The full empty space

This article traces the influence of the Bauhaus and Saussurean semiotics in the aesthetics of hypermediated performance, making a case for "inverting" positive and negative space to discover a gridded matrix where meaning is experienced as an embodied, rather than intellectual, phenomenon.

Photograph: Bruce Adams

I have often speculated that the conventional perception of performance space; as an empty void in which objects and bodies are arranged and rearranged, and where it is those bodies (chiefly) and objects (secondarily) in which the significance of the theatrical encounter is vested; can be inverted. If theatre is a process by which live acts are converted in meaning, then it is logical to privilege those parts of the composition which are performing those acts. Thus the stage image is divided into positive space and negative space: the acting bodies and objects, and the empty air between them.

But, of course, that air is not empty. Literally, for a start, it contains billions of photons and air molecules. This isn’t insignificant: it is the vibration of those molecules that delivers sound to the ear drum in an unbroken line from stage to spectator. Light works in a similarly analogous way. We often imagine a kind of holy communion in theatre, where the actor speaks and, in perfect unison, we understand, but in doing so we forget that we are actually physically connected to it in ways that are imperceptible yet very real. The actor may speak and the audience may hear, but it is the space in between them – a densely-packed grid of lines and connections, both hard-wired and intangible – that vibrates with meaning. The empty space turns out to be full.

Grids have long served practical and symbolic functions in the theatre. As a student, one of the first things we were taught was to “move on the grid” – to map our bodies in space along a set of imaginary horizontal and vertical axes, finding freedom in restraint and, ultimately, to understand the power of establishing and disrupting simple paradigms. Grid work remains one of the primary tools that I use both for training students and when building movement with actors. Here, the “grid” is an imaginary exercise for structuring physical movement, but there are real grids in theatre too: the lighting rig is commonly referred to as the grid; the conventional division of the performance space into up- and downstage, stage left and stage right is a kind of grid; the audience themselves, sitting in rows, form a grid. All of these “grids” occupy the two dimensions parallel to the floor and ceiling. There is, however, another grid: one that is both intangible yet monolithic; and which occupies all three dimensions of the playing space.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure laid out his foundational semiotic theory of language: that language consists of a “two-sided psychological entity” (77) with concepts (or signifieds) on one side and sound-images (or signifiers) on the other. A tree is a concept, while the word “tree” is an image (written) or sound (spoken) that represents the concept. Moreover, the signifier is invariably arbitrary, i.e. the sound-image “tree” is as irrelevant to the inherent treeness of trees as “arbre”, “Baum” and “شجرة” – all of which, notionally, mean tree. Meaning is derived not from the signifier itself but from the context in which it is communicated.

Saussure conceived of these two entities as shapeless chaotic masses: separate but equally indistinct. Concepts exist as depicted in Fig.1A: formless and without order – the entire body of human thought. So, too, do sounds (and images); shown at Fig.1B. Both entities exist, in their purity, as a primordial soup of meaningless potential energy. It is only when they are mapped onto each other, shown in Fig.1 by means of a grid, that they assume meaning: “Thought, chaotic by nature, is made precise by this process of segmentation.” (132)

In the diagram below (Lupton 32), it is possible to see how meaning is drawn from concepts and sounds by means of a grid, where related concepts (but unrelated sounds) and related sounds (but unrelated concepts) are plotted along the x-axis, while meaningful links are drawn on the y-axis:

Concepts (A)
donkey – horse – mule
|
house – horse – bourse
Sound-images (B)

Through this process of segmentation between two shapeless masses, the “infinitely gradated continuum of experience” can be broken down into repeatable signs capable of communicating meaning:

“Language is a grid, and a grid is a language.” (34)

Figure 1: Saussure’s visualisation of signifier and signified (132)

Here, Lupton is writing about Saussurean semiology in relation to the Bauhaus movement, which sought to embed formal objectivity in its design practices. The school was drawn to a visual vocabulary based on grids, graphs and basic geometric forms, reasoning that graphs (the etymological link with graphic is not considered incidental) essentially consist of abstracted visual representations of tangible realities:

“Scientific grids, graphs and diagrams constituted a privileged branch of the sign; they were seen as the basis of a visual script that is anti-illusionistic yet universally comprehensible, a graphic language that avoids the conventions of perspectival realism yet is linked objectively to material fact.” (28)

Theatre theory has resisted the lure of illusion and its tendency to rely on the kind of imagined communion described in the opening paragraphs since at least the namesake of this article, when Peter Brook wrote in The Empty Space (1968) of rejecting illusion in order to “yield to a harsher common sense” (50). Bauhaus design theory makes a clear case for considering the principles of visual design as directly analogous to written and verbal language, where visual form was seen as a “universal and transhistorical script” (ibid., own emphasis). From here, the leap to theatre, and to considering the designed vis-aur-al components of the stage image within the context of the dramaturgical (i.e. that which is “read”, and in which meaning is made, structured and reconfigured), is straightforward.

Katie Mitchell’s live cinema work, especially in its earlier (and simpler) forms, provides a clear visual example of Saussure’s segmentation theory at work in live performance. In these works, the underlying visual-dramaturgical principle holds that the completed image is seen together with the means of its construction. In their earliest example, Waves (2006), it is possible to see an almost direct transposition of Figure 1, where a chaotic melee of sound-images; in this case, acting bodies and objects (visible in the lower half of the image below); are vertically mapped onto concepts, represented by the cohesive projected film (at the top of the image), in grid-like fashion:

Waves (National Theatre, 2006). Photograph: Donald Cooper

Ada/Ava (Manual Cinema, 2013). Photograph: Hiroko Masuike

Manual Cinema (pictured) provide a near-identical example, albeit in a different style. The company’s use of shadow puppetry further de-centres the human body from its position of privilege in the overall composition; and yet the shadow puppets alone cannot occupy this position by themselves either. Rather, it is the transmission of the acting object via the y-axis; a journey along a grid traced in negative space; that gives it meaning, and which elevates it from an arbitrary Saussurean sign to a contextualised sensate experience. In other words, it is not the image itself that speaks, but the audience’s ability to visualise the coruscating reverberation of meaning between image and idea.

By virtue of being scenographically arranged along two horizontal axes, the examples above are able to most closely resemble Saussure’s diagram; thus they provide a straightforward comparison with the grid in Figure 1. While it is arguably not coincidental that the DNA of a grid should find its way into either set design (the Bauhausian principles of formal objectivity are as relevant to theatre design as they are to products, graphics and architecture, and the influence of the Bauhaus is vast), it is also in no way necessary for a theatrical composition to bear a strict (or even loose) visual resemblance to Saussure’s diagram in order for the same theory to be applied. Indeed, later work by both Katie Mitchell and Manual Cinema has departed from the flat axes of Waves and Ada/Ava to embrace more fragmented and three-dimensional forms. Neither is it the case that negative space is only “gridded” in performances of this style, where images are self-consciously mediated by means of visible technology. On the contrary, the “shapeless masses” of ideas and sound-images are a permanent and inherent presence; these hypermediated performances simply provide material avatars for them.

From the simplest of encounters to the most complex of spectacles, the empty space between actor, object and audience where photons hurtle, air vibrates and ideas are mediated in and out of forms must always be full. The gridded negative space is an embodied visualisation of this phenomenon.

References

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. 2nd ed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Lupton, Ellen. ‘Visual dictionary.’ The ABC’s of ▲■●: the Bauhaus and design theory, ed. Lupton, E. and Abbott Miller, J. Princeton Architectural Press, 2019.

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Penguin Modern Classics, 2008.

Waves. Dir. Katie Mitchell. National Theatre, 2006.

Ada/Ava. Dir. Drew Dir. Manual Cinema, 2013.