spacesof[aesthetic]experimentation

Harvie, J. (2009) theatre & the city / Ridout, M. (2009) theatre & ethics. Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke

A new series of books simply called ‘theatre & …’ has been launched, with the series’ editors – Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato – looking to explore the “restless interdisciplinary energy of theatre and performance” and yet be short enough to be read in one sitting. The collection includes audience, the city, politics, education, human rights, globalization and ethics, with more forthcoming: museums, sexuality, nation, feeling, interculturalism, Ireland and architecture¹. This review looks at just two books in the series, the city and ethics, and how they speak both to each other and some of the work which is on-going in cultural geography. Both books are short: even with a section on ‘further reading’ and a useful index, they are around 80 pages and are small enough to fit in your back pocket. Necessarily selective (as is this review), the structure of both books is straightforward and the arguments are maintained throughout. Nicholas Ridout explores theatre as a practice through which we experiment with ethical action and Jen Harvie investigates the relationships between theatre, performance and the city. Whilst both are eminently readable and very informative, this review tries to open up new lines of enquiry which are neglected.

Ridout’s volume is split into three sections – ancient, modern and post-modern – and attends to theatre as an ethical practice; put differently, what is theatre for, and how do audiences interact with it? He begins by opening up the space of ethics (12)², by asking the reader what ethics is: ‘how shall I act?’ (1). Early on, we are alerted that theatre and performance are valued for their ethical stance, or the ethical responses it can generate from audiences, and an argument takes shape: is there a risk that performances are only valued for what they might offer ethics?  Do we instead need an unethical or anti-ethical theatre (9)? Theatre dramatises ethical situations; the role of the spectator is one of observer and participant. Ethical dilemmas are deployed to resonate, or perhaps produce, ethico-political concerns of a public. As with Bertold Brecht’s (1898-1956) plays – one of Ridout’s examples – they serve to provoke discussion, for the issues to be debated. Here, the theatrical text resembles a musical score, with its focus on “processes of improvisation, rewriting and discussion”; the practice of theatre becomes “a collective labour of political and ethical exploration” (48).

The relationship between theatre and ethics, Ridout notes, is one of form rather than content: how you make theatre and the relationships you establish in the making of it. This focus on form and processes “goes hand in hand with an openness to the future and the unpredictable rather than a closure around a specific ethical position” and establishes a “space for the unknown, the unpredictable … typical of a reorientation of ethical thought which started to take shape in the middle of the twentieth century” (49). Here, performance can be understood as an ethical practice (54). Drawing on the work of Hans-Thies Lehmann, Ridout highlights the concept of ‘response-ability’, a capacity to respond which is ethical and political, or ethico-political. This foregrounds how in the act of responding to something, we are also taking responsibility for it (59). The performance group Goat Island are a useful example through which to think this concept: their “work is an always open process, and performances are instances of a further opening of the process towards a public rather than moments of conclusion or accomplishment” (61-62). The performances call upon “its audience to think about their own engagements and responsibilities” (65) and although Ridout is not making a call for shock tactics, he does advocate the “possibility of surprise, challenge or affront” (70).

Jen Harvie’s contribution to the series is equally adroit in her attempt to work together material conditions and performative practices. The book opens with a foreword (following the Series Editors’ Preface) from Tim Etchells, with a refrain of ‘why city?’ This style somewhat clashed with the rest of the text but worked well, as a means of drawing the reader in. By exploring the relationship between theatre and the city, the book looks to redistribute “some of cultural materialism’s caution and performativity’s hope” (69). Cultural materialism has been influential in theatre analysis, Harvie argues, and understands cultural practices as inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history, as well as involved in the production of cultural meaning which is always political. These cultural practices include “play texts and theatre events, but also working in the theatre, funding it, situating it in the city” (24). She makes a case for cultural materialism being a useful approach as it investigates the political and social consequences of our cultural practices. For all the mention of space and place, it is thus disappointing to read that space is understood as a material condition, space as a container or already made. This tendency to treat space, or geography, as a ‘factor’ comes in for similar criticism from Steven Shapin when talking about work done in science studies ³. Further, there is a tendency to deconstruct: ““some meaning is immediately readable in a theatre’s urban location” (26). Looking for a meaning; imposing meaning? Harvie does, however, offer some critique, noting that this approach “focuses on material conditions, perhaps to the exclusion of other relevant conditions such as how theatre makes us feel and behave” (43).  It is perhaps for these reasons that Harvie is keen to draw attention to performative writings and practices.

Performative analysis “concentrates overwhelmingly on the ways people can and do act with freedom to self-author, exercising agency, control and power through everyday acts of self-articulation and self-creation” (45). But what might this mean? Harvie provides many examples, both historical and contemporary and these help to investigate the utopian potentials for challenging hegemonic oppression (48); some of this work resonates with recent papers on psychogeography⁴. The flâneur of Paris in the 1930s confounded “dominant uses of the city by casually strolling through it” making his or her own pathways, his or her own version of it through this performance (49).  The dérive, or drifting, would follow the walker’s desire paths and can be understood as a sort of intervention: “acts meant to be seen and to see things differently – aimed at transforming capitalist society” (50). The ‘happenings’ of 1960s “eschewed theatrical and fine art conventions, avoided linear plotting and realistic characterisation, could appear illogical and collage-like, and usually involved a handful of performers, as themselves, executing a variety of tasks derived from the everyday and not intended to appear fictional” (54). This notion of a happening is both performance and event, situation and art, and arguably opens up the prospect of surprise, as mentioned in Ridout’s book. These happenings challenged audience and performer separation and were not restricted to set texts, tended to be temporary and were difficult to commodify. More recent examples of performances include site-specific artists’ walks⁵, urban protest, Critical Mass and ‘highly visible performative interventions’ which are all parts of alternative culture. Although restricted for space, it is a shame that there is no link made between these guerrilla activities and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically on micropolitics⁶.

Harvie’s argument to hybridise cultural materialist and performative analytic strategies and use them to think across theatre and performance practices together comes late on in the book and is perhaps not as strong as the rest of the text. Along with her call for us to redistribute caution (cultural materialism) and hope (performative analysis), she argues that theatre and performance practices are part of the same ‘ecology’, that instead of looking at different practices separately we should consider how they relate to each other. So far, so good. Yet she goes on to claim that a hybrid approach provides “complexity to understand the complex cultural effects of contemporary urban life” (70). Harvie admits that the “[t]he story told by this book so far is one of ambivalence” (70) but the conclusion does not seem to alter this.

Although a somewhat arbitrary selection of theatre studies and everything else, these seem to be productive encounters. The books provide a good overview of key debates and concepts and develop an argument. Geography’s interest in thinking the event, performance and performativity, as well as its continued concern with ethics means that these books are certainly of much interest to geographers.

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This post is tagged city, ethics, performance, performativity, theatre