87TDR: The Drama Review 58:2 (T222) Summer 2014. ©2014

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

To appreciate the reality of its performance is to know that chess is played on an action space, a miniature stage: a checkered board of 64 squares, half filled with 32 pieces — 16 white, 16 black — and half empty. Most of these figures — knights, bishops, queens — stand for human actors (rooks or castles are the exception, even though human habitat is involved). They dart about, intersecting with each other in captures, jumps, traps, and pins. A chess match, as Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish playwright and chess journalist, explains, can be riveting: “I know of no spectacle on earth that can keep thousands of spectators enthralled for five hours. Utterly immobile and deep in thought, the players sit facing each other like the hieratic actors in a Japanese Kabuki production” (in Gelb and Keene 1997:23).1 Or, as the great Soviet chess grandmaster David Bronstein phrased it, chess is first and foremost a form of theatre, featuring “actors on the chess stage” and existing as “a spectacle where the spectators share anxiety and

Still ThrillsThe Drama of Chess

Gary Alan Fine and Harvey Young

1. In fact, players are not literally motionless. Compare Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in their 1972 champion-ship: “Fischer is almost never still and continually swings around in his special $470 swivel chair while Spassky is deep in thought over his next move. Fischer bites his fingernails, pokes his nose and cleans his ears between moves” (from the International Herald Tribune, 24 July 1972, in Steiner 1974:14).

Fine

and

You

ng

88

experience pleasure” (in Bronstein and Smolyan 1982:13, 99). But how can chess be made dra-matic for a public that may understand little of the subtlety on the board? How do small and brief movements produce enthrallment?

At first glance such claims by Arrabal and Bronstein may seem baffling, particularly for those who are not committed (“addicted”) to the sport. Recognizing the assertions of Richard Schechner ([1988] 1994:14) that games share much in common with theatre and are perfor-mances, chess as an action arena seems especially desiccated. The event is constituted by slight hand movements of a duo seated silently on opposite sides of a table. The oppositional qual-ity of the game generates conflict, but the conflict must be read into the movements. Perhaps the minute actions are sufficient, following the conventions of Japanese no\ (not kabuki), but the movements in themselves do not enact an argument, only their own transit. Still, chess has a lively and articulate following, and for good reason. As one of the oldest forms of systematic symbolic action (some 1500 years old, developed on the Indian subcontinent before spreading throughout the Middle East and into Europe, following migration and trade routes), chess drips with tradition and is laminated with meaning.

The game permits audience involvement at several levels: as action understood through the movement of pieces (interpreting chess from the inside out, knowledge available to those com-mitted to the activity); and as metaphor, understood through treating the game as representing strategy in a larger social order (interpreting chess from the outside in, knowledge available to situate the game through the symbolic use that external actors make of it). Given these diver-gent forms of interpretation, it is significant that the meaning of chess occurs less through the actions of the players themselves as actors in and of themselves, but as the motivators of meaning by the manipulation of pieces. In other words, it is not only the physical movements of partici-pants in their chairs (the hieratic acting within chess), but also how the game as performance is revealed on the board and beyond the board. Not only does chess possess theatrical attributes, but it also exists as a notable performance event that invites audience involvement and evaluation for two fundamental reasons: the temporal feel of the game, including the sport’s propensity toward stillness; and the ability of the chess match to stand for something beyond itself.

The Internal Grandeur of Chess Performances

Much like no\ drama, the Japanese theatrical genre that has been performed since the 14th cen-tury, an understanding of the chess player’s mastery of performance depends on appreciat-ing the enactment of stillness. No\ actors spend their entire lives perfecting their control over their bodies and its movements. According to theatre historian Donald Keene, “the crown of

Gary Alan Fine is John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University and worked previously as a professional theatre critic. As an ethnographer, he has focused on leisure, art, and play worlds, including Little League baseball, Dungeons and Dragons, Mushroom Hunting, High School Debate, and Folk Art Collecting. He is completing a book manuscript on competitive chess based on five years of observational research, tentatively titled, “Over the Board: Sticky Culture and Soft Community in Competitive Chess.” g-fine@northwestern.edu

Harvey Young is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Theatre, with a concentration in theory and aesthetics, from Cornell University. He is the author of three books, including Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (The University of Michigan Press, 2010), and the editor of four books. He briefly played competitive chess as a member of his high school chess team (which was back when Sir Mix-a-Lot topped the music charts). harvey@northwestern.edu

Figure 1. (previous page) World chess champion Garry Kasparov makes a move during his fourth game against the IBM Deep Blue chess computer, 7 May 1996. (Photo by Stan Honda, courtesy AFP/Getty Images)

The D

rama of C

hess

89

an actor’s career [...] is the performance of the almost motionless roles of old women.” Only the most accomplished no\ artists can master “the elusive quality of roles with little movement” (1990:57). Audiences familiar with the conventions of the theatrical form revel in the staging of stillness. At chess tournaments, a similar level of attention to the gestures of a chess master and the determination of meaning in the slightest move is possible — a scratch of the chin, a wipe of the brow, a tap of the finger, and, most significantly, the relocation of a chess piece.

This reading of the durational quality of chess, the performance of stillness and of small acts witnessed by an audience attuned to the meaning inherent in the subtlety of gestures and the potential consequences of movement, imbues chess with theatricality. Julian Barnes, the prom-inent British novelist, referred to chess as “a most curious form of theatre: austere, minimalist, post-Beckettian” (1995:233). Indeed, the slowness and near stillness of the game was what fas-cinated Samuel Beckett and informed his 1957 play Endgame and his 1938 novel Murphy (see Ackerley 2010). Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (1957) similarly emphasizes the austere stillness of chess. What interested Bergman was the game’s seeming interminability. It could continue without a clear victor if neither party outright loses or resigns and when the game is not subject to time limits.

Although it was post-Beckettian before Beckett, chess has long existed as a form of subcul-tural theatre: thrilling for those who can read the text with its historical references to games past and who can see the emotion in the performance of two men sitting noiselessly in easy chairs. It is not surprising that chess in the mid-19th century would attract global interest as a spectator sport during the heyday of the tableau vivant. These extremely popular living pic-ture shows in which actors, either professional or amateur, would recreate identifiable portraits by costuming and arranging themselves to resemble the subjects in them and then holding that pose, were performed everywhere, in domestic parlors, traveling carnivals, public parks, and theatres. For audiences, the thrill of encountering the tableau vivant was in the fascination with the effort to control the movements of the body. A contemporary equivalent of such perfor-mances and their ability to incite awe in spectators is the gilded street performer who becomes a living statue. Additionally, the appeal of the living picture in the 19th century — somewhat like a still and silent version of charades — was the fun derived from the recognition of the scenes being recreated. Much like chess, spectators had to make sense of the internal meanings that the performed stillness was to represent. Those skilled in the performance form are able to make plausible interpretations, while those outside the boundary of this activity may find the still-ness wearisome and uninteresting. For this latter group, there is insufficient relevance to fill the seemingly empty and slowly passing minutes.

Chess and theatre have been intertwined for centuries. In The Tempest, William Shakespeare stages a chess match between young lovers Ferdinand and Miranda. The intensity of the pursuit on the board serves as a metaphor for the budding relationship between the two characters and, perhaps, more generally, the social order of the board spotlights the disorder and chaos that drives the play itself. More explicitly, the sport appears in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624), which employs the language of chess and features characters named after chess pieces (such as Black King, White King, et al.) to satirize figures recognizable to Jacobean audiences. The play was suspended by royal decree for its thinly disguised representation of the monar-chy and “discussion of contemporary politics” — after nine performances, “an unprecedented run, the longest on the Jacobean stage” and after having been seen by an estimated audience of 30,000 spectators (Cogswell 1984:273). Nearly 300 years later, the influence of chess on the-atre remained. Constantin Stanislavski, the celebrated teacher of acting, frequently found inspi-ration in chess matches and the dramatic performance of stillness. His student, Vasilij Osipovic= Toporkov, remembers Stanislavski telling his class, “Have you never been to a chess tourna-ment? There they also just sit and move the chessmen, but all the while there are exceptionally tense moments” (Toporkov 2004:112). The enduring influence of chessic theatre is evident in a 1993 revival of Anton Chekhov’s Platonov at Moscow’s Uliss Theatre. The production “divided the action into a series of acting-class exercises — ‘chess game,’ ‘sur la plage,’ ‘confessions,’ and

Fine

and

You

ng

90

2. We can distinguish between a match, a competition between two players in which one or the other will emerge triumphant after a set number of games or of victories, and tournaments, which involve numerous players — sometimes very numerous players — competing. We focus on matches here.

the like” throughout the four-hour production (Senelick [1997] 2000:355). More recently, the popularity of theatre of an extended duration, what Jonathan Kalb (2011) describes as “mar-athon theater,” appears inspired by the temporal feel, if not explicitly the stillness, of a chess game. Citing the 2010 New York City productions of “Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (a seven-hour performance of The Great Gatsby); Peter Stein’s twelve-hour adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Demons; and Taylor Mac’s five-hour downtown extravaganza, The Lily’s Revenge,” Kalb notes, “marathon theater has become so common that it is no longer automatically major news” (2011:21–22).

Producing a major chess tournament is big business, closely resembling a major theat-rical production or, even, championship boxing. Indeed, the pugilistic metaphor became explicit when American challenger Robert James (“Bobby”) Fischer and World Champion Boris Spassky met to draw for colors in preparation for their first match: “After shaking hands, Spassky humorously tested Fischer’s biceps as if they were two boxers ‘weighing in’” (Brady 2011:188). Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of spectators attend chess events in person while many more can watch broadcasts on television.

The 1993 match between Soviet world champion Garry Kasparov and British grandmas-ter Nigel Short, less publically contentious than many matches, was held at the Savoy Theatre in London, a traditional West End theatrical venue. That this match was seen as an influen-tial, viewable event is evident in that expensive tickets were sold (up to £55 for the match) with the hope of recouping part of the promoters’ (the London Times) £5 million investment (Barnes 1995:234). Despite a television audience estimated at a million viewers for the first few games, the Savoy Theatre itself was half-empty for the first game, even after ticket prices were slashed (Weeks n.d.). The match, appealing at first for British audiences cheering on their own con-tender, proved less thrilling as Kasparov took an early lead, ahead 7.5 to 2.5 after the first ten games. By the conclusion of the fourth game, English bookies refused bets on Kasparov retain-ing the title; the outcome seemed certain (Lawson 1994:127).

In major tournament matches, the top competitors are seated on a stage, separate from the audience.2 The set design can be a matter of dispute. In 1972, Fischer and Spassky sat on a cur-tained platform in Reykjavik’s Laugardalshöll, a large sports hall, but the negotiations for how that was to be organized proved contentious, particularly given Fischer’s demands. As Frank Brady reported,

After an eighty-minute inspection, [Fischer] had a number of complaints. He thought the lighting should be brighter; the pieces of the chess set were too small for the squares of the custom-built board; the board itself was not quite right — it was made of stone, and he believed wood was preferable. Finally, he thought that the two cameras hidden in burlap-covered towers might be distracting when he began to play, and the towers themselves, looming over the stage like medieval battering rams, were disconcerting. (2011:189)

To be sure Fischer had an exquisite sensitivity to his surroundings, but the structure of the space of a chess championship often requires considerable negotiation. In Fischer’s case the complaints continued after the match began. Despite the carpeting and sound baffles on the ceiling, Fischer complained bitterly about the whirring of the cameras and the noise of candy wrappers. He demanded that the games be played in a small, private room, although he eventually relented, but demanded that cameras be removed and that the first several rows emptied (Steiner 1974). Fischer was not alone in attempting to control the audience. Angry discussions about who could

The D

rama of C

hess

91

properly attend characterized the 1978 world championship match between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi in Baguio in the Philippines, with claims that the rivals planted hypnotists, parapsychologists, and yogis in the audience ( Johnson 2007:272–76).

That matches are public events brings them into public discourse and permits the audi-ence to read players through their poses. Body position provides a window into thought. Tiny changes in posture can be significant. As a grandmaster explained watching Nigel Short in his match with Garry Kasparov, “Look, Nigel’s thinking again. That’s a very bad sign. He does not look like a man who’s going down a route he planned [...] The body language is looking bad” (in Barnes 1995:242). Indeed, Short lost the match. Body language was similarly revela-tory in the Icelandic contest between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. In the 13th game, which Fischer won after 9.5 hours in a closely fought contest, powerful emotions were conveyed through their soundless performance:

On the sixty-ninth move, obviously exhausted, Spassky blundered. When he realized his mistake, he could barely look at the board, turning his head away several times in humil-iation and frustration. Fischer, after moving to collect Spassky’s gift, sat back in his chair, grimly, staring at the Russian — studying him. For a long, long moment, he didn’t take his eyes off Spassky. There was just a bit of compassion in Fischer’s eyes, which turned the episode into a true Aristotelian tragedy: Spassky’s terror combined with Fischer’s pity. (Brady 2011:198)

Even when the bodies of the players reveal little movement, there is drama in sharing a stage, where spectators can imagine the battle raging in the heads of the two seated figures, with any action interpreted according to the standing metaphors of the match as anger, glee, ambiva-lence, or concern. When players rise to pace or twist in their chairs, these movements are lam-inated with the same concerns that adhere to the players as they are seated and more directly suggest a resemblance to theatrical performance.

The External Politics of Chess Performances

Throughout its long history, chess has always been more than a game. In its original formula-tion, as the sport was first developed between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D. on the Indian subcontinent, chess pieces reflected a military order (Leibs 2004:92; Murray 1913; Golombek 1976), but by the Middle Ages, martial strategy was transformed into a social order (Adams 2006): a manageable stage in which life could be simulated without carnage (Hoffman 2006). The characters who live on the board and whose lives are animated by their handlers encoun-ter one another in battle. Although the possibility exists for the most disenfranchised members in this chess world to elevate their social status — a pawn reaching the eighth rank of the board can be exchanged for any piece, and is most often turned into a queen, chess’s most powerful figure — a more common fate for pawns, in chess as in life, is death.

In the mid-19th century, the sport began to appear at international exhibitions and world fairs with the players serving as the embodiments of their respective nations. The first major chess competition was the London International Tournament of 1851 in which Howard Staunton, the man whose innovations standardized chess play for international competitions, deliberately gathered the leading European chess players to compete at and to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Great Exposition. Since then, the international and nationalist flavor of leading tour-naments has been evident with national flags of the competitors adorning tables or nearby placards. Chess Olympiads, formally begun in 1927 to mirror the sporting Olympics, likewise emphasize the nationalism inherent in the competition. Tournament outcomes may be treated as a reflection of a competitive world order, certainly the deliberate goal of the Soviets at the height of their chess prowess ( Johnson 2007), when even the KGB was involved in chess poli-tics in the name of the motherland (Gulko et al. 2010).

Fine

and

You

ng

92

To explore the societal sig-nificance of chess, we describe three moments in which the performance of chess enters into public discourse: a set of matches in London and Paris in 1858 and 1859 in which American chess prodigy Paul Morphy triumphed over top European players, challeng-ing the intellectual and sport-ing hegemony of European play by the upstart American; the 1972 “war” in Reykjavik between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, mirroring the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union; and the 1997 contest in New York City between World Champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. On these occa-sions, the match acquired mean-ing beyond what transpires on the board itself. In each case, the games became a prism for pub-lic discourse.

Morphy vs. Europe

The first global chess celebrity was surely the American cham-pion Paul Morphy. Morphy was born in New Orleans in 1837 and learned in childhood to play chess, beating strong visit-ing players with ease. In 1857, he captured first place at the First American Chess Congress

in New York, a tournament organized to publicize the development of American chess. Charles Gilberg, a chronicler of the tournament, hinted at the ambivalence that greeted the new sport in the United States: “The chess pageantry of the Old World had been but slightly reflected across the ocean, and the stray gleams that reached our shores proved too evanescent to pen-etrate the plebian soul of the uninitiated” (Gilberg 1881:2). After Morphy’s success, the American champion was encouraged to tour Europe, challenging the best players on the con-tinent, demonstrating that Americans could compete with the elite masters of Great Britain, France, and Germany. As Morphy wrote, “I have made up my mind to cross the Atlantic and throw the gauntlet to all comers” (in Lawson 1976:90). He had the particular goal of playing against Howard Staunton.

Arriving on 20 June 1858, and over the next months, Morphy played numerous matches with the strongest European players, defeating those that he faced, including the champion Adolf Anderssen, who was widely considered to be the greatest living chess master. He played at most of the important chess clubs in London and Paris, often to enthusiastic audiences. He

Figure 2. Paul Charles Morphy, seated at a chess board, 1859. Wood engraving. (Library of Congress, LOT 10618-66)

The D

rama of C

hess

93

also met and played against political leaders and European royalty, including Napoleon III (163). But to the chagrin of the British chess community, Staunton avoided Morphy, and the two never played (152). Still, the tour was a triumph for Morphy; observers considered it to be the moment when American chess came into its own, and the crowds at the major European clubs were substantial, such as at Paris’s Café de la Régence, where he was “treated like a god” (Lawson 1976:158). Throughout the tour his victories were not only taken as personal, but also as nationalist. As the London Field of July 1858 announced, “Let us do Mr. Morphy full jus-tice; he is beyond question, one of the finest players alive; and we may fairly question whether he will meet with his superior. [...] We heartily congratulate our chess brethren in America upon the skill and chivalry of their young champion” (103). On 4 December 1858, the same mag-azine noted: “We are afraid that Europe, as well as England, must bow the neck to America, and acknowledge themselves.” After his impressive performances Morphy was hailed as “the American chess king” (137). The contests introduced not just Morphy but the young nation as serious international competitors. As chess historian Fred Reinfeld put it, “In 1857 American chess was in its infancy. The infant was not strong and lusty, giving promise of vigorous growth; it was weak, pulling feebly, helplessly dependent on its European wet nurse” (1957:3). The matches were designed to show that at last, “The United States had a master who could be matched with the best that the Old World could offer — and no American need be ashamed of the outcome” (5).

Fischer vs. Spassky

Perhaps the only event in chess history that truly achieved extensive global notice in the mass media age, including a huge audience in the United States, was the 1972 world champion-ship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. George Steiner commented about those days: “For several months, a totally esoteric, essentially trivial endeavor, associated with pim-ply, myopic youths and vaguely comical old men on park benches, held the world enthralled” (1974:86). The games themselves were powerful and instructive for those enmeshed in the chess world, but their meaning eventually extended beyond two quiet men hunched over a board.

This match became more than a game, transformed into an existential competition between West and East. As David Remnick argued:

Matches for the world chess championship have a way of taking on political meaning. Bobby Fischer’s psychodramatic match with Boris Spassky in Iceland [...] was a Cold War epic [...]. In the popular press, it was not enough to say that Spassky failed to contend with Fischer’s brilliant and unpredictable openings; more comprehensibly, it was a tri-umph of American ingenuity over a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy. (2007:72)

Novelist Julian Barnes also recognized this construction of the world championship matches, in which he saw an us vs. them narrative: “In that epochal match in Reykjavik, Fischer was held to represent the triumph of Western individualism against a nominal figure thrown up by the Soviet chess ‘machine’” (1995:237). The drama was a “cold war arena where the champion of the free world fought for democracy against the apparatchiks of the Soviet socialist machine” (Edmonds and Eidinow 2004:2–3). In the Soviet Union, responses were mixed, but Soviet dis-sidents treated Fischer’s decisive victory as a metaphor for the crumbling of their system ( Johnson 2007:213).

As was the case when Paul Morphy played a century prior, the Soviets had dominated the game for decades and American chess was widely perceived as second-rate, barely comparable to the Soviet chess hegemony. It was a challenge matched eight years later by the performance of the United States Olympic hockey team against the Soviets in Lake Placid, New York. In the case of the Reykjavik match, the performances that surrounded the contest were equally salient. Although at the board he was a gentleman, Fischer’s actions surrounding the match — we should label them as antics — created a continuing, startling drama from what is otherwise often

Fine

and

You

ng

94

the routine of a chess match. It was as if he was taking on the Soviet Union single- handedly, and had to do so through unexpected ju-jitsu moves. There was ongoing uncertainty as to whether Fischer’s demands about the prize fund (Fischer wanted several hundred thousand dol-lars, plus 30 percent of the gate revenues) and the conditions in the Reykjavik venue would be met and whether he would get on the plane to Iceland. On one occasion Fischer arrived at JFK Airport in New York City, only to decide not to fly (Brady 2011:80). After several aborted plans, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called the unpredictable Fischer and beseeched him to play for the sake of his nation, explaining, according to Fischer, “America wants you to go over there and beat the Russians.” Fischer later commented, “I have decided that the interests of my nation are greater than my own” (in Johnson 2007:186). Despite having the tournament postponed under the watchful eyes of an expanding world audience, Fischer eventually arrived, but continued to make demands. Despite or because of these demands, the match was followed avidly, even though the television audience did not receive a live feed of the players in action (Hoffman 2007:70). Shown on the Public Broadcasting System in the United States, the broad-cast received the highest rating in PBS’s history at that time, with over one million viewers each night (Brady 2011:197).

As with Morphy, Fischer returned home a hero. He was offered a ticker tape parade, received the key to New York City from Mayor John Lindsay, and appeared on the Tonight Show (Lawrence 2008:18). Some spoke of Bobby Fischer as the James Bond of chess (Bronstein and Smolyan 1982). The American public was transfixed by the spectacle, but, as with Morphy, sweetness turned bitter as Fischer elected not to defend his title and disap-peared from public scrutiny.

Figure 3. Bobby Fischer (right), an eight-time US chess champion, ponders his next move against world champion Boris Spassky in the sixth round of the 19th Chess Olympiad, 20 September 1970. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

The D

rama of C

hess

95

Kasparov vs. Deep Blue

A claim, sometimes attributed to computer scientist Donald Michie, asserts, “Chess [is] the Drosophila Melanogaster [the fruit fly] of artificial intelligence” (Emden 2009). Whatever the case with fruit flies, chess has proven an appealing model for AI research (Shenk 2006) and for cultural imagery of computer technology. How proficient could a computer pro-gram become? Could it play “like” a human, mirroring human thought? In the early days of research the possibility that a computer could beat a human was laughable. In 1963, I.A. Horowitz and P.L. Rothenberg wrote:

That a richly endowed robot will one day be able to play a highly skillful game of Chess leaves no room for doubt. On the other hand, in the absence of a fantastic superspeed electronic brain, the Chess championship of the world is likely to be retained by humans for centuries to come. (1963:345)

In 1989, Garry Kasparov, then World Champion, announced: “A machine will always be a machine... Never shall I be beat by a machine!” (in Hallman 2003:30). His victory over IBM’s Deep Blue in 1996 (4 – 2) and then his defeat in 1997 (3.5 – 2.5) made Kasparov the cyberage’s John Henry. Following the matches, Bob Bales (2000) pointed out, “Kasparov is the greatest player that ever lived; and ‘Deep Blue’ is the greatest player that never lived [...]. It is not dif-ficult to be sucker-punched by an anti-strategy, robotic-zombie!” The Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner joked, when asked which strategy to choose against a computer opponent, “I would bring a hammer” (in Max 2011:47).

Both matches — the first held in Philadelphia, the second in New York — were followed avidly. When on 17 February 1996, Kasparov beat Deep Blue, it was held to be a triumph in the “ultimate test of man vs. machine” (Pandolfini 1997:71). The next year in New York, post-ers announcing a rematch appeared with Garry Kasparov’s visage, asking “How do you make a computer blink?” (Hsu 2002:2). While Kasparov and the computer programmers (acting as the “extensions” of the computer) faced off in a television studio on the 35th floor of the Equitable Building, an overflow crowd attentively watched the match on three projection screens in a 480-seat auditorium: the left showed the players, the middle was devoted to commentary, and the right revealed the board (Hsu 2002:3). The match was covered by 200 journalists, including all the major news channels. For the final, game tickets that had been sold for $25 were being scalped for $500 (Hsu 2002:253). Chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini proclaimed that the final game between Kasparov and Deep Blue (won in 19 moves by the machine) “will undoubtedly go down as one of the most famous games in the annals of chess [...] but also for its import in the history of civilization” (1997:144). It was “a momentous occasion in the long history of men as toolmakers” (Hsu 2002:5).

Technology triumphed in this chessic theatre. The game was breathtaking. It was a stun-ner, even to the human champion: “In unceremonious fashion, after having played a mere eigh-teen moves over a period of only an hour, Garry Kasparov, the strongest human chess player of all time, got up from the playing table, resigned, and walked off in a huff [...]. Forever after, he will be remembered as the first chess champion to be trounced by a supercomputer” (Pandolfini 1997:144). Whether the champion was exhausted, emotionally disabled, or selected poor strat-egies, spectators suggested that Kasparov didn’t play like “himself.” As Pandolfini suggested, examining the actions of the embodied champion, Kasparov seemed enervated. “With his eccentric choice of openings, and his overcaution, he fought without his greatest weapons, his courage and his brilliance” (1997:162). By observing Kasparov’s behavior, audiences could read the inevitable outcome.

The match received more publicity than any since the Fischer-Spassky showdown. Kasparov emphasized that his loss was a human achievement by the IBM team, but he distinguished Deep Blue from humanity, noting that, “Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better”

Fine

and

You

ng

96

(2010). His loss still rankles, as he claims that “on his best day the best human can defeat the best machine” (Kasparov 2007:96). But how to find that one day? With their focus on brute cal-culations, some say that computers do not play like humans, but Joel Benjamin, a US Champion who helped the IBM team, commented, “sometimes Deep Blue plays chess” (in Hsu 2002:5).

The Chessic Stage

For chess to be a spectator sport, its rituals must be married to the staging of a recognizable thought process in order to create theatrical intelligibility. This happens rarely, but occasion-ally. Significantly, each of these cases involves powerful narratives of American exceptionalism. First, Paul Morphy triumphs over Europe, demonstrating the rise of this New World nation. Then America triumphs against the Soviet empire on the Soviet’s own field of battle during the height of the Cold War. Finally, American technology proves transcendent against the strongest human (and Russian) player. The global conflict evident in the depiction of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky as representations of West and East was surely a large part of the appeal of their defining match, but it must on some level be connected to an internal meaning or topos of the event itself that the public can understand (Edmonds and Eidinow 2004; Johnson 2007). The same might equally be said of the matches in the mid-1990s between Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue (Hsu 2002; Pandolfini 1997), depicting a battle between machine and man, as well as Morphy’s matches that encapsulated American-European competition (Reinfeld 1957; Lawson 1976). The games matter, but to reach a public they must be laminated with meaning. Put another way, the macro-environment of the match as stage performance must build upon the micro-environment of players’ local movements. In these cases the chess match illuminates itself and something beyond.

As Victor Turner indicated, through performance a community can “portray characteristic conflicts and suggest remedies for them, and generally take stock of its current situation in the known ‘world’” (1982:11). Although the local meaning of the chessboard can be stripped away, as in the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Chess (1986) or Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, that stripping uses chess as a metaphor without fundamentally being “about” chess (Holden 1988). The most compelling moments of chess as performance draw on chess and from chess.

While chess is meant to be played, it is also performed, becoming discussable and notable. Championship matches reveal that the presence of an audience creates the performative aspect of the game. Most chess games do not have this viewed quality, but there is always a potential audience that cares and is willing to treat the game as a performed text that deserves response in casual conversation or in a written record. An audience is important for treating the chess match as a theatrical event.

Recognizing the creation of meanings in the competition, the performance of chess rever-berates, even long after the participants have exited the stage. Chess is a performance of indi-vidual, flesh-and-blood (and now metal-and-wire) actors, who are necessary for seeing chess through its external politics, for interpreting how chess fits into social and political worlds. However, simultaneously, the internal grandeur of chess comes from appreciating not just per-sons, but players and the pieces they push.

In a double sense chess is a performance: it is a theatrical event, but it is also an imaginative performance. Theatre is not only a realm of bodies, but of imaginations. Of hands and of minds.

References

Ackerley, C.J. 2010. Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Adams, Jenny. 2006. Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bales, Bob. 2000. “He’s the Greatest!” Illinois Chess Bulletin, July/August:8.

Barnes, Julian. 1995. Letters from London. New York: Vintage.

The D

rama of C

hess

97

Brady, Frank. 2011. Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness. New York: Crown.

Bronstein, David, and Georgiû L’vovich Smolian. 1982. Chess in the Eighties. Oxford: Pergamon.

Cogswell, Thomas. 1984. “Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: ‘A Game at Chess’ in Context.” Huntington Library Quarterly 47, 4:273–88.

Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. 2004. Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time. New York: HarperCollins.

Emden, Maarten van. 2009. “I Remember Donald Michie.” http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com /Artificial+Intelligence (12 March 2011).

Gelb, Michael, and Raymond Keene. 1997. Samurai Chess: Mastering Strategic Thinking through the Martial Art of the Mind. New York: Walker & Co.

Gilberg, Charles. 1881. The Fifth American Chess Congress. New York: Brentano’s.

Golombek, Harry. 1976. Chess: A History. New York: Putnam.

Gulko, Boris, Yuri Felshtinsky, Vladimir Popov, and Viktor Kortschnoi. 2010. The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown. Milford, CT: Russell Enterprises.

Hallman, J.C. 2003. The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game. New York: Thomas Dunne.

Hoffman, Paul. 2007. King’s Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game. New York: Hyperion.

Hoffman, Steve. 2006. “How to Punch Someone and Stay Friends: An Inductive Theory of Simulation.” Sociological Theory 24, 2:170–93.

Holden, Stephen. 1988. “‘Chess’ Seeks to Shed Its Checkered Past.” New York Times, 24 April. www .nytimes.com/1988/04/24/theater/chess-seeks-to-shed-its-checkered-past.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (13 March 2011).

Horowitz, I.A., and P.L. Rothenberg. 1963. The Personality of Chess. New York: Macmillan.

Hsu, Feng-Hsiung. 2002. Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Johnson, Daniel. 2007. White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard. London: Atlantic Books.

Kalb, Jonathan. 2011. Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kasparov, Garry. 2007. “Human Malfunction.” New in Chess 1:95–97.

Kasparov, Garry. 2010. “The Chess Master and the Computer.” New York Review of Books, 11 February. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer (13 March 2011).

Keene, Donald. 1990. No \ and Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theatre. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lawrence, Al. 2008. “Remembering Bobby Fischer.” Chess Life 3 (March):20–24.

Lawson, David. 1976. Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess. New York: David McKay.

Lawson, Dominic. 1994. End Game: Kasparov vs. Short. New York: Harmony Books.

Leibs, Andrew. 2004. Sports and Games of the Renaissance. Sports and Games through History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Max, D.T. 2011. “The Prince’s Gambit: A Chess Star Emerges for the Post-Computer Age.” The New Yorker, 21 March:40–49.

Murray, H.J.R. 1913. A History of Chess. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Pandolfini, Bruce. 1997. Kasparov and Deep Blue: The Historic Chess Match between Man and Machine. New York: Touchstone.

Fine

and

You

ng

98

Reinfeld, Fred. 1957. “Paul Morphy.” In Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess, ed. William Ewart Napier, 3–9. New York: David McKay.

Remnick, David. 2007. “The Tsar’s Opponent: Garry Kasparov Takes Aim at the Power of Vladimir Putin.” The New Yorker, 1 October:64–77.

Schechner, Richard. (1988) 1994. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge.

Senelick, Laurence. (1997) 2000. The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shenk, David. 2006. The Immortal Game: A History of Chess. New York: Doubleday.

Steiner, George. 1974. Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky in Reykjavik. New York: Viking Press.

Toporkov, Vasilij Osipovic =. 2004. Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years. London: Routledge.

Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

Weeks, Mark. n.d. “World Chess Championship 1993 Kasparov — Short PCA Title Match Highlights.” mark-weeks.com. www.mark-weeks.com/chess/93ks$$.htm (28 September 2012).