Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 2, July 2001
_______________________________________________________________
Autobiographical Spectatorship
This paper addresses the role of
interpretation … and it does so through a questioning of the role of text in
contemporary performance. By 'text', if only for the purposes of this paper's
opening remarks, I am referring to that which is intended to be spoken aloud ...
to the text as words rather than the texture of the whole. To the ‘dramatic’
rather than the ‘performance’ text. The paper has a generic theme, which
concerns the obligation within university departments to introduce students of
Performance to contemporary rather than mainstream practice. It is hoped that during the course of this paper these
seemingly discrete areas will coalesce into a unified argument.
This paper will suggest that
developments in professional performance are inextricably linked to scholarly
experimentation and that innovation in theatre owes much to the university
studio as a laboratory of trial, error and creative discovery. It may well be
the case that the greatest evil (and I choose the word with some care) of the
modular system is that its more rigidly structured assessment criteria combine
to work against the notion of progression via
a natural and organic process of related study.
The greater the compartmentalisation of
neatly packaged courses, the less likely the opportunity is afforded the student
to get things wrong for the right reasons. Independent modules, with their
tendency to preclude cross-fertilisation, chance and the circuitous routes of
the enthusiastically idiosyncratic student, have an in-built bias towards the
safe and formulaic. Modules, irrespective of the subject, thrive on a tenuous
and ubiquitous 'equivalence', on a belief in parity defined by learning
outcomes, aims and objectives, which, by the precision of their vernacular, lean
heavily towards the prescriptive in place of the provocative. The management of
these modules likewise seems at times to amount to little more than job-creation
schemes for ex-academics, keen to swell the coffers with one-off courses for
sale to the inquisitive non-specialist. The problem of the modular system is
that the most surprising and valuable discoveries are often made whilst seeking
answers to an entirely different brief.
At best, the relationship between
university courses in performance and innovative professional practice functions
on a reciprocal commitment to work which is at the frontiers of knowledge. This
investigative emphasis has resulted, in the last fifteen years, in some of the
most radical and influential companies stemming from academic rather than
vocational courses in the subject. [1] Essentially,
vocational drama schools concentrate on the 'how' of acting and not the 'why' of
performance, implicitly reinforcing rather than challenging mainstream practice.
The relatively new hybrid courses offering a degree qualification as an aspect
of accredited drama training, in keeping with their traditional roles as
providers for the 'legitimate' stage, prefer to approach ‘experimental
performance’ as historical genre and little else.
Theatre history, like the bones of the
dead, can be picked apart without fear of reproach. When Brecht said that a good
idea, badly taught, dies a long time, he can have had little idea that his own
organic, practical and often-contradictory approaches to theatre would
metamorphosise into 'Study Packs' for last minute revision. Would be staged with
slavish deference by directors clutching their Short Organums and manipulated into the alienation by numbers of the
mock-ensembles of countless undergraduate productions. Would lead to the
irreversible calcification of form into formula. We would do well to remember
Heiner Muller’s claim that to refer to Brecht without challenging him is to
betray him[2]. Derrida has shown us that we can develop
Muller’s position into the idea that to refer to any text without challenging
it is no less a betrayal.
And what of 'text'? Contemporary
performance displays a predilection towards self-reflectivity, in that the
product seeks to exemplify and even foreground the process. This makes the
theatrical essentially theoretical. Notions of the mechanics of text are thus
central to the ways in which it may be used. If text is taken to be the body of
messages bound up in chosen codes in order to create an experience of
signification, then it follows that anything spoken is text. Anything spoken
within the theatrical frame forms one element of the performance text. As
Barthes has argued, 'text' can only exist in expression, inside a system of
production which is opening itself to the dynamics of interpretation[3].
Not only is text all that is uttered, but only that which is engaged at that
time in a process of signification and signified can be known as 'text’. The
playscript on the shelf then, whilst inevitably authored, can no longer stand as
a text. The script in performance is a text with multiple authors. Deference to
the writer has given way to a tacit approval of directorial and performative
interpretation, which has in its own turn given way to reception-theory.
This is not so much the eroding of the
authority of the author as recognition that it is no longer plausible to accept
without question that the writer's words can ever speak for themselves.
'Meaning’ is generated by the dialogue between the one who sees and that which
is observed, between the experiencer and the experienced; interpretation is not
a deviation from meaning, it is
meaning, because all meaning is interpretive. The possibility of a core of
absolute meaning in the text, either written or performed, has disappeared.
Deconstruction then emerges as the tension between the unreliability of
presentation and the unpredicatbility of response.
Watching performance is an exercise in
the making of value judgements. Despite the best (sic)
intentions of directors, spectators choose what to look at and they choose what
to see. More than this, they choose how to
see. The eye may move but the ‘I’ is fixed. We believe what we see when we
believe in the things we are seeing. There is more at stake here than mere
suspension of disbelief: it is an acceptance that all acts of belief
are acts of interpretation. Contemporary performance seeks to expose as
false the solid-seeming ground on which the ‘truth’ of any moment might seem
to exist. This is not a contradiction. In telling lies performance tells the
truth, because so many of our truths are lies.
That which is not a lie is only ever that which we believe to be the truth.
Truth and reality are thus
subject to plasticity, and contemporary performance reveals this ambiguity
in presentation. Truths, like theories, do not always stand the test of time. It
is within this spirit of temporary reliability that spectators are increasingly
asked to engage with current practice.
The spectators’ inevitable
interventions in the spectacle are manifest in the personal pronoun. This is an
acknowledgement that the ‘I’ has an overt function. We need to remember
Barthes’ warning, however, that the ‘I which approaches the text is already
itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or more
precisely, lost.’[4] This applies to the performance
maker’s ‘I’ no less than to the ‘I’ of a spectator. The sense we send
is the sense we make. This sense is flawed and incomplete, but only inasmuch as
it is born of partiality. Spectatorship will always reveal more about the
spectator than the spectacle. Approached thus, the choices we make as to what we
omit are as significant as the ways that we deal with what remains, and
partiality is accepted as an act of revelation.
When Geraldine Harris writes of Rose
English’s The Double Wedding she
explains that ‘the theoretical terrain in which this piece appears to be
placed, in and of itself, suggests that in the final analysis this is a show
which cannot be interpreted, only described.' [5] This is a
negation of the fact that all description is interpretative. What it is that
Harris chooses to describe is the result of an interpretative act, not vice
versa. To suggest otherwise is to argue for a type of factual reporting that
we know is impossible, and, ultimately, undesirable. What makes Harris’
reading of English as interesting as it is is the perspective she brings. As
‘drama’ has its origins in the Greek verb ‘to do’, so ‘theory’, like
‘theatre’, comes from the verb ‘to see’: we can trace both theatre and
theory to the word ‘theatron’, meaning ‘a place to view’. The place that
we view from is as central to our findings as the subject on which we fix our
gaze.
If we accept that any reading of any
culturally manufactured product, of any art, is an act of interpretation, then
we are also recognising that the ‘meaning’ of the work is interpreted, and,
as such, that all meaning is interpretative and personal. [6]
Every performative act can be consumed in a multiplicity of ways and the ways in
which performance is interpreted are subject to innumerable variations of
perspective. Meaning can no longer be discussed without referring to the
question of who reads the work, of where,
of when, of how. In this
sense, notions of cultural reception, of aesthetics that are inseparable from
the vagaries of reading are central to all aspects of interpretation.
Gadamer argues a position of moderate
relativism, wherein understanding is always one’s own. In this way,
interpretation is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, it simply ‘is’.
Prejudice becomes a positive force, to the point where Gadamer can claim that
Prejudices are
not necessarily unjustified and erroneous,
so that they
invariably distort the truth. In fact, the
historicity of
our existence entails that prejudices, in the
literal sense
of the word, constitute the initial directedness
of our whole
ability to experience. [7]
Prejudices, or ‘preconceptions’,
shape the way we start to view, and any subsequent rationalisation is
conditioned by this first response. The circle is thus interactive and
anticipatory in nature, with the spectator, approaching the performance with the
inevitability of projecting certain meanings onto and into the work. This
happens in a variety of ways: the theatre space (or the space(s) designated for
the theatre) attended; the price of admission; the dress-code required; the
previous work of either the creative personnel involved or the ‘theatre’
itself; any reviews encountered; one’s previous and/or abiding predilection
towards certain types of work. [8] Gadamer uses the term
‘satisfactory understanding’ to describe the end-result of this relationship
between that which is seen and the one who sees; referring to a mediation
between the author and the reader which nevertheless stops some way short of
licensing an infinity of meanings. To Gadamer’s mind, the intention of the
author plays a considerable part in this construction of the satisfactory
response.
Gadamer has his adversaries, notably E.
D. Hirsch Jr., who prefers to speak of ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’
interpretations. For Hirsch, the job of scholarship is to somehow arrive at the
author’s own intended meaning.b [9] In this way, the
‘correct’ meaning of, for example, Shaw’s Major
Barbara or Robert Wilson’s Einstein
on the Beach would always lie within their own ‘authorial’ intention,
rather than relating to it in the Gadamerian sense. Where Gadamer embraces
subjectivity, Hirsch favours the assumed objectivity of meaning arrived at
through archival evidence and literary rather than dramatic excavation. [10]
The text is thus a puzzle for the scholar to solve, with, presumably, the prize
of meaning as the ultimate goal ... a goal which is only ever attainable by the
scholar. Both Gadamer’s and Hirsch’s positions are exposed and subsequently
attacked by Roland Barthes. [11] For Barthes the author’s
voice is banished entirely from the equation of meaning, thus
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single
‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the
Author-God)
but a multi-dimensional space in which
a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and
clash. The
text is a tissue of quotations drawn from
innumerable
centres of culture .... Once the Author is
removed, the
claim to decipher a text becomes quite
futile. To
give a text an Author is to impose a limit on
that text, to
furnish it with a final signified, to close
the writing.
Such a conception suits criticism very well,
the latter
then allotting itself the important task of
discovering
the Author beneath the work: when the
Author has
been found, the text is ‘explained’ –
victory to the
critic. [12]
There is more at stake here than a
surface understanding of semiotics, an ability to rationalise, both in a
directorial and analytical fashion the signification of signs. The realisation
that interpretation is always already an act of re-creation stems from the
polysemic nature of performance itself. The codes on which performances are
built are complex and, semiotics notwithstanding, the ways in which these codes
are deciphered are never absolute. [13]
That which some will regard as the exemplification of an ‘incorrect’ reading
is embraced by others as an exemplar of a post-semiotic world of polysemia.
Italian art critics coined the term inesspressionismo
to describe that art which, through the creation of moments of loaded ambiguity,
aspires to a state whereby it means whatever the viewer chooses it to mean. For
those of us who regard the Derridaen idea that things may not mean what their
creator intended as an eminently acceptable philosophical positioning, inesspressionismo, or inexpressionism, can still seem like a leap
into an excess of liberality. In reality, inexpressionism differs little from
the negotiated readings inherent in all forms of communication, with the
perceiver incorporating ‘intended’ and ‘accidental’ responses to any
given subject. As indeterminate works, performances cannot but leave spaces that
the spectator will fill in in the process of spectating; the spectator,
therefore, fixes that meaning in the
process of spectatorship. That the work means something else to other
spectators, as it will to the creator and any participants, is to be embraced.
Inexpressionism fails as a philosophical
as well as a critical phenomenon because of the impossibility of creating an
entirely ‘open’ text: indications always exist, whether they are recognised
as such or not. If the text is never open then it follows that subjectivity is
always compromised by indications. Performance draws on the preconceptions of a
spectator. There is no idealised watcher. A spectator is guided by the structure
of the performance, which suggests that the range of interpretations, although
infinite in the subtlety of their variations, is chiefly situated within the
artist’s version of events. [14] Meanings are suggested,
although not demanded, by the rigidity or otherwise of the codes in operation,
and these codes will, for the most part, be manipulated by the artist, by the
creator of the work.
‘The spectator is the decoder whose
code overlaps that of the performer, the encoder’[15],
and the stage figure is only one element in the set of signs that offer
signification. The stage action is also only a partial sign. A number of other
codes convey what it is that is happening, and how it is that this might be
read: the set, the lighting, music, the space in which the work is performed.
From a directorial perspective, no one of these enjoys an a
priori status over the others.
As the making of performance is a
process plagued with doubt, so too is the process of spectatorship. Of
particular significance to the spectator may be those elements that remained
(and remain) unknown to the makers/performers. And the spectator is as capable
of determining the meaning of a performance as its creator(s). We should heed
Zygmunt Bauman’s assertion that the spectator ‘understands as much as his
knowledge allows him…. If the author sends his signals from an island whose
interior he has not and could not explore in full, the reader is a passenger who
walks the deck of a sailing ship he does not navigate. The meaning is the
instant of their encounter.’ [16]
All performance can be regarded as
autobiographical, inasmuch as all performers will bring something of an
autobiographical self to their work [17]. This phenomenon
will differ in degree from one performer to another, but authorial presence,
shaped by personal history and intent, will remain. In this way all performance
is a document of the discoursal self. Artists
make work not as a result of being divorced from the structures that determine
human behaviour, but precisely because they choose to enter into a world where
they are able to make performative that choice given to each of us through
biography and society. [18] As
such, performance emerges as the outcome of an always specific and individual
response to a body of determinants. The artist operates through choice, and the
choices available are no more or less determined than the impetus and ability to
work through the choices made.
Any work that makes a claim for truthfulness is compromised
at source by the inevitability of its mediation. The truth in performance, no
less than in performance writing, cannot be regarded as either absent or present
… the differences between production and reception make any such claim
redundant. We might argue that the
here-and-nowness of performance makes it more ‘truthful’ than the there-and-thenness
of writing; however, performance is no less subject to mediation than is written
text. Any apparent immediacy is illusory. The moment is loaded, and only partly
by the performance maker. To say that activities take place in the same context
in which they are read is to disregard the fact that the frame around
performance is always also a contextualising framework within the spectator.
This takes us some way towards an
understanding of truth’s adulterated transference - as an omnipresent act of
spectatorial deconstruction – it also throws into doubt the possibility of
truth having any currency for the performer. If truth has no possibility of
‘successful transmission’, then its value as currency is reduced; equally,
we have to question the extent to which a performance maker has an adequate
understanding of how and why performative choices have been made. What we think
is the truth may not always be so.
‘Every
practical procedure … presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind’. [19]
With the practice of performance, theories - some of the theories of
postmodernism, for example - are part of the conceptual apparatus of making
work. In this way, performances are as much dialogues with the makers’ selves
as a dialogue between the performance and
its spectators. Performance then is a record of ‘a’ truth and not ‘the’
truth. It is a characteristic of language that webs of meaning are generated and
that any and all texts are necessarily self-contradictory. Performances are no
different. They are, in Wittgenstein’s terms, language games. [20]
Works which, in seeking to utilise the language of performance, are handicapped
‘because the attempt to do so itself constitutes a (further) language game.’
[21] For the most part, we can substitute the word
‘truth’ for ‘significance’, inasmuch as imbuing an occurrence with
significance is less problematic than regarding that same occurrence as
‘true’ and incontestable.
If we accept
that the certainty of ‘truth’ is lost to us, which is a theory rather than a fact, then
it becomes difficult to see any space beyond this for theory to occupy.
Interpretation per se relies upon
arriving at a distinction between what is offered as the surface of a text and
what is thought to exist beneath it … interpretation is in this sense the
making of a distinction between surface and depth. If all that we are able to
say is that something happened, or did
not (to take Baudrillard’s
assertions that the Gulf War never really took place) then there is little left
for theory to do. [22] If the degree zero of postmodernism
is left unchallenged, if truth is to remain as a disenfranchised concept, then
the idea of academic honesty is equally bankrupt, for we cannot believe in one
type of ‘honesty’ in a world where no truth can be said to exist.
This contradiction is a part of making
performance. The printed word has a permanence (and a status) that is denied to
the ephemerality of performance. However, the existence of live performance in
the now imbues it with a different
relationship with truth. The work seen may be illusory, but the seeing
of it, in this space and at this time, is rarely, if ever, in doubt. Readers
of words written are not usually witnesses to the process of writing. Words, no
matter how truthfully they may read, are constructed in the elsewhere, whereas
performances, no matter how other they may seem, are constructed in the here and
now. Where performance charts a
wrestling with the contradictions between truth and lies that contradiction is
undermined by performance writing that functions as though truth were something
identifiable and transferable.
Contemporary performance is predisposed
towards text which aims for distance rather than empathy. For the relative
truthfulness of description rather than the sham of imitation. For a recognition
of the device of performance rather than the fake spontaneity of a form where
the aim is to hide the rehearsal.
This approach empowers the endless
alternatives of reception-theory, and this is a negation of the importance of
sub-textual analysis. Sub-text suggests that any reading which contradicts the
writer's or director's own is emphatically wrong. Sub-text implies that all we
need to know is somewhere hidden in the words. Sub-text, though interpretive,
has a logical point of closure (how many 'meanings', after all, can be
intentionally buried in the dialogue of characters?) "Who owns the
play?" is no longer a question of directorial interpretation versus
authorial intent, but a plea to be told that whilst the play might belong to the
author, the performance belongs to anyone who witnesses it, and from every point
or side of the stage.
Is it possible then to 'teach' a play?
Clearly not, in the old sense of ascribing a given 'hidden truth' to the work,
which can then be determined by an examination of established scholarly
interpretations. The text in performance belongs to the receiver and the concept
of a misreading or a misinterpretation becomes redundant. The playwright's
intentions are not so much stripped of their relevance or usefulness as included
in an ever-shifting matrix of information which, whilst denying the concept of
authorial ownership, cannot fail to recognise the writer's role in the
assemblage of given codes of fluid meaning. We would do well to remember, as
Peggy Phelan tells us, that representation will always convey considerably more
than it intends. [23]
The key
question in theatre is not ‘what is happening on stage?’ so much as ‘what
is happening to me?’ Not ‘what the butler saw’ or even ‘what the butler
is seeing or might see next’ but ‘what can I see?’ For the ‘I’ of the
spectator is inseparable from that same spectator’s ‘eye’. The
spectatorial ‘I’ is in motion from moment to moment, moving at pace but
never fully in line with the performance made ‘real’ as it is watched. In
this way, performance no more imitates life than life could be said to imitate
performance ... apparent, and even artfully designed similarities are at once
both more and less than they may seem
Theatre resists change at the same time
as it appears to embrace it. Performances are a series of conventions, and it is
only when a shared understanding of the performative codes in operation exists
between the watcher and the watched that the process of presentation and
reception aspires to ‘successful’ communication. The willingness of an
audience to suspend its collective disbelief is as integral to the 'as if' of
mimetic drama as the actors' commitment to representation. This knowledge of
convention is no less vital when dealing with contemporary performance. For,
just as we know that the poison which kills the good Sweet Prince is only potent
within the fictional content of the play, so must we realise that, in certain
areas of work, the 'play' itself is essentially without meaning. This absence of
a limited, intended meaning can work towards a prioritising of the 'event' of
performance over and above the 'object' of the play.
The reason contemporary performance
continues to reject the re-presentation of traditional practice is that this
practice seeks to present as significant that same object (the play, the theme,
the ideology) which, even in its apparent absence, has been pre-dominant since
Aristotle. Contemporary performance demonstrates a concern with the difference
between event (performance) and object (that which is being performed); this
concern results in, and indeed rests upon, the process of performing performance
rather than presenting the re-visited glorification of classicism.
This can be regarded as a form of
anti-didacticism. Anti-didacticism, however, does not amount to apoliticism. Any
performance with its roots in mass culture at the same time as its text denies
an unequivocal meaning is dealing implicitly with a process of empowering the
perceiver. One cannot be reduced to the level of passive consumership when there
is no packaged object to consume. In foregrounding an active subjectivity the
watcher becomes as vital to the event of performance as the watched.
The priorotising of the presentational
(the here and now) emphasis of performance at the expense of the literary (that
which has been) nature of theatre is a way of making clear that all performance
has to be viewed as process. All work becomes work in progress. Once this
initial tenet has been accepted, it is natural that any subsequent critical
discourse about process should be seen as an integral part of the performance
itself and not, as has been previously held, as a separate (and separating)
accompaniment.
Any and all attempted objectivity is
obsolete; for we cannot report as 'fact' that which exists in no concrete form.
When we label performance as 'abstract' or 'meaningless', we are actually
recognising a series of subtractions: narrative coherence, character, linear
activity etc., and yet we are conditioned to accept this subtraction as an
artistic inferiority. We do so as if the space where apparent logic used to sit
is somehow transformed into an inaccessible vacuum.
The performance no longer serves the
text; it is the text, the once meaning-laden object, which is now used to serve
the performance. Similarly, ‘meaning’ can no longer be regarded as something
(some thing) that exists to enhance
the lives of spectators. Something which, when communicated ‘correctly’,
will travel through time and space sans
interference.
Performance exists to encourage a tiny
percentage of the infinite number of ways of looking at a given event … to
show us certain things from a particular perspective and to invite our views.
Nothing more. Performance has no monopoly on entertainment, enlightenment,
celebration or catharsis, and there is a strong argument that it satisfies none
of these. Its continued existence is valuable because, and only because, it seeks attention and we attend … it seeks
interpretation and we interpret. The most potent performance will always be that
which facilitates the widest possible variety of interpretations, because
performance is only ever potent when it succeeds in providing us with a space in
which to look.
As with performance, so it is with
documentation. These words are presented as an accumulation of intentions. The
sentence and paragraph structures are possessed of intentionality. The font
seeks to persuade. The words, flat on the page or screen, strive to evoke ideas
about performance at the same time as they are antithetical to all that is
performative. In writing about an absence of meaning I write in order that
meaning is conveyed. In discussing performance-in-denial-of-closure I seek now
to close this paper with an emphasis that ensures my thoughts are also yours,
that the reader trusts both the teller and the tale. Where Derrida (after
Flaubert) is able to make the claim that he is writing to you without knowing
what he is going to say [24] I am claiming to be writing to
you without knowing what you are going to think.
“There is no
such thing as an objective, innocent,
primary
document. The document … is the result,
above all, of
an assemblage, whether conscious
or
unconscious, of the history, the time and the society
which have
produced it, and also of the ensuing
periods
through which it has continued to be used, even
if perhaps in
silence…. The document is a monument ….
In the end,
there is no documentary truth.
Every document
is a lie. [25]
Think what you will.
1.
1 Keefe, J (1995) A Report on the European Mime and Physical Theatre
Workshop Symposium. Moving into Performance. (M.A.G), p.24.
2.
Drain, Richard (1995) 20th Century Theatre a Sourcebook. (Routledge,
London)
3.
Barthes, Roland (1977) From Work to Text. (Fontana, London)
4.
Barthes, R. S/Z, trans. Richard
Miller, Hill & Wang, New York, 1974. p. 10
5.
Harris, G. Staging Femininities.
Manchester University Press, 1999. p. 23
6.
‘By interpretation I mean here a conscious act of the mind which
illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation.’ Sontag, S Against
Interpretation. Anchor, New York, 1988. p.5
7.
Gadamer, H. G. Philosophical
Hermeneutics (1976). London, University of California Press. p. 9.
8.
See Beckerman, B Theatre Audiences.
Routledge, London & New York, 1993.
9.
See the section on Hirsch in Bateman, A Philosophy
of Art. Routledge, London & New York, 1997.
10.
Hirsch’s views on interpretation can
be found in Validity in Interpretation,
1967. London: Yale University Press; and The
Aims of Interpretation, 1976. London: University of Chicago Press.
11.
See Image,
Music, Text. Roland Barthes. Fontana
press, London, 1977, particularly the chapter entitled The Death of the Author, pp. 142-148.
12.
ibid.
pp. 46-147.
13.
See Esslin, M Fields
of Drama. Methuen, London, 1992 and Eco, U ‘Between Author and Text’ in Interpretation
and Overinterpretation. Collini, S (ed.) Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1992.
14.
Bennett, S (1992)
15.
Reeder, Roberta. ‘An Encounter of
Codes’ (TDR. Vol. 23 p. 86)
16.
Bauman, Z Hermeneutics
and Social Science: approaches to understanding. Hutchinson, London, 1978
p. 229`
17.
See Clark, R and Ivanic, R The Politics of Writing. Routledge, London & New York, 1997 for
a discussion of the ways in which the self is always made present in one’s
writing.
18.
Bohm, D Causality
and Chance in Modern Physics. Harper & Row, New York, 1958. p.96
19.
Barry, P, 1995. p. 35
20.
Lechte, J Fifty
Key Contemporary Thinkers. Routledge, 1994. p. 247
21.
ibid
22.
For an elaboration of Baudrillard’s
thoughts, see Norris, C Uncritical Theory:
Postmodernism, Intellectuals and The Gulf War. Lawrence & Wishart, 1992.
23.
Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: the
Politics of Performance. (Routledge, London)
24.
Derrida, J ‘Telepathy’. (Trans.
Nicholas Royle. ) in Oxford Literary
Review, 10, pp.3-41
25.
De Marinis, Marco. ‘A Faithful
Betrayal of Performance: Notes on the Use of Video in Theatre’ in New Theatre Quarterly. Vol. 1 No. 4, November, 1985. p. 383