After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance by Daniel Sack (review)

Theatre and performance—axiomatically, selfevidently—takes place in the present, with the most famous articulation of this being Thornton Wilder's evocative statement: "On the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future" (Writers at Work, ed. Malcolm Cowley). It is this connection between the continual now of performance and our engagement with and imagination of possible or potential futures that is the focus of Daniel Sack's book After Live.

There is a tension here, of course, for while onstage it may well be always now, theatre—classical Western drama, at least—is also fundamentally, structurally a kind of predestination in which the future is literally written into not only the script, action, and characters, but also the very manifestation of theatre as theatre: it will be on at these times on these nights, and these things will happen in this order. This is the nature of theatre, and the intersection among liveness, nowness, and such predestination is the quasi-theological dilemma at the heart of the practice of performance.

In the introduction to our recent edited collection, Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, Anja Mølle Lindelof and I draw on Peter Brook's notion of deadly theatre. Perhaps, we ask, the opposite of liveness is deadliness, describing deadliness as the result of a failed relationship between theatre and its audience. Sack turns to Brook in his own introduction, utilizing deadly theatre to describe performances that fail to escape their own structural predestination, "where the future experienced seems as decided as the past and we can see an end coming far ahead" (11). Sack's concern is with the more radical potential of theatre and performance to go beyond staging things we already know—the known knowns that we can foretell, that are predestined—and to construct, present, articulate, and even produce futures that we cannot know until or even except in the moment of performance.

This role of theatre as a form of thinking about ourselves and our future is powerfully rehearsed by Sack. Certainly, his proposal that theatre is an institution dedicated to experimenting with the future is invigorating, even if it is not always matched by our experience of theatre institutions more concerned with the conservation of traditions, techniques, and historical canons. "Drama," he writes, "allows us to rehearse our encounter with an unknown event, gives us scripts to practice such encounters" (7). Here we find echoes of Augusto Boal's description of theatre as a rehearsal for life (or indeed for revolution), and Sack cites Aristotle's declaration that "the poet's job is not to report what has happened, but what is likely to happen: that is, what is capable of happening according to the rules of probability or necessity."

The careful and rigorous work of the book is to go beyond such manifesto-like statements to explore precisely how theatre and performance might engage with possible and potential futures. Here also terminology becomes key, with the nuanced definitions of possibility and potentiality being the primary contributions of Sack's work. Possibility is the focus of chapter 2, describing the working of Western dramatic theatre as a technology "devoted to the revelation of what is to come" (25), and to the careful explication of how events unfold. Here I found particularly revelatory the exploration of how the "logic of possibility" (33)—with its focus on purpose, objective, consistency—forms the basis for actor training.

For Sack, possibility describes scripted dramatic envisioning of how things might be. His real interest, however, lies with potentiality: a much more ambiguous and ambitious engagement with indeterminate, multiple, and unfixed potentials. Indeed, even in exploring the narrower notion of possibility he is often interested in the gaps and fissures, in the open rather than closed text, in those moments when even the predestination of the script cuts across itself. His attention is drawn...