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Theorizing about Performance: Why Now?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Natalie Crohn Schmitt
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Abstract

This article continues NTQ's recent exploration of the interaction between the study of theatrical performance and other disciplines – in this case, relating in particular to ‘Quantum Physics and the Language of Theatre’, published in NTQ 18 (1989). Schmitt argues that there is a correspondence between the contemporary interest in performance theory and the view of nature provided by modern physics. The analysis of nature in terms of events rather than objects, the perception of reality as a network of non-teleological, non-hierarchical relations, the interest in the interplay between nature and our perception of it: all correlate, she suggests, with an interest in theory of performance. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theater at the University of lllinois at Chicago. She published ‘Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious’ in NTQ 8 (1986), and has also published in Theatre Notebook, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, Comparative Drama, Theatre Survey, and elsewhere. Her full-length study. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature has just appeared, from Northwestern University Press.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 23 , August 1990 , pp. 231 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes and References

1. Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Graff, Gerald, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).Google Scholar

2. See, of course, Frank's, Joseph groundbreaking ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, The Sewanee Review, LIII (Spring, Summer, and Autumn 1945).Google Scholar

3. John Cage, Silence, p. 118.

4. Pechter, Edward, ‘The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama’, PMLA, CII, 3 (05 1987), p. 292–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. The present literary interest in metaphors and puns is comparable.

6. Because the idea of continuous motion in linear time, the single chain of which consists of causally linked events, is replaced by the concept of the field, developmental theories of theatre history – histories in which one period of theatre logically leads to another – lose their force. As they do, we might well shift our focus to questions of function, showing what kinds of theatre were important at the time for people who saw performances and participated in them. A history of American theatre in terms of function might, for instance, include more than a passing reference to ethnic theatres and home-town talent shows, kinds of theatre many people knew well and participated in but which rarely led to other kinds of theatre. It would not be a history of influential dramatic literature and stage décor, but a social history of theatre. The concept of the field causes us radically to re-examine longstanding assumptions about what constitutes theatre history. Cf. Seller, Maxine Schwartz, Ethnic Theatre in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Eckey, Lorelei F., Schoyer, Maxine Allen, and Schoyer, William T., 1001 Broadways: Hometown Talent on Stage (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

7. Heisenberg, W., The Physicist's Conception of Nature (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 17.Google Scholar

8. Cage, John, Silence (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967), p. 173.Google Scholar

9. ‘Serious’ art may well be ‘hard to remember, because it is (was) that which we-are-not-yet, and so that-which-we-are finds it hard to remember because that-which-we-are resists. … For me, the prime reason for the work of art is to further understanding … of a very certain kind’. Foreman, Richard, Plays and Manifestos (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 186–7.Google Scholar