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IV. Staging Receptions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Extract
The focus of this chapter is on reception and staging, including opera, dance and physical theatre. There are two aspects of staging which raise crucial issues for reception studies. The first is that staging implies a live performance, a live audience. Each live performance is different and it is impossible to recapture it to allow the kind of analysis and debate about an established ‘text’ that is possible when discussing a poem or a painting. In fact, the task of the theatre historian in trying to reconstruct past performances has been compared with that of an art historian trying to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions: One only needs to imagine what a history of painting would look like where the author had at his disposal neither originals nor copies of pictures but only any number of good descriptions! The historian of the theatre finds himself provisionally in just such a situation as soon as he leaves the realm of his own perception’. In the 1920s when this distinction was drawn it was a radical one since it added to a historiographical approach, which was already shared with cognate areas of study, a new approach based on personal observation. This provided a counterweight to the transitory character of theatrical performance.
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References
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