Theatre Symposium

The normal image of a theatrical performance is one that takes place inside a space particularly created for such activity. Almost all theatrical cultures have developed some sort of performance space set apart from the normal world of human activity, a space that serves as a site of imagination subject to certain rules, a fundamental one being that the audience agrees to serve as spectators and accept the fictive world the actors present to them. The performance space itself thus serves as a kind of “frame” emphasizing this dynamic (indeed, an alternative name for the proscenium arch theatre is the “picture-frame stage,” and some late nineteenth-century British theatres in fact surrounded the stage on all four sides with an ornate frame). In most cases this performance space, the stage and auditorium, is not even entered directly from the outside world, but is separated from that world by a liminal area, as a kind of mimetic airlock, the theatre lobby, which allows audiences to move by stages into the illusory realm of the theatre.

Theatrical performances that were not “protected” by this house of illusion have been much more susceptible to incursions from the physical world. Even the classic Greek stage, forming a partial enclosure, could and apparently did take advantage of the “real world” accessible to its audiences, the open sky above them. Thus, many of the extant plays, among them Oedipus and Antigone, begin at or near dawn, and it is difficult to imagine that the plays which were presented at that time of day did not take advantage of this contribution from the real world.

In the very earliest liturgical dramas of the Middle Ages we find already a complex mixture of theatrical elements and real spaces. Early liturgical drama was staged in parts of medieval cathedrals, but although these were real locations, they were accepted as suitable symbolically, reinforcing the effect of the performance on an emblematic if not on a realistic level. When religious dramas began to be performed outside the cathedrals, [End Page 9] the utilization of the physical surroundings became much more complex. Often these plays remained in the vicinity of the cathedral, particularly on its wide front platform and steps, and the cathedral performed not merely as a rich decorative background, like the classic Roman scenic façade, but also in its “true” role as the abode of God and the angelic choirs.

In some cases this “theatricalization” of real places could involve a large part of the city, most notably in the Passion processionals that are still echoed in the widespread Via Dolorosa process of modern times. As early as the fifteenth century, the city of Vienna staged the public humiliation of Christ in the city marketplace, and then the actor bore his cross through the winding streets of the city to the distant cemetery where the crucifixion and resurrection were to be enacted. The market, the streets, the cemetery, and even the watching public were thus elements of the real world imaginatively refigured as parts of the universal city, Jerusalem.¹ There is still of course a certain slippage between the Vienna cemetery and what it represents, because although it is a real cemetery, it is not the site it imaginatively represents. This distinction is of particular importance in reference to sacred sites, which inevitably take on some aura of the actions that reportedly occurred there.

In fact the most ancient records that we have of theatrical activity are ritual observances carried out in specific sacred locations, which are essential to the event. The ancient Egyptian text from Abydos, whose “passion play” of Osiris is often cited as the earliest known theatrical text, was performed annually for some two thousand years, beginning in the second millennia bce. These were presented at the most sacred site in Egypt, the island where Osiris was reportedly buried.² Jerusalem also witnessed theatrical activities at its major sites from very early times, as may be seen in the first detailed reports that we have from a pilgrim to that city, Egeria, in 381–84 ce. She reports a number of commemorative activities at various sacred sites, including a reenactment of the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday with “the bishop led in the same manner as the Lord once was led,” accompanied by children singing hosannas and waving palm and olive branches.³

With the Renaissance and the movement of theatre indoors, the concept of the actor performing in any sort of “real” surrounding was almost completely lost. Even when the great baroque festivals moved outdoors, as in Louis XIV’s famous Pleasures of the Enchanted Island, performances either occurred within a courtyard whose classic architectural background was as neutral as a Roman stage façade or in the royal park, where natural elements like trees and water had been subjected to such ruthless control that every possible trace of the natural had been removed. [End Page 10]

A remarkable example of an almost opposite aesthetic—and one much closer to modern experimentation—was undertaken by Goethe in 1782, early in his Weimar years. Goethe invited members of the Weimar court to an evening entertainment he had devised himself, a small comic opera called The Fishermen. They assembled at a small pavilion in the court park appropriately called “the Cottage of the Muses.” Entering the small building, they found seats arranged facing the back wall of the cottage, which had been removed to provide a frame for the actual landscape outside, a wooded glade and the bend of a stream. The audience was reportedly entranced by the sight of a real boat coming down the real stream with a singing oarsman and by the mysterious effect of lanterns carried by actors bobbing amidst the trees.⁴

It would not be an exaggeration to say that this modest court entertainment represented the most fully realized theatrical representation to date of what would come to be recognized as the Romantic aesthetic—the emphasis upon nature and the natural, upon rustic simplicity, upon the sort of atmosphere created by lanterns and moonlight. A similar impulse lay behind the interest in atmospheric scene design begun the following year in London by Garrick’s designer Philip James de Loutherbourg. Both projects shared the same desire to make contact with the “real,” and both sought this in the somewhat mysterious realm of nature so beloved by the Romantic imagination. The following century’s theatre designers would almost without exception follow de Loutherbourg in trying to bring this reality into the theatre, but in the twentieth century Goethe’s example would also become more and more followed, as the theatre began to colonize extra-theatrical space.

No one articulated more clearly than Victor Hugo the bond between nature and the real and the centrality of the real to Romantic art in general and the theatre in particular. In his best-known statement on this subject, the 1827 Preface to Cromwell, he asserts that “the poetry of our time” is the drama, and “the characteristic of the drama is the real.” He continues: “In the drama, as it may be conceived at least, if not executed, all the parts cohere and everything happens as in real life.”⁵ Even though one may protest, with justification, that this hardly applies to the larger-than-life heroes and melodramatic turns of a Hugo drama, it marks out a direction that the future Realistic drama, in many ways an outgrowth of Romanticism, would follow. In the present context, Hugo’s remarks on reality and scenic design are particularly important: “We are beginning to realize in our day,” he observes, “that exactness in the matter of locality is one of the most essential elements of reality. The speaking or acting characters are not the only ones who leave a faithful impression upon the mind of the spectator. The place where this or that catastrophe [End Page 11] occurred becomes an incorruptible and convincing witness to it; and the absence of this sort of silent character makes the grandest scenes of history incomplete upon the stage. What poet would dare murder Rizzio elsewhere than in Mary Stuart’s chamber? To stab Henri IV elsewhere than in the Rue de la Ferronerie, blocked up with drays and carriages? To burn Jeanne d’Arc elsewhere than in the Old Marketplace?”⁶ For a modern reader, this may well seem a call for the development of what would later come to be called site-specific theatre, and indeed it may be considered as helping to prepare the way intellectually for such work, but for Hugo and his contemporaries the implications of this passage were not that radical, though radical enough. He was calling for theatre settings to reflect iconically their presumed locations, differing from play to play and even, perhaps, from scene to scene, rather than relying upon the single neutral antechambers used for Racine and the tradition he represented.

For most of the following century the Romantics and the Realists who followed them worked in this direction, creating scenic designs that reflected with greater and greater realistic accuracy the locations indicated in the dramatic text. The major English director Charles Kean was honored for both the splendor of his Shakespearean productions and for the historical accuracy of their scenery. The culmination of this monumental approach to visual realism in Shakespeare came in the productions of English directors Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, who, in a famous 1911 revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, offered his audience live rabbits and a mossy stage floor sprouting live flowers that could be plucked by the actors. In the Realistic theatre the modern box set appeared, re-creating onstage what seemed to be a real domestic space, with real doors and doorknobs, real molding, and dimensional furniture. Like monumental realistic Shakespeare, such domestic illusions of everyday life reached their apotheosis at the turn of the next century, in this case in the work of David Belasco, perhaps the most famous champion of Realism in scenic environments. For The Governor’s Lady in 1912, he re-created the interior of a popular chain of New York restaurants, Child’s, in which the audience could even smell the coffee and pancakes being prepared. According to Theatre Magazine, “It is as if he had taken the audience between the intermission, walked them around the corner of Seventh Avenue and seated them to one side of the Child’s restaurant at that location and let the last act be played there.”⁷ Of course, an important part of subsequent experimental theatre, such as promenade productions and immersive theatre, would do precisely that, converting real space into theatrical space.

An early example of such activity was undertaken by an amateur society in England, the Pastoral Players, which caused a stir in artistic circles in [End Page 12] the mid-1880s with their outdoor productions of pastoral plays by Shakespeare and Fletcher in the Coombe Wood in South London. One review of that production observed that both actors and audience were no longer looking at canvas and “carpentry, but at realities, real rounded trees, living grass, glades and prospect. There is no sham. The sun is really shining, the birds are singing, the leaves and blades of grass and flowers really waving in the breeze.”⁸ In the opening years of the twentieth century, some of the greatest directors moved out of conventional theatres to utilize such non-theatrical space. Two productions, both staged in 1920, were particularly outstanding examples of this. First was one of the most famous stagings by the great Max Reinhardt, his Everyman, which inaugurated the Salzburg Festival that year. Here, taking inspiration from the open-air productions of the medieval period, Reinhardt placed the action on a large platform set before the doors of the Salzburg Cathedral, and the entire area was incorporated into the performance, with characters entering from side streets and bells rung or cries shouted at appropriate moments from towers elsewhere in the city. Even nature was theatricalized, as Hofmannsthal reports: “One of these criers had been placed in the highest tower of a medieval castle, built far above the city, and his voice sounded, weird and ghostly, about five seconds after the others, just as the first rays of the rising moon fell cold and strange from the high heavens on the hearts of the audience.”⁹ The Salzburg Festival inspired some of Reinhardt’s most ambitious open-air productions. In 1933 Reinhardt’s designer Clemens Holzmeister built an entire small medieval village with trees, bushes, and flowers that grew from summer to summer as the production was revived. Once again, nature was pressed into theatrical service: “Moon and stars joined in the play, and gusts of the night wind led from a sultry evening to the pallid dawn of the dungeon scene.”¹⁰ The following year, Reinhardt produced one of his most striking and influential outdoor productions, a production of The Merchant of Venice actually staged in a small square in Venice in front of a palazzo that Reinhardt claimed had been the resident of a Jewish merchant in Shakespearean times and with a bridge at the rear over a small canal, along which gondolas passed to and fro and upon which the elegant Spanish barque of the Prince of Aragon arrived with its noble suitor.¹¹

Reinhardt’s productions in found locations of this type inspired a number of directors elsewhere in Europe. In Italy several Goldoni plays were presented in appropriate town squares, and in 1937 the Danish Tourist Board invited the British Old Vic company to present a festival production of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle, its presumed actual location (although the current castle was built in the sixteenth century, contemporary with Shakespeare, but centuries after the historical Hamlet, if he indeed really [End Page 13] existed). Thus in June 1937, the Old Vic Company, headed by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and directed by Tyrone Guthrie, went to perform Hamlet “in his own home” or “in its rightful setting,” as the British press announced it.¹² In such productions as the Elsinore Hamlet or the Venetian Merchant of Venice we seem, at least at first glance, to have literal fulfillments of Victor Hugo’s vision of a performance in its correct historical location, where the walls themselves “bore silent witness” to the events. Indeed, almost this thought exactly was expressed by the Special Correspondent of the London Times of June 4, 1937: “The ghost not only of Hamlet’s father but of all the vast and shadowy legend of the Danish Prince haunts the green roofs, the fantastic pinnacles, the dungeons, the great embattled strength of Elsinore.”¹³ The problem with this vision, of course, is not only that Hamlet (if he ever existed) never saw any of this architecture, or vice versa, but more importantly that the “real world” evoked here is not, as in Hugo, drawn from historical events, but from a dramatic fiction, as was the Reinhardt Merchant, however authentic its Renaissance palazzos and gondolas.

Just a few months after Reinhardt’s Everyman, Nikolai Evreinov in Russia created an even more ambitious outdoor spectacle, a re-creation of the historical storming of the winter palace in St. Petersburg upon the actual location of that event, involving over 8,000 participants, tanks, armored vehicles, and even the battleship Aurora. Evreinov essentially echoed Hugo by stressing the fact that this work was “performed in the actual place where the historic event occurred.”¹⁴ Many such reenactments were presented as part of the Russian Revolutionary theatre, but the major modern vogue for battle reenactments, staged on their actual locations, enjoyed a major revival in the United States in the 1960s for the centennial of the Civil War and again in the 1970s for the bicentennial of the American Revolution. Countless battles and other historical events were re-created in their original locations with participants in authentic costume attempting to follow with varying exactness the events of a century or two before. This activity, part hobby, part recreation, has spread over the United States, then to Britain, and today is found around the world.¹⁵

Despite their considerable social and cultural importance, historical reenactments (with a few exceptions) have not attracted a great deal of attention from theatre historians. Nevertheless, this sort of blending of fiction, history, and real locations in fact has very close ties to a movement that has been generally acknowledged as an important part of late twentieth-century theatre: site-specific performance, created not by hobbyists or amateurs, but by professional theatre organizations as specific contributions to that art. Site-specific theatre, like much experimental theatre of the twentieth century, had its origins not in the theatre world but [End Page 14] in the world of art. In reaction to the exclusivity and commodification of “museum” art, a number of artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to create works of art for specific public locations, outside the world of museum culture. By the later 1970s such work was widely recognized as a new approach and generally designated as “site-specific.”

This term brought with it from the art world the idea of a work of art created for and, theoretically, fully understandable only within a particular location; but even more important than this formal concern was a political and social one. The very act of moving outside the conventional theatre, the concert hall, or the gallery was generally seen as representing a break not only with the practices of the past, but also with their exclusivity and isolation from a more general public. Site-specific theatre in its early years in particular sought out physical locations that had specific relevance to a working-class audience. Of course this orientation was closely in harmony with the increasing politicization of the experimental theatre of Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it was also surely reinforced by a major shift that was taking place in the study of history itself. As the traditional “great man” view of history began to be seriously challenged by the idea of “history from below,” much early site-specific theatre turned away from figures such as Abraham Lincoln or William Tell and from re-creations of famous battles to build works based on everyday locations and everyday life.

No one expressed this aesthetic better than Armand Gatti, one of the leading experimental dramatists in France at this period, and also one of the most politically engaged. In 1964 he presented a play based on a freedom fighter in the Spanish Civil War whose story, said Gatti, could not be told in a theatre, but only in a space congenial to its subject, a factory, or a prison. The show was in fact presented in an abandoned Belgian factory, and Gatti’s comments on this space provide a striking example of Hugo’s image applied not to settings of the great events of history, but to the life and work of the lower classes:

We had to make the discovery that with this kind of subject it’s mostly the place, the architecture, that does the writing. The theatre was located not in some kind of Utopian place, but in a historic place, a place with a history. There was grease, there were acid marks, because it was a chemical factory; you could still see traces of work; there were still work-clothes around; there were still lunch-pails in the corner, etc. In other words, all these left-over traces of work had their own language. These rooms that had known the labour of human beings day after day had their own language, and you either used that language or you didn’t say anything. . . . That’s why I wrote in an article, “a play authored by a factory.”¹⁶ [End Page 15]

As the term “site-specific” grew in popularity in the late twentieth century, so did its range of usage until it came to mean almost any kind of theatrical performance taking place outside a conventional theatre building.¹⁷ Some producers, such as the British artistic team of Ewan Forster and Christopher Heighes, did not, like Gatti, place a narrative within a location, but instead sought to reveal the “language” of certain historically socially and architecturally significant buildings and locations. Still others, more like the original site-specific creators in the art world, sought to let locations inspire new original works. For the most part, site-specific theatre has dealt with urban or at least with human-created sites, but with the rise of a few interested in environmental concerns, some site-specific work turned from constructed environments to natural ones. Sunrises, moonlit night skies, bodies of water, forests, even breezes have always been a part of exterior site-specific work, but it was not until after the environmental movement of the 1970s that artists began to produce major site-specific works that, although they might involve human actors, were primarily concerned with their audience’s experience of the real natural world.

The most ambitious such artist was the Canadian R. Murray Schafer, who from 1980 onward created a series of monumental works, primarily in natural locations, which together have made up his ongoing Patria project. Princess of the Stars, the third play in the cycle, begins in darkness and features the forest and lake as dawn slowly comes, the major sounds provided by awakening birds. The Spirit Garden (Patria 10), first presented in 2005, involves planting seeds in its first section and the harvesting of their products in the second, for which the audience must return six months later. Real products are grown in real time and the spectators, if they choose, can also share in consuming them.

While Patria remains the most ambitious theatricalization of nature yet attempted, audiences have come to accept during the past half-century the ability of theatre to claim almost any real location, as it can almost any activity, as part of its domain. Although Schafer is an important exception, the great majority of the new spaces claimed by theatre in recent years have been urban spaces, where it is easier for audiences to gather. Although early site-specific works usually were planned for a conventionally passive audience, in the twenty-first century audiences are more commonly encouraged to move about in the theatricalized space, becoming to a greater or lesser extent performers themselves within that space.

This encouragement to physical involvement began with British promenade productions of the late twentieth century, a variation of site-specific theatre in which audiences were required to move to a series of different [End Page 16] sites as the production progressed. Most commonly they were guided as a group from location to location, but in some cases, such as Reza Abdoh’s major work Father Was a Peculiar Man, set in a several square block area of New York in 1990, or Deborah Warner’s 2003 The Angel Project, covering a much larger part of the city, spectators had considerable freedom as to how they would visit and experience the various prepared locations.

In the twenty-first century, experimental productions that have utilized spaces outside of traditional theatres have come to be more commonly called “immersive” than “site-specific,” reflecting a change from an emphasis upon the character of the space itself to an emphasis upon the audience experience within that space. The term “immersive” was popularized by the British company Punchdrunk, which has abandoned traditional theatre space to create elaborate indoor environments in multi-floored abandoned structures of all sorts, allowing audiences to wander according to their own choice within these spaces. Their Macbeth-flavored production Sleep No More was brought to New York in 2003 and became one of the most popular successes of the new century, still running today, more than a decade later.¹⁸ Its success has inspired countless other so-called “immersive” productions, such as Speakeasy Dollhouse, set in several adjoining locations presumably in the 1920s, which encourages audience members to come in costume and interact (in character) with the inhabitants of these created spaces. Even more elaborate immersive productions have been mounted in Europe by groups like Rimini Protokoll in Germany and Signa in Denmark. For their 2008 production of the Ruby Town Oracle, Signa created a complete village of twenty-two buildings, which audiences could visit at any time and for any length during its week of performance, using the spaces as if they were an actual community and interacting however they wished with the more than forty inhabitants.

Bert O. States, in his short but enormously influential book Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, calls attention to a particular quality of theatre as a practice. In States’ words, “Theater is the medium, par excellence, that consumes the real in its realest forms: man, his language, his rooms and cities, his weapons and tools, his other arts, animals fire and water—even, finally, theater itself. Its permanent spectacle is the parade of objects and process in transit from environment to imagery.”¹⁹ An important part of the real that States does not specifically mention in this catalogue is the real of the space in which we exist, and in recent times, having consumed the other realities States mentions, theatre has today added space to its objects of consumption. Moving outside the restricted space within which it was confined for centuries, theatre today can claim and has claimed almost any space the earth provides, natural and artificial, [End Page 17] city and country, as potentially part of its domain. An essential part of this process, of course, is the cooperation of the audience in making it work, a cooperation that has always been at the center of the operations of theatre itself. Theatre only began to exist when a performer stood before a group of fellow humans and asked them to see him as something else, as a fictional being, given a new reality by their willingness to look at him in a different way, as a character.

This same process of altering our perception, we now realize, can be applied to any part of our experience, including the space we inhabit. A striking example of this was demonstrated almost forty years ago in an exhibit called Light Touch by the New York visual artist Robert Whitman. Whitman created something very close to a traditional theatrical atmosphere by seating his audience as in a theatre but inside a trucking warehouse facing the main warehouse door, which was covered by curtains like a stage opening with an image projected on it. These curtains were then opened to reveal the actual street outside, like a stage setting. According to one of the reports on that performance, the normally banal spectacle of passing traffic was in this manner converted into a strange and fascinating kind of theatre simply by an alteration of perception: “Cars appeared occasionally, framed by the door, as they passed on the street directly outside. Appeared, but appeared transfigured, as if a spell had been cast over them. Details of their shape and movement ordinarily not noticed, leapt out, as if from a numinous aura. It was as if cars were being seen for the first time.”²⁰ Although Whitman’s audience remained a traditional passive one, the alteration in their perception indicates clearly how any space can be similarly transfigured, similarly theatricalized. In more recent times, we have seen how this can be done not only with an actual frame, as Whitman demonstrated, but with the frame that the audience itself sustains simply by agreeing to view a space, even one they inhabit, in theatrical terms.

The modern theatre’s colonization of space evokes the visions of one of the major pioneers of that development. Nikolai Evreinov, in addition to being the director of one of the first great theatricalizations of public space, the famous Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920, was also a major theorist and critic. In a series of books and essays written between 1908 and 1920, he promoted a theatrical view of life in all its aspects. In a typical essay, “Apology for Theatricality,” he wrote, “To make a theatre of life is the duty of every artist. . . . The stage must not borrow so much from life as life borrows from the stage.”²¹ His experiments in “theatre for oneself” distinctly anticipated the forays of Light Touch and later immersive work out into the real world. One instance, much in the manner of [End Page 18] Light Touch, was “to sit on a bench in a park or square and look at passing crowds and automobiles,” while another looked at more recent work that encourages direct engagement: “To go to a party and behave there ‘like a queen.’ Like ‘a gentleman of importance,’ like a ‘he-man, and hell-raiser,’ like ‘a misanthrope,’ and so on.”²² He encouraged applying a view of theatre and of stage management to the experience of “walking in the streets, sitting in the restaurants, visiting the boulevards and the stores of Paris or New York or any other place in the world.”²³

In short, Evreinov suggests going a step even beyond the work of Punchdrunk or Rimini Protokoll, and taking upon ourselves their role as organizers and framers of our interaction with the external world. In this way, says Evreinov, we can attain “self-transformation, new feelings, new sensations, new conceptions of the world we live in.”²⁴ Whether the future sees a widespread application of Evreinov’s vision or not, experimental theatre’s current continuing encroachments upon the real, and particularly its colonization of the real of human space, may be seen as central to the theatre’s traditional and ongoing mission. There is now and has always been a desire, through the reflective process of mimesis, to make the human experience in the world more rich, more varied, and more open to experiment and understanding.