Theatre Architecture: A Derivation of the Primal Cavity

Author(s): Donald M. Kaplan

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, No. 3, Architecture/Environment (Spring, 1968), pp.
105-116
Published by: MIT Press
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 105

Theatre Architecture:
A Derivation of the Primal Cavity

DONALD M. KAPLAN

Among the cultural odds and ends that supply the architectural imagination are pre-
vailing conceptions of the human body-its functions, perfectibility, and possibilities
for pleasure and pain. Though architects of various periods have employed ideal pro-
portions of the human body in conscious decisions about the structural proportions
of monuments and buildings, this is not the only way, nor the most interesting way,
in which the human body informs architecture. What is also meant by the body's re-
lationship to architecture is the memory of body states that architecture evokes in the
observer. These body states are recalled in the form of their psychological derivatives:
moods, affects, and emotions. These derivatives initiate and qualify our aesthetic
judgments about architecture.

Architecture is able to evoke moods, affects and emotions because perceived forms
vitalize an observer's kinesthetic sense, a sense exemplified by a bowler's listing em-
pathetically to one side or another as he follows a bowling ball visually down an
alley toward the pins at the far end. Like the bowling ball, but with far more subtlety

1The psychoanalytic concepts that will will be employed further on in this study have been
developed by Rene A. Spitz. Dr. Spitz has summarizedmany of his contributions in his book
The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of
Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965). The bibliography at
the end of this book contains full references to a number of papersby Spitz that I have found
especially useful, namely: "Diacritic and Coenesthetic Organizations" (1945), "The Primal
Cavity: A Contributionto the Genesis of Perception and Its Role for Psychoanalytic Theory"
(1955), No and Yes: On the Genesis of Human Communication (1957), "Life and the Dia-
logue" (1963), "The Derailment of Dialogue: Stimulus Overload, Action Cycles, and the
Completion Gradient" (1964).
Also, I should like to acknowledge my gratitude to Mr. William Herman of The City Col-
lege and to Professor Richard Schechner. Mr. Herman placed at my disposal his personalcol-
lection of technical materials and photographs of theatres. Professor Schechner has always
been generous with the details of the rationale for his experimentalactivities in theatre, lately
having to do with his revisions of traditionaltheatre spaces for play production.

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106 DONALD M. KAPLAN

and variety, architectural forms are capable of arousing and organizing our neuro-
muscular inclinations and playing upon them with rhythms of tension and release.
The appeal to our kinesthetic system accords with idealizations of body attitudes,
which are experienced as psychological epiphenomena. The transition, for example,
from the square and circular forms of Renaissance design to the rectangular and oval
of the baroque produced a changing kinesthesis, as a cultural mood of implacability
gave way to a mood of greater leniency.
The interaction between architecture and mnemonic kinesthesis is by no means a
novel idea. It can be found in Geoffrey Scott's well-known study The Architecture of
Humanism. "A spire, when well designed, appears-as common language testifies-
to soar," Scott writes. "We identify ourselves not with its downward pressure, but its
apparent upward impulse. So, too, by the same excellent-because unconscious-
testimony of speech, arches 'spring,' vistas 'stretch,' domes 'swell,' Greek temples are
'calm,' and baroque facades 'restless.' The whole of architecture is in fact invested by
us with human movement and human moods." Scott acknowledges his debt for this
approach to Theodor Lipps, whose work along these lines at the turn of the century
influenced many discussions. More recently-Scott's book on architecture came out
in 1914-Lipps has been integrated into Rudolf Arnheim's brilliant analysis Art and
Visual Perception. However, the idea of art and body states seems to have always
been current. Vasari talked of it. So did Michelangelo. And it crops up in the writ-
ings of Bernard Berenson.
But were the idea really to come to roost, I think it would do so within contemporary
psychoanalysis, where for the past 20 or so years there has been considerable interest
in locating the origin of perception in early body states and functions. Rene A. Spitz
is a luminary of this phase of psychoanalytic development. At any rate, I should like
to place theatre architecture-the stage-auditorium unit-in the context of these is-
sues, in hopes of glimpsing yet another detail of the complex experience of theatre.
If "arches 'spring,' vistas 'stretch,' domes 'swell,'" what does a theatre do?

There is a sense in which it could be said that theatre architecture has persisted vir-
tually unchanged since antiquity. (This is to leave aside for the moment certain radi-
cal alterations of theatre space and structure, like John Cage's Black Mountain theatre
of 1952.) New York City's ANTA Playhouse and Vivian Beaumont Theatre, for ex-
ample, are much more similar to the theatres at Epidaurus and Priene than they are
different. While it is true that the intervening centuries produced notable develop-
ments in the structure, position and function of the proscenium and in the compart-
mentalization of the auditorium into boxes and balconies, no development has gone
so far as to destroy the integrity of the fundamental unit of two segregated spaces,
one for action (the orchestra/stage/skene), the other for the formation of an inac-
tive group (the auditorium).

Indeed, whenever a development has threatened the integrity of this fundamental

unit, that development has tended to recede. The compartmentalization of the audi-
torium, which reached prominence in 18th-century England and fostered interactions
among different classes of the audience, has subsequently declined in theatre design.
On the other hand, when the house lights were snuffed out in the English playhouses

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THE PRIMAL CAVITY 107
of the 1830's, they were not to be turned on again; for a darkened auditorium and
brightened stage further clarified an important kinesthetic function of the stage-
auditorium unit. With the advent of the electric light, the stage curtain is now merely
vestigial and is disappearing-light is an actual architectural material, curtains are
not. It is almost as if theatre architecture has a life of its own that not only outlasts
the immediate social wear and tear it submits to, but goes on to acquire technical sus-
tenance for its own perpetuation. I have the idea that the kinesthesis evoked by
theatre architecture, a least to this moment in history, has been too gratifying, fasci-
nating, fundamental, and continuously valid to be outdone and disposed of in the
wake of social-psychological developments.

Consider a prospective member of a theatre audience entering a theatre. He is about

to occupy one of the two major spaces inside the theatre, and he is joining others
who will share this space with him. The repetition of geometric forms in the audi-
torium-the rows and files of the seats, for example, with the likeness of one seating
space to the next-induces a crowd to become a group. As you enter a theatre, your
perceptions of those people still finding their way to seats discriminate individuals,
mostly unknown individuals, but individuals nevertheless. "Who is that?" is the per-
ceptual inquiry. As the audience finds its seats, the perceptual inquiry shifts to what
kind of a group you are getting involved with.

With this fading of discriminatory perception, the unlighted, unoccupied stage be-
gins to function quite powerfully. Though a circumscribed space, a stage does not
consist of a repetitious geometry, as the auditorium does. The stage space, however
conventional, is suited for activity in a way that the auditorium is not. A stage fur-
thers a regression in those occupying the auditorium, because it reminds them that
they are not present to sustain an activity, as the group about to appear on the stage
assuredly is. The audience is devoid of a work mentality.
Consider an actor entering the theatre. The group he joins inside the theatre is a work
group and requires, for continued membership in good standing, a performance of
highly specified skills. In contrast to the audience, the actor must rise to the occasion
of a populated auditorium. Prior to going on stage, he experiences the audience as a
unified, demanding force, entirely free of obligations to think or act-a kind of
thoughtless hunger emanates from the auditorium. This contrast between actor and
audience is a source of very notable enmity in the actor toward the audience. Anxiety
in the actor, manifested as tension and "stage fright," is a signal of the presence in
the situation of aggression mixed with solicitous impulses. The actor despises his
own eagerness, which is a very confusing state of mind. (His internal order is restored
only after he begins performing onstage; for he thereby experiences command over
the mindless force created by the auditorium.) These processes reach an apogee during
the long moment when the stage is just about to be occupied, a moment enhanced in
modern theatres by a marked alteration in the lighting of the entire theatre.

Thus, as the theatre fills up and the performers prepare to go on, a voracity in the
auditorium is about to be shaped and regulated from the stage by an active exercise
of some kind of prescribed skill. At this point, we can begin to answer the question of

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108 DONALD nM. KAPLAN

what a theatre does kinesthetically by observing that its geometries and functions
favor a juxtaposition of a visceral and executive experience.

Though we might suppose this to be more or less true of any space that relates a spec-
tator and an object, only a theatre makes an extensive use of such a juxtaposition.
The spectator space in museums and galleries, for example, is comparatively weak in
regressive, visceral inducements. Indeed, mobility by the spectator is encouraged. One
reason for this is that painting and sculpture are static entities in the sense that their
essence does not unfold in time. Museums and galleries mount objects, not perfor-
mances. Occasionally, as on planned tours, a group of spectators is formed, in which
case the art objects become props for the performance of a guide. However, there is
no architectural tradition for such performances, which use elements of theatre for
non-theatrical ends.2

A movie house is closely derived from a theatre. It consists of an auditorium, and its
screen may be likened to a stage-except that a screen is not exactly a stage. The
flatness of a screen promises only an illusion of action and of agents responsible for
the immediate occasion on which the movie is viewed. However, the real occasion of
the movie is over long before the audience assembles. Actually, the visceral position
induced in the audience by the geometry and lighting of the movie auditorium finds
its executive counterpart in the projectionist, an absented agent, whose shaping and
regulatory skills are not relevant anyway, inasmuch as they are concerned entirely
with a machine and not with the audience's appetitive vicissitudes. Compared to a
theatre, an empty movie house is merely a machine that has been clicked off, which
is why the emotions that arise with the impending use of the premises are relatively
bland. A movie house is at most a phantom theatre. It lacks a stage with a tangibility
equivalent to the auditorium.
But let us return to the theatre and our quest for its architectural kinesthesis. I have
emphasized the importance of two spaces segregating two groups with different, yet
reciprocal, agendas. If we assign the terms anticipatory and appetitive to the experi-
ence a theatre induces in the audience and the term consummatory to the reciprocat-
ing executive task of the acting company, we are talking about what psychoanalysis,
following Spitz, calls an action cycle. Whether or not, or to what degree, the consum-
matory end of the action cycle will bring the cycle to a successful completion depends
upon the actual performance and its relationship to the audience on a given occasion,
an obviously important matter but not bearing on this discussion. What is relevant
is that a theatre is a place where an action cycle is not only feasible but inescapable.
The essential elements of a theatre-those that seem to want to persist-have no
other purpose.

Erving Goffman has produced a series of studies on the theatricalityof everyday life. Theatre
occurs just about everywhere from around bridge tables to hospital operating tables. But
where all the world's a stage, Goffman uses the term "setting"for the space in which the action
occurs. Architecturally, these settings are not theatres.Even an operating room that contains
a special spectator space does not function as a theatre, because there is no stage. The space
in which the operating team performs is a technologic area that does not induce regressionin
the spectators. An audience of medical students witnessing an operation possesses a didactic
tension not discernible in a theatre audience.

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THE PRIMAL CAVITY 109

Now, an anticipation-appetite-consummation series can be completed autonomously.

Indeed, certain action cycles must be completed autonomously-for example, nobody
can urinate for us. However, action cycles are also completed in connection with part-
ners, and such reciprocities have been called by Spitz primal dialogues (to distinguish
them from verbal dialogues). A theatre, then, structures an opportunity for a primal
dialogue between the audience and the actors. Psychoanalytic findings about the
primal dialogue may have interesting implications for theatre design, and I shall sug-
gest several. However, I want now to stress the powerful forces at work in a primal
dialogue: there is a myth that the passivity (what I have called a visceral state) that
a theatre induces in an audience is equivalent to emotional inertia and non-participa-
tion; this myth, which is based on an assumption that physical activity and vigorous
sensual stimulation guarantee involvement, can (and, in fact, does) misguide experi-
mentation in theatre design and in the arts in general.

I recall a theatre production in a small cabaret in Greenwich Village, during which

the actors circulated among the audience and spoke lines directly to individual mem-
bers of the audience, staring into their eyes and stroking their faces. The aesthetic
motivation here was painfully apparent: this was the way to "reach" the audience,
to involve the audience, as if more physicality is equivalent to more involvement.
Another production I recall sent actual odors out into the audience to enhance the
experience of the mise-en-scene. However, the arousal and engaging of the motor ap-
paratus of the audience-the activation of behavior in the audience-is not ipso
facto more desirable than the evocation of perception, which is always shut off when
external stimuli provoke motor apparatus to respond, that is, to behave. The notion
that a passive motor apparatus leads to a lack of experience is an enormous myth. The
provocation of behavior suppresses the possibility of perception, and, as I shall show
later, it is perception, not behavior, that shapes experience.
I mentioned earlier this business of the actor's aggression toward the audience, and I
want to return to it because its source can be traced to the primal-dialogue situation
in the theatre; moreover, this aggression that so troubles the actor in states like stage
fright resides, I think, in the audience, but is taken on by the actor as part of his gen-
eral responsibility for the occasion.

In a rather casual yet outstanding paper ("Life and the Dialogue"), Spitz under-
takes a discussion of how we distinguish between the living and the inanimate, sug-
gesting that the discriminatory sense we use in this regard permeates more of our
existence than we are aware. This sense achieves such cunning that we can distin-
guish, unfailingly, a child from a very lifelike doll in a photograph. There was such a
photograph used for an advertisement for a doll, in which a little girl was kissing a
doll that in all respects resembled the little girl. The caption read, "Which one is the
toy dolly?" "The photograph fools nobody," Spitz writes, "Even though absence of
color, lack of motion, and two-dimensionality handicap photography in conveying
meaning, we 'know' the child from the doll immediately." The "we" means we adults.
In neonates this highly specialized sense of discrimination is not present. Longitudinal
studies of child development indicate that this sense begins to appear (within normally
expected variations) around the sixth month of life. Before the sixth month, an infant
will not discriminate between a human face and an inanimate artifact, such as a balloon

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110 DONALD M. KAPLAN

with painted facial features. But it is not until the eighth month that this discrimina-
tory sense is established with some reliability. The maturation of this sense coincides
with a prolonged phase of infancy called eight-month anxiety, in which the infant, also
for the first time, discriminates reliably between the mother and strangers. Anxiety is
an important concomitant of this stage of development.

The eight-month-old infant's fear of strangers is a common observation of all those

who rear children with reasonable watchfulness. Though equally reliable as a re-
sponse, fear of the inanimate is not as commonly noticed. Spitz has filmed "doll anx-
iety." In a typical film "the child, 11 months and 26 days old, looks searchingly at a
baby-sized doll, cocks her head as if to look at it from a different angle, then looks at
the doll straight on and considers it. She is unable to come to a decision. After a few
seconds she approaches the doll, pokes her head at it, touches it with her face and
then retreats, watching the motionless doll all the time. After a few moments of con-
templation the child begins to show unpleasure, becomes restless and cries." Other
filmed incidents eventuate in the child's retreating, in panic, screaming, kicking and
beating the doll.
I might add-and this has always astonished me-that the inanimate produces anx-
iety in other species as well. A sudden and tremendous furor goes up in a cage of
monkeys when laboratory personnel happen to carry a dead monkey past the cage.
The experimental psychologist D. O. Hobb discovered that a plaster model of a mon-
key's head brings forth similar reactions. (He called this a "ghost reaction.") Konrad
Lorenz, the celebrated ethologist, tells how he was attacked by a flock of rooks who
perceived his black swimming trunks, dangling from his hand after a swim, as a
dead rook. (Spitz suggests that "seemingly unmotivated attacks on unsuspecting per-
sons by birds, reported from tinmeto time, may have a similar explanation.")

Among the several credible explanations advanced for all these phenomena is the
absence in the inanimate of a capacity for partnership in a primal dialogue. In the
mother-infant relationship, physical handling of the infant, especially in connection
with feeding, is the principal activity of the dialogue. Good mothering consists of the
mother's skillful partnership in a dialogue, her ability to complete an action cycle
by administering the consummatory phase to the infant's anticipatory and appetitive
arousals. Food, in and of itself, is not sufficient for infant survival (nor for survival
among other species of mammals). Anaclitic depression ("hospitalism") is a pediatric
condition, the etiology of which is the absence of a dialogue. It was studied during
World War II on the wards where orphaned infants were provided with the elements
for survival but by hospital personnel unable to offer these elements through the
medium of a dialogue. Beyond a certain point, anaclitic depression is irreversible
and terminates in death. The cause of death, to put it simply, is the aggression in the
infant that is unregulated by a dialogue. Efforts at contact with an infant wasting
away in a terminal anaclitic depression succeed ultimately in eliciting only one re-
sponse: a horrifying scream. There is no way left to begin to shape and regulate the
aggression manifested in that scream, for the infant has lost its capacity to engage in
a dialogue. Short of the scream, the anaclitically depressed infant is, to all appear-
ances, passive-an inert non-participant. But the aggression at work within such
intense passivity is mortal.

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THE PRIMAL CAVITY Ill
Infantile anaclitic depression is the model for all subsequent depressions and depres-
sive states. Depressions in adults result from the loss not only of symbolic oral sup-
plies but of their symbolic provider. The suicides that sometimes terminate psychotic
depressions are indications of the extraordinary unregulated aggression involved in
seemingly inert states. In mourning, a so-called normal reaction modeled after the
anaclitic depression, the deceased had been a partner in some sort of primal dialogue
with the mourner. The aggression that was bound by the dialogue comes loose and
appears as mourning. Bereavement at the death of a beloved person is not simply an
emotional collapse into inertia. On the contrary, it is a very powerfully energized
state.

There are myriad variations on these dynamics. The shock at the sight of a corpse,
for example, or even a dead member of another species, is not unlike "doll anxiety."
During the last century, the wax museum was a favorite place to visit; the fascination
resided to a large degree in the challenge of the highly naturalistic wax figures to our
discriminatory sense of the animate and inanimate and in the "spooky" effect-the
flirtatious aggression-that occurs when this sense falls victim to dissemblance.

Aggressive insurgence by audiences is a lively chapter in the history of theatre. Au-

diences have been reported to have pommelled actors with all manner of debris, to
have stamped their feet and hurled obscenities, rioted, even rushed onstage and
stripped the costumes from the actors' backs. No other social occasion of comparably
expected decorum ends up in such manifest aggression. When a run of bad food is
served in a restaurant, customers have not been known to assail the waiters and the
chef, despite the fact that food seems to be a more ctncrete consummatory item than
art. Nor is this simply a matter of restaurant diners' not feeling identified with a
group. Where diners do form a group, as in institutional mess halls, bad fare evokes
measly expressions of aggression, like grumbling and complaining, which is not the
straightforward aggression of a theatre audience. But stage a meal in a theatre; have
the diners enter an auditorium, the chef cook onstage with the house personnel stand-
ing by to serve the food to the audience. Imagine the reaction to a bad culinary per-
formance. It would not be hunger that is thwarted, but a primal dialogue-the medium
through which the food is served.
In speaking of such matters as the phases of an action cycle, aggression, the dialogue
and the complex sense perception through which the phenomena of these concepts
come to life, I have been speaking about a particular kind of psychology. And I have
been suggesting that this psychology is useful in inquiring about the experience of
being in the midst of a theatre. Now all the phenomena of psychology originate in
the organism's physical processes, which include, very importantly, maturational
processes-the maturational schedule of a species influences the psychology of a
species every bit as much as its particular physiological structures. (The psycho-
sexuality of human beings is determined much more by the maturational schedule
of the human being than by the ultimate functional structure of the genital apparatus.)
Psychology is the study of the epiphenomena of an organism's present and past (mat-
urational) biology. Though it is not always pertinent-or possible-to relate psy-
chology to its biologic matrix, the relationship is pertinent for our present discussion,
because we are trying to reach the kinesthetic level that a theatre appeals to and that

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112 DONALD M. KAPLAN

gives rise to the epiphenomena I have been describing. The feelings, motivations and
sense perceptions I have been describing and interrelating are, after all, the reminis-
cences of certain body states.

But which body states? The kinesthesis of a theatre is not as simple as that of, say,
an architectural spire or tower, which celebrates the momentous maturational achieve-
ment in man's upright posture by calling forth a kinesthetic response of the muscles
and balancing mechanism involved in the upright posture. Here the epiphenomena
include feelings of striving, reaching, soaring, achieving. (The notorious "phallic"
property imputed to such structures by psychoanalysis derives not so much from the
paradigm of an erect penis as from the erect posture of the child, a maturational event
that ushers in the so-called phallic stage of childhood, in which muscular striving
and locomotion are libidinized.)

With a theatre, the kinesthesis will involve the physiology of that sense perception
of the living that is so central to the primal dialogue and its sequels. The maturation
of this particular sense perception would seem to depend exclusively on the matu-
ration of the visual apparatus. However, the maturation of the visual apparatus, while
an essential factor in any type of visual perception, is never the exclusive factor. Vis-
ual perception of any but the grossest kind (like the perception of an indistinct mass
in motion) is always matured in concert with other perceptions. If you fit an experi-
mental subject with lenses that turn the visual world upsidedown, the subject will
begin to rely on his hands to assist his vision in making his way through the en-
vironment. He will grope as well as look. But over several days, this groping will
have educated his visual perception, and the subject will begin to get about again
solely on the basis of visual perception. The upsidedown world will have lost its
awkwardness. Removing the lenses will necessitate another period of falling back
upon the assistance of manual-tactile perception.
For the dialogue, the perceptions that assist vision originate in the organs used for
sucking and swallowing: the tongue, lips, cheeks and throat. To this group of co-
ordinating muscles, Spitz has assigned a special term: the primal cavity.
The characteristics of the primal cavity are very interesting. For one thing, the primal
cavity has an immediate postnatal responsive reliability that is very high. I have
never failed to experience astonishment at the sight of the coordination of these
muscles in the otherwise completely uncoordinated new-born creature. The respon-
siveness of the primal cavity insures survival, and it is through this group of organs
that the primal dialogue first takes place. Again, if a dialogue does not get established,
the reliability of the primal cavity diminishes; sucking and swallowing lose their
vigor and coordination, and nutritional failure begins to occur. Also, the primal cavity
has a tactile sensitivity. It can register touch, taste, temperature, smell, pain, and the
deep sensibility of deglutition. It is an organ of perception, originally far exceeding
visual perception in variety and organization. I might add that the primal cavity is
later employed for the first social communication, which carries the dialogue to a
higher level: the smiling response.
But more interesting for our purposes is the fact that the primal cavity is the active
end of the viscera. Being continuous with the viscera, yet directly in contact with

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THE PRIMAL CAVITY 113
the external world, the primal cavity is the first mediator between the internal and
external circumstance of the organism. The primal cavity is both visceral and exec-
utive. Thus the seed of the action cycle is planted there; for the primal cavity is
attached to the anticipatory and appetitive end of the cycle that originates in the
viscera and, in addition, is capable of executing a consummatory completion of
the cycle.

Much as groping behavior informs the visual sensations of the subject wearing up-
sidedown lenses, the frequent and complex operations of the primal cavity will in-
form the sensations of the maturing visual apparatus and educate them into percep-
tions. By the eighth month of life, the activity of the primal cavity will have es-
tablished a visual perception that discriminates the living from the non-living. Though
we see with our eyes, what we actually perceive depends upon the memory of numer-
ous senses other than vision.

We should finally observe that the primal cavity remains, through unconscious mem-
ory, an ultimate referent in the maturation and later performance of the body. Matu-
ration dichotomizes the original intimate unity of visceral and executive musculature
within the primal cavity. As the executive muscles of the face, hands, arms, neck,
legs, shoulders, abdomen mature, they oppose, as well as foster, consummation of
appeals from the visceral system. The articulation of these muscular systems have
an enormous perceptual concomitant. The original simple connection of the primal
cavity to the inside of the body and to the external world is elaborated into percep-
tions of body definition-where the body boundary leaves off and the external world
begins, what is me and not-me, what is inside and outside. Yet the effectuality we
gain in all this is never sufficiently compensatory. If the joy of civilization is the
sense of triumph over the dichotomies of maturation, the malaise is the memory of
our lost competence at drawing the world's milk into our parched throats. For every
Ninth Symphony, we also produce a Book of Genesis.

It is my sense that a theatre enlivens the executive and visceral musculature in a

kinesthesis of separation and interaction. The interface of stage and auditorium is not
a celebration of a maturational achievement, as certain other architectural forms are.
A theatre reminds us of a dynamic condition. It beguiles us into postures of hope and
trepidation.
Western society has proceeded through the development of executive competence in
the external world, at the expense of visceral experience. We often glamorize Eastern
society, because it seems to us more concerned with visceral matters. If architecture
reflects idealized body states, we should find in the history of Western theatre design
an emphasis on the executive aspect of the auditorium-stage unit. I think we do.
The executive space of the theatre-the stage-has acquired in the course of time an
extraordinary technologic complexity, while the stark geometry of the auditorium
has been gilded out of all proportion. This situation has culminated in the large
Broadway-type theatres, which architecturally tend to institutionalize executive
functions. Such theatres evoke a dynamic kinesthesis, but, at the same moment, over-
whelm us with a reassuring complacency. Moreover, the technology of the Western
stage has invited a naturalism in set design that rigidifies the dichotomy between

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114 DONALD M. KAPLAN

actor and audience and suppresses the dynamic possibility of theatre architecture.
Mercifully, we are beginning to see an end to this 18th-century architectural tradi-
tion, as newer theatres crop up.

Wrapping the auditorium around the stage, as is done in theatres-in-the-round,

seems a very significant evolution in theatre design. This preserves the basic kines-
thesis I have been describing. But by abolishing the proscenium-a derivative of an
original sacred structure-round theatres tend to divest the kinesthesis of extra-insti-
tutional valences. A purer kinesthesis occurs. Moreover, the continuities of space-
a full circle encircling a full circle-intensify certain qualities of the dialogue between
actors and audience and weaken others. For example, the collaborative elements of
the dialogue gain in prominence, while the oppositional elements subside somewhat.
The theatre-in-the-round is thus an architecture of intimacy, and though intimacy is
merely one aspect of a primal dialogue, it is certainly an important enough aspect
to warrant its own architectural counterpart. These theatres are testimonies to the
possibility of transforming theatre architecture through experimental activity.
Like all architecture, theatre architecture embodies an institution, and institutions
are always conflicted agencies, combining advantages and dangers. Institutions accu-
mulate wisdom and preserve it against the superficial immediacies of daily social flux.
An institution wants to be a cultural, rather than social, entity. On the other hand,
this conservative function sets constraints on the freedom of imagination and activity
of those who participate within the confines of the institution. Though the basic
architectural configuration of theatre accommodates a great range of creative activity,
it also places limits on this activity, however unspecific they may be. Indeed, one of
the functions of art is to find the limits of its institutional forms. The kinesthesis I
have been describing and its ramifications constitute a segment of the limits of theatre,
which the artist explores and specifies.

Of late there has been a notable experimental activity in theatre that can be located
somewhere beyond the limits of theatre because the context of this activity is non-
institutionalized space. I am thinking of happenings, events, environments and per-
formances of various sorts in anonymous, nondescript spaces, like experimental
studios and random localities in the community. The homogenization of theatre
space in this recent activity indicates an interim resignation from theatre, at least as
defined by the stage-auditorium situation. I say interim because no such resignation
continues indefinitely without acquiring institutional auspices, either its own or
some other. It does this or comes to grief like last year's best-sellers. More than likely,
the vast theatrical establishment will put out a pseudopod, absorb from these activ-
ities what is nutritious, and discard the rest.

Whatever, I think "new" theatre does not outstrip the concepts I have been urging
in this discussion. Architecture is one application for these concepts. However, the
absolute definition of theatre does not depend upon architecture. Architecture hap-
pens to be a very powerful context for theatre. But the dialogue is at the heart of
theatre. In non-theatre everyone assembled is a performer. The dialogue is intra-
mural-confined within the group. In theatre, the dialogue is between groups, those
who perform and those who witness. The nature of the performance and the physical

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THE PRIMAL CAVITY 115

arrangements for the occasion define only the variety of theatre but not theatre as a
generic.
As for "new" theatre, my familiarity with it inclines me to several observations,
which take us beyond architecture but return us to the issues of the primal dialogue,
the action cycle, the distinction between sensation and perception.

One of the leading questions about the exercise of imagination is whether it trans-
forms social experience or merely serves as an advertisement for the social moment.
We live in a social moment when industrialization and urbanization are the domi-
nant social processes. Electricity, especially in the form of communication systems,
is omnipresent. The population explosion is a prime factor in the urbanization
process. A duplication of some of these features of the social moment in colonies of
laboratory animals leads to behavior remarkably similar to behavior appearing in
large numbers of our human population. Overpopulated rats, for example, become
sexually perverse, occasionally, homosexual, even delinquent in that they carouse in
packs. Some become withdrawn into a passive daze. Others engage in numerous
sexual incidents but without apparent consummation. In short, the appetitive branch
of the action cycle is activated, while the consummatory branch is crippled. The
loss of competence with a primal dialogue leads to a very high mortality rate among
litters and eventually to the dying off of the colony. The outstanding experimental
variable is increased interaction.

The social processes I have mentioned are beginning to revolutionize human child-
rearing, literally interrupting the dialogue between mother and child and creating
partners unsuitable for any kind of meaningful dialogue. As never before, dialogues
tend to be illlusory-two-person monologues, which increase interactional sensations
and decrease interpersonal perceptions.

The reiterated aspects of the program of the "new" theatre (and not insignificantly
its most advertised aspects) include the desegregation of audience-performer space,
increased physical interaction not only between the audience and the performer
but also between the audience and technologic props of the performance, random-
ness of events, and unintelligibility ("absurdity"). This program is quite close to the
effects of our present social process and to the forms of a derailed dialogue.

The quest of such experimental activity for more profound and varied experiences
in the audience is really gratuitous. I am put in mind of the experiments many years
ago in psychoanalytic technique by Sandor Ferenczi. Ferenczi (who should have
known better) reasoned that if the trouble with the adult patient was the sick child in
the patient, he, Ferenczi, would simply treat the child directly. He ended up plac-
ing his adult patients on his lap, nursing them with baby bottles. The program of
the "new" theatre involves a similar issue of the dynamics of emotional directness.
Deep experiences can be reached not by by-passing intervening defensive perceptions
-all perceptions have a defensive function-but only by finding the means for
addressing perceptions and transforming them. For perceptions are the medium of
experience.
Gyorgy Kepes speaks of the infatuation with the isolated kinesthetic act, the accep-

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116 DONALD M. KAPLAN

tance of "the autobiographical note of an accidental moment at the expense of the

rest of life."3 This is always a peril of art. Yet a succession of accidents can yield a
design-an aesthetic-and in this is the vindication of the artist's infatuation with
fortune. If I have been normative, perhaps even prescriptive, I acknowledge this
as one of the perils of criticism, especially of psychological criticism. However, I
hope I have succeeded in demonstrating also that psychoanalysis, which has offered
the arts so much interpretive material in the past, is continuing to produce concepts
serviceable for the future. It may be that in the social moment theatre will find a new
kinesthesis, a new architectural context with perceptual strivings other than those
of our present theatre. I cannot imagine that current psychoanalytic approaches to
the problem of perception will be without interest.

3 "The Visual Arts and Sciences,"Daedalus,Winter, 1965,p. 118.

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