Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 119
the classical paradigm surely makes better sense of what is going on in
Hedda-to-Hedda than the ingredients model, and avoids having to view the
tradition of literary theater as massively self-deceived. This suggests that our
initial response to Hamilton’s presentation of the ingredients model as an
explanation of performances like Grotowski’s The Constant Prince was the
right one. There is no single model – not even a single model of the clas-
sical paradigm, as we have seen – that can be usefully applied to theatrical
performance as a whole. Theater, like music, requires a pluralistic approach
which limits, but does not eliminate, the scope of the classical paradigm.
Hamilton is not the only person to argue for the general inapplicability
of the classical paradigm to theater, however. David Osipovich (2006) has
argued for a similar conclusion. Osipovich takes as his starting point a more
restricted critique of the classical paradigm. David Saltz (2001) has argued
that individual theatrical performances are properly seen as being of produc-
tions , not of theatrical works. Salz maintains that productions that bear the
names of theatrical works are not rightly understood as guided by an over-
riding intention to be faithful to such works. Rather, the decisions that shape
productions are often purely practical, depending upon such things as the
nature of the performance space and the human resources available. Also,
where decisions are made on artistic or aesthetic grounds, these often reflect
the artistic or aesthetic goals of the company itself, rather than those of the
playwright. Thus an independent theatrical work is, in Hamilton’s terms,
merely an ingredient upon which a company can draw in a production.
Osipovich argues for a more radical conclusion. Just as there are extra-
work considerations that shape productions, so, he argues, there are extra-
production considerations that shape performances. The “liveness model,” as
he terms it, takes a defining condition of theatrical performance to be the
co-occurrence at a given time of an act of showing and an act of watching
what is shown. Because the performers – those who are doing the showing –
must always be sensitive to, and willing to respond to, the responses of those
who are watching, all theatrical performances are “unscriptable” – that is to
say, it is impossible in principle to specify in advance what the performers
should do in order for the performance to succeed.
[E]very time one [performs live] one has to decide, based on the audience’s
responses, whether this time a particular set of tactics will work. But the fact
that this decision has to be made during the course of every performance ...
means that every performance has a unique set of circumstances. Because this
set of aesthetically significant circumstances is based on the interaction of a
particular audience with a particular cast on a given night, it is unscriptable ,
either beforehand or afterward, since every night the actors will have to
decide if the way they have been “doing” it will work for this particular house.
(Osipovich 2006, 464)