Editorial Comment: Theatre, Performance, and Visual Images

The visual image is now, thanks in part to high-quality cameras embedded in smart phones, ubiquitous in our lives, but the image has been a fixture in theatre and performance for almost as long as the technology has existed. Developments in image technology and the accessibility of historical images that can assist in extending our knowledge about theatre history suggest the need to revisit this topic critically. The essays in this special issue engage with the image in theatre and the image of theatre, such that Jim Davis and Diana Looser both refer in their essays herein directly to the doubled perspectives that images induce, while Sally Barnden quotes Barbara Hodgdon, who also makes this point about theatre images in particular. This double vision in some cases refers to audiences looking at the stage and being looked at; in other cases the doubleness is explicitly historicized by examining a similar topic through the distance of time.

The essays’ discussions of visual culture, and specifically the visual image, across time return briefly to some of the topics explored in previous special issues of Theatre Journal, including “Visual Culture” and “Spectatorship.”¹ They also take the use of images in divergent directions, some engaging with the languages of art history and visual culture (among others), which can jostle with the discourses of theatre and performance. Davis argues that theatre cannot be quarantined from other disciplines that deploy the visual (and their discourses), and the authors widely use critics who explore theatre within the context of other disciplines (such as Maaike Bleeker and Joel Anderson, among many others).² Some of the arguments also intersect with journalism, architecture, media studies, and other art forms. Images, as Emma Cox notes in this issue, form ideas, such that images, like objects, come to take on an agency—a perception that W. J. T. Mitchell explores in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Images, he argues, “make demands.”³ Joe Kelleher has further explored this perception of the agency of images in The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images, and this special issue pursues this agency in both performance and its analysis.⁴

Images make political demands in the lead essay: Diana Looser’s “Viewing Time and the Other: Visualizing Cross-Cultural and Trans-Temporal Encounters in Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected]” explores Reihana’s complex multichannel video installation that examines the numerous representations of Captain James Cook, focusing in particular on the popular early nineteenth-century wallpaper designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet and manufactured by Joseph Dufour et Cie that depicted Cook’s life and death. Looser explores the visual image through the wallpaper, itself a representation of Cook’s exploits, and the Māori visual artist, filmmaker, and performance artist’s contemporary interpretations of it. Cook is the subject of many critical reengagements that take issue with the dominance of his story in settlement history. More recently, in the wake of the Charlottesville, Virginia, riots in August of this year, discussions of removing his statue (or at least altering the wording of the statue’s commemorations) has reignited debate in Australia about the nature of his visual place in the historical record. The backdrop to Looser’s argument is the many attempts, across numerous art forms, to interrogate the Cook narrative. Rather than simply adding to this reinterrogation, Looser examines how the visual and the performative combine in Reihana’s piece, and how Reihana succeeds in encouraging a renewed self-determination for indigenous peoples. Specifically, Reihana deploys a spiral motif that intersects with the Māori concept of whakapapa, which can be understood as a layering of ancestry that intertwines both past and present. Looser engages with the multidimensional temporality that Reihana’s doubled optics produce to demonstrate the remarkably rich and strategic cross-cultural engagement that in Pursuit of Venus [infected] brings to a revisioning of indigenous people’s agency following the colonial encounter.

Emma Cox’s essay “Processional Aesthetics and Irregular Transit: Envisioning Refugees in Europe” also pairs strong, influential images from the past and present. She begins with a...