Let Theatre Happen, or How Erika Fischer-Lichte Continues to Inspire Us
Manabu Noda*
Let me show my appreciation of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s tremendous academic achievement by drawing attention to what she quotes. You are what you write, and, in more senses than one, what you write is what you quote – just as in theatre, where cultural quotes are the currency in action.
In her autobiographical essay published in 2005, she quoted the theatre critic Friedrich Luft, who said (and I quote her quote), “Theatre is necessary, most of all in times of misery” (557-67). This radio soundbite is from Germany, soon after WW2. Theatre companies which had come close to total annihilation rapidly began to resume their activities. When the article was published, and only relatively speaking, it was a peaceful time – at least more so than now. Ironically, the soundbite may look more suitable for our post-pandemic times, when the world is stricken with wars and conflicts, and some key elections in the world may pose even tougher challenges to us.
Now, after quoting Luft’s line, Fischer-Lichte says that in the four sectors of occupied Germany, urban or rural, “everywhere actors, directors, and audiences would assemble in whatever places were available in order to let theatre happen” (2005, 557). Theatre is not something to be taken for granted. We need to let it happen.
Just as this quote, and of course in many other ways as well, Fischer-Lichte reminds us of the basics, among which is that theatre cannot happen unless we allow it to. It is a dynamic mode of communication that takes place among people here and now. From this bottom line she develops her léger-de-main analysis of meaning-production process in theatre, taking into account diverse cultural parameters. As we find in her 1997 Show and the Gaze of Theatre, “Stories, rituals, ideas, concepts, perceptive modes, conventions, rules, techniques, actions, behavioral patterns, objects, etc.,” are “circulated among the different spheres, traveling to and fro” (1).
Theatre now begins to look like a market where meaning production is a co-constructive process between the seer and the seen. While language and body are still central, theatre study is now clearly situated on the map of cultural and media studies. We are now talking about cultural transactions.
Like any market, innumerable factors determine theatre. I can only gasp in awe at the manner she manages to historicize and theorize them in her writings – always smart and readable. Using semiotics that became part of our common academic parlance in the 1970s, she discusses intercultural theatre that characterized the 1980s, ranging from Ariane Mnouchkine, through Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, to Tadashi Suzuki.
When I was writing on Ninagawa’s Shakespeare, I always put The Show and the Gaze of Theatre (1995) within my hand’s reach, along with Homi Bhabha, Patrice Pavis, and Rustom Bharucha. Fischer-Lichte’s argument always helped me when my thoughts on Ninagawa nearly got bogged down in oversensitized identity politics. Borrowing her line of argument, I was able to see how Ninagawa’s foreign elements taken from Mediaeval Japan serve to estrange European audience through external decodification, i.e. susceptible to external forces, on the one hand, and help them assign new meanings through internal decodification, i.e. internal to the piece, on the other (152). Fischer-Lichte saved Ninagawa’s samurai Macbeth from ending up as a ready bait for transcultural consumption in my paper.
In the same book, she draws a beautiful parallel between Benjamin’s view on language and allegory. His strongly postlapsarian view on representation may look tempting to our times, especially for those who would stress the ephemeral, deceptive, and “post-truth” nature of theatre. However, her reading of Benjamin is concluded by stressing that “the phases of deconstruction and construction are to be considered necessary constituents” (1997, 289). Scrap and build. Fischer-Lichte helps us avoid the kind of cynicism that some writers would be tempted to affect. We must let theatre happen. Thank you, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and congratulations.
Note: Laudation Panel speech
Bibliography
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “The Theatre Journal Auto / Archive.” Theatre Journal, vol. 57, no 3, 2005, pp. 557-67.
—–. The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. U of Iowa P, 1997.
*Manabu Noda, Professor at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, is an Executive Committee member of the IATC. As a theatre critic and researcher, he has written on British and Japanese theatre, acting and theatre history. He is on the editorial boards of the Theatre Arts (IATC Japan) and Critical Stages (IATC).
