From the Postdramatic to the Poly-dramatic: The Text/Performance Divide Reconsidered

Theatre is a critical minefield: concurrently a space of meditation in contemporary theory—of key concepts such as textuality, performativity, liveness, the real—and a site of contestation where interconnected and coexigent categories of drama, performance, and spectacle continue to be disputed. Much of contemporary theatre criticism remains enmeshed in the timeless debate over text and performance, bodies and language, liveness and mediation. At key moments in the twentieth century, it has been argued that theatrical writing does not belong to literature nor should literary tools define theatrical analysis. At different times, the author, the director, the actor, the performer, and the audience have taken their turn as the primary arbiter of stage meaning. The dramatist’s authority was dislodged by the advent of the modern theatre director in the late nineteenth century.¹ Subsequently, many processes challenged the primacy of writing: the splintering of authorial univocality through collective creation, the actor-performer appropriations of the text, the multiplicity of audience interpretations and responses, and the disjointing of narrative through the use of multimedia and intermediality in performance. Philip Auslander and others have warned that a knee-jerk suspicion of the text coupled with a valorization of liveness have given rise to a species of “performance studies evangelism.”²

If, as Elin Diamond has argued, performance studies needs to be credited with “dismantling textual authority, illusionism, and the canonical actor in favor of the polymorphous body of the performer,” it is equally important to note that, on the one hand, the body is also a discursive and an ideological battlefield and that, on the other hand, texts of the modern period have posed various challenges to their own authority, their illusionist claims, and their assumptions as definitive modes of expression.³ High modernist and postmodernist textual experiments of dramatists, such as Nathalie Sarraute, Peter Handke, Marguerite Duras, Adrienne Kennedy, Jan Fabre, Valère Novarina, Anna Deavere Smith, and Robert Wilson, to name a few, have challenged the text/performance divide and tacitly reinscribed textuality in the realm of the performative.

This article will not simply suggest reestablishing textual autonomy, nor will it divorce the text from other elements of performance in order to isolate its means and place it on a pedestal in the name of a romantic ideal of literary genius, or superiority of writing over performance. Instead, it will construct theatre’s inability to distinguish between the written text and the performance text as a productive site. After decades of border wars, performance today cannot do away with theatre, be it textual or performative, as Marvin Carlson points out: the mere presence of an audience “watching an action, however neutral or non-matrixed, and presented in whatever unconventional space, inevitably called up associations with theatre.”⁴ Can we move the debate today past the binary opposition and acknowledge along with Patrice Pavis that plays, literary works, and dramas “are still being written, and a performance does not need a textual origin, aid or trace in order to exist”?⁵ Like Pavis, we no longer see “performance as a semiotics emanating from the text” questioning whether we have “come any further, in particular in theorizing a ‘post’-theatre: postmodern, postdramatic, post-post?” Pavis suggests to “historicize and localize this debate between text and performance and not to continue to treat it as an atemporal logical problem.”⁶ This essay aspires to historicize and localize the debate and further to analyze the modalities of antitextual biases by looking at how extremely complex and conflicted cultural anxieties have continued to construct theatrical texts in the way they exploit fragmentation, challenge dramatic unity, and deny the unity of subject. This will help us develop critical tools to rethink stage textuality, not as a source, a supplement, or an impediment to performance, but as performance and as a site of experimentation where the boundaries between the textual, the corporeal, and the mediated are constantly disputed, contested, and rearranged. The text, be it performative or written, has become the embattled ground between language, body, and liveness. We are calling this performative textuality...