Introduction
While the live-performance industry is still recovering, fragile from the impact of the global pandemic, performers now have more cause for concern that their job opportunities will shrink since the launch of ChatGPT. It is very likely that the physical presence of performers and spectators will become nostalgic for many of us. It is time to rethink and re-emphasize the significance of stage presence. Historically, studies investigating the factors associated with stage presence have focused on the performer’s physical and mental training and on the liveness of performance, particularly in relation to digital technology. Debates revolve around the question whether the achievement of stage presence is attributed to the performer’s quality or an effect that technology can produce, and whether it is really the performer’s presence or just the spectator’s illusion created through mediatization. In practical approaches to stage presence, some use training methods to equip the performer with mental or physical skills and power, while some use technology to create an impression of presence for the spectator, demonstrating that a performer does not need to be present for presence to be experienced by spectators. One relies on the performer; the other relies on the spectator.
This research seeks to steer a middle course between presence-as-quality and presence-as-effect by drawing on the phenomenological approaches of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The in-between perspective holds that stage presence is a result achieved by both performer and spectator, and as a result generated from the bodily communicative process. This study adds to the debates between stage presence as a quality and as an effect. By re-examining the strategy of enhancing stage presence in traditional Chinese theatre, this research reveals that the ‘opposition’ in Chinese acting technique does not aim to create attractive energy with regard to stage presence. Rather, the objective of ‘opposition’ is to make the perfomer’s whole body accessible to the spectator, especially the front of the performer’s body, perceivable for every spectator. This demonstrates that stage presence is a relational and contingent phenomenon.
A utopian community with presence
From its literal meaning – being there – to its extended meaning – a performer’s quality – the word presence is laden with multiple implications. In contrast, Chinese words for presence tend to focus on one meaning – aura. The words taifeng (台风) and qichang(气场), as more often used nowadays, are Chinese words for presence. The characters 风 and 气 in these terms literally mean ‘wind’ and ‘air’, both figurative expressions for aura. In contrast to the multiple meanings of presence in Western theatre, the Chinese words for presence in traditional theatre primarily refer to the performer’s quality.
The research is predicated on the understanding that the presence of performers can motivate new theatre-goers to attend performances on a regular basis. As Shay Sayre and Cynthia King state, ‘The experience of being in the presence of performers is what drives audiences to attend live performances’.Footnote 2 In qualitative research on motivation among theatre-goers, Ben Walmsley emphasizes the audience’s connection with the performers, because spectators ‘are ultimately human beings who are essentially motivated by human interaction and insight’.Footnote 3 Similarly, in research on audience development for companies in Australia seeking to convert non-theatre-goers into new audiences, Rebecca Scollen highlights the need to prioritize the performer when finding ways to attract new theatre-goers, which is evidenced by ‘the participants’ consistent attention to, and appreciation of, the performers and their actions, combined with their fascination with the live nature of the performances’.Footnote 4 She argues that ‘theatre companies should continue to attempt to tell stories that are relevant to people’s lives and that are expressed by highly skilled and charismatic performers’.Footnote 5 In particular, her research demonstrates that ‘performers and their actions … played a very strong role in theatrical communication for new audiences’ and that participants in the research ‘were particularly impressed with the performers, their skill, talent, energy, enthusiasm and closeness’.Footnote 6 Scollen’s research into how to ‘break down the barriers to attendance and introduce people to the arts’ indicates that the performer’s presence makes a significant contribution to the engagement of new spectators and their enjoyment of theatre.Footnote 7 The work of these researchers indicates that, from the perspective of theatre-goers, the presence of the performer is a significant factor in increasing the influence and popularity of theatre.
As a performer, I am motivated by the ability to attract spectators and to expand theatre’s influence and appeal. But I am faced, at the outset, by the contradictory status of the performer when comparing the histories of Western theatre and traditional Chinese theatre. In particular, I need to consider the status of the performer in relation to the authority of the playwright, script and character, on the one hand, and the vision of the director, staging and scenery, on the other. This consideration concerns whether the performer’s attractiveness to audiences is prioritized in theatre. I am not conflating the performer’s presence and the performer’s status. Instead, I am suggesting that if the performer is subordinated to other elements of theatre, then the performer’s presence will be undermined. In this regard, conventional Western theatre and traditional Chinese theatre treat the performer differently.
In conventional Western theatre that follows a text-based approach to production, critical discourse has often relegated the performer to the status of a secondary authority. Elinor Fuchs notes that, for a considerable time after Aristotle, plot was maintained as the primary concern of Western theatre, until character and thought replaced plot as authorities.Footnote 8 Between the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, the performer came to serve as a vessel for the character. In a review of acting styles of the eighteenth century, Erika Fischer-Lichte observes, ‘It is not the actor that should be perceived as being present on stage, but the dramatic figure.’Footnote 9 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s idea that character and subject are the priority of drama discloses one of the main characteristics of Western theatre. Between the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, discourse on Western theatre, either explicitly or implicitly, refused to recognize the corporeal existence of the performer onstage and the concrete form that the ghostly character takes.Footnote 10 Some of the theatre modernists between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth tended towards strategies for concealing the performer’s presence. For the symbolists, such as the director Gordon Craig (1872–1966), the biggest obstacle was the character–performer relation, that is, the human image onstage, which he believed would distract the audience and disrupt their understanding of the director’s thought.Footnote 11 The symbolists used strategies for disrupting the human image,Footnote 12 where everything, including the presence of the performer in character, was subordinated to the communication of the director’s thought.
By the mid-twentieth century in Western theatre, opposing ways of approaching the performer had emerged: one placed an emphasis on the performer’s presence, and the other sought to minimize or eliminate it. The 1960s saw an influx of avant-garde directors who contributed to advocacy for the priority of the performer, including Grotowski and Eugenio Barba in Europe, Joseph Chaikin in the United States and Tadashi Suzuki in Japan. Yet the priority given to the performer’s presence in mid-twentieth-century theatre was challenged by the anti-essentialist idea of deconstruction, advanced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida,Footnote 13 and by some post-dramatic approaches to theatre-making.Footnote 14 According to Philip Auslander, the influence of deconstructionist strategies in theatre subverted the authority of the performer’s presence, leading to attempts to create characters without essence, and the use of technology to create action without agency.Footnote 15 These debates about presence revolve around one question: where is authority in theatre? For Hegel, authority is given to the playwright. In modern theatre, authority is taken by the director. In the wake of deconstructionist philosophy and postdramatic theatre a new answer has emerged: nothing should have authority.
Unlike Western text-based theatre, traditional Chinese theatre is an aesthetic form that foregrounds the performer. One important reason for this is the varying status of play scripts. Many traditional Chinese performances are not based on scripts, while many scripts in Chinese theatre are either valued for their literary merit rather than for performing or, where written for performing, they are not polished writing. The shallow plots and flat characters of many Chinese scripts written for performance have been criticized as ‘naive’ by critics from the West.Footnote 16 Yet the same critics expressed amazement at the performance when they saw these ‘naive’ plays onstage.Footnote 17 In traditional Chinese theatre, the performer’s performance is the foremost element, while the script is secondary.
The artistic form taken by traditional Chinese theatre grants the performer primacy. With ‘naive’ plots, minimalist settings and stylized movements and forms of singing and dancing, the performer in traditional Chinese theatre bears the full weight of attracting and engaging the audience. Wang Guowei (王国维, 1877–1927), an eminent literary critic who was born in the Qing Dynasty and died in the Republic of China, recognized the performer’s priority in famously describing traditional Chinese theatre as ‘telling the story through singing and dancing’.Footnote 18 Performance in China became an independent form of art when performers began to perform complete stories during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 AD). The dazzling virtuosity of these performers is described in records of the reception of performances of the play Huanggong of the East Sea (Donghai Huanggong 东海黄公).Footnote 19 Chinese theatre arrived at its traditional form during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), and at that time the performer played a decisive role in convincing the audience and striking a chord with them.Footnote 20 A Jia (阿甲, 1907–94), a theorist, playwright and director of traditional Chinese theatre, observed,
In the past there was usually in the middle of the stage a table and two chairs, which are just abstract ornaments having no relation whatsoever with the action of the play. Only when the character enters, a specific locale is assumed … The locale changes not only from one scene to another, even within the same scene.Footnote 21
As everything onstage is transformed through the performer’s performance and the staging is very flexible with regard to fictional time and space, the performer holds a central position in traditional Chinese theatre.Footnote 22 In effect, the performer of traditional Chinese theatre was their own director, until the role of director was introduced in the twentieth century.Footnote 23
Scholarly discourse on traditional Chinese theatre attaches great importance to the performer’s presence. Pan Zhiheng (潘之恒, 1556–1622), an early Chinese theatre critic and poet, offers an account of presence that is typical in discourse about traditional theatre performing. Captivating Presence is Faye Chunfang Fei’s translation from an article Pan wrote to appraise Yang Chaochao (杨超超), a performer working in traditional Chinese theatre. The original text of Pan’s article is written in ancient Chinese prose. The Chinese title of his article is ‘仙度’ (xiandu), which literally means ‘being like a god’:Footnote 24
It is rare that a skilled performer possesses all three of the following qualities: talent, intelligence, and presence [or charisma].Footnote 25 Some have talent but lack intelligence, thus rendering their talent witless. Some have intelligence but lack presence, thus rendering their intellect lusterless. It is extremely rare to see brilliance in all its dimensions standing in front of you as big as life … It is this presence that adds wit to her talent and luster to her intellect.Footnote 26
The ancient Chinese character that refers to presence in the main body of Pan’s article, which Fei translates as ‘presence’ or ‘charisma’, is zhi (致). This term can be translated into modern Chinese as fengzhi (风致) or fengyun (风韵), which literally means ‘graceful bearing’ or ‘charm’. What does not appear in Fei’s translated version is Pan’s description of Yang’s godlike aura. Pan writes, ‘She shines with boundless radiance’.Footnote 27 From Pan’s perspective, it is zhi that makes Yang glow like a god.Footnote 28 In this article, Pan implies that, of the three qualities of the performer, presence seems to be the most powerful, because it adds brilliance to the other two qualities, talent and intellect, and because it endows the performer with divine power.
The prominence of the performer explains why traditional Chinese performance – with a simple story, short performance text and repeated stylized movements – attracted people to visit the venue and watch the performance over and over again. One of the earliest historical records of the Chinese spectators’ obsession with this theatre can be found in a letter which was sent to the Emperor Wen (581–604 AD) of the Sui Dynasty, to condemn theatre for its impact on people:
But nowadays, around the capital and also in the provinces, streets at night are crowded with all sorts of people watching theatrical performances on every first full moon of the lunar calendar. Amid deafening drums and burning torches, humans don animal masks, men wear women’s clothes, actors and acrobats assume the most outlandish and bizarre expressions and postures … People spend all they have as if there were no time left. Whole households show up, and there is no distinction between the noble and the lowly, between men and women, or between monks and laymen. In such an environment indecent acts, theft, and robbery all get started. And before anyone knows it they become prevalent. [These theatrical activities] do not teach good morals but only bring harm to the people. Please officially prohibit all of them immediately.Footnote 29
There are many aspects of the theatre culture that were condemned in the letter sent to Emperor Wen that I seek to realize now: for people from every walk of life to be enthusiastic about theatre on a widespread basis; for the performance to be so appealing that the spectators can forget their own time and space; and for an absence of hierarchy, classes and discrimination, at least for the moment when people are brought together into a utopia through theatre, where we can imagine a ‘more just and equitable’ future, as Jill Dolan describes.Footnote 30 It is through the corporeal co-presence of the performer and the spectator that a utopian community with ‘a multiplicity of presence’ is constructed, and this utopian community is the reason why Dolan believes live theatre appeals to the spectator.Footnote 31 This research on stage presence, inspired by the aim of attracting new spectators to the theatre, embraces Dolan’s idea of constructing a utopian community through theatre-making.
The pursuit of a utopian community entails the re-examination of presence. Throughout history, the concept of presence in traditonal Chinese theatre has corres-ponded to the Western concept of presence as quality. However, this article looks afresh at traditional Chinese theatre through a phenomenological lens, which enables a glimpse into the understanding of presence as an ever-changing phenomenon rather than a stable quality.
Presence and the body
Approaching presence in theatre entails a focus on the body. First, theatrical events are bound to concepts of the body, either the presence and absence of the body, or the bodies of the performer and the spectator. Bodies are ‘both the subjects of and the tools for communicating performance research’.Footnote 32 Moreover, the body is always a central issue in discussions of presence. Directors like Grotowski, Barba and Zarilli, who have sought to cultivate the performer’s presence through rigorous physical training and to pursue a non-representational form, have held that presence is a quality generated by the performer’s phenomenal body. Conventional theatre-makers in the Stanislavskian tradition, working from the assumption that the performer’s presence is indebted to the character’s charm, discipline their performers to disappear into their semiotic body – the character. Artists and theorists who are interested in presence as a pure effect on the spectator dedicate themselves to an absence of the performer’s body by employing advanced technology.Footnote 33 Therefore, the analysis of body becomes necessary in the exploration of presence, no matter what kind of body it is – phenomenal, semiotic, present or absent.
The body is a useful concept to resolve the tension between the proponents and critics of presence. Since the eighteenth century in Western theatre, according to Fischer-Lichte, the performer was disciplined to serve the character and conceal the self behind the semiotic body.Footnote 34 Later, during the twentieth century, the idea of non-representational acting developed among certain practitioners. Theatre director Eugenio Barba, for instance, distinguishes expressive articulation as representing something from pre-expressive articulation as non-representative presence; Barba calls for a particular usage of the body in such a way that the performer can command the space, in a bid to create a non-representational immediacy.Footnote 35 This development in theatre practice makes two assumptions: one is the representational assumption that the semiotic body – the character – endows the performer with presence; another is the non-representational assumption that the performer’s phenomenal body creates presence.
In this way, ideas and types of presence are associated with both representational and non-representational strategies. Tied to this are debates about representation and non-representation. Critics of presence exploit the concepts of representation and non-representation to question the immediacy of presence as the ontology of live performance. While some proponents believe that presence in theatre is experienced unmediated through the phenomenal body, critics of this belief question this immediacy, taking issue with the idea of non-representation and claiming that the semiotic always haunts experience in the theatre. In addressing Derrida on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, Elinor Fuchs shows how Derrida challenges the idea that speech is a moment of pure self-presence. Her summation of Derrida’s idea of writing infiltrating speech propels her to consider that there is ‘no single moment at which utterance originates’ and therefore ‘no originary principle [that] can be identified’.Footnote 36 As a result, she concludes, ‘Presence is merely a self-serving illusion.’Footnote 37 Once speech is regarded as equivalent to being present and writing is regarded equivalent to representation, the deconstructionists’ dismantling of the authority of speech over writing leads on to the denial of presence as the ontology of performance. As Connolly and Ralley observe, critics of presence deny the possibility of ‘immediate encounter’ when experiencing the performance.Footnote 38 For the critics, each presentation is a representation. They reject presence because they assume that there is no unmediated experience that is non-representational.
Fischer-Lichte applies the practice of deconstructing binary oppositions – in this case, the opposition between the phenomenal body and the semiotic body – to defend the concept of presence. Fischer-Lichte argues that the phenomenal body and the semiotic body should not be regarded as separate when it comes to experiencing presence, insofar as the spectator always projects meaning onto the performer’s phenomenal body, while the semiotic body is often trespassed by the phenomenal body.Footnote 39 She points to a process of embodiment during performance, where the performer ‘exists only as body’, and the body is not just a medium for the consciousness.Footnote 40 Agreeing that presence is a process of consciousness, Fischer-Lichte emphasizes that the body is where consciousness comes into being. As a result, Fischer-Lichte proposes that presence be regarded as embodied mind – PRESENCE, as she calls it – a proposition that transcends the binary opposition of body and mind.Footnote 41 In following Fischer-Lichte’s approach, the discussion of presence can be extricated from the contradiction between conventional representation and non-representational acting, where the former pays attention only to the semiotic body and the latter to the phenomenal body.
While Fischer-Lichte addresses the debate on presence from a phenomenological perspective, Connolly and Ralley approach it by turning to cognitive science. Cognitive science shows that reality resides in representation, for a human’s sensorimotor processes operate in the context of representation in the same way as in real life, and perceptual imagination operates in the same way as regular perception.Footnote 42 Hence, Connolly and Ralley call for an account of presence that is situated in the context of representation and extricates itself from the problem of being mystically unknowable.Footnote 43 According to Connolly and Ralley, representation does not contradict presence, as presence involves a communicative experience between the actor and the audience, rather than standing as a metaphysical authority.
Taken together, whether a performance is regarded as representational or non-representational, meaning always haunts experience because one thing always points toward another thing that is absent; and whether in a fictional context or in real life, humans retain the ability to have an immediate response through the sensorimotor process. A performance in which representational forms dominate involves non-representational perceptual processes, while a performance in which non-representational forms dominate is tangled with representational perceptual processes. Consequently, this research aims to explore presence by looking at the body phenomenologically, in a way that can resolve the tension between claims about immediacy advanced by proponents of non-representational experience in theatre and claims about how theatre is haunted by meanings and therefore never fully immediate. This research is undertaken from a phenomenological perspective. Pioneers have contributed to the application of phenomenology in theatre and performance studies, which are relevant to investigating acting and staging.Footnote 44 A phenomenological attitude can help to clearly understand presence as an important factor in the lived experience of performance. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concepts, which radically break down the opposition of body and mind, and that of subjectivity and objectivity, can be related to what Fischer-Lichte claims is the process of embodiment during performance, where presence transcends the binary opposition of body and mind. The term ‘presence’ – in its literal meaning, ‘being’ – relates to existential questions, while the term ‘body’ is connected with experience. Carrying the same connotation as the first dimension of presence, phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s view is a philosophy about being. Merleau-Ponty claims that ‘[t]he 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.’Footnote 45 The concept of bodily being-in-the-world breaks down the dichotomy of body and mind because the mind is embodied. Merleau-Ponty objects to ‘the autonomy of consciousness’.Footnote 46 He does not claim that we have no moment of mentally visualizing an object; rather, he suggests that bodily experience is the premise upon which a complete and impartial grasp of the object is based.Footnote 47 Moreover, the body is the starting point of our encounter with the world and it houses a pre-reflective experience. Any reflection ‘bears upon an unreflective experience’.Footnote 48
For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness and the body cannot be separated until we enter into the layer of reflection. The reason for pursuing a pre-reflective experience is that ‘[o]bjective thought too often has ignored the complex ambiguous “milieu” in which human meaning comes to expression’.Footnote 49 To adequately perceive, we must return to the beginning of our cognitive activities, which is a bodily encounter with the world. Bodily perception is where knowledge begins.Footnote 50 Working from these ideas, Merleau-Ponty calls for ‘a return to the perceptual pre-conceptual experience of the child’.Footnote 51 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological inquiry is an investigation into bodily being-in-the-world. Informed by Merleau-Ponty, this study investigates presence through bodily being-in-the-theatre, as the theatre is both a part of the big world and its own little world.
The structure of stage presence
Stage presence, as created through strategies designed for live performances, cannot be recorded fully through technology, because the ways in which the senses are engaged by recorded and live performances are different. One may perceive the performer’s presence in recordings, but the senses of the perceiver are differently engaged. The performer’s attractiveness on-screen is shaped by the influence of camera ‘language’ upon the spectator’s senses, while the approaches for creating presence in a live performance may cease to be effective on-screen. One reason I have added ‘stage’ before ‘presence’ is to differentiate the object of the analysis from ‘screen presence’. The strategies for enhancing stage presence can invite failure on-screen. An example is given by the director Patrick Tucker in a statement about a screening of a famous theatre production:
The British actor Ian Richardson was in New York and saw that they were going to show a video recording of the famous production of Marat/Sade that he had starred in some ten years before. He sat at the back of the auditorium to see it; he was shocked not so much that the audience thought it bad and laughable, but that he found it that way too. He was brilliant – at the time it was seen in the theatre by the audience, who correctly gave it a standing ovation each night – but the recorded version gave no indication of this.Footnote 52
The performer can have presence both onstage and on-screen, but the strategies for enhancing stage presence in the two realms are different. Presence on-screen is beyond the scope of this research.
The Phelan–Auslander contention in most discussions concerning presence in performance revolves around the distinction between live and mediatized performances. Phelan claims that performance’s ‘only life is in the present … It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as “different”.’Footnote 53 This claim accords with Derrida’s concept of différance, a term that refers to ‘the mark or trace of differences between repeatable signifiers generating new meanings’.Footnote 54 Drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, Auslander contests Phelan’s argument for the ontology of performance.Footnote 55 He states that both live and mediatized performances are characterized by ‘types of liveness’.Footnote 56 Auslander argues that live and mediatized performances share the same ontology,Footnote 57 while Phelan claims that reproduction betrays the performance’s ‘in-the-present’ ontology.Footnote 58 Suzanne Jaeger addresses the tension between the opposing arguments by employing Merleau-Ponty’s work, indicating that presence is ‘a lived experience and a real phenomenon’Footnote 59 in which the senses are engaged in a live performance differently than they are in a mediatized performance.Footnote 60 Mediatized performances do have their own types of liveness, but live performances are uniquely distinguished because the co-presence of the performer and the spectator assures a different bodily engagement. This uniqueness is attributed to an environment that influences both the perfomer’s and the spectator’s perception.
According to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the world we can know is a perceptual world, which is neither pure consciousness nor pure object, but the reciprocity between consciousness and object through our perception. Merleau-Ponty defines perception as follows: ‘a figure against a background is the most basic sensible given we can have … This is the very definition of the perceptual phenomenon … The perceptual “something” is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a “field”.’Footnote 61 According to Merleau-Ponty, our perception of a ‘thing’ always concerns a ‘field’ within which the ‘thing’ is situated in a particular way. The differences between the perceptual ‘field’ in live and mediatized performance lead to the differences in the spectator’s bodily attitudes towards the performers. In his analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s work, Taylor Carman puts it this way: ‘The “things” we ordinarily see are not abstract, free-floating qualities, but opportunities, threats, dangers – in short, things to do, things to grab, things to avoid. This is in part just to say that perceptual experience is intentional, or “of” something.’Footnote 62 Similarly, David Cerbone explains,
According to Merleau-Ponty … things are manifest as near or far, here or there, in reach or out of reach, above or below, available or unavailable, usable or unusable, inviting or repulsive, and so on in relation to our ways of inhabiting the world, and such inhabitation is always bodily in nature. Things are not encountered primarily in terms of a detached gaze, as though our main relation to the world were one of staring; on the contrary, things are manifest, arrayed before and around us, in relation to our bodily abilities, our many ways of getting a grip on the things we encounter.Footnote 63
It follows that, in different situations, the body has different tasks and forms of intentionality. Intentionality is the bodily attitude directed towards a ‘thing’ in the phenomenology of perception. The perceiver, the background and the perceived that stands out against the background together constitute a spatial relationship, which determines the perceiver’s bodily intentionality.
In theatre, the immediate environment influences the spectator’s perception of the performer’s presence. In a live performance, the performer is presented to the spectator by the background – the surrounding environment which includes the flesh-and-blood performer, the theatre, the space, the lighting, other spectators and so on in relation to the unique moment where the spectator experiences the performance corporeally. With a recorded performance, the background might be a screen in a cosy, private, well-lit room. Accordingly, the spectator’s perception of the performer’s presence changes. It is not the presence that has been perceived in the live performance, but a new perception which is very different from the original. The performer’s presence is framed by the screen, the camera techniques, the white wall behind the video player, the noise of a phone call and so on. The spectator’s bodily relation to the performer’s presence varies to such an extent that things that emerged in the theatre might be lost in the recordings, for the new background and the perceived object constitute a new perception. In short, the contextual aspects of perception matter. Stage presence is explored in the context of an immediate encounter between the performer and the spectator.
Both the performer’s presence and the spectator’s perception constitute stage presence. The performer and the performer’s presence are the perceived, and the spectator is the one who perceives. Stage presence cannot exist alone without the spectator’s perception, as ‘[t]he thing can never be separated from someone who perceives it; nor can it ever actually be in itself’.Footnote 64 As ‘every perception is a communication or a communion’,Footnote 65 the performer’s presence is not a stable ‘truth’ or meaning. Rather, it is contingent upon the immediate environment. This contingency accords with the post-structuralist concept of the indeterminacy of meaning.Footnote 66 Presence is not a stable metaphysical entity that one has to shy away from or call into question, because it is an ever-changing and contingent phenomenon, whose only life is in the relationship between the performer and the spectator. This phenomenological perspective of presence does not contradict the post-structuralist approach to presence.
The phenomenon of stage presence that this study explores is the performer’s presence perceived by the spectator in the bodily encounter between the performer and the spectator. The emphasis of the performer and the bodily encounter indicates that stage presence involves not simply the performer, but also their relationship with perceivers. This emphasis is based on Merleau-Ponty’s conception of a paradox in the phenomenological world, as Ted Toadvine summarizes: ‘a reality is perceived only in so far as it is experienced, and it is therefore always “for me”. But the perceived thing, to be real, must also present itself as “in itself”, that is, as preceding and exceeding my experience of it.’Footnote 67 Therefore stage presence involves the perceived performer, and the spectator’s perception, which concerns how the perceived performer is presented to the spectator, neither of which can be excluded from the other.
Bodily encounter: the performer–spectator connection
Stage presence can be intensified through the manipulation of the bodily encounter between the performer and the spectator. Writing about the words used to describe presence in the eighteenth century, Jane Goodall observes a historical shift in the rhetoric of presence towards a perspective where the performer is the source of the ‘circulating power’, an idea which is analogous to the communication between the performer and the spectator.Footnote 68 In her analysis of one metaphor of presence – ‘electrical fire’ – Goodall draws on an observation made by Tracy C. Davis:
[The performer] Kean’s performances created very different impressions on spectators depending on where they were seated. To view him from the pit, where the light showed up the rapid transitions of facial expression for which he was celebrated, was one thing; to see him without the advantages of light and proximity was another …Footnote 69
This account of the spectator’s experience of the performer’s performance indicates that the perception of the performer is based on the spectator’s situatedness, their body’s spatial relationship with the performer and the nature of the environment. This embodied dimension of the spectator’s perception can be created and manipulated by staging.
Manipulating the perceptual connection between the perceiving body and the perceived body is a prerequisite for the achievement of stage presence, because for both the performer and the spectator the body is what generates the performer’s presence and what the spectator uses to experience the performer. Body, other than consciousness, is what completes the perception. Merleau-Ponty deals with perception as bodily intentionality. He gives the following illustration of how the body perceives:
A fifteen-month-old baby opens his mouth when I playfully take one of his fingers in my mouth and pretend to bite it. And yet, he has hardly even seen his face in a mirror and his teeth do not resemble mine. His own mouth and teeth such as he senses them from within are immediately for him the instructions for biting, and my jaw such as he sees it from the outside is for him immediately capable of the same intentions. ‘Biting’ immediately has an intersubjective signification for him. He perceives his intentions in his body, perceives my body with his own, and thereby perceives my intentions in his body.Footnote 70
In Merleau-Ponty’s observation, the baby carries out an action guided by his body’s intention, which is the same intention in the body of another person that he perceives. He bites without knowing that he does not have full-grown teeth. However, he can fully grasp the other body’s intention by seeing from the outside. He experiences the other’s body in his own. This phenomenon reflects Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘intercorporeality’, which Shogo Tanaka explains as follows:
Intercorporeality contains a perception–action loop between the self and the other. Perceiving the other’s action prompts the same action in the self (like contagious yawning) or the possibility of the action (like smiling). Conversely, the self’s action prompts the same action, or its possibility, in the other’s body.Footnote 71
According to the notion of intercorporeality, the baby example shows that we perceive others not with a pure consciousness but with our body. When we encounter the other person, we are not only seeing, but experiencing, the other body in our own. Therefore the spectator encountering the performer is the spectator’s bodily perception of the performer’s body.
In theatre, to perceive presence is to experience it in the spectator’s body. A performance where spectator meets performer is a bodily encounter. It is not a one-way reception process in which the spectator passively takes what the performer gives, but a bodily involvement even when the spectator is sitting still. Fischer-Lichte refers to this bodily activity as ‘synaesthetic perception’, which is ‘shaped not only by sight and sound but by physical sensations of the entire body’.Footnote 72 The perception of the performer’s body involves the spectator’s bodily experience. This bodily perception is predicated on the body’s situatedness and its relationship with the perceived object. Moving in different ways or directions, the performer generates different relationships with the spectator, while the spectator experiences different bodily encounters. The differences of bodily situations are concerned in devising strategies of enhancing stage presence.
The concept of intercorporeality in performances can serve as a means of achieving equality within a utopian community. In this utopia, societal divisions such as those between the aristocracy and the underclass are eradicated through a deep interconnectedness of bodies. Intercorporeality facilitates a state in which individuals, regardless of their social status, engage in body-to-body dialogues on an equal basis. This equality is based on the notion that, through intercorporeality, individuals establish a deep affinity with one another, fostering accessibility and mutual understanding. Ultimately, the inherent sameness in nature and status among individuals serves as the foundation for equality within this utopian framework. In this envisioned utopia, the traditional hierarchies that stratify society are dissolved through the transformative power of intercorporeality. Within this paradigm, distinctions between spectator and actor, as well as among spectators and actors themselves, are obliterated. Through intimate body-to-body dialogues, individuals from different social classes interact as equals, transcending conventional social barriers. This equality does not depend on external markers of status or privilege, but is rooted in the shared experience of bodily encounter.
Re-examining the strategy of enhancing stage presence in traditional Chinese theatre
Bodily connection between the performer and the spectator can be achieved through different strategies. Theatre anthropologist and director Eugenio Barba assumes that it is resistance, created by oppositional forces, that grips the attention of spectators. In Barba’s observation of Chinese performers, he found that the performer ‘always begins an action with its opposition’.Footnote 73 According to this opposition technique used in traditional Chinese theatre, as well as some other Asian performance traditions, he observes, opposition creates attractive energy, which he believes is an obvious indicator of the performer’s presence.Footnote 74 In his exploration of the methods for improving presence, Barba found that the acting and physical technique of opposition made a substantial contribution to presence.
Re-examining traditional Chinese theatre, Peking opera (京剧, Jingju) in particular, this study finds that the opposition technique may serve another purpose. That purpose is ‘a consideration of the whole spectators (观照全场 guanzhao quanchang)’, a concept articulated by Peking opera artist Gai Jiaotian (盖叫天, 1888–1971).Footnote 75 This purpose, which is not considered by Barba, plays a pivotal role in the process of creating opposition. Gai suggests that a performer must make the performance perceivable for every spectator.Footnote 76 In this regard, theatre is not like film, which only provides us with the camera’s perspective and the particular aspects of the picture that the film-maker wants us to see. While attending theatre, what we can see, if we wish, is the entire performance of the performer. Gai, however, does not take the perception of the performer’s performance as a whole for granted. He believes that, in order to make the spectator fully appreciate the performance of the performer, it is necessary to follow the idea of ‘four sides and eight directions (四面八方, simian bafang)’,Footnote 77 with eight directions meaning all directions. He explains as follows:
The carpet on the stage has four sides, which is the ‘four sides’; the audience from every corner comes to see your performance, which is called the ‘eight directions’ … No matter which corner people come from, they can clearly see your facial expression as well as the graceful gesture of your body.Footnote 78
Though we can see the performance in its entirety, it has different sides. Each spectator’s viewing position is distinct from that of all other spectators. The relationships between each spectator’s body and the performer are thus distinct in ways which influence the spectator’s perception of the performer’s presence.
The goal of the ‘opposition’ is to make the performer’s body accessible to the spectator. For example, in a proscenium theatre, if the performer is in front of the spectators, the spectators will see the performer’s front without seeing their back, or they will see the performer’s back without seeing their front. If the performer is facing the spectators on the left side of the stage, then the spectators on the right side will only see the left side of the performer’s body; the expression of the right side of the performer’s body is obscured, and so the connection between the right side of the performer’s body and the right-side spectators is blocked. In this way, a performer may deploy angles of the body to ensure accessibility that necessarily involves spatial oppositions.
The key point of the all-around connection is that different angles of the performer’s body need to be visible to the spectators. When the front of the upper body is oriented towards the spectators on the left side, the front of the lower body needs to be seen by the spectators on the right side. According to the idea of ‘four sides and eight directions’ enunciated by Gai, the performer should consider that spectators view from all directions. Performers need ‘a consideration of all spectators’.
Based on this direction of performance, the methods of ziwuxiang (子午相) and ningmahua (拧麻花) were named. Gai Jiaotian defines ziwuxiang as
a method of body movements in traditional Chinese theatre. On the stage, the actor’s trunk and limbs are, making a possibly inappropriate metaphor, like the hands of a clock. The hands of the clock include a big one and a small one, the two of which sometimes coincide and sometimes separate. The time slot from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. is called zi, the time slot from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. is called wu … 12 a.m./p.m. is the reference to determine the body movements. In the theatre, the audience is the 12 a.m./p.m., which implies that the audience is the reference to determine the body movements.Footnote 79
While ziwu means ‘time slots’, xiang means ‘shape’. Ziwu signifies the hands of a clock which point in different directions in different time slots, indicating that different parts of the performer’s body should turn in different directions. If the upper trunk as the small hand of the clock is towards the 12 a.m./p.m., then the head and the lower body could be towards 11:50 a.m./p.m. or 12:10 a.m./p.m. Ningmahua literally is a description of making mahua – also known as Chinese fried dough twist. Ning is a verb meaning ‘twist’. This Chinese snack is made through the action of ‘twisting’. Ningmahua in traditional Chinese theatre indicates that the performer twists the body in a manner akin to the twisting of the mahua. In a study of Gai Jiaotian, Liu Huifen observes that ziwuxiang and ningmahua are for a connection between the performer and the spectators from ‘four sides and eight directions’.Footnote 80
The methods of ziwuxiang and ningmahua provide the opposition in traditional Chinese theatre that Barba observed. It is possible that the attracting energy produced by opposition will not have an effect on developing presence if there is no all-around connection between the performer and the spectator. I am not denying that the oppositional forces may generate energy that attracts the spectator. Instead, I am arguing that the oppositional forces are not the purpose of the techniques; rather, the aim is to achieve an all-around bodily connection.
This kind of connection between the performer and the spectator can also be found in contemporary Asian theatre. The Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki, whose theatre draws from traditional Japanese theatre forms such as Noh and kabuki,Footnote 81 requires his performers to face the front and the spectators, even though they are having a dialogue with other performers. Suzuki asks his performers to make sure
that you are heard and seen by the audience, and also never losing the sense that there is someone else, a fellow actor, there with you. When it comes down to which one you should concentrate on more, the audience comes first and your co-actors second …Footnote 82
Suzuki gives primacy to the performer’s concentration on the spectators. In Suzuki’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac, two characters, Cyrano and Roxane, are sitting together and communicating with each other, while facing the spectators instead of facing each other. The performers are communicating with the spectators while communicating with their interlocutors.
In practice, the frontal bodily connection between the performer and the spectator is a common strategy. The performer is usually required to face the spectators for most of the time, except for some unavoidable moments when the back is turned to the spectators. While the masters of traditional Chinese theatre remind their pupils not to forget the frontal connection with the spectators, Suzuki pushes this requirement to an extreme. A key difference between the two theatres is that traditional Chinese theatre considers the spectators from ‘four sides and eight directions’, whereas Suzuki considers the spectators from straight ahead. The two theatres use different methods for a common purpose – that is, to show as much of the spectator’s frontal body as possible. A common view is that the front of the body and the face convey more information to the spectators. And for the performer, frontal bodily encounter can make the self easily perceive the spectators.
Conclusion
The concept of presence is essential in performance, and the body is a key factor in understanding it. This article has discussed various perspectives on presence and explored the debates surrounding stage presence, specifically whether it is attributed to the performer’s quality or just an effect that technology can produce.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological paradigm for perceiving presence has been used in the embodied probings, as embodiment from a phenomenological point of view is a useful concept for resolving the tension between proponents and critics of presence, and for supporting the research hypothesis: the bodily encounter between the performer and the spectator intensifies stage presence. It has found that stage presence is a relational and contingent phenomenon which can be achieved through a bodily communicative process. This new understanding should help us discover more strategies for enhancing stage presence and thereby building a utopian community. The research has analysed the performance techniques of bodily connection in traditional Chinese theatre (using Gai Jiaotian’s method as an example) and contemporary Asian theatre (using Tadashi Suzuki’s method as an example). This challenges Eugenio Barba’s assumption that oppositional forces create presence.
The spectator’s perception varies according to the way the performer is presented in the shared environment. Many practitioners emphasize the performer’s ‘inner quality’ through rigorous mental or physical training. They regard stage presence as equal to the performer’s ‘inner quality’, and believe that stage presence can be achieved when the performer acquires mental or physical skills and power. Nevertheless, since the performer’s craft is for the spectator’s perception, how the spectator perceives the performer is fundamental to stage presence. Following Merleau-Ponty, the spectator’s perception of the performer is a communication with the performer. The spectator’s perceiving implies the bodily attitude towards the perceived performer against a ‘background’ – the shared environment, as well as the spatial situatedness of the spectator in the theatre. The perceiving spectator, the perceived performer and the shared environment form varying relations, which suggest different ways in which the performer and the spectator relate, and the way they relate decides the perception. Therefore strategies for intensifying stage presence focus on the bodily encounter between the performer and the spectator.
