Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Theatre of Operations

The following two essays, which were both originally published in Millennium Film Journal, showcase a descriptive style of writing that was commonly practiced in film criticism during the early 1980s. Banes’s writings chronicle both Stuart Sherman’s and Ericka Beckman’s films, and are the only articles that discuss these particular artists’ films in that time period. k One of the dilemmas of modern theater and dance is their rivalry with film. In the nineteenth century the stage was a venue for magic, a place that bedazzled the theatergoer with spectacular apparitions and transformations , opulent landscapes, natural disasters, and all manner of impossible creatures from dragons to demons to ballet beauties who could spin, fly, and in general defy the limitations of the human body. The theater was a domain where reality could either be heightened or transcended . But film launched a powerful attack on theater’s prerogative. 148 k Theatre of Operations Stuart Sherman’s Fifteen Films : Millennium Film Journal 10/11 (Fall/Winter 1981–82): 87–101 How could the crowd scenes in even the most lavish play, ultimately still boxed in by the proscenium frame, hope to rival the effect of the limitless expanses and thousands of extras the cinema commanded? The old monsters and melodramas would never measure up to the diabolical aberrations of a film like The Exorcist. And a stage fight will no longer impress us when we regularly see plane crashes and murders on screen. But theater’s move toward realism was also countered by film. How can we be touched by an actor’s impassioned monologue when through the cinematic closeup we can watch his lips tremble and his eyes fill with tears? The vitality of live performance has been curiously flattened by the shadowy events of cinema. The possibilities that film offers, not only in terms of creating spectacular effects, but—more radically—in terms of manipulating material reality, have consistently attracted theater artists as they approach the limits of performance. In “Through Theater to Cinema” Sergei Eisenstein recalls his own movement toward a barely existent Soviet cinema, from a no longer compelling theatrical reality. Eisenstein staged Tretiakov ’s “Gas Masks” (1923–24) in a real gas factory. “Theater accessories in the midst of real factory plastics appeared ridiculous. The element of ‘play’ was incompatible with the acrid smell of gas. The pitiful platform kept getting lost among the real platforms of labor activity. In short, the production was a failure. And we found ourselves in the cinema.”1 Fifty years later Yvonne Rainer, treading the line between fact and fiction in anti-illusionist postmodern dance performance, echoed Eisenstein’s frustrations. “Dancing could no longer encompass or ‘express’ the new content in my work, i.e., the emotions,” she wrote after making Lives of Performers (1972). “Dance was not as specific—meaning-wise—as language . . . Dance is ipso facto about me (the so-called kinesthetic response of the spectator notwithstanding, it only rarely transcends that narcissistic-voyeuristic duality of doer and looker); whereas the area of the emotions must necessarily directly concern both of us. This is what allowed me permission to start manipulating what at first seemed like blatantly personal and private material. But the more I get into it the more I see how such things as rage, terror, desire, conflict, et al., are not unique to my experience the way my body and its functioning are.”2 Stuart Sherman’s foray into film stems from an impulse he shares with these directors. Indeed, the irony of his title, Spectacle, for his solo Theatre of Operations 149 performances in which he manipulates small ordinary objects is an index of his sensitivity to the precariousness of performance in our times. As a live performer, in fact, Sherman trades in magic. But as Noël Carroll has noted, his subject is not the illusionistic metamorphoses of the stage conjurer, nor the transformations of the stage technician , but a modernist baring of the devices of sleight of hand. The associative structures Sherman employs, as well as his stance in performance (like a prestidigitator, he stands at a small table with his suitcase full of props, focusing obsessively on the operations of his hands), reveal infantile themes of control and solipsism that gratify our fantasies of mastering the material world and that, further, locate “the basis of magic in our earliest and most submerged ways of thinking.”3 Sherman ’s tabletop is a kind of screen for the concrete projection of mental...