Performing Drama/ Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text by Michael Vanden Heuvel

Abstract

190Comparative Drama Michael Vanden Heuvel. Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Pp. [x] + 262. $32.50. Robert Wilson's 1987 staging of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine— like his production, the year before, of Euripides' Alcestis—reflected a shift from the largely self-generated textuality of Wilson's early theater to a more interventionist staging of established dramatic texts. This and similar shifts are the subject of Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance , Michael Vanden Heuvel's bold attempt to analyze the increasing intersection of performance theater and literary drama since the mid-seventies. As the avant-garde has turned toward the textuality it once repudiated, Vanden Heuvel claims, the postmodern theater has seen the emergence of "hybrid" forms, in which traditional literary drama and performance "mutually deconstruct, interanimate, and redefine one another" (p. 65). After an historical overview of contemporary alternative theater, Vanden Heuvel analyzes the emergence of hybrid froms in the performance work of Wilson and the Wooster Group. To exemplify what he considers a parallel development—the opening of traditional literary drama to more radical performance elements—he also discusses the plays of Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard. According to Vanden Heuvel, the appearance of text-performance hybrids within contemporary performance theater is a direct consequence of the limitations, even failures, of earlier avant-garde experimentation. Sixties performance was grounded in a rejection of textual authority and an elevation of performance as an antiauthoritarian celebration of irrationality and unmediated wholeness. But the work of such groups as the Living Theater, Vanden Heuvel argues, merely replicated the unitary structures against which it was ostensibly opposed: "such an agenda does not seek to displace textuality, but simply to recuperate its illusion of Presence in another guise" (p. 45). Subsequent performance theater would reject this unitary, transcendental notion of performance. Paralleling the emerging poststructuralist critique of such concepts, Richard Foreman, Wilson, Lee Breuer, and other artist/ auteurs of the seventies developed a deconstructive aesthetic of performance in which language and other performative elements were subject to deformation, estrangement, and recombination and where the activities of theatrical creation and perception were caught up in indeterminacy and play. Yet even these second-generation performance artists advocated a practice that valorized performance over textuality, whether this latter was the scripted authorial text of traditional drama or the broader texts of culture and history. Vanden Heuvel illuminates the shift by which the ahistoricism of the early-seventies avant garde has given way to a theater where performance confronts its inseparability from structures of textuality. "Rather than trying to move past traditional text-centered theater—whether by performance-as-ritual, or by performance-as-play/ deferral—contemporary artists are more inclined to critique theater's bases of reproduction from within its own theatrical, dramatic, and performative matrices" (p. 63). Wilson has followed Hamletmachine with productions of Woolfs Orlando and Ibsen's When We Dead Reviews191 Awaken; Foreman has collaborated with Kathy Acker on The Birth of the Poet; Breuer's recent productions include Gospel at Colonus and Lear. In his longest (and best) chapter, Vanden Heuvel traces the emergence of this "hybrid" aesthetic within the work of the Wooster Group, from the Group's more strictly deconstructive production of Spalding Gray's Sakonnet Point (1975) to what we might call the "intertextualized" staging of Thornton Wilder's Our Town in Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981) and of Arthur Miller's The Crucible in L.S.D. (Just the High Points) (1984). In these latter works, Vanden Heuvel argues, the Wooster Group has directed its deconstructive performance techniques toward the existing texts of American culture, within which any theatrical event—including its own—is inescapably situated. Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance is a splendid reading of alternative theater and a fresh, intelligent analysis of the hybrid form that represents this tradition's most recent, and most clearly "postmodern ," achievement. It draws upon contemporary physics and mathematics in order to articulate new models for the relationships between text and performance. The theoretical discussion gets a bit dense and self-conscious in places, particularly the book's Introduction. But on the whole Vanden Heuvel writes with facility and authority...