1. Animation as performance: Research context
1.5 The ontology of performance
B
efore examining in greater detail the premise that animation could be seen as performance, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by performance (a term often used with its meaning assumed) and how key concepts from perfor-mance studies can be useful for a deeper consideration of animation. I should first say that I am using the term generally, without specific reference to one single institutional context or style, such as narrative theatre, dance or live art.The broader concept of ‘performance’ is more applicable to the activities of character animators than that of ‘acting’, as contemporary puppet animator, Barry J C Purves suggests:
It’s a bit easy to say all animators should be actors, but acting probably has certain connotations of the theatre and film, and is maybe too defined by scripts and human personae. These days I prefer to say that all animators need to have the sensibilities of a performer, as that widens the field and brings in dance, mime, singing and a mil-lion related skills. We are performers who happen to be telling big stories on a small scale.1
Performance theorist, Richard Schechner, has expanded all notions of what per-formance is. As with approaches to the definition of animation, for Schechner perfor-mance can be treated as a very broad concept, which stretches beyond the stage and into all aspects of life:
In business, sports and sex, “to perform” is to do something up to a standard – to succeed, to excel. In the arts, “to perform” is to put on a show, a play, a dance, a concert. In everyday life, “to perform” is to show off, to go to extremes, to undertake an action for those who are watching… The underlying notion is that any action that is framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed is a performance.“2
The process of performing an identity determined by social role is developed in the concept of performativity, as defined by Judith Butler and examined in my case stud-ies in 2.2 The performative animator on page 36 and 2.6 Performing animated presence on page 74. In a theory of performativity informed by linguistics, Butler proposes that performance is an act that defines our very being. A performative
1 Barry J C Purves, Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (Amsterdam; Boston et al.:
Focal Press, 2008), xvii.
2 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, Second Edition (London; New York:
Routledge, 2006), 28.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
speech act, as conceived by the linguist J. L. Austin, is a phrase that has an audience and performs the act it describes, e.g. “I apologize”, “I bet you”, “I thee wed”, “I come out to you”.1 A performative act, then, is an existential act in which one seeks to be-come that which one enacts. Butler further argues that our sense of self is a fragile construct that must be constantly performed as a role in order to be maintained. The notion that there is a performance inherent in everyday life is a concept with historical precedents. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, and its Renaissance idea of a theatrum mundi, itself derived from classical thought, was that all the world is a stage and all people merely players, playing out roles in their everyday lives. As with very broad definitions of animation, this view of performance risks becoming a
‘catch-all’ holding term for all of human behaviour. In order to differentiate between the psychological performances enacted in everyday life and those performances that are created specifically in an organised context for public display, Richard Schechner uses the terms ‘restored’ or ‘twice-behaved behaviour’2. With these, he is referring to actions or speech acts that are prepared or rehearsed and then re-presented. A process of preparing speech acts and bodily movements, which are then presented to the public, also takes place when a character is animated.3
The concept of twice-behaved behaviour that is out of the ordinary can be further developed through the work of Eugenio Barba. In his book The Paper Canoe4, Barba outlines his theories of theatre anthropology in which he seeks to develop a transcul-tural ‘meta’ theory of performance5. Rather than referring to narrow conventional stereotypes such as European vs. Asian, dance vs. theatre, he strives to uncover universal principles that could apply to all performance and he therefore focuses on human behaviour in an organised performance situation that differs from everyday
1 Austin cited in Judith Butler, “Burning Acts, Injurious Speech,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 197.
2 Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, Second Edition, 29.
3 I acknowledge here that the preparation of animated performances usually takes a longer time than that of live performance.
4 Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide To Theatre Anthropology (London; New York:
Routledge, 1995).
5 Ibid., 10.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
human behaviour. Barba further identifies two tendencies in performance, which he refers to as North and South Pole performers1. South Pole performers have no strict codes and have to develop their own rules based on ‘the suggestions contained in the texts to be performed, the observation of daily behaviour, the emulation of other performers, the study of books and pictures, the director’s instructions.’2 This category includes conventional naturalistic Western acting. On the other hand, North Pole performance is based on systems of artificial, codified rules: moving and per-forming in non-naturalistic poses that are larger than life. The North Pole performer
1 Ibid., 13.
2 Ibid.
Figure 6.A visual juxtaposition of the use of the Shadow Test to determine strong readable body poses in both Disney animator’s Preston Blair’s animation manual and Decroux mime exercises by Ingemar Lindh from Barba’s A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
‘models her/his scenic behaviour according to a well-proven system of rules which define a style or codified gesture’.1 This category includes dance and highly stylised theatrical forms. In Balinese theatre, classical ballet and kathakali performance, for example, types of walks are used in which there is an alteration of normal balance, a ‘luxury balance’, meaning that ‘A whole series of tensions is then set in action just to keep us from falling’.2 It could be argued that, as commercial character animation also makes use of traditional rules, much of it could fit into the category of North Pole performance, specifically that following the classic ‘cartoonal’ principles of animation developed at Disney’s studios3. For example, formulae for the representation of a walk have become codified by animation practitioners into stylised movements that animation students study and replicate: the strut, the double bounce walk, the sneak,
1 Ibid.
2 Ibid., 19.
3 cf. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (New York: Hyperion, 1981) for a detailed description of the evolution of the Disney approach to animation.
Figure 7. Preston Blair, Movements of the Two-Legged Figure.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
the shuffle.1
Whether the performance style reflects a naturalistic or codified approach, what is presented is an ‘extra-daily’2 use of the body: ways in which a performer behaves for public presentation that differ from standard behaviour in their specific cultural con-text. These extra-daily techniques span a vast spectrum of vocal and physical activi-ties, from speaking in rhyming couplets to juggling and acrobatics, to stylised perfor-mance such as Japanese noh theatre. They could also apply to character animation.
Further refining this concept of re-presented activity that is out of the ordinary, Michael Kirby argues that ‘acting is a sub-category of performance’3 and proposes that performance involves a continuum of activities according to the degree to which a character is represented:
• Complex acting is used to refer to the emotional commitment of the whole ac-tor’s being to represent a role;
• Simple acting involves simulation and impersonation, but only a little emotion;
• Received acting involves being there, in costume, but doing little, such as an extra;
• Symbolized matrixed is the representation of a character role by a performer, such as a comedian, who is clearly acting as themselves,
• Non-matrixed is a style of performance in which the performer carries out actions, but does not represent a character and can be used as a term to describe a range of activities from performance art to Kabuki stagehands who participate in the action and are seen on stage, but are not in character4. Thus, the term non-matrixed is a useful concept to differentiate from acting when describing performance behaviour that has been created for public display and is
1 cf. Preston Blair, Cartoon Animation (Laguna Hills, California: Walter Foster Publishing, Inc., 1994), 98.
2 Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide To Theatre Anthropology, 6.
3 Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, Second Edition, 174.
4 Michael Kirby, “On Acting and Not-acting” in The Art of Performance eds. Battock, Gregory and Nickas, Robert (1984)[1972]), quoted in Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 27.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
beyond the context of the everyday yet remains outside the representation of ‘char-acter’.
All the concepts set out so far referring to the creation of a character, the as-sumption of a role and the behaviours that the character enacts can be used to describe animation practice. However, animation is not conventionally thought of as performance. The theatre company, Faulty Optic, for example, whose show Soiled is examined in 2.4 Animation Theatre on page 61, think of animation and live perfor-mance as two separate entities. They see animation as a pre-recorded, linear, filmic form and live theatre as a continually evolving process.1 The primary differences implied here reside in the specific conditions in which the performance is played out.
Adrian Heathfield in Live: Art and Performance specifies three primary factors that contextualise the performer:
• time – temporality, immediacy, duration, pacing;
• space – dynamics of location, mass, context, the site itself;
• physical presence – the power of the body, intimacy and proximity, risk, dan-ger, relationship between actor and audience.2
I will now examine in more detail these three factors of time, space and physical presence identified by Heathfield as contextualising a performance situation and, in particular, how notions of liveness, authorship and presence challenge the notion of animation as performance.
Temporality is a crucial part of live performance as it is experienced ‘now’. Peggy Phelan argues in her essay, The Ontology of Performance, that an ontological fact of live performance is that it happens now, which makes it non-reproducible, in a state of disappearance and beyond control or regulation:
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of represen-tations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance…
Perfor-1 Liz Walker, interview by Birgitta Hosea, September 17, 2010.
2 Adrian Heathfield, Live: Art and Performance (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 7.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
mance’s being… becomes itself through disappearance.1
The experience of live performance is ephemeral, its only trace in the memory of the spectator. It is a unique event that takes place now, in front of the eyes of the specta-tor. In The Paper Canoe, Barba argues for a broader understanding of the concept of theatre, which should be thought of as much more than an institution or a building.
He concurs with Phelan that ’theatre is the art of the present’2 and that it exists only in memory,
In the age of electronic memory, of film and reproducibility, theatre performance ap-peals to living memory, which is not a museum but metamorphosis. This relationship defines it.3
Another aspect of being present at a live event is that it involves the element of chance, the unplanned and the unpredictable. Indeed, many commentators on acting find this a key feature of a convincing performance. In their book, Improvisation, John Hodgson and Ernest Richards suggest: ‘Truth in acting is not necessarily the represen-tation of reality, but rather the kind of acting which, by its spontaneity, enables us to see it as a true identification with life.’4 Spontaneity is not only a feature of improvisa-tion, but is present to some degree in all live performance. However tightly blocked and scripted a live performance may be, variations will result from factors such as the emotional state of the actors, audience reaction and the different spatial contexts of the venue that a performance is produced in. Concepts of immediacy and the present appear at first glance to be antithetical to a conventional understanding of animation.
I will, however, examine issues of liveness, spontaneity and improvisation in greater detail in Chapter 3 on page 91 to page 126, where I will argue that animation can indeed be a live event.
An additional feature of live performance is that an audience perceives the actual physical presence of the actor. Theatre director, Peter Brook, starts his book, The
1 Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 146.
2 Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide To Theatre Anthropology, 36.
3 Ibid.
4 John Hodgson and Ernest Richards, Improvisation (London: Methuen, 1969), 11.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
Empty Space, with the lines:
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.1
This corporeality is experienced in three dimensions and a connection between the authorship of a performance and the body of the actor is clearly evident to the audi-ence. Brook’s definition again raises issues, which at first sight appear to diametrically oppose live performance with a conventional understanding of animation. The creator of an animated performance is the animator: performed behaviour does not originate from the flat body of the animated character. I will explore the issue of the authorship of performance in 2.2 - 2.4 (on page 36 to page 66), presence and the animated body in 2.6 - 2.7 (on page 74 to page 86) and experiencing animation in three dimensions in 3.3 (on page 99 to page 106).
The attention of the audience is paramount in the relationship between performer and viewer, as Barba asserts: ‘the theatre’s raw material is not the actor, nor the space, nor the text, but the attention, the seeing, the hearing, the mind of the specta-tor. Theatre is the art of the spectator…’.2 This implies that performance requires an act of cognition, a relationship between the world on stage and the world inside the spectator’s head, a vital process of exchange between actor and spectator, as Barba describes:
What is particular about the theatre is the live and immediate contact between actor and spectator… the performance is the spark which flashes from the contact between these two ensembles: the actors and the spectators…3
There is an exchange of looks, a risk that the performer will look back or involve the spectator directly. Thus, in a live situation the spectator may think, “I see you, do you see me back?”, whereas a viewer of a film is in a secure position of voyeurism, “I see you, I need not fear you seeing me back, I am in control.” This process of exchange occurs both between the actor and spectator and within the audience itself because
1 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 1982), 11.
2 Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide To Theatre Anthropology, 39.
3 Ibid., 140.
1. Animation as performance: Research context
audience members can look at each other.1 Animation is not conventionally thought of as a form in which there can be a spark between performer and viewer, however digi-tal technologies have enabled greater possibilities for interaction and the involvement of audience feedback in animation. I will look at the idea of audience participation and interaction in more detail in 3.2 on page 92 and 3.4 on page 107.
This section has considered different theories about performance in order to clarify what is generally meant by the term, so that it can then be examined whether animation may be said to sit within the field of performance. Definitions of animation may appear ambiguous, yet it is usually assumed that animation is pre-recorded in time-consuming detail, played back in a linear form through the medium of film or digital video and enclosed inside a flat screen. Thus, the playback of the animation will be repeatable and predictable. In addition, it seems safe to assume that, as cartoon characters are not living beings and lack actual embodied presence, they cannot in-teract with the viewer. As we have seen, performance, on the contrary, is embodied, live, has the potential for chance, for spontaneity, for reciprocity of gaze between audience and performer. It is experienced now, in the present in a spatial setting.
According to the ontological debates that I have considered, the two concepts of animation and live performance appear to be mutually exclusive.
However, a closer examination of what performance actually is, and what ani-mation can be, complicates any simplistic binary opposition between the two. As a working definition for the purposes of this thesis, a ‘meta’ theory of performance is proposed in which a human body (or a substitute for it) assumes an identity be-yond that of her everyday life and is displayed for an audience where she re-presents behaviours, which were planned and prepared. This is a time-based process, which takes place in the present and can be applied to theatre, live art and other forms of performing arts. I will go on to argue that this working definition can also be applied to animation.
1 For example, in a traditional proscenium theatre the royal box often had a poor view at the edge of the stage, but people in it could display themselves to the audience.