| In this dissertation I propose a methodology for describing the phenomenon of stage presence by drawing on my theatre training with Jacques Lecoq and on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I begin from their shared commitment to ambiguity and their understanding of space as an embodied and imaginative relationship that orients us to a system of possible actions. I contend that stage presence involves a loss of certainty regarding the center of these systems, that it is a shared relationship of disorientation between performers and audience members. It is thus neither a possession nor a quality of an individual but a kind of relationship between active agents. Their experience of disorientation occurs in arrangements of privilege and power that I examine by extending experiments in cognitive science to consider how attention is allotted in different varieties of theatrical performance. By figuring attention as a resource and tool of performance, I outline the construction of its politics, its economies, and its ethics, all of which are implicated by the hierarchies associated with stage presence. In particular, I use a phenomenology of space to establish that an ethics underlying stage presence depends on our sense of being oriented to one another. Through performance analyses I posit that these responsibilities are obscured in the centripetal space of charismatic and virtuosic performers while the centrifugal space involved in stage presence foregrounds them.;This work intervenes in the study of performance by emphasizing the shared perceptual relationship between performers and attendants instead of assigning agency to one or the other in older models of the "disciplining gaze." I draw focus from the politics of presence to its ethics, the shifting codes of responsibility negotiated in our attending to each other, and I provide one of the first extrapolations of Merleau-Ponty's ethics into the realm of performance. My work also inaugurates the first extended analysis of space in Lecoq's pedagogy and addresses an absence currently distorting the legacy of this influential pedagogue. |
