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  • The Spectator and Her Double:Seeing Performance through the Eyes of Another
  • Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (bio)

"The human animal learns everything in the same way as it initially learnt its mother tongue, as it learnt to venture into the forest of things and signs surrounding it, so as to take its place among human beings: by observing and comparing one thing with another, a sign with a fact, a sign with another sign."

—Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10

As I remember it, my daughter, partner, and I were at the Japan Society in New York City in 2003 attending the Butoh troupe Dairakudakan’s performance when, in the middle of the show, a performer entered the stage, covered in white makeup, dressed in a slinky, long red dress, and wearing ridiculously high heels. He carefully moved to center stage before reaching down and ever-so-gracefully lifting the dress up over his head to expose a giant, hairy phallus. My then 8-year-old daughter grabbed hold of my shirt, pulling me toward her to whisper "Mom, is that real?" I was suddenly critically aware of the images and performance in a way I had not been a moment ago; slightly mortified, I turned to quietly shush her: "No, no, of course not. It is theatre."1

I began to sweat at that moment, aware of the unfolding images through my own bodily response, and I continued to flush and grow more uncomfortable through the rest of the piece in awareness of my daughter’s reactions as more nudity, haunting images of war, distorted body positions, and even more phalluses appeared. My shifting mater/ial state during this particular performance has recurred on a number of occasions when my daughter’s experience has influenced, and at times overtaken, my own, when her physicality translated back into mine.2 Since she was age 4, my daughter Zeena, now 19, has regularly accompanied me to the theatre. She’d been a spectator before this age, seeing people we knew perform, and attending child-friendly, or "age-appropriate," shows, but at 4 she entered into performance spaces as a regular theatre-goer, usually by my side.

This essay began to take shape in my thinking many years ago when my partner and I started keeping a list (which has since developed into a spreadsheet) of my daughter’s theatre-going, a "baby-book" remembrance of sorts, something she can keep as a record of experiences she may or may not remember fully. This list has also been a partial record of my own theatre-going, yet I realize that these performances retain a different quality than my other spectatorial experiences. The memories associated with the list of shows I attended with Zeena are filtered somehow, embodied differently, blurred by a sense of her experiences, and often changed by them. I have a sense of seeing some of these performances through our two bodies, hers and mine. This physicality—at times uncomfortable, fidgety, tense, or relaxed—often translated into a space for exchange. This sense of relating to each other and to the work we saw became a barometer alerting me that a particular conversation could, would, or should follow. Our experiences took on a kind of embodied pedagogical quality that combined Jacques Rancière’s "emancipated" spectatorship with an intercorporeal, phenomenological embodiment; that is, a sense of the phenomenological, following such scholars as Stanton Garner and Gail Weiss, that emphasizes the embodied nature of the experiences under investigation, and with a further awareness of how these specific bodily affects have shaped our thinking together. " To describe embodiment as intercorporeality," writes Weiss, "is to emphasize [End Page 125] that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies" (5). While the theatre is always already an intercorporeal space, my continual spectatorial interaction alongside my daughter has complicated my understanding of both theatre and of parenting; thinking about this relationship through intertwining phenomenological/pedagogical perspectives builds on Rancière’s notion of the "emancipated spectator" as it intersects with questions about the potential space of children—in...

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