Theatre/Archaeology (review)

Theatre/Archaeology. By Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks. London: Routledge, 2001; pp. vxiii + 186. $85.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

If the origins of cultural performance lie near the intersection of theatre and anthropology, perhaps its future unfolds in Theatre/Archaeology, an extraordinary text by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks. With this book, the authors jump-start a field of inquiry whose contours, contests, and passions they stage from a variety of perspectives, beginning with two biographies, two disciplines, and two sites: Pearson and Shanks, theatre and archaeology, ancient Greece and contemporary Wales. Mike Pearson is Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and former artistic director of Brith Gof, a Welsh experimental theatre group known for its site-specific and very physical brand of performance. Michael Shanks is Professor of Classics and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University and the author of several combative texts on ancient Greece and the theory and practice of contemporary archaeology, in particular that of interpretative archaeology. Over the past several years, the two researchers have collaborated on a series of practical and theoretical projects, research that revolves around site-specific performance and the performativity of archaeological sites, the interpenetration of past and present, event and site, human and artifact.

Theatre/Archaeology is both a culmination and a single moment in this serial research. Using a variety of voices and typefaces, Pearson and Shanks at times distinguish their perspectives, section by section, running side by side, then colliding, bouncing off one another, while at other times they blend and merge, making themselves known and unknown to their audience. In some respects, their collaboration recalls the entwined theatre/ritual research by Richard Schechner and Victor Turner some thirty years ago, but while this earlier duo traded essays and workshops, they (unfortunately) never published a co-authored work, never created such a condensed layering of concepts and methods as that found packed in the pages of Theatre/Archaeology.

In its methodology, the text is itself ajar, cracked open by two questions: Can models of theatre and performance help generate interpretative, even experiential, knowledge of archaeological sites and artifacts, knowledge that gets at the lifeworld of Stonehenge, for instance, or a Greek kouros? Alternatively, can archaeology provide methods for generating site-specific, temporally-dissonant performances, events that suspend places, objects, and people somewhere between the now and the then? Together, both questions are answered in the affirmative and answered through both explanation and demonstration. Indeed, the authors point to what might be called a generalized anachronicity, the citationality of any and all site specificity. For Pearson and Shanks, the past is not so past, for it is always bubbling up in the present, reanimating a temporality that escapes us even as it engulfs us. Thus figures found on a seventh-century Korinthian perfume jar—warriors, women, animals, and monsters—are contextualized, but in multiple times: shaped and painted at one time, filled and stored at another, buried with the dead, dug up millennia later, able to take their places alongside figures of Kubrick and Tsukamoto, Pearson and Shanks, you and me. Between now and then, the authors write "no single story need be told. . . . Indeed the frameworks may be so different in nature that their juxtaposition recurrently creates new and unexpected meaning. Here is a fusion of the creative and the analytical, the past and the present, and the animation of individuals within a variety of dramatic structures which can evoke a richness and density of meanings, trapped neither in one period nor in the mannerisms of costume drama" (111-12).

The disciplinary fortifications of performance and archaeology are surveyed and breached in this book, inviting readers to "regard performance as an experimental archaeology of the interpretive. And as information technology brings further challenges to the discrete nature of individual disciplines, archaeology and performance might be drawn into joint endeavors for which, as yet, we barely have names" (132). Through subterranean passages, Pearson and Shanks's theatre/archaeology also connects up with past digs, such as Nietzsche's genealogy of sovereignty...