Staging Modernism: Introduction

This special issue originated as a symposium, "Staging Modernism," held at Texas A&M University in March of 2006.¹ The symposium began with the premise that drama, theatre, and other forms of performance have been minimized in or excluded from many accounts of modernism,² and that the history of modernism would look different if reviewed through the lens of some of the plays and performances that anticipated, articulated, and/or challenged modernist aesthetic and social innovations. Following out of the symposium, the seven case studies included in this issue of South Central Review together clarify the central role that drama and performance played in forming and circulating modernist ideas and aesthetic practices. In doing so, they join a growing number of scholarly studies that are underlining the biases and blindspots in accounts of modernism that have overlooked performance as one of its key manifestations.

The under-representation of drama and performance in histories of modernist practice can be explained in part through the development of the field of literary studies in the early to mid-twentieth century.³ The formation of the modernist literary canon and the orthodoxy of the New Criticism that accompanied the establishment of literary studies as an academic discipline advanced the claim that serious art should display formal autonomy and stylistic innovation, qualities best understood through the practice of close reading by individuals in a private encounter with a text. The celebration of autonomous artworks and unique authorial styles that came to be regarded as essential to literary modernism clearly privileged some genres and styles of writing over others. Dramatic texts and theatrical performances, however, resist the formal qualities of autonomy and single authorship. A play, for example, exists both as a printed and as a performance text, and the latter varies, however slightly, with each performance. Further, theatrical productions and other forms of performance necessarily involve artistic collaboration, with all of the contingencies associated with the inter-art mingling of performers, directors, set and costume designers, composers, and choreographers. And finally, the difficulties of fixing and examining non-textualized performances disqualified them as worthy candidates for close study. Events and texts that did not lend themselves to the scientific scrutiny of close reading and analysis became marginal or altogether invisible examples of awkwardly hybrid, and therefore inscrutable, aesthetic anomalies.

As Katherine Kelly's essay on the phenomenon of Ibsenism, Maria DiCenzo's essay on the coverage of theatre and drama in the suffrage press, and Kurt Eisen's essay on ethnography and primitivism in the works of Eugene O'Neill and Zora Neale Hurston all make clear, however, dramatic literature, theatrical performance, and the ancillary events connected to these served as important vehicles for critical discourse, aesthetic experiment, and social cohesion central to the modernist program of challenging tradition. Moreover, in their edited volume on modernist anti-theatricality, Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner demonstrate, through examples ranging from Bertolt Brecht to John Cage, that the "critique, even destruction, of certain types of theatre" was "a productive force within modernism and a force that led to the most successful reforms of modern theatre and drama."⁴ Thus, while drama and theatre have been insufficiently represented by historians and critics of modernism, ample evidence exists that scripted plays and theatrical productions served not only as one of the aesthetic forms supercharging the modernist moment but also as occasions for interrogating and motivating cultural change.

But while the contributions of Kelly, DiCenzo, and Eisen to this special issue demonstrate the centrality of theatre and drama to the development of modernism, a fresh attention to the integral relationship between modernism and performance reveals other events that complicate our understanding of what modernism was and how it functioned. As Penny Farfan's essay on Vaslav Nijinsky's staging of queer masculinity in Afternoon of a Faun demonstrates, the embodied and sometimes nonverbal nature of performance enabled subversions of normative notions of gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism that have increasingly come to be recognized as fundamental to modernism, but that, in strictly literary form, were subject to...