By transforming its participants, performance achieves the reenchantment of the world. The nature of performance as event – articulated and brought forth in the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators, the performative generation of materiality, and the emergence of meaning – enables such transformation. Theatre and performance art since the 1960s have repeatedly demonstrated a peculiar interest in playing with and reflecting on these constitutive conditions of performance and its inter-related processes of transformation. In consequence, we have begun to understand these conditions as inherent to all performance, regardless of its genre or historical placement. The aesthetics of the performative I have developed in this book bases itself on these conditions.
The aesthetics of the performative does not aim to replace but to add to established theories of the aesthetics of work, production, and reception. Whenever artistic processes can be adequately described within the categories of “work,” “production,” and “reception,” the aesthetics of the performative does not seek to be a substitute, but merely offer the possibility to complement the existing categories productively. The aesthetics of the performative primarily addresses artistic processes that have traditionally been beyond the grasp of “work,” “production,” and “reception.” Such processes have consequently, if at all, been dealt with inadequately and been frequently distorted within the frame of the aesthetics of work, production, and reception. It is noteworthy that “non- theatrical” art forms since the early twentieth century and especially since the 1960s have tended to privilege the performance mode. In light of this development in the arts, the formulation of an aesthetic theory of the performative seems imperative not merely for the theatrical context but for all the arts.
As I am grounding the aesthetics of the performative in the concept of performance, its scope expands beyond artistic performance so as to encompass all other types of performance. Since the performative turn of the 1960s and the spread of new media, a range of new performance genres have emerged in such diverse domains of our culture as politics, sports, and spectacle and festival culture. These performances do not claim to be art; yet they are staged and perceived as new possibilities for the theatricalization and aestheticization of our environment; they partake in the reenchantment of the world.1 Since the aesthetics of the
for discussing the constantly shifting relationship between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, art and non-art, and for reiterating the question of the autonomy of art in today’s world.
In the course of our analysis and especially in the preceding chapter on the nature of performance as event, I have left two undeniably fundamental terms for the aesthetics of the performative unexplained: mise en scène and aesthetic experience. Both are closely linked to the processes of reenchanting the world and transforming the performance’s participants. Both were coined in the nineteenth century and have since undergone a series of reimaginations. For very different reasons, they enjoyed but a limited scope until the 1970s. While the concept of the mise en scène was exclusively applied to theatre, the term aesthetic experience abruptly fell out of the theoretical vocabulary with the onset of World War II. In the 1970s, philosophical aesthetics and the newly conceived aesthetics of reception resurrected the idea of aesthetic experience to address the specific relationship between the subject and the work of art. Except for a few isolated attempts in the 1970s, the concept of mise en
scène was only broadened into a more general, aesthetic term in the 1980s. Ever since
then, it has enjoyed undiminished popularity.
It is no coincidence that both terms were rediscovered, redefined, and popularized in the course of the performative turn of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The performative turn contributed to the dissolution of boundaries within the arts and between art and non-art. The new artistic development required an accompanying terminology that would apply to the most diverse art forms and, at the same time, be able to capture the aesthetic within non-artistic phenomena and processes. Both terms, mise en scène2 and aesthetic experience, seem particularly
suited to fulfill this dual purpose. Today, mise en scène does not just refer to the arts but also to non-artistic performances and all spheres that theatricalize and aestheticize daily life. Likewise, aesthetic experience captures experiences responding to a wide range of phenomena from fashion, design, cosmetics, and advertising to sports, urban and landscape design, and nature; they all share an aesthetic function without belonging, strictly speaking, to one of the arts.
Where the concept of the work of art is accompanied by the terms production and reception, the notion of event is complemented by mise en scène and aesthetic experience. Their terminological triad constitutes the conceptual backbone of the aesthetics of the performative. I will therefore elaborate on mise en scène and aesthetic experience before concluding by discussing the scope and merit of this aesthetic theory in its entirety.
Mise en scène
Despite the fact that the term mise en scène was coined only in the nineteenth century, the process it refers to goes back to antiquity, given that all performances contain staging of some kind or another. All performances require preparation and often meticulous and elaborate rehearsals. In Athens, performances of tragedies took place as part of the biggest and most representative festival of the polis, the Great
Dionysia. According to credible sources, preparations lasted several months. Responsibility for each performance usually lay with a single person, who scripted the text and rehearsed the parts with the members of the chorus and the actors (the responsibility for production costs, however, lay with a wealthy Athenian citizen). The rehearsals with the singing and dancing citizens that formed the chorus constituted a particularly time-consuming and laborious task. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who all took up this task of poet/director, invested great care and effort into the staging process. Successful theatre people who repeatedly earned the victory in the tragic agon gained great prestige and extraordinary public esteem throughout the polis. A successful poet/director enjoyed such a high regard with his fellow citizens that he frequently was afforded important political and military offices. Sophocles, who between 468 b.c. (the year of his first participation) and 406 b.c. (the year of his death) had won 20 victories in the tragic
agon, was elected onto the board of the hellenotamiai or treasurers in 443/2 b.c. In 441/439 b.c. he held strategic leadership for the Samian War alongside Pericles – apparently because of the extraordinary impression his Antigone performance had made. In 428 b.c., he again was responsible for military strategy together with Thucydides and finally, in 411 b.c., he was elected probulos or chief advisor. These examples clearly illustrate that the ability to develop successfully staged performances was considered an essential qualification for executing a political or military office.
As a technical expression, the term “Inszenierung” (mise en scène) was introduced to the German language only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. August Lewald elaborates in his essay In die Scene setzen (To Put on Stage, 1837):
In recent times the expression “to stage” [in die Scene setzen] has been introduced at all German theatres; I heard it for the first time in the fall of the year 1818 in Vienna and at that time did not quite know what to think of it. Herr Carl Blum, whom I met on the street, informed me: he would remain in Vienna until he had completed staging [in die Scene gesetzt] his latest ballet, “Aline.” It certainly sounds more elegant than: giving or performing a play, and we evidently appropriated it from the French. The French also say “la mise en scène” – the staging of a play – which has not as yet become customary here.
(Lewald 1991: 306) While preparing the essay for print Lewald added the following footnote: “Of late, the phrase ‘Inscenierung’ has become popular.” He goes on to define the concept: “To stage a play means to illustrate a dramatic text in its entirety in order to complement the poet’s intentions through exterior means and enhance the play’s effect” (1991: 306). The term here applies to literary theatre and was developed within the framework of the two-world theory. Mise en scène went beyond the process of a one-to-one translation of linguistic signs into theatrical signs that eighteenth-century theoreticians had emphasized. Rather, the term foregrounds
that something is given physical appearance onstage that can otherwise only exist in the reader’s imagination.
As indicated by Lewald, the term mise en scène originates in the French.3 References
to it appeared only after 1800 and accumulated after 1835. The term was used to signify “measures taken to transform a play into a state of being represented” (von Wartburg 1964: 294) or in the sense of “to transform [a dramatic text] into a stage performance” (Rey 1994: 1892). The meaning of the verb “mettre en scène,” to stage, changed accordingly. These definitions, too, referred to literary theatre. They proceeded from the assumption that the primary, given essence was the literary play text which was to be transformed into a performance with the help of the mise en
scène. The introduction of the term proves that this process of transformation was no
longer performed as a self-evident and simple task; one became increasingly aware that staging required the development of certain strategies of representation.
The notion of the mise en scène was created at a time when fundamental changes set in at the theatre. It coincided with the rise of the theatre director from an organizer to an artist-creator of the “artwork” of performance. In Germany, Goethe was one of the first to realize this new function of the director during the years of his artistic direction at the Weimar Hoftheater (1791–1817). Goethe introduced reading-rehearsals to acquaint the actors with the entire play and thus with the specific function of their roles; until then, actors generally knew only their own parts. He discussed the backdrops in detail with the painter and carefully matched the colors of the backdrops with those of the costumes. He also devised gaits and postures for the actors and rehearsed declamation, gesture, and movement with them. Finally, he chose the “appropriate” musical accompaniment. These tasks precisely matched the list of directorial tasks given by the 1846 General
Theatre Dictionary (Blum et al.) and by Lewald in his article. However, the Weimar
Hoftheater was the exception rather than the rule. Not until the 1840s did the “arrangement of staff and material for the performance of a dramatic text as a whole” (284) generally bec0me a part of the director’s job, as the dictionary states. The practice of naming the director on the playbill became customary during the same period.
In the 1840s, there was still no consensus as to whether the director’s work of staging plays could be deemed an aesthetic process or was a purely technical task. Both Lewald and the theatre dictionary entry stress that the director’s job required a variety of abilities and knowledge not limited to the different arts – poetry, the art of acting, painting, and music – but included awareness of various historical building styles and costumes “in order to avoid anachronisms” (Lewald 1991: 308). Although Lewald describes the staging of plays as a highly complicated business, he never refers to it as an artistic activity. Franz von Akáts separates “scenic art” into “arrangement and decoration” and “arrangement of the living,” in his study entitled Kunst der Scenik in aesthetischer und oekonomischer Hinsicht (Aesthetic and Economic
Aspects of Scenic Art, 1841). Although he includes the mise en scène in the visual arts
because it intends “the representation of aesthetic ideas through images,” he explicitly negates its status as a “creative art” (IV). Akáts also explains scenic art,
seen as a merely technical occupation, in terms of the two-world theory: the world of aesthetic ideas is opposed to images, which are created by the mise en scène in order to represent and give these ideas appearance. Throughout the nineteenth century, the term mise en scène denoted the appearance of something given which existed “elsewhere,” in the play text or in the realm of aesthetic ideas. However, lacking visualization, that something remained abstract and inaccessible to the senses and was restricted to taking shape in our imagination or thoughts. It was the job and role of the mise en scène to bring the abstract sphere of ideas into appearance. Hence, the mise en scène referred to strategies of representation.
At the turn of the last century, the staging of plays became elevated to an artistic activity as the literary text of the play ceased to be the sole basis of performance. The historical avant-garde declared theatre a self-sufficient art form independent of literature. In his study On the Art of the Theatre, Edward Gordon Craig noted that
… the Art of the Theatre is neither acting nor the play, it is not scene nor dance, but it consists of all the elements of which these things are composed: action, which is the very spirit of acting; words, which are the body of the play; line and colour, which are the very heart of the scene; rhythm, which is the very essence of dance.
(Craig 1911: 138) In other words, performance was not the product of a literary text but a collage of its smallest constitutive elements – action, words, line, color, and rhythm. The choices are made by the director who, “when he will have mastered the uses of action, words, line, color, and rhythm, then … may become an artist” (1911: 148). The performance thus becomes an “independent artwork” and the theatre an “independent art” (50) as Lothar Schreyer explicated in his study entitled
Das Buehnenkunstwerk (Stage Work, 1916). The job of the director – the staging
– advanced to a creative activity. The scope of the mise en scène now extended beyond “illustrat[ing] a dramatic text in its entirety in order to complement the poet’s intentions … and enhance the play’s effect,” as Lewald had phrased it. Nonetheless, when Craig defined it as rendering “the invisible” (1911: 46) visible it seems that he, too, ultimately took recourse to the two-world theory; the mise en
scène would make something appear which is given “somewhere” else, in the realm
of the invisible.Craig’s further explications, however, raise doubts about such a conclusion:
There is a thing which man has not yet learned to master, a thing which man dreamed not was waiting for him to approach with love; it was invisible and yet ever present with him. Superb in its attraction and swift to retreat, a thing waiting but for the approach of the right men, prepared to soar with them through all the circles beyond the earth – it is Movement.
Hence, the task of the mise en scène lies in making movement appear and seem present. While movement can always be seen as present, it frequently remains “invisible.” Whenever the mise en scène works towards making movement appear, it means that the staging enables movement to become visible as itself. While Lewald, Akáts, and others saw the value of the mise en scène in its ability to illustrate and represent something else, Craig’s conception of the mise en scène stresses the use of all artistic and technical means to make something appear as itself. For Craig, this means that it is perceived in its “[s]uperb … attraction,” magically appealing to the perceiving subject and capable of transforming it. Mise en scène here does not refer to a strategy of representation but to one of creation. The mise en scène brings forth the presence of the perceived object – its ecstasy.
Despite this radically new view of staging as an independent process, a modified version of Lewald’s definition of the mise en scène has persisted until today. In his article for the French Encyclopaedia (Paris, 1936), Jacques Copeau defines directing and staging as “the sum of the artistic and technical processes with whose help the work compiled by an author as written text is transferred from its mental and hidden state of existence into the real and present state of theatre” (1991: 341). He considers the text a pre-existent, “mental” entity to be transformed into sensual presence through the process of the mise en scène.
Reinforcing the validity of the two-world theory, Wolfgang Iser also uses this definition when expanding the term mise en scène from an aesthetic to an anthropological term. He builds on Plessner’s theory that stresses the fundamental distance of human beings to themselves: “what is staged is the appearance of something that cannot become present” (Iser 1993: 297). Staging must therefore
… be preceded by something to which it has to give appearance. This something can never be completely covered by the staging, because otherwise staging would become its own enactment. In other words, every staging lives on what it is not. For everything that materializes in it stands in the service of something absent, which, although given presence through something else that is present, cannot be present itself.
(Iser 1993: 301) As we have seen in Chapter 4, staging since the late 1960s and 1970s largely disassociates itself from the two-world theory. As with Craig, staging becomes a strategy of creation. Artistic and technical means have the task to enhance the actor’s presence and the ecstasy of things; they direct the spectators’ attention to their phenomenal beings, and they render this phenomenal being conspicuous. Thus, the body of the actor and the objects appear and show themselves to the spectators in their own ephemeral presence. When people and things appear as what they are the world becomes enchanted. At its core, enchantment comprises self-referentiality. It is the liberation from all endeavors to understand and the revelation of the “intrinsic meaning” of man and things.
The process of staging is a trial by which to find the best way for generating materiality; decisions are made and frequently changed after performances. Staging is a planned process that employs various strategies from chance operations to self- organized rehearsal techniques in order to probe which elements are to be brought forth performatively. Staging decides what will appear or disappear at what place and time during the performance. The staging process circumscribes a strategy of creation, which performatively engenders presence in a certain temporal sequence and spatial constellation.
This process is most accurately captured by Martin Seel’s recent definition of the term mise en scène. He defines it as “the staging of presence. It is the conspicuous creation and emphasis of the presence of something which occurs here and now, and which, because it is the present, utterly eludes the complete grasp” (2001: 53). Staging gives appearance to the present. Yet, Seel points out a significant distinction between artistic and non-artistic mises en scène. His definition of artistic