The Living Theatre: A Brief History of a Bodily Metaphor

Fall 2010 9 The Living Theatre: A Brief History of a Bodily Metaphor Sarah Bay-Cheng Amy Strahler Holzapfel1 It is a question, therefore, of making the theater, in the proper sense of the world, a function; something as localized and as precise as the circulation of the blood in the arteries. . . . —Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto) This means that the body, as the theater, is a site, like a crypt: an apparatus designed for both protection and preservation. —Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre By now, we are nearly all familiar with the metaphor of the living theatre. The life of the drama, the stage life, the living art wend their way continuously through the criticism, theory, and practice of theatre and performance studies of the past century or more. The analogy is so entrenched in the rhetoric of theatre and performance that we hardly register the oddity of the idea. The title of the 2010 ATHE conference—Theatre Alive: Theatre, Media, Survival—provides, perhaps, the best example of late. Examined more closely, however, we find that this figuration contains a central assumption in need of further questioning: the conception of theatre itself as a living, reproducing, and dying body. In this essay, we revisit the recent history of theatre’s body to articulate the persistence of this metaphor and its deeper implications for the field of theatre and performance studies. After a century of living, dying, postliving, and rebirth, such theoretical formulations, we argue, may be limited. Theatre itself is not and has never been a living thing, nor is it a body, though it is certainly constituted by living bodies. Such metaphors obscure the ways theatrical forms have always sought to Sarah Bay-Cheng is associate professor & director of graduate studies in theatre at the University at Buffalo, where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, performance theory, and intermediality. Her publications include Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010) and Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2005), as well as various essays and reviews. Amy Strahler Holzapfel is an assistant professor of theatre at Williams College. For the upcoming year, she will be a Lehman Fellow at the Oakley Center for Arts & Humanities, completing her book Reality Effects: Theatre in the Dawn of a Photographic Age. 10 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism integrate, even to colonize, other forms: texts, spectacle, music, and media. Indeed, the integration of a bodily metaphor may be less the articulation of an organic whole than a compensation for the haphazard appropriation of other art forms. In our view, the bodily metaphor serves primarily to smooth the rough contours of an art form that has, from its very origins, lacked its own prominent ontology. What’s more, in comparing theatre to a living body, one necessarily individuates the art form as well as its historical contents. That is, by referring to a play or production as a living thing we bestow upon it a uniqueness, rarity, and subjectivity of its own—we make it human. There’s a real danger in this: to theorize theatre as a life form or humanlike body may legitimize and reify canonical approaches to our field, since the emphasis on the life, death, rebirth, and haunting of individual plays, productions, or elements of performance may, in the worst cases, serve the interests of a myopic historical analysis.2 Instead of comparing theatre to an animate life form or body, then, we propose at the close of this essay a definition of the art form that brings us into the twenty-first century: theatre as a network. Let us begin, however, by addressing the two quotations appearing at the start of this essay. Each offers a heuristic treatment of theatre’s relation to the body: for Antonin Artaud, theatre becomes itself a bodily form; for Alice Rayner, theatre becomes an embodied “site.” That is to say, in Artaud’s poetry, theatre is likened to a bodily mechanism that produces physiological and psychological effects, such as arterial circulation and dreams in the brain, whereas Rayner conceives of theatre as both a body and a “crypt” that preserves and houses dead material...