Any creative endevour prematurely dies when overwhelmed by the question of where to simply start. Brook remarks on the first day of any rehersal stating: “the purpose of anything you do on the first day is to get you through to the second one.” In a counterpoint to his examples of sketches, jokes, games, or activities for beginning a performance, Elinor Fuchs’s “Visits to a Small Planet” offers many questions to begin analyzing a play. As she mentions in the introduction, the template is not an ends but a departure point: a set of questions to help look for the evidence for analysis.
Although written for performance criticism, her approach also resonated with my thinking about an architecture or urbanism. In particular, the questions regarding the social world are foregrounded by questions of space, environment and time. This connected to my ongoing question of how social relations function through form (architecture, environment, and so on)? Social relations functions through architecture, it is not powerful in and of itself. Perhaps “character”–and relationships between characters–could similarly be said to function through a performance’s environment not only the performer herself? As discussed by scholars more broadly: subjects and their environments are co-produced–Stuart Hall, Foucault, Richard Sennett, etc. Note: by co-production, I’m roughly referring to the making identities, discourses, and material culture.
I found a related notion of co-production also discussed through numerous examples in Peter Brook’s ‘The Deadly Theatre’ in The Empty Space. For any given performance the relationship between audience, performer, critic, writer, environment, place and geography, history and present is in process, different time and time again. “Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience and other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events…” Yet this idea of change and influence is at odds with the (perceived? desired?) repetition of performance. Brook writes, “A performance gets set and usually has to be repeated–and repeated as well and accurately as possible.” (Brook, 15) This desire for pure duplication is unattainable. However, the repetition in performance and rehearsal offer procedural attempts at “making better” through repetition and precise iteration.