The Imagistic Theatre of Robert Whitman

This essay discusses the experimental theatre of Robert Whitman who, in 1960, turned toward performance with the sensibility of a process-oriented painter and sculptor. More specifically, it addresses the role that perception plays in both the creation and the reception of three of his less often studied performances: Architecture (1972), Northern Dark (1987), and, more recently, Passport (2011). As part of a larger intermedia trend in American art of the 1950s and early 1960s to create audio-visual “Happenings” that seek to “intensify” and “renew perceptual experience,” these postdramatic event-structures interweave film into complex imagistic sequences that are both felt and understood cognitively, live and mediated. In a discussion of the remedial intent implicit in Whitman’s theatre of vision, termed a “theatre of images” by Bonnie Maranca, the article relies on early American process philosophy to clarify the nature and the effects of embodied experience that these works seek to elicit.