An important shift occurred in the work of many analysts of performance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift suggested by the title and the main argument of a book appearing at that time, Gerald Hinkle's 1979 Art as Event. Hinkle argued that critical understanding of the performing arts had been hindered by the application to them of strategies evolved in arts such as literature and painting, where temporal placement and duration were not so central a part of the experience. Instead of attempting to analyse a phenomenon like a theatrical performance as an art object, Hinkle suggested, it should rather be considered as an event, a shift in orientation that not only places more emphasis on the working out of the performance in a temporal dimension, but also on the embedding of the entire experience in a particular historical and cultural moment which normally operates on a more direct and conscious fashion in both the creative and the receptive processes than it does in such arts as literature and painting.

I assume that any work of art reflects authorial intention. Its determination, however, is probably one of the most difficult tasks in interpretation. I also assume that accounts by the authors themselves are not necessarily valid, and indeed they are often conspicuously inadequate. Therefore, for the scholar, the work itself essentially remains the only reliable object of research. In the following paragraphs I intend to suggest, apply and eventually formalize a method of research whose main objective is to determine authorial intentions and purposes in a given theatrical performance text.

Woyzeck 91, was staged by the Itim Ensemble and the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, in 1991. The production was adapted from Büchner's Woyzeck and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. The adaptation expands Büchner's play text mainly through the addition of scientific lectures, mostly about human physiology, which present the human being as a biological organism: heart, sex organs, reproducing cells, nervous system as the source of feelings. These additional scenes focus attention on Woyzeck's body as an experimental model, along with other performative devices (slides of body parts, and a skeleton). The juxtaposition of the human body (human subject) with its scientific and technological fragmentation reflects the performance's central theme: it objectifies the human subjects in our modern world of genetic experiments, technological innovations and socio-political reactions, which threaten the destruction of humanity.

Charles Mee, before turning to playwriting, authored several well-known political histories. To the last of these, from 1993, he gave the ironically portentous title of Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World. With this deconstructive final word after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theatre. In doing so Mee has come to share a view articulated by Roland Barthes, who was once a university student of theatre and actor in Greek tragedies: the view that theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, can illuminate our history as a story unfolding before us, allowing us to connect critically past with present as our best hope for the future. The American director Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator with Charles Mee, likewise believes that the ancient Greek tragedies helped constitute, articulate, and today still codify the structural base in myth and history of Western civilization. Accordingly, Mee and Landau have created a number of what they call ‘site-specific pieces’ adapted from Greek drama, site-specific in that they are created out of the specific material space and time at hand. One of these is The Trojan Women a Love Story which was developed and premiered at the University of Washington in Seattle in the spring of 1996. The production was based on Euripides' play The Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's 1859 opera Les Troyens, which in turn retells the story of Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil's epic, The Aeneid.

This is the story of a Jew from Israel, who dreams that he is a Marrano priest in Spain, who dreams that he is a Jew in Israel.… And as the reader stands between these mirrors.… and looks at the faces doubly reflected all around, there is certainly no need to tell him whose face he is seeing.

In the middle of the cranescape around Potsdamer Platz, one of the most questionable building projects of the reunified Berlin can currently be viewed. If one walks in an easterly direction along Potsdamerstrasse, on the left, just behind the Kammermusiksaal and the Philharmonie, one sees the scaffolding of Helmut Jahn's eleven-storey Sony Centre, which, in its triangular form, extends to the Potsdamer Platz. As can be gathered from the models and computer simulations found in the scarlet infobox on the adjoining Leipziger Platz, the Chicago architect is planning to construct a complex consisting of a forum, the Sony Europa Centre, an office tower and two office blocks. In conjunction with the Centre and the tower as the tallest element, these two office blocks—one pointing east toward Bellevuestrasse and the other pointing west toward the Philharmonie—form a triangle that circumscribes an oval forum. The office blocks, as well as the Centre and the tower, are steel and glass constructions whose rooms at the back will offer a view of the forum from floor to ceiling. The approximately 100-metre high office tower will assume dynamism and elegance by virtue of a glass façade that will extend sideways above and beyond the semicircular building.

As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it relates to theatrical activity, I am struck by the fact that this question has both micro and macro-cosmic implications. Certainly, we must address the far reaching ideological concerns that permeate any performance, but within specific parameters, within the confines of a particular performance, the interrelationship of material components demands that we deal with the physical presence that appears before us. This essay grapples with this problem of theatrical presence through adiscussion of visual perception.