Sophie Nield

The Proteus Cabinet, or ‘we are Here but not Here’

In the early nineteenth century, there were three stage illusions in which a magician could cause a person to disappear. In one of these, the Proteus Cabinet, participants would enter a box, and simply vanish. As the designers of the Proteus Cabinet said of them, they were ‘Here, but not Here’. My essay explores this concept in relation to contemporary border politics. The border is a place where you have to appear. To pass through, the border-crosser must simultaneously be both present and represented. That representation has historically taken the form of papers: passports, permits to travel, proofs of nationality, photographs, or verbal accounts of reasons for travel. More recently, this representation has been drawn from the body itself: fingerprints, retinal scans – what Agamben has called the ‘biometric tattoo’. Drawing on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz, and addressing this new concern with the body part as passport, I will argue that the disaggregation of representation and the subject of representation makes it impossible for the border-crosser to appear – the border becomes a machine of disappearance, and makes a person vanish in plain sight. Here, but not Here.

There is another world: Space, theatre and global anti-capitalism

The Republican National Convention (RNC) is coming to town. For weeks now, radical and independent media websites have acted as clearing houses for the astonishing range of planned street theatre events, demonstrations, spokes-councils, and meetings of grassroots democratic groups. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the FBI is calling at the homes of activists; rumours circulate that the police have organised forty-foot holding vans for the anticipated arrestees, and that the court schedules have been cleared for the last weekend in August. The ‘free speech zone’ at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston last month was a chicken-wire cage under a fly-over. Protesters were quick to subvert this one, kneeling, hooded and bound, in mock-Guantanamo poses, alongside the fences. The big anti-Bush, anti-war march organised by the group United for Peace and Justice in NYC on 29 August has been routed, not into Central Park, but down the unshaded West Side highway, where the temperature is likely to be 90 degrees. There is speculation that the authorities want trouble. Whose city is this, anyway? On the Staten Island Ferry, which hauls commuters back and forth between Staten Island and the financial district of lower Manhattan, tourists and weary travellers watch the Statue ofLiberty slidepast the window. It is 27 August, and there is a larger than usual police and law enforcement presence on board – passengers look anxiously around to see what might be happening – the whole area is on a heightened terror alert because of the Convention. A group of people dressed in knee breeches, eighteenthcentury dresses and red and blue spangled hats are handing out leaflets; the passengers shuffle nearer, and jostle to see better, as the group, accompanied bymusic, lead the way to the front of the ferry. Once there, they unroll a large parchment and arrange themselves in the image of the famous painting of 1. See for example: http://www.nyc. indymedia.org; http://www.counter convention.org; http://www.united forpeace.org; http:// www.notinourname. net/rnc (all accessed August 2004); http://www. rncnotwelcome.org (accessed June 2005). For image archive, see independent photographer Fred Askew’s work documenting political action and performance protest in NYC and beyond at http://www. fredaskew.com (accessed December 2004). See also L. Bogad, ‘Billionaires for Bush: a Postmortemist Accounting’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 15:1 (2005). Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 16(1), 2006, 51 – 61

Galileo's Finger and the Perspiring Waxwork: On death, appearance and the promise of flesh

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‘Speeches that draw tears’: theatricality, commemoration and social history

On 31 August 2011, at sunset, in the heart of the English countryside, a flag was lowered over a small Wiltshire town. As the tenor bell of the Church of St Bartholomew tolled, two thousand people stood silently, and rows of current and retired service personnel drew themselves up in smart salute. The president of the local Royal British Legion branch, Maurice Baker, recited Laurence Binyon’s famous words from 1914: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them’. The Union flag, carefully folded, was carried into the church, where it was placed on the altar to spend its final night in Wootton Bassett. For this ceremony took place in the town which had been, since 2007, by accident and circumstance, the place through which the bodies of British servicemen and women, killed in conflict overseas, were repatriated. The ceremony described here did not commemorate a repatriation. It was a commemoration for the ceremonies themselves, as repatriation flights had been routed back through a different airfield, and another town was now to take responsibility for marking these melancholy occasions. But it shared many elements of the ceremonial structure which had evolved over the preceding months and years. The observances did not have any central co-ordinating body. They began when, in 2007, RAF Lyneham became the temporary site for the arrival of repatriation flights in the UK. By chance, the then Mayor, Percy Miles, was shopping in the town when he ran into a colleague from the council, who mentioned that a cortege would be passing directly through the town on its way to the hospital in Oxford. He put on his mayoral robes, and stood to attention as the funeral car passed through the town. Gradually, others became involved: the local branch of the Royal British Legion (RBL); local pub owners and business people; and, of course, the people of the town. By 2009, at the height of the repatriations, the streets were thronged with people. Serving and former soldiers lined the route, lowering brightly

Coda: Picturing Charlie Hebdo

This volume is predicated upon a particular kind of doubling, captured in its title: Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis, Extremity. For the theatre and performance makers who created the performances under discussion are not only making a claim for a particular mode of survival: articulating an alternative, shaping a future, staging a different kind of life. They are also staging those alternatives: materializing and performing them, for however temporary or provisional a moment. They are performing survival and performing for survival, working in registers of both presence and representation simultaneously.

Performance in a time of terror: critical mimesis and the age of uncertainty

This volume analyzes the relationship between performance and politics through the concept and experience of terror. The book is divided into six chapters that analyze performances and theatre during the first decade of the 21st century within the framework of the so-called War on Terror. The first three chapters provide a theoretical introduction, paying particular attention to the concepts of critical mimesis and waste, and focusing on radical performances of violence such as the 2004 video beheadings in Iraq and counterterrorist tactics used by British forces in Northern Ireland. The second part of the book is divided into three further chapters looking at theatrical, activist, and community-based performances that respond to the political and social pressures of the War on Terror. These include an analysis of verbatim political theatre in London such as the work of the Tricycle Theatre, David Hare, Michael Frayn, and Mark Ravenhill, among others; antiwar camps and street protests in London and New York; and community performances commissioned by counterterrorism agencies in the UK following the bombings of July 2005. The book will provide a valuable resource for scholars interested in the way performance studies problematizes the idea of terror as articulated by Anglo-American foreign and domestic policies.

The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State

the filming. They discuss cars, local landmarks and pubs they walk past. They mention the festival and suggest that they will go there in the evening, to ‘make friends’. Next, the DVD teaches the viewer the alphabet in British Sign Language and in Croatian Sign Language, and then goes on to show a conversation in Sign Language with no translation. Finally, Angel and the blind man embark on a race through the town, inspired by the Tortoise and the Hare. A young blonde woman waves a flag and sends the men off – we see the blind man, as the tortoise, walk on steadily, while Angel is drinking in the pub. Finally, the uptempo music changes to ‘Chariots of Fire’, and the blind man reaches the closing line seconds before Angel, the blonde woman rewarding him with hugs and kisses. During the race, there is no visible audience and there are no signs of the festival; this part seems to be produced solely for the DVD audience. With this, the DVD is a documentation of the weekend, but also offers additional, exclusive, performances. This combination makes it possible to conjecture the atmosphere of the M21: the glimpses of a slightly confused, diverse audience trying to make sense of performances that were not explained to them resembles my experience of watching the DVD. The DVD menu and the box give little indication of how the second part of the DVD relates to the overview of the M21 performances given in the first part. One interpretation is that, just as the otherM21 performances rework themes of the Olympic Games, the Invalid Film, Part 2 shows how sensory impaired visitors ofMuchWenlock explore the town,much like many tourists in 2012 explored and tried to make sense of Olympic London. The juxtaposition of sensory impairment and the experience of trying to apprehend a foreign language, culture and country is an interesting idea, but sometimes the film almost conflates these two experiences. Of the two booklets, one consists of postcards containing images and writings by all of the artists. Each artist uses a different approach to discuss his or her performance, recounting the expectations or inspirations for the piece, or simply describing a scene from it. Some of the writings function as an extension of the piece, echoing its style and mood. The beautiful images in M21: From the Medieval to the 21st Century offer a sense of unification amongst the art and the artists; they create a burst of colour and interruption, and emphasize the tension between the modern and the Medieval – most vividly, for example, with Simon McKeown’s vibrant light projections against an ancient church. The second booklet contains specifically commissioned essays by Diana Damian and Emma Geliot. Damian’s essay ‘The Politics of Difference: Conversation Pieces’ offers short readings of several of the performances, and explores how they tease out the hidden history of disability in the town, for example through Ann Whitehurst’s performance Training To Be Me, performed on the site of the former St John’s hospital for ‘lost and naked beggars’ (p. 6). Damian’s focus on the rural as a largely unexplored space for Disability Live Art emphasizes the important role of Much Wenlock in these performances, as the performers take over the town and create a new site where rituals, symbols and traditions are destabilized and subverted. Although Damian’s essay is too short to offer in-depth close readings of the performances, it provides some reflection on the event and on its relevance within Live Art. In contrast, Geliot’s essay, simply titled ‘M21’, is comprised of short, snapshot-like descriptions of all of the events during the weekend. These quick glimpses manage to visualize the diversity of the event and the chaos and disruption it created in the town, but in comparison to the snapshots of the events offered in the DVD, Geliot’s seem more dream-like and sensual. They create a magical atmosphere not apparent in the documentary. In combination, the essays and DVD leave the performances intangible, an idea. As such, M21: From the Medieval to the 21st Century highlights the immediate and temporary nature of Live Art. One of the main assets of this release is its date: it was published by the end of 2012, and thus can build on a memory of the Cultural Olympiad that is still fresh. Rather than trying to recapture fully one of the spectacular Unlimited commissions, it provides alternative points of view, extends the artworks and creates new art. As such, it does not predominantly offer reflection on the Unlimited commissions, but puts the focus on an expansion of the work. Hopefully this release will be followed by other publications offering a more complete retrospective of Unlimited.

Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions

example). It is also striking that two key texts of desire – Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1978) and Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card (1987) – do not attract attention. The collection is also notable for its focus on theorists and case studies drawn predominantly from western philosophical and artistic traditions. Here it would have been worth considering, even if briefly, the implications of this selection, especially in relation to other cultural formations, histories, and traditions. Given the admirable historical scope covered by the book, from Attic tragedy to one of Cave’s performances following the release of Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008), and the care that many of the authors take to engage with the historical and cultural specificities of their chosen cases studies, I would have welcomed a reflection on shifts (or otherwise) in the death/desire dynamic that the book implicitly tracks, especially as the introduction notes that the essays ‘reflect changing attitudes to sexual desire and death’ (p. 10). Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance will be of interest to students and academics interested in the topics, artists, genres, and periods covered by the book. Readers may wish, though, for a stronger sense of the collection’s position on relations between eroticism, death, and theatre and reflection on the theoretical and methodological concerns that inform the book.

Siting the People: Power, Protest, and Public Space

I begin with three ‘theatrical’ events. On 21 June 1887, after almost 20 years away from public life, Queen Victoria travelled in an open landau through the streets of Westminster to Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey, escorted by her Indian cavalry and accompanied by rows of brightly uniformed soldiers. The streets were packed with well-wishers and spectators, arrayed on ten miles of specially erected scaffolding, who had gathered to see as much as they could of this glittering imperial pageant. This moment marked two things: the shift from actual to symbolic power of the monarch, and the beginning of Britain’s reputation for unparalleled pageantry. By the time of her Diamond Jubilee ten years later, Victoria was able to write, ‘[n]o-one, ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me passing through these six miles of streets’ (cited in Cannadine, 1983, p.134).

Performance in the Borderlands

There is considerable critical energy currently circulating around the study of borders within the field of theatre and performance studies. Michael Kobialka, in his pioneering edited volume Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory wrote of the ‘border’ as being a productive metaphor for the analysis of identity, artistic practices, and histories. The idea of the border opens up space for analysis of both formally conceived performances taking place at borders and in border zones, and also recognises something of the performative nature of the encounter at the border itself. Perceived as the natural limit of territory – the geographical defining point at which civil rights, laws, and so on are made manifest – it becomes the symbolic and material entity onto which national, migrant, and diasporic identities are projected, both figuratively and literally. With Performance in the Borderlands, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young have produced a new edited volume of essays in Elaine Aston and Bryan Reynolds’ ‘Performance Interventions’ series; the book offers an exciting series of perspectives, readings, and cross-disciplinary engagements with this most important theme and makes a persuasive case for the contribution performance studies can make to the wider border studies field. For Rivera-Servera and Young, the concept of the border is itself enriched by the encounter with performance studies: ‘the border sensorium exceeds the artificial limits of the national boundaries, travelling in embodied, as well as mediatised forms, tactics, even feelings, and extending its temporality well beyond the act of crossing’ (p. 4). The editors figure the centrality of the border to so many forms of cultural practice, engagement, and imagination, as a relation to the restriction of, or potentiality for, movement. The experience of the border, which produces an inside and an outside against which the subject cannot help but take a position (or be forced to take a position), provides a productive model for so many of the pairings which concern the performance studies field: questions of identity and exclusion; of representation and the ‘real’; of bodies and inscriptions upon bodies. This book, comprised of fourteen chapters and a transcribed conversation between contributors, presents several interpretations of what it might mean to think through a border. Although the sequencing of the essays offers several fascinating counterpoints and complementarities, there are frequent thematic chimes across the collection as a whole: José Manuel Valenzuela explores the dance-works of Minerva Tapia, examining the inscription of the migratory process on the dancers’ bodies, and his questions find resonance in both Ana Elena Puga’s reading of migrant melodrama and Alejandro L. Madrid’s account of the dance form of Danzóa as a site of cultural exchange between Mexico and Cuba. Madrid’s essay frames questions, furthermore, on the borders between ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, and on the relationship between diasporic and nation-state communities. This simultaneous reading of a physical and a metaphorical border is something shared between a number of the essays. Lowell Fiet’s examination of the problem of the border ‘in the context of the sea-separated island societies of the Caribbean’ (p. 248) finds a useful counterpart in Patricia Ybarra’s essay on the experiences and representations of balseros, the rafters who, in attempting to cross it, produce 1. Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, ed. by Michael Kobialka (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22(3), 2012, 421–432