Finding Interaction in Body Displacement

Les Chaises (The Chairs)
Video Recording
Eugene Ionesco
Modlin Center for Arts
Richmond, Va
2006




I am keeping on exploring audience actor interaction, and looking for methodologies of participation realization, then ignored that there is something called “absurdism” opposing the idea of realism. It accentuated the “paradoxical invisibility of spectators” (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 106), which explains spectator’s significance in another point of view.

Artist “Ionesco’s game of presence/absence, placement/ displacement, reality/ unreality serves to accentuate the invisibility of the spectators in the modern theatre and their phenomenal disembodiment as they sit in the dark. Like the onstage chairs, those in the theatre auditorium serve as seats of displacement for an audience that surrenders to dramatic mimesis and assumes invisibility through the self-effacement of theatrical watching (a spectatorial disembodiment, as Worthen notes, often central to the aesthetic of realism).’’ (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 106)

In The Chairs, as video presents, empty chairs were arranged as queues on the stage, as those in auditoria, with a huge mirror projecting them, then actors shuttled back and forth among the rest, which looked as a routine “speaking theatre” “promising a spatial and material field for linguistic self-extension and for a regaining of self-possession through speech” (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 104). Then those audiences sitting in dark were playing the role of pure witness outside of “theatre watching”, and they, in my opnion, had nothing difference with the spectators of television or film.

Ionesco’s game of paradox of theatre audience (both there and not there) was playing audience itself presence as absence (visible as invisible), by declining spectator’s appearance:

The chairs explores the paradoxical status of this theatre audience that is both there and not there---- that, paradoxically, is there by making itself not there---- and Ionesco’s ending underscores the mutual, though problematic, entailment of embodiment and disembodiment: “We hear for the first time the human noises of the invisible crowd; these are bursts of laughter, murmurs, shh’s, ironical coughs; weak at the beginning, these noises grow louder, then, again, progressively they become weaker. All this should last long enough for the audience---- the real and visible audience---- to leave with this ending firmly impressed on its mind”. In Ionesco’s metatheatrical game, these “real and visible” audience members may have been less “present” than their chairs. (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 107)

Since the interpretation of absurdism: “[The] divorce between man and his wife, the actor and his sitting, is properly the feeling of absurdity (Camus, 1955: 23)” and Ionesco’s saying “personal identity is rendered unstable in the general confusion of placement and displacement (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 105)”, my understanding of this separating of affinity stuffs or unstable rendering for confusion in absurdism is purposive reversing explanation. Then this practice of making visible body as invisible is just in order to make awareness of the consequence of spectator’s presence, through absence of physical body in phenomenal to get an inside bodily self experience in awareness, perception, knowledge and intention which beyond audience’s physical boundaries.


Reference:

Camus, A. (1955) The Myth of Sisyhus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’ Brien. New York: Random House.

Stanton B. Garner, Jr. (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press