Contemporary Mise En Scène: Staging Theatre Today by Patrice Pavis (review)

French theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis reminds us that despite its emergence from the histories of directing and scenography, mise en scène is “an abstract, theoretical notion, not a concrete and empirical one” (4), and it is worth revisiting its legacies in this postdramatic age. The book’s thirteen chapters collectively argue that contemporary mise en scène might be renamed performise, a term that acknowledges the rise in creative agency of performers and audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that often eclipsed the traditional powers of metteurs en scène, or theatre directors. The performise, then, is the active creation of the mise en scène made possible by directors and designers, enacted in real time by performers, and read by audiences whose role in the creation of meaning is constitutive. By charting the reemergence of mise en scène as a semiological and phenomenological force post-1990, Pavis reconciles the postmodern tendency toward dismantling texts with audiences’ desire to “read” performance. The implications for this reclamation of mise en scène as a reconstructive practice is potentially game-changing not only for theatre-makers and audiences, but for Pavis’s core readership of writers of dramatic criticism.

Early chapters contextualize the shift in agency to performers and audiences by historicizing the role of the director in Western theatre practice. Pavis locates the origin of mise en scène in the late-nineteenthcentury European avant-garde, pointing out that Naturalism and Symbolism, although opposed in their adherence to an aesthetics of materiality, necessitated the production of onstage meaning through a system that stressed the importance of the director. Later chapters chart major shifts in notions of mise en scène from the 1880s to the 1980s. Pavis explains that while the English-speaking theatre embraced the poststructuralist theory of the 1980s and beyond, the French theatre denied it. This led to a French preoccupation with scenography governed by directorial authority, in contrast to the body-centered and time-based performance art that emerged in the United States and United Kingdom. Pavis goes on in later chapters to apply theories of mise en scène to particular theatre productions.

Not only does this endeavor expand the scope of mise en scène, freeing the term from the confines of theatre design and production to include the contributions of performers and audiences, the performance analyses that result from Pavis’s project form a valuable archive of avant-garde theatre and performance across a variety of genres and production models over the last fifteen years in France, Germany, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Many of these analyses cover familiar territory: “Tendencies in French scenography,” for example, illuminates how several director/designer teams configure space to foreground the stage languages of the performer. Other chapters address how an actor- and audience-centered dramaturgy destabilizes authorship. “The mise en jeu [setting in motion] of contemporary texts” advocates for “iconoclastic experiments” in the staging of new plays (96), illustrating practices that call faithfulness to the playwright’s text into question. Likewise, “[t]he splendour and the misery of interpreting the classics” is a catalog of insightful performance analyses of classic plays (Racine, Shakespeare) produced from 1989 to 2010 that illustrates that the most faithful interpretations of classics might be those that desacralize the text—most notably Jürgen Gosch’s spare, obstreperous Macbeth, with a mise en scène that externalizes what Pavis calls the (b)anality of the original, the actors performing boring, repetitive tasks and startling scatological acts with equal abandon (234–35).

It will come as no surprise to readers of Pavis’s full body of work that here he reclaims the practice and politics of intercultural performance, situating them in their current global moment while identifying lineages and responses to foundational intercultural inquiries. A chapter on the video art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña examines the “reverse anthropology” of Graffiti, the Chicano performance artist’s series of short films that parody ritual...