Dr. David Roesner, University of Exeter
Performing Theory and its Evaluation as Research
Based on a presentation given at PARIP 2005, University of Leeds, Bretton Hall Campus,
1st of July 2005.
1. Introduction
My contribution to this DVD identifies some of my practice as research work, which I have
undertaken at the Institut für Medien und Theater, Universität Hildesheim, Germany,
sometimes in collaboration with the Stadttheater Hildesheim, between 2002 and 2005.1 All of
the work was highly collaborative and based on different models of ‘créations collectif'. My
role in those projects ranged from facilitator and supervisor to director and back. What I
would like to demonstrate is how theory and practice are interlinked in those projects, and I
will do this on the basis of five productions. Without trying to give a clear overview over each
production, I will aim to extract and generalize certain research issues questions and
techniques, which we have asked and developed in these creative processes.
In particular, I am referring to two projects on gender performance,
Frauen im Anzug (Goethe) 2002, on a programmatic text by Goethe („Women's parts
played by men in the Roman theatre“), that focussed on cross gender performance;
Barbette (Jean Cocteau, Plato, V. Woolf, Balzac, etc.) 2002, on an essay by Jean
Cocteau (Le numeró Barbette, with an additional literary text collage of Woolf's
Orlando, Balzac's “Sarrasine”, Plato's Symposium) about androgyny or the „third
sex";
two other projects were dealing with essential theatrical terms, techniques and aspects,
The ABC of Theatre, 2004;
Buffet of Masks, 2005;
and finally one project on Greek drama, on the rarely performed,
„Phoenissae“ (Euripides) 2004.
2. Research issues
Generally speaking one could say that all projects dealt with fundamental questions about
theatre itself, rarely about an altogether extra-theatrical subject. The gender related projects
did raise questions about gender as a sociological and psychological issue, by researching on
the historical notions about sex and gender, the taboo and attraction of a third sex or
androgyny. But a central focus was the connection that Goethe's2 and Cocteau's3 essays make
in an astonishing correspondence: both describe cross gender performance as a challenge and
a model case for theatre theory.4 Cocteau comes to similar conclusions while watching the
high-wire artist Vander Clyde, who performed his act dressed as a woman and was, according
to Cocteau, „an extraordinary lecture in theatre craftsmanship“.
Without going deeper into this, you can see that a main interest of our research was to identify
the theoretical implications of these texts: what is theatricality and what is “Darstellung” (an
almost untranslatable German word that refers to what an actor does on stage and covers
presentation as well as representation or acting). In the context of all five projects
"Darstellung" rarely referred to 'acting' (in a strict sense) but to forms of non-psychological
acting, non-acting, acting as a choir or ensemble, which often also was embedded in a notion
of acting as a musical performance, a score of sounds, movements and voices.
This leads me to the second general research issue, that we addressed particularly in ABC and
Buffet of Masks: Theatrical means of expression and their interaction/interdependency/interrelatedness. How do e.g. music and theatre, object and character, light and movement interact,
how can they be semantically connected or disconnected, rhythmically juxtaposed, visually
intertwined? This often resulted in laboratory-like settings as in the ABC performance, where
we developed miniature scenes for one theatrical term for each letter. Auftritt (entrance),
Bewegung (movement), Chor (choir) etc.
In one scene, which connected our three terms for L, M and N: Light, Music, Non-Acting, we
wanted to investigate how a particular piece of music “charges” an almost immobile tableau
of performers with emotion and/or narration. Light served here as a rhythmical shift of focus,
an deliberate means of hiding and revealing, which granted a direct connection of a new
musical clip with a new set of performers, that arranged themselves in the dark.
The experiment showed that most members of the audience did suppose certain story lines
behind the given grouping, they identified broken hearted lovers, cool secret agents, mourning
emergency teams, depending on how fixed the semantic connotations for a certain music
already were and how suggestive the tableau was.
The second line of research referred to a rhythmical question: how long does a musical
atmosphere and a theatrical image need to sink in, to communicate with the audience, when
does it need some time to develop, when do you need to take it away quickly, so that it does
not become too obvious, and how much contrast and continuity are required. Obviously we
did not extract a golden rule, a formula from this experiment, but the performers developed an
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increased awareness for timing and gained insight on how you can tell stories on stage with
no acting and language involved.
3. Research techniques
This example also raises the question of the techniques that I have theatrically used and
employed in these research areas. I will not develop the most obvious techniques, that any
theatre production makes use of in one sense or another: intensive text analysis and
improvisations on terms, association or situations given by the subject at hand.
What might be particular though are three procedures that all the productions more or less had
in common: there was always a sense of the experimental nature of the project, seeing the
stage as a testing site, the performer as a 'guinea pig' and using dramaturgical decisions for a
certain setting analogous to the decisions a scientist makes when defining the parameters for a
test. Within this setting one of the recurrent ideas was to use the research texts themselves as
objects and material of the theatrical events. How can you perform an essay by Goethe, a
philosophical treatment by Plato or brief definitions of theatre terms like “presence”,
“alienation”, or “focus”?
In Frauen im Anzug, we decided to perform Goethe's text as a score of voices and movements
in a clearly formalized manner. The ingredients for the experiment we agreed on were:
unifying costumes, a unified movement, with individual variations, and spreading the text
amongst all twelve performers ignoring questions of “character”. The text's subject is
serialized, the means of expression: posture, attitude, voice and movement have become mere
parameters, features, quotations that can be put on and off like costumes (see Frauen.mov).
What I would also like to exemplify with this excerpt is, that I would consider process and
product of our projects being self-interrogative and self-reflective, and I should specify, how
this is achieved.
Ideally the performances reflect both: a given subject, text or theory and the theatrical means
of presenting them. In the case of Goethe’s cross dressers, we invented a performance, that
focused on taking up poses that represent gender clichés and getting rid of them again. The
overall structure of the 30-minute performance is given by the performers’ changing from
bathrobes, to male suits, to individual female outfits (see Frauen1/2/3.jpg).5 All changes are
onstage (Frauen4.jpg) and are displayed in various intermediate stages. The processual and
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performative nature of gender, as investigated in the writings of Judith Butler, hence became a
central semantic and structural element of the performance.
Form
As a result all of our productions had in common that they made extensive use of form as a
sensual and reflective element and “translation”. In Frauen.mov you can see the highly
formalized movements of cat-walking and 'vogueing' served as a rhythmical and spatial
translation for Goethe’s text, that dealt with the absence of women in the theatre and the
virtues he saw in this. The text, as used in the performance, says: “The ancients, at least in the
best periods for art and morality, did not permit women on stage. Their plays were organized
in such a way that either women could be more or less dispensed with, or else female roles
were played by an actor who had prepared himself especially for them.“6
The very formal solution for this scene gave us the opportunity to introduce some of the
central issues of the performance without having to invent a naturalistic situation, which
might have reduced the range of allusions to only a few. By splitting the text on twelve
individuals, all women, we gave it a dialogue quality, opposed by the uniformity of costume
and movement. The movement sequence playfully alleges to gender related situations such as
the catwalk or the military drill. You may also see aggressive approaches vs. subservient
retreats; you can see cliché-imitations of male and female walks and voices (two means of
expression, we found most revealing when in doubt about someone’s sex.) You may see the
aspect of preparation as mentioned by Goethe (many scenes actually developed out of
movement exercises!) and you can see the interplay between repetition and uniformity and
variation and individuality.
Musicality
I already mentioned the rhythmical aspect of this particular way of formalizing. I want to add
that I generally try to make use of musicality in order to translate issues, texts or contents into
a sensual and time shaping form. Very often musical performance becomes a metaphor itself
and makes use of another “double attraction” that music on the theatre stage offers: the act of
singing or playing an instrument is always ambiguous in respect to its referentiality.
Convention disencourages us to see a musical performer as an actor, but within a nonconventional setting this may change. And the second double attraction lies within the
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semiotically ambiguous nature of music: music does mean something, but the references
between signifier and signified are unstable, loose, subjective and very often non-discursive.
Here are just some brief examples: in Barbette – when playing instruments – conventional
expectations were often disturbed (Barbette1.jpg), or the musical performance signified an
altogether extra-musical situation (like the surgery scene at the vibraphone, that accompanied
a text about surgery on hermaphrodites, see Barbette2.jpg). In particular scenes from
“Phoenissae” the choir of the Phoenician girls simply put their hands on the musicians
shoulders (and later the shoulders of audience members), which transformed their playing and
singing into a theatrical situation that expressed acts of consolation and compassion
(Phoenissae1.jpg; Phoenissae2.jpg). This example also shows how different lines of research
condense into a particular theatrical image and action: text analysis showed us the choir's
predominant functions of compassion and distance (as strangers) and made us think about
why Euripides made the choir the eponymous hero, despite the choirs seeming marginality.
Further research on ancient performance practice and a music theory made us aware of the
almost “operatic” nature of Greek drama and the musical instruments and harmonic
characteristics of the music used. In our performance we did not try to reconstruct this, but
translated certain insights into sounds and imagery and an overall presence of the choir that
mirrored our preoccupation with the play and its historic dimensions.
Transparency
Another recurring element in this kind of practice is a great degree of transparency we are
striving for. Although performances may be more suggestive and allusive than any academic
text would allow itself to be, we tend to make our line of thought understandable, reveal our
sources, strive for evidence just as any academic text would do. The Brechtian notion of
“showing that you are showing” applies to our projects, although it is stripped of its original
educational tendency. In Buffet of Masks, (Masks1.jpg; Masks2.jpg) we presented all kinds of
masks in their different textures, looks, meanings and contexts: you could see scary masks,
disguises, masks as political statements, as wellness procedures and comical deformations of
the human face. But most of all you could see processes of masking and unmasking
(Masks3.jpg, Masks4.jpg) and were invited to reflect on the question, which of many mask
layers that the performers wear, is actually their private and individual face. Can you
distinguish clearly between authentic face and mask, or is, as Nietzsche claimed, our face our
most undistinguishable mask?
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In conclusion, practice as research meant for me setting a process in motion, that got different
groups of researchers and performers together to collaboratively interrogate and engage with a
variety of material, asking scholarly questions and undertaking creative experiments, as well
as asking creatively and experimenting scholarly.
1
Some of the productions and their research context are widely reflected in two publications: Gromes, Hartwin /
Kurzenberger, Hajo (2000), Theatertheorie szenisch. Reflexion eines Theaterprojekts, Hildesheim and the
Video Documentation "Vision 1800/Theater 2002" by Bastian Buchtaleck, Manuela Hankel, Karen Heinrich,
both available through the Institut für Medien und Theater, Universität Hildesheim.
2
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1993 [1788]), 'Women's Parts Played by Men in the Roman Theatre‘, translated by
Isa Ragusa, in Lesley Ferris (ed.) Crossing the stage: controversies on cross-dressing. London/New York:
Routledge, 47-50, p. 48f.
3
Cocteau, Jean (1988 [1926]), Barbette. Mit dem Essay "Le Numéro Barbette" von Jean Cocteau in einer
Übersetzung von Catherie Garo, und illustriert mit zeitgenössischen Fotografien von Man Ray, Berlin:
borderline.
4
For further detail see also my article "Bending Gender and Acting Theory: Performing essays by Goethe and
Cocteau on the theatrical benefits of cross-dressing", to be published 2006 in Studies of Theatre and
Performance.
5
Photographs were taken by Uta Birkenberg, Georg Werner, Katrin Eckstein, Andreas Hartmann and myself,
Video-Footage by Bastian Buchtaleck, Manuela Hankel and Karen Heinrich.
6
Goethe: 'Women’s Parts Played by Men in the Roman Theatre‘, p. 48f.
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