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Shifting Terrain: Landscape, Ecology and Environmental Theater

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Shifting Terrain: Landscape, Ecology and Environmental Theater Shifting Terrain: Landscape, Ecology and Environmental Theater Michelle Shafer Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 ©2015 Michelle Shafer All rights reserved ABSTRACT “Shifting Terrain: Landscape, Ecology and Environmental Theater” Michelle Shafer “Shifting Terrain” is about the theater’s potential to offer crucial resources to resist ecological crisis. Despite the efforts of a number of theorists over the past twenty years, ecocritical theater, which draws upon ecological language and concepts, has failed to thrive in part because it lacks a cohesive, discursive framework to organize its ideas. This dissertation seeks to define the goals of this nascent ecocritical theater along topical, discursive and formal lines by establishing two distinct ecocritical genres: landscape theater and ecology theater. Theater theorists have argued that, formally and ideologically, landscape and ecology are roughly synonymous. In the first half of “Shifting Terrain,” however, I argue that landscape resists ecological concerns, contributing to anthropocentric attitudes by delineating the natural world from humans and the theater they make. Using Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind (1890), Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949) as examples, I argue that landscape theater performs nature as a framed, aesthetic creation in order to criticize the “ruptures” between humans and the ecosystem generated, at times, by the theater itself. Conversely, through readings of ecologically oriented plays including Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904) and Heiner Müller’s Despoiled Shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with Argonauts (1982/83), I argue that ecology theater seeks connections between ecosystems, their inhabitants and the theater, pointing beyond the theatrical frame, physical or conceptual, to the ecosphere. In the latter half of the dissertation, I investigate the genres of landscape theater and ecology theater in the context of environmental or, more specifically, immersive staging. I first challenge the notion that immersive staging inherently resists the aesthetic distance between theatrical worlds and the ecosphere, using productions of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and Punchdrunk Theatrical Experiences’ Sleep No More (2011). Both performances surround their audiences with rich environments, but they are also insular, engaging only the synthetic spaces created by performers and designers. Then, I examine the ways in which the outdoor, immersive productions of Robert Wilson’s KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE (1972) and Big House Theater’s Across (2000) apply ecological ideals by emphasizing theater’s capacity to make direct contact with the ecosystems the plays present. No production entirely eliminates the theater’s mimetic division from the surrounding world, but performances such as KA MOUNTAIN and Across represent significant movement toward limiting the aesthetic distance between audiences, worlds of performance and the world itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Theatrum Mundi 1 Part I Shifting Genres: The Problems of Representation in Landscape Theater and Ecology Theater Chapter One “the mirror up to nature”: Landscape Theater 59 Chapter Two “Life on the Stage”: Ecology Theater 110 Part II Negotiating Terrain: Environmental Staging in Landscape Theater and Ecology Theater Chapter Three “Through the Looking-Glass”: Environmental Landscape Theater 162 Chapter Four All the World as a Stage: Environmental Ecology Theater 210 Conclusion: The Way Out 255 Bibliography 262 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Arnold Aronson, W.B. Worthen, Julie Stone Peters, Anne Lake Prescott and John Blair Gamber, who comprise my dissertation committee, for their sharp insights and unflagging generosity throughout the course of this project. I would also like to thank Sharon Marcus, Susan Crane, Sarah Cole, Jim Adams, Katherine Biers and Martin Puchner for their perceptive comments at crucial points during the research and drafting process. Additionally, I am grateful to the members of the Columbia University Theater Colloquium, who are too numerous to name here but equally responsible for positively impacting the shape of this work, for their kind advice. Shilarna Stokes, Kelina Gottman and Tara Gellene also offered valuable feedback for this project during its earliest stages. I offer particular thanks to Kat Savino—and, by extension, Sue Mendelsohn—for her tireless support, relentless advocacy and keen, attentive, but always encouraging, criticism. Several individuals and groups also contributed generously to the contents of the following pages. I spent several wonderful days over a series of weeks perusing The Robert Wilson Papers, 1969-2000, at the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library. I am grateful for the prompt and knowledgeable assistance of every librarian with whom I was fortunate enough to interact. Livi Vaughan and Bea Minns, the astounding designers for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, graciously spent an afternoon satisfying my many questions about the company and the production—some scholarly and many more entirely self-indulgent. I spent several years, both at Bryn Mawr College and as a member of Big House (plays & spectacles), working under the direction of Mark ii Lord. I was delighted to revisit those days as we discussed the production of Across, and I thank him for his time, intelligence and support. Finally, this dissertation would never have been completed without my mother Peggy Shafer, who offered her help and support in hundreds of ways over the last several years and well beyond. I offer her my love and my deepest thanks. iii DEDICATION In memory of Hiroshi Iwasaki and William L. Rauch iv Introduction: Theatrum Mundi Ecological victory will require a transvaluation so profound as to be nearly unimaginable at present. And in this the arts and humanities—including the theater— must play a role. —Una Chaudhuri, “There Must be a Lot of Fish in That Lake”1 The evolution of ancient Greek and Roman theatrical architecture and scenography provides a useful illustration of the ecocritical theater this dissertation explores. Situated first in the Athenian Agora and later on the southwestern slope of the Acropolis, the Theater of Dionysus was among the first formal theatrical spaces in the West.2 It helped to establish, along with other Greek theaters, the frontal orientation of the stage relative to the audience, still the most traditional staging arrangement today. But in contrast to many contemporary performances, the City Dionysia was an outdoor affair. Arnold Aronson paints a vivid picture of this scene: Unlike our modern experience of theater, in which we sit enclosed in darkness peering into an artificially illuminated box, the ancient Greeks sat in the bright Mediterranean morning sun in springtime watching mythological stories being reenacted against the glorious background of the landscape that was for them the center of the universe.3 One can imagine, as Aronson describes, the gathered citizens of Athens celebrating the Festival of Dionysus, looking down at the comedies and tragedies played before them and 1 Una Chaudhuri, “’There Must Be A Lot of Fish in that Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater,” Theater 25:1 (Spring/Summer 1994), 25. 2 Richard Beacham, “Playing Places: the temporary and the permanent,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre, Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 205. 3 Arnold Aronson, Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 55. 1 out at the ecosystem that encompassed Athens and the theater itself.4 The “center of the universe” the Athenians beheld was this ecosystem, from the Greek root “oikos,” meaning “home.”5 The theater historian David Wiles suggests that in its earliest incarnation, probably at the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., the Theater of Dionysus on the Acropolis was a “flexible environment lending itself to creative innovation” made all the “richer for its lack of a finished architectural frame.”6 Richard Beacham observes that “[the Greek] audience was seated, probably initially upon the bare incline of the hill,” in direct contact with the land that also framed and infused the theatrical spectacle, before wooden and, eventually, stone benches were added to the space.7 As the Theater of Dionysus continued to develop over the course of the century, the skênê house—first a temporary apparatus, likely made of wood and canvas, and then a permanent structure of stone—was added to the back of the orchêstra or playing area.8 During the Hellenistic period, the skênê grew to be approximately a story tall, creating an even more ordered performance space, particularly in contrast with the “flexible environment” of its earlier phases, but preserving the view of the Athenian landscape and with it some sense of 4 David Wiles adds, “In the theatre the audience looked down not upon their immediate civic environment but upon the sanctuary of the god, and upon the mountains and sky beyond. The function of theatre was to take citizens away from immediate political issues in order to explore the wider moral and religious context of those issues, and to view the human being outside the context of civilization.” Tragedy
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