Shifting Through Space-Time: A Chronotopic Analysis of Peter Sellars' Don Giovanni

Shifting Through Space-Time: A Chronotopic Analysis of Peter Sellars' Don Giovanni TERRY DO NOVAN SMITH From a wild weird clime that Iieth, sublime, Out ofSpace - out o/Time. Edgar Allan Poe At the 1989 FIRT/IFTR conference in Stockholm, Erika Fisher-Lichte posited that "performance analysis is still, even today, one of the most neglected areas of academic theatre research.... Just as in every analysis of a work, so in performance analysis the question of possible methods of segmentation poses one of its cardinal problems." Establishing her approach to Ralf U.ngbacka's Don Giovanni, Fischer-Lichte suggested several methodological procedures: "One might turn to categories provided by the poetics of drama such as character, plot, situation, space, time; or one might make segmentation according to the various sign systems......, One possible analytical approach is the "chronotope " which I will demonstrate using Peter Sellars' production of the Mozartda Ponte opera, Don Giovanni as exemplar.' While segmentation generally accounts for moment-lo-moment, linear movement through the narrative, the segmentation required in considering the chronotope is vertical. That is, chronotopes are sedimentary structures that form a basis for understanding the work as a whole. This concept of the chronotope is adapted from Mikhail Bakhtin's "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel." Here, he develops his notions on the use of "time-spaces" as fonnal devices which are "organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qua1ification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative."3 The chronotope in the novel includes what we traditionally call the "setting," but goes further into how the historical time and space together constitute a way of understanding the story. Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 668 Peter Sellars's Don Giovanni As Bakhtin does in the novel, I will apply the chronotope as the device that is metaphorically and materially employed to advance the story. It is the structure that surrounds, infuses, and finally defines the narrative. It is also a way to understand the performance generically; that is, we can see its relationship to other texts in terms of structure. In the literary artistic chronolope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of.time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.4 There are four fundamental chronotopes which can be clearly demonstrated in Don Giovanni and Sellars' production of it: the "road," the "castle," the "parlor," and the "threshold." The chronotope of the road is pervasive in all forms of representation: the novel, theatre, and cinema. From Cervantes (Don Quixote) to Kerouac (On the Road), from the action film (e.g., The Professional ) to Beckett (Waiting for Godot), the road serves as a place where "representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, [and] ages ... who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet.'" "The castle" is explicitly "historical in the narrow sense of the word." It operates on the order of an a priori setting which throws the presented "now" into immediate interplay with the physically explicit past surrounding it. "The Parlors" (or "salons") are those private places where public business is conducted.6 The parlor is the site where political and sexual interplay frames the social and personal "need" for domination. Its privateness is seductive and creates a voyeuristic spectatorial relationship. (We note how often this voyeurism is represented, even encouraged, by having someone on stage view private scenes from some "hidden" spot.) "The threshold" is both a physical and thematic concept: things can happen in literal doorways, which become visual metaphors, and/or plots can hinge on decisions which will propel the character(s) into new eras of life.' My project is not simply to enumerate the places where these chronotopes exist, but to understand how their polysemy is established. PETER SELLARS' DON GIOVANNI You don't do this because yOll want.people to like you. It doesn't bother...