Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance i: improvisation and rehearsal 165
It seems not. The same considerations that led us to question Kivy’s
account of Bach’s Musical Offering seem to be operative here. However bril-
liant or innovative a performer’s improvisations in rehearsal may be, they
acquire status as elements in a production or performance only as a result
of a decision to accord them that status taken after the fact. Indeed, this
decision is usually taken by another party or other parties, either a director
or choreographer or the rest of the company. There are no conventions
whereby innovations introduced in rehearsal are ipso facto accorded status as
elements in the production or performance, so the conditions that we sug-
gested for genuine improvisational composition are not met. This is not to
denigrate in any way the role of rehearsal in the generation of theatrical and
dance performances, however. As in our earlier discussion, the point here is
a conceptual one.
Our interest in the present context, however, is precisely in the creative
import of what transpires in rehearsal and its bearing upon some issues that
we left undecided in Chapter 6 concerning the scope of the classical para-
digm in theater.^14 Where, as in contemporary theater,^15 it is common for
improvisations and discoveries by performers during group rehearsal to be
incorporated into the finished performance, this clearly undermines any ver-
sion of the classical paradigm that draws a sharp distinction between an act
of composition by the author of a playscript and acts of interpretively real-
izing that playscript once it has been composed. The idea of theatrical works
as scripts that only require realization through the performative norms of
an interpreting community seems to make little sense here. As we noted in
Chapter 6, this might motivate a non-text-based model of what a theatrical
work prescribes for its correct performances, rather than a repudiation of
the idea that theatrical performances are of works at all.
The “ensemble revision” model of theatrical preparation upon which
Hamilton relies in sketching his hypothetical Hedda Gabler cases is so familiar
to contemporary students of theater that it is natural to project it back ear-
lier than 1850, when he begins his outline of the historical background to the
exciting developments in twentieth-century theater reflected in such pro-
ductions as Something to Tell You. In the absence of any illuminating evidence
about rehearsal practice in, say, Shakespearean or Restoration drama, schol-
ars have nonetheless assumed that the ensemble revision model obtained.
Fredson Bowers (1955), for example, advised editors of Shakespeare that
they must take account of the revisions to the plays in group rehearsals,
while Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare (1989) rests on the assumption
that Shakespeare’s plays evolved through group rehearsal.^16 It is therefore
very interesting to consider the insights into the process of theatrical prepa-
ration in English drama from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries pre-
sented by Tiffany Stern in the first serious scholarly studies of these matters