Dramaturgical Development: The Haunted Stage: An overview.
The following writing below collects my thoughts on Marvin Carlson’s writing on The Haunted Stage: An Overview (2003).
Ghosting a term popularized and coined by theatreoligist Marvin Carlson is the understanding that “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” (Diamond, 1996, 1). This concept or notion can be a basic as a reusing of a costume which is recycled or reused in performance. Typically, its association usually refers to actors or artists being ‘haunted’ or ‘ghosted’ be a previous theatrical encounter or role while in this environment.
When thinking of the subject or term of ‘ghosting’ I am drawn to the phrenological feeling of déjà vu which simply means having “the strange feeling that in some way you have already experienced what is happening now” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2016). This sense or feeling of déjà vu is not exclusively linked to daily life, however, it’s more if not clearly shown within the context of ‘theatrical ghosting’ that occurs throughout most performances and written texts. Carlson outlines some of the issues concerning theatrical ghosting and its implication in regards to theatrical conventions. Carlson outlines that, “ghosting presents the identical thing they [the spectator] have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of the similarity, as in genre, but of identity becomes part of the reception process, with results that can complicate this process considerably” (Carlson, 2003, 7). To the casual theatre-goer, they may be in some form aware that the event they are situated within, is in some form ghosting itself. Arguably they have experienced situations in their lives where they are allocated the position of a spectator, in an atmosphere beyond their control. Carlson claims that“one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return, the uncanny but inescapable impression imposed upon its spectators that “we are seeing what we saw before” ”(Blau, Cited in Carlson, 2003, 1), so much so that, the present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences..” (Carlson, 2003, 2). Time and time again, we are aware of what we are seeing within a theatrical setting has been witnessed by countless others over an expansive amount of time. “All theatrical cultures have recognized, in some form or another, this ghostly quality, this sense of something coming back in the theatre” (Carlson, 2003, 2), this arguably, can be seen through prolific re-runs or reimagining’s of established theatrical texts and performances in which established actors return countless times to perform previous performances. The issue of re-tellings and reimagines is no more clearly exemplified than within Carlson’s text in which he refers to theatre critic Ben Brantley who states that:
Across the bloody fields of Scottland, in the land where the stage smoke swirls and the synthesizers scream like banshees, strides a faceless figure in black, thudding along in thick, corpse-kicking boots. Who is this masked man, speaking so portentously about how “foul and fair” his day has been? At last he raises the gleaming vizard of his helmet and there, behold, is a most familiar wide-browed visage: hey, it’s one of America’s most popular television stars, and boy, does he look as if he means business. (Brantley, cited in Carlson, 2003, 9).
Brantley’s “physic disjuncture”(Carlson, 2003, 9), as Carlson states, is evoked through the familiarity with a portrayed actor on stage. Similarly, theatrical ghosting could be argued to be a hindrance to the development of any actual connection between spectator and actor as yet again they are situated within a sense of perpetuated nostalgia or false memory like that of well known actors in culturally established roles like Ian McKellen’s Gandalf from Lord Of The Rings or, Patrick Stewart’s Captain Kirk from cult-classic television show Star Trek. This connection and, “process of using memory of previous encounters with new and somewhat different but apparently similar phenomena is fundamental to human cognition in general and, it plays a major role in the theatre, as it does in the arts” (Carlson, 2003, 6). In many regards, the subject of ghosting is a mental thought process that is almost dreamlike in its inception as we are not inherently aware we have experienced the same numerous event until we reflect on past events through our cognitive thinking by which time the experience has already ghosted itself out of existence. This excessive feeling of ghosting, is more clearly exemplified in theatrical performances where there is the very physical appearance of a ghost on stage is as Carlson explains, “one of the world’s oldest and most venerated dramatic traditions, is the image of the play as a story of the past recounted by a ghost, but ghostly storytellers and recalled events are the common coin of theatre everywhere in the world at the every period” (Carlson, 2003, 3). This physical depiction of a ghost or a haunting on stage is another example of theatrical ghosting as we are witnessing the very presence of an object that supposedly existed within the given space and will continue to do so after its termination.
Carlson echoes the thoughts of Roland Barthes who observes that “we now know that the text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the ‘message’ of Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (Roland, cited in Carlson, 2003, 4). In essence, the text is no longer constrained to a fixed time and instead is open to the concept of an open time that is open to interpretation and can be ghosted from its inception or final sentence, this too is true of theatre that is no longer confined to a linear timeline and instead employs theatrical conventions that mess and distort the very dimensional space it is situated within. This distortion further adds to the importance of theatrical ghosting within a performance context as it now appears the very structure of theatrical construction is ghosting itself. However, Carlson argues that “it seems to me that the practice of theatre has been in all periods and cultures particularly obsessed with memory and ghosting” (Carlson, 2003, 7), this reliance on ghosting has led further to some to claim that theatre has the ability to ghost real historical events even though it can not accurately recreate these on stage it still holds a physical relevance within a theatrical setting. This had led to ‘historical’ texts being now considered as the perfect examples of theatrical ghosting as the “repressed ghostly figures and events from that (‘real’) historical past can (re) appear on the stage in a theatrical performance.” (Rokem, cited in Carlson, 2003, 7), even though an audience is aware it is, in fact, a fabricated event devised for the purpose of theatrical performance, this haunting allows the privilege of placing spectators within any given event or haunting in the safe environment of a theatrical space.
Arguably, theater’s purpose is to keep the importance of storytelling alive and is vital to the development of a developing society outside of a theatrical setting, as its aim is to inform and to educate from subject matters that are often considered too taboo or irrelevant outside of a theatrical setting. Ghosting remains vital to the overall understanding of theatrical development and is a useful tool when trying to distinguish the intimate relationship between both the actor, spectator, and text. Everything in the theatre, the bodies, the material utilized, the language, the space itself, is now and has always been haunted, and that haunting has been an essential part of the theatre’s meaning to and reception by its audiences in all times and all places (Carlson, 2003, 15).
Works Cited.
Carlson, M. (2003) The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: New York. University of Michigan Press. 1-15.
Diamond, E. (1997) Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. New York: Routledge.
Cambridge Dictionary (2016) Meaning of “déjà vu” in the English Dictionary. Available from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/deja-vu [accsessed 06 October 2016].