E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ Adapting The Tempest : from performance to MetAdaptation Unlike Miranda, we live in information-rich environments. Just as for Prospero, furnished with his books by Gonzalo and empowered by Ariel, the wisdom and the folly of the world are at our fingertips, with low barriers to participation. Given these facts, I decided against interpreting Julie Taymor’s 2010 Hollywood movie of The Tempest, a movie that makes obvious computer-generated imagery choices in providing spectacular visuality (along the lines of a ‘cinema of attractions’ suggested by Tom Gunning) 1 . This would have been an obvious choice for a scholar specialising in adaptation studies, but it seems to me that social-media environments and online video platforms such as YouTube which provide a global stage without (or rather: nearly or presumably without) gatekeeping ask more pertinent questions about the play. In spite of its indisputable visual attraction, therefore, Taymor’s The Tempest (first encountered as a YouTube trailer) looked much less attractive as a cultural indicator of performing and adapting Shakespeare. Instead, then, this essay will address communityrather than industry-generated content on YouTube (‘fan-fic’ vs. ‘pro-fic’, i.e. ‘professional fiction’). As it is a novel way of adapting The Tempest on stage that I also first encountered on YouTube, I will focus on the 2009 lecture-performance project Pornstorm (Hildesheim University). In her recent study of The Tempest in performance, Virginia Mason Vaughan (2011, 1) remarks “a recurring tension between what is tried and true and what is experimental“, and, noting the 400-year time span since its first performance in the Blackfriars theatre, she continues to wonder “what comes next“ and, facetiously, suggests we mine Ariel as a technology buff for his IT expertise (2011, 214-215). It is, indeed, tempting to cast the Web as an island to be peopled by the inane 1 This may be seen to reduce The Tempest to just another fantasy vehicle on which to pin the display value of CGI cinema. Broeren (154) acknowledges that the funfair attractions of cinema diagnosed by Gunning may be successfully applied to big-budget Hollywood CGI (which is what I imply here). Nevertheless, he makes an interesting case for online video as “attractional dispositif“ (164). E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 266 offspring of media amateur ‘CalibanMirandas’ against the attempts of the censoring Prospero and his books (software), Ariel (search engine), enforcing functional tasks (fetching fuel; 1.2.367) 2 and censorship (to Ferdinand: “I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together“ (1.2.462)) on an anarchic space full of Sycoraxian mischief (“earthy and abhorred“ (1.2.273), “unmitigable rage“ (1.2.276)). 3 I would like to appropriate at least Prospero’s final plea for freedom in his epilogue to answer those who still think that the meaning of The Tempest resides solely within the covers of the Arden edition or on the boards of the Globe or the RSC: “Let me not [...] dwell / In this bare island by your spell“ (EPILOGUE.5-8). As Vaughan and Vaughan gloss in the new Arden edition, Prospero refers not just to the island as setting, but also metatheatrically to his stage here (307). The meanings of The Tempest, as Shakespeare indicates here via Prospero, reside crucially in its protean performances and adaptations beyond the confines of a text or even a canon of text and performance. Vaughan rightfully observes that no “person could see and comment“ on all of the performances of The Tempest in the world (2011, 192), but, we may add, we may glimpse a number of them on YouTube as a global rehearsal space, performance stage and archive for The Tempest. A YouTube ‘YouStorm’ and a Tempest lecture-performance might be some of the things that are coming next for The Tempest. On YouTube and elsewhere on the Net, creative originality may be in peril, but we may be grateful if Shakespeare continues to be a presence, his avatars “as the sun is daily new and old,/ […] still telling what is told“ — the Shakespearean version of intertextuality (in Sonnet 76). The Tempest is one of the most palimpsestuous and metatheatrical of Shakespeare’s plays, having been “re-read and re-written more radically, perhaps, than any other play“ (Hulme and Sherman 1). It is also experimental “from the beginning“ (2011, 214) as Vaughan notes. Arguably, it is a very special case among Shakespearean texts in triggering rich actualizations and versions that appropriate the play to specific cultural moments, such as gender revisions and postcolonial re-writings (Forbidden Planet, Prospero’s Books, Une Tempête, Indigo, The Forest Princess, No Telephone to Heaven, etc.). Studies of The Tempest on film and on stage in the context of cultural appropriation are legion (see Vaughan 2011, the essays collected in Hulme and Sherman, as well as Nixon; Dobson etc.). 2 Quotes from the text refer to act and scene divisions in the Arden edition, 3d series, by Vaughan and Vaughan (2011). 3 It is fascinating to note how the claims made in traditional media rage against YouTube recall Prospero’s account of Caliban: “Juvenile, aggressive, misspelled, sexist, homophobic, swinging from raging at the contents of a video to providing a pointlessly detailed description followed by a LOL, YouTube comments are a hotbed of infantile debate and unashamed ignorance“ (Owen and Wright). Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 267 Why these continuing re-writings and re-stagings, these Bearbeitungen (literally: re-workings) of The Tempest? An argument might draw three concentric circles around Shakespeare’s text that focus on (1) the attraction of adaptation and appropriating in general, (2) the attraction of Shakespeare’s work in particular, or (3) even the very specific case of The Tempest. (1) In studying the “what (forms), who (adapters), why (adapters), how (audiences), when (contexts), and where (contexts) of adaptation“ (Hutcheon xvi), Linda Hutcheon has laid out very clearly the inevitability and the attraction of adaptation and appropriation: Repetition with a difference breeds recognition and remembrance as well as change. (2) Shakespeare — himself an arch-adapter — has proven to be attractive to these modes of engagement for a variety of reasons associated with recognition and change. He is out of copyright, he is instantly recognisable, most of his works come with a baggage of adaptations and performances; as the most renowned playwright of all he represents Western culture; as the most important literary figure of Britain he represents its national and imperial past. The lure of quasi-automatic cultural capital and dignity bestowed on any project associated with Shakespeare has proved irresistible, regardless of whether the actual outcome has always lived up to the legacy invoked by the name of Shakespeare. From the viewer/ reader’s perspective any performance of Shakespeare is likely to be experienced as a re-performance. His authorial weight and a history overseen by guardians of fidelity, however, have meant that for a long time variations and appropriations have seemed provocative, daring, original and fresh. When Jean Marsden introduced her collection on The Appropriation of Shakespeare, in the wake of the pioneering reception studies by Gary Taylor (Reinventing Shakespeare) and Jonathan Bate (Shakespearean Constitutions), she quoted the foundational principle of Constance School reader-response criticism as articulated by Hans Robert Jauss: “A literary event can continue to have an effect only if those who come after it still or once again respond to it“ (1). I shall come back to the interesting initial phrase used by Jauss, “a literary event“ (my emphasis) as it seems to combine the idea of reading and the idea of literature as a performance. Since then, Shakespeare studies have compartmentalized their interest according to the media involved (adaptations on film, theatre, novels etc.) or the cultural re-positionings intended (national, gendered, ethicized etc.), so that now we have a hyphenated Shakespeare adaptations culture worthy of a Polonius. (3) Thirdly, The Tempest is a very special case in the history of appropriating Shakespeare, as the sequence of rewritings quoted at the beginning of this essay suggests. Issues of postcolonialism, gender, and aesthetics have dominated these re-readings. From Charlotte Barnes’s The Forest Princess (UK 1844/ USA 1848, see Loeffelholz), which re-mixes The Tempest and Pocahontas, E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 268 to Philip Osment’s 1987 play This Island’s Mine, colonial rewritings and postcolonial writings-back have been most prominent. Thomas Cartelli (106) has criticized these writings-back as “questionable“. He isolates a first phase, in which the Prospero-Caliban relationship is subverted and criticized in an attempt at postcolonial national articulation, from a second phase marked by a Shakespearean shorthand for postcolonial repositioning. To radicalize Cartelli’s point, it might indeed seem as if mentionings of Caliban (defiant aggression), Miranda (not-yet liberated cultural dependency) and Ariel (idealised post-colonial subject) have served to stereotype to some degree the attitudes of ‘writing back’. Indeed, Vaughan (2011, 214) suggests that postcolonial readings of The Tempest may deteriorate towards a pro forma, “obligatory gesture to political correctness“. Attempts to ‘equalize’ the central text such as The Tempest, to rewrite a Caliban as good as Prospero, tend to reinforce its cultural status and thus the colonizer’s perspective. Cartelli, interestingly, has also noted a diminishing importance of Shakespeare as a reference point, as the colonizer’s cultural icons have become at least partially superseded with a cultural iconicity ‘of one’s own’. As Vaughan (2011, 212) concludes her study of The Tempest in performance, it is a play that is conscious of the stage technology and “consists of plays-within-plays that comment on the transient power of dramatic art“. This metadramatic and metatheatrical appeal, Vaughan argues, accounts in particular for numerous experimental media-conscious adaptations of the play. Given this media consciousness and ubiquity of The Tempest, we can safely assume that Shakespeare’s play has entered the stage of meta-adaptation (or “MetAdaptation“, Voigts-Virchow 2009), in which adaptations and appropriations, from a variety of viewpoints, adapt not necessarily The Tempest, but what has been done to The Tempest in a variety of media, forms, genres, and discourses. YouTube: understanding in rehearsal Taking recent theories of appropriation/ adaptation (Sanders; Hutcheon) and academic research into YouTube (Snickars and Vonderau; Strangelove) as a basis, this paper seeks to go beyond the standard questions asked of every new adaptation of The Tempest, and bring into close focus the re-adaptation and re-performance of The Tempest’s adaptations, appropriations, and performances. My approach is certainly not unique — for instance, at the 2010 ESSE conference at Torino, Maurizo Calbi and John Joughin offered a panel focussed on “online hypermediatisation (e.g. Karaoke Shakespeare)“ and “You Tube Shakespeare”. Desmet (66) has argued in favour of YouTube as a didactic tool and praised YouTubers as Shakespeare bricoleurs. YouTube Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 269 makes performances of The Tempest readily and globally available. It is a ‘prosumptive’ space. Let us pause briefly to comment on the idea of a ‘prosumptive space’. The portmanteau word ‘prosumption’ was coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980 to reflect the increasing role of the consumer in shaping the process of production. The (often self-referential) co-presence of producers and consumers is constitutive of this culture of ‘prosuming’ and YouTube or blogs are the transient Net spaces for these communities of ‘prosumption,’ spaces that are “characterized by, among other things, the sharing of knowledge and expertise based on voluntary affiliations“ (Jenkins 2006, 280). The exploration of affinity spaces has begun in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Henry Jenkins whose Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) describes the mechanisms and acceleration of text migrations across media boundaries, with attendant problems of legitimacy and authorization: “[c]onvergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others“ (Jenkins 2006, 3). These early investigations of fanfiction as “participatory culture“ and “collective intelligence“ (Jenkins 2006, 2) often, at least implicitly, occur within a discussion of the potential and limits of social participation, along the lines of media ‘empowerment’ vs. media ‘disempowerment’ — classic questions in Cultural Studies. What is the effect of the platform/ distributor/ database YouTube on this particular intertextual space of The Tempest? Its most interesting qualities are those of a wild, transient, non-commercial, self-referential archival space of re-formatting and performances — and their re-appropriation and reformatting by commercial interests (Strangelove 4-5). Clips on YouTube appear within a highly structured media environment and infrastructure that organises the interchangeable co-presence of producers and consumers. In the case of The Tempest, for instance, we find: Clips and trailers from commercial movies, theatre performances, adaptations etc. Educational material, for instance from the BBC — since 2007 on the YouTube auxiliary TeacherTube (an Oprah Winfrey-like talk show host interview Miranda, Ferdinand, Prospero (in white socks and tourist outfit) and Ariel — apparently Caliban was too uncouth and unpalatable for the key stage 3 Shakespeare (aimed at children from 11 to 14 years old). Mash-ups of trailers and other ‘professional’ material Amateur versions (live-action, but also lego/ playmobile performances) E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 270 Examples of amateur performances are often low-tech antitheses of The Tempest as a template for the display of spectacular visuality (as in the 2011 film version by Julie Taymor). They are often infused with all kinds of hybrid popular textualities. Key examples include: “a[n] animated version of the Tempest, by William Shakespeare, which was made for the manchester cs animation contest in under 2 weeks. All the voices were done by me, in one take.“ (32.019), Andrew Watts, Warwickshire. The Tempest in arcade game-style raster graphics (2.789) by “Petter and Simon”. “William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as performed by the cast of Banana-nana-Ninja - in one minute! “ (5.103): animation, all the characters are cartoon fruits. Examples of ‘professional’ performances on YouTube include: The first clip from the BBC Animated Tales “The Tempest“ (207.820) The official trailer for the 2010 Julie Taymor movie by Touchstone Pictures — incorrectly advertised as “Shakespeare’s final masterpiece“ (686.542) Whereas ‘official’ material, therefore, garners a much higher number of views and may be the reason for most YouTube users to access YouTube in the first place, the relative importance of non-publicized amateur material — rich in variety — seems to be much higher. I do not take these short Tempest clips to be endowed with depths of meaning that require intense interpretative endeavours. This paper takes the transient pastiches and parodies of The Tempest on YouTube as instances of a trend toward ‘presentification’ (Hans- Ulrich Gumbrecht). Gumbrecht uses this word in the context of his attack on a furor hermeneuticus — the idea that our relationship to the world is governed exlusively or primarily by reading it — when in fact its manifold ‘meanings’ are quite as often established through mere ‘material’, ‘preinterpretative’ contact — by ‘simple’ presence. Anyone who has ever watched The Tempest in performance will be able to testify to the impression that its manifold meanings have rushed past him or her in the course of the stage transactions. For me, it is the information-saturated situation of contemporary media culture that gives weight to Gumbrecht’s ideas of a ‘culture of presence’ (in brief: focused on a pre-meaning aesthetics; focused on material signifiers, not just signifieds; body is just as legitimate as mind as location of significance). As any theatregoer can confirm, interpretation is not the only way to relate to The Tempest — the co-presence of actors and audiences in a theatre and the visceral experience of the show may be just as (or more) important. Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 271 Manifold adaptations, appropriations and performances of The Tempest have passed before various audiences’ eyes as (often non-interpreted) instances of ‘presentification’, as a consequence of the specific proclivity of Shakespeare towards being presentified, and in view of the long history of adaptations and stagings of The Tempest. We might, therefore, direct our interpretative energies towards its metatheatrical dimension and the media context of its textual presence in YouTube. Any contemporary version of The Tempest is likely to be experienced as already appropriated, invoking and actualizing a memory of earlier re-positionings. Thus, a contemporary film version of The Tempest will follow the rules of Hollywood Shakespeare, but will also be experienced as a ‘MetAdaptation’. Clearly, one might read Helen Mirren’s Prospera (or Russell Brand’s Trinculo) in the context of their Hollywood personae, but also in the light of earlier stage performances by Vanessa Redgrave in the new Globe (2000), or, in the Münchener Kammerspiele 2007, Hildegard Schmahl, the movies by Greenaway or literary and even academic gender revisions of Shakespeare of, say, Stephen Orgel or Marjorie Garber. YouTube is an obvious, low-barriers outlet for Tempest performances in a context of intensely intertextual ‘MetAdaptation’ — it is, among other things, a stage. This is suggested not only by the metaphorical use of the term ‘platform’ for the database (Snickars and Vonderau 13), but also by its exhibitionist affinity towards film and theatre, maybe in particular to vaudeville (Broeren 159). Just as the rehearsal room, YouTube is a special instance of an affinity space. What emerges in these affinity spaces is both an interpretative ‘culture of meaning-making’ and a non-interpretative ‘culture of presence’ (Gumbrecht). With Gumbrecht, the desire for presence might be addressed as the single most important motivator in these communities: reading alone just won’t do. And as it is a communal activity: Reading alone just won’t do. Any scholar of drama and theatre will be alert to the difference between hermeneutics and performativity. Hermeneutics casts the reception of art as a solitary process of interpretation, in which individual or even cultural horizons merge and historical gaps are bridged in the reading process of ideally, humanistically educated or abstractly idealized readers. Clearly this version of a reading process has been somewhat fetishized at least in the German tradition of hermeneutics and reader-response theory, and therefore, has given rise to severe criticism. Recent German theories of performativity (Wirth; Fischer-Lichte) that have their roots in speech-act theory (Austin and Searle) and gender studies (Butler), have indeed cast hermeneutics as their bête noire. For Fischer-Lichte (19) hermeneutics and semiotics (i.e., the reading and decoding of texts) are incompatible with performativity (i.e. staging, ‘Aufführung’). Most importantly for any approach to YouTube performance, a performative approach to E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 272 texts explodes the difference between the subject and the object of interaction: re-situated and re-contextualized on a stage shared by audience and performers, texts are not being read and interpreted, but rather, performed. If we apply Fischer-Lichte’s ideas to social media, her argument is all the more pertinent: this kind of aesthetic event (rather than aesthetic object) calls for a new theory of production and reception (22). Let me remind you at this point that Jauss explicitly addressed “literary events“. In contrast to Fischer-Lichte, I think that this difference between reading and performing is collapsed in the readers/ doers of participatory cultures: we can both read the YouTubers’ texts (just as they have read Shakespeare) and observe their rehearsals as (in a sense) there is no end to rehearsal in the theatre. Avid readers are keen to perform what they are sharing in what has been called ‘affinity spaces’ (Gee) rather than in film studios, publicly-funded theatres, classrooms or lecture halls. Rather appropriately, Pugh has used the language of performance to describe fanfic writers, addressing them as “puppeteers“ (Pugh 13). This is a leisure-time Shakespeare in a terrain where he possibly has never gone before. YouTube may be one of the new spaces where Shakespeare loses his quality of transcendental artist and where his work re-joins the world in a presence shared with a great diversity of other human emanations. 4 In our context, the post-hermeneutic slant of studies of performativity is particularly illuminating. Mere reading is not enough — its place is taken by the agents of presentification. What is crucial in participatory culture is the dynamic, divergent, and even divisive appropriation of texts in performances staged by performative communities. These communities use spaces such as YouTube primarily as an archive for records of presence — the re-performance of Austen’s texts as lived-in intertextual ‘universes’ composed of quotation, pastiche, parody, but with very little critical distance. What we see on the potentially borderless stage of YouTube is ‘understanding in rehearsal’ in a situation of conspicuous prosumption: the thresholds to offer one’s individual understanding and performance to the (presumably indifferent) world have never been so low. I will look at the video of Pornstorm by the group ‘Horst Majeure’ a lecture performance based on The Tempest, that had its first night at the Lindemannspeicher, Hildesheim, in July 2008. It was kindly sent to me by 4 The reference is to a conundrum of hermeneutics picked up by Gadamer in Truth and Method. Gadamer addresses a situation that can be found in Kant’s transcendentalist view of art, namely that the work of art and the artist emerge at the cost of a loss of “world space“ and transfer into “aesthetic consciousness“ (Gadamer 93). According to an “aesthetic of presence“ (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; Martin Seel), this split must, and can be overcome. Thus, invoking Seel, YouTube offers glimpses of processes of understanding rather than of the final products of these processes. It is understanding in rehearsal. Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 273 Margret Schütz after I had come across its trailer on YouTube. One encounters the short video via its suggestive title, and the number of ‘views’ is the key criterion of popularity. According to the online Urban Dictionary, a ‘pornstorm’ results from “surfing for porn and getting bombarded with popup windows“ (UD Online 2012). Probably the group deliberately coined a title that would serve well as a teaser in YouTube and elsewhere. As Schütz told me in an e-mail, she thinks that the word ‘porn’ in the title is the key reason for “a couple of thousand views, [...] chiefly from male North American users“. YouTube statistics show that, while the general user tends to be the middle-aged and male, the predominant fan-base of the trailer is in Germany. 5 Thus, even the allusion resulted in a meta-effect, in provoking a response similar to what it alludes to. Short, amateurish, experimental, updating, and parodic, Pornstorm is representative of defining features of the YouTube clip. To be more precise, Pornstorm is a lecture-performance, that is, a performance that collapses the categories of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary texts’ and ‘presentifies’ both The Tempest and its long reception history, albeit admittedly in a rather fragmentary version. By definition, the lecture performance is a critical re-positioning of materials that embeds and comments on earlier ‘positionings’. It is precisely the ‘about-ness’ of lectures that makes it an interesting format as an adaptive practice that is able to adapt not just The Tempest, but a history of readings and performances of The Tempest — particularly in academic contexts. In this sense, it is a ‘MetAdaptation’ much more appropriate to You- Tube than many of its countless other clips from performances of The Tempest: It is quite aware of how a past text or script becomes a presence or is ‘presentified’. I am thus not arguing for the superior quality of the acting or the performance or even the concept of Pornstorm, but for the superior significance of the text as a cultural practice. Presentification and the lecture-performance As Sybille Peters has pointed out in her study on lecture performances, a lecture is essentially a performance: “We basically understand a lecture as performance — as a specific combination of ‘show’ and ‘tell’/ (watching and listening) that can be described along categories of performance-analysis 5 “Wir haben schon ein paar tausend Klicks. Ich denke aber das hängt mit dem Wort ‘Porn‘ im Titel zusammen. Die YouTube-Statistik zeigt, dass über 90 Prozent der Nutzer, die dieses Video sehen männliche Nordamerikaner sind“ (Schütz, the exact number of views as of December 2011 is 13.517) [We already have a few thousand clicks. But I think that is because of the word ‘porn’ in the title. The YouTube statistics show that over 90 percent of the users who view this video are North-American males]. E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 274 such as space, time, persona, media and public“ (2010). 6 Peters adds that under the conditions of the ‘broadcast yourself’ slogan of YouTube, a lecture is more likely than in former years to present the lecturer with or against or above his/ her material: a lecturer is a performer and has been, at least since the 18 th century, but is only now, being perceived as located in between the performing arts and science (cf. Peters 2011, 11). Peters calls the current situation a Präsentationsgesellschaft, ‘society of presentation’, but, invoking Gumbrecht and Seel, I prefer ‘presentification’ as this key word has a much larger remit than pertaining just to academic presentations. Performances and lectures share, of course, a number of important categories: the style and habitus of delivery, the role of the performing/ lecturing body, the activation of other media (cf. Peters 2011, 15). Pornstorm is palpably inspired by the Giessen school of postdramatic theatre as laid out in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential manifesto, which was formulated in 1999 and translated into English in 2006. In fact, the controversial and successful 2007 Tempest at the Münchener Kammerspiele, which was subsequently invited to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffen, was the collaboration of the translator Jens Roselt (now Professor at Hildesheim) and director Stefan Pucher. The post-dramatic team presented a pop-cultural Tempest in which Caliban accosted Prospero as a “humanist asshole“ (“Humanistenarschloch“). The Roselt/ Pucher Tempest is indicative of the experimental attitude towards the text in the tradition of the German Regietheater, in which Shakespeare’s text is seen as material that may be transformed at will. As a mode of postdramatic theatre of this ancestry, the format of the lecture-performance has become very popular since its beginnings in the work of Fluxus artist John Baldessari, from artists Walid Ra’ad or Xavier le Roy to the infamous PowerPoint Karaoke by the Berlin-based Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur. 7 The lecture performance or “Diskurstheaterabend“ (‘evening of discursive theatre’) Pornstorm aims at merging aesthetics and the dissemination of knowledge. It may be high-concept, but it is low-tech and can be easily performed by amateurs. Prospero’s island is represented by a Yucca tree, and, later in the show, by a plastic paddling pool that — somewhat deflated — also serves to suggest a vagina. A lecturer explains that the deflated pool represents Miranda’s half-awakened desire, finally satisfied through “Shakespeare’s clever idea“ to “bring a sexual partner, Ferdinand, to the island via the medium of acceleration” (that is, the ship). Among other things, the performance lecture is a meta-lecture, asking the question of what academics are doing when they are delivering lectures on, say, “Shakes- 6 Peters’s monograph is in German. Key ideas can also be found in her blog, which also provides this quote. 7 This is an impromptu lecture based on a number of randomly ‘sampled’ slides. Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 275 peare’s The Tempest in the age of a postcolonial economy of desire“ (Shakespeares Sturm im Zeitalter postkolonialer Triebökonomie, the subtitle of Pornstorm). Of course, we do not expect to witness a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but to witness the dissemination of knowledge about Shakespeare’s The Tempest and we are expected to judge a lecture to some extent according to its production of evidence (in this sense: knowledge that emerges or seems to emerge in the performance). Pornstorm works two ways — it parodies the dissemination of knowledge in humanities classrooms, but at the same time it reinforces the presence of thinking culturally about The Tempest. It may have been influenced by Andrea Fraser’s lecture-performances — parodies of pseudo-intellectual pontifications, in this case on post-colonial interpretations of The Tempest. Its key device is a basic relocation: Prospero is not present, but has transformed into the academic lecturing apparatus; the island is a seminar room. We are supposedly witnessing a lecture in a lecture series “Shakespeare Revisited“. First, a variety of female sub-lecturers in poignantly ‘authoritative’, ‘masculinist’ and ‘academic’ dress code of dark suits and white shirts announce that the key lecturer Dr. Anna Dresemann of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialökonomie is late as her train was caught in a storm. This failure initiates a parody of academic lecturing, subsequently highlighted in moments of embarrassing silences and padding. This may reflect the framing devices of the Shakespearean Renaissance stage, but it clearly subverts the voice of academic authority and makes the importance of the bodily presence of the lecturer/ performer immediately evident. Pornstorm’s starting point is an argument put forward for instance in Vaughan and Vaughan (1991, 43-44), who argue for a more than tenuous link (via John Smith’s 1608 report) between Pocahontas and The Tempest, with Powhatan a possible source for Prospero and Pocahontas re-cast as Miranda. They also present wild but likely interpretations of Gauguin’s Tahiti, and Walt Disney. The group seems to criticize — again, working two-ways, in the very Freudian terms the group itself criticizes — the sublimation of bodily need — the id or libidinal desire, which sets the Triebökonomie in motion, its investment represented and rewarded by dance, nakedness and bodily contact. Behind a lecture by authoritative academics as contemporary Prospero stand-ins and the vestiges of (western) cultural ritual and respectability there seems to be lurking the perennial Caliban. Pornstorm says: we are implicated ourselves in the academic structuring of The Tempest — therefore its parody and travesty oscillates at times towards pastiche and the performance changes seamlessly from disseminating knowledge towards satirizing the dissemination of knowledge in academia. Gradually, the cultural veneer comes off and Caliban reclaims his island. The use of water — itself an essential category in The Tempest — is E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 276 exemplary: from the wild splashing in Caliban’s appearance to its presence as a controlled tool to enable speech during the lecture. Overhead transparencies are used for palimpsestuous writings-over (see fig. 1), so that anonymously uniformed lecturers become ‘indigenised’ through feathers, amulets, etc. The island, complete with governing staff, emerges on the overhead slide. Bits from Caliban’s speech in 1.ii are performed at the bidding of the female lecturers by a white, male student actor in loincloth and fur cap, whose excessive rendering of “the poisonous slave“ (1.2.320), the “tortoise“ (1.2.317) and “hag-seed“ (1.2.366) that would have violated Miranda and “peopled [...] This isle with Calibans“ (1.2.351-52, see fig. 2) does not do justice to the noble savage he has become in recent rereadings. One of the female lecturers is herself gradually unclothing, magnetically attracted to his ‘indigenised’ body. Another keeps spouting the received opinions of New Historicism and supplies the travesty of visual analysis of the Disney Pocahontas. In an overly sexualized reading, she sees “phallic rule”, “male gaze” everywhere in John Smith and his gun, (“iron phallus”), positioned behind Pocahontas to suggest “anal desire”. In Paul Cadmus’ 1939 mural, John Smith’s “steely, male” colonizer’s body becomes “feminized, turned into a hip, a breast, by its convulsion“. The Caliban performer daubs himself in mud — after all Prospero does call Caliban “earth“, while the first female lecturer whose rational lecturer-self has gradually been decomposing, testifies to the increasing attraction of this earth. Linking Prospero’s island to the current obsession with brown skin, she introduces her own master’s thesis on the cultural history of tanning. Suggesting that “ethnic marking“ and “self-fashioning“ are excellent links between The Tempest, Pocahontas and tanning, she proceeds to display the timeline in the cultural history of ‘brown-ness’ (Josephine Baker to Buena Vista Social Club) by spraying tan marks on her own leg. Echoing notions of gender performativity (Judith Butler) and the recent re-performance of the implied gender structure in The Tempest, Pornstorm also seeks to undermine the holistic view of male domineering via Prospero’s arranged marriage (among all of his other arrangements). Thus, the Caliban actor, hired, after all, by the female ‘academics’ to perform scenes from The Tempest, can easily also don a bikini to perform Miranda’s speech: “‘Tis a villain, sir/ I do not love to look on“ (1.2.310-11). The Hawaiian flower necklace (in German national colours, a leftover of the 2006 football world championship) gradually intrudes on the discursive modes of academia. Under conditions of increasing nakedness and disorder, the pseudo-academic readings of The Tempest culminate in a computer-beat-driven staccato on the identical features of the names of Miranda and Caliban (“two a, one i“, see fig. 3). Finally, the muddled discourse on ethnic ‘Othering’ and ‘Otherness’, on the clichés of the savage as well as on jargon-ridden orthodoxies of Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 277 Figure 1: Pornstorm, Lecture performance, Hildesheim 2011: The Tempest as palimpsest (Photograph: Ellen Coenders). Figure 2: Pornstorm, Lecture performance, Hildesheim 2011: Caliban in furs (Photograph: Ellen Coenders). E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 278 Figure 3: Pornstorm, Lecture performance, Hildesheim 2011: savagery intrudes on academia (Photograph: Andreas Hartmann). Shakespearean criticism and Freudian analysis, is drowned in the stamping beat and dance routines that overturn the order of the sober classroom. Interpretation is replaced with presentification. The white body as recolonized by ‘black’ popular music asserts itself over language, again reworking and reversing themes prevalent in The Tempest. The performance does not lend itself to ‘interpretation.’ It merely quotes and presents its intertexts as a directionless and possibly cynical collage. Pornstorm is a peculiarly apt appropriation of a text that asks crucial questions about the uses, dissemination and ethics of knowledge. It asks the question that is at the core of this essay: How does The Tempest become a presence, how does it claim a space, in the contemporary cultural climate? From Pornstorm to WeStorm It follows from the analysis of this example, a lecture performance which is representative of the short, parodic and metatextual space YouTube, that appropriation on YouTube not only “extends far beyond the adaptation of other texts into new literary creations, assimilating both historical lives and events […] and companion art forms […] into the process“ (Sanders 148), but also redefines the very ways in which the palimpsestuous Tempest becomes a presence in the contemporary cultural field. It is indicative of a growing Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 279 unease with a traditional hermeneutics (i.e., text-based readings of The Tempest and hermeneutic strife enacted between book covers) in a tendency towards ‘presentification’: there is no outside-of-the-stage. Whether we see this as an empowerment of consumers at the mercy of Shakespeare readings controlled by the culture industries — or as the final nail in the coffin of academic readings of Shakespeare — is open to debate. It is clear to me, however, that the lecture performance is one of the more promising ‘presentifications’ of Shakespeare in this age of conspicuous prosumption. Adapting Henry Jenkins’s statement that YouTube is a misnomer for what is actually a WeTube (Jenkins 2008), we can conclude that the omnipresence of YouTube performances has indeed whipped up yet another intertextual, if possibly transient WeStorm. This is the situation in social media. For a moment, at the cost of order and gatekeeping, Prospero has left for Naples, his ‘chick’ Ariel is free to the elements, and it is quite doubtful if Caliban will indeed “seek for grace“ (5.1.296) with new Prosperos only a storm away. E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 280 Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. 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