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Defining Postmodern Theatre

I'd like to begin by differentiating postmodern theatre from its preceding periodizing categorization, the 'classical' and the 'modern' drama. Classical drama is characterized by the value placed in the plot and its adherence to Aristotle's laws of dramatic unities. In the nineteenth century we also observed how Hegelian philosophy filtered into modern drama with the movement of 'man'/character at the forefront of dramaturgy in the character dramas of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekov. We also see how Aristotle's mimesis is taken to the heights in the period of naturalism as influenced by the Darwinian science in the stagings of modern theatre. Raymond Williams observes the perfection of tragedy in modern drama where the alienated predicament of the human being in a highly industrialized world is highlighted. He sees Beckett's tragicomedies representing the reduction and degradation of the human beings in a new absurdist dramatic structure.

To Elinor Fuchs, it is in the postmodern theatre that we witness the "death of the character" and the eradication of the plot. In this statement we are reminded of Barthes' announcement of the "death of the author", Foucault stating the "death of man" and Lyotard hailing the dissolution of metanarratives. As rigid categorization and structures of modernism collapse, eclecticism now characterizes postmodernism. But unlike Jameson's notion of pastiche and extreme consumerism of multi-national capitalism, critical postmodern theatre derives its theory from the post-structuralists' insight on semiotics. De Saussure laid bare the very construction of the human language exposing its structure of signs and codes. Taking off from this, Derrida's analysis of the subjectivity of man's meaning-making has furthered the invalidation of metanarratives. Now as the validity of the sign-signified and code-meaning constructs of languages are put into question, postmodernists are forced to investigate the language construction itself. Ultimately, we come to realize that meaning and signification is subjective and should be contextualized. With this, categorizing boundaries set by modernism collapse as well.

How do all these reflect in postmodern theatre?

Raymond Williams notion of the theatre convention explains this. Conventions in theatre according to Raymond Williams are methods such as figurative speech, stage blocking, songs or dance through which specific dramatic objectives are achieved. He pointed out how conventions in the theatre whether, performative techniques or literary devices, are characterized by its acceptability by the audience and its relations to the specific given standards. With this, he stressed the fact how dramatic conventions are maintained as "terms upon which author, performers and audience agree to meet, so that the performance may be carried on." Nicole Boireau expounded on the concept of dramatic conventions through the Hamletesque metaphor of the 'Mousetrap'. From this, he claims that the truth can be accessed through the world of illusion; that it is only through theatricality that truth can be revealed. Theatre expresses reality through the use of artificial conventions. He explained that only through the reflective nature of drama and the dramatic conventions that truths presented in drama are validated . It is then through the same dramatic and theatrical conventions set as the medium in expressing truths, that the expressed truths can be validated. It is through the limitations and self-confined means of definition can the expressed truths substantiate.

Williams and Boireau's explanation is a profound manifestation of structuralist and post-structuralist concept of laying bare language and systems of signs and codes. Although rooted in the Classical and Modern Theatre tradition, this is a postmodern realization of what Linda Hutcheon calls the self-reflexive nature of postmodern theatre.

With the dissolution of a 'universal' language, postmodern theatre is but provoked to look into historical and cultural contexts for a language to articulate itself. The same characteristic is seen in other art forms. Postmodern choreographers made dances about dance, inquiring on the very core of movement vocabularies that gave birth to choreographical works on walking, skipping, etc. This is also true in the experimentations on the various dance styles seen in Twyla Tharp's combinations of jazz, ballet and ballroom. In the Philippines, this is seen in Agnes Locsin's and Alice Reyes' fusion of jazz and ballet and Philippine folk and ethnic movements. Postmodern architects see the history of architectural design as a diverse source of signs to be combined and recombined, thus Greek columns, Art Deco ornamentation and Modern Industrial materials are eclectically put together in a single building.

Postmodern theatre sees the various cultural and historical traditions as a vast source of signs. Kaye describes how postmodernism sees history as a store of signs available for postmodern theatre practice. In a recent production of Hamlet in Singapore, Hamlet was shown as a Noh actor Ophelia as a Balinese dancer. Or in the recent staging of Dulaang Habi's musical Sa Kaharian ng Araw, audiences are taken into an seemingly incoherent worlds of a cabaret/rock concert, a Peking opera stage, and an extremely expressionistic theatrical world. The music is a mixture of Broadway influenced pop and rock songs, and fusion of classical and traditional Filipino ethnic and folk music. In the postmodern theatre, representations in acting style, costumes, production design, music and other elements are taken from different contexts.

With the collapse of the modernist boundaries, postmodern theatre takes on pluralism and multiplicity in style, approach and over-all process. This has been reflected in various approaches to production. Another important postmodern theatre practice is the use of inter-text, or what Jameson calls a culture of quotations, where various texts could be used to comment on each other. Such is in a production of Romeo and Juliet, where the play ends with the closing monologue by Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Nick Pichay's musical version of the Oyayi ng Ulan, the character Dugong complained about the accumulating garbage in the ocean. He remarked that the worst kind of garbage is the postmodern poetry of new poets- which of course includes Pichay himself.

With the similar collapse of the modernist notion of Aristotle's linearity and the Hegelian logic of cause and effect, postmodern theatre is characterized by multi-dimensionality and simultaneity. A simplified example of this is Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends where the audiences are divided into groups to see different scenes of the play happening in various places. Or in the seashore scene of the 2002 staging of Sa Kaharian ng Araw, past and present converge with the appearance of Paolo's deceased parents in the same stage where Paolo lovingly recalls them. On the same space in the stage an actor fishes on one side, while another plays with a rain stick, while other actors waiting for their cue sit attentively on chairs onstage. Here, multi-dimensionality and simultaneity is not just seen in how the plot is (dis)arranged. Even the actors playing the characters go through different dimensions of performance and representation in the same time and space. The actor although dressed up for the character he is to portray sits on a chair on the side waiting for his cue, substantiate both as the actor and as the character. The person exist as both the actor and character simultaneously but in different dimensions - where at one point, while he waits for his cue he essentially is not part of the play but simultaneously, physically and intentionally, he is physically there.

As Fuchs sees the diminution of character and plot in postmodern theatre, she sees the other theatrical elements taking on equal importance with these elements. She sees that "each signifying element - lights, visual design, music, etc., as well as plot and character elements - stand to some degree as independent actor." She pointed out that the Aristotelian elements survived but their classical and modern structural hierarchies ceased to operate. This attitude in theatre production takes its roots from the Brechtian Epic Theatre. Brecht earlier on said: "Today we see the theatre being given absolute priority over actual plays. The theatre apparatus's priority is a priority of means of production... The Theatre can stage anything; it theatres it all" (Raymond Williams, p.280).

And as postmodern theatre see the "death of the author" (the playwright), the director now takes the central role as the theorist responsible for creating the language of a production.

Postmodern theatre is also differentiated from the modern theatre with its mode-of-production. The Industrial Revolution and the idea of mass-production and the division-of-labor affected music and theatre production. The symphony orchestra and the opera are megalomaniac inventions of modernism. The eighteenth century symphony captured the massive sound of modernism. Here music is produced by a big group of musicians who are divided into sections. The opera is an even bigger modernist creation. Such massive theatre production requires a complex web of 'workers'/artists who work as a big company that include an orchestra, singers, dancers, clothes-makers, carpenters, etc. Even the art-products are now produced for mass consumption. While music used to be performed in courts and chambers, the symphony and the opera are staged in large opera houses that sit thousands.

This new paradigm in theatre production calls for a different attitude from the audience as well. In postmodern theatre, Aristotle's notion of catharsis comes to extreme obscurity in postmodern theatre. Aesthetic experience becomes completely dependent upon the meaning making process. The aesthetic experience that transpires in the postmodern process is closer to Kant's sublime. Unlike Aristotle's cathartic drama that succumbs its audience to empathizing attitude towards the mimetic illusion of classical and modern drama, Kant states that distance is necessary in achieving aesthetic pleasure. Brecht in turn, proposes 'complex seeing' in theatre: "Complex seeing must be practiced... . Thinking above the flow of the play is more important than thinking from within the flow of the play" (Ibid., p281).

In as much as postmodern theatre is required to go through a dialogic process of taking theory into practice and back to theory for it to be able to express itself, postmodern audience then is also called to go through this process of meaning-making. Here, postmodern theatre forces its audience to always take on a critical stance in watching. Language-creation and meaning-making in postmodern theatre is never a simple one-on-one correspondence mode of cognition. With a wary stance towards subjectivity of language, postmodern productions then are manifested with recurring disruptions in its audience's cognitive process. John Orr sees this as intentional dis-recognition/mis-recognition and he notes that these are often used as dramatic-shock effects. The audience is provoked to figure out what is 'menacing' and 'strange" in familiar objects onstage and they are prodded to "translate back the strangeness, as a performed disguise of the metonymic, into something they truly recognize, knowing there is no complete translation" (John Orr, p.32) .

In the elusive nature of postmodernism as a theory, DiGaetani sees the importance of having a terminology that can serve as a handle. He noted that "it is wonderful to have a term like postmodernism to describe the art" (John DiGaetani, p. xv). To Fuchs, the theatre has indeed what we can call now postmodern and she asserts that the sooner we grasp its methods we are "immediately at a better vantage point from which to view what used to be called 'avant-garde' theatre" (Elinor Fuchs, p.171).

Works Cited:

Boireau, Nicole. Drama in Drama. Macmillan Press: London, c.1997. John DiGaetani. The Search for Postmodernism: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. Greenwood Press: New York, 1991. Elinor Fuchs . Death of the Character. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c.1996 John Orr. Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture. Hong Kong: Macmillan Academic and Professional, Ltd., 1991 Raymond Williams. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Oxford University Press: New York, 1969 c. 1968.

About the Author

meLê is a theatre director, web/graphic/video artist, a music composer and an intercultural art studies scholar from the Philippines. His interdisciplinary practice and scholarship in the media and fine arts, has built him a reputation as one of the most active postmodern/postcolonial artist in Southeast Asia. Visit his website: www.meleyamomo.com.

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