Deleuze and the Humanities by Rosi Braidotti Kin Yuen Wong Amy K. S. Chan

Author:Rosi Braidotti,Kin Yuen Wong,Amy K. S. Chan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786606013
Publisher: National Book Network International

Figure 7.2 Map for Attempts on Her Life, second floor and outdoor spaces. Designed by Chiang Kang Che.

Image courtesy of Dark Eyes Performance Lab.

As soon as audience walked past the ensemble, they would be able to view scenarios either as suggested by the programme or randomly roaming around to catch what was being enacted at their leisure path. For example, as indicated in figure 7.1, Scenarios 7, 9 and 11 would be the next being staged simultaneously, scattering in three spaces in the galleries. The three scenarios would be enacted again after the ‘White Moments’, which mostly were solo performance at a certain space. In this way, audience alone would have the freedom to decide how they approached the production, and they would be able to construct their own narrative, quite possibly independent to Crimp’s text or Liu’s vision. Such an occasion manifested what Jacques Rancière terms as ‘Emancipated Spectator’: ‘in a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them’ (2009: 16). While Rancière is interested in spectatorship, which, at times, might be subjective to personal interpretation, Liu’s adaptation also called attention to Crimp’s own experiment of text-based theatre and the adaptability of the play in an East Asian context.

Liu’s direction followed Crimp’s own experiments in forms and narration and chose a format that would not necessarily rely upon representational theatre, which Crimp himself distrusts.5 Promenading through acting spaces would emphasize the play’s episodic feature, and one’s eagerness to learn about the story, which supports the narratives in representational theatre, would soon be dispelled because of the format of the production. Audience were more like participants in a live event. The intimacy between actors and audience, like in other promenade theatre productions, also broke the frame usually determined by more conventional venues, which ‘reinforce representational performances’ (Collins 2012: 57). The ‘human qualities’ of the play, as Crimp terms (Sierz 2006: 103), are reflected in many scenarios via conflicts and violence, yet, these emotional expressions would not necessarily have to bind to a representational theatre because the form of the play is deliberately made fragmented. Although Attempts on Her Life’s experimental outlook gives the play ‘the appearance of affectlessness’ while ‘emotional blankness’ might be assumed upon reading it, interestingly, for Crimp, the play is ‘actually emotionally driven’ (Sierz 2006: 103). Deleuze’s doubts about aesthetics of representation in theatre, when he discusses Carmelo Bene’s Richard III, could be a point of reference on this occasion.

But why do conflicts generally depend on representation? Why does theatre remain representative each time it focuses on conflicts, contradictions, and oppositions? It is because conflicts are already normalized, codified, and institutionalized. They are ‘products’. They are already a representation that can be represented so much the better on stage. (Deleuze 1997: 252–253)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.