The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images by Joe Kelleher (review)

Given its ephemeral state, live performance often only lasts beyond our experience of it through our memories. Those memories degrade over time, falling apart a little bit more with each recollection. Despite this, certain images from performances stay with us, and these images and the reasons for their persistence form the focus of Joe Kelleher’s theoretical text. Kelleher draws from his own memories throughout the book, at times creating an informally colloquial feel though never detracting from the analysis. Such analysis is unique in its combination of experiential subjectivity and theoretical insight, its intimate dimension rightly informing a highly personal experience. Kelleher’s chief concern is identifying the characteristics of theatrical images (and at times images from other media) that mark them out from the work as a whole and linger over a period of time. In a sense, Kelleher is getting at the heart of performance’s value as an art form despite its resistance to preservation or recording. What can remain when the performance is over and how do audiences learn to process it? Although these images are not tangible Kelleher wants to trace their impact by examining his own remembrances, tenuous as they sometimes may be.

Although Kelleher does look at other writers’ recollections, his own memories form the basis of many of the chapters as he looks back on theatrical performances and other artistic works he has seen. In some places the writing functions as an exercise in how much he can remember about an event seen a decade or longer ago, creating an uncertainty that is atypical for a scholarly work though appropriate given the aim of the study. As the title indicates, Kelleher is not describing images that stand immutable, but rather those that suffer either in their transmission or reception.

In describing a performance by Dickie Beau titled LOST in TRANS, Kelleher writes that old stories “offer ways of seeing that tempt us to re-tell, that seduce us with the possibility that we might be interpreters” (33). Kelleher identifies a number of factors in the creation of a theatrical image, and his first set of case studies focuses on the communion between actor and audience as agents of image-making. He describes the actor as an interpreter of worlds for the audience, with images jointly crafted by both parties. From text to performance to reception, a process of conversion is integral to both the creation and suffering of images.

In exploring what constitutes a theatre image, Kelleher also attends to other art forms, such as the film Helen (2009), in the second chapter, and Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz’s installation The Art Show in chapter 6. Kelleher acknowledges that while images function differently within these comparatively permanent forms, the process of reception still creates images in a way similar to performance. Kelleher also analyzes other descriptive accounts of performance, such as Kierkegaard’s Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, through which Kelleher ties the idea of repetition as difference rather than similarity to the experience of performance in which each instance is a repeatedly different encounter.

With several of Kelleher’s examples, the tension between comprehension and the visceral impact of live performance is key to an image’s suffering. His analysis of his own experiences with performance focuses particularly on postmodern or postdramatic pieces performed in Europe, his own subjectivity highlighting the symbolic and ambiguous nature of the pieces. Rather than attempting to provide thorough interpretations, he foregrounds the phenomenology of the experience. For example, the third chapter is dedicated to Nerone, by the Italian collective Kinkaleri, which the writer describes as a “black hole,” with doubled images driven by both the casting and the structure (57). Kelleher admits that while he did not understand the production’s intent, the images remain with him all the same.

Often, The Illuminated Theatre functions as a performance all of its own, recording and remembering in much the same way as performance. For example, the book’s fourth...