IBS4390 Master thesis in Ibsen Studies Jasminka Markovska Performance and Modernity – Analysis of When We Dead Awaken Center for Ibsen Studies Oslo, Spring 2007 Contents: 1. Introduction .......................................................................... 1 2. Modern, Modernity and Modernism .................................. 10 3. Performing Modernity, Performing Modernism .............. 32 4. The Consequences ................................................................ 63 5. The Playful Sollution ........................................................... 97 Performance and Modernity – Analysis of When We Dead Awaken 1. Introduction Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic works are automatically prone to performance analyses – one can analyze the techniques and performative methods that the works themselves imply. One can also analyze the separate performances of Ibsen’s works during the years. However, what I will investigate and try to uncover in this analyses is Ibsen’s awareness of life as performance and its connection to modern times, to be more precise, to the characteristic modern self-reflexivity. I believe that this is a very important, and one of the strongest points of his work that connects him to modernism and the post-modern audience of today. It is a universal quality that elevates his work away from the aesthetic and historic period it was written in. The field of performance studies covers many concepts and areas, to the point that it had become a “contested” concept because it is used for representing different, sometimes colliding purposes and meanings. (Carlson 2004 : 1) It is a new development, a contemporary counterpart of the old academic text-oriented methodologies. Richard Schechner calls this study approach the ‘broad spectrum approach’ of performance studies. It is a method of study that allows application of performance research in practically all strata of culture, not only in the studies of performance art or live art. This broad spectrum approach deals with studying all types of performative behavior, as well as the ways performance and performative behavior is used in politics, medicine, religion, popular entertainment and ordinary face-to-face interaction. …Performative thinking must be seen as a means for cultural analyses. Performance studies courses should be taught outside performing arts departments as part of core curricula. (Schechner 2004: 8) Schechner sees performance studies as the new paradigm that needs to replace theatre studies completely, while other theorists, like Philip Ausslander respond with the milder approach that instead of a replacement, what is at stake is an ‘articulation’ of a paradigm. Following Thomas Kuhns concepts and terminology on scientific evolution, Ausslander shows that [t]he evolution of Performance studies [derives] out of Theatre Studies, Speech Communication and Anthropology… [and that what is at stake is] the application and extension of a paradigm to new areas of research.” (Ausslander 1997 : 3) 1 Performance and Modernity – Analysis of When We Dead Awaken At the same time, discourse used in performance studies is more and more used in literary studies, while discourse used for studying texts is more and more employed while studying performance. Literary engagements with performativity tend to focus on the performative function of language as represented in literary texts, and much performance-oriented criticism of drama, for all its invocation of the theatre similarly betrays a desire to locate the meanings of the stage in the contours of the dramatic text. Performance studies has developed a vivid account of non-dramatic, nontheatrical, nonscripted, ceremonial, and everyday-life performances, performances that appear to part from the authority of the texts. Both disciplines view drama as a species of performance driven by texts; as a result, drama appears to be an increasingly residual mode of performance. (Worthen 2003 : 86-87) According to Worthen, these approaches lead to discussions of drama as lead by the text, as a left-over, remnant type of performance. Performance studies have been successful in analyzing dramatic texts that contain performative aspects. These performative aspects originate in the performance-like aspects of culture, society and behaviour, such as Judith Butler’s studies of performativity of gender, Victor Turner’s studies of culture as performance or Austin’s studies of the performative functions of language. These approaches also relate to contemporary stages of plays written in the past, but performed in the style of the new ‘performance art,’ and have been especially successful in analyzing Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett and Moliere, even some classical Greek dramatists, for example. (Worthen 2003 : 87) The re-staging of plays very often means deconstructing the relations of the age the original work was written in (gender, political, religious, social, economic and power relations), thus functioning as criticism. The re-staging can also mean introducing modern issues, problems, technology or staging techniques in the new staging of the old texts, thus making them postmodern collages, intertexts and signs that span way beyond the original meaning of the texts. Sometimes the original meanings of texts can be neglected completely. In 2006, The National Theatre in Oslo staged a performance of When We Dead Awaken in the ‘performance art’ style, with the emphasis put on the triangular relationship between Rubek, Irene and Maja, and the problem of the aging artist (or the aging man) put up front. One of the main characters – Ulheim was completely absent in this performance. The title of the new staging was Når vi døde… gjenbruk av Henrik Ibsens Når vi døde vågner , thus clarifying that what is being staged is a re- usage, a re-reading and a new text. This changed many of the aspects of the original text of the play, but allowed emphasis on topics that the director wanted to stress 2 Performance and Modernity – Analysis of When We Dead Awaken significantly – relations between people, age and death. The new staging also completely changed Ibsen’s realistic presentation by making performance art of his disputably modernist play and by introducing the metaphor of dance as a metaphor for relations among people. As a short commentary on the new staging the following text was offered: de danser… de danser livets dans. De virvler rundt og merker ikke alle tær de tråkker på, alle partnere de byr opp og bytter ut, de merker ikke hvor mye de svinger seg rundt seg selv og hverandre i narsissistisk takt. de danser... I NÅR VI DØDE konfronteres tre mennesker, han og hun og hun med sine skavanker, sine håp, sin tro og sine lyster. De lengter etter å leve livet til bunns som frie individer, men snører samtidig ufrihetens ned tettere rindt seg. De narrer andre, men egentlig bedrar de seg delv. Og alltid liger døden og venter. men, de danser... (from the program for the performance, 2006) The director of the performance offered this text to the audience as a verbal explanation of the performance, as a sublimation of the issues that were emphasized. This short text is stressing the corporeal, bodily aspect of the performance. However, instead of through the performance itself, this dance is textually ‘pre-performed’ for the spectators, so that the illusion of seeing a classically staged play by Ibsen was lost even before the performance actually started. The actors in the performance were not really dancing, they were interacting verbally and moving between the open stage and the audience. Thus, the dance mentioned here is a verbal lead to a dance (dance is always performative) that was not performed on stage. This mentioned, but absent on the stage dance is a metaphor of life as dance, of life as corporeal interaction that stops when the body stops to live. Ironically, as Worthen showed previously, the analyses of this understanding of life as a corporeal interactive performance, the pointing to it, is done verbally, and by no one else but by people that work in theatre. The connection between performance studies and textual analyses, the connection between performance and text is undeniable and unbreakable – after all, texts are what we inherit as guides for performances. 3 Performance and Modernity – Analysis of When We Dead Awaken Jon McKenzie went even further in the broadening of Schechner’s broad spectrum approach and understands performance studies as “an emergent stratum of power and knowledge.” (McKenzie 2001 : 18) For McKenzie, there are three general types of performances that shape humanity and the world (especially USA) as it is today: organizational performance (that has slowly overtaken the public office life and the companies by introducing the performance management strategy), cultural performance (that is the focus of interest of this thesis and embodies study of all manifestations of performance or performative behavior in a culture), and technological performance (that originates in the Cold War’s technological frenzy, but is more than obvious today in a world where we are totally dependent on bar codes and machines of all sorts.) Based on the performative theories of Butler, the attitudes towards the postmodern of Lyotard, the analyses of Marx and Freud by Marcuse (mainly in Eros and Civilisation ), as well as the analyses and theoretical presumptions of Foucault, Deleuze and Gatari (as well as of many others), he comes to the conclusion and the prophecy that “ performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries