Behavior, Performance, and Performance Space

Author(s): Richard Schechner

Source: Perspecta, Vol. 26, Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990), pp. 97-102
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
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97

Behavior, Performance, and Performance Space

an interview with Richard Schechner

How do you define theater?

Let's start by saying that I think all definitions are bullshit b

perceptual nature ofa thing, especially theater. As soon as yo
you are framing it. You are putting a finiteness on it, boxing
I think theater is a set of perceptual transformations and ela
it is where we become aware of our behavior. Theater is also

I separate theater from other performance behaviors, and I d

from film. Film to me is in the domain of literature. Literature

relation to a floating text; the floating text is the audience. T

page. Film is also a fixed text. It happens to be on a spool of
is going to happen to it.

Theater consists of at least two floating texts. The actors ar

well rehearsed, but you can't guarantee their behaviors. A fil
but the behaviors encoded there are not going to change. Th
but they can't change. On the other hand, no matter how fix
mance is, it changes with every enunciation of it. It's two sh
therefore interactive and transformational events.

I think that the psychological relationship of an audience to a fi

from its relationship to a theater piece. We can see almost an

This interview was conducted by the editors in New York during the sprin

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 in theater. We can turn on the tube, basically a film image, and we can see killings.
Even a slight degree of actual violence in the theater is very disturbing and would be
interfered with. The temperature doesn't have to be quite so high in the theater to
get the involvement. The living flesh, the body, is there.

It is also important to separate theater from the other performance worlds: rituals,
sports, games, play, performance in everyday life. Dance is traditionally about
movement. Theater, of course, uses movement, but it is not about movement.

Ritual is about belief structures which incorporate narrative. In the Christian

church, narrative is used to further a kind of ideological belief structure. Theater
can also do this. They overlap, but theater basically is twice-behaved behavior,
performed for pleasure, involving narrative.

Mimesis is a subcategory of twice-behaved behavior where the figure on stage is 98

standing for something else. The mimetic theory of theater, which is based on
Aristotle, says that theater is an imitation of an action of a certain magnitude with
a beginning, a middle, and an end. It really allows us to participate in behavior
which is not as finished as in a film or book, but which is not as raw as ordinary life.

We can have a little more grasp on it, a little more experimental distance from it, a
little bit more looseness and play than we can in ordinary life. Theater is a kind of in-
between genre, and therefore dangerous. Theater can at any moment slip into life
and, of course, it can be in danger of being fossilized.

I think we privilege depth over surface, but I don't think it's a privilege we should
always grant. Surface is sometimes extremely important, especially in a sensuous art
like theater. To a certain degree the theater is a play of surfaces. Surfaces can be very
powerful, yet not mimetic.

The theater is appropriational. Theater can take something and play with it, either
mimetically or through repetition. The very act of recuperation, of remembering, of
putting back together what was dismembered, of twice-behaving distinguishes
theater.

One of the reasons performance is such a powerful paradigm in the social sciences
is that it is a model of an experimental mode. The controlled life action can be
observed from the outside and thus repeated and tested. The difference between
scientific inquiry and artistic play is not so much what's going on, but how you
treat what's going on.

Do you require the presence of an audience?

To a certain degree an audience is required, but I wouldn't be strict about that. I

have seen performances without audiences. I was the accidental audience. I
remember one night in Arizona- I was studying the Yaqui Easter ceremonies. I
was the only one there. You can say God was their audience. You could say they
were their own audience. The notion of receivership is very important, whether or

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No

ed

not there is an active receiver. Sometimes spectatorship is necessary. For ex

the home team advantage comes from the active participation of the specta

What is theater's role in society?

What is the role of a bagel at breakfast? I think that theater has a number of ro

Sports in a sense is much more ritualized. That's why we have records in sp

because in the performance of sports you have a kind of historical depth of
and an almost unchanging ritual of performance. The theater is a place to e
and play with behaviors, characters, and stories that not only fascinate us, b
disturb, shock, and change us. Almost all radical groups, whether they happ
be lesbian groups, black groups, anti-war groups, or whatever, practice thea
either directly or indirectly as a way of exploring and presenting their value
99 and as a way of educating, or gaining solidarity with their own members, an
educating other people.

Sometimes theater is a way of criticizing the establishment. During World

in Germany, they were able to stage certain Shakespearean plays whose the
very well known, but which couldn't be directly attacked, even by the Na
have seen this in other totalitarian societies where theater is a way of sendin
message. But it can be used in the opposite way of forming mainstream val
well. In both cases, theater is a form of presentation.

In modern western society theater provides a safe arena where the spectato
play with alternate behaviors. It is a place where-through behavior, which
more powerful than simply reflective thought-one can follow a chain of ac
with its consequences to its end in a way not possible in real life.

Let's take a courtroom drama-it's not so safe there. Courtroom performance

to theater in its techniques of uncovering secrets; in its narrative; even in it
oppositional way of having lawyers play the roles of the defendant and pros
The real protagonists are sitting apart, as spectators. There is a second line
spectators, thejury, and a third, thejudge, as well as the other spectators, t
You could make a nice theatrical analysis of western courtroom proceedings
way. Compared to the theater, however, the irony is less obvious and the st
too immediate and too high to allow certain ideas to drive to the end. Very o
the overt courtroom drama is to get to the bottom of things, but the real dram
cover up things, not out of venality, but to get someone off the hook.

Does theater have the ability to reverberate back into real life?

Well, it does reverberate. In the i960s and 70s, of course, I worked for that. At
one point I wanted theater to be very close to a direct political action. I am closer to
another point now. I feel theater snuggles up to rituals. It can both reaffirm
and criticize actions and beliefs. I also see theater as sheer entertainment, as sheer
yielding of pleasure, erotic in the large sense, not the narrow, sexual sense of
the word-recreational rather than procreational play. A performance is a marvelous

Richard Schechner

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 way to do that: although the actions are real, the emotions exceed the actions.
Small actions yield large emotions.

Certainly in Asian Indian philosophy, the notion of Lila-play, sport, and drama-
has a much more positive aspect to it than in Western culture. Illusion is also the
power of creation. It is not assumed that the ultimate reality is material, deep, far
away. The ultimate reality is relational. Theater is real. Theater deals with these
relational modes, metaphors, paradigms. The anti-theatrical prejudice in the West is
extremely strong-in the West we see this prejudice in aspects of the Jewish tra-
dition, and in the Augustinian Catholic tradition; and in Islam, in the Koran. Those
are philosophical systems that demand a kind of patriarchal possession of ultimate
truth which does not reside in ordinary experience, certainly not in sensuous
experience which can undercut and subvert it. Theater deals with tragedy. It also
Ioo

deals with comedy, irony, parody and travesty Folks are not very comfortable
with those things. Anybody who wants to guard a hegemonic set of values is not
very happy with irony, travesty, and parody, because they are subversive.

We are very interested in your writings about anthropological models. You give examplesfrom

places, like Bali, where traditional society does not establish boundaries between theater and

life. There is a sort of continuum. Since we are not living in that kind of society, aren't we forced
to make some boundaries?

Well, no. We agree to those boundaries' being imposed on us and continue to impose
them on ourselves. In this society we increasingly have a formalized, building-bound
theater, while in many other aspects of performance we've opened out. Not only
in the obvious things like ballfields and church processions, local festivals, and so
on, but most recently in restored villages, theme parks, Disneyworlds. These are
really performance spaces which blow apart the notion that Western theater always
takes place inside a theater building. These are probably the most active, certainly
the most popular, theatrical events going on in this country. But our elitist theater
for the production of dramas continues to be done inside fixed space theaters.
The academic establishment tends to concentrate its attention on the elite theater.

Ifyou're going to define theater by where dramas are enacted, where stories are

being told, where twice-behaved behavior occurs, then you have to include Colonial
Williamsburg, Plymouth Plantation, Disneyland. We should realize that the
Elizabethan theater was also a rough and ready place.

What should a theater for drama be?

I would start with certain functions. I'd like to have people eat in my theater as they
often do in European theaters. I'd like to have focused areas, but I would also like to
be able to have multiple areas of involvement so that we could have places where we
need not use the stage or the classic black box. In my productions we used to re-
design the space for each production, rather than use a locked-in cubic kind of space.
I'd like an empty space and enough money to spend on each production to redo
the interior. The interior has to be event specific. You decide on the particular group

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ed

4)

of people, the particular performance, the particular text you either do

and the architect or designer must work with you during the formativ
production. What I want to do is to provide for fifty years of experim

So in that sense it's not an architectural problem, it's afinancial one?

Well, it is an architectural problem because architects work for people

their names in stone, and architects also have their egos, which are bas
egos. What I want is process. I want access to the resources to do an i
had yet and you haven't had yet. So in a fundamental way I am oppose
architecture.

I would want the nondisposable aspects of this theater building to be as simple as

possible, a simple kind of nest or shell, incorporating only an assembly place for an
IOI
audience, acoustically controllable with access to food.

Your idea of having sufficient money to remake the theater sounds quite radical but isn't it actually

quite conservative? Why have the shell at all? Why not start over completely each time?

That's economic madness. You couldn't buy land each time. I do want to keep the
rain off people's heads. I would like to have control over lights. I would like to be
able to open the roof up to perform in daylight, to lay the walls down, and have the
walls come back up and the roof come back on.

Would thisfact that part of the structure would remainfrom performance to performance be an asset?

To me it is a positive thing to develop a space with your own traditions, like mine
for the Performing Garage. Use makes tradition. By the time you are forty-five, the
lines on your face tell something about your life experiences. The other approach is
to take an old building and use it. Peter Brook likes to do this-to take a found space
and negotiate with it. I like that, too. The spaces I like least are the spaces that
have been built specifically to be theaters and to have solved future problems. They
usually don't solve the future problems and they lock you in.

I would empty the room each time so that one would have to think of the whole
cubic volume of space. I would like to work with an architect as my designer or with
designers who are architecturally aware, because I like to work in three-dimensional
space. The architect would have to want to experiment with me in building
disposable spaces within a shell.

I think of space as a metaphor for action or action as creating space. When I did
Oedipus I saw it as a round Roman arena. We built an arena with slanted seats. You

were really thrown forward-audiences weren't expecting this. For Mother Courage,
the theater was stripped to the wall with ropes defining spaces. Ropes are easily
moved so we had shifting arrangements and spaces. Oedipus was fixed because to
a certain degree it is about a destiny that is fixed. For Mother Courage, the notion was
that she could have made other choices. She chose what she chose. That's the nature
of the play. These plays have fundamentally different kinds of spatial suggestions.

Richard Schechner

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Where should theater be located in the city?

I like festival districts. I like entertainment districts. I think restaurants, sex, and

theater all belong in the same district. I am very disturbed about Times Square, not
so much that they are cleaning up the porn, but that what they are putting up is
so massive. It's not going to simply clean it up, but clean it out, eviscerate it without
achieving its so-called sanitizing social purpose. It will destroy a neighborhood that
I think has a flavor, one of the few, and that's why so many people go. In fact, I
think it's the biggest draw for good, clean-cut middle Americans because it's very

active visually. It's what Disney knew. You build things 5/8 human scale and people
feel better. Entertainment districts should not be super-large scale; they're for
human entertainment, human scale.

You have to make a distinction between a cultural center like Lincoln Center and
102
a theater district. Lincoln Center isn't a festival center. Architecturally, it's a disaster.
It's walled, it's separated, it looks at itself. It doesn't foster the kind of interaction
I am talking about. Currently in New York we aren't doing too badly. We have
P. S. 12, which is an old public school. We have the Performing Garage, the Times
Square theater district, Lincoln Center (I don't like it but it's there), and Carnegie
Hall. One of the dangers is of building too much at once. No matter how good
an imagination one has, one person cannot substitute for an accumulation over time.

Do you consider the environments that people makefor everyday life to be sets?

They are analogous to sets to a certain degree. A set is that which appears to be
something but really functions as something else. In the kind of theater I do,
environmental theater, I very often insist on not having a set. You can take a living
space and use it as a set but it's very hard to take a set and use it as a living space.
However, I think some people do live in sets. They design their living space in order
to give an impression of something that it isn't.

When I direct a play, I like to use the ordinary things that people bring in. I always
insist that the actors bring in their own costumes and that they have on them
something of personal importance, so that some of their ordinary life is filtered into
the performance.

I feel that the interior, visceral spaces of the body connect to architectural spaces.
One can develop exercises to further these relationships. The designer should watch
these exercises so that they can see the inside-outness of the performance before

they fix the space. The space of the performer should be determined in rehearsal,
not in a drawing studio. I have tried to extend the sensual nature of the skin into the
performance space.

When we think of theatrical space we shouldn't think only of room space. I like
planetariums because you lean back and suddenly have this vaulted space which
gives the illusion of limitlessness.

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