The Ends of Theatre & the Postmodern Stage
The stage is a tangible phenomenon. We see it and we can touch it if we like, so at last we have something more than a purgatory of pure ideas. This in turn will help up clarify our concept of reality – because we can then assume that reality is everything which is not a stage and which does not take place on stage. So we can say that reality begins behind the stage – in the wings, and stretching in concentric circles into an infinity . . .
A stage can simply exist in its own right. A stage can simply exist and exists simply by being where it is. Where there is no stage there is something else instead, and that is it. The limits of a stage are clear and well defined: one can be either on a stage or off a stage, but never in between, because such an intermediate zone simply cannot exist. With reality it is entirely different. Although it is obvious that reality begins where the stage ends, nobody really knows where are its limits. It is not even clear whether it has limits at all.
These are the terms by which Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek differentiated theatre and reality in a 1988 address to the Nobel Foundation
. In his lecture, “Theatre versus Reality,” Mrozek articulates this fissure with trepidation. The theatre’s longevity, he posits, is due to its role as a refuge from the chaos and unpredictability of real life existence. Unlike reality the stage is clearly “placed” in space and time and supplies the spectator with the comforting limitations of beginnings. The spectator of stage action is privy to the whole story: all action has immediate and finite consequences. Most importantly the stage action does not extend beyond the stage. The action and its figures belong to the stage and cease predictably with the end of the performance. But this does not bring into focus the differences between theatre and reality.
Toward that end of his address Mrozek asks, what is the relationship between the stage and real life? Mrozek follows a line of questions stemming from the proposition that theatre re-presents life. Instead of a conception of the stage and stage action as an entirely fictive construction with no relationship to life or even as an imitation of real or realistic events, he conceives of the stage and reality in analogous terms. This is a compelling but “dangerous” alignment that provokes Mrozek to ask: “if theatre represents life, what does life represent? . . . What if life is not self-sufficient? Or what if life is only a representation of something else? And what is this something else if it exists?”
In following this thread Mrozek registers one of Baudrillard’s most important cultural criticisms, the aestheticization of the real. The binaries differentiating the real and the imaginary have been dissolved into a hyperreality in which meaning is contingent on the subject’s gaze. This, Baudrillard tells us, is an “aesthetic fascination” that spells the demise of the art object in that it equalizes the experience of the aesthetic art object and the real. This problematizes Mrozek’s account and though he does not put his concerns into the terms of Baudrillard’s crituque, Mrozek sense that the border between the stage and reality has dissolved and abruptly turns away from the question altogether: “If we want to preserve our peace of mind, perhaps we had better not think about the relation of theatre to reality at all. Perhaps we’d better watch television.”
The tension at work on Mrozek’s account stems from the status of illusion. Baudrillard’s critique stymies the possibility of creating illusion because any attempt to represent that which is fabricated implies its opposite, that which is authentic or real. But any authenticity or reality is, in light of this criticism, always already fabricated: “Illusion is not possible, because the real is no longer possible.”While Mrozek lammented illusion’s ubiquity because gave the stage real terms, he resists Baudrillard’s position that illusion is no where because its opposite, these real terms, do not exist. It follows that the creation of illusion cannot be understood as the domain of the theatre or the activity of the stage; in fact, the aestheticization of reality means “there is no theatre because there is no longer any stage upon which it could be performed.” The art object has not escaped “the omnipresent banality of the simulacrum.” As Baudrillard explains:
There once existed a class of objects that were allegorical, and even a bit diabolical, such as mirrors, images, works of art . . . of course, these too were simulacra, but they were transparent and manifest…they had their own style and characteristic savoir faire. In these objects, pleasure consisted more in discovering something “natural” in what was artificial and counterfeit. Today, the real and the imaginary are confounded in the same operational totality, and aesthetic fascination is simply everywhere.
In the “twilight of the real” the art object, stripped of any inherent or “essential” qualities, is consigned to the gaze, the barometer of reality in postmodernity. This is a gaze that operates on the aesthetic level in all constructions of meaning. Developments in live performance has been in recognition and response to this formulation of contemporary subjectivity. Recognizing the illegitimacy of representations of authentic or real subjects, the impossibility of overcoming the mediation of technologically, and the expansion of performance into the everyday life of the spectator’s life, postmodern performance pursues its own abolishment.
In Postmodern Performance Nick Kaye describes the foundational ambitions of modernist projects to “overcome the arbitrariness and instability of the sign” through the realization of the arts object’s “essence.” The endeavor was to ground meaning in the art object itself so that meaning was already present in the object and inherent “in its own terms,” thereby excluding the aesthetic from the rational that fuelled other modernist projects, for example semiotics and psychoanalysis. In contrast, the postmodern “occurs as a disruption of this very claim to meaning,” both the claim that the object has inherent “essential” qualities and the subsequent claim that meaning resides in the art object. This counterclaim not only reentates the spectator it reinserts the contingencies at work in meaning-making. The postmodern in performance, Kaye tells us, takes a page from Baudrillard in its “endless parade and exchange of equivalences” and in doing so these practices undermine “the very terms of which it would seem to consist.”
Using Jean-Françoise Lyotard’s theories of narrativity Kaye explains that the dominant feature of postmodern performance is the calling into question the figure, “the event of narrativity, or the telling.” The postmodern abolishes any attempt at the authenticity postmodern critique tells us is an impossibility and answers by acknowledging the illegitimacy of its own representations. This disrupts any reading of the discourse, “the process by which narrative represents and gives meaning,” as authentic. In doing so “the story is displaced by the telling of a story that looks toward its own displacement.” Kaye’s analysis of postmodern performance describes inconsistent and often contradictory practices but performance modes that questions the terms of its own existence by destabilizing the formation of meaning, displacing the subject or subverting the representation of any coherent subjectivity, and above all highlighting the contingency of meaning through an emphasis of the spectator’s presence.
Paradoxically, as these performance practices become introspective, postmodern performance focuses outward on the spectator. Scrutinizing the relationship between the performance event and the spectator is one of the primary ambitions of postmodern performance. By frustrating the usually passive role of the spectator these practices actively implicates the spectator’s authority as the arbiter of meaning. Instead of having meaning “in its own terms” the postmodern performance dissects the figure, and places meaning in the terms of the spectator.
In this way, the very ground on which the ‘work’ depends is rendered unstable, as the languages by which it is constituted are deployed in such a way as to make visible problems and limitation which cannot be resolved or transcended . . . It follows that the postmodern in art is subversive and transgressive, that is occurs as a critical and skeptical stepping beyond bounds, a disruption that purposefully upset the terms by which the ‘work of art’ would constitute itself.
In light of the cultural shifts that altered the way reality or real life is experienced in contemporary culture, shifts elucidated in Baudrillard’s stark criticisms, traditional dramaturgies were usurped by performance practices that overtly scuppered meaning by owning the illegitimacy of their own representations. This development can be understood as a response by contemporary theatre makers like Mrozek who saw the boundaries of the stage and real life blurring dangerously with the growing ubiquity of illusion. Postmodern performance practices emerge from these modes in open acknowledgment of realty’s absence and do not strive to rescue subjectivity from the simulacra. This development saw the conventions of the Dramatic stage and its fictional narrative voices compromised out of existence the idea of the “real presence” of the performer is also eradicated. Instead, the postmodern in performance can be seen as the expression of the contingencies at work in the construction and meaning of representations. This is particularly true of the fragmented, divisible, and self-abolishing representations of the subject and subjectivity in live performance.
