We will present the theoretical approach to the problems of body and technology in stage performance. The starting point will be the status of the categories such as presence, ephemerality, immediacy of the (theatre) performance radically undermined in the texts of performance studies scholars such as Rebecca Schneider, Amelia Jones or Philip Auslander. Utilizing examples of performances from young Polish theatre:Krzysztof Garbaczewski\u00a0(b.1983) and\u00a0Rados\u0142aw Rychcik\u00a0(b.1981), we will juxtapose two functioning models of body-technology relation on stage. The first one \u2013 represented by Garbaczewski \u2013 is based on understanding the body as always mediated. It multiplies (undermines) the body\u2019s presence by use of audiovisual means. The second one \u2013 Rychcik\u2019s case \u2013 is to push the theatrical presence of the body to the absolute maximum. In this case an audiovisual layer is used to build a strong opposition to the actor\u2019s stage presence. The two examples will be used to propose new theoretical approaches. We would like to show that such stage phenomena are not only the sign of a changing technological reality, but are also important theoretical input in the understanding of theatre itself. We will posit that every single body on stage (no matter if consciously, as in Garbaczewski\u2019s case, or unconsciously, as in Rychcik\u2019s case) is already mediated, and the use of technological tools is a way to play with this specific aspect of theatre\u2019s corporeality. This broader perspective will also incorporate elements of the political dimension of annexing media-mediated and media-manipulated corporeality, for it will follow the apparently transparent and natural dimension of such actions, whereby once again, as postulated by\u00a0Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u00a0it will turn aesthetic considerations into political considerations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Peggy Phelan\u00a0in her famous text\u00a0Ontology of Performance<\/em>, asserts that \u201cPerformance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance. [\u2026] Performance [\u2026] becomes itself through disappearance.\u201d (Phelan, 1993, p. 146) What she is saying here also is that body itself cannot be saved, recorded or documented; it becomes itself only through unmediated presence that can be experienced by other bodies. The performing body is singular and ephemeral, present and real. At the same time she explains: \u201cIn performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of \u2018presence.\u2019 But in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else \u2013 dance, movement, sound, character, \u2018art.\u2019\u201d\u2019 (Phelan, 1993, p. 150)\u00a0How should we understand this? What is the body on stage if it is not the \u201cbody\u00a0per se<\/em>\u201d? The answer given by Phelan is not very satisfying. Performance becomes a metaphysical category with its ephemerality that transcends a mortal body. Becoming itself through disappearance, performance is pure experience, not anchored in any kind of materiality. But looking closer at her text, one can see that all the examples she analyzes are not classical performances. She chooses artworks that are literally based on the use of different media and different technologies. In the very center of every work recalled by Phelan there is a problem of presence, which becomes questionable and unsure.Cindy Sherman\u00a0(Film-stills<\/em>) dresses herself in various costumes to become an image of the body photographed and hung on the wall. She is herself and not-herself at the same time, touching the classical problem of impossible dualism between the actor and the character she embodies.\u00a0Angelika Festa\u00a0in the work\u00a0Untitled Dance (with fish and others)<\/em>, which is a key example for Phelan, changes her body into the static figure while the \u201cperformance\u201d is taking place on the screen where different projections enter into the complicated game with the body and its ability to endure. One screen presents the image, which is delayed in relation to the \u201creal time\u201d presence of the body. Time is in question here, as is the presence itself, but it is only visible via technology, which becomes here a tool of mediation. Phelan, in her examples, is defending a thesis that is almost the opposite of the one formulated at the beginning of her essay: performance becomes itself through mediation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is surprising, moving from performance to the field of theater theory, is that one can find\u00a0 similar thinking. In one of the most important books about theater theory,\u00a0Samuel Weber\u00a0states that theatricality, as the oldest form of dealing with the problem of the body and its presence, should be understood literally as medium.\u00a0(Weber, 2004) The author \u2013 looking at theatricality in its media dimension, which enhances its status of being \u201cin between,\u201d its functioning that escapes any certainty, any permanent nature or unifying approach \u2013 views theatricality as an alternative to Western philosophical thought, perceived as totalizing, building permanent identities, excluding otherness, and founded on the metaphysics of presence. Weber, in the footsteps of Plato, finds in the theater a subversive power that is capable of undermining the Western desires to survey reality with a single common-to-all and integrative view. This potential is also the reason why \u2013 from Antiquity up to the present day (as exemplified by\u00a0Debord\u2013 the theater is now and then presented as a destructive activity whose product is a show that beguiles us and obscures the truth. For Weber, on the other hand, it is this mediation between concealment and revelation, between truth and fiction (a feature much deprecated by Western thought) that is the unique lesson we can learn from the theater. This specific art practice \u2013 in contrast to the classical understanding of a work of art \u2013 can never be ultimately defined, since it is in a state of constant circulation between production and reception. It is this movement that takes place not only between an actor and a spectator, the body and the participant in the performance, but also between the corporeal and the fictitious, the concurrent being here and there. It is the movement that stretches one\u2019s presence between the past and the present, and is a harbinger of the future. It destroys cohesion, unity, and coherence. It is a heterogeneous medium. The theater is not a means of presenting an identity, or self-presence, but a condition that must be fulfilled and, as Weber puts it, \u201cmust take place.\u201d It is a location determined by the place. And since this perspective, as determined by the place, is by design entangled in artificiality, it induces us to take falsehood for reality. While instantly raising suspicion, it reminds us of the relativity of the place we occupy. Theatricality as a medium challenges all the systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the chapter titled Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality<\/em> Weber states that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the traits that distinguishes electricity as a source of energy, at least insofar as it pertains to the electronic media, is its tendency, by virtue of its velocity, to transform traditional experiences of space and time, of distance and proximity, and hence of bodies, which in great part are defined through their spatio-temporal mode of being situated. What would seem to be specific to theater, by contrast, and presumably also to theatricality, as both are traditionally construed, is their dependence upon the \u2018Euclidean\u2019 experience of space-time that the electronic media tend to relativize if not to abolish: above all, recourse to the opposition between presence and absence as well as to that of proximity and distance in the situating of bodies, especially living bodies. (Weber, 2004, p. 99)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doesn\u2019t this mean that the so-called \u201cnew media\u201d used on the stage question not only our experience of the body in its relation to traditional notions of space and time, but also, they deny the privileged place of the body on the stage? The body is no more present than any other medium used in the theatrical performance. In Weber\u2019s perspective, not only does theatricality become a medium, but the body itself \u2013 oppressed or emancipated by technology, depending on the stand we take \u2013 becomes a medium between presence and disappearance, between materiality and ephemerality, between reality and fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rychcik<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2014\u00a0Rados\u0142aw Rychcik\u00a0received one of the most prestigious cultural prices in Poland for his theatrical realization of Adam Mickiewicz\u2019s\u00a0Dziady<\/em>. This play, written between 1822 and 1860 when Poland was under partitions and didn\u2019t exist on the map, is fundamental to Polish national identity. It is a romantic, phantasmatic vision of Poland seen as a metaphysical space where the freedom of the whole universe is fought for. It was one of the most important dramas for the 1960s and 1970s Polish theater, and in Rychcik\u2019s reading, this 19th<\/sup>-century text is once again shown as important statement about the contemporary world. This intention is inherent in Polish theater, but this time the way\u00a0Dziady<\/em>\u00a0was staged is very interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first scene introduces a character, which in Mickiewicz\u2019s vision is a pagan priest, a shaman who conducts old Slavic rituals for the souls of the dead and the condemned. In Rychcik\u2019s spectacle he becomes the Joker, literally taken from the Batman Dark Knight <\/em>movie. Later we see Marilyn Monroe, two twin sisters from Stanley Kubrick\u2019sThe Shining<\/em>, NBA players and \u2013 at the very heart of Rychcik\u2019s concept \u2013 a choir of black bodies. Polish national drama is presented as a metaphor of emancipation \u2013 especially that of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In the most important scene, the \u201cGreat Improvisation\u201d (the climax of the drama, and in Polish tradition, the greatest speech in the play) is presented on a screen. This is the scene from the movie by Tadeusz Konwicki in which the \u201cGreat Improvisation\u201d is declaimed by legendary actor Gustaw Holoubek, who played in Dziady <\/em>in 1967. That spectacle was banned by the government, and is considered as the beginning of widespread student protests in Poland in 1968. In Rychcik\u2019s show it becomes a kind of monument \u2013 an (unfortunately) uncritically presented ruin of past theater and national history, which cannot be resurrected and haunts from the screen as a powerful ghost of our identity. When the action returns to the stage, the \u201cGreat Improvisation,\u201d recounted by the \u201cliving\u201d actor, changes into Martin Luther King\u2019s speech: \u201cI had a dream\u2026.\u201d It is supposed to become new, but in fact, it is the same old paradigm of freedom for Poles. Before he starts to speak, naked black and white actors slowly surround him. They gather and become a choir of slaves supervised by the Joker. Moved by the speech, they start to sing the song about revenge taken from Dziady,<\/em> but in the style of an old gospel song. They move from one foot to another. As a crowd they are powerful, beautiful and dangerous. We feel their power, which is coming from their bodily presence, the unmediated contact (in contrast to the projection we\u2019ve just seen) with multiplied singing and moving bodies. The scene ends with the sound of rain, which becomes a symbol of freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what is striking in this moment is the real provenance of the blackness \u2013 transposed as a notion of slavery and emancipation to the white bodies \u2013 on the stage of Polish national drama. In Poland there is no meaningful black minority. We know blackness from images, movies, photos. With the Joker, Marilyn, NBA and other figures, it should be read in the context of a particular technological mode in which Rychcik\u2019s work function \u2013 the television.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An old television set is almost always present on the stage. It shows some hypnotic images, fragments of Lost Highway<\/em> by David Lynch, and some kind of control screen making our status as an audience deeply unsure. Isn\u2019t this a looped highway, which in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s reading is the psychoanalytic scene of phantasms more real than what we see on the stage? Or maybe the stage is only the function of the television screen, and it absorbs all its two-dimensional characters, mixing and re-mixing them in this strange constellation, which is supposed to be the image of our freedom? And if the television is really a frame for the entire story, how does it change the status of naked white and black bodies that are supposed to be present and live in confrontation with the ghostly screen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Samuel Weber in his book Mass Mediauras. Form, Technics, Media<\/em> writes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n What television transmits is not so much\u00a0images<\/em>, as is almost always argued. It does not transmit\u00a0representations<\/em>\u00a0but rather\u00a0the semblance of presentation as such<\/em>, understood as the power not just to see and to hear but\u00a0to place before us<\/em>. Television thus serves as a surrogate for the body in that it allows for a certain sense-perception to take place; but it does this in a way that no body can, for its perception takes place in no more than one place at the time. Television takes place in taking the place of the body and at the same time in transforming both place and body. (Weber, 1996, p. 117)<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why the confrontation of the body and the screen doesn\u2019t really take place on the stage. Screen, which in Rychcik\u2019s case is strictly connected to the television and its mode of representation, doesn\u2019t allow the body to build itself as a living and breathing being. At the same time we cannot say that black bodies become just an image. Their mode of being is strictly \u201ctelevised\u201d \u2013 they are bodies in place of the bodies, they mediate between body and its presence, between experience of the body and its stage existence. The strongest scene of the performance is in fact the one that is less \u201clive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the deeper level of the performance, a dangerous and strongly ambivalent idea appears. For Rychcik, the blackness, treated strictly as a characteristic of the body and not as an idea of the subject, was supposed to guarantee the bodily presence of the actors on the stage. He confronted the television and its mode of representation\u2013so important for our era when television doesn\u2019t really need the television set anymore\u2013with one moment of true presence. The fact that it was supposed to be secured by the color of the skin, that the fight for emancipation was supposed to become current because it was translated into black people\u2019s fight, seems very questionable. In fact it seems like a repetition of the colonial gesture described by postcolonial thinkers: \u201cAs Fanon noted many years ago, this is the inescapable \u2018fact\u2019 of blackness [\u2026] which forces on \u2018negro\u2019 people a heightened level of bodily self-consciousness, since it is the body which is the inescapable, visible sign of their oppression and denigration.\u201d\u00a0(Ashcroft, 1995, p. 321)\u00a0In Rychcik\u2019s\u00a0Dziady<\/em>\u00a0the discourse of freedom is mixed with the discourse of authenticity, and in theatrical reading it becomes the desire of true bodily presence. But this presence can only happen if the body itself is treated as another\u2013different, exotic and attractive because unknown and un-understood. So the body can reach its presence if it is deprived of its political subjectivity, if it becomes a slavery existence placed on the stage for us to look at. This logic of Rychcik\u2019s concept uncovers something that is valid for all the theater\u00a0\/\u00a0performance discourse \u2013 the ambivalence of the \u201clive presence.\u201d Here, put in the context of race, it unveils itself in a very powerful way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As observed earlier, the body, confronted with technological mode of representation, is not the real body anymore. There is no pure presence. The mediation appears then as a truly subversive and emancipatory power that saves the body, replacing it with the unfinished chain of repetitions, re-enactments and reconstructions that mark the stage as a space of action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Garbaczewski<\/p>\n\n\n\n