Stanton B. Garner, Jr.
Among its many contributions to our understanding of contemporary theatre and performance, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre provides a framework for thinking about this theatre’s engagement with subjectivity, consciousness and narrative. By setting the postdramatic in dialogue with the dramatic model it supersedes, Lehmann challenges the matrix of character, plot, fiction and dialogue that has conventionally oriented the perception of subjectivity in theatrical performance toward the singular, coherent individual. He further undermines this unitary notion of subjectivity by displacing the dramatic actor and distributing agency within a decentered scenic field. As Lehmann insists, however, the rejection of unitary subjectivity in its singularity and depth does not entail an abandonment of the human subject altogether. Addressing what Gerda Poschmann called the ‘autonomization of language’ in contemporary theatre works – which is directed against the principles of depth and mimesis – he writes, ‘Is it not rather a matter of a changed perspective on human subjectivity? … [R]ather than bemoan the lack of an already defined image of the human being in postdramatically organized texts, it is necessary to explore the new possibilities of thinking and representing the individual human subject sketched in these texts.’1
In order to explore these ‘new possibilities of thinking and representing’, one has to read beyond – and sometimes against – Lehmann’s limited theorization of postdramatic subjectivity. Louise LePage observes, ‘[W]here postdramatic theatre locates film and voice-altering techniques in juxtaposed and equal roles with the live presence of the performer on stage in ways that hybridize and reformulate the (post)human subject, the question arises as to what, precisely, are the new ontological formulations being conceived?’2 Postdramatic Theatre’s relative neglect of this and related questions concerning subjectivity limits its theoretical generalizations and its otherwise provocative observations on specific texts and productions. The present essay’s contribution to understanding what we might mean when we think about subjectivity in a postdramatic context is twofold. On one hand, it will consider the experiential or ‘lived’ dimension of a performance subjectivity unmoored from its traditional grounding in personal consciousness. Whereas Lehmann claims that post-epic narration is about ‘the foregrounding of the personal’ and ‘the closeness within distance’, he offers little account of what the personal consists of in this new theatre.3 Similarly, when he points out that Peter Brook’s production The Man Who …? ‘presented examples of pathological dysfunctions of perception’, the notion of perception he refers to seems restricted to basic cognitive operations.4 What I propose to do is bring a phenomenological sensibility to the non-unitary field of consciousness that Postdramatic Theatre gestures toward but fails to theorize with the nuance it merits. Understanding the experiential contours and operations of postdramatic subjectivity clarifies the perceptual stakes in Lehmann’s theoretical project, and it underscores the opportunities that contemporary performance presents to phenomenological accounts of consciousness, particularly those recent accounts that interrogate this tradition and its conceptions of subjectivity, perception, presence and embodiment in light of contemporary theory, new performance practices and an increasingly technologized/mediatized world.5
On the other hand, if Postdramatic Theatre has little to say about the experiential and perceptual dynamics of the decentered subjectivity it alludes to, it is also silent on the social and institutional structures in which subjectivity manifests itself and through which it circulates. While this contextual dimension may seem different from the experiential givenness of subjectivity, the two are intimately related. An infant becomes aware of itself as a subject through intersubjective entanglements with those around it and through the position it occupies in a network of social relationships and institutional backdrops (nursery, home, school, medical institutions and consumer infrastructures). What may appear entirely personal in the lens of experience, in other words, is also a product of subjectivity’s social context. Indeed, while Lehmann’s notion of the ‘postdramatic’ pays relatively little attention to this dimension of the personal, the fragmentary and dispersed subjectivity he discerns in the postdramatic lends itself to materialist and sociological forms of analysis. Understanding the contours and operations of postdramatic subjectivity not only clarifies the perceptual stakes in Lehmann’s theoretical project; it opens the door for a more socially-situated understanding of postdramatic theatrical form and the institutional practices that produce it.
As a way of accepting Lehmann’s invitation ‘to explore the new possibilities of thinking and representing the individual human subject’ offered by postdramatic texts, I will consider the perceptual and interactive dynamics of Sandglass Theatre’s 2012 production, D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks. Sandglass, an award-winning Vermont puppet theatre company, devised this theatre work using stories collected through workshops with individuals suffering from dementia. While this production employs features and devices that Lehmann would call ‘dramatic’ – its actions follow a linear sequence, and it proceeds from a recognizable conception of character – its use of the puppet theatre form and its narrative/theatrical staging of dementia consciousness offers postdramatic openings in its otherwise dramatic matrix. Puppet theatre and dementia performance extend Lehmann’s theory of the ‘postdramatic’ into phenomenological, institutional and ethical areas largely undeveloped in Postdramatic Theatre. By foregrounding the interaction of artists and performing objects, puppet theatre offers an intricate exploration of animation, subjectivity and their distribution across agencies. Puppet handlers animate crafted objects that carry an imagined subjectivity in their painted faces and eyes. When puppets move and speak, they do so with borrowed gestures and words, drawing kinetic and verbal agency from the human figure that manipulates them while also asserting themselves as quasi-autonomous subjects as a result of this transfer. Subjectivity crosses subjects, one animate and one animated, in an ontological ambiguity that signals one and two points of consciousness at the same time.6
Dementia performance has a similar effect of expanding the postdramatic and clarifying its implications. For one thing, the phenomenological insight that D-Generation and similar works provide into the embodiedness of subjectivity underscores the place of disability – particularly, neurological disability – in postdramatic theatre. On the whole, disability occupies a troubling place in Postdramatic Theatre. When Lehmann mentions disabled bodies, he focuses on their deviance and irregularity. An example of his theory’s unacknowledged normativism can be found in his discussion of the body’s physicality in postdramatic theatre: ‘In addition, there is often the presence of the deviant body, which through illness, disability or deformation deviates from the norm and causes an “amoral” fascination, unease or fear.’7 The subjectivity of those with physical or cognitive disabilities and the impact of non-normative experiences and representations on theatrical form seem not to concern him.8 This is a surprising omission given that neuroatypicality, in particular, maps well onto the postdramatic’s concern with divergent subjectivities. Robert Wilson’s collaborations in the 1970s with autistic poet Christopher Knowles are an example of this affinity, as is Jérôme Bel’s 2012 performance piece Disabled Theatre, which was created in collaboration with cognitively impaired actors from Zürich’s Theatre HORA. The discontinuous mental landscape of dementia presents particular challenges and opportunities for contemporary theatre practice, as attested to by the proliferating field of performances for, about and with Alzheimer’s individuals and those with other forms of dementia. Much of this work originates in care facilities in addition to, or instead of theatres, and includes individuals with dementia as well as their caregivers. Often multimedia in nature, dementia theatre tends to be intensely collaborative, and it engages an inter-institutional infrastructure including care and treatment facilities, therapeutic regimens, arts organizations, medical funding agencies and media outlets as well as theatrical institutions. In 2010, for example, the London-based company Spare Tyre developed a series of participatory workshops entitled Once Upon a Time at a London residential care facility for people with dementia. These workshops engaged participants in interactive and multisensory storytelling through the use of coloured lights, music and multimedia projections that responded to clapping and voice. Residents who had previously shown little expressive capacity were able to tell stories in a range of performance modalities. Once Upon a Time was subsequently conducted at other dementia care facilities and centres across the UK.9
Spare Tyre describes itself as a ‘participatory arts charity’ rather than a theatre or performance group,10 and the difference in terminology may suggest why its work and the work of community-engaged organizations like it have largely been neglected in more formally and aesthetically grounded theatrical models such as Lehmann’s. The participants in Once Upon a Time do not perform in a public theatre space, nor do actors stand in for them in a performance based on their experience. But their creative engagement is performative nonetheless, and it shares aesthetic principles that postdramatic theatre defines itself by: the retreat from synthesis, simultaneity, irruption of the real, impulse and improvisation, intermediality. With Once Upon a Time and other socially-situated performance work, these principles manifest themselves at the meeting point of theatrical and non-theatrical institutions and practices. As D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks illustrates, the institutional contexts of dementia performance remain in place when it migrates from the activity room of a care facility to more public stages. The final section of this essay will explore this inter-institutional dimension of postdramatic subjectivity.
D-Generation was developed in 2012 by Sandglass Theatre’s Eric Bass, Ines Zeller Bass and Kirk Murphy. The production was based on stories generated by people with late-stage dementia and the collaborative interaction that was used to elicit them. Bass, Zeller Bass and Murphy gathered these stories at a number of care facilities in Vermont using a creative-storytelling method called TimeSlips, which was developed by Anne Basting in 1996 and is now practiced by trained facilitators throughout the world. As part of this method, circles of people with dementia are shown a picture and asked to share what they think is going on in it. Anything they say is acceptable, and every statement they contribute becomes part of the collaborative story. Facilitators prompt them by asking questions and write down what they say in response. The purpose of this activity, which involves residents and staff as well as certified trainers, is to direct attention away from the narratives the individuals with dementia can no longer remember and engage their resources of imagination and creativity.11 The term ‘timeslip’ refers to a temporal dislocation, often in fantasy or science fiction, through which a person finds herself travelling between different points of time; it can also refer to the bringing together of different points of time so that the events of one time can be experienced at another time. The relevance of a process bearing this name to individuals who have undergone severe memory and cognitive impairment is apparent. In 2008, Sandglass was approached by Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI), a New York-based nonprofit that works to improve services for long-term care for elders and those who care for them, to see if they were interested in creating a theatre piece based on the TimeSlips technique. As Renya Larson of PHI observed:
There’s sort of a double nature with TimeSlips stories. You have the experience of the facilitator with the participants who are creating the stories, and there’s this other reality, the make-believe reality of the stories themselves. And because Sandglass works with puppets, there’s this lovely opportunity to have multiple layers of reality functioning at the same time.12
Members of the company worked with TimeSlips facilitators for ten weeks at two Vermont nursing homes and developed D-Generation based on their experiences.
D-Generation recreated a residential care setting and the TimeSlips creative interaction with puppets standing in for the residents. The play’s residents – Henry, Rose, Mary, Elwood and Florence – were rod puppets, approximately two feet in length and realistically detailed to resemble elderly people. For most of the play they sat in raised chairs, which were wheeled around by the three puppeteers. In addition to operating the puppets and delivering their lines, Bass, Zeller Bass and Murphy played caregivers to these dementia-care residents. The play’s action, which consisted of interactions between the caregivers and the residents and sequences focused on individual residents, was organized around two creative storytelling sessions and the collaborative narratives produced in them. Framed by mobile curtain screens that were rearranged in changing relation to each other, the play’s interactions were supplemented by brief scenes or tableaux involving the puppet operators and the residents, animated video sequences projected on a large background screen, and a sound score featuring music and the occasional voices of unseen family members trying to communicate with the residents.13 At one point in the middle of the play, the residents were shown a toy-theatre stage on which Murphy and Zeller Bass presented the story they had just created using simple stick puppets and cardboard-and-paper props. At several other points during the production, one or more of the puppeteers stepped forward to talk about Alzheimer’s disease and those who have it.
In her discussion of applied performance and dementia by contemporary groups such as Spare Tyre, Magic Me and Entelachy Arts, Nicola Shaughnessy points out the ability of trauma and dementia (which she considers a form of trauma) to destabilize identity constructions.14 While the physical coordinates of time, space and action in D-Generation were conventionally delineated – the residents and their caregivers occupied a scene that was externally identifiable and coherent – the subjective dimension of this dramatic world was radically destabilized by the dementia that formed its subject. In contrast to the three caregivers, who maintained coherent dramatic selves despite the fact that they stepped out of these roles to address the audience, the inner world of the dementia residents was fragmentary and often inaccessible – an ‘empty hole’, as the puppeteer/caretakers characterize it.15 The residents often spoke in non-sequiturs, repeated themselves, or withdrew into inaccessibility. Any sense of coherent subjectivity was splintered apart in a neurodivergent landscape of unpredictability, discontinuity and absence. With memory and recognition impaired, subjectivity was cast adrift, and all that seemed apparent were its residua. Some of the residents provided suggestions about the lives they led before entering the care facility: Rose’s father, she claims, built a sawmill and paid for her dance lessons; Henry seems to have been a painter; Florence speaks about having travelled the world. The precise outlines of these experiences were hard to determine, and even the most articulate recollection (such as Florence’s in the play’s closing moments) felt oddly detached from the present. The dynamic of this detachment shifted when the residents participated in the group storytelling sessions. Because they were invited to create story details concerning the pictures they were shown, the focus shifted to their collaborative exercise of imagination. Some of the details they provided were clearly autobiographical, memories transmuted into fiction; other glimpses of their former lives – the song line ‘I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places’, for example – came out of nowhere, or (perhaps more accurately) from untraceable areas of their experience. The narratives that resulted from this process were disjointed, funny, surreal – like this story, which they collaboratively generated in response to a photo of a dancing couple:
Figure 13.1 Kirk Murphy and puppet Rose in Sandglass Theatre’s D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks, 2012. (Photo by Laura Bliss.)
He is going to kidnap her. They are dancing on the roof. On the railroad tracks. Look at her shoe, up in the air! The music is coming from the building behind them.
I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces all day through…
They’ve taken off, to the airport. They want to go to Paris. They are going to a dance. They’re behaving themselves. They just got married. They’re celebrating, but they’re still stuck on the rail.
This will be the end of them.
The air feels wonderful.
They’re on the balcony, overlooking the city.
Hello and goodbye, he says. Watch your step on the roof.
I love you, my dear.
Let’s have a cup of tea when we’re done.
If she doesn’t watch her step, she’ll fall down and go gooey.
Can we have another drink?
They’re going to Paris to go shopping and to see the Mona Lisa. Shopping for a tux and something bright and different. They have cocktails. Gin and bourbon. Whaaa. He’s a dance teacher (or a doctor). Maybe with a circus. She works in a bakery. He went into the bakery and ordered a croissant.
Want a donut, Honey?
Hello.
It’s elevating really quick.
She is Rose.
He’s not worth a name.
Find a room.
Jack and the rabbit came together.16
Rose’s dance lessons and Florence’s time in Paris found meaning in this new pastiche, which was open to additions and transformation. The narrative was further transformed as it moved from the residents’ separate contributions to a collaborated narration and then was converted into its own staged puppet play.
The concept of narrative engaged in this exercise suggests another important contribution of dementia theatre to Lehmann’s theory of the postdramatic. In a brief section of his chapter ‘Panorama of Postdramatic Theatre’, Lehmann lists narration as ‘an essential trait’ of postdramatic theatre. ‘Lost in the world of media’, he writes, ‘narration finds a new site in theatre’.17 Taking several theatre works where narration foregrounds itself in the performance field as examples, Lehmann argues for a postdramatic practice different from that of Brecht’s epic theatre. Rather than distancing the events of the stage, as epic theatre seeks to do through the technique of narrativization, postdramatic narration asserts presence over representation, and personal encounter over mediatized distance. The presence that narration brings to a mediatized performance space is evident in a 1997 performance that Lehmann refers to in which the Danish company Von Heiduck explored the subject of eros using dance, Hollywood film music, scenic design and provocative erotic gestures. At one point during the production in question, a man took the stage and retold Hans Christian Andersen’s tale ‘The Metal Pig’ for thirty minutes in an undramatic voice. In this and similar performances that Lehmann refers to by Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Bernhard Minetti, the moment of narration ‘returns to the stage and asserts itself against the fascination of bodies and of media’.18 Aristotle’s opposition of tragic drama and narration is undone, in Lehmann’s account, and the latter becomes a vehicle for the intimate in theatrical performance. The contrast with Brecht is important:
[W]hile epic theatre changes the representation of the fictive events represented, distancing the spectators in order to turn them into assessors, experts and political judges, the post-epic forms of narration are about the foregrounding of the personal, not the demonstrating presence of the narrator, about the self-referential intensity of this contact: about the closeness within distance, not the distancing of that which is close.19
Postdramatic narration, in the examples Lehmann uses, is associated with speakers who transform the stage into the site of a narrative act; while there may be interspersed episodes of dialogue, ‘the main things are the description and the interest in the particular act of the personal memory/narration of the actors’.20 But the personal – in this section and elsewhere in Postdramatic Theatre – is not necessarily the same as the individual, the autobiographical, or even the subjective. In WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a 1989 theatre project directed by Renate Lorenz and Jochen Becker, German students documented their daily lives (going shopping, meeting with friends and other activities) through a variety of forms and media (pictures, films, photos, performed dialogue). While this performance offered a mediatized presentation of its performers’ lives, Lehmann suggests it achieved an ‘anti-media-effect’ through the actors’ presence, which keeps theatre ‘in the proximity of personal encounter’. By transforming objective documentation into self-narration, in other words, the actors endowed WYSIWYG with a subjective intimacy not present in ‘the arbitrary exhibitions of biographical “realities”’ in confessional TV shows.21 While it is anchored in the performing subject, though, the act of narration produced by performances such as this is not merely personal in the sense of a direct communication between speaker and audience. Refracted through its media and human formats, collective rather than singular in its overall presentation, the subjectivity at play here is multi-channelled and multi-referential. The personal, in such an environment, becomes a matter of orientation rather than one of origin, expression or singular subjectivity.
What happens when we consider Lehmann’s concept of narration in the context of dementia subjectivity and the storytelling method of TimeSlips? What happens when dementia narrative takes the stage as performance? An obvious first step toward answering these questions is to recognize that the cognitive conditions associated with dementia, particularly memory loss, complicate any simple notion of the personal or the subjective. As D-Generation reminds us, dementia dismantles the narrative through which selfhood constitutes itself in time. The narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves establish our place in a community of parallel and intersecting stories; they constitute a point of intersection between the personal and the public, the subjective and the intersubjective. When these narratives are robbed of their detail and coherence, a radical disjunction occurs between the individual, the past and one’s established community. Individuals with dementia retain memories, but these are fragmentary and discontinuous, and the line between memory and other forms of mental content (imagination, non-personal events) is precarious or non-existent. Thomas DeBaggio, who wrote about the onset of his dementia, observed at one point during the progression of his disease, ‘I now lack enough mental security to be sure I remember memories of actual events; they might belong to someone else and I have stolen them for the moment, unknowingly.’22 Reflecting later in the same book on the dissociation he often felt from himself, he wrote: ‘Clouded memories flit through my brain, wandering moments in a jumble of events only half-remembered. Faces smiling and sullen rise through a mist of years. Is any of this true? Can memory lie? It is too late for me to judge. Days are numb with forgetfulness and verbal stumbling.’23 For a besieged subjectivity such as DeBaggio’s, the ‘personal memory/narration of the actors’ that Lehmann identifies with the postdramatic exists entirely and ambiguously in the slash mark that separates these terms.
As noted earlier, the group exercise developed by TimeSlips redirects attention from personal memory loss to the collective creativity of those freed from the need to make individual sense out of what they produce. By replacing inability with play, this shift allows individuals with dementia to free-associate in response to a photographic image and the responses of others without worrying about the referentiality of what they say to the personal history they have limited access to. The result, as D-Generation demonstrated, is a pastiche of the remembered and the imagined, the relevant and the random. The two stories that the puppet residents collectively authored included details that clearly came from their personal lives but also included fabulous realities, abrupt exclamations and observations that came from who knows where. The aleatory narrative that resulted from their contributions was richly subjective, but the subjectivity it brought into play was fragmentary and collective rather than coherent or bound to a unitary subject. It offered a hybridized field that gestured toward individual consciousness while recognizing that consciousness under the shadow of dementia is characterized by indeterminacy and inaccessibility.
D-Generation and the therapeutic process behind it demonstrate that the dismantled landscape of dementia narrative offers new possibilities for storytelling, expression and community. If Lehmann’s ‘dramatic theatre’ is predicated on traditional notions of coherence, then dementia narrative opens a recognizable subjective space within postdramatic theatre – a theatre, as Lehmann writes, that ‘renounces the long-incontestable criteria of unity and synthesis and abandons itself to the chance (and risk) of trusting individual impulses, fragments and microstructures of texts in order to become a new kind of practice’.24 By trusting these impulses, fragments and microstructures, D-Generation gestures toward more experimental versions of the postdramatic that have used dementia and other neurological disorders in their development of innovative theatrical works: Brook’s The Man Who …?, Robert Wilson’s work with Christopher Knowles, and Melanie Wilson’s Autobiographer, for example.
Autobiographer, which was first performed in 2011, exemplifies the postdramatic possibilities of dementia performance, and its immersive strategies provide a useful counterpoint to Sandglass Theatre’s puppet aesthetic. Wilson – a London-based writer, sound artist and performer – was drawn to dementia because of its connection with notions of identity: ‘My interest in dementia stems from the very particular way that stories and narratives are picked away at and unraveled by the disease, creating a constantly shifting and illusive understanding and retention of the self.’25 Autobiographer, the outcome of her research on this disease, explored the consciousness of a woman in her late seventies named Flora. Performed by four actors who played Flora at different stages of her life, Wilson’s play staged a disintegrated subjectivity peopled by separate selves and voices. Memory fragments, recurring words and images were voiced by different performers as they walked around and sat down largely unaware of each other. Their words and sentences followed each other in shifting and ambiguous relationship. Sometimes the Floras spoke of seemingly different things as if they were different personalities; other times they repeated words or parallelled each other as if they spoke to or for each other. The play’s richly poetic text, as a result, hovered uneasily between dialogue, monologue and parallel monologue, refusing to demarcate the subjectivity it sought to express. The experiential registers of this subjectivity – what it felt like to be Flora, wandering lost in her psyche – were conveyed through Wilson’s use of immersive technologies. Hanging light bulbs throbbed, flickered, went on and went off during the performance like synapses firing and failing to fire; at certain points they went off entirely, subjecting performers and spectators to momentary blackouts. In keeping with Wilson’s interest in ‘the use of sound as a distinct and subjective agency’, the play’s soundscape played an important role in this cognitive and visceral immersion.26 Speakers, positioned behind the curtains that enclosed the playing space, produced an environmental base line of sonic effects, unworldly in their acoustic synthesis, sometimes frightening in their intensity. At times voices could be heard, oscillating on the edges of comprehensibility. One of the play’s reviewers noted, ‘Voices whisper and mutter as though they may be solely in your head and there are snippets of dialogue which you can’t quite catch. It’s a haunting recreation of being mentally detached, but connected to your own inner world.’27 In Part Four of Autobiographer, the space succumbs to ‘an overwhelming auditory environment of real world sounds, like a shopping centre, supermarket or public space. Augmented by fragments of other sounds. Familiar sounds becoming alien’.28 As the performers engaged in repetitive, agitated movements, the audience underwent a version of the disorientation that caused their distress.
Whereas Autobiographer used the resources of multiple casting, fractured discourse and immersive staging to probe the contours of dementia subjectivity, D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks engaged the question of how, or whether, one can ever know this terrain from the outside. As I have already suggested, the interior world of D-Generation’s dementia care residents was largely impenetrable, available in glimpses but otherwise inaccessible. This aspect of dementia subjectivity was foregrounded through the play of animation intrinsic to puppet theatre. When the play began, Zeller Bass wheeled out the puppet named Mary and handed her a doll that was lying on the floor. While a video played on the screen, Mary began to move under Zeller Bass’s guidance, stroking the doll, looking around, slowly rocking, then holding her head. Unlike the doll she held, which remained inert throughout the production, Mary and the other puppets were performing objects that acquired life and imagined subjectivity when animated by the puppeteer’s manipulations through the process of what Jiří Veltruský termed ‘vivification’.29 But even the liveliest of puppets remains an object; its life, when it comes to life, is a borrowed one. When puppets cease to be manipulated, their thingness, or object-status, threatens to take over their aliveness; when this happens, puppets become partially or fully desubjectivized. Phenomenologically, this dynamic involves the presencing and de-presencing of a consciousness imagined into the object-brought-to-life.
The objectness of puppets taken out of aliveness acquires different meanings when the subjectivity in question is conditioned by dementia. When the puppets of D-Generation were left on their own or were otherwise still, they did not necessarily exit the characterological field. Instead, they were there and not there at the same time. As the puppets remained seated in their chairs on the stage of D-Generation, their inanimate stares suggested the inaccessibility that frames and often overtakes dementia subjectivity. Their motionless impenetrability was poignantly intensified when the voices of family members addressed them without receiving responses or signs of recognition (‘Florence, where are your pearls? You’re not wearing them. Did you forget them? Hi Dad, it’s me, Frank, your son. Don’t you remember me? I’m your son. See, we’re in the picture together.’30). At one point in the play, the human performers brought the question of animation and subjectivity directly to the audience. Before Murphy put on his separate puppet show for the resident puppets dramatizing their first collective story, the puppets were placed on spectators’ laps where they could watch the makeshift production. As the puppet-show-within-a-puppet-show went on, some spectators in the performances I observed sat awkwardly with their puppets; others moved them as a way of animating them. In these different states of movement and non-movement, the puppets appeared alternatingly conscious and unconscious of what was being acted out in front of them. In another sequence, a curtain was moved aside to reveal a tableau of Murphy standing with a piece of cake on a plate between Elwood and Florence, who were seated in their wheelchairs. All three wore party hats. Elwood and Florence stared forward with unseeing eyes, and the force of their inanimacy threatened to subsume Murphy as he joined them in immobility.
Animacy, in this case, implies subjectivity: not to move, not to see bespeaks a vacancy at the seat of agency and identity. In his phenomenologically-insightful study of puppets, Kenneth Gross notes this uneasy association between humans and things: ‘[Puppet theatre] may also remind us that we do not yet know what it means to be inanimate, that we do not know fully the different kinds of death that humans own, or the shapes of the lives that can be lived by inanimate things.’31 D-Generation employed additional means to question what we can know about the puppet residents we observe. At three points during the play, videos were projected onto the viewing screen while individual residents were alone on stage. While these videos, which consisted of figural and abstract painterly sequences, were clearly related to the figures they accompanied, the nature of this relation was unclear. Did the videos represent the difficult-to-articulate subjective world of each resident (as when the screen turned black when the resident Mary became agitated), or did they represent an external viewpoint on the characters? At a later point when Henry was alone on stage with Zeller Bass and Murphy manipulating his body, Henry painted an imaginary painting in the air in front of him. Images appeared on the screen behind him that initially represented the painting he was executing, but when he dropped his brush the video proceeded on its own. A figure resembling him, paint brush in hand, climbed a ladder on the screen but started to fall at the point when Henry rose in his seat. The unclear relationship between figure and moving image marked the uneasy boundary between the internal and external products of Henry’s mind. Was what we were seeing a representation of Henry’s thoughts, an independent meditation on his character by the production’s video composer Michel Moyse, or some hybrid of the two? Like the stories that were fashioned from the residents’ scattered contributions, the subjectivities we glimpsed were collaborative – the result of external fashioning as well as individual expression – and they took the form of pastiche, mixed with other products of an intersubjective creative process.
Through its combination of puppet theatre, multimedia presentation and storytelling with material gathered in clinical settings, D-Generation demonstrated that aesthetic fragmentation has a subjective register, whether the subjectivity in question is located in a consciousness that produces its elements or the consciousness that works to make sense of it. Throughout the Sandglass production, the products of consciousness fell apart, reconstituted themselves in new ways, and refracted themselves through different sites and media. The audience’s perceptual role in processing D-Generation’s divergent materials was phenomenologically complicated by the production’s unwillingness to reduce the residents’ inner worlds to anything but a provisional narrative cohesion and by its desire to destabilize the spectators’ access to the residents’ imagined interiority. Dementia presents its own phenomenologies to those who live its dislocations, those who care for them, and those who witness its expressive representations. What results – here as in other works we might locate within Lehmann’s ‘postdramatic’ category – is an elusive, non-unitary subjectivity that fits squarely within the postdramatic paradigm. In the end, the narrativity intrinsic to this subjectivity provides continuity and important disjunctions between postdramatic theatre and the dramatic model against which it defines itself. If narrative is the process by which the human subject constitutes itself in time, it is also the medium through which subjectivity breaks apart, bares its gaps and joins its voice with others not its own.
In the final analysis, this ‘not its own’ may be one of the most important contributions of D-Generation – and similar productions – to our understanding of postdramatic theatre. The personal, this production makes clear, is also public, and its performance inside and outside the theatre is enabled and conditioned by institutional frameworks. As noted earlier, the blurring of institutional boundaries between theatre, clinic, research facilities and funding agencies is particularly evident in performance work being conducted around dementia, autism and other forms of neuroatypicality. Anne Bastings’s TimeSlips project, which earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016, was developed almost by accident when she tried to get residents involved in improv games as a volunteer in a nursing home.32 Similar activities that engage the experiences of dementia have been aimed at caregivers as well as residents. Tanya Myers’s Inside Out of Mind, which premiered at Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts Centre in 2013 and subsequently toured England, recreated the experience of living and working with dementia. Drawing upon field work conducted by researchers at the University of Nottingham and oscillating between the disorienting perspective of dementia sufferers and the differently disorienting perspective of their caregivers, the play was performed for audiences that included dementia professionals. Some National Health Service (NHS) trusts purchased tickets for their care assistants and ran workshops for their staff in connection with the performance.33 Sponsors of the production included the Nottingham Institute of Mental Health and IDEA (Improving Dementia Education and Awareness), which provides information and accredited courses for people living with dementia and their caregivers.
Tracking the collaborations, funding streams, venues and audiences of productions like Once Upon a Time, Autobiographer, Inside Out of Mind and D-Generation suggests a different provenance of the postdramatic and its engagements with subjectivity. Rather than defining the postdramatic performance field in terms of the theatrical models it seeks to displace, this perspective considers its aesthetic within a broader infrastructure of practices, institutions and disciplines. That these non-theatrical fields generate ‘individual impulses, fragments and microstructures of texts’ from their own engagements with neuroatypicality suggests that postdramatic subjectivity is much more institutionally diverse than we have allowed. The British company Sound & Fury’s 2005 show Ether Frolics, which explored the history, contemporary practice and experience of anaesthesia using postdramatic and immersive performance techniques, was funded by the Wellcome Trust, which funds projects connected with medical science and by BOC Medical, one of Britain’s leading providers of medical gas products. D-Generation’s narrative framework came from therapeutic exercises conducted in a nursing home. Dementia and its performances, I propose, are particularly suited to unsettling the boundary between the personal and the institutional, the subjective and its social manifestations. That the postdramatic also exists in, depends on, and orients this inter-institutional space is one of its under-told stories.