Steam Radio: On Theatre's Thin Air
A paper given at the London Theatre Seminar, 27 October 2003
A mouth that has
no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon
Being but a mouthful of air I am content to perish
I am but a mouthful of sweet air
There is a venerable tradition that emphasises the airiness of
theatre; seeing actors as ghostly shades, able to be dissipated
by a puff of wind, and the braggart business that transpires upon
the stage as gust and bluster, so much hot air. Like Hamlet, the
chameleon actor lives on air, promise-crammed (III.ii, 107). At
one end of the continuum might be King Lear, in which
the modulations of air participate in and are seen as a rich and
varied correlative to the action, at the other end,
Becketts Breath, which stages the interval of life
as a simple act of breath and thereby shows the elemental
incidence of breath to the stage.
I am going to suggest that the air is among the most important of
the unacknowledged frames or material contexts for what goes on,
or as they say in the North, comes off in the
theatre. Air is in one sense literally the raw material of
theatre; the inert, unshaped reserve of matter that is shaped
into utterance. Actors take to the air, take it up, make it move.
The round and hollow O of the theatre, the great
globe itself, may be at once a world, a throat, or a slipknot of
the lips; in the framing of that o, and the oohs and
aahs, the gales of laughter, or the boos and hisses, that are
supposed to answer it from the auditorium, the air is formed into
those smoke-rings that are the temporal form of performance. But
something has happened, and is still happening to the air in
theatre. I will say in fact that the substance and the salience
of air in theatre come to notice especially because theatre
habitually evacuates the air, attempts to substitute a kind of
air conditioning for the condition of air that it must always
inhabit.
The Vulgarity of Air
Theatre has become liable to look down on the air. Classic
theatre, proper theatre, knows its place, which is precisely
upright, planted foursquare on the stage, striving against the
pull of earth, but also drawing Antaeus-like from it. Theatre
that occupies the mid-air, attempts to occupy itself with it, is
vulgar, showy, popular, parodic, parasitic. Kleist found in the
puppet show a kind of grace that living actors could never
attain, deriving from the fact that string-puppets merely skirt
or brush the ground, rather than being planted on it. His
arguments seduce precisely because the predominating opinion is
still that ungrounded performance of this kind is ersatz,
infantile or untrustworthy. The same kind of lightness of being
is on display in shadow-theatre and in cartoons. The interaction
of live actors and animated figures in Who Killed Roger
Rabbit? posed a problem for the movies sound-design:
what would toons sound like if you bashed or brushed up against
them? The answer hit on was that they would thud and boom like
balloons. The violence of cartoons comes not just from the
sadistic recognition you can do anything you like to creatures
whose life is merely imputed, but also from the desire to
compensate, with the violence of volume, impact and screamingly
garish colour, for the fundamental airiness of animation. Hence,
the most famous invention of the cartoon, the principle that, if
you run off the edge of a cliff, you will remain suspended in
mid-air, legs furiously whirling, until you look down and
acknowledge your situation. In the cartoon, to fall requires a
conscious consent or exercise of the will
Many of the most meretricious forms into which theatre can
decline and against which it consequently struggles, are
characterised by disrespect for the dignity of the ground and the
lust to inhabit the air; tumblers, acrobats, human cannonballs,
high-wire acts, stiltwalkers trapeze artists, even fandancers and
ballondancers. Yeats recognised this in the last poems in which
he sought to identify his work, not only with the sluttish
low-life 'where all the ladders start,/The foul rag and bone shop
of the heart', but also the strutting 'high talk' of popular
show:
Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye
Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane. ('High Talk')
Juggling, which has come to mean the art of keeping things suspended in the air, is a narrowing of reference of a word that, well into the seventeenth century, referred to a range of magical practices, employing both natural magic and less legitimate kinds of sorcery, for creating illusion or cozening the senses. In that juggling involves not just the tossing of objects in the air, but also the raising of spirits, juggling is in this sense almost a code-word for theatre itself. It is appropriate that it should derive from Latin jocare, which also gives us the lexical series - jeu, jest, joke - all related to the word 'play'; for the theatre, it has often been feared, is no more than a flatulent jeu d'esprits. Until the arrival of cinema, legitimate theatre had its work cut out to keep all this stuntwork in its place, namely in the theatres devoted to spectacle, like the Adelphi and Sadlers Wells and, later on, the music hall. Circus, which for so long provided a safety valve for this kind of thing, is characterised not just by the fact that much of what occurs in it occurs in mid-air, but also by the pneumatic nature of its very setting. What is a big top but a kind of balloon, a tethered Zeppelin, inflated especially for the performance, and let down when it is time to move on? Disneys Dumbo shows a fine, instinctive intuition of the fundamental lightness of circus, despite all the clowning and pratfalls; for its central conceit is of aerated weight, in an elephant who learns to fly by flapping his outsize ears.
One might note here the striking
parallels between ships - which, if not sustained by air, are at
least propelled by it - and the theatres. Plays and sea-voyages
both take place on boards, or decks, surmounted in both cases by
rigs. Greek nautical engineers are credited with the invention of
the mast-and-boom apparatus known as the machina which
allowed the entrance of the gods from above and the language of
stage rigging still has many correlations with nautical terms (White 1997). Prospero closes The Tempest by calling
on the audience to provide him with a favourable following wind
for his journey back to Milan: 'Gentle breath of yours my
sails/Must fill, or else my project fails' (Epilogue, 11-12)
Fireproofing
Part of what is embarrassing (or, under certain circumstances,
invigorating), about popular forms of theatre, is that they are
so flamboyant flaming, pyrotechnic, pyromorphic.
And theatre is characterised by an extraordinary
institutionalised pyrophobia. A kind of dignity can always be
conferred upon an amateur production, no matter how clumsy,
tawdry and tantrum-threatened it may be, by the visit of the
local fire officer, who will suck his teeth at the combustible
curtains made from bedspreads, and reduce any possibility of
profit by insisting on gangways and unblocked doors. In my day,
the fire-officers attendance would always be followed by
demands that the canvas flats and fabrics of the set be soused in
fire-retardant washes. Along with the conspicuous adoption of
theatre talk, like the tarry argot affected by Guildford
landlubbers on their Thames cruisers, the worry about fire and
the ritual of fireproofing is one of the ways in which amateur
productions could attain guild status.
Not, of course, that the history of theatre does not provide
plenty of grounds for serious concern about fire. Ever since the
mythical burning of the Globe on the night of June 29th 1613,
when the wadding from a cannon got lodged in the thatch during a
performance of Henry VIII, the fear of fire has been
structural in theatre. This was followed by the burning of
Alleyns Fortune Theatre in Golden Lane in 1621 and the
Blackfriars Theatre on the premonitory date of November 5, 1623.
Drury Lane, built 1662, was burnt down in 1672. The Haymarket
Opera-House was destroyed by fire in 1789. The French Opera House
in Paris was burnt down in 1763, and rebuilt on the same spot,
only to give a repeat performance on 8 June 1781 (Hemmings 1991,
237). Astley's Amphitheatre was burnt down twice in 1794 and
1803. Covent Garden was destroyed by fire September 20, 1808,
followed only a few months later by the Theatre Royal, Drury
Lane, in February 1809. (Authentic Account 1809, 37).
Perhaps the worst fire of the nineteenth century was that which
claimed the lives of hundreds of people - perhaps as many as 400
- in the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1887 (Hemmings 1991, 244-5). The
fact that so many theatres have been burnt down and rebuilt on
the same spot, is almost a metaphor for the
permanence-in-impermanence of the theatre itself, as it nightly
rises from the ashes of the previous night's performance.
The introduction of gas added risks to the theatre, with the
result that the nineteenth century was the most combustible in
theatrical history. A book-length report on the fire services of
the US in 1858 included a chapter listing some theatres destroyed
by fire, extending from the burning of Pompey's celebrated
theatre at Pompeii in AD 250 through some fifty examples up to
the time of writing (Dana 1858, 348-57). Another writer, who, as
the producer of a new patent instant-release door, had something
to gain from not underestimating the degree of the danger,
claimed that there had been fifty-four fire alarms in theatres
during 1890. He warned that playgoers were either staying away
from theatres because of the fear of fire, or going there only in
the utmost trepidation: Even when the playgoer ventures
hither, he is always on the alert; his fear is such, that at any
unusual noise, or even at the sight of a fireman casually
entering, his first thought is to escape, although the danger may
be merely imaginary (Résuche 1891, 9). I do like that
'fireman, casually entering', though this in fact refers to a
common practice in the nineteenth century that was actually
designed to reassure audiences. The fear of fire in theatres does
indeed seem to have been felt by many audiences. F.W.J. Hemmings
writes that, during the late nineteenth century, the
nightmare horror of being roasted alive inside a darkened
theatre, choked by smoke and stumbling over fallen corpses, with
the hellish flames flickering ever nearer, was to trouble the
mind of even the most fanatic theatregoer (Hemmings 1991,
248). Thieves in France created mayhem with false shouts of fire,
assisted by the smell of burning produced by white phosphorus
thrown on to the stage (Hemmings 1991, 241).
That fire was sometimes thought of as a natural outcome for the
profligacy and corruption of theatre, like the spontaneous
combustion of Krook in Dickens's Bleak House, is
suggested by the fact that one mournful account of the burning of
the Richmond theatre was issued bound together with an
antitheatrical tract by 'Penevolus', which condemned the theatre
as the seat of infection and corruption: 'The very air suffers by
their impurities, and they almost pronounce the plague' (Particular
Account 41) it growled. Another pamphlet produced in 1812
hinted darkly that the Richmond fire was a punishment for the
iniquities of the American slave system (Remarks 1812).
But the immolation of theatre does not reliably put paid to it,
since the cancellation of the performance by fire was sometimes
made up for by the thrilling supplementary, and of course, free,
spectacle afforded by the burning of the theatre itself. Sheridan
went to watch the watch the last hours of the Theatre Royal with
the Duke of York: 'Finding it impossible, by any human exertions,
to subdue the relentless fury of the flames, they proceeded to
the Hummums, and from the leads contemplated the spectacle with
the most pungent sensations and ineffectual wishes.' (Authentic
Account 1809, 19)
Fire is the sign and effect of some deeper disturbance of the
relations between stage or performance-space and audience space.
Stages are defended, after all by pits, commonly
used, not only to keep animals safely apart from their
spectators, but also as firebreaks. (A trench is dug in Book XI
of the Odyssey, in order both to summon shades from the
underworld, and, one assumes, to keep them at a distance.) Fire
often came from the stage, since the source of conflagration was
regularly found to be the flies, that hidden lung or breathing
space above the stage, especially during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, as scenery became more elaborate and as the
stage became increasingly hot because of the many naked flames
employed in the theatre. The flammable combination of fire and
fabric made this truly a time of arson and old lace. A chandelier
set the scenery on the flies on fire during a performance in
Richmond, Virginia on Boxing Day 1811, and the theatre was
subsequently burnt to the ground. (Particular Account
1812). A burning torch set light to one of the bandes
dair or sky pieces in the Gaité theatre in Paris in
1835 (Hemmings 1991, 238), while burning scenery dropped from the
flies was also the cause of the disastrous fire in the Exeter
theatre in September 1887 (Anderson 2002, 76-7). Performers were
particularly at risk. A ballerina called Emma Livry set her skirt
on fire after swirling too close to the gas-jets in the
footlights at the Paris Opéra in 1862, and took six months to
die from her burns. (Hemmings 1991, 243).
The safety curtain was introduced during the eighteenth century
to defend against the danger of fire. Experiments with crankable
safety curtains began in the French theatre in 1756 in the new
theatre at Lyons (Hemmings 1991 242). At the opening of the
Covent Garden theatre in 1733, the audience were reassured in the
Prologue that:
Our pile is rock, more durable than brass,
Our decorations gossamer and gas;
The very ravages of fire we scout,
For we have here herewith to put it out,
In ample reservoirs, our firm reliance,
Whose streams set conflagration at defiance;
Consume the scenes, your safety still is certain,
Presto - for proof, let down the iron curtain. (Remarks 1812, 32)
The safety curtain proved no
defence against the burning of the theatre in 1808. I know I am
not alone in wondering who is supposed to be made safe by the
safety curtain that is routinely winched down during the interval
in all traditional theatres. We may know that it is the audience
who are supposed to be at risk from the hot air released on stage
along with all the flimsily combustible fabric of the sets and
costume, but it is hard to restrain the suspicion that it is also
there to protect the cast from the more inflammatory kinds of
audience response. And, now I come to think of it, the strangest,
the stagiest thing about the safety curtain is the very pretence
it requires that the stage is thereby sealed off from the
auditorium, when everyone knows that the theatre is drilled full
of apertures, trapdoors and back-passages. What the safety
curtain makes safe is a certain fantasy of absolutely articulable
space. The theatrical partition provided Churchill with his
metaphor when he first spoke of the Iron Curtain dissevering
post-War Europe.
And why a curtain, when the thing is so
self-evidently not a curtain at all, but a metal grille or sheet?
Perhaps the reference to the fabric which traditionally divides
the action from the audience is intended to import an even more
emphatic disavowal of the fabrics and textiles which
traditionally marked off action from audience, as well as
different areas of space within the action. A certain style of
modern theatre advertises its sleek modernity by its repudiation
of fabrics, in favour of more stripped, architectonic forms,
brazenly advertising themselves as what they are. The theatre of
fabric is a flimsy, tawdry, affair, full of the coy come-on, and
hinting at the bordello (the contempt for the flock wallpaper of
the Indian restaurant comes out of this theatrical history of
discredited fabric). When I think of stage curtains, I always
think of Eric Morecambes routine of desperate, buffeting
fumbles, as he tried to find the gap through which to make his
entrance. For all its fragility and lightness, it is always
dangerous to tangle with curtains, a danger that the performer
will be revealed himself as nothing but a kind of patchwork.
While formally dividing the space of the action from that of the
audience, the curtain phenomenally registers, through its
fluttering vulnerability to air-currents, the fact that this
space is subject to the same air, the same unsettled weather.
This background of apprehension about the possibility of fire
makes the appearance of actual combustible actions on stage
particularly thrilling. And yet, stage combustions are nearly
always botched, paltry, unsatisfactory kinds of thing. Perhaps
this is because they have to be. Nowadays, there are no real
fireworks on stage, because fire can never really be allowed to
work; staged fire must always misfire. There is, for example,
something oddly, voluptuously wrong about the gunshots called for
in so many popular and successful plays. Guns always sound too
loud, too abrupt, and yet also too tinny and too fake, in the
theatre, which is one of the reasons, perhaps, that sound cinema
would be driven to invent the reverberating whine of the gunshot.
There was a period in which, no matter how damply enclosed the
space in which you fired a gun in the cinema, it had to sound as
though the shot were ricocheting down a ravine or gulch, whatever
a gulch is when its at home. I used to own a toy rifle that
had a spring mechanism in it which imitated this echo. Early
cinema celebrated its release from the inhibitions and
disappointments of the theatre by means of the depiction of fires
and explosions, a joyous obsession which lasts to the present
day. Where fire and explosion threaten the very fabric of
theatre, cinema can expose itself and its viewers to them without
threat. As a result, cinema has continued to expend a huge amount
of its resources on the staging of explosions. There is a
constitutive link between the kind of reflexivity on display in
Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) and the fascination with
disintegration in the final sequence of his Zabriskie Point
(1970). In both cases, cinema confronts and survives and thrives
on the dissolution of the stage, the frame, the setting, the
apparatus of viewing, of which fire is the great enemy in the
theatre.
But to return to the stage. What happens when a gun is fired on
stage? Either there is no smoke, which is itself risibly
implausible, or there is, which is the source of a different kind
of trouble. Smoke is a worry because of its sheer
unpredictability, an unpredictability that is always there when
the air is invoked or acknowledged. And smoke on stage always
takes too long to clear For minutes or more after a gunshot, of
the lighting of cigarette, the actors will have lost their
audience, who will have switched off from what is being said in
order to concentrate on the slow, blue, seducing loops of the
dissipating smoke. Smoke makes visible the air, revealing it as
the antagonist of illusion. Smoke is never realistic or
life-like. In life, which is to say, in cinema, smoke is disposed
of once its job is done. On the stage, smoke is not so easily
ushered off, but hangs, drifts, not just laterally across the
stage, but across the footlights too. The worst of smoke is, of
course, that you continue to smell it, long after it is no longer
visible. Like the light from a distant star, the smoke from a
crime of passion in Act I is only just starting to tingle in your
nostrils by the middle of Act 2. It is for this reason that only
the worst kind of bungler writes a scene which ends with a
gunshot. For to do so means that the next scene, which may well
need to be set in an interrogation cell or courtroom, will be
contaminated by the haze from the last. So the danger of smoke is
really that of anachronism, which muddles the geological,
layer-cake time of stage-play, in which one thing follows and
displaces another, with a kind of nebular time, in which nothing
is ever neatly on cue or over and done with, and one thing
follows another by becoming part of it. The aesthetic menace of
fire in the theatre is, precisely, no smoke with
fire, but, rather, no fire without smoke.
Smoke is an important sign of and reason for the vulgarity of
air. Smoke the puff of smoke in which the genie appears in
the pantomime, the ankle-hugging clouds of dry ice in naff rock
opera - is as much part of the vulgarity of popular performance
as Peter Pan aeronautics or show-off backflipping. For, unless
one resorts to noisy smoke extraction processes, smoke will
always find a way to drift across and thereby dissolve the
ontological divide between actors and audience, curling beneath
and round the safety curtain. Brecht thought that audiences
should be encouraged to smoke in the theatre, to encourage a
contemplative attitude in them and to resist the narcosis of
spectacle. One might imagine that forcing the actors to perform
in an atmosphere made up of the smoke blown at them by the
audience would also play a large part in deflating their
pumped-up authority.
Smoke is a discloser of air, just as fabric is an amplifier of
it. The clean air act that theatre has progressively become means
that audiences are exposed less often to the sort of impure or
commingled air represented by smoke. In all of this, the contrast
with mediaeval and early modern drama is very clear. Fire was a
frequent and active element in this drama. Illumination was
provided by candles, torches, rushlights and cressets, which not
only made the light of the stage less powerful and controllable
than gas or electric light, but also meant that light
itself was palpable rather than just the transparent means for
making other things visible. Light was as fluctuant as air, and
the time of the performance became what Bachelard called the
'igneous time' of candlelight, making the metatheatrical snuffing
of Macbeth's 'Out, out, brief candle' (V.v, 30) much more than a
rhetorical twitch. Only gradually did it become possible to
remove light sources from the scene they were making visible. The
association between light and combustion meant that when
smokeless light could be achieved the effect was much prized.
Leoni di Somi recommended in the 1560s the use of mirrors and
concealed saying that here we obtain light without smoke
a great consideration (Dialogues of Leoni di Somi,
quoted Butterworth 1998, 65).
The fact that almost all artificial light sources were produced
by some form of combustion also meant that light was odorous; the
convention of lighting the stage with torches in daylight
performances to indicate a nocturnal scene must thus have given
darkness its characteristic smell. In fact, smells were not just
thought of as byproducts: substances like camphor, pitch and
sulphur, whose primary uses were to produce effects of light and
flame, were also employed specifically for their olfactory
appeal.
Philip Butterworth (1998) has shown how prominent smoke and fire
were in the medieval and Tudor theatre, and how prominent
pyrotechnics were in the pageants, spectacles and entertainments
that formed a continuum with theatre, his work thus disclosing an
unexpectedly close link between the theatrical arts and the
specialised skills of Her Majestys Gunners. A particularly
prized effect was the englobing of actors, usually those playing
devils, in flames; this was achieved by impregnating their
costumes with 'aqua ardente', or burning water, in fact alcohol
mixed with colouring powders, the vapour of which would, at least
in theory, burn without consuming the costume which acted as its
wick or reservoir. Fire was employed to heighten two effects in
particular. The first was to show flames emanating from hell
mouth in mystery plays - the Coventry Drapers
Accounts record regular payments to individuals for kepying
of fyer at hell mothe (Butterworth 1998, 83). The second
principal use of fire was to billow from the mouths of dragons.
These two occasions for stage fire mark the mixed or median
condition of the air, which is both above the earth, from which
fire and smoke billow, and below the sky, which is the element to
which the dragon belongs. Much ingenuity went into suspending
dragon-figures from wires so that they should appear to fly
(Butterworth 1998, 87-90). Butterworth also quotes a remarkable
passage from a witness to the preparations for the meeting of
Henry VIII and Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of
Gold in 1520:
Here mention must be made of a singular circumstance, namely the appearance in the air of a great salamander or dragon, artificially constructed; it was four fathoms long, and seemed to be filled with fire, very horrible and terrible. It seemed to come from the direction of Ardres. Many were greatly frightened thereby, thinking that it must be a comet or some monster or portent. (Butterworth 1998, 10)
The identification of the dragon
and the salamander is instructive, for the salamander not only
inhabits fire as its element, it seems also to be made of it. So
theatrical dragons would not only breathe fire, but also
routinely be consumed by it. The air of the theatre was not a
uniform space or resource, but was in continuous transformation,
as though in confirmation of the doctrine of Anaximenes that the
air is the origin of all the other elements; mixed with water, it
manifests itself as steam; with earth, it is seen as smoke; and,
as fire, it represents the air visibly consuming itself. Air was
itself seen as intermediary, a mixture and meeting of the thick
fogs and smokes and miasmas emanating from and returned to the
earth, and the pure ethereal upper air. Macbeths
witches figure the religious and moral suspensions of the play in
terms of a hovering, even as their toil and trouble at the
cauldron is producing the elements of which they chant:
Fair is foul and foul is fair/Hover through the fog and
filthy air (I.i, 13-14).
Werner Habicht (1990) has made out in Shakespeare's plays a
pattern of reference to two kinds of air which correspond to this
distinction between the upper and the lower. Theatre provides the
laboratory of their meeting and compounding; the congested,
corrupted air of the playhouse, transformed into the airy forms
and higher illusions of art. When Cleopatra imagines her own
theatrical display, captured and on show in Rome, her horror is
at being enfolded in the audience's breath as much as at being
exposed to their gaze: 'In their thick breaths,/Rank of gross
diet, shall we be enclouded,/And forc'd to drink their vapour'
(V.ii 211-13). Cleopatra's words make reference to a common joke
about the knee-weakening wafts of pong from the pit which actors
had to confront, reminding us that air goes in more than one
direction. Air was never inert in the early modern world,
especially not stale air, which was believed to have a role in
forming monsters of imagination. Habicht describes a kind of
theatrical meteorology in the Shakespearean playhouse, in which
the sweet and wholesome air of the playwright's invention meets
and contends with the foul, but equally generative air of the
groundlings, as though in a kind of occluded front:
Sensitizing his audience to the "thickness" of the air that prevails in the playhouse, and also to its troubling influence on the minds of the characters in a play, is, then, one of Shakespeare's devices that contribute to generating and conveying the illusion of an oppressive atmosphere of corruption, and of infected fantasies emerging from it, whether or not the latter take the visible shape of ghosts or bloody daggers (Habicht 1990, 306-7).
This tradition of theatrical
thick air survives in the more grotesque and extravagant kinds of
eighteenth and nineteenth-century entertainment, in which, not
only the dalliance with air, but also playing with fire, was
prominent. One might instance the career of Ivan Ivanitz Chabert,
the Human Salamander, whose heyday was during the
1820s. His most well-known act involved him entering a blazing
oven holding two raw steaks in his hand, emerging some time later
unharmed, but the steaks perfectly cooked ('Like the martyrs of
old', punned one contemporary poetic celebration of Chabert's
art, 'He is bound to the steak'.) Nineteenth-century popular
theatre also featured Signora Josephine Girardelli, The
Fire-proof lady, who held redhot iron bars and cooked an
egg in boiling oil held in her hands, along with numerous
'Fire Kings' and other incombustible performers (Jay 1987,
239-73).
The theatrical entertainments of the medieval and early modern
periods not only inhabited the air, they consciously and
conspicuously worked it. The air of the this theatre was
palpable, perturbed, dynamic, animated, moralistic, metamorphic,
populous, portentous, 'pendulous' (Lear III.iv, 49),
agonistic and heterogeneous. The controlled or conditioned air of
the modern theatre that emerged through the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is homogenous, transparent, inert, enclosed,
invariant, indifferent and invisible. The air becomes palpable
only in occasional spasms of spectacle (tumblers employed to jizz
up The Tempest, that kind of thing), or in its residual
ghostings, like the drift of smoke, or the chaotic flutter of a
page or ribbon falling to the floor. At these moments, it seems
as though theatre might still be able to take place in the air,
rather than, as is usually the case, the air being taken up by
theatre.
Artificial Respiration
The rise of the professional theatre across Europe was secured by
means of fixed abode. Drama got to be theatre when it went
indoors. As walls went up around the playing space and finally
the lid got put on theatre, theatre was able to carve itself out
from spectacle and pageant. Acoustics were able to trump
atmospherics, and the word to win out over the weather. This
claustration produces a kind of dephlogistication, or apnoea. It
might appear as though none of what I am saying can apply in the
same way to open-air performance. I have two defences against
this. One is that although such performance is indeed open to the
air, exposed, as we say, to the elements, its air can never be
wholly open. The theatre at Epidaurus is, as Michel Serres has
fancied it, a giant ear, or sound trap (Serres 1998, 107). The
act and fact of performance always involves a hemming in, or
taking up of the air. Performance must always mark out a space, a
magical circle of fire, a hovel on the heath, within which an
artificial climate of artistry and attentiveness may be
constituted.
Of course, it is not true that theatre is entirely breathless, in
the sense suggested by Derrida's reading of Artaud (1978). There
is another sense in which modern theatre is suffused with air,
namely in the words which have become its principal form of
currency. We can see this imaged in the displaced meteorology of
Lear's heath scene. Evoking the howlings of the 'enmity of
th'air' (II.iv, 243), Lear demonstrates that he does not have to
raise his voice to be heard above the storm, because he has the
storm in his voice. The apparatus used to generate the
antagonistic sound of the weather is in fact a doubling of the
wind machine that is his own voice. Indeed, one may think of the
whole of theatre as this kind of wind machine, or artificial
lung. The most important fact about the air in the theatre is
that it is circulated drawn on, drawn in, shaped,
expelled, diffused. Air in the theatre circulates between the
abstract condition of mere availability, and the animation and
the form it is given through the choreographed collective
breathings of the actors.
The condition that Luce Irigaray (1999) has called the
'forgetting of air' has been accompanied and concealed for the
last couple of centuries by an extraordinary mysticism of the
breath. Not surprisingly, acting and performing are areas in
which this mysticism has flourished. I say not surprisingly
because I want to be able to take it as a given that acting and
the theatrical condition are at bottom a kind of atrocity. It is
no surprise that the idea of performance provokes such terror,
horror, rage and uneasy hilarity, nor is it a surprise that the
practice of theatre should depend so much upon superstition and
the occult, or that a very large part of what is thought of as
theatrical technique should consist of mystique. Of no area of
actorly experience is this more true than the vicissitudes of the
breath. No aspect of the physical experience is more made over to
desperate propitiatory magic, as the operations of the breath. A
large component of stage fright is the loss of control of the
breath; under conditions of theatrical panic, one is both out of
breath and surfeited with it, as one threatens to expire amid
one's hyperventilation.
It would be absurd to suggest that there are no benefits for
those who use their voices professionally, actors, speakers and
singers, in paying attention to the processes of breathing. There
is no doubt that there is such a thing as bad or pathological
breathing, or that breathing exercises can be of great use not
just for respiratory complaints, but also for the control of
anxiety and depression. But my interest is in the vast
exaggeration of the powers of the breath, and the secondary
powers that are believed to come from mastering it. Breath is
important to the theatre not just in a narrow technical sense,
but also because of the close association between breath and
power. Since everything that lives appears to breathe, breath is
regarded as having the power to give life. Breath enacts the
fantasy of power over death, and the power of self-ownership and
therefore self-transformation. There is no bodily symbol more
alluring for the one so helplessly exposed and vulnerable as the
actor. In a sense, breath control is an allegory of the condition
of the actor. Nearly all the time, breathing is natural,
spontaneous and unconscious. The actors awareness and
conscious regulation of his breath are enactments of his
agonisedly prohibited being.
It is relatively easy to show that much of what passes for the
science or therapy of the breath is pitiful or contemptible
fantasy. But there is a twist here. For simply pointing out the
fantasy of power involved in breathing neither registers nor puts
paid to the power of the fantasy which drives the fantasy of
breath-power.
Many of the fantasies associated with the breath emphasise the
taking in of vital substance in the act of what is, tellingly
enough, called inspiration. Since the isolation of oxygen and
nitrous oxide described in Joseph Priestley's Experiments and
Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1775), and the
establishment in 1799 of the Bristol Pneumatic Institution by
Thomas Beddoes and Humphrey Davy, writer after writer has
announced the discovery that the conditions of modern life were
leading to oxygen-starvation. The intoxicating effects of nitrous
oxide were ascribed by some to the oxygen in the compound. George
Catlin (1861) led a campaign through the nineteenth century to
discourage the pernicious practice of breathing through the
mouth, to which a terrifying range of evil consequences were
ascribed. Exercises designed to encourage deep breathing were
described on all sides.
The Victorian cult of ventilation encouraged some extraordinary
aggrandisments of the power of the breath. The Swedenborgian
homeopathist and anti-vaccination campaigner John James Garth
Wilkinson wrote of what he called 'the empire of the respiration'
as a bodily power of self-transcendence:
[W]hen we rise into motion, and the will comes forth a limb of air becomes steel, runs vigorously down to our toes and fingers. The skin is braced so tight, that the muscles threaten to start through it, and the will in the same manner menaces to bare itself by throwing off the muscles. The clothes and the body fly out like concentric planetary rings in a rapid vortex. The man becomes more and more of air; he ceases to lie, he ceases to sit, he ceases to stand, and, like an elastic sphere bounding upon a point, the ball of his foot is his only contact with the ground. This is the extreme effect of the aeration of his limbs. He has become a bird for that moment, and can then fly through difficulties, which are the atmosphere of these great actions of the lungs. (Wilkinson, p. 100, quoted Robinson, 17)
Over the next century and a half there would be dozens who claimed to have hit upon new and previously unsuspected methods of breathing. Mme. M.A. Carlisle, the author of a handy booklet entitled Keep Breathing, blamed unenthusiastic breathing for lassitude and the collapse of the human frame. In those who have forgotten the deep breathing which is automatic in children, dire consequences can be expected: The blood is starved for want of oxygen, the muscles of the body become enfeebled, and joy goes out of living' (Carlisle 39). Her book is staged as a series of admonitory dialogues:
A. Well-filled lungs are powerful to prevent curvature of the spine, especially in young children; they support and uplift the chest, and are, in fact, the greatest actors in the drama of a human life.
Q. It would be very careless, then, to breathe wrongly, after knowing this?
A. It would be worse than careless; it would be culpable. (Carlisle, 10)
The condition of breath
deprivation is so unpleasant and frightening, and the effects of
restoring depleted levels of oxygen by flooding the lungs with
air so pleasant and relieving that it is scarcely be a source of
surprise that mystics, medics, theologians and other
body-fantasists should have idealised the action of the inbreath,
attributing to it spiritual powers which match and extend its
physiological importance.
What is less easy to understand straight away is the idealisation
of the opposite action of the breath, the expiration of the
exhausted air. Indeed, one can say that the mystification of the
breath is characterised by this inverse respiratory logic. Of
course, it is just as much a relief to expel carbon dioxide as it
is to take in oxygen, and one can be asphyxiated by failing to
breathe out just as easily as by failing to take a breath. But
expiration is excremental rather than incremental, and, although
certain powers are ascribed to bodily products (think of the
sight-restoring effects of Christs spittle), one does not
in general find other excremental actions giving rise to such
extensive systems of symbolism as the waste products of
respiration. Breathe on me, breath of God goes
the English hymn, neatly summarising the Christian assimilation
of a notion of the divinely-creative outbreath of the deity to
the Stoic doctrine of the pneuma or creative principle
running through the universe. Obviously, only a divinity can
breath life into the nostrils of his creatures; the action of
artificial respiration performed by humans is effective only in
stimulating the lapsed breathing response; if carried on too
long, blowing carbon dioxide into the lungs of a victim already
near to death from asphyxiation or suffocation is strongly
contraindicated.
There are two other reasons why the outbreath might have come to
be regarded as holy or sacred. The first is that the most
important social as opposed to mechanical action in which the
breath participates is in speech. The positive action of
producing words, and the fantasy that it encourages that in so
doing one is populating the world with embodied ideas, feelings
and conceptions, takes place during the action of breathing out.
All the modulations of spoken language are nothing more than
modifications of the stream of air expired from the lungs, which
is arrested, channelled, overlaid with mucous membrane, amplified
by the resonance of pharynx, nose and mouth. Speech is a
prolongation and complication of breath.
The second reason for the sacredness of the outbreath arises from
this first. Given the unavoidable implication of the breath in
the symbolic action of speaking, it is not surprising that
respiratory actions should be apt to supply metaphorical
enactments of the content of speech as well as the mechanical
conditions for its production. Hence the range of mimetic effects
favoured by a certain school of thought which centres on the
performative dimension of speech; angry or aggressive utterances
may employ the violent compression of air in hissing sibilants,
or premonitory bombs of plosive sounds. The prevalence of the
sigh in poetry and public speech, as emblematised in that most
theatrical word oh, seems to bring together loss and
retention. In the sigh, the breath passes from the body, as the
beloved or lamented object is lost; yet the sigh gives
breathing to ones purpose, and, in creating a sound
picture of ones feeling of loss, partially assuages it.
Hence the common mixture of yearning and onanistic
self-satisfaction in the sigh. Voicing the breath seems to be a
way of keeping it for oneself, even as it is given out. Speech
relates particularly to the performative condition or, as some
would prefer, predicament, in that it involves a kind of
hungering of the air; a putting of the air to work; a making do
with air.
I have suggested that there is something structurally apnoeic
about theatre. Now I want to suggest that there is a link between
the metaphorical rarefaction of the air in the theatre and the
actual condition of mild oxygen starvation which is its dominant
physiological mode. This link between theatre and the outbreath
the fact that, as we might say, the theatre is always on
the point of giving out - is itself implicated in much of what is
thought and said about the inspiration of theatre, or its
infusion with a kind of higher air.
Poets, mediums and, insofar as they are vulnerable to their
attentions, actors, have been much enamoured of the condition of
partial apnoea. This can take mild and harmless forms, which can
be seen as spiritual versions of the more drastic kinds of
pleasure reaped from breath restriction to be found among erotic
asphyxophiliacs. But they can also develop into full-blown (just
the opposite really) fantasies of a higher, more spiritual
breath, or second wind. Emmanuel Swedenborg characterised the
action of the outbreath as a communion with the soul, a
detoxification, or breathing out of the lower being.
If we carefully attend to profound thoughts we shall find that when we draw breath a host of ideas rush from beneath, as through an open door, into the sphere of thought; whereas when we hold the breath and slowly let it out we doubly keep it the whole in the tenor of our thought and communicate, as it were, with the higher faculty of the Soul Holding back the breath is equivalent to having intercourse with the Soul; drawing it amounts to intercourse with the body (Swedenborg, quoted Crookall 197, 14)
Swedenborg claimed, like many another mystic, to have developed a way of living, not on thin air, but on something finer, more tenuously ethereal still.
I noticed that there was a tacit respiration, scarcely sensible, about which it was given afterwards to think, and then to write. In this way for many years from infancy, I was introduced into such breathings, especially through speculation, in which the ordinary breathing subsided, otherwise no intense speculation of truth can be given. Then afterwards, when heaven was opened, so that I spoke with spirits, I breathed so completely in this way that I did not take a common breath for a space of an hour, only just enough air being drawn to enable me to think. (Swedenborg, quoted Crookall 1997, 14)
David Crookall's Psychic
Breathing multiplies examples of mediums, mystics and yogis
who lived the same fantasy of a life freed from the vulgar and
tedious necessity of drawing breath. A belief in the powers of
carbon dioxide, or 'carbonic acid' as it was once commonly known,
is often to be found among mediums. Eileen J. Garrett describes a
life lived among visions of auras and airy gossamer-like
extrusions. She saw the floating surround of all living
organisms
as though it were a breathing outer lung. ..I knew
then that these surrounds were sustained and kept in shape not by
the breathing of oxygen but of carbonic acid gas' (Garrett 1939,
91).
Theatre seems to literalise the medium's fantasy of a series of
lives formed of expirations, or exhaust fumes. Theatre exists
more and more in the fantasy of an exhaustless reserve of air
which can be breathed out without ever having to be breathed in.
Theatre is one long expiration, and the dissolution spoken of by
Prospero is in fact its fundamental condition: 'these our
actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/Are melted into
air, thin air' (Tempest IV.i, 181-3). No more telling
example of this effacement of air is the horror of the line
ending; the stopping of the breath at the end of one line and the
hauling in of new air for the next. The device that smoothes this
transition is known as enjambement, but the legwork
involved might just as aptly be known as empneument,
breathwork, the work of the breath that theatre works to make
invisible, inaudible and inoperative.
Ventriloquism becomes the representative art of the theatre. In
my Dumbstruck (2000) I tried to show how the art of
conjuring voices out of thin air, which was often incredibly
alleged to be practised en plein air, achieved its
modern form, a theatrically interesting form, only when it came
indoors. This process brought with it an a focus upon the
ventriloquist's body, especially the body of his breath. Rather
than summoning spirits in the air, he drew the entire space of
the theatre into the theatre of his breath. How-To-Do-It books
for budding ventriloquists emphasise, not trickery, but athletic
art, not guile but physique. More than anything else, it is
necessary to be able to disguise your respiration, by taking
large, surreptitious gulps, which are then released, in a slow,
equally indiscernible fizzle. Women were not thought to have the
pulmonary power necessary for ventriloquism, since they breathed
with their chests rather than their magic diaphragms.
Ventriloquism is the image of the theatre made into the image of
a single, variegated expiration. The superstitious ban on
mingling speech with the inbreath is evident in the earlier
belief that ventriloquism was practised by speaking during
inspiration. It will be said at some point in the career of all
great ventriloquists, that they were capable of speaking, not
just alternately, but simultaneously with their dummies. The fact
that theatre still for the most part obeys the one-at-a-time rule
when it comes to dialogue (the choreographing of interruption and
overlap in a play like Caryl Churchill's Top Girls being
a rule-disclosing anomaly) is an indication of how theatre
remains an art of the distributed or orchestrated breath, rather
than an art of the air, the nature of which, as we have seen in
the case of smoke, is to mix and mingle. The synchronised
breathing of which actors and directors dream, in which whole
audiences can be induced to hold and release their breaths in
time with the actors, is the enlargement of that anthropomorphic
making over of air into collective breath. Carbon dioxide used to
be known as fixed air: by the end of the show, when every
particle of air has been used up and rebreathed, the air has
become entirely fixed into breath.
Breath is the raw material of theatre, providing the fuel for all
the words and action that transpire and are respired upon the
stage. But, for all its functional centrality and its prominence
in the training of actors and performers, the work of voice
training aims to efface the breath, or rather to ensure that it
is all put to work, leaving no unconsumed residue, in the form of
the wheeze, the gasp, the grunt, the whistle. Dickens makes the
breath emblematically audible in the wheezing, bronchial lisping
of the low but honest circus-proprietor Sleary in Hard Times:
'People mutht be amuthed, thquire'. Of course, the breath is
abundantly heard in the theatre, but not as breath. Every sigh,
hiss, cough, gurgle and death-rattle has been turned into
something legible, audible, as though saying its name out loud,
or supplied with its own subtitle or speech-bubble. Theatre is
made of breath, but it is a breath that must neither catch its
breath, nor waste it, lest the wasting condition of the breath
become apparent. Here, in other words far too late, is the right
place to acknowledge the starting point of these reflections on
theatrical air, in a series of conversations with Nick Ridout
about breathing in theatre, and in particular the arresting
comment he once made to me: that the only time you ever see an
actor breathe on stage is when he is dead.
I have said that the artificial respiration of the theatre begins
with its establishment as interiority, of spatial enclosure, or
sealing up of the air. This is assisted by another of the very
strong fantasies attaching to the exercise or control of the
breath of the breath. Disciplines of breathing from many
different religious and psychiatric traditions represent the
action of breathing, and especially of breathing out, as
conducive to higher states of balance, composure, harmony,
connectedness, freedom and presence. The merely random, ragged
and disorganised breath of ordinary life is made to seem
intolerably brutish. There is a strong connection between these
many guides to breathing and the question of bodily orientation.
Breath imagery techniques encourage their users to imagine their
breath extending throughout their beings, as though the body were
a kind of balloon, or windsock, and one could, by gathering one's
normally dispersed powers of concentration, direct the
invigorating airstream right into one's fingernails. The Hindu
traditions of pranayama emphasise the directions of the
different breaths that are believed to inhabit the body. The prana,
located in the nostrils and the head, moves upwards (or is
inbreath); the apana, involved in expiration and
excretion and finding its point of focus in the anus, moves
downwards; the udana, associated with the throat and
actions of eructation, belches forth or goes upwards; the samana,
associated with digestion and the belly, translates gross
elements into more subtle ones and distributes them outwards
through the whole body; and vyana, which supports and
underlies both prana and apana the body
as a whole, moves in all directions at once (Ewing 1901, 13, 57).
To these griddings of the body, we must add the theories of left
and right-handed breath characteristic of Swara Yoga, the
adherents of which are instructed in an elaborate system of
opposites and connections arising from differential nostril
dominance.
Whatever else all this breath imagination does, it establishes
the breath as something amenable to vision, recruiting it to the
eye and the spaces it requisitions and commands. The professional
superstitions attaching to the different registers of the voice,
which refer them to different sources or locations in the body -
chest voice, head voice, and so on, and, most of all what Hollis
Huston has called the 'fabulous character' of the diaphragm
(Huston 1984, 200) - belong to the same cast of thought.
All of this depends upon the making out of a lived truth, which
is to say an imaginary truth; namely that the body is itself a
precinct or theatre of air. (Theatre means a seeing, which is to
say a blindness to the air that all acts of seeing must use to
see through.) All of this involves a forgetting or setting aside
of the condition of the air, which will not easily consent to be
centred, contained or made present. Air has substance, but not
shape or place or orientation, no permanent up and down, no
inside or outside. Its nature is to tie orientated space in
non-existent knots.
All this may sound as though I am working my way up to some
Artaudian protest against the stolen body, the parole
soufflée, or spirited-away breath and blood of theatre. I
do not wish to be thought to want this. The point is not to
insufflate theatre, relieving its shallow breathing and drooping
posture with invigorating drafts of circus and acrobatics, and I
propose no return to some putatively burly, basso-profondo
open-air time of theatre. If anything, just the opposite. If I am
interested in the firetrap theatre of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, it is not because I see this as a richer, riskier
time, but rather because it suggests a kind of raggedness, a
short-windedness that the most advanced disciplines of the breath
in the theatre have never been able to shrug off. The theatre is
live art, not because it breathes the breath of life, but because
it is subject to chronic fatigue, always short of breath, since this is what
breathing means. In an era of electro-magnetic virtuosity,
theatre can still be, cannot but continue in some sort to be,
broken-winded - a kind of steam radio.
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| Steven Connor | School of English and Humanities | Birkbeck |