On 28 March 2010 The Observer newspaper reported that MPs representing Britain's major political parties were backing moves towards the addition of an extra hour to the country's time zone. Under these plans Britain's temporal organization would be shifted away from Greenwich Mean Time and into that currently occupied by British Summer Time. A new British Summer Time would be established, two hours ahead of the current GMT. This would draw Britain into temporal step with the rest of Europe, it was suggested, and add an extra hour of daylight to the nation's evenings. Although the north of the country (and Scotland in particular) might suffer darker mornings in the winter as a result, the reduced drain on energy resources and the civilizing benefits of daylight would be to the nation's advantage.
On 3 December in that same year, MPs gave their approval to the second reading of the Daylight Saving Bill proposed by Rebecca Harris, the member of Parliament for Castlepoint, allowing it to progress to consideration by a parliamentary committee.Footnote 1 A significant proportion of the proposed bill covered the benefits to social well-being, such as a reduced number of road accidents, a reduction in crime and an increase in the numbers of citizens taking exercise. It also hoped to benefit the nation's well-being in more affective terms. In northern latitudes like Britain's, the long nights of winter are often held to be responsible for the ‘winter blues’, or seasonal affective disorder. For those afflicted by SAD, bouts of depression are experienced during winter but recede with the arrival of spring and longer, lighter days. By increasing daylight during waking hours in winter, Britain (and Britons) would become happier. Furthermore, as well as an affective leavening, the Daylight Savings Bill sought to make the case that increased daylight would lift depression of a more economic nature. Tourism would receive a boost, it suggested, with the additional hour of daylight furthering opportunities for sightseeing. Although the move would shift the financial markets of London further from those of New York, the resultant temporal proximity to Europe and Asia would increase trade with other powerful economies. Moving the nation further into the sun would enhance its sense of self through increased well-being and draw it closer to those of other, more distant, places.
There is an irony in this, and not only insofar as increased leisure seems so inexorably linked to increased work. By increasing available light, the additional opportunities for seeing that the bill sought to enable would, more than ever, make plain the very distances that it proposed to overcome. Seeing in the light (or at least doing so clearly) demands a necessary distance between the eye and the object it regards, in order to bring it into focus. By contrast, the visual experience of darkness is one of proximity. It is right there in front of you, and the pleasures and terrors of the dark surely rest on the collapse of distance as result. Where light reveals the distance between you and the objects of your perception, you are together with them in darkness for good or ill. What and how one sees is not an entirely separate matter from what and how one feels.
As I will discuss, the penetration of darkness by technologies of light is sometimes held to be an elementary condition of contemporary theatre.Footnote 2 Subsequently, events seen in the light are more often the subject of discussion than the darkness in which that seeing is founded. In this article, I ask what might be said of that darkness, both as a theatrical condition and as one that relates to the social and cultural politics of illumination outside it. Although it did not refer to theatre in any direct way, the Daylight Savings Bill serves to frame this discussion by speaking, in part, to a series of investments in the social, political and affective possibilities of photic energy. In the increased daylight it would allow, seeing, working and feeling better are drawn together.
In theatre studies (to say nothing of its practices), much store has been set by the supposed ability of theatrical events to generate a sort of proto-community, by providing temporary frameworks for shared experience.Footnote 3 In performance studies, a critique of theatre is often offered by the delineation of more efficacious forms of social and aesthetic participation.Footnote 4 In either case, theatre is perceived to be a place or event where participation is, if not achieved, then at least presumed. This participation is afforded in spite of the visible distance between the spectator and the spectacle, or else is frustrated in consequence of it. Nevertheless, Alan Read argues, ‘Seeing, watching and looking at theatre, do not begin to explain what happens between an audience and a performer’.Footnote 5 What happens, he claims, is as much a matter of metaphysics as it is of materiality, but must also be understood to have an unavoidably ethical dimension. The metaphysics of theatre are what is not seen, he proposes, inasmuch as its experience is always of ‘something more’ than its representations are pretending to be. This demands an ethical consideration as it concerns ‘how one knows what one is seeing and experiencing and its relation to reality’.Footnote 6 What, then, of theatrical situations where one does not know what one is seeing, because there appears to be nothing to see?
British theatre companies such as Shunt and Sound and Fury have increasingly explored the theatrical potential of a sight blunted by darkness in recent years, as a means both of unsettling their audiences and of appealing to the scope of their imaginations. Whilst the aesthetic novelty of darkness as a theatrical medium is undoubtedly a significant element in the success of some of these productions, I also want to argue that this is so, in part, because of its increasing scarcity in social and cultural life more widely. Although night-time partly represents a temporal zone of leisure in which ‘nightlife’ is the pleasurable reward of daily grind, the darkness that is its characteristic medium is not generally engaged with anything like the same relish, even as its environmental loss is lamented. Night-time's darkness has become saturated by light, in the social illumination of streets and houses, and in the glowing presence of technological ephemera. Phone calls bring our voices to one another's ears, but now also cast the glow of our information upon each other's faces. Via the glow or pulse of the standby light, televisions, DVD players, microwaves and computers all show their readiness for our welcome inputs. This profusion of light has become cast as a pollution, in the extraordinary amount of energy that must be generated to support it, and in its presence in those places where properly, it seems, it shouldn't be. What this luminous superabundance paradoxically obscures, I want to argue, is the significance of darkness as a medium for seeing and being differently. Where light reveals the great mass of difference amongst people and the objects of their environment and allows a power of vision that individuates them, its blunting by darkness makes that difference an altogether more ambiguous proposition. Who or what others may be becomes less fact than possibility. In this article I consider the possibilities of theatrical practice in darkness for being and seeing together, by examining a performance that was dark, but not all that dark, and, by some of its standard conventions, not all that theatrical either. What makes it particularly significant, I want to argue, is the extent to which it drew its audience's attention to the specific and peculiar reality of their being together in darkness.
Devised for and presented within the darkened interior of Miroslaw Balka's giant installation How It Is at London's Tate Modern in March 2010, Chris Goode's Who You Are used the artwork's shadowy cavern to ask questions of who you and we are when the lights are switched off, and of what it is that we might imagine of one another in the absence of visible images.Footnote 7 Standing thirteen metres high and thirty metres long within the vast central chamber of the former power station, How It Is in part resembled a giant shipping container raised up on stilts. Walking beneath it one could hear, as well as the clang of the contact of other visitors’ shoes on its metalled floor, the muffled cries of teenagers in school parties up to no good inside its dark interior. More than the structure itself, it was this interior that formed the substance of the installation. Within its black-painted walls light seemed to disappear gradually, leaving visitors fumbling, perhaps a little giddy and nervous, but engaged by the apparent novelty of seeing nothing. Like many of the large-scale installations within the huge space of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall (perhaps the highest-profile location for contemporary art in Great Britain) How It Is inevitably came with a certain amount of hyperbole attached. Not only did the piece engage ancient fears of the dark, its curators claimed, but in its staging of a (or the) void it connected cultural memories of the Holocaust, the existential fears of Samuel Beckett and the shadowy visions of the prisoners in Plato's cave.Footnote 8
All the same, as the philosopher Ray Sorensen has argued, we do see in the dark, ‘but not what we generally wish to see or in the manner we generally wish to see’.Footnote 9 Darknesses like that of How It Is/Who You Are offer a means of questioning this ‘seeing more generally wished for’. In a cultural milieu that is supersaturated by light, it may be that the consideration of who and what one sees is better served by an endarkened set of circumstances than by illuminated ones, in terms of what Hans Jonas calls the handing over of the image to imagination.Footnote 10 The saturation of the world outside the theatre by light also lends seeing and being in the dark (temporarily at least) a transformative potential. In the dark, who you are may be only what you can make of this immediate moment, even if only fumbled and brief, as Goode's performance suggested.
Houselights
Amongst the standard conventions that govern contemporary theatrical performance, one of those most widely adhered to is that it should begin with the lowering of the houselights in the auditorium prior to the raising of those focused on the stage. For the audience this is preceded by a period (even if only a brief one) in which they wait, under the houselights, for their lowering. In it they take stock of their surroundings and of one another, and in this lull before the show starts, begin to develop something of a sense of themselves as a collective. Under houselights you watch others and wait. Reading a programme or talking to a friend, you prepare yourself for the experience to come. Before descending into the darkness of Who You Are, this article also needs to illuminate itself similarly in a pre-performance lull.
Christopher Baugh holds that the contemporary theatre is ‘fundamentally a place of darkness that is energized and brought to life by the performance of light’.Footnote 11 Modern theatrical lighting is powerful enough that light can be seen against a darkness that gives it an edge or definition, lending it an almost objective, material quality. Roberto Casati usefully points out that this sort of powerful, objectified and objectifying light not only is a peculiarly modern condition, but that it also develops a similarly special or acute sort of darkness as a result.Footnote 12 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the development of first gas and then electric lighting in playhouses introduced a light that was more powerful and pervasive than the candles and limelights that preceded them. Moreover, as much as the stability of this new form of lighting established new modes of looking in or at light, it also changed the nature of the darknesses that offered it contrast or relief:
the newer light sources were more luminous and they also had another property: they were stable. They no longer depended on a flame exposed to air currents, and they didn't flicker . . . The nineteenth century didn't just vanquish shadows; it created ones. They were frozen shadows produced by a fragment of material heated to incandescence. These were new shadows: static shadows had never existed in nature, nor were they ever before produced by man.Footnote 13
Even if, following Baugh, the relationship between focused luminescence and a defining darkness is considered a determining condition of contemporary theatre, even a cursory glance at history reveals that the photic division of labour between light and dark has not always been as well defined as it currently appears. The somewhat paradoxical convention of going inside darkened buildings in the night-time in order to watch performances lit by artificial means has been shaped by changes in theatre architecture and technology, and by broader sociopolitical developments that allowed the colonization of the night-time's darkness by activities devoted to leisure.
Before the advent of widespread patterns of nocturnal leisure, darkness, in the form of the night, was frequently politically enforced.Footnote 14 The gates of cities were routinely locked at sundown, and appearances on the street after curfew could be strictly punished. The night was a domain of crime, fear and transgression. The political and energetic power necessary to dispel darkness sufficiently, in order that such activities could take place, was therefore the prerogative of kings. Perhaps the most emblematic example of this power of luminescence is provided by the entry of the fourteen-year-old Louis XIV of France as Le roi soleil in the Ballet de la nuit, an eleven-hour spectacular, in 1653. Appearing in a dazzling costume against a darkened background, Louis's performance was intended precisely to bedazzle his subjects, and impress on them the absolute nature of his power.Footnote 15 As brilliant as it may have been, it was not only by the representation of powers of illumination that such absolutism was demonstrated. In 1688, in ‘a culture of ostentatious waste’ under the ancien régime of France, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘24,000 lights were used to illuminate the park of Versailles alone, presumably all wax candles – an extremely costly form of lighting, normally used for royal displays’.Footnote 16 Following this excess, the combination of social discontent at such waste, technological advances, and the rising wealth of the middle classes saw darkness increasingly wrested from the aristocracy. Time spent in darkness under lighting – as opposed to being in light per se – became a matter of leisure, or of not working, previously the prerogative of the ruling classes alone.
Notwithstanding the exceptions of street- and floodlights, to be at leisure under lighting (rather than in (day)light) has also been a predominately indoor experience, the theatre following suit architecturally and institutionally with the introduction of purpose-built indoor theatres in Europe begun by the opening of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in 1580.Footnote 17 Even before this, the benefits of a technological deployment of light and dark to theatrical production were already known. In his Dialogues on Stage Affairs, written in the mid-sixteenth century in Mantua, the playwright and designer Leone di’ Somme proposed not only the use of coloured and side lighting to reduce the harshness on the eye of more direct sources, but also the darkening of the auditorium:
It is a natural fact – as no doubt you are aware – that a man who stands in the shade sees much more distinctly an object illuminated from afar; the reason being that sight proceeds more directly and without any distraction towards this object, or, according to the peripatetic theory, the object impinges itself more directly upon the eye. Wherefore I place only a few lamps in the auditorium, while at the same time I render the stage as bright as I possibly can. Still further, these few auditorium lights I place at the rear of the spectators, because the interposition of such lights would be dazzling to the eyes.Footnote 18
Despite the visual enhancements noted by di’ Somme, audiences proved remarkably resistant to being left in the dark; one of the attractions of attending theatre has long been that of watching others watching. Furthermore, given the social and political freedoms developed in tandem with the penetration of the night as technology advanced, it is perhaps unsurprising that audiences were unwilling to replace its darkness with another, or to be prevented, under its cover, from looking at or amongst themselves. Although the introduction of argand and then gas lighting greatly enhanced the illumination of the stage through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the convention of a corresponding darkness in theatre auditoria was not widely adopted even with the introduction of powered electric light.Footnote 19 Indeed, Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests, it took the rise of another cultural form, the cinema, for auditorium darkness to be conventionally adopted as a necessary condition of theatrical performance.Footnote 20 Even if this darkness has not always been, or is still not, the totalizing blackout to which theatrical performance aspires or pretends, it is a substantial participant in its event.Footnote 21 Blackouts, shadows, and gloom – shades away from illumination that one both sees and sees in and through – are as inherent in the theatrical sensibility as they are in its visual field.
Fade to blackout
Stanton Garner has observed that the common perception that audiences in theatre auditoria are seated in darkness is itself the result of a sort of sleight of hand, as the high intensity of light directed on or at the stage draws attention away from lower-intensity light remaining or spilling into the auditorium. This quasi-darkness, he explains, ‘nonetheless draws on the phenomenology of actual darkness, engaging its experiential displacement and its distinctive perceptual unmooring’.Footnote 22 Although, as I have suggested, Goode's performance was not actually entirely dark, it played with the same sleight of hand.
Having walked up the ramp and through its cavernous entrance, to progress into the interior of Who You Are was to experience (initially at least) the elision of one's field of vision. Out of the darkness came a voice, clearly amplified and played over speakers. Given the darkened conditions, it was impossible to tell whether this playback was live or recorded:
(CHRIS begins to speak – or appears to. His words, which seem to be live, are in fact pre-recorded and the voice is not his.)
VOICE: Thanks very much. OK, so . . .
Actually, first of all, I should just quickly check . . . Can everybody hear OK? . . . Because obviously you can't see, so if you can't hear either . . . We're in trouble . . .
It feels to me like it could be a little bit louder, maybe? Could we . . . would you mind just . . . giving it a little . . . tweak . . .
One two one two one two. Bit more? One two one two. That's it, that's perfect. Thank you.
OK, so welcome.
Here we are inside a piece called HOW IT IS, doing a piece called WHO YOU ARE.
This piece is about . . . In a way it's about this moment.
This moment where everyone's in the dark.Footnote 23
At its beginning, the darkness of Goode's performance was that of the installation itself. After one's initial encounter with Balka's structure, the darkness became less that of the artwork, and more that of the theatrical production that inhabited or embodied it. In the theatre this moment where everyone is in the dark is perhaps better, and more conventionally, known as a blackout.
Although most often used to cover onstage scene changes, blackouts also serve to indicate shifts in time and place, or, through the lowering of light, to develop an atmospheric effect of a sombre or foreboding nature, paralleling a narrative or characterological development. Despite being a relatively recent convention of the theatre, reliant on the introduction of dimmable lighting, it is difficult to give a precise date or location for its entry into the repertoire.Footnote 24 Certainly, as Schivelbusch speculates, the convention of seating the audience in darkness relative to light on the stage may in part be a borrowing from the cinema, that very medium of light, which relies on darkness for its image to be projected. As he further argues, the seating of the audience in darkness relative to light onstage represents a tendency towards the diminution of the communal experience of audience in favour of a communion between the individual spectator and the stage.
Whilst that may, in general, be the case, the recent efforts of a range of British theatre-makers to reverse this trend by darkening both stages and auditoria are worth noting further. When a leaking roof knocked out the theatre's lighting system in 2008, the Bush Theatre staged the Broken Space Season. This series of plays and events taking place in, and written for, darkness included a series entitled What the Dark Feels Like. Since their establishment in Battersea Art Centre's Playing in the Dark season in 1999, Sound and Fury Theatre Company have made playing in the dark their speciality, as I have discussed elsewhere.Footnote 25 In 2009, Complicité's Shun-Kin – a co-production with Tokyo's Setagaya Public Theatre – drew on Junichirō Tanizaki's essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’ to make the use of low light and shadows central to the aesthetic of its mise en scène. The promise of some of these productions (and of others like them) may be that of a greater communion with an onstage performance that is conventionally perceived at a distance. Experiencing this, however, is not always as comfortable as one might wish.
In Tim Crouch's play The Author (first seen at the Royal Court in May 2009), two sets of audience faced one another on banks of seating, separated by a narrow channel. The play slowly describes the unfolding of the creative process of a playwright, Tim Crouch (played by the author himself), and two actors, Esther and Vic, working with him on a new and controversial play for the Royal Court Theatre. This is interwoven with observations from Chris, a theatre fan, who tries to share with the audience his love of theatre-going, and his sense of the strangeness of it all. Shortly after he performed Who You Are in Tate Modern, Goode replaced Adrian Howells (who had the theatre fan role in the initial Royal Court production) for The Author's performances at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival and an international tour. As well as Goode's performing presence, what these two works share is a desire to make the audience present to one another, both in the light and out of it. In Who You Are, the prevailing presence of darkness in Balka's installation was a foundational condition of the performance in terms of both its subject matter and its mise en scène. In The Author, both audience and actors sat together under the same ‘general state’ of lighting, and in a series of blackouts.Footnote 26 Facing their fellow spectators as well as the actors, the audience no longer had the opportunity to look out at staged events, but were drawn within their compass. As the actors tried to ‘get into’ the reality of the violence the play seeks to portray, they began to lose a sense of moral and personal perspective. Any sense the audience might have had that they could watch all this from a position of contemplative distance became increasingly problematic, and frequently literally so, as a series of blackouts left them in the dark for extended periods.
Writing of the play's final, gut-wrenching description of child abuse, Stephen Bottoms has argued that ‘Crouch uses spoken language to conjure these images in individual spectators’ imaginations . . . one could argue that by co-opting our imaginations in this way, Crouch makes the violence and abuse seem all the more “real”’.Footnote 27 Curiously, Bottoms makes no mention of the fact that this powerful final moment of ‘reality’ is spoken in the darkness of a blackout in which the actors and audience who have previously been present before you are removed. What makes the hideousness so awfully real is not necessarily that one retreats to the fetid reaches of one's own imagination, but that the words come in a darkness that is tangibly before and around you, and which lasts for far longer than the changes of scene that it might be used to cover conventionally.
At a stroke, the blackout eradicates what Herbert Blau calls the ‘specular boundary’ separating the dark of the auditorium from the light of the stage.Footnote 28 For Alice Rayner, it is both a material event and a metaphor that
marks a point of leave-taking and a return of visibility that, in returning, takes on the idea of the uncanny, the return of the repressed . . . the period of dark . . . puts in question everything that returns to visibility: What happened in the interim? And what, exactly, has returned?Footnote 29
Although, as she argues, the power of the blackout rests partly on seeing's supposed return, what unsettles about it is not only the loss of light, but the unsettling of seeing itself. Shorn of a purposive direction or intentionality that made it thus, seeing is suddenly a confused and confusing business. Given that Who You Are started and then continued in this state, the audience were in effect placed in a sort of tempo-spatial stasis or limbo. Despite the blackout preventing things from being seen, Rayner contends, it does not disable seeing per se: ‘The blackout not only signifies a nothingness; it is a nothingness set in a visual register’.Footnote 30 In other words, whilst we do not see things in the darkness, we do nevertheless see. In the darkness, seeing is no longer of, or about, some other thing or things that appear before you ‘out there’. Rather, the darkness before the eyes seems to extend to that behind them: the unknown, or unconscious territory of the Self within.
In The Foundation of the Unconscious Matt ffytche considers the development of theories of the unconscious mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as resting, in part, on earlier, Romantic schematizations of a metaphysical interiority as a state of ‘darkness’.Footnote 31 This served both to lend an ambiguity to the Self, which interpretative techniques like psychoanalysis would seek to unravel, and to valorize non-visual senses and experiences as means of accessing an authentic subjectivity.Footnote 32 When the object of one's attention is no longer observably, and thus consistently, ‘over there’, but all around you in the form of sound and darkness, then that attention becomes subject to a blurring between states conventionally presumed to be ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. As much as The Author and Who You Are collapsed Blau's specular boundary between the theatrical sites of stage and auditorium, their darknesses also opened a continuum between the focusing of the audience's attention ‘out there’ in the performance unfolding before them, and its concurrent movement in the ‘in here’ of their imaginations.
Goode's writing and delivery of Who You Are drew attention to this. Shortly after the beginning of the play, ‘Chris’ describes the Random Name Generator, a web-based tool that uses US Census data to generate male and female names: ‘for screenplays, fake id's, car rentals, pick-up lines, books, prank calls, movies. Give a random name to that special someone you meet at the bar’.Footnote 33 Drawing on the deep well of the names of the citizens of the United States, in addition to generating names one would readily recognize, the generator can produce seemingly improbable appellations, even though the fore- and surnames involved are ‘real’:
What do you imagine when you hear these names?
What sort of people do you see in your mind's eye?
These unlikely people with their incredibly improbable names . . .
What do you think they'd imagine when they heard your name?
However unlikely or improbable you are.
Who would they see in their mind's eye?
What would they think you were doing right now?
How would you feel if the person you imagine was imagining you and got you completely wrong?
How would you feel if they got you absolutely right?
In all your unlikelihood.Footnote 34
Although Goode appeals to the appearance of these improbable, randomly generated people ‘in your mind's eye’, what makes his thought experiment so compelling is not necessarily only that one ‘sees’ a projected set of imagery within one's imagination. As in The Author, the idea and the sound of the words expressing it come in and of an almost palpable darkness before and around you, which is heavy with the presence of others. There is an intimacy to this darkness. Unlike other visual perceptions, to be in it is to experience it as close to hand; not only because of the urge to feel out into it, but also because its visual content is one of immediacy. It is inescapably right there in front of you. To know, or anticipate, others in this darkness is to experience them, similarly, as part of this intimate immediacy – an experience that may be as ludicrous as it is profound.
Amongst other soundtracked voices, the performance played a recorded interview between Goode and the gallery's ‘Director of Visitor Experiences’, Elsie Artbung, in which the institution's misgivings about his possible nudity in the dark are explained.Footnote 35 Artbung begins by explaining to Goode that his unseen nudity might be offensive because of its appeal to the audience's imagination. The jump from ‘mental pictures’ to actual experience is seemingly a very small one: ‘You put nudity in this piece and, frankly, anything could happen. The possibilities’.Footnote 36 Whilst audiences might imagine his nakedness, the act and actuality of undressing is yet more problematic, she argues. The sound and the smell of him doing so may lead to them actually having erotic experiences – and that would really be offensive. Whilst Goode makes this an absurd encounter between his seemingly quite simple desire to be naked in the dark, and the ‘health and safety’ concerns of a bureaucrat, the gap between imagination and experience under the shade of darkness is indeed a small one. Seeing and being in the dark is to experience not so much absence as an imminent possibility.
Shadows
The promise of the ‘pitch-black’ space of Balka's How It Is installation was in part that of a sensory extremism in which vision might be reconnected to its viscera. In a temple of visual culture like Tate Modern, the stakes of seeing nothing could be thought to be particularly high. In seeing nothing, incapable of searching through a visual field, the attention of the eye might be returned to itself. As a shock to sense that might unbalance the scopic regimes of spectacle and speculation, could the darkness draw spectators into the experience of art-as-event, rather than as a thing to be viewed or observed?
Certainly, one might infer that that was what was supposed to happen. Nevertheless, even leaving to one side its momentary illumination by the camera flashes of those gallery visitors who hoped to photograph themselves in the dark, and the glows and blinks of phones and watches, the cavernous entrance at the front of the installation (through which visitors entered by a ramp) meant that the space was always at least partially illuminated. The suddenness of the blackout in the theatre and ‘the sense of shock of the disorienting plunge into darkness’, Alice Rayner argues, are explanatory of its affective power.Footnote 37 However, in Who You Are the audience entered themselves into the darkness, slowly walking up the ramp into the installation, to find a place to stand or sit within its interior. It took one's eyes some time to adjust to the relative lack of light within, but even towards its rear it was still possible to make out something of the forms of others. Aside from a moment when, standing at the top of the ramp, one waited for one's eyes to adjust, the installation might better be described as ‘shadowy’ than dark in the strictest sense.
Roberto Casati proposes that shadows are ontologically curious; as ‘quasi-objects’, they sit somewhere between concreteness and abstraction:
above all they are absences, negative things. A shadow is a lack of light. Negative things are bizarre. In the end, actors and attendants are on the payroll of the theatre . . . But shadows are not listed anywhere. These uncertain things confuse the mind; they trouble us.Footnote 38
Cast shadows, he argues, index the objects to which they are causally related. They are the projection, or virtual other, of an object obscuring the passage of light and provide, in silhouette or relief, an image of them. This is given in turn by ‘the shadow line’, the leading edge of a separation between shadow and light. To be behind the shadow line and thus out of the light to some extent is to enter an area of ambiguity – the shadow zone. Although it may sustain visibility to some degree, the zone that begins behind the shadow line also marks the beginning of a retreat from the material world of surfaces and solids conventionally made apparent by vision. ‘Shadows bear witness to the meeting between the world of material things and a world in which matter does not seem so important’, Casati suggests.Footnote 39 In the states of uncertainty that shadows either produce or represent, it might be argued that matter matters more than ever. It is in the certainties of the lit world that material things pass beyond concern. In its darker recesses, the ambiguous possibilities of the shadow zone, however fleeting, can be brought to bear on situations that light would reveal as differentiated – here from there, me from you, child from adult and so on.
As Who You Are unfolded, the audience could hear a series of voices claiming to be that of Chris Goode: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Chris Goode. You were expecting a man. You got a man. It's all been a game so far. My name is Christina. My friends call me Chris or Chrissy’, before the voice of the ‘real Chris Goode’ emerged, a theatre-maker worrying about his audience.Footnote 40 ‘Who’ the audience are is a worry for him, since the work of theatre must inevitably be ‘for’ them:
You do not yet exist. You are not the audience. We worry about you, we worry that you're going to be OK, that we aren't going to bore you, or insult you or make you feel stupid. We worry about you and you don't even exist. Do you think about us.Footnote 41
Given this inevitable worry about who the other is, whether they're OK, and what they feel like, might the dark offer more possibilities for actually being together? Safe from the tyranny of having to appear for one another, ‘there are more possibilities in the dark’, he suggests.Footnote 42 Throughout this, Goode could be seen, in silhouette, at the installation's entrance, standing at a lectern. As his script reveals, however, ‘His words, that seem to be live, are in fact pre-recorded and the voice is not his’.Footnote 43 Who you are, it seems, is not what you appear to be, and the performance took the opportunity of the installation's shadowy interior to address the issue of ‘who we are to each other’, when we cannot reliably see one another. Furthermore, that we appear to one another in and as shadows in such an environment allowed Goode to draw attention to the virtuality, and thus the theatricality, of such umbral presences.
In front of the lectern Goode was a silhouette only dimly distinguishable from the gloom of the shadows that surrounded him. This shadow amongst shadows was himself both an object of attention and the subject of distraction, as the performance twisted our suppositions of whose voice we were hearing, and who it was we expected to find here. Trying to determine ‘who’ appears to be talking is, of course, one of the most capricious of theatre's pleasures, with audiences and critics alike – and indeed at times actors themselves – often confused as to whether what one sees and hears is an actor who is simply pretending to be someone he is not, a character made carnate before you, or a projection of the absent genius of the director or the playwright. As well as being a performer, Goode is a well-known theatre director and writer; not only a playwright, but also a poet, and (until recently) a prolific blogger.Footnote 44 In this, the work's title Who You Are was a play not only on who, as an audience, we might find or assume ourselves to be under such conditions, but also perhaps on whom we assumed Chris Goode himself to be.
The notion that theatrical presences are but shadows has a long history. Not only does Puck refer to them as such at the close of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the most notorious set of charges against theatrical representation also rests upon the same assumption. In the gruesome thought experiment Plato conducts in the Republic, prisoners in a cave who have never seen the world of objects lit by the sun instead take the cunningly staged performance of a shadow puppet play for reality. They mistake a doubtful world of appearance for that of concrete reality, things for their representation. Plato argues that to be satisfied with these shadows is to take on, wilfully, a kind of blindness that for him is also a form of unreason. It is curious that his effort to discredit the theatre takes place not under the light of the sun that lit the theatres of ancient Greece, but in a dream world of artificial light, with the spectacle provided by shadow puppets. Puppet theatre was a popular entertainment in ancient Greece, as Jurkowski and Gocer have demonstrated, and it is likely that some shadow-play form of it would have been familiar to Plato.Footnote 45 Given that such performance requires some degree of darkness, and was presumably lit by the fire of torches, the parable may have a more empirical grounding than it is sometimes given credit for.
In the Republic, one of Plato's concerns is with the problematic nature of appearances. Human beings have a foolish tendency towards satisfaction with partial or obscure impressions of things, he suggests. What separates the philosopher from the common man is that he knows that these obscure visions are dispelled by the stable and brilliant light of the sun as the ultimate cosmic entity, ‘making our eyes see perfectly and making objects perfectly visible’.Footnote 46 Light and sight conjoin in the revelation of essential truth. Any art (such as theatre) that operates on the basis of appearances is thus seeking to hide itself or its viewers from this revelatory light and vision, and to lead them to be satisfied with virtual, rather than actual, presences. What disturbs about shadows (and what Plato chose to ignore) is that, despite being virtual aspects of something else, they are real-world phenomena nevertheless – immaterial aspects of a material world, and apprehended, in vision, by entirely sensible means. Tim Ingold has observed of light that we do not see it as such, but in it; the same can be said, to some degree, of shadows.Footnote 47 A Platonic light seeks to draw appearances into illumination before the perceiver. Shadow, by contrast, draws the perceiver into it. The mode of looking that it engages – peering – does not simply wait for light to hit the retina in receipt of visual information, but more actively seeks it out. In the sense of trepidation with respect to what might emerge out of the gloom, one is kinaesthetically aware, ready for whatever action it might necessitate, and also listening carefully, seeking to conjoin any auditory clues to fleeting or partial visual forms.
As I have already suggested, seeing (and seeing in) shadows in Who You Are was still seeing something, even if that something was ambiguous at best. Whilst shadows often index the bodies that cast them, in themselves they rarely carry much more information than the bare fact of those bodies and their relative location. It is this, in Platonic terms, that makes them so theatrical; they really are no more than they appear. For Nicholas Ridout, recognizing that theatre is failing to be more than it appears is constitutive of it:
That there is something wrong with theatre is the sign that it is theatre . . . For each instance of face-to-face encounter gone wrong, I argue that there is a particular feeling and that feeling has meaning. What we experience as affect in these moments of undoing is an apprehension of our own position in relation to the economic and political conditions of our theatre-going.Footnote 48
To this, I would also add, that it is in such moments that attention is drawn to the oddness of our own perceptions, and of the efforts of the theatre to draw attention to them by shifting the conditions that obtain in ‘everyday life’.
Houselights again
Although it was the subject of a lively parliamentary discussion (and some filibustering), on 20 January 2012 the Daylight Savings Bill was defeated at the report stage, as MPs effectively talked it out of time.Footnote 49 Although the merits of darkness are not recorded in Hansard's transcript of the debate, several MPs pointed out the extent to which a shift in the time zone and the recording of daylight hours might exacerbate existing differences between areas of the Union – such as, for example, between Scotland in the north and south-east England, and between the latter and Wales in the west. Finding a balance between light and darkness is now, as it has long been, a matter of political responsibility. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this article to lay out what such a photic politics might be, what Who You Are revealed is the most nascent aspect of any politics worth the name: the sense of potential in others, found in their presence as they appear at the threshold between light and darkness. It is a presence that might at least be called ‘theatrical’, I propose, even if it is not exactly that of theatre per se.
Beyond a notional idea that the text of Who You Are might be described as a ‘play’, Goode's repeated references to, and spins upon, multiple, confused or blurred identities were intensely theatrical – all the more so because of the ambiguity lent to them by the shadows of Balka's artwork. As Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlethwaite suggest, theatricality can be thought of as both referencing the theatre, whilst at the same time exceeding it.Footnote 50 It is a labile term that must be repeatedly addressed in clarifying the instance of its use. Furthermore, they argue, theatricality can mean ‘not only that which is quintessentially the theatre, but the theatre subsumed into the whole world’.Footnote 51 Although I am not making a claim that darkness and theatricality are phenomenologically equivalent, I have tried to suggest how they might draw out one another's potential to affect those within them, in relation to the ethical and political considerations demanded of the theatre by Alan Read. By reducing spectators’ perceptions to the very barest level of appearance – and then remaining there – Goode was able to subvert and draw attention to the alienation that might be experienced as both the theatre and the world it represents assert themselves ever more through and under lighting. Even if we did not get to participate actively in the lives of others in the shadows, as Elsie Artbung explained to Chris, we at least got to feel through them towards a sense of their possibility.
At the end of Who You Are, although Goode had been the sole performer for nearly an hour, the presence of his solitary silhouette was joined, suddenly, by that of twelve others walking up the ramp to stand framed with him in the light at the installation's entrance. Variously clothed, naked, or half-naked, the arrival of these other nameless bodies to stand amongst the shadows was at once shocking, and profoundly moving. In spite of an age-old desire for greater knowledge, clarity or revelation, ‘who you are’ is always hidden in some dark interior. As impossible as the fulfillment of that desire may be, in its temporary staging in and as darkness, who you are is staged as a theatrical possibility, of which these ambiguous shadows are the very barest appearance. What theatre – what art – offers, paradoxically, for a short time at least, is some balm for that ambiguity as it works to ‘bathe our thwartedness in the light of hope and candour’:Footnote 52
They meet in the darkness.
For not even an hour.
They don't know each other. Some of them are nervous. Some of them can't remember why they decided to come here in the first place. One or two of them can feel the beginning of something inside them.
The darkness takes care of them.Footnote 53
