Sense and Sensation: Exploring the Interplay between the Semiotic and Performative Dimensions of Theatre

Abstract

Spring 2008 69 Sense and Sensation: Exploring the Interplay Between the Semiotic and Performative Dimensions of Theatre Erika Fischer-Lichte The Semiotic and the Performative In the 1970s, when the so-called linguistic, or semiotic, turn took place in the humanities, it opened up new possibilities for theatre research. Up to then, its main self-understanding had been that of a historical discipline analogous to art history and the history of literature. But whereas these disciplines regarded the analysis and interpretation of works of art from past epochs as their main task, a comparable approach was not open to theatre studies. Performances of the past are no longer accessible; they are gone and lost forever. The ephemeral and transitory nature of performance, which the German playwright and theoretician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing referred to as early as the 18th century as theatre’s unique peculiarity, does not allow the analysis or interpretation of a past performance. It is possible to examine documents on a performance as well as the material traces left behind, such as the theatre building, stage sets, costumes, props, the text of a play, a score, reports or reviews on the performance, etc., but not the performance itself. On the other hand, a performance, which was accessible, i.e. contemporary theatre, was not considered a suitable object of research. For while the literary scholar or the art historian is able to take recourse to the object of his study whenever it is needed and become absorbed in its details, contemplating it as long as he feels necessary, the performance is not at the theatre scholar’s disposal in a comparable way. Because of its fleeting nature, any attempt to analyze it seems doomed to failure. Therefore, dealing with contemporary performances was left to theatre critics, while the scholar’s object of interest was taken from theatre history. By the 1970s, when theatre scholars began to question this distribution of labor and tried to develop methods of analyzing a performance despite its ephemeral nature, semiotics provided them with a set of tools. Semiotically speaking, a performance can be defined as a structured coherence of theatrical signs such as Erika Fischer-Lichte is professor of theatre research and director of the newly founded Institute of Advanced Studies on Interweaving Theatre Cultures at the Freie Universitaet Berlin. She is past president of the International Federation for Theatre Research and a member of the Academia Europaea, the Academy of Sciences at Goettingen and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Her publications include The Semiotics of Theatre (German 1983, English 1992), History of European Drama and Theatre (German 1990, English 2002), Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (1993), The Show and the Gaze of Theatre (1997), Das eigene und das fremde Theater (1999), Aesthetische Erfahrung. Das Semiotische und das Performative (2001), Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005), and The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008, German 2004 as Aesthetik des Performativen). 70 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism scenic space, the bodily appearance of the actors, gestures, movements, language, sounds, music, and so on, and in this sense as a text–which does not mean the literary text of a play but a text made up of heterogeneous signs. Thus, semiotic methods could be applied to a performance.1 The central purpose of semiotic analysis was to search for possible meanings. It stemmed from the assumption that an unequivocal meaning can never be accorded to a performance—as it cannot to lyrics or a painting. It is ambiguous and polyvalent. Accordingly, it is open to most diverse processes of meaning generation. It is never the meaning of a gesture, action, scene, or the whole performance, but only one possible meaning from a generally large number of meanings generated with regard to the element in question. A semiotic analysis never strives to discover a unified meaning of performance or any one element of it. Even if one particular meaning is generated, this does not mean that all others are to be excluded. Rather, a choice is made with a view to the particular problem, question, hypothesis, or perspective under which the analysis is undertaken, for there is...