Abstract
An accelerating intermedial turn in Shakespeare production has made itself felt in forms and formats ranging from the use of video projection in/as stage scenography to digital performance-capture techniques that produce holographic characters onstage. The first half of this chapter concentrates on two recent productions—Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III and Romeo Castellucci’s Julius Caesar. Spared Parts—that embrace intermediality but demonstrate as well the turn to embodiment that predates, and may well postdate, emergent intermedial trends. The chapter concludes with a sustained case study of the provocative face-off between New York’s Wooster Group, representing the American theatrical avant-garde, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, established keeper of the Bardic sacred flame, in their collaborative production of Troilus and Cressida at the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival .
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Notes
- 1.
Unlike Aneta Mancewicz who defines intermediality as involving “inter-exchanges of media in performance, activated through digital technology” (2014, 3), I deploy the term more literally and loosely to embrace, in the words of Irina Rajewsky , “those configurations which have to do with a crossing of borders between media, and which thereby can be differentiated from intramedial phenomena as well as from transmedia phenomena,” which she identifies with “the appearance of a certain motif, aesthetic, or discourse across a variety of different media” (2005, 46).
- 2.
I refer here to performances of Helen Lawrence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music , 14–17 October 2015, conceived and directed by Stan Douglas , written by Chris Haddock , with video programming by Peter Courtemanche .
- 3.
The Belgian performance group CREW recently gave attendees at the European Shakespeare Research Association conference in Gdansk (2017) a chance to sample its ongoing work on the Virtual Reality (VR) project, “Hands-on Hamlet.” On one occasion, I found myself standing between life-like avatars of Hamlet and Polonius, intangibly encircled by Polonius’s outstretched arms; on another, poised precariously atop a long staircase, I seemed to be only one step away from tumbling down. The overall experience was deeply immersive, uncannily enlivening, and “genuinely” made me feel captured in and by a virtual Elsinore . Upon visiting the “real” Elsinore (that is, Kronborg Castle in Helsingør in Demark) a few days later and witnessing scenes from Hamlet performed from room to room, I felt considerably less engaged. Gina Bloom and her UC Davis cohort describe a different form of “immersive spectatorship ” in the “motion-capture game” Play the Knave in “A whole theater of others” (2016).
- 4.
For a comprehensive assessment of Sellars’s Merchant production and other engagements with Shakespeare, see Ayanna Thompson (2018).
- 5.
For a wide range of up-to-the-moment critical assessments of this phenomenon, see Aebischer , et al., ed. Shakespeare and the “Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience (2018).
- 6.
See my discussion of Sleep No More’s one-on-ones in an issue of Borrowers and Lenders 7:2 (2012/2013) that also includes other discussions of the performance event.
- 7.
Even though New York’s Federal Hall is only a reconstruction of the building that once sponsored and housed the making of the American nation, it was sufficiently charged with “aura” to bridge the historical gaps between American revolutionary history, the assassination of Julius Caesar and its aftermath, and the staging of those events in Shakespeare’s play of that name when it sponsored and housed their radically abbreviated essentializing in Castellucci’s Spared Parts.
- 8.
From Directors Notes on Giulio Cesare , 11 June 1996. The “Archivio” of Romeo Castellucci and the Societas Raffaello Sanzio, no. 53_01_13, Cesena, Italy. Papalexiou adds, “Thus, the actor, or rather this body, was selected as an authentic dramatic material, in order to protest against the incessant flow of political speech [and] the rhetoric of the word gave way to the rhetoric of the body” (2015, 54).
- 9.
As Matthew Causey observes, “The work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio combines the use of complex imagery and dense audio scores, in linguistically minimal works devised from deconstructed classic texts with what the director Castellucci calls the ‘dis-human ’: actors’ bodies altered by disease and surgical interventions, animals, children and performing objects” (2006, 121).
- 10.
For a full history of the company and institution to 2004, see Chambers (2004). For a detailed accounting of the rise and fall of The Other Place , see Smith-Howard (2006).
- 11.
Chambers offers additional insight into the RSC of the 1980s and ’90s in the following: “Although there were many bright RSC performances, by the company’s own high standards, much of the work had become honourable but routine, and most of it was unexceptional. The ability to reflect and comment on society in anything but an ironic way was being lost in the drive for technical bravura. The RSC’s subsidy was insufficient to free the company from its commercial imperatives and the production of Shakespeare had become just a custom. A domestic, country-house Hamlet in 1997 that deliberately eschewed the play’s political dimension was a symptom of this overproduction and perpetual quest to surmount the deadening effects of familiarity. The company had been asking itself for many years how it could be ‘relevant’ five times a year and when certain titles reappear with the regularity of a merry-go-round? The director of the production Matthew Warchus acknowledged the problem by suggesting, only slightly tongue in cheek, that the company institute a moratorium on Shakespeare” (126–127).
- 12.
I would identify as the ur-version of contemporary RSC Troiluses the deeply cynical, sadomasochistically inclined and, in many ways, groundbreaking 1981 RSC production directed by Terry Hands and starring David Suchet as Achilles, Tony Church as Pandarus, and Joe Melia as Thersites.
- 13.
For a critical account of this production, see Chapter 6. Also see W. B. Worthen , “Hamlet at Ground Zero” (2008).
- 14.
In an interview in which she’s asked to elaborate on past and present Group practices, Elizabeth LeCompte avers that “It’s about the meeting of two artistic cultures that are very different” (2013, 237).
- 15.
This tendency to fabricate “authentic” traditions for cultures that one is in the process of annihilating, of course, complicates further the already complicated question of what properly pertains, or belongs to, Native American heritage. As the Group’s self-styled Office of Mesophytics states in the Group’s program notes, “When The Office of Mesophytics was in college we owned a t-shirt featuring a picture of Chief Seattle with the caption, ‘The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth,’ words usually attributed to the Suquamish leader from an 1855 speech [which actually] come from a 1972 TV script about pollution produced by the Southern Baptist Convention, and were written by a white screenwriter from Texas.” Another of the many mysteries the Wooster Group’s performance cultivates is why exactly the playwright Jason Grote , author of its section of the program notes, refers to himself as “the Office of Mesophytics.” An additional source of bewilderment is what mesophytes—landplants growing in surroundings that have an average amount of water—have to do with anything in the immediate confines of this production.
- 16.
As Causey notes, on occasions when the videated source of the Wooster Group actors’ emulations /imitations are invisible to the audience , “All the audience can observe are the performative results, [since] the motivating or initiatory material is unavailable.” Moreover, “The motivations for action initiated by technology remain hidden to the spectator and to the actor [alike] who is nonetheless compelled to repeat and reenact the patterns” (Causey 2006, 45).
- 17.
Unless viewers and readers are capable of suspending some of the progressive pieties of the present, it may be difficult to comprehend, much less appreciate, the nature of the Group’s provocations. In the interview from which these remarks are drawn, Kate Valk and Liz LeCompte recall the “cowboy and Indian” movies of their (and my) childhood, and how both the provenance and point of view of these films changed in the last thirty years or so, “where there were more fluid, multiple voices for native Americans because some of the films were made by them, the indigenous people” (2013, 234). Growing up as they and I did, one thing that didn’t change was our identification with and sympathy for the Indians (even though most were played by “white” actors in “redface”). Hence, where some viewers and critics see condescension, even racism, in the way the Group “puts on” and combines seemingly patronizing stereotypes of the past with more positive simplifications of the present, I would submit that the Group projects a fondness and sympathy rooted in childhood identifications.
- 18.
Elia Kazan’s classic film Splendor in the Grass (1961) is the only one of the four films the Wooster Group draws on that does not involve Native American/First Nations themes or imagery. The fourth film from which additional footage is drawn is the 1970 Western, A Man Called Horse , which features British actor Richard Harris in the role of a captive white man dressed in much the same bare-chested, gone-native garb of an American Indian worn by the Wooster Group actors in this production.
- 19.
Cf. the 1981 RSC production directed by Terry Hands , which established the practice, and the 1996 production directed by Ian Judge , which sustained it.
- 20.
This is not at all to diminish the creativity, craft, and effort of the RSC and its actors, who were all no doubt affected by the last minute defection of Rupert Goold , the production’s original director. That the director’s substitute, Mark Ravenhill —normally the RSC’s writer-in-residence—did what he could to respond to the Wooster Group’s challenges in an answering vein is evinced by his own contribution to the production’s program, in which he refreshingly reconstitutes the “problem” of the problem play into an opportunity for experimentation: “If we can create something that is inconsistent in tone, unreliable in information and driven by contradiction then maybe we can create the realistic theatre that Shakespeare was looking for.”
- 21.
Benjamin Fowler notes that “whenever the RSC actors took over the stage … the Wooster monitors imaged their textual delivery with an undulating visual sound-graph” (2014, 224). Interestingly, as Kate Valk and Liz LeCompte note, while the Wooster Group “took the hit in the press,” in part for its foregrounding of technology onstage, “the RSC has all the technology in and around the production: monitors backstage, microphones, everybody’s talking to each other on microphones,” such that “it is the perfect inverse of what is on the stage” (LeCompte et al. 2013, 242).
- 22.
In a private email exchange, Kathryn Prince recalls the “critical mauling” the RSC took in response to Lucy Bailey’s 2009 production of Julius Caesar , “which caused quite a stir with its significant use of cinematic projections.”
- 23.
According to the program’s Office of Mesophytics , “The Dutch sculptor and installation artist Folkert de Jong made the costumes for The Wooster Group. De Jong’s primary material is Styrofoam , a material that is fragile, pliable, lightweight and modern and which will never decompose.” A second entry farther down in the program reads:
“Styrofoam is the brand name for a proprietary substance invented and owned by the Dow Chemical Company, made from a liquid hydrocarbon manufactured from petroleum. It is not naturally occurring, but is abundant in the outdoors because it floats on air and water. It is toxic to marine and land animals.” In an earlier program note of her own entitled “A Curious Eye,” Wooster Group director, Liz LeCompte, quotes from a published conversation of de Jong’s with Ana Finel Honigman to the effect that “I try on purpose not to make the different references in my work too literal or recognizable to actuality or related to one issue. I want to refer with my work to subjects on a deeper level, and to trigger the curiosity of the general audience with a strong figurative body of work. It is the curious eye that makes the brain want to know more, and by taking a closer look at my [sculptural] scenes almost everybody starts to participate in the process of association and to recognize an absolutely heavy undertone that reflects on deeper human emotions.” A slideshow and additional still images of de Jong’s work are available at www.folkertdejong.org.
- 24.
As Aneta Mancewicz eloquently writes, “There is a haunting precision in the mirrored movements of the Wooster Group actors, and after a while one accepts the broad gestures and swinging postures as a natural element of the staging. One is even invited to perceive these movements, evocative of Inuit and Native American culture, as a fitting feature for the Trojan tribe, a besieged nation, doomed to die under the ruins of their ancient city” (2014, 90).
- 25.
Paul Prescott speaks to both in his broadly dismissive review of the production. Remarking Mark Ravenhill’s count of “only 76 walk outs” after the first preview of the production, Prescott contends that “a majority left, I suspect, because they were merely bored by a production that was to their eyes and ears—and it may be cathartic for some to read the following words slowly and emphatically—half-baked, pointlessly baffling, ill conceived and sophomoric” (2013, 217).
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Cartelli, T. (2019). The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment. In: Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40482-4_2
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