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  • Fixing the TV:Televisual Geography in the Wooster Group’s Brace Up!
  • Phaedra Bell (bio)

What the televisual names then is the end of the medium, in a context, and the arrival of television as the context.

—Tony Fry (13)

Could be Melikhovo, could be anywhere.

—Hilton Als

According to Fry's theory, performance was already functioning inside the larger environment of the televisual when the Wooster Group first staged Brace Up! – their version of Chekhov's Three Sisters – in 1991. Indeed, the Wooster Group had already taken some aspects of the televisual into account in previous works. Against claims that these works were apolitical, Philip Auslander argues, in his landmark defense of their work, that their previous performances, particularly L.S.D., made political contributions by miming what he calls "the flow of mediatized culture" (83). Televisual flow "can be disorienting," Auslander explains in his reading of Raymond Williams' concept (18). The word "disorienting" is used figuratively here, referring to Williams' arguments about how the "central televisual experience" of flow blurs distinctions between fact and fiction, between ads and programs, and so on (95). The televisual and its flow can be literally disorienting as well. As Williams develops his concept of flow in his book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, he writes of an experience he had watching American television in Miami "still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner" (91). While he was watching one movie, the station played trailers for two other films scheduled for broadcast on other nights. "A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film)," Williams writes, "began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York […] I can still not be sure what I took from that whole flow" (91– [End Page 565] 92). Williams connects the ocean liner, one disorienting technology of transportation, with the "technology and cultural form" that caused his next "daze" through its imbrication of four cities normally located on different coasts and continents. Though it functions quite differently from planes, trains, and automobiles, televisual flow can still deracinate the viewed and the viewing bodies and detach them from their geographic locations. According to Hilton Als' review of the 2003 revival of Brace Up! a sense of geographic disorientation already at work in the Chekhov play persists even in the recent revival of the Wooster Group's televisual adaptation. If L.S.D. took on the figurative expression of American televisual disorientation, Brace Up! takes on its more literal manifestation.

The Wooster Group's major political achievements, according to Auslander, are their capacity to represent "the voiding of historical and political discourses under mediatization" and their capacity to "enable the spectator to position herself relative to such an environment" (171). The spectator can position herself relative to this ahistorical, apolitical environment in part because the Wooster Group gives this environment a landscape. Brace Up! shapes the geography of that landscape through its combination of live performance and video. Its landscape voids one historical and political discourse, in particular – modernism's discourse of home, a discourse that Una Chaudhuri calls "geopathology" or the "characterization of place as a problem" (xii). Brace Up! in fact replaces the modern discourse of geopathology with a discourse of anxiety and survival under late capitalist mediatization.

Three Sisters already complicates the modern discourse that the Wooster Group voids in their production. Even as Anton Chekhov's plays help define the modern dramatic canon, they deconstruct its geopathic discourse. Rather than participate in this genre's problematic relationship to place, Chekhov dismantles modern dramatic realism's insistence on the literalism, completeness, and centrality of the stage living-room to which a given character either belongs or doesn't. Geopathic realism, Chaudhuri writes, "relies on a longstanding conceptual structure in which two figures are balanced – and constructed – as opposites: the figures of belonging and exile" (12). Chekhov though, according to Chaudhuri, doesn't place the figures of exile and belonging in opposition but rather links them with a logic "of supplementarity: the emotional structure that is most familiar, most habitual and...

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