Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 2, August 2007
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Operating postmodernly—
my intentional postmodern theatre
by
Monash University
As in many fields of artistic endeavour, postmodern thought has deeply affected the practice of theatre and created the possibility for new forms of consciousness to emerge in theatre. From the radical use of multimedia, animation and virtual spaces in theatre, to the crossing of traditional genre boundaries, theatre has been transmogrified in the last 20 years to a more hybrid and multi-modal textual practice, to a more postmodern stage. There is a new (and perhaps not so new) consciousness in theatre: one stamped with paradox, shifting boundaries and elusiveness.
However, such a consciousness in theatre, such a practice, is best described as uneven. When we speak of theatre we should properly speak of ‘theatres’. Not all ‘theatres’ have adopted or intend to adopt a postmodern aesthetic and some theatres only utilise the postmodern aesthetic partially. There are community theatres, amateur theatres, professional theatres, experimental theatres and new virtual theatres. The nature of these theatre is as varied as the communities that support them. Some are overtly postmodern, while others are traditional or modernist. Other theatres, like my own, are hybrid theatres: theatres where traditional theatre practice and experimentation are purposefully juxtaposed and an epistemological crisis is constructed in order to create the possibility of the new. This essay is focuses on my conception of a postmodern practice and my praxis in a community theatre context that has flirted with postmodern thought.
Firstly, before discussing the basis for my practice, I want to begin with some definitions. Postmodernism has been described in terms of an historical condition (Jameson, 1991), as a crisis of knowledge, or as a contested space. Indeed it could be argued that postmodernism is about a wholesale questioning of ‘reality’ and reflects a reaction to what has gone before, namely modernism, structuralism and realist constructions of knowledge. If we take postmodernism as a ‘condition we are in or were in’ (The Jamesonian argument), as a phase we are going through or a reaction to modernism, then a postmodern theatre could be said to exist in that condition and would react to it; if we are not in such a condition then a postmodern theatre does not exist. If the condition was but has passed, then, equally, a postmodern theatre cannot be said to exist. This ‘either/or’ construct is a binary category that does not seem useful in describing either the complexity of society or the diversity of theatre practice and is self-defeating in the end.
This complexity can be defined by conceiving society-at-large, and theatre in particular, as being ‘pocketed’: that is to say, that it exists as a large set of discrete phenomena that are contextualised but may share common characteristics with other ‘pockets’, including expressions of postmodernism, as well as conventions of form and practice. The idea of a 'pocket' is that an organisation, group or community is unique in and of itself, with its own idiosyncrasies, practices, discourses and values. Yet, at the same time, it is embedded in a broader community and ultimately society-at-large. Each ‘pocket’ thus exists in the tension between finding it identity and expressing ‘its way’ and conforming to the broader expectations of society.
Moreover, to conceive postmodernism as a condition of society that permeates all social institutions is simplistic at best. I am not sure if there ever was a ‘postmodern age or condition’ (just as I am not sure there was a modernist condition), but I am sure that there is a postmodern practice. We are not so much in a ‘postmodern condition’ as imbibing postmodern possibilities. We are not so much in crisis (though 'crisis' is a useful method of creation in theatre) as rediscovering the possibilities of text. The existence of theatre is not so much under threat as it is finding new modes of existence. Modernism has not ceased to exist but lives happily with postmodernism, even in my theatre. We have two states of consciousness that co-exist and constantly wrangle with one another.
If we must speak of a crisis of the postmodern for theatre then it might involve the following: what is it that theatre now does, and what is it that theatre now says? Or, what is there left to say and how can theatre say it? What is the identity and place of theatre in a multi-modal world that is satiated with entertainment? To me, as a practitioner of theatre, what theatre says very much depends on the community in which the theatre exists in its particularity, as a phenomenon. And in the context of a community, a theatre finds its voice and its practice there among the many voices and the many concerns of that community. Theatre (or theatres) is contingent on the community in which it exists and finds its being in that contingency.
Rather than seeing postmodernism as a construct for a period of transition, as if it is ‘something that we have to get through’ or have ‘got through’, I want to emphatically conceive postmodernism as a creative and an analytical tool (an aesthetic tool) and a self-aware consciousness very much aligned to the method of the original architectural and artistic application of the term. ‘Postmodernism’ becomes for me a means of constructing a theatre world within a community of participants and then theorising about it. Indeed, while postmodernism has been conceptualised as a reaction to modernist sensibility, and has a definite historicity, it can also be positioned more usefully as ‘a way of doing’ and a ‘state of being’ not reflecting a Jamesonian construction. For my theatre being postmodern is what I ‘put on’ and what my community wishes to ‘put on’. It is not so much about vague infusion from broader culture, though this is undoubtedly important, but what is allowed to exist, or receives sanction (so Foucault is especially important for my practice). I can create a postmodern theatre if I choose to create it, and I can put it off just as easily. I can create a retro German expressionist theatre if I wish (and I have done this), or I can make it a hybrid of many genres and forms of theatre. There is intentionality about creating a postmodern theatre that needs to be recognised. A postmodern theatre does not exist as some all-encompassing socio-cultural or historical phenomenon but only as the theatre community sees it as germane to its purposes. It is the allowance of creative agency that is all-important.
So what is it that I choose to ‘put on’ in my hybrid theatre? For a start, it is an attitude to text. For me, social reality can be conceived as a text to be played with and manipulated. This means, in effect, that we view social reality as constructed from a set of discourses, not as unitary but as fragmented and multi-faceted, subject to change and fluidity, and capable of multiple interpretations and perspectives, the perfect ground for my experimentation and practice. As such, there is no stable substance to social reality, and it, being a text, is capable of multiple readings, even mischievous repositionings and irreverent associations. Even within my company, I frequently get complaints that I’m too daring and take too many risks with texts as I challenge treasured notions of what is real. However, ‘risk’ is my core method in theatre making.
Such a fluid notion of textuality has long been postulated in the annals of poststructuralist and semiotic theory. The postmodern text reconstructed by the reader or readers demonstrates what is called ‘the floating signifier’. Semioticians speak of meaning being created by the association of a concept (the signified) with an entity (the signifier). However, according to poststructuralists this relationship should not be seen as a stable linear one. Because the signifier is conceived as ‘floating’, as sinuous and fluid, it is capable of variant or new associations (Harvey, 1990; Carlson, 1990) and is thus exciting for experimental theatre. Thus multiple texts are possibly bred out of the one signified text. Derrida (1998) coined the French word différance to encapsulate this process of signification which Culler describes as more akin to the English term “spacing” (Culler, 1979, 65). It designates both a completed arrangement and an act of distributing and rearranging. In other words, the meaning of the signified is accessed only as it sits (or could one say, floats) potentially in the space of the signifiers and as it is reflected in the differential flux of those signifiers. This movement of the signifier is a critical aspect of postmodern discourse and postmodern concepts of ‘reality’. In the postmodern aesthetic, texts are volatile creations that are not totally the property of the author but, in the inter-play of significations, the veracity and ownership of a text is finally created by the reader (Hassett, 1993), in whatever form this readership and readerly interpretation takes. For me, difference is the key concept in creating the complex and multi-layered texts in our theatre.
As a consequence of the above, in my postmodern theatre, the actors who participate in the process of dramatic text creation and the audience who consume it and encounter it are conceived as active agents in the process of text creation such that my postmodern vision can unfold there in the phenomenon of this community. The audience are readers of the performance texts and creators of meaning from the performance texts, meaning which is often fed back to the actors, as well as the production staff of a theatrical work. In my postmodern theatre the textual exchange between audience and performers can be positioned in such a way that this open textuality and subversion of traditional textual boundaries is heightened, is embraced, in fact. This exchange has often been created in structured audience forums or through more informal feedback processes. There is a consciousness that performance texts are not one-dimensional but promote a complex serendipity of textual exchange in the performance gestalt and the fluidity of rehearsal. This is indeed risky, and often productions that I have directed have not evolved into what I originally conceived them to be.
Let me reiterate that this fluidity of textuality and open hermeneutic process is sanctioned in my community. We do not have to take on an overt openness to textual expression (we could be much more closed like other theatre groups in our locality) but we choose this freedom and we confront the logo-centrism of traditional theatre practice because of the rich possibilities that such an approach to practice brings. It does carry with it, however, a danger. The implication of this approach is that the notion of authorship is under threat, is in crisis. It is a crisis that, in my theatre, we choose to allow. Derrida, in his Of Grammatology (1998), suggests that the very term ‘author’ should be abandoned, since it is the linguistic codes, borrowings and various forms of inter-textuality that spawn texts. One implication of this is that the traditional assumption of there being a binary category between subject/object, between writer and reader, and in this context between performer and audience, is dissolved into a sea of cross-signification or what Shalin calls a “perspectival approach to truth” (1993, 303-332). My experience of this risk-taking approach and this openness to authorship is that it takes time for both performers and audience to understand that they have permission to be open and to express their reactions candidly, a point that I develop further below.
So, the question has to be asked: is the character and the dialogue that the audience see, hear and make sense of belong to the writers of the script? Does the semiotics of the stage belong to the director or the production designer? Or does it also belong to the performers and also to the audience. A semiotician such as Derrida may well argue that perhaps it belongs to all three: that it belongs to the community who experienced it and created it. In my own practice the threat to authorship has sat uneasily at times with the authority of the writer, of the dramaturge. We have instituted community readings of scripts during the drafting process and fielded open feedback about the authorised text during rehearsals, as well as promoting a wider community dialogue through specialised forums. We have also formed community writing groups to promulgate new ideas. However, it is not easy to open up a treasured work, often taking hundreds of hours of work to compose, to the scrutiny of the community. It can be painful and fraught with conflict, but it is my belief that in the end the possibility for textual innovation is higher and the ownership of the work in the community is greater. We have also created theatre, especially youth theatre, in which a performance text is created out of the work of the ensemble through improvisation and workshopping scripts, with the writer decentred and the ascribing of authorship unclear.
So, in response to postmodern textuality, postmodern dramaturgy in my theatre has shifted away from (but not abandoned) the modernist construct of conceiving the individual as subject (as somehow autonomous and solitary) and reconceived the position of the subject or individual, be it as actor, writer or director, through a serendipitous process of interaction, of dialectic. This is not to say that we have deserted such subject positions, rather that we have opened them up, so that actor can become writer and writer can become director, for example. In this regard, it is important to introduce the notion of ‘power’ and social control in methodology about how these subject positions are created in drama. The theory is that the individual subject (the actor, the writer and the director) is an intersection of activities and narratives that compete for dominance (Watt, 1998; Whitmore, 1994). However, working within a theatre community it is not always easy to enact this dialectic process and to facilitate an understanding of the role of power in theatrical creation, and on many occasions success in this regard has only been partial at best. The static view of subjectivity has considerable traction and all participants in the process seem reluctant to move to a more decentred position. One might expect a theatre community and an ensemble of actors and performers to readily embrace textual openness. This has not always been the case. From our experience, to engender such a textual disposition often requires a pedagogy of liberation. We have attempted this in a series of workshops that accompany productions. There is no doubt that democratic participation and an educative process for community people without formal training in theatre have to be connected by necessity.
In light of the above discussion, there are at least three implications for theatre practitioners. Firstly, existing ways of seeing the world can be contested and questioned, including conventional methods of portraying character and human experience (DiGaetani, 1991). Character is a construct (in the poststructuralist sense), since an actor's construction of stage identity could be viewed a composite moulded by the forces of the surrounding culture, especially the institutional culture in which the actor works and the community which contributes to the work, including the director. Individual consciousness—a vague, "decentered" collection of unconscious and conscious beliefs, knowledge, and intuitions about selfhood and the world—is malleable and arrived at through interaction with the surrounding culture. Postmodernism, in stark contrast to modernism, is about the dissolving of the self such that we should not think of the stage character created by the actor as a unique, unified, self-conscious, autonomous person.
Admittedly, the issue of identity dogs this postmodern consciousness, especially in regard to the ontology of acting. In practice, actors treasure their autonomy and there is a profound individualism in acting. The ‘dissolving of the self’ presents a crisis for the actor, and one could never say that the culture of the theatre and the pervasive effect of the ensemble ever fully divests the actor of a notion of autonomous subjectivity and personal creative power. It is, however, one of the more interesting areas of contestation in which my theatre has engaged.
Secondly, the audience (and broader, the community) is integral to the shared meaning making of the rehearsal and performance process and are participants in the creation of a performance (Bennett, 1990; Bennett, 1998; Rayner, 1993). Kosidowski (2003, 85) suggests that
If the mission of theatre is indeed to bridge the fissure between observer and observed, or at least to create a meaningful, if illusory, connection between the two, isn't the audience the locus of our energy? Shouldn't the audience be our primary concern when we shape our art and create our drama?”
Anne Ellis (2000, 92) maintains, in fact, that theatre could more readily engage in conversations with the audience, and sustain such dialogue in public spaces. She writes:
The community conversation, also called the talkback or postperformance discussion, is thriving in new forms that go beyond the traditional goal of dazzling subscribers with the skill of theatre professionals. Unlike some question-and-answer sessions at regional theatres for season-ticket holders, where audience members ask questions of the professionals who work onstage and backstage, community conversations typically take place after performances in more communal spaces, with audience members and artists speaking as equals.
In terms of the broader community, the work of playwright and dramaturge Fred Newman in the poor districts of New York City is emblematic of a community-based approach that attempts to ‘bridge the gap’ and create a community for theatre. Dan Friedman (2004) of the Castillo Theatre, writes of Newman’s work this way:
Yet Newman and his community suggest ways, I would maintain, in which theatre and community--any community--can support each other, in this postmodern age. When a community expresses itself through performance, it strengthens its ties and clarifies its vision of itself. And when a theatre finds its community, it need no longer fear the competition of the mass media or the vicissitudes of government and corporate funding. The big question is: how can such a relationship be established?
Essentially then, my perception of an intentional postmodern theatre is similar to Newman’s in that it is ideologically democratic, or is at least a theatre of inclusivity (See Coult & Kershaw, 1993). It is the theatre towards which playwright and director John McGrath was aiming, one in which there is genuine participation, social critique and the giving of voice to the excluded and marginalised (McGrath, 2002). Yet it is also a conception of theatre that must be contested since such ideological notions of a democratic theatre are often understood in romantic terms, terms which tend to ignore the realities of practice and the real issues of the expressions of power and status that exist within theatrical organisations. Indeed, one must ask what one means by ‘democratic’. Does that term mean equity of power? That would be unworkable. Or could it mean participation and an active voice in the community? Most probably, but is that all? In practice each community probably works out its own democracy: its own mix of control, surveillance and textual practice. This harks back to the ‘pocketed’ notion of the way communities and theatres work introduced earlier.
Finally, for some productions in my hybrid postmodern theatre, the rehearsal process is driven to a greater or lesser extent by shared meaning making and improvisation, rather than totally by the logo-centrism of an authoritative scripted text. I write ‘some’, for in other productions the auteur was much more to the fore. The work of Augusto Boal (1992, 1998, 2000) has been influential in shaping my community’s consciousness and even its political postmodern intent to break traditional boundaries and to question and subvert who controls the dramatic text. Magill (2004) recalls this comment from Boal in his interview:
We made the plays, we discuss what the theme of the play is going to be. Everyone participates. Everyone has access and everyone participates. We try to make a play. Everyone has the right to propose the text and scenes of the play and then when we produce with the actors everyone is entitled to get a role in that play. Of course by consensus they say who should play what, but the authorship of the play for instance belongs to everyone and the ownership the same.
Like Boal, our workshops and exercises challenge hegemonic control over dramatic composition and reinforce the creative agency of each member of the ensemble. Boal’s ideas have served as a framework for critique of my own practice as a director, though I have not always been convinced that his ideas are fully relevant to the realities of doing theatre for an audience in a local community not schooled in the aesthetics of theatre.
Indeed, the perspectives of Boal, even Grotowski, about the hegemony of the text in relation to the actor and the rehearsal process could be criticised. It might well be that the scripted text provides a modicum of certainty for the actor, and that liberation comes in allowing the actor to interpret the text and to make the text ‘invisible’ through interpretation. Hartley (2001), using the case of the authority of Shakespearean texts, notes how there are changes to the text in rehearsal that are both verbal and non-verbal. In other words, there is playfulness with the text that emerges through the actors themselves and through the interpretations that emerge in the rehearsal process itself. This subverts the hegemony of the text but not its authenticity.
It is interesting to note that this very confrontation or tension between the authorised text and the textual practices of the ensemble and the wider community has characterised all productions in which I have been involved. It is possible to live in the paradox of affirming the sanctioned text and utilising the improvised textuality of the ensemble. In my recent production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream there was an emergent irreverence with the text that was encouraged in the ensemble, but at no stage was the authority of Shakespeare ever questioned. During the rehearsal process, actors were given agency to freely “muck with' the text, and I, as director, noted what worked or brought a fresh perspective to the text. In our forums before rehearsals, this discussion of the possible meanings of the text took centre stage and reinforced this agency.
It must be stated, however, that my hybrid, sometimes postmodern, theatre is not based on some idealistic feel-good notion of including all the voices in the process of creating performance texts, and subverting the written text to the extent where the authority of the text is lost, but exists in the dialogue and the struggle to create an authentic set of texts, a set of community texts that are often profoundly idiosyncratic.
What is becoming increasingly clear for me is that this approach to textuality is part of a broader textual and political experience entrenched in the social and experienced in community. In my postmodernism theatre there is the perception that the apparently unified reality attributed to authors, actors and readers is actually constructed by the dominant social discourses of a society (or an institution), and is intimately related to who or what has power and control. It is in this regard that the work of Foucault has been especially influential in my thought and practice.
Foucault (1973, 1990, 1991), in his seminal works on the relationship between knowledge and power, postulates that the ideal ‘subject’ is constructed by the sanctioned discourses within an institutional setting, but within this frame of knowing contrary discourses form which challenge this ‘ideal’ conception of the subject. There is interplay (a dialectic) between centralised and marginalised discourses. In my theatre I have attempted to foster self-reflectivity about the exercise of power, both in the theatrical works themselves and in the social and political structure of the company.
Whatever ‘reality’ is taken to mean, we must include the idea that it is created (is a construction) by those who have power, even in the theatre organisation in which I work. There is no doubt that I exercise considerable power and assume a strong agency of control in the company. Foucault follows the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (1979; Wilcox, 1974) in suggesting that those in power shape the world through the tool of language. Foucault argues that whoever dominates or controls the "official" use of language in a society (or an organisation such as my theatre company) holds the key to social and political power. (Think, for example, of how official political "spin" control of specific words and phrases can alter the public perception of political decisions, policies, and events.) Put simply, Nietzsche said all reality is someone's wilful, powerful construction; Foucault says language (as developed in dominate discourses) is the primary tool in that construction. So, it is my control of language that is central to the creative work of the theatre community in which I work, but I choose, even given this power, to open up the language of control in theatre to my broader constituency.
Part of postmodern practice is to deconstruct these discourses of control (Constantinidis, 1993). I take the term ‘deconstruct’ to mean not so much strict categorical analysis of language but an exploration of the inter-textual traces that have shaped the text, as well as the traces of social-mediated discourses that have been adopted to construct a text. Part of these traces would be the psychological nuances that have given rise to the focuses, motifs and expressions in a text. In this sense, a primary methodology of postmodern writers and thinkers is post-structuralism. This is not to suggest that the two are synonymous. Indeed, many poststructuralist writers could be deemed modernist in outlook. It is just that poststructuralist methods are useful in postmodern analysis, and especially in examining the workings of theatre making.
Tompkins (1988, 746) focuses on the key locus in post-structuralism and an important aspect of postmodernism, when she writes:
Instead of the self and/or the object of perception, you have effects of language, language which is always in process, always modifying itself. The self and its precepts, its objects, are simultaneous products of discourse, embedded in and articulated by systems of differences that are culturally specific.
The pivotal words “effects” and “products” signal that it is language and discourse that create texts as part of a community, and that author (the writerly ‘selves’) are shaped and are products of language itself. This is not to argue that authors are automatons of language but to acknowledge the inter-textual dependency and not the transcendence of authorship.
The use of words such as “effects” and “products” also suggests the multiple and fragmented nature of the writerly self, one which has significant implications for the practice of theatre and drama (Allsop, 1999). This ‘self’ is conceived as “socially constructed, emergent and plural” (Shalin, 1993, 304). The creation and writing of a cultural product, such as play, musical, dance or piece of movement theatre, is also an effect and a product of what is centralised and marginalised in terms of the institution or community in which the work is created. Anyone who is a theatre practitioner will have experienced the very grounded way that a playwright or dramaturge works in creating a script within a theatre community, and they will also have been aware of the influences of the surrounding sets of cultural texts and formative relationships on this creation. Quite overtly, in my theatre, we identify the forces that have created the cultural product. Indeed there is a growing self-awareness about the discourses and the social forces that are employed in the formation of a social product.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the writer, indeed the playwright, was accorded considerable authority as a transcendent creative artist, but twentieth century postmodernists conceived the author as having accidental or ephemeral authority at best. The writer, according to postmodernists, does not nor cannot have a monumental sense of textual supremacy, since the writer’s meaning is constantly deferred to other texts and to the world view of the reader, and depends on matrices of interactions that are culturally determined and constructed by power relationships within a context.
In the sphere of dramaturgy, in my theatrical practice and in my role as director, this suggests a number of issues to do with the process of making theatre. Firstly, narrative need not be complete but can be broken, paradoxical and imagistic. Some theatrical works in my theatre have moved away from linearity to multiplicity (to inter-related 'webs' of storying), where acts and scenes give way to a series of shorter dramatic moments or what one might call vignettes. For us, this has allowed space for a number of discourses and perspectives to be heard, and it acknowledges the broader cultural imperative of television and film that impacts the audiences for our productions. It also moves theatre away from grand narratives and the perception of completion and perfection that was a product of Enlightenment (and later modernist) thinking. Indeed, it could be suggested that there is not one unified reality, but many culturally constructed ‘realities’. Taking this stance on the delivery of narrative is not a rejection of modernism but a wilful playing with narrative for the sake of novelty and experimentation.
Secondly, one of the roles of theatre, to apply a central idea of Foucault, could be to challenge centralised and dominant discourses, and posit other possible cultural ‘realities’. In this regard, the emergence of a postmodern political theatre is a conscious attempt to subvert and challenge dominant discourses, and to forge new discourses and social debate (Kershaw, 1992; Chaudhuri, 1995). My theatre is in the process of becoming a space for debate and contestation without the dogma of some early political theatre (or at least that is our goal). Of course when one is so close to the process of creating such a political theatre, remaining free of dogma has been a challenge, especially when fellow members of the company believe in a dogmatic position and you are caused to defend a less partisan approach.
While essentially modernist, the theatre of Brecht contained within it antecedents to such contemporary postmodern political theatres. Brecht’s emphasis on contesting dominant ways of knowing could be viewed as a prelude, as a precursor or prototype, despite its Marxist and modernist base (Wright, 1989). For Theodor Adorno (1984, 1990, 1991), in much the same tradition, the work of art (including theatre) has a capacity to create a critical space within culture as a platform for critique of that culture (See Kershaw, 1999). In my theatre I have set out to create a critical space, despite running contrary to popular notions of theatre-as-entertainment. In a working theatre community a consciousness of critique is not always easy to engender, being shaped as it is by the idea that theatre becomes an imaginative space of diversion, not necessarily a critical space of cultural awareness, though the two are not necessarily incompatible, as we have discovered in many productions, workshops and dramatic showcases.
In order to construct this critical space of cultural critique my favoured devise is ‘pastiche’. ‘Pastiche’ refers to the condition where blank parodies of style, form, genre or shape are commingled in new or unusual ways. This concept, borrowed from postmodern art and architecture (Jencks, 1986) is based around notions of hybrid form: that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ but that new combinations from the ‘wasteland of the old’ are possible; that established genres are subverted through unexpected association, repositioning and juxtaposition. In popular culture pastiche is clearly seen in the rock video, with its disintegration of sequential narrative elements, its rush of seemingly disconnected images that dissolve the binary form of realism and anti-realism, its use of the visual as the primary representational form, its multi-layering of sound and image and its heterogenous mix of musical forms, woven with irony and appropriation (Dettmar, 1998; Thomas, 1992; Kotarba, 1994). The more recent compelling example is the complex layered textuality of Gwen Stefani’s pop dance song, “Wind it up”, with its echoes of The Sound of Music and it polemic for the allure of the dance club. The cultural influence of this postmodern form has been considerable in my theatre and among the community in which I work. Indeed, an audience member once described one of our productions as 'one long rock video'.
In 2004 my theatre company completed a modern rendering of Robert Lewis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, conceiving it in a contemporary setting and engaging with such issues as cloning and the trade in body parts. In one scene the infamous Dr. Jekyll is removing a body part to sell from an unwitting victim. During this stylized surgery scene, an aria from a Puccini opera was played. The pastiche of opera with the exaggerated expressionist surgery scene had a profound political effect on the audience, who grappled with not only the notions of victim and perpetrator but also with the social forces that created the possibility of allowing victimisation.
In television this use of postmodern pastiche has become increasingly pervasive. Perhaps the most distinctive dramatic work that uses a postmodern paradigm is that of the seminal BBC series of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (Potter, 1986), which came onto Australian television on the ABC in the early 1990s, and has been influential for both film makers and theatre practitioners. The same ironic repositioning and pastiche of genres is seen in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duet of films (Kendricks, 2003). In a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I recently completed, the Shakespearean narrative was embedded within a larger narrative about gangsters in the 1920s, vying for control of the theatre company putting on a production of the Shakespearean comedy. The multiple narratives and juxtaposition of comedy and melodrama created what appeared to be an interesting and challenging textual mix for the audience.
My postmodern theatre practice is shaped, then, through theft and transformation, via paradox, kitsch, parody (Hutcheon, 1989), eclecticism, bricolage, and ironic juxtaposition, and a mix of the contemporary and la mode retro (Jameson, 1991). It is a cornucopia of tradition and the subversion of tradition. It is also about identifying and dissolving those taken-for-granted binary oppositions, such as truth and fiction. In combining truth with fiction, for example, there is the possibility of creating a confronting political theatre in which the boundaries between truth and falsehood are not so certain and there is an uncomfortable dissonance for the audience.
In theatre, this notion of pastiche could suggest that there is a far-reaching fusion of traditional theatre forms with a range of other interactive media genre and media texts. In effect this creates another set of spaces within the conventional theatre space, with these other ‘spaces’ acting variously as meta-text, as a place of playful creativity, and as critical reflective devises in the meaning of the drama. The use of video in conventional theatre is an adoption of this concept, since it contextualises and acts as a point of critique for the live (on-stage) action. According to David Salz (2001, 107-130), bringing “interactive technology into theatre opens dynamic new possibilities for theatre artists”. Salz also suggests that “When live performers and media interact dramatically, a fascinating ontological question arises: is interactive media itself "live" or not?” (See also, Murphie, 1990).
One recent published example of this type of work is Jet Lag. Wehle (2002, 133-139) describes this work as
a collaboration between the New York-based multimedia performance company The Builders Association and media artists and architects Diller & Scofidio, is an adventurous cross-media performance combining live action, live and recorded video, computer animation, music, and text. Developed collaboratively over a two-year period, the piece weaves together two fascinating stories of contemporary travel investigating the interaction between new technologies and live performance in a form of hybrid theatre.
Using many of the concepts of McLuhan (1964, 1965) about the way that media have shaped our notions of reality and knowledge, Boenisch (2002) suggests that the we can now speak of a new and a renewed discourse within theatre: that of ‘intermediality’. He argues that theatre’s mediality implies its intermediality. The use of other media within theatrical discourses should not be viewed as an addition or an oddity but as a normal part of the development of theatre. One could argue that since most audiences are already postmodernly ‘mediated’ through television, film and the Internet, that such postmodern transformation should be seamless for an audience. This is all very well in theory but in practice the point of debate and crisis for theatre is whether to embrace such multimedia textual forms or rather to offer an audience an experience that is outside its normal frame of reference. In our theatre we have chosen to reverse the logic and make theatre a way of understanding the nature of visual and digital media forms.
Another outcome could be that there is dissolution or playfulness with time frames, so that a pastiche of historical form and style, with arbitrary semiotic patternings, is possible. This implies that strict adherence to the historical frame of a play or dramatic work is subverted by the incursion of allusions and references to contemporary and even futuristic ideas and visual images. In effect, these act as a capricious reference point for critically evaluating an historical period or using an historical period as a counterpoint for contemporary issues. In our current show of 2007 (in production), a musical titled Waltzing with Matilda, the setting and characters reflect the period of the mid 1800s in Tasmania and Melbourne, and the post-convict experience. Juxtaposed to this will be the use of video material that acts as a visual commentary on the stage action, constructed textually from contemporary political references and social allusions. A contemporary and a period time frame are thus juxtaposed to created a mediated political theatre.
Thirdly, there is a use of parody and inter-textuality. Blank parody is a key modus operandus in postmodern work because it borrows the ‘shell’ of past styles and forms and reinvents these styles and forms with new content and ideas. The use of parody related to television in a theatrical space could, for example, be particularly aimed at the perceived audience for whom television could constitute a shared experience and an embodied semiotics.
Media, including virtual media, are becoming increasingly interwoven and combined as a result of technological innovations and the growth of the Internet. Traditional boundaries between film, television, telephony and communications are being dissolved in what is amounting to communication revolution. So, finally, my postmodern theatre embraces this change and incorporates it into its technologies, remembering that the theatre performance space is intrinsically also a technological space, with its props, lights, scenery and gadgets. It is a space where an imaginative consciousness combines with a technological consciousness to produce the performance. In other words, the convergence of technologies and theatre traditions is creating the emergence of a new theatre consciousness: what could be termed a techno-dramatic fusion. Indeed, in my theatre we have practitioners who are interested in film, photography and animation working alongside people from a traditional theatre background.
Beyond the immediacy of theatre practice, and the hands-on work of theatre making, there are implications of a postmodern consciousness for research into theatre and theatre practice. My theatre work is not just about creating but understanding the creation. The radical critique of modernism by Barthes, Derrida and Foucault has resulted in a questioning (even debunking) of traditional academic forms and disciplines built on the precepts of modernism. The emergence of postmodernism in the 1960s and its link with the avant-garde, and the incursion of postmodernist thinking into academic circles has meant the beginnings of a ‘melting’ of traditional academic disciplines. The amalgams produced in this ‘melting’ are surfacing, particularly in online journals and blogs, and the emergence of academic work with a distinct focus on creative output. In addition, the tendency in postmodernism to borrow and transform ideas means that cross-fertilisation of thinking is highly likely, and that the boundaries between conventional academic discourses and writing and the more creative, so-called non-academic discourses, are increasingly ambiguous.
In terms of theatre and research about theatre this would imply the inclusion of personal as well as academic discourse in the analysis of theatre, an approach that has become increasingly a part of my own practice. Therefore autobiographical, reflective and anecdotal inclusions are juxtaposed with more conventional academic analysis. There is a possibility that academic researcher and creative practitioner are co-extensive and inter-related. The voice of the researcher as practitioner can emerge, adopting both the observer (third person) and practitioner (first person) perspectives. The likelihood of paradox is not seen as problematic but as possibility. In my theatre we practice such research as both a way of enhancing our productions and as a way of forging a future in which we develop and adapt to the needs of our community. In this sense research becomes essential for our future.
The implications of theatrical action research or practitioner research for theatre and theatre research are significant. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that there has been obsessive focus in the last twenty years on theories about theatre, rather than research based resolutions to the problems of theatre practice. Julian Meyrick (2003, 242) of the Melbourne Theatre Company, while not opposed to theoretical speculations, suggests that
Another way of saying this is that the academy must focus on theatre as a professional whole, not just a bundle of culturally specific aesthetics.
Indeed, Welton (2003) suggests that theory and practice more properly go together in theatre research. From the point-of-view of university theatre academics and practitioners working within theatre organisations, there could be abounding possibilities in engaging with an on-going and active practitioner research program, one in which the oft-applied dichotomy of subject-object is dissolved. It is my belief, both as someone interested in academic research and as a theatre practitioner, that studying and doing theatre are not mutually exclusive and can be combined, even though I acknowledge potential for paradox and the possibility of issues in such practice. Practitioner research, from my experience, is often accompanied by issues of integrity and conflicts of interest that must be identified and confronted. In doing research in my own company, in offering the reader one way of doing practice-based research, there were questions asked about how the data of such research would be used and how this data could be of political advantage to me in the company. My politics, my research goals and my creative goals cannot, indeed should not, be separated.
One of the key ideas that has shaped my thinking in regard to research and especially concerning an exploration of a postmodern aesthetic in my theatre community is liminality. Giroux and McLaren (1994) have written about a younger generation caught on the border between the monolithic idealism of modernism (‘Truth, justice and the American way’) and the fragmentation of truth that the so-called postmodern age has brought. While I am uncomfortable with the notion of periodising the postmodern, I nevertheless acknowledge the possibility that absolutes are being dissolved and the prescribed in-and-out boundaries taken as the proprieties of good taste and practice are jettisoned or modified.
Postmodern liminality can be conceived as this “melting” experience across a multiplicity of boundaries. The ultimate epistemological effect is a web-like landscape of constituents that intersect at many points but never at an ultimate point. This landscape is etched and erased in a shifting kaleidoscope. While the term ‘liminality’ was initially used in anthropology to point to a period of transition between one state of being and another (Dolgin, Kemnitzer, and Schneider, 1977) in the postmodern sense this transition phase is often suspended or elongated, and the periodicity typical of its classical use hardly applies.
For theatre and dramaturgy the notion of ‘postmodern liminality’ appears to have several inferences. Firstly, contexts for dramatic expression are radicalized and subverted, so unusual theatre spaces or a radical arrangement of spaces in a conventional theatre are part of postmodern experimentation. Indeed, my company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ended up being performed in a shed with the rustic context reinforced by the mooing of cows outside. Peter Brook’s work during the 1960s has been an antecedent and an inspiration for my postmodern experimentation with space, even unconventional space (Brook, 1968). As Brook was well aware, layered psychological spaces and unexpected contexts for theatre subvert the spatial unity typical of a naturalistic stage design, and unusual performance contexts subvert treasured notions of theatricality. Secondly, the division between audience and performers is blurred as audience and performer interact and begin to share a common experience and explore issues together. The postmodern political theatre is thus a more democratic theatre built on the perspectivism of postmodern thinking. Finally, combinations of different theatrical performance genres are juxtaposed and intertwined. It could be, for instance, that dance is juxtaposed to monologue or comedy provides a repartee with melodrama. Genre and form are positioned to cross-pollenise and subvert conventional notions of narrative to form a new and rich liminality. Let us suppose, for example, that a dancer works with an actor: that movement is combined with words or monologue to create a hybrid speech and movement form.
My postmodern liminal theatre is one in which there is a playfulness with the boundaries and the consciousness that have shaped theatre since Classical times. There is an overt mischievousness with style, form and textuality and a wilful experimentation with boundaries that creates at once an exciting theatre and a theatre of danger. I have faced both the excitement and the danger in the grounded world of doing an experimental theatre in a community context.
There is danger that can emerge in creating a hybrid postmodern theatre of experimentation, of liminality. This danger involves the possibility that the surface or appearance of the aesthetic project becomes all-consuming and the resultant theatre abandons its political project and no longer has anything substantial to say. During the 1960s, Debord (1994, 1: 1, 4) coined the term ‘society of the spectacle’, to evoke the idea that
all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation…The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Likewise, in his seminal work, Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard (1984) decries the notion of the referent: that representation has any essential reality behind it. According to Baudrillard, we create our own illusions, our own simulations (our simulacra) that mask the absence of reality. So his species of postmodernism (one that I regard as pernicious) is about the artificial: "put-ons", "dress-ups", "make-over", and a culture of surface with a void beneath. To Baudrillard the caprice of play is important here. Simulation, such as seen in “Disney Land”, or in Australia “Dreamworld” (Symes, 1995), evokes a culture of play and experimentation with the surface of human experience and imagination (Shaffer, 1996). In his most contemporary writing Baudrillard suggests that in our fast-paced world “simulacra have been absorbed by reality” and “the simulacra now hides, not the truth but the fact that there is none” (1995). Though he denies the claim that he is overly pessimistic, Baudrillard’s simulacra is the dark postmodern virtual world that is denuded of any indignation, for indignation is a sure sign that there is some truth, some sense of moral order, no matter how transitory and incomplete. Personally, I cannot imagine a theatre without indignation, since it is the foundational stuff of a theatre of critique and involves a passion for the issues of a community. While indeed my theatre involves artifice, it is not without substance.
Despite my reservations about loss of a genuine subjective voice, however, Baudrillard’s ideas have significant implications for postmodern theatrical expression and mediality in my theatre. So, for example, there is a more significant foregrounding of the image over the word in our theatre practice. The look, the ‘surface’, of our constructed realities becomes pivotal place for theatrical exploration. Theatre-as-display is the outcome of this notion of a constructed imagistic and mediated theatre. Ben Elton’s We will Rock You is a recent example of a mainstream commercial musical in which staging, technology and appearance become a more important factor in expression than characterization and plot. Showcasing the music of the British rock band Queen, the musical is described by a reviewer from The Guardian as “this hi-tech extravaganza” (Logan, 2002). While acknowledging the potential for triviality in this theatre-as-display, to create a more visual and physical theatre has exciting semiotic possibilities and has the potential to connect with an audience imbued with the sensibilities of mass media.
Nevertheless, I must personally decry the emergence of the spectacle as a major theatrical event, or what one could call theatre-as-event, if that is all it is—an event. In this postmodern turn on theatre we, as audience, go to an event not to see a theatrical work but to be part of a larger-than-life artifice. Easily coming to mind is the work of Barry Humphries in his creation of the Dame Edna Everidge character. In this example, going to the show becomes more important than going to a show. It is the spectacle that is Dame Edna Everidge as so-called housewife superstar and icon, rather than the comedy and satire of the work, which impels attention (See McCallum, 1998). It is ‘her’ embodiment of the notion of the ‘successful Australian export’ that legitimizes ‘her’ place as myth and event at the same time. Yet, however valuable the work of Barry Humphries might be as an art form and as an iconic representation of what is deemed to be quintessentially Australian, in a sense it also undermines the role of community in the creation of theatre, since the concerns of such a theatre are not localised, nor are they an embodiment of a more open textuality and dialogic process. Indeed, the theatre of the spectacle, often seen in major public events and frequently in the type of commercial theatre experience promoted by Capital, there is the potential for a dull reinforcement of sanctioned values and a sharing in the values of consumption (Firat & Dholakia, 1998). This is the bleak end of the postmodern aesthetic, an end that suggests that theatre is captive, not free. It certainly is not my theatre.
Rather than a theatre that reinforces the expectations of the social order, my theatre is one in which our values, indeed our very ethical foundations, are interrogated and problematised. This postmodern consciousness expresses incredulity about a universal ethics and an uncertainty about taken-for-granted ethical principles (Lyotard, 1984). Generally speaking, postmodern ethics, by contrast to Classical, traditional, Marxist and modernist thinking, is built on the concept of ‘relativism’: the idea that universality (this transcendent form or substance from Classical ethics) is a myth and our values are relative or localised to culture and society (Bauman, 1993), or 'pocketed', as I discussed earlier. There are no grand narratives (such as ‘progress’ or ‘the emergence of the worker’) or transcendental concepts that bind all cultures and individuals, only smaller, more circumspect, stories that have meaning in a particular circumstance (Best, 1996; Best & Kellner, 1991). There are only metaphors and paradigms that parallel our experiences and our deepest wish for order and unity. This means that all points-of-view are equally valid (Westacott, 2004), though not all positions may be equally sanctioned. In sum, there is, theoretically, an incredulity about an ethics that claims to be all-encompassing or universal. So, in doing a theatre that can make ethical claims, one must work with the perspective that this is an ethics or this is a possible ethics.
However, this ‘relativism’ is a rather vague and rubbery concept in that it can be made to accept anything and fit everything. It has the potential to dissolve morality into arbitrary personal tastes, idiosyncratic fantasy, and social whims. This is to deny the felt need for moral positions, and it also has the potential to justify a place of passivity in regard to universal acknowledged breeches of fundamental ethical principles, such as genocide or protecting our environment, for example. This places my postmodern theatre in a quandary or crisis: as a theatre that is perspectival in approach, how much of a universal approach to ethics or what types of ethical action can be accepted before this perspectival philosophy collapses? If my theatre is indeed a 'pocket' of thought and practice (as I suggested earlier in this essay), how much does our 'pocket' differ from or run into conflict with other 'pockets'? Indeed, is a 'transpocket' or 'interpocket' ethics possible and what shape would it take?
In choosing an ethical approach in our theatre company, there are at least two distinct species of postmodern ethics that could inform our practice. There is one species that one might call a ‘moderate postmodern ethics’ that enforces the idea that all these different, relative, conflicting ‘truths’ are legitimate in their own right, within their own internal contextual logic. There is truth, even if it is localised and contingent ('pocketed'), but one must not take this for the Truth. Such an ethical position is probably the basis of contemporary multicultural Western societies. This position is built on the notion of tolerance, one in which, as Michael Polanyi (1958, 1975) has argued, contains multiple paradigms, a miscellaneous array of claims and a diverse set of communities. This also reflects a fairly pragmatic view of ethics and ethical responsibility. It is an ethics that emerges out of the notion of ‘what works best for most people is right’. It is not a view of ethics in which there is a moral duty to a metaphysical necessity beyond context and what we know, as conceptualized in the pragmatism of Richard Rorty (1982, 1991, 1993). It is one grounded in our language and our experience. For the most part it is this species of postmodern outlook that has shaped what we do in our theatre. We are not a neutral theatre, but I hope we are at least a theatre that is self-aware of its ethics and its biases and finds a space for multiple positions to be heard and respected. Consensus with and tolerance of differing and alternative views, or 'pockets' that may adopt another perspective on particular issues, are the democratic principles that underlie our practice.
But there is also more radical postmodernism, one derived from a Nietzschean account (built on the pronouncement of God's death, and so by consequence, the death of Truth, with a capital T) (See, Jalava, 2001). This radical nihilist postmodern position advocates that we ought to do away with the idea of the 'legitimate' altogether, no matter what the culture, religion or discourse, and no matter how unreservedly an ethical position is sanctioned. There are no principles, imperatives or utilitarian concerns that have overriding ascendancy. And this, I think, moves postmodern ethics to the precipice, where ‘for-myselfness' is the only claim to being legitimate that one can make.
The consequence of this position is that no discourse is privileged, meaning that the cultural fundamentals that all of us rely on, be they in religion, or faith in science and technology, are only contingent, not fixed. There are no absolute answers, and no set of beliefs can be imposed on others without suppression and marginalisation. Values and ethics become an arena for debate, consensus and dialogue but are never conclusive. This matches with contemporary experience of the world: a complex array of cultural and historical pastiche, with competing value positions. It also fits the observation that our view of so-called reality is a construction through the various media and sources of information that dominate our lives (Fiske, 1990). ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ become constructions that are driven by political concerns and the wish for power and control.
In summary, in ethics there seems to be three distinct positions available on any issue: the ‘idealist’ position, coming out of Classical Platonic notions of an essence beyond the substance of the world, where there is a supra-contextual, universal set of values or morals that apply to all situations; the ‘pragmatist’ position in which the practical working of ethics, consensus or negotiation in context is the focus, though with the recognition that there may be some universal truths, and there is certainly truth within individual contexts; and the ‘nihilist’ position, which is highly incredulous about so-called truths, and contends that all truth is contingent upon context and personal choice, and is driven by the discourses that shape our perceptions.
The application of a particular postmodern ethical pattern to theatre presents difficulty for theatre practitioners. It creates a sense of angst that we all feel in doing theatre and connecting it with a living and vocal community who also have their views and their values. I know that in creating theatre my politics and biases become more evident. It seems that theatre is incisive in cutting to your ultimate worldview. Moreover, in establishing characters, themes and ideas in plays, one is often fashioning an ethical position, and this fashioning can function sub-textually in a work. Indeed, the whole notion of a political theatre, a theatre formed on Brechtian notions, for example, might be one in which stances are taken and certain positions and discourses are privileged. In making political theatre, or in creating a forum for politics-in-community, there is the potential to be didactic and to foist certain standpoints on an audience, even inadvertently. The modernist univocal approach is often much to the fore, even in work with the claim of being postmodern. Theatre takes very seriously its right to speak, and in speaking there are value positions that are sanctioned and political agendas that are enacted. However incredulously one may think about advocating a sanctioned ethics, in practice remaining neutral is close to impossibility.
So, is it possible to have a postmodern ethics or a perspectival philosophy in a postmodern theatre? To answer this question one must come back to the fundamental difficulty about what theatre is and what theatre should do. To me, theatre is primarily about creative expression and the work of a creative community, not necessarily about deliberative ethical construction or political discourse, even if there is a desire to evoke a political response or to be the pedagogue for an audience. Of course, part of theatre’s function (part of creative expression) is to interpret and to critique political and social culture— that has always been its role, so the bleak nihilist ethics described above is difficult to sustain in the praxis of theatre. In my theatre we feel strongly about issues of significance in society, issues of an extensive and universal significance. For example, the environment and protecting our habitats and native wildlife has been to the fore in several of our productions. We want to enter the debate as part of a broader community debate. We want to have something to say and we cannot remain neutral, since we believe this is a case where a 'transpocket' ethics could apply. However, it is not our role to be another Greenpeace and be an advocate for human rights such as Amnesty International. Nevertheless, our mission is to sensitise our community and to bring such matters to the forefront of community discourse. One children's production that I directed, titled Fire, explored the concept of conservation and awareness of the Australian bush and its animals through a narrative that was a pastiche of an aboriginal legend. Many audience members that I spoke to were significantly affected by the production, and inspired to reexamine issues of conservation and climate change, through seeing the bush from the point-of-view of the animals themselves. We were political in our pro-conservationist stance, but the audience still had (and indeed took) the right to question or critique our position.
This show typifies our belief that theatre should be educative and embody possibilities, a point that I have argued throughout this essay. But that is not the same as being so overtly political or producing a piece of feminist theatre that avowedly supports abortion, for example, without allowing the space for alternatives to emerge. Theatre not a place to inculcate in others a particular ethical stance, religious perspective or political persuasion. If one is producing a feminist piece of theatre it would be to critique, question, or problematise gender constructions and notions of gender in our culture. It would be to bring an audience out of the chimera of our gender constructions and to deconstruct such representations. To cite the abortion example again, a postmodern feminist theatre might examine who controls the female body in our culture (and why), rather than engendering a pro-choice stance, one that is especially modernist and early feminist. And if it does take a pro-choice stance, there should be a space for other positions to be heard or articulated.
Thus, my postmodern theatre would adopt both the pragmatist and the nihilist ethical positions (or somewhere in between) in not trying to impose a moral exposition from afar but drawing the understanding about ethical questions out of the context in which these questions are discussed. It is focused on the actors and the audience and the understandings that both bring to ethical concerns that emerge out of a theatrical event. Such a theatre would allow an audience to question absolutist and authoritarian positions, even the positions that we present, and to engage with the possibilities of other perspectives. It is a theatre in which universal ethics and more localised 'pocketed' moral positions are held in creative tension to make a theatre of possibilities and a dramatic space of dialogue. It is a theatre in which we, as a theatre community, affirm our own values while still acknowledging the differences with other communities. In my own local geographical area, there has been much recent dialogue between theatre companies about common concerns and values, a dialogue that has been nonexistent in the past. What is evident is how theatre communities that appear to be so different in practice and approach share many ethical positions and find common ground in seeing the theatre as transformative in the broader culture and community. It is this openness to dialogue and difference that prevents the collapse of a perspectival approach, and this is built on the ability to negotiate and to find consensus.
Traditionally, theatre has operated through an ‘inside/outside’ paradigm: that is, theatre (composed of production people and actors) has been a closed world of interpretation that is brought to an audience for the audience’s edification and entertainment. The postmodern theatre disrupts this paradigm with openness to community and to audience interpretation and input, indeed to the diversity of other communities, as I have argued throughout this essay. In the case of ethical concerns this means that the role of theatre is to invest ethical decision-making in the audience: empowering the audience to identify their own values and views and to unearth their own stance. This does not mean that my theatre has nothing to say. We have taken a position on ethical issues on numerous occasions, but it has been made clear to the audience that this is our position and that they are allowed to (and even encouraged to) question that position. A case in point is our 2004 production of Jekyll and Hyde (discussed above). In the production, we took an especially firm position against the trade in body parts around the world. However, one audience member that I spoke to argued the alternate position: how can such a trade be wrong when it can save a person's life, no matter if others profit by it? When shared with the cast, this became a fascinating point of debate.
To sum up this essay, when I speak of a postmodern theatre consciousness in my practice as a theatre maker, I think of a consciousness that is sceptical of the Cartesian rationalism of the Enlightenment, that is open to textuality, that repositions the modernist project, that reinvents the use of naturalistic theatrical methods and creates a political theatre that is not driven by the binary categories of Marxist or early feminist thinking but values dialogue and community and the embeddedness of self (Grenz, 1996). It is a consciousness in which subject and object are, paradoxically, positioned together, and research and practice are co-extensive. It is a state of being in which performance can be as much virtual as it is live, and it is often a layered experience in which video and other visual material are juxtaposed to live stage action. This consciousness exists deliberatively in a community where the audience and the ensemble participate more holistically in creating the performance and in arguing about ethics, as they examine the many ways we can express what it is to exist as a human on this planet with its multiplicity of cultures, perspectives and problems.
Somehow, though, having written all that has preceded and having described my postmodern practice and consciousness, I cannot help thinking that postmodernism, with its radicalisation of form and practice, may have run out of steam, and its project of creating the new and reinventing the old is now mainstream and has become so normalised that it has lost its radical edge. David Bate (2005) reminds us that ‘postmodernism’ was the name given to this phenomena of ‘new’ representations coming into existence by more or less explicit reference to other representations, not to any first order reality. It was like that sometimes dizzying experience of looking up a word in a dictionary, only to find its meaning referred to an equally unfamiliar word that you then have to look up, which in turn refers you yet another unfamiliar term and so on. Post-modern culture enjoyed this play with signs of never-ending reference, where the more you played the less anyone seemed to know what reality it was touching, as they perhaps once imagined they had. The theory of postmodernism was that these types of process and strategy had also reached mass culture in epidemic proportions, such that we had all lost touch with what we thought reality to be.
It seems that we could be moving, and or have moved, into new debate about social reality and the values that undergird who we are and what we do (see Fekete, 1988). Certainly, the edifice of postmodernism is still ever present and dictates the aesthetic of so much popular culture, be it theatre, television, film or popular music. But could it just be that what my community and I are creating is now a post-postmodern theatre? This theatre may exist in a state in which modernist and rationalist approaches compete with more experimental and postmodern ones. There is a revisiting and rethinking of old, often rejected, positions. Because the postmodern and the experimental are not so new any more, the drive towards finding the possible means returning to the old and the forgotten? Perhaps it means finding a new experimental theatre.
If, as a company, we have moved, then our post-postmodern or after-postmodern theatre might consider the following revisitings in creating a practice that has not jettisoned postmodernism but moved beyond it. It could be, for example, that there is a more overt affirmation of the integrity of the script and the writer. Though not denying the postmodern and post-structuralist notion of the social constructedness of all texts, there is a competing idea that texts, such as theatre texts, have an integrity, singularity and purposefulness that should not be denuded, even if these texts live within a community of readers with multiple interpretations. In losing the vision of the playwright within the discourses of a theatre community, we could be denying the specialised skills and traditions of the dramatist that have a long tradition.
A corollary of the previous point is that individual autonomy and originality, which have come under strong attack by postmodern thinkers, are reinstated or at least re-examined. In the postmodern, originality is not possible in the cornucopia of other texts and ideas. In the after-postmodern theatre, while the inter-connectedness of texts is not denied, the possibility of the wholly new is put back on the agenda. Part of this rethinking of the dramaturgical agenda is the revisiting of those over-arching narratives that were so especially criticized but are particularly prized by communities looking for hope in a fractured world. Climate change is one emerging universal narrative that needs to be engaged with by theatre.
In our theatre we may even look to some form of recursion to old forms and practices which are valued in and of themselves. It may be possible, for example, that a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard done naturalistically is followed in the same company by a highly experimental and postmodern rendition of Macbeth, thence to a old-fashioned audience-booing melodrama from Victorian theatre. The retro is valued not for what it can contribute in juxtaposition to the whole but as a discrete part in the whole, in and of itself.
We may also imbibe a renewed affirmation of theatre as a transformative agent in a particular community and in society at large. The epic political theatre of Brecht has not died but been repositioned. It is possible for theatre to have something to say without being didactic or only embracing nihilist playfulness, as discussed above. A radical critique of society has always been the possibility of theatre, even if it has overtones of modernism and Marxism. In the post-postmodern theatre it keeps this place, and it lives within the practical realities of a contingent and demanding society in which economic survival is as important as creative output.
Our theatre, as part of a living community, also brings back the carnivalesque: weaving the dramatic as part of the grounded celebrations of the wider community. In this regard it is interesting that my company has taken control over the running the local annual festival in the community, so that we see the carnival, the broader arts and the dramatic as being part of the one cultural mission. In my theatre we are not afraid of being mission-orientated and of using theatre and culture as a means of promoting social change.
On a personal level I have taken a renewed interest in the embodied experiences of the actor in theatrical work. The postmodern aesthetic tended to focus on form and combination without experience. As I have well and truly discovered in my own practice, the surface and the visual tend to be emphasised over the intuitive and the internal state. The after-postmodern theatre could hark back to the work of Stanislavski (1967), Meyerhold (Braun, 1969) and Gotowski (1968), in understanding and applying the ‘in the flesh experience’ of the actor, the tangible, the practical that works. It would move forward to understanding the ontology of acting and the affect of performance space on the body of the actor. Moreover, in my own practice I want to place a greater emphasis on the performance and the presence of the performer (the poor theatre, to use Grotowski’s idea), rather than the spectacle, even though the spectacle is a part of our work in the company.
The postmodern theatre is most certainly alive and well and existing in a theatre near you, including my own. It exists in ‘pockets’ in all its diversity and species of form and practice. But perhaps it has now moved beyond that consciousness to a place of rediscovery of what was lost and imagination of what could be new.
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