Practical Manifesto for a Theatre of Repetition

Abstract

In the preface to the English translation of Félix Ravaisson’s De l’habitude (2008 [1838], eds and trans. Claire Carlisle and Mark Sinclair, London: Continuum), Catherine Malabou identifies ‘two basic ways of speaking of habit’ in the European philosophical tradition, either as ‘a primary ontological phenomenon’ or as an ‘epitome of inauthenticity’; she suggests that we are ‘habituated’ to the second (vii). Indeed, in our everyday experience, especially in the West, habit has acquired this overall negative connotation of an automatic routine. However, even when considered more positively as an ‘ontological phenomenon’, this acknowledgement of habit’s decisive role in the constitution of identity is no guarantee against the deadening effects of its automatisms. Since these effects can be quite explicit, whatever creative force underlies the phenomenon will remain concealed unless it is somehow brought to the surface of experience. In other words, one has to reconcile the potentially stultifying forces of habit with the perhaps more subtle, but just as resilient, generative ones. To this end, a performance practice that may at once manifest habit’s hidden sense and neutralize its side effects would go some way to complement a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon. Accordingly, in the spirit of a manifesto, this article first lays out a statement of values and then considers a number of workable principles for the theatre, with both instances based on relevant theories of habit and on my practice-as-research on the work of actors, oscillating between spontaneity and repetition.