Scenography, spectacle and the body of the spectator (original) (raw)

Embodying Spectatorship: From Phenomenology to Sensation

Phenomenology is the study of things as they appear in the world. While this concept seems simple enough, the ways in which phenomenology manifests itself, particularly in the study of gender and cinema, become more complex. Phenomenology is often identified as an alternative to philosophy—but this is confusing, because many of the individuals associated with the emergence of phenomenology were themselves European philosophers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. As is so often the case, this list reads in the masculine: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger are all associated with the emergence of phenomenology as a philosophical field. But perhaps it is not helpful to begin with the philosophical origins of phenomenology, particularly because phenomenology itself is not interested in origins or roots. It is interested in the now: what we see, how we perceive, and how those perceptions shape or become the world that is constitutive both of our environment and us. In this chapter, I am not just seeking to connect feminism with phenomenology, or phenomenology with film, but gender, film and phenomenology. I am also interrogating terms of varying familiarity to film studies—spectatorship, embodiment, and sensation. This is no doubt a difficult task. But it is important to identify those aspects of thinking about film that destabilize film as a detached object of cool observation, an object that can be decoded or ‘read’ as a text. If studies of spectatorship acknowledge that the screen is not the only site where meaning is made for a film, then studies of embodied spectatorship go one step further: they attempt to talk about the ways that film relates to and affects a film viewer’s entire bodily experience: her breathing, her sensation, her memory and her emotion.

Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!

Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself! , 2019

At present, we are witnessing a significant transformation of established forms of spectatorship in theatre, performance art and beyond. In particular , immersive and participatory forms of theatre allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space. Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary immersive performances. Split into three parts, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances, respectively, focuses on various strategies for mobilising the audience, methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre, and thematising new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art. Poignantly capturing experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy. Doris Kolesch is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and a co-director of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded Collab

Towards Embodied Spectatorship

2015

The article discusses the cognitive approach to spectatorship. There are different aspects that interest theatre scholars in the field of spectating research, for example, how audiences perceive the process of acting, how emotions and empathy work, and how spectators create meanings. The main premise for the cognitive approach to spectating is that the engagement of the audience in the performance is foremost corporeal. The article analyses the roots of this standpoint and poses a question concerning the possibility of measuring the impact of theatre. Further, the statement that for spectators the most significant engagement with a performance is emotional is considered. The concept of empathy and kinaesthetic empathy in particular is discussed. The article suggests that the crucial specification for successful audiences’ embodiment is embodied acting and trained body-mind that in fact means coherence within and between the mental and emotional systems. Proposing that most reliable ...

Sight as trauma : the politics of performing and viewing the body on stage

2012

My thesis aims to partake in the controversial and theoretical debates surrounding sight which can be traced as far back as Plato. It seeks to provide an overview of the cultural history of the gaze in order to set up a triangulated and indepth schema or triadic relationship between theatre, text and trauma through the lens of psychoanalytical, phenomenological and socio-theoretical frameworks. More specifically, it attempts to explore the various interactions, along the axis of representation, between theatrical metaphors and those of traumatic vision, as well as traumatic representations on stage of viewing and the multi-layered and sociopolitical implications of various ways of looking (or non-looking), which often trigger traumatic responses. By examining two canonical plays – Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth – as well as the modern performances of artists such as Orlan and Franko B, I hope to show how visual trauma can transcend time and space and how the stage,...

The Pleasure of Objectification: A spectator's guide

Performance Research, 2008

This paper proposes that ‘space’ is bound up in lived experience, in the social activities and interactions between ‘objects’, not as passive receptacle, but as active agent (in terms of function, structure, and intention). An object, therefore, is not only defined by being something that is acted upon or intended towards by a subject, but as a phenomenon that can also be acted upon or intended towards by space itself. Here, then, the link between subject and object is fragmented, or at least brought into question. This paper explores how in looking at contemporary performance, spectators are always looked back at by performers, such that both groups are acted upon by the tension and space between them, and are thus constituted as objects. This is not just through being acted upon or intended towards by a subject, but also by being acted upon by space itself. The spectators’ positions as objects are moulded and formed not just through subjectivity, but by space (theatrical, aesthetic and architectural). As spectators we see that we are acted upon and we know that as part of this dialogical contract we too are doing the acting. Drawing on de Certeau’s distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’ and between ‘map’ and ‘tour’ (1984: 115-130), this paper argues that the act of spectating is a fundamentally spatial act, and proposes a speculative guide to the pleasures of performative and spectatorial objectification in performance practice. Using the author’s own site-specific performance practice with Pigeon Theatre, this paper argues that space itself might be responsible for the construction of performers’ and spectators’ bodies as objects. From this position it provides a reading of Pigeon Theatre’s The Heist Academy whereby the spectating body is philosophically, pragmatically and artistically spatialised as object. In this way, Pigeon Theatre’s work might be seen to challenge, whilst working within, normative frameworks of seeing.

Audience Immersion and the Experience of Scenography

2015

This study sits at the intersection of two fields of academic enquiry into performance practice: audience reception of scenography and the rise of ‘immersive’ theatre. Using my own scenographic practice as a tool, I illuminate the understanding of audience experience of scenography in environmental performance and question how scenography might act as an agent for audience immersion. I examine the nature of sensory and imaginative engagement in the context of performance installations in black-box studio spaces where audiences are central to the composition. This practice-based study is composed of two parts: the presentation and development of a series of three performance installations (VOID/ROOM, If anyone wonders why rocks breakdown, and it all comes down to this…) and this supporting written thesis. In this thesis I present an original model of audience immersion that elucidates how audiences might become entwined with the scenography of performance. My three-part model of audi...

The Question of the Scene: On the Philosophical Foundations of Theatrical Anthropocentrism

Theatre Research International, 2009

The article consists of two interrelated arguments: First, all theoretical or everyday talk on theatre implies a certain scenic understanding, related to the phenomenon of human action and speech. Second, this understanding has been concealed by an anthropomorphic conception of the human phenomenon, based on the givenness of the human figure. The article tries to deconstruct this figure by analysing classical philosophical texts where the link between the human appearance and the theatrical mode of representation is theoretically established. By questioning this link, new ways to exercise the critique of theatrical anthropocentricism, both in theory and in practice, are established.

Dramatic Space and Performer ’ s Body , a Case Study (2015)

Studia Dramatica UBB, 2015

Mediated images alter the perception of the real, then again, they emphasize themselves in a dynamic manner arising critical attitude, for they compel the spectator to consider all the images entering his/her visual field, and to integrate them into his/her own reference system. As recorded images offer the possibility of simultaneous representation of parts of actors’ bodies, an interaction between virtual images and real / optical images occurs, interaction which, whether demonstrates itself compulsory, acquires a powerful dramatic finality, since the existence of a viable relation between the stage images, either virtual or real, is a sine qua non dramatic condition.