Literature Review: Theatre and Phenomenology
When I first began to examine actors’ spatiotemporal experiences and the corporeal processes they go through in training and creation I was looking for a theoretical and methodological approach that would help me evade Cartesian paradigms and terminology as much as possible. In addition, I needed a way to position the body as belonging to the realms of space and time while, at the same time, as having subjectivity and agency. Phenomenology’s main concern lies in exploring human reality as it appears to perception while negotiating between the subjective and objective aspects of experience. In other words, it explores the way we, as subjects-in-the-world, perceive phenomena in time and space. Furthermore, it is not only an amalgam of theories but a methodology and a “way of seeing” (Moran and Mooney 1). It thus provides specific methodological tools for observing phenomena and perception within theatre praxis. In its various theoretical strains, phenomenology serves as a way into various forms of experience. In this review I focus on a number of phenomenologists whose theories are relevant to my research and on the ways in which phenomenology has been used within the fields of theatre and performance studies.
I begin with a definition of the kind of phenomenology I use by discussing the theories of three major figures: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Their writings, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s work, provide the theoretical and philosophical foundation for most of the existing phenomenological explorations in theatre and performance studies. I then turn to examine works that use phenomenology in the research of what can be termed “the products of theatre”: written plays and staged performances. These works concern mostly with the experience of the audience – the spectators or, in some cases, the readers of plays. In the third section of this paper I examine the ways in which phenomenology can be used to explore questions of gender and sexuality both in our daily experience and in performance. The final part looks at two attempts to use phenomenology to theorize the experiences of the performer.
Foundational Theories
As a philosophical current and a theoretical frame for the investigation of human experience, phenomenology was the first to offer an alternative approach to the Cartesian paradigm that was prevalent in both philosophy and the sciences around the turn of the 20th century (and, arguably, still today). At that time, most approaches to the investigation of human experience positioned themselves on either side of the subject-object dichotomy. This dichotomy can be seen as parallel to the mind-body duality. Most physical sciences including medicine, for example, attempted to look at perception—the vehicle of experience—as an objective process, claiming for the irrelevancy of ‘mind’ to the way humans perceive reality around them. According to this approach the function of perception is detached from, and unaffected by, any subjective aspect of experience. On the other side of this dichotomy stood most of philosophy and psychology, which claimed that the inner life of the subject—the mind—was the most relevant aspect of human experience and that the body was a mere vessel. Both approaches reaffirmed the mind-body split paradigm. Phenomenology introduced a both/and approach in which the inner/subjective and the outer/objective experiences are part of the same process and thus body and mind are not categorically separate. In this section of the review I discuss the writings of Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and Heidegger, his most prominent student and, eventually, adversary. I then juxtapose their approaches to Merleau-Ponty’s theory, which I examine more elaborately.
Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was the first to propose a theory of body-mind unity. In his writings he claims that through the phenomenological stance objective truths of the world can be understood within and as part of subjective experiences. In other words, a phenomenological exploration exposes “the manifold layers of the experience of objectivity as it emerges at the heart of subjectivity.”[1] He calimed that as opposed to the common “natural attitude”, in which we experience the world and things in it as they are given to us, the phenomenological attitude affords a specific body/subject a view into the truth of objects in the world. This truth is revealed to the subject/body, which is the “zero point of orientation,”[2] by observing objects in their spatiotemporal relationship. However, Husserl’s approach, which was revolutionary at the time, was still trapped in Cartesian language. For example, he repeatedly mentions the body and the ego as ostensibly separate: the first as the material extension of the second. Thus, Husserl’s attempt to go against Cartesian duality required him to use language that reinforces this duality.
Another example of this trap can be observed in the way Husserl theorizes the sense of touch. According to Husserl touching is a process through which the body acquires knowledge both of the object it touches and of itself. It is through the sense of touch and through movement that the body knows itself. The touching hand, he claims, senses two things – the surface of the table and its own surface. There is, therefore, a clear separation that differentiates between two distinct sensations. Unlike Merleau Ponty’s account of touch, Husserl’s writing leaves the touching hand as either a felt object or a feeling subject and, thus, the duality remains. In opposition, Merleau Ponty complicates any clear distinction between touched object and touching hand. He described the touch as an intertwining of the touching hand with the touched object which reveals the hand’s object-ness through its subjective experience. (I elaborate on Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology below.)
In his essay “The Fundamental Discoveries of Phenomenology, its Principle, and the Clarification of its Name” Heidegger explains many of Husserl’s ideas. Particularly, he clarifies the notion of intentionality in its specific use in phenomenology. According to Heidegger, intentionality is a direct and unmediated perceptual contact of our body/self with the world. It is our contact with perceptual aspects of things in the world—such as the color, texture, hardness, and smoothness of the surface of a table—that we habitually perceive only as an attribute that belongs to the thing itself. Intentionality, unlike intention, is not an active part of the psyche. Rather, it is a structural element of perception, its toward-ness that connects the body/self with things in the world. Although Heidegger’s essay can be read as a review of Husserl’s theory, Heidegger begins to develop in it his own idea of the representation of the world to the self. According to him the world is constantly re-presented before an individual as a kind of projection of reality. The individual perceives this reality from the subjective perspective in which he/she is positioning him/herself. The representation of the world, thus, is framed by the individual positionality.
Heidegger develops this idea in his later work, “The Age of the World Picture,” where he claims that
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” now means the structured image that is the creature of man’s [sic] producing which represents and sets before. In such producing man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is. Because this position secures, organizes and articulate itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views.[3]
The representation of the world establishes the interplay of subject and object as its core and creates the subjects’ world picture. This picture is not a visual image of the world, but it is the world as perceived and apprehended wholly by the subject. Humans are also represented as part of the world picture but, in decisively positioning themselves within the world picture and in front of it, they take part in framing it and determining their relationships to its objects. Although Heidegger’s notion of the world picture is particularly valuable for theories of reception and analysis of performance, I find Merleau Ponty’s approach much more suitable for the exploration of the performer’s embodied experience in the processes of training and creation.
Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology draws more on Husserl than on Heidegger. However, in his seminal book Phenomenology of Perception Merleau Ponty establishes his phenomenological attitude as distinct from Husserl’s in that it rejects the notion of a neutral or transcendental phenomenological observation. He critiques Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as a form of Cartesian observation and claims that the ‘essences’ of things in the world, which Husserl spent much of his time discussing and exploring, should not be the goal of phenomenology but its means of exploration. Husserl’s attempt to detach the object from one’s body as subject and from the body’s spatial and temporal horizons may reveal the “idea” of the object but not the object’s presence in experience. To fully grasp the experience of a single object in its totality means understanding the multitude of horizons that form one’s experience. Thus, Merleau Ponty claims that there is no objective experience that can be universally understood, nor is there subjectivity that is separate from the world it inhabits. In order to uncover human experience in its wholeness we need an ambiguous realm, which he calls the phenomenal field, in which we can examine “the thickness” of subject and object as they come together.[4] This approach to the body and objects around it is particularly useful for investigating the physical-actor’s body in its relationship to elements of time and space. It enables an observation of the body with its surrounding without erasing its individual identity and self. It also enables an observation of the relationships of objects to bodies as they engage within one live space.
Merleau Ponty’s theory also poses an alternative to Heidegger’s theory of the world picture. The body, according to Merleau Ponty, stands in front of its world like a metaphorical mirror, reflecting experience of the world in its own constitution and being. This metaphoric reflection is not caused by the world and cannot be traced and understood as knowledge of the world; rather, it is perceived experience itself, which is motivated, not caused. This means that the motivation and its result are reciprocal and intertwined within a circular dialectic rather than a linear progression. Furthermore, by talking of a world structure that fluctuates between the layers of the existing (objective) world and the immediacy of life experience (rather than representation), Merleau Ponty reminds us of the fluidity and temporality of being-in-the-world. He stresses the interdependence of the existence of the body and the world and that external perception (of the world) and internal perception (of the body) are entangled as two aspects of a single act of being.
Of particular importance to my research is Merleau Ponty’s understanding of subjectivity and the relationships between self and other, especially when considering his claim that “an analysis of [time and space] that is at all searching really touches upon subjectivity itself.”[5] Although Merleau Ponty refers here to a theoretical-phenomenological analysis of time and space, we can extend this claim into practices that are based on a form of analysis of time and space, namely physical acting techniques. These practices can be seen as a type of experiential analysis of time and space and, therefore, can be seen as a way to “touch upon subjectivity itself.” Merleau Ponty’s analysis of body/self and other can also fit in with the analysis of the practice of physical-acting techniques. He claims that the ambiguity of my existence in the world enables an other to penetrate into the self while both mine and the other’s perspectives of the world slip into one another. The other, therefore, cannot be what my gaze makes of it because it is not a fragment of the world but a point of view of the world. This description can perhaps become apparent when looking at the relationships between self and other in techniques such as the Viewpoints.
In his last book The Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty reconnects perception to ontological questions and further establishes his theory. The most valuable part of the book for my research is the fourth chapter: “The intertwining—the Chiasm.” In it he claims that through perception, especially vision and touch, we are intertwined with the world and with objects and people in it. In both vision and touch there is a double perception from within and from without: seeing and being seen, touching and being touched. This doubleness creates a “thickness” or a “flesh,” which is “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.”[6] Merleau Ponty’s concepts of the flesh, the intertwining and the thickness of experience can be useful for analyzing embodied experience in theatre praxis.
The theories and approaches of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau Ponty appear in most of the literature I review below. Since, as I mentioned earlier, I find Merleau Ponty’s theories to be the most useful for my work, I continue to focus mostly on the aspects of the theories that echo his ideas. In the next section of this review I discuss some of the literature in which phenomenology is the main approach used to analyze aspects of the audience’s experience of perceiving theatre.
Phenomenology of Theatre Plays
Like the majority of theatre research, most phenomenological research in the field focuses on the plays themselves, either as written works or as staged productions. The researcher’s position, thus, is of a reader or a spectator. This is apparent in the writings of Bruce Wilshire,
The distinction I am drawing between watching a play and the processes of training and creation can be reconsidered as I trace the various discussions in this part of the review. This dichotomy includes, on the one hand, the written or staged play as “finished products” that can only be changed (and therefore be alive) in the perception of the audience and, on the other hand, the processes of training and creation that are seen as the loci for the exploration of undetermined horizons of meanings. This dichotomy is clearly maintained in Wilshire’s writing. He mostly refers to plays and their components (character, story, props etc.) as stable, almost objectified aspects of theatre as a work of art. The instance of performance, therefore, seems to occur only for the audience and only in their perception. Wilshire is first and foremost a philosopher and his concern with the way plays are perceived and experienced by the audience reflects his particular position as an outsider to theatre.
Nevertheless, I found Wilshire’s claim that, generally speaking, not only is theatre life-like, but also “life is theatre-like”[7] to be especially helpful. Wilshire does not refer to a particularly mimetic style of theatrical performance as found, for example, in naturalistic theatre; rather, his theory takes the experience of theatre—watching and being watched—as an essential and constitutive part of being human. Theatre, hence, forms the conditions to explore and experiment with existential elements of human life. Extending this claim into the training and rehearsal studio means that the research of training and rehearsal processes can expose aspects of our experience of being-in-the-world beyond its immediate artistic and theatrical value. This is made clear in Wilshire’s discussion of questions of identity and self. He claims that theatre as a type of practiced phenomenological investigation plays a role in returning the subject from the perceived back to itself and to its identity. Hence, since identity is in large part embodied, by observing how theatre constructs identities on stage we can learn about the construct of identity in life.
Similar to Wilshire’s book, a large portion of Bert O. States’ book, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, deals with plays and their per/re-ception. States claims that things onstage are closer to being signified rather than signifiers and that in theatre “image and object, pretence and pretender, sign-vehicle and content, draw unusually close.”[8] This argument is framed by his attempt to bring together semiotics and phenomenology. For practice research this approach can clarify the different ways of seeing and creating meanings that specific techniques privilege. His approach, however, pertains mostly to conventional, text-based theatre.
In the last two chapters States emphasizes the centrality of the actor in relation to text and to the audience. His examination of the relationship of actor and character takes another step towards a deeper understanding of the actor’s self and subjectivity when playing a character. While the actor may be seen to disappear into the character, s/he is also the embodiment of that character. The character, hence, may similarly be seen to become the actor. Moreover, the text, which is considered to be repeated by the actor, is expected to be “owned” by the actor to such an extent that it becomes fresh and reveals new meanings that were not there in the original written text. These valuable arguments are complicated when considering physically-based techniques that focus on devised work. For instance, in these techniques the actor-text relationship becomes more than an interpretation and the ownership of the text mentioned by States is taken to a deeper level.
Stanton Garner takes an approach similar to States. He proposes a dialogue between phenomenological investigation and semiotics as well as poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories. Like States, he also focuses on phenomenological analysis of plays and the experience of the audience. However, he adds that theatre’s as-if-ness pervades the entire experience of being in the theatre. Full darkness, for example, rarely occurs in the theatre yet it can be experienced, and even created, through spoken text. Theatre’s imagined reality, therefore, pervades actuality. To put it in Garner’s words: “the theatrical field offers itself in terms of an irreducible oscillation between perceptual levels, and though spectatorial vision is thus bifurcated, the theatrical mode of this presence, or givenness, is oriented in terms of an experiential actuality that transgresses (while never fully erasing) the boundaries between the “is” and the “as if”.”[9] While Garner continues to paradoxically regard experience as received almost solely on the audience’s side and to implicitly suggest that it is created primarily onstage, I propose to use his important insights when looking at actors’ experience in performance and in training and cration.
Garner mostly refers to the actor’s body as experienced from the outside, as a looked-at body or as a vehicle for the embodiment and signification of text. However, at least in one of these instances his train of thought momentarily leads him to “reverse his gaze” and thus to venture (temporarily) into the actor’s experience. Due to its livedness, Garner claims, the actor’s body on stage both embodies the dualities of reality/illusion, sign/referent and threatens to break these dualities and send them back into the “real” real. The spectator’s body in its particular orientation and positionality is invisible for the actor’s virtual gaze (as character) yet visible for the actor’s actual gaze. The actor’s ability to gaze back onto the audience makes theatre experience different from most other arts (most notably, cinema). These variables of presence and absence show that “embodiedness is subject to modification and transformation, multiple and varying modes of disclosure, and that the forms of ambiguity that characterize the phenomenal realm represent experience in flux, oscillating within and between modes of perceptual orientation.”[10]
While Garner’s analysis mostly explores the visible aspects of theatre, Alice Rayner’s book focuses on phenomenology as a discipline that, like theatre, is concerned with the invisible and unspeakable ghosts of our reality. By discussing these unseen ghosts Rayner exposes aspects of the experience of theatre that are not usually spoken of. The elements of theatre she examines—time, memory, props, chairs, and curtains—constantly correspond to each other within a multitude of experiences. As her discussion travels from the most pervading elements (time, memory) to the more specific ones (from props to chairs to curtains), it seems to zoom in on the tangible, particular and visible. Yet, as it progresses, it constantly re-turns to include any present argument within the previous ones, thus creating a repetitive pattern that, in fact, performs one of her most salient argument. Using phenomenology in conjunction with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Rayner claims that theatre experience, which exists in the present of performance, emerges in the “gap or syncopation”[11] between perception and consciousness. The repetition of this structural syncopation enables the existence of intersubjectivity and the memory of the present. By performing this repetitive syncopation in her writing, Rayner avoids the risk of turning something fluid, temporal and multifaceted into representation and signification, thus fixing it within determined parameters. With this she demonstrates the need for innovative ways of writing, particularly when trying to explore experience as a process through time.
One of Rayner’s aims is to show “the way that theatrical doubling is both simply the province of theatre and the model for an epistemology by which perceptual experience is transformed into knowledge of experience.”[12] The kind of knowledge she speaks of, the ghostly knowledge, “is neither a topic nor an issue for discourse.”[13] That is, it cannot be put simply into words and explained away. It is embodied and experiential knowledge. Such knowledge of history, for example, “is not a matter of documentation or information but a matter of imitation and performance that embody both material specificity and the gaps that arise in the process of imitation and repetition.”[14]
Phenomenology and Gender
Phenomenology is often accused of erasing the particularity of the body as gendered body. This critique may be true of Husserl’s transcendental approach. However, although Heidegger and Merleau Ponty do not discuss sex and gender in depth, they do give tools for exploring questions of gendered identity through phenomenology. Hence, the writings of Iris Marion Young and Amelia Jones are of particular import as they provide models for analyzing and theorizing gender and sexuality with the use of phenomenology. Their concerns with questions of identity and gender may help me avoid the essentailism and “gender blindness” for which phenomenology has often been critiqued.
Young’s book contains several of her essays from various moments in her career. She presents a phenomenological approach to theorizing the female body and, by extension, to theorizing issues of gender and sexuality. She claims that the prevalent theories of sex and gender, most notably Judith Butler’s theory, obscure real life consequences of having a gendered body/self. These theories, according to her, suggest no real way of practically dealing with questions of gender or even understanding them in practice. Young expands Toril Moi’s theory of the lived body as a definition that pertains to concrete real life experience and includes a wider range of lived experiences than does the category gender. “The lived body is a unified idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context; it is body in situation. For existentialist theory, situation denotes the produce of facticity and freedom.”[15] Young adds that the way Gender has been defined and theorized makes it useful for understanding larger structures and social forces rather than for looking at subjectivity and individual experiences. She relies heavily on Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology and Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist theory, suggesting that by analyzing “the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality”[16] we can develop an understanding of the female lived experience that pertains to individual experience.
This type of analysis can be especially productive in exploring an actor’s experience of self and other within processes of training and creation with physical acting techniques specifically because the practice of physical-acting often disregards gender roles and seem to ignore bodies as gendered. Many of the exercises and improvisations used in these techniques make no gender distinction and the resistence to the use of written text as the creative starting point prevents the inscription of bodies with specific pre-arranged roles. In text-based theatre such inscription can be followed or it may create resistance and lead, for example, to a feminist or deconstructive interpretation. Conversly, the lack of text opens up various possibilities for the emergence and/or reconstruction of roles within the contexts of specific groups. Young’s feminist phenomenology, however, mostly focuses on what may be seen as normative female bodies. In contrast, Jones’ focus on body art leads her to explore non-normative bodies in performance and to examine non habitual ways of constructing the self through performance.
In her book, Body Art: Performing the Subject, Amelia Jones examines body art through phenomenology in order, among other things, to go against claims that “the performed body/self is ever completely legible or fixed in its effects.”[17] She thus complicates the more prevalent theories of performance that use representational and discoursive methods to theorize the gendered performed body. Jones claims that body art is demonstrative of the instant of the dislocation of the Western Cartesian subject of modernism into a “postmodern” intersubjectivity. That is, by creating a complex relationship between the artist (his/her body) and his/her work (which is his/her performed body), body art challenges the Cartesian, disengaged and “disinterested” point of view of both artist and art critic/academic. At the same time, she claims, body art disrupts clear modernist dichotomies such as subject/object, male/female, reality/representation.
Of particular value to the research of physical theatre praxis is Jones’ focus on the positionality of the artist within and in relationship to his/her work. In body art the artist’s body/self is positioned as the originating artist, the source from which the art’s content and form emerge as well as the performed material body. The same can be said of most devised physical theatre. The main difference between the two is that physical theatre is usually created in groups and the process commonly includes using specific shared and prescribed practices (such as using a specific known technique). Conversely, body art is, for the most part, an individual practice that resists the notion of shared, prescribed techiques. Nevertheless, Jones’ analysis of the artists’ body/self as the source of the work of art and, consequently, as performing its self can prove to be fruitful for my research in the way it exposes the complexities of performing identity and self.
Jones explores two body artists whose work, she claims, dislocates the mainstream concepts of performed masculinity and femininity. She argues that Hanna Wilke’s nude “posing” exposes hegemonic positioning of the female body as an object in front of the male gaze, while implicating the viewer in a disrupted and subverted re-articulation of this relationship. Of special interest, however, is the chapter on the work of Vito Acconci. Jones analyzes his work as an attempt by a male artist to perform his subjectivity as an ambiguous masculine body/self which is also feminized. Acconci tries to position his masculine heterosexuality in relation to his audience in a place normally occupied by women. He undermines conventional oppositions that equate sado/mazo and active/passive to masculine/feminine, subject/object and self/other. This novel analysis of ambiguous performed heterosexual masculinity can serve to complicate the prevalent discourse around performance of gender and subjectivity that has commonly been located within the fields of women studies and queer studies.
Another facet in the exposure of the self through body art is by the use of technology. Maureen Connor and Laurie Anderson are exemplary in the use of technologies of representation that perform and become the flesh of their body/self (in Merleau Ponty’s sense). Technology, then, can be used to connect the body/self to the world and intertwine it with the Other. Both artists also explore and subvert their femininity through technologies.
The works of Orlan and Bob Flanagan go even further. With the help of technology they literally expose the flesh and draw the viewers into an intertwined and interactive relationship with the artists. Their bodies/selves are, in fact, experienced by their audience through technological means. As Jones puts it, their work
points to an expansion of the phenomenological relation to a technophenomenological relation that intertwines intersubjectivity with interobjectivity: we are enworlded via the envelopment of our bodies in space, the touch of the keyboard, the stroke of our gaze on the video screen. Seemingly paradoxical, given the conventional association of technology with disembodiment and disengagement from the world, recent body-oriented practices have increasingly mobilized and highlighted this reversibility, using the artists’ own body/self as both subject and object, as multiplicitous, particular, and unfixable, and engaging with audiences in increasingly interactive ways.[18]
Technology has been a part of theatre for many years. However, when included in the process of devising physical theatre it may similarly create technophenomenological relationships, both with the audience and among practitioners. Although Jones mostly explore the performance of self before an audience, it is possible, I argue, to use her theory and methodology in examining this process from the point of view of the practitioner in the process of creation. In the next section I look at two attempts to use phenomenology to analyze theatre and dance from the practitioner’s point of view.
Phenomenology of Praxis
Phillip Zarrilli uses phenomenology to explore the particularity of the actor’s body in performance. He classifies four types of awareness that affect the actor’s perception and create four different “bodies”, which he names: “flesh”, “blood”, “breath” and “appearance.” The flesh-body is the aspect of the body by which we live in the world and experience it. It is our habitual sensorimotor being that includes exteroception and prorioception. The blood-body is the interoceptive body of our inner organs. Although our awareness rarely focuses on the act of perception in these two bodies, “everyday experience of the lived body is a constant intermingling and exchange of “flesh and blood.””[19]
The bodies of “breath and appearance” are both “non-ordinary, extra-daily” bodies. The breath-body is the subtle embodied awareness—developed through various psychophysical techniques such as yoga or martial arts—to one’s bodymind as a single dialectic whole. Breath, the interoceptive process that is the closest to the outer surface of the body, creates a connection and constant shift from inner to outer worlds. It thus connects the blood-body with the flesh-body. The fourth body, “appearance”, is the aesthetic outer body that is available for the spectator’s gaze. This is a fictive body in which the actor’s perception is attuned to absent things (the “as if” or Rayner’s ghosts) and is presented outwards. The fours bodies, however, are never entirely separate. According to Zarrilli the actor’s experience should include all four of them in order to be fully present.
Zarrilli takes two important steps in this essay: he uses phenomenology to both theorize actors experience in practice and to create a terminology that can be easily taken back into the practice. Although the terms he uses and the specific definitions he makes can be contested, his approach is by far the most relevant to research of training and creation.
In her essay Sandra Farleigh attempts to find a way to make meaning out of both dancer and spectator’s subjective experience of dance. She argues that “the essence of dance is not identical with its motion. It arises in consciousness as the motion reveals the intent of the whole and its parts.”[20] Furthermore, she claims that a dance has an identity that can be revealed through the phenomenological stance in which form and content are not separate. Thus, she shows how the body’s intentionality in dance differs from the everyday intentionality in that it takes on “aesthetic” spatiality and motility. This is particularly significant in the subject’s attention to his/her own body as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Although Farleigh’s essay seems theoretically undeveloped, several of her observations can serve as starting points for further exploration. For example, the implication of dancers’ specific attention to their own body can be explored within the question of self objectification and subjection. In addition, Farleigh connects through her moving body her imagination, inner life and identity to a kind of freedom in front of the gaze of others. This line of exploration can expose elements of embodied creativity, non-verbal communication and meaning creation.
The fact that this final section includes only two short essays is part of the problematic place praxis research occupies within the disciplines of theatre and performance studies. While staged performance has been given considerable attention in theoretical research including (though not exclusively) with the use of phenomenology, processes of training and creation have generally been only documented through descriptive and ethnographic accounts. Within the dearth of substantial theorization of praxis, the actors/performers have been given even less attention. Questions that have been explored about performance—about embodied experience, subjectivity, self and other, to list a few of the central questions—have rarely been looked at within the creative processes that precede it. I suspect that this is not because of lack of interest but, rather, due to methodological and material difficulties.[21] Phenomenology, I argue, can help overcome some of the methodological difficulties by focusing on spatiotemporal processes of which subjective experience is a part.
Works Cited
Farleigh, Sondra. “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology.” Dance Research Journal, 23.1, (1991): 11-16.
Garner,
Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture”. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. NewYork: Harper & Row, 1977.
---. “The Fundamental Discoveries of Phenomenology, its Principle, and the Clarification of its Name.” In Moran, Dermot and Timothy Mooney eds. The Phenomenology Reader.
Husserl, Edmund. “Material Things in Their Relation to the Aesthetic Body.” And “The Constitution of Psychic Reality through the Body.” In Don, Welton (ed.) The Body: Classic and Conte,porary
Jones, Amelia. Body/Art: Performing the Subject.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.
---. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Moran, Dermot and Timothy Mooney eds. The Phenomenology Reader.
Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater.
Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor.
Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. "Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Modes of Experience." Theatre Journal 56.4 (2004): 653-66.
[1] Moran 2002:2
[2] “Material” 12.
[3] 134.
[4] Phenomenology 61
[5] Phenomenology 477.
[6] Visible 146, italics in original.
[7] Wilshire 139.
[8] States 20.
[9] Garner 42.
[10] Garner 51.
[11] Rayner 10.
[12] Ibid 114.
[13] Ibid 47.
[14] Ibid 42. She demonstrates with an example from a performance of Waiting for Godot by an Irish company, in which her experience of the history and memory of the repression and famine of the Irish people, which are not part of the original content of the text, emerged through the voices and bodies of the actors.
[15] Young 16, italics in original.
[16] Ibid 32.
[17] Jones 34.
[18] 239.
[19] Zarrilli 660.
[20] Farleigh 12.
[21] I do not expand here on the material difficulties for such a discussion goes beyond the scope and context of this review.
2 comments:
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I'm doing a theatre degree at the moment and I've got a presentation coming up where phenomenology will feature quite heavily. I was really struggling to understand the basic concept, but your explanation at the beginning is to the point and was very useful in helping me grasp the basics so thank you very much!
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