Un-desiring the Real (original) (raw)
Abstract
Why do we desire the real? Even highly stylised pieces of performance, such as the ‘bad acting’ of Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players, are seemingly valued because of their relation to a higher reality (for example, one critic suggests Maxwell’s actors reveal our ‘core’ being). We also see this distinction in Tim Etchells’ argument that performance should create not ‘an audience to a spectacle’, but ‘witnesses to an event’. The appeal of this interpretation seems to be that it gives the theatrical experience an ethical value, a value that it can only have if we are authentically invested in the event. But, as Rancière has argued, such an interpretation requires that the theatre-event must suppress or transcend its own nature, and in particular that the spectator must first confess and then absolve his or her passivity. Can we articulate a value for the theatre-event – particularly for those events that present damaged, tenderised, or suffering bodies – which is not derived from such a model of guilt and redemption? Drawing on Rancière and Sontag, I will suggest that one argument for the value of these theatrical representations could be based precisely on their ability to destabilise the distinction between reality and representation, between the artificial and the authentic.
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