paul rae : presencing

Part 2: Space



This is a postcard image of the Poliziano Theatre of Montepulciano, a small Tuscan hill town in Italy. Nothing of singular historical, aesthetic or personal significance led me to buy the postcard, yet I did so, and kept it. Dating from 1795, the Poliziano was constructed some decades after the heyday of Italian Neoclassicism, and renovated in 1881. Today, it hosts plays in the Winter, and, in July, a festival of contemporary music. Back in London, at the National Theatre, I noticed a similarity with postcards of the Lyttleton: the stage is not visible, because that is the place from which the photograph is taken. On the back of the card, the theatre is named. In the case of the Poliziano, this is rather insistently asserted in Italian, French and both English and American English. The part stands in for the whole, and a question arises: what does it mean to show a picture of an auditorium and call it a theatre?

A photographer is employed to photograph a theatre. She strides onto the stage and turns her back to it. Click! Why? First, where is the interest in a bare stage? If Peter Brook 'can take any empty space and call it a bare stage'(1968: 11), then why would a tourist want a picture of this particular bare stage? Though the stage of the Poliziano, as in any theatre, has its own properties, these are of more concern to the actor who must get from one place to another within the course, say, of two lines of dialogue, than it is to the prospective postcard-purchaser. True, an actor on that stage would give the picture a quite literal measure of interest - but it would also detract from the theatre building itself. This being the aim, it is the auditorium that stands out, as the ornate chandelier and electric candelabra illuminate. Not for theatres of the eighteenth century the subdued and recessive house-lights of more modern spaces, whose unobtrusive aim is to smooth the passage of the audience from the disinterested glare of street-lamps to the finely sculpted stage-world about to take shape before them. The auditorium of the Poliziano was lit to be seen, and to allow the seers, in turn, to be seen. And when those lights did eventually dim, all attention would turn to precisely that spot, centre-stage, where the postcard locates its viewer. Perhaps, as a modern audience member or tourist, one has never had the opportunity to stand upon such a stage, and know what it feels like to be the seen rather than the seer, or, more specifically, to know what the seen sees. Looking at this postcard permits a glimpse. More at home amongst the many who look upon the one, the 180 degree inversion carries a particular weight, felt as an imbalance. One is forcefully reminded of the 1:1 ratio between performing and spectating bodies that for centuries has certified the indisputable liveness of the theatrical event.

The viewer is located where the actor might stand and yet, it is to be hoped, the actor never sees what the viewer sees, which is: no audience at all. Brook goes on: "A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged"(11). What the postcard depicts is the stuff of actors' nightmares - the opposite of those where one finds oneself in an unfamiliar role before a packed house. Here, one is faced with an opportunity for theatre entirely unactualized. The auditorium is now the empty space. A cruel dichotomy, but one undone for me by an ambiguous feature in the image, which prevents those ochre seats becoming merely bricks in a literal fourth wall: the front three rows of seats are hidden from the chandelier's light. Lurking in roughly the same degree of dimness into which they would be plunged with the house-lights down, this actor's-eye shadow-zone pre-figures a performance. On an invisible stage, facing an empty auditorium, it is a spectral reminder of the potential energy in that 'theatre unactualized': of performances yet to come, and performances that have already been. It is what renders this postcard more than an image of the Poliziano Theatre, but a specific manifestation of theatre in general. This is a paradox, but a productive one. It is what inhabits every theatre practitioner in the making of a work, and every audience member in their anticipation of it. It means there never is an 'empty space'.

Think about what happens when a company moves from rehearsal room to theatre. The rehearsal room, though the playing space of the stage may be matched exactly, is defined by the absence of an auditorium. Actors locate themselves proprioceptively in relation to the walls of that room, but that location is always doubled with another, looser sense of 'the theatre': auditorium, wings, even a vague notion of 'backstage'. Moving into the theatre is primarily a process of perceptual recalibration, which is less to do with marking out the stage itself, than with what that yawning space before them (and that vague sense of 'behind them') does to their voices, their emotional register, and their altered sense of scale and self *.
* Interestingly, Gay McAuley makes the inverse point in her book Space in Performance. There, she observes how the imprint of the rehearsal room is frequently to be discerned in the final production when translated to the stage. See G.McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p.71.
The director prowls the auditorium, watching run-throughs from a range of different places, adding his or her body to the long line of audience members who have sat in this place before, on behalf of those still to come. Technical matters are equally at stake. No-one who has set sound levels can remain ignorant of the extent to which the act of spectating is also one of absorption. The ability to pre-empt audience density is an art in itself. All these activities (however accelerated by touring companies, for example) constitute the process of drawing the specific out of the 'in general'. Yet the latter never entirely fades away, neither for performers nor audience members *.
* Expanded studies on variations of this theme can be found in Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), and Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

What does the advent of telematic performance do to this pragmatic, working sense of the theatre-in-general? That Australia's foremost performance group interfacing with new technologies is called Company in Space begs the question: in where? 'Everywhere and Nowhere', Alice Rayner would answer. In a perceptive article on theatre in cyberspace, she argues that using theatrical terminology to describe the operations of telematics and telepresence severely limits what can be discerned of them. This is because the processes of encoding and encryption that define the digital transmission of information elude the spatially construed metaphoric and metonymic figures of speech in which an understanding of the theatre and presence is embedded: "There is no hypothetical space in cyberspace. The 'as if' that creates such space is flattened by the fiat of digital systems. That is, the digital act must always be done; it cannot be held in suspense because it exists only when it is done" (1999: 289). As a result, argues Rayner, we must strive to grasp in other terms the nonspatial, nontemporal 'immaterial reality' that attends telepresence, and this is the focus of her article. A second challenge also presents itself: how do these insights reflect back on an understanding of space in the theatre? For, just as Rayner asserts that "…'theatre' carries the very sense of space that telepresence seeks to overcome"(289), so it is not hard to envisage a situation in the near future where the 'overcomings' of telepresence will be so prevalent as to call 'theatre' into question. How might a response be formulated? Rayner hints at an approach in a postscript to her article, where she notes that it is inconceivable that the immaterial real can be comprehended without recourse to the temporal and spatial. By consequence, she writes: "…there is a way of knowing that is other than spatial and temporal and that, like the ontological base of performance, has been there all along"(301).

I want to suggest that one feature of the immaterial real that has been operant in the theatre 'all along' is this notion of what I have called the theatre-in-general. Re-enter Brook:

Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse, laughter, darkness, these are all confusedly superimposed in a messy image covered by one all-purpose word. We talk of the cinema killing the theatre, and in that phrase we refer to the theatre as it was when the cinema was born, a theatre of box office, foyer, tip-up seats, footlights, scene changes, intervals, music, as though the theatre was by very definition these and little more(11).

In so far as the Poliziano is a specific manifestation of the broad projection that I have called the theatre-in-general, well, yes it is 'by definition' those familiar features and little more, however well-acquainted one may be with examples of Brook's Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate theatres. This is because the theatre-in-general is virtual. A vitally informing, though radically varying feature in the promise of all performance, this virtual theatre is nonetheless impossible to represent. For although it relates to a spatial sense, it is not itself determined spatially. Think of it as an empty theatre, any empty theatre (for me, it is the Poliziano) *.

* A dizzying display of the possibilities (including the Poliziano) can be seen at Andreas Praefcke's wonderful online collection of theatre postcards.

You almost had it, but you lost it. Why? Because you were the photographer, looking at it from the stage, perhaps, or from a lighting bar, from seat K19, or from 'the gods'. But your image was not godlike, because it always has to be seen from somewhere, and as soon as it is, it is not virtual any more. The virtual theatre is manifested by a presence of, not a presence in. Maybe this is what the advent of telepresencing in our lives will do to 'theatre': sharpen a sense of the virtual that was there all along: bring those unrepresentable features of the space to bear on the experience of theatre-going in new, productive, exhilarating ways. Question is, will it ever be realised? Think of a theatre. Click!

Brook, Peter (1990(1968)) The Empty Space. London: Penguin Books.

Rayner, Alice (1999) 'Everywhere and Nowhere: Theatre in Cyberspace', in Kobialka, Michael (ed) (1999) Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice and Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.278-302.

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