A note on methodology and what may count as ‘evidence’ in a theatre studies analysis of the Christian occupation of the stage

According to a report on French national radio, twenty protesters were arrested at the theatre, but there was no mention of the use of force in this account.Footnote ⁶ Alternatively, a conservative news reporter offered a description of the protesters (outside the theatre) being ‘bashed’, ‘restrained’ and ‘sprayed with tear gas’.Footnote ⁷ While we can assume that physical force was, to some degree, exerted in the removal of the protesters from the theatre, I would like to ask what it might mean to speak of this event in the language of degrees of violence. Speaking of the degree of violence that was or was not used, I will propose, participates in the language of state arbitration into scenes or events of violence. This prescriptive methodology – of a court of law, for example – which requires a finding of fact in bodies of evidence, signals the Foucauldian concern of an operative biopolitical gaze, of the state, into the human body.Footnote ⁸ Rather than repeating this kind of evidence-based analysis of the event at the Théâtre de la Ville, where we would essentially replay the biopolitical initiatives of the state, I would like to turn to a different focus. My focus will be to problematize the principle of the use of the police at the theatre and ask what this might imply for a theory or philosophy of the contemporary theatre, particularly in relation to its capacity to act as a public sphere and site of civic dissent.Footnote ⁹

I will first trouble a positive relation to the use of riot police in the theatre to suggest that an affirmation of the use of the police signals a committal of the theatre to an overexposed relation to governance. This overexposure to governance, I will argue, restricts the possible definition of what may be considered an aesthetic event or object, making the field conform to increasingly restricted interpretations that are qualified and arbitrated primarily by the state. While not suggesting a retreat or withdrawal of the institution of the theatre into something that resembles or performs like a private aesthetic enterprise, I would like to appraise critically a configuration of a theatrical ‘public sphere’ that is institutionally limited by the policing aspects of governance. It seems that the theatre has unintentionally subscribed to a definition of civic action that in principle precludes the theatre, and a philosophy of the ‘public sphere’ of the theatre, as a possible site of dissensus. My intention is to draw attention to this slippage with a view to restoring the vision of the theatre as a ‘public sphere’, in which dissensus may be supported rather than policed.Footnote ¹⁰

The notion of public space and how citizens may occupy the space of appearance within the theatre as polis

The incident in the Théâtre de la Ville has taken place at a time in which protest movements, inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, have swept across university campuses and public streets in Europe and North America. Termed the ‘Occupy’ movements, these public protests have exposed a trend of excessive policing of public gathering and expression. Stories and videos of police brutality have been picked up by the media and the image of a police officer casually pepper-spraying seated and unarmed University of California–Davis students in the face has gone viral. While the Christian protesters at the theatre are on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Occupy movements, these protests all appear to stage a civic struggle for public visibility and political presence in spaces presumed to be public but policed in a way that betrays their status as closed to actions of protest.Footnote ¹¹

As evidenced in the Occupy movements, sites of public dissent are documented by members of the public on smart phones and other forms of highly accessible technology. The events are then shared with a global audience via dissemination over the Internet. This was how I witnessed the Christian occupation of the stage at the Théâtre de la Ville. This method of access is at once global and localized in its original, physical siting. The tension between local and global implies a politics of spectatorship in which values of authorship or authenticity, presence and absence, are necessarily questioned and said to be ambiguous or put at risk. This raises the question: as a second-hand witness what may I legitimately claim regarding my knowledge of events, when viewed from this unsituated or globally situated context? What valid claims may I make about the occupation of the stage at the Théâtre de la Ville in France, when I am viewing the incident from my private space of an office or home on the other side of the globe? While my second-hand witnessing may be subject to the failure associated with ‘impure’ or ‘tampered-with’ bodies of evidence, I nonetheless am compelled to comment on what I perceived to be a slippage in the structural supports for staging potential democratic encounters with the other within the context of the theatre. My claim is not intended to follow the logic of the slippery-slope argument in which, for example, the event at the Théâtre de la Ville speaks universally for the institution of the theatre on the whole. Neither is it my intention to presume a universal theatre and its political arrangement in accord with the public sphere of political democracy in a way that is universally and monolithically fixed.

The incident at the Théâtre de la Ville raises the question of the theatre as a public space and the institutional constraints of a potential articulation of a theory of a public sphere for theatre in the West. In her recent article, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age’, Janelle Reinelt problematizes Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere for theatre.Footnote ¹² She argues that Habermas homogenizes the effects and influences that the particularities of race, gender, class and caste may play in shaping the dynamic of a public sphere within an extended and global context. The Habermasian ordering of the public sphere around specifically European concerns and presumptions forms the core problem, according to Reinelt, which she frames in the following way: ‘I became immediately aware that even the concept “the Public Sphere” conjured up a European term, clearly associated with a theorization of the rise of civic culture and bourgeois behavior during the Enlightenment period.’Footnote ¹³ Reinelt's article raised a number of productive connections and questions with regard to my thinking around the Christian protest in the theatre. The idea that theatre reflects a Eurocentric ordering of the public sphere, which conforms to Habermasian presumptions about the way in which subjects may, or may not, participate and perform within it, relates to the policing of the Christian protest on the stage. Reinelt emphasizes how the Habermasian insistence on a ‘discipline of rational public debate’ precludes the participation of subjects that gesture, speak or indeed do not have speech, and that do not, for reasons to do with gender and race, conform to bourgeois ideals of public comportment or styles of citizenship. In contrast to the bourgeois public sphere, the avant-garde and experimental theatre has traditionally provided an open space for the articulation of bodies and subjects that do not conform to the regularities of bourgeois expectation.Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore the question becomes: how can we revise the principle of rational discourse and modes of communication without ghettoizing alternative citizens and forms of participation? What seems to be at stake here is a public sphere that insists on a fully democratic and open participatory encounter. To what degree is this notion of an embodied democratic aesthetic culture an achievable goal? How do we begin to theorize and insist upon an articulation of the theatre as a fully fledged, democratic public space of embodied encounters?

In order to further address the problem of ‘exclusivity in the bourgeois public sphere of modernity’, Reinelt calls upon Michael Warner's theory of ‘counterpublics’.Footnote ¹⁵ As Reinelt explains, for Warner, the production of ‘counterpublics’ enacts an alternative zone or ‘rival public culture’ to the dominant configurations of the ‘public’. Within ‘counterpublics’ modes of address may vary in order to include codes of communication that are ‘affective’ and ‘emotive’, therefore providing a kind of democratic alternative to the exclusive sphere of a dominant public. However, Reinelt points out the problem of ‘voluntarism’ implicit in this theory of ‘counterpublics’: there is a presumption about the equal access to personal agency that allows individuals to initiate, enact and manifest their membership in a counterpublic.Footnote ¹⁶

In the case of the occupation at the Théâtre de la Ville, it is initially difficult to ascertain precisely which group of people is theoretically constituted as a counterpublic. Is it the aesthetic avant-garde, comprising the theatre director, actors, staff and sympathetic audience? Or is it the retaliatory band of young Christian conservatives who constitute the enactment of a counterpublic? Connected to this first issue regarding the identification of counterpublics along the line dividing the aesthetic avant-garde from the Christian political conservatives, we might add the confusion of determining whether or not the theatre in this case performs as a dominant public or an alternative public. In staging a civic disturbance in the theatre by contravening the normative or traditional codes of appropriate spectatorship – i.e. disturbing the scheduled performance, exhibiting aggressive posturing and meddling with the set, followed finally by defiant praying – we might read the theatre in this case as performing under the category of a dominant public, even though the theatre is literally walled off from the public nature of the streets and spaces outside. The framing of the occupation, and dealing with it, as a breach in the civic codes relating to the proper comportment of citizens positions the institution of the theatre in a positive relation with the state and a style of governance restricting ‘affective’ conduct. My inclination is to conclude, however, without being too hasty, that neither of these groups – the aesthetic avant-garde or conservative Christians – constitutes what we may properly call a ‘counterpublic’ as imagined by Warner.Footnote ¹⁷

This leads to the question: might it be that avant-gardism is no less constituted in the bourgeois civic space, with all its presumptions and exclusivities, than are the white, conservative Christians occupying the stage? Initially the difficulty of reading this event was in part due to my own unexamined investments in the role of the avant-garde. Romeo Castellucci's body of work represents the possibilities and promise of a contemporary, performative avant-garde to resist the status quo. His iconic insistence on the presence of irregular bodies in the performative modes of his theatre – including bodies of the elderly, children, the bulimic and the obese – constitutes a type of political antidote to the biopolitical proclivities of governance invested in corporeal normativity as a covert guarantee of the human-as-capital.Footnote ¹⁸ My romantic vision for the avant-garde was that it performed an efficacious resistance to state violence in all its manifestations, particularly the more covert means of bodily governance and control. The avant-garde can perform efficaciously in this way, i.e. according to the romantic vision of resistance, but may also deploy a more regressive politics. This split or irregularity in the way avant-gardist cultures have historically performed themselves in relation to the broader ideological projects of government is told in the varied histories of the historical avant-garde, from the Italian futurists and fascism, to the left-leaning French Dadaists, right through to Soviet avant-gardist culture.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words there is no fixed formula to decipher the ideological leanings of contemporary avant-gardist performance culture. History delivers a lineage (if we may indeed propose a single lineage) of avant-garde movements that arise out of fascist ideology and democratic impulses alike. Reinelt describes how the functioning of ‘the public sphere’ is equally confounding with regard to its political effects and relation to the state. She explains,

How might we read and indeed rectify these oscillating functions, political qualities, and desires for the public sphere that incorporate the institution of the theatre as one of its constituent parts? Might the goal of the institution of the theatre as a form of public sphere be arranged to reflect a more successful democratic space, ultimately resistant to neo-liberal forms of government bodily control? If this hope for the institution of the theatre to perform as an open space for public, democratic and embodied encounter is not explicitly stated, then the tacit wish for such a space seems to be present just beneath the surface of theatre and performance scholarship. Perhaps the nature of democracy and democratic participation is predicated on the precarious negotiations that civil actors make as they move through these oscillations and conjunctions of political power. Pictured in this way, the project of political democracy and its determinations in aesthetic participatory practice are, in a historical sense, a never-completed task. Perhaps this explains those slippages that occur in institutionally framed forms of art and theatre that, on the one hand, are ontologically predicated on the notion of open democratic encounters, but on the other hand collapse into configurations of power indicative of the practices of surveillance and bodily control in dominant styles of governance.

The theatre production, On the Concept of the Face of Christ, and the theology of the face

The theatre production On the Concept of the Face of Christ has three parts. The first part focuses on the action between a son and an elderly father. The scene is set in the home and shows the son caring for his dying father, repeatedly mopping and wiping his father's faecal incontinence, in a narrative of care. The second part involves a group of young children throwing plastic hand grenades at the large picture of the face of Christ. In the final section, the face of Christ is ripped from backstage and a dark liquid spills from the broken surface. Each of the three parts of the theatre production seems to evoke the Christological themes of sacrifice and persecution. The thematic engagement with sacrifice and persecution is further enhanced by the set design, in which the face of Christ acts as a focal point for the audience, but also as a kind of silent witness to the action on the stage and the spectators beyond.

According to Castellucci, the use of the face of Christ was strategic. In a 2011 interview he states that he chose this particular rendition of Christ's face because of the direct gaze of the face in the painting.Footnote ²¹ Castellucci explains that the spectators’ gaze would be turned upon them, leaving the impression that they were the ones being gazed at. By placing the face of Christ as the focal point for the audience, Castellucci creates the impression of a reversed spectatorship. The audience are not simply watching an action onstage, but they are themselves being watched as they watch. Castellucci claims that the theatre production ‘is a way of illuminating with a divine light this scatological reality of a person's profound humiliation, the reality of daily life; this reality is returned to the face of God; there is an exchange of value’.Footnote ²²

The central focus of the face of Christ in Castellucci's production may be read against an ethical consideration of the face and its function as representative of the Other. Emmanuel Levinas's interpolation of the face in describing an ethical framework for responding to the self-constituting and yet volatile call of the Other performs as a type of corollary to the theatrical function of Castellucci's face of Christ. In her book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler revisits a Levinasian ethics of the face in a bid to understand how the figure of the Other becomes so thoroughly dehumanized in times of war that it does not register in any capacity as a grievable life.Footnote ²³ Butler's proposal in Precarious Life includes a reconsideration of this idea:

Butler's understanding of the demands and responses to the face, as occurring outside personal volition or other notions of agency that provide for the idea of pre-existing ‘freedom’, characterizes something of the dynamic of the events unfolding at the Théâtre de la Ville. The performing of acts of refusal and resistance directed in relation to the face of the Other, both the figurative messianic face and those belonging to the embodied militant Christians and other spectators, might reflect a homogenized mode of reading and relating to the Other indicative of the current political neo-liberal mode. The shutting down of the Christian protest in the theatre by the police, apart from representing a defence of the right to freedom of expression by enabling the play to continue, also seemed paradoxically like an emphatic ‘NO’ to the philosophical principle of the ‘face’.

The notion and presence of the face and its capacity to draw out an ethics of relating to the Other are also suggestive of the human capacity to feel pain or to suffer. In a paper describing the work of the theatre company Socìetas Raphaello Sanzio (SRS), Bryoni Tezise refers to her experience of viewing Castellucci's theatre as a type of ‘spectatorship that hurts’.Footnote ²⁵ Concentrating on SRS's theatre production BR.#04 Brussels, which stages a scene of theatricalized violence, Tezise identifies the working of what she refers to as a meta-affective function in Castellucci's theatre. BR.#04 Brussels restages or replies to an actual incidence of violence in which a man was brutally bashed by police. Tezise argues that the theatricalized violence that ghosts the first event is performed in such a way that the image and bodies on the set complicate the relation of spectatorship. The ‘fakeness’ in the staged violence is nonetheless felt as real. The production of the meta-affect was very troubling to the audience at the time when Tezise went to see the production:

This reworking of a theory of affect into meta-affect signals, according to Tezise, the ‘negation’ of representation, so that the staged violence is experienced as a kind of spectacular real.Footnote ²⁷ What Tezise calls the ‘meta-affective theatre of memory’ recalls the real through the fake. Tezise illustrates this point by quoting performance theorist Rebecca Schneider, who says, ‘the represented bumps uncomfortably . . . against the affective, bodily, instrument of the real’.Footnote ²⁸ Tezise's description of the meta-affective mode of spectatorship and the embodied relation that it signals with regard to representation makes sense of the audience members’ desire or need to leave the theatre. The bashing of the body and the presence of the fake blood, although clearly and strategically shown to be fake, took on a semblance of the real in such a way that the cacophonous blows in the action were too much to endure.

This theorization of meta-affectiveness in the theatrical context bears an uncanny resemblance to a theorization of religious modes of reading and relating to pictorial representations of Christ, Mohammed, Ganesh or the saints. In sacramental modes of viewing holy art, iconic portraits of the face of Christ are said to evoke a similar representational field of the real in which the spectator finds an engaged and embodied relation to the image or object.Footnote ²⁹ If that fake surface of the painting or the body of the actor is ruptured or bashed, even if the gesture is theatrical, i.e. not a real incidence of violence, it is still as though a real body were being assaulted. For Tezise, ‘This form of spectatorship, as a radical kind of sensationship, forces us to feel feeling, and the truth-effects held therein. It hurts: morally, emotionally and physically.’Footnote ³⁰ Tezise's proclamation of the ‘pain’ bound up in this kind of spectatorship not only reverberates with Judith Butler's reckoning with the morally binding and unwanted call of the face of the Other; it also provides the clue for understanding claims of religious ‘pain’, customarily relegated to archaic, fundamentalist and or regressive modes of sensationship.

Erika Fisher-Lichte's theory of ‘the transformative power of performance’ also describes instances of spectatorship that are equally complicated and transformed by visual encounters with painful or morally binding performative Others.Footnote ³¹ In an analysis of Marina Abramović's iconic 1975 performance of Lips of Thomas, in which Abramović performed a range of injurious acts upon her body, including the cutting of a five pointed star into the skin of her abdomen, Fischer-Lichte notes that the ‘performance transformed the involved spectators into actors’.Footnote ³² Describing how the audience in Lips of Thomas intervened in Abramović's acts of self-injury, Fischer-Lichte theorizes a transformation of the audience into actors that occurs before a possible semiotic reading of the performance can take place. Thus the simple act of seeing and then responding to the material concerns of a progressively injured/injuring body describes the precipitation of the transformation of the audience into actors. The condition of this transformation is such that it logically occurs prior to a semiotic reading of these same injuries. Fischer-Lichte draws the following conclusion from her observations:

In light of Fischer-Lichte's analysis of hermeneutic and semiotic aesthetics, we may establish how an aesthetic-based reading of the transformation of spectators into actors during a performance translates into a possible reading and problematic for the event in the Théâtre de la Ville. We might describe the event in broad terms in the following way: perceiving an injurious action upon the image of Christ, the Christian protesters transformed from audience members into actors who intervened in defence of the face. Presented with the unexpected occupation of the stage and interruption of the scheduled performance, and interpreting this act as an injurious attack upon the secular institution of freedom of expression, the real audience intervened with vocalizations and some isolated attempts to remove the Christians from the stage. The event in the theatre was no longer able to contain the traditional separations of actor and spectator or theatrical representation and political event. Finally, upon the entrance of the police on the stage, the institution of the theatre was then transformed from a site of aesthetic practice and aesthetic interest into a site of civic unrest, precipitating physical intervention by the state.

The Christian occupiers not only disturbed the flow of the scheduled performance by literally blocking the space where the actors should be; they also interrupted the intended secular semioticity of the face that resided on the back wall. How the face signified to the Christians was not a reading of the face necessarily intended by the director, nor could this religiously engaged interpretation of the face be supported by the secular institutional framing of the theatrical representation.

For the fundamentalist Christians, only one meaning can be attributed to the face of Christ and that is that the image participates in the actual presence of divinity, and any violence done to the image is tantamount to an attack on the person of the divine. This form of literality, usually assigned to the semiotic practices of fundamentalists and belonging to various systems of religious law, is not considered part of an enlightened method of viewing and interpreting the world. This semiotic reading of the image that cannot seem to separate between sign and signified, representation and materiality, is usually ascribed to archaic methods of living in and interpreting the world. Saba Mahmood describes this prejudice as arising out of a conflicting system of semiotic practices in which one system, the secular, is preferred and assigned the value of modern, while the other, the religious, is ascribed the value of ‘archaic’ and ‘failed’.Footnote ³⁴

Fischer-Lichte explains that the audience intervened in Abramović's performance because they were reacting to an immediate threat, i.e. that the artist was injuring her body and consequently her life. On further reflection, after the crisis had been averted, the audience may at their leisure have extrapolated a more nuanced reading of the act, one that included a narrative of state violence upon the body, for example. However, in the moment of the performance, according to Fischer-Lichte, the catalyst prompting the transformation of the spectators into actors/performers was the unbearable vision of the artist's injuries inexorably happening before them. Presumably unable to carry the moral responsibility of letting the event unfold according to the original self-sacrificial plan of the artist, the spectators were transformed from passive onlookers into intervening agents. The conditions of transformation suggest that the decision to intervene did not belong to any one individual as such; it was not as a result of individual agency that the spectators were transformed into actors, but rather that the logic of the event itself had steered this outcome. The participants were participating within the logic of an event of transformation that, although initially planned or choreographed by the artist, was nonetheless operating outside a knowable, determinable outcome.

If we consider Mahmood's explanation of the semiotic logic belonging to the religiously pious, a similar factor was at stake, i.e. that of a body becoming injured and humiliated in such a way as to be unbearable. The presumption of aesthetic theory is that the semiotic reading of art and performance should consist in a secular world view. This is perfectly understandable and reasonable, as the objective of academic study is one that may reference, may be genealogically related back to, and may be theorized through religious forms of ritual, but is nonetheless positioned within the secular frame of analysis. Fischer-Lichte's description, ‘because they saw blood flowing and imagined the pain on their own bodies’, is analogous to the conditions under which the Christians were ‘forced’, according to the logic of their semiotic reading of the image of the face of Christ, to intervene on behalf of the face, as though the burden of not intervening would be too much to bear.Footnote ³⁵

What has been pertinent to this analysis is the way in which Castellucci's manufacturing of the call to the audience to respond to the specifically Christian face resulted in a political event that conformed to, rather than resisted, the dominant power of state policing upon bodies. The various spectators responded to the call in a way that accorded to the laws of their semiotic conditioning; what ensued was something that in the end looked much more like a scenography of the police state, evidenced in any number of the Occupy events, than like a democratic reckoning with dissent. The democracy that the theatre was purportedly calling for had indeed manifested as its political opposite.Footnote ³⁶ The question for the avant-garde then becomes: to what extent can we tolerate these slippages within the political dimensions of our theatre practice? Can we rationalize these slippages as momentary and inconsequential when viewed against the greater aims of political democracy? At what point do the small slippages in culture become significant enough to mark a political scene, a ‘public sphere’, as something truly other than democratic? The challenge for the avant-garde, particularly within a climate of ever increasing xenophobia and bodily surveillance and control, is that we are increasingly critical of these institutional slippages that expose civic actors to ever more restrictive modes of governance. Applying the language of democracy and rights to describe a scene that inevitably slips, even momentarily, into a kind of scenography of the police state was a point that required some extended analysis. Reflecting on the idea that institutions, including the institution of the theatre, have become shaped in the image of an art of governance to which Foucault famously attributed the theory of biopower is perhaps the first step in a much larger project.