The Performer examines the move from open stages to digital screens

The Performer: Art, Life, Politics

Author:  Richard Sennett

Publisher: Allen Lane

Pages: 256

Price: Rs 1,396

  “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” If we start looking at ourselves as characters who perform, and observe where the stage is, a lot more can start to make sense. Richard Sennett in the book The Performer: Art, Life, Politics borrows the observation Shakespeare’s character “the melancholy Jaques” makes in the play As you Like It,  to knit a thread of what a performance is across the thread of what the stage to perform looks like. The many knits finally turn into a scarf that drape thoughts on civility and cultures.

 

The author holds the thought on what a performance is with a lot of care. A performance has a lot in common with a ritual. Different cultures have evolved strict practices that are coordinated actions with a sense of order. An artist modifies such rituals in the service of self-expression. A performance is this self-expression that has the potential to engage and even dissolve the barrier between the performer and the spectator. The book offers many instances from works of multiple artists to help a reader get a full grasp of this thought. For me, the matchstick struck flame on viewing a football match as a performance. When athletes on the pitch express themselves using rituals crafted by rules, barriers between spectators and players often dissolve. One can feel nervous before a penalty kick or devastated as the goalie misses to save.

 

Performances can also have agendas. Machiavelli went on to advise rulers to pick up a performer’s skill to deliver on the burden of governance and consolation, expected by their subjects. On the political stage of US elections, Donald Trump enacted his performance better than his contestants. A cause to worry is when a ruler loses the ability to switch off from performing. A willing suspension of disbelief can lead to fear and violence. It explains how rioters who attacked the US Senate gathered the will and power to cause injury and destruction, but when they were arrested and were questioned on the why, they were in complete denial that any such thing happened. The book has deep insights for readers to become conscious of this force. In addition to gathered wisdom, these insights also emerge from the author’s experience as a cello performer himself.

 

In the book, the author posits that, “All the world’s a stage has an urban meaning” to bring attention to the fact that places to perform have evolved within cities. Where humanity gathers to watch a performance offers stages of three kinds. The open, closed, and the hidden. This part of the book is also where a reader gains from the heightened sense of observations made by Richard Sennett as an urbanist. Narrations in the book are across a 2,000-year spread, and it reflects most prominently in descriptions of how cities evolved along with how humans perform. The ancient Greek agora is an architectural marvel in how it enabled performances of multiple kinds. It paved the way for the open stage in a modern city: Its streets.

 

Streets are the stage for one of the greatest human performances: Haggling in an economic exchange. To show curiosity in a ware, then to perform being disinterested, to then settling on a price that works for both, is a daily performance we all engage in.  Streets can be seen as a large stage filled with hundreds of people, using it for mixed purposes, offering diverse performances. To verify the attraction of the street as a stage, one can bring back the visual of any “mall road” in any touristy hill-station to mind. These perspectives are deep and important for reformers to turn around our cities from becoming closed and gated.

 

Open stages though evolved into a closed theatre, leading up to becoming hidden. The crowds turned bourgeois, sombre, and quieter for the performances unfolding in front of their eyes, under closed roofed and soundproofed rooms. The modern-day stage is hidden in our television and smartphone screens. The book crafts vivid descriptions of how architecture influences the stage and through it, the performance. Mr Sennett has a vision for what a modern theatre can look like, which is a membrane that traverses the open and closed to allow people to enter and exit, while also offering the artist the conveniences of a space for self-expression.

 

The arc of human progress must be looked at through changes in civility, which is much larger than changes in culture. Civility flourishes when humans give up control of each other and dissolve barriers. It’s a performance that takes place when people move into cities and meet each other. The book talks about this abstractness in a concrete way. The author does this by opening the jar of performances that make us human. The book too is a performance worthy of our time.

 

The reviewer is an urban policy researcher. He also writes SimplyCity, a newsletter on urbanisation at simplycity.substack.com