The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics

Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan, Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351399111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today's writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?"

To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords:

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• Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real)

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• Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee)

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• Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed)

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• Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules)

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• Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation)

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• Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda)

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• End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy)

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• Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this).

These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre.

Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.

Figure 1 Detail of Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s Urban Action Clinic, Vooruit, Ghent, 2015

Photo courtesy of Joey Van Kerckhove

1
A dramaturgy of cultural activism

Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the key existential questions faced by theatre and performance makers, scholars and audiences in our time. It features a range of texts written by scholars and artists in our field who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally). Its multiple perspectives broadly address the question of how we can be political now. To respond to this question productively we have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre, and theatre as politics. These themes are as follows: post, assembly, gap, institution, machine, message, end, and re.

Florian Malzcher’s argument that we need to create ‘politically engaged theatre … where things are real and not real at the same time. Where we can observe ourselves from the outside whilst also being part of the performance’ (Malzacher 2015: 30) is prescient. He argues that this is the only way for us to move beyond the old tropes governing art/politics of the 20th century – tropes that no longer work. We need a theatre in which we see and question contradictions, injustices, and imbalances. Where we engage with performances that ‘subtly or polemically … critique the capitalist status quo… . [and in doing so] shift the emphasis from the ambiguity of the artwork to the ambiguity of our own lives’ (Malzacher 2014: 25). Many scholars argue that we live in a ‘post-political’ age, in which the manufacture of consensus, rather than open political debate, is the most important feature of society and politics (Mouffe 2005, 2013; Dean 2012, 2016). This is an age in which ‘value’ is often measured through the acquisition of objects and one in which debate and critical reflection are diminished. As Chantal Mouffe explains, ‘to maintain its hegemony, the current capitalist system needs to constantly mobilize people’s desire and shape their identities’ (2013: 90). Put more bluntly, neoliberalism must destroy the social-cultural infrastructure of the recent past in order to survive. In this context then, the role and value of theatre has become unclear. Some theorists argue that theatre has become a cog in the capitalist machine and that it has, as a consequence, lost all value. Theatre’s engagement with power has been called into account, and perceptions of how to be an artist, audience/participant, and/or scholar of the theatre are being transformed and challenged.

As theatre scholars we often draw on many of the same theoretical frameworks to help us out of this bind. We refer to the crisis of the ‘left’, the end of ‘representation’, possibilities and limitations of the ‘social turn’, the ‘end of the avant-garde’. We analyse many of the same artworks and performances. We try to unpick and find meaning in these works so that we might understand more fully how to exist within, or to respond to, the status quo. But these attempts no longer seem to be working and it is time to do something new. We urgently need a paradigm shift.

It is in this context that we developed The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics. Our aim in this book is twofold. Firstly, it is to open up (reinvigorate, think anew) the discussion and debate about theatre and politics – the politics of, in, and in response to performance. We did this by inviting essays from a range of scholars, artists, and activists situated in – or writing about – works that are diverse in their artistic techniques, as well as in their mobilisation of or resistance to politics (local, global, or micro). Contributors were invited to move away from the old language and trusted keywords such as democracy, representation, truth, presence, identity, participation, capitalism, and ideology. We encouraged a diversity of views and responses with the aim of stimulating dissensus, debate, and what Mouffe calls ‘agonism’ (2013) amongst and between contributors, as we believe this is key to opening up the space for dynamic analyses of the works and companies included in this Companion.

The dramaturgy of the volume

We see the editorial process as a dramaturgical one, as a way of bridging the political themes and organising practices of the volume and ensuring that we engaged in the interactive process of dialogue and exchange with authors, topics, themes, and the politics within which they were situated in the development of the book. In this sense then, the process – from our Melbourne symposium to this publication – enacts and activates politics. In doing this, we explore how practitioners and companies respond to the impacts of politics on/in their lives, practices, and communities. This has resulted in a volume of essays that cover all continents and engage with a range of theatrical and performance modes including traditional plays, performances, public protest, community theatre, and experimental works. They do this from myriad perspectives and using multiple approaches. As such the collection offers readers a sense of the vastly different ways in which politics is understood, enacted, and activated within different performance contexts across the globe. This is an approach we believe is novel.

Whilst our aim is to explore key concerns for the discipline, we do so by framing questions in new ways. For example, the volume seeks to find ways that the present-day cultural politics are in solidarity with cultural activism globally. Thus, we include a range of voices, of disciplinary and geographical perspectives. We seek to debate overarching conditions that dominate politics, including media and technology, inequality, privatisation of the public sphere, precarity, environmental concerns, migration, and authoritarianism. Given the ongoing turmoil in global politics, there is a renewed interest in and need for theatre and performance to speak back in myriad ways, and this volume seeks to facilitate the documentation of some of the most significant and innovative works from around the world that engage in this process.

Keywords for cultural activism

Post-post-consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real

The impetus for this section of the book is in part a response to the challenges of living in a time of thinking that things were somehow better in the past. For example, there is a tendency that drives populist politics to think that there was less crime or more work in the past when in reality this was not always the case. In such contexts there is often a general antipathy towards confronting, or a refusal to accept, the realities of the contemporary moment. Ironically, this is the ‘post moment’ of looking back but actually moving forward without the capacity to think about the future in concrete terms. Theoretically, the ‘post’ draws on a range of perspectives including Rosi Braidotti’s Posthumanism (Polity 2013). In this book, Braidotti explores the consequences of the predicament of humanism’s displacement by posthuman life, including the informational economy and cyborg theory. While Braidotti is critical of the universalism of humanism, she also notes the need to re-engage with transformative thinking around questions of equality and ecology. A second point of reference is Jeffery Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism (2012) with its revival of debates about postmodernism after Fredric Jameson. Nealon’s focus on the sense of intensification of capitalism and speed has significance for the wider discussion of ‘post’ and its ramifications for the production and consumption of the arts.

Assembly – assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee

Assembly takes its cue from Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Here Butler shows the importance of collective acts of assembly such as protest marches and occupations of public space as ‘concerted actions of the body’ (2015: 9). Questions of speech in times of precarity and austerity are central to her argument for the importance of the right of assembly. Assembly makes ‘visible’ people for whom visibility cannot be taken for granted and fosters solidarity. Assembly has a history connected to the radical activism of the 1960s and has the capacity to remake the acceptable uses of space and place. As well as negotiating various modes and sites of assembly, the essays in this section consider the idea that theatre and performance are always critical acts of assembly and hence capable of provoking and/or unsettling politics.

Gap – who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed

Inequality in the contemporary context is widely recognised as the inevitable outflowing of neoliberal capitalism. It has hollowed out middle classes and created the zombie-like image of the ‘working poor’, not to mention its contribution to the rise of homelessness, the displacement of people, and huge disparities in wealth within societies. Access to the means of production has been dramatically reduced for most of the world and meanwhile, the ‘1%’ seem to live in another stratosphere. Socially engaged arts practices have evolved to address questions of inequality and explore how these gaps between rich and poor and between those who access resources and enjoy quality of life and those who do not. The existence of gaps has redefined the social sphere and created lasting ruptures in the socio-cultural fabric of our world. This section responds to Shannon Jackson’s observation in Social Works that contemporary arts practice has a ‘fundamental interest in the nature of sociality’(2011: 2). It draws on the ‘social turn’ as its point of departure to consider artistic practices that blur the distinction between art and activism, and often include people from diverse communities in participatory work in an attempt to bridge gaps of exclusion. Robust debate surrounds this concept and this section opens this debate further by expanding the contributions to it so that we can hear from artists and writers who are both allowed or invited in, and those who are not.

Institution – visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules

Jen Harvie’s Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (2013) investigates how the rise of neoliberalism has substantially remade the institutions that support, sustain, and display the arts. On the one hand, there is a refreshing sense that institutions are more open to the public: witness the opening-up of modernist theatre spaces to daylight and wider uses by diverse groups (the National Theatre in London is a good example here). On the other hand, institutions are now enmeshed in privatisation and intrusive marketing. For Michel Foucault (1977) the institution is a means of government, regulation, and discipline and this fact makes the analysis of institutions that support, fund, and disseminate artistic practice important.

Machine – biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation

Theatre has always been interested in, and found creative expression through, machinery. The spectacle and the ideology of theatre are both centred on this formation. Vsevolod Meyerhold’s idea that body is the machine and the worker is a machinist is one of many references to the politics of performance and stage machinery – from Heinrich von Kleist’s marionette theatre to the exploration in contemporary theatres of performance without human actors. The machine is also a defined as a political system in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988) and in Maurizio Lazzarato’s Signs and Machines. In the context of his work on the production of subjectivity, Lazzarato discusses the machine as an assemblage of human and non-human flows, from a multiplicity of social and ‘technical machines’ (2014: 51). To think about performance in this way emphasises an expanded awareness of dramaturgy to include a range of affective qualities such as light, flow, time, body, conditions of performance, and so on. There is a need to think about these objects/forms in terms of being dramaturgical agents or, following Bruno Latour (1996), ‘actors’.

Message – performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda

The question of why and how theatre expresses or communicates an idea or a message is especially important for this project. The notion that theatre is revolutionary and socially transforming that is associated with Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, for example, still holds sway for theatre makers in many places around the world. Yet, we can also reject this kind of theatre as too one-sided. Another dimension in the contemporary performance landscape argues that audiences can be ‘emancipated’ from the didactic spectacle of theatre (after Jacques Rancière 2014) and through ruptures, dissociation, and affective response to theatre, they can form more complex dynamic relationships to artistic practice. Certainly, we witness daily Brecht’s idea that ‘for art to be “unpolitical” means only to ally itself with the “ruling” group’ (1974: 196). This shows how politics always returns to challenge the activities, superstructures, and critical domains of the performing arts, even those that espouse a disinterest in politics or those that reject a political perspective on their work. Theatre, Brecht argues, ‘must alienate what it shows’ (ibid.). In a similar vein, Mouffe calls for a ‘critical art’ that uses a strategy of disarticulation to foster new social relations and unsettle the dominant hegemony. We see the contemporary relevance of this idea in new ways of thinking about objectivity in post-dramatic theatre, documentary theatre, and performance art. At the other end of this spectrum is the performance of belief and conviction. Such potentially controversial areas of analysis touch not only on the role of the emotions in performance, but are also relevant in the consideration and analysis of performative acts of violence, as discussed in Rustom Bharucha’s Terror and Performance (2014).

End – suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy

In And: Phenomenology of End, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi argues that humans have already experienced an end of the world: ‘A world ends when signs proceeding from the semiotic meta-machine grow indecipherable from a cultural community that perceived itself as a world’ (2015: 331). In this bleak analysis, capitalism is supported by a class of semio-workers who are rendered machinic and drained of memory, history, and community. There is no outside to this reality and questions of a politics of art and performance are therefore sometimes less clearly expressed or understood. However, a phenomenology of end is both spectacular and eschatological; it returns in the history of art and performance. At present, the work of artists such as Kris Verdonck is contingent on an awareness of living in an age of end times and this work explores environmental catastrophe, stasis, the Anthropocene, and collapse. The beauty and danger of this kind of work is interesting to investigate. Are we fatally attracted to the aesthetics of end-time as statement of nihilism or is there some other politics seen at play here?

Re – reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to this

Jill Dolan’s call for attention to ‘utopian performatives’ and performance that is ‘generous, aesthetically striking and intersubjectively intense’ (2005: 5) is one important way to think about the productive power of performance to reanimate and reimagine the world. Performance can inspire audiences and it can bring people to new awareness of things; in times of repression the arts, broadly speaking, it can generate a community of solidarity and resistance. Moreover, the contempora...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A dramaturgy of cultural activism
• Part I Post
• Part II Assembly
• Part III Gap
• Part IV Institution
• Part V Machine
• Part VI Message
• Part VII End
• Part VIII Re.
• Index