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seven  Presence Jon Erickson You are standing waiting at an airport gate for the beloved’s plane to arrive.1 Air traf‹c has been heavy and the plane is late. Finally the plane arrives at the gate and passengers begin to emerge out of the tunnel. You search for her face among all the various faces of the people being greeted warmly by family and friends, or simply moving quickly to some connecting ›ight. You keep scanning but see no sign of her as more and more people get off. You are annoyed that none of these faces, which you glance at and then ignore, are hers, and worried that she missed her ›ight and she won’t appear at all. It seems as if everyone has now gotten off the plane when suddenly you see her face. She doesn’t see you at ‹rst, but then turns and beams at you. Suddenly the whole gate area seems to ‹ll with her presence , the rest of the people disappear and all that exists is her. As you embrace and walk toward baggage claim, the rest of the world is gone and the only thing that matters is the two of you linked by ›ows of words punctuated by looks. This is one way to look at the concept of “presence.” Other ways: the entrance into a restaurant, cafe, bar, of someone, male or female, whose beauty is so striking that no one can resist looking; a person whose personal charisma and authority prevents an angry group of people from hurting an individual; a stranger to whom you tell your troubles and who then can see deep into your soul and tell you exactly what the problem is, whether or not you want to hear it; a person, perhaps even yourself, who in the midst of a disaster or horrendous accident has the presence of mind to do the right thing to save or protect lives. All these things involve something we might call “presence.” Despite the tendency of theater theorists to view with suspicion the power over audiences that 142 performative presence has, it should not simply be relegated to a form of authority that we would call oppressive, but should also be recognized as a kind of authority that can evince wisdom and respect. It may indeed mystify us in a certain way, but not necessarily in an exploitative sense: it may simply be a mystery (not all mysteries are mysti‹cations). But perhaps most of all it is related to the most positive aspects of human attraction and love. This is not to deny that the power of personal presence can be used to seduce and manipulate others for evil or ideological purposes, or to intimidate . But to associate presence only with these things is to advance a rather simplistic idea of what presence means in human experience. And by extension, any animus directed at the quality known as presence in the theater that derives from a critique of theater’s power for or over the spectator is likewise simplistic if it reduces the concept of presence to a purely invidiously framed notion of authority. The problem with the critical animus against presence, character, and inevitability in dramatic performance is that its entire focus is on the presumed deleterious effects of these features on the critical capacities or potentials of the audience in their reception of a work. Methods for disrupting or subverting these features are deemed necessary for the critical awakening or political enlightenment of the individual spectator. But what is avoided is the question as to why these features are so important to the spectator and how they function in terms of his or her desire. Thus, disruption or subversion of these elements is really a frustration of spectators’ desire. How is the frustration of desire supposed to lead to a critical awakening ? Doesn’t it actually tend toward its opposite—a rejection of the work precisely because of its intent? What spectator wants to be frustrated by a work? This is not the same as dealing with the dif‹culty of meaning that comes with the seductiveness of complexity. The critical answer—as dif‹cult as it is to accomplish—is that the performance should frustrate the spectator’s typical desire in order to transform it into desire for something else. Thus, in Brecht it is the pedagogue’s desire to transform the pure love for entertainment into the purer love for instruction. (“Instruction...

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