The Presence of Mediation

Abstract

Two productions, precisely 20 years apart, emblematic of their respective decades as well as of the immense chasm that separates the 1960s from the I980s: the Living Theatre's Paradise Now (1968) and Richard Foreman's What Did He See (1988). former is often regarded as a quintessential affirmation of live, unmediated presence. Its most notorious sequence, The of Universal IntercourSe, was also its most representative. Julian Beck and Judith Malina described it as follows: The actors gather near the center of the playing area. They lie down together on the stage floor, embracing. Their bodies form a pile, caressing, moving, undulating, loving. They are breaking the touch barrier. [. . .] If a member of the public joins this group, he is welcomed into the Rite (1971:74). Twenty years later Foreman's production was intent upon constructing barriers, not eradicating them (or, perhaps more precisely, objectifying otherwise invisible barriers). Here the performer/spectator relationship was mediated both aurally and visually. A transparent, Plexiglas wall separated the audience from the performers. actors' voices were heard indirectly, filtered through microphones and speaker systems-but not for the conventional purpose of amplification. performance took place in an exceedingly intimate space (the Susan Stein Shiva Theater in Joe Papp's Public Theater complex). That thin sheet of Plexiglas notwithstanding, there was no conventional reason to amplify the actors' voices. Indeed, the space was so intimate, one could virtually read the actors' lips. No, this mode of technological mediation was there to mediate, not to amplify or to allow for some sort of hypernaturalism or whispered intimacy. (The body mikes, by the way, were unabashedly and rather gruesomely visible, taped to the actors' cheeks like I.V. needles that had missed their marks.) This may sound like yet another set of classic confrontations between Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht. And indeed, one could easily approach the juxtaposition in that way. Certainly 20 years ago, one would have read it that way. Paradise Now would have been viewed as an attempt to reunify the community in a neo(or pseudo-) ritual, erasing any sense of theatrical rift. Our word theatre, after all, derives etymologically from the Greek theatron or seeing place, implying a necessary separation between the audience (those who watch) and the actors (those who do). What Did He