Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Antitheatricality, Ibsen, and Black Women's Bodies

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scr.2008.0009

1549-3377

Richard Paul Knowles,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Antitheatricality, Ibsen, and Black Women’s Bodies Ric Knowles (bio) Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner, eds. Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 260 pp. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 476 pp. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 396 pp. Late in Bodies in Dissent, Daphne A. Brooks' extraordinarily dense exploration of transatlantic black popular performance from 1850 to 1910, Brooks describes black actor/dancer Aida Overton Walker's historic performance of Salome (the first black performer of the role) as "resistant" to the historical evolution of dance towards disembodiment, citing dance historian Susan Leigh Foster's description of the dancers becoming "no-bodies" (338). Walker, according to Brooks, resisted being subsumed into pure form, claiming agency for the black female body. Not once in her quixotic, compelling, and archivally magisterial study does Brooks reference modernism as such, and yet this book is paradoxically central to the project of this special issue of South Central Review on the subject of "Staging Modernism." The book never mentions antitheatricality and only briefly explores the issue of theatricality as such. And yet Bodies in Dissent articulates brilliantly against the other two books in this review package—Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner's Against Theatre and Toril Moi's Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism—where those issues are foregrounded. And the story of Overton Walker's Salome is representative of a project that articulates popular, black (women's) embodied agency against the exoticizing, antitheatrical, and formalist agenda of the modernists, for whom theatricality in general, and the (black, female) body in particular, were problems. Ackerman and Puchner's book began its life as a special issue of the journal Modern Drama. Focusing on a narrower time period, the book picks up where Jonas Barish left off in his classic 1981 volume The Antitheatrical Prejudice, exploring various aspects of the apparently oxymoronic field of "modern theatre." Setting out to "indicate how modernist theatre responds to, represents and critiques the forces unleashed by rapid industrialization and the capitalist mode of production" (1), the [End Page 163] book focuses on a central problem: that theatricality involves representation (including a requisite subject/object binary); that modernism opposes representation in its search for pure form, seeking the merging of subject and object; and that therefore modernism is inherently antitheatrical. The book explores, moreover, the paradox that the modernist attack on theatricality positioned the theatre as "a productive force within modernism," one that led, through the staging (or hosting) of its own critique, to "the most successful reforms of modern theatre and drama" (1). Ackerman and Puchner are careful in their introduction to historicize antitheatricalism, arguing that modernism's antitheatricality always emerged in response to a specific theatre, and many of the essays in the volume address the evolution of modernist antitheatricality as a series of responses to very specific theatrical forms. Thus, Herbert Lindenberger accounts for the evolution of the modernisttwentieth-century opera of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Messiaen as a fundamentally antitheatricalist response to Wagner's theatricalization of all of the arts. David Savran finds the "legitimate theatre" of 1920s America—"serious literary drama" (203)—to have been fashioned out of an attempt to set itself apart from the debased theatricality of popular performance forms of the time such as comic strips, movies, jazz, and vaudeville. Julie Stone Peters, focusing on Wedekind and Wilde, argues that the modern theatre constituted itself through its encounters with antitheatricalist censorship, where, "if theatre was troubling in part because it always verged on the obscene, obscenity was troubling in part because it always verged on the theatrical" (214). Elin Diamond explores the representational regimes of Zora Neale Hurston's "art theatre" and Brecht's epic theatre, rooted in the "primitivist body," as rejections of "the gate-keeping bourgeois theatre establishment[s]" of their day. This includes, for Hurston, the middle-class melodramas and classical plays presented by the Negro Art Theatre in 1920s Harlem. On the other hand, Patrick McGuinness and Arnold Aronson examine the Symbolist theatre's recoil from...