Spools of Thread, Socks and Table Salt: What Things Can Teach Us About Theatre
Michael Schweikardt
In a 2017 article for The New York Times, award-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar argued that a living actor before a living audience is the situation of all theatre (Akhtar). While this may describe the best situation for theatre, recent history has taught us that it is not the only situation. In this time of the pandemic, bodies pose a problem for live theatre—they sneeze, they cough, they spit, and they sweat—coronavirus may be the culprit, but bodies and the fluids they secrete are its weapons. Consequently, we must remain at a distance from one another, and with no live actors on our stages and no live audiences to watch them, we long for new situations in which acts of theatre can transpire.
I remember another time when bodies posed an existential threat. It was during the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, and I was just entering puberty. Terrified of bodies (both others and my own), I withdrew, and in my self-imposed isolation, I would comfort myself by making up plays and musicals and stage them using things I had found around my bedroom. Like the solitary child in nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s essay A Philosophy of Toys who, playing at war, imagines his corks and dominoes as soldiers, so too, in my imagination, my things would seem to come alive and perform for me (199). Today, alone in my room and with no live theatre on the horizon, I turn my attention to Teaching Theatre with Things to fill the void, and I marvel, once again, at how things—like spools of thread, and socks, and table salt—come to life and give performances of their own.
The trouble with things is that they tend to go unnoticed. This is because things have jobs to do—specific purposes for which they were created—and while performing these jobs, things are often rendered transparent. For example, while focusing on our morning coffee, we pay little attention to the coffee cup that conveys it. By virtue of its functionality, the coffee cup becomes transparent; we see right through it. In order to make the coffee cup present, we must see beyond its function; we must see that the coffee cup is blue. In Teaching Theatre with Things, things are, in a sense, rendered useless, at least in terms of their intended function; we cannot reach into the virtual space and use Alison’s thread to sew on a button, or Alyssa’s socks to warm our feet, or Rozy’s table salt to season our food. Here, divorced from the jobs that normally make them invisible, we can see these things for what they are, not what they do; we see that the spool of thread is brown, the sock is wool, and the salt is gritty. In recognizing the physical aspects of their color, material, texture, etc., things become present in the virtual space—and once present, things can begin to take on new significance. In his 2002 essay Tables, Chairs, and Other Machines for Thinking, philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Kingwell explains:
I place a couch in an empty room, and it acquires a new significance: the air now shimmers with possibilities of conversation or napping or seduction. The absent protagonist of the various human stories of that room has witnessed and will witness are instantly summoned, necromantically, by the couch’s human dimensions, its constant invitation to sit or lie (177).
In other words, when we place things in the virtual space, they take on a life of their own and create possibilities for new dramaturgies to emerge. This phenomenon is evident in Alyssa Ridder’s video, Sock Talk.
Is there any object more overlooked than an ordinary sock? Mismatched or solo, stuffed in a drawer or stuffed in our shoe, we hardly notice socks. Alyssa uses the virtual space to call our attention to them. Under our gaze, the physical aspects of socks materialize, and they become present; one sock is sturdy and ordinary, while another sock is small and pink. With these characteristics made known, the socks begin to signify other things; for Alyssa, a sturdy and ordinary sock signals an heroic everyman while a small and pink sock signals an innocent child. As characters develop, Alyssa establishes relationships between them and imagines new stories in which they behave. Thus, the socks become actors in a drama; an act of theatre transpires. It is true that in all the Teaching Theatre with Things videos, things are activated by the instructor’s hands, but in the virtual space, things are also activated by our imagination. Looking makes things present and a thing’s presence compels us to look; we cannot take our eyes off of it. We get lost in a world of daydreams where the instructors (mostly) disappear, but there are no absent protagonists here—the things signal protagonists.
And yet, a sock is still a sock. There is a remarkable moment at the end of Alyssa’s video when she breaks the magic spell of the virtual space by shuffling the socks into a disorganized pile in the middle of the table. This abruptly disrupts our gaze, and the daydream, the illusion of theatre, falls away. The socks return to being lifeless. In a time where there is so much longing for live theatre, the moment is almost painful to watch.
And so, Teaching Theatre with Things shows just how remarkable things can be. While things like socks (and spools of thread, and salt, and coffee cups, and corks and dominoes) are not flesh and blood, in our imagination, they seem to come to life and give performances. In the absence of live theatre, this provides some comfort. But Teaching Theatre with Things also asserts that the essential situation of theatre is still human, for things require our gaze to become remarkable; without our participation, no act of theatre can transpire. Teaching Theatre with Things places “liveness”, once again, at the center of theatre.
Works Cited
Akhtar, Ayad. “An Antidote to Digital Dehumanization? Live Theatre.” nytimes.com, 29 Dec. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/theater/ayad-akhtar-steinberg-award-digital-dehumanization-live-theater.html?auth=login-email&login=email. Accessed 8 July 2020.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated and Edited by Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press LTD, London, 1964.
Kingwell, Mark. “Tables, Chairs, and Other Machines for Thinking.” Practical Judgements: Essays in Culture, Politics, and Interpretation, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002.
Bio
Michael Schweikardt enjoys a successful career as a set designer working for opera and theatre companies across the United States and abroad. He has published essays in Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge 2020), and Text and Presentation, 2019 (McFarland 2020). He serves as managing editor for design at theatretimes.com. His work can be viewed on his website: www.msportfolio.com.