Performance Space and Stage Technologies: A Comparative Perspective on Theatre History ed. by Nawata Yuji and Hans Joachim Dethlefs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performance Space and Stage Technologies: A Comparative Perspective on Theatre History ed. by Nawata Yuji and Hans Joachim Dethlefs Pascale Aebischer (bio) Performance Space and Stage Technologies: A Comparative Perspective on Theatre History Edited by Nawata Yuji and Hans Joachim Dethlefs. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022. Pp. 176. Nawata Yuji and Hans Joachim Dethlefs's edited collection arises from "Towards a Global History of Culture," a research project based at Chuo University in Tokyo. In March 2020, the project was forced to pivot from in-person exchanges at a symposium to the alternative format of this volume. Consequently, until the final chapter in which Nawata seeks to offer categorizations and sketch out the global circulation of "cultural techniques," the book offers a starting point for comparison rather than an overarching comparative argument. As someone trained in early modern studies, I found Ishida Yuichi's analysis of the role of central perspective in Catholic churches (with a focus on Italy) particularly illuminating: the discussion of altar pieces and how they related to theatrical set designs and the creation of a "theatrum sacrum" as a place for seeing God's miracles struck me as an important context for understanding the connection between spiritual values and perspectival set designs in secular performance spaces. This was also one of the few chapters that seemed to pick up implicitly, if not explicitly, on another contribution to the volume: preceded, as it is, by Dethlefs's chapter on the early modern German reception of Vitruvius's and Serlio's architectural tracts regarding theatre design, Ishida's argument seemed to offer a possible answer to why Walter Hermann Ryff (the subject of Dethlefs's contribution) was so suspicious of perspectival design in the theatre. That comparative connection, however, is never actually articulated within the volume and it is the reader who has to do the work of joining the dots. Other chapters open up windows into fields, periods, and cultures with which I had little prior acquaintance: Seo Tatsuiko's essay on the theatrical elements of a Chinese novel, The Tale of Li Wa, set in Tang dynasty (ninth century) Chang'an, intricately maps the urban landscape of the novel before, in a surprise twist, suggesting that there is a global "four quadrant structure of love drama" that is "universal." Mitsuma Yasuyuki's consideration of semicircular theatre in ancient Babylon springs a similar surprise in the sudden turn from a scene analysis of the presentation of Crassus's head to the reading out of letters. However, there is little in this chapter to link it either to stage technologies or the semicircularity of the theatre advertised in the title. Three chapters focused on entertainment culture leading up to and around the turn of the twentieth century are connected by little more than rough simultaneity: Hioki Takayuki's investigation of stage machinery and special effects in Kabuki theatre is fascinating in the detailed insight it affords [End Page 588] into the staging of historical shipwrecks. It is worlds apart from Itoda Soichiro's investigation of the legislation that changed what could be defined as "theatre" in Berlin between 1870 and 1890 and, consequently, the expansion and subsequent decline of the theatre industry in the German capital. The section closes with Enomoto Yosuko's exploration of the Lyceum Theatre in Shanghai and its role in "expressing to the Chinese what Western art was" (p. 125). The book's final section contains two essays alongside Nawata's conclusion. Ito Masaru's essay on the Leningrad School's approach to theatre spaces is concerned exclusively with the theoretical writing in the 1920s of A. Gvozdev, the head of the Department of Theatre History at the Institute of Art History in Leningrad. Kai Van Eikels's discussion of projection technology stretches from Piscator via Peter Brook to the more recent work of Robert Lepage, the Japanese collective Dumb Type, and Frank Castorf's staging of Erniedrigte und Beleidigte in 2001, in which video projections of actors who remained inaccessible to the audience frustrated the audience's desire to see the actors' "laboring-for-the-audience" (p. 155). The book thus offers an eclectic selection of essays that offer valuable insights into...