The Encounter: Sculptural Principles in the work of New York City Players

This doctoral thesis represents the first sustained analysis of the work of New York City Players from the perspective of sculpture and through the lens of spatial theory. By combining traditional and practice-based methods, this thesis interrogates how a ‘sculptural’ approach to theatre and the aesthetic framing of performer ‘essence’ or presence, shapes the encounter between the spectator and the work.
The central question of my research asks: What is the value of applying the principles of visual art and sculpture to theatre, and how does this approach shape the performer/spectator encounter? In a world renegotiating and questioning the position of the human in relation to the non-human and the posthuman, what is the value of art that is founded on the primacy of heightened performer presence? What spectatorial mode does it invite and what are its wider social significances? By positioning spatial practices as a crucial component of aesthetic form, my research argues that the application of sculptural principles to theatre – specifically, an increased attention to and manipulation of space - invites an embodied, self-conscious spectatorial experience in which the objecthood of performance brings the subjecthood of to the spectator to prominence. In this way, the spectator is brought into contact with the construct of their own subjecthood, in relation to wider society. In my investigation of the social relationality of the performer/spectator encounter that is established through space, I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad in The Production of Space (1974) and Sara Ahmed’s concept of an ‘ethical encounter’ proposed in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000). I argue that a sculptural approach to theatre works to reveal gaps in experience within the performer/spectator encounter, and the impossibility of pure exchange, the impossibility of taking the place of another. I demonstrate that it is through the exposition of what is missing in communication, of what is absent, in which the potential exists for learning and discovering new ways of being together.