Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle by P. A. Skantze (review)

Reading the pages of P. A. Skantze’s wonderful new book Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle, I cannot imagine having a better performance companion or a better model for how to watch theatre. Skantze delivers nothing short of the deepest and most beautiful recitation on, and poetic manifesto about, learning to spectate. While she embraces Walter Benjamin’s construction of the flâneur, the “semi-conscious wanderer,” she nonetheless offers something much more complex and compelling than the productive sparks that occur as a result of “incidental turnings.” Rather, Skantze provides a model for how to watch responsibly. This, of course, should not be confused with some didactic notion of watching attentively or remembering faithfully. Instead, inspired by the flâneur, Skantze employs a method of spectating that provides “textual 3D glasses, a kind of looking that sees the historical dimensions, often flattened when one looks without such an aid, with the added volumes made by memory and interpretation” (8). The book sets out to demonstrate how memory and time should be brought to bear on our interpretations of theatrical events. Skantze’s adopted metaphor of the weathered threshold allows her to theorize a type of palimpsest for theatre viewing.

The chapters are organized around broad elements that impact viewing (satisfaction, sound, structures, senses, and states) and are often anchored to a particular production (Ubu and the Truth Commission in chapter 1, Story of a Soldier in chapter 3, and Blind Date in chapter 5), but the chapters productively meander around various productions. Ultimately, the chapters perform Skantze’s memories about specific productions in New York, Rome, and London, even as she acknowledges that her memories are imaginations, and that “the spectator [she is] at any given performance perishes as surely as any romantically imagined fragile performance” is fleeting and ephemeral (25). Now, I should say from the outset that I am wary of projects that flaunt their international bravura and un-self-reflexive cosmopolitanism, but Skantze never falls into that trap. Instead, she exposes her own mistakes in translations when watching productions in non-English languages; she reveals her own distempered responses to translation devices (both auditory and visual); she uncovers her own artistic intolerances for productions that have become not only famous, but also canonical; and she discloses her ever present pessimism at the beginning of every new production. (She writes: “As the lights dim or the action begins or the performer appears in the gallery, I suffer an unfamiliar and deep pessimism, my heart sinks as I think, ‘oh this might not be good’” [15].) These confessions serve to lay bare an imperfect, vulnerable, self-conscious, and yet open-hearted spectator. So even as Skantze describes productions we have not seen in the past and may never see in the future, her written memories envelop the reader like the gentlest embrace that invites us to imagine along with her.

Moreover, Skantze is fearless in her willingness to raise issues that cause what she calls “uncomfortable pauses” in conversation. As an early modern race scholar, I loved the following bit of fearlessness:

Wherever I roam, I read programs, I see theatre, I hear interviews in which men, overwhelming white men, continue to dominate the imaginative space as protagonists, actors/makers, and directors. You might be a white man reading this, and the statement may have frozen your reception the way I find in conversation with others that mentioning what is so patently visible, the tiny proportion of women in charge, the tiny proportion of people of color as actors, directors and writers, tends to create an uncomfortable pause unless the conversation takes place among those who find themselves under-represented.

(32–33)

Then Skantze acknowledges that there are those who argue that visibility is not the same as representation, and she notes how often that becomes an excuse for noninclusive practices (“for a performance of an opera at the English National Opera where in the 100 chorus members, the several principal singers, there is not a person of color...