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Experiencing Expectation: Perceiving the Future in Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2009
Abstract
This article examines the realization of the future in performance through aesthetic experience. Following the historian Reinhardt Koselleck, who introduces the category of ‘experience’ as the present past, and ‘expectation’ as the present future, in order to formulate a theory of possible histories, I examine the interconnection of different time layers and the potentiality of a performance. I argue that every performance constitutes a space of possibility, defined by a permeation of traces of the past and the future, emergent phenomena characteristic of performance, and a dimension of future inherent in the performative materiality. Hamlet by New York's Wooster Group serves as an example for an analysis focusing on the aesthetic experience of the future in performance. The Hamlet performance proves exceptionally suitable, since the staging is based on a theatrical repetition of the film document of a Hamlet performance long past, and unfolds a complex system of past and future bound time layers.
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References
NOTES
1 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.
2 Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 259Google Scholar.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 256.
5 Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 223Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., p. 235; italics in original.
7 Ibid., p. 235.
8 Ibid.
9 The philosopher Gernot Böhme coined the term ‘ecstasy of things’. These ecstasies describe a thing's ability to become conspicuous and touch its surroundings. See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 31.
10 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, p. 226; italics in original.
11 Ibid., p. 237.
12 Ibid.; italics in original.
13 I attended the world premiere of the Wooster Group's Hamlet at the theatre Mercat De Les Flores in Barcelona on 27 June 2006, and their guest performances in Berlin at the HAU 2 theatre on 16, 17 and 19 November 2006.
14 In my analysis I am making a distinction between ‘experience’ and ‘aesthetic experience’. ‘Experience’ stands for the dimension of present past, a repository of influences from the past, which are evidently part of the staging of a performance. ‘Aesthetic experience’, on the contrary, describes the present experience of intensities initiated by aesthetic phenomena like a performance.
15 Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between two orders of perception in performance: the order of presence and the order of representation. While the first generates meaning around the phenomenal being of the perceived, the second produces meaning, which constitutes a fictive world or symbolic order. She characterizes the aesthetic experience in performance as the experience of crisis born from the perceptual shifts between these orders and the reciprocal transitions between subject and object positions. See chaps. 5 and 6 of The Transformative Power of Performance.
16 This process is even further complicated by the fact that the audience additionally perceives the Gielgud Hamlet film characters, embodied by actors long-dead for the most part, whenever they are visible on the screen.
17 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, p. 235.