culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

RECREATING THE SPECTATOR’S/VIEWER’S SPACE THROUGH
CULTURAL ACTS
GABRIELA DIMA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Cultural acts are tokens of culture and are being shaped according to the
meanings attributed to the latter. For some, it means opera, art (poetry, painting,
drama, film, music, etc.), for others it means “the network or totality of attitudes,
values and practices of a particular group of human beings” (Marwick in
Harrison 2005: 23-24). Adopting this subject territory delineation, in what
follows we shall briefly emphasize the spectator’s/ viewer’s space as the
underneath, targeted and wanted pole of the creators involved in the cultural acts
of theatre playing and painting, where space should have motivated (emotional)
designators.
A much debated topic along the centuries, space - spatiality is complex
and multi-layered and has become a mode of representation in contemporary
culture.
Theatre, as distinct from other dramatic media, stands fundamentally for
the relationship between performer, spectator and the space in which both come
together: “the relation between the playing and viewing area is crucial to miseen-
scene”, as Bassnett (1980) points out.
Under this evaluation, the spectator’s space becomes the source of ‘rising
action’ up to dramatically filling up what Brook (1990) calls the ‘empty space’,
the profane, normal, objective space existing before the performance starts. The
‘dynamic space’ thus created stimulates the spectator’s receptive capacity,
recreates his space and establishes the connection to the stage seen as ‘divine’
space, evincing a dramatic subjectivized space–time communication with the
spectator: “The mass of dramatic event effect both time and space. In many
ways every stage space is ‘raked’, downstage is heavier than upstage, the public
is the black hole which swallows everything” (Brook 1990:80).
Interrelated with theatre playing in multifarious ways (see Dima 2007),
painting also allows us to give the viewer’s space a semiotic ability, to
reconstruct dramatic tension through sight, our field of vision being a cline of
continuity.
Either ‘active’ or ‘passive’, the viewer feels his space shrink or enlarge,
by occupying various viewing positions. In many cases it is the painter who
allows that, bold perspective devices implicating the viewer in the drama. We
shall illustrate this by resorting to a case from art history.
Art history has always been one of the most preferred genres by famous
European painters in the period of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Within the thematic range of the times, Lucretia’s life and figure occupies a
special place due to her virtuous nature and her choice for a tragic death.
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