About Performative Time

Camila Caiza 30-04-2016, Utrecht Theater, as well as life, is composed by a sequence of moments, of changes. These changes make the passage of time visible, as Felipe Fernandez Armesto said ‘Time is change. No change, no time’1 (Fernandez, 2010). Changes, being understood as a sequence of infinite moments in time, show a character of not lasting elements, which would make theater and life itself shaped by an ephemeral quality. However, even if life and theater both share a frame of non-eternal duration, it has been historically proved that both in a deeper understanding can transcend through time. In order to approach the paradoxical duality between the ephemeral nature of theater in opposition to its transcendent aspect, it is necessary to first introduce the main concepts of both ephemeral and transcendent. ‘Ephemeral’ is understood as ‘fleeting, evanescent, transient, momentary, or brief’2; while ‘Transcendent’ is defined as ‘going beyond the limits of ordinary experience’3. These two contrasting qualities of ephemeral and transcendent, being present at the same time on theater, reflect a total ambiguous character on art and life, if we consider ambiguity as ‘the possibility of interpreting an expression in two or more distinct ways’4. Therefore, being theater an expression of an ambiguous relationship between ephemerality and transcendence, it is quite interesting to approach and analyze the performative time from this quality within the frame of scenography.

In order to get a wider view on the subject of ephemerality, it is relevant to consider examples in this frame referring to theater, as well as, the human experience itself.

Furthermore, these examples can be the medium to clarify and explain the main

1

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/felipe-fern225ndez-armestonever-mind-the-hour-we-have-lost-track-of-what-time-really-means-2121167.html 2 http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ephemeral 3 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcendent 4 http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ambiguity

motivation behind the choice to approach time from its ephemeral quality. These two examples came from two different fields, one from the text ‘Time Structures/Time Sculptures’ by Hans-Thies Lehmann, in which he referred to the human body as the epitome of a sculptural form of time, and the other one, the scenographical approach of the performance ‘Schwalbe performs a time’ developed by the Collective Schwalbe5.

According to the reflection made in the text and during the performance, they both referred to ephemerality, but in different contexts. First, in the quote from the text ´Time Structures/Time Sculptures’, Hans-Thies Lehmann expresses that ‘the human body is from the very beginning a sculptural form of time. With a beauty able to become an image, an exhaustion able to become age, breath able to become life, and gestures able to freeze, the body becomes – in the statuary of the gods and in the myth of Pygmalion, in painting and in the theater – the epitome of an object-subject, which makes time itself in potential readable.’ (Lehmann, 1997) Here, Lehman states how the human body is a direct reflection on the passage of time creating in this way a metaphor on how time is being shown in to the matter or the substance and its changes. But also, it generates a reflection on how ephemeral these changes are and consequently the human body and the human existence. The other example is the one referring to the performance ‘Schwalbe performs a time’ by Collective Schwalbe. With the purpose of getting a better understanding on the nature of the performance itself, it is important to be aware of the context in which the event was developed. The performance took place into the traditional frame of a theater stage and started almost at midnight, lasting six hours until the early morning, which also generated a very specific environment regarding time and its relationship between performers and spectators. Throughout this time the performers built up a series of

5

Schwalbe is a theater collective formed by seven performers and creators coming from mime studies at the Amsterdam College of Arts. See web site http://www.schwalbe.nu/

different theater scenographies taken from past representative Dutch theater plays, all of them from different points in time and also from very different contexts. After the assemblage of every set, the performers broke them down almost immediately and started to build up the next one. The whole duration of the event showed the building up and tearing down of a series of different scenographies, but it was not just about the aesthetics of each image created through the generation of these constructed landscapes; indeed, it created a deeper reflection on how ephemeral theater can be, especially the scenography itself. Both examples show the character of ephemerality in two different scenarios, the human body and theater. Also, both metaphors referred to the passage of time in real situations, the first one using a poetic analogy through the human body and its decline over time, and the other one constructing and deconstructing sets on real time, which made the ephemeral quality more obvious. These two different experiences triggered on me the curiosity on the subject of ephemerality, but also at the same time, they immediately made me think about the opposite concept of ephemerality: transcendence, and how both can became coexisting elements within the frame of the same field, in this case theater. Maybe there is no specific or unique answer to this question, which also made the question remain ambiguous, but in any case it is important to consider the concern of how theater can abandon or transform its inherent ephemeral quality and be taken to a level of transcendent. As well as any other form of art, theater, in addition to create or generate an aesthetic language, pretend to develop a reflection or some sort of parallel perspective or point of view. Is in this creation of a perdurable reflection that theater finds its transcendent character, but also it endures on the collection of ideas captured not only physically, but in a more important way, by the individual and collective memory. Nevertheless, there is also a physical part remaining from a theatrical experience, which might not be the essential part of theater that would transcend, but

should also be taken in count as a physical archival of the event itself. Therefore, the ephemeral physicality of theater is being taken to the level of transcendent by the generation of a reflection in the intellectual aspect and a collection of material in the physical side. Going back to the fact that theater is composed by a sequence of changes; and these changes all share the quality of being ephemeral, it could be said that the reflections created during this process, the images, the traces are the transcendent material generated through these composition of ephemeral moments, and that the ambiguous relationship between these two qualities made any theatrical experience a unique one.

To get a different approach on this subject, it is relevant to bring up also some comparisons related to other art fields. For instance, by taken a look into architecture, being perceived in its very basic approach to space and time, it could be said that the materialization of an architectonical object is meant to be enduring or permanent in opposition to the main understanding of an scenography that is meant to endure as long as the performance is being developed. But also, by getting a deeper thought on the main purpose of architecture, and here it is pertinent to quote Architect Bernard Tschumi that said “there is no architecture without program, without action, without event” (Tschumi, 1996), it could also be said that both architecture and scenography share the quality of enclosing a specific action or event, then regarding this action in time that could take place in a designed space, both architectural and scenographical actions or events remain ephemeral. However, as said before, the transcendent element does not lie on the physical action but in the quality of the traces. Then, continuing with the reflection regarding the comparison between architecture and scenography, if in architecture the traces are, of course, the ruins left from the physical space; what could represent the “ruins” of a theatrical experience or a performative event? Regarding the experience lived there and the reflections generated. This instance could also be approached from different art fields,

but architecture is the only area sharing the same qualities of space, time and action with theater. Along these lines, it is possible to say that this transcendent element of scenography can be analyzed through comparing the performative space in relation to the ruins in architecture, since time and history are left on those spaces, how this specific performative action that took place in another time can transcend by the means of space, in the same way as the ruins work for architecture, taking the feeling of an action that took place there to another future time? Then, it presents another question, is the archival of a scenographical event revealing the traces of the reflection generated there or is it in the collective memory created by it?

Either way the ambiguous quality of theater being an ephemeral form of art reveals a lot of questions regarding the essence of the main theatrical practice, which in a way could present a reflection by itself that can be taken into the spatial dimension through a scenographical view.

Bibliography: Fernandez Armesto, Felipe. “Never mind the hour, we have lost track of what time really means”, 2010. Independent: 1.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. “‘Time Structures/Time Sculptures’: On some Theatrical Forms at the End of the Twentieth Century”, 1997. Theaterschrift 12. Belgium, Kaaitheater: 47.

Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction, 1996. Cambridge, MAS: MIT Press.

Collective Schwalbe. Schwalbe performs a time, 2016. Utrecht, Theater Kikker. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ephemeral http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcendent http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ambiguity