Theatre as a Scene of Otherness

Abstract

Western theatre, whose origins go back to the ancient Greeks, presents itself as a scene, as an open place of showing and being shown, of exhibiting and being exhibited. In German we use the word Schauplatz. This common term is closely related to the Greek word theatron, which is derived from theoria, i.e. from contemplation as an intensive and persistent manner of viewing. Thus the theatre is certainly a scene, but a scene of otherness, of alienness, of strangeness, a Schauplatz des Fremden; but what does that mean? In this essay, I shall unfold step by step some phenomenological features of the theatre. In this context I refer to the presuppositions of what I call responsive phenomenology, especially stressing the aspects of corporeity and alienness. Theatre proves to be an aesthetic whole in which elements of sensuality, of mobility, of affectivity, of expression, of spatiality and of temporality are closely interwoven. The quality of otherness points to the fact that everything happening on the scene deviates greatly from our everyday life as if we were entering the world of dreams. The ways out of the normal are various, varying from one culture to the other and varying within one and the same culture. Let us here take the Western origins of the theatre as one paradigm among others, one that has now been considerably influenced by Eastern forms of theatre such as the Japanese Kabuki and Bunraku. The essay starts with general remarks on otherness on stage and then deals with various aspects of theatre that address specific phenomenological issues. Finally it touches upon the politics of theatre that exceed pure aesthetics.