Hilton's theory

'Not since Shakespeare's death has interest in the audio-visual been greater than at the present.'

Julian Hilton, Introduction to New Directions in the Theatre.

Hilton then mentions how 'twentieth century advances in audio-visual technology have combined to shift the balance away from print' and that 'recorded sound has enabled us to hear how past performers sounded.' He sees this as a resurgence of  'oral rather than printed culture.'

Works like Ban This Filth or Sister (or Hate Radio) or stand-up comedy have a text that goes beyond the script: the performers and creators are the same people, and Hilton suggests that 'they belong to an old European tradition, neglected in the English speaking world, of writers who also perform (as Shakespeare did).' In other words, this apparently new movement is rooted firmly in theatre history.

The text under consideration in the case of Ban This Filth is not the bare-bones script - Bissett has a few interludes where his words are less important than the accompanying choreography. And the climactic confrontation with the audience, dangling the possibility of a naked finale, relies on a public vote. The script cannot contain that dialogue, as it is theoretically reworked with every show.

This isn't all that interesting, except in so far as it acknowledges that performance is not simply appreciated through the literary component. Hilton later notes that this is nothing more than a re-assertion of humanist values, as developed in the Renaissance, that recognised education as a 'full-body' activity, and not just aimed at the abstract mind.

Unfortunately, Hilton confuses me two pages later: he builds a model of performance which 'deliberately omits both any mention of a text, for two principal reasons.' Apart from the need for an editor ('both' is left hanging in the source text), he suggests that 'key performance modes... have no text at all - mime is iconic, text is symbolic.'

Text is getting equated with script or notation, or something. I prefer to think of the text as 'the object of analysis.' That is probably because, as a critic, I study complete events - and regard the script as just one part of the overall text.

And I don't understand the difference between iconic and symbolic (in this instance).

He doesn't mention an audience either 'for the reason that performers can perform without an audience being present.' Meaning that he observes a strict divide between performer and audience, meaning that the performers aren't watching each other (or in the case of a solo performance, the performer is not observing their own actions).

But here is Hilton's model of performance...

Anyone fancy picking the bones out of this?