Staging the Ethical Dilemma of Liveness

Ondertitel:John Jesurun's Divergent Play with Convergence

In contemporary experimental theatre, the preeminence of verbal text and linear narrative progression seems to have shifted shifted towards a 'postdramatic' predilection for polysensorial communication. At the same time, general technological developments have led to a morally troubling tension between an overall sense of greater efficiency and the confusion caused by their sophistication. Taken together, though, both phenomena rely on similar cognitive strategies to derive meaning from a complex context.

For, not only did the advent of new technologies spark discussion in techno-specific and non-specific fields alike, their interplay in a recognizable/ 'traditional' context such as the theatre underscores nothing if not the potentialities born from such encounters - and this predominantly through an invitation from performer to spectator to connect via conscious participation in a shared effort of meaning-making. Simply put: it thus becomes a meeting that stages its own disruptive constructedness (see also Rayner 548). This essay, accordingly, will strive to foreground precisely those mechanisms at work in simultaneously stimulating, enabling, and constricting said interchange.

Iconic explorer of the rampant technologization and its effects on human consciousness, the American 'post-surrealist' dramaturge-director John Jesurun, for one, refuses to tell unambiguous stories with clear beginning, middle, and end. Instead, he ventures to direct his spectators' gaze towards the untold stories of the 'in-between.' Small wonder, then, that he moved from filmmaking to the theatre and its unique capacity of incorporating a virtually limitless number of perspectives, signifiers, and signifying systems in a temporally and spatially ritualized event whereby performers and spectators are physically present at the same time in the same place. Indeed, Jesurun's media-saturated compositions all integrate video projections, mainstream filmic montage techniques, and narrative strategies from different genres in a stage performance while upsetting any sense of linear logic. Accordingly, with an aesthetic conception designed to bombard our senses 'in real time' with the impossibility of narrative closure, Jesurun effectively stages what theatre scholar Bonnie Marranca has termed "the dilemma of liveness" (2010).

By dramatizing 'otherness' while communicating across 'sameness' in the here and now, the perspective so conveyed effectively establishes the parallel notions of 'interpration' and 'identity' as products of a perennially oscillating play between attraction and alienation. In recent critical discourses this type of analogical transfer has gone by the name of convergence culture, a concept popularized by theorist Henry Jenkins with his influential book bearing the same title (2006). Stressing above all the emancipatory potential and ethical dimension of "a technological process bringing together multiple media functions," Jenkins simultaneously also contends that "convergence leads to divergence" on behalf, precisely, of the hybridizing impulse at its root. The relevance of John Jesurun's artistic practice for this discussion is therefore just that: by reminding us that the 'live' is inevitably mediated, he conveys a kind of techno-functionalism that is exuberantly lucid about its own limitations.

The discussion's ethical dimension thereby particularly foregrounds the aforementioned constructedness of our contributions (as creators or spectators) to the aesthetic event. Because it is performed 'live' (despite a possible pluri-medial mediation) a theatre production as such "cannot be separated from what it does" (Bank 17), and hence procures us with an "ethical imperative" (Fenske 7) to consider not the distinctions but rather the interconnections between real and simulated, material and virtual, product and process. Effectively shifting our focus from qualitative evaluation to structure-based reasoning, the perspective so proposed focuses not on specific values per se, but rather on the relations that constitute the field under scrutiny. The theatre production's inescapable interpellation of audience participation - cognitive or embodied - does the rest: by dramatizing meaning-in-process, its spectators are forced to address the act of signification itself, deconstruct this dialectic, and in doing so evaluate their own value judgment. To Fenske such an imperative "is not merely critical, it is ethical" (13) because it highlights the intrinsic incompatibility of ideas. Indeed, when incompatibility leads to meaningful interpretations malgré soi, it becomes the very locus of ethical engagement. The invitation for response or participation so bestowed upon the spectator ultimately generates a reciprocal tension between creator, performer, and audience opening up a dialogic space of engagement - and as such a wealth of new, but now traceable possibilities that form a more concrete basis for value judgments.

ISBN:9789004346338

Jaar van publicatie:2017

Trefwoorden:ethics, dramaturgy, mediaturgy, John Jesurun

Toegankelijkheid:Closed