ABSTRACT

Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in Theatre and

Performance Studies
During the last twenty years, there has been a slow but increasing proliferation
of scholars and practitioners employing phenomenological methodologies in
the study of performance. This is symptomatic of a desire to escape from overly
theoretical approaches which diminish the status of the creation, enjoyment and
experience of the performance and to embrace methods which allow an access to
the materiality and affective substance of the performance itself. In this paper, I
argue the worth and relevance of phenomenology to the study of performance,
tracing some key historical developments, outlining the current state of the field,
explaining some key points of resistance and pointing towards a few possible
future directions. The paper begins in noting the phenomenological origin of
many key debates in performance studies concerning embodiment, presence
and reflective practice. It traces early developments in the field and points to
isolated, often institution-specific pockets of activity. It makes a survey of recent
publications and the exciting new field of performed phenomenology as a mode
of embodied research.

BIOGRAPHY
Stuart Grant is a Lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne Australia. He
specializes in philosophy of performance and performance as research with an
emphasis on phenomenology. He has published phenomenological work on
audience, laughter, rhythm and place. He is co-founder of the Association for
Phenomenology in Performance Studies and the phenomenology group in
Performance Philosophy.

8 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24

Genealogies and Methodologies
of Phenomenology in Theatre
and Performance Studies
STUART GRANT
INTRODUCTION
In 2006, Faith Hart wrote: “to reclaim the
materiality of props, lighting, stage space, costumes,
and of course the human body itself…theorists and
practitioners of theatre have increasingly turned
to phenomenology”.1 Hart’s essay is symptomatic
of a growing frustration with the predominance
of discursive and political approaches to the
understanding of theatre and performance;
approaches which obscure the object itself in a
primary concern with the social context from
which it emerges as an expression of a power
structure, culture or system of signification. Her
observation expresses a desire to escape from
theoretical approaches which diminish the status
of the creation, enjoyment and experience of the
performance and to embrace methods which allow
an access to the materiality and affective substance
of the performance itself. As will be evidenced here,
Hart and many others believe that phenomenology
provides such access.
The use of phenomenology in the study of
theatre and performance, though marginalized
in the climate of the last few decades, is not new.
There is a sporadic history of methodological and
theoretical dispersal and diversity, characterized by
isolated scholars and often institutionally-specific
pockets of intensive activity. As mentioned, in
recent times, there has been an escalation of activity,
but it remains uncoordinated and diffuse. Against
this background, this essay aims to achieve three
primary tasks. First, it offers a very brief analysis
of the intellectual climate in which theatre and
Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
performance studies have operated since the
1960s, and examines some of the connections and
divergences in the ways in which phenomenology
manifests in and relates to that climate. Second,
it traces a rough survey of the diversity of ideas,
practices and methods which constitute the field
of phenomenology in general. And third, it begins
an examination of the patterns, genealogical and
methodological, in the use of phenomenology in
the study of performance, currently and in recent
decades. It should be noted that a full account of the
geographical and historical dispersal and theoretical
and practical diversity of phenomenological
approaches to performance would require a
substantial endeavour with significant resources.
Most instances occur in isolated pockets under the
influence of individual scholars and performers.
Many have received little dissemination through
academic and other outlets. Often, these endeavours
have met with active institutional resistance. I
am currently engaged with colleagues in seeking
funding and facilities for an attempt to gather this
often forgotten and hidden material. We are in
the process of compiling an archive of work and
an index of artists and scholars who have worked
and are working in the field. This current article is
part of an early foray into the field. I would like to
apologize in advance for any exclusions and would
welcome information about any work overlooked
here.
I would also note that in the context of this
volume of this journal that the situation I describe
in the following section, concerning an active
9
resistance to phenomenology in the discipline of
performance studies, pertains to a tendency in the
Anglo-American academy of the humanities which,
I am assured by colleagues, does not hold in Europe,
where structuralist, poststructuralist, critical and
phenomenological traditions are often brought
together.
THE RISE OF POLITICS AND LANGUAGE AS
FIRST PHILOSOPHIES
In the wake of the political activism of the 1960s,
and in the context of the flourishing of Marxist-
influenced philosophies of poststructuralism,
deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism,
semiotics and postcolonialism, schools of humanities
in universities across Western Europe and particularly
in the Anglophone world fell under the influence of
a reinvigorated Continental Philosophy. The work
of a primarily French group of thinkers influenced
by the rising structuralism—Lyotard, Foucault,
Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, Cixous,
Kristeva and others—revolutionized the study of
the humanities and social sciences. Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, theories of deconstruction
and semiotics dominated literature, theatre studies
and the humanities generally, while Foucauldian
concepts, feminism and ideology critique became
the primary modes of study across the social
sciences. A new canon was instituted, dominated
by a retrieval of names representing such diverse
modes of thinking as Lacan, Artaud, Benjamin
and Saussure. Performance Studies was born into
this environment. It began in the heady political
climate of the 1960s, as the study of the overtly
political dimension of the avant-garde theatre
and performance of the time; and as the bastard
offspring of theatre studies and anthropology, it
was, and remains, particularly in the Anglophone
context, drenched in postcolonial theories of inter-,
trans- and multi-culturalism.
There are two primary, intertwined threads of
impetus underlying these intellectual developments.
First, the universally assumed, Marxist-derived
belief in politics as first philosophy, and second,
the all-pervasive assumption of the primacy of
language in all things human. In the ideological
10 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
climate of post 1960s humanities there is no escape
from these terms. They are sacrosanct. Although
phenomenology does, where necessary, give direct
address to questions of politics and language, it aims
at a very different level of ontological and existential
explication.2 Phenomenology claims access to a
fundamental-transcendental level of cognition,
perception, intersubjectivity and being which
would apply to all humans. The predominant beliefs
and methods in the intellectual climate which has
increasingly pervaded institutions of the humanities
in the Anglosphere across the last forty years,
question the validity of claims to access to these
domains. In this environment, phenomenology
has been dismissed as essentialist. Work which
aims at fundamental, underlying human structures
does not serve the immediate political interests of
the scholars and institutions in the academy of the
Anglo-American humanities and social sciences.
I am however, assured by colleagues working in
Europe, some of whom are contributors to this
journal issue that these distinctions are neither as
clearly drawn nor as damning of phenomenology
in their milieu as in the English speaking world of
performance and theatre studies. This is a difference
which requires further examination and elucidation.
Again, in the Anglosphere, there is a critical
lack of first-hand knowledge of phenomenology
among scholars in the field. Most make their
judgments on the basis of secondary sources,
through interpreters of Butler and Derrida.3 There
is certainly little awareness in the discipline of the
extent to which the works of Derrida and Butler are
themselves phenomenological, and to which even
the central concept of performativity is inflected by
the phenomenological tradition. Derrida’s views on
language and performativity, and his central concept
of différance result from his early, exquisitely detailed
and rigorous phenomenological work on Husserl’s
Logical Investigations.4 Butler’s own conception of
performativity stems directly from her engagement
with Merleau-Ponty.5 The work of both of these
important philosophers partakes in the fundamental
movement of the phenomenological tradition
towards questioning the presuppositions of their
forbears, seeking an ever greater interrogation
of the fundamentality and radicality of concepts
and terms. The central concern in theatre and
performance studies with the radical questioning
of the concept of presence as the keystone term in
the possibility or otherwise of its ontology, is one of
the great discoveries of phenomenology. It becomes
possible precisely and entirely as a result of the by
no means exhausted tradition of enquiry initiated
by Heidegger’s vast undertaking into the complexity
of the idea of the present in Being and Time.6 Again,
Derrida’s acute phenomenological analyses are a
worthy continuance of this tradition. Further, the
prominence of ideas of absence, groundlessness
and perspectivism in performance studies proceeds
directly from discoveries made by Heidegger as a
corollary of his introduction into phenomenology
of crucial tenets of Dilthey’s hermeneutics and
historicism.7 It should finally be noted that Derrida’s
foregrounding of absence could only occur in an
enquiry conducted in a profoundly transcendental
register, and, more tellingly, first as an interpretation
of Heidegger’s concept of the withdrawal of the
vorhanden in the instrumentality of the zuhanden,8
and second as a development of Sartre’s concept of
non-being as the ground of being.9
Simon Bayly refers to “a certain critical
orthodoxy”, in Anglo-American performance studies
which has developed as a result of this climate. He
notes, as an example, that despite the take-up of
phenomenological themes such as “the body” in
theatre and performance studies, there has been a
“relative neglect of…a phenomenological analysis
of embodiment”.10 However, this lack of awareness
of the phenomenological origins of key concepts
is understandable. As mentioned, performance
studies itself emerge from the same social/historical
milieu as the rush of intellectual and creative
activity of the work of the French poststructuralists.
The scholarship is entirely contemporaneous with
its object, of the same political earth, inspired
by the same cause. There remains a tendency in
performance studies to champion political causes,
rather than studying, critiquing or analyzing them.
Still, despite these obstacles and resistances,
phenomenology has endured, and, as this article will
demonstrate, is clearly undergoing a renaissance.
The rise of phenomenological work in theatre
and performance studies is now too substantial
Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
to be dismissed on ideological grounds. It needs
to be documented and explained. Performance
studies needs to turn towards phenomenology, to
understand its theories, methods and results, and
establish a systematic approach to them, harnessing
their benefits, rather than persisting with an ill-
informed ideological dismissal.
PHENOMENOLOGY AS METHOD
The difficulty of the take-up of phenomenology
is not only due to external critical factors.
Phenomenology is essentially a difficult, dispersed
and diverse terrain, lacking an easily apprehensible
through-line. There are many phenomenologies,
applied in many diverse areas of study, using different
methods and theoretical underpinnings, often
bearing little clearly perceptible terminological,
methodological resemblance, consistency or
coherence with each other. Merleau-Ponty’s explicit
address to this problem sixty years ago still holds
true. In the 1945 preface to the Phenomenology of
Perception, he asked: “What is phenomenology? It
may seem strange that this question has still to be
asked half a century after the first works of Husserl.
The fact remains that it has by no means been
answered”.11 He notes the diversity of methods,
approaches, ontological registers and changing
definitions in Husserl’s own work, in the projects
of his immediate followers, in Heidegger’s radical
reappraisal, and then briefly surveys the field as it
was in his own milieu of existentialism in the mid-
twentieth century. He eventually gives up on seeking
a unifying thread between all the examples of work
identifying itself as phenomenology and notes that
phenomenology is a “style of thinking”12 rather than
a doctrine or method. It is a “re-learning to look at
the world”13 and an attempt to “bring back all the
living relationships of experience”.14 These insights
of Merleau-Ponty are a refinement of Heidegger’s
assessment: “Thus the term ‘phenomenology’ is
quite different in its meaning from expressions such
as ‘theology’ and the like. Those terms designate the
objects of their respective sciences according to the
subject-matter which they comprise at the time.
‘Phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its
researches, nor characterizes the subject matter thus
11
comprised. The word merely informs us of the ‘how’
with which what is to be treated in this science gets
exhibited and handled.”15
This is a radical grounding of Husserl’s call to get
“back to the things themselves”. Phenomenology
requires that the method of apprehension and the
course of the inquiry be determined to as full an
extent as possible by the demands of the object
under study. The ultimate result of this, as pointed
out by many of the existentialists, is the effacement
of the distinction between the subject and object
in the enjoinment with the experiencing. Heidegger
emphasizes this further with his ultimate definition
of phenomenology: “to let that which shows itself be
seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself
from itself ”.16 This is the concrete methodological
meaning of “back to the things themselves”. In
opposition to a feminist analysis which will always
produce the gender power relations involved in a
situation, or a postcolonial analysis which will
always demonstrate the relative disempoweredness
of the different cultures involved, or a semiotic
analysis which imposes a preconceived schemata of
signification on the analysis, a phenomenological
investigation seeks the way in which the object
of study gives itself, taking the terms of the study
from the object itself. No phenomenologist would
be naïve enough to assume that they were capable
of an objective, presuppositionless approach
to a phenomenon (the mere selection of the
phenomenon from its surrounds implies a complex
positionality of the researcher) but the primary
impulse of the phenomenological approach, the
dominant methodological tenet, is to suspend
prejudice and presupposition as far as is possible
while still remaining coherent and intelligible.
This is the sole purpose of the phenomenological
reduction. It is also the gesture underlying
Heidegger’s introduction of hermeneutics into
phenomenology. Hermeneutics is precisely the
study of the interpretive foreknowledges from which
it is necessary to speak in order to make sense at all.
In this way phenomenology offers a relief from the
over-determining theoretical violence of many other
modes of enquiry. There is also an ethical imperative
in this gesture, in that, opposed to the approach
of ideology critique, which, in the face of the
12 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
knowledge that all truth is implicitly perspectivist,
seeks to privilege particular ideologies and
viewpoints, phenomenology, no doubt quixotically,
attempts to continually renew its examination of
its own presuppositions in an aim towards an ever
greater, though ultimately unattainable, clarity of
intent. This is Husserl’s philosophy “as the idea of
an infinite task”.17
Despite the diversity and dispersal of
phenomenological theory and practice, there
are certain terms, imperatives and tendencies to
which a method must bear relation in order to
make a rightful claim to stand as phenomenology,
rather than one of the many species of qualitative
psychology or experiential philosophy. The first
is the spirit of the phenomenological reduction,
the second, an investigation into intentionality
or givenness, the third, an aim towards revealing
underlying, fundamental constitution. Apart from
these essential features, phenomenology often aims
to reveal the hidden dimensions of the taken-for-
granted, to describe experience from within the
experiencing, and deals with issues of corporeality,
intersubjectivity, time, place and the fundamental
structures of self.
The reduction is the primary methodology
of Husserlian phenomenology. In a nutshell, it
consists in taking out of play the taken-for-granted
presuppositions about the phenomenon, beginning
most radically with its existence and reality. To
violently oversimplify, there are three basic levels
of the reduction: 1) the worldly, or psychological
reduction, in which experienced phenomena in the
world are described as they are given, after bracketing
out presuppositions of their existence as received
definitions and categories; 2) the transcendental
or phenomenological reduction, in which the data
of the worldly reduction is further reduced to its
constitutive fundamental philosophical elements;
and 3) the eidetic reduction in which perceived
and otherwise encountered variable phenomena
in the world are reduced, through processes of
free variation in the imagination to their invariant
structures. The various puttings-out-of-play,
bracketings, and suspensions which are practised
in the reductions take the phenomenologist
out of the natural attitude in which the world is
ordinarily encountered and enable the entering
of the phenomenological attitude where underlying
constitutive structures are revealed. Although the
reduction is a contentious issue in the history of
phenomenology, with Heidegger dispensing with
the term almost completely, Levinas completely
refiguring it, and Merleau-Ponty claiming “the
most important lesson which the reduction teaches
us is the impossibility of a complete reduction”,18
the impetus of all phenomenology remains the
revelation of underlying constitutive structures
through the putting aside of the taken-for-granted.
Similarly, the central term intentionality has
undergone many interpretations and refigurings
throughout the history of the phenomenological
tradition. Husserl claimed that the analysis of the
noetic-noematic intentional relationship between
the subject and its objects was the most central
task of phenomenology.19 Heidegger and Sartre
claimed that intentionality or directedness towards
objects was the most fundamental defining moment
of the human, a fundamental transcendence.20
Merleau-Ponty foregrounded elements of Husserl’s
Ideas II21 and transformed intentionality into a
structure of bodily engagements with the world,
through the concepts of operative intentionality
and the intentional arc. Operative intentionality is
more fundamental than Husserl’s noetic-noematic
structure by which the subject has its objects. It
“projects round about us our past, our future, our
human setting, our physiological, ideological and
moral situation”, and consequently “brings about
the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility
and motility”.22 Merleau-Ponty’s other main
contribution to the history of intentionality is his
concept of motor intentionality. Motility is “basic
intentionality”23. Because it is bodily intentionality
it must be construed as an I can rather than an I
know. Perception is no more knowledge of objects
than movement is “thought about movement” or
bodily space is “space thought of or represented”.24
“Our bodily experience of movement is not a
particular case of knowledge; it provides us access
to the world and the object…which has to be
recognized as original and perhaps as primary.
My body has its world, or understands its world,
Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or
‘objectifying function’.”25
I dwell at greater length on Merleau-Ponty than
other phenomenologists because his work has been
a more important influence on phenomenologists
of performance, primarily through his emphasis on
“the body”.
Among other existentialists, Dufrenne
completely collapses the distinction between
subject and object, referring to their bond
in the “consubstantiality…of an original
communication”,26 in which: “intentionality is
no longer an aim or mere intention toward but a
participation with…not merely to be conscious of
something but to associate myself with it…(in) an
act of communion…we are dealing rather with the
acquisition of an intimacy.”27
Levinas takes this movement even further, to
an immersive intentionality of enjoyment in which
objects are “lived from…,”.28 Later in his career he
posited a “non-intentional intentionality”29 in which
he posits the unpositable, the before and after of
intentionality, the “dark context of the thematized
world”, which, in the attempt to be rendered clear to
reflexive, intentional thought, can only be betrayed.30
In the realm of theatre and performance where so
much dwells in the opacity of the unutterable, the
potential for Levinas’ thinking of the “dark context”
has not had its surface scratched.
Despite the differences in the positions
and conceptualizations in this history of
phenomenological intentionality, they all share
certain characteristics. They are structures of the
relationships of humans to their worlds; they
move towards fundamental explanations; they
attempt to reveal taken-for-granted underlying
presuppositions. These are the fundamental tenets
of phenomenology.
There are also other phenomenological
concepts which offer great promise for the study of
performance. Dufrenne’s idea of “the spectator” in
his Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is a vital
text for understanding audiences.31 The history
of intersubjectivity, from Husserl’s primordial
reduction32 of the other person and his idea of open
intersubjectivity,33 Sartre’s origin of the self as object
13
for the other,34 Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality35
and the Levinasian face-to-face36 provide new
ways into understanding the fundamental
intersubjectivity of performance and the essentiality
of performance to a human. German philosopher
Gernot Böhme, in his recently-translated work
on the phenomenology of atmospheres, writes
at length on theatrical staging.37 Sondra Fraleigh
writes about parallels between the work of Butoh
performers and Japanese phenomenology.38 Most
importantly, phenomenology, like performance,
is primarily a practice rather than a set of ideas
or concepts. Jan Patočka in particular is deeply
concerned with “the primacy of practice”,39
proclaiming that “every realization takes place
ultimately through movement”.40 Patočka’s work
on embodiment, intersubjectivity and movement
offers a potential wealth of resources for the study
of theatre and performance. He foregrounds the
status of phenomenology as a practice of reflection
on lived experience from within that experience. In
this, phenomenology participates in an essentially
performative temporality. It is a mode of research
and analysis which claims to be able to participate
in, describe and understand the experience in the
moment of its coming forth. Merleau-Ponty puts
it thus: “The phenomenological world is not the
bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing
being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy
is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but,
like art, the act of bringing truth into being”.41
This is perhaps the most perspicacious view of the
source of the appeal to performers and students
of performance. First, phenomenology aims to
be a revelatory participation in the moment of
the experience itself. Temporally, performativity
distinguishes itself as the cleaving of the action
or the utterance to the moment of its coming
forth. The performative moment is the utterance
which does what it says, the collapse of action and
meaning. Phenomenology promises to gain access
to this performative moment, as methodological
insinuation into the moment of coming forth,
speaking from the experience, opening it up and
bringing it back for reflection. Second, this structure
reveals phenomenology as a performative act in itself;
a method which is implicated in the intrigue of the
14 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
coming-forth, making it a potentially powerful tool
for bringing force and clarity to the understanding
of the much-debated and misunderstood question
of the ontology of performance.
PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF THEATRE
AND PERFORMANCE
Despite the obstacles and the misunderstandings,
phenomenology not only endures, but is undergoing
somewhat of an explosion in the humanities
generally, and in particular in the study of the
embodied and emplaced practices and experiences
of theatre and performance. This article has
pointed to some explanation of why this is so, but
a more thorough overview of the field as it stands
now and as it has developed will help to provide
a more detailed and coherent picture. I will again
emphasise that this cannot be a comprehensive
overview. It is a beginning, perhaps an outline, for a
more substantial project which calls, with increasing
urgency, to be undertaken.
Historically, the growth curve of the use
of phenomenology in performance studies is
characterized by moments of sporadic, isolated
activity from the 1960s to the mid-1990s,
followed by an acceleration in the late 1990s and
a rapid proliferation throughout the new century.
Some works consist in specific phenomenological
investigations of performance-related phenomena,
but many more others draw on phenomenological
concepts and methodologies in the context of
broader enquiries. The remainder of this article will
point towards some significant works and trends
and will try to make sense of current directions.
As already stated, this brief survey is by no means
comprehensive. The work of phenomenologists of
performance is scattered, there are no central organs
of dissemination, and much of it is performative,
leaving little documentation.
The earliest phenomenological work in the
study of performance is Maxine-Sheets Johnstone’s
The Phenomenology of Dance (1966).42 Sheets-
Johnstone has been a consistent presence in the
application of phenomenological methods to the
study of performance. In this ground-breaking
early work, she begins a life-long commitment to
the application of phenomenology in the study
of dance centring around terms of qualitative
movement, the primacy of kinaesthesia to human
understanding and the fundamental role of dance
in an evolutionary perspective on embodiment.
She has maintained a steady output of work
dealing with experiential analyses of dance and its
audiencing and the fundamentality of movement
to all forms of cognition and sociality. By the time
of her major work, The Primacy of Movement, in
1999, Sheets-Johnstone had cemented herself as
the pre-eminent English speaking scholar in the
phenomenology of performance. Partly due to
her influence and partly due to the concern with
embodiment, phenomenology is taken up more
in the study of dance than in any other genre
of performance. Sheets-Johnstone has inspired
following generations of dance scholars writing
about the neurophysiology of dance, the body in
place, choreography, the experience of watching
dance, the ethics and philosophy of dance.43 The
connection between phenomenology and dance
has led to a recent special issue of the journal,
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on dance
and its relation to cognitive science.
In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Bert O.
States sets out to “write a form of critical description
that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses
on the activity of theatre making itself out of its
essential materials: speech, sound, movement,
text etc.”.44 States explicitly eschews the task of a
full phenomenology of the theatre, of “a far more
thorough and scientific consideration of every
aspect of theatre”,45 preferring to concentrate on
the “standpoint of the actor”46 in his relationships
with the performance, the text and the audience.
As Sheets-Johnstone’s work heralded significant
concern with phenomenology in dance, States’ was
a precursor to a prominent strand of study of the
phenomenology of acting.47
Bruce Wilshire takes a phenomenological
approach to issues of self, audience, theatrical event
and everyday performance in Role Playing and
Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor.48 In this,
his book is the first phenomenological work on key
specific issues of performance studies.
Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
Stanton Garner combines issues of embodiment,
performativity and spatiality in his 1994 book
Bodied Spaces.49 He addresses specific plays and
performances from twentieth-century drama with
an emphasis on “perception and corporeality”.50
He explicitly addresses the dominance of
poststructuralism in the humanities of the 1990s,
warning of an “analytic desiccation” which “loses
contact with human corporeality” and “risks losing
the very livedness that theatre so boldly puts into
play”.51
Since these pioneering works there has been
a slow acceleration of phenomenological works
through the early years of the new century. Alice
Rayner approaches an ontology of performance
through a phenomenology of modes of action;52
Simon Critchley has applied phenomenology to
questions of comedy;53 Jan Mrazek and Benjamin
Fisler use a phenomenological approach to explore
postcolonial and race issues in puppet theatres;54
Susan Kozel introduces phenomenology into
the relations between technology and bodies in
performance;55 Helena Grehan and Simon Bayly take
different approaches to the application of Levinasian
concepts to ethical questions of performance;56
Bayly’s work also touches on affective issues
explored by Martin Welton in his Feeling Theatre.57
Willmar Sauter, Kristen Langellier and this author
use phenomenology to enter the hidden worlds of
the audience.58 These works are the tip of the iceberg
in an ever increasing number of publications from
a new generation of leading performance studies
scholars engaged in a reappraisal of the worth of
phenomenology to performance studies.
The use of phenomenology in the study of
performance is also clearly on the rise among
younger scholars. There appears to be something
of a generational shift occurring. In 2011, the
Association for Phenomenology in Performance
Studies (APPS) was founded. The initial call for
interest garnered almost 100 responses from scholars
of performance. More than 70% of responses
were from postgraduate students or early career
researchers. Searches of websites of institutions
of performance studies reveal a large number of
current PhD theses being written in the field.
15
 The last Performance Studies International (PSi)
conference featured more than twenty papers which
directly claimed to be applying phenomenological
methods (PSi 2011b). In 2011, a roundtable
discussion on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology”
at the Modern Language Association of America
annual convention claimed phenomenology as “a
new way to explore tactile, aural, olfactory, and
emotional dimensions of early modern culture”.59
The journal Criticism has commissioned an issue
from the event. Stockholm University is running
postgraduate seminars on phenomenology in
performance studies.60 The University of Sydney
and Monash University in Australia run regular
postgraduate seminars on phenomenology of
performance.
In the European context, phenomenology has met
with a lesser degree of explicit resistance. Influenced
by a line of post-war German phenomenology,
particularly the New Phenomenology of Hermann
Schmitz61 and its corollary, Gernot Böhme’s
Aesthetics of Atmospheres,62 a school of performance
phenomenology has sprung up at Freie Universität
Berlin. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s seminal text, Ästhetik
des Performativen, in which she proposes the need
for a phenomenological aesthetics, vigorously takes
up the question of presence anew in the context
of materiality and corporeality.63 Fischer-Lichte
proposes a performative aesthetics of presence which
would bring together Böhme’s idea of the “ecstasies
of the thing”64 with “the concept of the presence of
the performer”.65 Fischer-Lichte’s work has inspired
inquiries in intermediality, culture, corporeality and
acting theory.66 Again, this European tradition is
less afflicted with the combativeness of the Anglo-
American tradition. Phenomenology is brought
into the poststructuralist tradition to enhance the
discourse in areas of corporeality, experience and
perception.
There are undiscovered, unheralded and often
institution-specific pockets of phenomenological
work which need to be unearthed and made
available to the new generation of scholars. These
emergences are often the result of the influence of
isolated scholars. For example, during the 1980s and
1990s, the Department of Speech Communication
at Southern Illinois University produced more
16 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
than thirty theses in phenomenology of aesthetic
and everyday performance under the influence of
Richard Lanigan and Lenore Langsdorf. These
theses, dealing with rhetoric, gender, aesthetic
performance, media and communication, sit in
archive rooms, unpublished and unavailable to
scholars in the field. There is an urgent need to bring
these works together and to find other collections,
to archive them and bring them to the attention of
the discipline. There is a wealth of methodological,
theoretical and genealogical foundations which
need to be explored and understood.
Most importantly, with the rise across the
discipline of performance as research, performers
themselves are turning in large numbers towards the
embodied, grounded methods of phenomenology
in their performative research investigations,
often claiming the work itself to be performed
phenomenology. There has been a marked uptake of
phenomenological practices and discourses by some
site-specific performers, Butoh dancers and other
performance artists whose work entails an explicit
research dimension.67 However, partly due to the
temporal and geographical dispersal of the work
and partly to the fact that these scholars and artists
tend to be dedicated to their own practice, these
workers have remained isolated from each other.
This has led to a lack of institutional structure and
support, no central organs of dissemination, and
difficulty in finding appropriate expert reviewers
for publications. As phenomenological practices,
concepts and terms become more prevalent,
particularly in the language and work of performers,
this situation needs to change. There is a need to
make available a methodological rigor and shared
language to these emerging scholar-practitioners
currently enlivening the field with performance as
research projects. This new generation is exploring
new theories and methods and is attracted to the
promise of the turn to the materiality and moment of
the performance itself. As scholars, phenomenology
provides them with methodological principles and
clear and consistent terms by which their work can
be conducted, assessed and evaluated.
There is a further problem in the methodological,
practical and theoretical heterogeneity of
phenomenologists of performance. This diversity
is clearly indicated by the stated interests of the
members of APPS. Significant numbers are studying
acting, audience/spectatorship, dance, technological/
virtual/digital performance, performance-making,
everyday performance and embodiment. Others
mention religious performance, music/sound,
site-specific performance, interculturality and
puppetry. Theorists of influence span the entire
century of phenomenologists. Merleau-Ponty is the
most common, followed by Levinas, Heidegger,
Husserl and Derrida. There is a further need to
bring together the different threads in order to
unravel their confluences, disparities, overlaps and
intertwinements.
THE FUTURE
Performance studies is deeply concerned with the
study of bodies acting in places. Phenomenology is the
original site of the foregrounding of the study of the
body as the centre of experience. There is a century of
phenomenological writings on embodiment which
have as yet not been applied fully to the study of
performance. Whilst the embodied phenomenology
of Merleau-Ponty is central to many currently-used
concepts in performance studies, including Butler’s
foundational idea of performativity, there is very
little application of some key phenomenological
works. Husserl’s Ding und Raum and Ideen II, on
which much of Merleau-Ponty’s work is based. In
other areas, Anthony Steinbock’s ground-breaking
work on interculturality in Husserl’s generative
phenomenology;68 Heidegger’s Beiträge, which
outlines the earliest concept of something which
might be considered performative; and many other
phenomenologists from the last thirty years, such as
Edward S. Casey, Alphonso Lingis, Lester Embree,
Drew Leder, Michel Henry, Don Ihde, Jean-Luc
Marion and Luce Irigaray all present sources of
rich value of phenomenology for forthcoming
generations of scholars in performance and theatre
studies.
The primary reason for the persistence and
flourishing of phenomenology is its capacity to
produce real-world results for researchers, writers
and performers alike. Phenomenology actively
attempts to resist the unnecessary imposition of
Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
theory or pre-ordained schemata into the domain
of study. It aims precisely at the maintenance
of the awareness and suspension of theoretical
presuppositions and attempts to limit their influence
in apprehending the givenness of the object of
study. This directive towards staying grounded in
the world is central to understanding embodied
and emplaced practices of performance. As long as
scholars and practitioners maintain a concern with
the materiality of performance, with exploring and
expounding the experience of both the performer
and the audience member, with bodies in places,
the interest in phenomenology will continue to
grow and the multiplicity of approaches, theories
and methods which constitute the diverse terrain
of Husserl’s infinite task of phenomenology will
continue to yield results for scholars and artists in
theatre and performance.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 F. Elizabeth Hart, “Performance, Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Turn” in Bruce A. McConachie and F.
Elizabeth Hart, eds., Performance and Cognition: Theatre
Studies and the Cognitive Turn, Routledge, London
2006, p. 19.
2 Indeed, all the major phenomenologists spent large
periods of their careers addressing the centrality of
questions of language to human understanding and
being. Heidegger turned from the study of Being to
the study of its “house”, language, where “man finds
the proper mode of his existence”. Martin Heidegger,
On the Way to Language. Harper & Row, New York
1971, p. 57. Phenomenology itself originated as a result
of problems in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, in the
discussion of distinctions between sign, meaning, sense
and expression. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations,
2 vols., Routledge & Kegan. Paul, London and New
York, 1970a. Language was also a primary concern of
Merleau-Ponty’s work throughout his career: “On the
Phenomenology of Language” in Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Signs, Northwestern Univ. Press, Evanston
1964, pp. 84-97; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose
of the World, Northwestern University Press, Evanston
1973a; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and
the Acquisition of Language, Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy,
17
 Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973b.
Merleau-Ponty also wrote many essays on politics:
Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., pp. 247-341. Husserl’s work
on politics is primarily concerned with the constitution
of community in his lifeworld phenomenology:
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University
Press, Evanston 1970b.
3 For an example of this genre of criticism, see Pannill
Camp, “The Trouble with Phenomenology” in Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 19 no. 1, 2004,
pp. 79-97.
4 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays
on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Northwestern University
Press, Evanston 1973; Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc.,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1988.
5 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative, Routledge, New York and London
1997; Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory” in Theatre Journal, vol. 40 no. 4,
1988, pp. 519-531.
6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford 1962.
7 Heidegger, 1962, op. cit., p. 450.
8 Ibid., pp. 102-7.
9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A
Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, Washington Square
Press: Pocket Books, New York 1992, pp. 33 ff.
10 Simon Bayly, A Pathognomy of Performance, Palgrave
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2011, p. 74.
11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
International Library of Philosophy and Scientific
Method, Humanities Press, New York 1962, p. vii.
12 Ibid., p. viii.
13 Ibid., p. xx.
14 Ibid., p. xv.
15 Heidegger, 1962, op. cit., pp. 58-60.
16 Ibid., p. 58.
17 Husserl, 1970b, op. cit., p. 291.
18 Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p. xiv.
19 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy:
First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology,
Kluwer, Dordrecht 1982, pp. 82-3.
20 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Transcendence of the Ego:
Sketch for a Phenomenological Description” in Dermot
18 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
Moran, ed., The Phenomenology Reader, Routledge,
London 2002, p. 405; Martin Heidegger, The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, rev. ed., Indiana University
Press, Bloomington 1988, p. 65.
21 Edmund Husserl, 1982, op. cit., 1989, pp. 151-168.
22 Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p. 136.
23 Ibid., p. 138.
24 Ibid., p. 137.
25 Ibid., pp. 140-1.
26 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic
Experience, Northwestern University Studies
in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1973, p. 7.
27 Ibid., p. 406.
28 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, Duquesne Studies Philosophical Series,
Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1969, p. 110-
118.
29 Emmanuel Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality” in A
Montefiore, ed. Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge 1983, pp. 100-115.
30 Emmanuel Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness”
in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, Columbia
University Press, New York 1998, pp. 123-132.
31 Dufrenne, op. cit., p. 7.
32 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction
to Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1960,
pp. 89-151.
33 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der
Intersubjektivität, ed. Iso Kern. 3 vols., Husserliana,
Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1973.
34 Sartre, op. cit., pp. 334-340.
35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible,
Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology &
Existential Philosophy, Northwestern University Press,
Evanston 1975, pp. 140-2.
36 The concept of the face is such a central theme to
Levinas’ work and it undergoes such significant change
and development throughout his career that it would
be impossible to locate one principal source. An early
version is found in Levinas, 1969, op. cit., pp. 79-81.
It is developed more thoroughly in Emmanuel Levinas,
Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Martinus
Nijhoff, The Hague 1981, pp. 88-94.
37 Gernot Böhme, “The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm
for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres”, http://www.
cresson.archi.fr/PUBLI/pubCOLLOQUE/AMB8-
 confGBohme-eng.pdf.
38 Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Butoh: Metamorphic Dance
and Global Alchemy, University of Illinois Press, Urbana
2010, pp. 65-7.
39 Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World, Open
Court, Chicago 1998, p. 85.
40 Ibid., p. 79.
41 Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p. xx.
42 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance,
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1966.
43 Vivian Sobchack, “’Choreography for One, Two,
and Three Legs’ (a Phenomenological Meditation
in Movements)” in Topoi, vol. 24 no. 1, 2005,pp.
55-66; Corinne Jola, Shantel Ehrenberg, and Dee
Reynolds, “The Experience of Watching Dance:
Phenomenological–Neuroscience Duets” in
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 11 no. 1,
2012, pp. 17-37; Nigel Stewart, “Dancing the Face of
Place: Environmental Dance and Eco-Phenomenology”
in Performance Research, vol. 15 no. 4, 2010, pp. 32-
39; Emily Cross and Luca Ticini, “Neuroaesthetics
and Beyond: New Horizons in Applying the Science of
the Brain to the Art of Dance” in Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 11 no. 1, 2012, pp. 5-17;
Philipa Rothfield, “Differentiating Phenomenology and
Dance” in Topoi, vol. 24 no. 1, 2005, pp. 43-53 Sondra
Fraleigh, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through
Phenomenology” in Dance Research Journal, vol. 23 no.
1, 1991 pp. 11-16.
44 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the
Phenomenology of Theater University of California Press,
Berkeley 1985, p. 1.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., p. 14.
47 Daniel Johnston, “Active Metaphysics: Acting as Manual
Philosophy or Phenomenological Interpretations of
Acting Theory”, PhD thesis, University of Sydney
2008; Phillip B. Zarrilli, “An Enactive Approach to
Understanding Acting” in Theatre Journal, vol. 59 no.
4, 2007, pp. 635-647; Bruce W. Wilshire, Role Playing
and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington 1982; Phillip B. Zarrilli,
“Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s
Embodied Modes of Experience” in Theatre Journal, vol.
56 no. 4, 2004, pp. 653-666; Mark Seton, “Forming
(in)Vulnerable Bodies: Intercorporeal Experiences in
Actor Training in Australia”, PhD thesis, University of
Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24
Sydney 2004.
48 Wilshire, op. cit.
49 Stanton Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and
Performance in Contemporary Drama, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca 1994.
50 Ibid., p. 10.
51 Ibid., p. 16.
52 Alice Rayner, To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the
Phenomenology of Action, University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor 1994.
53 Simon Critchley, On Humour, Thinking in Action,
Routledge, London and New York 2002.
54 Benjamin Fisler, “The Phenomenology of Racialism:
Blackface Puppetry in American Theatre, 1872-1939”,
PhD thesis, University of Maryland 2005; Jan Mrazek,
Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on
the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit, KITLV Press, Leiden
2005.
55 Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies,
Phenomenology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2007.
56 Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship
in a Global Age, Studies in International Performance,
Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York 2009;
Bayly, op. cit.
57 Martin Welton, Feeling Theatre, Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke 2012.
58 Kristin M. Langellier, “A Phenomenological Approach
to Audience” in Literature and Performance, vol. 3 no.
2, 1983, pp. 34-39; Stuart Grant, “Fifteen Theses on
Transcendental Intersubjective Audience” in About
Performance, vol. 10, 2010, pp. 67-79; Willmar
Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance
and Perception, Studies in Theatre History & Culture,
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2000.
59 Kevin Curran, “Shakespeare and Phenomenology”,
h t t p : / / s h a k e s p e a r e a n e x t e r i o r i t y. w o r d p r e s s .
com/2011/01/03/shakespeare-and-phenomenology/
(retrieved 16 March 2013).
60 Stockholm University, “Phenomenology and
Performance Studies”, http://sisu.it.su.se/search/info/
TVFENO/en (retrieved 16 March 2013).
61 Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Müllan and Jan Slaby,
“Emotions Outside the Box—the New Phenomenology
of Feeling and Corporeality” in Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences, vol. 10 no. 2, 2011, pp. 241-259.
62 Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental
Concept of a New Aesthetics” in Thesis Eleven, vol. 36
19
 no. 1, 1993, pp. 113-126.
63 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of
Performance: A New Aesthetics, Routledge, London and
New York 2008, pp. 98-101.
64 Böhme, op. cit., p. 121.
65 Fischer-Lichte, op. cit., p. 100.
66 Meike Wagner, “Of Other Bodies: The Intermedial Gaze
in Theatre” in in Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt,
ed., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Themes
in Theatre: Collective Approaches to Theatre and
Performance, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York
2006,pp. 125-136; Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie Des
Theaters, Übergänge, Fink, Munich 2008.
67 Rachel Sweeney and Marnie Orr, “Surface Tensions:
Land and Body Relations through Live Research
Inquiry: Rockface” in Double Dialogues, vol. 14, 2011,
http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_fourteen/
Orr_Sweeney.html; (retrieved 16 March 2013) The
Post Humanities Hub, “Meeting Materialities”,
h t t p : / / w w w. t e m a . l i u . s e / h s p a l t / 1 . 3 1 0 4 0 2 /
MeetingMaterialitiesASTRIDA.pdf; (retrieved 16
March 2013) Nicoline Van Harskamp, “Expressive
Power Series Part 1 - Max Bonner on the Phenomenology
of Speech”, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010.
68 Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative
Phenomenology after Husserl, Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1995.

20 Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 24

Copyright of Nordic Theatre Studies is the property of Nordic Theatre Studies and its content may not be copied
or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.