performance ii: audience and embodiment 189
and distanciation techniques in a Brechtian production, the reflections to
which she is moved are intended to lead her to view as outrageous certain
features of the social and political world outside the theater. But the external
interrogative interest upon which the Brechtian relies is, we have said, cru-
cial to our taking an artistic interest in a presented manifold. The Brechtian,
then, puts our artistic interest to political use. But an artistic interest in a
performance of Aristotelean theater will also require that we take an exter-
nal interrogative interest in that performance, even though the Aristotelean
production is not putting the latter interest to any political use. To simply
respond to the Aristotelean performance emotionally in the way intended
is not to take an artistic interest in it, any more than someone who simply
wallows in the visual experience elicited by an “op art” painting is taking an
artistic interest in the painting.
The objection to Woodruff’s account, then, is that it excludes from our expe-
rience of theatrical performances something central to our interest in these
performances as art , whether the performance be Aristotelean, Brechtian,
or, indeed, Hamilton’s hypothetical Something to Tell You (discussed in Chapter
6). As Thom stresses, the audience of an artistic performance is required to
respond not only by being affected in certain ways by the performance, but
also by interpreting what is going on (1993, 196–199). And interpretation is
an activity on the part of the audience that requires an external interrogative
interest, as we have termed it, in what the performers are doing.
3 The Embodied Performer and the Mirroring Receiver
Mirroring Receiver
When the Irish poet W. B. Yeats asked, “How can we know the dancer from
the dance?”^9 he traded for metaphorical effect upon a distinctive feature of
dance as an art form. He could not have inquired, to similar effect, how we
could know the painter from the painting, or the musician from the music,
or even, for traditional theater, the actors from the play. It is most common
to characterize this distinctive feature of dance by saying that in the latter
the performer uses her own body as the vehicle through which an artistic
content is articulated. Martha Graham, for example, wrote that the solitary
aim of dance training has always been “so to train the body as to make pos-
sible any demand made upon it by that inner self which has the vision of
what needs to be said” (1974, 139). It is because a dance seems to just be
the movements executed by the dancer’s body that we can raise the question
posed by Yeats.
It is not only in dance that the artistic content of a work can be in part a
function of what the artist does with her body. We have already encountered