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Redecorating the Fourth Wall: Environmental Theatre Today

1989; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1145988

1531-4715

Steve Nelson,

Theatre and Performance Studies

It has been 20 years since the term first entered the critical and practical performance vocabulary. The intervening years have brought about a different audience sensibility. Performers and techniques once considered part of the theatrical fringe have become decidedly mainstream. Philip Glass now makes scotch ads while Robert Wilson and Spalding Gray have become fixtures of public television (Gray is even available on home video). The stylistic and methodological innovations wrought by these practitioners are also becoming more familiar. Actor/ audience relationships that were daring and novel in 1968 are now commonplace. The growth of performance art during the past decade, and its steady emergence into the mainstream of aesthetic consciousness, has served to make environmental theatre a more complex and less straightforwardly theatrical enterprise. This article will explore the evolving nature of environmental performance in the theatre by examining four contemporary environmental productions, their relationships to one another, and their connection to the larger tradition of environmental performance. The shows discussed by no means represent a comprehensive survey of productions utilizing environmental staging, but they do provide a representative sample of the directions taken by contemporary artists. Environmental theatre has meant many things to many people since Richard Schechner first applied the term to the experiments of the late I96os (see plate i). At the very least, it implies nonfrontal staging and a flexible approach to the actor/audience relationship (see Aronson I977). The concept has also been largely associated with the avant-garde, although the past decade has seen the increasing use of environmental techniques in the commercial theatre. Today's environmental productions lack the urgent political and artistic agendas that typified such efforts in the '6os. They are also more reliant on the eclectic, smorgasbord-style blending of techniques and traditions that typifies much postmodern performance. There is also a very definite shift in focus from engagement to entertainment in the pieces themselves. Terms such as theme park, carnival,