by When he started writing The Performer, says Richard Sennett, “a cluster of testicles had come to dominate the public sphere”. Figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are skilled in “malign performances” that draw on a wide range of theatrical devices and content. The best answer, however, is not to hate their techniques – not to try to fight them but with cold justice – but to “push back” the “making of art” in equally strong ways. He believes that performance, and the emotions it evokes, are fundamental to the human being.
Ever since he published The Fall of the Public Man in 1977, Sennett described with unique insight and intelligence the ways in which human bodies and actions interact with the cities and buildings in which they live. Now 81, he plans to complete a trilogy, “if I live long enough”, on “the presence of art in society”, with essays on imitation and paintings to follow. I The Performer He brings particular experience to the subject, as he himself trained as a professional musician – as a cellist – at the Juilliard School in New York. A career-ending hand injury and an operation too painful to heal led him to pursue an academic career in sociology.
A demagogue can demand obedience from the crowd, and the temporary anger of the audience becomes a permanent feature of life.
He combines, as he has in previous books, appreciation with personal experience. He mentions Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, Freud, Aristotle, his friend Roland Barthes, and Hannah Arendt, under whom he studied. He also tells stories about Dirty Dick’s Foc’sle Bar in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, which used to be the haunt of artists, “gay men of colour”, and unemployed dock workers. It describes a 1980s performance of it As You Like It – “creative death struggle” – by patients in the AIDS ward of the Catholic-run St Vincent’s hospital, also in Greenwich Village. The notion of “the performer” for him includes political protesters and people going about their daily lives, as well as actors and paid players.
It goes far, tracing the history of theater spaces from open-air auditions in Ancient Greece, to Shakespeare’s Globe, to Wagner’s opera house in Bayreuth. Dwelling on the Teatro Olimpico, the “first fully roofed theater in Europe”, designed by Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi at the end of the 16th century, he explores the progressive enclosure of theaters and their withdrawal from the surrounding streets on them. It tells colorful stories about the changing relationship between performers and audience, which was once very different from the respectful attention that is now considered appropriate. In the 18th-century Comédie-Française, with its sweat and junk food and urinals, as much attention was paid to sexual incidents in the boxes as on the stage. In the London theaters of the same century audiences shouted familiar lines (“that is the question”, for example, after “to be or not to be”) and actors egged or tried to knock them out.
It’s hard to draw firm conclusions in an enjoyable rambling book, but certain themes do emerge. Sennett sees performance as complex and ambiguous, a form that dies if it is enlisted to deliver simple moral messages, but which still has the potential for good and evil. He describes, as an illustration of the latter, how crowds can be driven into thoughtless fury and hatred, for example by proto-Trump politician George Wallace’s televised racist speeches, which lured the ignorant dockers without job in the Foc’sle Bar. . A later case is a conference of climate crisis deniers – polite people who become inflamed in the auditorium – which Sennett decides to infiltrate.
Forces for good could be found in the reciprocity between performers and audiences and between themselves. Sennett calls the performer a “social artist”. He believes in “non-verbal communication” and the “unspoken collaboration” between players in an ensemble. The civilizing power of performance lies not so much in what is said as in the way it is done.
Things go wrong when reciprocity is lost. Then a demagogue can command obedience from the crowd, and the temporary anger of the audience becomes a permanent feature of life. “Visceral theater,” says Sennett, “fills the void left by empty words.” The question he asks, without fully answering, is how the power of performance can serve liberation rather than destruction.
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The Performer: Art, Life, Politics by Richard Sennett is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
