grant genealogies and methodologies

8 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24

ABSTRACTGenealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in !eatre and

Performance StudiesDuring the last twenty years, there has been a slow but increasing proliferation

of scholars and practitioners employing phenomenological methodologies in the study of performance. !is is symptomatic of a desire to escape from overly

theoretical approaches which diminish the status of the creation, enjoyment and experience of the performance and to embrace methods which allow an access to

the materiality and a"ective substance of the performance itself. In this paper, I argue the worth and relevance of phenomenology to the study of performance,

tracing some key historical developments, outlining the current state of the field, explaining some key points of resistance and pointing towards a few possible future directions. !e paper begins in noting the phenomenological origin of many key debates in performance studies concerning embodiment, presence and reflective practice. It traces early developments in the field and points to

isolated, often institution-specific pockets of activity. It makes a survey of recent publications and the exciting new field of performed phenomenology as a mode

of embodied research.

BIOGRAPHYStuart Grant is a Lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne Australia. He

specializes in philosophy of performance and performance as research with an emphasis on phenomenology. He has published phenomenological work on

audience, laughter, rhythm and place. He is co-founder of the Association for Phenomenology in Performance Studies and the phenomenology group in

Performance Philosophy.

9Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24

Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in Theatre and Performance StudiesSTUART GRANT

INTRODUCTIONIn 2006, Faith Hart wrote: “to reclaim the materiality of props, lighting, stage space, costumes, and of course the human body itself…theorists and practitioners of theatre have increasingly turned to phenomenology”.1 Hart’s essay is symptomatic of a growing frustration with the predominance of discursive and political approaches to the understanding of theatre and performance; approaches which obscure the object itself in a primary concern with the social context from which it emerges as an expression of a power structure, culture or system of signification. Her observation expresses a desire to escape from theoretical approaches which diminish the status of the creation, enjoyment and experience of the performance and to embrace methods which allow an access to the materiality and a"ective substance of the performance itself. As will be evidenced here, Hart and many others believe that phenomenology provides such access.

!e use of phenomenology in the study of theatre and performance, though marginalized in the climate of the last few decades, is not new. !ere is a sporadic history of methodological and theoretical dispersal and diversity, characterized by isolated scholars and often institutionally-specific pockets of intensive activity. As mentioned, in recent times, there has been an escalation of activity, but it remains uncoordinated and di"use. Against this background, this essay aims to achieve three primary tasks. First, it o"ers a very brief analysis of the intellectual climate in which theatre and

performance studies have operated since the 1960s, and examines some of the connections and divergences in the ways in which phenomenology manifests in and relates to that climate. Second, it traces a rough survey of the diversity of ideas, practices and methods which constitute the field of phenomenology in general. And third, it begins an examination of the patterns, genealogical and methodological, in the use of phenomenology in the study of performance, currently and in recent decades. It should be noted that a full account of the geographical and historical dispersal and theoretical and practical diversity of phenomenological approaches to performance would require a substantial endeavour with significant resources. Most instances occur in isolated pockets under the influence of individual scholars and performers. Many have received little dissemination through academic and other outlets. Often, these endeavours have met with active institutional resistance. I am currently engaged with colleagues in seeking funding and facilities for an attempt to gather this often forgotten and hidden material. We are in the process of compiling an archive of work and an index of artists and scholars who have worked and are working in the field. !is current article is part of an early foray into the field. I would like to apologize in advance for any exclusions and would welcome information about any work overlooked here.

I would also note that in the context of this volume of this journal that the situation I describe in the following section, concerning an active


resistance to phenomenology in the discipline of performance studies, pertains to a tendency in the Anglo-American academy of the humanities which, I am assured by colleagues, does not hold in Europe, where structuralist, poststructuralist, critical and phenomenological traditions are often brought together.

THE RISE OF POLITICS AND LANGUAGE AS FIRST PHILOSOPHIESIn the wake of the political activism of the 1960s, and in the context of the flourishing of Marxist-influenced philosophies of poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, semiotics and postcolonialism, schools of humanities in universities across Western Europe and particularly in the Anglophone world fell under the influence of a reinvigorated Continental Philosophy. !e work of a primarily French group of thinkers influenced by the rising structuralism—Lyotard, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva and others—revolutionized the study of the humanities and social sciences. !roughout the 1980s and 1990s, theories of deconstruction and semiotics dominated literature, theatre studies and the humanities generally, while Foucauldian concepts, feminism and ideology critique became the primary modes of study across the social sciences. A new canon was instituted, dominated by a retrieval of names representing such diverse modes of thinking as Lacan, Artaud, Benjamin and Saussure. Performance Studies was born into this environment. It began in the heady political climate of the 1960s, as the study of the overtly political dimension of the avant-garde theatre and performance of the time; and as the bastard o"spring of theatre studies and anthropology, it was, and remains, particularly in the Anglophone context, drenched in postcolonial theories of inter-, trans- and multi-culturalism.

!ere are two primary, intertwined threads of impetus underlying these intellectual developments. First, the universally assumed, Marxist-derived belief in politics as first philosophy, and second, the all-pervasive assumption of the primacy of language in all things human. In the ideological

climate of post 1960s humanities there is no escape from these terms. !ey are sacrosanct. Although phenomenology does, where necessary, give direct address to questions of politics and language, it aims at a very di"erent level of ontological and existential explication.2 Phenomenology claims access to a fundamental-transcendental level of cognition, perception, intersubjectivity and being which would apply to all humans. !e predominant beliefs and methods in the intellectual climate which has increasingly pervaded institutions of the humanities in the Anglosphere across the last forty years, question the validity of claims to access to these domains. In this environment, phenomenology has been dismissed as essentialist. Work which aims at fundamental, underlying human structures does not serve the immediate political interests of the scholars and institutions in the academy of the Anglo-American humanities and social sciences. I am however, assured by colleagues working in Europe, some of whom are contributors to this journal issue that these distinctions are neither as clearly drawn nor as damning of phenomenology in their milieu as in the English speaking world of performance and theatre studies. !is is a di"erence which requires further examination and elucidation.

Again, in the Anglosphere, there is a critical lack of first-hand knowledge of phenomenology among scholars in the field. Most make their judgments on the basis of secondary sources, through interpreters of Butler and Derrida.3 !ere is certainly little awareness in the discipline of the extent to which the works of Derrida and Butler are themselves phenomenological, and to which even the central concept of performativity is inflected by the phenomenological tradition. Derrida’s views on language and performativity, and his central concept of di#érance result from his early, exquisitely detailed and rigorous phenomenological work on Husserl’s Logical Investigations.4 Butler’s own conception of performativity stems directly from her engagement with Merleau-Ponty.5 !e work of both of these important philosophers partakes in the fundamental movement of the phenomenological tradition towards questioning the presuppositions of their forbears, seeking an ever greater interrogation of the fundamentality and radicality of concepts


and terms. !e central concern in theatre and performance studies with the radical questioning of the concept of presence as the keystone term in the possibility or otherwise of its ontology, is one of the great discoveries of phenomenology. It becomes possible precisely and entirely as a result of the by no means exhausted tradition of enquiry initiated by Heidegger’s vast undertaking into the complexity of the idea of the present in Being and Time.6 Again, Derrida’s acute phenomenological analyses are a worthy continuance of this tradition. Further, the prominence of ideas of absence, groundlessness and perspectivism in performance studies proceeds directly from discoveries made by Heidegger as a corollary of his introduction into phenomenology of crucial tenets of Dilthey’s hermeneutics and historicism.7 It should finally be noted that Derrida’s foregrounding of absence could only occur in an enquiry conducted in a profoundly transcendental register, and, more tellingly, first as an interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of the withdrawal of the vorhanden in the instrumentality of the zuhanden,8 and second as a development of Sartre’s concept of non-being as the ground of being.9

Simon Bayly refers to “a certain critical orthodoxy”, in Anglo-American performance studies which has developed as a result of this climate. He notes, as an example, that despite the take-up of phenomenological themes such as “the body” in theatre and performance studies, there has been a “relative neglect of…a phenomenological analysis of embodiment”.10 However, this lack of awareness of the phenomenological origins of key concepts is understandable. As mentioned, performance studies itself emerge from the same social/historical milieu as the rush of intellectual and creative activity of the work of the French poststructuralists. !e scholarship is entirely contemporaneous with its object, of the same political earth, inspired by the same cause. !ere remains a tendency in performance studies to champion political causes, rather than studying, critiquing or analyzing them.

Still, despite these obstacles and resistances, phenomenology has endured, and, as this article will demonstrate, is clearly undergoing a renaissance. !e rise of phenomenological work in theatre and performance studies is now too substantial

to be dismissed on ideological grounds. It needs to be documented and explained. Performance studies needs to turn towards phenomenology, to understand its theories, methods and results, and establish a systematic approach to them, harnessing their benefits, rather than persisting with an ill-informed ideological dismissal.

PHENOMENOLOGY AS METHOD!e di#culty of the take-up of phenomenology is not only due to external critical factors. Phenomenology is essentially a di#cult, dispersed and diverse terrain, lacking an easily apprehensible through-line. !ere are many phenomenologies, applied in many diverse areas of study, using di"erent methods and theoretical underpinnings, often bearing little clearly perceptible terminological, methodological resemblance, consistency or coherence with each other. Merleau-Ponty’s explicit address to this problem sixty years ago still holds true. In the 1945 preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, he asked: “What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. !e fact remains that it has by no means been answered”.11 He notes the diversity of methods, approaches, ontological registers and changing definitions in Husserl’s own work, in the projects of his immediate followers, in Heidegger’s radical reappraisal, and then briefly surveys the field as it was in his own milieu of existentialism in the mid-twentieth century. He eventually gives up on seeking a unifying thread between all the examples of work identifying itself as phenomenology and notes that phenomenology is a “style of thinking”12 rather than a doctrine or method. It is a “re-learning to look at the world”13 and an attempt to “bring back all the living relationships of experience”.14 !ese insights of Merleau-Ponty are a refinement of Heidegger’s assessment: “!us the term ‘phenomenology’ is quite di"erent in its meaning from expressions such as ‘theology’ and the like. !ose terms designate the objects of their respective sciences according to the subject-matter which they comprise at the time. ‘Phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject matter thus


comprised. !e word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.”15

!is is a radical grounding of Husserl’s call to get “back to the things themselves”. Phenomenology requires that the method of apprehension and the course of the inquiry be determined to as full an extent as possible by the demands of the object under study. !e ultimate result of this, as pointed out by many of the existentialists, is the e"acement of the distinction between the subject and object in the enjoinment with the experiencing. Heidegger emphasizes this further with his ultimate definition of phenomenology: “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself ”.16 !is is the concrete methodological meaning of “back to the things themselves”. In opposition to a feminist analysis which will always produce the gender power relations involved in a situation, or a postcolonial analysis which will always demonstrate the relative disempoweredness of the di"erent cultures involved, or a semiotic analysis which imposes a preconceived schemata of signification on the analysis, a phenomenological investigation seeks the way in which the object of study gives itself, taking the terms of the study from the object itself. No phenomenologist would be naïve enough to assume that they were capable of an objective, presuppositionless approach to a phenomenon (the mere selection of the phenomenon from its surrounds implies a complex positionality of the researcher) but the primary impulse of the phenomenological approach, the dominant methodological tenet, is to suspend prejudice and presupposition as far as is possible while still remaining coherent and intelligible. !is is the sole purpose of the phenomenological reduction. It is also the gesture underlying Heidegger’s introduction of hermeneutics into phenomenology. Hermeneutics is precisely the study of the interpretive foreknowledges from which it is necessary to speak in order to make sense at all. In this way phenomenology o"ers a relief from the over-determining theoretical violence of many other modes of enquiry. !ere is also an ethical imperative in this gesture, in that, opposed to the approach of ideology critique, which, in the face of the

knowledge that all truth is implicitly perspectivist, seeks to privilege particular ideologies and viewpoints, phenomenology, no doubt quixotically, attempts to continually renew its examination of its own presuppositions in an aim towards an ever greater, though ultimately unattainable, clarity of intent. !is is Husserl’s philosophy “as the idea of an infinite task”.17

Despite the diversity and dispersal of phenomenological theory and practice, there are certain terms, imperatives and tendencies to which a method must bear relation in order to make a rightful claim to stand as phenomenology, rather than one of the many species of qualitative psychology or experiential philosophy. !e first is the spirit of the phenomenological reduction, the second, an investigation into intentionality or givenness, the third, an aim towards revealing underlying, fundamental constitution. Apart from these essential features, phenomenology often aims to reveal the hidden dimensions of the taken-for-granted, to describe experience from within the experiencing, and deals with issues of corporeality, intersubjectivity, time, place and the fundamental structures of self.

!e reduction is the primary methodology of Husserlian phenomenology. In a nutshell, it consists in taking out of play the taken-for-granted presuppositions about the phenomenon, beginning most radically with its existence and reality. To violently oversimplify, there are three basic levels of the reduction: 1) the worldly, or psychological reduction, in which experienced phenomena in the world are described as they are given, after bracketing out presuppositions of their existence as received definitions and categories; 2) the transcendental or phenomenological reduction, in which the data of the worldly reduction is further reduced to its constitutive fundamental philosophical elements; and 3) the eidetic reduction in which perceived and otherwise encountered variable phenomena in the world are reduced, through processes of free variation in the imagination to their invariant structures. !e various puttings-out-of-play, bracketings, and suspensions which are practised in the reductions take the phenomenologist out of the natural attitude in which the world is


ordinarily encountered and enable the entering of the phenomenological attitude where underlying constitutive structures are revealed. Although the reduction is a contentious issue in the history of phenomenology, with Heidegger dispensing with the term almost completely, Levinas completely refiguring it, and Merleau-Ponty claiming “the most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction”,18 the impetus of all phenomenology remains the revelation of underlying constitutive structures through the putting aside of the taken-for-granted.

Similarly, the central term intentionality has undergone many interpretations and refigurings throughout the history of the phenomenological tradition. Husserl claimed that the analysis of the noetic-noematic intentional relationship between the subject and its objects was the most central task of phenomenology.19 Heidegger and Sartre claimed that intentionality or directedness towards objects was the most fundamental defining moment of the human, a fundamental transcendence.20 Merleau-Ponty foregrounded elements of Husserl’s Ideas II21 and transformed intentionality into a structure of bodily engagements with the world, through the concepts of operative intentionality and the intentional arc. Operative intentionality is more fundamental than Husserl’s noetic-noematic structure by which the subject has its objects. It “projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physiological, ideological and moral situation”, and consequently “brings about the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility”.22 Merleau-Ponty’s other main contribution to the history of intentionality is his concept of motor intentionality. Motility is “basic intentionality”23. Because it is bodily intentionality it must be construed as an I can rather than an I know. Perception is no more knowledge of objects than movement is “thought about movement” or bodily space is “space thought of or represented”.24 “Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us access to the world and the object…which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world,

without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’.”25

I dwell at greater length on Merleau-Ponty than other phenomenologists because his work has been a more important influence on phenomenologists of performance, primarily through his emphasis on “the body”.

Among other existentialists, Dufrenne completely collapses the distinction between subject and object, referring to their bond in the “consubstantiality…of an original communication”,26 in which: “intentionality is no longer an aim or mere intention toward but a participation with…not merely to be conscious of something but to associate myself with it…(in) an act of communion…we are dealing rather with the acquisition of an intimacy.”27

Levinas takes this movement even further, to an immersive intentionality of enjoyment in which objects are “lived from…,”.28 Later in his career he posited a “non-intentional intentionality”29 in which he posits the unpositable, the before and after of intentionality, the “dark context of the thematized world”, which, in the attempt to be rendered clear to reflexive, intentional thought, can only be betrayed.30 In the realm of theatre and performance where so much dwells in the opacity of the unutterable, the potential for Levinas’ thinking of the “dark context” has not had its surface scratched.

Despite the di"erences in the positions and conceptualizations in this history of phenomenological intentionality, they all share certain characteristics. !ey are structures of the relationships of humans to their worlds; they move towards fundamental explanations; they attempt to reveal taken-for-granted underlying presuppositions. !ese are the fundamental tenets of phenomenology.

!ere are also other phenomenological concepts which o"er great promise for the study of performance. Dufrenne’s idea of “the spectator” in his Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is a vital text for understanding audiences.31 !e history of intersubjectivity, from Husserl’s primordial reduction32 of the other person and his idea of open intersubjectivity,33 Sartre’s origin of the self as object


for the other,34 Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality35 and the Levinasian face-to-face36 provide new ways into understanding the fundamental intersubjectivity of performance and the essentiality of performance to a human. German philosopher Gernot Böhme, in his recently-translated work on the phenomenology of atmospheres, writes at length on theatrical staging.37 Sondra Fraleigh writes about parallels between the work of Butoh performers and Japanese phenomenology.38 Most importantly, phenomenology, like performance, is primarily a practice rather than a set of ideas or concepts. Jan Pato$ka in particular is deeply concerned with “the primacy of practice”,39 proclaiming that “every realization takes place ultimately through movement”.40 Pato$ka’s work on embodiment, intersubjectivity and movement o"ers a potential wealth of resources for the study of theatre and performance. He foregrounds the status of phenomenology as a practice of reflection on lived experience from within that experience. In this, phenomenology participates in an essentially performative temporality. It is a mode of research and analysis which claims to be able to participate in, describe and understand the experience in the moment of its coming forth. Merleau-Ponty puts it thus: “!e phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”.41 !is is perhaps the most perspicacious view of the source of the appeal to performers and students of performance. First, phenomenology aims to be a revelatory participation in the moment of the experience itself. Temporally, performativity distinguishes itself as the cleaving of the action or the utterance to the moment of its coming forth. !e performative moment is the utterance which does what it says, the collapse of action and meaning. Phenomenology promises to gain access to this performative moment, as methodological insinuation into the moment of coming forth, speaking from the experience, opening it up and bringing it back for reflection. Second, this structure reveals phenomenology as a performative act in itself; a method which is implicated in the intrigue of the

coming-forth, making it a potentially powerful tool for bringing force and clarity to the understanding of the much-debated and misunderstood question of the ontology of performance.

PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF THEATRE AND PERFORMANCEDespite the obstacles and the misunderstandings, phenomenology not only endures, but is undergoing somewhat of an explosion in the humanities generally, and in particular in the study of the embodied and emplaced practices and experiences of theatre and performance. !is article has pointed to some explanation of why this is so, but a more thorough overview of the field as it stands now and as it has developed will help to provide a more detailed and coherent picture. I will again emphasise that this cannot be a comprehensive overview. It is a beginning, perhaps an outline, for a more substantial project which calls, with increasing urgency, to be undertaken.

Historically, the growth curve of the use of phenomenology in performance studies is characterized by moments of sporadic, isolated activity from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, followed by an acceleration in the late 1990s and a rapid proliferation throughout the new century. Some works consist in specific phenomenological investigations of performance-related phenomena, but many more others draw on phenomenological concepts and methodologies in the context of broader enquiries. !e remainder of this article will point towards some significant works and trends and will try to make sense of current directions. As already stated, this brief survey is by no means comprehensive. !e work of phenomenologists of performance is scattered, there are no central organs of dissemination, and much of it is performative, leaving little documentation.

!e earliest phenomenological work in the study of performance is Maxine-Sheets Johnstone’s !e Phenomenology of Dance (1966).42 Sheets-Johnstone has been a consistent presence in the application of phenomenological methods to the study of performance. In this ground-breaking early work, she begins a life-long commitment to


the application of phenomenology in the study of dance centring around terms of qualitative movement, the primacy of kinaesthesia to human understanding and the fundamental role of dance in an evolutionary perspective on embodiment. She has maintained a steady output of work dealing with experiential analyses of dance and its audiencing and the fundamentality of movement to all forms of cognition and sociality. By the time of her major work, !e Primacy of Movement, in 1999, Sheets-Johnstone had cemented herself as the pre-eminent English speaking scholar in the phenomenology of performance. Partly due to her influence and partly due to the concern with embodiment, phenomenology is taken up more in the study of dance than in any other genre of performance. Sheets-Johnstone has inspired following generations of dance scholars writing about the neurophysiology of dance, the body in place, choreography, the experience of watching dance, the ethics and philosophy of dance.43 !e connection between phenomenology and dance has led to a recent special issue of the journal, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on dance and its relation to cognitive science.

In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Bert O. States sets out to “write a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theatre making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, text etc.”.44 States explicitly eschews the task of a full phenomenology of the theatre, of “a far more thorough and scientific consideration of every aspect of theatre”,45 preferring to concentrate on the “standpoint of the actor”46 in his relationships with the performance, the text and the audience. As Sheets-Johnstone’s work heralded significant concern with phenomenology in dance, States’ was a precursor to a prominent strand of study of the phenomenology of acting.47

Bruce Wilshire takes a phenomenological approach to issues of self, audience, theatrical event and everyday performance in Role Playing and Identity: !e Limits of !eatre as Metaphor.48 In this, his book is the first phenomenological work on key specific issues of performance studies.

Stanton Garner combines issues of embodiment, performativity and spatiality in his 1994 book Bodied Spaces.49 He addresses specific plays and performances from twentieth-century drama with an emphasis on “perception and corporeality”.50 He explicitly addresses the dominance of poststructuralism in the humanities of the 1990s, warning of an “analytic desiccation” which “loses contact with human corporeality” and “risks losing the very livedness that theatre so boldly puts into play”.51

Since these pioneering works there has been a slow acceleration of phenomenological works through the early years of the new century. Alice Rayner approaches an ontology of performance through a phenomenology of modes of action;52 Simon Critchley has applied phenomenology to questions of comedy;53 Jan Mrazek and Benjamin Fisler use a phenomenological approach to explore postcolonial and race issues in puppet theatres;54 Susan Kozel introduces phenomenology into the relations between technology and bodies in performance;55 Helena Grehan and Simon Bayly take di"erent approaches to the application of Levinasian concepts to ethical questions of performance;56 Bayly’s work also touches on a"ective issues explored by Martin Welton in his Feeling !eatre.57 Willmar Sauter, Kristen Langellier and this author use phenomenology to enter the hidden worlds of the audience.58 !ese works are the tip of the iceberg in an ever increasing number of publications from a new generation of leading performance studies scholars engaged in a reappraisal of the worth of phenomenology to performance studies.

!e use of phenomenology in the study of performance is also clearly on the rise among younger scholars. !ere appears to be something of a generational shift occurring. In 2011, the Association for Phenomenology in Performance Studies (APPS) was founded. !e initial call for interest garnered almost 100 responses from scholars of performance. More than 70% of responses were from postgraduate students or early career researchers. Searches of websites of institutions of performance studies reveal a large number of current PhD theses being written in the field.


!e last Performance Studies International (PSi) conference featured more than twenty papers which directly claimed to be applying phenomenological methods (PSi 2011b). In 2011, a roundtable discussion on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” at the Modern Language Association of America annual convention claimed phenomenology as “a new way to explore tactile, aural, olfactory, and emotional dimensions of early modern culture”.59 !e journal Criticism has commissioned an issue from the event. Stockholm University is running postgraduate seminars on phenomenology in performance studies.60 !e University of Sydney and Monash University in Australia run regular postgraduate seminars on phenomenology of performance.

In the European context, phenomenology has met with a lesser degree of explicit resistance. Influenced by a line of post-war German phenomenology, particularly the New Phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz61 and its corollary, Gernot Böhme’s Aesthetics of Atmospheres,62 a school of performance phenomenology has sprung up at Freie Universität Berlin. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s seminal text, Ästhetik des Performativen, in which she proposes the need for a phenomenological aesthetics, vigorously takes up the question of presence anew in the context of materiality and corporeality.63 Fischer-Lichte proposes a performative aesthetics of presence which would bring together Böhme’s idea of the “ecstasies of the thing”64 with “the concept of the presence of the performer”.65 Fischer-Lichte’s work has inspired inquiries in intermediality, culture, corporeality and acting theory.66 Again, this European tradition is less a%icted with the combativeness of the Anglo-American tradition. Phenomenology is brought into the poststructuralist tradition to enhance the discourse in areas of corporeality, experience and perception.

!ere are undiscovered, unheralded and often institution-specific pockets of phenomenological work which need to be unearthed and made available to the new generation of scholars. !ese emergences are often the result of the influence of isolated scholars. For example, during the 1980s and 1990s, the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University produced more

than thirty theses in phenomenology of aesthetic and everyday performance under the influence of Richard Lanigan and Lenore Langsdorf. !ese theses, dealing with rhetoric, gender, aesthetic performance, media and communication, sit in archive rooms, unpublished and unavailable to scholars in the field. !ere is an urgent need to bring these works together and to find other collections, to archive them and bring them to the attention of the discipline. !ere is a wealth of methodological, theoretical and genealogical foundations which need to be explored and understood.

Most importantly, with the rise across the discipline of performance as research, performers themselves are turning in large numbers towards the embodied, grounded methods of phenomenology in their performative research investigations, often claiming the work itself to be performed phenomenology. !ere has been a marked uptake of phenomenological practices and discourses by some site-specific performers, Butoh dancers and other performance artists whose work entails an explicit research dimension.67 However, partly due to the temporal and geographical dispersal of the work and partly to the fact that these scholars and artists tend to be dedicated to their own practice, these workers have remained isolated from each other. !is has led to a lack of institutional structure and support, no central organs of dissemination, and di#culty in finding appropriate expert reviewers for publications. As phenomenological practices, concepts and terms become more prevalent, particularly in the language and work of performers, this situation needs to change. !ere is a need to make available a methodological rigor and shared language to these emerging scholar-practitioners currently enlivening the field with performance as research projects. !is new generation is exploring new theories and methods and is attracted to the promise of the turn to the materiality and moment of the performance itself. As scholars, phenomenology provides them with methodological principles and clear and consistent terms by which their work can be conducted, assessed and evaluated.

!ere is a further problem in the methodological, practical and theoretical heterogeneity of phenomenologists of performance. !is diversity


is clearly indicated by the stated interests of the members of APPS. Significant numbers are studying acting, audience/spectatorship, dance, technological/virtual/digital performance, performance-making, everyday performance and embodiment. Others mention religious performance, music/sound, site-specific performance, interculturality and puppetry. !eorists of influence span the entire century of phenomenologists. Merleau-Ponty is the most common, followed by Levinas, Heidegger, Husserl and Derrida. !ere is a further need to bring together the di"erent threads in order to unravel their confluences, disparities, overlaps and intertwinements.

THE FUTUREPerformance studies is deeply concerned with the study of bodies acting in places. Phenomenology is the original site of the foregrounding of the study of the body as the centre of experience. !ere is a century of phenomenological writings on embodiment which have as yet not been applied fully to the study of performance. Whilst the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is central to many currently-used concepts in performance studies, including Butler’s foundational idea of performativity, there is very little application of some key phenomenological works. Husserl’s Ding und Raum and Ideen II, on which much of Merleau-Ponty’s work is based. In other areas, Anthony Steinbock’s ground-breaking work on interculturality in Husserl’s generative phenomenology;68 Heidegger’s Beiträge, which outlines the earliest concept of something which might be considered performative; and many other phenomenologists from the last thirty years, such as Edward S. Casey, Alphonso Lingis, Lester Embree, Drew Leder, Michel Henry, Don Ihde, Jean-Luc Marion and Luce Irigaray all present sources of rich value of phenomenology for forthcoming generations of scholars in performance and theatre studies.

!e primary reason for the persistence and flourishing of phenomenology is its capacity to produce real-world results for researchers, writers and performers alike. Phenomenology actively attempts to resist the unnecessary imposition of

theory or pre-ordained schemata into the domain of study. It aims precisely at the maintenance of the awareness and suspension of theoretical presuppositions and attempts to limit their influence in apprehending the givenness of the object of study. !is directive towards staying grounded in the world is central to understanding embodied and emplaced practices of performance. As long as scholars and practitioners maintain a concern with the materiality of performance, with exploring and expounding the experience of both the performer and the audience member, with bodies in places, the interest in phenomenology will continue to grow and the multiplicity of approaches, theories and methods which constitute the diverse terrain of Husserl’s infinite task of phenomenology will continue to yield results for scholars and artists in theatre and performance.

NOTES AND REFERENCES1 F. Elizabeth Hart, “Performance, Phenomenology and

the Cognitive Turn” in Bruce A. McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds., Performance and Cognition: !eatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, Routledge, London 2006, p. 19.

2 Indeed, all the major phenomenologists spent large periods of their careers addressing the centrality of questions of language to human understanding and being. Heidegger turned from the study of Being to the study of its “house”, language, where “man finds the proper mode of his existence”. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language. Harper & Row, New York 1971, p. 57. Phenomenology itself originated as a result of problems in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, in the discussion of distinctions between sign, meaning, sense and expression. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., Routledge & Kegan. Paul, London and New York, 1970a. Language was also a primary concern of Merleau-Ponty’s work throughout his career: “On the Phenomenology of Language” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Northwestern Univ. Press, Evanston 1964, pp. 84-97; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, !e Prose of the World, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973a; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy,


Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973b. Merleau-Ponty also wrote many essays on politics: Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., pp. 247-341. Husserl’s work on politics is primarily concerned with the constitution of community in his lifeworld phenomenology: Edmund Husserl, !e Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1970b.

3 For an example of this genre of criticism, see Pannill Camp, “!e Trouble with Phenomenology” in Journal of Dramatic !eory and Criticism, vol. 19 no. 1, 2004, pp. 79-97.

4 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s !eory of Signs, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973; Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1988.

5 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, New York and London 1997; Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist !eory” in !eatre Journal, vol. 40 no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531.

6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1962.

7 Heidegger, 1962, op. cit., p. 450.8 Ibid., pp. 102-7.9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A

Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, Washington Square Press: Pocket Books, New York 1992, pp. 33 ".

10 Simon Bayly, A Pathognomy of Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2011, p. 74.

11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method, Humanities Press, New York 1962, p. vii.

12 Ibid., p. viii. 13 Ibid., p. xx.14 Ibid., p. xv.15 Heidegger, 1962, op. cit., pp. 58-60.16 Ibid., p. 58.17 Husserl, 1970b, op. cit., p. 291.18 Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p. xiv.19 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure

Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Kluwer, Dordrecht 1982, pp. 82-3.

20 Jean-Paul Sartre, “!e Transcendence of the Ego: Sketch for a Phenomenological Description” in Dermot

Moran, ed., !e Phenomenology Reader, Routledge, London 2002, p. 405; Martin Heidegger, !e Basic Problems of Phenomenology, rev. ed., Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1988, p. 65.

21 Edmund Husserl, 1982, op. cit., 1989, pp. 151-168.22 Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p. 136.23 Ibid., p. 138.24 Ibid., p. 137.25 Ibid., pp. 140-1.26 Mikel Dufrenne, !e Phenomenology of Aesthetic

Experience, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973, p. 7.

27 Ibid., p. 406.28 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on

Exteriority, Duquesne Studies Philosophical Series, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1969, p. 110-118.

29 Emmanuel Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality” in A Montefiore, ed. Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983, pp. 100-115.

30 Emmanuel Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness” in Entre Nous: On !inking-of-the-Other, Columbia University Press, New York 1998, pp. 123-132.

31 Dufrenne, op. cit., p. 7.32 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction

to Phenomenology, Martinus Nijho", !e Hague 1960, pp. 89-151.

33 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, ed. Iso Kern. 3 vols., Husserliana, Martinus Nijho", !e Hague 1973.

34 Sartre, op. cit., pp. 334-340.35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, !e Visible and the Invisible,

Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1975, pp. 140-2.

36 !e concept of the face is such a central theme to Levinas’ work and it undergoes such significant change and development throughout his career that it would be impossible to locate one principal source. An early version is found in Levinas, 1969, op. cit., pp. 79-81. It is developed more thoroughly in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise !an Being or Beyond Essence, Martinus Nijho", !e Hague 1981, pp. 88-94.

37 Gernot Böhme, “!e Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres”, http://www.cresson.archi.fr/PUBLI/pubCOLLOQUE/AMB8-


confGBohme-eng.pdf.38 Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Butoh: Metamorphic Dance

and Global Alchemy, University of Illinois Press, Urbana 2010, pp. 65-7.

39 Jan Pato$ka, Body, Community, Language, World, Open Court, Chicago 1998, p. 85.

40 Ibid., p. 79.41 Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p. xx.42 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, !e Phenomenology of Dance,

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1966.43 Vivian Sobchack, “’Choreography for One, Two,

and !ree Legs’ (a Phenomenological Meditation in Movements)” in Topoi, vol. 24 no. 1, 2005,pp. 55-66; Corinne Jola, Shantel Ehrenberg, and Dee Reynolds, “!e Experience of Watching Dance: Phenomenological–Neuroscience Duets” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 11 no. 1, 2012, pp. 17-37; Nigel Stewart, “Dancing the Face of Place: Environmental Dance and Eco-Phenomenology” in Performance Research, vol. 15 no. 4, 2010, pp. 32-39; Emily Cross and Luca Ticini, “Neuroaesthetics and Beyond: New Horizons in Applying the Science of the Brain to the Art of Dance” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 11 no. 1, 2012, pp. 5-17; Philipa Rothfield, “Di"erentiating Phenomenology and Dance” in Topoi, vol. 24 no. 1, 2005, pp. 43-53 Sondra Fraleigh, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology” in Dance Research Journal, vol. 23 no. 1, 1991 pp. 11-16.

44 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of !eater University of California Press, Berkeley 1985, p. 1.

45 Ibid.46 Ibid., p. 14.47 Daniel Johnston, “Active Metaphysics: Acting as Manual

Philosophy or Phenomenological Interpretations of Acting !eory”, PhD thesis, University of Sydney 2008; Phillip B. Zarrilli, “An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting” in !eatre Journal, vol. 59 no. 4, 2007, pp. 635-647; Bruce W. Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: !e Limits of !eatre as Metaphor, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1982; Phillip B. Zarrilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience” in !eatre Journal, vol. 56 no. 4, 2004, pp. 653-666; Mark Seton, “Forming (in)Vulnerable Bodies: Intercorporeal Experiences in Actor Training in Australia”, PhD thesis, University of

Sydney 2004.48 Wilshire, op. cit.49 Stanton Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and

Performance in Contemporary Drama, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1994.

50 Ibid., p. 10. 51 Ibid., p. 16.52 Alice Rayner, To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the

Phenomenology of Action, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1994.

53 Simon Critchley, On Humour, !inking in Action, Routledge, London and New York 2002.

54 Benjamin Fisler, “!e Phenomenology of Racialism: Blackface Puppetry in American !eatre, 1872-1939”, PhD thesis, University of Maryland 2005; Jan Mrazek, Phenomenology of a Puppet !eatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit, KITLV Press, Leiden 2005.

55 Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2007.

56 Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age, Studies in International Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York 2009; Bayly, op. cit.

57 Martin Welton, Feeling !eatre, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2012.

58 Kristin M. Langellier, “A Phenomenological Approach to Audience” in Literature and Performance, vol. 3 no. 2, 1983, pp. 34-39; Stuart Grant, “Fifteen !eses on Transcendental Intersubjective Audience” in About Performance, vol. 10, 2010, pp. 67-79; Willmar Sauter, !e !eatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception, Studies in !eatre History & Culture, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2000.

59 Kevin Curran, “Shakespeare and Phenomenology”, h t t p : / / s h a k e s p e a r e a n e x t e r i o r i t y. w o rd p re s s .com/2011/01/03/shakespeare-and-phenomenology/ (retrieved 16 March 2013).

60 Stockholm University, “Phenomenology and Performance Studies”, http://sisu.it.su.se/search/info/TVFENO/en (retrieved 16 March 2013).

61 Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Müllan and Jan Slaby, “Emotions Outside the Box—the New Phenomenology of Feeling and Corporeality” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 10 no. 2, 2011, pp. 241-259.

62 Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics” in !esis Eleven, vol. 36


no. 1, 1993, pp. 113-126.63 Erika Fischer-Lichte, !e Transformative Power of

Performance: A New Aesthetics, Routledge, London and New York 2008, pp. 98-101.

64 Böhme, op. cit., p. 121.65 Fischer-Lichte, op. cit., p. 100.66 Meike Wagner, “Of Other Bodies: !e Intermedial Gaze

in !eatre” in in Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, ed., Intermediality in !eatre and Performance, !emes in !eatre: Collective Approaches to !eatre and Performance, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York 2006,pp. 125-136; Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie Des !eaters, Übergänge, Fink, Munich 2008.

67 Rachel Sweeney and Marnie Orr, “Surface Tensions: Land and Body Relations through Live Research Inquiry: Rockface” in Double Dialogues, vol. 14, 2011, http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_fourteen/Orr_Sweeney.html; (retrieved 16 March 2013) !e Post Humanities Hub, “Meeting Materialities”, h t t p : / / w w w. t e m a . l i u . s e / h s p a l t / 1 . 3 1 0 4 0 2 /MeetingMaterialitiesASTRIDA.pdf; (retrieved 16 March 2013) Nicoline Van Harskamp, “Expressive Power Series Part 1 - Max Bonner on the Phenomenology of Speech”, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010.

68 Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1995.

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