On Performance
Conflict is the driving force of dramatic theatre. It is no surprise then to have the death of a character be commonplace on stage. These deaths may serve to ignite an emotional pathos in the audience, or as some symbolic casualty to the world at large.
Lehmann refers to theatre as an “intimation of mortality’. What can be said then about the audience on today’s stage? For all the world’s a stage, isn’t it?
Aristotle’s concept of the unity of time (nowadays accepted as the norm) seeks to define a sealed-off sphere of events that are subjected to an artistic time and gravity of its own. Lehmann suggests that this unity of time creates a continuity that makes the split between fictive time and realtime invisible. The audience is to be closed off from external realities, and their attention is to remain constantly on the continuity of the story. This poses the question of whether or not dramatic theatre and its escapist temporalities serve as an audience’s escape from reflecting on their own mortality?
While dramatic theatre may wish to retain the audience’s attention on its insular continuity, theatre in the postdramatic tradition would rather make the division between reality and stage visible. In his discussion on technological media, Lehmann proposes that it is the electronic image that can serve as a foreground only to the presence of the body itself on stage. Nothing can be more present than the body. When we look at the work of the Wooster Group, we notice that the technological components of the work is visibly raw, thus making the production of theatre itself visible. This is opposite to Aristotle’s ‘unity of time’ which sought to demarcate between reality and fiction. Furthermore, if the Postdramatic’s concern is of ‘presence’ (which Lehmann defines as “not simply perception but the also the desire to see”) and of the body as a signifier of desire, what effect is had then on the audience in their reflection on mortality?
If dramatic theatre wishes to have the audience occupied by the allure of fictive action such that they ignore the mortality of reality, does the Postdramatic then wish to have its audience be constantly aware of their finite existence?
There are more questions and challenges than answers but we must go on…
