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Reproducing the White Bourgeois the Sitting-Room Drama of Marina Abramović Eleanor Skimin

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Reproducing the White Bourgeois the Sitting-Room Drama of Marina Abramović Eleanor Skimin Reproducing the White Bourgeois The Sitting-Room Drama of Marina Abramović Eleanor Skimin Figure 1. The Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (1996) by Yinka Shonibare MBE. Dutch wax printed fabric covered wood, cast iron, brass, marble, mirror, bound printed books, porcelain, glass, framed works on paper, and props 8.5 × 16 × 17.4 feet. (Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle; courtesy of James Cohan, New York. © Yinka Shonibare MBE) In 2010 Marina Abramovic; sat daily on a chair in the atrium of MoMA for almost three months, from the museum’s opening to closing time. Members of the public were invited to sit oppo- site her for as long as they desired, and during those hours Abramovic; never left her seat. This performance, part of a retrospective exhibition entitled The Artist is Present, is one of several over the course of her career in which Abramovic; has staged the sedentary face-to-face arrange- ment, beginning with Nightsea Crossing (1981–1987) and Conjunction (1983), and most recently Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2011) and In Residence (2015). I began encountering images of Abramovic; sitting face-to-face with people at MoMA at the same time that I happened to be TDR: The Drama Review 62:1 (T237) Spring 2018. ©2018 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 79 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00720 by guest on 28 September 2021 researching the prevalence of the sedentary posture in late-19th-century bourgeois realist the- atre practice, notably in the domestic dramas of bourgeois sitting rooms1 where the sedentary tête-à-tête functioned as the sine qua non of intimate relational exchange. I started to wonder about the connection between the sedentary dramas of the bourgeois realist theatre’s sitting- room sets and Abramovic;’s sedentary performance pieces, and a string of questions followed: What are we able to see when we set, say, a tête-à-tête between Nora and her husband Torvald in the sitting room of Ibsen’s A Doll House (1879) alongside the scene of Abramovic; sitting face- to-face with visitors at a museum? How, by way of reproduction of this formal arrangement of bodies in performance, might we think about the history of performance art not only as a prac- tice that, coming out of the historical avantgarde, has developed as a repudiation or critique of the white bourgeois realist theatre of the late-19th century, but also as the inheritor and repro- ducer of its powerfully persuasive legacies? In what ways has performance art abided by the conventions, rhetorics, and ideology of conventional theatre? Or, to take up Marvin Carlson’s spectral terminology: How have the stages of performance art been “haunted” by the ghosts of white bourgeois realist theatre?2 How can we more consistently bring theatre history into the study of performance art, and in turn follow theatre history through the historical avant- garde to performance art? Recognizing the roots of dramatic realism and naturalism as intimate kin rather than, as is more customary, the bourgeois antithesis of bohemian antitheatricality may be a start. What follows is an exploration of a sleight of hand: contemporary performance art’s capacity to reproduce the archetypal figures, poses, scenes, and conventions of white bour- geois realist theatre while simultaneously appearing to disavow and erase that tradition. At the center of this discussion is the sedentary figure in modernity and its particular relationship to bourgeois whiteness’s conceptualization of itself as humanity defined by the interior life of the still body. Old Men in Armchairs In 1896 the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck published an essay entitled “The Tragical in Daily Life” in which, paradoxically, the fantasies of an earlier generation of bourgeois realist and naturalist theatre-makers before him coalesced. Most commonly associated with the sym- bolists who rejected what they saw as the gritty literalism of the realists and naturalists in favor of metaphor, suggestion, and dream logic, Maeterlinck conjured the image of a figure sitting at home as the universal sign of everyday modern life. He imagined an entire play consisting of an old man sitting silently in his armchair as the exemplary mode for a new kind of tragedy, a new 1. I use the term “sitting room” in this article in order to emphasize the importance of sitting in a range of bour- geois domestic spaces designed for sociable encounters among family members, and on occasion, their guests. The terms sitting room, parlor, drawing room, living room, lounge room, and family room were used in various regions and contexts in the second half of the 19th century. For a comparative discussion of the terms parlor and drawing room in the US context see Thad Logan’s The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study ([2001] 2003:12). 2. In The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory MachineCarlson (2001) explores the relationship between the- atre spectatorship and memory and the particular phenomenon of recycling elements of past performances in the theatre. Eleanor Skimin is completing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her research explores the sedentary figure in modern theatre and performance in relation to formations of white bourgeois subjectivity. She is a dramaturg (Classic Stage Company, Kate Whoriskey, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Native Voices at the Autry, Poor Dog Group) with an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and has worked as Humanities Manager at BAM. In 2016 she had a residency at the Ingmar Bergman Estate in Sweden, and in 2017 was the recipient of first prize in the IFTR New Scholars Essay competition. She has taught at Brown University, the University of New South Wales, and the National Institute of Dramatic Art (Australia). She teaches at UCLA and USC. eleanor.skimin @gmail.com Eleanor Skimin 80 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00720 by guest on 28 September 2021 theatre of everyday life that would be a “static theatre” ([1896] 1899:106). This new tragedy would take as its setting a domestic scene replete with the requisite homey props and fixtures: armchair, lamp, doors, windows, table. “I have grown to believe,” wrote Maeterlinck, “that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or ‘the husband who avenges his honour’” (106). Maeterlinck offers a scene of civilized comfort, peace, leisure, and security after the barbarians have fled the gates, after the age of duels, overwrought emotion, and the violent plots, daggers, and bloodshed of aristocratic tragedy. In this particular vision of the modern world, violence is the exception, and quiet, ease, and stillness the rule. Maeterlinck’s essay points to a theatre problem that intensifies in the late-19th-century Euro-American bour- geois theatre: How would bourgeois theatre artists dramatize the inner life of a class whose intimate encounters were understood to occur while just sitting at home? The bourgeoisie, a sedentary class par excellence, had given birth to the modern office and the office chair, and had aspired to a home-life of sedentary leisure and upholstered comfort on sofas and armchairs. If action and movement had been the thrust of Western theatre since Aristotle, how could this still life be made stage worthy? Maeterlinck’s solution was to imbue the seated figure with a soul, a vibrant interior life; to make the immobile body articulate; to activate and to elevate the white sedentary body of private bourgeois domestic life, the body in repose, to the realm of the legitimate drama. Maeterlinck’s vision of a new static drama, a vision that would become synonymous with symbolism, was not especially new. By the time he had written his essay the bourgeois realist theatre was already effectively a static theatre driven by the sitting room tête-à-tête. This cho- reographic device, which positioned two people sitting down on chairs face-to-face in intimate exchange, was already firmly entrenched as the bodily configuration that drove the realist domestic drama, and the sitting room was its preferred locale. The hybridity of parlors, liv- ing rooms, and drawing rooms — their public privacy — enabled them to function as spaces of intimate sociability and display, as points of intersection for the receiving of guests and visitors from the outside world and as meet- ing places for members of the household. Dramaturgically, these sitting rooms offered Figure 2. Konstantin Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper a rich array of possible comings and goings on the sofa as Rakitin and Natalya in Turgenev’s A as well as varied bits of stage business (tak- Month in the Country, Moscow Art Theatre, 1909. ing tea, reading letters) to support and sus- (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia) tain those sedentary interactions. Natural life took place amidst a profusion of commodities conspicuously consumed, in the clutter of a multiplicity of objects of desire. These details, the sitting room’s prized pieces, were arranged to represent the true character of the household.3 Among these prized pieces, domestic chairs invited a range of sedentary activities that brought characters together for the private encounters that have been the bread and butter of the realist Reproducing the White Bourgeois Reproducing the theatre. The chair was crucial to the vision of theatrical realism and the arrangement of chairs for intimate exchange was for such playwrights as August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen the key bodily configuration for getting to the reality of everyday private lives. 3. For a useful discussion on the relationship between the environment and character in naturalism see Raymond Williams’s essay, “Social Environment and Theatrical Environment” in which he vividly explains: “In high natu- ralism the lives of the characters have soaked into their environment [...] Moreover the environment has soaked into their lives.
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