Dystopian Performatives: Negative Affect/Emotion in the Work of Sarah Kane
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DYSTOPIAN PERFORMATIVES: NEGATIVE AFFECT/EMOTION IN THE WORK OF SARAH KANE By Copyright 2016 Scott C. Knowles Submitted to the graduate degree program in Theatre and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. Henry Bial ________________________________ Dr. Rebecca Rovit ________________________________ Dr. John Gronbeck-Tedesco ________________________________ Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley ________________________________ Dr. Christopher Forth Date Defended: May 10, 2016 ii The Dissertation Committee for Scott C. Knowles certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: DYSTOPIAN PERFORMATIVES: NEGATIVE AFFECT/EMOTION IN THE WORK OF SARAH KANE ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. Henry Bial Date approved: May 12, 2016 iii ABSTRACT Dystopian Performatives: Negative Affect/Emotion in the Work of Sarah Kane seeks to combine three areas of theoretical inquiry to understand the way that affect/emotion operates on an audience in the theatre: affect/emotion science, performance theory, and utopianism. Utilizing Sarah Kane’s body of work as a case study, this dissertation connects each of her plays to a distinct basic emotion in order to bracket the vast interconnections between affect/emotion science and the theatre: disgust within Blasted, anger within Phaedra’s Love, fear within Cleansed, memory within Crave, and sadness within 4.48 Psychosis. Specifically, Dystopian Performatives investigates the negatively valenced experiences that occur in the theatre as a kind of dystopian practice that seeks to critique the present and promote action to adjust the future. The dystopian performative theory demonstrates the way in which experiential and viscerally impactful moments in the theatre potentially create change within an audience that directly attacks social and cultural issues relevant to the content of Kane’s plays. The experience of affect/emotion, I argue, performatively “does,” or acts, on the body of the audience in a way that has a meaningful impact on cognition, behavior, ideology, and morality. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible with out the guidance and support of a multitude of individuals who have given their time and expertise generously. Thank you to the Department of Theatre for the Joseph R. Roach Dissertation Research Award that helped fund my initial exploration of this topic, and thank you to the School of the Arts for funding multiple conference trips to present pieces of this work and receive invaluable feedback. My dissertation committee members have guided and directed me as a student throughout my time at KU. Thank you to Christopher Forth for serving as the non-departmental member. Your support of my research from my first year at KU in many ways gave me the confidence to continue to write and research. Thank you Nicole Hodges Persley for your questions and demand for clarity. Thanks to John Gronbeck-Tedesco for your wit and ability to make me think deeply. I am grateful for Rebecca Rovit’s constant attention to detail and desire to push the limits of my ideas and theories. Many thanks to my dissertation advisor Henry Bial, who has always pushed me, questioned me, and demanded excellence. Without his guidance and keen insights this dissertation would not have been possible. Thanks to Mary Karen Dahl who initially got me thinking about representations of violence and the general unpleasantness that is possible on the stage. Thank you Scott Magelssen for your interest in me as a scholar, for your desire to help me grow professionally, and for all the lessons you provided while I served as your Managing Editor. I am forever grateful for all the encouragement, camaraderie, and disagreement I have received from my colleagues, particularly Jeanne Tiehen, Danny Devlin, Alison Christy, Amanda Boyle, Boone J. Hopkins, Chandra O. Hopkins, Jeff List, James Diemer, Zach Sudbury, and Rachel Blackburn. Thank you for all the wonderful memories, support, and ideas. Additional thanks to Rachel Blackburn for taking wonderfully detailed notes at my defense. A special thanks is owed to Ryan Lowe, who not only read many pieces of this dissertation and kept me on schedule but has served as a life-long friend and intellectual sparing partner. I must also thank Tyler Forbush who has encouraged me throughout my education. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my family for their unending support of my educational journey. While they don’t realize it yet, Addison Tyler Knowles and Kennedy Maree Knowles have provided significant moments of joy and pleasure throughout the formation and writing of this project. I can’t thank you enough for being there to v engage my mind in different, playful, and imaginative ways. Most of all, I want to thank my partner, friend, and ally, Ginae Maree Knowles. Without you I would not be the person I am today. vi Dedicated to Addison Tyler and Kennedy Maree Knowles vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER 1: Dystopia, Performance, Affect/Emotion ............................................................ 1 CHAPTER 2: “The Disgusting Feast of Filth”: Blasted and the Elicitation of Disgust. ......... 48 CHAPTER 3: The Effect of Affect: Anger, Fear, and the Promise of Affect/Emotion .......... 86 CHAPTER 4: Crave and the Impact of Affect/Emotion on Cognition ................................. 122 CHAPTER 5: Positive Sadness: Utilizing the Positive Side of a Negative Emotion to Understand Clinical Depression ................................................................................................................ 166 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 200 NOTES ................................................................................................................................... 204 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 222 1 CHAPTER 1: Dystopia, Performance, Affect/Emotion Introduction There are moments in theatre in which the participants are transported into what Martin Heidegger called a “riff” or “somewhere else.”1 Bert O. States describes this riff: “This ‘somewhere else’ is not a spatial elsewhere in the sense that the mind thinks of being elsewhere […], but in the sense that what is before us, the painting itself, offers a different kind of here than we ‘usually tend to be’ in.”2 Moments in the theatre, according to Jill Dolan, achieve a similar goal through a utopian performative. Utopia, as will be discussed later, is a “no place,” or rather a “somewhere else” that in Dolan’s formulation is not spatial but embodied individually and communally. These utopian performative moments are affecting, emotional, and provoke feelings. For Dolan these moments are hopeful, and though they may come out of negative events, they ultimately provoke optimism and positivity. Concerned with the “somewhere else” that particular violent theatrical moments provoke, what I will call a dystopian performative,3 this dissertation will address the performative power of negative experiences, emotions, affects, and feelings in the theatre to demonstrate the potential community building effects of an embodied dystopic moment. To put it simply, what is the value of transmitting negative thoughts, affects, feelings, and emotions to an audience? The primary focus will be on affect/emotion as one potential cause for this transportation to “somewhere else.” The centrality of the exchange of emotions, affects, and feelings between audience and performer has long been a concern of the theatre. The Natyashastra (200 BCE - 200 CE), an ancient Indian text on the performing arts, describes the audience’s reception of this emotion as Rasas: 2 There is no Natya [complete theatre/dance] without rasa. Rasa is the cumulative result of vibhava [stimulus], anubhava [involuntary reaction], and vyabhicari bhava [voluntary reaction]. For example, just as when various condiments and sauces and herbs and other materials are mixed, a taste is experienced, or when the mixing of materials like molasses with other materials produces six kinds of taste so also along with the different Bhavas [emotions] the sthayi bhava [permanent emotions experienced ‘inside’] becomes a rasa.4 In the theatre the relationship between audience and performer is considered paramount and the controlling of that relationship (to the best of a theatrical artist’s ability) is essential to the transmission of rasa, or emotion, or affect. Western traditions within the theatre also point to the importance of affect/emotion. For Aristotle, moments of recognition and reversal followed by a scene of passion could provoke a cathartic experience, variously now understood to be the purgation or purification of the emotions provoked—most essentially pity and fear. Seneca, and Roman tragedy (although Seneca is almost all we know of Roman tragedy) is also concerned with emotion. According to Gregory A. Staley’s Seneca