square white world

It is the desire to occupy a place from which one can take everything in, first and foremost visually, but also orally and audibly, that renders the theatre and theatricality so suspect.

- Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, Fordham University Press, New York, 2004, p. 7

Samuel Weber calls Plato’s ‘cave’ in The Republic a theatre. He calls for a mediumistic interpretation of theatricality. I would rather consider the cave in Plato’s story theatrical on the basis of its exaggeration, its blatant artificiality. Theatricality, then, is problematic for being artificial by nature, rather than suspect for interesting us in its panoptic potential. This view of theatre includes the impression it gives of potentially showing everything and when Weber calls on Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory to attest to the extra, the remainder, of what is in excess of the signifying system or regime installed by theatricality, he is sensitive to what I would more readily like to call exaggeration.

If Plato’s theatricality is not in the image he has chosen but first and foremost in his choice of adding a theatrical dimension, what we have in the ‘cave’ is indeed theatre by way of metaphor. The thought behind it has chosen a theatrical metaphor and done so not to express a theatrical truth or truth about theatre and its placing and setting of us up to see, hear and taste (? Weber writes ‘orally’) everything but to stage a truth about everything or set up a theatrical stage in order for that truth to be represented: the theatrical is constituted here by its metaphoricity. I would prefer to contrast this metaphoricity of the thought as it is theatricalised and/or performed with a theatricality particular in every instance of performance, a theatricality, that is, of theatre as it is thought. The theatre of thought depends on a generality, that supplied by metaphoricity. The thought of theatre is used to find a way to express and analyse the problematic natural artificiality we call theatricality.

As a note further on this line: I was reminded of the difference and the difference in relation to difference of theatricality and metaphoricity watching a DVD of Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum. This is Kraftwerk in performance - which means doing not much apart from standing in a row in front of identical keyboards… while behind them a three-part screen explodes with all sorts, carefully contrived and often synched up with the songs, of graphic illustration.

I was struck by how innately theatrical the machine is. And it is so without speaking of our desire to see, hear, touch, taste, experience everything through our senses. It’s not its prosthetic McCluhan dimension that makes the machine dynamically theatrical, it is its strong artificiality. And this is where the risk lies, the danger: machines are sexy and dangerous. If they are prosthetic, the danger appears to lie in their exaggeration of single qualities, speed for example, strength, tele-vision. That they are machines makes them theatrical. Machines stage their own risky qualities. They make what they do obvious. They exaggerate. And this constitutes their appeal.

Machine designs are often said to be ‘revolutionary.’ I don’t think this is an entirely baseless description but applies less to the superfices of the machine than to its artifice: what it does AND what it stages. The delicious threat of being replaced or degraded by or upgraded to a machine exists and is compelling because robots are to the nth degree not us. The Big Other is a robot. We are literally upstaged by robots. Which is why robots are the future. (& Crime Oil - which is a trademark: contact for your order now.)

From the more limited point of view of metaphoricity, machines virtualise, become virtual, in the sense of virtual reality. They are put to work at creating a moral image, much like the ‘cave’’s use of a theatrical metaphor. Virtual reality is only sexy and dangerous to the extent that the artifice is highlighted, that it exaggerates us, itself or not us. The appeal of Second Life appears to lie directly in this performative dimension of prostheses or body modification. And the appeal of talking about Second Life or the immersive experience appears to have more to do with real-world implications on the nexus between artifice and nature, which is exactly that realm opened up, I would suggest, by the problematic of theatricality. In other words, our self-performance in virtual reality really really happens. It is exaggerated and signposts its artificiality. It takes place not within theatricality as a medium but theatricality as a problematic field.

to denounce the Big Lie that encased our lives like the thin shell of an egg … As you touched it, the membrane burst, and you suddenly found yourself alone and helpless, at the mercy of a whip wielded by authority. … The Big Lie, like a new placenta, prevented us from both dying and being born. One imprudent gesture and the filmy membrane exploded. You had to hold your breath and check yourself constantly, so that your mouth, choked with lies big and small, did not let out, involuntarily, the breath of air that could have shattered the protective cocoon. In fact, we were constantly wrapping the eggshell in other coverings, one inside another, like a nest of Russian dolls. So, what was this blessed Big Lie? … The membrane of lies had become, for many, a thick protective coating, dense, indestructible, resistant to cracking. … the penal colony of the Big Lie - the prisoners were condemned to compulsory happiness.

I did not puncture that filmy membrane. … I ignored, as well as I could, the shell under which I went about my business. …

- Norman Manea, The Hooligan’s Return, trans. Angela Jianu, pp. 196-197

… the publisher … wrote: “You were an eyewitness, and as a writer you must react.” Publicly decoding his life, writing a personal memoir? Cioran had warned about it: “A cinder bath, a good exercise in self-incineration.” It would be like peeling away one’s skin, layer after layer, in competition with the tell-all confessions of television talk shows or the self-revelations of group therapy.

…

“I am in favour of forced migration,” Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Romania, army commander, and leader of the Romanian state, declared in the summer of 1941. “I do not care whether we shall go down in history as barbarians. The Roman Empire committed many barbaric acts and yet it was the greatest political establishment the world has ever seen.” The noble barbarian [cf. Cioran] did not want to miss the opportunity afforded him of at last eradicating the national pest. “Our nation has not known a more favourable moment in its history. If need be, shoot,” Hitler’s ally declared.

- Ibid., p. 224

Nothing was more important than survival, Mother kept saying … The logic on which my father had built his life was now useless. … He could accept death, but not humiliation. Risking everything, he recoiled in disgust from the grim truth of his present reality. He did not become servile and hypocritical, as was demanded of the slaves; he would not surrender his dignity. His wife didn’t care about such idiocies, but he did. The black market in sentiment, not only in aspirin or bread, that prevailed in the camps, disgusted him, and so did the barbarity of victims determined to save themselves at any cost from the barbarity the oppressors. Monster-executioners breed monster-victims, he used to repeat in his soft but determined voice.

- Ibid, p. 228

“You won’t believe it, but I finally gave in and signed. There was no choice. They also gave me a code name, ‘Alin.’”

The name the policemen had chosen for him was the very pen name their new informant used for the poetry and theatre reviews he published in literary magazines. Let this be a lesson for him; both vocations, poet and informant, after all, probe the mystery in which we all hide.

- Ibid., p. 230

Would Comrade Doctor allow himself to be psychoanalysed by a patient obsessed with the comedy of double roles? Could the poet find the lyric correlative of duplicitous chaos, conducted on the surface by the masked men of power and perpetuated, underground, by the venom of resentment?

The patient’s questions quickly rebounded back to himself, as though he had borrowed the doctor’s mannerisms and was able to read the theme of the psychiatric session with closed eyes: the Initiation after the Initiation. Or should it be called adaptation? And what exactly did the survivor adapt to? A familiar question. Over a decade later, it would also be asked by an American psychiatrist. The answer was familiar, too: The patient adapted to life, as simple as that. Indeed, it is to life that all survivors adapt, whether they are survivors of black, green, or red dictatorships. They do so with that impertinence of normality which is life itself. This was how I summarised my own biography on the eve of exile, an experiment no less educational than the preceding ones.

How can one be a writer if one has no freedom was the dilemma posed by the American psychiatrist, an expert in the psychoses of freedom in the New World. The question would have sounded like a bad joke if uttered by his East European counterpart, but an exchange of expertise between the specialist in the pathology of constraint and the analyst of freedom’s traumas would not have been useless. The psychiatrists of these two very different worlds would have discovered many surprising resemblances alongside the differences.

The freedom of the New Man meant accepting necessity - this was what doctor and patient had learned from the Marxist dialecticians of a party that became less Marxist every day: necessity, hence adaptation; adaptation, hence pragmatism: hence, accepted necessity. Adaptation to life, Doctor, this was the task facing the apprentice in the banality served pedagogically by daily life. Life, that was all. In the East, in the West, in the cosmos.

- Ibid., p. 238

More time has now passed. You have learned the joys and the maladies of liberty. You have accepted the honour of exile. … “The return to the homeland is but a return to the mother’s grave” …

…

You were, you told yourself, in the living present, not in the ever-present past.

- Ibid., p. 247

“The place of our truth is here. We are writers, we have no other solution,” she had said. I was familiar with such banalities. I myself had once been a victim of misery’s pride, it had often fed my despair.

- Ibid., p. 259

“Maybe you should wander around America a bit,” he said. But that advice was followed, thank God, not by a list of places to visit but by another prolonged silence.

“You can’t have better lessons in solitude anywhere else.”

- Ibid., p. 309

The wall behind the bed is cold in the blackness of the night.

- Ibid., 373

“Poetry, the lie detector prone to burst into tears.” The shadows and the clowns take off their masks, their prostheses, leave aside their crutches, and line up into a neat row of phosphorescent letters: “Florin Mugur - Poet - 1932-1991.” I am alive, still alive, for yet another living moment, leaning against the gravestone of Florin Mugur …

- Ibid., p. 377

Joyce Carol Oates:
If Obama wins, very likely there would be an efflorescence of a kind, perhaps most evident in the more public artforms - dance, music, theatre.

Gore Vidal:
Oliver Stone, I gather, is doing father-and-son stories. I’m very fond of Oliver, but you don’t need Freud when you’re dealing with Caligula.

Art is always needed in a country that doesn’t much like it. Performance is all anybody cares about.

Paul Miller:
Usually when you have a rightwing lunatic such as Nixon, or more cynical regimes such as Reagan or Bush I’s administration, there’s a counterpoint. What ended up happening with Bush II is that the counter-culture response became incoherent.

The “culture-entertainment” industry is different now. They realise that the idea of rebellion can be made into an echo-chamber and sold back to you.

Britney Spears giving herself a haircut or the “hyper-realism” of the execution of Saddam Hussein spreading like video wildfire on people’s cellphones. It’s incoherence - montaged and edited a la Oliver Stone.

Elizabeth LeCompte:
The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don’t think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.

Theatre in America is in decline, however. A lot of the people who would have been writing for the theatre 100 years ago are now writing in television. In America, all art is denigrated, basically, with the possible exception of music. Written and spoken arts aren’t taken seriously here, and I don’t think they’ve ever been.

Edward Albee:
We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn’t seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.

Somebody asked Beckett once why he writes if he’s such a pessimist. He said, “If I were a pessimist I wouldn’t write.”

Alex Gibney:
Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.

It contributed to an extraordinary flowering of political documentaries - and not necessarily pure anti-Bush ones. The administration provoked a thoughtfulness, both in aesthetic terms and in terms of political thinking, that expressed itself in documentaries in a very exciting way. Iraq in Fragments, for instance, was a beautiful film - not overtly political but political in a deeper sense.

Lionel Shriver:
Hate figures are far more motivating than heroes, and W has graciously provided the collectively leftwing artistic community an embarrassment of riches. In fact, the biggest problem with the Bush era’s artistic legacy is that this widely despised president has tended to inspire polemics and agitprop. Many novels, films, plays, and artworks from the last eight years have been spitting with indignation, painfully obvious in their political intent, sledgehammer subtle in their execution, and clubby - since most of these works are preaching to the converted. Thus W may have bequeathed a whack of subject matter, but whether any of this stuff will be of enduring value is open to question. You have to ask yourself whether the diatribes denouncing Bush in a novel, such as JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (a book trying enough when it was published in 2007), will hold the faintest interest after January 2009.

And here’s the really bad news: Obama could be terrible for the arts. Why, when there’s barely an artist in the States who doesn’t support him? Art thrives on resistance.

Trisha Brown:
I was so in love with art-making - but I’m tired of the suppression of arts and I’ve shifted into other disciplines to find vitality and exchange.

Naomi Wolf:
there’s something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.

I’ve done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late 30s. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant garde, to any originality in art. Some of the most interesting visual artists we’ve seen in recent times, for example, were working behind the iron curtain, and of course, they had to work allegorically.

Much of the protest work I’ve seen [in America] has been very bad, pedantic, heavy-handed. I’ve seen so many bad monologues about the Iraq war, so many dreadful photo-montages. I think it’s because Americans don’t quite understand repression yet.

Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Václav Havel. Here, people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way … Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?

Daniel Libeskind:
At Ground Zero, we’re not sure if the performing arts centre planned will ever happen. This was a key part of the masterplan, but all that’s mattered in the World of Bush is the workings, and failures, of the market economy. So, Ground Zero could yet end up, unless we get a sympathetic new president, as a purely commercial venture.

[full text available here]

Where is there a similar attempt to question, articulate or even consider Helen Clark’s legacy? Whether political, polemical or cultural?

You are welcome to a submit comment to this post … by way of protest, restitution or recapitulation: What is Helen Clark’s cultural legacy?

- Augusto Boal

Excerpts from Tom Magill’s interview with Augusto Boal [full text here]:

Communitage:

The word community, communitage in Portuguese, we use to define sometimes a region of the city, e.g., a slum. In this state there is a communitage within that slum. Sometimes we can talk about also the communitage of psychiatric hospitals or we can talk about the communitage of a trade union for instance, so the word communitage / community has not the same meaning as it has in English, and of course they don’t have theatre inside those communities.

a community having the same interests without specialities:

In slums there is no theatre, only one slum which is an area called Digegow, in Rio, has a community and curiously, Cicerly Berry, who is the great teacher of voice of the Royal Shakespeare Company, when she went to Brazil twice she went to that community in the slums to teach the people how to pronounce better, how to free their voices. And so community means that. It means a group of people who can be located geographically or because they have the same interests and they don’t have specialities so there is not a difference between that community theatre and the other forms because they don’t have other forms. And then we worked with those communities to make them produce theatre.

A “community theatre” is a special place in New Zealand, or, in the Boal’s example, the US:

… it is only for that region or whatever you know. It’s not in our case, our poor communities or workers’ communities. They don’t have theatre at all and then what they make is not creative theatre. But to help them make theatre, wherever, in any place, but not a special place, that is our task.

On building bulwarks:

all the barriers have been collapsing already and now what I think we should reinforce are some barriers instead of collapsing them. Building new walls against racism which is one of the horrible things that exist in the world. A wall against intolerance which is not accepting and is a form of racism, not accepting the existence of the other one. The wall against sexism which enslaves half of humanity - women. A wall against globalisation which makes all of us become clones of ourselves to become robots, so now is the moment to build barriers, to build walls and to fight against intolerance, against racism, sexism and globalisation, to fight vigorously against that.

On political and theatrical representation:

Democracy is a very beautiful system but has this inconvenience. You have extreme power in your hands and when you vote you lose that power. It’s a paradoxical reality and then you’re going to get power again, 2, 4, 8 years later to vote again and to lose your power the moment you exert your power. You use your power you lose it, and then we thought during this time how can we make the citizen be aware of what’s going on? To delegate power to the other ones is so horrible. When you delegate power you lose your power and then you become a spectator of that person. You may have confidence in the person, you may trust them, but it is something that when you speak with your voice and something else when someone speaks in your place. When someone speaks in your place, even if it’s an honest person, intelligent person, creative person, but that person will never translate correctly what you want to say.

On participation including both amateur and professional:

if everyone did theatre the professional theatre would be full every day because they would like to see what the other ones are doing. So sometimes professional theatre is not so interesting to the population because the population does not practice theatre. If you do theatre all of the time then you want to see a play done by others. The more you develop theatre inside the population in general, the more you create conditions for having bigger audiences, a more interested audience, more participation from the audience.

On copying methodologies:

I think that the bad results can come from an automatic, a mechanical transposition forcing a method that is flexible and not stratified, so if it serves as an inspiration it is good.

On the invention of theatre from rebellion - jumping out of not into the chorus:

If I think about the Ancient Greeks, the one who influenced me very much was Thespis. Why Thespis? Because he was the first person who was in a chorus in the dithyrambic chorus singing all disciplined the song that the poet had written and dancing the movements of the choreographer and saying what was the acceptable official story so he jumped out of that and refused to be inside the chorus and said what he really thought. So this act of rebellion, he invented the theatre with this act of rebellion when he went out and said I don’t agree with it, the chorus singing in poetry and he answering, replicating in prose. So this act of rebellion for me is extraordinary. A man invented the theatre. In this act of rebellion he jumped out of the chorus.

On funding:

I am a professional, we should have our money from the government because art in most cases is not self sufficient, you need sponsorship. But, we should have a balance, popular art should be developed for its own benefit and for the benefit of art in general.

(Augusto Boal was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

It was awarded to Martti Ahtisaari.)

Augusto Boal was arrested in 1972 after the publication of Theatre of the Oppressed. Following a brief outbreak of democracy, Brazil had been returned to a military dictatorship - by coup - in 1964. Censorship was most intense over the period 1968-73.

Boal was imprisoned, suffered various types of torture, over a four month period, until he was eventually, like Caetano Veloso, deported.

He returned to Brazil in 1986 and has since then worked in Brazil and throughout the world on / in the theatre of the oppressed. Turning sixty-five in 1996, he was refused his pension on the grounds that he remained classified as a ‘menace to the state.’

International pressure on the Brazilian government to grant Boal the pension increased when it became widely known in 2005 that this classification still had not been revoked.

Is Boal still an unpensioned enemy of the state?

- Micha’s dragon’s skeleton

Micha Cárdenas’s Becoming Dragon questions the one year requirement of Real Life Experience that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery (Sexual Reassignment Surgery), and asks if this could be replaced by one year of Second Life Experience to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery. For the performance, Micha Cárdenas will live for 365 hours immersed in Second Life with a head mounted display, so that all she will see is Second Life, and a motion capture system to
map her movements into Second Life. The performance is Micha’s final MFA project at University of California’s San Diego campus.

Read Micha’s live blogging from Second Life during the performance here.

Recollection is defined both in relation to the perception with which it is contemporaneous and the following moment in which it prolongs itself. Reuniting the two senses produces a bizarre impression: that of acting and being ‘acted’ upon at the same time.
- Gilles Deleuze, quoted in Difference and Givenness, Levy Bryant, p. 126

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art or rather elementary forms of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all bring with them their own disappointments. One grows sated or disillusioned with love. We wake from sleep and whilst we slept, we did not live. The price of drugs is the ruin of the very body they were used to stimulate. But there is no disillusion in art because its illusory nature is clear from the start.

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, pp. 258-259

At this moment I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I feel suddenly tired and decide not to write anymore, not to thing anymore, but to let the fever of saying lull me to sleep whilst, with closed eyes, I gently stroke as I would a cat all the things I might have said.

- Ibid., p. 260

Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence and of whatever emptiness, negativity and inconstancy I share with them, the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some god…

- Ibid., p. 262

If I could articulate it, the thesis of the proposed dissertation on Deleuze and theatre, it would include my frustration at not being able to make the work I want to, to work with the people I want to and to command the resources, at a global level if you want, I need to do so. It would be a complaint, in the old sense. The thesis would howl. And it would bay at the moon who remains out of reach.

I must come back to Constantine Cavafy’s ‘The Windows:’

In these dark rooms where I live out empty days,
I wander round and round trying to find the windows.
But the windows are not to be found -
or at least I can’t find them. And perhaps
it is better that way.
Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will expose?

- photos by Duane Michals of the actor Joel Grey, a friend of the photographer, playing the poet, inspired by the writings of Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

- Arthur Boyd, Figure supporting back legs and Interior with black rabbit, 1973-4

the image is from Arthur Boyd’s ‘caged painter’ series, commenced in 1971 upon his return to Australia after over a decade in England. The year he left Caetano Veloso was recording his own record of exile, ‘A Little More Blue.’

Norman Manea repeats the mantra he learnt from Franz Kafka: in the confrontation between oneself and the world, take the side of the world.

Jorge Luis Borges is a poet of the pathos of time. He writes of Citizen Kane that it links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. [Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weingberger, Viking, New York, 1999, p. 259]

Emptiness, emptiness, says Koheleth, emptiness, all is empty.
…
So I came to hate life, since everything that was done here under the sun was a trouble to me; for all is emptiness and chasing the wind.
…
I considered all the acts of oppression here under the sun; I saw the tears of the oppressed, and I saw that there was no one to comfort them.
…
Woe betide the land when a slave has become its king, and its princes feast in the morning.
…
Whatever has already existed has been given a name, its nature is known, a man cannot contend with what is stronger than he. The more words one uses the greater is the emptiness of it all; and where is the advantage to a man?

and the Koheleth, said to be a sage whose sayings were recorded in the second century BC and collected in Ecclesiastes, also wrote the song which goes … a time to be born and a time to die, and so on.

There is an empty thing found on earth: when the just man gets what is due to the unjust, and the unjust what is due to the just. I maintain that this too is emptiness. So I commend enjoyment, since there is nothing good for a man to do here under the sun but to eat and drink and enjoy himself; this is all that will remain with him to reward his toil throughout the span of life.

… and I bethought myself of all the fury and hatred I had to bring against the world and its illusions and because the door opened a crack I heard the engine pounding, its hammers beating. I wondered if this was the engine, the war-machine with which I was to assail the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze; albeit that its hammers were butterfly wings shamanically grafted onto it and that its beating was only theatrical: the apocalypse is achieved with a backlit gauze on a proscenium arch stage. It is sheer melodrama.

Nothing is more terrifying writes Borges than a labyrinth without a centre.

And if for every step the thread was cut?

Walking into the rehearsal room, possibly with a script in hand, possibly not, flanked by a small group of actors, we are struck - if the room is a familiar one and not itself a complete surprise - by how much is already there, although invisible. The room is not empty. It is not a desert. We do not make work in a vacuum.

Choices stretch out beyond the three or four visible walls. The working area is jam-packed with clichés. So the first task becomes how to clear the room, because the problem confronting us is: where to start.

At the beginning of chapter III of Difference and Repetition, entitled “The Image of Thought,” where the show really gets under way, Gilles Deleuze presents the problem of where to start in philosophy as of the utmost delicacy. Before he gets to it, so as not to make, before the curtain rises on this the opening night, a false start, a false theatre, a false drama, a false movement, he opposes the theatre of representation to the theatre of repetition.

On the latter’s platform, he writes, “we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters - the whole apparatus of repetition as a ‘terrible power’.”[Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Continuum, London, 2004, p. 12]

In the rehearsal room, which is our theatre of repetition, and which we often hope to take beyond and to the stage, to the theatre of resemblance - to the run - we are confronted with just the kinds of clichés Deleuze names. Theatre and philosophy depend on where we choose to start: “for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions.”[ibid., p. 164] These presuppositions constitute the Image of Philosophy as much as the choices we face in the rehearsal room constitute the Image of Theatre.

We will never entirely escape the Image. In fact, both theatre and philosophy prepare, albeit in different senses, its advent. Rehearsal, commonsensically, precedes and is only justified by performance. What Deleuze at first calls the theatre of repetition, though it pass to it by a phase of misosophy, ends up philosophy. What is more, as Deleuze remarks in comments about surfing, posthumously published in the Abécédaire, it ends up on the inside of philosophy, having to be reattached to the outside, and to life, again and again, by the living.

Theatre and philosophy, however, differ all the way through: what is artifice for one is an article of faith for the other, because theatre is pretend. Deleuze’s ‘dynamic lines in space’ are a gestural histrionics; his ‘language before words’ is sheer clowning; ‘gestures before bodies’ becomes shorthand for status onstage; ‘masks’ are worn to dissimulate; ’spectres and phantoms’ appear in the list of dramatis personae as distinct characters; the ‘apparatus’ sounds like the philosophical equivalent of the deux ex machina, the ‘terrible power’ which is achieved with fx and sfx, or smoke and mirrors.

This is where I suggest we start, at the inversion effected on philosophy by theatre, from which two critical prospects immediately arise: metaphoricity and theatricality. By the former is meant the voracity of theatre as metaphor, not only a matter of its discursive frequency, the frequency of its appearance in discourses, and therefore quantifiable, but also a matter of its power, its ‘terrible power’, and therefore qualifiable. By theatricality is meant exactly this quality of theatre-as-metaphor, a distinct metaphoricity.

There are theological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, political, economic, martial and passional theatres. It seems there is a theatre of everything else apart from theatre. Psychoanalysis has used the metaphor of theatre with a compulsiveness bordering on the obsessive to the extent that it has practically metastasized. When it does we see the outcome not as the death of the body but its spectacular recovery, if not as philosophy, then as the thought we tend to call theory, with which theatre shares its etymological roots.

Theatres of war and thought, theatres of engagement and operations, are deadly serious. From within their three walls we hear the sweet bird of truth singing, loud enough that the gods will take notice, having unleashed its payload of explosive. To talk about Paul Virilio’s ‘theatre of thought‘ is to get at the essential Virilio-ness of Virilio, into his very bunker. The play is high stakes; we risk losing everything on a single throw of the dice.

If we are all already squashed into these theatres, as Virilio seems to say, that is, if we are already within the purview of this metaphoricity, then we are here not just to put bums on seats and see the actors get paid; we are not here for the sake of the spectacle but of panic, and terror. The metaphor heightens our experience, makes it immediate, creates the impression we are in danger.

In reality and not hyper-reality, if we run the risk of ultraviolence being used upon our persons, we understand that it remains theatre. Keeping it real, it is at the level of the actor that the danger passes; and that it exists. Even should the theatricality of the moment insist that he avert it with a wave of his chiffon scarf, yet the risk informs the theatrical encounter. The lie here tells the truth.

Theatricality joins, insofar as the theatrical is also artificial, mannered, forced and unnatural, showy, fake, kitsch, camp, ironic, and effeminate, with other logics of inversion. It is an historicising vector of theatre: it contains without ever exhausting the history of artifice; which suggests that it is a logic of sense, in Deleuze a condition of truth and as sensation a condition of creative thought, native to theatre. [Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003]

As for terror, it is general over the countries and on all sides, in full regard of the theatrical conditions which give rise to and sustain it. Terror could be seen as the disease which afflicts the prevailing humour of theatricality; which suggests a clinical prospect: theatre as an artform.

The problem of theatre’s metaphoricity is that it doesn’t save any room for theatre. The problem of theatricality lies in its power to create between what is and what is not a transformative tension, but one too easily coopted by recognition, representation and the recuperation of identity, rather than absolute inversion or transfiguration. Theatre is blocked. It is the art of representation par excellence.

Art is of signal importance in Deleuze’s philosophy because it is in sensation, in the encounter which disrupts the harmony of the faculties, that thought opens into thought. Art gives access onto the real, the virtual and creative ground of being. For these reasons, it is first in Deleuze that we should look for a ‘thought of theatre.’ It is on the ground of a virtual ontology that we may build theatre as an artform.

Although a collection of essays about him might bear the title Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, Deleuze’s writing on theatre amounts to a single extended piece, “Un manifeste de moins.” In this text, Deleuze considers the work of Carmelo Bene, exhorting us to represent nothing, to accede to a minor theatre and a minor consciousness, and to make a decisive transformation.[Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Routledge, USA, 1994. "Un manifeste de moins," translated as "One Manifesto Less," by Alan Orenstein, in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 204-222]

From 1) the critical project of looking at the ‘theatre of thought,’ as metaphor and logic, comes 2) a clinical consideration of the ‘thought of theatre,’ as artform, from which proceeds 3) thinking theatre: the theatre of theatre.

In this third part of the proposed work, we will seek to build a theatre in thought and set forth the conditions for a thinking theatre. While at the same theatre the death of man is playing tonight, and will be back tomorrow, by popular demand, we will open in theatre another.

The crack of theatricality divides chiffon scarf from act of terrorism by bringing them together. It too divides brothel from church and state. The actor, like the whore or the priest and politician, betrays his promise. But he does so rather before he makes it than after. So it is in it and in him that the problem is shown to come into being and it is here where it is most clearly elaborated: in the theatre we might attend to it as a problem of being and not with being, of and not with ontology.

Herbert Blau gets very close to this sense of a theatrical logic being borne out by a virtual ontology when he writes that what gives theatre life is what theatre hides. As both practitioner and cultural theorist, he attends carefully to “the living insignia of theatre, seen unseen, its troubling materialization from whatever it is it is not.” Where Blau returns us to this side of the looking-glass, to follow Deleuze is to continue around the turn in thought, to come to a place we no longer recognise. [Herbert Blau, "Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze," unpublished essay, provided courtesy of the author]

This is the challenge Deleuze presents to thinking, with the object that without too many false starts, but very many rehearsals, we arrive at a theatre of theatre. In the context of New Zealand theatre practice, a theatre without context and a colonial history post- and neo-colonially of diminishing interest, let alone return, the task is to develop a ground on which theatre might justify itself, find its context within itself - the meaning of ‘theatre of theatre’ - and find also within itself the ‘terrible power’ of creation.