A Thin Audience: On The Emaciated Spectator

 

 

Image: No Members of the Public

I am indebted to Thea, Sodja and Gundega, who organized with great care my visit here, nestled between two school-play productions of my children in London, A Midsummer Night’s Dreamand Bartholomew Fair. I needed to be at the theatre last night, and I have to return to the theatre tomorrow. So please forgive my absence from your discussions tomorrow. If you know my writing, you will have guessed that I can I perhaps excuse myself not with recourse to my children, they are neither here nor there, but to the unmissable beautyof the school play, where expanded scenography is alwaysat work, often in the form of utter collapse.

Image: Anatomy Museum

I will be at the drinks party later if you would like to follow up any of the points I make, and indeed would be happy to host you should you wish to visit me at King’s College London where I run a research space for the Performance Foundationin a recovered and restored Anatomy Theatre and Museum on the Strand.

Image: Anatomy Theatre

My e mail, along with some credits and references for this talk, is on the handout that you should have.

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This talk is called: A Thin Audience: The Emaciated Spectator and the Witness of the powerless. It is in four parts, the first part of which is called: TheShame of Emancipation

Image: Children in Box

When I asked Thea what she was hoping to achieve with this session she explained she was seeking to discuss an extended/expanded notion of scenography, and as a rider, but an important one for me she positioned this debate as: “outside the black box for a start.” This seemed a laudatory aim and one that I might be expected to have some sensibility for.

Image: Theatre & Everyday Life

My first work in the 1980s, over a decade, running a dilapidated space for theatre in east London, and the book that subsequently arose from that decade of theatre making, Theatre & Everyday Life,engaged with a whole range of sites, spaces and places where performance was occurring among a great diversity of individuals and groups, what I described as ‘a processof building theatre’ as distinct to ‘buildings fortheatre’.

Image: Urban Carpet, Zaha Hadid

In a later collection of essays called Architecturally SpeakingI gathered together a repertoire of architects and artists whose innovations I felt precisely expanded our senses of imagining the mise en scene of performance itself, for instance Zaha Hadid’s writing on and construction of the urban carpet, that liminal space between building and street that defines everything that can happen in either.

Image: National Theatre

Such irruptive carpets have proliferated everywhere we go now, distending and warping the edges of otherwise hermetically sealed institutions, art galleries and theatrical environments, who one suspects doubt their own best intentions with regards to access and public engagement.

Image: Helen Levitt Image

And more recently in Theatre, Intimacy & EngagementI proposed some very stern, not always wholly serious empirical enquiries into what I called ‘a science of appearance’, a reminder that claims for special status for theatre as a preeminently social,communitarian act,have long been exaggerated as a convenient means to defer, yet again, some more pressing questions as to why there is ‘never enough immersion’, ‘never enough equality’, however welcoming the theatre act in its expanded form now seems to be. Why, to put it too bluntly, the theatre always, by definition failsin its political aspirations. Or, much more poignantly perhaps, as a student put it to me the other day, how they feel shamed by their incapacity to relate tothe participatory invitation of the work of certain companies with anything but suspicion, despite their generous offers of inclusivity. Just for the record the companies they felt shamedby included:

Image: Punch Drunk

Punchdrunk

Image: Fuerza Bruta

Fuerza Bruta

Image: Punchdrunk

Punch Drunk

Image: Rimini Protokol

Rimini Protokol

Image: Roman Tragedies

Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies

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Shunt Theatre Cooperative

Well, I am not about to spend half an hour of your time diagnosing a student’s sense of shamein the theatre, there will be a myriad subliminal associations for that student that I can barely guess at given our generational separation, but it occurs to me that that very expression of shamemay touch a nerve among some of us, and that it would be such shame that could act as a sober reality principle in our undoubted, well deserved century long celebration of a certain dissembling of theatre’s impervious borders.

Image: SHUNT boy and case

I need not, I am sure rehearse here why the theatrical invitation to participate, to join in, has very little to say about or do with emancipation proper

Image: Woman and case

and hence my immediate reversal of Jacques Ranciere’s now well-known figure, four years under intense discussion, of the ‘emancipated spectator’.  Here, Ranciere, in what appears a tongue in cheek mode of live address summarises a century long attempt to transcend the separation of stage and auditorium:

Image: Text from Emancipated Spectator

“The precise aim of the performance is to abolish this exteriority in various ways: by placing the spectators on the stage and the performers in the auditorium; by abolishing the difference between the two; by transferring the performance to other sites; by identifying it with taking possession of the street, the town or life.” (15)

Of course Ranciere is having nothing of this and he concludes:

Image: Text from Emancipated Spectator 2

“[… ] this attempt dramatically to change the distribution of places has unquestionably produced many enrichments of theatrical performance. But the redistribution of places is one thing; the requirement that theatre assign itself the goal of assembling a community which ends the separation of the spectacle is quite another. The first involves the invention of new intellectual adventures, the second a new form of allocating bodies to their rightful place, which, in the event, is their place of communion.” (15)

Leaving aside what on earth Ranciere might mean in such a congregational-liturgical term as ‘communion’, what prognoses does he offer this Brechtian/Artaudian, following the gossip columnists collapsing of names such as Brangelina, we might say, Bra-taudian, stasis? He sides with the individual being of the singularin the plural, he has to for the sake of the rest of his philosophical legacy. He says:

Image: Text from Emancipated Spectator 3

“What our performances – be they teaching or playing, speaking, writing, making art  or looking at it  – verify is not our participation in a power embodied in the community. It is the capacityof anonymouspeople, the capacity that makes everyone equalto everyone else. This capacity is exercised through irreducible differences; it is exercised by an unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations.” (17)

Notoriously for us, if us means theatre people, he concludes with the only act possible in the circumstances.

Image: Text from Emancipated Spectator 3

He proposes, following in a tradition of 2000 years of anti theatrical rhetoric, to:

“[…] revoke the privilege of vitality and communitarian power accorded the theatrical stage , so as to restore it to an equal footing with the telling of a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an  image. In sum, it proposes to conceive it as a new scene of equality where heterogeneous performances are translated into one another. For in all these performances what is involved in linking what one knows with what one does not know […]”. (22)

Image: Sommerakademie Programme

Ranciere is of course not innocent as to the potential impact of these words given that he is saying them among performance specialists at the Sommerakademie in Frankfurt.

Image: Sommerakademie Programme close up

I was a fellow keynote speaker at the same Sommerakadmie, in 2004, at which Ranciere unveiled these ideas, in what has become such a well-circulated text. My name is there somewhat to the right of Ranciere and just above Franco B, which is an uneasy place to be in any programme. I recollect little ofRanciere’s talk  as I was exhausted having been up throughout the night before Ranciere spoke.

Image: Robin from Forced Entertainment

What I cannot recallof Ranciere’s live performance then, of course gives us the hint of the elision, the sacrifice of the intelligence of feelingthat has somehow gone missing in Ranciere’s egalitarian economy committed to a certain kindof knowledge. Ranciere’s knowledges seem peculiarly distanced from the affects of performancethat I, and I think you, are always interested in. These feelingsthat I was having during his talk on the Emancipated Spectator, for me went something like this in my distributed sensibility: a thick head after too many drinks with Forced Entertainment in a Frankfurt bathing club, a sore throat from drinking the fetid lake water when I inadvisably dived in to swim to the shore, a stiff back from sleeping on a park bench. I did begin to feel better when Ranciere started speaking, he is very caring, avuncular in his words and performances, but I was sore.

Image: Franco B

I had been on the park bench because I had nowhere to stay thanks to Franco B, a friend and collaborator who had got me thrown out of my Frankfurt Hotel room the night before. My recollection was that he had stood up for me in an argument at the bar and, in baring his teeth, which if you know Franco are quite alarmingly gold,had somehow with a smile, a smile I will return to in the theatre, had got me ejected while hereturned to his capacious suite comfortable in the knowledge that he had got me thrown out. As an artist key-note at the same Sommer Akademie as Ranciere and myself I took it that Franco believed artistic sleep more relevant than academic sleep.

Image: Giacometti

As for Ranciere and his emancipatedspectator, let’s get back there despite our reservations as to Ranciere’s reliance on the return of the word over the senses. My taciturn side would wish to turn that emancipatedspectator, that saturated figure of potential for democratic alliance, somehow in excessof the stage spectacle, always somehow more independent than reception theory would have us believe, into an emaciatedfigure. I hope this is more than just a play on words as the words only work in English, little more. Once I, inadvisably perhaps, built a book on a similar counter intuitive principle, that Peter Brook had got it wrong with theEmpty Space. I said there was no such thing asan ‘empty space’ and indeed it is only aspiring military invaders of apparently virgin territories that would have us believe so. I filled up his empty space with the everyday and much else besides.

Now I would like to invert his second proposition in that work, that the figure who in their fullness watches that otherenter that space constitutes the audience for the theatre to occur. I am not about to suggest that this is an empty audience, that would be intemperate and presumptious, but I would like to take seriously the English colloquialism of a disappointingaudience, a house half-full, which English with its typical insensitivity expresses as: “a thin audience”. There is no equivalent in German, French, Catalan or Slovene of this phrase, though in Croatian there is a phrase for a ‘modest audience’ which is quite close.

Image: Baldessari crowd with reason missing

You may think I have gone mad in doing this at the outset of a congress on spectatorship. Indeed I would doubt my own sanity having spent years writing and working in theatres towards what I call radical inclusion: not just the inclusion of minorities in the theatre, those beyond the professions that I call the ‘lay theatre’, but more recently objects, things, animals and children previously denied any sensible relationship to the work that we do in the theatre. But I have to admit, none of this writing, not a page, made any claims for the audience, I have never thought an audience as suchexisted on the grounds that all my efforts were working towards exploring the ingenious ruses of erupted audiences, the retooling of the artist formally known as audience. So, when I come to that spectral figure and its potential for participation I want to start with less not more than Ranciere dares to imagine.

Image: Baldessari: crowd with reason missing 2

I want to do this just in case I mistake what is happening in the theatre as readable across to much more complex and fragile practices such as social change, justice, ethics. A mistake that leads so many conversations in and around theatre into thinking there is action and change when in fact there is pseudo action and change. For instance: the model of the theatre audience in its closing proximity to the stage and the action has often been taken for some sort of change despite the fact that there is still, so many years on, almost no touching allowed. I suspect some of you might agree about my reservations regarding pseudo action when you compare the continuing injustices of the world when set off against the warm glow of a participatory theatre event. So sordid is this yawning gap that a young student of mine should express his frustration at continuing separation as shame. This is a shame, but not I have to admit the most pressing shamewhen considering such questions, especially when a word like emaciatedis in the title.

Image: How It Is

So, when Thea wrote to me about this and very generously gave me a starting point by saying the point here was to discuss an extended/expanded notion of scenography, I noticed that she followed this with the limpid phrase: “outside the black box for a start”. She might not have expected me to take this quite so literally. But as someone who has rarely written about theatre in such places I went to look for a black box where shamemight be at work, and I found one at Tate Modern in London. By definition, being a black box, this shame would not be visible,but it might be felt.

The second part of my talk is called: How It Is

Mirolsav Balka’s monumental work, currently installed in the Turbine Hall, is named after Samuel Beckett’s incarcerated, muddy, prose work: How It Is.

This is how it is described in the Tate Modern programme:

“The latest commission by Miroslav Balka in The Unilever Series is a giant grey steel structure with a vast dark chamber, which in construction reflects the surrounding architecture – almost as if the interior space of the Turbine Hall has been turned inside out. Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, on 2 metre stilts, it stands 13 metres high and 30 metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel, or enter via a ramp into a pitch-black interior, creating a sense of unease.”

Image: Ramp

The Tate, through an author who chooses to remain anonymous, perhaps for security reasons, chooses to position this troubling work in the following, deeply suspect way:

“Underlying this chamber is a number of allusions to recent Polish history – the ramp at the entrance to the Ghetto in Warsaw, or the trucks which took Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz, for example. By entering the dark space, visitors place considerable trust in the organisation, something that could also be seen in relation to the recent risks often taken by immigrants travelling. Balka intends to provide an experience for visitors which is both personal and collective, creating a range of sensory and emotional experiences through sound, contrasting light and shade, individual experience and awareness of others, perhaps provoking feelings of apprehension, excitement or intrigue.”

Image: Corridor at side

I am always suspicious of cultural organizations, especially ones as risk averse as Tate, who stage associations of this kind within audible range of an espresso machine, delivering coffees, lattes, cappuccinos, to those like me who need a ‘double skinny’ with an ‘extra shot’ to take on what the curators of such relational spaceswould wish me to take on in the line of duty. From their description of How It IsI take this to be a kind of living proof that Nicholas Bourriaud was always right and that relationality is what this work is about. But my question is: relationonal to what? In relation to the movements of a refugee, or in relation to the death camps? Surely this could only be a relation of shame?

Image: Darkness interior

This is what I feel when I move and look into the obscurity, the darkness at the back of How It Is, in its deepest recesses. This is what I brought back into the light, having been alone and on leaving this chamber remaining alone:

Contrary to the claims of increasing relationality what we seem to have here is a very interesting state that I would like to describe as: immunity. One would have to be blind not to notice an increasing degree of distinction, differenceand distancebetween the participants, what I want to call here againstproximate relationality, what theatre people used to call perhaps quite naively but nicely, community, an immune condition.

Image: Separate people

As claims for communitywithin relational art works and participatory performance grow the unavowable evidence of rapacious immunity is on show. What is startling in How It Is, which may be not so different from Beckett’s first rendering of How It Iswith its singular voice, isolated deep in mud, with only a sack for company, is How Separate it is, How Distinct it is, How Singular it is,How never WE it is, How ‘I’ it is. And maybe that singular force, that anti-communitarian ethic is exactly how it isfor Miroslav Balka, he is, after all, an artist who has given considerable thought and labour to the material demands of the labour camp, in which singularity was not an aesthetic nicety.

Image: Balka Deer

In his film installations: Bambi (Winterreise) of 2003

Image: Carrousel

Carrousel

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And Pond(Winterreise). I will not insult your sensitivity by naming where these installations were made.

In identifying the singularity of Balka’s vision I am not just mimicking Ranciere’s own ideas on this singular theme, what we have already seen him described in The Emancipated Spectatoras: the capacityof anonymouspeople, the capacity that makes everyone equalto everyone else.” For Ranciere we already know believes: “This capacity is exercised through irreducible differences…”.I am proposing something quite different to mend the fundamental break he has to make with theatre’s communitarian logic, the way he has to propose some form of equality through anonymity.

Immunityis the opposite of anonymity though it may seek anonymity as part of its defences. Contrary to anonymity it has to know everything about community, or at least seek a partof it, to immunize itself from it. My proposition here is that theatre, as distinct to some of the performance work I have been discussing so far, is an extraordinarily rich, complex and misunderstood place where such relations between immunity and community are played out.

So, given my interest in theatre, and the illuminated theatre at that, the third part of my talk explores this relation: Immunity – Community

Immunity is a term that the Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito, has explored in its close relation and semantic proximity to its other, community. Immunitas is built around the word Munos, the Latin word for gift, it shares a relation to the gift that is embedded at the heart of both words, the gift that defines community, a word that is built around Munos, as well. The gift is what community presumes and what immunity cannot bear the promise of.

Image: Theatre Box

I think we need an example. When Soren Kierkegarrd in his work Repetition, has his character Constantius go to the Konigsberg Theatre in Berlin he has him always go alone, he always seeks out the same discrete box seat that is separted out from others by a row, and he is irritatedon the one occasion that he has to move among the theatre audience proper when he is forced to take a seat among others. Kierkegaard describes a moment in the play Constantius is watching, a piece of stage action and then offers the reader an interpretation of what he sees: “A smile is given but it is not necessarily in anyone’s gift”. This means that while the smile is offered from the stage, like Franco B’s smile with his gold teeth, no one in the audience can presume it is theirs. This is the special quality of theatre. The community, you for instance, with my smile now, which might like to presume the gift of the smile is for them, is of course simultaneously troubled by the obvious reality that it cannot be for them, or at least not for them alone.For Constantius this troubles him so much he spends days irritated by its paradox and in this irritation expresses his frustration at not being able to immunizehimself from the gift that was shared among the community of which he does not wish to be a part, what we callaudience.

Immunity sounds complicated but is readily understood when you think not so much of its biomedicalmeaning, a certain resistance of an organism faced with disease, and more to the political-juridicalmeaning of the term. This is how Roberto Esposito defines that politico-juridical meaning: “ a temporary or definitive exemption is offered, or taken, on the part of a subject with regard to concrete obligations or responsibilities that under normal circumstances would bind oneto others”.

In my view this very nicely describes the real reals that make theatre reals, such as the irritation of Constantius, seem rather trivial: for instance General Pinochet’s immunity from prosecutionfor the torture and murder of countless Chileans, Tony Blair and George Bush’s immunity for their involvement in an illegal war. But it does help us with those theatre reals: the capacityof the modern audience, and I think it is a modern audience, to immuniseitself from whatever is put before them, round them, amongst them is the story of the modern theatre. This is the emaciated narrative I am proposing in the light of Ranciere’s emancipated narrative. This emaciation is indeed our defining quality because it describes a statefrom within, wherein our willingness to enter the contract of performancestems from a contract for such immunity from involvement. That is what going to the theatre is all about. It is not a pathology, it is not a disease of outmoded theatre, it is the theatre, it is the norm of theatre.

Image: Citroen

Where the condition for entry to a meeting might be an assumption of engagementat a certain level of listening,

Image: Voting

voting, or indeed action, irrespective of the expansion of the spectatorial role there remains in performance in general, and theatre in particular, the immunisatory paradigm to protect us. This is why Plato did not have to worry so much about the power of the poets in the Republic, that immunisatory principle has been at work between life and politics throughout our recent history.

Image: Degas Theatre

Immunisation is a negative form of the preservation of life, nicely summed up by an audience member’s, let’s say its Constantius at the Konigsberg Theatre, their avoidance of the one free seat in the front row at the spectacle, however apparently distanced and safe, with the peculiarly morbid English phrase: “not over my dead body”. Immunity saves, insuresand preserves the organism, either individual or collective.

Image: Bobby Baker

The important thing to remember here is how immunity does this. Immunity does this by introducing a minute foreign elementto the body, whether that be an individual such as a patient, a community or political body, introducing a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect itself, and it is thisthat blocks natural development, and with it the risk of further infection.

Image: SRS Bull

The pathogen of performanceis the contract we makeat each stage of the dissembling of the stage to reassert the very protocols we thought we were paying to see dispelled. My proposal here is that this repertoire of affects of adjustment is what makes sitting in the dark watching illuminated stages so interesting. This is the immunisatory logic of theatre, something that performance in all its guises has done little to destabilize so powerful is its hold on us. And, in my view, this is the inherent power of theatrethat uses all its theatricality to unpick its own communitarian stupidity. Examples are myriad for they aremodern theatre’s history:

Image: Earth Rampant

Meyerhold’s production of Earth Rampantin 1923

Image: Six Characters

think of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author

or indeed auditoria that knowlingly unpicked their own distances:

Image: The Werkbund Theatre Cologne (1914)

The Werkbund Theatre Cologne (1914)

Image: Piscator’s Theatre

Walter Gropius’ theatre for Erwin Piscator (1927)

Image: El Lissitsky for Meyerhold

And of course Lissitsky’s space for Meyerholds production of I Want A Child:

If you think these are a bit Russian-Germanic they are because they are Erika Fischer -Lichte’s excellent examples of what she signifies as the theatrical revolution of the 20^thcentury.

And what this list leads to, is, perhaps inevitably for that theatre trying to immunize itself against the charge of distance, only to arrive back whence it came, but somehow, in peculiar but symptomatic sites more conservative than it ever was. If you doubt my analysis of the return of the repressed go to St Martin’s Lane Theatre in London and have a good look at the rhetorical strategies of a play there called The Mousetrap. This 54 year-old enduring spectacle makes Tesching Schei’s year-long durational performances look positively glancing, temporally challenged. We are indeed living in the century of The Mousetrap, and I think most neo-liberal cities have their own version of long runs that reassure at the same time as appalling for their sheer, Artaudian cruelty.

Image: Vaccine

Our whole last century, since Nietzsche commented on this at least, has been a play of protective containment, self-protection and immunity, an ethos of virulent vaccination. My daughters, performing last night and tomorrow in their two plays are considered delinquent in a western immunisatory system, they are not immunized against a number of diseases, since Florence, my older daughter, became seriously sick from receiving a bad batch of polio vaccine from an errant doctor in London when she was four years old. As a parent of a newly immunized child I was given a booster from the same batch of vaccine, lost weight very rapidly, and since recovering have not subjected my children to further systemic attacks. We are routinely abuse by our doctor as jeopardizing a public contract of trust based on such immunization.

Image: Cyropreservation Unit

It is this, what I want to call, immunisatory logic,that ushers in a century of the negative: that which contradicts norms, order, values becomes history’s productive impulse. It is only this negativethat allows individuals to free themselves in order to realize their ‘greater performance’ as Nietzsche might have put it. I suspect this is where the shame of that theatre event was coming from for that student, or partly, the shame of an experience of sudden and inexplicable entropy in the face of an apparently generous invitation to greater involvement.

Image: Vuitton SARS

It is this alienationthat represents the indispensible condition of our own, essentially modern identity as alienated humans, we would not be a witnessing humanaudience if we were not feeling that shame. Shame here, like other embarrassments in theatre witness, immunises us from the excess of subjectivity that simultaneously liberatesus and yet of course, deprivesus of experience.

Image: Theatre riots

This modern sense of self-representation is partly predicated on the urgent social need to constrain what are perceived as excessiveforms of expression, such as violence, within the individual psyche. Where ‘theatre manifestations’ of violence such as the Covent Garden theatre riots of 1762 pictured here, or more recently the Playboy riots at the Abbey Theatre in the early years of the twentieth century, were latent eruptions of the audience as violent, these have been sublimated, I would like to say supined, into more socially manageable valences such as blushing, coughing (something Harold Pinter took to be inherently violentto his plays) and that peculiar form of judgemental clapping that acknowledges the performance but somehow simultaneously evokes hatred for a particular performer.

Image: Safety Theatre

Immunisation does not of course just register at the level of internal, psychic states. It is manifested outside for all to see. The whole machineryof the theatre has been a history of regulated assumption of conflict within order. I have shown in my book Theatre & Everyday Lifehow the London council authorities effected this shift in 19^thcentury fire regulations and the invention of the ‘safety theatre’ in London in 1888 to ensure that everyone was safe from burning, from risk, to ensure that the sibling of the hotel in this regime of public safety, the theatre, should be treated as a safe place to sleep.

Image: Burning Theatre

There is no point in appealing to Antonin Artaud’s romantically singed figure ‘signaling through the flames’, galvanizing us to close the gap between audience and act, when we know just how powerful the fire chief is in our immunized environments. We live in the order of the NO as Nikolas Lurmann put it. The Power of Yes, a play by David Hare detailing the horrors of the fiscal breakdown may be on at the National Theatre in London but it is constrained within a wider power of No for the rest of us.

Image: SRS Burnt Theatre

Such immunization protects us though negationfrom something I suspect we should not underestimate given where I am heading with this talk: annihalation. I was not asking for annhialation by burning when I wrote about combustion, indeed, as conservative a director as Peter Brook once said that the one quality he valued in a theatre space was its combustibility. Rather I was suggesting that this negotiation between safety and less safety, risk and more risk, was in a neo-liberal context wholly subsumed to a set of market and entrepreneurial freedoms way beyond our control and rarely truly available to the rest of us subjected to the seriously fatal consequences of those neo liberal risk takers who drive the capital markets within which our entertainments entertain.

Looking at these anoxeric figures, two of Romeo Castellucci’s performers in the second act of Giulio Cesare, one of whom has since died, demands here that we pause to note that we are talking about a material reality not just a metaphoric figure, such as Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, which may be responsible for the deaths of many but can never be held responsible for the death of any-one. The emaciation of the system did not start with the Hunger Artistby Kafka, but he did put his finger on something thin and getting thinner, about artists and as you will hear audiences, when he said:

“ Over the last few decades, the interest in hunger artists has suffered a marked decline. While it may once have been profitable to put on great public spectacles under ones own production, this is completely impossible today. Times really have changed. Then, the whole town got involved with the hunger artist; from day to day of his starving people’s participation grew…”. (p. 252)

Image: Les Miserables

I felt Kafka at my shoulder the other night on leaving the London production of Les Miserables. I have seen it many times, it is another of those pieces that if you go often enough, with your eyes screwed up, and you think of Marina Abramovic, it looks very different after twenty years of seeing it. And I had been weeping as always with the communards, those furthest away from us, the leisured class, tose miserable ones starving behind the barricades in Victor Hugo’s great novel of hunger and political organsiation. And I was asked on leaving the Queen’s Theatre, by a homeless man on the street with a can of lager, if I could “spare him some change”. I did wonder as I set off to find a pizza nearby whether I had quite understood the way this particular urban carpet was working to contain a number of worlds of emaciation as much as any promised emancipation.

Systems such as theatre systems but all equivalent social systems function not by rejecting contradictions and conflicts of this kind, but, as a show like Les Miserables, but also How It Isdemonstrates, by producing them as necessary antigensfor reactivating their own antibodies. The Les Miserablescast had after all made an announcement from the stage appealing for the hungry of Haitti and understood that it was better to have a poor hero from the show we had just seen ask for money, rather than one of the villains, despite the fact they were speaking out of character, though still in the costumes reminding us of their moral power.

Image: Image: The Crazies

But the real leverage the immunisatory paradigm offers is in its tension with that great shibboleth of theatre, the term community. As I have described it immunity has a contrastive symmetrywith community. Etymologically, immunitasis the negative, or lacking form of communitas. This is how Roberto Esposito puts it:

“One can generally say that immunitas, to the degree it protects the one who bears it from risky contact with those who lack it, restores its own borders that were jeopardized by the common.”

In this Esposito wants to characterize our modern age as an age of immunization. I would go with that, if only at the level of banality, a word in French from banal that means those ovensshared by all in a village, those who bake together because they do not have the private means to bake apart bake their bread in what are called banal ovens. This is the sandwich choice form I was sent prior to a recent workshop on radical theatre forms at UC Davis:

Image: Form

When I asked, on behalf of my daughter who was genuinely concerned to know, why there were so many varieties of filling on offer, why so many different types of bread in the land of the free, I was told by one of the artist participants that this varietyguaranteed what he called ‘the singular sandwich’, a sandwich that, separately and hygeinically wrapped, could not be confused with anyone elses. This protected everyone from everyone else, their choices and their fears, their diets and their desires and their demands and, not theirdecadence, they were as fraught and challenged a group of artists, as sensiblea group as I have met, but a system’s decadence, its immunised expectation had normalized this quite offensive social norm.

Image: Forced Ents Plackard

Immunisation implies a substitution, or an opposition of private or individualistic models with a form of communitary organization. Immunity is the ‘non-being’ or the ‘not having’ of anything in common. This might sound like Jean Luc Nancy’s ‘inoperable community’ or indeed Al Lingis’s ‘community of those who have nothing in common’. But of course immunity is inherently inhabited by its opposite, it cannot do without it, there is no immunity without the community from which it gains its force of exclusion. The solo sandwich would be no fun without the spectre of the clubsandwich, that strangely comprehensive yet vulgar combination of ingredients, the smorgasboard or salad bar against which it is set in the hierarchy of cold snacks.

Image: Bubble with figure in it

Immunity is the fold that in some way protects community from itself, sheltering it from an ‘unbearable excess’. To survive, the community, everycommunity, is forced to introject the negative modality of its opposite. It is the theatre’s place I would suggest, quite literally, to provide the peculiar conditions that make immunityfrom the prosecutions of performancepossible. It would be this perverse dynamic that I would assign as theatre’s greatest social measure, indeed perhaps its only measure, as it enters the 21^stcentury proper. Following this counter argument it would be that knowing introversion of theatre’s once proud communitarian logicthat would be its intelligence, an intelligence way beyond the now slightly exposed and quite dumbly literal relationalities of the visual artists with their one trick pony installations. They have no purchase, no tension as we have become wholly immune to their special pleading to be considered: sui generis. I would suggest, ironically, that is precisely theatrethat has that purchase once again, and that is precisely why the myriad conversations concerning modes of spectatorship here are so critical as them maintain a dialogue between theatre and its other performance forms, they are inclusive not exclusive and seem to achieve a synthesis that so far Nicholas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop who are blind to the longer communitarian histories of theatre are unable to achieve.

Image: The Sun

The fourth and last part of my talk is called: The Truce

Image: Auditorium

In the theatre one might wish to shorten the history of immunisation being spoken of here to the beginning of theatre’s secularization, with the end of sovereignty, that is the moment when the monarch with the perfect seat with the only true perspective, the theatrical expression of the divine right of kings, gives up that seat and retreats to the royal box above the action, better to be seen than to see.

Image: Cats in Theatre

But that would be a willful misreading of the continuous part biopolitics,that is the relationship between power and biological life, crucial mechanisms shaping what performance can and cannot do, has played since the most ancient times, since pre history in fact. But not pre-image.

Very briefly: starting here with the human figuring themselves at the edge of the animality of the hunt 20 thousand years ago on the walls of the caves of Lascaux:

Image: Cave: Shame of laughing man

Laughing in shame at their own use and abuse of the animal, they record for us that the I of the human subject is of course dependent for survival on the non-I of the animal.

Image: Tile Lions

Or here, six thousand years ago, at the outset of what I have called the Ceramic Age, with the advent of a suspended narrative in a glazed tile, understanding that those 2D representations suspended in the glaze were distinct from the live actionthat they were in the presence of, that they provided the back drop for. In other words the recognition that there was a live event in front of the mediatised in the tile, and, inevitably then we must guess, the advent of performance studies some 6000 years before Richard Schechner got around to it

Image: Young Vic Tiles

And here, a butchers shop that doubles as an entrance to a theatre, where more recent butcheries have been wiped clean from tiles that share exactly the same qualities as they always have: an impermeable front that lends itself to being wiped clean of history with a permeable back promising interactivity with the world.

Image: Ovens

Or more profoundly, but within the same biopolitical logic, to these tiled ovens in concentration camps which were discovered by the liberating Russian forces at exactly the same time, in 1945, that the cradle of biopolitics was being discovered, the caves at Peche Merle and Lascaux were being uncovered, rediscovered, for the first time since that lonely human figured himself in shame at his own marginality.

Image: Balka Bambi

If the immunisatory principle has anything to offer our understanding of the shame that comes with ‘not enough immersion’, then I wonder to what extent this shame is also our awareness of too much immersion, now, a saturation in an image field that we know to be all to real and yet have few tools to comprehend. The kind of images indeed I showed you by Miroslav Balka. By this I mean that we are a generation who uniquely have incontrovertible evidence of a barbarity brought to us by witnesses to inhumanity. The shame that links that laughing figure in the cave, in shame at their own awfulness, the shame of recognition that this is our story, it is a human history.

In Primo Levi’s coruscating encounter with the death camps there is just one chapter dedicated to the theatre, one might say that is one chapter too many given the irradiation of the Real at the heart of the rest of the work. But this encounter with theater occurs on a journey away from the camps that has already been figured as treacherous but somehow towards home, or what might be left of home for a chemist who has endured what he has in order to be a witness to that endurance through writing. In the chapter titled ‘The Theatre’, surely a place if we are interested in the theatre we would wish to go, the following episode is described. Despite having taken so much of your time I will not abbreviate it for obvious reasons, and I will not have anything to say about it as it resists all gloss. All I will acknowledge is that there is a profound and disturbing distance between the words and the images, a distance that I would suggest might be measurable as another version of the shame I have been trying to discuss:

“A large fat person came on to he stage, with hesitant steps, and legs wide apart, masked, muffled and bundled up, like the famous Michelin man. He greeted the public like an athlete, with his hands clasped above his head; meantime, two assistants, with great effort, rolled alongside him an enormous piece of equipment consisting of a bar and two wheels, like those used by weight lifters.”

“He bent down, gripped the bar, tensed all his muscles; nothing happened, the bar did not move. Then he took off his cloak, folded it meticulously, placed it on the ground and prepared for another attempt. When the weight again did not move from the ground, he took off his second cloak, placing it next to the first; and so on with various cloaks, civilian and military cloaks, raincoats, cassocks, greatcoats. The athlete diminished in volume visibly, the stage filled up with garments and the weight seemed to have grown roots into the ground.”

Image: Clothes / Boltanski

“When he had finished with the cloaks, he began to take off jackets of all kinds (among them a Haftling striped jacket, in honour of our minority), then shirts in abundance, always trying to lift the instrument with punctilious solemnity after each piece of clothing had been removed, and renouncing the attempt without the least sign of impatience or surprise.”

“However, when he took off his fourth or fifth shirt, he suddenly stopped. He looked at the shirt with attention, first at arm’s length, then close up; he searched the collar and seams with agile monkey-like movements, and then with his thumb and forefinger pulled out an imaginary louse. He examined it, his eyes dilated with horror, placed it delicately on the ground, drew a circle around it with chalk, turned back, with a single hand snatched the bar from the ground, which for the occasion had become as light as a feather, and crushed the louse with one clean blow.”

Image: Boltanski highest pile

“After this rapid parenthesis, he continued taking off his shorts, trousers, socks and body belts with gravity and composure, trying in vain to lift the weight. In the end, he stood in his pants in the middle of a mountain of clothing; he took off his mask and the public recognized in him the sympathetic and popular cook Gridacucco, small, dry, hopping and bustling, aptly nicknamed ‘Scannagrillo’ (Cricket Butcher) by Cesare. Applause burst out: Scannagrillo looked around bewildered, then, as if seized by sudden stage fright, picked up his weight, which was probably made of cardboard, put it under his arm and scampered off.”

Shortly after this episode Primo Levi and his fellow survivors hear of their imminent release, and of course where else should such a redemptive scene be staged:

“[…] finally the announcement came: the announcement of our return, of our salvation, of the conclusion of our lengthy wanderings. It came in two novel unusual ways, from two different sides, and was convincing and open and dissipated all anxiety. It came in the theatre and through the theatre, and it came along the muddy road, carried by a strange and illustrious messenger.”

Image: SRS Curtain

The trust this witness puts in the theatre here is startling but perhaps should not be surprising given the gravity of the really real from which that theatre cannot in these circumstances takes its leave. This is not a metaphorical figure, perhaps like that of Giorgio Agamben’s troubling association of bare lifewith these scenes and realities. Indeed this is so much not a figurebecause it is a material, thin figure, an emaciated spectatorof a history that demands to be told. Indeed the imperative to witness this for historyis the precise imperative to survive, here the separation I have been sustaining between an audience and their object of attention collapses into the community of witness, it repels forgettingin the immunityof a feigned ignorance. This is not the Trucethat Primo Levi is referring to in his title, but it is a small truce between the theatre and the road, the two directions from which salvation comes.

It is not just me who has said these things, I owe them to Miroslav Balka, whose black boxmade me think of stories of this kind. A black box, despite Thea’s invitation to me, I am obviously having trouble getting beyond. For it is in the darkness of another black box that I am having trouble making you out now, despite the warmth you have brought to me with your patient listening.

For which I thank you.