WEEK 5: The Phenomenology of Theatre
Theatre is life (...not the life of signs!)
LECTURE SUMMARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fortier, Mark. (1997) Theory / Theatre : An Introduction. London: Routledge
Kearney, Richard. (1994) Modern Movements in European Philosophy : Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Structuralism. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Rayner, A. (1994) To Act, to DO, to perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Shepherd, Simon and Mick Wallace eds. (2004) Drama/Theatre/Performance. London: Routledge
Shates, B.O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: on the Phenomenology of Theatre, Berkeley: University of California Press
(*) On my office door – D103 – I have left a few master copies of relevant excerpts from Simon Shepherd’s Drama/Theatre/Performance, as well as Richard Kearney’s Modern Movements in European Philosophy : Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Structuralism. These are for you to photocopy and return. These are relevant to today’s lecture and will prove useful should you write on Phenomenology and Semiotics for your essay.
1. THEATRE IS LIFE.
Mark Fortier:
Page 37
A. In addressing theatre as a system of codes, [semiotics] misses how theatre feels ... the task of phenomenology is to keep the life in theatre.... To return perception to ... its encounter with its environment.
“...how theatre feels”.
“feeling” , “life” – how is this measured?
Are we back in the territory of liberal humanism? Trust the experience and nothing else outside of this? Not quite. The clue is in the last line: “return perception to [theatre’s] encounter with its environment”.
i.e.: HOW do we perceive the world?
Or, put another way: how is meaning recognised?
Remember, the job of semiotics is to ask the question: how is meaning made? I.e. How does theatre communicate? If through signs and visual codes, then how do these signs, or codes work to communicate the meaning?
In the case of phenomenology, we are changing our approach again (task of theory: look at something another way) and asking NOT how meaning is made, but rather how we recognise [observe/ accept (perhaps)] the meaning.
The onus is taken OFF the object that wants to communicate, and placed instead onto the ‘eye of the beholder’ – onto the person perceiving.
2. WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGY?
Mark Fortier: page 38
B. Phenomenology is concerned with what it is like for humans to be alive in the world. How they perceive the world.
“to render oneself present...”
So...,
If semiotics is focused on the relationship between signs and their connotations, Phenomenology is focused on the relationship between the intellectual and the sensory.
Phenomenolgy is a philosophical approach – versus scientific.
[Remember job of theory. We are veering further and further away from the text and into questions of science, language and philosophy].
How do we step out of ourselves and consciously feel what we are experiencing?
Life: how do we perceive its phenomenon?
> (This quote is from Fortier): Phenomenology is not concerned with the world as it exists in itself (i.e. the structured, order of the world), but rather how the world appears (as phenomena) as we encounter it. Mark Fortier. p. 38
Back to Fortier and Merleau – Ponty who refers to our ...“lived bodiliness:
“To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body...”: What can we make of this? Let us see what else Fortier has to say:
3. WHAT IS THEATRE ?
Mark Fortier: page 38
C. + D. Theatrical space is a phenomenal space,
governed by the body and its spatial concerns.
The audience is living a full experience with theatre: Our senses are alive with something to see, to hear ...and sometimes to be touched, tasted, and smelled.
I ask: “how is this different from the experience we have when watching film, or viewing art?”
Theatre is a live experience. The action is unfolding.., or put another way: the art is a being created as we watch - the art is ALIVE. ..”being”: a life form , organism, a living thing.
Okay, this making some sense of the “lived bodiness” that Merleau-Ponty refers to.
What else can Fortier say to shed light on this?:
Mark Fortier: page 39
E. The sensory effects of theatre are central to the concerns of phenomenology ... ‘Lived bodiliness’ can be seen in the ways that theatre works through sensory channels for extreme effects.
Q: how might the audience live a full, sensory experience within theatre?
Practical example # 1
Gina Pane
Practical example # 2
Hotel Medea
Theatre as “an event”.
Audience is involved in every aspect ... No escape!
Runs from midnight till dawn
Space: Found venue (warehouse near Canary Warf)
Hear: Live club music -DJ Dolores
See: Live actors, interact with audience.
Smell: incense burning, coffee, chocolate
Touch: Audience is invited to ‘wash the nude actors’.
http://www.medea.tv/site/videoclip/
“ The sensory effects of theatre are central to the concerns of phenomenology ... Lived bodiliness can be seen in the ways that theatre works through sensory channels for extreme effects”. Fortier: 39
4. PRACTICE TO THEORY
How might Phenomenology lend us the vocabulary, so that we might make sense of how we perceive theatre?
In other words ...
Let’s extract the theory from the practical
Phenomenology (key ideas):
(Shepherd: p.238)
From object to subject[ivity].
Meaning is made as we perceive the world, not
through encountering individual signifiers.
It is our perception of objects, rather than objects
per ce that give meaning.
Phenomenology: the roots
(Read Richard Kearney – handout for further details)
> Edmund Husserl
Meaning is understood through the very act of perceiving (how the world appears).
The meaning of the world can only be recovered in the living act of consciously perceiving something.
This is a radical conviction: meaning is not in the mind, or in the world (on the stage) alone, but in the intentional relationship between the two.
> Maurice Merleau – Pontey
Seeing and experience is based on the actual physical body: not simply done to, but doing.
“the living relationship of experience”.
“The bodily relationship to the world”.
Phenomenology, for Pontey, is subjective: we experience s/t ourselves and it is from this subjective view that we question its meaning.
“We must determine and express the concrete form for ourselves”.
Phenomenology: the roots
> Jean-Paul Sartre
It’s been suggested that his phenomenology is concerned with how we act in light of others
watching us.
“Hell is other people”.
Existence precedes essence: The sense of things as existing outside consciousness and incapable of being absorbed into it.
> Heidegger
Interested in the question of Being. Being in terms of our everyday being-in-the-world.
“Works of art have a special relation to truth”.
“Art provides access to reflection and understanding of the word.
semiotics & phenomenology
Shepherd: p.236
Semiotics: concerned with how meaning is made. A process of signification and communication
Where is the value for the analysis of performance?
Its capacity to explain the ensemble of elements in a theatrical production that compose its meaning: the text, the actor, the stage space, the lights, the blocking, etc
Shepherd: p.239
Phenomenology articulates the contradictory nature of theatre...striving to show how theatre becomes theatre....how theatre throws up the pretence that it is another kind of reality than the one constituting the ground on which its pretence is based.
From theory to practice:
OH! WHAT ALOVEY WAR
How can the phenomenological model of interpretation help us to open up a new interpretation of this recent production?
We have actors and we have the essence of a live experience: discuss this production in these terms.
See Shepherd: p.239:
[k] Herbert Blau affirms Pontey (“Seeing and experience based on physical body: not simply done to, but doing).:
‘a body can die there in front of your eyes; is in fact doing so’. (p 239)
“on stage, things that play the part of signs, acquire special features that they don’t have off-stage”. (p. 236)
In the context of a staged reality, an audience reads objects differently
5. FROM PAGE TO STAGE
ACTION IN THEATRE AND DRAMA:
From theory to practice:
Beckett: Act Without Words
Theory: phenomenology is concerned with the way humans think and act in the world.
Practical: Fortier takes this philosophy and applies it to a concrete example, choosing to emphasise the human ability of remembering, thinking and being aware of our mortality (time).
Beckett on Film - Act Without Words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWkRtS_pvkQ&feature=related
A fusion of form and content:
Fortier: p. 40
Let’s analyse this text and performance through the framing device of phenomenology.
Phenomenally used to study action in theatre and drama.
i. the study of action on stage
ii. giving shape and making visible
iii. action is realised in dramatic circumstances
[h] Fortier: “Here we have the phenomenological condition: a human encountering the environment with the body – attempting to act – reflecting- revising choices”.
[i]
iv. An individual is consciously aware and capable of insight and reflection
v. Audience experiences reality not as a series of signs, but as sensory (and mental) phenomena.
Audience perceive s and reflect on the world.
Audiences concern is with the interplay with the real
Fusion of Form and content
From theory to practice:
‘Not I’: Beckett
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU
Not I
A FUSION OF FORM AND CONTENT
Let’s analyse this text and performance through the framing device of phenomenology:
How might the staging of this text help make the audience aware of its condition of being? How does Beckett aim to place the audience in the conditions of the human mind: never-ending thought process. No relief. Blackness. Thoughts. Auditorium is black, staging: just a mouth.
(still with Fortier....p. 42. )
“Works of art have a special relation to truth”.
“Art provides access to reflection and understanding of the word.
1. Theatre works with life. /
2. Its primary accomplishment is not to represent the world but to be a part of it /
3. the transaction between consciousness and existence.
Phenomenology is the search for present human existence and also the failure to achieve this existence – which is the condition in which we live: How might you see the relevance of this in Beckett?