Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching ed. by George Rodosthenous (review)

“The theatre is a legal place to exercise voyeurism” (16). This provocative claim from the introduction of George Rodosthenous’s edited volume Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching encapsulates the central observation of the ten essays to follow: that the theatrical spectator uncannily resembles a voyeur, albeit one whose taboo gaze is implicitly sanctioned by the performance context. The volume offers rich critical engagements with this theatrical voyeur by asking what pleasures, inter-subjective relations, and sensorial dynamics might emerge from such a model of spectatorship. Building primarily upon literature on theatre audiences by Susan Bennett, Patrice Pavis, and Anne Ubersfeld, Theatre as Voyeurism marks a substantial contribution to this field by offering up a novel theorization of the spectator/performer relation as a pleasurable exchange between voyeur and exhibitionist.

Rodosthenous has curated a collection of essays that cohere remarkably well and build on one another to demonstrate the many directions and potentials of his theatre-as-voyeurism frame. The volume is organized into five sections, each a pair of essays on a theme. Part 1 focuses on the director’s dramaturgical control of the voyeuristic gaze, featuring Laurens De Vos on Jan Fabre and Eleni Papalexiou on Romeo Castellucci, while the following section considers spatialized voyeurism through essays by David Shearing and William McEvoy on site-specific performance. In part 3 Luk Van den Dries and Fiona Bannon consider voyeurism as an active form of spectatorship in works by Xavier Le Roy, Anna Halprin, and Dave St-Pierre, among others. The fourth pair of essays focuses on the exhibitionist performer, with scholar-artist Daniël Ploeger discussing his own experience as a performing body and Aaron Thomas advancing an Artaudian reading of Ann Liv Young’s performance art. The final section examines the naked body in performance, as Tim Stephenson offers a historical account of nudity on Broadway and Rodosthenous proposes David Greig’s play Outlying Islands as a model of theatrical voyeurism, in which the taboo gaze is paradoxically rendered licit.

Each individual essay offers incisive accounts of its respective case studies, but the richest insights of this volume emerge as thematic foci over the course of the book—several chapters, for instance, touch on voyeurism as a multisensory pleasure, the explicit body in performance, and the director as the voyeur par excellence. Certain standout essays crystallize these insights, such as Shearing’s contribution, “Intimacy, Immersion and the Desire to Touch: The Voyeur Within” (chapter 3), which deftly uses Merleau-Ponty to formulate the body as a nexus of multiple intersecting sensorial pleasures. Placing Punchdrunk’s immersive aesthetics in dialogue with other site-specific work, Shearing gives full articulation to a theme developed throughout the volume: framing voyeurism as an embodied, and thus more than strictly visual, mode of spectating. Elsewhere, Thomas’s essay, “Viewing the Pornographic Theatre: Explicit Voyeurism, Artaud and Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella” (chapter 8), offers the volume’s most engaging treatment of the explicit body, as he mines Young’s pastiche of cultural references (from Disney to pop music to feminist body art) to theorize the pornographic as a wide-ranging category of performance (175). The essay also identifies these pornographic aesthetics with an erotics of cruelty, offering an engaging rereading of Artaud in the process.

Perhaps the most evident through line of the volume is Rodosthenous’s suggestion that the auteur director may be the “ultimate voyeur” (223). It is telling that the case studies in Theatre as Voyeurism are predominated by directors, mostly European men identified with the postdramatic, Regietheater, or other contemporary avant-gardes. The introduction explicitly identifies the work of Calixto Bieito, Fabre, Castellucci, Le Roy, Konstantinos Rigos, and Dimitris Papaioannou as a few touchstones of contemporary theatrical voyeurism (2). Taken as a whole, the volume implies that the voyeur’s gaze is most evident in stage action organized by the singular eye of an auteur. This interest in the director does not feel incidental to the book, either; given Rodosthenous...