Introduction to Angus-Arbus Thesis

Re-presenting the Photographic Representation
Reading Theatre in the Works of Angus McBean and Diane Arbus
September 2011, So-Rim Lee

I. Introduction

The work, once performed, disappears forever. The only memory which one can preserve is that of the spectator’s more or less distracted perception.[1]

Theatre is a ritualistic and collaborative creative process that has long accompanied human history. It is a storytelling medium that verges upon notions of art and behavioural science in anthropological and other heuristic pursuits, and it serves as a constantly wielded metaphor for literary conventions of all ages. Axiomatically, theatre is a compound of meanings physically materialized into gestures, words and traditions within a community of individuals. In every case, two most essential elements that comprise theatre are people (e.g. the actor and the audience) and action (i.e. physical manifestation of scripted or unscripted form of a story) framed within a set time and space. Unlike film, a recent rival in the arts and entertainment arena, theatre is ephemeral; it exists only within the premise that it never really exists when it is not in play, and through repetition it constantly re-creates itself through the memory reservoir. This zombie-like quality of theatre verging on the mortal and immortal has been the key subject area for theatre studies, as exemplified by Marvin Carlson:

All theatre is as a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition. Moreover, as an ongoing social institution it almost invariably reinforces this involvement and haunting by bringing together on repeated occasions and in the same spaces the same bodies (onstage and in the audience) and the same physical material…Just as one might say that every play might be called Ghosts, so, with equal justification, one might argue that every play is a memory play.[2]

Memory, thus produced and re-produced, allows theatre to seem immortal, always ghosted within different contexts, performances, and social occasions. The plurality of the audience creates varying bodies of spectatorial memories; one may remember a pair of red heels whereas another may remember a pair of purple. These different memories altogether formulated a certain mythology, which, until the advent of visual recording, played the major part of promoting theatre; before ‘seeing is believing’ became literally possible due to the invention of photography, the only way to validate theatre was to hear or read about it, look at promotional drawings and paintings, and ultimately witness it in person to in order to authenticate these external references. When George Eastman’s Kodak cameras first started to be popularized in 1888 and photographs soon became ‘as common as a box of matches’,[3] the myth of indirect memories in theatre started to be demystified by photographic images; performance shots, portraits of actors in their costumes, pictures taken on and offstage during rehearsals, backstage shots, and promotional picture posters now replaced words of mouth and paintings with its direct visual still shots of what supposedly ‘really happened’, for the particular momentums freeze-framed, inside the theatre.[4]

Photography henceforth changed the dynamics of memory and its functions within the theatrical realm; the primitive form of subjective and individual memory, once reigned as the singular source of remembered history after a performance, has been demystified and dominated by the powerful and authoritative visual aid of photography. One’s remembrance of the colours of shoes can no longer stay uninfluenced, let alone replaced, by the production shots printed on programmes, posters, and on the internet. Whereas the veracity of the photograph has always been questioned since its very naissance, theatre stayed a sanctuary where photographs were taken at their surface value in which the Wordsworthian perspective of insight ruling over sight[5] was largely dismissed. This triumph of vision is largely due to the limited expectation of photography used in theatre, commonly referred to as theatre photography or stage photography[6], only to faithfully document the action that has actually happened; although manipulation and artificial rendering of the photograph were immediately popularized alongside candid photography in the theatrical realm[7], performance shots have mostly served the singular purpose of attesting that what they portray have been real.

This thesis aims to explore the relationship between photography, used in theatre primarily as a means to preserve, and theatre, unlive yet undead in its very essence. The reason photography is to be discussed instead of film, a technologically more recent form of visual recording, pertains to the fact that the overarching theme of this thesis is a static and momentous visual memory – memory as images that are processed during and remnant after a performance, and memory as images that photographs evoke and possibly alter – which is more imminent in the single photographic image than a series of moving images.[8] In-depth analysis of photographs will ensue after every theoretical assertion, using respectively three examples from the photographic works of Angus McBean, a British theatre photographer, and three from Diane Arbus, an American photographer whose works do not pertain to the theatre locale, per se, but are often assessed as ‘theatrical’ by photography scholars. By discussing the attributes of particular photographs and positioning the styles and meanings of the two photographers’ works within the context of the theatre, this thesis aims to examine the nature of the relationship between theatre and photography, redefine theatricality and the function of theatre photography, and attempts a symbiosis between the two memory-making media.

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[1] Patrice Pavis, ‘Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference’, in Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 67
[2] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001), pp. 2, 11
[3] Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography, 1916’, in Essays and Images: Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography, ed. by Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980)
[4] Aoife Monks distinguishes between the photographs of a particular moment of performance and the performance itself as she discusses a production shot of The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of the Bacchae: ‘Of course, this is a photograph, not a performance, and as such, it can’t be taken as a representative of “what really happened” in the production. The photograph might instead be seen as a faulty memory of the performance, and its stillness allows us to artificially slow down the moment, and to look at it in isolation, in order to imagine its possible meanings.’ From Aoife Monks, The Actor in Costume (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.4
[5] In “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’”, Marjorie Levinson claims that Wordsworth’s language harbors a depth of meanings embedded beneath the surface of the written words, thereby ascertaining the notion that the poet-observer goes beyond the sight on surface to recognize the insight underneath it. This allegory is adopted by Sigfried Kracauer in his argument that the photograph does not merely copy nature but that it ‘metamorphoses’ it, thereby transcending its role as a literal documentarian. From Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), pp. 14-57; Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Photography’, in Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993), pp. 421-36
[6] The two terms are interchangeably used among theatre scholars and critics alike as general reference to photography used within the theatre locale. However, neither of them is an academically appropriated denomination and a further clarification of the definition itself needs yet to be established. This thesis henceforth employs ‘theatre photography’ to designate the aforementioned generic meaning as used by Richard Traubner in his introduction to Angus McBean’s works in The Theatrical World of Angus McBean (Boston: David R Godine, 2009)
[7] Examples of manipulated photography in theatre include Angus McBean’s ‘surrealized’ portraits of famous actors and Zoe Dominic’s dress rehearsal photographing sessions where the performances never took place but the actors posed still in mid-motion wearing full costumes on the stage.
[8] Roland Barthes speculates on the fundamental difference between photography and film in Camera Lucida, arguing that this difference is an ontological one: ‘Looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye… This explains why the Photograph's noeme deteriorates when this Photograph is animated and becomes cinema: in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins here, though derived from the first one.’ From Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981; repr. London: Vintage, 2000), p.78