STP 30 (1) pp.

101114 Intellect Ltd 2010

Journal of Media Practice Volume 30 Number 1

Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stap.30.1.101/1

Karen Jrs-Munby

Text Exposed: Displayed texts as players onstage in contemporary theatre

ABSTRACT
This article explores some of the dramaturgical functions of visibly displayed text in contemporary postdramatic theatre. By analysing a variety of performance examples, it identies functions such as the opening up of gaps between source material and performance/performer and the use of text as a player in live improvisation and as an acknowledged prompter for performativity. It proposes that exposed textuality is often used to reect on the intensely mediatised state of our lives. Finally, it revisits a debate about the subversion of presence by exposed writing and suggests that the openly exhibited tension between text and performer can be mobilized for a political aesthetic.

KEYWORDS
text and performance performance writing reading in performance presence in performance postdramatic theatre

The relationship between text and performance is commonly discussed as that of a seamless move from page to stage, with countless textbooks offering actors and directors advice on how to best manage the transformation from literature to theatre. In a recent article on the relationship between text and stage in postdramatic theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann reiterates a point he had already made in his book Postdramatic Theatre (2006), namely, that this relationship between text and stage has never been an easy one but has always been riddled with tension and conict: Small wonder: the text is and remains a literary phenomenon, even if it is drama, and the text proper literally disappears on the stage of the theatre.

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With the exception of devices for having written words on stage from written scene indications to multimedia presentations of text in high-tech theatre the drama as a literary linguistic reality all but vanishes and makes room for something completely different: for the paralinguistic dimension, for voices and intonation, rhythm, speed and slowness of speech, sexual and gendered auditive information, gesture and the expressivity of body language in general. (Lehmann 2007: 37; see also Lehmann 2006: 145) What Lehmann cites here as the exception, however, has been occurring for some time and with increasing frequency in contemporary theatre productions, namely, written words do not simply vanish in performance but are displayed on stage to be read by the audience, or scripts or texts are read from by the performers as a visible reminder of their speechs origin in writing. This article intends to identify a number of important aspects of exposed textuality in contemporary performances. By exploring some of the dramaturgical functions it may serve, I hope to show that it is an important aspect of a sizable portion of contemporary postdramatic performances and part of their capacity to highlight, rather than obscure, the gap, tension and conict between text and performance. I will argue that the openly exhibited tension between text and performance/performer can become productive for political aesthetics. Before moving on to the analysis of selected performance examples from seminal performances, by the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment, to very recent performances, by companies like Proto-type Theatre, Apocryphal Theatre and The Strange Names Collective I would like to sketch in some theoretical background.

DEFAMILIARIZATION AND THE DIFFERENT WRITINGS ON STAGE

On one level, the exposure of textuality on stage is simply an extension of the Brechtian project of making the apparatus of the theatre visible, instead of hiding it. For Bertolt Brecht himself, of course, the display of text onstage belonged to his directorial arsenal of defamiliarizing techniques. He used written placards, text banners (Spruchbnder) or projections for three main purposes: (1) to introduce external information (e.g. newspaper headlines) in order to increase the spectators awareness of the real-life political contexts of the play (2) to disrupt illusion and make the spectators aware of their own viewing habits, as when he put up signs in the auditorium that said, Dont stare so romantically! (Glotzt nicht so romantisch!, Brecht 1989: 176) and (3) to display descriptive titles of the scenes to come, in an effort to reduce any dramatic suspense and allow the spectators to perceive the episodic structure. He describes the latter practice as part of an attempt at literarizing the theatre, which entails punctuating representation with formulation (Brecht 1964: 43; see also Fuchs 1996: 75). But in his own practice Brecht would not have gone so far as to undermine the speech of gures on stage by exposing their script because his focus, as Lehmann (2006: 3) rightly argues, was still very much on representing a fable/story. Another important theoretical impulse for a new defamiliarizing and deconstructive use of text in contemporary theatre came from Roland Barthess work on theatre semiotics. In his Empire of the Signs, for example, he considers Japanese Bunraku puppet play as an alternative to the unifying use of the

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Western actor. Bunraku, he argues, practices three separate writings, which it offers to be read simultaneously in three sites of the spectacle: the puppet, the manipulator, the vociferant (Barthes [1970]1982: 49). The vociferants, or the speakers of the text, he explains, are seated behind little lecterns on which is set the huge script which they vocalize and whose vertical characters you can glimpse from a distance, when they turn a page of their libretto (Barthes [1970]1982: 48). For Barthes, Bunraku is thus a perfect realization of the Brechtian alienation effect: That distance, [which] Brecht very specically located at the center of his revolutionary dramaturgy [. . .] is made explicable by Bunraku, which allows us to see how it can function: by the discontinuity of the codes, by this caesura imposed on the various features of representation, so that the copy elaborated on the stage is not destroyed but somehow broken, striated, withdrawn from that metonymic contagion of voice and gesture, body and soul, which entraps our actors. (Barthes [1970]1984: 5455) For Barthes, the separation of different writings (critures) within Bunraku was a way of countering Western theatres illusion of totality which has as its model the bodys organic unity: the unity of movement and voice produce the one who acts; in other words, it is in this unity that the person of the character is constituted, i.e. the actor (Barthes [1970]1984: 59). Like Brecht, Barthes did not yet question the need for a dramatic story. Nevertheless, I contend that for contemporary postdramatic performance practices his realization that graphic/literal writing interacts with other writings (and readings) and can be isolated and exposed to subvert the illusion of totality remains an important insight.

SUBVERTING THE PRESENCE OF SPEECH

Twenty-ve years ago, Elinor Fuchs already commented on the striking recent emergence of writing as subject, activity, and artifact at the center of theatrical performance in numerous plays and performance pieces (Fuchs 1985: 163; see also Fuchs 1996, which contains a developed version, chapter 4). Fuchs comments on plays by Richard Nelson, Len Jenkin, Adrienne Kennedy and Daryl Chin, as well as the collaboration between Robert Wilson and Heiner Mller on CIVIL warS and performances by The Wooster Group, Stuart Sherman and Richard Foreman. Writing as a topic in playwriting is considered by Fuchs, but will not be considered in this article, although it rightly belongs within the purview of making textuality visible. As Fuchs (1985: 63) analyses, drama had, since the Renaissance, been a form of writing that strives to create the illusion of spontaneous speech and is usually unproblematically realized as such on stage. The resulting, seemingly spontaneous, theatrical presence became a vital aim for dramatic theatre in order to aid the self-completion of the world of the spectacle and the heightening awareness owing from actor to spectator and back that sustains the world. What happens when writing no longer retreats behind the presence of the performer but is openly exposed, Fuchs postulates, is that theatrical presence is undermined.

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From a different perspective, Fuchss strict bifurcation into practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s on the one hand and those of the 1980s and 1990s on the other is somewhat surprising, as critics like Erika Fischer-Lichte and Hans-Thies Lehmann (with hindsight perhaps) see the earlier practitioners as part of a historical performative turn that questioned the authority of the invisible dramatic text and brought the phenomenal body to the fore (Fischer-Lichte 2008, esp. chapters 1 and 4). This was an important step towards emerging post-dramatic theatre and performance practices that explored the materiality of theatre and eventually also allowed for new relationships between text and performance text.

With reference to Derridas critique of logocentric metaphysics and his assertion that writing has actually always already inltrated speech, Fuchs (1985: 166) argues that contemporary theatre practitioners have begun to expose the normally occulted textuality behind the phonocentric fabric of performance. The performers presence as a revelation of the self and a corresponding suspicion of the text, Fuchs comments, became further cultivated in the 1960s and the 1970s by theatre practitioners such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina (Living Theatre), Richard Schechner (Performance Group), Joseph Chaikin and Peter Brook. Fuchs (1985: 164) regards this idealization of presence in the theatre and theory of the sixties and seventies [as] almost a rear-guard action, since a new generation was challenging the absolute value of the Presence of the Actor . In newer productions of the 1980s and the early 1990s, as she also concludes in The Death of Character, the text has become an actor (Fuchs 1996: 91).1 Whether contemporary performances that expose textuality actually subvert the production of the performers presence altogether and how they negotiate the tension between theatrical presence and textuality in performance are questions I would like to pursue further in this article.

PERFORMANCE WRITING IN A TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED WORLD

Since the mid-1990s, the term performance writing has gained currency as a broad frame through which a range of writing and performance practices are brought into view the textualities of sonic, visual, graphic and movement performances; the performance of sonic, visual, graphic and movement texts (Allsopp 1999: 77). Performance writers like Tim Etchells set out to open the door to a broad, adventurous description of what writing for performance might mean beyond ideas of playwrighting. His vision includes writing words to be seen and read on-stage rather than spoken (Etchells 1999: 98). The increased and developed exposure of textuality on stage from the 1990s onwards is not just owing to the possibilities of new media technologies on stage (digital projection, television monitors, laptops etc.) but, more importantly, I would contend, because the world we live in has itself become much more technologically mediated and profoundly more complex in its entwinement of the virtual and the actual. Since Fuchs and Barthes rst started writing about textuality on stage, we have seen the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web, mobile phone technology and other digital communication media, all of which have rapidly intensied the everyday mediatisation of our lives and advanced globalisation. Consequently, it has become ever less tenable to represent the world as a surveyable whole with the help of conventional dramatic forms of theatre, as Lehmann (2006: 4041) points out. Typography and print, rather than being superseded by the advent of the digital age, are in many ways still at the foundation and the heart of electronic media. As Marshall McLuhan (1964: 173) writes, repeatability is the core of the mechanical principle that has dominated our world, especially since the Gutenberg technology. The message of print and of typography is primarily that of repeatability. In this sense, especially the World Wide Web is an outgrowth of print culture in the digital age. We are bombarded not just with media images and sounds but also with media texts. Together they mediate our sense of the world and of ourselves. Therefore, new uses of exposed textuality onstage also have something to do

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with the way in which theatre companies, writers and directors try to give an account of our electronically mediated world whether or not they actually use such new technology onstage. In his essay On Technology and Performance, Tim Etchells (1999: 95) reects that Forced Entertainments work, while being understandable by anyone brought up in a house with the television on, had moved away from the use of lots of technology on stage: I am starting to believe that old technology is more interesting than new, at least in performance terms. Is this because old technology (analogue) always shows its (crude mechanical) means, where new technology (digital) is all for instant and hence invisible change? (Etchells 1999: 94) In this way, using texts or writing on stage as an older techne could also be seen as a way of slowing down perception in order to get a perspective on newer technology. As I hope to show below, the uses of texts as artefacts and players onstage are, in any event, not mere avant-garde gimmicks but can have important perceptual and political implications. What follows is not an exhaustive analysis but an attempt at a provisional taxonomy of some of the functions exposed texts may serve in contemporary performances. The different points I make are not to be seen as discrete observations applicable exclusively to the performances discussed under each heading; rather, there is signicant overlap and interconnection between them.

MIND THE GAP: STAGING READING, OPENING REFLECTION

The reading of text onstage as an integral part of the dramaturgy rather than just part of the rehearsal process is, on the surface, one of the simplest uses of exposed textuality in theatre. Yet one of the earliest examples of this practice that I remember watching in New York in 1984,2 the Wooster Groups L.S.D ( . . . Just the High points . . . ), proved that it can produce a dynamic that is anything but simple. In Part I, the male performers sat down at a long table on a platform and proceeded to read into microphones from an assorted array of 1960s cult books (Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, etc.), while a female performer (Nancy Reilly) sat to the left listening on a walkman to an interview with Timothy Learys babysitter, Ann Rower, and speaking her words. The effect of this ad hoc reading (and listening to tape as another form of reading), as David Savran has analysed, was the production of a certain gap that articulates and enables the performances distanced reection on the history of the 1960s: This platform is not the stage of memory on which the past is magically present. Instead, it is a part of a performance space that conjures up the dynamics of memory in the tension between the absent real thing and the substitute at hand: between stage and platform, character and performer, Ann Rower and Nancy Reilly, Timothy Leary and Jeff Webster. (Savran 1986: 170) Further gaps and tensions opened up in the montage of the production putting into mutual relief the 1960s counter-culture and the political struggles and

There have, of course, been earlier examples of onstage reading of text. A memorable example, by all accounts, was Peter Brooks 1965 rehearsed reading of Peter Weiss The Investigation on a bare stage at the Aldwych, a play that used verbatim text from the interview transcripts of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. Although the actors relentless reading from the scripts no doubt contributed to its stark effect, it is debatable to what extent the act of reading itself was a conscious dramaturgical decision on Brooks part, as the evening was scheduled to coincide with a larger social activist event of simultaneous readings in thirteen theatres in East and West Germany (Helfer and Loney 1998: 136). Nevertheless this production is curiously resonant with Forced Entertainments Speak Bitterness discussed below.

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values of the previous decade. Part II saw the performers reading excerpts from Arthur Millers The Crucible, a political drama about the Salem Witch trials, written in response to the McCarthyist witch hunt in the 1950s. Although this form of reading from a dramatic script seemed closer to traditional acting than did the reading from non-theatrical texts, in fact, as Philip Auslander remarks: When performer origins in textuality are not effaced, it becomes difcult to make such a distinction. The actors made no clearly greater investment of self in one procedure than the other; in both cases, they were literally on book: the text had not been internalized. (Auslander 1997: 66) At one point, scenes from The Crucible (the hearing) were enacted in a manic, fast-forward sort of way that garbled the text (see Savran 1986 and Fuchs 1996 for further accounts of the whole performance). I remember that each spectator was supplied with a copy of Millers The Crucible tucked into a pocket on the seat in front of them, as if to mark the gap between the great American canonical text and the performance in front of us, as if to involve us in the general reading and say check for yourself! (At the time, The Wooster Group was engaged in a ght over the performing rights with Miller, which might have motivated this gesture on their behalf.) Finally, the reading and repeating game was famously pushed even further in Part III when the group re-enacted now in precise naturalistic detail excerpts from their own videotaped and annotated rehearsal of The Crucible whilst on L.S.D., thus marking the gap between a hallucinatory/paranoid state and a sober state. Savran (1986: 170) observes, Reading is made possible by temporal discontinuity, by the persistence of a discourse in time, by the disparity between the authors intention and the readers interpretation. Reading in its many forms (listening to interview, watching videotapes) became one of the main ways for the Wooster Groups production to articulate historical gaps and disparities and thereby enable the spectators own political reections on the juxtaposed and collaged historical material. A recent production by Proto-type Theatre demonstrates the abiding fascination with reading in contemporary performance. About Silence, written by artistic director Peter Petralia in 2003 and still evolving, involves three locally chosen performers, grouped thematically (e.g. a group of burlesque performers, artistic directors or arts workers in a rural town), who are confronted by a text they have never seen before. This creates local resonances as well as different generic effects, depending on the performative and interpretive habits and proclivities of the group. The text is read off laptop screens, the performers voices amplied by microphones. Below them, facing the audience, are three TV monitors that show live-feed video footage of their hands on the keyboards and of the text scrolling down on their screens. In this way attention is drawn to the physical and physiological act of reading, including handeye coordination, deciphering and voicing, listening and mental processing. The texts layout on the screen is simultaneously transformed into different spatial, personal and interpersonal articulations in performance. The content of the text revolves around human relationships, intimacy and communication. It consists of a stream of consciousness, a list of statements and images mostly starting with about: About the smell of your sweet, salty, bitter, tangy sweat. About your tongue on my hip. About your nose in my wiry hairs.
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The curly hairs between your legs. About getting a hair caught in your teeth. Spitting it out. The lines are by turns sensual, erotic, funny, transgressive, shocking, blasphemous and thought-provoking. The performers are instructed to follow a few simple rules: none of the lines are assigned to a performer, all the lines must be spoken, the order of the lines cannot change, if one of them starts speaking at the same time as another they synch up their voices (Proto-type website 2003). What this means in practice is that the text becomes differently charged as different intensities evolve; performers linger over lines or race through them; get embarrassed, bored or excited; they speak solo or together. Inevitably, there are also moments when no one feels moved to say a line and there are sudden pauses and pregnant silences leaving gaps for the spectators imagination to take over. For the spectator/auditor this performance dynamic translates on one level as being about communication and (self-) censorship, about what can and cannot be said. For Proto-type it also has to do with creating a live space for voicing intimate thoughts and feelings in a world of mediated and virtual communication: In a time where television is the backdrop to our daily lives, where communication happens through mediation (mobile phone, fax, e-mail) more frequently than it does through face to face discussion, where we are less likely to feel and more likely to think in this time, About Silence meditates on life, love and obsession. (Proto-type website 2003) But we may ask, whose life, love and obsession? The ambiguity of the text and its articulation by different male and female performers make any determination of gender and sexuality impossible, sometimes queering, sometimes neutering its images. Furthermore, reading someone elses writing on computer screens could potentially also be about the voyeuristic reading in chat rooms and blogs, about the vicissitudes of virtual communication on the Internet. The text hints at: Becoming someone else Identity theft Modern crimes Technology murder Mass miscommunication Rather than presenting us with authentically present selves, the performers (not unlike Barthess vociferants) thus gauge the distance between self and other in a mediated world even as they blur that very distinction through the polyphonic voicing of the text.

TRUTH OR DARE: LIVE COMPOSITION THROUGH IMPROVISATION

Were guilty of dice . . . are the rst words of Forced Entertainments Speak Bitterness in the version printed in Certain Fragments (Etchells 1999: 181). This could be read as a key to the procedure of the performance itself, a
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clandestine admission to its aleatory game or rather its illicit combination of dice and cheating, of chance and choice. What was already an aspect of the Wooster Groups random reading from a library of books, namely a certain unpredictability and consequent liveness and uniqueness of the event, was extensively developed in Forced Entertainments work in the 1990s. Shows like Speak Bitterness and Quizoola feature performers choosing texts from random bits of paper, which creates a dynamic of play, not only of fun and surprise but also of plays darker side: of risk, challenge, and at times a strange sense of fatefulness. Speak Bitterness (rst performed in 1994 and recently revived in its durational version) consists of seven performers obsessively reading confessions from sheets of paper strewn across a long brightly lit table or making them up on the spot. As a text, Speak Bitterness is a kind of re-invention of Peter Handkes Sprechstck (speaking play) Self-Accusation (Selbstbezichtigung, 1966), which starts with the confession I came into the world and ends with I went to the theatre. I heard this piece. I spoke this piece. I wrote this piece (Handke 1997: 35, 49). In Forced Entertainments version, the confessions are in the plural and not, as in Handkes play, arranged in a chronological order suggestive of an individuals gradual socialization. Compared with Handkes play, however, the major twist is that the lines of text, collectively written by Tim Etchells and the company, are not simply memorized and then spoken, but are present on written documents from the very outset, as something that demands to be addressed and fessed up to, either whispered in all sincerity, shouted out loud, got off ones chest or proudly proclaimed. A major scenographic element on stage, they are present as a material for the performers to work with and to be contextualized in the live situation. The confessions range from the criminal to the trivial, from the idiosyncratic to the inherently human, from the ctional to everyday urban disobedience: Were guilty of murder, arson and theft. We sold defective oven gloves door to door. We confessed to crimes we hadnt even committed to waste police time and get our names in the paper. We had butteries. We cut off the hand of an evil-hearted pirate called Captain Hook in a fair ght. Where people had written their names on walls and the side of the subway and the high-rises, we went around and added the words is dead. So it said Rob is dead, Big Dave is dead, Lucy is dead [the list goes on forever]. Depending on the nature of the actual confessions read and the context implied through performance, the meaning of the personal pronoun we constantly shifts in our minds between the people present on stage; a larger, perhaps generational or gendered we; the we of a specic social group or the we of the human species. The linguist Emile Benveniste (1971) suggests that it is in the nature of personal pronouns like I, we and you to be shifting in terms of their signieds depending on the actual instance of the discourse, which may be why they are so effective in these kinds of performative productions. Unlike the Wooster Groups quite distanced reading in LSD, the performers in Speak Bitterness often create a strong sense of presence and co-presence with the audience by meeting the spectators gaze. They make an effort to own each statement they address to the audience and thus own up to each

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confession with great sincerity even though it is often clear from the statements that they could not possibly have committed the acts they profess to (e.g. We dropped atom bombs on Nagasaki, Coventry, Seattle, Belize, Belsize Park and Hiroshima). I would thus disagree that the presence of the written text on stage subverts theatrical presence altogether in fact the production of presence is crucial to the nature of the game. This is despite the fact that any individual identity that is established here is maintained only momentarily and is often contradicted by the next confession that is read. In this sense, Speak Bitterness is reminiscent of other Forced Entertainment shows, such as Emmanuelle Enchanted and 12am: Awake and Looking Down, in which the performers rapidly change clothes and pose with ever-changing identity labels. It could be argued that the very process of presencing identity is modelled in these performances and that the assumed possession of interiority and conscience is critically probed. Metaphorically, the effect of the written confessions on the table dominating the action could be read as the human sins that pre-exist and go beyond the individual who enters culture and society, pre-scripted subject positions of guilt and failure that the individual is asked to embody and identify with. Althusser would have described this as the mechanism of ideological interpellation. Yet, here the offered confessions and their attendant subject positions accumulate to a preposterous and absurd degree. In this way, the game of confessions authored from afar also becomes a response to life in a society where the media with their simulated effects of presence (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 100) turn us into witnesses of the most horrendous images, deeds and stories on a day-to-day basis. With reference to war correspondent Michael Herrs comment on his experience in Vietnam that you are as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did, Etchells comments: We always loved the idea in this of ones responsibility for events only seen. The strange responsibility of the city and its endless crowds and half-glimpsed lives, or of the media space with its images everywhere, always, already. That (lucky) experience of having seen only two real dead bodies and yet thousands upon thousands of TV corpses real deaths and ctional deaths, mediated deaths. We wanted to speak of what it felt like to live in this space of second third and fourth-hand experience. (Etchells 1999: 2021) In a sense, the randomness of the spoken confessions in Speak Bitterness thus mimics the random viewing experience of channel-hopping and web-surng, the old medium of print on paper standing in for the newer media of radio, television and the Internet. The mere fact that speech is prompted by visible text does not by itself subvert the sense of the performers presence, intimacy and spontaneity, which is produced not only through the performers direct communication with the audience (eye contact, direct address, etc.) but also through the game structure and live improvisation. Etchells (1999:65) recounts a durational performance in Amsterdam where the performers ran out of material and found the intensity of the audiences unspoken demand on them almost unbearable: the desire, really, was for nakedness, defenselessness. An exposure that does not have a name. Something beyond. Signicantly, the improvisatory nature of Speak Bitterness is much stronger in the durational version than in the 90-minute theatre

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version developed in 1995, which has a compositional structure and xes much of the improvisation, while still allowing for long unscripted sections. As Etchells explains, the company . . . tried to preserve the feeling of the Glasgow durational (spatial and performance intimacy, a sense of real-time process, etc.), whilst adding enough in the way of structural architecture (narrative and musical development) to keep a theatre audience engaged for an hour and a half. [. . .] We set and scripted sections out of successful improvisation and then combined these sections into different orders. We also left whole sections of the piece unscripted so that performers would be free to choose new lines in each performance, or to interrupt each other, speaking in a different order each night in various sections. Our aim was for an architecture/structure that did develop leading you in and taking you places but one that seemed live, accidental, spontaneous. (Etchells 1999: 180) The question of theatrical presence is thus a complicated one here. There is a constant interplay between speech and writing of improvised composition (making it up) and pre-designed composition. Rather than accept the onesided subversion of speech by writing that Fuchs seems to imply, it might be a more accurate analysis not just of this performance to speak of the mutual inltration of speech by writing and writing by speech/performance. This is also true for the improvisatory methods to be found in the work of American writer and director Julia Barclay and her London-based company Apocryphal Theatre. Inuenced by William Burroughss concept of the cut-up, Barclay produces collaged and stream-of-consciousness texts around political subjects that are then played with by the performers in the space. All performers initially memorize the whole text but the way in which it is enunciated in performance, and by whom, is improvised and different every night; there are no particular performers assigned to certain bits of text. As Cathy Turner states about Barclays previous work, as a directorial strategy this is also designed to undermine the one political voice of the writer: [Barclays] writing also implicitly questions the idea that one can satisfactorily disinvest [from dominant ideology] since there can be no clearly established boundary between ones own words and those of the media or ones social group. Even words which have once seemed ones own may not survive an older self. This perspective increasingly leads her to offer up the text to the performer as material to play with, use and abuse. (Turner 2002: 61) The political stakes are high: Apocryphal are trying to undermine the realitygrid of right now (Apocryphal company website). By making both performers and spectators listen afresh to language in newly created contexts and connections, they hope to . . . make visible the construction of the language with which we create the world we perceive; to allow us a moment in the gap between the understood and the unknown, to listen for the voices which have not yet

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formed, not yet been heard but still call to us in an undened language which is perhaps no less real or pressing for being as yet unwritten. (Barclay 2005) Thus, their almost Utopian vision calling to mind Blochs principle of hope, of the not yet is that new political impulses can emerge in the interstices and gaps created in performance between the written and the not-yet-written. Apocryphal Theatres most recent piece, Besides, You Lose Your Soul, or: The History of Western Civilization is concerned with the impact of Western philosophy, specically the Western concept of the soul in relation to US and British imperialist acts of war and torture (the title was taken from a statement by a US army ofcer explaining the inefciency of torture: you dont get the information you want and besides, you lose your soul). The performance space is littered with stacks of canonical philosophy books, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, books taught in school as Western Civilization in the United States. At various points in the performance (as programmed into the script), performers and spectators spontaneously read from these books. This is juxtaposed with Barclays own collaged and stream-of-consciousness text in which at times the writers subjective voice seems to emerge arguing with the philosophical texts invoked in the performance. Even though the performers have memorized this text, the seeming spontaneity of their speech and by extension their metaphysical presence as soul and being is contradicted by the fact that the text is also projected onto a screen in the space. Guest performers invited for every performance will read their lines off this screen rather than have them memorized. Moreover, the author is sitting at her laptop merrily amending the script with any alterations made by the performers, who in this way also become rewriters and co-writers of the script. A feedback loop between reading and writing is created, the changes tracked onscreen. Thus, both Speak Bitterness and Besides You Lose Your Soul can be seen as different attempts at getting the now into the written text, as Turner (2009: 106) puts it in a recent article on dramaturgies of process, citing director Phelim McDermott even though this now is ultimately always already under erasure, as Derrida would say.

REPEAT AFTER ME: BRINGING PERFORMATIVITY INTO PLAY

Confessions belong to the type of sentences that J.L. Austin termed performative utterances: when I say I confess or I promise or I swear, I actually do something with these words, I perform or enact a confession, a promise or an oath (Austin 1975). Speak Bitterness derives much of its peculiar power from this performative function: in addressing the confessions to us, the performers change in front of us into penitents, turning us into confessors to their sins, great and small. This kind of performative dynamic occurs with reversed roles in the performance Gratitude of Monsters by The Strange Names Collective (directed by Philip Stanier). The performance, described by the company as a triptych of comically nightmarish performances challenging ideas of progress and civilization (Strange Names Collective website) contains a long middle section of 700 Echoes, in which two performers make the audience repeat lines they read from a script (this game of prompting is reminiscent of another Handke play, Kaspar, in which an innocent is gradually taught civilization by being prompted with sentences). The performers take us through ten acts of scripted communal rituals, including singing the National Anthem, a Show

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There has been much debate in performance studies over the complex relationship between the performativity of artistic performances and the performativity Austin had in mind (see Loxley 2007: 13966 and Fischer-Lichte 2008: 2437), a debate which is ultimately beyond the scope of this article.

and Tell ritual about theatre, a recitation of the biblical creation, a biology lesson, a list of promises and so on. In each act the ritual script takes a turn for the sinister: singing all the verses of the British National Anthem makes you realize how imperialist and bellicose it is; the biology lesson ends with us repeating that we engage in paedophilia, zoophilia, necrophilia and the act called Photography makes us repeat the horrendous things we do to a torture victim and then we take a picture. But can we really speak of performatives, in the Austinian sense, in these shows? Are the Forced Entertainment performers seriously confessing, and do we have the power to absolve them of their sins? And, do we really mean it when we repeat we swear the world is a safe place? Of course not. It is important to remember, at this point, that Austin observed that the circumstances of each utterance decide whether the performed speech act is serious or whether it is infelicitous. If your marriage vows are not said in front of a priest or registrar, for example, they will not fulll the criteria for felicity and will be void. Crucially, Austin (1975: 2122) also added another circumstance that infects the utterance: a performative will [. . .] be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. The theatrical frame of pretend and as if casts doubt over the efcacy and seriousness of the performative.3 This has led Lehmann (2006: 179) to propose the term afformance art, in order to allude to the somehow non-performative in the proximity of performance. The non-performativity (in the Austinian sense) of these performances does not mean, however, that nothing happens. Victor Turner coined the term liminoid to describe performances that have a family resemblance to ritual processes but are not such processes themselves (Loxley 2007: 157). It is in this liminoid, in-between place, that we may, for example, experience complicity in the monstrosities committed by humanity (in The Gratitude of Monsters) or feel the weight of confessions we are witnessing. By putting performativity into play, these performances reect on the normative performative social rituals we usually engage in and potentially open up spaces for rewriting them.

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: RESISTANT TEXTS/RESISTANT PERFORMERS

All of the performances discussed thrive, in various ways, on the openly exhibited tensions between text and performance/performers, which in these postdramatic pieces have supplanted the suspense associated with dramatic theatre. It should be noted that this is the case not only in devised work by independent companies but also, for example, in recent German stagings of plays by writers like Elfriede Jelinek where directors and actors deliberately demonstrate their helplessness and perplexity in the face of Jelineks complex text collages (see Jrs-Munby 2009). Most of Nicolas Stemanns productions, for example, gure actors struggling with the actual script, picking it up and discarding it throughout the performance. These frictions between text and performance can become productive on the level of subject matter, as the performers attitude and energy is brought into play. The resistance of performers against text and vice versa can function to disturb ideological normalization and business as usual. In Apocryphal Theatres Besides, You Lose Your Soul, for example, one of the female performers (Zo Bouras) had a real problem with the fact that all books quoted in Barclays text and present on the oor were by male authors. This personal investment

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came out in her improvised performance and ultimately aided the feminist dimension of the performances critical probing of the History of Western Civilization. Proto-type Theatres About Silence, too, works with both the unconscious desires and resistances of the unsuspecting performers. The fact that all lines have to be said by at least one of the performers can subtly break cultural taboos/silences around sexuality. And The Gratitude of Monsters lets audience members as performers experience social and cultural contradictions, as they are asked to repeat increasingly questionable statements. Texts on stage as resistant players remind us not only of the ways in which we are continually being scripted and conscripted by dominant ideologies but, equally, of the ways in which writers are engaged in creating spaces to expose these dominant scripts.

REFERENCES
Allsopp, Ric (1999), Performance writing, Performing Arts Journal, 21: 1, pp. 7680. Auslander, Philip (1997), From Acting to Performing, London and New York: Routledge. Austin, J.L. ([1955]1975), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Barclay, Julia Lee (2005), Apocryphal Theatres Artistic Vision, http://www. yingoutofsequence.org/aboutus.html#APO. Accessed June 2009. Barthes, Roland ([1970]1982), Empire of Signs (trans. Richard Howard), New York: Hill and Wang. Benveniste, mile (1971), The nature of pronouns, in Problems in General Linguistics (trans. Mary E. Meek), Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, pp. 21722. Brecht, Bertolt (1964), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (ed. and trans. John Willett), London: Methuen. (1989), Werke (ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei and Klaus-Detlef Mller), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Etchells, Tim (1999), Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance Practice and Forced Entertainment, London and New York: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008), The Transformative Power of Performance: a New Aesthetics (trans. Saskya Iris Jain), London and New York: Routledge. Fuchs, Elinor (1985), Presence and the revenge of writing: re-thinking theatre after Derrida, Performing Arts Journal, 9: 2/3, pp. 16373. (1996), The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Handke, Peter (1997), Plays: 1 (trans. Michael Roloff, introduction by Tom Kuhn), London: Methuen. Helfer, Richard and Glenn Loney (1998), Peter Brook: Oxford to Orghast, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Jrs-Munby, Karen (2009), The resistant text in postdramatic theatre: performing Elfriede Jelineks Sprachchen, Performance Research, 14: 1, pp. 4656. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006), Postdramatic Theatre (trans. and with an introduction by Karen Jrs-Munby), London and New York: Routledge. (2007), Word and stage in postdramatic theatre, in Christoph Henke and Martin Middeke (eds) Contemporary Drama in English, Vol. 14, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlage Trier, pp. 3754.

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Loxley, James (2007), Performativity, London: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge. Proto-type Theatre (2003), About Silence, http://proto-type.org/Prototype_Theater/Projects/Entries/2003/12/8_About_Silence.html. Accessed June 2009. Savran, David (1986), Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre Communications Group. The Strange Names Collective, The Gratitude of Monsters, http://www. strangenamescollective.co.uk/projects/dating.htm. Accessed June 2009. Turner, Cathy (2002), Cutting it up: fragments and ruins in Julia Barclays New York Theatre, Performance Research 7: 1, pp. 5763. (2009), Getting the now into the written text (and vice versa): developing dramaturgies of process, Performance Research 14: 1, pp. 10614.

Suggested citation
Jrs-Munby, K. (2010), Text Exposed: Displayed texts as players onstage in contemporary, Studies in Theatre and Performance 30:1, pp. 101114, doi: 10.1386/stap.30.1.101/1

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