Phenomenology For Actors: Theatre-making And The Question Of Being 6i43

Phenomenology for Actors

Phenomenology for Actors

Theatre-Making and the Question of Being

Daniel Johnston

First published in the UK in 2021 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2021 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Frontispiece: Justin Amankwah at the Pop-up Globe, Sydney, 2018. Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks Production manager: Jessica Lovett Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Print ISBN 978-1-78938-409-3 ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-410-9 ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-411-6

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This is a peer-reviewed publication.

For Harry and Elliott

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun …. there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand …. nor look through the eyes of the dead …. nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)

The question of whether human thinking can reach objective truth is not a question of theory but a practical question. (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Text

1.Beginnings: Being There Touching hands with being

What is phenomenology?

Performance and phenomenology

Philosophers on stage

Mapping the self

2.Phenomenology: Being-In-The-World Some background

Space and bodies

The history of Being

Destruktion and the text

From theory to practice

Observe a walk

Observe stillness

Scrutinize an object

Chart a place well known to you

Unpack a place where you feel at home

Dissect a familiar activity

Describe a person

Recount a time when you struggled to communicate

Demonstrate a moment when you had an unusual experience of time

Stage a life choice

Recreate the instant in which your life was threatened

Text-character-performance

3.Being-With Others: The Cherry Orchard Equipment

Involvement

Touch

Being elsewhere

Other people

4.Authenticity and Freedom: Antigone Falling

Nothingness

Moods and faring

Thrownness and projection

Fate and destiny

5.Time and Resoluteness: Hamlet Timeliness

Having a history

Being-a-whole

Resoluteness

Being-towards-death

6.Possibilities: Aletheia On the essence of truth in theatre

Poetry, language, theatre

Building, dwelling, theatre

The question concerning theatre technology

Ereignis

References

Index

Illustrations

1Stars above the pier at Coffs Harbour, New South Wales.

2Walking into the world.

3The Cherry Orchard workshop, Sheffield Hallam University, 2017.

4Antigone seminar workshop, The University of Sydney, 2019.

5Hamlet workshop, Pop-Up Globe, Sydney, 2018.

6The Tamar River, Launceston, Tasmania, 2019.

7Walking in the forest.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Tim Fitzpatrick, Ian Maxwell and Paul Dwyer for their generous . Thanks also to the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at The University of Sydney, where various sections of this book were presented as seminars. Versions of the chapters in this book were presented at the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies which has provided an encouraging environment for academic exchange. Initial practical work leading to this book began with a workshop funded by Sheffield Hallam University. Special thanks to Henry Bell for his directorial contributions, together with Neil Sissons and Ashley Barnes for their practical guidance and . Finally, thank you to Russell Emerson and Antonette Collins for their videography skills in recording rehearsals and workshops contributing to the thinking here. Antonette is my extraordinary wife, and none of this would be possible if it wasn’t for her.

A Note on the Text

Where Heideggerian are employed in this book, I have used capital letters to indicate their philosophical use; for example, ‘Time’, ‘Historicality’, ‘Beingwith’, ‘Moods’ and so on. I have used ‘Being’ with a capital ‘B’ to indicate Being (itself) and ‘being’ with a lower-case ‘b’ to pick out the being of specific entities – a difference explained throughout this text and in Heidegger’s philosophy. Page numbers from Being and Time (Heidegger 1967) appear with an ‘H’ before them to indicate the original German pagination so that you can consult a different translation of the text should you wish. I have attempted to write this book in an engaging way by using ‘I’ and ‘you’ in order to invite the reader into the text. While I imagine a readership that is interested in acting, the text itself should be relevant to directors, creatives, scholars and even those just curious about theatre-making. The use of ‘you’ in this context is intended to be inclusive but always with the aim of inspiring practical exploration in mind. At the end of most sections in the work, I have included some suggested discussion points and exercises for this reason. These are simply suggested starting points, and my hope is that they can be expanded in any practical theatre laboratory situation with your own tweaks and explorations. Indeed, creating your own exercises will fulfil the hope of theatre ‘talking back to philosophy through creative practice’ – a theme that runs throughout this book. Some portions of Chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form in Johnston (2017b). Parts of Chapter 6 are revised sections from Johnston (2019) and (2011). The majority of this book was written before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the world in 2020, and it has been tempting to dwell on examples of how life has changed in this period. Nevertheless, I have resisted the temptation in order to focus on the phenomenon of theatre itself.

1

Beginnings: Being There

In Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary (widely known as An Actor Prepares), Tortsov (the fictional distinguished actor, director and teacher) suggests that actors should attend to action on stage with a focus on being there in the ‘here-today-now’ to achieve spontaneity in the given circumstances of the play (Stanislavski 2008: 289; Merlin 2015: 35–37; Whyman 2013: 110–11). Although the craft of theatre often involves creating a fictional world, a keenly attuned attention to the immediate physical environment is crucial to training, rehearsal and performance. Stanislavski asserts that truthful actors should develop their focus on ‘being there’ through conscious awareness as a resource for creativity and fostering the conditions for luring inspiration from the unconscious. In fact, striving for presence is a common goal to actors from many traditions in of the fictional world, the aura of the performer and meaning making through the signs of performance (Power 2008). But what exactly does ‘being there’ mean? Theatre scholar Elinor Fuchs defines an actor’s presence in the theatre as ‘the unique self-completion of the world of the spectacle, and the circle of heightened awareness flowing from actor to spectator and back that sustains the world’ (1986: 163). How is such selfcompletion achieved in this intersubjective experience? A number of assumptions about the structure of consciousness and its relationship to the world in Stanislavski’s of the creative process might need investigating if we are to answer these questions. As I will ask you to think about here, every theory of acting is based on an implicit or explicit theory of selfhood (and a set of scientific understandings of the body and emotions) in order to understand the creative apparatus of their immediate situation and the fictional world of the play (Roach 1985). In fact, all human actions are founded on a model of selfhood within an historical and cultural world view that can open up and close off certain aspects of ‘Being’ (i.e. Being itself and the fact that things ‘are’ at all).

Yet although we almost always have a specific focus of action in everyday activities in life (as you do the washing up, make your bed or brush your teeth, for example), the same kind of concentration of attention is difficult while performing on stage with others looking in on the scene and without an immediate purpose to action. For this reason, Stanislavskian actors cannot depend on spontaneous ‘inspiration’ in the moment of performance as it is so unreliable. Instead, the well-developed performer should have a dependable technique for allowing the conditions for truthful performance. The state of being there experienced ‘naturally’ in real life needs to be relearned on stage. According to Tortsov, successful performers discover how to ‘see again’, and I would argue that this requires a special attitude towards Being much in the same way as ancient philosophers. It is not simply a matter of focusing one’s attention on ‘what is’ but also exploring the conditions for the possibility of encountering what is in the first place. I believe that theatre can be a medium for investigating Being in a practical way.

Figure 1: Stars above the pier at Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Photograph by Christopher Lee-Joe. Printed with permission of the artist.

Phenomenology – the approach to philosophy that I explore here – might help to give new insight into the art of acting by beginning with the very fact of existence and also everyday actions both in life and onstage. This opening chapter sets the scene with an overview of some literature on performance and phenomenology, presents a brief consideration of philosophers represented on stage and raises the question of what we mean by selfhood in theatre. Chapter 2 introduces some key and methodologies in phenomenology, outlines the criticisms of past metaphysical systems in coming to with lived experience and begins to think about what a philosophical creative practice might look like. Chapters 3–5 explore some ways in which we might apprehend Being through specific dramatic texts and rehearsal practices. I have chosen three of the most well-known, analysed and performed works in Western theatre (which is slightly daunting, if I am honest). Specifically, I focus on The Cherry Orchard, Antigone and Hamlet to explore how phenomenology can be helpful in approaching a range of performance texts and styles by letting existential themes arise from the texts themselves and then folding those themes back to explore through the theatre process. Last, in Chapter 6, I touch upon some of Heidegger’s later work exploring a more poetic form and employing a mysterious language in the continuing search for Being. Hopefully, my reflections will serve as a springboard for future investigations and expand the type of philosophy that might be useful in the creative process. Each chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive or definitive interpretation of these dramatic texts or the accompanying philosophical concepts I consider. Instead, I am attempting to open a path of phenomenological questioning and suggesting exercises and explorations to activate the approach. You may find it useful to choose some of the exercises and issues raised in these chapters and adapt them to work on a different play text or performance process altogether.

Touching hands with Being

Have you ever felt as though you were touching hands with Being and experienced a heightened sense of wonder and awe at the universe? Sometimes I go outside into the dark yard at night just before I go to bed and look at the sky. When there are no clouds, it is amazing to gaze up at the millions of stars and vast expanse of black peppered with specks of light. The effect is much greater if you are in a remote location, away from the city lights. It can be strangely liberating to acknowledge one’s own insignificance while looking at this farreaching space. Other people have done the same since the dawn of time. Generations of humans divined meaning in the stars as pointing to the origins and destiny of life, although most of the time we do not stop to think for a second about this marvel of existence. But is it a relevant question with the assumption that we know a great deal about the universe in our modern, technologically advanced age? In fact, we have so much more to find out about the universe and how it works. What would it have been like for the ancients to gaze at the firmament and wonder what it was that they were looking at? They looked for clues in their own experience of life to for it. Faced with the sheer size of the universe, I realize that my own being and my everyday worries pale in comparison. In the next moment, I step back inside from my firmamentgazing, these huge metaphysical questions evaporate, and I simply get on with the job of everyday life and prepare for bed rather than worry about my fragile and insignificant claim on being in the wider scheme of things. Alternatively, you might have experienced not being – those instances when time and space do not fit together. These are situations of ‘seeing again’ when the strangeness of existence stands out. Such moments might offer insight into being in everyday life when any thought of existence remains hidden or overlooked (Leder 1990). Here, a different kind of seeing can happen unexpectedly and in a very different way. Sometimes I find myself observing an object right in front of me with which I am intimately familiar, but it looks quite odd when I bring my focus to it. The feeling can arise when I look at something that I have never really paid attention to before or I become aware of my own perception of the thing before me in a new way. It could be a cup, or a pen, or light switch. You may have had the experience of looking at a familiar word on the page although

it looks strange and not quite right. The string of letters looks foreign or wrong. Stepping back from quotidian tasks and objects in the immediate environment can make them seem uncanny when the perceiver is broken away from their everyday flow of action. Another kind of ‘re-vision’ can occur when we learn a new skill or attempt a task that we have never done before – a kind of ‘soon to be’ or ‘potential to be’. Learning to surf, for example, may include many familiar aspects of balance, orientation, timing, force, movement, angle, tension and release. But in order to put them together, there are many wipeouts before the perfect wave. It is almost as though we need to learn our own body again from scratch in this foreign world of the break and experience a continuity with our environment. The uncanniness of water hits like a wall. This type of wonder abounds in childhood, as we experience new things for the first time and begin to find our way in the world. There are many other ways in which Being can pop out in our experience of the world – a ‘being otherwise’. Illness, for example, can cause us to encounter our body and its environment in a radically different way. The same might be true of religious experiences, states of flow in skilful activity, states of pain, sensual ecstasy, in meditation, in shock, terror or horror and even chemically induced states of consciousness. Being comes to the fore in these moments when we come to experience the world in an alternative way. The point is that these altered perspectives with an inflected focus on existence can give a glimpse of Being in everyday life (and help us to understand the lifeworld of a character) because everyday tasks and connections are broken, missing or shifted. We notice something because it is not there. What is the ‘there’ of the ‘it’? More broadly one might ask, how is it that humans can encounter the world at all? The fine-tuned workings of the human brain remain just as much of a mystery as the universe and yet the most intimate knowledge of neuroscience will not draw out the experience of the world in concrete . The key thought in this book is that theatre-making has a particular capacity to shine a light on Being. For actors, the problem of being there never really goes away. The craft of acting regularly comes face to face with the uncanniness of one’s own being as an actor attempts to grapple with ordinary objects and activities that we take for granted in everyday life. Mystery and unexpectedness are vital ingredients in creativity in so far as they invite us to see the world with

fresh and open eyes. Stanislavski’s system calls us to see the world in the subjunctive mood – the possibilities of how the world might be ‘if’ we found ourselves in different given circumstances. The task of the philosophical actor is partly to search for the meaning of Being (and how things can be meaningful at all). Consider the billions of things that might have happened that could have altered the very fact of your being. If only one thing had been different, it is entirely possible you would not be here. You might have lived in an age past or future. You might have been born in another part of the world altogether, speaking a different language, navigating another social world and in an altogether different natural environment. Even more extraordinary than your being, it is astounding that there is anything at all in the first place, let alone a universe that contains conscious organisms capable of interacting with the world. Yet we rarely stop to wonder in such a way. In fact, taking a step back somehow makes everything that we take for granted suddenly strange. Occasionally, we might be presented with a set of circumstances to look for meaning – to ask why are we here? Faced with a sudden death in the family, going through a midlife crisis or being issued an unfavourable medical assessment, for example, can spark re-evaluation of what is important. Why is there something rather than nothing? What’s the point of life? We might reflect in such a way when faced with a major life-changing decision or a new set of living circumstances. These are moments of stepping back to consider the big picture, and they challenge us to reassess our priorities. Apart from the larger questions of life, the universe and everything, you might also attend to your present sensations, thoughts and impulses. The wonder and awe at being in the first place becomes strange and unfamiliar when we step back in such a moment of self-awareness. When an actor ‘lives through’ a role in what Stanislavski calls ‘переживание’ (perezhivanie), the task also has already involved inquiring into the meaning of Being or, more accurately, the meaning of specific actions towards an objective in the given circumstances. This preparation is related to a technique later known as ‘actioning’ the text by plotting particular tasks within the scene and deciding the objective of their character at that particular moment, by thorough preparation in rehearsal (Moseley 2016). Understanding and performing action is a matter of tacking between particular objectives at any given moment and what the character or performance persona is hoping to achieve in the broadest sense (also known as the super-objective).

Theatre-making is not just about individuals and their choices but also creative collaborators interacting with one another as part of an ensemble. In other words, acting is always about Being-together in a special way. Just as the fictional character exists in relation to others in their world, so too does the actor in relation to the audience. Sometimes this Being-together is helped on through the vision of a director and creative team. Humans share stories because they can give a sense of meaning and connectedness to the events that happen in life. It can be a lot of fun getting up on stage, but it all depends on the context of performance – sometimes it can go a lot deeper. Sometimes the motivation of young (and old) performers is to gain fame and notoriety, praise and validation from an audience or even money and material gains. But Stanislavski argues that if mere appearances and the iration of audiences are their primary focus, actors are doomed to failure and would produce merely a superficial performance without a sense of truth. I have suggested that actors are ‘manual philosophers’ in so far as their craft is a practical exploration of a human encounter with the world (of a possible living soul) in combination with one’s own Being-in-the-world (Johnston 2017a). Acting is the art form of touching hands with Being. Of course, we cannot jump outside of our own consciousness, but we can imagine what the world would look like if things had been otherwise by using the ‘magic if’. The thought behind this book is that by taking a philosophical approach to their art, actors might find inspiration from the big questions of existence together with productive and rewarding material that can feed into their process. This does not mean that they will go out and write long technical academic tracts about the meaning of life, sitting in a leather chesterfield next to the fireplace with a glass of brandy, disengaged with practical activity in the world. Such an endeavour would mean abandoning the practical demands of the rehearsal room and performance at the heart of their craft. The challenge here is to undertake philosophy through creative practice. A philosophical perspective is also relevant to directors, designers and the creative team of theatre-makers. Theatre is, after all, a collaborative process. And the journey of the actor is very often realized in conjunction with the input of a larger group of people who combine and influence the gift of storytelling and careful curation of experience for the spectator. Be warned, however. You should be careful not to expect too much from this book. It does not lay out a ‘theory of acting’ or a ‘new method’ in and of itself.

More modestly, I offer some questions and suggestions for approaching the craft of acting by focusing on relevant philosophical themes coupled with an alternative language to talk about experience. Each set of concepts may be of use in exploring and describing actions, modes of beings and dispositions towards others and evaluating authenticity and decisiveness in your process. It may direct you towards further exercises and experiments extending your own practice and open up new avenues for exploration. If a philosophical view is at all faithful to experience, then it should be useful in creating a fictional world too. Part of the problem is that most of the time, we neglect to ask and explore philosophical questions because we are simply immersed in the activity of the world. And this can be true in theatre too. ‘Show me, don’t tell me’ (a maxim adapted from Anton Chekhov’s approach to writing) is an oft-repeated phrase in rehearsal with a suspicion about overthinking and destroying the creative process through intellectualization. The challenge is to find a set of practical activities opened up by deeper questions that will set up an honest exploration of Worldhood that is both informed and creatively revealing in practice. Phenomenology can help in articulating ‘what’ is being investigated in rehearsal and more precisely describe the ‘how’, while also bridging a gap between what an actor believes they are doing and the practice itself. Phenomenology can assist with a reflective practice and feed into the iterative nature of performance while gaining a unique understanding of the craft, not only from a spectator’s point of view but also from a creative artist’s perspective. You might record your reflections in different ways. You could keep a journal or writing portfolio to describe your experiences. Perhaps you could keep a video diary or spoken description and thoughts on a digital voice recorder. The point is never to remain static but rather always to look for new revelations about the text and process. Such an has the potential to articulate a phenomenology of creativity in your work. Indeed, the resulting piece of work may very well enter into dialogue with philosophy and present a unique portrait of Being-in-theworld by pushing back on theories that have gone before.

Wonder and Being

• When have you experienced a strange sense of your own being in relation to an object, action or situation? • What was it that brought that experience about? What was it like? • What sort of Mood or disposition might you need in order to ponder the nature of Being? • When is it time to act, and when is it time to think? Can you think of activities where thinking might get in the way? • What is the difference between acting and thinking? In what way does acting seek to ‘forget’ Being?

What is phenomenology?

The question you are probably asking at this point is ‘what is phenomenology?’ Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to the question because philosophers contest its approaches and methodologies in many and various ways. ‘Phenomena’ are simply ‘those things that appear to view’ or ‘that which is seen’. In an everyday sense, we might talk of ‘natural phenomena’, referring to extraordinary occurrences and wonders of the natural world as they occur, including weather events, natural disasters and physical processes. When we call something ‘phenomenal’ in everyday language, it means ‘exceeding expectations’ or ‘out of the ordinary’. As an approach to philosophy, however, phenomenology studies everyday as well as extraordinary events. The word ‘phenomenon’ comes from the ancient Greek φαίνειν (phainein), meaning ‘to bring to light’ or ‘to show’. So more formally, phenomenology is the study of the ways in which things show themselves. There is some contention over the relationship between philosophical phenomenology and phenomenology in the social sciences, however (Zahavi 2019; Natanson 1973), and we should be clear that it is not simply a first-person description of experience or a purely subjective of the world. Phenomenology is not the study of mere appearances or what things look like on the surface. It aims to provide an of the ways in which things appear as they do. In its strictest sense, phenomenology involves attending to the manner of appearing of things that show themselves from themselves. Nevertheless, there are a number of things that we can say about phenomenology and the common themes that are common to its approach despite disputes over definition, scope and object. Phenomenology responds to the call to ‘return to the things themselves’ (the famous phrase from Edmund Husserl [1906] – widely recognized as the founder of the phenomenological movement). In many respects, this rallying cry is a reaction against ‘traditional’ philosophy that posits the truth of reality behind materiality and appearances. Phenomenology puts aside our assumptions about the ‘real’ existence of the world outside of consciousness and attends to the way that the world presents itself to experience as it is actually lived. In this way, it does not make sense to talk about what is

‘behind’ the world. Phenomenology rejects previous suppositions from intellectual and philosophical traditions that have always been assumed to be correct and privileges attending to phenomena without prejudgement. It tries to get to ‘the things themselves’ by examining the features unique to a specific experience and, in some cases, considers the conditions for the possibility of experience in the first place. It should not be a surprise that there is no universally agreed procedure for apprehending and observing phenomena (perhaps just as there is no single approach to acting and performance). As already mentioned, some philosophers have begun by bracketing off assumptions about the real existence of the world outside of our mind. This was one of the central features of Husserl’s ([1906] 2015) phenomenology inspired by the psychologist Franz Brentano (1973). Husserl was working at the turn of the twentieth century in , before the First World War, at a time when ‘metaphysics’ was studied in of logic, mental processes and history. For Husserl, the conscious mind represents the limit for what can be known. In other words, experience itself has fixed constraints that determine the possible ways we can conceive of the world; we cannot jump outside of our own heads to experience the view from nowhere. A key challenge to this approach is the task of boiling down our lived encounter with the world to its essential structures. In other words, what qualities of the thing could not be taken away without changing what is fundamental to the object of inquiry? We can also begin to ask about the structures of consciousness that allow us to apprehend the world at all. Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, developed and reoriented phenomenology to focus on the question, ‘What is Being?’ This was the fundamental question that he returned to over and over again, having pointed out a distinction between the being of particular entities (what there is) and Being itself (the being of what there is). The being of a thing is not some additional quality that is tacked onto its other characteristics and properties. At any given moment, the being of an entity stands out in relation to the world in which it is encountered. Taking a step back, the only place we can begin to ask about this strange term ‘Being’ is to look into the type of entity that can apprehend its own being to begin with. Only something with a very specific kind of Dasein (‘Being There’) can have such an understanding. But that being is bound up in a whole network of involvement in the world, tasks it is undertaking and from a standpoint within both time and history. Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology is ‘letting things show themselves in the way they show themselves from themselves’. This approach

offers a finely tuned attention to the givenness of the world both in everyday activities and in the task of philosophy itself as a search for truth. Other followers of Husserl explored different aspects and regions of experience, including embodiment, meaning, interpretation, ethics, human-ness and history (Moran 2000). A wide range of phenomena have been examined in the subsequent adaptations of phenomenology to other disciplines. It is also worth pointing out an overlap between phenomenology and existentialism with which it is often closely associated. Existentialism tends to emphasize the absurdity of life as having no inherent meaning. Albert Camus even suggested that ‘[j]udging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’ (1960: 3). If there is no meaning in life, does it matter which we choose? Aspects of both movements of philosophy owe a debt to Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard to some extent, both of whom investigated and radically challenged traditional notions of value, morality and choice. Phenomenology does not necessarily conclude that life is absurd, however. In some forms, on the contrary, it starts with the meaningfulness of life as we experience it while also challenging the metaphysical assumptions behind traditional understandings of meaning and value. The task is to begin with experience and analyse the structures and conditions for the possibility of meaning and value in the first place. My contribution here is intended to gesture towards how we can expand phenomenology from its focus on language to a ‘philosophy of the flesh’. Here art takes centre stage – or more specifically, the art of the actor in search of Being. Two intellectual heirs of Husserl relevant to the phenomenological movement as it relates to intersubjective experience are Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edith Stein. Merleau-Ponty is the celebrated philosopher of embodiment who sought to develop a faithful description of primary experiences and human existence in the flesh. His work seeks to apprehend the ‘pre-reflective’ world of experience (before it has been formulated into words) so as to see the world afresh as it is encountered by the eyes of a child who is surprised by all sensations. It also hopes to uncover the roots of rationality by examining the origins of our awareness of the world and reinserting the perceiving subject (in contrast to ‘objective thought’). Stein (who was Husserl’s assistant before Heidegger) develops a phenomenology that centres around the ideas of empathy (Einfühlung) and ‘the incarnate self’. For her, we can perceive other people’s experiences such as shame and grief as encounters with ‘the foreign’ (das Fremde) just as we might intuit aspects of a physical object even though we

cannot see them from a particular angle or perspective of that object. We can live in the Other’s experience even though we do not experience it directly ourselves because the experience of the foreign reveals itself as a primordial in itself. Phenomenology developed as a movement in response to a range of world views that appeared to be detached from everyday experience – in particular, ‘positivism’ as a collection of facts about the world justified through logical proofs. On this view, only matters that can be scientifically or mathematically verifiable can be judged true. Heidegger labelled this and other theories based on suppositions about existence and the nature of reality as ‘metaphysics’. As we will see, such assumptions are not merely abstract and theoretical but also affect our everyday life and our behaviour, our politics and aesthetics, our ethics and our language. By moving away from the idea of a correspondence theory of truth, phenomenology attempts to take into the way that the world appears to the involved subject. We cannot jump outside of our heads and see the world in a view from nowhere. This brings with it the huge question of ‘what is truth?’ if we cannot escape our involvement in the world. While there may not be any hard and fast rules, phenomenology tends to ask questions like:

• What is the ‘there’ of your ‘Being There’? This might first manifest in your physical surroundings, for instance, but that is not all. • Who are you? What is unique to the particular type of being that you are? Are there others who share that way of being? • Where are you? Is this just a physical space or a world invested with (changing) meaning? • What is the difference between space and place, and how do we engage with them in different ways? • Do you experience a sense of place differently depending upon what tasks you are undertaking? • What filters the way that you experience your ‘there’? What about Mood, time and history?

Phenomenology can also help us to understand our concrete experience of the world. Take a moment to think about the fact that you are the type of being that has the capacity to grasp the world in the first place. Go and grasp some objects in your environment. For example, pick up a chair. Feel its weight.

• What does the weight of the chair mean? • How do you perceive weight? • What does it feel like? • How is the weight of this chair different from other kinds of weight of a small child wriggling in your arms, for example? • How does the quality of weight relate to time, space, form and movement in relation to the chair? • What if you felt the weight of an antique chair handed down through your family for many generations? • What if it is the weight of a chair you used to sit on when you were at school, bringing back fond memories from the past?

Weight could be thought of as a scientific quality of gravitational pull. But it can depend on what you are trying to do in the world, too. Maybe the weight of a chair is important because you want to move it to the other side of the room, stand on it and reach into the cookie jar. But it is too heavy. The weight of the chair becomes an obstacle to the satisfaction of your sweet tooth. And yet sometimes we use the word ‘heavy’ to refer to a general mood in the room or a topic of conversation. Weight is important because it affects us and how we behave in an existential sense. All of these sorts of questions sound very theatrical in that they are exploring specific elements of the world and how they affect the action in a scene.

In some forms, phenomenology articulates the existential conditions for consciousness experience:

• What do you have that is special to you? What is yours and yours alone? • Is there a quality of ‘mineness’ that is specific to your being? • How does that uniqueness find its expression? • How do you think of yourself as an individual in the world? • When do you become aware of your individuality? • What is it that we humans share in our essence of humanity? • What is it without which we would cease to be what we are? • How do we go about preserving our own being? • What simple steps do we take to care for ourselves in an immediate way? • What does it mean to be part of a culture and community? • How does society shape and form our individual existence and sense of being? • What about the language that we speak? How does it form who we are? • As we navigate our way around in the social world, do we switch the language that we use? How does that change our sense of being in that situation? • Of which institutions would you consider yourself a member? How do they shape your being? What about those institutions from which you are excluded? • In what way does the world cover up and discourage asking about truth?

These questions give the flavour of a phenomenological approach and a taste of how they might be woven into the processes of the actor.

Part of an actor’s task in this sense is to investigate human ‘consciousness’ (if this word does not bring too much metaphysical baggage) in its unique ability to conceive of and understand its own being – in so far as we inhabit a living, breathing, bodied mind. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus points towards Heidegger’s distinction between looking at something, understanding it and conceiving it (1991: 16). Roughly, these pick out different modes of access that we can have to objects, our environment and ourselves. We can simply look and stare at the materiality of a thing, understand how we might use it in a project or context and imagine the thing in human – of people who made it, personal significance and larger existential symbolism. These are ways in which we can choose access to an entity. How can we ask these same questions ourselves as beings? I suggest that performance is one way, although the process of acting and rehearsal is not simply to look but to understand for the purposes of creativity and conceive of truthful action in the given circumstances. This difference is often distinguished in of ‘procedural knowledge’ (‘knowing-how’) versus ‘propositional knowledge’ (‘knowing-that’). An actor’s work is not only to look and understand but also conceive through performance. In this way, it might be that ‘consciousness’ is not even the right word for what we are in search of here in so far as there might be elements of one’s engagement that one might not even be aware of at the time. In of theatre-making, it might help to think of approaching the question in three overlapping layers, each folding into the other:

1. To examine and describe one’s own world; 2. To explore the world of a fictional character; 3. To reflect upon how performance reveals Being-in-the-world.

In a way, these three steps echo Bert States’s (1985) approach (discussed in the next section). Each layer subtly shifts one’s focus, and it is quite possible that more than one investigation might be present in any given phenomenological observation. World, character and performance are deeply intertwined. Performance studies theorist Richard Schechner (1985: 103) outlines how manifest processes of ritual and aesthetic performances feed into rhetorical

structures of everyday life which influence and sustain social ecologies of the human lifeworld – from the ‘as if’ to the ‘is’. In other words, performance helps us to understand, interpret and change reality by bringing about a new state of affairs in addition to reflecting the world as it is. Indeed, from a phenomenological point of view, one cannot conceive of a ‘self’ separate from the world. And the same is true of a fictional world and the artist’s process – each is an action and event that unfolds rather than a static ‘thing’ to be unpacked. But we can understand the performativity of the process of being in the theatre. The first stage is to reflect on one’s own experience of the world and gather a storehouse of ways that we encounter the world. In the chapters that follow, I attempt to unearth some of the key ideas put forward by phenomenology and consider how they might be of use for actors. ‘Unearth’ is a good word for the task in the sense of exposing what is covered up by digging in the soil. Some things get uncovered while others become buried as we work. Some ideas are consolidated and developed in the process of rehearsal. But the word ‘unearth’ also points towards a need to avoid floating off in philosophical abstraction detached from our world. To unearth is not to take away from the context of the world in this case. Our description of the world must remain grounded yet drawn out. In his later philosophy, Heidegger wrote about gathering together of the Earth and Sky, Gods and Mortals (as I explore further in Chapter 6). For him, meaning arises only out of the productive conflict of opposites as the space of the Sky allows the Earth to come into view and the eternity of the divine helps us to see the meaningfulness of finitude. The world around us opens up the possibility of apprehending opposing forces and aspects of our surroundings. Everyday life has the tendency to cover the truth of Being, because we become forgetful and reduce the world to mere materiality. Part of the task proposed by Heidegger involves uncovering that which is before our very eyes but remains unseen. In a way, this text is not necessarily suggesting anything new – but what it does do is provide an alternate vocabulary to talk about our experiences of the world – and in turn, a vocabulary for action. Therefore, the task is also to ‘re-earth’ philosophy through theatrical practice – to connect with everyday experience in its embodied, visceral, tactile forms. Previously, I have investigated how phenomenology might relate to theatre through specific twentieth-century techniques and approaches (Johnston 2017a). The exploration of Heidegger’s work here is explicitly meant to open up a new way and feed into practical approaches to rehearsal and performance here and now. In this sense, although this book is called Phenomenology for Actors, it may well be useful to directors, designers and other theatre-makers in addition to

students of theatre – hence the broader subtitle, Theatre-Making and the Question of Being. A degree of caution is needed, however. Practitioners at the intersection of theory and practice should avoid simply ‘applying’ philosophical ideas without examining whether they too may be subject to assumptions and unchallenged traditions. Indeed, some have argued that we should keep theory and the art of acting separate unless we can reconfigure the entire field between (Puchner 2013; Meyrick 2003). Phenomenology itself has been observed as a series of beginnings as subsequent philosophers propose a new start-point for the investigation of phenomena in the world (Glendinning 2007). In this sense, you should never take the work of any previous philosopher or theory as indisputable doctrine and simply look around for examples and readings that confirm what they said. So too might your creative practice open up its own phenomenology – and your findings may well be at odds with what has been asserted previously. That is not to say that we should always reject any philosophy from the past and throw the baby out with the bathwater. There may be much to learn from the history of ideas while also being mindful of the blind spots that may have led them astray. Part of the task is to understand why philosophers of the past might have been led in that direction and what led them to their conclusions. The important thing is to remain faithful to the things themselves – phenomena as they are actually apprehended – and always use experience as your guide while avoiding presuppositions. This is not attending to mere appearances. The process involves apprehending phenomena and the way the world shows itself in a meaningful way. Having noted this, it is useful to survey the literature on performance and phenomenology and see how theatre scholars have attempted to grapple with the task up until now.

Performance and phenomenology

In the past half-century, there has been a growing interest in the intersection between performance and phenomenology, not to mention theory and theatre as Fortier (1997) and Carlson (1993) explore. The ‘performance phenomenology’ field broadly draws upon philosophy as a lens for examining and describing performance in addition to examining the performative nature of philosophy. It is worth thinking about how these academic foundations fit with the project of this book. This section might give you some tips for background reading if you would like to follow the academic history of the field. If you are more inclined to theatre practice rather than theory, you might wish to come back to this next section later. The first book-length study of theatre and phenomenology was Bert O. States’s Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, published in 1985. Rather than provide a formal phenomenology of theatre from a rigorously philosophical perspective, States aims to present ‘a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc.’ (1985: 1, original emphasis). He situates semiotics (the study of signs) in productive tension with phenomenology (understood as one’s embodied encounter with the world) by examining scenic elements of drama, the fictional and material world on stage and the actor in relation to character. Each section highlights different phenomena in the performance process. In order to apprehend the theatre, he suggests that we need a ‘binocular vision’ bringing together both signs and embodied description of the text, the actor and the scene in order to get the full picture of what is going on. I have argued that the relationship between phenomenology and semiotics is not so simple (and that these two theoretical approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive) (Johnston 2017a). One specific way that we engage with our environment is as a set of signs, but this is nested within the broader way in which we experience the world – we have a body, we are within time, space and history. Nevertheless, States sees the origin of theatre not merely in imitation, but rather in overcoming signification and somehow entering into nature by allowing the gods and truth itself to be present through performance (1985: 3). Furthermore, different

conventions and forms of theatre foreground different aspects of our encounter with Being: from Shakespeare to naturalism, and from expressionism to the avant-garde. And similarly, a focus on the actor in relation to character and the ontological status of the world viewed by the audience will draw attention to different aspects of being, including the curious transformation of the stage back into the ‘real world’ enacted through the curtain call. Rather than linger in the ‘theater seat of the mind’s eye’ (States 1985: 14), Stanton B. Garner (1994) ventures to take his phenomenological approach to new grounds by examining a range of specific dramatic texts and productions, beginning with an example from Trevor Smith’s Preoccupations. He does not so much provide a phenomenological schema of theatrical events in general as he delivers a close examination and description of specific performance texts and bodies in so far as they can approach a phenomenology of performance. Garner is not limited by ‘pure phenomenology’ (if by that we mean examining the structures of our conscious experience of the world), preferring to forge connections with critical theory from Marxism, feminism and so on in order to focus on the body in the theatrical space. In this respect, phenomenology supplements these critical approaches by helping to articulate the material practices underlying class and the distribution of wealth, gender and politics in performance and so on. He proceeds through perceptual analysis in Samuel Beckett’s plays, socially marked bodies in post-Brechtian political dramatists, and then a specific production of Robert La Page’s The Dragons’ Trilogy which toured to the United States in 1990. Later, Stanton Garner (2018) explores kinaesthetic movement and cognition in performance, particularly with respect to the spectator’s empathetic perception of movement. This includes an investigation of the way that theatrical spectatorship interacts with the perception of movement and bodies in the world at large, a consideration of varying types of bodies of difference and different abilities and the interaction between language and empathy in shaping bodily movements. Susan Kozel focuses more specifically on technology as she explores intersections between dance and philosophy in her book Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (2007). She echoes ‘the worn wisdom that art reveals life [… and that] the dance or performance studio is a hothouse for understanding wider social engagements with technologies’ (xiv). In these thoughts we see a bridge between digital understandings of the body and its relation to being in performance. Kozel explores broader discourses around the digital world and focuses on a range of phenomena and concepts from Merleau-

Ponty, including the extended body, responsivity and reversibility, intersubjectivity and otherness through motion capture, and closeness or dissolving the gap between bodies through performance. She suggests that through her phenomenological reflections,

potentially dense or difficult concepts can be demystified and given a sort of intuitive fluidity once they are read through the body. Perhaps these are just modest glimpses of otherwise abstract or incomprehensible concepts – that our relations with the world and people are reversible, that the invisible is the lining of the visible, or that our digital data prompts us to reevaluate our views of ethics – but by being understood on a corporeal level the impact might just be lasting and have a transformative effect, subtle or great, on how we engage with our computational systems and with one another. (xv)

Here Kozel points towards the practical potential of phenomenological description both in re-examining our understanding of the body but also reconsidering our relationship with the digital world in performance and everyday life. Since Kozel’s publication, this issue of the digital self has become more and more pressing in a world of pervasive social media and artificial intelligence. There are also a number of edited collections of essays on performance and phenomenology giving a broad range of perspectives. Bleeke et al. (2015), for example, begin by noting the parallels between performance and phenomenology in that they engage with experience, perception and making sense of the world through embodied, situated and relational processes. Their case studies address both the phenomenological tradition and a range of performance practices, arguing that performance is a privileged object for phenomenological investigation while also exploring the performativity of phenomenology. A similar frame following the phenomenological nature of performance is explored by Grant et al. (2019) in their attempt to give a snapshot of the field in Performance Phenomenology: To the Thing Itself by drawing in key figures such as Sondra Fraleigh, Maxine Sheets-Johnston and Phillip Zarrilli

among others. Phillip Zarrilli recently published an in-depth descriptive phenomenology of his own creative process in (Toward) a Phenomenology of Acting (2020). He discusses his process of ‘doing phenomenology’ in the studio informing both his practice and how he writes about his own work on Beckett. Part of the process of the actor in this approach is learning to ‘listen’, to attend to and begin to hear in a process of receptivity in a way similar to the calligrapher’s attentiveness to the sound of the brush (2020: 3–4). For him, acting is a ‘question’ to be explored in the studio and then reflected upon, moving inward and outward in order to ‘touch the untouchable’ (2020: 9). Zarrilli also draws upon cognitive science and an exploration of the body-mind/brain relationship through dynamic systems theory (an approach shared by Garner 2018). My discussion in this book extends these previous works in performance phenomenology because I take philosophy not simply as a lens for examining and describing the embodied experience and nature of the performance process but also as a rich source of material to ponder through the creative process, thus considering the practice of actors as philosophical work. The primary focus is not on the performativity of phenomenological philosophy thus making my object narrower than some of the approaches mentioned earlier. I concentrate on theatre rather than on the broader concept of performance, with the claim that theatre-making can be thought of as a phenomenological investigation in at least some instances. Philosophy can ask questions and offer provocations for creating performance – not just analysing it – while also allowing theatre’s creative processes to ‘talk back’ to theory. Conversely, the role of the philosopher-artist might be in articulating the philosophical contributions of an artistic practice. From Seneca to Sartre, there have been many philosophers themselves who were also playwrights, choosing to stage their ideas through story, action, character and consequence. This does not mean that all artists do (or should) necessarily lay out their practice in relation to a philosophical tradition, however. The point is that art does not simply apply philosophy; it has the capacity to enter into dialogue with the history of ideas through action – either explicitly or implicitly. It is not without relevance, therefore, that we take a quick detour into theatrical representations of philosophers and intellectuals throughout the ages in order to explore suspicious attitudes from the other side.

Philosophers on stage

The conversation between philosophy and theatre has almost always been tinged with a hint of contempt. At least as far back as Plato’s Republic, philosophers have been suspicious of actors and even advised to banish them from his ‘ideal city’, along with all (representational) artists, because they create mere reflections of the true reality of ‘Forms’ behind mere ‘appearances’ in the world (1992). In Ion, Plato attacks actors for not having any real knowledge of the matters about which they perform nor any true understanding of poetic construction, functioning rather ively as mouthpieces for the poet (1987). He thinks their inspiration is no real skill but just a ‘knack’, although it is not without irony that Plato himself chose dramatic dialogue as a vehicle for communicating his ideas. Since this attack, ‘the antitheatrical prejudice’ has had an enduring persistence (Barish 1981; Johnston 2017b). Likewise, the distinction between true knowledge and sham rhetoric is taken as a theme in theatre too. Theatre-makers did not remain silent on the matter, of course. In Aristophanes’ fifth-century bce comedy The Clouds (Νεφέλαι/Nephelai), the playwright pokes fun at Socrates and his pedantic, intellectual, philosophical hair-splitting and disingenuous arguments. As events unfold, Strepsiades sends his son Pheidippides to the ‘Thinkery’ so that he can learn the art of argument and get him out of his debts for which he is being pursued. We hear that Socrates, the head of the school, has made fantastic new discoveries such as a measurement for the distance jumped by a flea, the trumpet backside of a gnat as causing its buzzing and a new method of stealing cloaks from the gymnasium using a giant pair of comes as hooks. It all turns bad for the protagonist in the end when his son, transformed into a philosopher, argues his right to beat his own father. Incidentally, Aristophanes’ play was mentioned in Socrates’ prosecution and trial for corrupting the youth of Athens. The animosity between theatre and the academy continued throughout the ages. In commedia dell’arte of the medieval period (masked performances based on a pre-prepared scenario or story), for example, the broader character type of the learned scholar Il Dottore, or Doctor Balanzone from Bologna, amused audiences with his prolixity and self-certainty, while in actual fact he was a

quack and nothing more than a mountebank swindler. In the early modern period and in addition to Shakespeare’s evolution of these stock character types, things get a bit more serious as Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus receives knowledge and power in a pact with Mephistopheles in return for his soul. The knowledge of the learned doctor is seen as a threat to the world or rather the power that it brings left unchecked will breed evil and selfishness. In the late nineteenth century of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, the doctor is transformed into an aspiring academic who has written a manuscript that will convince the university to appoint him as the Chair in Future Histories. An old rival who had succumbed to addictive behaviours some years ago has cleaned up his act and is back on the university scene. Hedda, the academic’s wife, displays her genetic predisposition as the daughter of a military general and seeks to destroy any opposition to his position and thereby destroys the rival’s manuscript. The realm of ideas is infected by political human intrigue. The twentieth century (which heralded the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’) produced Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which Lucky, the slave, performs a garbled monologue of logical, theological and philosophical rhetoric as the other characters in the scene – Gogo and Didi (the tramps) and Pozzo (Lucky’s master) – look on. The unfortunate slave’s party trick is amusing to the audience looking on this scene because it is disconnected from the current circumstances of these outcasts on the side of a road and functions as a meaningless diversion to the time. Beckett turns conventions of philosophical argumentation into vaudeville entertainment. Lucky’s thinking-act bears the traces of logic and philosophy but mixes up phrases and lacks coherence, punctuation and a through-line of communication. Conversely, the party trick makes a joke out of performing philosophy, which is really just a set of conventions, formulae and jargon. The actor’s performance in this case is just a shell without any substantive philosophical point to communicate – all form and no content. Or then again, perhaps that is the point: there really is no meaning to it all and we are all just performers, frittering away our time with pointless entertainment. More recently in the 1970s, Tom Stoppard’s comedy Jumpers examines the inner workings of a philosophy department in all its humanness and the loss of mysteries with advances in science and technology, such as the moon landing. Again, the problem is not with philosophy, but human actions and transgressions in the changing world. Stoppard’s 2015 play The Hard Problem even focuses on the debates around the relationship between subjective experience, neuroscience and human moral behaviour.

These theatrical representations of philosophy on stage demonstrate the contingently human aspects of expressing thought because of the machinations of power that surround and sometimes limit or distort them. In a way, drama exposes the impediments of our everyday concerns and shows why we construct the philosophical systems we do. At this point in history, we are also able to note missing voices in both theatre and philosophy. There is an absence of women and non-Western voices both in the history of philosophy and in representations of philosophers onstage, for example. Both fields have their own internal politics and power structures and an emphasis on a Western canon encoming mostly ‘dead white males’. Yet the theatre establishment is also coming to with the issue of a lack of female leads and encoming different ethnicities and races on stage through practices such as ‘colour-blind casting’, together with equity and diversity plans. In the history of philosophy when the voices of the ‘Other’ appear, they are often couched in of the ‘mysterious and exotic’. For instance, Plato uses the female character ‘Diotima’ to whom Socrates deferred knowledge about the wisdom of love and art. Even in phenomenology, it is worth considering how towering figures such as Edith Stein, Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt receive less attention. Conversely, gender itself has become the subject of philosophical and political thought as Judith Butler (1989) focuses on the performativity of gender as a set of repeated social acts that are claimed to be ‘natural’ but are in fact socially inscribed. The discourses of philosophy are also performative – perhaps bringing philosophical criticisms of theatre back on philosophy itself. Having considered all of this, however, theatre is perhaps the quintessential manifestation of collaborative thinking because it shares ideas and debates in an embodied way. Sometimes viewing a performance reassures us that there is meaning in our lives – even if by the sheer fact of having someone else watch and interpret the events depicted. We feel as though our lives have meaning in the same way. The ions that a good performance can raise are pleasurable (even if they might normally be seen as negative and possibly even too much to bear in real life). For example, despite the fact that two young lovers from Verona have perished and are taken from the stage, we believe that their love was worthwhile beyond their continuing physical existence or that the social world that allowed such a tragedy needs to change. It is horrible that Romeo and Juliet have died, but their lives did not fail to have meaning. Or perhaps if they did, then we can redouble our efforts in our own life to ensure that such futility is avoided. The educational value of theatre and storytelling has long been expounded (and feared). Often the events depicted in drama are the same as

those mentioned earlier: tragic situations, life-changing events and significant events. It can teach us lessons or perhaps help us frame the question of how we ought to live. We need only look back to medieval morality plays as examples of how drama has been used explicitly for ethical instruction and the development of virtue in the audience simply by witnessing the events displayed. Nevertheless, as I have suggested earlier, most of the time we do not go about analysing our every action. If we do, sometimes this can lead to incapacitation and mistakes – as when a batsman overthinks her or his stroke. Our investigation starts from the observation that the world hits us all at once. A phenomenological perspective maintains that we are not thinking beings first and then physical, embodied, active beings in a derivative manner. The reverse is true, although action involves understanding the world. In what follows, we investigate the contention that Descartes was mistaken in his distinction between matter and thought and that dualism was mistaken in assuming a distinct inside and an outside to the mind. The challenge is to explain how it is that we thought there was an inside and an outside at all. In fact, we rarely experience ourselves as ‘separate’ from the world in the regular way that we go about our business. Instead, the primary way that we exist from moment to moment is in ‘doing’ stuff. We have projects, goals, tasks and so on that keep us preoccupied. Try not to think. Just do some stuff in your creative process. And do not forget that even thinking is a task. Or if you are exploring on the rehearsal room floor, demonstrations rather than over-intellectualization are preferable in order to remain with ‘the things themselves’. Before we go further, however, it is useful to ask what we mean by ‘me’ or ‘myself’ – concepts that we may very well take for granted or assume as given.

Mapping the self

There is an intriguing piece of writing by the Argentinian writer and poet JorgeLuis Borges (1983) entitled ‘On Exactitude in Science’. The short work simulates a fragment from an historical text that describes cartographers as an ancient empire who were so advanced that they could produce a one-to-one map of the territories and spread it out over the land itself. While the map covers the entire empire, over the years it deteriorates and frays over the land beneath. Through the age of time, the representation of the territory becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself – or rather that the ‘simulation’ completely covers and merges with the ‘real’. Borges is quoted by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1983) in his description of the ‘simulacrum’ as a parable for the way in which images have come to saturate our society in such a manner that there is no longer an ‘original’ reality distinguishable from the representation – a metaphor for the postmodern condition in which there is no singular truth as its source but simply a playful system of signs through which power and control are generated and perpetuated. Just as the hope of producing a one-to-one scale-identical copy of any given physical territory is unfathomable, how much more difficult it would be to map our subjective experience of the world? There is no exactitude of science in this case because of the insurmountable task of distilling the essence of an individual. Yet even if there is no hope of producing a complete map of a ‘self’, it can be revealing to see the key elements that we might include because the attempt makes explicit things that we take for granted in our implicit understanding. The symbolic world in which we live becomes intertwined with anything discernible as an originary self. Sketch out what you would put on a ‘map of the self’. As soon as you begin to represent the experience of being, it is somehow separated from the experience itself and falls short. Merleau-Ponty (2002) distinguishes the ‘antepredicative’ experience of the world from our encounter after it has been formulated into words. Description is always limited by the boundaries of spoken language as those very structures help to shape physical perception in the first place. Transferring the metaphor, language is the map which covers the territory

‘underneath’ and has become indistinguishable from ‘the self’. Such a suspicion of language may be the very reason why so many approaches to acting refuse to formulate experience words on the rehearsal room floor, preferring action: do not tell me, show me. You need to feel it – not reduce it to a fixed formulation in words. Feeling and emotion are a fundamental part of what we understand selfhood to be. Yet even the concept of emotion is not as unquestionable as you might think. For example, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990) employs a spatial metaphor in his description of a Hindu understanding of emotion that engenders a ‘topography of the self’ and accommodates specific internal, external and interbodily experiences through a set of social practices around ‘feeling’. Certain Indian experiences of emotion are not ‘inside me’ directed outwardly ‘towards you’ as we might commonly describe on a Western model, but rather ‘between you and me’. Feeling is, at least in part, socially constructed. Similarly, Clifford Geertz (1983) explores what he calls a ‘matrix of sensibility’ around art, taste and reception in various cultures and historical periods – the rich weave of symbolic meaning that affects the way we sense the world in the first place. Following this line of thought, the by-product of attending acting school is to achieve intimate knowledge of the terrain of the self (or perhaps even ‘construct’ it through a set of power relations) so that its regions can be drawn upon in artistic representation (Maxwell 2010). I believe that it is also a good place to begin an examination of your understanding of Being by unpacking your assumptions. It is also possible to turn this notion of implicit theory of self to analyse different approaches to acting. Stanislavski, for example, represented his ‘system’ in the form of a lung that produces inspiration (Whyman 2008: 40). The image indicates a biological model of self with an emphasis on breath as the basic metaphor. Through time, acting has taken on many forms, traditions and conventions: Method Acting, Viewpoints, Michael Chekhov, Le Coq, Practical Aesthetics and so on. Or perhaps glance across cultures to the many different dominant performance practices emphasizing dance, ritual and specific sets of aesthetic sensibilities. The thoughts offered here do not replace or undermine any given technique of acting or refute the usefulness of any given approach or tradition. Contemporary actors rarely follow just one way of working but rather pick and choose according to what might help with a particular text or process (despite what some acting teachers might say to ensure maximum ‘buy-in’ from their students – or sell more spaces in their workshops). Each approach presents

a topography or map of how we might understand selfhood (Taylor 1992). Bringing phenomenology and acting together does not stop at Stanislavski’s Method of Physical Actions or his later Active Analysis in exploring different conceptions of Being-in-the-world; it is relevant to opening up and exploring a range of different acting techniques. Indeed, each different approach might offer a radically different disclosure of truth. Nevertheless, all performance is by its very nature ‘conventional’ in that it draws upon a set of agreed ways and forms of representation – conventions that shift between historical eras. Many historical forms of performance bear very little relation to one another apart from some kind of encounter between audience and performer. Each is highly specific to its historico-cultural context, and it would be wrong to conflate all theatre and performance. Each subsequent era has seen those that have gone before as ‘convention’ while considering their own to be real and ‘natural’ (Counsell 1996). This is because social and cultural understandings of ‘selfhood’ changed (Roach 1985). Many different cultures will have very different topographies of the self (Appadurai 1990). Indeed, it is possible that individuals might even switch between different maps of the self, according to social context, as they move through different worlds in a phenomenological sense. For example, as we will see in Chapter 3, Ancient Greek Theatre was deeply imbued with a cultural sensitivity, civic duty, enshrined sense of competition and a devotion to religious beliefs. Performances at the Festival of Dionysus were not mere entertainment but crucial contributions to public discourse and political debate. Similarly, Kathakali dance-drama from southern India is inspired by representing sacred figures and epic stories, but connects with martial arts, codified movements, gestures and training regimes to conform to a strict sensibility in appreciation of the art form (Zarrilli 2000). Truth in this sense is achieving and embodying a set of principles and ideals in performance while also tapping into a spiritual dimension. Noh Theatre from Japan, too, is a highly conventionalized form (derived from a word meaning ‘skill’ or ‘talent’). The virtuosity of performance centres on the ability to carry out stylized gestures, inhabit character types and achieve a mystical suspension of awareness of unique presence in the religious context of Shinto. The twentieth century ushered in a new understanding of self and mourned the loss of this ritual basis for theatre and performance. In , for instance, Antonin Artaud called for a return to a metaphysical basis in performance so as to transcend conventional literary communication and connect more or less directly and viscerally with the

audience. Later in eastern Europe and then the United States, Jerzy Grotowski emphasized a rigorous training regime, inviting the actor to strip away encultured elements of behaviour and access their truthful core that is limited by conventional rules of behaviour. Springing from the Stanislavski system, Method Acting in the United States also advocated accessing the truth of one’s own feelings and psychological self as the basis for truthful representation on stage. On the other hand, by rejecting representational performance postmodern approaches emphasize the display and presence of one’s true self on stage rather than a character or persona. Each approach is an attempt to grapple with the nature of reality and our experience of it – but more importantly, to challenge our everyday understanding of what it means to be a self and how one should act. Such an active critique of self (especially in of political action) can be traced from Bertolt Brecht through to Augusto Boal’s socially engaged theatre and modern forms ‘applied theatre’ that aim at real-world efficacy over and above aesthetic representation. In pursuit of truthfulness, philosophy might not always be your first port of call, of course – you could look to literature, art and even science for inspiration. But I am convinced that phenomenology may be helpful in a range of different theatre-making situations because of its basis in radical questioning mentioned earlier. It might open up contradictions in the theories of selfhood underpinning each approach, or it may open up new pathways for investigation. So how can we come to with a slippery model of self so deeply intertwined with contingent social and historical metaphysical systems? Rather than blindly accept any given geography of the self, Heidegger enlists the word ‘Dasein’ to refer to the human experience of the world, presence and existence. Literally, the term means ‘being there’ although ‘da’ can also mean ‘here’, ‘then’ and ‘since’. ‘Sein’ is the infinitive form of the German verb ‘to be’. Heidegger uses Dasein both for the being of humans and the being of particular individuals such that it does not have a plural. Dasein is the particular type of being that we have in Being-in-the-world, unlike rocks and stones and trees. Specifically, we have the ability to inquire into our own being, we always exist within time and both have a history and live within history. By choosing this term, Heidegger also emphasizes the intertwined and interdependent relationship between self, world and others there with us who have the same kind of being as we do. For this reason, it is worth unpacking the notion of Being-in-the-world before considering how it might elucidate and offer inspiration to the craft of acting.

Mapping the Self

• Having drawn a map of your understanding of Selfhood, find a way of visualizing the relationship between the different parts: create a representation of the map in your theatre studio (either abstractly or scenes showing the self in action). Take a partner on a journey through the different areas of self as if they were located in different parts of the room. Why have you chosen particular spatial relations and landmarks as key to ‘self’? • Compare your map to someone else’s. Allow of the group to direct their own version. How do those other representations differ from your own and why? • Think about what sort of map someone might have drawn 100 years ago. What about one or two millennia ago? What about someone from a different country? • Where might you search from information to help you reconstruct those maps of the self? • What do you think s for differences in understanding ‘the self’ in various approaches to acting?

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Phenomenology: Being-in-the-World

In this chapter, I introduce a number of key concepts related to phenomenology and review the context in which this approach to philosophy developed. First, I survey some key and methodologies. Part of the phenomenological project is to for the conditions for the possibility of existence: we have a body, we take up space, we move in an environment, we carry out tasks, we use tools and we exist alongside others with the same kind of being that we ourselves have. But most of all, we have the fundamental ability to inquire into our own being – and that is what makes us unique as humans. From this point, I will consider how our understanding of Being has changed throughout history (and indeed how it is formed and informed by historical conditions). Some phenomenological approaches argue that historical conceptions of Being are founded on specific notions of ‘metaphysics’ – the branch of philosophy dealing with first principles, including being, knowledge, space and time. But the term has also come to mean an abstract concept with no basis in reality – an unfounded set of assumptions about what Being is. For the careful scholar and actor alike, these assumptions should be unpicked if we are to avoid falling into error and perhaps add to an understanding of how the text is relevant to the world today. Before we can analyse elements of Being-in-the-world in the world of a play text or devising process, however, we should first shine some light on how they work in our own experience of the world. When I have led workshops of this kind (as outlined in this chapter), I have found that it can be a quick and efficient way into the text because the actors have considered each element in their own life experience and can quickly draw into similar elements in the given circumstances.

Figure 2: Walking into the world. Photograph by Daniel Johnston.

Some background

Edmund Husserl was not satisfied with mere words detached from intuition and experience when describing and analysing our encounter with the world. For him, there was something more to the experience of phenomena than a string of descriptive phrases because language itself brings with it a range of preconceptions about the world. He borrowed the term ‘intentionality’ from psychologist Franz Brentano (1973) to describe the way that our mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc.) are always directed towards something. When I think, I think of something. When I believe, I believe something. When I desire, I desire something. Mental dispositions must have content: they are ‘about’ something – not just words. In expressing this, we say that they are ‘intentional’ in that each experience presents itself in a certain way to consciousness. This is called its mode of ‘givenness’. Husserl suggests that we need to ‘bracket’ or ‘suspend’ previous theoretical explanations for any given phenomenon and assumptions about its ‘real’ existence. This is what he calls the epoché. We need to attend to the object of analysis (i.e. phenomena) with openness and without dogmatic bias. Ordinarily – even before we attempt to articulate an experience – we may be prone to this bias about what we perceive and fail to attend to the way in which the thing reveals itself to us. Therefore, the phenomenologist seeks to hold back the ‘natural attitude’ taken when attending to things – as we go about our business in the world – so that we do not overlook aspects of the way that the thing shows itself as itself. In general, we take for granted the independence of the world outside of our experience. Even in our pre-theoretical involvement or activities, we make assumptions about the existence of the world outside of our intuition (‘natural realism’). As philosopher Dan Zahavi puts it,

To perform the epoché is to effectuate a thematic reorientation. It is not as if we cannot continue to observe, thematize, and make judgments concerning the world, but we must do so in a reflective manner that considers the world as related to the perspective we bring to bear on it.

(2018: 903)

In other words, we do not stop being involved in the world when observing in this way, but rather, we turn our attention back to the way that our experiential perspective arises. Furthermore, phenomenology is not describing the world as it appears in an unsystematic way but rather a method of paying close attention to how it is that the world presents itself to be apprehended in various modes from a particular perspective. The investigation does not get bogged down in whether the thing exists ‘in reality’ or not. Instead, part of the task is to for how we came to think that there is a reality ‘out there’ and an ‘inside here’ of my mind in the first place. Our attention is on the manner and mode in which a particular phenomenon under investigation appears and shows itself. Part of the phenomenologist’s task then is to describe how (and under what conditions) the phenomenon presents itself. This is called ‘transcendental reduction’. It includes considering any ‘intentional acts’ and ‘experiential structures’ of our encounter with the world. For example, not only do I experience the table in front of me in of time, space, proportion, strikingly white colour and so on, I also encounter it as an object of use for resting my laptop on and as an object of design beauty for its simplicity and pure lines. In this way, we carry out a systematic examination of the relationship between subjective experience and the world by sorting through these characteristics and elaborating each mode of givenness. Phenomenologists may also attempt to scrutinize and identify the features of the phenomenon one is investigating that make it what it is (and without which it would not be what it is). That is, they look for essential features over and above any accidental properties of the specific object at hand. This does not mean that there is some reified material or metaphysical ‘essence’ beyond or behind the thing as it appears. In part, phenomenology considers the conditions for the possibility of the thing being apprehended as it is. We might look at other similar or related phenomena (van Manen 2016). And we begin to see patterns or themes that emerge from the experience and our lived encounter with the phenomenon. The important thing is that previous interpretations and theories are not the primary guide for its interpretation. In this sense, the exercise is not merely a linguistic distinction but a process of gathering one’s experience of the thing itself into view. When we encounter a faithful phenomenological

description, we should say, ‘That’s what it’s like! Yes, that’s how it is!’ It is about attuning with experience. The task is daunting, because it is an attempt to bring the world into view without pinning it down in advance. I argue that at least some forms of artistic practice constitute such a reorientation of perspective both for the artist and for the spectator. When we see a world represented on stage, we are invited to see in it some aspect or element of reality that it brings to light. When we look at a production, it is a satisfying feeling to come out and say, ‘That’s how it is’ or ‘I had never seen it like that before, but it’s right’. But it is not simply an experience faithful to reality that is important in the creative process. Music, for example, might create a special sensitivity to phenomena in our own world such as to bring them to life through Mood. I suggest that artistic performances can allow a moment of ‘unconcealing’ of something about the world, bringing something into ‘unhiddenness’. This is not simply the naturalistic representation of material reality as it is uncovering an existential reality through the process and production. A subtle clarification of a common misconception is worth ing here: phenomenology is not straightforwardly synonymous with experience and its description, even though this is how many people might perceive the term. ‘Phenomenological’ does not simply mean ‘experiential’. It is not just providing a detailed of the way the world appears. For the actor and theatre-maker, it is a step back to consider how we experience the world in the first place. This can happen in training and rehearsal where actors pay attention to their own apparatus of perception, and such reflection provides a reference point for creating the world of the play. I would argue that specific practices, dramatic texts and works of art offer specific phenomenologies that bring to light new insights into the structures of Being and how they appear in the given circumstances.

Space and bodies

One of the things about the world as we experience it – or rather, one of the things that we tend to overlook in the world – is that it ‘hits us all at once’. As outlined in Chapter 1, there are specific times when aspects of being in our surroundings come into view. Further examples might include when my keys become urgently foregrounded when they are missing; or when a roadblock becomes the object of my focus as I have just ed a left-hand turn I was meant to take. It is only through our engagement with the world that we experience spatiality in relation to the tasks that we carry out in our everyday life. The remote control is just out of reach, which means that I will have to get up from the couch to grab it to switch over to the news. The tenth floor is very high up when the lift is out of order. Or we might become particularly aware of space when we are not familiar with it or using it in the way that we are used to (for this reason, I would be terrible at parkour). Think about when you have travelled to an unfamiliar foreign city or environment and how you negotiated the spaces within it – not knowing how to read the signage or being unaware of the social conventions of being in that area. Again, it might have been when you are given a different relationship to a space. Think about putting on a pair of iceskates for the first time. I find it amusing to watch people (the adults, particularly) in the rink fall over because they have taken on a different relationship to balance and their centre of gravity, making it impossible to walk in the way that they are used to. It is similar to Henri Bergson’s (1911) suggestion that humour arises when watching someone slip on a banana peel because they suddenly become an automaton. Space in this sense is not an empty void but something that is encountered in relation to our dealings with the environment. Being in space is a necessary precondition for our Being-in-the-world. But ‘being in’, in this sense, is not the same as a liquid being ‘inside’ a cup. We are affected by the world in which we live and by our tasks within it. It is relative to these dealings that directionality of left and right, up and down matters. Sticking to the left-hand side of the road is crucial to driving in some parts of the world. Furthermore, we tend to experience things as near or far from us not in of geometric spatiality but rather in the context of our dealings with the world.

Even though I might be looking at the diamond ring in a shop window which is centimetres away from me, I know that the size of the jewel within it and the quality of its cut make it far too expensive for me to afford and thus very far away from me. Another essential aspect of our Being-in-the-world is that we are always in a body, we have a body, we are a body. This might seem obvious, but it is precisely one of the assumptions that we should not leave uninvestigated from a phenomenological perspective. Most of the time, I do not experience my body in of epidermal, cardiovascular, respiratory and neural systems. I experience it phenomenally as my body. My body is not of the same order of things as those that I encounter in my environment. I do not encounter my hand in of space, geometry and velocity, for example. My body is ‘here’, and the things and places that I manipulate and inhabit are ‘there’. I am the locus around which the world reveals itself because of the tasks I undertake. My body as a focal point is not static, but rather mobile and dynamic, as I move through the room carrying out my business. Husserl makes the distinction between Leib and Körper on this point of distinguishing a scientific materiality and experience as it is lived. He marks the difference between the lived body as we experience it in a rich lifeworld of activity and the body as an object of biology composed of organic materials with specific coordinates. Merleau-Ponty also employed the corps objectif and corps propre to distinguish the objective body and one’s own body as it is encountered. In English, we have the word ‘corpse’ to describe the body devoid of life in so far as it is no longer a person in the same way as it was when living (interestingly, to ‘corpse’ on stage is to freeze – to be unable to speak one’s lines, move one’s body or make a creative decision). But the world as we experience it from a first-person point of view is very different from encountering a biological entity. And yet, we can touch ourselves and flip between the two modes of the observer and the observed (Merleau-Ponty 2002). Rub one hand over the other and let your attention rest on the sensation of feeling and of being felt. Now switch over and have your other hand do the feeling. Most of the time, our bodies are invisible to consciousness because we are ‘outside’ of ourselves and involved in the objects of intention. For example, in the moment of play a footballer does not experience the mathematical angles of their location on the field and the present location of their body in relation to the ball. The player’s attention is already ahead to where the ball is about to go and

the goal that they are about to kick. The body comes into stark awareness when we feel pain and discomfort that interrupts our goal. My body also changes throughout time and develops capacities and perceptions according to the activities that I undertake. I can develop skills that change the way I see the world around me. When I have played the piano long enough, I do not see the keys as mere black and white notes, but rather I see the piece that I am about to play, as if it were laid out before me. Moreover, there is a question as to where the body ends and the outside world begins. When I put on my glasses, they correct my degraded sight. When I get behind the wheel, it is as though the car becomes part of my body as I drive automatically on my way to work by the usual route. Similarly, we do not primarily experience our own self as an isolated subject floating in space. We always understand ‘I’ in relation to ‘others’ there in the world with the same kind of being as our own, who matter to us and with whom we communicate. The social world is as much who we ‘are’ as our material bodies in this sense. Indeed, the social world helps to shape our physical being and precedes the existence of any given individual. Language is an obvious key to unpacking the way in which we exist and make meaning in relation to others ‘there’ around us, but there is also a ‘pre-reflective’ sense in which our actions and reactions take the being of others into by interpreting, reacting and acting within our environment. Others there with us in the world are not an ‘afterthought’ when analysing the concept of world. They form the third term in a triad co-constitutive of our being: self-world-other.

The history of Being

Bodies and space are not the only essential elements to our Being-in-the-world, of course. As I will explore later (especially in Chapter 5), Time and History are also crucial horizons for our perception and understanding of Being. An actor’s phenomenological approach to any given dramatic text might therefore ask, ‘How does the work itself understand and disclose Being?’ The answer affects how the dramatic characters experience bodies and spaces in the first place from a specific historical junction. This can be both in of the world of the play and in relation to the historical perspective of the playwright. Time and History are crucial to an actor’s investigation of given circumstances because they form a foundation for culture, economics, politics, social status, language, knowledge, religion and geography. Each historical ontology radically inflects how you might interpret action, objectives and communion with others in the world of the play for your character. Indeed, deciphering our contemporary understanding will also help to reach out to the audience, connect with our social understanding of Being now and possibly challenge that perspective. Intuitively, we might think that Being is something unchangeable throughout time. Things just are – even though their form and matter might alter. But in fact, Being as a whole has been understood in many different ways throughout the ages, because the structures of society, language, thought and technology have unfolded variously throughout history. Arguably, we are living through an epoch with a shifting (and forgetful) self-understanding at the fastest rate of change at any point in history (Johnston 2017b). Digital technologies increasingly offer insights into the essence of human consciousness as Susan Kozel (2007) notes. Perhaps we could say technology is a ‘foil’ to our understanding because rather than show ‘what is’ in itself, it allows something else to be seen by reflecting light off its object. We grapple with who we are in contrast to machines and yet notice many similarities to the technologies around us. This is the topic of many science fiction films in the past century from Metropolis (1927) to Blade Runner (1982) and the Terminator (1984) series to Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). The question is whether we have come to see ourselves as mere rule-following automatons, merely organic computers, or even worse, as mere ‘resources’ that can be used up for the sake of productivity and technological reproduction.

Incidentally, phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus (1992) has had a lot to say about this since the very beginnings of AI research and development. Heidegger spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how Being (and by extension, the being of beings) had been understood historically, especially in his task of unpacking the metaphysics of philosophers he believed were on the right track and contributed valuable insights to the history of thought, but had made fundamental mistakes in of ontology. He argued that past philosophers such as Aristotle, Augustine and Kant did not take the concept of time into adequate consideration when thinking about Being. In fact, this ‘unpacking’ was intended to be presented in the second division in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) – a division that was never printed because he rushed the book to publication (although some have argued that he completed this work in other writings). Your excavations as a creative in the rehearsal process will not necessarily be providing an explicit philosophical critique of historical metaphysics but rather using your interpretation to shape your artistic choices in the here and now. In this way, you might avoid Heidegger’s teleological view of being and examine metaphysics in its concrete manifestations (as thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida attempted later). Heidegger suggests that there have been a number of ‘epochs’ in (Western) history, defined by successive notions of what it means to be (Inwood 1999: 96). The idea has parallels with Thomas Kuhn’s (2012) concept of a ‘paradigm shift’ in the history and philosophy of science – where a discovery or revolutionary theory can change the way that we understand a scientific field forever (the ‘Copernican turn’, for example). Heidegger believed that the concept of Being had its birth in classical Greece as ‘nature’: ‘form’ (in Plato) and ‘essence’ (in Aristotle). These ontological foundations were subsequently transformed in the Christian era and into the Middle ages, when Being was thought about in of ‘something created by God’. In the modern age, and then after the Industrial Revolution, Being came to be understood in of that which could be controlled and calculated or as a ‘standing resource to be used up’ (Heidegger 2001: 74). In other words, an understanding of Being shifted from nature to man-made craftsmanship and skill, to divine creation, to consumables for technology. Heidegger also suggests that these understandings have a parallel in the historical nature of art because art has the capacity to reveal Being in its own time through a unique form of reflection.

It is important to that historical conceptions of Being are not always completely wrong with respect to Being. In a way, each interpretation contains a germ of truth. The word ‘epoch’ comes from the Greek ἐποχή, which means ‘restraint’ (Inwood 1999: 96). In this sense, every worldview not only holds something back but also reveals something else about the nature of Being itself. Although it might sound odd, Heidegger is not sketching out the ‘actual history’ of metaphysics and ontology but rather setting out what he calls ‘historical reflection’ which takes into the worldview in which we are immersed now and interrogates how the very notions of ‘meaning’ and ‘understanding’ become available. Every historical perspective contains an ‘open region of goals, standards, impulses, decisive possibilities and powers’ that ‘belong essentially to happening’ (Guignon 2005: 393). History is a story that we construct about the past, a process of looking back and a way of looking forward to possibilities for the future. In other words, the way that we understand the past is more to do with the direction that we are heading towards in the future rather than simply an objective collation of events that have already taken place. This is because we will select elements of that story and search out facets of events that are useful for us in our current projects both as individuals and as societies. For this reason, ‘the meaning of Being’ both reveals and covers up its own history together with the future-directed structure of its interpretation. Nevertheless, this structure reveals a unifying meaning in the ‘sending’ of Being that is the subject of historical reflection for the phenomenologist (Guignon 2005: 393). The history of Being is not a singular fateful succession of happenings: it is always within time and inflected by our projects and aspirations of the day. This thought is not very far from an actor’s consideration of actions and objectives but from a broader social and cultural perspective – a kind of socio-historical superobjective. Most of the time, the meaning of Being goes largely unquestioned in a period of ‘ordinary-reckoning’ as life goes on as usual without much thought to metaphysics. At various points, however, the ‘essence’ of Being is allowed to appear and we discover something that had not been apparent up to that point. Political, philosophical and theological upheaval, scientific and technological advances, changes in language and shifts in artistic creation can all contribute to what Heidegger calls a ‘moment of vision’ (Augenblick). For the most part, traditional ontologies go unchallenged because we are caught up in everyday business and tasks as we make our way in a world full of specific beings and entities. The meaning of Being as a whole generally does not generally arise.

For Heidegger, however, great art can and does raise the question and can contribute to a recalibration in metaphysics by challenging the status quo (as I will explore in Chapter 6). Art can both show and change the world by altering our perspective on meaning and existence (Dreyfus and Spinosa 2002). According to Heidegger, great art pushes history along. Following from Hegel’s view, art reflects society’s self-consciousness and can reveal what it takes for granted. In your artistic practice, it is well worth considering whether the dramatic text you are exploring stands at a point of seismic change in history. Indeed, you might even consider whether it contributes to that change – and if so, how? And then you might consider the way in which you can demonstrate this shift to a contemporary audience. I would suggest that the three chosen texts in the following chapters come at precisely such a point of reinterpretation in the way that they challenge traditional metaphysical systems. Antigone questions ‘Nature’ and ‘Law’ through the protagonist’s obedience to a higher order. Hamlet questions man as a ‘created thing’ and sheds light on one’s own existential choices in creating meaning. The Cherry Orchard questions the way in which individuals are reduced to mere resources in the modern world as its characters come to be evaluated by their monetary worth and as means to an end. Other dramatic texts might not offer such philosophical critique, yet they too will express a certain historical perspective of Being that can be uncovered and revealed through performance. The point is that theatre too can be part of this process of change, and it is not without relevance that these plays have become canonical dramatic works. Through your choices as an actor, you can consider how to embody each perspective in the history of Being and possibly aspire to challenge our contemporary worldview. The thought parallels Michael Chekhov’s advice to ‘[r]eject the dogmatic and misleading notion that the human personality never changes but remains the same at all times and in all ages’ (2002: 4).

Destruktion and the text

This might be interesting in theory, but how can a creative artist respond to these different understandings of Being in the past and present? As I have mentioned, the role of the theatre phenomenologist is not to write a history of philosophy but rather to ‘return to the things themselves’ and explore the Question of Being in relation to the task of theatre-making. Such an approach might ask, ‘What assumptions have we made about the nature of Being as presented in theatrical practice of the past and how can we interpret those practices today?’ One task of theatre phenomenology is to identify and come to grips with metaphysical assumptions – especially those that might be at odds with a worldview grounded in experience. The choice is then to either review differences between and authentic understanding tapping into a contemporary sensibility or highlight ontological distances between the historical text and the present. Part of theatre’s task is to smash the illusions of metaphysics in this sense. While Heidegger’s central philosophical quest was to formulate the question of the meaning of Being, he also sought to lay bare the misconceptions of traditional ontological systems and explain why they fell into error (1967: H41– 49). He employed the term ‘Destruktion’ to describe the process of examining various ‘metaphysical’ (i.e. mistaken) understandings of Being underpinning various periods of history. Specifically, Heidegger sought to expose world views that misapprehended Being as a ‘thing’. Nevertheless, by dissecting historical conceptions of Being, Destruktion should never simply disregard them; on the contrary, the task of the philosopher-actor is to seek out essential truths revealed by past world views. Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics is therefore not simply a process of demolishing historical ontology but a ‘loosening up’ of metaphysical s in order to discern the original experiences that gave rise to them. There is a risk that certain ways of thinking about the world or assumptions about Being can lead us astray. This highlights the moral and political effects of ontology, for example, as we have seen in misguided regimes with a distorted view of the human. Perhaps ironically, Heidegger himself is a prime example of such assumptions: He folded his thinking about Dasein, history and cultural destiny into his of a nationalist ideology. And the evidence is not good. He remained silent for many years after his academic

suspension and subsequent reinstatement. My suggestion here is that the actor’s work on the text in rehearsal and performance processes can also enact a Destruktion by exploring the conception of Being that underpins the world of the work with a critical eye, unpacking the historical period in which the text was written and critically exploring contemporary understandings of Being held by the audience in the world now. This would include teasing apart the understanding of Being implicit in your character or persona and exploring how such an understanding arose in the circumstances and in the historical period of the playwright. The explicit or implicit understanding of Being in any given play text as a whole – commonly known as the ‘main idea’ (Thomas 2009) – will also provide clues about how to approach it in rehearsal. The important thing is to be guided by the text or process itself rather than artificially superimpose an interpretation in advance. The task also requires deep and truthful reflection on our own contemporary understanding so that the work of art can reveal something about Being in the world now. Again, we recall that Destruktion is not simply destroying past conceptions but taking apart to see how such conceptions have arisen and understanding how they work. Theatre can display those attitudes in such a way that an audience can see for themselves (perhaps in a way similar to Bertolt Brecht’s conception of theatre to demonstrate the social and material conditions underpinning the individual actions and decisions of a character). One option in production might be to emphasize the ‘strangeness’ in the conception of Being in this fictional world and challenge the audience to formulate their own perspective. As a further clue, we can observe that emergent understandings of Being throughout history in theatrical works themselves in so far as they contribute to a shifting world view as well as depicting the world as we see it now or have seen it in the past. Shakespeare scholars, for example, note the early modern period as departing from medieval scholasticism into a new era before the dawn of the Enlightenment (McEvoy 2000), and in a way, Shakespeare dramatizes the transition. Some might argue that Beckett’s works stage the dissolution of the decentred modern subject in an alienating world. The Broadway production of Hamilton can serve to highlight inequities of the past, including slavery in the United States, by allowing black bodies to inhabit historical figures of the past on stage and direct our view of history through the prism of race. The musical Six enacts a similar performative critique of gender in history and

representations around the wives of Henry VIII in England, mindful of lingering discourses still present to this day. Destruktion in this sense comprises various attempts to loosen up the conception of Being not in the history of philosophy but in the history of theatre and in the world of the play. Shaping a production or response for our own epoch – especially in an approach aiming at truth – requires such an excavation of ideas. This should not stop at the texts and productions, however, and might even interrogate theatrical practices too. Postdramatic theatre and devised performance art practices of the late twentieth century have taken up the fight against the notion of a fixed and stable subject in the work of Heiner Müller, The Living Theatre Company and Punchdrunk theatre company, for example.

Destruktion

• Choose a play text from a culturally or historically remote period and repeat ‘Mapping the Self’ (Chapter 1) by representing the notion of self in that text. What elements of your representation reveal different ‘epochs’ of Being as outlined in this section? • What might you look for in a dramatic text to discover a ‘topology of Being’ that it implies? • Where might you look in a character’s response to a set of given circumstances to reveal their understanding of Being? • How might you highlight a particular epoch of Being in costume and/or stage design? (As a hint, this might not necessarily be through naturalistic representation but draw on physical and symbolic elements of costume to highlight a particular world view and understanding of Being.) • How can you reconcile that world view with our own contemporary understanding of Being?

From theory to practice

Of course, there is no set way of approaching theatre phenomenology and investigating philosophical ideas through rehearsal. Nevertheless, I led a research laboratory in Sheffield, United Kingdom, involving a mix of professional and student actors which I believe led to some practical insights (Johnston 2018). Our workshop began with a discussion of phenomenology more broadly and then introduced key concepts that I had hoped we could explore in the text (which was The Cherry Orchard). We set out to investigate themes, including Worldhood, Being-with others, Moods and Temporality – not just in theory but on the studio floor. The workshop comprised exercises to develop personal awareness and reflection, a read-through of the chosen text, discussion in relation to relevant phenomenological themes and then finally an attempt to move the text on the rehearsal room floor. Each participant had a digital voice recorder which was used to record their reflections at various points in the workshop. When reflecting upon each philosophical phenomenon in their own lives, the actors sometimes responded alone in their own private corner of the studio and sometimes in pairs or groups, interviewing one another to unpack their partner’s experience. The intention was to investigate each actor’s and character’s experience of objects, places, the flow of time and the process of rehearsal and performance itself. I believe it is important to conduct workshops of this kind in concrete with a very clear focus on materiality in the world around us. Working with tangible activities will help to explore one’s senses, physical engagement and touch, sound and tone, space and environment. The process becomes a lot more complicated when you ask someone to produce a description and physicalization of the concept of ‘Being’ in general. Yet phenomenological themes in a workshop can explore how Time, History and Being-towards-death (for example) affect concrete action both for the actor and for the character. It all becomes meaningless in the task of acting when you float off into abstract problems and theoretical discussion. The same is true in approaching a dramatic text. There is always a wealth of critical theory in approaching a classic text like Hamlet or Antigone. The

theatre-maker’s task is to approach it with fresh eyes. And the present moment will always offer a new context for its interpretation – sometimes breaking with the past. Part of the phenomenological perspective here is not simply unpacking a text but also understanding and engaging with the audience and a contemporary world view (and possibly challenging that view). As I have suggested, there are at least three focuses in a philosophical approach to theatre-making: one’s own self and experience, the world of the play and the reality of the performance situation. The challenge is to think and explore how the theory can help us to understand self, character and audience through ideas such as: Being-with others, the anonymity of public social existence, the way that the world matters to us, the finitude of life giving meaning to every moment, who one ‘really’ is through one’s possibilities and the idea of authentically choosing oneself by facing those possibilities. Following the phenomenological method, you could try to isolate the essence of the experience and the way in which it presents itself to your consciousness. Or you might draw out from concrete physical experience to a broader reflection on Time, History, Authenticity and so on. There might be further questions about different approaches to Being-in-the-world that can stimulate ideas for costume, design, staging, movement and music. If you are interested in attempting such a studio practice, each of the thematic subheadings in Chapters 3–5 might be used as a start point for your own discussions and exercises, regardless of which text you are exploring. Of course, you might wish to investigate other themes and construct different exercises by excavating the work of other philosophers you have encountered and also depending on the play you have chosen. I would suggest limiting the depth of philosophical analysis to begin with and trying to observe each aspect of Beingin-the-world in a practical way – always being led by the text itself rather than imposing a structure upon it. At the very end you might dip your toe into the philosophy and bring in your own observations and discoveries in relation to phenomenological theory. The danger is that your session will slip into philosophy tutorial mode rather than moving through a development process in theatre phenomenology. For this reason, try to get on your feet and activate those concepts in a physical and creative way as soon as you can. Here are a few examples of activities that you might try.

Observe a walk

A preparatory exercise to begin with is simply to walk outside your theatre studio or rehearsal room and allow the world to reveal itself to consciousness. I have previously conducted this activity outside with many student groups, and it is always surprising how much detail the participants are able to recall (Johnston 2017a). In essence, the task is a simple form of the phenomenological reduction, which involves stepping back from one’s everyday attitude and attending to the manner in which things appear to consciousness. The trick is not only to describe the experience itself but the way in which it presents itself. When carefully observed, the superabundant meaning of experiences such as a puff of wind touching one’s cheek, the muffled sound of a fragment of conversation ing by or the smell of food wafting down the corridor opens up the immense window of sensations that contribute to our Being-in-the-world. Of course, the very act of walking gives a purpose to the activity, and the movement of one’s body gives a different take on one’s environment compared to being static and stationary. Walking itself becomes the object of phenomenological enquiry. In many cases, participants unpack the strangeness of not walking with a particular goal and without their usual equipment of bags, phones and computers and so on. The absence of these elements uncovers something about our regular patterns of behaviour and movement actions. The pace, tempo, direction and duration of walking also affect embodied meaning and perception. Share your experiences and observations at the end of the exercise.

Observe stillness

Another task is to stand still in the studio and simply take in the room around you, complete with the people in it, the objects and furniture, lights and shadows, smells and sounds. Centre your breathing and posture and allow your surroundings to reveal themselves. The exercise has parallels with Stanislavski’s ‘concentration of attention’ exercises where the student actor focuses on different circles of awareness from their immediate body, to a section of the room, to the broader locale (2008: 98–106). For many participants, the stillness of the exercise draws out one’s own awareness of self and connection to the immediate environment. Our own thoughts shift attention through waves of awareness even though the body is stationary and the environment around seemingly fixed. In this way, you might discover that your own ‘internal’ action is just as important as ‘external’ action in of perceiving and interacting with your environment. Just as we do not usually walk without a purpose or goal, we often do not remain in the same place without a reason or restriction. Through the walking and stillness exercises mentioned earlier, we find that movement and stasis are wrapped up in a purposefulness that can be useful in constructing a scene and adjusting your character’s attention throughout. Once you have noticed how things reveal themselves to you when you are still or in movement, you can consider what your character observes and focuses upon at each moment of the action. The next set of activities involves describing objects and places and the way that they affect us. Before each session, the workshop leader might consider the dramatic text beforehand in order to see what sorts of things might be useful or relevant to elements that present themselves in the play. These exercises also tie into sense memory and emotion memory development because objects and locations also bring with them an imaginative and emotional response, together with an expression of personal significance that can rise to the surface when imagined fully.

Scrutinize an object

One of my favourite workshop activities is to describe an object as if to an alien with no prior knowledge of the thing at hand. Participants are asked to think about:

• the materiality and form of the thing; • what it looks and feels like; • what you can use it for; • how you might use it; • where it came from; • the context in which you might encounter it; • other objects that you might expect to interact or go with the world of the object itself; and • how the thing might symbolically represent the person who owns it.

In order to activate this information, you might simply discuss or describe it, but I have found that it is helpful to demonstrate the information silently or construct an improvisation around the object to convey your observations. If you were talking to an alien, language is a problem. For example, one actor from our workshop chose to consider a watch. Not only did they have to think about what it is used for (and indeed ‘the concept of time’ and being ‘on time’ for humans!) but also how you might put the watch on. Such unconscious movements become stubbornly impenetrable when you try to articulate them. I was fascinated with the detail of threading the watchband through and then pressing the strap against

one’s chest in order to hold it in place and fix the clasp through the loop. It was a subconscious action that I had never noticed before. You might have each participant imitate the movements and magnify them by degrees or internalize them and thereby inform their movements. Fill the space with bodies activating these permutations between participants and see what happens. Or you might take the object as a basis for representing the social relationships between different people – how might the object depict class, status, power and control? How can you depict these different relationships in the theatrical space? When describing and exploring actions that we are familiar with, there is a definite sense of ‘the uncanny’ in unpacking what we know from procedural knowledge to propositional knowledge.

Chart a place well known to you

A twin exercise to this one is to explore a place with which you are intimately familiar. This could be an observation exercise if you are able to visit that place or it could be an imagination exercise if not.

• What is the topography of the place? • Is it big or small, open or closed? • What are the smaller regions within that place, and how are they related to one another? • What are the ading places, and how are its borders delineated? • What has happened there in the past (for you personally or more broadly for the community)? • How have those events marked that place? • How does the place affect the bodies that move within it? • Who is allowed to be there, and who is excluded? • Is it a public or private space? • How does the place change throughout the seasons and time of day?

You could try this exercise on a different scale too. Think about a country as place. Then you might think about a state/county, city, suburb, street, house, room or corner. Explore your perceptions of public places and private places. It is amazing to think about how a sense of place can affect us as human beings.

Unpack a place where you feel at home

A variation on this exercise is to explore the feeling of ‘being at home’ in a particular place. In my workshop, this was particularly relevant to The Cherry Orchard because the text as a whole deals with returning, maintaining, losing and ing home before the family is eventually forced to leave (perhaps with the exception of Firs who is left there in the cold, like a slave sealed into a pharaoh’s tomb). Again, it is important to avoid applying phenomenological themes uncritically to any given text but rather let aspects of Being-in-the-world arise from the story itself. As with the aforementioned exercises, you might find that sense and emotion memory come into play:

• What are the familiar smells there? • What are the common objects that you encounter there? • What are the reassuring emotions of safety and belonging that go along with being at home? • How does the familiarity of place affect the way that you move in space and relate to others?

I recently discovered that the house in which I grew up has been demolished and a brutal set of townhouses erected on the site. It brings a sense of loss, together with the thought that I will never be able to show another person what was once there and experience the past through ing by in the same way. So, my relationship to that place is characterized by absence, like a limb that has been cut off but can still be felt. As an alternative, you could also unpack being in a strange place and consider the same sorts of questions. You could think about a trip to a foreign country or an area of town that you have never been to before. How did it change the way

that you move? How did it make you feel? What elements of the place stood out for you? How did you relate to others in that place? Did that place make you lose a sense of who you are in some way?

Dissect a familiar activity

Similar to the aforementioned exercise asking you to describe an object, here you might dissect and demonstrate a specific action or task familiar to you. This could be linked to the place explored earlier or some other activity that you think is particularly relevant to who you are as an individual. It might be locking up the house and checking all the doors and windows before leaving for your holiday. Or it might be the particular way in which you shave your face (or legs). It could be the way that you use a specialist piece of equipment – a lawnmower or hair straightener. Perhaps it might even be a musical instrument – a violin or piano. Take note of how equipment disappears in such action – such as how the car disappears when you are driving. With this exercise, part of the process is breaking down the overall task into small steps, sensations, anticipations and intuitions. You might need to describe the pieces of equipment necessary for the task and the way that it interacts with your body. This activity has a lot in common with Stanislavski’s breakdown of actions into smaller tasks and bits (2008: 135–51). Think about why the particular activity you have chosen to explore matters to you.

Describe a person

An obvious next step from describing objects is to observe other people – both present and absent and the way that they affect and determine the way that we behave and react. You might do this in a silent exercise simply by standing opposite someone else and observing what it is like to be with them. Be sensitive to each other in your descriptions! Make sure that you set out a safe space for open discussion and an atmosphere of unconditional positive regard. You could also practise this exercise by observing a person who is near you in a public space (without getting creepy). What questions do you have about that person? Who do you think they are? Why? Perhaps it might be more helpful to describe a celebrity, politician, artist or public figure. Then, you might describe what it is like being with a person that you are very close to:

• How does being with that person make you feel? • How does it affect your behaviour and movements? • How do you talk to that person? • What are the tempos and rhythms of your interactions? • How does that person hold their body in relation to their environment?

I suggest that you direct your description to a person in the workshop space who stands in for the individual you are describing. Address them as if you were talking to your chosen person as you let them know what being with them is like. Again, this exercise has much in common with Stanislavski’s description of Communication and fits with the phenomenological theme of Being-with others

(2008: 229–57). You could explore different people from celebrities and politicians who you have never met to intimate acquaintances, lovers and enemies.

Recount a time when you struggled to communicate

Over and above physical being in the environment, language shapes the way that we experience the world and move within it. In this exercise, recall a time when you struggled to express yourself. It might have been when you were among people who did not speak your language. Or there might have been some other impediment to your expression. How did it make you feel? Did it change the way that you thought about yourself? Did it alter the way that you interacted with others? Now create an improvisation where you are trying to complete a task, but others in the scene are speaking gibberish and you do not understand them. How do you react? What can you try to get the message through?

Demonstrate a moment when you had an unusual experience of time

For this exercise, I invite participants to think about the flow of time and how it varies depending upon context. You might think about a moment when time seemed to speed up and the moment ed in an instant. Then you could describe a situation when time seemed to stand still for you. Rather than merely describe, try to demonstrate the moment in your workshop space. You could do this naturalistically by having workshop participants stand in for the people who were there with you at the time, or you might find a way of directing movements, gestures, words and sounds to give a sense of the experience more abstractly.

Stage a life choice

In a similar vein, you might explore a choice that you made at some point in your life. On the one hand, you could describe a seemingly insignificant choice such as what colour shirt you will buy. On the other hand, you might recall the circumstances and details of a significant choice that you made at some point. The outcome could have been extremely good or catastrophic. What led you to the decision? What were the constraints upon you? What were the pressures for you to choose one way or the other? How did you feel about the choice that you made? How has it affected your circumstances now? Again, get up on the studio floor and find a physical representation for that choice. Find a theatrical image for the different options for your choice take you in different directions until one choice wins. You might wish to foreground the power dynamics at play in the various people involved in the decision by getting other workshop participants to stand in for those people.

Recreate the instant in which your life was threatened

Share a moment where you felt that your life was in danger. You may have had the experience of everything flashing before your eyes or a sense of detachment from the environment. Create a moving image with bodies and sounds in your studio space to depict the moment. Consider how that moment changed your attitude to your own life. Did it make you cautious and afraid? Did it make you change your values and priorities? How long did it affect you (if at all) before you slipped back into your everyday comfort zone? Create a walk or movement pattern around the room to depict the moment and its changes felt in your body. Rank different degrees of threat and self-awareness of responses from your group from a level of one to ten and stage them one after the other to show each magnitude.

Text-Character-Performance

Having explored some of these phenomena and shared them with the group (together with further phenomenological themes relevant to your chosen text), the next step is to explore those same themes and exercises in your character. The exercises in boxes in the following chapters will give you some examples of how to do this. Rather than recall something from your own life, you begin using your imagination to create the world for your character. You could also go through the tasks mentioned earlier in character, using observations from your own experience as a guide to imagine their situation and response. Begin with your character’s walk and how they might remain still and observe the world. Then you can explore objects they might observe and use, activities they regularly carry out, places they inhabit, people they love and hate, choices they have made, their experience of time and flow, and values that they hold under threat. You can complete these experiments and improvisations for events that the character has experienced in the past or at specific moments in the text as you go along. Rather than stick with one choice or interpretation, try out different versions to explore how it affects the storytelling in the scene. Do not feel like you need to be bound by your creative choices at any given moment. You will move away from those improvisations gradually through your process towards embodying the text on the rehearsal room floor. Throughout the exercises and after, you might find it useful to reflect on your own performance. Explore the sensations that you felt worked or did not in your creative work. Consider your awareness, energy, attention, flow, communion, voice, breath, connection to the ensemble, relationship with audience. Finally, you can step back and think about phenomenological themes running through your chosen dramatic text as a whole and let them direct your practice. The next three chapters provide examples of such analysis as a guide to rehearsal.

3

Being-with Others: The Cherry Orchard

Sharpen your awareness and focus on what you are doing right now. Of course, you are reading. But apart from that – or rather in that activity – what does your reading entail? What is it for? You are in a specific place and time, within a body, carrying out a specific task. You have the ability to decode printed shapes and interpret their broader significance. You might be looking for new methods and techniques to use your creative process. You might be researching information for an essay about critical theory and performance. You could be reading out of pure interest in the creative arts and its intersection with philosophy. What is the point of what you are doing? What does it mean? Your activity points towards a set of relations in your life and endeavours requiring involvement with tools and procedures. Perhaps the activity of reading draws meaning from the broader context of earning your degree, gaining employment or impressing your partner with mysterious knowledge about the craft of acting. Maybe the task feeds into your understanding of selfhood, your theatrical practice and the world of performance (constituted by an intimate exchange with the audience). Possibly it is to do with your personal intellectual development or sharing ideas with your friends. The task of reading has meaning only when it connects with your world, and this is true of every activity or project that we undertake. What happens when you fail to connect with this world and your purpose or with those there with you? What about when relationships fail, your goals are left unattained and you neglect your very own being in connection with others? In general, we could ask what it means to do stuff at all. Again, we might ask, ‘Why do we do things?’ Anyone who has been questioned by a persistent (and relentless) 5-year-old will be familiar with answering an unending string of ‘why?’ questions and resort to the final answer, ‘Just because’, when it all becomes too difficult or you simply do not know what the correct answer is. As I suggested in Chapter 1, mostly we do not stop to ask. We just do. We go on

being. Being-in-the-world is the activity of existing – of going about our business. It should not be anything mysterious because it is just what we encounter every day. We carry on in our own world. In fact, it is often so totally banal that we do not even notice it as such. The world just sits there in the background, and we do not give it a second thought. What is a world then? What is involved in Being-in-the-world?

Figure 3: The Cherry Orchard workshop, Sheffield Hallam University, 2017. Photograph by Daniel Johnston.

It has been suggested that the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov explored phenomenological questions in his drama and literature (Fortier 1997; Tait 2002) although there is no evidence that he explicitly engaged with phenomenology as an approach to philosophy which was still in its nascency when he died in 1904. Nevertheless, his characters and dialogue explore philosophical themes such as identity, moral obligation to others, humanity’s relationship to Nature, Authenticity, Truthfulness, Historicality and Temporality (although he does not use this terminology). It is interesting to note that late in his career, Chekhov’s famous director and interpreter Stanislavski did indeed work with the phenomenologist Gustav Shpet, who had studied with Husserl. One might argue that these sorts of issues were beginning to concern thinkers at the time, and it is not surprising that they should also be explored in literature, art and theatre. Interestingly, Chekhov’s references to philosophy never wholly endorse a particular approach, and he is suspicious of philosophers in that he depicts them as somewhat detached from reality rather than engaged in it. Perhaps Chekhov was drawn to a particular philosophy of life given his own experiences with his background in medicine, an Orthodox Christian upbringing, a grandfather who was a serf and experiences with the extreme poverty and suffering in his medical patients. Chekhov presents a unique philosophical world view through his art. A series of existential crises run through many of his plays and stories together with a sense of inevitable personal and social downfall – if only because the characters neglect action or carry it out in a misguided or misdirected way. He creates a world of hesitation and flawed choices with a rich and complex weave of past choices, present decisions and future possibilities. Chekhov’s characters struggle to make meaning of their own lives and venture upon pathways that neglect happiness and self-awareness. It is perhaps for this reason that Stanislavski’s Method of Physical Actions, which involves dividing a role into units and objectives (or ‘bits’ and ‘tasks’) in a coherent way so as to achieve the character’s overarching super-objective and appropriate action in response to the given circumstances, is closely associated with Chekhov. It is also perhaps why

many acting schools around the world spend a significant amount of time on ‘Chekhov Immersion’ (exploring his plays in depth in of historical context, cultural world and social sensibility). Of course, Chekhov’s plays helped to consolidate the Moscow Art Theatre at the vanguard of the Russian theatre industry (although evidently Stanislavski sometimes misinterpreted his plays and attempted to stamp his own authorial interpretation on their productions). Most characters in Chekhov’s oeuvre have complex and sometimes conflicting motivations. What if we take this philosophical reflection of the play and apply it as an approach to rehearsal? In order to understand and represent this ‘broken’ world, we need to understand what a ‘world’ is in the first place. You might read through The Cherry Orchard and choose a character to examine or consider specifically when you read through this chapter. The approach hinted at here includes mining the text through a series of questions and imaginative improvisations on aspects of the play and its characters. These should be closely linked to an exploration of your own phenomenological engagement with the world. You could, of course, adapt these to other texts, but it is important to find exercises that are appropriate to each play rather than artificially grafted on. Think about the dramatis personae to begin with. As I have suggested, Chekhov’s characters experience lack and failure in connecting with their world and in turn with each other. Therefore, let us take the theme of deficiency in engaging with Being-in-the-world to lead the interpretation. I will pick out moments of action in the text that appeal to different aspects of phenomenological exploration that show when a person does not really connect with their world. But the trick is to explore each character’s engagement or lack thereof in a practical way on the rehearsal room floor. A finely tuned phenomenological exploration of self and fictional world will help to unearth possibilities within the text. Even if you are very familiar with The Cherry Orchard, it is still worthwhile reviewing. The action takes place on the Ranevsky rural estate. Its owner, Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Lyubov), and her daughter (Anya) are just arriving back home from Paris, where the mother has spent five years. The heavily mortgaged property has left the family in arrears, and it must be sold to honour the debt, although its owners put off making a decision about its disposal. Lopakhin is a self-made man of wealth, who has risen up from the peasantry and has a plan to sell off the cherry orchard that is located down by the river and rent it out for holiday lettings, but he is ignored. Lyubov constantly avoids the

practicalities of life and turns away from her painful past, having experienced a number of losses. But in doing so, she squanders her money and fails to look to the future. Trofimov, a neighbour and former tutor for the household, is an ‘eternal student’ in his mid-to-late twenties caught up in revolutionary ideology but incapable of engaging in any real action to bring about social change. The 17-year-old Anya is enthralled by Trofimov, although she lacks clear awareness of what she herself believes in. Epikhodov, the estate clerk nicknamed ‘two and twenty troubles’ by the others, drifts without a sense of purpose and teeters on the edge of self-destruction, with a gun in his pocket and squeaky shoes that make his very presence awkward. Yasha, the footman, and Dunyasha, the maid, both agree that the world is something happening somewhere else and yearn to climb up the social ladder. Charlotta, the governess, lacks a personal history and does not really seem to know who she is but fritters her time away with magic tricks and entertainment. Gayev, Lyubov’s ageing brother, drifts in and out of the present as he imagines the angles of balls on a billiard table in relation to the shot he would play and is prone to spontaneous panegyric speeches. None of these individuals really connect with one another as is evident by their constant talking at cross-purposes and failure to hear what each interlocutor is saying. It seems reasonable to proceed with our approach to the text itself drawing on this idea of ‘world’ because at its core is a world coming to an end or the advent of a new world – a post-aristocratic, newly emerging, industrial world of commerce and private property. The task of the theatre-maker is to create a world on stage. But in Chekhov’s drama things are not going so smoothly – and sometimes not going at all. We could use the analogy of a motor accident: in order to understand a broken engine, you need to know how it is that a car can run smoothly. Or think about how neuroscience is informed by the ‘abnormal’ or damaged brain. We can see the function of each part in isolation although the overall cumulative effect is very different from the mere sum of its parts. The Cherry Orchard explores and unpacks Worldhood in a ‘deficient’ mode (i.e. when one’s relationship with the world is not connecting in some way). It is no mistake that many of Chekhov’s dramatic works require a large cast and often his scenes involve quite a few characters on stage at any given point because they depict a complex social world in flux. Indeed, the world as we generally experience it in real life is never simple. If this play is a study in failure to connect with the world – or what we might call ‘Inauthenticity’ in Heidegger’s terminology – we might also begin to think about what it means to connect to the world in an authentic way. The task of the actor in each role here

is to find out how and why each character flees from the world, what deprives them of self-honesty and what makes their actions believable and relatable. We can interpret Chekhov as grappling with dramatic content in a phenomenological mode because he challenges traditional modes of understanding Being as strangely lacking in this modern world – in of Being-with others, our relationship to the environment and ethical choice – and we can approach the text through these themes. In this way, The Cherry Orchard provides a useful pathway into thinking about what a world is in the first place. And there is no better place than thinking about objects that surround us in our world. As we will find, the material world contains more than meets the eye. In Chapter 2, I outlined some exercises for exploring elements of Being-in-theworld with a mixed cast of professional and student actors at Sheffield Hallam University in 2017 (Johnston 2018). We moved away from the terminology of ‘intentionality’, ‘reduction’ and ‘mode of givenness’ and instead described our experiences in rich detail first to a digital audio recorder and then to a partner. The practice involves thinking about the way things are given to consciousness, although we quickly realize that it is very different when we are actually engaged in the world. The activities I describe entail a constant moving between doing and reflecting that propels a hermeneutic circle and overcomes the fact that most of the time we are forgetful of the way the world presents itself to us in our daily activities. How can a careful examination of ‘Being-in-the-world’ help us to approach a role in dramatic performance?

Equipment

First, we will explore how philosophical phenomenology might inspire the rehearsal process by focusing on objects that we use in our daily activities. As suggested in the opening chapters of this book, we humans are the type of beings that have the ability to reflect on our own awareness and activity within the world because most of the time we just go about our business. For the most part, we might not even be aware of the minute details of tasks that we undertake. How many times have you driven your normal route to work or walked to class while absorbed in thought or conversation about something else, only to realize that you were meant to be somewhere else? Or perhaps you cannot recall the journey at all. It is almost as if we have a code ‘running in the background’ that enable us to focus on higher-order capacities. Furthermore, the different and varied skills that we have acquired throughout our lives lead to many and varied experiential processes. If you have an intimate knowledge of playing football, for instance, you watch the game in a particularly ‘embodied’ way as you imagine your body diving in for a tackle or taking a penalty kick from the spot. You feel the ebb and flow of the game in a different way from the uninitiated. All of this points to the fact that we might not always direct our awareness to the factors underlying our Being-in-the-world. But there are some moments when it hits us in the face. For instance, consider the sheer obstructiveness of a shopping trolley that refuses to go straight, an instrument that refuses to be played in tune or the oven that sabotages your ‘Bake Off’ recipe. These pieces of equipment show themselves in the process of skill acquisition or malfunction. Notwithstanding this fact, the more we practise an activity involving these tools and machinery, the less we see them and the more adept we become at participating in the world in which they exist. The equipment steps out of the way and the world comes into view. Fix your attention on your chosen character in The Cherry Orchard and perhaps begin to think about the everyday routines and activities they engage in. Gayev’s billiard game frequently floods his thoughts as he imagines himself in the games room. It is almost as if he is trying to sort out a problem of the contest that he thinks must have a solution and which returns to mind. It is much easier to do this by the rules of the billiard table than facing the complexities of real life. Or

you might reflect on how Lyubov squanders her money and drops coins from her purse with almost deliberate carelessness. In contrast, Varya has an immediate knowledge of what it means to take care of the estate as she goes about tending to her duties and managing the staff. All of the micro-practices of everyday life reveal the lifeworld in which they dwell and what they hold to be important. The ‘programs that run in the background’ reveal a set of social and cultural values, political ideologies, class, gender norms and so on, held or rejected by the individual. As we will see later, they also point towards other people there in the world with us. When faced with unfamiliar or uncomfortable situations, the characters in The Cherry Orchard revert to a safe and familiar world. You might consider how you yourself avoid reflecting on your own actions because they will reveal a painful truth. The characters do the same. Anya, for instance, is calmed by her uncle’s plan to borrow money to pay back the bank’s interest, even though it is almost certain that the plan is fanciful. Each family member clings to some kind of hope. Almost all of the characters neglect to ask the question of their own responsibility to action or at the very least come up with a reassuring but inauthentic answer. Heidegger describes the mode in which we engage with things as tools or equipment as ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden), and this idea is relevant to an investigation of world in this sense. You could begin to investigate objects that surround your character (props, costumes and scenery required from an actor’s perspective). Consider Epikhodov’s brilliantly polished but squeaky boots. What is it like to walk around in them? Think about his relationship to the bouquet that he drops, which the gardener sent for the living room – he almost does not know what to do with it. Is it possible that in fact he brought it to give to Dunyasha? He even seems to be out of sync with the environment that surrounds him, knocking over chairs and dropping things. Of course, this might be because of his affection for the maid or something more deeply existential for this man of many misfortunes. Think about Dunyasha’s candle, which she brings with her at the opening of the play. It is just becoming light outside, and she blows it out. Is she careful not to waste household supplies? She is shaking because she is so anxious about the family’s return. Or is it really Yasha that she is expecting with trepidation? The candle she holds symbolizes her domesticity and status. But she is dressed like a lady with hair done up in a certain style. She is dreaming of being something else – a constant reminder of the burden of this house. Think about Varya’s keys attached to her belt with the constant burden of the estate’s management on her back. Think about Lopakhin and the book that he has been trying to read the night before. It is not an object that he feels comfortable with.

Perhaps this object becomes obstructive for him as he fails to find a relationship to it. He does not understand the words on the page and falls asleep when he tries to read. Think about his call for kvass and the connotations of Baltic peasantry in this traditional drink. Consider his waistcoat and yellow shoes that signal his arrival into the wealthy class. But is his real purpose to greet the family tenderly or to deal with the estate’s looming sale? Similarly, Firs has an old-fashioned livery and a stick to help him walk – a symbol of a past world of loyalty and unquestioning service. Think about the coins in Lyubov’s purse that represent something about the social relationship between the characters but more importantly a lack of care for what they can purchase in their squandering owner. Pick another object related to your character and consider its meaning to the world at stake. There is nothing particularly new about exploring objects and stage properties in rehearsal in that they reveal and create a fictional world, as Stanislavski discovered. Such a focus on the fully fleshed out world rubs up against the start point of many past approaches to epistemology and ontology in philosophy. The practice also addresses a blind spot in traditional thought about the materiality of the world. From an everyday perspective, the primary way that we encounter the world is in of mere objects that surround us in the environment. Heidegger calls this mode of things ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). If the world is just materiality, the challenge for the dualist is to venture beyond the sheer physical qualities of a thing to the rich experience of consciousness. Scientists observe specific characteristics in materials in of weight, size, colour, shape and so on. But this is not the main way that we go around in the world. Heidegger’s most famous example to explain his notion of equipment’s readiness-to-hand is the hammer. It is in seizing it and using it to hit a nail that we apprehend the being of its hammer-ness – not in describing its peculiar shape, the grip on its handle and the flatness of its head. Jean-Paul Sartre (1969) describes a related kind of existential ‘uncanniness’ in Nausea when he stares at his hand opening a doorknob, suddenly aware of its materiality, and detaching it from its primary function of opening the door. It seems so absurd all of a sudden. Arguably, there are several moments in The Cherry Orchard where the very world itself becomes uncanny. The most famous of these is represented in the sound effect of a guitar string breaking: everything that was familiar about the feudal social order in which rich landowners ruled over the peasants working on their land has changed in this new age of commercialism and social mobility. The advent of the tramp asking for money is

another break or fissure in the aristocratic world of these characters. No one really knows how to interact with this outsider, and he is met with a mixture of terror and bemusement. But some of the specific objects in the play also become quite strange, such as Epikhodov’s gun or the money that falls from Lyubov’s purse. Literally translated from the German, unheimlich could mean ‘un-homely’ – not at home. In this mode, everything becomes strange and unfamiliar – perhaps like a word that you use all the time but when you see it written down looks completely odd and alien. Strangely, that is exactly what happens when you put an everyday object or action on stage. When we really look, the world can become curio and curio. Lyubov discovers this too late when she wants to look at the walls of the house just before she leaves. The experience is tinted by the fact that the home is no longer hers in Act IV. Perhaps the most intriguing example of Chekhov’s examination of material objects in the given circumstances is the bookcase that Gayev rhapsodizes about in Act I. He discovers a date on the inside of a drawer and finds that the piece of furniture is exactly 100 years old, feeling this to be a remarkable coincidence. Gayev acknowledges that it does not have a soul of its own but talks about it as if it did:

Dear respected cupboard! I salute your existence, which has been directed for over one hundred years toward the glorious ideals of goodness and justice. Your silent appeal to fruitful labor has not weakened during the course of one hundred years, sustaining courage (Through tears.) and faith in a better future through generations of our family and engendering in us ideals of goodness and social consciousness. (2009: 254)

The other of the family react with awkwardness to this speech of praise to an inanimate object, and Gayev retreats into the billiards game in his head to alleviate and diffuse the embarrassment. Anya berates her uncle for talking so much – perhaps not so much because he is senile but because he is revealing something truthful that the characters do not wish to acknowledge. The history of the bookshelf is their history – one that they do not want to face.

Equipment

• Choose an object and concentrate on its materiality in the space. Describe the object to a partner from different angles in character focusing on its surfaces, sheen, shape, edges, shadows, movement or lack of and so on. • Next, grasp the object. Feel it. Feel its weight. Try to use it in different ways. Hold it how you would when you use it. What would it be like for you to become so familiar with it that it fades into the background? • Choose an object that you think portrays your character symbolically – something that ‘stands in’ for the character and ‘who they really are’. Form a tableau with the object to reveal the ‘essence’ of your character. • Pick a piece of equipment from a scene that you are working on and repeat the aforementioned exercises. It could be a guitar, a seat, a cup or perhaps even an object off in the distance, for example, telegraph poles. Feel the thing. Get a sense of its weight. Look at the patterns on it. Feel its texture. Grasp its shape. Think about what it is for. What does it remind you of? What events does it take you back to in your character’s life? Describe these things in character. • Now choose an everyday activity or task that your character engages in and create a scene or short improvisation. What equipment do you need to carry out the task? Take Varya’s keys, for instance. What happens when suddenly she finds the keys are gone? What does she do? Repeat the exercise for each member of the workshop.

Involvement

The next step in our investigation of Worldhood considers the way that objects in the world fit together while directed towards a purpose or goal. We could see this as a network or series of ‘affordances’ of objects or equipment – the types of actions that we might carry out by interacting with the object (Gibson 1977). For example, let us think about the tools and materials required to put together an IKEA flat pack. The hex key is related to all of the pieces that it can fix together. It fits into the hexagonal socket perfectly and allows them to be fastened together. There is a ‘totality’ of involvements or affordances here in all the parts that go together to make the Svärta bunkbed that I am putting together. The key is related to other keys of the same type too – be they bigger or smaller. I have often been frustrated trying to find the right-sized hex key years after initially putting the pack together! It is no good having any old key. You need to have one with just the correct gauge in order to secure the bolt. You might even decide to put the bed together in a non-standard way by ‘hacking’ the flat pack and ignoring the standard instructions. Other equipment also rests in this field of affordances: there is all of the bedding required once you have put the thing together, bedroom furniture, house furnishings and interior design aesthetic and ultimately, of course, the person (or people) who will sleep in the bed. The bed makes sense in the context of a sheltering structure for daily life and ultimately the continued existence (and rest) of the inhabitant. The bed is a machine for sleeping, and yet it is so much more than that. It can be the holder of memories, the place of retreat for recovery, the sanctuary from a family altercation or the prison of anxieties in the early hours of the morning. We can understand things in our environment just as material objects present before us, but this is by no means the first or most common way in which we do so. As we have suggested, the world hits us all at once as we go about our business. When we do notice things in our environment, they are most commonly seen as ‘things that we can do something with’. In other words, we see things in our environment in so far as they are of use to us for particular projects. We could call the mode of things a ‘tool’ or piece of equipment. Equipment is a nice term for what we are reaching for because it seems to indicate a number of different tools that fit together. In the United Kingdom,

people sometimes call it ‘kit’. Think of all the equipment that is needed for playing cricket: pads, helmet, gloves, box, whites. All of these things are connected to each other, and they are also connected to the world of cricket. They are made for purpose. So here we can think about the purpose or ‘what for’ of the tasks that the characters carry out. You might be familiar with ‘actioning’ the text as mentioned in Chapter 1, which is related to the ‘what for’. Here we see the much broader significance of our actions which are connected with those not present and ultimately for the sake of our own continued being and dwelling as mentioned earlier. By way of example, consider the contemporary artist Tracey Emin’s work My Bed (1998). She presents her bed complete with detritus surrounding, including worn underwear, the remnants of a personal breakdown, an empty vodka bottle, a used prophylactic and a plush toy, among other things. The work evokes a very specific and intimate world – or rather its traces in what has been left behind – and this kind of grouping of objects and equipment is not limited to man-made things. The bed is not a thing; it is a world. In order to investigate this notion of involvement further, consider that natural landscape and the way that it lends itself to tilling, sowing, farming and producing crops when we put the work in. The totality of the world is brought together by the unique being that exists within that world and brings it to life as we human beings ‘gather’ things together through our projects and involved activity. The word ‘involvement’ is a clue to deepening our investigation of the Question of Being through equipment. It can mean ‘relating to something’ (as in what is involved in putting an IKEA bed together) – more or less a set of instructions, steps of action to take and equipment to manipulate. If something is involved, it can sometimes mean that there are intricate steps and details in the task that require a certain level of expertise. But the word ‘involve’ can mean ‘being a part of something’ – the thing or task matters in some way. I could be involved in a political party or movement. I could be involved in lengthy legal proceedings. I could be ‘involved in a political party’. This sense has the idea of participating in a broader political movement and a shared understanding of the activities and tasks that are required to take part. We can also think of involvement as a certain relationship to other people – I have become involved with the neighbour across the street. This ‘in’ denotes a different sense of ‘in-ness’ from mere spatiality – it is a way of being. Being in a relationship gives a sense of connectedness to that

out person through this ‘in’. It is as if you have become part of that other person’s world and they part of yours. The in-ness of our being is more like to reside or dwell. But we tend to mistake our involvement in purely physical . Interestingly, when phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus introduces this idea, he reaches for a metaphor from the theatre:

Even now when we speak of being in the theater, we can mean both that someone is spatially in the theater and that the theater plays a crucial role in that person’s self-interpretation-or better, we may mean something more simple than either of these alternatives. When we recall that ‘in’ derives from ‘reside’, it jars us out of our assumption that our objective, ‘literal’ sense of ‘in’ is basic. (1991: 42)

Theatre is an intriguing word because it can mean the building in which performances take place and also the activity that happens there. In fact, it is a very good example because we might talk of ‘the theatre world’. That could include the Broadway or the West End ‘scene’ together with opening nights, parties and affairs. Or it could mean the apparatus of putting on plays – technicians, directors, stage managers, actors, rehearsal and performance. Returning to The Cherry Orchard, you might think about the way in which each character is entangled or engrossed in their own particular world. The worlds of this estate are not unified but fragmentary and disconnected, and the dramatic tension is created by their conflicts. Here is a point at which you might begin to map out the equipment that your character interacts with on a daily basis. What equipment, procedures and tasks are they familiar with? How do these fit with other people there in the world with them? What points in the play represent two different worlds rubbing up against one another? Perhaps the most obvious is Lopakhin and his business-minded practicality and Lyubov’s sheer indifference to commerce. But we could also think about Yasha’s disdain for his employers. Think about the senses of ‘in-ness’ that your character experiences according to the different affordances or involvements that they have with objects and the environment. Since objects can sometimes move across different worlds, think about the

involvements that surround them in particular circumstances. Think about the different worlds they cut across and different meanings they might take on. The nice thing about this way of thinking is that we can switch between worlds and modes of interacting with them depending on context. Sometimes, there can be conflict and dysfunction when multiple worlds collide and issue competing obligations on the individual acting within the situation. And this, of course, is at the heart of The Cherry Orchard itself. The characters are simultaneously in an ‘old’ world of aristocratic rule and the privilege of the gentry while at the same time, the ‘new’ world of mercantilism is taking hold. Think about Firs’s understanding of the context of his involvement – a very old style of relating to others and sense of formality. He prepares the samovar and other daily routines of traditional Russia. Or you might consider each character’s relationship to the train at a distance from the estate. To some, the locomotive is a symbol of hope and progress, to others it is the encroachment of modernity in this secluded country life. The train bringing Lyubov and her entourage home at the beginning of the play at 2.00 a.m. allows a transitional scene of reminiscence and otherworldly place of apparitions, sleep-filled wakefulness and unreliable perception. In addition to material involvement, there is also the emotional and romantic set of involvements at the centre of the drama here (as Chekhov remarked in a letter, the play has ‘a whole lot of love’). Lyubov has been involved with a swindler in Paris and as a result lost her financial independence – yet she is drawn back to him because he offers her an escape from the past. Even a simple thing like her newfound appreciation for coffee is a signal to the world of Paris and its set of equipment in everyday life. The telegram brings conflicting desires to decide on as she tries to destroy and deny in ripping the message up. Varya is involved with Lopakhin (notionally), but neither of them takes action to actually become engaged. She seems to be involved in some other realm of life, alluding to pilgrimages and holy places over and above her domestic duties here at the country estate. And he can only find meaning in work, labour and productivity. Anya reconnects with the cerebral Trofimov who encourages her to cut off her involvement with the estate and cast off the shackles of the dubious history of the place with respect to its enslavement of individuals in the past. The family itself is at the intersection of a set of overlapping worlds as evident in Gayev’s plan to rescue the family from debt: The Countess Aunt in Yaroslav, the people at the local district court, Lopakhin and his new wealth. The world and its involvements are changing, and the trick here is to explore these shifting affordances in rehearsal.

Involvement

• Choose an object and describe to a partner the network of other related pieces of equipment that go with that thing. So, for instance, if you chose Varya’s keys, it might lead you to consider the doors in the house, the housekeeping money box, domestic equipment for cleaning and so on. • Now think about different ways that your character can be ‘in’ their world. Explore the space in your studio as a fictional place in the world of the play. Think about the different ways that you can occupy the space. Expansively. Diminutively. Take large steps. Take small ones. Switch to different places, and describe to a partner how you felt in different contexts of ‘involvement’. • Experiment with different situations of involvement. Improvise a scene in which you are having an affair with another character. How does this change your relationship to the environment and the activity? Now imagine that you owe money to someone else and you need to find repayment. Imagine that this is the last time that you will carry out the particular activity of involvement that you have chosen. How does this fact change the activity? • From a design perspective, how might different networks of involvement or ‘affordances’ direct your creative approach to the mise en scène?

Touch

Yet another clue in our search for the elusive meaning of Being can be found in one’s experience of ‘touch’. Consider a table resting against a wall so that it touches it. Material objects can physically touch one another, but they do not have a sense of mattering to another. The table does not ‘matter’ to the wall. But my concern that the table might scratch the wall matters because I have guests arriving any minute and I want to impress them with my spotless house. Objects in our environment generally matter in so far as they are ‘handy’, that is, as they are of use (‘ready-to-hand’). But they also matter because the task we are involved in is important. If the weather is closing in, then the urgency of me finding the mallet to hammer the tent pegs into the earth matters (so that I can remain dry, enjoy my camping holiday and spend quality time with the family). The being of objects in this sense is also dependent upon the activities of the person doing them. We grasp things in our midst in that they allow us to carry on with our enterprises in the world. Yet they, too, fade into the background when we are concentrating on the task at hand. And likewise, their being might be shown in a different way if the object is encountered through a different task. The mallet I use to hammer my tent pegs becomes transformed when I grasp it as a means of self-defence against an approaching person threatening my life. Merleau-Ponty notes that touch is unique as a sense because we can touch ourselves, becoming both subject and object of the action (or perhaps our awareness switches between toucher and touched in the one act), and it is the sense by which we bring things close. So Being-in-the-world is not an ‘extra’ characteristic that we have. It is not something that is ‘added onto’ an object either. As we see from this discussion of involvement and inhabiting, the being of things in the world around us is part of a whole. Objects and people, for that matter, never exist in isolation. ‘No man is an island’, the poet John Donne famously put it. We are invested in the being of others there with us too. This leads to the question of where I begin and the world ends. The glasses at the end of my nose form an essential part of the way that I interact with the world. Are they part of me? My phone allows me to stay in touch with my friends and family, organize my life and provide ing moments of idle distraction. Is it part of me? The clothes that I wear indicate so

much about who I am and who I am trying to tell the world I am. Are they part of me? It does not really make sense to me to demarcate a clear beginning and end to the world even though we might assume that such a border exists for the most part. But I do not experience myself as a soup of experience mushed in with the rest of the world. Touch can differentiate or ‘light up’ a particular point of view that we take on at each moment. In fact, touch invites us into the world and navigates it in certain ways through repulsion and attraction (Dreyfus 2007). We bring things close and push others away by feeling. Far from remaining ive, there is something special about our Being-in-the-world that sets us apart from the soup of existence without consciousness as we bring things to presence through touch. With this in mind, it is revealing to find moments where characters interact with props and costume. Think about the feeling of touch that they experience, but then think about how that touch fades into the background when they are engaged in the tasks they are carrying out. Think about moments where they connect with the material world in which they dwell. Now think about moments where that connection fails. Next, think about when the characters literally touch each other in the play. Then you might consider how your character is touched by someone who is not present at all or even no longer present. Lyubov’s drowned son is the obvious example. The family estate seems to be drenched in his spirit. Yet Trofimov also notices the many peasants who have tended the land and property over the years with their very souls – to whom the current generation owes a great debt. In a much broader sense, you could consider the material world of nature as the great sustaining element of our existence that touches our every action. Gayev sets off on a poetic speech about the sun as it sets in Act II:

(Not loudly, but as if declaiming.) O nature, divine nature, you shine with an eternal radiance, beautiful and indifferent, you, whom we call Mother, contain within you both being and death, you give life and you destroy. (Chekhov 2009: 271)

It is as if he is reaching into the metaphysical significance of the sun and its

power over human existence, its sustaining qualities for human life but ultimately is material indifference to our continuing existence. The age is a metaphor for the world that is ing beyond this family as its remain idle on the estate – and in fact, shortly after this age, as the group falls silent, they hear the strange and out-of-place sound of a string snapping in the distance. But the silence and separation of the group seems to indicate that they have somehow become detached from the world. They are afraid of being ‘touched’, or they no longer have the capacity to feel.

Touch

• Focus your awareness on various things that you touch while carrying out a silent scene improvisation. Usually, the sensation of touch fades into the background but now you bring the sensation to the surface of your awareness. Describe it to a partner afterwards. • Experiment with different types of objects and the way that you touch them. Press heavily or lightly on the object. Touch quickly or deeply. Feel the object when you use it properly, with skill, or when it is broken. How does the object ‘become a part of you’ in your action? How does it alter your body when you interact with it? • Now choose another character in your scene. Touch that person ‘in character’. What feels right? What feels wrong? What are the rules of touch at play between them? • In character, describe a moment from your past that touched you. (Take, for example, Lopakhin’s description of Lyubov’s care for him when he was a young boy beaten by his father.) How does the memory bring touch back to life? • Describe someone whose touch you can still feel even though they are no longer there. Now think about a touch that you have forgotten or is somehow out of reach. What is it like to be touched by someone who is gone?

Being elsewhere

The next stop on our phenomenological journey of discovery involves getting a sense of the ‘where’ and the ‘in’ of these characters from The Cherry Orchard. Humans are not ‘in’ the world in the way that water is in a cup or a chair is in the room. We are in the world in the sense that things are of consequence to us about that world and we are going about tasks in order to carry on. We have a vested interest in the way that things turn out, and somehow the totality of things in our world are connected to one another. They fit together as a complete whole. Our Being-in is not merely a set of spatial coordinates as when we might find ourselves on Google Maps. The environment through which we walk is imbued with emotions, memories and sensations. Here we return to the idea of ‘dwelling’ in a phenomenological sense – we do not just live in a house, for instance. It is not the same as any old public building that we enter and exit. We belong there – we are ‘at home’. This brings up a whole bunch of other things such as a sense of security, familiarity with the space, control over things, a sense of rootedness, containing all of the things that will give us nourishment and shelter. Alternatively, we might make do with an unfamiliar environment. We can cope and work out what to do in an alien world, led by our past experiences and capacity for action. In order to do so, we need to work out how to manipulate the world to our own advantage. We might begin by looking at the scene and location for Act II. We from the beginning of the play that Madame Ranyevskaya (Lyubov) and Anya have come back from Paris. Lopakhin advises the family to convert the cherry orchard on the estate into holiday lettings to create a much-needed income stream. With Lyubov having delayed making a decision, the estate is now up for sale. It is summer as Act II opens. The location is out in a field near an abandoned shrine. There are tombstones in a dilapidated state and a garden seat. On the other side of some dark poplars lies the cherry orchard boundary. Beyond the telegraph poles in the distance is a large town – the modern world is an increasing threat to this country estate and its way of life. And finally (not without symbolic significance), it is sunset. There is something coming to an end here as we enter into the liminal threshold of twilight (as opposed to the approaching dawn of Act I).

The fictional space of the scene is a key here. What is the purpose of the old bench out in the estate among dilapidated gravestones and a little shrine? Of course, while this world is familiar to the characters, it also takes on a symbolic meaning for the audience. It is a place of past worship that is no longer tended to. Was it a family shrine or place for peasant reverence? Either way, it represents a past world that has long since been left behind. We are no longer in the formal structure of the estate, but in the natural world too – with a hint of encroaching civilization and industrialization in the distance. The very environment seems to be against the family, as Yepikhodov notes at the beginning of the play. At the end, Lopakhin suggests that it is sunny and clear and this should bring beauty and happiness, but in fact, it is cold and there is frost around, bringing an altogether different mood. In these moments, the ability to grasp beauty in the environment is relative to the observer – and what should be pleasurable to these characters is painful. The orchard itself raises issues about worth, land value, historical and national value (it is in the encyclopaedia as a place of national significance, we are told), its ability to produce fruit only once every two years and the jam and preserves that used to yield (according to Firs, although no one re the recipe now). The estate itself represents a place in transition from being a home to becoming something else’s property. The thought reminds us of how human beings are bound up by ‘inhabiting’. Yet in this case, the habitat is being taken away. Think of some different worlds that you inhabit. What does it feel like to run onto the football field? What is it like to arrive home at your front door? How do you inhabit the supermarket? Is it a transitory space? Is it a space through which you transit? Is it a protective space? Is it a public space? We have particular ways of being in a different world. Think of the way in which you might cast your eyes down and make yourself small on the underground train system. Think of the way that you open up and expand on a coastal walk along a vast cliff-face. In fact, this might indicate that we do not just inhabit one world. We skip between worlds, environments and contexts depending on our mode of inhabiting at each point in time. And finally, as mentioned in the previous section, the past of this estate also lingers in reminiscences of place – especially the nursery at the beginning. Lyubov is transported back to when she was a little girl at the sight of the white room. She bids farewell to the house at the end of the play as if it were a person, soon to be destroyed by the progress to come. But unlike Gayev’s inappropriate rhapsodizing, Lyubov’s speech to this inanimate

building rings true for the family now that it has been sold. It is not a public eulogizing but a final realization of emotional connection.

Being at Home

• Pick a place that your character feels most comfortable in. Explore it and describe it through an improvisation. What offers a feeling of comfort? • Explore the scene of each of the acts from The Cherry Orchard (note that Acts III and IV are the same). How does your character feel about the place? How might this internal feeling be incorporated into the production design? • Imagine your journey to this particular scene. You could depict and describe your arrival from the train station, for instance. How did you get to this location from the ading room or space? Act out the journey. • Choose a place in the ‘world’ that is operating in your play (the world of the doctor, the world of the musician, the world of the merchant, the world of the governess, the world of the fading aristocrat). Think of all the different ‘objects’ that exist in that world. What things do you associate with them? The world is, in one sense, the totality of things in that world. • Now think about the being of Nature. How does it show itself to you in the world ‘untouched’ by humans? But the natural world surrounds us and sustains us too. We cannot escape it although we rarely see it. How might this influence your stage design?

In a phenomenological sense, then, we are never really in just one place. We carry the places that we have been in our lives with us at all times. Specific experiences can summon those locations back all at once. And more often than not, this feeling will summon the people we encountered in those places into

presence. I often have dreams about the house in which I grew up – sometimes with a mixed-up feeling that I know that the property is no longer my family’s. I feel both at home and not quite at home because there is an awkwardness or concern in the dream that I will be discovered walking about the rooms that I knew so well. I can see specific interactions that I had with my family and perhaps even material traces of those events – a dent in the wall, a paver that was laid in the backyard. Even more so, when we are engaged in activities, often human beings are somewhere quite other than their immediate surroundings. A song or a smell can set off the most vivid remembrance of rooms and gardens we know so well along with what was happening at that very moment. It could be a room, a building, a suburb or a city. Sometimes the place where we are might summon up where we want to be. The drink station summons on a long hot road that forms the route of a marathon. The boudoir beckons on a romantic date. Sometimes we might even be somewhere else at a specific moment in time. An imaginary hole burns in the wall as the judges consult regarding the winner of the singing competition that I have just competed in. The operating theatre bursts into my mind as I wait for my wife who is in for surgery. In our workshop of The Cherry Orchard in 2017, I asked the company of actors to consider ‘the feeling of not being at home’ for each of these characters; it is clear that there is something strange and alien about the country estate that does not feel quite right for these characters (Johnston 2018). The places where the characters are not intruding upon where they are. Gayev’s billiard parlour at the social club in town is his place of escape that becomes vivid in his imagination, a distraction from his real situation. For Yasha, Paris represents a world free from stifling traditions and expectations and opening up a new way of being – he begs Lyubov to take him back. For Firs, he sees himself not being somewhere else but rather as some time in the past: back in the good old days when aristocrats were in charge and the servants were very clear about their place. The new possibilities of social mobility represent a threat to old certainties regardless of inequity. For Trofimov, he projects himself into an imaginary future that has transcended social oppression. Charlotta feels something like a ghost in this world where nobody really listens to her. Her ventriloquist act is a theatrical attempt to summon up somebody with whom she can actually converse since there is nobody else who is able to listen to her. Almost everyone in The Cherry Orchard would for one reason or another rather be somewhere else than where they actually are – whether through fear or fancy. There is an incessant sense of being elsewhere reflected in the fact that the

characters do not quite communicate with one another. It is as though they are in parallel but unconnected worlds and never really ‘touch’ one another. Some of the characters are ‘ing through’ (such as the tramp and, one might suspect, Yasha). Varya is rooted to this place with a sense of obligation and responsibility. While Lyubov is drawn back here only because of necessity, Dunyasha is dreaming of life in a different place with her newly found womanhood. She dances with gentlemen and jumps out of her station. Upon finally acquiring the property, Lopakhin is back facing his father who beat him as a child. The purchase is his revenge for his treatment. Pishchik is obsessed with money and trying to get it despite coming from a noble and aristocratic family. He is always ahead of himself at a meeting with the bank to pay his interest. He even quotes Nietzsche, fancying that it is okay to forge bank notes! (Although he its he has not read the philosopher’s work directly but that his daughter mentioned it once.) He dances with Lyubov merely to get money in this social context. Chekhov finds a dramatic expression for this ‘being somewhere else’ in the stagecraft of the play. In Act III, for instance, the Klezmer band positioned just offstage in another room gives this sense of the ball as happening somewhere else or at least not quite here. It creates the effect that life is what happens to other people. Likewise, the auction of the estate is happening off in town at this very moment, and Lyubov is anxious as to the result – she is anywhere but present because of this unknown. Once again, the train arrives and waits to leave at the station a few miles away from the estate, thus bookending the play.

Being Elsewhere

• Improvise a scene and ‘snap’ or ‘jump’ to being somewhere else in the world of the play like a space-jump exercise. How might your character’s behaviours change when they switch between different worlds and locations? (For example, Paris, the train station, the dining club in town, the servant’s quarters, the field with a little shrine or the ballroom.) • Read through a scene and walk towards a character that you are listening to. Walk away if you are not listening and want to be somewhere else.

• Pick a number of places where you might ‘be’ in your mind as you play a scene. Use the text to that to take you to each new place as you go. How does this affect your physical state? • How might you bring these absent places to life when directing a scene?

Other people

The phenomenon of ‘Being-with’ others is developed in more detail in the following chapters, but it is impossible to avoid the idea here and it is essential to Chekhov’s work. From a phenomenological point of view, we never simply exist as isolated individuals encountering the world and objects as equipment and stark material. We dwell alongside others who have the same kind of being as ourselves. Nevertheless, although we might not like to it it, we are as much made up of other people there with us in our world, just as much as we are formed by enterprising interactions with our environment and our given biological capacities. Think about the other people who are there ‘with’ these characters even though they are not physically present. Perhaps the most prominent and haunting is Lyubov’s son who is no longer with them. But the husband, father and former master who died is also there, especially for Anya. The lover who swindled Lyubov of money lingers in the desperate situation of the family even though Lyubov is conflicted in her feelings for this charlatan. Consider Yasha’s mother who has turned up to see him on several occasions but is ignored by her son. Think about Lopakhin’s father who beat him as a child (made present by the return of Lyubov who tended to him as a child). His present situation as a wealthy businessman is driven by this experience as he attempts to rise above the station of peasant. But when he finally achieves his goal of owning the estate, there is no one there to celebrate with him (although Yasha obligingly drinks his champagne – or sparkling white wine as is pointed out). Consider Trofimov’s advice to Lopakhin to stop waving his arms about in gesticulation. Of course, what he means is that all of his ostentation and building of cottages is not really a matter of helping those people who will live in the cottages become landowners. In contrast to Lyubov’s carelessness with money, the self-made merchant profits off others in a different way. We do need to be careful of placing undue shame on Lopakhin, however, because Chekhov is careful to make him a complex character rather than a stereotype. I would argue that none of the characters are ever truly ‘with’ one another in any authentic way. They are off in their own worlds and demonstrate a spectacular

failure to connect in any meaningful sense. With the zealousness of an evangelical, Trofimov believes that he is on the right path in contrast to Lopakhin. He imagines a march towards truth, neglecting those in his immediate vicinity:

To avoid the petty and illusionary that interferes without being free and happy, that is the goal of meaning in our lives. Forward! We are going irresistibly toward a bright star which shines in the distance! (Chekhov 2009: 274)

Yet Trofimov gives a convincing philosophical point of view earlier on emphasizing the ‘Being-with others’ that is constantly experienced in our interaction with the world is Trofimov’s ‘all Russia is our Orchard’ monologue (2009: 274). He recognizes that the very land they walk on is built on the back of peasant labour and all present enjoyment of the environment owes its existence to their toil. He imagines that in each tree is the soul of a serf from the past calling to the present for suffering, labour and redemption. The present becomes a future-past, and the young student presents a view of the current generation bequeathing a legacy for future generations but swamped with a moral obligation for making reparations for the past. The irony of the play’s ending, of course, is that no such penance is forthcoming, and the family simply walk away (even forgetting Firs, the servant, who will presumably freeze in their absence). Life must inexorably go on, and the truth is that no one really has an exclusive attachment to this place as a home anymore. No one makes a genuine and positive decision, but rather the sale of the property is thrust upon the family. At the end of the play, the old servant is almost like a ghost of the past lagging behind when everyone else has left. In a way, it is not possible for him to enter into the new world and so too does the rest of the family forget him. The bane of idealism is the failure to see what is very much right in front of you.

Being-with

• Choose another character from the play and stand them up in the middle of the space. Talk to them as if you were a ghost returning to say the things that you really felt towards them. • Create a series of frozen tableaux to depict the different relationships between characters in the world of the play. How do they change throughout the drama? • Think about how your character uses other people as a means to get what you want. Talk through a plan to achieve your goal and how you will position others in the scene to get it. Play out the improvisation. For instance, approach the rich aunt to ask for money. Let the other character push back – make it hard to get what they want. • Choose an object that brings the being of someone else into presence. How does it make you feel? What was the specific moment that made the object important? What does it make you want to do? • How might you signal the relationships and connections between characters in the stage design? What about the use of props and costume?

Chekhov does not really give a clear statement of what Authenticity would look like for these characters from a fading Russian aristocracy (not that he would even use such a term, of course). There are glimmers of truth and goodness in each member of the household, but something stops each good intention from connecting with others there in this home. The downside of Lyubov’s generosity is her failure to attend to pressing financial matters. The double effect of Lopakhin’s business acumen is that he takes away the very thing that keeps this family together. Firs is loyal to the point that he fails to recognize the world has moved on. Yasha has already jumped ahead to a new age of freedom, thus neglecting the present. Varya is virtuous but gets left behind in penitent selfdenial. Trofimov remains with his head in the clouds in his search for truth, forgetting what is right in front of him. The ambivalence in the play’s resolution pushes the question of Authenticity back for the audience to answer. How can we be with others in a truthful way in our own lives? This question is never in

doubt for the central character in the play explored in the next chapter. She never wavers from choosing herself from her ownmost possibilities.

4

Authenticity and Freedom: Antigone

Now we jump back almost two and a half thousand years to the Classical Age of Ancient Greece in the fifth century bce. Imagine the great city with its Parthenon on the Acropolis. Envisage the impressive amphitheatre nestled into the southern slope of the mountain with monumental buildings as its backdrop at the top and the audience abuzz with anticipation of the performance about to begin. It is no mistake that Athens offered fertile ground for philosophy. Debate was at the heart of everyday life in this leading Attic city – in the marketplaces, temples and homes. Yet the contest of ideas had real consequences: the authorities condemned Socrates to death by poison, possibly because he asked uncomfortable questions (although the official charge was corrupting the Athenian youth). The Greeks did not just discuss philosophy, they enacted it in public life and – as we will see in this chapter – performed it on stage. Playwrights dramatized political and philosophical questions about how to live and act by embodying both mythical cycles and events from recent history so that audiences could experience them with their eyes and ears. It is also no mistake that Plato’s philosophical texts took the form of dialogue given that discussion and drama went hand in hand with philosophy in the performance of ideas. Heidegger was very much taken by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s German translation of Antigone which he believed demonstrated a special relationship between poetry and Being – particularly the ‘Ode to Man’ Chorus (First Stasimon) where Sophocles considers the dual nature of man’s being which is both awesome and fearful (Heidegger 1959). For this reason, I have chosen Antigone as a focal point in the investigation of theatre phenomenology. In this chapter, I will look closely at sections from the play through five parts (including the prologue and exodos) and draw upon different phenomenological themes for the sake of practical exploration in each section. Since the themes are applicable and relevant both to other sections and to the play as a whole (and

other theatrical works, for that matter), you are welcome to explore further on your own and in your rehearsals or workshop. I have chosen a number of fundamental existential horizons or phenomenological themes, including Falling, Nothingness, Moods, and Thrownness and Destiny, in suggesting a pathway inspired by the text for an ensemble to explore in an embodied way. Each of these characteristics of Dasein is based on an intertwined unity between self, other and world. As played out in Sophocles’ drama, there is a call to take resolute action in order to become oneself rather than simply be handed over by the circumstances we find ourselves in. My hope is that these existential concepts may well be inspirational to artistic creativity as well as philosophical examinations of being and self. In this way, Heidegger’s descriptions of the phenomenological horizons of Being can help to frame the fictional world of the play stemming from its historical specificity, the lifeworld of the artist and the with-world of the audience seeking communion and connection.

Figure 4: Antigone seminar workshop, The University of Sydney, 2019. Photograph by Daniel Johnston.

Drama was much more than a few hours of entertainment for the citizens of this founding city of democracy (more specifically, democracy for male citizens). Performance embodied a special kind of civic discussion and took an active role in shaping and reflecting public debates in politics (Cartledge 1993). Competition was central to Athenian culture – expressed in the concept of αγωνία (agonia), meaning ‘struggle’ or ‘striving’. Drama represented the epitome of competition at the great festivals, as the various tribes of the city were pitted against one another through performance and each theatrical production was designed to win over, move and convince audiences and judges. Yet the City Dionysia – the festival that included these competitions in addition to processions, sacrifices and drinking – was also a key event in the religious calendar and served an important ritual function with respect to the cycle of seasons and the city calendar. It is hard to think of an equivalent in today’s world (at least in the West), because there really is not one unifying set of religious beliefs that binds such communities together. From a phenomenological point of view, it is appealing to imagine the smells, sounds and embodied sensations of being at the theatre and performing as part of the festival. What would it feel like to express civic duty by performing in this sacred space? What sounds would you hear reverberating through the amphitheatre? What sense of anticipation with the selected judges having taken their place in the audience on this auspicious holiday? What pressing political significance brought special bearing on this play being presented right now? Historical research will be helpful to you as you unpack the available meanings in the extant play texts from this period in an informed way. But over and above a historical imagination of the past, there is also something to be explored in of Being-in-the-world today in this play from the ancient world, as we will see. It is no mistake that many key stories written for performance at the height of the Athenian Empire were not set in Athens itself, but in the nearby rival city of Thebes – a projected location for cautionary tales and what not to do and how to

avoid a state of civic strife. Much in the same way as we might now watch a period drama or science fiction adventure in space that reflects contemporary and immediate issues in society, so too did the Athenians use Thebes as a fictional location upon which to project its own debates. In of modern stagecraft, it is doubtful that we can simply approach Ancient Greek drama in the same way as we might explore a character-driven, narrative-based work of dramatic naturalism. Zachary Dunbar and Stephe Harrop (2018) suggest that a purely psychological-Stanislavskian approach to performing Greek Tragedy (focusing only on internal action) with a ‘logocentric’ attitude towards text (that takes words as referring to a stable referent in the world) is misguided and limiting for the contemporary actor. Similarly, the authors argue that privileging the type of formalism as set out in centuries of Aristotelian criticism is misguided. For Dunbar and Harrop, a flexible ‘psychophysical’ approach (in Stanislavski’s later ‘Active Analysis’ improvisation work to explore meaning in the text with attention to both physical and psychological aspects of creativity) avoids such a narrow and misdirected understanding of ancient Greek performance. This different approach is

to abandon two fundamental assumptions, which (in the experience of the volume’s authors) almost all of our students, colleagues, and collaborators bring to the task of acting tragedy. The first is that an ancient tragic drama may be treated just like a modern play-text, peopled by naturalistically motivated characters, with complex inner lives, whose journeys through the play follow logical, legible, and uninterrupted arcs. The second is that an ancient drama’s author will have adhered to classical principles of plotting, presenting a narrative focused upon a hero’s ‘tragic fall’, resulting in a play-text which obeys a series of structural rules, and therefore offers a predictably organized series of intense emotional effects. (2018: 3–4)

Dunbar and Harrop sketch a process informed by embodied elements, including sound, space, performing myth more generally and the unique theatrical element of the Greek chorus. Building on these ideas (or, rather, bending them through a

phenomenological lens), I intend here to offer further philosophical prompts for contemporary performance makers. Sophocles produced many works for the Festival of Dionysus, an event held on a holiday in spring when citizens would attend a series of plays presented in competition composed of performance troupes led by coryphaei representing the various demes of the city. Through these theatrical presentations, Athens actively debated the tensions between public obligation and private interests of its citizens and their families, morality, piety and ethical demands. Arguably, the festival itself contributed to the development of democracy in the city in the first place, and given that performing groups were separated into clans, the event may have highlighted familial ties, possibly ing a reading sympathetic to Antigone’s defence of familial obligation (Rose 2012). Although the myths presented onstage were largely familiar to Athenian audiences, they were constantly reinterpreted in new ways to suit the times. The meaning of existence is vital for Antigone in the dramatic arc of this story. As the daughter of the great Oedipus and the cursed family of the Theban King Laius of the House of Cus, she responds to the call of divine obligation. Her backstory would have been familiar to the ancient Greek audience partly because these myths were deeply ingrained in the psyche of Athenian consciousness through constant retelling and recurring artistic and theatrical representations of these stories (although details and some elements differ in various renditions). The Ancient Athenians lived in an oral culture with storytelling at its heart. As one version of the story goes, the patriarch of Antigone’s family, Cus, founded Thebes by planting dragons’ teeth in the ground from which sprang a band of warriors of whom five survived and became ancestors to the city. The immediate events preceding the action in this play are set off with the death of Antigone’s father, the infamous Oedipus. In the period that follows, Oedipus’s two sons Eteocles and Polyneices are at war. It had been agreed that each would rule the city state by alternating every year as king, but the former went back on his promise after the very first period of rule. Polyneices then raised an army from Argos and attacked Thebes, but in the ensuing battle the two brothers killed each other. Although the work concludes the trilogy in of story, Antigone was the first of Sophocles’ ‘Theban Plays’ to be written and performed. The story cycle was completed over 30 years as Sophocles connected these inevitably unfolding events in his plays. First, it is useful to revise the key events of Antigone. After an attempted

invasion of the city, two brothers – Polyneices (who attempted to attack with Argive forces) and Eteocles – are dead, having killed each other in battle over Thebes. Antigone tells of plans to inter Polyneices who was been left unburied and entreats her sister to help. Creon decrees that anyone caught attempting to bury the disgraced brother will be sentenced to death. Initially, the Chorus of Theban citizens agree with their king, grateful for the victory in repelling the invading forces. A watchman arrives and gives the terrible news that the body of the treacherous brother has been disturbed and an attempt at burial made, although exactly who did this is unknown. The Chorus begins to become uneasy, suspecting the intervention of the gods. The king sends the watchman back out to guard over the body, and when he returns, he brings Antigone back, having caught her red-handed. The young princess freely its to the crime but argues that divine obligations supersede the laws of the living. Creon orders that both Antigone and Ismene are to forfeit their lives for the action, while Ismene attempts to claim responsibility for the burial (even though she was not, in fact, involved). We learn that Antigone is engaged to Creon’s son, Haemon, who confronts his father afterwards, whereupon the young prince then falls out with the king after initial loyalty. Teiresias, the soothsayer, also finds himself in dispute with the king and predicts imminent disaster that will be delivered to the family. At the last moment, Creon relents and rushes to free Antigone from being buried alive in a stone cave, but it is too late. A messenger arrives and we learn that Haemon is dead. Upon hearing the news, Eurydice, his mother (and wife to Creon), exits to the palace and kills herself (while also grieving for the earlier loss of her older son, Megareus). Creon is left with nothing but loss, thus fulfilling the Chorus’s declaration that as mortals we have no escape from the fate of Hades. In contrast to The Cherry Orchard explored in the previous chapter, Antigone is not about a failure on the part of the central character to connect with others in the world and authentically engage with the community around them. Quite the opposite is true in this play if we take Antigone as the protagonist. Indeed, by giving his play the title ‘Antigone’ (rather than ‘Creon’), Sophocles shifts the focus of tragedy from the monarch to the opponent of unchallenged power. This version of myth emphasizes how the Thebans cannot accept this degree of Authenticity in an individual, since Antigone defies state authority in an extraordinary set of actions as Butler (2000) notes. The rule of law in Thebes is seemingly out of touch with piety, dignity and respect such that it leads to the unwarranted death of this figure struggling against the tide, as tragic fate hovers over the unravelling events. The story is a warning to the people of Athens

against unchecked tyranny and power, blindly following law, inflexible legislation that is insensitive to human and historical needs, a lack of listening to one’s fellow citizens, overconfidence in one’s own knowledge, pride in one’s presumed exclusive access to reason, respect for the dead and piety before the mysteries of the gods – a sentiment equally applicable to our own age. In other words, the play is a warning about the seductiveness of the world and how we can become lulled into our own sense of control and certainty about it only to learn that there are forces operating beyond any mortal’s control that determine destiny. In this respect, incompatible moral and political requirements are at the heart of the tragedy – and mutually contradictory requirement of the gods (perhaps not unlike that which Kierkegaard [2006] examined in Fear and Trembling many centuries later with respect to Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac). However, the Athenian audience would have held a firm belief in one’s duty to bury the dead – even one’s enemies – as their army had done in recent times. In the critical literature, Antigone’s actions have been interpreted as the dissolution of kinship as the basis for society to be replaced by universal principles of ethics and morality by Hegel, for instance. But like Judith Butler (2000) and Luce Irigaray (2013), I am not so sure that this is quite right. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (2008) argues that Antigone’s actions demonstrate the death drive in human nature and also the possibility of transcending the limits of the symbolic order (language, laws, customs, representation, society, etc.). He ires Antigone’s grasp on selfhood, and from a phenomenological perspective, that is a good place to begin. What is it like to act in an authentic way that is out of step with the world? With whom do we identify in viewing such an act of transcendence? One of the main criticisms of Heidegger’s of Authenticity is that he outlines what it means to be inauthentic rather than give clear examples of the positive mode of existence. In Antigone, we see such an exploration – of what it means to choose oneself for oneself and for an individual to become who she is.

Falling

This first term to investigate in your studio practice of Antigone is ‘Falling’ (Verfallen) as a constant movement towards ‘forgetfulness of Being’ in our actions and choices. The term is useful in reflecting on creative practice itself as well as analysing the text in this sense. First, we can see a kind of falling back in Creon the lawmaker’s ὕβρις (hubris) in ignoring the call of the gods and arrogantly trying to stamp his own authority on the city. Falling is also relevant to Ismene’s initial refusal to help Antigone bury her brother because she would rather stay in the safe boundaries of her uncle’s proclamations than follow what is right and sacred. Similarly, even the Chorus falls back into line for fear of the king rather than standing up for what is humane and just. This section considers the prologue with Antigone and Ismene, Watchman and Creon, and First Stasimon, noting how the characters are seduced by the easy path. The forgetfulness of Being here stems from failing to see Being-in-the-world as it is: most of the time, we have a tendency to interpret ourselves in of those things that we encounter on a day-to-day basis rather than come face to face with our own being. Because we dwell in a world surrounded by material objects, we come to see ourselves in of the things that we see and encounter for the most part. We are intrinsically incomplete in this mode in that we come to treat both ourselves and others merely as present-at-hand or as equipment for use in the world. Falling in this sense can trigger an abrogation of ethical responsibility and results from avoiding the call of Being itself. The given circumstances in which the sisters Antigone and Ismene find themselves are fearful. The events that have led to the mutual fratricide of their brothers have been set in motion by the actions of their father, the great Oedipus, if we are to believe that there has been divine premonition of the events. As women, they are denied a voice in deciding the fate of their brothers’ bodies as the power rests with their uncle. Their choices are also restricted: to obey the wishes of their king’s law and turn their back on their brother Polyneices to be eaten by birds of prey and denied due age into the afterlife; or take action and pay homage to family and the gods. One sister obeys this higher demand while the other refuses to act in violation of the citizen’s consent. These are two ships taking very different courses. Ismene claims that Antigone is hunting for

what is beyond her means, although in fact she is reaching beyond the Thrownness of her own existence to choose herself through her actions (see the section that follows). Antigone says to her sister, ‘Put your own life straight’, as she chooses a path that will lead in only one direction. In phenomenological , she refuses the pull of Falling and projects herself as her ‘ownmost’ choice even though this will lead to her own demise. Heidegger employs the word ‘Fallenness’ to describe this specific mode of Dasein. The term brings to mind ideas such as deteriorating, lapsing into bad habits and falling victim to something. It also echoes a sense of losing control of one’s own being in some way and simply having it handed over by the world. We are mostly ‘alongside’ the world that concerns us at any given point, as we become absorbed in it while carrying out our tasks and activities. But in doing so we are guided by ‘idle talk’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘ambiguity’. We coast along with ‘platitudes’ (such as ‘death will come one day, but not now’) and become careful not to inquire too deeply into the meaning of things or our own being. We are infatuated with the latest fashions and fads, sometimes becoming fixated on the present and what is before us right here and right now rather than thinking about the possibilities that are open to us in the future or the past that allowed for our existence in the first place. By succumbing to the temptation of Falling, we get swept up in public interpretations of the shared lifeworld and interpret ourselves in of what other people are doing. We keep up with the Joneses. We buy the latest iPhone. We fall prey to the interpretations of tradition (especially when it comes to the meaning of Being), and this inhibits our ability to do philosophy. We tend to keep doing things in the same way and go about our business without question. Arguably, today we come to accept ourselves as consumers and inevitably as part of a global financial system based on trade while constantly remaining jacked into social media. Or perhaps we resign ourselves to being data to be manipulated through an algorithm as we once unquestioningly accepted our position as subjects to the king. Before that, we were creatures of God. To resist these metaphysical systems requires an individual choice by attending to Being itself made possible in the historical circumstances. The idea of Falling invokes Christian connotations of sin which is said to have led to Adam and Eve being banished from paradise. On this conception, the prefall condition was complete and innocent, but when these humans entered the world, they lacked perfection and were subject to error in the exercise of free

will. Self-knowledge is symbolized in the stolen apple from the tree of knowledge and the resulting self-awareness causes us to become ashamed of our nudity. We were no longer in a natural state but debased through desire, lust and power. Heidegger claims that his use of Falling is very different from this religious interpretation, but some have interpreted elements of his thought as a secularization of Kierkegaard’s perspective which was imbued with a theological position. In phenomenological , we are ‘guilty’ as beings because we are always chasing an incomplete project: there is always more to be done as we are called by Being to inquire into ourselves and choose our ownmost Being. This is in effect what Antigone does through her steadfast commitment. Antigone begins as two women enter the stage (possibly one from inside the palace and the other from the path leading from the city). We hear that Antigone has been looking for Ismene, her sister. Upon finding her sole remaining sibling, Antigone greets her with closeness and affection, indicating they were born from the same womb and in the same breath mentioning Ismene’s ‘head’ (which was considered to be the centre of feeling for the Ancient Greeks). She recounts the inconceivable horrors seen that day and the proclamation of the ‘general’ (here meaning Creon but a position held by Pericles in Sophocles’ Athens when he wrote the play). Antigone asks her sister what suffering from Zeus is yet to be fulfilled, given these unfortunate events. We learn from Ismene that the enemy from Argos which had been led by Polyneices has fled in defeat but no further news from their friends has been heard since the death of the two brothers. This opening scene sets out utter desolation and inconceivable grief as the world belonging to these two women has been ripped apart. Evils lurk outside the city despite the fact that the immediate threat has abated. Antigone has apparently turned blue after straining to call out for her sister – distraught in mind perhaps like the sea when it has been disturbed. She relates how the king has ordered a grave for one of their brothers and left the other to rot. What is extraordinary is that Antigone does not seek to preserve her own life, given that her very being is under imminent threat throughout the action. She puts piety and honour for her dead brother above all else – above her betrothed Haemon, above respect and obedience for the uncle and ruler. In this respect, the work lays out a phenomenology of sacrifice. Incidentally, the name ‘Antigone’ means ‘against the family’ and includes the double meaning of both ‘opposed to’ and ‘very close to’ in the sense of nearness. The dual aspect in the name results in ‘that which is closest’ and ‘that which one is against’. In a way, the selfconflict stands in for Antigone as an individual, for Oedipus’s family and for the

city of Thebes itself. One might also ask whether this is true of Dasein as ‘that which is closest’ as Heidegger defines it. ‘Falling’, in this sense, is to turn to the easy choice rather than take responsibility for one’s own actions and their consequences. In your theatrical practice, it may be useful to explore this internal conflict in the character both for Antigone and for the other characters. The king is on his way to ban any attempt to bury Polyneices on pain of public stoning. As such, the punishment would be carried out by the entire community with no individual able for the murder (perhaps reminding us of the anonymous ‘They’ in such an action). In fact, this debate about mutual responsibility and guilt is key to interpreting the play as a whole, both in of Oedipus’s family and the city of Thebes. Antigone reveals the plan to her sister and asks her to help bury the corpse – but there is a question as to whether Polyneices’ body is a mere ‘thing’. The princess will not be caught betraying her brother – in contrast to the historical Thebans who had ed the Persians in opposing Athens. In response to Ismene’s argument against breaking Creon’s law, Antigone replies, ‘He has no right to keep me from my own’ (line 49). In a sense, she identifies that her brother is part of her own self, and in her actions, she seeks to transcend the immediate concerns and threat of her own needs, this world and its powers:

Go on and be the way you choose to be. I Will bury him. I will have a noble death And lie with him, a dear sister with a dear brother. Call it a crime of reverence, but I must be good to those Who are below. I will be there longer than with you. That’s where I will lie. You, keep to your choice: Go on insulting what the gods hold dear. (lines 71–77, original emphasis)

Witnessing the approach of the Chorus in the next section, it is worth noting that there would have been many military resonances for the Athenian audience – not in the least the drumbeat resembling the sound of hoplites charging into battle. The of the Chorus themselves would have been young men (although they are playing the old men of Thebes in this instance), and the choreographic formations would be informed by the infantry training and regimentation with which they were familiar. Likewise, there are also nautical allusions in the text which would have evoked the battle of Salamis still fresh in the memory of the Athenians. Sophocles himself fought with his fellow citizens and led a chorus of celebration after the famous naval conflict. The story would also have reminded audiences of the island of Samos which had just been brought under Athenian control once more, as many of its citizens were brutally executed. It is mostly because of the strength of its navy that Athens was able to rise as a dominant power in the Greek world. In this sense, the drama issues a warning against Falling by choosing power and subjection over honour and duty. Despite the horror of the attempted invasion of Thebes in this play by Polyneices and the army raised from the men of Argos – of which they give a short recount – the Chorus pleads, ‘[t]herefore let us forget our pain’ (lines 148–54) while they seek solace in Bacchanalian drinking and dancing. On the one hand, this seems reasonable in of psychological self-preservation. On the other hand, Antigone will not forget and wants to face up to the reality of what has happened. The Chorus chooses to turn away from the horror of their circumstances while the young princess faces it with the full force of awareness. Again, this draws in the theme of Falling in the sense of forgetfulness of Being – a turning away from truth and its disclosure. Creon then announces his law based on the belief that the first duty of citizens should always be to the good of the city. The speech is statesman-like and lays out the reasons for his actions. He suggests that the true essence of a man is tested when he is entrusted with power and the ability to legislate, yet he spurns any leader who ignores the best counsel available or places their personal friendships and relationships over the good of the state. Nor would it even be possible to be friends with someone who is an enemy of the state – or so he suggests. For this reason, Creon holds Polyneices able for wanting to burn Thebes, raze the family temples and reduce the citizens to slavery. With his decree, the king does not require any immediate action from the citizens other than their loyalty and a commitment not to yield to anyone wishing to disobey the orders. The king enables the citizens to simply ‘fall’ into acquiescence rather

than question and reflect in any authentic way. At this point, a messenger arrives from the ramp up from the city. A Watchman from the battlefield appears, although he is not out of breath as you would expect of someone with an urgent communication. He explains how he changed his mind many times about telling Creon the news and turned around with frequent pausing along the way because he fears prosecution had he been found to be withholding the information. Even in the messenger’s words, there is considerable delay in delivering the news, foregrounding the evident innocence of the Watchman. But he finally reveals that the body of Polyneices has been given funeral rites and dusted with a light covering of soil thus ensuring that the corpse is undisturbed by dogs or beasts of prey. There are no marks in the surrounding earth as you would expect nor any evidence of a wagon used to bring the dirt. The sentinel describes how the discovery of this crime turned the duty guards on each other and drove them to deny guilt of the deed. Indeed, upon realizing that they must report the matter to the king, the guards drew lots, and the Watchman was the unlucky one chosen to deliver the bad news. Note the reluctance of the soldiers to take responsibility for the situation and fulfil their duty (similar to how the Chorus had also hoped to ignore the situation). Falling in this sense leads to fleeing from the world and rescinding one’s own responsibility, preferring rather to be lost in the crowd. The Chorus begins to wonder at that the mysterious burial and fear that it might even be the work of the gods, although this is immediately refuted by Creon who is outraged with the suggestion that supernatural agents would be against justice. How could the divinities be on the side of evil men over and above the good citizens of Thebes who show piety and give offerings in their temples? The followers of Polyneices, Creon reasons, are wicked because they have taken bribes, and this corrupts the soil thus leading to perversion. The Watchman then displays a degree of impertinence towards the king, asking whether he should speak or simply go, given the prolixity of the ruler. Creon’s ears sting with the news, but the messenger points out that the doer of the deed is the one who has caused real offence. Vowing never to return, the guard says that he owes the gods a considerable debt of gratitude. From here, the Chorus steps forward and recites an extraordinary and now famous piece of poetry that Heidegger (1959) himself reflected upon (in Hölderlin’s translation): ‘There is much that is strange, but nothing sures man in strangeness’ (lines 332–33). Humans can travel across vast cold seas

towering around, plough through the Earth, catch birds and creatures from the sea, ensnare animals from the mountains and tame horses and bulls. Humanity possesses swift language and thought, the ability to govern cities and shelter itself from the elements. Man is resourceful in his apprehension of the future, but the one thing he cannot evade is death, despite a knowledge of medicine. He has invention and skill, and wanders between good and evil, masters the laws of nature and civilization in justice. The Chorus proclaims that the ignoble man is not welcome in the city and vows never to have such people at their hearth. There is a duality here in that the human can be both magnificent and horrific. Although they might still be subject to Falling in that they defer to their king, the Chorus begins to open up a deeper investigation into the inevitability of death inherent in nature. When you investigate these events in the opening of the play in relation to Falling, I suggest that you find a physical expression for each ‘turning away’ from individual responsibility.

Falling

• Choose a moment in the opening scene between Antigone and Ismene. Think about whether your character is seduced by Falling (the concept of self as a mere thing with opinions handed over by the world) and if you resist or submit. Strike a series of three poses to demonstrate this seductive power acting upon her and present to the rest of the group. • Carry out a moving silent improvisation of the interaction between the two sisters. Find a physical embodiment of Ismene’s ‘turning away’ from the situation and ethical demand. Try this improvisation on a large scale (as if this turning were external to her) and then a smaller scale (as if the struggle is inward). • How do the characters in these opening scenes manipulate each other as pieces of equipment or means to an end? Choose a line to recite while being manipulated by the other character throughout the scene. Consider Creon’s exchange with the Watchman, for example, and play the scene with the guard standing still in the centre of the space and the king controlling the other man’s

body in the space. • To what extent is the Chorus sedated by a superficial approach to being and swayed by the ‘They’? Present an improvisation of the different fears and concerns of the people of Thebes. Find a physical representation for their tactics of avoidance of responsibility informed by the dialogue. • When do you find yourself reaching for platitudes and falling into idle talk about life and death? When do you avoid making an authentic decision about taking action? Construct an embodied image to represent the way the Watchman avoids making a choice. • Now read the First Stasimon of the Chorus as a warning against such falling by stepping out of the action of the play to comment on the story. Find physical images for the language of the text in movement and countermovement of the strophe and antistrophe .

Nothingness

What does it mean when someone says, ‘Just be yourself’? This advice is often given to candidates preparing for a job interview, young lovers going out on a date for the first time and even actors preparing for an audition. The phrase means taking off pretence and simulation which in itself can be difficult because the attempt can produce self-consciousness and self-awareness and stifle genuineness. From a phenomenological point of view, being yourself is to do with the choices you make and the possibilities you have. There is no objectively persistent ‘truthful’ inner core that is to be found in your psyche, no purely material self that is waiting to be revealed, no eternal soul as a thing that is yet to be unearthed. What makes us a Self in phenomenological is that we are based on a ‘Nullity’ – no-thing – because Dasein is not a thing. More generally, we might ask, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ What is nothing? On the one hand, there is the negation of particular things as in when we say, ‘There is no food in the fridge’, for example (in the sense of a particular kind of thing not being there). On the other hand, we might think about nothing itself – das Nichts – which Heidegger argues is important because it brings the totality of beings into view. Nothingness is what we fear in the mood of Anxiety where Being as a whole as one’s own being seems to be slipping away, denied of anything stable. This involves wresting ourselves away from the proximate things in our vicinity to consider Being as a whole. In such a Mood, we realize not only that there are things that are ‘not’ in specific circumstances, but the Nothing continues its negation persistently. Through Angst, we come face to face with this annihilation (see the next section for more on Moods). How can we rescue ourselves from such a seemingly hopeless thought? We humans have a particular kind of being that makes us unique among other entities in the world. Our being there – Dasein – is that which is closest to us at every moment. The problem as we have explored is that we often overlook what is close and fail to consider it in the first place. The ‘I myself am’ is the way that being is handed over to each of us and forms an essential part of how we can apprehend selfhood in the first place. For Heidegger, Dasein is ‘your being’,

‘their being’, ‘my being’ and ‘one’s being’ – all together without a singular form. It is that which is ‘most mine’ in each case. We cannot take that being and dissect it into component parts because it is never simply ‘present-at-hand’ before us as some object in the world might be. Yet we are deeply concerned with our own being and that it persists. This is what differentiates us from other entities ‘there’ in the world: we care about our being and seek to preserve it, not just in the sense of biological life, but as Being-in-the-world. The alternative in annihilation. It is useful to consider these thoughts around ‘Nothingness’ in relation to the next parts of the play involving the Watchman, Creon, Antigone and the Chorus’ Second Stasimon. Antigone is brought into the stage space, having been caught in the act of carrying out the burial rites for her brother. In fact, it has been noted that Polyneices’ body seems to be buried more than once throughout the play which does not seem to make logical sense, but I wonder whether it could suggest a kind of ‘temporal looping’ that replays the action as a kind of ‘traumatic ing’ or dream-like recurrence in the dramatic scene. The Chorus is surprised and shocked to see the princess treated as a prisoner, while the fortunes of the messenger (who had sworn never to return) quickly change when he discovers Antigone. This time, there is no hesitation in his decision to deliver the news to the king, yet even Creon finds it hard to believe that his niece is the guilty party and demands evidence. The Watchman tells the story of how he and the other guards kept a lookout after they had dusted off the body that was already beginning to decompose. A dust storm rose up and obscured their watch, but after it had settled, they saw Antigone, like a bird returning to its nest to discover its offspring gone. He describes how she sprinkled dust in reverence and wine in accordance with ceremony but when the guards went to take her, she had denied nothing. The Watchman says he was grateful for the silence because he still feared to be involved in the death of a friend: ‘It’s nature’s way / For me to put my own survival first’ (lines 439–40). Upon questioning, again Antigone denies nothing to Creon and even its having heard the public decree, leaving no doubt as to her defiance in this case. In a way, we could say that even though Antigone has given herself up, she has in fact chosen herself by taking on this choice and possibility that will lead to her own death. She has chosen herself in her own obliteration. Antigone explains that Creon’s edict defies divine decree and that rules made in the world do not have such a divine origin, invoking the universality of the gods’ laws – outside of time and into eternity. The princess has recognized her own

mortality and that death is inevitable. Given the state of the world that she lives in, she supposes that anyone in such a situation would see death as a friend and although she considers her own death to be of no importance, to leave her brother unburied would have brought suffering. Creon scorns her attitude, accusing her of being like her father Oedipus and not yielding to reason, pointing out that inflexibility leads to many things breaking easily. The king’s hand has been forced, for not only has his niece broken the law, she is boasting of it, and so he sends the guards out to arrest Ismene too. The language escalates as Creon its that he now wants nothing more than Antigone’s death while she claims that all of those present should praise and honour her deeds despite the king saying what he wishes. In the section that follows, the two characters go back and forth with point and counterpoint, with Antigone arguing care and reverence are due to all the dead. The paradox is that even though she gives herself up, she also wins herself back from the Nothingness by becoming a sign and an example of Authenticity. Creon’s temper explodes as he says that she should find her socalled love in hell. At this point, Ismene is brought in. Just as there had been a change of heart in the messenger, there is a change in Ismene as well. Although she did not commit any crime in action, she is willing to concede guilt to Creon. Antigone contradicts the confession explaining that her sister had nothing to do with it. Tellingly, she says, ‘[Y]ou are sensible; these men agree […] But they agree with me’ (gesturing to the gods or the dead below), thus gesturing beyond the symbolic order of man and offering herself to the judgement of a higher order. Ismene has finally come to understand what Antigone was requesting at the beginning in this deferral to divine judgement. Even though she has the same obligation to honouring the dead as her sister, she will gain nothing by suffering death herself. Antigone mocks Ismene’s pandering to Creon with joyless laughter, as the king comments to the audience that one of these women has lost her mind, while the other never had one in the first place. Ismene counters that this is what grief has shown her: she does not think that she will be able to live on without her sister and even pleads with Creon not to kill his own son’s bride. The Chorus seems to be turning too, on this point, noting that this current course of action will steal this girl from Haemon. Creon signals an end to the dispute, saying ‘Shut up! What a pain you are, you and your marriage!’ (line 573). He can feel the momentum slipping away in the conversation as he commands that these women be taken away under guard. Creon clings to earthly power and the sustained illusion of control over his world rather than face the Nothingness.

In the Second Stasimon, the Chorus ponders those who have never felt the vengeance of the gods, because once divine retribution has been sent, there is no escaping its inevitability. Such a situation of inevitably shows Being and Nothingness with full force. It is hard not to see this as a warning to the people of Athens themselves. The language invokes natural imagery of waves, winds drumming up death on the shores and a storm of sorrow that has been gathering since Oedipus’s demise. This flower of his line, once in the sunlight, is about to be taken away by a handful of dust. Zeus’s wrath transcends time and no sleep can delay it. No pride on earth is free from its grip. In this sense, the joy of any human is just the spring before the burning that is to come. Even though we might walk blindly forward, our folly in the present life will be the seed for extended woe in eternity. The Chorus performs an existential turning when it recognizes the Nothingness of temporal human existence and the prevailing divine order of eternity. They begin to express such transcendence in their poetry soon after Ismene comes to a realization and turns to face it in her actions. Antigone faces Nothingness right from the beginning and chooses her own negation. Her actions and ultimate death awaken such a realization in her sister, the citizens of Thebes and hopefully for the audience watching on. Only when it is too late does Creon come to understand.

Nothingness

• Explore Creon’s refusal to accept the Nothingness of his own being by rejecting Destiny and the will of the gods in his conversation with the Chorus. Improvise a scene where he is being attacked on all sides to wear him down to Nothingness. • Choose a line or two of text for your character. Explore the idea of ‘limiting’ or ‘dominating’ the given circumstances in of space. For example, have Creon with the power to control the space. Consider how this might change throughout the performance. • In order to explore freedom and choice, play out the story of Antigone and have your character enunciate their choices: ‘I choose …’ For example: ‘I

choose to bury my brother’, ‘I choose to turn away from my family obligation’, ‘I choose to impose rule of law to bring stability’, ‘I choose to tell the king of the attempted burial for fear of reprisal’ and so on. Consider the alternative possibilities of acting for your character at each pivotal moment in the text. For example: ‘I might have chosen to leave my brother to the scavengers’, ‘I might have chosen to help my sister in her quest’, ‘I might have chosen to show mercy to my citizens and sympathy to their obligations’, ‘I might have chosen to protect Antigone when I found her’ and so on. • Think about a contemporary warzone and the complete decimation that has been caused by the surrounding conflict. What would you feel in those circumstances having lost everything? Create a physical image with gesture to depict this loss in silence. Let each cast member take a turn. Now form an image of healing as a group. • Explore the Second Stasimon by directing the Chorus’ words towards Creon, Antigone, Ismene and the Watchman, who stand still in the centre of the space. Which sections would you direct outward to the audience?

Moods and faring

When I was young, I intensely disliked it when my brother used to say to me, ‘You’re in a mood’. It really annoyed me. I had not even been thinking about ‘how’ I was until he drew attention to it. And I was convinced that he said it to put me in a bad mood, not that I was already in one (although I probably was, of course). Perhaps it was just the awareness of my mood that drew an irritated response. Everyone exists within a mood at every point whether they know it or not (although in a phenomenological sense, it is not necessarily to do with an emotional state). The word ‘mood’ is also used in a grammatical sense to pick out the way a verb expresses itself: a fact, a question, a command, a condition, a wish/possibility. The subjunctive mood, for instance, can indicate a hypothetical: ‘If I come tomorrow, we will go to the cinema’. The verb ending (or form) alters the meaning of the words that surround it in many languages. This is similar to Mood in a phenomenological context: Mood is the way in which we find ourselves in relation to the world (even if we do not know that it is there), and it alters the way that we perceive the world; it is the ‘how’ in ‘how are you?’ One’s mood filters the world as it is disclosed at any given moment: we can apprehend the ‘Facticity’ (the material and circumstantial state) of our world, we can attempt to command it, we can hypothesize in the conditional mode, we can wish for a possibility and so on. In other words, Mood is a disposition that allows the world to be encountered, although most of the time we are unaware of it and sometimes it can spring forward and cloud our actions and behaviour. More broadly, Dasein’s world is always filtered through a particular Mood (Stimmung), humour or disposition. Heidegger’s term here could also mean ‘atmosphere’, and it comes from the German word related to ‘tuning an instrument’. In this context, it would be misleading to place an emphasis on affect and emotion, though that might be part of a mood. Rather than thinking of Mood as something ‘inside us’, it might be better to think about something like ‘the mood of the room’. In this way Mood is intersubjective and contextual in of self and world. A fundamental aspect of the world is that it encomes those ‘there’ alongside us, of course, and they are crucial to our

mood. Heidegger also employs a related term, ‘Befindlichkeit’ (sometimes confusingly translated as ‘State-of-Mind’), which means ‘situatedness’, ‘containment’, ‘feeling/faring somehow’ and ‘where/how one finds oneself’. Again, we should be wary of emphasizing psychological state in this concept. ‘Faring’ is more to do with ‘the way in which we find ourselves’, ‘how one is’ and ‘how one is getting on’. As with the Heideggerian introduced earlier, Mood and Faring are not things. They are not objects open to rational procedures and logical methods but are fundamental to Being-in-the-world, nonetheless. Our moods are also temporally directed, as we can turn backward or forward with respect to the possibilities of action in any given circumstance. Moods are time oriented in that they are directed at the past or the future, fleeing away from the world or facing it. Fear, for example, is backward facing (towards an unpleasant past event, for instance) and turns away from the world and the future. Certain Moods can reveal Being itself. As mentioned earlier, Heidegger suggests that Anxiety (Angst) is a particular Mood that reveals the Nothingness of our own Being and the impending coming of our own death as the event ending all possibilities of our own existence. The concept of Mood is directly relevant to exploring Antigone. To see how, we can look both at the interchange between Creon and Haemon and also the Third Stasimon. At the start of the scene, it is possible that Haemon, Antigone’s lover, will intervene and save his bride, as is speculated upon by the Chorus when he is approaching. Creon suggests that he has no need for a soothsayer in determining the matter he is about to encounter as he will find out soon enough. The king gets straight to the point and presents his son with a choice between hate and love of his father in light of the circumstances, and Haemon responds without hesitation that he is completely loyal to his father’s will. Creon approves and claims that his son would soon grow cold of a marriage to this girl in any event. The king’s language is extreme: he wishes that Antigone finds a husband in Hell and recognizes that if he is not able to keep his own family in check, it would be difficult to maintain public confidence, order and obedience. He positions his own authority as that which must be obeyed in all circumstances – whether his commands be just or unjust. In fact, in an effort to convince his son further, he claims that the man who knows how to obey is the man who will learn how to lead and give commands. There is, of course, some irony in the fact that the king is demanding complete filial duty from his own son without question while at

the same time denying such loyalty to family for Antigone. Creon identifies anarchy as the greatest evil threatening the state and that which scatters armies. For him, the good life is achieved by discipline, and rather outrageously from a modern point of view, he takes a swipe at the idea of losing to a woman. The insinuation is that women stand in opposition to order. The Chorus readily endorses the monarch as having spoken with dignity and to the point. The mood at this point is one of acquiescence for Haemon and domination for the king. Haemon replies that ‘reason’ is the crowning gift to man and agrees that he should not lose his own sense of what is rational, although he acknowledges that there are other men who might have a different opinion from the king. He says that Creon is not in a position to know what all men think or feel, yet his quick temper may inhibit people telling him directly. According to the son, there are some who speak underneath their voices to say that no woman has ever been sentenced to death in such a shameful way for what appears to be a generous act and indeed that she deserves honour. But Haemon also says that nothing is dearer to him than his father’s happiness while he begs the king not to be unchangeable and to soften his certainty that only he is right. The son notes that such a man is, in fact, empty because there is a contradiction in mind that will not yield to reason. Drawing on natural imagery, he notes that in times of flood, trees bend to the storm in order to keep their branches intact whereas inflexibility leads to uprooting. Meanwhile, the Chorus is swayed by this argument and counsels the king to listen as they also ask Haemon to listen to his father. This is where the Mood begins to change. Creon refuses to be schooled by a boy although Haemon argues that it is the truth that matters, not the age of the speaker. The Faring becomes rocky from this point. In a rapid-fire exchange, the dispute escalates moving into the Moods of anger and rage. Creon claims that the State is the king, and in this way, the nature of his tyranny is exposed for the audience. Tellingly, it is the king that loses his temper and flies into a rage as the son warns Antigone’s death will lead to another and exits in disgust. Hot with fury, Creon orders that both women be brought in to be killed, although this decision is finally queried by the Chorus of citizens. The king agrees that Ismene’s hands are clean but holds steadfast to Antigone’s sentence and vows to lock her in a cave in the wilderness – outside of society – given only food in order to absolve the State of her death. He plainly states that piety shown to the dead is pity in vain. The Chorus enters the presentational space here to comment on the situation in

the Third Stasimon in a mood of hope. Love is the thing that transcends all – this applies to rich and powerful men too, carried in the soft face of a girl, with control over even the immortals, and even more so over humans who have one short period of daylight in this life. The hope is that love can come between this father and son. This moment of Faring is precarious as the Chorus notes that a girl’s face carries with it the power of heaven towards her horrific destiny. Hope soon turns into despair in Love the Destroyer.

Moods

• What would you say the overall mood of this play is? Why? • Choose a section of text (perhaps a portion of the interaction between Haemon and Creon), and map out the shifts in mood in the scene. How might you signify these changes in theatrical ? • Create a colour scheme to represent the moods of each character. Now add a ‘texture’ to the palette – perhaps a type of material that might represent gradations of Mood. How might you incorporate this into props and set design? • How might Mood inspire a lighting design? Think of a body posture in your character in relation to Mood. What about spatial movement and perhaps even soundscape? Choose a piece of music to accompany a silent etude of the action within the scene. It might even be an abstract soundscape. Bring all of these elements together with the dialogue. • Create ‘ether characters’ (invisible entities in the scene filling out the space between characters onstage) and explore the connections between people and space. Think about these characters as a physical embodiment of the Mood ‘in between’. (This externalizes the idea that Mood is not something inside but rather in the relational connections between characters and space.) Imagine that these beings are messengers of Mood in the ether, directing, controlling and interacting with the exchange.

• Consider the temporal direction of Mood for your character – as they turn towards or away from the world and the choices that they face. Consider the Mood looking forward, to the present, or backward. Experiment with variations on these choices. • Can you pinpoint specific moments where Anxiety (Angst) is presented here? Anxiety in this sense is not fear of a specific event or objects but rather an apprehension about Being itself. How are these moments expressed? How do they stare into the Abyss of meaning? How might you find a theatrical image for this dread?

Thrownness and projection

There is a theatre improvisation game where actors encounter a dramatic scene without any idea in advance of what was going on and what to expect. The central actor might encounter the scene of a date-gone-wrong, or an operating surgery in panic, or a lost temple deep in a jungle. The task is to play out the action in response to other characters in the scenario, and the humour is that they gradually work out where they are and are able to play along. The game is about being ‘thrown’ into a situation that precedes us. Similarly, in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest the protagonist and advertising executive Roger Thornhill is mistaken as a spy trying to foil the anti-government plot of a mysterious organization. The story unfolds as he struggles to work out what is going on, finally taking on the ‘role’ that he was mistaken for. He is thrown into a world that he does not understand and gradually comes to recognize his situation and how to deal with it. This theatre game and film together resonate with Heidegger’s description of Being-in-the-world when he suggests that the nature of human project is essentially a ‘thrown possibility’. We are propelled into circumstances that precede us with pre-existing meaningful structures that present possibilities for action and from which we must choose. This can be the case even if we do not know it or are consciously aware of it. In fact, we are mostly not aware of ‘Thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) because the novelty of each situation does not usually hit us all at once (as in the theatre game) but gradually as we are acculturated from birth. Every human has a limited set of choices to make within their lifetime, and there are always constraints on those decisions that preclude other. To this extent, we can express our own freedom and choose action within the world that is handed over to us. Thrownness in this sense is familiar to actors as ‘action in the given circumstances’ and is an important element in both the reality of the stage and the fictional world. The way that we choose action has implications for what we might understand as Selfhood. To a certain extent, ‘who’ we are is a ‘Projection’ (from the Latin root, ‘throw forward’ and Entwurf – in German – meaning ‘design’, ‘draft’ or ‘plan’) into the future from the point of ‘Thrownness’. For example, when I attempt the

task of putting together a LEGO Deathstar, I am stepping forward into the finished product as I make it up from the pieces in the box. My actions are projecting onto the completed model, and it is this assembled display that I anticipate in each brick snapped into place. We project ourselves as Dasein too through the choices that we make, and it is not such a stretch to say that we have the capacity to ‘choose ourselves’. We are never truly in control of the world that precedes us when we arrive, but we are responsible for making decisions based on those circumstances. Technically, we are a ‘Thrown Project’. It might seem strange that we are thrown into existence which already has a set of possibilities and shared meanings in advance of our arrival. We did not choose to be born at this time, with this family, in this society and its social norms of behaviour, but we can project ourselves through the action and tasks we chose. In other words, the social and material conditions of our plans are given over to us, but we can work creatively with the given circumstances. As explored earlier, the harder path is to resist being ‘carried along’ by what ‘They’ say and to make a choice of one’s own. And this means facing up to the individuating event of one’s death and living one’s life in accordance with the limited time of our own existence by responding to the call of one’s own being as intrinsically incomplete. This need not solely be in a theoretical manner. One’s actions can take on an authentic mode in that they demonstrate a commitment to a task and the uniqueness of our own acting and choosing rather than simply accept what is ed over to us. Thrownness and Projection are relevant to almost any dramatic situation, but here I invite you to think about the interchange between Antigone and Creon, the Fourth Stasimon, and the encounter between Tiresias and Creon. When Antigone enters under guard, the Chorus is drawn to tears as she is led towards her eternal place of sleep. The poetic language contains imagery about the ending of the day and the setting of the sun away from the cold shore. Antigone enters and spars with the citizens of Thebes in this section through stichomythia. She is about to be led to the cave without having sickness or wound and is compared to Niobe who had eternal tears issue forth in water (having lost her entire family to Artemis and Apollo and then turned to stone). Antigone believes the men of Thebes to be laughing at her and eager for her death as she asks them to bear witness to her fate and heads below the earth where there will be no more tears. The Chorus comments on the place of stone where she is to sit, imagining what shape Oedipus’s guilt will take from these unfolding events. Antigone realizes that she has been condemned by her father’s incest, and for that reason she says,

‘But I have no place with human beings, / Living or dead. No city is home to me’ (lines 851–52). Nevertheless, the Chorus levels the blame at her for having broken the law which must be observed because of the act of her own conscious hand. She asks to be led not in song and lamentation, but in silence. Creon interrupts the exchange saying that dirges and lamentations would go on forever if they could put off death, as he urges the Citizens to get on with it. By taking her to the cave and leaving her with food, the king claims that their hands are clean. At this point, Antigone compares herself to Persephone in her journey to the underworld but is consoled by the thought that she will be with her father, mother and brother once more. Up until the end, she proclaims her innocence and prays that if Creon is guilty of her death, he should receive a punishment equal to hers. In her final words, Antigone warns that her death will be ed because she would not disobey the divine law. Finally, she utters, ‘Come, let us wait no longer’. In these words, Antigone projects and accepts her own fate, having been thrown into this world set in motion by Oedipus’s actions. The Chorus narrates how she is locked away in stone, recalling how in ancient times Zeus changed himself into gold streaming from the heavens and impregnating Dana who had been buried in a chamber of bronze. Antigone is also compared to Lycurgus who was locked up in a similar manner by Dionysus, but whose frenzied madness resulted only in echoes after he realized his sin against the god. The Thebans note how the sons of Phineus were blinded by their mother at Clashing Rocks in the Black Sea. (Phineas himself bargained and accepted blindness in return for long life, and as such, the arrival of Tiresias the blind soothsayer is signalled.) Yet in contrast to all of these mythical characters, Antigone’s stain is her lineage rather than her own action which is ultimately at the heart of this tragedy. The Chorus positions these myths almost as prophecies of this young woman’s fate. Tiresias is led onto the stage here by a boy (in contrast to Creon, we should note, who refused to be counselled by his junior). It is also significant that the prophet may have been played by the same actor who had the role of Antigone, thus creating a metatheatrical effect in his appearance of ‘describing one’s own death’. In this way, Antigone projects beyond her own death through her actions as the king recognizes Tiresias’s oracular authority having witnessed and suffered it before in the events of Oedipus’s life. This is the point where chance sits on a razor’s edge and Creon is given the opportunity to think carefully. The soothsayer describes how he had put forward a burnt offering that fizzled into

slimy fat and had it described to him by his boy: ‘It’s common knowledge, any human being can go wrong. / But even when he does, a man may still succeed’ (lines 1024–25). After Creon refuses and even accuses the prophet of selling out, a heated exchange ensues, and the prophet warns the king that he will pay back for his deeds with his own flesh when avenged by the Furies and dark gods of Hell. In the not-too-distant future, his house will be full of weeping and the citizens will be cursing his name. Tiresias finally asks the boy to lead him home and prays that the king will learn wisdom, leaving the Chorus to fear these words as a plague since the seer has not been false before. Creon finds it hard but finally relents not wishing to risk everything for pride as the citizens of Thebes ask him to free Antigone and build a vault for Polyneices. The king has changed his mind although we have already heard that the gods act swiftly. Creon himself must carry out the rescue, with the belated realization that the divine forces must be obeyed. Ultimately, the story of the king is resisting the Thrownness of his own situation until it is too late. He has projected himself through his own authority, yet as we find out his choice has been blind to fate.

Thrownness

• Take a scene and throw the action forward and back in time to different moments of decision as you read through the dialogue. Consider each character and the circumstances into which they are thrown in this scene. What are the physical restraints of their action? What are the emotional and legal restraints? • Choose a parallel social experience that confines the choices of individuals in our social world now. It might be a section of your society. It could be a religious state or authoritarian regime. Perhaps it is refugees being detained and denied entry to a country. Perhaps it is from the recent past or distant history. What shift in meaning would there be from alluding to this context in your production? Or perhaps, could you imagine a dystopian version of the present in which these events could occur? • Physicalize the restraints that hold each of these characters back in each of the decisions they make. Allow each of the characters to enter the performance

space and other cast to physically push back on them against what they want as they enact their choice. • Experiment by introducing the ghosts of the dead – Polyneices and Eteocles, Laius, Oedipus and Jocasta, Megareus, Eurydice and Haemon – to haunt the scene in this section of the play.

Fate and destiny

We do not seem to think much about destiny in the contemporary world. We like to believe that we are in control of our own fate and have the ability to change our own future as we wish. Or we might surrender to the thought that the world is, in fact, random and meaningless with no preordained order or play. Perhaps there some who hold a belief that there are gods in control of our existence and prophecies foretold that pick out future events that are unchangeable. But certain things are inevitable in life – not in the least the fact that our time will end at some point, as all possibilities are taken away. Such finitude brings liberation, and this forms the key to a phenomenological approach to destiny. Heidegger refers to the words ‘Schicksal’ and ‘Geschick’ when he talks about fate and fortune, respectively, as powers that determine events and the events that occur (Inwood 1999: 67). The pick out individual providence and communal fate, but Schick is also related to the German word for ‘history’ (Geschichte) as well as ‘skill/skillfulness’ (Geschicklichkeit). So, there is a sense in which there is a destiny unfolded in each historical epoch according to the skills and capabilities of an historical society and also the way in which individuals respond to the call of Being as if it were their own. We can actively choose our own possibilities and bring them to actuality through skill and mastery or turn away. In misguided (and some would say unforgivable) moments, Heidegger saw German destiny in the politics of National Socialism and believed that the German nation offered a special fulfilment of a historical unfolding of Being. This should be a point where we diverge from Heidegger and remain steadfast in recognizing the rights and potential disclosure of Being in all people. Instead, we should respond to the call to see others ‘there’ with us with the same kind of being as our own, and with whom our being is intertwined. To take a more sympathetic reading of his work, we could focus on Heidegger’s thoughts on poetry, Hölderlin and the ‘poeticization’ of the Question of Being (which I consider further in Chapter 6). In this phase, Heidegger sees the essence of both language and Dasein’s very being in poetry (Dichtung). The task of the poet is to provide an anticipation of the coming of Being as an historically

destined event. In his later work, Heidegger suggests that Being sends itself and gives destiny from itself. We are ‘put on the path’ towards understanding our own being. Technology in the modern epoch offers such a path if we can understand its essence, in which humans come to understand themselves as a ‘standing reserve’ most prevalent in the term ‘human resources’. The essence of technology is Being. And if we can listen to the call of being with an openness, then we can choose our own individual fate and communal destiny as a moment of the disclosure of truth (again, see the final chapter for more discussion). By responding to the call of Being and attending to our individual fate, we can transcend our finitude and accept our destiny: to become what we are – that is, our ownmost possibilities. And this is exactly what Antigone does. This notion of destiny is essential to Sophocles’ tragedy, perhaps no more so than in the Exodos and final address from the messenger. Before the final section of the play, the Chorus recites a prayer or ‘paean’ in the Fifth Stasimon, noting how difficult it is to discern what is an actual invocation of the gods to come forth – the god of many names. At this point the ritual element of the performance is foregrounded as the story takes on a present and pressing significance for the performers and the audience alike. Suddenly, the messenger arrives on the scene to address the men of Thebes. He begins by asserting that nothing is fixed in human life and that no one can foretell fate because it affects both the happy and the unhappy. He takes the case of Creon as an example, noting that though he is a king, afforded many riches and material possessions, without joy, he is a dead man walking. The messenger announces death and that those who are still living are guilty: Haemon has killed himself while Eurydice has overhead some news of sorrow. The messenger does not try to sugar-coat it, thereby suggesting that truth is the best thing. He describes how Creon and the servant had gone out to the plain and washed Polyneices’ body that had been shredded by dogs and burnt what was left of it. Having heard noise, the servant rushed ahead and called the king to come quickly. Upon arriving at the cave in which Antigone had been left, the servant looked in and saw the body of Antigone who had hanged herself with the linen from her veil. Creon had gone to beg forgiveness of his son who was also there, but it was too late. Haemon spat in his face lunged at his father with a sword, missed and then plunged the blade into his own chest. As he was dying, he held Antigone, with his blood contrasting the whiteness of her cheek. Immediately upon hearing this news, the Queen exits into the palace.

Creon then enters with servants carrying Haemon’s body. He realizes that all his civic wisdom was for nothing. All of this is learned too late. He feels crushed under the weight of heaven and trampled upon by the loss. The messenger acknowledges the burden but forewarns more pain to be within the house. The Queen is dead. If the king did not already feel dead, he does now. The doors to the palace fly open, and the body of Eurydice is seen within, as the messenger describes how she died with the dark flowing through her closing eyes. Creon asks to be led in. Leave the future for itself. Fate has brought all his pride to dust:

Wisdom is supreme for a blessed life, And reverence for the gods Must never cease. Great words sprung from arrogance, Are punished by great blows. So it is one learns, in old age, to be wise. (lines 1348–53)

In this dramatic ending, we see how Creon had, in fact, turned away from destiny and refused to accept it in his own pride. Antigone, by contrast, embraced her destiny and grasped the truth of existence through her actions in accordance with divine law.

Fate and Destiny

• Create a static tableau of the final scene as Creon hits the abyss of loss. Now move through a series of tableaux of the entire action in this play towards this final tableau position with a sense of inevitability. Think about varying the speeds, directions and direct/indirect flow of the transitions. • What is the role of language in destiny? How do different forms of language show Being in different ways? What is the role of poetry in language? Look at the Paean and choose short words or phrases to repeat in the space, exploring their sound and meaning. Experiment with trying to keep these words in and releasing them into the theatre space directed at someone in the room. What about the tempo and rhythm of the words? • How might you find a visual emblem for Antigone’s fate in the play? For example, how might the image of the stone tomb serve as a design idea for a production? Perhaps it might be a spatial progression on stage towards the place where this final action happens. Consider how you might represent destiny in the design and staging. • What can the story of Antigone tell us about mastering destiny in our time? How might you bring in a contemporary fate into your design without imposing or labouring the analogy?

The existential themes explored in this chapter can extend and inform an embodied approach and awareness of how action and interpretation are created. Because we lack a commonly held universal belief system embedded with the ritual aspects of festival today, perhaps a phenomenological lens can open up an ‘in-between’ space for viewing contemporary society through this ancient play. By exploring these themes about our own Being, we can bring Sophocles’ ancient text to life in our world. But unlike Richard Schechner (1974) who predicted the re-emergence of efficacy in theatre-making, perhaps there is a different place to start. If the artist begins with their own connection to the horizons of Being, then the story of Antigone’s stand against Inauthenticity might resonate with our own times. We might consider the seismic shift of the Persian wars and the political uncertainties of the rise of Athens as a power in relation to our own . How might we stand up against a tyrant now? What obligations to a higher order do we arrogantly ignore today?

ing the political and religious implications of this play, it is important to consider how it functioned in its festival and ritual context. As with many tragedies, the play draws close attention to the groundlessness of our own Being as something separate from the world in which we find ourselves. This seems to contradict any certainty of belief offered by religion. But the Greek gods were fickle and flawed, perhaps showing an indeterminacy beyond human ideals of justice. The misguided state execution of Antigone throws up a problematic relationship between individual and society, sacrifice, and self-knowledge. To a certain extent, we are all constrained by the given circumstances through which we enter into the world. We also bring a certain Mood or disposition to every moment of our action that colours the way we see the world. The danger is that we turn away from what is required of us and acquiesce in the trivial, the easy, the popular, the pre-digested desires of the crowd. The harder path is to face the meaningless void and create meaning through our own actions, and this may be at odds with the demands of the state and the family. For Athens, the warning comes from the unnerving self-confidence of a dictator and the preservation of social control at all costs. There may be higher demands than the letter of the law, and for these, Antigone sacrifices her own life with Authenticity. But given that all avenues for action were cut off for her, she did not attempt to resist fate and save her own life. Rather, she provided an example to others for authentic action and thereby achieved transcendence of her own being. Yet, what if someone did have the opportunity to take action but did not seize the opportunity at the right time? That is exactly the situation we will explore in the next chapter.

5

Time and Resoluteness: Hamlet

‘To be or not to be: that is the question.’ These are possibly the most famous ten words ever written for the stage, yet their meaning is not unequivocal. Although the verse is composed in iambic pentameter, the line has a ‘feminine ending’ – an extra beat – so that what might have simply been ‘quest’ becomes ‘question’. In fact, it is possible to interpret the play as a whole in of a quest and its questioning. Hamlet lays out a choice between resisting the demands of honour in this mission and actively pursuing justice in accordance with tradition and familial piety. The unexpected scansion in the poetry gives insight into the troubled mind of the speaker and an unresolved sense of ending suited to his ion (Stern 2004: 79–84). Turbulence in the disted rhythm seemingly points out the royal heir’s distress over the issue; however, the speech is not about whether Hamlet should end his own life, as is often assumed. Initially, death is the upshot of taking action against injustice – the result of opposing the wrongs of the world in reality (correlating with ‘not to be’ in the opening question). In the second half of the monologue, Hamlet considers why anyone would endure the misfortunes and painful circumstances presented by life at all. We humans soldier on for fear of the unknown. First and foremost, Hamlet is asking whether he should resist seeking justice for what appears to be his father’s murder in the role of avenging son. In a way, the choice echoes the tension between New Testament Christianity’s revision of Old Testament reckoning as the choice between forgiveness and the demand for retribution. ‘To be’ in this case is to remain ive and bear the situation internally without challenging the social circumstances constraining action. ‘Not to be’ is to take on the role of the avenger, matching exterior action with interior intention (as a good performance does), although this action will enact a social violation. The disjunction between Hamlet’s thoughts and actions contained in the monologue presents the argument of the play in distilled form. If he is carried along by the medieval code of vengeance, Hamlet’s death will almost certainly come and for this reason – alongside most of us – he is plagued with doubt and questions his

own resolve to actually carry out the deed authentically. In many ways, this situation resembles the actor’s quest for meaning – to avoid external traditional conventions and by living-through a character authentically in one’s own right. Hamlet is about taking on a role.

Figure 5: Hamlet workshop, Pop-Up Globe, Sydney, 2018. Photograph by Daniel Johnston.

When faced with such radical individuation, we humans mostly flee in fear because we would rather stick with the status quo and received wisdom than take a chance on uncertainty. In the midst of the woes that life might throw at us, we could end it all with a bodkin (a tool that a print-setter uses to take out a character in the press). But we could never be sure of the consequence of such an act, as even the greatest of plans of a heroic kind are aborted out of this fear. Death could be just a ‘sleep’ or an escape route from our troubles in this life: that is what we might tell ourselves to tranquilize the anxiety – but who can ever know? Doubt is the key here. Shakespeare is asking, ‘What do you do when everything that you thought was certain in your world is pulled out from underneath you?’ How can we discern between appearance and reality with our own eyes? In fact, this parallels the question faced by the phenomenologist in gazing upon the world as it does the anxiety of the actor searching for truth. How can we truly grasp the world when our very senses might be unreliable (or we might be deceiving ourselves)? How can one act freely when one’s circumstances as an actor are set out in advance? How can we make meaning of an essentially meaningless situation on the stage? Hamlet muses having spoken to the troupe of travelling actors and witnessed a performance:

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do Had he the motive and the cue for ion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appall the free,

Confound the ignorant and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. (2.2.586–93)

In this final case study, I will consider some ‘heavy’ phenomenological themes including Temporality, Historicality, Being-a-whole, Being-towards-death and Resoluteness. Of course, this is not an exhaustive consideration of Shakespeare’s text – or even an interpretation that supposes there is one definitive reading, given the diverse history of Shakespeare in performance of this play. Instead, I gesture towards phenomenological entry points that also fold back onto the craft of acting. As we will see, not only the words of the text but also the dramatic form and spatial orientation in performance enacts a phenomenology in practice. Using the text as a catalyst for exploration, contemporary Shakespearean actors can find a through line for performance by drawing together the world of today, the world of the play and the world of Shakespeare. In this sense, anachronisms that appear in the text (and its productions) are less important than engaging in dialogue with the audience about the Question of Being. The philosophical task in performance is to find a way of unpacking time, history and choice for contemporary spectators through the process of theatre-making. In another sense, both Hamlet and the actor confront the tension between reason and emotion. The Prince of Denmark tries to resist the destabilizing mental strain of vengeance, having become immersed in his ions and (possibly) feigning his own insanity. Incidentally, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been seen as a tempering riposte to emotional revenge in John Marston’s play Antonio’s Revenge as well as the simulated madness of a grieving person from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The Bard’s play reflects upon the very processes and effects of performance itself. The structure and arguments of Hamlet’s most famous speech resemble legal counsel offering a case to a jury or at least following a classical rhetorical structure. The answer to the question at the beginning of the monologue is far from clear, because the young prince is not sure whether the vision of his father that he witnessed in the opening scene of the play is malevolent or not. We should that ghosts appearing onstage on the early modern stage were often demonic and maleficent, making it entirely unclear whether this apparition was being truthful or not. In Seneca’s Thyestes, a

precursor to Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy, for example, the ghostfather is led by the underworld figure of revenge personified as Furia or rage. In a broader historical context of Shakespeare’s world, the prince’s dilemma stems from an emerging epoch of scepticism and questioning doctrines that had to this point simply been taken as given. His arguments are characteristic of those expressed by a student and thinker trained in Wittenberg, although his study abroad time had been cut short by the untimely demise of the former king. In this sense, the speech is a study in argumentation itself – a rhetorical exercise in theology and moral philosophy. Interestingly, the word ‘question’ is ‘point’ in the Q1 version – probably a ed version written down by an actor (possibly the person who played Marcellus) or an audience-member hoping to make money out of selling the text (Stern 2013). Yet Hamlet’s words are also the utterances of a royal patron who has just been spending time instructing a group of travelling players that are about to present a show at Elsinore. He clearly knows a thing or two about acting. Hamlet also stands at the transition between medieval scholasticism and an emerging scientific world view, revealing the contemporary concerns of Shakespeare’s intellectual milieu rather than some distant foreign past. The form of the play departs from the linear medieval quest plot in poetry and drama while chronicling the prince’s coming of age and taking responsibility for his own actions. No longer can eternal truths be taken as given. It is almost as if Shakespeare had stumbled upon the existential order to create meaning without such foundations and within the scope of possibilities handed over to us by the world. And for this reason, this play, perhaps more than any other, is a play for our time too. Shakespeare was living in a period of immense historical change as war and rebellion with Spain and Ireland threatened England, debates and retribution over religion were in full flight and theatres themselves were under attack from the Puritans. On a personal level, the playwright faced considerable sorrow in his own life with the loss of his son, although this is said to have been dealt with in his play King John more than Hamlet, and it is not clear how close he was to his offspring (Shapiro 2018). But all of this must have made him ask what it is all about – this thing we call ‘life’? Is ‘the question’ merely a series of argument points in a philosophical exercise? In what appears to be such a rehearsed argument, Hamlet is also exploring the essence of Being and Nothingness, action and non-action, and dissimulating appearance versus truthful behaviour. The effect of the multiple feminine

endings in his famous monologue is that there is something outstanding or drawing him onwards in his through line of thought. In practice, the extra beats might also stop the audience interjecting with an answer at this serious moment of thought. The rhetorical structure might also be spatialized in the speech itself – with one half of the stage standing for ‘to be’ and the other for ‘not to be’ as Hamlet is drawn between the two sides. A useful exercise here is to explore the spatialization of thought patterns in the text through blocking and movement so as to find a visual rhythm to the arguments set out in the dialogue – for and against, thesis and antithesis. To do this, break up each speech to map out a movement pattern on the stage, placing your thoughts in the space. It is odd that our prevaricating hero seems to forget that he saw his father’s ghost in 1.5 at all by the time we reach 3.1 when he talks about death as an undiscovered country from which no traveller has returned. In fact, it is possible that this speech was relocated from elsewhere in the play, perhaps bringing with it some of the motivational factors and contextual significance from that other moment altogether (Edwards 2003: 27). The equivocal Ghost does not give any certainty to the question at all. There is also speculation as to whether Hamlet is aware that he is being watched by the King and his ageing royal advisor during this famous monologue and the prince’s encounter with Ophelia shortly after. Is this merely a performance for the benefit of the onlookers? If he is aware, then the whole thing might be a ruse to throw Claudius and Polonius off the scent (with the knowledge that Ophelia is bait in the plot). Hamlet’s words could be an outwardly affected display to play upon the conscience of the spies. If not, it could be a genuine attempt to find a solution amid these confusing circumstances. It could be merely an intellectual exercise rehearsing a philosophical argument. It could be an undergraduate attempt at academic rationalization and deduction. It could be the incessant ravings of a man losing touch with the world. Or perhaps it might be a combination of all of these. There are many possibilities. The indeterminacy of the text is precisely what calls for a careful philosophical approach which calls meaning itself into question. Hamlet is part of a specific theatrical tradition in early modern England with its own (shifting and emerging) conventions too. In order to prepare for such a role, therefore, and create a fully formed fictional world around each character, one needs to take into the context of Shakespeare’s writing and some technical aspects of his stage and dramaturgy in order to connect authentically

with the modern context (or at least, to make informed creative decisions). Arguably, this is what makes Shakespeare difficult for contemporary actors since it poses different challenges from many other performance texts closer to their own lifeworld. In this play, the themes of time, history, totality, finitude and choice all fold back upon the immediate task of interpreting the text. The problem that Hamlet faces is really a problem about acting in its different senses (on this, see Rayner 1994). Embodied meanings activated within the theatrical space are key to meaning making in text. The dramaturgy of the early modern English stage brings out the Question of Being because it draws attention both to the fictional world of the play and the social reality of the performance (McAuley 2000; Fitzpatrick 2016). In this sense, the Globe itself is a kind of ‘existential clearing’ because its elements allow us publicly to explore ‘what is and what is not’. There are many points at which the audience can be brought in on the action and addressed directly, thereby activating the stage as a nodal point bridging the real and imagined worlds. In this way, the contemporary actor is challenged to navigate a double ontology in connecting both with the audience and with fictional characters in Shakespeare’s Elsinore. The conventions of early modern theatre often play with this dual reality in the context of the early modern lifeworld. For example, the visceral bearbaiting and cockfighting were highly structured entertainments with a set of conventions (which leaked over into theatres, it should be noted). The Elizabethan stage had an evolving set of unspoken rules of viewing and performing (Fitzpatrick 2016). These patterns of meaning making on stage gave Shakespeare an enticing vehicle to probe the inner workings of the mind and lay bare the decisionmaking processes of the characters as they go about their business. Shakespeare was not a genius working in a vacuum but a playwright deeply imbued by his culture and context – equipped with a ‘machine for thinking’ in the Globe Theatre. This is not to say that exploring the implied spatial meanings in the text is the only way to present his work in performance. But an informed understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean staging will allow for a deeper understanding of the text and perhaps even open up meanings as they might appeal to a contemporary audience – even if you depart from any attempt at ‘original staging practices’. Theatres were not only places of entertainment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also escape, titillation and a showcase for the melting pot of social ideas, politics and social action. The language and action of the stage could mimic the pulpit, the marketplace, the anatomical

theatre, the bear pit, the court, the tavern and the university lecture hall (Stern 2004). Given the central tension between thought and action, I suggest that Hamlet presents an inquiry into authentic Resoluteness articulated through a spatial dramatic vocabulary. In approaching this text, the challenge for the actor is to pursue authentic choices in living through the role. Unlike Antigone from the previous chapter who stayed her course with unwavering duty, Hamlet prevaricates in his resolve. But it is not just any resolve of action; it is about finding a balanced inward intention and outward action in accordance not with socially agreed norms and laws but with Being. The structure of the play swings between Hamlet committing to action and then appearing to remain ive after each such resolution. In performance, the journey in the role of Hamlet is about choosing from one’s ‘ownmost possibilities’ and taking responsibility from the Nothingness of existence in itself. Unlike the Greeks who took destiny as that which can only be met with futile resistance, in Shakespeare’s texts there is an indeterminacy about where the future is leading. We humans stand at a crossroads between being determined by the circumstances in which we find ourselves and choosing freely from that set of possibilities. The same dilemma also faces any actor attempting this most daunting of roles.

Timeliness

Time itself is one of the central concerns of Hamlet with some 66 occurrences of the word or its derivatives in the text. From the opening scene, the audience is reminded of the temporal order of things – the rhythm of the day and its duties – when Francisco declares in 1.1, ‘You come most carefully upon your hour.’ Barnardo, the guard, has come to relieve his fellow-watchman, amid an air of threat from the neighbouring Norwegian mercenary forces who have been gathered and mobilized ready to strike by young Fortinbras. Midnight signals the liminal hour at the threshold between two days and two worlds – of being asleep and awake – when the senses might not be relied upon. The action of the opening scene takes place under the cover of darkness in the bitter cold in the fictional world. Of course, this is indicated by the language only since the performance was happening in broad daylight. The contrast between the darkness of the scene and the daylight of the performance space confirms the metatheatrical motif that recurs a number of times in the play. At the same time, there is clear anticipation of an extraordinary spectacle about to appear both for the audience and the doubtful Horatio who has come to observe with his own eyes what he has only heard about second-hand. The Ghost would have been a particular feature of interest for Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences watching Hamlet and a selling point to the theatregoing public. In fact, it is even possible that Shakespeare himself performed the role, although it is highly probable that the Ghost was not his invention at all but rather was borrowed from an earlier stage version (possibly written by Thomas Kyd). It is not far into Shakespeare’s play before the audience get what they have come for, as Horatio is pushed forward by the guards to question the apparition:

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, Together with that fair and warlike form

In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march? (1.1.46–49)

Having ‘ed over the stage’ (possibly from the stage left door, across the front of the stage towards stage right and then around the back to stage left), the spectre exits as if it has been offended, and the soldiers are left to debate the intentions and significance of this apparition from the afterlife. The repetition of the Ghost’s appearing in the play gives a sense of ‘looping’ in time set in limbo until justice has been appeased, perhaps like a soul in purgatory awaiting votive prayers to ensure their age into heaven. Again, Marcellus points out the dramatic irony that night is turned into day (in that time has been turned upside down) since the playhouse simultaneously reveals itself and gestures beyond to a fictional reality. It is no mistake that the apparition exits just as a cock crows – a reference both to the hour of morning as it approaches and also the betrayal of Jesus by the disciple Peter, who denied he knew his Master after his arrest. There may have been a vestige or spatial hangover from the medieval mystery play whereby the stage left door signifies the mouth of Hell (Fitzpatrick 1995). The spatial patterns of the Ghost’s movements on the stage are particularly significant. There is something very sinister afoot here indeed. The scene itself is deeply existential in that it questions the relationship between appearances and reality in relation to time, and it is justified that we turn to Heidegger in his examination of Temporality in order to interpret the action. Part of the reason that Heidegger wrote Sein und Seit is that he thought the question of what Being is had been overlooked throughout history. The missing element to that understanding is time. In reality, we can never experience the world from outside of time and our sense of timeliness always reflects the way that we see and interact with the things that are around us in the world. But time is not a ‘thing’ in the same way that we might experience objects in our environment, as some might argue that our perception of time is not the only way that it might be conceived. I would argue that Hamlet performs a ‘stepping out of’ and ‘stepping into’ time as experienced through the locus and platea – the fictional world of the play and the metatheatrical space where direct communication with the audience is possible (Weimann 1978).

Time is one of the fundamental horizons for existence in that it allows us to experience the world in the first place, yet a purely scientific understanding of the ing of moments could never reach the rich experience that we have of a temporal world. We are born, we live, we die – and for this reason we go about our business as time is running out and we need to get things done before it is too late. Importantly for Heidegger, time is not simply a series of ing ‘nows’. Rather than successive points that one after another – metaphorical frames in a film reel – in fact, we experience time in of the ‘not-yet’ (i.e. in of what is still to come or what is about to come next). When we go about our daily activities, we do one thing after the other in anticipation of what is coming, and there is always something ‘outstanding’ in that we have more to do at every turn. In this sense, ‘where we are’ (or ‘when we are’) is always ‘ahead of ourselves’ in anticipating what is going to happen next: the future is something that we constantly encounter in the present as it presses upon us with a certain urgency in the now. Likewise, the past is not simply a set of facts about what has happened up to now but rather something that we always experience in the present and in anticipating the future. Far from experiencing time as a series of ing moments, time in everyday experience is fluid, unitary and connected for the most part. Generally, we do not encounter time moving as fragmented segments with each instance disconnected from the next. Instead, we encounter the flow of time as a whole, although often we are not aware of it at all. Furthermore, it is unusual to experience specific moments that are not in relation to, or part of, a larger totality. Similarly, we do not primarily notice ‘clock time’ or the ing of objectively measurable quantity of time-units in a purely scientific way. This is especially so when we are engaged or engrossed in an activity. In many moments, the tasks or activities that we are undertaking determine the way that we perceive the ing of time: the time that it takes for the kettle to boil, walk across the field, put your clothes on in the morning or complete a journal article. In this sense, time is relative to what you are doing at any given moment. ‘Clock time’ is something secondary in that we encounter the world only after the fact and in an altered mode. For example, I realize that I am late for a philosophy exam when it turns out that I have written the timetable down incorrectly. Or perhaps I need to eat my dinner quickly because I need to make it to the start of the concert. Sometimes time is drawn out – when we are bored, for example: the detention room clock is ticking at an excruciatingly slow pace because I want to run outside and play with my friends. The striking of the clock at the beginning of

Hamlet is significant because it signifies the ghostly time of night. In German, the adjective zeitlich (temporal) can also mean ‘transitory’: our time here on earth is fleeting and will in a flash. The thought brings to mind the image of Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick – an emblematic symbol indicating artistic ‘memento mori’ in the graveyard scene in 5.1. It can also mean ‘chronological’ giving the sense of ordering in time. The appearance of the Ghost, of course, throws the chronological sequence of time out of order as the past intervenes in the present. And there is a kind of repetition in time as the Ghost is held in a kind of purgatory waiting to be released by human actions in the present. As a noun, Zeitlichkeit can mean ‘Timeliness’ – an interesting translation in the sense that it points towards ‘being on time’, ‘being in good time/at the right time’ (Inwood 1999). Again, this thought is particularly relevant to Hamlet in that the Prince hesitates from killing his murderous uncle, who is immersed in prayer, because it is not the right time. Killing the praying usurper king would spare his soul, and Hamlet wants to catch him out and damn him by his own guilt. And of course, performance is all about timing, as the rhythm of words and movement of an actor on stage. There is nothing worse than an actor who misses his or her cue! (Quinones 1965). As a verb, zeitigen is ‘to ripen’, ‘to bring to maturity’, ‘bring about’ or ‘produce’. Timing in this sense is relevant to an actor’s work on text and building a character throughout the rehearsal and performance process, in addition to a broader application to our broader human activities here on the earth. This sense of ‘bringing maturity’ through performance is also resonant with Hamlet’s advice to the actors visiting Elsinore (3.2) in that the good actor avoids overplaying and underplaying a role in order to avoid a natural monstrosity. The performer should help the speech become ‘what it is’ and ‘what it was meant to be’ by attention to this balance of time coming to fruition. On the other hand, Heidegger uses the word Temporalität (Temporality) to refer to that which belongs to Being (not to a particular entity). He sets out a new understanding of this word in the second part of Being and Time, explaining that Dasein is not merely Being-in-the-world, but also Being-in-time. Temporality in this sense is that which makes the experience of time possible in the first place. The world is always within time, and Dasein’s time makes the experience of space and the world around possible in the first place. Time gives Dasein its individuality in that it is time, as one might say ‘there is still time’ or ‘there is no more time’. Both ‘Being’ and ‘Time’ have been mistaken as entities or ‘things’

that can be apprehended in the same way as a physical object. Dasein ‘extemporalizes’ itself insofar as it is faced with a set of possibilities and enacts an orientation towards the future, present or past in response to them. In other words, ‘being there’ is always within time, although it is not purely the ‘now’. Dasein’s Temporality ‘steps out’ of itself by turning in one of these three temporal directions. In regretting a past relationship, I might neglect those that I might love in the future, for example. Or in anticipating a future job opportunity, I might neglect my current responsibilities. We humans are ‘thrown into the world’, faced with a set of choices in our given circumstances, and have the opportunity to make something of ourselves in the limited time that we have still to come. All activities that we engage in can embrace or neglect a choice into the future: the present is the moment of opportunity through which we can seize ourselves in our possibilities. Tellingly, zeitlich can also mean ‘getting carried away’ in German, perhaps indicating a neglectful attitude towards time where we do not make a controlled choice about our situation but rather have it handed over to us by the world. Arguably, Hamlet himself gets carried away, particularly towards the end of the play where his destiny is set in tow by a series of fateful choices. Similarly, an actor can fall prey to this deficient experience of time in a similar way rather than authentically choose the possibilities of their own action in performance. When the Ghost reappears in 1.4 and 1.5, it is again just before midnight – the liminal hour. After beckoning Hamlet to follow him alone, the spectre proclaims that its ‘hour has almost come’. Hamlet follows the ghost offstage and comes back on again (possibly to signal a change of location to a different part of the castle, having exited through one door and then in again through another). Hamlet declares, ‘The time is out of t: O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!’ (1.5.189). The world has been turned upside down where children are charged with rectifying the misdeeds and misfortunes of their elders. The royal heir sees his deceased father returning to haunt the present and in this, the Prince has seen a glimpse of the future that lies before him. Traditional hierarchies and ways of being in the natural order have been turned upside down as indicated by the fact that this son is required to bring about justice for his progenitor. In a different sense, the young Dane is coming face to face with time and Temporality through Angst – stepping out of regular interactions with the world and seeing things in an uncanny way (see the section titled ‘Moods and Faring’ in Chapter 4). After the unnatural events preceding the events depicted in the play, Hamlet is an outsider and no longer involved in the day-to-day

functioning of courtly social existence. We see this visually when he first enters the stage, dressed in black, out of place in the procession of the courtiers as they enter – a set-piece of the early modern English stage (Gurr 1987). It is important that one’s own body keeps time with its environment – as Hamlet notes in 3.4 when he has seen the Ghost. His heart beats to ‘temperately keep time’ (3.4.141). The pulse creates a healthy music and brings forth the connotation of ‘keeping time’ as in matching a tempo in such a way as time is dictated by the rhythms of our body. When you are exploring these scenes from Hamlet, I suggest that you experiment with your character’s experience of time. There will be moments in the play where time speeds up or slows down in of internal timeconsciousness – presenting an opportunity to reproduce this experience for the audience watching the performance. During a workshop that I led at the Pop-Up Globe in Sydney (a temporary version of the Globe Theatre that has been touring Australia and New Zealand), we noticed the way that the actor’s choices about movement on the Elizabethan stage radically changes the meaning of the words. The dual temporality of performance space and fictional world also presents an opportunity to play with a sense of time. In moments that engage the audience, regular time ceases as the character comments on their own existence. At other points, the actor and spectator alike are absorbed in the action. Experiment with various spatial patterns in relation to time (as mentioned earlier in the ‘temporal loop’ of the Ghost, for example). Obviously, the pace of text, verbal timing, energy, rhythms of voice and overlapping movements will play into a temporal score. When a character is carried away and forgetful of time, movement might be mechanical and rehearsed. When time presses itself within a scene, there might even be a split between the internal world of a character like Hamlet and the busy court and other characters that surround him. Each individual will have varying focuses on past, present and future throughout the play, and in this sense, it would be useful to mark up your role with shifts in this temporal attention. Finally, in a mood such as Anxiety as Hamlet seems to be experiencing, there might even be moments where time seemingly stops or becomes radically ‘out of t’. Part of your challenge is to find a theatrical expression of these manifold expressions and experiences of time.

Time

• When has time moved slowly or quickly for you? What were the specific circumstances of the experience? Now examine your character to consider their experience of Temporality at different points in the scene or play as a whole. How does the experience of time affect your energy in the scene? • When have you experienced ‘clock’ time? What is it like? How does it change your behaviour? What about when you focus on the activity that you are engaged in? Now consider the tasks that your character undertakes and moments when they are immersed in their activities and when that flow is broken. • Take an object that you encounter in everyday life. How do you experience time in relation to that object? Now consider the props throughout Hamlet and their relation to time: skulls, letters, swords, flowers, crowns and so on. • When did you experience a mood that looked forward in time? When were you focused totally on the here and now? When were you backward looking? How did the temporal focus change the flow of time? How did it change your focus on action? Then you might think about the temporal focus of your character at points within the play. • Have you ever experienced time stand still? What was your embodied sensation of this moment? Can you identify any moments in Hamlet where your character might have had this experience? What theatrical image could you use to externalize this feeling?

Having a history

We have already noted that Shakespeare was living through a period of significant historical change with a new world view emerging from the dominant understanding of Being in the medieval period imbued with the metaphysics of a Christian universe. Yet, as with many of Shakespeare’s texts, although set in the past, the play is very much about the early modern English court too – so there is a doubling of history as both Shakespeare’s past and present. If we add in the ‘now’ of theatrical performance and reception, there is a third Time-Space threaded into the time of theatre. In this section, we are not primarily concerned with the academic study of history – in causes and effects, progress and decline. Instead, it is appropriate to focus on history as what makes us who we are in our lived experience – that is, we have a personal history and also a collective history. Theatre is very well placed to reflect on the connection between social circumstances that inform our actions and historical context. This type of reflection is key to actor training in developing an awareness of one’s own response to being together with the rehearsal task of investigating a character’s backstory and objectives. Having said this, Hamlet is more than simply a play about an individual’s choice concerning whether to carry out revenge or not. The play might also present a dramatic image of a struggle for the soul of Denmark as a state (viz. early modern England – and perhaps the contemporary performer/audience’s country). In this context, individual survival and choice is not the only thing that is important, but also the historical situation of the state – as we see at the beginning of the play as Shakespeare’s exposition in that it sets up its history in the backstory. What is more, any performance of this ‘great play’ also brings historical baggage with it. When an actor plays Hamlet, he or she is entering into a well-trodden path of tradition stretching back through History dragged into the present. In this way, history looms large in approaching any role in this play as an actor, and it is important to consider from a phenomenological point of view. Historicality is not simply the sum of all the events that have happened in the past but rather the way that the past ‘hands over’ a certain experience of Being that opens up future possibilities. There are two words that Heidegger uses for

history: Geschichte and Historie (also see the section titled ‘Fate and Destiny’ in Chapter 4). He employs the latter for the formal study of history, including historiological research (as the methodology of history), while the former is ‘history as it happens’ – the past as we experience it in our lives. Individuals, communities, societies and collective humanity all have their own kind of history. There are various meanings and connotations of these two words for history, including that we can study it through a coherent theoretical attitude; that it produces something; that it is in some sense the totality of a group’s achievements; that it is a continuing tradition; that it is what we can learn from the past; that it somehow constitutes the ups and downs of one’s life as in ‘having a history’; that it is the same old story happening over and over; and that it is being involved in some affair or event. These phrases tend to pick out history as it is experienced in real life, not just as a theoretical exercise, and it is not such a stretch to say that these are key issues investigated in many theatrical productions. Just because an era or society does not have a written history does not mean that it is unhistorical. It still has a past that it hands over to itself. In this sense, the academic study of history is not a precondition of history itself but rather forms a derivative mode ‘stepping back’ to examine what is through a particular attitude. In a phenomenological sense, Dasein is itself historical, and this is what enables Historicality and world history. Part of our ‘being there’ as humans is always that we have a history, and we can never escape this fact. Objects and spaces in our environment also have a past. For example, sometimes I walk around the rehearsal room and notice the scuff marks on the ground as physical remnants of the creative acts that have gone on there. Or I might gaze into a museum cabinet to marvel at the journey that this artefact has taken to end up where it is. Dasein does not merely have a past; it is its past. Nevertheless, the past is oriented in of the future for Dasein. Dasein is also the past of its community and generation. On a broader view, history is bound up in the history of metaphysics and the way that we have understood being at any given time. Heidegger suggests that there is a History of Being itself rather than humanity (see ‘The History of Being’ in Chapter 2). In his later writings, Heidegger articulates History as the event of the Between: the conflict between gods and man, world and earth (see ‘Building, Dwelling, Theatre’ in Chapter 6). Yet the choices of history are always determined by a pre-established word in which an individual or community finds itself.

In order to unpack phenomenological history in Hamlet, you might look at the court scene in 1.2 as an example. The mysterious haunting of the previous scene is followed by an earthed, worldly political display of human power in the next one. In a sense, history coincides with ‘the given circumstances’ of action on the stage, and obviously, an actor should do the relevant historical research about , language, social behaviours, objects and equipment, costume and dress, geopolitics, customs of gesture, voice, tempo (Thomas 2009). There are various lengths that you might go to in this pursuit: you might that Stanislavski took his company to a medieval town in order to portray the subject of his production authentically. And there is a feeling that physical presence and immersion can give a strong and embodied relationship to the past. For the actor, history is not simply a theoretical pursuit but a vital activity of embodied exploration. And yet in Shakespeare, there are some anachronisms that make it difficult to discern ‘actual history’ with Shakespeare’s version of history. The procession of the royal court that enters the stage in this scene is a set-piece of Elizabethan stagecraft and displays ceremony and status for all to see. Hamlet would have been a striking figure in black and out of place in this picture. Claudius gives an exposition of current events and the recent death of Hamlet’s father, the King. He notes that rather than succumb to grief, they use discretion to think of themselves at this time of crisis. There is an inherent tension between mirth and grief, ‘delight and dole’, given the previous King’s death and the new one’s marriage that pulls the public mood in two directions – a duality at the heart of the drama to follow. Claudius uses the threat of Fortinbras and holding the kingdom together as justification for the speed of his actions; we also learn that Laertes is seeking leave to return to , having fulfilled his duty to witness the coronation of the new king. History is set out in this expository scene and is the background against which Hamlet’s concerns are set in motion. Throughout your workshop or rehearsal of Hamlet, it is well worth keeping this view of history in mind. There are seismic shifts in history and society taking place within the world of the play, as Denmark battles with Norway and the agreed customs and codes of warfare are renegotiated through this conflict over territory. Indeed, early modern England was also under threat from external forces as old customs were quickly being superseded. There are historical constraints upon the characters in the play with respect to their behaviours and social obligations (e.g. think of Ophelia and her relationship with her father, brother and suitor). But there is also something unclear and troubling in the exact nature of Old Hamlet’s death that affects the son’s obligations in this world. A

certain metaphysics operates in the hierarchy and order of the court (together with a sense that the Great Chain of Being has been thrown off balance as the ‘state to be dist and out of frame’). In performance, the challenge is to find a theatrical image of this dark history – and how it is relevant to our own world now. Finally, it is also worth thinking about your approach in the context of the history of this text in performance from Burbage to Olivier and from Garrick to Cumberbatch. These performances haunt the contemporary stage.

History

• What are the major historical events in the news today? What belief systems are contesting our understanding of Being-in-the-world right now? How might you find a reflection of these shifts in Hamlet ? • How are the actions of your character in the play determined by their historical situation? In what sense are they in tune or dissonant with the mood of the times? How might you find a theatrical image for this? • Choose an object that you think represents this historical moment? What object would you choose for Elizabethan/Jacobean England? What object would you choose for medieval Denmark? • Look back on some major past productions of Hamlet . What elements of their historical period are pivotal to each production and performance? • In Claudius’s speech retelling recent historical events, find theatrical images to present each thought as he tells it, and then contrast it with the truth of what actually happened within the world of the play. • Map out the key events in the play as a whole and note where they happen on stage. Consider history within the plot as it is spatialized with these choices. What connections are highlighted when you note the events that occur in the same location?

Being-a-whole

For living human beings, the project of life always remains ‘under construction’. I driving through the city as a young boy and seeing all of the cranes and construction sites. No sooner would one project be completed than another two skyscrapers had been begun further up the street. Large holes in the ground appeared as the sound of jackhammers echoed up and down the windy corridors of the urban landscape. ‘When will the city be finished?’ I imagine I asked my parents. Of course, the question is absurd in that there is no single endpoint that construction work is aimed at. There is no master plan. In Sydney – my home city – this is especially true as construction companies are continually on the lookout for the next big development or repair of a vital piece of infrastructure. Part of the structure of our experience of time is that there is always something ‘outstanding’ in the commitments we have made to the world. Our work is never done. It is as though we are in a permanent debt of action that is left to be repaid. We might move from project to project, activity to activity or pastime to pastime. But there is always a ‘not-yet’ that remains in our objectives. And in this way, we are ‘guilty’ of never being complete. There is always a call from Being for us to do more. What is it that makes you complete? When have you felt ‘whole’? When challenging actors with such questions, I find that they usually describe a situation of being with family or a loved one in a moment of happiness. Or perhaps it might be a moment of ‘flow’ as a performer or losing oneself onstage. Of course, one’s memory of these moments might be very different from the reality of an actor’s experience of performance in that moment itself (because one’s attention is focused on performance rather than the feeling it elicits). In a similar way, sometimes I find that there is a mismatch in looking back at a photograph of an event and what I felt when I was actually there. We do not usually stop to think of how we are in the now. And if we do, it might interrupt the flow of being in the moment, although soon that situation es when we move on to what is coming next in anticipation. The concept of ‘Being-a-whole’ has a theatrical equivalent in Stanislavski’s term ‘super-objective’ or ‘supertask’ (2008: 306–21). In our everyday lives, we do not

just aim straight at the thing that we want ‘overall’. In order to achieve a certain end, we need to break down the goal into smaller tasks. In An Actor’s Work, Kostya, the student actor, works this out when he counts the many different activities that it takes for him to make his way back home from school to his apartment (2008: 138). As we go about our business, there are always more and more things that we need to do next. I put my clothes on for work, then I need to find my keys, then I need to go out to the car, then I need to drive to work and so on. In a play, it is possible to mark out each scene into smaller sections or beats that tell the story through these actions. Life is never finished because there is always more ‘outstanding’. In this way, we can think of ourselves as a perpetual ‘project’ – a work in progress. You might look at 1.3 to unpack this idea in Hamlet. Laertes is preparing to leave for Paris and is bidding farewell to his sister (in a parallel plotline to Hamlet returning from university). It transpires that Hamlet has been in a relationship with Ophelia, given her mementos and declared his love. But Laertes urges his sister to end the relationship given the royal prospects of the prince and the fleeting nature of what he sees as this love. As she proclaims that nothing untoward has occurred in this relationship, Ophelia defends both herself and Hamlet. Indeed, she suggests that Laertes should take the same advice in his affairs overseas. Polonius enters the scene and gives much the same advice to his son, urging caution and moderation in his affairs. Most memorably, the father champions self-knowledge as the surest way to conduct oneself: ‘To thine own self be true’. Shakespeare’s text mirrors themes elsewhere in the play about appearance and reality, together with self-regulation to ensure justice and balance in one’s own life. Ironically, Polonius hides himself away later in the play (in contradiction of his own advice) at least twice to observe Hamlet. In pursuit of the truth and to witness truth, he literally conceals himself behind the arras. Polonius advises caution in his daughter, while at the same time questioning whether young men can have honour and self-restraint at all. Loyal to her father’s will, Ophelia agrees. In this scene, the characters look towards the future with hope and also foreboding of what is still to come. This ‘not-yet’ rests hopeful in the possibilities of Laertes’ trip (although he is berated for staying around too long when his ship is ready to set sail). For Ophelia, there is the question of her future too in her relationship with the future monarch. The restrictions of Hamlet’s future obligations as a monarch raise the question of any possibility of flourishing courtship in the long run. From a modern point of view, there are

many questions about double standards for male and female offspring, of course, but the possibilities of action for both of these young people are bounded by youthful desire and moral obligation and duty to family and state. Polonius suggests that young people are green in this respect and yet to be tested. In this sense, the ‘not-yet’ is much more open (as is the potential to err):

[…] I do know, When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter, Giving more light than heat, extinct in both, Even in their promise, as it is a-making, You must not take for fire. (1.3.124–29)

Polonius paints a picture of the future and even notes the relative freedoms open to Hamlet in this respect. He notes Hamlet is privileged since ‘with a larger tether may he walk than may be given to you’ (i.e. Ophelia) (1.3.134–35). In this sense, the structure of the ‘not-yet’ is limited by one’s stage in life, in one’s dealings with the world to this point, by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, by our station in life (e.g. the social constraints that history has handed over) and even our ability to articulate our own desires truthfully. The question facing each character is a choice of what being true to oneself means. Is it a commitment to familial obligations and the social order of the court? Or is it to pursue personal fulfilment and satisfaction possibly to the detriment of propriety? In this sense, the characters reach towards transcendence by embodying a set of values. But Being-a-whole is more than simply finishing one’s tasks because one’s life is never complete. Even when we reach our very last moment here on earth and breathe out for the very last time, there is not a ‘totality’ that is ‘present-at-hand’

at this moment. The moment we die, we are gone, and there is nothing left to be total. We are not merely our bodies that change and move throughout our lives. Even less are we the ‘shell’ or ‘skin’ that is left when we have died. The irony is, of course, that Dasein never ‘is’ a whole in the sense of completion in Facticity (the material elements of our being). It is only existentially that we can fulfil this totality through comporting ourselves towards our ownmost possibilities. In 1.3, the characters reach beyond themselves towards an ethical responsibility that brings totality. Ophelia reaches towards holy love, Laertes to honour, and Polonius to reason. In his discussion of Authenticity, Heidegger suggests that we can only be a whole by facing up to our state of incompleteness and making a choice. Being-awhole is something that we can choose for ourselves or turn away from. Most importantly, it requires us to realize that we are much more than simply a ‘thing’ like other objects in the world. It becomes even harder when we are thinking about ‘Being-as-a-whole’. As an actor, Being-a-whole is difficult to grasp. In a sense, it is always about the next job or the next great opportunity on the horizon. Being-a-whole onstage means engaging authentically with each moment in the context of artistic creativity. This involves balancing the supertask of the character and the specific tasks and actions at any given moment in performance. Each beat in each scene adds to the whole. Being-a-whole is working in communion with the theatrical ensemble. This means reaching outside of one’s own personal approach to a role connecting with others in the task of co-creation. Being-a-whole is establishing a genuine connection with the audience to focus on the central dramatihilosophical question of the play. This means finding theatrical means by which to raise the question rather than provide an answer. In rehearsal, it is important to think carefully how each section of the scene and action for each task contributes to the production as a whole. Your own creative practice will also reach beyond itself towards a certain set of artistic values. As I will explore more in Chapter 6, Heidegger moved away from the question of the meaning of Dasein – human Being There – to the question of the meaning of Being as such. Yet in Being and Time, the answer is found in the most unlikely place: death. In his final moments, Hamlet realizes that he had been so full of words and weighing up of his possibilities throughout his life: ‘The rest is silence’. In a way, the young prince reaches a similar conclusion to Heidegger. But before we get to that, let us think about how one can live life either by

making a choice or by avoiding it – a duality at the heart of Hamlet.

Being-a-Whole

• What projects do you have as outstanding at the moment? What will mark your projects as complete in your eyes? How key are those projects to your own sense of being? Consider these same questions of your character in a scene of your choice. • When did you feel complete? What was it like? Why do you think you felt that way? What do you think your character yearns for in such completeness? Does this change throughout the play? • What specific tasks is your character carrying out in this scene? What are the steps that they need to take to complete those tasks? How does this project fit into their broader purpose? Break these down in a silent physical improvisation that you will present to your workshop group. • Freeze at any given moment in a scene and hotseat the task that your character is engaged in. How does it relate back to their being a whole? • What broader ideals and values does your character subscribe to? How might these offer a ‘transcendence’ of their individual situation?

Resoluteness

When you hear the word ‘conscience’, you probably think about an inner religious voice urging you to ethical behaviour, atonement and forgiveness and reminding you of the dangers of eternal damnation. The word comes from the Latin to ‘know with’ and then later in medieval French to ‘know inwardly’. These are of course some central themes of Hamlet and a predominant concern for the protagonist. But in a phenomenological context, Heidegger derives his conception of conscience from Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and forerunner of existentialism. Kierkegaard (1995) saw conscience as listening to the voice of God with one’s heart on the journey between the aesthetic, ethical and religious modes of being. In Heidegger’s revised , conscience becomes ‘secularized’ beyond feeling guilty for departing from the will of some Divine Being, towards facing the obligation or ability for the outstanding actions we are yet to carry out in achieving the tasks of our life projects. Heidegger strips the word ‘conscience’ of this religious anchoring and places it in relation to the existential human situation we are faced with. We are constantly ‘guilty’ in the sense of having more to do and of turning away from the reality of our existential situation. Sartre (1992) called it ‘bad faith’ when we behave more or less like a machine without choice and free will. Conscience in this sense is the call of Being for us to take action and seize our own possibilities. And Resoluteness is listening to this call of conscience and rising to the demands that Being places upon our existence. In German, the verb for ‘deciding’ is entschließen, from the word ‘to close’, ‘fasten’, ‘infer’, ‘ what precedes’, and the prefix ent means ‘open’ or ‘unlock’. It came to mean ‘to make a decision’, ‘determine’, ‘decide’ or ‘resolve upon’. Heidegger also discusses ‘deciding’ as ‘self-opening’ in the sense that we face the possibilities of action in any given situation and make a choice. Its related adjective is entschloßen, meaning ‘resolved’ or ‘determined’. Such determination can be triggered by another Heideggerian term Augenblick (‘the blink of an eye’ or ‘the moment of decision’), which is the point of between time and eternity or an instant of decision between truth and illusion. In this way, Resoluteness happens as an event more than it is something that we inwardly decided about the external world. On the other hand, Sartre argued that

it was only important that we choose, and the content of decision was not as important. For Heidegger, what matters is that one chooses in accordance with one’s ownmost possibilities. That means facing up to the world into which we are thrown, replete with its limitations, and deciding freedom for ourselves from the available possibilities. It also means overcoming the ‘handed over’ interpretations of the world – most importantly to see the self as more than just a ive object controlled by the environment. Resolute decisions have a temporal element in that they transform and preserve the past because authentic Dasein is not just absorbed in the present. A person with resolve runs ahead to interpret their present actions even to the point of their own death and repeats or retrieves the past through their decision. Resolutions are not frivolous promises that we make to ourselves at the beginning of a new year but rather are specific kinds of intense deliberations, forceful actions and recollections in that they preserve what was earlier present at-hand and now no longer is. Resoluteness in this sense is not simply thinking about death while at the same time failing to conduct one’s life in view of it. Authentic Resoluteness requires a certain detachment from the present – or rather a different understanding of time other than a ‘series of nows’ (see the section on ‘Timeliness’). Resoluteness is impossible to define in advance but can only be found out by becoming resolute and making an existential leap. This notion of Resoluteness is also relevant to the situation of actors on stage. In a fixed and rigid performance, the misguided actor can decide in advance one’s reaction to a moment in a scene. However, you can remain open to the possibilities of performance ‘in the moment’ and respond to the circumstances as they occur in that instant. Actors can put on a false exterior by simulating the signs of action and emotion without alignment with a truthful connection to an inward state. It is also useful here to consider the choices that your character makes and consider whether that choice is focusing on the past, present or future. You might even experiment with different emphases within the scene. This would be a kind of ‘temporal concentration of attention’ exercise where your focus within the scene is directed forwards, backwards or outwards. Returning to Hamlet, then, we may recall that in 3.3 Claudius makes preparations to send the prince away to England and once again attempts to find out the reason behind his apparent madness. The court has seen the travelling players’ performance and Hamlet’s subsequent outburst. The King determines that his nephew is a danger to the country in his present state and asks the

prince’s childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to probe the cause of his disposition when they accompany him on the voyage. Rosencrantz points out how the lives of many are pegged like spokes in a wheel to the monarch and majesty that rules them. When he is alone, Claudius openly its to killing his brother, thus confirming the Ghost’s version of events for the audience. But the King cannot find belief in his empty prayers for forgiveness. Even though his words fly up, his thoughts remain firmly on the earth. In many ways, Claudius is an inverted mirror image of the prince, given that he can and does execute the actions of his will, but cannot find the truthful inward disposition to match his outward appearance. He is resolved to action, but it is an action which is in search of worldly power. Hamlet enters as the King is kneeling in prayer in what seems like the perfect opportunity to exact his intended revenge. With the resolve to kill his uncle, the young prince is impeded in carrying out the murder by the thought that his victim will go to heaven having shown such an apparent act of repentance and contrition in prayer. In fact, the King realizes that he cannot repent and give up the worldly spoils of his deeds and for this reason is unable to achieve redemption, like a bird stuck in a sticky trap of lime. The next scene 3.4 (known as ‘The Closet Scene’) follows rapidly on the heels of this aborted revenge. Polonius executes the plan previously agreed with Claudius – of hiding in the Queen’s closet behind the arras (the central feature on the Elizabethan stage). Incidentally, if Tim Fitzpatrick (2016) is correct, this central space should be a dead-end ensuring that the audience knows there is no escape for Polonius in his hiding place – perhaps the space determines his death. Just as Polonius used his own daughter as bait to draw out the true reason behind Hamlet’s madness, now he uses the Queen in order to solve the mystery. Hamlet arrives at his mother’s room just as the older man conceals himself. The Queen is preparing to speak to her son when he forces her to sit down until he has shown her a mirror to see the truth of her inmost part. Afraid that he is going to kill her, she calls out for help, at which point Polonius cries out too. Hamlet responds by stabbing the concealed eavesdropper through the curtain, as the Prince briefly thinks that he has killed the King (evidenced by his accusation expressed to his mother before lifting the curtain). The Queen bemoans his bloody deed, but Hamlet accuses her of much worse in complicity with the murder of his own father – a topic that is strangely not pursued in much detail. In fact, the reaction to Polonius’s murder is cut very short for both of these characters. Hamlet refers to two ‘counterfeits’ of the current and previous kings (possibly amulets with pictures inside them). It is a tantalizing thought that the Ghost and Claudius are also played by the same actor, thus bringing a frisson of

metatheatrical meaning to the situation. Following his berating comments, the Ghost appears once more. If we think spatially about this, there is a pattern to his walking across the stage from one door to the other and back, likely to be repeated throughout the play. The Ghost’s appearance is just after Hamlet has committed murder – again raising suspicion about whether this is a good or evil spirit. And yet on this appearance, Gertrude is unable to see the ghost while Hamlet does. Unlike previously where the soldiers bid to speak to the Ghost, here the Ghost bids Hamlet speak to his mother. He has returned to incite action and motivate the flagging purpose in Hamlet. When exploring these scenes, it may be useful to map out the actions of your character and indicate whether they are turning away from resolute choice or facing it at various points. Hamlet’s struggle is essentially about facing the bare facts of existence and choosing action – making meaning through his own choices. In the face of our coming death, we choose to choose. We create our own lives through choices. Now there is some debate as to whether Authenticity is even possible in this sense – is it possible to have the burden of existence weighing down upon us at every moment? It is almost without doubt that Claudius displays strident resoluteness in his decisions to cover up his deeds and control the court with a sense of confidence. But this Resoluteness is not authentic because it fails to take into the being of others there with him and treats them more like objects. Likewise, the Queen allows herself to be deceived in this new world order and marries Claudius as the ‘right’ action for Denmark as a whole and for herself. In any event, the concept of Resoluteness may well be helpful in considering the craft of the stage in of finding an inner and outer connection between intent and action and responding to the call of Being as articulated in a particular performance situation.

Resoluteness

• Describe a life-changing decision that you made at some stage in your life. Was it hard to make, and if so, why? What was happening at the time? In what way

did you face up to your current circumstances and resolve not to look away? How did action come out of the decision? How did it lead to a series of decisions that were not easy in order to stay on this course? Now locate a life-changing decision for your character and ask the same questions. • When did you avoid making a decision? How did you go about it? What was the consequence of the delay? Consider your character and a significant choice that they avoid in the same way. • Choose and explore a moment in the scene above where your character is avoiding facing the future. Play the same moment as if your character is avoiding the past. Now present a third version where your character is avoiding the present. How do each of these versions shift the meaning of the moment in performance? • Consider the key moments in the play where your character faces indecision, regret, false certainty or overconfidence. How might they have made an authentic choice? Improvise the two possibilities in a scene. You might even think about different weights, directions and magnitude of movements in the improvisation. • When does your character have their choices and decisions handed over to them by others? Are there any points where these are questioned by your character?

Being-towards-death

The term ‘Being-towards-death’ sounds a bit morbid because it seemingly gestures towards the coming-to-an-end of life rather than the purposeful activity of existence. But in fact, the idea that our material existence will come to an end gives meaning to every moment, and for that reason, in an existential sense, it is liberating of our actions. Death as a limit-point is the thing that gives value and uniqueness to our lives. There is a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson titled ‘Tithonus’ in which the Prince of Troy, and lover of Eos the goddess of dawn, is granted eternal life (but forgets to ask for eternal youth as well). His wish is fulfilled, but he suffers the regret of seeing the world him by, those he loves perish and the world constantly change around him. By losing the prospect of death, his life is flattened out to merely wandering the earth without meaning, since time becomes levelled out. For this reason, we would do well to put our everyday actions into this broadest context and be grateful that our lives will one day come to an end. A well-known counselling therapy is to write a letter to your loved ones as if you had died and wanted to communicate with them or a letter to your younger self. The exercise highlights what is most important in life and gets us to step back from the trivial worries of our life at any given point. And in a sense, an authentic relationship to death bears out the significance of one’s actions at any given point with a view to this ‘coming to an end’. One might also recall the old saying that only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. Whereas someone might be able to leap in and pay your tax bill for you, there is no chance they could do the same of your dying. It sounds downbeat to it, but we all die alone. It is something that happens to us as beings that is entirely individual and unique to our time here on earth. It is the thing that differentiates us from other people and in a way is the thing that is most ‘my own’. Someone else might take a fatal blow for you, of course. But that is not your death. And yet the moment we are dead, ‘we’ are no longer ‘there’. The being that experiences the world as a set of possibilities is gone. The body of the deceased persists, you might say – albeit no longer functioning. But the conscious being engaged in the world is no longer there. Death – in an existential sense – is different from the biological process of dying

when one’s body ceases to function as an organic whole and can no longer sustain itself in life. Death in this scientific sense is something that is observable. But in an existential sense of ing away, death is the moment when the range of different possibilities open to us at any given point narrows to just one. On the whole, these possibilities narrow throughout our lives. The thing about death is that it is only ever yours to experience. No one else can step in for you. Sure, someone could take a bullet and die in your place in a siege, for instance. But that is their death that they experience, not yours. The idea of finding your true self has many resonances in acting theory. In ‘Method-Acting’ (as articulated by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, for example), the reason why we might not act ‘authentically’ in any given situation is because of a series of blocks enculturated by society that stop us from expressing ourselves truthfully. A similar thought is found in Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘via negativa’ and physical approach to stripping the body back to its essential core. Depicting a character in Method Acting is about finding those truthful feelings and then suppressing them in relation to the social norms that surround the given circumstances of the character. But in Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, there is no inner core to our existence. Our ‘Being-a-whole’ is only ever as taking a relation to existence through our choices in the full knowledge that they will one day end. There is perhaps no more iconic tragicomic reminder of death than in 5.1 (The Gravediggers Scene). At the end of the previous act, we have just discovered from the Queen that Ophelia has drowned. Hamlet has returned from England and Claudius has hatched a plan with Laertes for a duel that will bring about the prince’s end (thereby creating a counter-revenge plotline set forth by the death of Polonius). The two clowns discuss Ophelia’s grave and whether she can be given burial rights in sacred ground (given that she has presumably taken her own life – a sin in the Christian tradition). Amid the wordplay, there is a point to be made that she killed herself in self-defence even though it seems a paradox (she was not the coward that Hamlet had hypothesized in ‘To be or not to be’). Alice Rayner (1994) unpacks the fool’s tripartite analysis of ‘to do, to act, to perform’, articulating Shakespeare’s phenomenology of action. The first is a mere physical action, the second is to act with intention and the third to carry out in accordance with intention. Again, the central theme of Resoluteness returns here in matching one’s actions with the inward intention. There is wisdom in the fool’s joke. He points out that the gravedigger is an ancient (if not the oldest) profession because it is a necessary accompaniment to mortality. After a song, the Clown throws up

a skull from the grave. Hamlet contrasts the empty mouth of the skull with the song that he has heard. The bones could be of a murderer, a politician, a courtier or a Lady Worm. Yet all of these become objects that could simply be used as throwing pieces in a game. In of dramaturgy here, much of Hamlet’s musing might be directed at the audience as he picks out different professions and personalities to ponder in their mortality. And I also wonder whether some clever role-doubling would have it that the actor who played Ophelia is now the Clown, giving a metatheatrical double meaning to the conversation as to whose grave it is that he is digging, presumably in the trap in the middle of the stage (‘For my part, I do not lie in’t, yet it is mine’; 5.1.105). It might also help to make sense of the wordplay of the grave being for ‘one who was a woman sir’ (5.1.114), given that one who previously played a woman would now be playing a man if the role was doubled. The argument over whose grave this is in the scene reminds us that Hamlet’s death is quickly approaching too. Further discussion of the bodies in the ground (again, perhaps using the groundlings in the yard as proxies) also highlights that there are many ‘poxy bodies’ these days – the current plague that affected London and intermittently closed the theatres for fear of spreading the disease. It is at this point that the Clown reveals that this skull belongs to Yorick. Hamlet re this man’s humour and friendship as a child as he played games and shared merriment. But his lips have gone, and there is no more song. Even the great Alexander looks like this in the earth – and smells so. Here the Prince takes on the role of Clown in his riddles and song: Alexander or Caesar could become a clay lid for a beer barrel, meaning that we will all one day succumb to becoming but part of the earth. When the funeral procession arrives, the onlookers note that the ceremony has been much pared back given the circumstances of death. Laertes leaps into the grave overcome by grief and is challenged by Hamlet, thus setting off the final plot trigger in an insult that leads to the duel of the final scene. Most of the time, we turn away from the fact of our coming death and seek distraction in the world. We deny or ignore that it is going to happen in order to tranquilize the fear by seeking solace in superficial clichés and launch ourselves into idle gossip, fashions and social anonymity. But there is something much more existential at play in death too. As one’s life goes on, the possibilities of our action, choice and being are narrowed down. Eventually we are heading towards the singular possibility of our coming to an end. Arguably, this is the structure of Hamlet too. Even though Hamlet has free will and attempts to make

rational choices based on the evidence of his situation, the machinations of the court and the pressing call for revenge from beyond the grave quickly close in on him. How is the concept of Being-towards-death relevant to the creative practice of theatre? Acknowledging and facing the certainty of our own death can be a way of life that is liberating. It changes the kinds of actions that we take because we shirk away from tranquilizing platitudes. Being-towards-death is not a morbid fascination and infatuation with the idea of our own death. It is stepping up to the fact that our time is limited and the call to action is urgent. In fact, as we have suggested, the fact that our life will one day end actually gives meaning to every moment that we live. Hamlet undergoes somewhat of a transformation by Act 5 in coming to this realization. He accepts that he too will come to the same end as all of these bodies strewn across the stage, but this liberates him in his action. For the actor, it means grasping each artistic choice with relish and cherishing the creative moment as opening up urgent possibilities. It also means commitment and discipline in order to achieve one’s creative goal. It means being prepared to give one’s all in rehearsal, being on time and ready to work, paying respect to one’s peers in the ensemble and seizing one’s own choices authentically.

Being-towards-death

• What would you do if you had eternal life and unlimited power to do whatever you wanted? What principles would guide your actions? Now ask the same questions of your character. • What would it be like if you knew the exact date and time of your death? Do you think your behaviour would change? How would it change your priorities of action? Consider how your character gets waylaid on the path to their superobjective. • Pick a character that dies in Hamlet and chose where on stage their death takes place. Form five tableaux with your workshop group to depict their journey

throughout the play towards this demise. Take note of the particular locations of stage of each significant event you choose. • How might role-doubling affect the meaning of death in Hamlet ? If the actor playing Claudius is the same as Old Hamlet’s ghost, for example? What if the actor playing the Clown is digging the grave of the character that she embodied as Ophelia? Can you think of other examples and possibilities?

Having explored these existential themes in a range of scenes, we can return to the question that Hamlet is asking in his famous monologue. If we look elsewhere in the text where the word turns up, we see that Hamlet’s father is the ‘question [emphasis added] of these wars’ as noted by Barnardo (1.1), meaning he is the instigator of the conflict between Denmark and Old Norway. Upon seeing the ghost (1.4), Hamlet exclaims: ‘Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable [emphasis added] shape.’ Here, question is doubt. Apart from multiple instances as a verb, question also appears in the sense of the ‘argument’ or technical point of a dramatic work (3.2): ‘some necessary question [emphasis added] of the play be then to be considered’. The Player King refers to the role of fortune in his speech: ‘For ‘tis a question [emphasis added] left us yet to prove / Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.’ In 4.4 Hamlet encounters a soldier heading off to a meaningless military scuffle that could take many lives (‘We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name’), to which the prince replies, ‘Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats / Will not debate the question [emphasis added] of this straw.’ In this sense, ‘question’ is the sheer fact of materiality. And of course, Shakespeare’s clowns, the gravediggers, have many questions in their wordplay (4.5). Finally, in 5.1 Horatio responds to the English Ambassador and Norwegian Fortinbras, ‘So jump upon this bloody question [emphasis added]’, meaning the scene of bodies there in front of them. The question here has an allpervading sense of futility and meaninglessness. The battlefield has invaded the city. All of these instances of ‘question’ resonate in Hamlet’s deliberations as time, Resoluteness and history fold in on themselves. In performing ‘To be or not to be’, the dramaturgical choices that one makes in production drastically affect the meaning of the question. If Hamlet knows he is being watched by Polonius, then it is an act of some sort and of dubious

authenticity – a double bluff. If he is beginning to be affected by insanity, then these are thoughts pushing the boundaries of rationality, led by ion over reason. It could be a discussion with the real audience there, somewhat like a chorus (risking some heckling answer to the question thereby deflating its significance). The question is also about accepting a role. In this case, it is not simply a role on stage, it is the role demanded by the gods, the role expected by the King and court and the role expected by his education in arbiter of truth. By accepting the role, by giving up his freedom and rational control, he is able to gain something eternal and transcendent. He must give up himself in order to gain himself. In a theatrical sense, the actor playing Hamlet both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ as the actor and the character. The question of to be or not to be is that there really is no choice between the two – and therein lies the tragedy. One’s fate and death will come no matter what, but how one acts in this world is still important. That is what will be ed. The ultimate resolution in Hamlet comes about through death. The Queen dies from a poisoned draught set out by the King while toasting her son. The King is killed by the poison at the tip of the very sword he has set as a trap for Hamlet and the poisoned cup that killed his stolen wife. Both Hamlet and Laertes die by the same means (a poisoned sword tip) but forgive one another even at this point. The Prince dies having charged Horatio to tell his story. And this echoes his father’s command, ‘ me’. Fortinbras notes that this scene should be on the field of war rather than in the court. But from this point, things can be put back in their correct place. Horatio notes that the dead can rise and influence the living through their story which, of course, is happening in the moment of performance:

So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I

Truly deliver. (5.2.359–64)

6

Possibilities: Aletheia

The three case-study chapters with workshop exercises in this book focus on three very different play texts from disparate historical periods and call upon Heidegger’s phenomenology in Being and Time to interpret each dramatic text. However, there is much more to be explored on this path to phenomenology through theatre. Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s underwent a shift in thought from beings to Being in what he calls die Kehre (the ‘Turn’) (Guignon 2005). During this period, Heidegger reoriented his approach to the connection between Dasein and Sein. This does not mean that he believed that there is a strange unseen metaphysical power lurking behind existence – exactly the charge that he had levelled at many philosophers of the past. Instead, he attempts to re-examine the relationship between specific entities and Being in a new way. Nor does it necessarily mean that he completely walked away from his earlier thinking. In fact, he claimed that the Turn was in his work all along. In one sense, the shift in Heidegger’s thinking represents a movement away from ‘fundamental ontology’ towards a ‘history of Being’. In other words, he changed course from investigating the conditions for the possibility of being (and its horizons) to examining the ways that we have understood Being both in the past and in the modern world. On the surface, he eschewed his earlier systematic approach and examined various literary-philosophical works as revealing of truth in their own special way. In part, this was related to his disillusionment with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party after holding the position of Rector at the University of Freiburg and the subsequent ban on teaching imposed on him after the war (Farias 1989). Heidegger departed from his earlier formal philosophical style in order to find other ways of expressing his ideas. The Turn is a refiguration of the Question of Being with a special focus on art, language, technology and the Event of truth as disclosure.

Figure 6: The Tamar River, Launceston, Tasmania, 2019. Photograph by Daniel Johnston.

In this final chapter, I offer a brief consideration of some philosophical themes that Heidegger developed in these later poetically inflected writings as they are relevant to acting. Thinking more broadly about the relationship between the theatre arts and truth, these themes may inspire you to consider how your practice might offer a contribution to thought in itself and analyse whether or how performance enters into dialogue with philosophy. Of course, your theatremaking process might not include a dramatic text of the same kind or you might be employing an approach other than character-driven realism. So rather than focus on a specific text here, I suggest that you reflect upon your own creative practice. It is possible to argue that many of Heidegger’s works after Being and Time are ‘post-phenomenological’ because they move away from an explicit use of many of the key introduced in the opening chapter of this book (which, in fact, Heidegger had already developed and evolved from Husserl’s approach). Nevertheless, characteristically, he still carries out a form of phenomenological reduction by inquiring into the essence of the phenomenon under investigation and a bracketing of assumptions and previous interpretation in order to get to the thing itself. Each group of ideas may also be relevant to approaching and exploring particular dramatic texts (e.g. see Johnston 2019). Nevertheless, I believe that themes in this chapter can be helpful in providing a way of seeing dramatic texts, processes and productions in the way that they are directed towards the Question of Being. Although some of the philosophical motifs that Heidegger sets out in his later work are perhaps esoteric and obscure (some would argue, ‘quasi-mystical’ and ‘pseudo-profound’), they also see art as way into talking about truth in a different way. The thoughts they express are useful for theatre-making and, in particular, in thinking about how theatre-knowledge can speak back to philosophy in a different language. Heidegger writes generally about art (and following Hegel, ‘Great Art’) without much attention to drama in performance (apart from some consideration of the playwright and poet Sophocles), although

it is tantalizing to apply a similar path of thought to the intricate and personal work of theatre-making. However, my reading of theatre as truth-revealing departs from Heidegger in so far as I hope to acknowledge the theatrical ensemble as creator of the work of art rather than the individual Romantic genius in solitude on the path to uncovering the meaning of Being. Such an exploration is not limited to verbal language but also seeks to include an embodied language of Being expressed in theatre. This interpretation also goes beyond art simply as a conservative force of tradition and culture to exploring the potential of theatre to open up new possibilities of being in an ontologically significant way. We begin with this tricky notion of truth and how it is relevant to acting.

On the essence of truth in theatre

Thumbing through almost any acting textbook or guide, you will most probably find the author invoking a concept of ‘truth’ at some point. Phillip Zarrilli (1995: 8) notes in Acting (Re)Considered that a range of acting theories are committed to ideas of truth and truthfulness. Stanislavski himself devotes an entire chapter to the topic in ‘Belief and the Sense of Truth’ (2008: 152–94). From a philosophical point of view, it might be easy to dismiss this talk as metaphysics required to ensure a certain commitment from the artist that sometimes might even border on religious belief (e.g. see Philip Auslander in Zarrilli [1995: 59– 68]). Truth in various acting processes involves accessing what we understand as emotions, believability of action, honesty of expression, faithful textual interpretation and most broadly capturing the essence of ‘the human condition’. Yet each of these elements is far from uncontested or self-evident. Looking back to the ‘Mapping the Self’ exercise in Chapter 1, you might also revisit the model of self that underpins its concept of truth as revealing an ‘inner core’ in a specific approach to rehearsal and performance. Not only does every theory of acting contain an implicit (or perhaps even explicit) theory of self, but also a theory of truth deeply influenced by its social, cultural, historical and philosophical context that can be deconstructed (Auslander in Zarrilli 1995). Indeed, you might argue that specific interpretations of selfhood and truthfulness are in fact created by the discourses of truth in actor-training (Maxwell 2010). Many rehearsal processes are also steeped in a discourse of truth-revelation where metaphors clustered around ‘excavating’, ‘digging’ and ‘uncovering’ are often apparent (e.g. see Rossmanith 2008). But is this talk of truth simply empty, misguided or, even worse, damaging? Rather than dismiss these truth-claims in theatre-making as confabulated myths or misdirected metaphors, I suggest that Heidegger’s philosophy of art can shed some light on what is going on. Heidegger (1977) appropriates the ancient Greek term ἀλήθεια (aletheia), meaning ‘unconcealment’, and it can be considered in relation to the processes of ‘world-revealing’ in a work of art. Truth in this context is not the correspondence between propositions and a state of affairs in the world, but rather ‘shining a light on what is’ – and indeed what Being is in itself (Young 2001). Heidegger suggests that art can make space for such a

‘happening of truth’ in a way that cannot be reduced to the relationship between linguistic statements and materiality. In other words, art has the potential to uncover both the existential horizons of the world and the work in its own being. This interpretation of truth is useful for thinking about theatre because it acknowledges the lived experience of time and history in the work rather than a foundational, fixed and static metaphysical entity that cannot fit with the temporal and ephemeral nature of performance as witnessed by an audience. On the one hand, we might be cautious in accepting Heidegger’s invocation of art and folk traditions as unsettlingly acquiescent with the world-historical ideas of Nazism, the supremacy (and continuity) of Greek/German language and culture, the aesthetics of destiny and the rural or pastoral idyll of living close to nature behind blind nationalism. On the other hand, his theory of art resists the ‘technologization’ of modernity or the thought of humans as mere numbers and resources (which saw its epitome in Auschwitz) (Pattison 2000: 43–44). I would argue that the face-to-face encounter between actor and audience in the theatre has a particular power in this respect because participants in the event – including the ensemble and creatives – are invited to see each other not as mere things, but as beings of the same kind that we ourselves are. I would also suggest that the processes of performance offer space for truth-revealing as aletheia. Actors, directors and theatre-makers do not merely undertake mechanical tasks determined by the resources at hand in rehearsal and through the application of technical knowledge as artists. The process of rehearsal ploughs, tills and turns over possibilities of expression, communication and action through words, sounds, energies, temperatures, gestures and tempos to reveal and hide aspects of their own materiality in the ‘open’ space of the studio. This idea resonates with Peter Brook’s (1968) ‘empty space’ in which theatre can take place replete with possibilities. Of course, the space is never empty but rather brimming with affordances and potentiality and can be transformed by the presence of human bodies performing and witnessing together the cultural lifeworld within which they exist – as an ‘energised play-space of Being’ (Johnston 2011). But the way in which the space is filled in relation to the audience can either fall flat or create a deep connection in the encounter (or somewhere in-between). For this reason, it is worth turning to Heidegger’s most famous essay on art in order to shine a light on theatre-making and its truth-revealing possibilities as an art. Heidegger’s (1977) lecture series first delivered in the 1930s entitled ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) reflects upon the ‘essence’

of the work of art. Any mention of ‘essence’ here may seem to contradict any Destruktion of metaphysics (as explored in Chapter 2) but actually the investigation enacts a form of eidetic reduction. What is the essence of an artist? The answer, of course, is art. Art makes the artist what they are. In a circular fashion, Heidegger notes that art is that which is produced by an artist. So, what is a work of art, if that is the case? In order to break into the circle, Heidegger begins by considering the ‘thingly’ nature of the work of art because that is what it ‘is’ in a sense. However, artworks are much more than sheer materiality: they point towards the world in which they are created and exist. Heidegger goes on to outline the different senses of being in of the artwork – as materiality, as equipment and as beings that live in a meaningful environment and care about that world and others who live in it. Part of the problem with traditional aesthetic theory is it focuses on the material and formal properties of the work (as it might appeal to the sensibilities of beauty, truth and goodness for an aesthetic elite). This misses the point that a work of art is not just a ‘thing’ and fails to reveal the dynamic relationship between the world and the artwork. Heidegger (1977) explores three examples to draw out the world-revealing possibilities of art: painting, architecture and poetry. First, Heidegger considers Vincent van Gogh’s famous pair of peasant shoes (painted in 1886). If we just consider the materiality of the shoes, we will not fully ‘get’ the work of art. The shoes are made of wooden material, leather soles, thread and nails. In looking and observing, we are reminded that they have been worn by someone – perhaps a rural worker in the fields. The shoes stand alone, but their deteriorated state points towards their use as if the creases and tears are reminders of the work carried out. They help to protect the worker, who labours on the land for food and produce, from the environment. In this sense the shoes reveal the ‘world’ and ‘earth’ of the worker – the environment and activities of the peasant woman’s work and what it is for and the material that sustains that existence. The worn-out quality of the shoes reveals these two aspects of their being. The artistic depiction enables a moment of aletheia or unconcealment in the work of art because it points towards the sustaining materiality of the shoes as an artistic subject and the world of the shoes’ owner. Over and above the materiality and equipment-context of these shoes, they also point towards the being and existence of the peasant who wears them. Next, Heidegger considers the idea of a Greek temple as a work of art. The temple stands in both for the society and values of the community and the natural world that surrounds it. The structure also harbours a religious sanctuary

that stands in the middle of a valley of rocks while enclosing the statue of a god within. The temple gathers in the life of its community with ceremonies, offerings, prayers and predictions of the future. In this sense, it ‘makes space’ for the people who participate in those rituals while at the same time creating a view out to the natural world and ‘Earth’ than can be seen from inside. The sacred place is a clearing for the opposition between Sky and Earth. For Heidegger, the temple is emblematic of aletheia in so far as it allows its inhabitants to see the things as they are – from both the standpoint of humans and their nurturing environment. Such revealing covers up and conceals too: when pondering the marble stone of the columns, one loses sight of the religious and social aspects of the building, for example. In clearing a space for this world of human ritual, one can forget the natural world which sustains and houses the structure. In addressing the divine and eternal through prayer, one can lose sight of the mortal and the practical aspects of life. Each conception or perception of being covers over another, and in this way, Heidegger suggests that the essence of truth is the twin movement of showing and veiling over. Yet each way of seeing the work of art picks out the truth of being in the Greek temple. After teasing out the relationship between the work and the artist, Heidegger then focuses on artwork as something that is ‘created’. He invokes the ancient Greek term for both art and craft: τέχνη (technē) as ‘a bringing forth’, ‘a mode of knowing’, ‘a way of seeing’ what is present. The process of creation also allows ‘what is’ to be seen from within a world-historical standpoint. The artwork not only reveals itself as a work in its materiality but also shows the world which surrounds it. Finally, Heidegger turns to think about poetry, a term derived from ποίησις (poiesis) as pertaining to the essence of art in of ‘fabrication’ or ‘production’ as well as ‘poetry’ and ‘poems’. Earlier in the essay, he refers to C. F. Meyers’s poem ‘The Roman Fountain’ as an example of art referring not to a specific thing (a fountain in this case) nor the general essence of fountains, but to something else – an expression of Being. At the very end of the essay, Heidegger quotes Friedrich Hölderlin, with the thought that art is still near the origin where it can reveal Being. The suggestion is that poetry can create an ‘opening’ and a ‘clearing’ for ontological revelation. Language is key to the way that every historical community understands itself in relation to the world, and poetry in this sense encomes the people’s customs, beliefs and way of life with respect to the world (as I will explore in the section ‘Poetry, Language, Theatre’). These traditions do not exist separately from Being – but rather through Being – and

for this reason, art requires ‘preserving’ through allowing the work to be a work. In this way, poetry creates and produces the world while also allowing a unique way of witnessing truth. Heidegger’s interpretation of the Greek term technē as ‘seeing what is’ (and implicit analysis of poiesis as ‘creating’) is helpful in thinking about theatremaking. The skills and expertise of actors, directors and designers enable them to ‘perceive possibilities’ in rehearsal – to explore what might be otherwise highly abstract philosophical concepts through the text in a physical and embodied way. In this way, theatre-making is a form of ‘preserving’ in so far as it allows the work to be a work – to let Being speak not merely as a museum displaying objects devoid of world but allowing them to live and breathe onstage. But theatre-making is also a type of seeing that seeks out the possibilities of connection and communion with the audience in the theatrical event. By taking everyday objects, gestures, actions, sounds and words and lending them a poetry of the stage, actors have an opportunity to create a world both for the character and the spectator who has come to witness. A successful theatrical event enacts technē – a way of seeing through skilful craft – and also poiesis – producing a world through artistic creativity. Exploring theatre-making in of aletheia is relevant both in reflecting upon your own performance processes and in analysing performance because it allows for a notion of artistic truth not as corresponding to real things in the world, but as revealing and covering up aspects of being. Part of a reflection on your own work might also include thinking about technē and what it has the capability to uncover through skilful seeing. What is there that is special about your particular seeing in the moment of performance? Think about the ‘World’ and ‘Earth’ that you encounter in the performance process and the creative strife that produces meaning. What is the material of the work? Describe the ‘thingly’ elements of a theatre production. How do those ‘things’ point to different worlds? What world does it indicate? What does your work bring into presence? What does it reveal, either from your point of view as a spectator or performer? Consider a rehearsal or workshop process you have taken part in and, consider the special ‘bringing forth’ or special way of seeing it enacts. Think about what the process ‘preserves’ by way of truth and how that preservation takes place.

Poetry, language, theatre

As discussed in relation to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, it is clear that Heidegger considers language not simply as communication but as something deeper – the articulation of ‘essential’ words attuned with Being. Language names things, keeps things, sustains things and preserves things in the world. Naming an entity allows it to appear in the way that it is. Words grant being to things as they are. In this way, language is intimately intwined with Being, as Heidegger famously writes in his ‘Letter on Humanism’:

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it through their speech. (1977: 217)

The guardians of Being are those who preserve this closeness to the origin and maintain it through their speech. Again, it is worth ing that this origin is not a separate metaphysical location where Being resides but rather an active ing and inquiry into meaning itself. Language in this sense is not the everyday talk of expressing and communicating as we go about our daily tasks but rather a form of expression that investigates and reveals itself as language and responds to the call of Being. As we will see, for Heidegger these guardians of essential language are poets. Theatre is, of course, closely linked with poetry not simply as a literature but through bringing words alive in the performance space shared with an audience (although Heidegger focused almost entirely on the dramatic text in any mention of theatre). In a sense, when one approaches a dramatic text (especially a classic text from a past era), part of the task is to preserve the essence of the work while

finding a way of keeping and sustaining it for a contemporary audience. Plato ridiculed the performer’s work in Ion, suggesting that the actor or rhapsode of poetry had no real knowledge or technē of the form and content they performed, but simply a knack or inspiration for reciting the words of its real creator (Plato 1987). A refutation of this argument can be formulated by extending Heidegger’s view to argue that actors and theatre-makers sustain the poet’s originary language to let Being itself speak. The skill of the performer as poet is in preserving the being of the work and allowing its world to appear. The relationship between linguistic expression and world-creation is at the core of Heidegger’s philosophy more broadly both in form and content. He is well known for inventing new words to convey his ideas and for appropriating ancient Greek into his project. In almost all of his philosophical texts, the reader encounters repetitions, idiosyncratic usage of words, connected etymologies between related , strange and seemingly self-reflexive verbs and calling back of archaic meanings to elucidate his ideas and arguments. This is partly because he is careful to avoid the pitfalls of metaphysics bound up in the history of language in its regular use and covering over of the essence of truth that it holds. In everyday situations, we tend to use words without thinking closely about the meanings that they express. But through poetic expression, we can discover insight into our own Being-in-the-world and the history of Being alike. For this reason, the language that we use to talk about rehearsal and technical aspects of acting should also be carefully chosen to avoid metaphysical conceptions of Being and open up the space for investigation. Heidegger suggests that language itself is something that cannot be spoken about directly in any essential sense, yet one can enter into dialogue with it. In its inauthentic deficient form, language is just talk and chatter – saying what the anonymous They say (‘what they say’). Every language is both enabled and constrained by a certain set of historical and cultural conditions that form the limits of expression. But when we get at ‘what is spoken’ – when we take the time to listen and hear – we can approach the way in which language speaks Being. The rehearsal process in theatre is also a way of entering into dialogue with the work of art – by responding to the texts of Shakespeare, Sophocles or Chekhov, for example. Similarly, if you are working with a contemporary playwright, then you must reach out to the lifeworld in which the work has been created. If your process is non-text based, then the form itself and source materials as ‘pre-texts’

should also be approached authentically (Schechner 2013: 226). If you take a superficial, pre-digested approach to meaning available in the work, you are unlikely to engage the audience. In theatrical , this is not simply accepting the ‘received’ interpretation of words on the page or even worse, to simply mouth them without reflection. In rehearsal – just as we might pay close attention to the words in a poem – the language of the playwright can stand out and reveal itself as language. The task of the actor, director and creative team is to ‘listen’ to the text rather than force their own meaning upon it. In what Peter Brook calls ‘deadly theatre’, one might be seduced by the latest fashions and fads in theatre production too while forcefully applying them to the text without justification and reflection (Brook 1968). Part of the theatre-maker’s role is to perceive and bring to life the way in which the text speaks to Being too. In some ages, Heidegger suggests that language has many characteristics of Dasein itself (as he also suggests of art). Language is a living thing that changes meanings according to the time and is not simply a tool for use in conveying meaning for practical purpose. Language in this essential form is the vehicle for exploring the meaning of Being itself in a creative and thoughtful way. In this sense, we could say that we do not have a language so much as language has us. In approaching a dramatic text or performance process from this point of view, close attention is required towards the language and poetry of the text or pretext. Deep in rehearsal, one might often feel as though the work has a life of its own. At the same time, it is important to that Stanislavski thought of the creation of a ‘third being’ in the process of acting: ‘the person in the part’ (2008: 334–35). Just as poetic language seeks ‘attunement’ with Being on this , so too can the actor find resonance with the playwright’s words and the collective ensemble’s work. For me, this is the essence of being-there on stage: bringing the work alive in the flesh in harmony and resonance with Being through an encounter with the audience. It is possible to unpack Heidegger’s idea that the essence of language is poetry in a bit more detail to explore further here in relation to acting. The word ‘poetry’ in German (Poesie) derives from the Greek ποιεῖν (poiein), meaning ‘to make, to do’, and can also refer to a poem or poetic mood. Aristotle distinguishes poiesis which ‘produces something’ from πρᾶξις (praxis) which is an ‘action’ and ‘process’ (Inwood 1999: 168). Poetry is not simply a tool – it creates something. Another word for poetry in German is Dichtung, from the Latin ‘dictare’, meaning ‘to compose’, ‘to dictate’, ‘to draw up’ or ‘to order/prescribe’, and the term applies to all art in general. The German erdichten means ‘making things

up’ or ‘fabricating’, and Heidegger suggests that our engagement with the world always contains an element of invention that is crucial to reasoning and thinking about our being. Fabrication in this sense is not lying or deception; nor is it an indication of solipsism (simply existing in one’s own mind) or relativism (being true for me but not necessarily for you). Essential making is, rather, a horizon that enables beings to engage with and perceive the world in the first place. In other words, poetry can create and change the world in which we live. In his work on Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that great philosophy is both thoughtful and poetic in this world-making sense (Pattison 2000). The upshot is that the language of philosophy can function like a poem in both ‘seeing’ and ‘creating’ the world in which we dwell. So too can theatre. Friedrich Hölderlin is the poet that Heidegger devotes particular attention to in his later philosophy because he embodies a tension between German tradition and theology and the ancient Greek gods and myths – a tension that he hoped to replicate in his own work. Heidegger appropriates this particular Romantic poet’s comments on language and poetry as an ‘intuitive phenomenology’ in dialogue with Being. According to Hölderlin, poetry is innocent and devoid of guilt, with the capacity to play with images and invent new languages and meaning. For him, language creates a clearing space for human beings, making their world and history possible. Words create and destroy worlds and as a gift from the gods is a common possession of humanity, although it opens man up to delusion. Language is something essential to man and takes the form of conversation – both speaking and hearing – fixed by a stable world that persists amidst the flux of the world. We have the ability to name things and invoke the ‘gods’ who demonstrate their claim on us through nature. This type of naming invents and brings order and measure to the flowing world in time, thus grounding human existence in something lasting. Poetry is essential to our dwelling on the earth, and it makes language possible; but it also brings danger in that it contains traces of the gods and the voices of the people ed on through the generations in myths and legends. In this way, the poet stands between the gods and man and creates the ‘between’ that determines who man is and the places in which we dwell. Of course, language is crucial to understanding theatre too. Yet, the stage offers an embodied expression capable of naming not with the spoken word but through a vocabulary of experience and sensation. This was the premise of French avant-garde theatre-maker Antonin Artaud and his search for an impossible theatre of direct communication with the audience. In one sense, we

can interpret actors, playwrights and directors as producing a poetic language of the stage. You might consider what it is that language picks out and names in your own work. How does language create a space between the eternal and our limited finitude through its poetry? How can we create a new language of meaning through the theatre process? More importantly, the question in relation to theatre is not just one of verbal language but of gesture, tempo, sound, movement and space. How does the process ‘create’ or ‘fabricate’ a world? How does the process ‘name’ things, people and places, thereby changing them? How does the work ‘effect change’ (or attempt to change) the real world? How does it give us a different perspective on beings and the world itself? You might also think about the language that you use in the rehearsal room to describe your craft. What is the language of your technical approach to acting (e.g. beats, actions, objectives and so on)? It almost goes without saying that you pay close attention to the poetry of the play text or other sources of inspiration for your process. Finally, you might consider the ‘historical’ nature of language in the text you are working on – and how language has evolved from the time it was written. How does the language stand in relation to our own time and point in history? In what way can a rehearsal process or workshop open up a dialogue using embodied language?

Building, dwelling, theatre

The fleshly, kinetic and embodied space of performance is essential to dramatic thought and, in my view, can provide a reveal truth beyond language and the spoken word (although I should avoid claiming that Heidegger only thought about poetry in relation to verbal expression only). Truthfulness in the theatre is not accessed by rarefied detached philosophy but through socially, politically and historically specific expression. As considered in Chapter 3, we humans do not just exist in geometric space; we build and navigate through a meaningful world in which we dwell – and this space forms the materiality of the theatre process. Just as we live and make our homes in the world and in doing so reveal something about our being, so too is this concept of world building relevant to acting and theatre. Extending Heidegger’s reflections on man and space, I would argue that theatrical spaces allow for a ‘gathering of being’ partly because the performance space wraps around living bodies and brings them together as they bring the house alive, as States (1985) and Garner (1994) explore. Similarly, the sensing bodies of spectators create the space as much as the architecture that encloses it with a boundary for possibilities. Theatre audiences witness a world built before their very eyes through story, movement and living beings whose bodies form part of the materiality of the work of art in performance. In order to understand how building functions in theatre, we can ask what it means to build a world more generally. Humans make worlds through their everyday activities and interactions with others. Scientists exist in a world comprised of the scientific method, peer review of research and disseminating their findings through conferences and media. Sportspeople move through a world defined by the rules of the game, training their bodies, testing for drug enhancement and competing on the field. Families make a world by seeking a safe shelter, sharing food and conversation and caring for one another. CEOs navigate a world of boardrooms, mergers, dividends and downsizing. Yet actors build a world in a different way. As a way into thinking about ‘building’ in the context of theatre-making, the space in which performance takes place is an obvious point at which to begin. Sometimes, theatre spaces are permanent structures and at other times, they

might be no more than a circle in the sand separating audience and spectators. Theatres and performance spaces are uniquely located at the intersection of multiple worlds – both real and imagined – of actors, characters (or performance personas) and audiences (McAuley 2000). This connection permits the theatrical event to explore what it means to make a world in a fictional context while also paying attention to the social context of the performance and the materiality of the event. Just as van Gogh’s peasant shoes draw attention to their own texture and materials while bringing to presence the world of the peasant woman’s work in the field, so too does theatre display its own construction while pointing beyond. Both remain in a world of ‘things’ while also pointing towards Being. It is not surprising, then, that theatre can be ‘about’ world-building both in form and content (States 1985; Wilshire 1982). In many cases, theatre is about theatremaking and the performativity of the human subject – as evidenced in metatheatre and the recurring motif of the play-within-a-play (Abel 1963). It is helpful, therefore, to turn to Heidegger’s reflections on building and dwelling to seek guidance. Heidegger’s lecture at the Darmstadt Symposium on ‘Man and Space’ in 1951, entitled ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1977), examines the nature and practice of building in the background historical context of a national housing shortage when there was an urgent need for homes for the German people following the decimation of buildings in Second World War. He puts off the broader practical, political and technical problems of this crisis. As with the discussion of art earlier, the question he asks is, ‘Exactly what is the essence of building?’ How do buildings make space for dwelling in the first place? The obvious answer is that humans build structures so that they can dwell in them. But it is not that simple. Not all buildings are directly made for dwelling – factories, offices and other public buildings, for example. Yet each of these public structures either points back to the dwelling of humans in space within a world or stands as a structure that forgets this more essential meaning of building. According to Heidegger, the post-war public housing shortage has disconnected building and dwelling because of the industrial economics required for providing shelter to the masses. Through the crisis, humans have forgotten the true meaning of these , because they focus on function, resources and affordability. He points out that the word bauen, meaning ‘building’, can be traced to an older word for ‘being’. The connection highlights the way people ‘dwell’ is bound up in the way that they ‘are’ – how they exist and who they are (both as individuals and as a community). Building is a particular way of Being-

in-the-world and a way of making space for dwelling. Building in its essential form brings forth both the natural and man-made world but does not rest in pure numbers and resources. According to Heidegger, the modern epoch has failed to distinguish between building and dwelling because it conceives of the problem merely in technical (e.g. in of cost effectiveness, scalability for the population and low project cost). Yet building is not simply an operational response to a need for homes – it is part of a tradition and a way of being for a community. It is a way for humans to experience being-together from an historical past into the future. Architecture, therefore, is not a universal science of unchanging function but a responsive craft in relation to place and history. Once again drawing upon Hölderlin, Heidegger articulates a mysterious unity in our experience of Being through what he calls das Geviert (the ‘Fourfold’): we dwell on the Earth, under the Sky, as Mortals and waiting for divinities to arrive as Gods (1977: 351–353). Each of these elements stands in for the horizons of human existence and comes about through productive conflict and opposition. The Fourfold enables dwelling through the tension between the finite and the infinite – bringing Being to light. This gathering ‘lights up’ the world as we humans move through space and time in their dwelling. The different aspects of the world in this poetic conception – the Earth, Sky, Mortals and Gods – are gathered together in each experience of being, although each can be thematized. The Earth is the ing ground for our dwelling and making the material of our world and sustaining us in our daily needs for nourishment and shelter. The Sky is the firmament above which gives the seasons, the path of the sun, the movement of the stars and the rhythms of the environment that surrounds us through the age of time. But in gazing upwards, we Mortals notice both the ‘here’ and ‘beyond’. In this sense, the heavens stand in for eternity and a horizon for apprehending space in the first place – the rhythms and cycles that govern our existence. This leads to the third element of the Fourfold: Mortals with a finite existence. In ing our certain and coming death, one can come to with our essential being. As explored in Chapter 5, although there is Nothingness at the heart of Being in itself, in facing up to this fact and acting resolutely, one can grasp meaning from that limited being. The inevitability that life will one day come to an end actually gives meaning to every moment. Finally, there are the Gods who can be understood as ‘divinities’ who have fled the earth. They create and provide for the Earth. Nevertheless, they have left the world in which Mortals live – although mysteriously concealed in the world that surrounds them. One might

think of the Gods as ‘divine destinies’ or laws holding the fabric of society together. These are not simply subject to ‘public opinion’ but represent much deeper and eternal laws demanding obedience. The Fourfold allows humans to be in the space where dwelling ‘happens’ in an essential way. Conversely, the act of dwelling sustains the Fourfold in its unity and gathers each aspect together. If carried out in an attentive way, dwelling tends to the Earth so as to maintain it without exploitation. In this sense, as Heidegger notes, building is not merely perfunctory constructing but a ‘preserving’ of Being:

In saving the earth, in receiving the sky, in awaiting the divinities in initiating mortals, dwelling propriates as the fourfold preservation of the fourfold. To spare and preserve means to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its essence. What we take under our care must be kept safe. But if dwelling preserves the fourfold, where does it keep the fourfold’s essence? How do mortals make their dwelling such a preserving? Mortals would never be capable of it if dwelling were merely a staying on earth under the sky, before the divinities, among mortals. Rather, dwelling itself is always a way of staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things. (1977: 353)

In other words, this preservation comes from the way we direct ourselves towards the Fourfold – of caring for Being and staying with things there in the world (rather than floating off and forgetting as we do in our everyday interactions). Heidegger’s reflections on ‘man and space’ are particularly relevant to theatre in that ‘things’ come to light when placed on the stage, and it is precisely the task of the actor to avoid such absorption and forgetfulness. It is not such a stretch to say that the Fourfold enables dwelling in the theatre. For Heidegger, buildings allow for dwelling spaces to occur, and I would argue that dwelling places are created through the performance process. The famous example in this essay is a bridge which creates a unique space by being stretched across a river as a site of crossing. However, the structure is not simply a functional construction nor merely the object of symbolic meaning. The bridge is

an example of the gathering power of the Fourfold in so far as it allows for dwelling. It gathers the Earth, Sky, Mortals and Gods into its being:

The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants mortals their way, so that they may come and go from shore to shore. Bridges initiate in many ways. The city bridge leads from the precincts of the castle to the cathedral square; the river bridge near the country town brings wagons and horse teams to the surrounding villages. The old stone bridge’s humble brook crossing gives to the harvest wagon its age from the fields into the village and carries the lumber cart from the field path to the road. The highway bridge is tied into the network and ever differently the bridge initiates the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. Now in a high arch, now in a low, the bridge vaults over glen and stream – whether mortals keep in mind the vaulting of the bridge’s course or forget that they, always themselves on their way to the last bridge, are actually striving to surmount all that is common and unsound in them in order to bring themselves before the haleness of the divinities. The bridge gathers, as a age that crosses, before the divinities – whether we explicitly think of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge, or whether that divine presence is obstructed or even pushed wholly aside. (Heidegger 1977: 354–55)

The bridge structure is therefore much more than a simple connection between particular locations on one side of the water to the other – it gathers different regions together and allows the parts of the world to be what they are. It allows the natural world to flow on in the stream, the heavens to be seen above in an open expanse of space, the human world to through to markets and meetings, and the divine laws that govern existence. In this sense, the bridge’s construction creates place and allows us to apprehend particular space in a certain way (i.e. in relation to Being) – if we take the time to pause and think. Of course, most of the time the bridge will simply fade into the background as we cross it because we are busy going about our daily business and travels. Heidegger suggests another paradigm for dwelling in this essential sense in the image of a Black Forest farmhouse (1977: 362–63). He draws on a very personal

experience of place linked to a specific cultural and folk tradition which sustains and preserves the surrounding land and provides shelter for its inhabitants. Dwelling in this mode is to ‘make oneself at home’. It is also a form of thinking because of its openness to being as preserving and sustaining both environment and culture. The rustic farm life participates in a world that has been ed down through many generations while caring for the land and nurturing its crops. Dwelling takes on the gathering of the Fourfold as a mode of being. It makes space for Being. Heidegger’s reflections are useful in thinking about theatre-making as building and about theatres as essential buildings. In your own reflective practice, you might think about different ways in which theatre-makers ‘dwell’ in the theatre. How do actors and creatives make themselves ‘at home’ in the space? How do the performances that take place in a venue actively participate in placemaking – both in the building itself and in its vicinity? I am reminded of the impressive Minack Theatre built into a cliff-face at Porthcurno in Cornwall, United Kingdom, with the sea as its backdrop, bringing the natural world alive. You might also consider the stage-space/auditorium interaction of a specific production as a ‘bridge’ between two worlds. This may well change from production to production and with different audiences. What and who are connected in that crossing? How does the building gather different regions together? Theatres are not religious venues, but they can bring gods to presence in the way that Heidegger suggests. Think about a particular theatre you are familiar with in relation to the succession of actors and directors in the past who have walked the boards there. Some theatres might be sites of pilgrimage in the theatrical world as if being in the space grants access to the theatrical gods of the past. I visiting the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg where The Seagull was first performed and feeling an acute connection to history and tradition. You might even think about the way in which the venue ‘preserves’ a sense of belief and culture in this sense. Outdoor theatres in particular might also point beyond towards the natural world that surrounds them, reminding us both of the earth that sustains our existence and the heavens that vault above. Not so long ago, I saw an outdoor version of Westside Story on Sydney Harbour when rain began falling heavily on the stage and created steam and splashes as the bodies of the dancers moved across it, extending the movement in a lingering after-image of spray. Reality imposed itself upon and was embraced by the fiction. Actors also make space for Being by building a world in a double sense (along

with the director and creative team that bring the production together) – not only in of creating a fully fleshed-out character with purposive action in the given circumstances but also in communicating with the audience and constructing a dialogue of self-reflection through rehearsal and adjustments. Following this phenomenological approach, one can say that performance opens up a set of possibilities, meanings and locations for being. The performance ensemble creates a connection between people, place and history. But unlike Heidegger who sees this relationship to Being and culture as intrinsically conservative, it is also possible that performance can challenge the status quo with respect to the meaning of Being and shift our self-understanding as a society. In reflecting on performance, Heidegger’s thoughts are useful for framing the dwelling places in the fictional world of your character. You might consider the private places or public spaces within the world of the play. What intersecting worlds do those places reveal? How do the characters go about ‘building’ a world? This might be both literally and metaphorically through the actions they carry out. How do you as an actor go about ‘building’ the world of the play? One key point in production is moving from the rehearsal space to the performance space, and it is worth considering how this affects the materiality of the production. How does a production alter or challenge our ‘dwelling’ as an audience? This question might lead into considering how the production attempts to change or reinforce a particular understanding of Being. In a sense, the process of building a character and inhabiting the stage space is akin to constructing a bridge (to take Heidegger’s famous example). It establishes locales and makes room for the possibilities and activities of dwelling. ‘Building’ in this way allows those places to come into being rather than simply connect what already existed. But the process is not simply an internal, psychological, analytical task involving an actor’s work on self; it involves creating a world that crosses over to the audience and fellow performers with a sense of authenticity. The theatrical event in this sense also uncovers something essential about dwelling: it has the potential to establish a way of being by gathering people together and allowing Being to come into presence. But there is something that stands in the way of this essential way of dwelling in the world in the age of modernity, as we will see next.

The question concerning theatre technology

Technology is deeply intertwined with theatre today. LED lighting, digital sound production, prosthetics, robotics, online streaming and elaborate stage machinery all derive from a spectacular tradition in performance infrastructure. But even the simplest stage craft involves technology of one kind or another in order to produce a theatrical effect: for example, sulphur rising from beneath the stage to signal satanic presence or a wind machine to give the aural sensation of a storm. These might be specific instances of technology for the sake of storytelling, creating atmosphere and sensory immersion in the fictional world, but there is a wider system of technology that operates on the theatre as product and production. Any working actor attending a casting-call will experience a feeling of being an expendable and substitutable resource for the entertainment machine. One director is hired and another fired in order to meet the needs of the studio. The creative department is chosen and expended as necessary. This type of technology frames both people and things as mere ‘resources’ for production – perhaps reaching its height in modernist theatre director and designer Edward Gordon Craig, who viewed actors as nothing more than glorified marionettes. In the theatre machine now, you might argue that actors are mere ‘consumables’ for the sake of production. In order to unpack the idea of technology in theatre, it is worth turning to Heidegger’s famous piece ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, delivered to a conference on the theme of art in the technological age (as a revised version of his earlier lecture ‘The Enframing’). Once again, he begins by looking to the essence of the topic under investigation. Technology seems to infiltrate every moment of our waking being in contemporary life, although it has been with humans all along, from tilling the fields with farming implements, through the industrial revolution and mechanizing of equipment and then again into the digital age. The arrival of these technologies is not simply the application of mathematical natural science to a problem but a gathering together and unconcealing of phenomena. Each epoch of Being allows for disclosure and gathering in its own way – as reason and rationality, ideas, createdness, forms and substances. The modern epoch is driven by technology with an ordering and consuming of resources defining the way that things ‘are’ today.

In many ways, Heidegger’s reflections on technology represent both the culmination and limitation of his philosophy. As mentioned earlier, ‘technology’ derives from technē, a term usually understood as a skill or way of doing something and producing something from the Greeks. Technē is often distinguished from ἐπιστήμη (epistemē), meaning ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’, in order to contrast ‘knowing-how’ with ‘knowing that’. But Heidegger claims technē should actually be interpreted in relation to φύσις (physis), meaning ‘nature’ or ‘beings as a whole emerging on their own’. Technē in this sense is the kind of knowing that guides our dealings with nature. Τεχνίτης (technitēs) are the possessors of this knowledge who have the ability to reveal beings as they are. Technology (Technik), understood in this way, reveals things prior to any making and is a way of linking up with what is already there in nature. Technology in its positive form is a way of seeing ‘what is’. A closely related but contrasting word in German is Machenschaft which is also related to ‘make’ or ‘do’ but even ‘wheelings and dealings’, ‘intrigue’, ‘machination’ according to some plan. This all-encoming tendency of technology reduces things to the value of their use and productivity. We might more broadly think about theatre itself as a technology in this sense – embedded in the entertainment machine as production. Heidegger defines modern technology in of this threatening predisposition to see human nature as a storehouse or standing reserve to be used up. The essence of technology for Heidegger is not technological in this sense. Heidegger enlists and traces the word Ge-stell (Enframing) – a term which once meant ‘position’ or ‘something put together’ and also ‘framework’ to for the essence. Drawing upon the historical roots of the two parts of this word, he suggests that they stand in for a rift between earth and world and is related to the form of a work of art (incidentally, the word Gestalt meaning ‘form’ or ‘organized whole’ has a common etymology). Later, Ge-stell is discussed in the context of the deindividuated worker, mobilized as a resource for work with no real purpose in relation to management, transport and production. He gives the example of the potter whose work reveals the form of the pottery (perhaps in contrast to machine made vessels) and the windmill on a dam that reveals wind and energy (in contrast to the power station on the Rhine that exploits the coal mines as a resource to be used up). Technology, in the former positive sense, is not about ‘correctness’ but rather the way in which the earth, man, the moon and the planets relate to one another. It

represents and reveals a phase of communal destiny. The encroaching, menacing and all-engulfing mode of technology reduces humanity to a ‘mechanized animal’ and a ‘standing resource’ for the sake of some project. The same becomes true of objects that we see in the world around us. It is hard not to think of a Cameron Macintosh musical that is planned down to the most minute detail of where an actor should stand and how the set is to be constructed for the same mass-produced, repeatable theatrical experience: the parts are expendable, but the frame is fixed as a product. Even in theatre, this comes from a drive to order nature (and theatre-makers) as nothing more than commodity resources to be used up. Although he had earlier put his faith in politics and politicians, Heidegger later came to see the remedy for technological subjugation (or ‘technicity’) in art. Machines might uproot us from our native habitat, but we need to cultivate detachment in order to avoid technology taking us over simply as material to be used up. Art can help us to see the world not in of raw material of use but as a source of revelation for Being. I would argue that this is especially so in the face-to-face encounter of actors and performers. The limitation of Heidegger’s view of technology is that it is seen in the context of a teleological History of Being that has evolved to the modern epoch. In yearning for a rustic village life connected with nature, and in his nostalgia for the pre-Socratic closeness to things, Heidegger’s picture also does not meet with the reality of modern life. We might be forgetful of Being now, but we live in a world of very different possibilities compared to Heidegger’s post-war Europe. In contrast to Heidegger, there is no reason to limit any reflection upon Being to philosophy, rendering science, sociology, anthropology and other disciplines to specified thought incapable of engaging with metaphysical questions. One wonders whether theatre would be on this list. Like Plato’s (1992) guardians who have ascended to apprehend the realm of pure forms (having escaped from the cave in which their shackled perception of reality was shaped by shadows on the wall), the danger for the Heideggerian is avoiding the pressing political, social and historical problems of our current epoch. This refusal of political responsibility in philosophy characterized Heidegger’s response (or silence). The theatre event, however, can highlight social and political responsibilities in its encounter and resist a teleological view of history through an embodied encounter. In your work, the concept of Enframing is important to think about if you are to

consider your work in relation to the Question of Being. In what respect does your work shine a light on our relationship and responsibility towards others – not merely as resources and things but as beings capable of inquiring into meaning itself? Can you think of examples of creative works and popular culture that reduce our being to mere resources? What about the field of cultural production that constitutes the theatre industry today? What forms of resistance are there available in the field as you know it? On a deeper level, we might ask whether we are homeless in the modern world. Do we lack a cohesive sense of being as a community and common gods in a way that we used to? Did we ever really have such unity, or is this a myth that we tell ourselves about the past? In what sense are theatre-makers ‘techniēs’ in that they reveal something about being? What special way of seeing do they bring to the process? How do different technologies in contemporary theatre reveal or cover up something in a production? How can theatre and performance be ‘used’ as a resource and put to the service of an all-encoming consumption (in economic, social, political, religious , for example)?

Ereignis

Throughout this book I have suggested ways that actors and theatre-makers might focus on Being-in-the-world in rehearsal by picking out phenomenological themes in the dramatic text or process to explore. The theoretical material presented here has been about dispelling metaphysical approaches to Being and finding a practical way of exploring Being-in-the-world on stage. The aforementioned exercises based on existential aspects of experience should be explored in conjunction with voice, movement, embodiment and physical training. The exercises do not advocate for constant self-consciousness of being in performance but rather form the preparatory ground to set the ship on the right course in a through line or channel in performance. A similar critique of Heidegger’s of Authenticity points out the impossibility of weighing our existential choices and possibilities so heavily at all times in life. In fact, our decisions might not always be conscious but rather set in motion by previous deliberations and choices. So too is the moment of performance prepared by rehearsal and training to foster the conditions for creativity. I have also noted that actors do not work alone but through collaborative artistic creation thereby inviting a collective reflection on Being. Just as Dasein is not a separate and distinct entity floating alongside a world of materiality, so too is the process of theatre-making inextricably linked with Being-with others. Truth as revealed onstage in performance is not an encounter of the ‘inner souls’ of separated individuals, if by that we mean an isolated thing hidden deep inside, waiting to be revealed, but achieved through a shared moment of unconcealment and connection with the audience. This shared moment is achieved through storytelling, the elements of the production and the woven design, sound, music, costumes, spatial architecture, lighting, movements, vocal qualities, text and textures of the stage. The theatrical event creates and inflects both the fictional world and the social world while bringing those worlds together. Heidegger enlists the word Ereignis (Event) to describe the ‘happening’ of truth. In a phenomenological sense, the Event is ‘the coming together of things that belong together’. Theatre too is a place for coming together. In Contributions to

Philosophy, Heidegger uses the term to signal a rethinking of our understanding of the human as a ‘rational animal’ into Dasein (Heidegger 2012). The word is also apt to describe the theatrical event where audiences and performers meet in what Stanislavski calls ‘communion’ or ‘communication’ (2008: 229 ff.). In this mode, theatre is not simply the physical space for coming together but a place that creates shared human time in an active reflection and bringing Being to presence. At the very beginning of this book, we asked, ‘What is “being there” for the actor?’ One definition was ‘the unique self-completion of the world of the spectacle, and the circle of heightened awareness flowing from actor to spectator and back that sustains the world’ (Fuchs 1986: 163). Stanislavski called it the birth of a third being in the act of world-creation – the actor in the role. I suggest that this is the Event or happening of truth on stage. Heidegger suggests that the happening of truth takes place in the Lichtung (Clearing) of disclosure. In German, the word is related to a clearing in a forest and to Licht, meaning ‘light’. The image reminds me of moving through dense foliage making everything dark into a space where suddenly you are able to see around you. But in this philosophical sense, the clearing is not simply the space around, it is Dasein, Language and Being. We bring the world to light through our very being. Of course, theatre involves not only a literal ‘lighting’ of bodies and objects within the mise en scène throughout time but also an existential lighting that forms an exploration of Being through the Event. This lighting can bring about a ‘moment of vision’ or what Heidegger calls the Augenblick (the blink of the eye). But rather than a singular moment where the scales fall from one’s eyes to discover the truth of being in theatre, skilful seeing is developed and tuned in training and rehearsal. The journey of acting is a long one with many different moments of revelation along the way. You should always be open to seeing and feeling things afresh – not just with your eyes but with your whole body and being. Unlike Heidegger, I do not believe that such an Event is the sole domain of ‘Great Art’ but can be encountered in small discoveries. Your aim need not necessarily be ‘world-historical’ and hoping to bring about a new epoch in the understanding of Being. The type of truth at play here is in the intimate presencing of one’s own being and the being of others there with you. This is what ‘being there’ means in the theatre. The final step is to allow your theatre-making practice to talk back to philosophy. Hopefully you have begun to think about how different approaches

to performance, dramatic texts and theatre-making processes can disclose truth. The key to a phenomenological approach is maintaining an openness to the text and process rather than falling into assumptions and unquestioned traditions. This involves listening and attending in a way that allows the possibilities of performance to show themselves and a skilful ‘seeing’ of truth in those moments. A poetic reflection on your theatre-practice and performance might not only contribute to your artistic development and self-awareness but also shed light on Being-in-the-world beyond the stage. My hope here is that you will continue to search for the ‘moment of vision’ where ‘ordinary time reckoning’ in the world can be upended through the theatrical event. The art of theatre itself can contribute to an emerging understanding of Being through a radical return to the things themselves. Rather than focus solely on ‘seeing’, however, we might think of a more fundamental way in which all elements of acting come together. To begin again, we can return to something fundamental to embodiment: breath. You might recall that Stanislavski represented the different components of his system in a diagram resembling a set of lungs (Whyman 2008: 40). We recall that the very word ‘inspiration’ means to breathe in, yet the actor also breathes out and communicates in an outward direction. Breath gives life to sentences, movements, gestures and moments, forming a basic unit of the actor’s process. The journey starts from breathing in the world.

Breath

• Take a moment to become aware of your breath, concentrating on the transition of air from inside to outside your body and back in. Let your attention shift down through the lungs to different parts of your body. • Explore the way that you can ‘make space’ in your body and in the environment through breath. • Synchronize your breathing with your group and begin to become attuned to each other’s presence in the room.

• Now breathe out with a sound and pitch that comes to you in the moment. Note the attunement with others there with you, which is enabled through this physical process. • In your work, check back on your attunement with the ensemble and audience as you drift between awareness of self and other. • Notice the top of your breath in the transition between in and out. Note how your breath can bring you into the presence of Being not in the vast night sky but in your own body.

Figure 7: Walking in the forest. Photograph by Daniel Johnston.

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Index

A actioning 6, 43, 56, 137 affordances 56, 58, 59, 131 aletheia (unconcealment) 130, 132–33 antepredicative experience 22 Antigone 3, 35, 38, 70–97, 103 Anxiety (Angst) 83, 87, 89, 108–09 Appadurai, Arjun 22, 24 Aristophanes 19 Aristotle 33, 72 Artaud, Antonin 24, 137 Athens 19, 70, 72–75, 78–79, 85, 96–97 attention 1–2, 29, 31, 40, 46, 107, 109, 114, 118, 149 Augustine of Hippo, St 33 Authenticity 7, 39, 48, 68–69, 75, 84, 91, 97, 116, 118, 120, 125, 147

B Baudrillard, Jean 22

Beauvoir, Simone de 20 Beckett, Samuel 16–17, 19–20, 37 Being (Sein) 2–6, 8–10, 14, 16, 23, 26, 29, 32–36, 38, 60, 51, 70–71, 76–78, 80, 82, 85, 87, 89, 94, 96, 100, 102–05, 107, 110–11, 113, 116–17, 120, 127, 129– 136, 138, 140–44, 146–48, 150 Being (the Question of) 14, 35, 57, 94, 100, 103, 127, 129, 146 Being-a-whole 100, 113–17, 122 Being-in 62 Being-in-the-world 1, 6–7, 13, 23, 25, 30, 32, 39, 42, 48, 50–52, 60–61, 76, 83, 87, 90, 107, 112, 135, 139, 146–48 Being-in-time 107 Being-towards-death 38, 100, 121–124 Being-with others / Being-together 6, 32, 38–39, 44, 47–51, 66–69 Bergson, Henri 30 Boal, Augusto 24 bodies 1, 16–17, 26, 29–32, 40–43, 45, 47, 52, 115, 123–24, 138, 142, 148 Borges, Jorge Luis 22 bracketing 9, 27, 128 see also reduction breath 13, 23, 40, 46, 148–50 Brecht, Bertolt 24, 36 Brentano, Franz 9, 27

Brook, Peter 131, 135 Butler, Judith 20, 75

C Camus, Albert 10 Chekhov, Anton 7, 48–51, 54, 58–59, 61, 66–68, 135 Chekhov, Michael 23, 35 Cherry Orchard, The 3, 35, 38, 42, 47–69, 75 Clearing (Lichtung) 103, 132–33, 136, 147–48 commedia dell’arte 19 communication (communion) 20, 32, 44–45, 105, 130, 147 consciousness 1, 4–6, 9, 12–13, 16, 27, 31–32, 39, 51, 54–55, 61, 122, 147 corps objectif 31 corps propre 31

D Dasein 9, 25, 36, 71, 77–78, 82–83, 86, 90, 94, 107, 111, 115–16, 118, 127, 135, 147–48 Derrida, Jacques 33 Descartes, René 21 Destiny 3, 36, 71, 75, 85, 89, 93–96, 104, 108, 110, 130, 135

Destruktion 35–37, 131 devised performance 37 Donne, John 60 Dreyfus, Hubert 13, 33, 57

E eidetic reduction 131 embodiment 10, 15, 52, 147–48 Emin, Tracey 57 emotion 1, 22–23, 40, 42, 58, 62, 64, 73, 86–87, 93, 100, 118, 129 emotion memory 40 empathy (Einfühlung) 10, 16 Enframing (Gestell) 144–46 epoch (of Being) 32–33, 37, 94, 101, 139, 144, 146, 148 epoché 27–28 see also reduction equipment 40, 43, 51–59, 67, 76, 81, 111, 131–32, 144 ethics 10–11 Event, the (Ereignis) 127, 147–48 existence 2–6, 9–12, 25–27, 34, 61, 73, 76–77, 85, 91, 95, 104–05, 120–22, 127, 137, 139–41

existentialism 10, 117

F Facticity 86, 115 Falling 71, 76–82 Faring (Befindlichkeit) 87–89 feminism 16 Festival of Dionysus 24, 72–73 Fitzpatrick, Tim 103, 105, 119 flow 4, 46, 109, 113 foreign, the (das Fremde) 10 Foucault, Michel 33 Fourfold, the (das Geviert) 14, 139–41, 142 Fuchs, Elinor 1, 147

G Garner, Stanton B. 16, 18, 138 Geertz, Clifford 23 given circumstances, the 1, 5–6, 13, 26, 29, 32, 36–37, 49, 54, 76, 85, 90–91, 96, 107, 111, 122, 143 givenness 10, 27–28, 51

Globe Theatre 103, 108 Great Chain of Being 112 Grotowski, Jerzy 24, 122

H Hamilton (musical) 37 Hamlet 3, 38, 98–126 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 34, 75, 129 Heidegger, Martin 3, 9–11, 13–14, 25, 33–36, 51, 53–54, 70–71, 75, 77–78, 81– 83, 86–87, 90, 93–94, 105–07, 110–11, 116–18, 122, 127–36, 138–48 here-today-now 1 history (Geschichte) 11, 48, 55, 93–94, 100, 110, 136 history 9–11, 15, 20, 25, 32–34, 36–39, 55, 93, 100, 103, 110–13, 115, 125, 142– 43 History of Being 32–35, 105, 111, 127, 135, 146 Hitchcock, Alfred 90 Hölderlin, Friedrich 70, 81, 94, 132, 136, 139, 132 Husserl, Edmund 8–10, 27, 31, 49, 128

I Ibsen, Henrik 19 Inauthenticity 51, 53, 75, 96, 135

inspiration 1–2, 6, 18, 23–24, 134, 149 intentionality 27–28, 51 intersubjectivity 1, 10, 17, 87 involvement 9, 11, 28, 47, 56–60

K Kant, Immanuel 33 Kathakali 24 Kierkegaard, Søren 10, 75, 77, 117 Körper 31 Kozel, Susan 16–17, 32 Kuhn, Thomas 33 Kyd, Thomas 100, 104

L Lacan, Jacques 75 language 11–12, 16, 31–32, 34, 41, 44, 75, 94, 96, 103, 127, 129–30, 133–34, 148 Leib 31 Living Theatre Company, The 37

M Marlowe, Christopher 19 Marston, John 100 Marxism 16 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 10, 17, 22, 31, 60 metaphysics (false ontology) 11, 28, 33, 35–36, 110–12, 129, 131, 134–35, 147 metaphysics (philosophy) 4, 9, 11, 26, 28, 33–34 metatheatricality 92, 104–05, 119, 123, 139 Method Acting 23–24, 122 moment of decision (Augenblick) 34, 118, 148 Mood (Stimmung) 8, 11, 29, 38, 71, 82–83, 86–89, 108–09 Moscow Art Theatre 49 movement 12, 15–16, 24, 40–41, 43, 45, 55, 82, 89, 102, 105, 107–09, 121, 137– 38, 142, 147, 149 Müller, Heiner 37 music 29, 39, 89, 108, 147 mystery plays 105

N natural attitude 28 neuroscience 5, 20, 51

Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 66, 136 Noh 24 Nothingness 71, 82–87, 102, 104, 140

O objectives 6, 32, 34, 49, 67, 137 objects (in rehearsal) 11, 13, 38, 40–43, 46, 51–62, 64, 67–68, 76, 109, 111, 113, 116, 133, 148 ontology 32, 34, 36, 54, 127

P perception 4, 16–17, 22, 29, 31–32, 40, 58, 105, 146 perezhivanie (living through) 6 performativity 13, 17–18, 20, 139 phenomena 8–10, 14–15, 17, 27–29, 45, 144 phenomenology 2–3, 7–18, 23–39, 48, 51, 70, 100, 122, 127, 136 place 11, 30, 38, 40–43, 46–47, 59, 62–66, 68, 137, 139, 141–43, 147 Plato 18, 20, 33, 70, 134, 146 poetry (Dichtung) 70, 81, 94, 96, 131–38 poiesis 132–33, 136 positivism 11

post-dramatic theatre 37 pre-reflective experience 10, 31 presence 1, 24–25, 111, 131, 147, 149 present-at-hand (vorhanden) 54, 76, 83, 115 Projection 90–93 Punchdrunk (theatre company) 37

R Rayner, Alice 103, 122 ready-to-hand (zuhanden) 53–54, 60 reduction 28, 39, 51, 128, 131 see also bracketing and epoché rehearsal 1–2, 6–7, 13–14, 21–22, 29, 33, 36, 38–39, 46, 49–51, 54, 107, 110, 112, 116, 124, 130, 133, 135–37, 143, 146–48 Resoluteness 100, 103, 117–122, 125

S Sartre, Jean-Paul 18, 54, 117–18 Schechner, Richard 13, 96, 135 self-awareness 5, 45, 49, 77, 82, 148 selfhood 1, 3, 22–25, 47, 75, 82–83, 90, 129–130

semiotics 15–16 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 18, 101 sense memory 40 Shakespeare, William 16, 19, 37, 99–104, 110, 114–15, 135 Shpet, Gustav 49 Six (musical) 37 Sophocles 70–71, 73–75, 78–79, 94, 96, 129, 135 space 4, 11–12, 16, 26, 28–32, 38, 41–44, 59, 62–63, 73, 85, 89, 103–04, 107, 111, 131–32, 136–43, 147–49 spectator 1, 7, 16, 29, 100, 109, 133, 138, 147 spontaneity 1 Stanislavski, Konstantin 1–2, 5–6, 23–24, 40, 43–44, 48–49, 54, 73, 111, 114, 129, 136, 147–48 Active Analysis 23, 73 Method of Physical Actions 23, 49 States, Bert 13, 15–16, 138 Stein, Edith 10, 20 Stoppard, Tom 20 super-objective 6, 34, 49, 114, 124

T technē 132–34, 144

technology 16–17, 32, 94, 127, 130, 143–46 Temporality (Temporalität) 38, 48, 100, 105–09 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 121 They (das Man) 78, 82, 91, 135 Thrownness (Geworfenheit) 71, 76, 90–93 time 4, 9, 11–12, 16, 22, 25, 32 33, 34, 38–39, 41, 44–46, 100, 103–04, 113, 118, 121, 125, 130, 137, 140, 147–48 Timeliness (Zeitlichkeit) 8, 41, 104–09, 118 touch 60–62 truth correspondence theory of 11 in acting 1–2, 6, 13, 24, 37, 99, 115, 118, 122, 128–29, 137–38, 147–48 philosophy 9, 12, 48, 118, 127–28 Turn, the (die Kehre) 127

U uncanniness 4–5, 41, 54, 108

V van Gogh, Vincent 131, 138

W Westside Story (musical) 142 Worldhood 7, 38, 50–51, 56, 63–64

Z Zarrilli, Phillip 17–18, 24, 129