Theatrical Repetition and Inspired Performance

Abstract

Repetition is intrinsic to theater. Besides theater's improvisational forms, a theatrical performance presents before its audience a sequence of events that the actors have rehearsed and acted many times. More than a contingent requirement of the ater, repetition is intimately linked with aesthetic value. Successful repetition has been described (such as by Strasberg above) as the greatest chal lenge for an actor.1 Inferior acting discloses aware ness of what is about to occur, or projects the out come of a lived process before it has taken place, or rushes through a dialogue in a pace that can not realistically capture the actual temporality of a conversation. Such failures reveal an inability to repeat a lived process when one's prior knowledge is not fully suspended. As for the audience, it is tempting to suppose that it ignores or is altogether unaware of the fact that it is attending an act of repetition. Tempt ing, indeed, but probably simplistic. The audience knows that the actor crying now has wept at last night's performance too. If spectators watch the performance again, they will see tears shed at pre cisely the same moment. If asked, theatergoers would assert that they are fully cognizant that repetition is taking place. By ignoring the diffi culty that accounting for repetition poses for un derstanding theater, we risk missing the intriguing key that it provides for unlocking dimensions of theater's uniqueness. We are also likely to over look an aspect that fuels our persistent fascination with theater, a fascination that should have van ished with the heightened realism readily created by cinema. What is theatrical repetition? How does such repetition differ from duplication or exercise? What might be the significance of the audience's consciousness of attending a repeated event to the overall meaning of theater as a distinct branch of performing art? My objective in what follows is to unfold the role that repetition might play for both creating and watching theater (and proba bly the role it sometimes plays in other perform ing arts as well). The answers such inquiry leads to do not account for the content of specific the atrical performances (roles, themes, images), but for the ways in which structural features of play acting touch upon subjective experience. I argue that both theatrical repetition and the subliminal awareness that one is enacting or witnessing it play a crucial role in theatrical communication in gen eral and may partly account for the significance of live acting in particular.