paul rae : presencing

Presencing.

"I'll tell you something, dear heart: spend your life in showbusiness and you become a philosopher."
Teddy in Faith Healer, by Brian Friel

Part 1: Object

At first glance, Double Bind, the huge installation by Juan Muñoz displayed in the turbine hall of Tate Modern in 2001-2 seemed disappointingly over-determined. Encountering a false storey between ground floor and first floor viewing gallery, and two lifts yo-yoing ceaselessly between the ceiling of the huge hall and the twilit world beneath the false floor, the first thing that springs to mind is that Spike Jonze got there first. His 1999 film Being John Malkovich features a lilliputian world on the seven-and-a-halfth storey of an office building, accessible only by jamming the lift between seventh and eighth floors. This reference can only be reiterated by the sculpted figures inhabiting this liminal realm, who can be glimpsed from below around the edges of the nine light-wells that cut through the storey. Grey bureaucrats, busying themselves with undefined jobs in featureless offices immediately invoke a world of Kafka-esque drudgery. The piece is a literal manifestation of the existential gloom of middle management - a familiar trope, leavened only by the curious indeterminacy of some of the figures' poses, and their inquisitive demeanour regarding the audience.
Fortunately, this latter aspect provided me with a way out of the double bind of over-determination. Meeting the gaze of some of these figures, dead though it may be, one also feels oneself to be on display - their inquisitiveness is, after all, merely my own reflected back at me. Following this existential ping-pong, I lowered my gaze, and found myself deeply struck by the behaviour of my fellow spectators. They appeared to be engaged in a bizarrely choreographed piece of sub-Bauschian Dance Theatre. Each 'spectator' traced a complex trajectory through the space, and a collective performance was generated. Broad arcs counter-pointed by minute foxtrots, the slow picking forward of newcomers finding the light, rendered slower by the determined walk of those who had seen enough. These erratic, compelling inter-relations stood in direct contrast to the mundane world above our heads.

As a regular theatre-goer, it tickled me to see an art-work choreograph a performance in this way: as a director, it itched me, for this was a feeling familiar from the rehearsal room: and as an academic, it was downright agitating, because I couldn't work out precisely why it was happening. What does it mean to say that a work choreographs its spectators? It is easier to consider first what it does not.

First, it does not mean it is simply 'theatrical'. This is a term frequently applied to Muñoz's work, and although he himself acknowledged the influence of the mechanics of theatre - for example the prompter's box - he also cautioned against a simplistic application of the discourse, stating: "I think we use the word 'theatrical' to describe something that doesn't necessarily deal with theatre itself…Maybe we should be using the word 'effect' instead of 'theatricality'"(in Schimmel, 2001: 146 and 150.) In other words, just because the work engages the spectator in the dialectics of seeing, which also happens in the theatre, it cannot be assumed that other features of the theatrical event are also entailed. People can be reflexive, be staged by lighting, even mimic the gestures of the sculptures without critics needing to invoke the figure of the theatre in explanation. The work draws neither hyperbole nor fakery out of its spectators, nor does it induce in them any presentational or representational skills they did not already possess.

Why, then, do I persist in my conviction that the most important aspect of Double Bind is the performance it generates? Because of the dynamic between the work and its spectators, and because maybe by stripping away the other 'theatrical' elements, something distinct is revealed about the performance event. On the street, we all locate ourselves in relation to each other, and to constantly changing stimuli such as consumer goods in shop windows. Since Double Bind necessitates that one look up, it constitutes an external stimulus in relation to which all spectators locate themselves. They remain peripherally aware of each other, but this awareness is mediated by an external determining factor. This is precisely how performers relate to each other in Western theatre. Traditionally, one of the aims of this principle has been to render itself invisible, to make it look as if everybody is not really reciting written words, or moving in ways pre-ordained by directors, but rather that everything is happening spontaneously, just as it might on the street. This apparent spontaneity is called 'presence'. Conventional theatrical performance erases the mechanics of its appearance in inverse proportion to the degree of presence it seeks to achieve. To achieve full presence would entail the absolute erasure of the past which authorizes it, and which might be termed 'inscription'. *
* The terms ‘authorize’ and ‘inscription’ refer to Jacques Derrida’s well-known deconstruction of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ in his writings on Antonin Artaud and others (see ‘The Theatre of cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ in Writing and Difference Trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)). In the late eighties and nineties, much theatre scholarship emerged that articulated the deconstruction of theatrical presence. Most significant were those commentaries that engaged with the deconstructive theatrical practices of the New York based Wooster Group. See, for example: P. Auslander, Presence and Resistance (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992) and From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1997), E. Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press 1996), M. Vanden Heuvel, Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991), D. Savran, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (New York: TCG 1988).

The performance generated by Double Bind is therefore extremely interesting because that temporal lapse between the inscription and its embodiment in is collapsed. This is not to say that the result is consistent, let alone of 'professional' quality. But what it does capture is performance in a perpetual state of becoming, like a slow-dripping tap. It is an intriguing Double Bind, in which the both the inscription and its embodiment exceed each other. The sculptures themselves are multiple, diverse and, as inanimate objects, both precede and will outlast the spectator's engagement with them. The spectators are called into a reflexive relationship with themselves, but nonetheless are unable to apprehend the full extent of their collective actions. Moreover, as I discovered from filming, as soon as they became aware of the performance, it stopped. By drawing spectators into a state of presencing, this mutual excess problematises the traditional understanding of presence in the theatre, although not, as Auslander and others have suggested, by writing it off as impossible dream, nor by dismissing it as politically manipulative. Rather, it gestures towards the complex, contradictory, multiple factors that engender this most elusive and yet compelling of theatrical elements.

What does it mean, then, to call an online journal project such as this one Presence? Just as Double Bind effects a temporal collapse in the installation space, so new technologies are beginning to enact similar distortions in the temporal and spatial realms, and problematise theatre theory accordingly. Drawing on informatics, N. Katherine Hayles has proposed that presence and absence are more productively reconfigured as pattern and randomness: "Pattern tends to overwhelm presence, marking a new kind of immateriality that does not depend on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information" (1993: 81). Yet for all Hayles' precise reasoning, the concept of presence maintains an appeal. Case in point: could we have called this project 'Pattern'? It simply does not resonate, and although one reason may be that the term 'presence' is haunted by a romanticised but out-dated sense of the ineffable, I want to suggest another: that for those engaged or grounded in the live performing arts, the 'only' at the end of Hayles' sentence does not tell the whole story. True, new information - new objects - are appearing in performance spaces and challenging performers and audiences alike to account for them - or be determined by them. But the desire to meet this challenge arises as much from what it does to one's sense of presencing as the new kinds of patterning it suggests. Presence persists: its promise is what draws me repeatedly to the theatre. In this article, I shall range over various aspects of theatrical presentation, and consider how they might be re-addressed in light of new media performance and discourse. 'In light of' is an appropriate term: like the skylights in Double Bind, they constitute the external determining factor that motivates my trajectory. Not always present in themselves, they nonetheless pattern the outcome.

Schimmel, Paul (2001) 'An Interview with Juan Muñoz' in Benezra, Neal, Viso, Olga M., Brenson, Michael, Schimmel, Paul (eds) Juan Muñoz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.145-51.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1993) 'Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers' in October 66, Fall 1993, pp.69-92.

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