Editorial Comment

I never cease to be fascinated by the different ways in which theatre and performance deploy and stage what has come before, while researchers continue to imaginatively reinterpret the past in the present. The essays in this issue foreground this plasticity of theatre, from the reimagining of religious iconography in the production of state-of-the-art “bioart,” to a reassessment of form and content in contemporary adaptations of canonical texts, to a rethinking of traditional perspectives and interpretations, and, finally, to a fundamental reuse of the signifiers of identity, place, and politics. Each essay examines theatre from a perspective that is somewhat counter to expectation; there is, as well, a spectral shadowing of previous texts and/or previous traditions that haunts each one.

Adele Senior’s essay “Relics of Bioart: Ethics and Messianic Aesthetics in Performance Documentation” opens the issue. She explores the work of Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), a group that pairs the “science” of live tissue culture with performance. TC&A grow living tissue from a range of organisms over a shaped object, called a “scaffold.” TC&A shape this tissue into “bio-art”—an example of which, the 2000–02 installation Pig Wings, is on the cover of this issue of Theatre Journal. This art has a limited lifespan: while the cells are provided nutrients to survive for the span of an installation, they inevitably deteriorate and die. TC&A’s work has not been without controversy, particularly when it has used human tissue. Senior examines TC&A’s development of bioart through an ethical lens when, she argues, most commentators who discuss bioart tend to concentrate on how it was produced. This is not, however, a strict ethical analysis; instead, she focuses on some of the problematic issues related to documenting this work, arguing that “[a]n ethics of the Semi-Living demands an ethical interrogation of the biotechnological tools that are appropriated in artistic contexts, but it also asks us to reexamine the ethical engagements that we… bring to our encounters with bioart.” Specifically, Senior raises the complex relationship that TC&A’s Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have with religious iconography and the ways they deploy such referents in their work. Using Derrida’s concept of “messianic without messianism,” she illustrates that TC&A’s work draws attention to a messianic figure that no longer has content and, therefore, meaning. These echoes of religious iconography present an “undecidability” that challenges spectators and the outcomes they can draw from the experience.

Johannes Birringer pursues the treatment of a very different type of technology in his contribution to this issue, titled “The Theatre and Its Screen Double.” He interrogates Katie Mitchell’s production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Originally produced for Berlin’s Schaubühne in 2013, Fräulein Julie shifts the balance of the narrative from Miss Julie and Jean to the cook, Kristin. The production stages a doubled set: one focuses on Kristin’s character, and a second focuses on the Kristin who is a body double for the first and whose actions heighten and alter the function of the first actor. Mitchell’s work is well-known for its extensive use of cameras and cinematic techniques onstage at the same time as it engages with more traditional theatrical devices; her stage sets often resemble film sets, with the actors’ self-conscious playing to cameras and even using handheld cameras never obscured. She frequently uses sound effects that the audience watches being made. This extensive use of sound not only breaks the illusion that underpinned their function in creating radio drama, but fractures the audience’s viewing perspective. Birringer addresses the effects of this type of performance, which, he argues, “raises questions about the gradual impact of multimedia decompositions of realism in the wider context of postdramatic performance.” Despite the long history of a relationship between film and theatre, he maintains that some filmic methods may not work as well in theatre as one might expect, and he turns to Artaud’s work on film to assist in making his case. To provide a sense of filmic experience onstage, Birringer also deploys his own experience of...