FRAMES AND BREAKING THE FRAME

      Most analyses of performance concentrate on the performance itself, theperformers and their attempts to communicate with or control thespectators. If we view a performance as a system, we realize that we don'twant to leave out the experience of half of that system. In this paper, wewill analyze the experience of the audience, those who watch a performance,in order to gain insight into the nature of performance.

      In 1980, I published an article entitled "Where is the Piece?"¹ whichdescribed and analyzed a performance by David Antin which took place at 80Langton Street, an alternative performance space in San Francisco. Thisperformance was particularly interesting to me because its frames, both intime and space, were challenged by the audience. Using Erving Goffman'sand Gregory Bateson's insights into the structure of framed interactions, Icould diagram this performance, and establish that although certain membersof the audience broke into the performance frame, each retained or set forhimself or herself a place in a social hierarchy which was fairly rigid andwhich determined an ultimate social frame for the piece which was not sodifferent from what we would have imagined had the piece never beeninterrupted.

      The methodology I applied to David Antin's piece could be used to analyzeany performance which is open to or encourages audience participation. Inthis paper, I would like to return to the problems of audience/performerinteractions by analyzing a number of performances that are essentiallyclosed to this kind of audience participation.

      It is useful to examine the audience at a closed performance for severalreasons. First, many if not most performances are closed and we are notused to thinking of the audience as having any but a passive role in them.In addition, we believe that if the performance is closed to audienceparticipation, the frames of time and space will not be broken and if theyare, this will be seen only as a disruption and not part of the performanceat all. Finally, examining the audience in this context may allow us toask new questions about why we go to performances and why we make them.

      Let us now turn to an audience member, a spectator. Who is he?
      According to Goffman, he plays two roles:

            One is the role of the theatergoer. He is the one who
            makes the reservations and pays for the tickets, comes
            late or on time, and is responsive to the curtain call after
            the performance. He, too, is the person who takes the
            intermission break. He has untheatrical activity to
            sustain; it is real money he must spend and real time
            he must use up -- just as the performer earns real money
            and adds or detracts from his reputation through each
            performance. The theatergoer may have little "real"
            reason for having come, his motives being ones he would
            not like to see exposed.²

His other role, Goffman calls "on-looker,"

            He collaborates in the unreality onstage. He
            sympathetically and vicariously participates in the
            unreal world generated by the dramatic interplay
            of the scripted characters. He gives himself over. He is
            raised (or lowered) to the cultural level of the
            playwright's characters and themes, appreciating
            allusions for which he doesn't quite have the background,
            marital adjustments for which he doesn't quite have the
            stomach, varieties in style of life for which he is not
            quite ready and repartee which gives to speaking a role
            he would not quite accept...³

      Although Goffman's idea of performance here is limited to a scripted play,his basic distinction is useful. I will primarily be investigating the"on-looker" role, but due to the nature of the complex experience I wish toinvestigate, the "theatergoer" reasserts himself at the core of the event.

      Both Goffman and Marco De Marinis⁴ assert that the spectator's role is notprimarily passive. In Goffman's words, "He gives himself over." DeMarinis lists "various receptive operations/actions that an audiencecarries out: perception, interpretation, aesthetic appreciation,memorization, emotive and intellectual response, etc." Although, DeMarinis believes that the spectator's relationship with the performance"can never become one of real equality," he stresses that the spectator isa "relatively autonomous 'maker of meanings' for the performance; itscognitive and emotive effects can only be truly actualized by theaudience."⁵ Because De Marinis's objective is to analyze the audience inorder to instruct performers on how to gain and keep an audience'sattention, his description of the active experience of the spectator lacksdetail and depth. Nevertheless, we will return to his notion of a"relatively autonomous 'maker of meanings'" and we will puzzle over justwhat Goffman meant by "He gives himself over."

      This spectator or on-looker, who I choose to call "watcher", participatesin the creation of the frames in time and space that contain theperformance. Although the Watcher knows that some of what happens in theplaying area may be illusion and some of what happens may be real, she(I've switched pronouns here because I'm about to describe my ownexperiences as Watcher) is aware that an essential part of her role is tobe outside, looking at, the performance. Any of us who have travelled,especially to a country quite different from our own, for me in countriesin Asia, knows that to be a Watcher is to objectify that which is watched.This objectification makes it clear that that which is watched is outthere, while the Watcher is in here. The Watcher, by the very act ofwatching, sets up a seemingly insurmountable barrier between herself andthat which she watches. On the other hand, she desires more than anythingelse to break through that barrier, to experience the Otherness of theOther. Paradoxically, she is reassured that this can never really takeplace; the frame imposed by her position as Watcher is a fence that keepsher safe from the transformations that identification with the Other couldbring about. So, she wants it and she doesn't want it; she's caught in yetanother of the ambivalent situations of desire. I would like to suggestthat in certain performances, and perhaps in certain moments of "real" lifeas well, the Watcher breaks through her ambivalence, through her need toobjectify, through the barrier that watching sets up, and becomesidentified with the performer. I am trying to describe a relationship hereand have chosen to use the word "identification" to do so. But it seems tobe a deeply inadequate word. Perhaps this is because as Gregory Batesonpoints out: "Human languages -- especially perhaps those of the West --are peculiar in giving undue emphasis to Separable Things. The emphasis isnot upon 'relations between'..."⁶ I have taken as my starting point anumber of performances that I describe as having "moved" me. Again, thisword, "moved" has always seemed sentimental and inaccurate. Nevertheless,this investigation will show that there is some truth in the idea that tobreak through the barrier between the Watcher and the performance isliterally to be moved to another place and another concept of the self.What I'm proposing then is a form of frame-breaking that is quite differentfrom the form that I described in my earlier article "Where is the Piece?"There frames of time and space were broken so that the audience mightbecome participants in the actual performance. That was a social eventwith social consequences. What I wish to describe now is a more privatematter with personal and philosophical consequences which I will only beable to begin to address.

      Any hypotheses will be postulated in the service of approaching a crucial,but extremely evasive experience, one which, because of its evasive andsubjective nature, is usually avoided. What follows, therefore, is ahighly speculative venture.

INSTANCES OF IDENTIFICATION

      The nature of the frame that the Watcher experiences between herself andthe performance is more complex than a simple fence or barrier. In fact,the frame is a complicity between the Watcher and the performers. Even themost cynical Watcher is willing to engage the performance in some way.Unless she falls asleep or is otherwise distracted by inner turmoil orsomeone yelling "fire", she will enter performance time and space, and shewill even hope to receive something for her efforts. For those of us whoattend a large number of performances, the moments of reward are often fewand far between. Nevertheless, we make our pact, we pay attention, and wetake our chances.

      Our complicity does not question the nature of the real. Everything inthe playing area, an arabesque or a waving hand, is unreal simply becauseit is framed in performance time and space. Often this impression ofunreality is so strong that an unplanned event in the playing space willautomatically be assumed to be a part of the piece.

      Sometimes something else happens. It may be an event or it may be amounting sense of realization engendered by a slow experiencing of thedetails of a performance. It may be an experience shared by all or most ofthe audience or it may be experienced by one individual for a series ofreasons best lumped, for the moment, under the idea of "readiness" andcaused by a special relationship between the context of the experience andthe prior knowledge of the individual. Nevertheless, this experience cutsthrough or shatters the frame.

      It is interesting to note that when I described this experience to aBuddhist friend, he used a different vocabulary to understand it. For him,this essential experience reveals a Gap, a radical discontinuity ofconsciousness. The Watcher identifies, perhaps merges, with the performer.This experienced Gap reveals to the Watcher her essential aloneness andalienation; paradoxically, this revelation leads to an identification sointense and so deep that she experiences it as a kind of shock.

      A precedent for describing the identification experience can be found inHans Robert Jauss's "Interactive patterns of identification with thehero."⁷ Although Jauss's reception theory primarily concerns itself withliterary works, his five patterns of interaction can easily be applied toperformance situations. Jauss believes that the communicative process ofart is a "back-and-forth movement between the aesthetically freed observerand his irreal object in which the subject in its aesthetic enjoyment canrun through an entire scale of attitudes."⁸ In an attempt to categorizethese attitudes and their concurrent "role models for behavior,"⁹ Jausslists five types of identification experience. Unfortunately, if we try tolocate the sort of identification that occupies our attention in thispaper, it seems to fit somewhere inside categories II and III. On theother hand, neither of these categories adequately describes theexperience.

      This experience is clearly not the same as Jauss's category I, AssociativeIdentification, in which the Watcher actually plays a part. This is thesort of audience participation that occurs in some experimental theater,happenings, rituals; the type of participation I was describing in DavidAntin's performance in my article, "Where is the Piece?" Furthermore, theidentification experience that Jauss describes in categories IV and V,Cathartic and Ironic, don't fit the type of experience we're after here.Both describe distancing machanisms in which feelings of pity and terror oralienation are followed by moral or critical judgement. This process offeeling followed by a sense of distancing judgement does not occur in theexperiences I am about to describe.

      Jauss's category II, Admiring, in which we emulate (Aemulatio) the perfecthero, and III, Sympathetic, in which we "pity" (showing moral interest anda readiness to act) the imperfect (everyday) hero, seem to be closest tothe experience. But Jauss is less interested in the internal process ofthe Watcher than he is in the socially and historically contextualizedaspects ofthe identification experience. For this reason, he turns hisattention outward, missing some of the deeper aspects of the process.

      When we attempt to describe this inner experience, we are confronted witha number of problematic issues. Roland Barthes in S/Z reminds us that thedeceptively simple sentence "I read the text" is unexpectedly complex. Notonly is the text a plurality of interrelated codes, but this pluralityextends to the "I" as well.

            This "I" which approaches the text is already itself
            a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite,
            or more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost).¹⁰

Thus, if we ask what it means for the Watcher to experience identificationwith a performer, we find both Watcher and performer, as signifiers,sliding out of our grasp. Who is watching and what is she watching? Whenthe Watcher identifies with the performer is she identifying with the realperson, the role, the context, or some infinitely complicated combinationof these possibilities?

      Further complications arise if we compare identification with certaintypes of mystical awareness. Frederick Streng in his article, "Languageand Mystical Awareness," reminds us that the mystical experience presentsepistemological problems. Although all who analyze the experience agreethat it is different from conventional knowing, R. Otto and EvelynUnderhill contend that the difference lies in the object of knowledge,while W. T. Stace insists that the mental experience is different.¹¹ Whileeach interpreter concentrates on one pole of a subject/object relationship,none locates the experience in the place between, the "relating to."

      But let us turn to some examples. In 1989, I attended a performance ofthe Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. I will attempt to describeone of the dances as I experienced it as a Watcher.

      The performers are dancing. They are graceful, although many of theirmovements have a typical Cunningham flavor, a kind of awkwardness that intheir cases is just another kind of grace. They have beautiful bodies andthere is pleasure in the simple act of watching them move. They dance intwos and threes, sometimes interacting in larger groups. Then, from thevery back of stage left, Merce Cunningham enters and walks diagonallyacross the stage. He walks slowly and with some difficulty; there seems tobe something wrong with his right leg. In fact, he is limping. With hisarms he traces a complex movement; first, it's a balletic sweep, then itturns into a mundane movement as though the arm is pushing something awayor as though the gesture says "go, leave me alone." It is here, as hewalks, that I think these thoughts: this is real. (My friend leans overand whispers, "there's something wrong with his leg.") I think: he's old,over seventy, he's courageous, he's fragile, this could be me. But it ismore than thinking that I'm doing. Cunningham's dance takes my breathaway; I struggle with him. I feel his limp in my body.

      There are a number of reasons why it is Cunningham and not his dancers whogives me this experience of identification. First, Cunningham is differentfrom the other performers; he is unexpected in several ways. His entrance,his appearance, and his limp are new information, set against a backgroundof the expected and essentially redundant entrances, appearances, andmovements of the other dancers. In addition, his arm movements echomovements that the dancers have been doing previous to his entrance.However, when he does these movements they have an added meaning; he is thechoreographer, the source of the movements. When he does them they areauthenticated by his presence and actions. This authentication of thedance movements is similar to the way a poet authenticates his poem throughhis presence.

      As Jerome Rothenberg describes it:

            The poet when he sounds his poem is witness to the
            way it goes, the way it comes to happen in the first
            place. He is in fact the witness to a (prior) vision, to
            an image-of-the-world expressed through word and sound
            ...Somehow it is enough that he has risked himself
            to do as much as he can do; to stand there as a witness
            to his words, he who alone can sound them.¹²

That Cunningham is known to me, that I recognize him having seen him manytimes before, that he is famous, may have something to do with the power ofhis presence. But this recognition, the thrill of seeing a star, is notenough to describe the experience I had at this particular performance.That I know something about Cunningham, his theories about dance, hisrepertory, his association with John Cage (although I'm not an expert onany of this), that I know his age, and that I know that many of the greatyoung dancers of our time have not or will not live to his age, may alsohave contributed.

      The experience of identification is signalled for me by the thought:"this could be me" and is always connected to a realization that somethingin the performance is "real", not illusion. Here the Watcher becomes againthe theatergoer, but not in Goffman's mundane sense. Here my reality (andI take that word and concept as a relative one, as an interpretation not atruth) is merged with the reality of Cunningham's demonstration of his wayof walking which in its turn is a demonstration of his age, and of thefragility of all human endeavor.

      There are several things that can be said about the particular event thatset off the identification experience in this case and that might begeneralized to other cases. First, it was unexpected. Although I knewthat Cunningham uses everyday movement like walking in his dance and I knewhis age, his particular way of walking, the struggle of it and the momentit occurred in the dance was totally surprising. Second, it wasundeniable, or as I have described it earlier "real." Third, it wasphysical. The experience of watching it was visceral. Fourth, though asmall thing in itself, it seemed to teach about larger things, courage andfragility. Finally, in order to learn, I had to be ready for the lesson.

      Terry Eagleton in the chapter "Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and ReceptionTheory" of his book Literary Theory describes this readiness as a "vicioushermeneutic circle." He contends that the reader who is transformed isalready transformed from the outset and is ready to be further transformed.In other words, the reader who is affected is the kind who needs to beaffected least, since she is already equipped with the right capacities andresponses. Or what you get depends on what you put in. Although Eagletoncriticizes this readiness as a vicious circle that cannot transform theunprepared, it is the type of readiness that many types of mysticaltraining create.

      When Linda Montano set about to plan her 1978 piece Mitchell's Death, shedrew a diagram in the shape of a cross. This diagram may help toilluminate this matter of identification. (See diagram)

      The diagram is a spatial plan for the performance. On the far right sat aVCR under a video monitor. On videotape, we saw Linda Montano applying themake-up that she was wearing in the performance. First, slowly she put ongrey make-up; then, even more slowly, she inserted long acupuncture needlesinto the skin of her face. Next to the monitor, on a cushion, PaulineOliveros sat cross-legged, hitting a Japanese bowl gong at regularintervals and chanting a simple vowel sound. Next to Oliveros was alecturn, Montano behind it, reading a text from her journal, a descriptionof the death of her ex-husband Mitchell, precise and chilling in itsdetail. Reading in a steady drone, her voice was fed through a tape-delaysystem (delayed three times), giving the piece a feeling of echo and depth.On the far left sat Al Rossi playing the South Indian Sruti box, a droninginstrument. This describes the right to left plane of the cross.

      Montano's diagram is more abstract when it comes to the plane that movesbetween the performance and the audience. She simply says that the lightdirected at the performers makes up the back of this plane, and the sounddirected out to the audience makes up the front. However, I believe thatthis plane is a physical representation of identification, something thatMontano wished would happen during her piece and which indeed did happen.

      "Mitchell's Death" was a mourning ritual, performed in public, with bothfriends and strangers in the audience, at a Performance Festival at theCenter for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego.At that time, I was a stranger in the audience, although I knew severalpeople and suspected that the story Montano told in her journal had reallyhappened. The piece was an act of real mourning. As Theodore Shankdescribes it:

            At the end of the performance there was a silence
            in contrast to the applause that had followed each
            of the other performances at the festival. Most of the
            sixty or so spectators knew Linda Montano and Pauline
            Oliveros, some had known Mitchell. After a couple of
            moments, the sobs of a man in the audience became
            audible. No one spoke until the next performance was
            announced.¹³

Although presenting her piece at a performance festival, Montano claimedthat "it was mourning, not art."¹⁴ And indeed it functioned successfullyas a ritual. But it was a ritual which the audience watched; no oneinterrupted or was invited to join in the chanting, no one entered theperformance space, and no one sobbed out loud until the end. Thus, theexperience of this piece, because of its presentational style, was similarto the experience of recognition and identification I've described duringthe Cunningham piece. "This is real. This could be me." Although I wasan outsider to this mourning ritual, I still had an identificationexperience, perhaps because of the unexpected nature of the performanceitself, in its context of non-ritual performance.

      In order to investigate the possibility of an identification experiencethat is not shared by all members of the audience, I will next describemyself as Watcher at a winter dance at the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. Ihad never been to such a dance before. (Subsequent visits to this dancehave not given me this same experience). I had seen dances by aprofessional troupe of Australian aboriginals, presented in a museum in thecontext of the Sydney Bienalle and I had seen dances on film. I might alsoadd that I have a particular aversion towards invading the life of thosepeople normally thought of as the "exotic" Other.

      We entered the Plaza and the dance had been going on for some time. Wewere careful to stand at the periphery, not interfering with the groups ofdancers who slowly entered or suddenly emerged from the clan houses. Atfirst I was simply interested in the beauty and ingenuity of the costumes,masks, and music. But I began to notice something that I had never thoughtof before. Most of the dancers were not skilled dancers. Although I mightexpect this of the children, the adults were also clumsy and amateur. Itwas true that the four Buffaloes and the two Corn Mothers danced with agreat deal of energy and skill, but the deer and the eagles and theantelope were, I realized, ordinary citizens of the Pueblo who had put onthese costumes for this special day and who knew the way the dance wassupposed to go, but who danced as I might dance if it were my place to doso. Then, I saw him, a man dressed as a deer, who before my eyes wastransformed. He was different, a sign of the possibility that through thisdance transformation could occur. He was, in some sort of reality, a deer.My identification with him, which was totally unexpected and sudden, wasof a completely different order than my critical stance towards the amateurdancers and my approval of the skill of the Buffalo and Corn Mothers. Itwas also quite different from the identification that occurred during LindaMontano's ritual by those who were intimately involved. For this dance wasnot a ritual that I could participate in as a member of that culture, and Iwas wary of the sentimentalized views of so many of my contemporaries aboutthe specialness of Native American cultures and the nostalgia for anagrarian time that might save us from ecological disaster and nuclearholocaust.

      Furthermore, this identification was experienced by me in isolation. Thisdoes not imply that another of the "tourist" watchers could not have had asimilar experience, but it does mean that this experience had a veryparticular shape. For one thing, the experience contained knowledge, thatthe dancers were mostly amateurs, that I had not had before. It wasgrounded in the fact that this was the first dance like this I had everseen. For another thing, my particular skepticism could easily have heldme back from such an experience. But it did not; in some sense, thisidentification experience had something in common with religiousconversion. From the moment I noticed him, he was there, the man turnedinto a deer; he was deeply special to me and I looked for his reemergencefrom his clan house with anticipation. His performance changed me, becauseit showed me that something absolutely marvelous was possible. And again,my experience was signalled by the now familiar thoughts: "This is real.This could be me."

      My analysis of Linda Montano's "Mitchell's Death" and of the dance at theJemez Pueblo point to the many possible levels of the identificationexperience. Most importantly, these two experiences show that the Watcherdoes not need to be an "insider" to have the experience and, in fact, therole of outsider may, in some cases, heighten the experience, since itdepends on new information. In addition, the experience does not haveanything to do with the intentions of the performers; that Deer dancer knewand cared nothing about me. Finally, I might compare the identificationexperience to that of an initiate on certain spiritual paths who learns atthe moment when all of her prior experience and all of her prior knowledgemake her ready to learn.

      I would like to turn my attention to the physical aspects of theidentification experience by describing a performance by Paul McCarthy, aperformance artist from Los Angeles, who used to create ritual performancesin the character of a ship's captain. I saw a typical piece at the SanFrancisco Art Institute in 1985. A number of chairs were arranged in theshape of a boat around two tables. The tables were stacked one on top ofanother and there were containers of food such as ketchup, mustard,mayonnaise and hotdogs on the bottom table. McCarthy asked for volunteersto sit in the chairs, and some of those were given passages to read frombooks. I did not participate but watched from the safety of the crowd whichstood around the playing space. McCarthy began to circle the space,singing sea shanties and behaving as though he were drunk or as though hewere on a rocking ship; his songs became chants of words like "rocking" and"rolling." He approached the tables and began to pour food over himself;he removed his pants, climbed on the upper table and "gave birth" to adoll. He continued to pour and rub food on his now half-naked body.Slowly, but persistently, I became aware of the smell of food and of afeeling of vertigo. McCarthy had become shaman, pariah, and an image ofthe disgust we all sometimes feel for our own bodies. As he walked by me,leaving the playing space at last, the smell of food was almost unbearable.I wished fervently that he wouldn't brush me or touch me, but he had inanother way. For his body was my body, which sweated and smelled, whichwas forced to eat and to expell the food I ate; I was an infantexperiencing my body directly, but with disgust and paradoxically with joy.

      A physical or visceral experience like this does not alone signal theidentification experience. When we watch a tightrope walker at the circus,we are having a physical, but vicarious experience. As the performerbalances herself on the high wire, as she seems to lose her balance andregains it, we watch in rapt attention, and it seems that we hold her upwith that very attention. But even though we feel her attempts at balanceand her glorious success in our bodies, we are primarily saying toourselves over and over: This is not me. We are grateful to be thewatchers, safe in our seats and getting our thrills from the danger ofanother.

      It is obvious here that one of the reasons we don't identify (in the sensethat I mean that word here) with the tightrope walker is that everythingshe does is expected. We know she will totter and we know she will regainher balance; we expect her to be skilled, and we expect this to be apleasant experience. Perhaps we would have an identificatin experience ifit were suddenly revealed that there was a large plexiglass platformsurrounding the wire and the danger of falling was fake, but I doubt wewould feel anything but cheated. On the other hand, the only way we couldreally identify with the tightrope walker is if she fell. This kind ofexperience happened to those who watched the terrible fall of one of theSankai Juku dancers from a rope attached to a tall building in Seattle; Ifeel it when I watch the T.V. news footage of that event. Yet although Igo to performances wishing for identification, I do not wish that thetightrope walker will fall. I cling to my Watcher role.

      The identification experience is also not the only moving or satisfyingperformance experience. The Wooster Group's LSD Part I in typical WoosterGroup style, featured the performers sitting around a long table which wassituated on top of a fairly high construction of scaffolding. All of theworkings of the performance were revealed; if we looked carefully enough wecould see the technicians working the lights and sound under thescaffolding. In the now famous dance scene, we could see that the legs ofthe dancers were actually the legs of other performers, seated on one levelof the scaffolding, while the dancers kneeled on the level above them. Thetext of the piece was one familiar to most of us, Arthur Miller's TheCrucible (read by most Americans in High School) and many of us had comebecause we knew that Miller would not give permission for his play to beused in this piece. (We were seeing it in previews.) The text was dealtwith in typical Wooster Group style, chopped up by variations in rhythm andspeed. An especially powerful technique was that of the actor Ron Vawterwho said his lines so fast that we only got the rhythm of them, not thewords, except for one or two words or a phrase which he would emphasize.This technique served to cut the text and to allow Vawter to emphasizethose phrases which seemed most important. All of these techniques aretypical of the Wooster Group's interpretation of Brecht's alienationtechniques. The illusion of theater is constantly broken; the Watcher iskept in his place, but for a reason; she is encouraged to use herintellect, to think about the content of the play and to think about theconsequences of that content in her own life.

      In the midst of this complex and sometimes incomprehensible activity (weneed to think hard to understand), the pace quickening, the chaos mounting,Ron Vawter speaking in tongues, suddenly he falls on his phrase and shouts"God is dead." This line, which is the center of Miller's Crucible, isalso the center of the Wooster Group's LSD Part I. I experienced thismoment with an intense physical shudder, as though the hair stood up on myback or my back arched involuntarily. I experienced this in spite of thefact that I have never cared for or particularly believed in God. But thatwas irrelevant; the play had been boiled down to its essence, and theWooster Group, through rhythm and entropy had manipulated its viewers froman intense and intended intellectual experience into an equally intensephysical and emotional experience. This was not, however, an experience ofidentification. Instead, thrown back on my body, I was thrown back intomyself, surprised that I was there, the Watcher watching; I knew almostimmediately I'd been tricked, manipulated into this shudder that I couldn'tprevent. I never entered the playing space, but was thrown further awayfrom it, examining with my intellect the possibility that I was more thanintellect. This experience was physical and I learned something from it,but it lacked an essential ingredient of the identification experience.there was nothing to identify with; the Wooster Group pushed the Watcheraway, out to the self and the world. In this way, its lessons areBrechtian, social and political.

IDENTIFICATION AND THE SACRED

      Let us return now, in light of the experiences of identification I havedescribed, to Goffman's description of the "on-looker" as one who "giveshimself over" and to De Marinis's "relatively autonomous 'maker ofmeanings.'" It is clear that in the process of identification, I am both ofthese things.

      As the Watcher, I give myself over by agreeing to pay attention and bybeing ready, hoping for an intense and rewarding experience. But duringthe identification experience I give myself over more completely; I give mywhole self, my past and present, my pain and joy, the impossibility of myexistence, and my most secret desires. I make myself "in relation to," andcan no longer exist without the Other who has inspired my giving over.This is why the experience is physical as well as emotional. While I amin-formed by identification, I am also trans-formed by it; I am moved.

      It is no coincidence that alchemy¹⁵ which symbolizes the alchemical workas the conjunction of two opposites (a hermaphrodite), can be applied here.For alchemy, like most mystical philosophies, is trying to describe arelationship that brings about transformation. To do the work, as Jung andothers have pointed out, was not merely to work with the material elements;the alchemist's attention to that which was outside was meant to create achange inside. We might, then, see Goffman's "giving over" as thealchemical work, an effort which often fails either because the material ispolluted or because the practitioner fails in some way either to paycorrect attention to the details or to be ready for the change when itcomes. But if the material is pure (unexpected, undeniable) and thealchemist is ready, the conjunction occurs, and base metal is changed intogold. I give myself over to a relationship with the performer who can moveme, inside and outside, spiritually and physically. I learn somethingwhich I can partly articulate but much of which remains hidden,unexpressed, because it is about the nature of a relationship thatdissolves when I try to express it.

      To think of the Watcher as an alchemist or a mystic is to explain for atleast some of us why we go to performances. Cutting through the barrier ofthe Watcher's separation from the performer, we are in relation to theOther which is also ourselves. We learn the archanum, the secret oralteachings, the knowledge of oneness.

      We give ourselves over.

      A similar interpretation can be given to De Marinis's "relativelyautonomous 'maker of meanings.'" In their last book, Gregory and MaryCatherine Bateson define the sacred as an "integrated fabric of mentalprocess that envelops all our lives."¹⁶ For Bateson, "information - orcomparison" or "responsiveness to difference"¹⁷ is mental process. If wesee ourselves as makers of meaning, active manipulators of the signs thatare presented to us during a performance, we see that there is apossibility of finding in that activity the sacred. We are "relativelyautonomous"; the signs are given to us; our personal and cultural memoriesconstrain us. Yet, we make meaning out of the conjunction of thosememories and those signs. Because the experience of identification dependson our "responsiveness to difference" which generates an experience ofrecognition that we share something with that difference, we enter thetension of opposites that makes up the realm of the sacred. The sacred isthe world of mental processes, or Creatura as Bateson defines it throughJung, a world of pure relationship. Here there are no things (that is therealm of Pleroma), but only relationships, and here it is possible for theWatcher to become one with that which she watches.

      It is possible, as Bateson warns us, that we will "become that which wepretend," learn "deep unconscious philosophies," "take the shape andcharacter our culture imposes upon us."¹⁸ If, on the other hand, we engagein the task of knowing the sacred, seek out the experience of relationship,we may make new philosophies, new myths, that will better serve ourselvesand our world. That possibility seems answer enough to the question of whywe go to performances and what in the largest sense we might hope to findin them.

      Identification is only one of the experiences that a member of an audiencecan have at a performance. It is a highly personal and private experience,although ultimately it can have more public or social consequences.Situating ourselves in the seats of the audience enabled us to analyze thisexperience, and to suggest a range of questions we can ask from thisviewpoint.

      What are the cultural limitations of this analysis of the identificationexperience? The ideas of the holy and the mystical experience, if notuniversal, are certainly widespread. However, both the Watcher and theperformance are socially and historically positioned. As Sartre pointedout in his 1948 essay "What is Literature?", every work encodes in itselfan implied reader; consumption is part of the process of production.Couldn't a Nazi rally give me an identification experience? To what extentcan I be manipulated by a performance and to what extent does my readinesscontribute to or prevent this manipulation?

      What really is the role of the audience in a performance? What can weexpect from performance and what do we give in return? These questions andothers are worth considering in the light of the speculations I've outlinedhere. Our experience sitting in audiences gives us access to theexperience of identification or situates us deeply in the state of "beingin relation to." It is surely one way, in our secular world, to access thesacred and to be transformed by something outside our selves.

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