Sensing’ is one of the first words in this book. What are we saying when we say that we are ‘sensing modernist theatre’? Are we gesturing towards the phenomenological turn in performance studies, in many ways practised and initially theorised by modernist performance? Are we citing the Greek ‘sense’ of the aesthetic, aesthesis, that also locates it in lived experience through the senses and our bodies? Or is it just a feeling?

This affective reading of modernist performance is in many ways enacted throughout this book: in the ways it addresses memorialisation, memory, tradition and experimentation; in the ways it combines different discourses from archival research to manifesto. Indeed, we might say that it enacts a performance itself and invites us to occupy any position we wish along the genealogy of performance theory and theatre historiography – two disciplines that forged themselves within modernism from its anthropological/ritualistic flourishes to its avant-garde radicalism.

It's no coincidence, I think, that Raymond Williams coined the phrase ‘structure of feeling’ initially in the early 1950s, when critically discussing the performing arts, modernist cinema and drama. In trying to read the relationships between the playtext and the performance, Williams uses the phrase to discuss the function of dramatic conventions (theatricality, as we might say, in a sense already practising performance theory). Later the phrase became more evocative and was used to address the complex and allusive ways literary and theatrical conventions are passed on through time, and how they ride the interconnected timelines of past/present/future. Again, in a sense this quest for the so-called ‘ideology of form’ had its parallels in the Frankfurt School, where ‘theatricality’ itself becomes a type of objective correlative, as that dynamic force (structure of feeling) that connects the past with the present and, significantly, propels it into the future. The Brecht/Benjamin/Adorno/Beckett debates that place theatre centre stage in discussing ideas about autonomy and engagement still resonate, as much for the continuously evolving lexicon they helped to forge as for their passion and flair. There was a time in modernism when these debates were a matter of life and death.

It was also a time when theatrical performance comes into its own, positioned as an autonomous aesthetic activity, quintessentially modern, but also part of a genealogy of performing arts that ranges from the Greeks, to Chinese acting, to kabuki, bunraku and kathakali.

MODERNISM

Thus cautioned Pope Pius X, in ‘On the Doctrine of the Modernists’, his 1907 Encyclical aimed at exposing the errors of ‘modernist’ interpretations of Catholic dogma. An ‘Oath Against Modernism’ followed in September 1910, two months before the time when, as Virginia Woolf claimed, ‘human character changed’. Extending to fifty-seven paragraphs, this pious pronouncement cannot be faulted for its polemical rigour: in what must be one of the earliest attempts to define ‘modernism’ as a project, aligned with rationalism, secularism and modern philosophical theories such as BERGSONISM, Pius X shows himself keener to attribute a coherent and literally un-canonical agency to it than many contemporary scholars. Such definitional reluctance is understandable as the term in literary and art-historical contexts has been imposed retrospectively since its inception in the 1950s, as Raymond Williams has pointed out (Williams 1989: 48). In fact, it may be more appropriate to define modernism as what it is not: for Theodor W. Adorno, ‘modernism is not a positive slogan’; it is a ‘privative [concept], indicating firmly that something ought to be negated and what it is that ought to be negated’ (Adorno 2004: 30). In that sense, modernism can be said to be consistently oppositional, including in its own self-definition. Even when one insists on the fact of modernisms, that plurality cannot be said to cohere into an easily unifiable position. Modernism, then, is not a movement, or the sum total of its AVANT-GARDES, their museum, archive or canon. Although it cannot be thought (or taught) without referenceor fidelity to the singular, combative challenges issued at their moment, innovative energies and EXPERIMENTS, their heroic failures and ongoing legacies, modernism is equally unthinkable without its ARRIÉRE-GARDE, the resistance to the charge of the ‘new’ and the recourse to tradition as the literary superego or enduring pantheon within which true ‘individual talent’ would find its place.