Higgins Kyle: MA Current Issues in Drama, Theatre and Performance.

The following post contains an in-depth breakdown of the final performance/working presentation.

Bellow follows the script for my working performance/presentation.

 

 

 

A PERFORMANCE ON GHOSTING:

A PERFORMANCE ON GHOSTING:

THE FUN VERSION…

Written by

Alexander Marshall, Kyle Higgins, and Lauren Watson.

Upon entering the space, the audience is subjected to a spectacle of seeing the performance area dominated with layer upon layer of cardboard placards each bearing a different word or line from William Shakespeare’s speech: The Seven Ages of Man. These placards are seemingly placed at random and at this point have no relevance.  Cardboard placards:  All, The, Worlds, A, Stage (…) (Shakespeare, 1559, .II.IV).

LAUREN and KYLE script in hand is ghosting his own rehearsal.  The two actors present on stage are walking aimlessly around the space seemingly looking at the placement of the placards on the ground. ALEX enters late. Several looks are exchanged in disagreement with ALEX’S late arrival. LAUREN and KYLE take center stage and reach into their pocket’s and, pull out small flickering electric candles, ALEX worryingly looks around for his candle and instead adopts a nearby coffee cup in a mad panic. 

Darkness. 

LAUREN.

When you think of ghosting, what do you imagine?

Images of ghosts etc. Someone whistles/mumbles or sings the Ghost Buster’s theme song.

You’re probably thinking of actual ghosts, bed-sheets, and poltergeists and the occasional jump scares.

KYLE.

But you’re wrong!

ALEX picks up a bed sheet with a piece of cardboard.

 

Beat. Someone directs an evil glare at ALEX.

LAUREN.

Put it down.

ALEX throws down the cardboard.

KYLE.

There’ll be none of that here.

ALEX.

Oh yes, there will.

KYLE.

Oh no, there won’t.

LAUREN.

If I was to ask you to think of, let’s say for example… James Bond, popular guy, well known, who are you first drawn to?

Have the names of characters on cardboard after they are spoken they are thrown away.

LAUREN:

Daniel Craig?

Throws cardboard.

KYLE.

Sean Connery?

Throws cardboard.

ALEX.

Peirce Brosnon?

Throws cardboard.

KYLE.

Nobody every mentions Timothy Dolton…

ALEX.

 – who was really good

LAUREN.

Or that other one?

ALEX.

Lasenbey?

KYLE.

What about Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice … Darcy?

 LAUREN.

…Mr Darcy to you.

Ask the audience.

ALEX.

Colin Firth, or the other guy?

KYLE.

    This is a form of ghosting, you have already been influenced by your cultural and social past. These have made you create these assumptions about these players…

LAUREN.

 -or actors

KYLE.

   -and link them to these characters, without you even knowing.

ALEX

-it’s like you’re ghosting yourself (making ghost noise).Oooo, oooo…

LAUREN.

This isn’t exclusively linked to characters; ghosting can also be seen in all aspects of performance ranging from set…

KYLE.

lighting

Snap to three spots, then back to wash.

LAUREN.

sound-

ALEX.

-and costume.

Pull down Alex’s trousers to reveal yellow tights.

ALEX.

-and even the physical/stage.

KYLE.

Christopher Booker, states in his text, that there are only seven basic plots, and therefore seven ages of man.

Rags to Riches,

The Quest,

Voyage and Return,

Comedy, Tragedy,

Rebirth,

Over Coming the Monster.

LAUREN.

This means all performances ghost other stories, with the notion that “this is a story that has been told before”.

ALEX states examples of these plots or devices.

Video, begins to play of “All The Worlds A Stage” compilation.

Compilation video used in the performance/presentation. Video made by Kyle Higgins. 

Higgins, K. (2017) All The World’s A Stage: Compilation video. 16 January. [accsessed 16 january].

KYLE.

Here you can see one of Shakespeare’s most popular speeches being performed by numerous actors. Each one different but ghosting the other.

ALEX picks up DAGGER SIGN. Begins to reenact speech. 

LAUREN:

Wrong speech!

ALEX throws DAGGER SIGN

ALEX.

Some actors will be more prominent than others, this is because you will know them other popular cultures.

For example…

ALEX states examples of these characters. 

LAUREN.

Ghosting cannot be escaped in regards to performance. When you go the

When you go the theatre, see a film, read a book, you will inevitably either think of the last similar thing you saw or the one which was merely most memorable.

KYLE.

It is not hard to see why it is easily accepted when theatrologist Marvin Carlson argues that theatre is “among the most haunted of human cultural structures” (Carlson 2003, p. 2); costumes are re-used, the space itself is re-created for each new performance, actors are recycled and language re-worked.

ALEX.

Such as Shakespearian character tropes – the fool,

the lovers,

KYLE beckons LAUREN over to his side of the stage. 

the villain. (repeats).

Essentially no character created is going to be new, and will…

KYLE and LAUREN begin to attempt to make love behind some cardboard.

  generally, fall into one of the eight archetypes.

KYLE.
Hero,

 Mentor,

Ally,

Herald,

Trickster,

Shapeshifter,

Guardian and Shadow.

LAUREN and ALEX run across the stage looking for the corresponding placards.

LAUREN.

Although this idea of theatre being haunted sounds potentially exciting, it can actually be fairly limiting

ALEX and ghost pulled from pocket

LAUREN.

-as previously discussed there are no white sheets here.

ALEX.

If you saw (or are going to see) the latest production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land by the National Theatre with Ian Mckellan and Patrick Stewart, you may be confused to find there are no mutants in it and Stewart can in fact walk.

LAUREN.

-And he’s not from the Enterprise

KYLE.

-and Ian Mckellan will indeed let you pass!

Video or memes of YOU SHALL NOT PASS and Steward with head in hands.

LAUREN.

 -On a serious note, though, you will always picture a previous actor in their most established (or most memorable role) This is arguably a subconscious reaction as, “the performance of past memories are recalled”.

KYLE.

-This means that you are never fully present for the liveness of the theatre as your mind wanders into past recollections of where you have seen those actors, where you heard that song,

‘Do You Hear The People Sing’ quietly plays.

ALEX.

-what you last saw in that venue,

what you took away from your last experience.

KYLE.

Liveness is…

Definition is shown on unfolding cardboard. 

ALEX.

-the performance, or general life event, being shown and performed in the here and now. Like this.

LAUREN.

And this.

KYLE.

And this.

ALEX.

And this.

ALL.

Live!

ALEX.

Not shown mediated through a camera, supposedly live streamed from London.

LAUREN.

Thank you NT Live…

KYLE.

-The act of performance and the reality of theatre is ghosted by itself – it’s ephemeral, (makes deliberate mistake in pronouncing word) 

made to be seen and experienced in the moment. Disappearing before our eyes, as each speech ends and the next one begins –

LAUREN.

-alternatively, the practice of Ghosting can be lucrative within the theatre in terms of marketing upcoming events. If a

If a theatre were, to say, employ Benedict Cumberbatch, for the role of, oh I don’t know, Hamlet. He hasn’t done that yet, has he?

ALEX.

He may have done a small fringe version or something  He may have done a small fringe version or something

Images of Benedict as Hamlet on stage

KYLE.

– fair enough. Well if this fictional production should happen, people would undoubtedly rush to buy tickets to see it simply because of it being…

ALEX.

-or seeming to the audience.

LAUREN.

-to be Sherlock

ALEX.

-or Khannnnnn!

KYLE.

– or Smaug

LAUREN.

– or even the enigma that is Alan Turing.

ALEX.

– on stage as Hamlet. Arguably, people aren’t coming to see a Shakespearean masterpiece, they’re coming to see someone they “know” and can relate to on stage.

LAUREN.

Is this them ‘selling out’, getting a ‘celebrity’ to fill their seats?

KYLE gets agitated

KYLE.

It’s not them selling out!

ALEX.

Two opinions, both alike in dignity, in fair Lincoln, where we lay our scene…

LAUREN.

With a pantomime starring the once fair Kerry Katona

KYLE.

-once fair?

ALEX.

-it fits the style, shut up!

Pantomimes battle year after year for better audience numbers for which the best way to guarantee this is by getting the biggest star. Let’s make a poll.

Who would you rather see, Biggins or Hasselhoff as the dame?

Grab a cardboard with their names/faces and ask for hands. Discard. KYLE does the cardboard

LAUREN.

The chuckle brothers or cannon and ball as Tweedle dumb and tweedled dee?

As above. ALEX does cardboard.

KYLE.

Lilly Savage or Dame Edna as the fairy godmother?

As above. LAUREN does cardboard

LAUREN.

See, we all have a preference, certain ‘ghosted’ characters or actors will draw in better crowds

ALEX.

-or a better class of crowd.

KYLE.

I’m confused now, are we on about positives or negatives?

LAUREN.

-Well, “Every performance, if it is intelligible as such, embeds features of previous performances: gender conventions, racial histories, […] political and cultural pressures that are consciously and unconsciously acknowledged”.

ALEX.

Making people aware of such histories can’t be a bad thing, surely?

KYLE.

Speaking of ‘bad’ things…

ALEX.

Ghosting, is not only a product of theatre.

It can be seen more recently as evidenced by the current political president…

KYLE.

Elect-

LAUREN picks up cardboard with a cat (pussy) and ALEX and KYLE grab it

ALEX.

The Don Man, and many times he has mentioned that he is a little bit, partially, well fairly, ok very, overtly ridiculously, rich.

KYLE.

(impersonating Trump. ) Rich, rich, rich, he’s very rich

During the above KYLE and ALEX and LAUREN throw pieces of cardboard which they have miraculously found in their pockets which say money/£/$…

ALEX.

By the way, he has some spare cash.

LAUREN gets on her knees, with a sign saying ‘looking good’

KYLE.

This is of course just a heightened example to show it’s not just in theatre that ghosting occurs, it occurs within ‘characters’ that really do-

LAUREN.

unfortunately-

KYLE.

exist.

ALEX.

  As there is no denying that Trump is a created theatrical persona.

The three hand gestures.

LAUREN.

So much so that people are creating artwork and performances about him.

Show the art images from Facebook and Alec Baldwin’s impressions (SNL), It’s Complicated Alec and naked Donald Trump.

Compilation image of “ghosted” Donald Trump performances used in performance/presentation. 

ALEX.

  Now, although we may have been talking at you about various celebrities and very well-known characters, we have been working something else into this presentation. As you may have noticed, Shakespeare has been brought up maybe once or twice/

Now, although we may have been talking at you about various celebrities and very well-known characters, we have been working something else into this presentation. As you may have noticed, Shakespeare has been brought up maybe once or twice/

LAUREN.

-or every other sentence/

KYLE.

  from Hamlet, the slight quote of Romeo and Juliet, to Benedict.

ALEX.

Be honest with yourself, if we featured classical actors who are well renowned, respected and considered to be the leaders of their profession, but have fallen into obscurity in current society  would you have felt quite as engaged with this presentation as you have been with us featuring Cumberbatch,  Craig, and all the many others we don’t have time to re-name. You were interested due to what you know them from, you were interested because of ghosting.

KYLE.

-Seeing as ghosting happens across the world, in every situation, we wanted to ghost ourselves in this performance, after all,

all the world is a stage…

LAUREN.

But, did you notice this?

“All the world’s a stage, all the men, and women merely players…”

Cut to screen, where our script creates the speech.

Script with words and Shakespeare link.

Edit: Below follows a working transcript of the performance/presentation script that is ghosting William Shakespeare’s text. We tried to use the following words as many times as possible so that when ghosting, we were not drawing explicit attention to the famous line and, the spectators would only perceive this on a cognitive, meta-theatrical and subconscious level.

A PERFORMANCE ON GHOSTING: THE FUN VERSION. 

 (Higgins, 2017).

 

KYLE.

In regards to theatre, drama, and performance, we really do believe ghosting, is… the… current issue

ALEX.

Thank you for your time.

KYLE.

If you would like to exit stage-left…

LAUREN.

The bear will see you out.

Fin.

My Observations.

The overall aim of this presentation/performance was to give a tongue and cheek perspective of ghosting that explicitly aimed while attempting to be scholarly, mock the overall concept of ghosting in performance. This attempt at mockery is what led the visual and ascetical roughness to look like it had been thrown together when in reality it has taken weeks of planning and strategy in order to navigate of what could almost be described as a minefield of cardboard (no pun intended).  This visual style inspired by Forced Entertainment.

This visual style inspired by Forced Entertainment’s, 12am: Awake & Looking Down (1993) allowed us to create something almost from nothing and in many ways, ghost the very act of performance and language itself. Our aim was to have a visual mouthpiece that would seem to overwhelm the spectator upon entering the space, with the floor covered in all manner or words and references to our play-text. With the added benefit of technology we were able to create yet again, a rough ascetical powerpoint that mocked the very performance we were about to re-tell, as in essence, we were ghosting our own kayos-ridden rehearsal process. Nothing to seemed to go quite to plan and, this feeling of theatre ghosting itself in all areas is what drove our performance/presentation. The harsh reality of theatre and performance is sometimes things do not go to plan and this very concept of rebirth and retelling of a narrative is something we wanted to echo. Allowing ourselves the freedom to link our performance/presentation to popular media also, allowed us the luxury of further rebirthing and retelling how ghosting is an ever ongoing issue in culture and society. This act of ghosting, also led to the discussion that one person in our performance/presentation should carry and exploit the use of a physical script in performance e.g ghosting the very text and performance that was unfolding from a previous encounter or experience.

Allowing ourselves the freedom to link our performance/presentation to popular media also, allowed us the luxury of further rebirthing and retelling how ghosting is an ever ongoing issue in culture and society. This act of ghosting, also led to the discussion that one person in our performance/presentation should carry and exploit the use of a physical script in performance e.g ghosting the very text and performance that was unfolding from a previous encounter or experience.

This concept is similar to seeing a live performance that is live-cast as you will ghost a previous performance the actor or actors are portraying in that space.

Overall, I thought we delivered as stated above, a tongue and cheek performance/presentation that while being a mockery of the subject matter that is ghosting. This performance/presentation highlighted and drew attention to important issues of its importance withing both society and culture. Ghosting remains as it always has, an unspoken cognitive, phrenological, mental process that maintains a constant presence in any given space regardless of context or its subject matter explored through the medium of performance. In essence, we wanted to draw attention to Marvin Carlson’s teachings and theories on the subject that is the concept theoretical concepts of ghosting.

Audiences: spectators, witnesses, voyeurs.

 

 

A still taken from a live-cast performance. 

 

 

For the purpose of this session, we were tasked with trying to describe or recall a memory of a live performative event that we had witnessed. In many ways, we were ghosting our own theatrical experience with that of those around us as several people appeared to have been present at the same live performative event and, therefore each individual had a different perspective and emotional cognitive response to the event at hand. For the purpose of this discussion, I decided to talk about seeing National Theatre’s Frankenstein,  which was directed by respected film-maker Danny Boyle.

An image depicting the hundreds of bulbs that hung above the spectators. 

 

My observations follow below.

 

Describing a live-event.

Firstly, let me say to describe a live and mediated event that I witnessed on a live-screening is no easy task.

Before you lies a dark and desolate cavernous space. No light can be seen and at present, there is no noise but the slow deep breathing of those around you as they wait with anticipation for the events they are about to witness on stage. Silence, nothing… No movement nothing. Slowly, ever so slowly there is a flickering of a single light-bulb that is suspended above the stage reaching far out into the seated spectators. One flash, silence, two flashes, silence, then nothing. People move around you excitedly, and sometimes nervously cautious for the anticipation of seeing Mary Shelly’s creature brought to life before their very eyes. There is a flash of a hanging bulb then, the entire stage comes to life from above as hundreds of hanging lightbulbs suspended overhead move in a rhythmic fashion echoing sound and emotes similar to that of a human heartbeat. Or is it human? Wave after wave of light pulses across the stage and the spectators are left with a sense of awe and bewilderment that what they are viewing is something truly unique to them. At the back of the stage large double heavy doors creak slowly open and the stage is filled with a thick smoke that seems to almost choke and clog the lungs of those around it, a makeshift object hurtles forward and the stage is covered in a ghostly and threatening red mask that leaves tension and fear in the air. Silence. Nothing. No movement, just waiting… Lights dim and we can see that inside this almost synthetic-womb a creature stirs, slowly at first but moves heavily and almost like something that has never stepped a foot on the ground below it… Something new has entered this realm.

 

The birth of a possible monster. 

 

National Theatre’s Frankenstein- Trailer.

 

Works Cited.

CINEPLEX EVENTS (2012)  National Theatre’s Frankenstein- Trailer. . Available from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsu-gbgqPoE  [Accsessed 26 November 2016].

 

My notes on Digital Aesthetics and Embodied Perception: Towards a Postmodern Performance by Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer. 

 

Multimedia performance of: “Modell 5’s Granular Synthesis”

 

“…new media is defined by the principles of Numerical Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability, and Transcoding.” (Klich and Scheer, 2011, 179).

 

“Through its meddling with the structure of the representational image, the ability of the digital medium to augment then simulation of reality, and so create new possibilities for performance, becomes apparent.” (Klich and Scheer, 2011, 184-185).

 

“The digital domain allows Granular Synthesis to denature and deconstruct image and sound components, and bring them into a space of abstraction where they can undergo shared algorithmic procedures. These algorithmic procedures are also conceptual formulations that Granular Synthesis apply to fusions of image and sound elements in order to alchemically renature and thus convert them back into lucid and persuasive fields of meaningful representation.

 

(Shaw, Cited in Klich and Scheer, 2011, 185).

 

“This work highlights the impact of digitalisation of representational imagery and explores the ramifications of this in relation to the rere-sentation of human bodies.

The medium in this work is not attempting to hide itself, to become immediate, but is foregrounded in the audio-visual field and re-emphasised in the reception of the image across the four channels. As such, the work is primarily ‘hypermediated’ in that the digital mediation of the sound and image is overt, and key visual element is the acting of the digital medium upon the representational image. This process is called ‘granular synthesis’, the name to a technique derived from the principles of digital sound design in which samples are split into tiny pieces of less than 50 milliseconds’ duration. These are called grains, which the different packets of grains are played at different speeds, creating phases” (granularsynthesis, Cited in, Klich and Scheer, 2011, 185).

 

“Physical reactions are unavoidable, and make their performances and installations a ‘dreadful’ experience wholly in keeping with Burke’s notion of ‘negative delight’. This disconnection from everyday is like being taken hostage in a vibrating color-space(ship) [Sic.]” (Richard, Cited in, Klich and Scheer, 2011, 86).

 

“The work invades our senses, assaulting and penetrating them. The pul-verisingly phat base-driven techno soundtrack feels as if it is doing permanent damage to our hearing even through the ear plugs provided while the component to Takaya is shown in extreme close up. These effects are hypnotic, and the atmosphere changes from an initially oppressive feeling to the experience of immersion. Jeffrey Shaw suggests: ‘The often seemingly aggressive audiovisual installation shake the viewer out of the stupor of habitual consumption and, in the best traditions of the avant-garde, bring about an unusual, even shocking, level of experimental intensity’ (Shaw, 2004). Yet the odour of sweaty bodies squashed into a small, hot room and the pounding base rhythms punctuated by Takeya’s synthesised screams affirms the liveness of the event even as it accompanies the inhuman four-channel projection”  (Kilch and Scheer, 2011, 186).

 

“At an immediate level, the work functions to produce the ‘hyperreal’. The hyperreal is created when the mediated, virtual, or simulated are perceived as the real: ‘simulation of the real produces the hyperreal’ (Stevenson, 2002,p. 166). The images presented in Modell 5 are recognisably human features, though they are based on digital information which produces this hyperreal effect. Takeya’s face gradually transforms and mutates, and an image of an exotically beautiful woman becomes an entirely alien thing. The confusion of reality and virtuality creates a haze of hyperreality in which the ‘mediatedness’ of the images is accentuated[Sic.] ” (Klich and Scheer, 2011, 186).

A still capturing the intense atmosphere of Granular synthesis mid-performance.

 

Ideas relating to the subject of “Postman”.

 

“…envisions the emergent relationship between the human and the machine as creating a hybrid subjectively that is continuously moving between the material realm of bodily agency and the informational realm of digitality. As Brian Lennon elucidates, ‘cyborg or posthuman neither dystopically rejects the automaton, nor transcendentally dissolves itself in it, but instead moves continually between nature and culture, organic and synthetic, individual and collective’ (Lennon, 2000, p.66). [Sic.].”

 

(Lennon, Cited in, Klich and Scheer, 2011, 189).

 

“This kind of tormulation represents the context for the performer in multimedia performance, the constant moving between registers of perception and between material and informational modes of being in the world, between image and flesh.” (Klich and Scheer, 2011, 189).

 

“Hayle’s influential book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), explores the complexity of the human-machine interface and argues for an ‘embodied virtuality’. Hayles looks into the history of cybernetics to demystify the emergence of inhabited virtuality as the new condition for social existence of

and outlines the nature of this cultural shift. Hayles’s ‘posthuman point of view’ is characterised by four key assumptions that precondition its formation. First, informational pattern is privileged over material presence, so that biological embodiment is not viewed as a fixed and immutable origin or destiny of life but rather as an ‘accident of history’, as contingent and subject to creative mutation (Hayles, 1992, p. 2). Secondly, consciousness, widely understood as the locus of human identity, is viewed as an ‘evolutional upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow’ (Hayles, 1999,p. 3). Thirdly, the body is viewed as a manipulable prosthesis, so that extending or altering the body with other prosthesis is essentially just the continuation of an ongoing process that begins before birth. Fourthly, the posthuman view constructs the human being so that it can be ‘seamlessly articulated’ with intelligent technology.”

 

(Klich and Scheer, 2011, 189).

 

“The posthuman subject rejects the ‘natural’ self, having become a composite, ‘an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (Hayles, 1999,p. 3). As a fantastical as this may sound, this kind of posthuman subject negotiates and is interpolated within informational space as an ongoing feature of its social existence. When we check out balance online and navigate the portals of the online business environment, we live this hybrid experience. We are, for the purposes of the transaction and the entire online world, a username and a password combination. At our terminals we are grounded in a different and sensational world but this world in its social manifestations is cybernetic space in which our virtual and real experiences combine in a continuously constructed hybrid subjectivity”  (Klich and Scheer, 2011, 190).

“…’the internet is not so much a case of a lack of physicality at all, but an alternative kind of operational system which connects physical bodies and machines with physical bodies in other places’

 

***

‘cybernetic corporeality is an extended and extruded embodiment that connects a multiplicity of remote bodies, spatially separated, but electronically connected.’

 

***

 

‘technology does not only replace what is missing from the body, but rather it constructs unexpected operational architectures. The body is not about lack, but rather about excess. It always has been. (Even the biological body alone performs with redundancy.) we are all prosthetic bodies with additional circurity that allows us to perform beyond the boundaries of our skins and beyond the local space we inhabit. Operating in the electronic space and electronics architectures, the body has spatially extended, telematically scaled loops of interaction’”  (Scheer Cited in, Klich and Scheer, 2011, 198).

 

“In the virtual world we may consider the physical self as being absent, and in the real world we recognise the physical self as being present; however, when in the virtual self is no longer limited to the virtual world but becomes a functioning double, spatially located in material reality, the participant simultaneously exists in the real world as both a physical body and an informational pattern”  (Klich and Scheer, 2011, 201).

 

 

Works Cited.

 

 

Klich. E and Scheer, R. (2011) Multimedia performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

duduchier (2011) Modell 5 – Granular Synthesis. 3 September. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATWljMbvVTg [accessed 17 November 2016].

 

 

 

 

Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. (1991).

 

“…performance generally presupposes our conflicted sensory experiences (which will differ by race and age, class and gender) of the technological scene and mobilizes audiovisual phenomenological reality of the stage. The theatre’s social function, therefore, will need to be reconsidered, and its current prediction for myth and science fiction more closely analyzed” (Birringer, 1991, 175).

 

“…the seductive appearance of endless technological semiosis has certain limits even if it were already possible to assume that the electronic mass media’s havior but indeed creates a new theoretical space “space” (contemporary, simultaneity) in which everything is subject to simulation. […] that would mean the end of the theatre of representation” (Birringer, 1991, 175).

 

Works Cited.

Birringer, J. (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. United States of America: Indiana University Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When We Talk of Horses Or, what do we see when a play?: Dan Rebellato.

 

“the way we watch theatrical performances is to make-belive that we are seeing the events represented (Rebellato, 2009, 19.

 

“it doesn’t require a complicated mental process whereby we convert perception into imagination, real experiences into fictional mental images. Instead, I perform an act of make-belive and then I just watch the story unfold as if it were real” (Rebellato, 2009, 19).

 

“to suggest that what we imagine and what we see are the same thing” (Rebellato, 2009, 19).

 

“you can’t imagine something without paying it attention” (Rebellato, 2009, 21).

 

“the most important difference between perceptions and mental images that I want to discuss is that mental images are indeterminate.  For example, let’s say I imagine a man. if someone asks me, ‘does this man you’re imagining have a beard?’ it is perfectly comprehensible for me to say I don’t know because I hadn’t imagined that aspect. That detail has not yet formed part of the imagined scene. I might think about my mental image again to get the answer but what I’m actually doing when we do that is deciding the matter of his beardedness. Before I made that decision, the man I imagined was neither bearded nor clean-shaven” Rebellato, 2009, 21).

 

“If there were a flock of birds in the sky outside, there would be a determinate number of birds in that flock. But Borges can perfectly plausibly summon to his imagination a flock of birds that is of an indeterminate number. And, because mental images can have some aspects determinate and others not (we might have known the skin color of the imagined man but not his facial hair arrangements), we can know something of the volume of birds without there being a number, and so there need not be a God ” (Rebellato, 2009, 21).

If you are seeing something then you are playing god. Less about there being a God, but more how our mind works that the information we receive is good enough to work with.

 

“we might distinguish this second use of the imagination is to call it ‘imagining that’. If I imagine that something is the case, I don’t need to visualize it at all. If I imagine that Hitler won World War 2, that Sarah got that dream job, that I were a Master of Wine, I might conjure up something roughly visual, but it’s not necessary, or particularly helpful, to do so” (Rebellato, 2009, 22).

 

 

In one sense, watching a play is much like reading a novel. When we read a novel, we are given verbal information to build up a picture of the imagined world which we might visualize – if we believe in mental images – or simply amass as information. The stage is only different in that the source of the information is itself visual, otherwise theatrical performances ‘are narrations carried on by other means: by means of objects and images visually presented’ (Currie, cited in Rebellato, 2009, 22).

The idea of me readingHarry Potter compared to how someone else imagines it, the information that you are given about something is only about as far as you are willing to go. The idea of a green pony is just that, you would not see it as blue or pink.

 

“The theatre has, within its technical means, similar flexibility. Old can play young, women can play men, black can play white, wood can play stone, large rooms can play small rooms, a wooden O can play the fields of France, and words can play horses printing their proud hoofs I’th’receivingearth. The means of theatrical production are metaphors for the worlds they represent. Metaphor is not limited”(Rebellato, 2009, 25).

 

“The closer the stage and the fiction are together, the more representation becomes identical with itself. Theatre as metaphor requires a non-identity of the two” (Rebellato, 2009, 27).

 

Theatre requires imagination and metaphors, it works because in our minds things we see are like other things. Our mind fills in the missing gaps. However, the one thing that is detrimental to that mind is if that thing is real and tangible. I.e. space, location then you are confined. The idea of Blasted within a hotel room… You crave something for your imagination to fill in the gaps. However, if it is laid out you invest more. The question and problem really is, how much information your hold and supply yourself. The idea of the metaphor become integral. It is simply up to the active spectator on how much they bring into this given space.

 

 

My observations.

In conclusion, there is no way of defining the correct way of what we are seeing. We as individuals have each very differently views. What we and, I am seeing is arguably very different. There is no way of seeing the real character onstage as written by the original playwright, you know this and are inherently aware of the discourse taking place in performance. You are just watching an actor, you are ghosted by that given actor from previous performances you have witnessed or have prior knowledge of. The idea of the of the eyes, you will always look for the phrenological line between the perceived theatrical work and the world of the play or text. Dan Rebellato draws issue with Henry V not apologizing for not showing a battle, saying sorry for it not being real and not containing ‘real theatricality’. The article, asks what is the process of what people i.e. spectators are seeing and how does it work, what is the illusion? Unlike Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, that is laid and projected in a form where you are aware of what you are seeing is not really what you were seeing i.e the suspension of disbelief. Your imagination is doing your cognitive thinking for you. You don’t think that actor or ‘person’ you are not in an illusion otherwise you would surely intervene and ask the question, where is the line between illusion and investment and where are its limits? What are the limitations of quality, imagination, and understanding? What is the difference between having  Tim Crouch instead of a human being Dad? How is using an object more convincing, why is this good as this? The idea of a metaphor, the over fictionalization and, the romanticized image that related to the humanistic or physical quality.

 

Works Cited.

Rebellato, D. (2009) When We Talk of Horses Or, what do we see when a play?  PerformingLiteratures:  Taylor & Francis Ltd. 14 (1) 17-28.