On stage, in the wings, in the audience and outside: these are the spaces ethnologists and anthropologists traverse in the practice of fieldwork and writing—metaphorically, as participant-observers within a given community, or literally, if they study theatre forms.

Immersion in another community or society (with the consequent blurring of exoticism), purposeful distancing in time and space (rivalling with empathy generated by field presence), systematic investigation of selected themes, and constant striving to have theory inform data and perceptions of the objects of study—all these aspects of the anthropological method can be applied, in a given society, just as effectively to theatre as to those institutions (matrimonial, political, economic or religious, among others) usually studied by ethnologists. A circumscribed object, but one with complex implications for individuals and groups, theatre is a sophisticated, often useful means of access to understanding society, or at least a key to reading the combinatory diversity of a community's functioning, its history, its material production and technology, its cognitive orientations. Building on the necessary contextual analyses revealing the social, political and economic underpinnings of theatre forms, developing the concept of an expressive or aesthetic system in which theatre is but one element interacting with other artistic productions or practices within a given society, and testing the concept through intercultural comparison, the horizons for theatre anthropology are broad enough.

Attempting a more modest beginning, this special issue seeks to portray a special moment, a meeting between anthropology and theatre in a fertile, though underdeveloped field of study, with contributions from both anthropologists and theatre scholars.

The articles in this issue are concerned with the analysis and theory of theatre performance. Little more than a generation ago, theatrical performance scholarship was an oxymoron and theatre history was concerned only with the description and chronology of performance rather than its theory or analysis. Theories of performance by directors and other artists occupied a nebulous territory between the aesthetics of genre and the anecdotal. Meanwhile books on theatre craft existed alongside theatre histories and anthologies of ‘drama’, with each treated as if it were an independent realm. Anthologies introduced plays as literary texts to be interpreted and contextualized, and the printed play alone was recognized as a legitimate object of inquiry. Performance was too ephemeral to be a proper artefact, much less a proper text. Yet for traditional literary scholars, even the printed play was not a truly primary text; instead, the source of the play was always located elsewhere, in a more authoritative and more academically institutionalized discourse. The play was only an example or concretization of another discourse: biographical, philosophical, theological, psychological, or historical. To be sure, performance descriptions were sometimes given in anthologies, and in the case of canonized writers like Shakespeare or Ibsen, even performance histories could be found. But performance analysis and theory only appeared if the playwright had also published it, as did Strindberg or Brecht, or if a recognized movement had claimed the playwright as one of its own, as with naturalism, expressionism or Theatre of the Absurd.

This situation was understandable considering that theatre studies had once been housed within departments of literature.

Hélène Bouvier (HB): How did you first become interested in theatre?

James L. Peacock (JLP): Most interesting to me, though perhaps less interesting to anyone else, is the question, ‘Why should I, the son of an engineer (one feature shared with Victor Turner whose mother, however, was an actress), study theatre?’ I had no background in it, and I had hardly even seen a play before I went to Java. I think I know a source. It is during World War II, my father is preparing to invade Normandy, while my mother, my sister and I have moved in with her widowed mother in rural Alabama. My mother's sister, a concert pianist, and her sister's son had also moved in because the sister's husband, also a pianist, was also overseas. This boy and my sister play act. I don't. I make things. Every morning I put on my shorts (nothing else, no shoes, no shirt) at the crack of dawn and go outside to play in the yard, especially the ‘sand pile’ where I construct forts and tunnels. (The one dream I remember is of finding a soldier I lost in the sand: my absent father, perhaps?) While my cousin and sister play, sometimes I watch. We grow up. He goes to New York and becomes an actor and musician. I become an anthropologist.

I have never acted in a play (except a pornographic skit in my college fraternity, in which I was a great success among the ‘brothers'), but I have always stared at people (today, women, but when I was growing up, men), and I would draw them, not while looking at them but later, alone—as teenager cartoon fantasies, like the Phantom or Superman, except more human.

In 1780 James Lewis published the first of two magnificent folios, entitled Original Designs in Architecture. The title page explains that it consists of ‘Plans, Elevations, and Sections, for Villas, Mansions, Town-Houses, &c. and a New Design for a Theatre. With Descriptions, and Explanations of the Plates, and an Introduction’. Plates XIX-XXII are for ‘a New Theatre, designed for the Opera’. In fact, the designs are for a new opera house intended to occupy the site on which John Vanbrugh's Queen's/King's Theatre in the Haymarket had stood since 1705. The building would consume all the existing site and much of the surrounding property. Lewis explains the origins of his plans: ‘Our Theatres being upon a very small scale, compared with those of other principal cities in Europe, about two years ago [that is, in 1778] a report prevailed that a New Theatre was intended to be built by subscription, which might serve as well for all Dramatick Performances, as Concerts, Assemblies, Masquerades, &c. And the proprietors of the Opera House intending to purchase several adjoining houses and ground, to render the theatre eligible for the various purposes mentioned, suggested the idea of making a design adapted to the situation of the present Opera House, with the principal front towards Pall Mall’ (p. 12). This grand edifice would be like no other theatre in London.

Les articles dans ce numéro sont consacrés à l'analyse et la théorie de la représentation théâtrale. Jusqu'à ces dernières années la notion d'études théâtrales était un oxymore et, dans le meilleur des cas, l'histoire du théâtre se contentait de décrire et d'établir la chronologie des représentations. La théorie de la mise en scène occupait une place incertaine entre le discours esthétique et l'anecdote. Les études sur l'art du théâtre côtoyaient livres d'histoire et anthologies de théâtre sur les rayons des bibliothèques, sans qu'il y ait dialogue entre eux. Les anthologies présentaient les pièces de théâtre comme des textes littéraires à interpréter et à replacer dans leur contexte historico-littéraire; et seule l'œuvre imprimée était considérée digne d'étude. On considérait que la représentation théâtrale était trop éphémère pour constituer une véritable œuvre d'art, encore moins un texte authentique. Même la pièce imprimée ne constituait pas le véritable texte primaire, le discours académique en situant toujours la source ailleurs. Une pièce n'était en définitive qu'une illustration ou une concrétisation d'un autre discours: biographique, philosophique, théologique, psychologique ou historique. Il y avait bien des descriptions de représentations dans certaines anthologies et, pour des auteurs canonisés tels Shakespeare ou Ibsen, il existait même une histoire des représentations les plus importantes. Mais, en général, il n'y avait théorie ou analyse de la représentation que si l'auteur en avait publié une, tels Strindberg ou Brecht, ou si le dramaturge faisait partie d'un mouvement esthétique tel que le naturalisme, l'expressionisme, le Théâtre de l'Absurde, etc…

Cet état de fait s'explique aisément puisque les Etudes Universitaires Théâtrales furent longtemps rattachées aux départements de littérature.

C'est toujours cela que j'ai voulu donner sur scene: faire voir la force violente des idees, comment elles ploient et tourmentent les corps.

Antoine Vitez

Two years ago, a philosophy professor friend remarked that he would never forget Jules and Jim and the sense of walking with Jeanne Moreau through the beautiful French countryside in spring with its colours in full bloom. When reminded that the film was shot in black and white, he replied that it must have impressed him so much that his imagination had added colour to it. To remember a walk through the landscape of another country and time, to insert one's own colours into a scene: does this occur in theatre as in film? And if the landscape can be transformed, what becomes of Jeanne Moreau? More specifically, what happens when such a star is imported onto the stage as a legend of woman incarnate? What happens semiotically when the ‘incarnate’ legendary woman confronts the material presence of the actress? These questions had already begun to emerge a year earlier, when I saw Moreau in person at Avignon, first on a performance on the open-air stage of the Com d'honneui in the fourteenth-century Palais des Papes, and then at a public discussion just outside the palace wall.

In Antoine Vitez's 1989 production of La Célestine, Jeanne Moreau played the mercurial, irascible procuress Célestine, the first picara, a larger-than-life character popular in Spain for four centuries. The play was written in 1499 by Fernando de Rojas, who coined the term tragicomedy to describe it.

George Bernard Shaw reviewed three of Augustin Daly's Shakespeare productions in the course of his stint as theatre critic of The Saturday Review, and wrote briefly on another when he was the music critic of The World. At the beginning of the last of these notices, describing As You Like It in 1897 and Ada Rehan's performance in it, Shaw wrote: ‘I never see Miss Ada Rehan act without burning to present Mr Augustin Daly with a delightful villa in Saint Helena.’ Listing some of the production's errors produced a more sombre threat:

To think that Mr Daly will die in his bed, whilst innocent presidents of republics, who never harmed an immortal bard, are falling on all sides under the knives of well-intentioned reformers whose only crime is that they assassinate the wrong people! And yet let me be magnanimous. I confess I would not like to see Mr Daly assassinated. Saint Helena would satisfy me. (ShSh, 44) Readers of Shaw's reviews, especially those who encounter them only through Edwin Wilson's selection in Shaw on Shakespeare, will only know Augustin Daly's productions as seen by Shaw. But these critiques were part of a campaign on behalf of Shaw's aims for the theatre, and, specifically, a ‘wooing’ of Ada Rehan for the Shavian drama.

In 1973, the poet and essayist Goenawan Mohamad wrote a lengthy and incisive defence of contemporary Indonesian theatre (that is to say, modern, Indonesian language plays of roughly the mid-60s onwards) against the complaints of its critics.1 The lack of dramatic and psychological development noted in many plays, the sketchy scripts, bizarre dramatic happenings, showy settings and inappropriate mixture of comic and serious elements—all of these purported ‘faults’, in Goenawan's view, were associated with the great strength of contemporary Indonesian theatre, its concern with the process of performance, and with intimate communication with its audiences. Previous playwrights had written worthy, wordy ‘schoolroom’ dramas, and members of a small European-educated élite performed them, for an amorphous, universal ‘general public’. Their view that the current minority position of modern theatre would strengthen as Indonesian society became better educated, at the same time revealed a sense of distance between plays and their public. But for the new breed of playwrights, people like Rendra, Arifin Noer and Putu Wijaya, who directed and performed in their own plays and were fully involved in the totality of production,2 there was no such gap. Spectacle and humour, colloquial, everyday language, and the improvisatory possibilities of sketchy scripts, served to entertain, engage and involve audiences drawn from a particular sector of society. Theatre audiences were identified by Goenawan as overwhelmingly young, educated but not used to reading. They had been brought up in a ‘post-literate’ culture of radio, television and film, influenced in some ways, certainly in its group-oriented entertainment habits, by the ‘pre-literate’ aural-oral regional cultures of their parents.

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production of Etta Jenks at the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators.

My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1

James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2 In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses to Etta Jenks in my analysis of their reception.

The analysis of theatrical performance has always provided a problem of particular difficulty to semiotic theory, for a variety of reasons—the ephemerality of the event, the complexity of the interrelationships of so many communicative channels, the almost infinite variety of physical realizations that may be generated from a single written script, the phenomenological concerns generated by the physical presence of the event, and the effects upon interpretation of changing historical and social reception strategies. Historical placement is of course a concern involved in analysing the interpretive process of any work of art, but it is particularly obvious and important in theatre, where an institutional collective process at a particular historical moment is always involved both in the specific realization and in the specific reception of the work.

Certain aspects of this complex problem have received useful attention, others have been very little considered. The Prague circle provided some useful distinctions in dealing with, for example, the various operations of the actor in the semiotic process.

More recently, theorists with a phenomeno-logical orientation or with an interest in reception aesthetics have further enriched our understanding of what is involved in the theatre event. Clearly much remains to be explored. One area is the effect on theatrical reception of the re-use of the same performance elements or combinations of elements in physical realizations of what might be quite different written scripts.

The most obvious example of this is the individual actor, who in the course of a career will be seen by the public in many different roles.

Performance is ideology! This is particularly true of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, one of his two comedies concerning the behaviour of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony—the other being The Comedy of Errors. Here he makes use of what may well be the longest-running English female stock character, the recalcitrant wife, who goes back to Mrs Noah, the disobedient woman of the mediaeval religious cycle plays. But at the same time he adapts the technique of classical farce to observation of human behaviour, by taking an impossible premise (that a wife can be tamed) and extending it logically to the utmost limits of absurdity. He also combines the Mrs Noah figure with the Judy puppet and the clever woman of the Interludes who outwits her husband, but with one distinctive omission: the physical violence commonly assumed essential to shrew-taming. I believe that here Shakespeare has forged a new dramatic mode by humanizing the intellectuality of rhetorically based classical farce and psychologizing the knockabout physicality of its Plautine offshoot.

The starting point for this brief study (which is a summary of several others) is simple: it is not so much in the location of the theatrical site as in the whole of the constructed spaces in which it is situated, that we glean what few insights there are into the evolution of theatrical space.

In Greece, in Rome, then in the Western world of the late Middle Ages, the primary dramatic site has always been an urban one, so that we could assert, paradoxically, that the question of the origins of the theatrical space is less a matter for theatre studies than an aspect of town planning!

Thus if we are to analyse the theatre we must analyse the town. In any case, the two poles between which the destiny of dramatized spaces is played out can be seen in the morphological unit which dominates the history both of the forms of the urban environment and the individual habitat and of the evolution of the theatrical space itself. In effect there exists an original space, a sort of matrix at the heart of the lived space of the urban/residential area, within which human enterprise includes, from the outset, activity which is generally dramatic: the hall-courtyaid-square,1 a complex of spaces which are identical in morphological, functional and symbolic terms and which is differentiated only by the built environment within which it is inscribed, provides a framework within which are carried out all the collective activities connected with the habitat and the urban area.

Representation carries a promise of a performative act. As Mark Taylor observes, in contrast to the so-called constative utterances which describe facts, a promise realizes ‘a state of affairs that did not exist prior to the language event’ or, as is the case here, prior to the events unfolding in a theatrical or any other space. Such an act signifies that the ‘I’ or ‘we’ making a promise understands or knows the problem or the text, plays the part of the agent authorized by a convention or its systems to execute a promise, and the act requires that representation assumes the function of reality maker that produces the real by simulating verisimilitude. For this process to be complete, the mode of operation needs to be clearly delineated by cultural or social practices and institutional structures that safeguard the promise, its execution, and its use.

Even though the general tenets are still dominant in everyday practice, the concept of representation has been championed and problematized ever since the fragmentation and the split within the subject became evident in the twentieth century. The ‘I’ and ‘we’ ceased to be valued as universally defined nouns. As a corollary, the promise of representation was no longer able to express the subject's desire to impose linear transfer and ideological order upon both human beings and the objects of their creation (theatre and drama). Once the subject was undone, the order of representation disseminated into pieces scattered throughout space. It became dispersed in contradictory meanings, which now could be assigned to objects that had been kept outside of its boundaries.

In sharp contrast to the Americans' involvement in Vietnam, which has been endlessly dramatized in different forms, the realities of the Algerian war, which lasted from 1954 until 1962 and cost 100,000 dead or wounded, have been dealt with by very few French playwrights or film-makers. In fact Genet is the only one to have written a substantial work based on this subject matter while the war was taking place. The one other dramatist with whom he can be compared in this respect is the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, whose trilogy Le Cercle des représailles offers some intriguing similarities with Genet's three great plays written during the course of the war: Le Balcon, Les Nègres and Les Paravents.

Künstler ist nur einer, der aus einer Lösung ein Rätsel machen kann. (Karl Kraus)

Only that person is an artist who can turn a solution into a riddle. (Karl Kraus)

The aphorism by Karl Kraus captures the intuition that an artwork is an intentional structure, that it represents the response to a question or the solution to a problem, if only a problem of self-expression. Even when, for example, a theatrical performance is riddled with accidental omissions of text and other mishaps, we find ourselves watching and appreciating it as if everything in it was meant to be as we see it. It has therefore been said that in the presence of art we ‘suspend disbelief’, we suspend the sceptical suspicion according to which the arrangement of internal relations within the artwork might be less than perfectly meaningful: in the presence of art we begin as absolute believers in the integrity of the artwork.

But there is another dimension to Kraus's remark: what appears to be the solution to a problem or a coherent response to some situation becomes a riddle of its own. The apparent integrity of the work may result from interpretation rather than through the deliberate intentionality of the artwork itself. Moreover, it is the exception for a work of art to be reducible to providing a solution to a particular problem. Indeed, we would tend to deny that artworks are governed by instrumental reason. This is true even in the case of theatrical performances: a performance is bound to provide more than a solution to the problem of how to stage a particular play; it cannot be regarded merely as an instrumental means of conveying a drama.

20 October 1986: the Rukun Kemala troupe is hired to perform at a wedding in Kalianget Barat, its home village from 8.30 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. In a courtyard between two houses, the stage is erected on poles, with a floor of woven bamboo panelling; one whole side will collapse in the middle of the night under the strain of the actors' entrances and exits, without so much as the performance being interrupted. The gamelan orchestra begins to play at 8.30 p.m. exactly, as contracted. Fifty minutes later, slides are projected onto the lowered stage curtain depicting names of the head and leading members of the troupe together with words of welcome to the audience. At 9.30 p.m. the curtain is raised for the first time to reveal a ten-minute dance number: four female dancers appear before the monumental split gates of a Hindu kingdom bathed in red light and strobe effects with Catherine wheels whirling. Next, photos of clowns are projected while the public is harangued to take an active participation in the forthcoming elections, family planning and family education organizations. The curtain rises again to reveal a painted backdrop depicting a street scene in an imaginary modern town, to accompany the clown programme which lasts forty minutes. A final set of slides, ten minutes long, this time shows the actors dressed in the costumes of the characters they are about to portray, with a brief introduction to the story by the scriptwriter. At 10.30 p.m. the curtain opens on the first scene of the play which will last four hours without an interval: ‘Black Mask, in the Story of Yuliati Awaiting Happiness’ (Topeng Hitam dalam kisah Yuliati menanti bahagia).

In the spring of 1992 the Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC) in Durban, South Africa, invited me to develop a performance based on Zulu traditions with their recently formed Kwasa Group and their long established Loft Theatre. ‘Kwasa’, Zulu for ‘it dawns’, was NAPAC's attempts to address the changing needs of South Africa. Two weeks after white South Africa voted in favour of a nationwide referendum to allow non-whites the ability to vote I began rehearsals for Emandulo.’

Performance analysis and performance theory have to deal in one way or another with the relationships between the written dramatic text and the stage performance of that text. The point of departure for most discussions of this issue is that the drama text through its staging is ‘translated’ or ‘transformed’ into a performance text but since the ontological status of the written and performed texts are fundamentally different it is virtually impossible to set up a clearly delineated hermeneutic procedure through which the new, ‘translated’ work of art, the performance text, can be analysed on the basis of the dramatic source text alone. It is quite evident, moreover, that the staging of a certain text is both a completely independent work of art, presented by live actors for an audience in the total context created especially for that performance and an ‘interpretation’ of another independent work of art, the dramatic text. The performance itself thus creates a special form of intertextuality where the words assigned to the characters on the printed page of the written text are spoken by the actors on the stage. The behaviour of a certain character on the stage is a specific realization of a potential range of meanings which that character contains in the source-text on the printed page.

Since the two texts are so fundamentally different any attempt to judge the adequacy of the ‘new’ work of art, the performance text, mainly in relation to the dramatic text is doomed to run into insurmountable hermeneutic difficulties.