Panych and Gorling: "Sheer" Texts "Written" in (to) Perception

Panych and Gorling: "Sheer" Texts "Written" in(to) Perception REID GILBERT In Pe1iorming Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, Alan Filewod sees the categories nation and theatre as examples of Pierre Bourdieu 's "structuring structures," those structures that "organize practices and the perception of practices" (I). He notes that these terms "share a slippage of language" that flags a "deeper conceptual intersection where the national imaginary embraces the theatrical imaginary" (x). Such speculation, tied in this case to the construct of nation, is equally compelling when related, say, to the "idea of North" in Canada, as it is by Sherrill E. Grace, or to broader issues of the theatrical genre itself as a "structuring structure" organizing perception. At the base of any such examination of genre and pertormativity are the questions of the splice between the theatrical and the imaginary, of the link between the theatrical and its institutionalization within power. The series of wordless theatrical pieces conceived and co-directed by Morris Panych and Wendy Garling invites such conjecture and serves as a starting point for a consideration of the intersection of theatre with the imaginary, with structure, slippage, and perception. The pieces invite speculation about genre by evading the fixed roles of language in defining literary type and in institutionalizing power within a linguistic economy - a theoretical space that many postcolonial critics have navigated. They invite speculation about the very idea of theatricality by building in themselves a non-verbal semiosis of physicality , sound, and movement. I recognize,here, that such enquiry threatens to divorce what is happening on stage from the material conditions of its making, and I hasten to concur with Ric Knowles's warning that theatre is never "universalist [...] essentialist [or s"implylliterary " (213). Certainly, these perfonnances do not free themselves from their material production, and their reception is always conditioned by social and cultural milieux, but something about them simultaneously yearns for a Modern Drama, 45:2 (Summer 2002) 282 "Sheer Theatricality" in Panych and Gorling spectatorial response that is more ancient, born directly in the psychic Imaginary of the viewer. Within this Imaginary, the performances meld the relationship of auditor and rhetor and, in the process, apply, query, and rupture notions of genre. They cannot shake off the colonizing power of language but somewhat evacuate its power by establishing an entirely theatrical universe without inscription , a world that is post-linguistic or - more exactly - pre-linguistic. This breakage, or at least, slippage - especially in The Company and The Overcoat - encourages reconsideration of terms such as drama. theatre, writing, and text, and the relationships among narrative, mimesis, theatricality. and performativity . Such reconsideration begins to open a space for an eventual theorization of theatricality - an enormous undertaking. Here, I want only to introduce some possible ways of thinking about these unstable creations which present themselves as moyement, but not dance, as mimesis, but not pantomime, as narrative , but as more than linear narratology, as performance beyond performativity - or, more correctly, before it. In doing so, I hope to suggest a species of prelinguistic perforrnative, a non-mimetic "acting-forth"that [will tentatively call "sheer theatricality," I immediately recognize that this term - itself highly provisional and easily contested - is loaded and romantic. The semantic danger lies in the adjective, sheer, which in addition to numerous nautical applications has other meanings , including "thin" (OED, Defs. 3A.3; 3A.S; 3A.6) and, "Of light: [...Jclear and pure" (OED, Def. 3A.4; see also Defs. 4.2 and 4.3). I want to avoid the moral implications of the adjective pure (though the second OED definition of this word does make it synonymous with sheer). Instead, I am attempting to investigate what the OED defines as "Of an immaterial thing: Taken or existing by itself [...J alone" (Defs. 3A.7b) and again, "Completely, absolutely, altogether, quite" (Def. 3B.t). I also recognize that the phrase implies a kind of transcendence, a worrisome concept. While the emptiness of the "sheer" at any moment awaits a "writing," its transparency necessarily reveals citational chains and, as I agreed earlier, a material construction. In a very particular sense, however, I do mean to suggest that something about this species of...