Volume 6

Towards an Approach of Performise : I Am a Normal Person (2018) as a Case Study

By Yi-Chen Wu

NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, TAIWAN

INTRODUCTION

This article is written from the author’s perspective while she was engaged in scenography and co-creation for the therapeutic theatre work I am a Normal Person (2018)[1] in which a woman with cerebral palsy performs her autobiographic memory onstage. The term “thera-peutic theatre” is a method in the field of drama therapy and can be defined as producing distinctive theatrical performance facilitated by a therapist who specializes in drama that can exert a psychotherapeutic effect on spectators and help them achieve a socially-beneficial shift in consciousness (Snow, D’Amico & Tanguay, 2003). In this sense, every participant in the production, including creators, actors, and spectators, can be thought of as experiencing group psychotherapy (Snow, D’Amico & Tanguay, 2003). Therapeutic theatre deepens the therapeutic process from rehearsal to after-show discussion while at the same time broadens the therapeutic group from private to public.

In Taiwan the field of drama therapy was pioneered by psychiatrist Tzu-Chang Chen and over the following four decades, has mainly relied on the methods of psychodrama (Lai, 2013) rather than therapeutic theatre. Various pieces have been presented in community centres, schools, and hospitals to small therapy groups largely in the fashion outlined in Jacob Levy Moreno’s concept of psychodrama (Moreno, 1953; as cited in Lai, 2013). Most frequently, because government education policy has embraced drama therapy as an effective tool, it often appears as a form of education-led performance for students (Chang, 2003). Overall, in Taiwan, productions that employ therapeutic theatre are rare. Of those that do, this type of performance is usually devoid of theatre design for pragmatic reasons such as budget, ease of transportation, and because the directors’ main focus is to use performance to draw attention to specific health issues and thereby achieve a therapeutic effect. Similar constraints and characteristics occur in psychodrama.

Nonetheless, during her work, the author found that this approach which lacks theatre design may not be the only way to present therapeutic theatre considering that the genre aims to devise a realm in which spectators can share disabled actors’ experiences, rather than inactively listening to the actors’ long monologues, or appreciating their acting techniques. This article proposes an alternative approach to therapeutic theatre that effectively employs theatre design, to achieve a political goal: by engaging spectators with the actors, disabled actors can be considered as equal to able-bodied people.

In this context, from the perspective of scenographer, the author contends that therapeutic theatre can apply characteristics of post-dramatic theatre, which, as Hans-Thies Lehmann (1995, 2006) states, implies an open-ended form of performance that releases theatre from drama and instead includes diverse experimental theatre methods that usually use audio-visual media. Furthermore, post-dramatic theatre signifies reciprocal responses between actors and spectators (Lehmann, 1995, 2006). Thus, instead of traditionally appreciating the actor’s ability to transform characters from plays into living roles onstage, spectators in post-dramatic theatre alternatively are stimulated to access to and even participate in what occurs in front. The specific qualities of post-dramatic theatre can transcend and break-down a spectator’s impression that disabled actors have inherent limitations in their acting.

By merging therapeutic theatre aesthetically with post-dramatic theatre in order to emphasize the performative, rather than dramatic, phase of works, one major question that is rooted in the author’s experience of scenography arises—how might the form of therapeutic theatre be restructured to effectively employ scenography with multimedia in order to achieve its goal of psychotherapy? This question encourages an exploration in the following pages of various practices that can merge with post-dramatic theatre in order to enhance a spectator’s accessibility to and participation in therapeutic theatre.

This article argues that these goals can be met through the application of performise, a semiotic notion developed by Patrice Pavis (2013) that associates ‘perf’ (i.e. performance) with ‘mise’ (i.e. placing something or someone) to point out an alternative way of making theatre that differs from the tradition of mise-en-scène. The association of perf with mise reveals a shift in emphasis from literature to performance of contemporary theatre works that employ the use of specific methods, such as improvisation and games, for the purpose of generating certain dynamic spatial configurations in theatre works (Pavis, 2013). In this way, the notion of performise echoes the characteristics of post-dramatic theatre in that both emphasize indeterminate factors to activate the process of theatrical performances.

Following this line of thought, since Lehmann’s post-dramatic theatre does not include fantasy in theatre, the notion of performise needs to be examined to draw out the definitions of reality that exist in therapeutic theatre. That is, what configurations of space in therapeutic theatre can converge different peoples’ realities? To assist with this project, the author proposes that Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action (1997), which provides a non-dualistic interpretation of reality, appears to share similarities with the notions of post-dramatic theatre and performise and thus is useful to understanding the two-fold, merged role of actors and spectators.

In order to achieve the above-mentioned integration in this scenography work, Arts-Based Research[2] for scenography is applied as research methodology. According to Robin Nelson (2013), art practices should be considered as a form of embodied proof to research questions, and emerge in the process of the practices. That is to say, practice is concomitant with academic research. To employ this methodology, the author has merged her findings of performise and intra-action with theatre design, so that the design process, or praxis, can “perform” academic theories during the course of performances.

HYPOTHESIS: AN APPROACH OF PERFORMISE

As a scenographer, the author has become accustomed to collective creation, that is, developing theatre works together with directors and other artists through a process of asking questions and extracting findings. According to Patrice Pavis’ studies, this approach to creating theatre, which is termed as ‘performise’, can be defined as focusing on the performance itself, and stands in contrast to the traditional approach of transforming textual symbols into movement and visual sets, namely employing the notion of mise-en-scène (Pavis, 2013). This split from the mise-en-scène tradition can be traced to the emergence of performance arts in the 1960s that brought about a turn from theatricality to performativity (Pavis, 2013).

In order to clarify the distinction between the tradition of mise-en-scène and the alternative method of performise that emerged, it is necessary to briefly explain the origin of mise-en-scène and its changing definitions. In 1903, French theatre director André Antoine’s writing ‘Causerie sur la mise en scène’ noted that the term can be traced back to the end of 19^th century when theatre directors were responsible for providing an overall interpretation of a work by building up scenes for actors to perform characters while at the same time dramatizing actors’ movements in relation to the dialogues to make meaning (as cited in Pavis, 2013). Mise-en-scène in this sense can be regarded as thoroughly tied to the directors’ vision and creation of stage circumstances based on literature. That is to say, the director’s efforts aimed to transform text from two-dimensionally printed words in books to three-dimensional scenery in theatre.

However, as mentioned in the beginning of this section, since the 1960s, performance art has undergone a “performative turn” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 39) through which theatre has become more deeply associated with performance, instead of with literature and dramatic representation. Following the 1970s, the arts world began to question whether spectators needed fantasy in theatre, and to perceive performance itself as a method or strategy that could challenge traditional notions of theatre and literature which overemphasized guiding spectators to read textual symbols contained in onstage sets (Pavis, 2013). Since then, an increasing number of theatre practitioners have shifted their attention to improvisation and uncertainty that are generated from the interconnections between perception and movement.

As Pavis became aware of the shift in attention, he invented the term “performise” to highlight the emerging trend of performance-led theatre works (2013, p. 303). The concept of performise can be thought of as referring to certain flexible and indeterminate mechanisms of theatrical performance. Although the concept of performise in Pavis’ book (2013) is not fully systematized, he outlines how a notion of performise could encourage theatre practitioners to broadly experiment with the dynamic equilibrium between performance and mise-en-scène. In other words, performise can be seen as an aim for theatre through which the mutual influences that emerge in the performative encounters among theatre practitioners, spectators, objects, and even spaces should be thought of as parameters that affect the dynamics of theatrical performance.

For the above-mentioned reasons, this article proposes performise as an approach well-suited for therapeutic theatre because performise, similar to the approach of post-dramatic theatre, converges the creation of performance with the setup of lines, objects, and multimedia. With the help of performise, scenography is no longer confined to decorating fictional space in theatre. Instead, if scenographers can realise the performative function of lines, objects, and multimedia, s/he can devise spatial configurations that effectively stimulate unpredictable responses from participants, including actors and spectators, during performances. This approach of performise has the potential to inspire diverse possibilities in therapeutic theatre.

INTRA-ACTION: LINKING EACH OTHER FROM WITHIN

In the last section, the article clarified the definition of performise and described how this new way of making theatre can lead to the sharing of authority between theatre practitioners and spectators in therapeutic theatre. Following this line, the authour suggests that Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action (1996), in terms of her discussion of agential realism, could be applied to further examine the spectator’s active role in the application of performise. The reality created in intra-action can be compared to reality constituted by performise, since both approaches reject a dualistic perspective of the world. Thus, because of the similarity between the concepts, the exploration of the concept of intra-action becomes indispensable to interrogate the hypothesis in this article.

Influenced by the physicist Neils Bohr’s philosophy that rejects the notion that anything can be totally divided from its surrounding, Barad’s agential realism can be described as “our participation within nature” (original italics; Barad, 1996, p. 176). The sense of participation indicates a perception of overlapping positions of the observing subject and the observed object and acknowledges the reciprocal actions between the two parties. Barad identifies these kinds of reciprocal actions with flowing agencies as “intra-action” (Barad, 1996, p. 187). Different from inter-action, which indicates the two-way reactions between two distinctive parties, intra-action refers to those between two relevant parties that consist of a dynamic whole.

Yet, according to Barad (1996), intra-action does not denote dissolving boundaries between the observing subject and the observed object. Instead, the condition by which the intra-action occurs requires moving boundaries between the two relevant parties. Following this non-dualistic logic, as Barad explains, “Phenomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena” (original italics; 1996, p. 176). This perspective sees reality as concomitant with intra-actions, and not veiled by phenomena. That is to say, the subject coexists with the object and yet both retain their own authorities of coexistence.

By applying the above-discussed concept of intra-action to examine the roles of actors and spectators in therapeutic theatre that applies the concept of performise, both actors and spectators can be transformed into actively observing subjects who recognize that unpredictable encounters, influences, and unknown elements are the constituents of reality itself, rather than representative of another fictional world. The realm in which actors encounter spectators brings about the emergence of a liminal realm in which the reciprocal actions between the two parties connect them in a dynamic whole that constantly evolves according to their reactions to each other. Using intra-action as a tool for creating scenography can give rise to therapeutic, healing effects on actors and spectators through their mutual responses in the process of performance.

CASE STUDY: I AM A NORMAL PERSON (2018)

The therapeutic theatre work I am a Normal Person, publicly performed in Taiwan in 2018, is a case study for this article. This onstage work is an autobiographic memory of the actress herself, a woman with cerebral palsy who recalls her childhood during which she saw herself as an able-bodied person because her mother had always told her that she was no different from other people. It was only after she began to attend school and experienced abusive comments from her classmates that she became fully aware of her health condition and developed the resolve to fight for the rights of disabled people. Even to the present day, she continues to see herself as mentally and physically competent as able-bodied people. For this reason, as co-creator of this work, she entitled it I am a Normal Person (Hsieh, 2018).

The author worked as a scenographer and co-creator for the collective creation of I am a Normal Person. After watching several rehearsals, the author found that the director was urging the actress to employ difficult acting skills characteristically used by able-bodied actor/actress such as perfectly transforming emotions from sadness to anger while accurately memorizing lines and clearly expressing them. This approach reflected the director’s traditional understanding of mise-en-scène, a drama-focused method that aims to represent literal scenes to the spectators. Because rehearsals primarily focused on achieving a literal representation of the character in the text, the director experienced many challenges.

To resolve the incompatibilities between performance-oriented and drama-oriented forms of theatre, scenography can be a way to return the therapeutic piece back to its original core idea—stimulating spectator engagement with the actress’s performance itself—to give the piece a stronger element of improvisation. To achieve this, scenography for the piece required an alternative approach that focused on performance, similar to the approach taken in the production of post-dramatic theatre. The author found her solution in Pavis’ notion of performise (2013), which can help creators to design the work so that the actress and spectators’ actions and reactions merge into a reciprocal whole.

Therefore, the notion of performise was employed in the production of I am a Normal Person in order to combine therapeutic theatre with post-dramatic theatre through multimedia scenography. Furthermore, Barad’s concept of intra-action (1996) was brought in as a way to stimulate the interconnection between the spectators’ active responses and the actress’s performance. With reference to these notions, the author’s scenographic design, which engaged the actress as well as the spectators into constantly shifting constituents of a dynamic whole, placed both within the realm of their reciprocal actions. This design avoided the pitfalls of a conventional mise-en-scène approach in which the actress and spectators would play passive roles according to the creator’s predetermined vision. The multiple choices offered by the design created a piece that is strikingly different from usual approaches that rely on visual effects that hyper-directs the spectator’s reading of the work. In what follows, the approach of this design will be will further articulated through an in-depth examination.

With this new approach that aims to avoid representation of literal scenes, I chose black box venues in the cities of Tainan and Kaohsiung to stage the piece. In the piece itself, I transformed the scenes in the actress’s memory into a blank white space consisting of two large white standing wooden boards, one of which was covered with cotton and the other with paper, and a huge span of white fabric that overlay almost the entire interior floor. On the surface of the fabric floor, a number of hand-made white pillows of diverse sizes were randomly placed as the audience seating. On the central stage, a wooden box, covered with different shades of white fabric, was prepared for the actress’s face-to-face talk to the spectators. At the back and extending to the upper stage were five translucent sheer curtains hanging from ceiling to the floor onto which layered images were projected (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Scene 5 of I am a Normal Person (2018): layered live images of the actress are projected onto five translucent sheer curtains hanging from ceiling to the floor. Photo: Yi-Chen Wu.

At first impression, the performance space appeared to be nothing but white space, a strategy the author employed to transform the performance space into a flexible space in order to link the generation of actions with that of scenes. The linkage can be characterized as a form of performise because it achieves a relationship between the actress and the spectators that spreads across the white fabric and pillows covering the surface of the floor. Because of the setting, the actress was able to freely walk into the audience seating area and improvisationally engage in direct conversations with spectators. During the after-show discussion, a number of spectators commented that it felt as though the setting carried them deep into the actress’s mind. Specifically, the tactile sensations provided by the fabric and pillows added an intimate atmosphere to the space. Overall, there was a sense of unsecured, shifting structure of boundaries between the actress and the spectators—this is precisely a characteristic feature of intra-action as described earlier in this article.

Furthermore, the author applied the same strategy to the design of the two large standing boards. The one on stage left looked like a blank wall and was covered with cotton to create a texture akin to storm and air currents. The cotton board was used as a medium to transport the magnificent life story of the actress via her verbal and physical expressions. When the actress entered the performance space and walked towards the board, a stick within the left fringe of the board was slowly lowered down to become a coat tree. Then, a table shape hidden in the middle part of the board was gradually exposed when the actress stood in front of the board. While the actress travelled back to her teenage years, the table-shaped prop transformed into a desk shape that was accompanied by the appearance of a chair shape from the board (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Scene 1 of I am a Normal Person (2018): the actress performs in front of the cotton board with augmented spaces (for hanging clothing on a coat tree, putting hands and hanging bag on desk, and sitting on chairs) that emerged from the board. Photo: Yi-Chen Wu.

The actress’ performance as she responded to her memory was accompanied by the emergence of related furniture shapes and thus generated augmented spaces for sitting, placing hands, and hanging bags. The design aimed to shift emphasis from representing literal places recalled by the actress to the physical presence of the actress. What the places actually looked like was no longer important. Rather the actress’s verbal and physical expressions and the spectators’ interpretations served to bring out colours and outlines of the scenery. In this way, the spectators became aware that the emphasis of the work lay not only on the actress’s performance but also on their participation in it. The emphasis echoes the notion of performise and relates to the concept of intra-action, which asserts that reality appears in phenomena. Thus, it seems that both the actress and the spectators together constitute a form of reality through what is in front of them. During the after-show discussion, several spectators commented that the blank space felt transformative and incited them to engage their own memories in the performance more effectively than did the literal scenes that they saw in other more conventional theatre works.

A similar effect was achieved with the other large white paper-covered board which was lowered onto stage right. When they were inside the performance space, the spectators were asked to write on stickers their comments about people with cerebral palsy and attached them randomly to the board. After doing this, as after-show feedback from spectators revealed, they were wondering how the stickers might be used in the work. The use of the stickers came to light when, in due time, the actress moved to the front of the board to select a number of stickers to which she wanted to respond, and read aloud the comments. If the comments were acceptable, she placed the stickers on the upper part of her costume. Conversely, if the comments were far from the facts that she had experienced, she tore up the stickers. (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Scene 2 of I am a Normal Person (2018): the actress responds to the stickers on which were written the spectators’ comments about people with cerebral palsy. Photo: Yi-Chen Wu.

Through the process of attaching and detaching stickers, a flow of agencies between the actress and the spectators was engendered. Here, the flowing agencies indicates the ever-changing reactions between the actress and the spectators. In this sense, the board with stickers can be seen as a form that identifies the concept of performise concomitant with the occurrence of intra-actions. In this example, the actress and the spectators perform together through the process of (dis)attaching stickers and the spectators became aware of whether or not their comments were consistent to the actress’s real situations and experience. Beginning from the time the spectators left their comments on the board, they would perceive various forms of reciprocal movement throughout the performance. The spectators thus became an important factor that fundamentally affected the development of the performance. By adopting the lens of agential realism, it can be seen that the spectators played the role of co-performer to varying extents, and that the co-performance contributed to the formation of a kind of organic unity.

Such flowing agencies with a shifting focus on co-performance is indicative of an intention to preclude a dualistic vision of the work. The non-dualization was employed as a fundamental condition necessary to achieve performise and intra-action as defined earlier in this article. That is to say, without separating theatre from life, the design strove to avoid pre-determined understandings of the work, but rather aimed to stimulate multiple responses between the actress and spectators, and among the spectators themselves. For instance, the spectators’ feedback on the piece suggested that they felt as though their own life stories were being performed onstage. This indicates not only the importance of the spectators’ contemplation of the scene that played out in front of them but also of the symbiotic relationship between the spectators and the actress. Thus, the scenographic design yielded an impression that different people’s life stories were linked together to search for solutions to moving forward.

In addition, the dynamic configuration of the performance space generated a liminal, agential realm, involving both the actress and the spectators, much in accordance with this article’s earlier introduction to the notions of performise and intra-action. During the after-show discussion, a number of spectators noted that they felt as though a shared space existed between themselves and the actress since their personal life crises seemed to overlap with certain aspects of the actress’s life story. This sense of shared space was created through the scenographic design to cause the performance space to appear as an evolving, morphogenetic state that introduced various improvisational factors such as writing comments on stickers, the emergence of furniture shapes from the cotton wall, carpeting the floor of the performance space with white fabric, and by projecting multiple live images of the actress on translucent screens.

CONCLUSION

This article has used the author’s scenography for the therapeutic theatre work I am a Normal Person to demonstrate that applying the notion of performise led to an alternative way of making theatre, similar to the method employed in post-dramatic theatre, in which the presence of the actress and her performance, rather than a visual representation of the text, was foregrounded. Meanwhile, the concept of intra-action helped to configure the performance space as a kind of liminal and dynamic realm wherein the actress and the spectators served as co-performers and reciprocally responded to each other.

Therefore, the outcome of the work has supported the article’s proposition—namely, an approach employing performise to stimulate the spectators’ active accessibility and participation in therapeutic theatre. As indicated by after-show spectator feedback, the work generated a perception of healing in the process of performance—that is, the work enabled everyone to be seen as an able-bodied person by causing us to understand that while we all have experienced incapabilities in various situations, we must nevertheless repeatedly continue to persevere and try again.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Wu, Y. (2019). Towards an approach of performise: I am a normal person (2018) as a case study. ArtsPraxis, 6 (2), 68-83.

REFERENCES

Barad, K. (1996). Meeting the universe halfway: Realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In J. Nelson (Ed.), Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science (pp. 161-194). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.

Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: A new aesthetics (S. I. Jain, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge. (Original work published 2004)

Hsieh, X.J. (2018) Interview with Yi-Chen Wu, Kaohsiung, 25 of June 2018, unpublished manuscript.

Lai, N.W. (2013). A Review of the Taiwanese Psychodrama Literature from 1968 to 2011: The Development and Transformation. Chinese Journal of Guidance and Counseling, 36, 33-66.

Leavy, P. (2018). Introduction to Arts-Based Research. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of Arts-Based Research (pp. 3-21). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Lehmann, H-T. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre (K. Jürs-Munby, Trans.). UK, USA, and Canada: Routledge. (Original work published 1995)

Pavis, P. (2013). Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today (J. Anderson, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge. (Original work published 2012)

Snow, S., D’Amico, M., & Tanguay, D. (2003). Therapeutic theatre and well-being. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 30, 73-82.

NOTES

[1] I am a Normal Person (2018) is produced by a team includes: I-Lien Ho (Director), Yu-Ming Wu (Psychologist), Xiao-Jung Hsieh (Actress), Yi-Chen Wu (Scenographer), and Hang-Gung Chang (Musician).

[2] Using the term Arts-Based Research, rather than Practice as Research, here aims to foreground that this methodology significantly involves researchers’ art-making practices in their research inquiry process to illustrate their results as creative arts. (Leavy, 2018).

Yi-Chen Wu is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Theater Arts at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. She received a PhD degree in Drama from the University of Exeter, UK, in 2016. With an honor of distinction, in 2002, she graduated from Laban wherein she studied scenography in dance. She is also an experienced scenographer for performing arts in Taiwan. The core of her design is to trigger a kind of performative relationship among the performer, the viewer and multiple-media. Her research papers have been publicly presented in the United Kingdom, Norway, Holland, Canada, Mexico, and Taiwan.

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