Content area
Full Text
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space - out of Time. Edgar Allan Poe
At the I989 FIRT/IFTR conference in Stockholm, Erika Fisher-Lichte posited that "performance analysis is still, even today, one of the most neglected areas of academic theatre research. ... Just as in every analysis of a work, so in performance analysis the question of possible methods of segmentation poses one of its cardinal problems." Establishing her approach to Ralf Langbacka's Don Giovanni, Fischer-Lichte suggested several methodological procedures: "One might turn to categories provided by the poetics of drama such as character, plot, situation, space, time; or one might make segmentation according to the various sign systems. ..."' One possible analytical approach is the "chronotope" which I will demonstrate using Peter Sellars' production of the Mozartda Ponte opera, Don Giovanni as exemplar.2 While segmentation generally accounts for moment-to-moment, linear movement through the narrative, the segmentation required in considering the chronotope is vertical. That is, chronotopes are sedimentary structures that form a basis for understanding the work as a whole.
This concept of the chronotope is adapted from Mikhail Bakhtin's "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel." Here, he develops his notions on the use of "time-spaces" as formal devices which are "organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative."3 The chronotope in the novel includes what we traditionally call the "setting," but goes further into how the historical time and space together constitute a way of understanding the story. As Bakhtin does in the novel, I will apply the chronotope as the device that is metaphorically and materially employed to advance the story. It is the structure that surrounds, infuses, and finally defines the narrative. It is also a way to understand the performance generically; that is, we can see its relationship to other texts in terms of structure.
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of...