Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre

Introduction

Introduction The rise of performance studies at the end of the twentieth century encouraged many theatre scholars to take a broader view of their discipline , and to consider models other than the one long dominant in the West. Ever since Aristotle, Western writers have primarily considered theatre as closely tied to the written text, essentially the physical enactment of such a preexisting text. With tools provided by semiotics, reception theory, cultural studies, and other theoretical approaches, current research in theatre and performance has vastly extended its areas of interest, greatly enriching the ‹eld. In the excitement and stimulation of this new orientation, however, certain more traditional areas of concern have been relatively neglected. Traditional theatre was from time to time almost forgotten in the early days of performance studies, as attention was given to a wide variety of other cultural performance and to nonliterary celebrative occasions. The long-standing theoretical privileging of the dramatic text was largely replaced by an attention to nonlinguistic and especially nonliterary phenomena. Language in the theatre, once a central theoretical concern , was generally relegated to a distinctly minor position. At the same time, changes in linguistic theory and theatre practice at the close of the century provided a challenge for a rethinking of theatrical language and of the various ways that language can function in the theatre. The purpose of this book is to suggest how the new perspectives opened by these changes can enrich our understanding of both present and past theatrical activity. When semiotic analysis began to be applied to theatre, in one of the major theoretical developments of theatre studies in the last century, it tied modern theatre theory close to modern linguistic theory, and encouraged the use of a communication model for analysis. This model, developed from the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure early in the century, sought to develop an objective, scienti‹c means of analyzing human discourse. Perhaps the best concise expression of this model of linguistic performance was provided by linguist Noam Chomsky, as a situation in which an “ideal speaker-listener” operates “in a completely homogeneous speech-community,” and “knows its language perfectly.”1 One can recognize in this formulation the regularizing and abstracting qualities, the search for an essential core, that characterizes much modernist thought in the arts, and dominated the thinking not only of linguists , but of theorists throughout the social sciences in the early twentieth century as they sought to ground their disciplines on solid “scienti‹c” principles. A central manifestation of late-twentieth-century thought, however, has been to challenge these abstract and totalizing constructions, through postmodernism in the arts, poststructuralism in language and cultural studies, and the new performative emphasis in the social sciences , particularly in anthropology and ethnography. Interestingly enough, performance theorists of the late twentieth century once again found signi‹cant inspiration in linguistic theory, this time in the work of J. L. Austin and John Searle, just as theatre theorists a generation earlier had found inspiration in the linguistic theory of Saussure and his immediate followers. A new generation of linguistic theory has moved even further away from the model Chomsky describes, but is a natural development from Austin’s emphasis on the total speech situation and is closely tied to the tendency in modern performance analysis to pay attention to the individual performance event, rather than to some generic abstraction. This contemporary approach to linguistics has been called “integrational linguistics” by Roy Harris, one of its leading proponents . The term was ‹rst used in Harris’s The Language Myth in 1981 and became extensively employed to suggest this new orientation by the end of the century.2 This approach stresses the improvisatory and indeterminate nature of every speech act: “language is continuously created by the interaction of individuals in speci‹c communication situations.”3 Such an approach ‹ts very well with recent developments in performance studies and performance analysis, but its possible relevance to the theatre as it has been traditionally conceived and studied has been much less explored. There still exists a widespread assumption that the vast Speaking in Tongues 2 majority of theatre through history has operated fairly closely according to the model of orthodox linguistics. That is, the dramatist can be looked at as functioning in the role of Chomsky’s “ideal speaker-listener,” and his audience as the “completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly.” This view of theatre...