Martin Welton has a feeling for theatre, and it is on display in his first full-length book, Feeling Theatre. While not presuming to offer a definition of how or why theatre affects, through effects or otherwise, the book points to recent developments in theatrical practice (which often recall the futurist sintesi of the 1920s, or happenings by the 1960s avant-garde) that reflect an interest in affect and bodily attraction as opposed to emotion, or desire and identification. Move over, Neil Simon; Hello, Simon Vincenzi! Drawing on collaborations with Vincenzi (and Frank Bock) as well as experiences with Sound and Fury Theatre Company (as a practitioner), with travel, with Asian martial arts and meditation practices, and with readings in psychology and philosophy, Welton convincingly shows how the experiences emotions “describe” are connected to “the wider sensate life of our ‘corporeal frame’” that he terms feeling (32). Gradually and effectively, Welton builds up an image of the theatre as an economy of perception that has too long been dominated by vision, not at the expense of the other senses, but at the great cost of reducing the complexity of our perceptive faculties.
Feeling Theatre deals critically and imaginatively with somatics and in doing so enters an already crowded field. However, Welton is not writing an introduction to the latest theories of affect. Nor is he interested in simply cataloging theatre you can teach, see, hear, and taste. Instead, the book is a wonderful invitation to the rich complex of emotions, sensations, and actions that theatre and performance hold out, while pointedly complicating them. Welton has not written a single-sense book, such as Maaike Bleeker's Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), or an inversion of one, such as Andrew Sofer's latest work, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (U of Michigan P, 2013). Instead, each chapter of Welton's book addresses a well-documented dramatic or scenic convention, and in each case, shows how that convention might be viewed as an attempt to reduce a dense thicket of synesthetic crossings into a straightforward idiom.
In Chapter 1, “Shows of Feeling,” Welton takes us through the dictionary meanings of feeling, its cognates, and synonyms, but is content to let them compete for our regard, like the actor who supposedly cranes for our attention. When Welton quotes a representative New York Times article by Ben Brantley on deadpan acting to show how theatrical failure has become a paradoxical index of the desire for emotional symmetry in performance—Dolan's “utopia in performance,” as it were—he makes a case for allowing actors to be misunderstood and misdirected. Actors have far more emotions than the ones they “show” onstage: the frustrations and triumphs of the rehearsal room, the nerves in the wings, the trepidation waiting for reviews. A later chapter, “Somewhere, Somehow,” is a wonderful evocation of motility, but it's also an entertaining (!) reminder of the hassle of traveling.
Performance works that plunge the theatre into prolonged periods of darkness or silence can delight by playing tricks on the eyes and ears, but they also give rise in Feeling Theatre to an account of touch, and even inner touch, that verges on Georges Bataille's famous notion of the informe. While only alluded to by Welton, this concept, and its related term, abjection, might contribute to decentering the subject by introducing new forms of relation. This leads me to one criticism of the book: that it might have benefited from more psychoanalysis alongside the psychology. However, a refreshingly idiosyncratic array of references—Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's In Praise of Shadows, alongside work by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia—rescues Feeling Theatre from any charge of playing it safe or covering old ground.
Of particular interest is the very detailed account in the second chapter (“Feeling Your Way in the Dark”) of spectating at Shunt and Sound and Fury's 2005 Ether Frolics in which Welton narrates the effect of periods of darkness on audience members, and elucidates the visual structuring of theatre experience. Furthermore, he argues, the performance underscores how all of our perceptual organs are trained on making the connection, becoming involved with or “getting amongst,” and not with being distanced, closed off, separated: the affective experiences of spectators coconstitute the performance so that “in darkness, as in light, we are in touch with what we see” (82). The fifth and final chapter of the book addresses the theatre of feeling by recasting it as the theatre of mood, or atmosphere, in “Bringing the Weather Indoors.” Noting that thanks to the “convenience of modern life [. . .] weather has become imagined as that which happens ‘outside’,” Welton examines how the theatre, which has come quintessentially to be “indoors”—a refuge from the world, as it were—can be made to perform an ecological critique (128).
As we approach a future that seems increasingly inimical to human habitation, the body has emerged as a key terrain for theatre scholars. Discipline-crossing researchers armed with fMRI machines use perceptual thresholds to formulate theories of how and why bodies respond to stimuli as they do. Feeling Theatre does not ask what experimental psychology can teach theatre, but what theatre can teach theoreticians of gestalt perception. Here the emphasis is placed not on technologically mediated theatre (although from a certain angle, Welton could have called the book Carbon Theatre: The Effects of Lighting, Sound Amplification, Air Travel, and Air-Conditioning on the Modern Theatre), but on theatre as a technology for focusing perception. But forced stillness, the compulsory concentration that looks less like attention and more like submission, is precisely what the exhausted dancers in Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, the unseen performers in Ether Frolics, or the fog-swallowed disorderly groupings of actors in motion in Here, As If They Hadn't Been, As If They Are Not (Bock and Vincenzi)—and indeed, the book Feeling Theatre—all “feel” (militate) against.
