natural’ is the body we’re talking about here, since it is managed by the psyche and impacted upon by social forces (as the naturalists and Brecht would, I think, have agreed)? I’m not yet sure how to answer these questions, but I do feel that they offer us one way out of the overly easy oppositions that have tended to dominate discussions of performance styles in recent years. Any thoughts?

More soon, I hope…

Very best,
Roberta

the therapeutic value of realism...

A recent New Yorker article describes the use of a virtual reality video game to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in returning Iraqi vets. The therapist controls the game and gradually adds in more and more details of the traumatic event so that its recall becomes less traumatic. Not sure yet how this ties in, but it's an interesting tangent....

Mari Gorman Thinks About Synthesis

I'm freshly emancipated from toil and will add information on my discoveries soon.  Right now, I'm reading an enlightening book entitled, "Strokes of Existence" by Mari Gorman, wherein she describes the collision of Brecht's with Stanislavski's style of acting as "a combination of a perception and a response."  Her aim, however, is to create an even more "lifelike" reproduction in order to communicate with an audience.  I have yet to read her conclusions, but her experimentation is exciting.

---Leigh 

Starting the conversation: initial questions

1. The idea of the "natural" body, the "live" body or the "unruly" body comes up in several of your abstracts. Kirsten understands Esther Williams' body as a feminist intervention into studio realism at the beginning of the Hollywood golden age; Roberta explores how Katie Mitchell takes existing realist performance conventions to their extreme, de-privileging the text in performance and foregrounding instead the psychophysical reactions of the performance body and the affect it generates in spectators; Leigh considers the "liveness" of the realist body the hinge that links Brecht and Stanislavski, and thus the hinge that makes realism at once private and personal, and resolutely social and communal - in other words, political. What can we say about the actor's body in realism? How important are perceptions of its naturalness? Is the unruly body hiding beneath realism's skirts (I think of Elin Diamond's "realism's hysteria" here) really its terrorizing, disavowed underbelly, or that body the core of its political as well as its theatrical effects? In other words, should we praise the "live," "natural" body for disrupting realism, or should we reconsider the relationship between the body and realism as one of defining interdependence?

2. Let's think in more detail about the politics of realist acting. Leigh aligns Stanislavski with Brecht; Robin suggests that realist acting deals with all aspects of the human, including the political; MK wonders about the real-world social and political ramifications of contemporary realist actor training. A major critique of realist acting has always (since Brecht) been based on its emphasis on the (liberal humanist) individual at the expense of the social, what Kirk Williams recently described as the often anti-social marriage of myth and science in early Naturalist drama. Can we get beyond these perceived dichotomies - between the private and the political, the fixed and the fluid, the Freudian and the Marxist? Should we move beyond them? Do they describe a genuine division of aesthetic thought, or do they represent decades of critical prejudice more accurately than actual performance technique? How are contemporary practitioners of realism (like Zarilli or Mitchell) implicitly challenging the validity of these well-worn binaries?

3. What role does the social context of the artists play in the efficacy of realist performance? What about the contexts, and lived experiences, of audience members? MK describes the incredibly personal, even dangerous, responses actors can have to realist performance; Roberta describes the intense affect realist performance can create in spectators; Kirsten considers the fraught relationship between Esther Williams' performance work and her autobiography. Indeed, especially in Britain and the US, realism is lauded in the press, but as soon as realist performance threatens to tip over into something a bit TOO real, a bit too familiar (like Agamemnon's curse-laced trip across the stage), reviewers and ordinary spectators alike begin to get genuinely nervous, begin to have unexpected reactions that trigger something akin to a fight-or-flight response. How do we account for these moments of "hyper" realism? How do we theorize their effects, and their value?

Starting the conversation: guidelines

Above you'll find some guiding questions to help start our conversation as we continue to develop our individual papers. Roberta and I created these questions after reviewing your abstracts and outlines; feel free to use them to dig into the issues we have highlighted, or to create your own questions for the group. 

Each of us is authorized to post to the blog, and we will all receive email notifications when a new post appears. Feel free to make your interventions in any number of ways: you may choose to build on these first questions, to ask new ones, to ask for assistance with an issue troubling your own writing, or to ask a specific roundtable member about a specific issue.

In order to keep things tidy, please respond to specific posts with a threaded comment; if you would like to branch off from that post in a new direction, create a fresh post of your own.

As your official moderator in Denver, I will keep an eye on all the posts and will participate in the conversation only when I have something specific to offer. I will use our ongoing threads to help build discussion topics for our eventual panel conversation in Denver.

Finally, remember that final papers are due July 1.

Cheers!

Kim and Roberta