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Theatre & Series Editors: Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato Published Joel Anderson: Theatre & Photography Vicky Angelaki: Theatre & Environment Susan Bennett: Theatre & Museums Bill Blake: Theatre & the Digital Marvin Carlson: Theatre & Islam Colette Conroy: Theatre & the Body Emma Cox: Theatre & Migration Jim Davis: Theatre & Entertainment Jill Dolan: Theatre & Sexuality Emine Fis¸ek: Theatre & Community Helen Freshwater: Theatre & Audience Jen Harvie: Theatre & the City Nadine Holdsworth: Theatre & Nation Erin Hurley: Theatre & Feeling Dominic Johnson: Theatre & the Visual Joe Kelleher: Theatre & Politics Ric Knowles: Theatre & Interculturalism Petra Kuppers: Theatre & Disability Yair Lipshitz: Theatre & Judaism Brian Lobel: Theatre & Cancer Patrick Lonergan: Theatre & Social Media Caoimhe McAvinchey: Theatre & Prison Bruce McConachie: Theatre & Mind Lucy Nevitt: Theatre & Violence Helen Nicholson: Theatre & Education Lourdes Orozco: Theatre & Animals Lionel Pilkington: Theatre & Ireland Benjamin Poore: Theatre & Empire Paul Rae: Theatre & Human Rights Alan Read: Theatre & Law Dan Rebellato: Theatre & Globalization Trish Reid: Theatre & Scotland Nicholas Ridout: Theatre & Ethics Jo Robinson: Theatre & the Rural Mark Robson: Theatre & Death Juliet Rufford: Theatre & Architecture Elizabeth Schafer: Theatre & Christianity Rebecca Schneider: Theatre & History Lara Shalson: Theatre & Protest Kim Solga: Theatre & Feminism Konstantinos Thomaidis: Theatre & Voice Fintan Walsh: Theatre & Therapy Eric Weitz: Theatre & Laughter David Wiles: Theatre & Time Harvey Young: Theatre & Race Keren Zaiontz: Theatre & Festivals
© Emine Fis¸ek, under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2019 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2019 by RED GLOBE PRESS Red Globe Press in the UK is an imprint of Springer Nature Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW. Red Globe Press® is a registered trademark in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–352–00643–8 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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contents
Series Editors’ Preface
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Introduction1 Community: Key Debates
7
Sameness and Difference
23
Individuality and Collectivity
42
Efficacy and Agency
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Further reading Index Acknowledgements
81 88 91
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T
he theatre is everywhere, from entertainment districts to the fringes, from the rituals of government to the ceremony of the courtroom, from the spectacle of the sporting arena to the theatres of war. Across these many forms stretches a theatrical continuum through which cultures both assert and question themselves. Theatre has been around for thousands of years, and the ways we study it have changed decisively. It’s no longer enough to limit our attention to the canon of Western dramatic literature. Theatre has taken its place within a broad spectrum of performance, connecting it with the wider forces of ritual and revolt that thread through so many spheres of human culture. In turn, this has helped make connections across disciplines; over the past fifty years, theatre and performance have been deployed as key metaphors and practices with which to rethink gender, economics, war, language, the fine arts, culture and one’s sense of self. vii
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Theatre & is a long series of short books which hopes to capture the restless interdisciplinary energy of theatre and performance. Each book explores connections between theatre and some aspect of the wider world, asking how the theatre might illuminate the world and how the world might illuminate the theatre. Each book is written by a leading theatre scholar and represents the cutting edge of critical thinking in the discipline. We have been mindful, however, that the philosophical and theoretical complexity of much contemporary academic writing can act as a barrier to a wider readership. A key aim for these books is that they should all be readable in one sitting by anyone with a curiosity about the subject. The books are challenging, pugnacious, visionary sometimes and, above all, clear. We hope you enjoy them. Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato
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Introduction
On August 19, 1991, the motorcade of a Lubavitcher Hasidic Jewish religious leader was driving along Utica Avenue in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, when one of the cars veered off the street and onto the adjacent sidewalk, killing seven-year-old Caribbean-American Gavin Cato on the spot. During the hours that followed, members of the Caribbean-American and African-American communities would join protests in Crown Heights and the surrounding areas, connecting Cato’s death to a systemic disregard for black life. By the following day, the protests had turned into what the press soon titled a “riot,” with participants looting and damaging Jewish homes, storefronts, and cars. Then, on August 20, an Australian rabbinical student named Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed by an African-American man while walking down the street in Crown Heights. He would die shortly 1
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thereafter. This state of emergency spanned a three-day period, but the tensions released by the Crown Heights crisis continued to reverberate for many months, leading to marches, demonstrations, changes in mayoral politics and community practices, and a play that would come to define the genre of documentary or verbatim theatre. Actor, playwright, and academic Anna Deavere Smith’s solo performance Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities, premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival the following year and was composed of a series of interviews that Smith had conducted with key protagonists involved in the conflict, from prominent artists and intellectuals who had publicly commented on the events to members of Crown Heights’ black and Jewish communities. Across twenty-nine monologues, Smith embodied these individuals, adopting their vocal mannerisms and their styles of dress and ventriloquizing the fears, anxieties, and attachments that the Crown Heights crisis had laid bare in their respective communities. Both groups, Smith’s play suggested, experienced the events of August 1991 as an extension of their particular historical traumas and mourned the deaths of Cato and Rosenbaum through the lens of an anguish that was foundational to their communal identities. Despite Fires in the Mirror’s commitment to documenting these communications, the structure of Smith’s play both confirmed and undid the idea of community. In two of the play’s earlier monologues, for example, Smith portrayed a teenage girl of Haitian descent and a Lubavitcher woman talking about how styling their hair was an issue 2
of community affiliation, a significant and yet ultimately arbitrary way in which they signaled their belonging and history to a mixed world. Angela Davis’s comments on the ambiguity of racial community drove this point home: “I’m not suggesting that we do not anchor ourselves in our communities,” she told Smith, “I feel very anchored in, um, my various communities, but I think that, you know, to use a metaphor, the rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow us to move into other communities to understand and learn” (43). Community, for Davis, was a necessary anchor, yet one that required the flexibility of movement indicated by a lengthy rope. These comments, in other words, seemed to reflect Smith’s commitment to ideas of cross-cultural empathy and identification. Smith’s later monologues, however, provided a contrast. Centered on chronicling reactions to the events of 1991, these testimonies displayed how easily one’s faith in the possibility of human commonality could be compromised by the presence of historical memory. For example, Richard Green, director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, drew attention to the absurdity of preaching non-violence to black youth, whose systematic experience of police violence revealed the structural racism of American life. Meanwhile, Crown Heights resident Reuven Ostrov told the story of an elderly Jewish woman who had died by suicide upon hearing the sounds of rioting outside her window, her consciousness of an ongoing Jewish Holocaust coloring her experience of the conflict on the streets. Where violence was concerned, Smith seemed to suggest, liberal humanist ideals 3
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of commonality were forced to confront the painful experience of racial, ethnic or historical particularity. I begin this book with Fires in the Mirror, because it helps propel my central question: What is the relationship between theatre and community? In Smith’s play, community is a multifaceted concept. On one hand, the kind of cushioning provided by a shared belief or identity can be a crucial tool for survival in times of distress. Even under ordinary circumstances, communal belonging helps shape an individual’s sense of themselves, their history, and their futurity. On the other, communal attachments can limit precisely these possibilities and impose homogeneity on a group of people with diverse worldviews and desires, thus fostering oppression and exclusion. The very practice of theatre heightens these contradictions. Smith’s bravura performance locates Crown Heights’s different communal experiences within the embodied capacities of her own physical frame, rendering her body into a space that joins these multiple grievances. At the same time, the very multiplicity of Smith’s monologues maintains a distance and a difference that pushes us to look beyond easy identification, problematize the issue of point-of-view, and question the diversity of the theatrical audience itself. Fires in the Mirror thus embodies the central premise of Theatre & Community, which is that critical approaches to the possibilities and limits of community enhance our understanding of theatre and that, in turn, theatrical practice and representation reveal the tensions inherent in community formation. 4
Why focus on community, and why now? References to community are as flexible as they are ubiquitous in twentyfirst-century public discourse. For many, community indicates a social grouping organized around a particular identity or locality; for others, it can encapsulate a desire for a grouping yet to come. Others invoke community as a moral imperative, a necessary strategy for enduring the alienating effects of modern life. And for artists in particular, the concept of community often anchors their social engagement, providing an ideal of connectedness. As literary critic Raymond Williams once put it, however, community is a “warmly persuasive word” (76) that conceals as much as it reveals: Does the concept of community imply, or even demand, commonality? In what ways do communities accommodate difference? Put differently, what kinds of ethical relationships does the forming of communities necessitate? Is community inherently liberating? How do we respond to calls for community when they are associated with corporate capitalism, for example, and aim to cultivate certain consumer practices? Partly because of the urgent nature of these questions, the concept of community has recently undergone a resurgence of critical thought. Where theatre is concerned, these questions are hardly new, because the stage has long been a site for thinking about community formation and collectivity. Theatre history is rife with questions that are raised by the collective encounter between performers and audiences, as well as within those very groupings. Artists, spectators, and scholars alike have questioned the nature of the temporary 5
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community that theatre makes possible, pondering the political consequences of these fleeting moments of proximity and the forms of artistic representation that have responded to ideals of commonality. In Theatre & Community, I hope to present at least some of this complexity. At the same time, I argue that the idea of a theatrical community is never a given and that it is best approached as a problematic, or a question. As a theatrical idea, community has emerged in particular geographies and historical moments; it is not a universal yearning for collectivity. A book that seeks to provide a general introduction to the relationship between theatre and community is therefore uniquely situated to do justice to the different ways that both theatre and community have been constructed, theorized, and experienced. To that end, I will draw on case studies of theatre and community that fall within as well as beyond the modern Western association of these terms, pointing to examples from the Middle East and South Asia as well as instances from ancient Greece and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Theatre & Community is structured into four sections. The question of community has been of interest to scholars working in a range of academic disciplines, from sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy to theatre and performance studies. The next section will provide a general overview of the main themes that emerge from this body of scholarship. The three sections that follow will group these themes into their most elemental tropes: sameness and difference, individuality and collectivity, and efficacy and agency. 6
Community: Key Debates
In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams defines community’s warm persuasiveness in two distinct ways. This fuzzy feeling can describe “an existing set of relationships,” he writes, or “an alternative set of relationships” (76, emphasis mine). Williams’s distinction is important because it separates the term’s factual dimension from its ideal connotation. In many ways, community’s English-language usage represents the meeting of the factual and the ideal: Williams notes that from the seventeenth century onward, the closeness implied by community is often placed in opposition to society, which is associated with the realm of the state. By the nineteenth century, community’s connotations of locality and immediacy are further opposed to the complexity of modern, urban industrialism, allowing the term to reference both the factual immediacy of local community and the aspiration for an ideal community. This brief summary encapsulates two themes that emerge throughout the literature on community. First, community is an existing but also a yearned for grouping, and references to community almost always mix the factual and the ideal. Second, the yearning for community often emerges from a frustration with modernity, a historical period commonly associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The technological and industrial innovations and rapid urbanization that characterize this period are understood to leave individuals feeling alienated and looking backward in search of an idealized, long-gone collectivity. 7
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In sociological thought, for example, community has historically emerged within related binaries like community vs. society, tradition vs. modernity, and rural or folk life vs. urban life. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s opposition of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft is perhaps the best-known framing of community as the symbol of a lost time and territory. “All intimate, private, and exclusive living together, so we discover, is understood as life in gemeinschaft (community),” Tönnies argues. “[G]esellschaft (society) is public life – it is the world itself. In gemeinschaft with one’s family, one lives from birth on, bound to it in weal and woe. One goes into gesellschaft as one goes into a strange country” (7). Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft was written in 1887, a historical moment when the nostalgia for the imagined intimacy of a quasi-feudal ideal of community served as a reaction to the “strange country” that was the competitive and cold landscape of bourgeois, urban capitalism. What is interesting for our purposes, however, is how these territory-based ideas of community continue to keep their wholly positive connotations, despite the fact that we live in a globalized era when social relations are seldom limited by geographic boundaries. Community, Williams presciently notes, “seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term” (76). Anthropologist Miranda Joseph has famously labeled this enduring trend a “Romantic” discourse, one that places “community in an idealized past, disconnected from the present as if by epochal break” (9). In Against the Romance of Community, she adds that “in representing a temporal 8
discontinuity between community and modern society, [this discourse] elides the material processes that have transformed social relations” (9). References to community, in other words, can limit our understanding of how pre-modern economic relations transformed into modern capitalism, an economic system where private individuals or businesses own the means of production and production itself is largely governed by the free market. Joseph suggests that when community is placed in opposition to capitalism, it emerges as an antidote to a range of social and political ills, allowing conservative commentators to suggest that increased community feeling will solve issues ranging from global economic inequality to police violence. Joseph’s core argument is simple: community is not the “other” to capitalist modernity, but rather, its supplement. The nostalgic idea of community can be used to support and even enhance, rather than undo, certain forms of social hierarchy. Joseph elaborates on the “supplementary” relationship between community and capitalism by using a theatre company as her example: San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros, which was founded in 1977 as a gay and lesbian theatre. When Joseph became involved with Rhinoceros in the mid1990s, the company wanted to promote work by and for San Francisco’s gay community. In her interviews with c ompany members, Joseph saw how double-edged this commitment could be: Was “the gay community” a unified entity? Or was it fractured by gender, race and class differences? Could it accommodate members who identified as queer? Company members were aware that in portraying this 9
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community, they were in fact producing and defining it and prioritizing certain identity features while excluding others. Additionally, portraying the gay community as a distinct community supported the creation of a new target for advertising campaigns, circulating the image of white, middle-class lifestyles as the community norm and contributing to capitalist exploitation. Finally, where the connection between community and capitalism was concerned, Theatre Rhinoceros members often talked about gay a rtists’ c ontributions and gay audience members’ loyalty to this community as gifts—that is, personal transactions and obligations; this discourse could mask the company’s need to position themselves in a competitive theatrical marketplace. Joseph’s aim is not to condemn these tendencies, but to note that thinking about community (and particularly nonprofit, activist “community”) as representative of organic desires or shared identities can mask the material reality of community’s constructed nature. Although Joseph’s argument is specific, a broad range of scholars has posed the following questions: How are communities defined? What kinds of exclusions do these definitions generate? Who benefits when communities are thought of as given, rather than constructed, entities? And even when communities strive for the most inclusive definitions possible, what kind of a relationship do they imagine between the collective as a whole and the individuals who form its parts? These questions will emerge throughout the sections that follow, but here, I will follow Joseph to underline the key emphases 10
that have emerged in the thinking around community: nationalism, liberalism, and identity politics. An important study of nationalism is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, which suggests that the late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century nation-state is “an imagined political community” (6) characterized by its unity, its specificity and its sovereignty. In the following section, I will suggest that nationalism is not the first movement to emphasize a shared identity; but Anderson’s argument is that nationalism puts forward an idea of “horizontal comradeship” (7) and community that is quite unlike its predecessors. Nation-ness has since become a widely available political ideal, a modular form that has shaped calls for self-determination and collective authenticity throughout the world. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s criticism of nationalism draws a link between Western European nationalism’s racial and cultural discriminations and the kinds of exclusions that have plagued the nationalism of anti-colonial movements. Fanon notes that for independent nations that are founded after decolonization, the desire to rehabilitate a national culture “to escape from the claws of colonialism are logically inscribed from the same point of view as that of colonialism” (170). In other words, postcolonial nations also produce imagined traditions, even as they position themselves in opposition to the imperial nations they seek to criticize. The connection between community and liberalism can be slightly more complex. Liberalism is a political philosophy 11
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that takes individual freedom as its basic principle. An immediate question that emerges is how free i ndividuals can exist in society and especially under the yoke of political authority. Liberal political theory has tackled this question in many different ways, but one suggestion is that if individuals are abstract subjects—that is, defined by qualities that are universally shared—and if political structures reflect the interests of this abstract community, individual autonomy and political authority can coexist. An important aspect of liberalism is the separation of the private sphere, where individuals can express their particular interests or identities, and the public sphere, where a universal political community can achieve consensus. Multiculturalism and immigration in the Euro-American world have challenged these visions of liberal community. In Western Europe, for example, the political visibility of Muslim minorities has questioned the idea of a universal political community; legislation that seeks to ban the wearing of Islamic headscarves in public demonstrates that an “abstract” public space requires excluding those individuals who are not considered universal subjects. Etienne Balibar notes that this is because social norms that are seen as universal are often themselves culturally particular, and inadvertently make cultural commonality the basis for citizenship. In We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Balibar argues for a move away from the idea of a community of citizens to a “citizenship without community” (51) premised on shared political rights. 12
Finally, as the example of Theatre Rhinoceros shows, community is a crucial question for identity politics activism and a crucial concern for the feminist and post-structuralist scholars who have sought to think through the conundrums of these movements. Like Theatre Rhinoceros, feminist and anti-racist emancipatory movements often use the idea of community-as-commonality as a political strategy for social change. After all, when advocating for the rights and needs of a particular group, it helps to underline the sharedness of the identity categories through which that group has experienced an oppression, not to mention the fact that there is strength in being able to claim a large number of constituents. The road to universal mobilization, however, is paved with fraught questions: Could the oppression in question intersect with other categories of exclusion? According to Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back or bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman, feminist movements are plagued by precisely this problem, and they emphasize the historical struggles, legal accomplishments, and personal experiences of white, middle-class, and heterosexual women in their attempts to advocate for all women. A related question is whether all such movements inadvertently essentialize the idea of womanhood itself—that is, promote the idea that there is a gender core (woman) that is presumed to follow from an individual’s biological sex (female). In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Judith Butler famously deconstructs this line of thought, arguing that gender is per formative—in other words, a norm that is constantly produced 13
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(and policed) as it is enacted in both language and everyday behavior. In terms of community, what the twin legacies of feminism and post-structuralism provide is the reminder to foreground the constructedness of all categories of sameness, even when such categories are politically necessary. Theorizing Theatre and Community
What happens when the terms “community” and “theatre” are placed in conversation? The most familiar association of these terms is doubtless “community theatre,” a phrase that indicates theatre projects that are undertaken by, for, or in collaboration with a group of people identified as a community. This community, in Jan Cohen-Cruz’s words, can be “constituted by virtue of a shared primary identity based in place, ethnicity, class, race, sexual preference, profession, circumstances, or political orientation” (2). And community theatre’s objectives can range from securing recognition for a community’s particular experience to demanding public intervention on a topic of social or political concern to revitalizing the cultural life of a given locality. At first glance, in other words, the practices that fall under the umbrella of community theatre intersect with a variety of other rubrics used in theatre and performance studies. El Teatro Campesino, for example, was founded in California during the 1965 Delano grape pickers’ strike, when Luis Valdez, an apprentice with the San Franciscobased Mime Troupe, approached the United Farm Workers Union’s organizing committee about starting a theatre company by and for the farmworkers. El Teatro Campesino 14
soon became the cultural outlet of United Farm Workers and the company’s early plays featured stock characters like the Patroncito, a symbol of the exploitation visited by the California agricultural industry on migrant farmworkers. In time, El Teatro Campesino’s work became as identified with Chicano cultural pride as it was with revolutionary labor activism, and it eventually inspired new playwrights, like Cherríe Moraga, who criticized and elaborated the masculinity of Campesino’s vision of Chicano identity. Today, the legacy of El Teatro Campesino and Chicanx Theatre is studied as political agitprop, identity-based and/ or community art, and social protest theatre. This diversity signifies two basic dimensions of community theatre. First, although the practice references a “shared primary identity,” the process of communal artmaking can often bring the fixedness and unity of this identity category into question. Second, the concern with community stands at the intersection of a broad range of political and artistic practices. This range is visible across the Euro-American world. For example, Baz Kershaw places British “community theatre” within the wider net of alternative theatre practices that emerged from the mid-1970s onward and uses a related series of terms like experimental, underground, or fringe. What unites all of these practices is their aim to cultivate new theatre audiences. The countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s are equally important in community theatre’s American history, but scholars like Jan CohenCruz and Sonja Kuftinec place American “communitybased” theatre and performance against a broader historical 15
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background that stretches from the agitprop performances of the Workers Theatre Movement in the 1930s to the social protest culture embodied by El Teatro Campesino and the Free Southern Theatre in the 1960s. Here again, terms and categories proliferate: references to community emerge in practices labeled popular or folk, grassroots or local, and socially engaged or protest theatre. One way to make sense of the scope of “community,” therefore, is to think through the key ideas and themes that emerge in the study of community theatre and performance. In this book, I have chosen the terms “efficacy” and “agency” to encapsulate these themes. Here, efficacy refers to an artwork’s political effectiveness in communicating its goals; in community art, part of the goal is the portrayal, maintenance, or even cultivation of a sense of communal belonging or experience. Scholars often underline in their study of community theatre how and whether the work is able to achieve such a phenomenon and what its political consequences might be. Agency, meanwhile, refers to the process of communal artmaking and whether the community in question is allowed to participate in and impact this process. If this project involves collaboration between artists and community members, then it emphasizes the nature of that partnership. Community-based theatre scholars’ references to cultural democracy, participation, egalitarianism, and consensus are an extension of this interest in agency. In many ways, this concern with efficacy and agency is a reflection of the domain’s frequent conversation partners. For example, the emphasis on efficacy draws on the legacy of 16
Brazilian theatre director and political activist Augusto Boal, whose Theatre of the Oppressed outlines theatre methodologies that are meant to heighten audience participation. For example, Boal’s “spect-actor” is a spectator who is invited, at a moment of their choosing, to replace an actor performing a role onstage and intervene in the evolution of the performance’s storyline. Boal’s techniques are indispensable for community artists who wish to cultivate collective artistic forms that draw on a broad participant base and enact progressive social change. Likewise, anthropologist Victor Turner’s idea of communitas is a frequent reference point for discussions of agency in community-based art. Turner draws on Arnold Van Gennep’s discussion of liminality, which is an experience associated with cultural rituals that mark a transition from one state to another, such as from childhood to adulthood. Turner suggests that moments of liminal transition between different structural hierarchies in a given society’s life often evoke feelings of communitas, or an idea of sociability based on “equality and comradeship as norms” (232). For Turner, communitas always exists in tension with structure, or consciously maintained social statuses and hierarchies, and so “often appears culturally in the guise of an Edenic, paradisiacal, utopian, or millennial state of affairs” (237). Not surprisingly then, communitas is often referenced to suggest that community theatre can create spaces of democratic, egalitarian exchange and community. Of course, not all scholars agree on what efficacy and agency look like, and the discussions that have emerged around these terms extend beyond community-based theatre 17
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and performance to related practices like participatory art and new genre public art. The term “efficacy,” for example, can acquire different meanings depending on the stakes that one associates with the artwork. Take Steelbound, a community-based adaptation of the Prometheus myth that was performed in 1999 in the former steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and featured stories from the town’s inhabitants. This working-class community’s life had been thrown into disarray when the Bethlehem Steel Company shut down its local plant. Bethlehem-based Touchstone Theatre wished to capture the town’s memories of this experience and developed a performance from their stories. In an article p ublished the following year, theatre scholar Sara Brady argued that although company members had conducted extensive research and interviews with Bethlehem community members, professional theatre-makers had ultimately exercised control over the artistic product. Additionally, the funding and the collaborations that the company brokered with both public and private entities shaped the context of the production. In “Welded to the Ladle: Steelbound and Non-Radicality in Community-Based Theatre,” Brady argued that these aesthetic agendas and funding connections reduced Steelbound’s political efficacy and undermined its grassroots origins. Brady’s criticism mirrors an inverse discussion taking place among art historians writing about “participatory art”—that is, non-studio art practices with explicit sociopolitical agendas. Whereas Brady asks whether communitybased theatre can maintain an aesthetic agenda and still qualify as a radical form of protest politics, these scholars 18
question whether “participatory art” projects can be collectively authored and still qualify as aesthetically rich. Notably, art historian Claire Bishop argues that “participation” has become a catchall solution to artists’ dissatisfaction with “passive spectatorial consumption” (275) or capitalist consumerism. She asks: Can participation automatically resist capitalism? And can an art project defined only by its collaborative strategies still count as, well, good art? In Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Shannon Jackson places Brady and Bishop’s questions next to one another and suggests that whereas one associates efficacy with radical politics, the other associates it with an aesthetic agenda. Jackson’s point is that these realms are contingent on one another and that the coming together of community and theatre is one context where this contingency is visible: community is not simply a social ideal that theatre represents or addresses; it is also something that theatre enacts in its practices. Efficacy, therefore, cannot always be measured in terms of political progress or professional accolades. Steelbound is equally helpful for thinking about agency in community-based theatre. Brady’s criticism of the production is partly targeted at Touchstone Theatre’s collaboration with Los Angeles-based Cornerstone Theatre, a company that was founded in 1986 and has since developed a worldwide reputation for its mobile working method: Cornerstone has had their home base since 1992, but their signature productions have been developed in collaboration with communities across the United States. In the case of Steelbound, Cornerstone members joined the production in 19
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its early stages and produced the playscript, leaving Brady worried that the text reflected “the community words as heard by the playwright” (64), thus compromising the “purity” of the stories being told, if not reorienting them away from social protest and toward “healing.” Could nonlocal artists truly represent Bethlehem’s stories without having come out of that community themselves? Once again, this question joins community theatre and performance scholars with art historians working on “new genre public art”—that is, the sculptures, installations and collaborative arts practices that have evolved outside of established gallery spaces and museums since the 1960s. In these contexts, “community” automatically implies a marginalized and disenfranchised group. Grant Kester likens these community arts practices to projects of “evangelical” urban reform, where an empowered community artist/social worker seeks “some transformation in the condition of individuals who are presumed to be in need” (137) and draws on “the putative universality of the aesthetic itself” (140) to authorize their practices. Whereas Kester is hopeful for collaborative projects involving groups that have already gathered around a clear political goal, o thers, like Miwon Kwon, share his overall concern with how references to community can mask the structural origins of inequality. “In actual practice,” she asks, “how does a group of people become identified as a community in an exhibition program, as a potential partner in a collaborative art p roject?” (116–117). In the example of Steebound, by what process does Bethlehem emerge as a community in the 20
theatre artists’ discourse? What might be lost or excluded along the way? Ultimately, Kwon argues that what is necessary is an expansive idea of community that identifies some measure of commonality but also recognizes the incoherent nature of communal identification. At this point, it is important to underline the EuroAmerican orientation of much of the scholarship I have referenced thus far. In this section, I have argued that the process of nation formation in the modern West, the central principles of liberal political theory, and the ongoing transformations of identity-based political movements have all informed the question of community. Of course, my contention is not that these critical debates exhaust the global concern with community; my point is that how these concerns have been formulated is often shaped by c ommunity’s legacy in Western modernity. Likewise, Euro-American histories tend to dominate the scholarly literature on theatre and community, but as Petra Kuppers notes in her meticulous Community Performance: An Introduction, it is important to “place community performance within the counter-movements that emerged in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western performance work” (16) and to recognize the specific contexts of these movements. When diversifying communitybased theatre and performance scholarship, the goal is not merely to detect a particular locality’s own vocabulary for thinking about community. In the final section, I will ask whether the ideas of efficacy and agency that inform the stakes of community in Euro-American contexts can be presumed to function the same way universally. 21
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Before moving into the rest of the book, however, it is crucial to note that scholarship on community-based theatre does not exercise a monopoly over the concern with community in theatre and performance studies. For example, Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater identifies audiences as “temporary communities” (10) with the capacity to participate in a shared utopian vision. Drawing on Turner’s notion of communitas, Dolan argues that rather than resting on an old humanist legacy of universality and transcendence, utopian performatives let audiences experience a processual, momentary feeling of affinity, in which spectators experience themselves as part of a congenial public constituted by the performance’s address. (14) This connection between transient feeling and communal belonging is a widespread assumption in scholarship that is interested in the progressive potential of theatre-making and theatregoing. Others, like José Muñoz, have questioned the complexity of “the public constituted by the performance’s address,” arguing that for postcolonial, queer, or minoritarian performers whose work takes place in the racial and sexual margins of mainstream American c ulture, surviving toxic forms of “address” requires developing strategies of disidentification. Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics is not opposed to the idea of community, merely skeptical of visions of commonality “forged through shared images and fixed identifications,” 22
arguing instead for an “anti-identitarian identity politics” (176) that questions all constitutions of a public. Dolan and Muñoz are important examples but by no means the only ones. Indeed, community has been at stake in a broad range of theatre and performance studies scholarship focused on political memory, cultural heritage, and commodification; on histories of colonial contact, racialization, and identity politics; and on immigration and citizenship. A review of this broader literature is beyond the scope of this book, but I have organized the following sections in a way that illustrates its main concerns and continues to pursue the basic questions that the conjunction of “community theatre” has allowed us to pose. Sameness and Difference
Of all the connotations that are associated with community, the sense of an identity held in common is perhaps the strongest. The question of a given community’s sameness, as well as how such a community might accommodate differ ence, is a central dimension of the philosophical and political debates that have shaped Western modernity. From Enlightenment visions of a universal human community to the more bounded ideas of commonality that accompany the emergence of European nation-states in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sameness and d ifference structure Western thought in the modern period. Theatre, not surprisingly, is part and parcel of this evolving landscape. In this section, I draw attention to theatrical case studies that illustrate the evolution of ideas of community 23
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in Western modernity. At the same time, I include a case study from the Ottoman Empire and its modern successor, the Republic of Turkey, to illustrate formations of (theatrical) community that developed in conversation with yet also departed from the Western norm. Throughout, I hope to show that theatre has served as more than a reflection of shifting political and social ideals. Both theatre-making and theatre-going have historically been at the center of some of the complexities and paradoxes of ideas of community. Enlightenment Community
The Enlightenment refers to a broad intellectual movement that emerged during the early part of the eighteenth century, drew on the rationalist and objectivist legacy of the Scientific Revolution, and eventually shaped the political ideals of equality and rights that would characterize the American and French Revolutions. At the core of Enlightenment thought was the figure of the abstract individual, an unmarked human being driven by the power of reason and characterized by its distance from identity categories like religion, race, or gender. The German Enlightenment, or Aufklärung, in particular emphasized bil dung, or self-education, as an antidote to the claims of both religious and political authority, and it envisioned a global community characterized by rational interests. These ideas of sameness were not without their tensions, however, not least since Western Europe’s colonial ventures also grew in the eighteenth century. Ideals of self-determination could be used flexibly, in other words, and often functioned to 24
deny colonized populations the very virtues that colonialism’s civilizing missions sought to instill. Yet one did not need to look abroad to encounter Enlightenment community’s contradictions; these were equally visible at home. German philosopher and playwright Gothold Ephraim Lessing’s 1779 play Nathan the Wise is an excellent example of the promises as well as the paradoxes of Enlightenment ideas of community. Set in late twelfth-century Jerusalem, where Egyptian Sultan Saladin has brokered a fragile ceasefire with the crusading Christians, Nathan the Wise depicts a pluralistic world where Muslims, Jews, and Christians debate the possibility of a tolerant, equitable society. At the center of the play is Nathan, a Jewish merchant who thrives on rational debate and feels wary of religious communities. At the beginning of the play, Nathan returns home from a voyage to find that a crusading knight has saved his adopted daughter Recha from a fire. Recha is a willing recipient of Nathan’s efforts at bildung, but the young woman is also religious and is convinced that her savior represents a divine intervention. Nathan insists that Recha has mistaken the knight’s white cloak for the wings of an angel and rejects the hubris of his daughter’s suggestion that she was chosen for a divine communication. For Nathan, training Recha to view the world through a rational, secular lens is a way to insure against his daughter’s sense of her own difference. The figure of Nathan is best understood in Lessing’s late-eighteenth-century context, a historical moment that witnessed a transition from the multiple German states composing the Holy Roman Empire to the search for a 25
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self-consciously “German” community. A central question for this new formation was that of religious diversity and how Jewish communities in particular were to be included within the boundaries of a united German public. Lessing’s close friend Moses Mendelssohn, a leading intellectual in the movement for German-Jewish emancipation, argued that Jewish integration was premised on assimilation, or the Jewish community’s rejection of their linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions. Meanwhile, other Jewish intellectuals asked whether Jews had to abandon their consciousness of themselves as a particular, historical community to participate in a universal, German community. This is a question that Nathan ponders throughout Lessing’s play, asking himself how he is to justify his universalist sensibilities when he continues to identify with a particular identity, that of being a Jew. The tensions of sameness and difference are visible in his encounter with the knight: when Nathan wishes to thank the young Christian man for saving his beloved daughter, the knight is hesitant to converse with a “Jew.” Yet Nathan’s rational conversation is alluring, and both men eventually find themselves asking, “Are Jew and Christian rather Jew and Christian than men?” (p. 149). Nathan the Wise was first performed in Berlin in 1783, but it is often presented as a play that was not intended for the stage. Although there were political reasons for censoring the play’s content (least of all its criticism of the Church), Lessing’s otherwise prolific theatrical career raises the question of what made Nathan the Wise ill-suited for the theatre. This query signals theatre’s central role in the 26
debate over sameness and difference. Lessing’s play was committed to ideas of a universal human community, a sameness that extended to human embodiment. But what could sameness look like on a theatrical stage? What would a universal human look like when represented theatrically? Despite the play’s ideological commitments, the eighteenth-century stage inherited a series of stereotypes that surrounded the depiction of race and ethnicity, such as the stylized theatricalities of the “Jew” and the “Muslim.” Thus, the representation of sameness met its limits where it encountered theatrical traditions that exploited difference. Theatre, in other words, exemplified the tensions of Enlightenment community; representations of difference were nonetheless necessary for thinking about abstract and universal sameness. National Community
The theatrical tensions of sameness and difference survived well into the nineteenth century, a period that witnessed the emergence of European nation-states and cultural nationalisms, as well as a growing fascination with racial typologies and classifications. Here again, the case of European Jews can be informative. In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, political scientist Wendy Brown notes that in the French case, Jewish assimilation eventually minimized the idea of Jews as a separate “nation” or community, and Jews were recognized as universal citizens. By the nineteenth century, however, Jewishness was reconceptualized as a racial identity, embodied in a set of physically 27
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distinguishable characteristics that set Jews apart from the “imagined community” populating the territory of the nation. In the case of the Jews, assimilation did not dissolve difference; rather, the ideals of communal sameness that emerged around national identities generated newer forms of difference that were now associated with racial identities. The essential “truth” of national, cultural, or racial identities is central to melodrama, the theatrical genre that dominated nineteenth-century theatre. In France, this flexible genre captivated audiences in both state-subsidized theatre institutions and popular boulevard theatres. Matthew S. Buckley notes that early French melodrama was captivated by the question of community and featured idealized collectives experiencing political violence and exile. These themes eventually evolved into an opposition between morally wholesome heroes and morally compromised villains. Melodrama’s “closing fantasies of redemptive justice and restored community” (180) were one way that the genre responded to the uncertainties of the French Revolution, but melodrama’s spectacular excitements also often served to confirm the righteousness of one (national) community over the evil aspirations of another. Moreover, melodrama’s central trope of mistaken or disguised identities, and the revelation of a character’s “true” origins, solidified the idea that racial identity was rooted in the human body. Nineteenth-century examples from both sides of the Atlantic quickly confirm melodrama’s centrality to theatrical depictions of national and racial community. Victor Hugo’s romantic melodrama Hernani was first performed in 28
Paris in 1830 and is set in a fictional Spanish court from the early 1500s, where Don Carlos, the King of Spain, desires the affections of the beautiful Doña Sol. The young woman is betrothed to her uncle, Don Ruy Gomez, but loves the poor Bohemian outlaw Hernani, who, by the end of the melodrama, will be restored to his rightful position as Duke of Aragon. True to both melodramatic and romantic form, this love quadrangle features a series of disguised identities, ambushed abductions, and thwarted political conspiracies, and it centers on the plight of Hernani, the noble bandit who inhabits Europe’s forests. What is interesting for our purposes is that Don Carlos is set to become Charles V, the next Holy Roman Emperor, and rule over a vast territory that stretches from the northernmost regions of present-day Germany to the Iberian Peninsula. A brief glance at Hugo’s historical source material shows, however, that by the time the real Charles V acceded to the imperial throne in 1519, the Holy Roman Empire was already fractured by the Protestant Reformation, a process that would eventually result in the Thirty Years’ War and calls for independence from various ducal estates. In Hernani, the landscape of imperial Europe is filled with territories that have boundaries and borders and features a patchwork of states through which Hernani travels as a refugee, seeking asylum from the vengeance of Don Carlos. Meanwhile, in a monologue delivered at the tomb of Charlemagne, the Emperor-to-be sees himself sitting atop a pyramid that includes kings and their states; beneath the kings is a hierarchy of feudal families; and at 29
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the bottom rung is all of humankind. This category of sameness is immediately fractured, however, when Don Carlos exclaims “Oh citizens, oh men! Wondrous human base of nations, bearing on your shoulders broad the mighty pyramid” (329). Shortly thereafter, he references again this “moving pyramid of states and kings” and asks, “Have I the strength alone to hold it fast, to be an Emperor?” Because Hugo composed this monologue for the sixteenth century ruler, Don Carlos’s language is filled with Hugo’s own sensibilities from the nineteenth century, a historical moment when, as Anderson notes, “no nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind” (7). In Hernani, “men” are immediately separated by national differences, the citizenship offered by different states, and the relationship between these states and specific territories. Ideas of community and sameness are now firmly anchored in nationality, race and ethnicity, and territory. In Hernani, ideas of communal purity are also visible in the figure of Doña Sol, the virginal young woman with “good Spanish blood … in her veins” (311). The representation of women’s bodies and sexualities as national territories that are subject to the competing claims of warring men is a core theme of nationalist discourses, and the same connections are on offer, albeit with significant differences, across the Atlantic. Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, first performed in New York in 1859, takes place on a fictional Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne and features the beautiful Zoe, who is neither a citizen nor a slave but rather a woman with one-eighth 30
black ancestry. Zoe’s racial ambiguity represents antebellum melodrama’s fascination with “true” racial identities. Zoe is pursued by the evil overseer McClosky but loves the young gentleman George Peyton, the nephew of her master and father, the late Judge Peyton, and the beneficiary of his estate. The fates of Zoe and Terrebonne are linked over the course of the play, and as Boucicault frames the moral struggle between the innocent lover George and the evil murderer McClosky, he illustrates the class consciousness of racial community in nineteenth-century America. In The Octoroon, the aristocratic George is meant to embody antislavery sentiment and moral righteousness, as he loves Zoe despite finding out that her blood harbors the “ineffaceable curse of Cain” (43). The greedy social climber McClosky, on the other hand, hopes to purchase Zoe, along with the rest of Terrebonne. There is little doubt that the play’s moral compass favors George, yet its reasons for vilifying McClosky are telling: When the lowerclass but wealthy McClosky wants to purchase Terrebonne, the Peytons’ neighboring planters offer to lend the impoverished but elite family “the whole cash, to keep your name and blood amongst us” (33). Likewise, McClosky’s desire for Zoe is illegitimate, while the late Judge Peyton’s sexual exploitation of Zoe’s mother, one of his slaves, is barely remarked on. Where community is concerned, class mediates relationships around race, gender, and sexuality. Saidiya V. Hartman argues that white supremacy in nineteenth-century America had the unintended effect of “making all whites equal to one another” (167). Propertyowning whites, like the Louisiana planters portrayed in 31
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Boucicault’s play, responded to this development with new categories of propriety and decency, and theatre was an important context in which these maneuvers took place. As scholars like Hartman, Daphne Brooks, and Eric Lott show, both racial melodrama and blackface minstrelsy flourished in the American north in the late nineteenth century. Blackface minstrelsy in particular became what Catherine Cole and Tracy Davis call “the first American mass culture” (8) and defined the cultural domain of white working-class communities. This distinction between high and low culture meant that the theatrical representations of blackness in minstrel performances would be associated with the white laborers composing the audience; in turn, white anxieties over these associations would be relieved with renewed emphasis on racial superiority and community, thus making a mixed-race class solidarity impossible. Racism in nineteenth-century America, Hartman suggests, not only denied black citizenship but also “retarded the development of social rights” (168) in general. Theatre was central to the cultural divides that emerged at the intersections of race and class, and it represented the core questions that plagued ideas of national community in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Public and the People
In the brief history of community that I have been drawing so far, ideas of communal sameness have decreased in scale, from Enlightenment visions of universal human community to the sovereignty of national communities to the 32
racial and class-based divides of national citizenship. Where ideas of class-based community are concerned, it is important to underline a formation whose emergence is central to Western modernity, what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has famously called “the bourgeois public sphere.” This composite phrase brings together the “bourgeoisie” (the social class identified as the owners of the means of production in a Marxist sense) and “the public sphere” (a social realm separate from the authority of the state but also the privacy of the home). The rise of modern realistic theatre in the late nineteenth century is impossible to contextualize without reference to the idea of the public as a community; in turn, the bourgeois public sphere and its separation of public and private domains finds a visual language in modern realism. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeoise Society, Habermas identified the bourgeois public sphere as the outcome of a lengthy historical process that spanned the modern period. Habermas argued that in medieval Europe and well into the sixteenth century, what was meant by public-ness was an aura of representative power associated with the political sovereign and the feudal nobility. In other words, public-ness was associated with the elite. The rise of a middle class of merchants and of a modern state in the seventeenth century began to transform these feudal arrangements, and public-ness increasingly referred to the bureaucratic functions of the modern state, such as the centralized management of laws and policies. Habermas’s core argument is that in the eighteenth century, a bourgeois class 33
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of merchants, doctors, lawyers, and scholars contributed to the emergence of a public sphere that was separate from the sphere of political authority but that could call that authority to task in the eyes of public opinion. “The bourgeois public sphere,” Habermas writes, “may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public” (27) to engage in public debate and arrive at a rational consen sus over matters of collective interest. For Habermas, this sphere was made possible by new spaces of communication, like coffee shops and debate clubs, as well as the growth of existing means of communication, like print media. In contrast, the private sphere was associated with the conjugal family, whose human closeness and affection was often framed in gendered opposition to a public world increasingly organized around market rationales. Habermas’s idea of a public community engaging in rational discourse and debate has since come under pressure from a range of scholars, including Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner, and Partha Chatterjee, who have identified the variety of “counter-publics” that have historically been left outside the public sphere’s space of consensus and have asked whether Habermas’s model can be applied to highly stratified societies. Given that contemporary references to community are often connected to the idea of a public sphere, as well as the seeming unity of public o pinion, a similar question emerges: Are community’s present-day usages inadvertently linked to the historical origins of public-ness, its class specificity, and its social exclusions? Indeed, the paradoxes of the idea of a bourgeois public sphere are already 34
on full display in the nineteenth-century “well-made-play,” as well as the naturalist and realist canon that builds on this tightly plotted form. For playwrights like Henrik Ibsen, the uniformity, rationality, and consensus of a “public” community cannot be taken for granted. Ibsen’s Rosmersholm was first performed in Bergen in 1887, and like a good deal of modern realistic drama, is set in a bourgeois sitting room that represents the threshold between the public and private spheres. Aristocratic Johannes Rosmer has withdrawn to this room after retreating from his public duties as a member of the clergy, one year after his wife Beata’s suicide. He now lives a life of quiet, philosophical contemplation with Rebekka, his late wife’s caretaker. The action begins when Beata’s brother, Professor Kroll, implores Rosmer to re-enter public debate and denounce the “radicals” who seek to dismantle the aristocratic culture of Norwegian politics. Kroll is fearful that the bourgeois “public” sphere is being invaded by a looming entity he calls “the people”—that is, revolutionaries that appear to shun rational debate. “The spirit of revolt has actually crept in to my own house,” Kroll opines, “into my own quiet home; the harmony of my family life has been utterly destroyed” (267). Kroll’s anxiety is a perfect illustration of the parallels between the public and private spheres: the authority of aristocratic politics in the public realm corresponds to the authority of the patriarch in the private realm. In Kroll’s imagination, both realms are supposed to be organized around shared ideals. Meanwhile, “the people” is a community of middle-class and working-class citizens 35
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that appears to displace the bourgeois “public,” pushing Kroll to reach back toward idealized models of aristocratic public-ness, like Rosmer of Rosmersholm, that are as dated as they are irrelevant. Rosmer, meanwhile, has his own plans. He and Rebekka wish to promote freedom for “the people” and push this entity to recognize its own nobility (279). In Rosmersholm, the duo’s vaguely defined idealism upsets antagonists from across the political spectrum, and both the conservative Kroll and the radical Montesgard, a newspaper editor involved in working-class politics, wish to manipulate Rosmer’s idealism for their own ends. Their strategy is to make Rosmer’s private sphere, Rosmersholm, accountable in the eyes of a now united public, before whom they threaten to reveal Rebekka’s sexual past and the ambiguous relationship between Rebekka and Rosmer. The “public” and the “people” may be divided political communities, Ibsen seems to say, but patriarchal misogyny is a force that unites across these divides. The play ends with Rosmer and Rebekka dying by suicide via drowning in the same current of water as Beata, unable to bear the guilt that accompanies the exposure of their private pasts. Toril Moi argues that Ibsen is an important representative of European modernity. If this is the case, then the playwright’s view of modern community is ultimately quite bleak. Modernity appears characterized by the absence of a space for rational, communicative debate. This loss is symbolized by the figure of Ulrik Brendel, Rosmer’s childhood tutor, who once joined a theatre company and now appears 36
homeless and suffering from alcoholism. Brendel is in search of an assembly hall where he too might preach emancipation to the people. Not surprisingly, this community is nowhere to be found. Paradoxically, however, Brendel feels that public statements are “vulgar” (275) anyway, and that no amount of public self-expression will communicate his ideas. Moi has identified this “fantasy of perfect communication” (276) and language’s subsequent failure to communicate as a central dimension of Ibsen’s modernism. Perhaps we might add that the yearning for and disappointment with communication demonstrates Ibsen’s view of modern community as well, where the “public” is a community for which one is always on the lookout, yet with which one can never fully communicate. Ibsen’s observation, in turn, underlines an important aspect of references to the “public” and the “people”: these terms can be used flexibly and never operate as given communities. Another History: Ottoman Community
Thus far in this section, I have sought to trace the development of notions of community in the modern West and focused on how theatre has not only illustrated but also shaped ideas of sameness and difference. Although this evolution belongs to a specific historical and political context, readers might note that it mirrors developments in other parts of the world. At the same time, this particular evolution is not universal, and both theatre and community are historically and geographically particular. My final case studies in this section hail from the Ottoman Empire and 37
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its modern successor, Republican Turkey, and they demonstrate the diversity of how theatre and community have come into contact in the modern period. The Ottoman Empire was founded in the late thirteenth century in Asia Minor and eventually spanned a vast territory that included parts of the Balkans, Greece, the Crimea, Asia Minor, North Africa, and the “fertile c rescent,” stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean Coast to the Persian Gulf. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Ottoman territorial expansion went into decline, a gradual recession that resulted in the formal end of imperial rule in 1922 and the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Thus, although the Ottoman Empire immediately bordered the cultural and historical territory glossed as the “West,” its modern political history looked quite different. Ottoman historians note that this difference extended to societal organization, as Ottoman society did not display the classic features of class formation associated with Western Europe, including the historical presence of a bourgeoisie. Instead, Ottoman society featured a strict division between the ruling body (organized around the Sultan’s household, with regional outposts mimicking the structure of this central administrative and political institution) and all those who were ruled by this entity. Nor were Ottoman subjects united around a notion of common citizenship: although the Sultan had the authority to administer justice throughout his realms, Ottoman social organization also maintained the boundaries of religioethnic communities and differentiated between Muslims and non-Muslims, like Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Arab 38
Christians. Each of these communities had a protected legal status, enjoyed a relative degree of communal autonomy, and often bore their difference through social markers like dress. The Karagöz shadow play, one of the oldest Ottoman performance forms, featured characters that represent members of different ethnic and professional communities. The Kurd, the Laz, the Armenian, the Albanian, the Arab, the Greek, and the Jew each had a stereotypical dress and accent. In fact, Daryo Mizrahi notes that the comedy of the Karagöz shadow theatre was rooted in linguistic play, as characters misheard and misunderstood each other, resulting in preposterous conversations that almost always centered on sexual puns. Where sameness and difference are concerned, the Karagöz shadow play both recalls and departs from the European traditions outlined above. Performances often took place in urban coffeehouses in the late nineteenth century, and they thus resembled the “public” culture of coffee shops in the Habermasian model. But the coordinates of this spectator community differed from the c onsensus-driven space seen in the Harbermasian model of the public sphere. Similarly, Karagöz’s racial typologies could resemble those populating the early modern and modern European stage, but the image of an abstract human uniting a universal community in pursuit of reason was nowhere to be found. At the same time, the latenineteenth-century Ottoman Empire experienced forms of ethnic conflict and nationalist sentiment that resembled the dynamics of their European counterparts, and these politics overflowed into the era’s theatre. 39
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Importantly, modern Ottoman theatre refers to the Italianate stages that began to emerge in port cities like . . Istanbul and Izmir in the late nineteenth century. These structures featured a proscenium arch and a clear separation between the stage and the auditorium, and they were generally home to non-Muslim professional acting companies that produced European plays. (Indeed, this was one way in which non-Muslim communities financed their community institutions.) Although theatre was a significant aspect of the forms of cultural Westernization that emerged during the Ottoman modernization movement of the nineteenth century, Muslim actors were slow to enter this field, and Muslim women were barred from appearing on the stage, a stipulation that pushed them to adopt non-Muslim stage names. The Armenian, Greek, and Jewish communities thus spearheaded “Ottoman” modernity in the theatre. By the early twentieth century, however, Ottoman culture had taken a distinctly national turn, and “Turkish” n ationalism dominated political discourse. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, modern theatre was understood to address a homogeneous Turkish national community, with Muslim men and women featured on the stage. Fahriye Dinçer notes that female Muslim stage actors were celebrated as signs of the new nation’s modernity, but the actors themselves dealt with racial, social, and sexual stigmas, often cutting their careers short. By the 1930s, Turkish theatre had effectively rid itself of the very communities that had promoted its emergence: Successive waves of violence against non-Muslim 40
populations decimated the Ottoman theatre community, and female Muslim actors were caught between the demands of modernization and dismissals for perceived non-pious behavior. Contemporary performance company BGST (Bog˘aziçi Gösteri Sanatları Toplulug˘u)’s play Kim Var Orada? Muhsin Bey’in Son Hamlet’i (Who’s there? Muhsin Bey’s Last . Hamlet), which premiered in Istanbul in 2016, focuses on Muhsin Ertug˘rul, the actor and director who is widely considered the founder of modern Turkish theatre. In the play, Ertug˘rul is getting ready to record his memories of his early career when the “ghosts” of Ottoman theatre come to haunt him. Armenian actor Vahram Papazyan and female Muslim actor Latife Hanım, who performs onstage under the Armenian name Arusyak, demand to be included in Ertug˘rul’s memories and thus in the collective memory of Turkish theatre. Vahram and Latife’s request is simple: They wish to restage Ertug˘rul’s signature 1941 production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As the play opens, the audience is reminded that something is “rotten” in the state of Turkish theatre, as well as in the state of Denmark: Both realms are battling collective amnesia. BGST’s work signals a broader questioning of the politics of national identity and communal memory in recent Turkish theatre. At the same time, it is unique in that it identifies theatre history itself as the space where the question of sameness and difference needs to be posed. In concluding this section on ideas of community-ascommonality in Western modernity, let’s remember that community’s meaning has been flexible, ranging from the 41
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idea of a species-level human commonality to communities gathered around national citizenship and to communities organized around racial or class-based identities. At times, categories of difference like race or class have become inseparable. At others, terms that appear to signal a neutral collectivity, like the public or the people, have functioned to draw boundaries between different groups. Finally, the Ottoman example has shown that these boundaries have historically both fostered and hindered theatrical activity. Throughout, theatre’s role has not only been to display and to shape but also to question ideas of sameness and difference, and indeed, the very opposition itself. Individuality and Collectivity
Now let me return briefly to the figure of the abstract individual. In the previous section, I noted that this figure was central to Enlightenment era visions of community, but the context in which I mentioned abstract individualism was that of commonality versus plurality, what people have in common versus what differentiates them. Abstract individualism, however, is also concerned with autonomy—that is, the independence of an individual from the demands of the collective to which they belong. Where community is concerned, the binary of individuality and collectivity is closely related to that of sameness and difference, and it produces a parallel set of questions: Can an individual belong to a collective grouping yet remain self-governing? Or will the collective necessarily overwhelm the individual? At the same time, does collectivity have to deny individuality? 42
Could there be circumstances in which individuality is in fact contingent on collectivity, such as when an individual’s rights are protected by collectively agreed upon rules and regulations? And what’s the big obsession with individuality and autonomy anyway? In this section, I explore how different debates around community have worked with the binary of individuality and collectivity; these explorations will be less chronological, however, and focus instead on a series of related concepts and figures. The Standing Man
The emphasis on the autonomy of the abstract individual is a legacy of liberal political theory, a body of philosophical and political thought that disagrees on a number of key issues but agrees on the fundamental freedom of human beings. For some liberal thinkers, freedom revolves around the ability to exercise self-interest and express one’s autonomous will as a form of self-realization. For others, freedom means the absence of external constraints, whether these may come from a collective to which one belongs or a state under whose authority one lives. These visions of freedom continue to be differentiated and intertwined in different ways; what is important for our purposes, however, is that ideas of autonomy and freedom often underline contemporary references to the individual. At the same time, this way of thinking about individuality has been criticized by a variety of thinkers, from those who bemoan the fact that it fosters a culture of self-interested profit and competition to those who mourn the passing of an idea of public-ness 43
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premised on collective responsibility and dependency. In recent work by scholars like Wendy Brown (2015) and Judith Butler (2015), these phenomena are often closely connected to neoliberalism, a form of political, economic, and cultural governance that calls for unregulated financial markets, a diminished welfare state, and a general emphasis on individual self-sufficiency and entrepreneurialism. Contemporary criticism of autonomous individuality, in other words, is often closely linked to criticism of neoliberal regimes and the forms of political and economic insecurity that they have produced. Individuality, collectivity, and their contemporary political meanings were at stake in the recent “Standing Man” protest by Turkish performance artist Erdem Gündüz. On June 17, 2013, Gündüz walked on to Istanbul’s central Taksim Square and proceeded to stand in one spot and gaze at the buildings in the distance for approximately eight hours. The context of this action was the Gezi Park protests of 2013, when millions of Turkish citizens gathered in Istanbul’s central Gezi Park to protest the demolition of one of the few remaining green zones in a heavily developed city. Initial concerns with environmental destruction soon dovetailed with a broader set of issues related to political authoritarianism, the silencing of print and televised media, and the use of militarized forms of violence by police forces. Over the course of several weeks, protestors set up c ollective marketplaces, held musical and theatrical performances, and experimented with various forms of public assembly. Resembling the forms of collective expression that emerged from the Arab Spring, 44
the Occupy Movement, and other public assemblies protesting neoliberal insecurity, the Gezi protestors sought to create a collective practice of resistance. By mid-June, Taksim Square had become a battlefield filled with tear gas canisters and water cannons, and riot police soon evacuated the space. Gündüz’s motionless protest was a reaction to this environment of enforced silence. Three hundred protestors joined the Standing Man on the following day, and similar protest actions soon emerged throughout the country, with standing people occupying politically significant streets, squares, and intersections in their respective cities. The “Standing Man” generated a variety of responses, and at stake for most observers was the relationship between the individuality of Gündüz’s protest action and the collectivist ethos of the Gezi occupation. Initial commentators noted that Gündüz’s insistence on standing alone mocked Turkish bans against public assembly in communal spaces. Gündüz’s individual action was simply not a collective gathering and therefore could not be dispersed. Performance historian Arzu Öztürkmen, for example, noted that “the peacefulness of the ‘Standing Man’ protest rendered all other weapons useless” (58) because it drew attention to global histories of civil disobedience and contrasted with the frenzied violence of security forces. Performance scholar Öykü Potuog˘luCook, meanwhile, asked whether Gündüz’s decision to be “the sole author and performer of this endurance/resistance … inadvertently reinforced the neoliberal cult of the individual” and “departed from the anti-market sociality of Gezi” (114). Potuog˘lu-Cook worried, in other words, about 45
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whether the performance connected the occupation of public space to individual exceptionalism. True to the nature of live performance, however, Gündüz was rarely able to determine the scope and reach of his actions, as his protest nonetheless resulted in an unintended community. In Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler characterized Gündüz’s impromptu gathering as an assembly of individuals, noting that “they were standing as single individuals, but they were all standing, silent and motionless, as single individuals, evading the standard idea of an ‘assembly’ yet producing another one in its place” (169). The reactions to “Standing Man” indicate some of the key questions that surround the relationship between individuality and collectivity, as well as the centrality of this relationship to the study of theatre and performance. Gündüz’s protest is both threatening and not: “Standing Man” bypasses the authorities’ gaze because it involves the physical presence of one body; yet, this singular body is immediately read as the representative of an absent collective. The relationship between the individual and the collective, therefore, is often taken to function metonymically, where the individual part stands in for the collective whole. For students of theatre, this tendency demonstrates a performing figure’s ability to signal avenues of identification that reach beyond the borders of the individual body on the stage and implicate larger communities. On the other hand, as we have seen, “Standing Man” did not remain singular for long, as the performance quickly developed into a collective 46
action. What can we make of the three hundred people who stood with Gündüz on the following day? They were there as audience members observing Gündüz’s gestures but also as participants in his performance. Did this collectivity overwhelm Gündüz’s insistence on individuality, or did the collective in fact make his individuality more visible? And what were the political consequences of this collectivity? Did the image of a group of individuals, all facing the same direction with the same bodily posture (kind of like audience members at a theatrical performance) imply a shared political orientation? Or did it simply imply a specific, fleeting experience of collective proximity, of community? The questions that I pose above are prompted by the very materiality of theatre and performance. Theatrical performance in particular generally involves the coming together of two collective bodies: first, the body of theatre-makers (actors, designers, stage managers, and many others), whose collective labor produces the presentation, and second, the body of spectators, whose presence provides the actors with a collective toward which to direct this presentation. And as the “Standing Man” makes clear, performance’s ability to prompt questions about collectivity can itself actually result in the formation of a collective, however ambiguous its combined intentions may be. Theatre history is thus rife with self-consciousness around the practical experience of collectivity. At the same time, it is equally filled with dramatic material that treats collectivity as a key thematic concern. 47
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theatre & community Singularity, Finitude, Collectivity
If criticism of neoliberal culture and its ideology of individual self-sufficiency forms one branch of the contemporary scholarship on community, then criticism of romanticized ideals of collectivity forms another. Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which was first produced at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, provides an excellent entry point for thinking about this second branch of scholarship. The play tells the story of the Prozoroff siblings, the eponymous three sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina and their younger brother Andrey, who live in a small provincial town, a military outpost to which their late father’s career has exiled them. At the play’s opening, the Prozoroffs mourn the loss of Moscow and yearn for the day when they will return to the social, artistic, and personal distinctions that the capital has to offer. For the Prozoroffs and their small circle of friends, the passage of time deadens their skills and sophistication; yet their small community appears to emblematize the speed of a rapidly changing Russia, where class boundaries are increasingly fluid and modern communication technologies are changing the meaning of both time and work. Military commander Vershinin’s take on the Prozoroffs’ lack of community is telling: Let’s suppose that among the hundred thousand inhabitants of this town, which obviously is backward and crude, there are only three such people as you. It is obvious that you cannot triumph over the dark masses that surround you; in the course 48
of your life you’ll have to yield little by little and be lost in the crowd of a hundred thousand; life will stifle you, but just the same you’ll still be there and not without influence; your kind, after you, will begin to appear, six, perhaps, then twelve, and so on, until finally your kind will get to be the majority. After two or three hundred years, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, wonderful. (20) In this passage Chekhov uses a series of images, like the backwardness of masses and crowds, which are central to early twentieth-century debates about collectivity. I will return to these images in a moment, but for now, Vershinin’s statement is equally important for the way that it frames the relationship between individuality and collectivity. At first, the sophisticated Prozoroffs are stifled by the “backwardness” of “the dark masses”—that is, the lower-class and petty bourgeois townspeople among whom they live. The hope, however, is that their individuality will prevail and that over time they will develop a different collective grouping, a “majority” of their “kind” that will result in an “unimaginably beautiful” life. What is ironic about the community that Vershinin anticipates is that Three Sisters does not present us with any such collective formation. As Anne Eakin Moss points out, Chekhov’s world is famous for housing communities that simply cannot exist as such: neither class, family, nor, in Moss’s argument, gender and sisterhood are enough to form 49
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meaningful, authentic bonds between individuals. Proximity does not help, nor does love impart any long-term meaning to life. Instead, individuals exist as singularities that are constantly coming to terms with their mortality, or their finitude. Moss frames Chekhov’s impossible communities with reference to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of singularity: the singular individual’s consciousness of their finite existence. This framing is important because part of Nancy’s argument in The Inoperative Community is that ideals of community emerge as an antidote to the experience of singularity. In fact, Vershinin’s reference to the “majority” of one’s “kind” represents not only a world where aristocratic sensibilities hold sway but also one where individuals form communities so as not to be disheartened by their awareness of their mortality and their consciousness of the passage of historical time. Nancy formulates his criticism of community in reaction to those who think like Vershinin: The philosopher argues that ideals of community that are rooted in a lost past (such as the Prozoroffs’ Moscow) and that in turn imagine a future to come (such as Vershinin’s “life on earth” two or three h undred years from now) make the mistake of s eeing community or collectivity as a space of almost mythical harmony. This longing, he adds, is not too far removed from the thinking that supported the disastrous nationalisms of the twentieth century. An important term that Nancy introduces into this discussion is immanence. He notes that both the figure of the “human” in humanist thought and the figure 50
of “human community” in ideas of common being (from the communist ideal to visions of community that have emerged in opposition to it) are organized around immanence—that is, the idea of self-presence or that something is present to itself. For Nancy, “a community presupposed as having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effect, or that it must effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the essence of humanness” (3). Human communities, in other words, when defined as such, always find themselves engaged in defining an identity unique to themselves, and this identity then risks closing in on itself and creating exclusive ideals of humanness. Nancy argues that these visions of immanent community have formed the basis for a series of toxic totalitarianisms, where community is seen as work, an ideal to be accomplished and produced. In short, Nancy is wary of ideals of communal collectivity. Importantly, Nancy is equally critical of the l iberal political tradition that I mentioned above, where the emphasis on autonomy and independence can negate interdependence and human sociality. Nancy’s suggestion, then, is that we should think about the relationship between individuality and collectivity without reference to immanence and instead highlight the idea of singularity and the singular experience of finitude as a basis for the experience of collectivity. Put another way, collectivity can be the shared awareness of non-sharedness, of distance rather than proximity. Recently, theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout has pondered what Nancy’s vision of a community of singularity might mean for theatre 51
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practitioners. In Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love, Ridout identifies theatre practices where theatremaking and theatre-going demonstrate a “communist potential” (11) that has less to do with producing collectivity and more so with drawing attention to singularity or “some kind of distance, in which participants are always separated from one another rather than merged with one another in an achieved community of the event” (11). Ultimately, Chekhov, Nancy, and Ridout push us to rethink the binary separation of autonomous individuality and communal collectivity. The Crowd, the Mass, and the Mob
Earlier, I noted that theatre and performance’s relationship to collectivity is visible as both a thematic concern and a practical question. A brief return to Vershinin’s comments will demonstrate that the thematic and the practical can sometimes merge. In the passage quoted above, Vershinin’s reference to the “dark masses” and the “crowds” of thousands that threaten to “stifle” the delicate Prozoroffs is not a coincidence. Chekhov was writing at the turn of the century, a historical moment when the question of community and its related binary of individuality and collectivity was channeled into a fascination with crowds, their composition, their effects, and their political potential. In fact, Robert Nye notes that the birth of a modern crowd, which was different from pre-modern examples like carnival crowds, took place in this period: the “modern” crowd was the product of late-nineteenth-century political developments that “thrust crowds into a new relationship with politics” (46). 52
On the one hand, Western European nation-states drew on mass ceremonies and public festivals in their efforts to build the nation. On the other, this “nationalization of the masses” (46) coincided with the mass labor activism that grew around new socialist parties and resulted in widespread May Day demonstrations and a new culture of striking. Thus, in Nye’s words, “crowds were no longer merely representative of local or corporate interests but dramatic representations of powerful social and cultural forces in the modern nation-state” (46). These were “the people” who terrified Ibsen’s Professor Kroll and fed his sense of a looming political crisis. Nye notes that the fin-de-siècle responses to the “modern crowd” generally gathered around two poles. The first was a largely uneasy and politically conservative approach that tried to understand the “nature” of crowd behavior. The second was a celebratory fascination that tried to capture its frenzied energy and revolutionary potential. The first of these approaches is represented by French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 work Psychologie des Foules (The Psychology of the Crowd) referenced images of contagion, hypnosis, and automatons to describe the effect of crowd formation on an individual’s will. For Le Bon, crowds were impulsive, easily irritable, and led by unconscious desires that would ordinarily be managed by an individual’s critical abilities. Sigmund Freud would build on Le Bon’s observations in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, arguing that if suggestibility and influence were the mechanisms through which crowds or leaders “hypnotized” 53
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individuals, then the libido or love instincts were central to the bonds that held crowds together. In so far as crowd collectives implied the negation of individual conscience and reason, they were potentially dangerous groupings in need of monitoring. The second approach to crowds can be seen in the theatrical movements that emerged in response to late-nineteenth-century naturalism and realism and composed the early-twentiethcentury avant-garde. For the theatre practitioners involved in Expressionism, Constructivism, Dadaism, and Futurism, theatre provided a living, breathing laboratory in which theories about the nature of the crowd could be put to the test. The founder of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, is an interesting example. Like many artists who identified with the broad swathe of experimentation called the avant-garde, Marinetti was critical of bourgeois culture and of the artistic practices and traditions that had developed around the museums, conservatories, and studios that embodied the tastes of Italy’s ruling elite. (In an important twist, however, Marinetti was not a socialist: He identified fully with industrialized militarism.) Futurist evenings, or serate, involved poetic, theatrical, and cinematic performances in which Marinetti and his peers sought to communicate with the audience in non-rational, nonlinear and often non-verbal ways, unleashing what Marinetti, in his “The Variety Theatre” manifesto of 1913, called fisicofol lia, or body madness (reproduced in Michael Kirby’s Futurist Performance, 179–186). In Italian painter Umberto Boccioni’s marvelous drawing A Futurist Serata (1911), fisicofollia looks a lot like a disorderly crowd: the line between stage and auditorium 54
has been blurred, the futurist actors appear to be trampling over the bodies of passive spectators who lie strewn across the floor, and a discombobulated conductor tries to signal to an orchestra that is in complete disarray. For the Futurists, however, this chaos is precisely the promise of a theatre in which the audience “doesn’t remain static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action” (181). These two approaches to the modern crowd shared an important tendency. For those who feared the crowd, as well as for those who delighted in its chaos, the image of an unruly collective was associated with a lack of rational individual thought and even a lack of communicative language. When lost amid a crowd, in Le Bon’s striking words, individuals “[descended] several rungs in the ladder of civilization” and turned into “primitive beings” driven by instinct and violence (Freud, 12). Le Bon’s image of the primitive as a non-rational, instinctual, and almost prehistoric figure would come to dominate representations of non-Western peoples in the early twentieth century, in an artistic movement called primitivism. At the turn of the century, the colonial expositions and fairs through which non-Western peoples were displayed before Western audiences fed the primitivist tendency and shaped modern racism. Unruly crowds and irrational primitives were tightly bound in the artistic and political imagination of this period, and this bond overflowed into the era’s theatre, often joining primitivism’s nostalgia for a primordial community to its seeming opposite: the growing fear of a heavily industrialized, mechanized mob. 55
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Czech playwright Karel Cˇapek’s expressionist masterpiece RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots: A Fantastic Melodrama) premiered in New York in 1921 and drew on the link between primitivism and industrial production to criticize capitalism. RUR features exaggerated human bodies that have taken an almost geometrical form: Cˇapek uses the term “robot” to describe these mechanized beings, and in fact, this is how the term entered the English language. But Rossum’s universal robots are better likened to clones, or artificially created biological mechanisms. The play takes place on an island, where general manager Domin oversees the creation of these organisms and dreams of a world where the international proletariat will be replaced by these universal robots. “Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor,” he announces; “everybody will live only to perfect himself” (51). If Domin envisions a classless, preindustrial human community, this vision depends on the proliferation of hyper-rational, utilitarian creatures that represent the violence of modern industrial labor. Indeed, Rossum’s original robot formula is consistently tweaked to result in an ever-quicker and more productive organism; even the introduction of pain nerves and suffering are meant to serve as “automatic protection against damage” (48) to the workers’ instruments, their artificial bodies. A decade later, Radius, one of the most developed of the robots, declares that “[humans] are not as strong as the robots. … you only give orders. You do nothing but talk” (91). In the final act, Radius’s robot revolution has imprisoned Domin and his small circle of humans in their 56
island mansion. As they glance out the window, the mass of robots is striking to behold: Dr. Gall: We made the Robots’ faces too much alike. A hundred thousand faces all alike, all facing this way. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles. It’s like a nightmare. Domin: You think if they’d been different – Dr. Gall: It wouldn’t have been such an awful sight! (123–124) This brief exchange encapsulates the uncertainties and fears surrounding the early-twentieth-century idea of the crowd. Domin’s desire to “shatter the servitude of [human] labor” (129), has resulted in a robot proletariat that views humans as “parasites” (117) who slow down their work. Cˇapek’s criticism of modern industrialization and the assembly line is visible in this fantasy workers’ revolution. In RUR, the hundred thousand robotic faces staring at the humans are also terrifying in their undifferentiated expressionlessness, a comment that reflects the era’s tendency to see the crowd as a formation that destroys individuality. Finally, like Freud’s artificial groups, the robot collective exhibits a connection to their leader; unlike Freud’s view of religious congregations or military collectives, however, they have no capacity for developing libidinal bonds among themselves. “There is nothing more terrible than the mob,” Fabry, the head engineer, declares (155), and Cˇapek’s ultimate criticism seems to be directed at a particular kind of modern “mob,” occasioned 57
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by modern warfare, where destruction has become so mechanized that no emotional tie can survive its violence. Another Collective: The Ancient Greek Audience
All of the images of community that I have evoked in this section have hailed from the modern period. But assemblies, crowds, masses, and mobs are not modern phenomena; they are simply represented in new and distinct ways in the modern period. Even the briefest glance at theatre history will remind us that collectives have been there from the start, as a way to trigger thinking not only around the idea of collectivity but also in the material form of an unwieldy mass of human bodies. To illustrate the simultaneity of collectivity as an ideal and an experience, we need look no further than ancient Greece. Simon Goldhill notes that classical Greek life was structured around the experience of collectivity. Whereas the theatre provided perhaps the most obvious practice of collectivity, its related spaces, like the law courts or the assembly, regularly rendered Athenian citizens the members of a civic audience. Goldhill’s numbers are staggering by today’s standards: While fifth-century assembly spaces could easily house 6,000 citizens, theatres could seat anywhere from 14,000 to 17,000 spectators (57), showing that “to be in an audience was not just a thread in the city’s social fabric, it was a fundamental political act” (54). What was important about this political act of civil spectatorship, however, was that it represented both collective democratic participation and the limits of citizenly equality. For example, classical 58
amphitheaters were hardly spaces of universal access or representation: Members of the city’s executive council had a specific seating area, different blocks of seats were reserved for the members of different tribes, foreigners had a specific seating zone, and women and slaves (at least officially) were not present at all. Goldhill writes that In democratic Athens, there was a marked tension between on the one hand collective endeavour, the ideology of citizen equality, and the pre-eminence of the state over the individual, and, on the other, the desire for individual honour, conspicuous personal display and family pride. The spatial dynamics of the audience – with blocks of citizens, and certain authoritative or representative groups or individuals distinguished by honorific seats – dramatizes this central dynamic of Athenian social life. (60) If being a member of an audience was a practice of democratic citizenship, in other words, this practice was experienced on both collective and individual registers, as a form of participation as well as of exclusion. It is no wonder then that classical Greek tragedy is filled with the conflict between the individual and the collective. Sophocles’s Antigone, which was first performed in Athens in approximately 442 bc, comes readily to mind here. The third of Sophocles’s Theban plays features the young Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, whose brothers Polyneices 59
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and Eteocles have fought and perished on opposing sides of Thebes’s civil war. Creon, the new king of Thebes, declares that while Eteocles will be remembered as a collective hero and mourned as such, Polyneices’s body will be left to rot outside the city walls. The young Antigone cannot bear the idea of the unburied body and secretly covers over her brother’s corpse, a crime for which she is punished with her own, premature, burial. As this brief synopsis already indicates, Antigone presents a confrontation between collective laws, mores, and even memories on one hand and an individual’s allegiance to personal or familial imperatives on the other. A lengthy scholarly tradition has read Creon and Antigone’s standoff as a conflict between abstract universality (often associated with both masculinity and state building) and unique particularity (often called autonomous individuality). At the same time, however, scholars have been quick to note that such approaches risk treating the category of “the individual” as an ahistorical concept and reading it into historical circumstances that may not have understood or celebrated autonomy and bounded individuality in modern terms. The fact that Antigone and Polyneices’s presentations as individuals are closely related to their respective deaths pushes us to question the value of individuality in classical Greek life. Antigone brings us back to this section’s basic question about community: What is the relationship between individuality and collectivity? The examples have shown that theatre has historically, in both its thematic concerns and its m aterial practice, embodied the fraught relationship 60
between individual autonomy and collective action. That is not to say that theatre offers a ready-made answer to the question of whether collectivity negates individual conscience, decision-making ability, and rational communication. Rather, theatre has been an important space where we might recognize the stakes of this question: Asking the question of individuality and collectivity has been, at times, a way to think about political agency; at others, a way to think about singularity and finitude; and at yet others, a way to promote both progressive and regressive ideas of race, class, and gender. And the final example of Antigone has reminded us that where community is concerned, (collective) power and (individual) agency may not exist in a purely oppositional relationship. Let’s keep these questions in mind as we turn now to the third set of tropes in the relationship between theatre and community: efficacy and agency. Efficacy and Agency
In scholarship on the intersection of theatre and community, two themes tend to underline activist potential: first, the political effectiveness or efficacy of community formation in promoting progressive causes, and second, the importance of self-expression and agency for the community in question, as well as the individuals that form its parts. Efficacy and agency are often referenced, and rightly so, by scholars who identify community-based theatre and performance’s democratic credentials; at times, however, these commitments risk overgeneralizing the meanings that “community” can acquire in different contexts and different 61
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historical moments. How then can we draw on the analytic and political power of our commitments to efficacy and agency while nonetheless recognizing that these terms are hardly ever givens? How do we celebrate exchange, interaction, and communion without making community into a universally available political ideal? Paradoxical Efficacy
Jacques Rancière’s meditations on theatre, community, and efficacy are a good starting point for thinking through these thorny questions. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière’s misgivings with the relationship between t heatre and community come out of his wariness with a branch of anti-theatrical prejudice that stretches back to Plato: In Western thought, he argues, theatrical spectatorship is routinely dismissed for promoting inaction and passivity. In turn, theatrical reformers from Berthold Brecht to Antonin Artaud have tried to overturn this passivity with different strategies for audience participation. And because criticism of passive spectatorship is closely connected to the idea of spectacle—that is, the individualizing aspect of capitalist consumption—reforming audience passivity has involved imagining theatre audiences as “the active body of a community enacting its living principle” (5). In other words, “the presupposition that theatre is in and of itself communitarian” (16), Rancière argues, comes out of a need to vitalize spectatorship, which is seen as a submissive, apathetic, and individual practice. Community, in this narrative, is active and participatory; it is the sign of an emancipated human. 62
Needless to say, Rancière does not think that physical proximity creates automatic community, adding that whatever power the theatre might have, it would have to be realized via individual processes of meaning-making. At the same time, his skepticism of theatrical community has implications for his understanding of theatre’s efficacy. If traditional oppositions between activity and passivity, or seeing and doing, are to be rethought, then so too must the idea that theatre artists’ intended message or political agenda have a corresponding effect on the theatre spectator. This is where Rancière’s vision of efficacy comes in. Across a number of different examples, he argues that political effects can be realized only through “the suspension of any direct relationship between cause and effect” (73)—in other words, the interruption of a direct transmission of artistic intentions into spectators’ actions. “The aesthetic community,” Rancière ultimately argues, “is a community of dis-identified persons” (73) who do not automatically identify with artists’ causes. Interestingly, Rancière’s criticism of the equivalence of cause and effect is born in part from his participation in a unique generation of political activism. For the intellectuals and workers who came together during the Parisian protests of May 1968, Rancière argues, the struggle had two requirements: According to the first, those who possessed an understanding of the social system had to teach it to those who suffered because of that system so as 63
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to arm them for struggle. According to the second, supposed scholars were in fact ignoramuses who knew nothing about what exploitation and rebellion meant and had to educate themselves among the workers whom they treated as ignoramuses. (18) The transmission of intended knowledge into social action worked in two opposing directions, requiring two sets of active performers as well as two sets of passive spectators. In Rancière’s estimation, the movement’s inability to sidestep the binary of activity and passivity was at the heart of “the ambiguous or failed encounters” (18) that characterized the meeting of workers and intellectuals. We might disagree with Rancière’s evaluation of the outcomes of May 1968, but one thing is clear: The problem that Rancière identifies is not unlike the meeting of artists and community members in projects ranging from community-based theatre and performance to participatory art to theatre for social change. If these “community” projects are premised on reciprocal exchange yet almost always feature asymmetrical power relations (thus containing some measure of passive spectatorship), is there space for Rancière’s “paradoxical kind of efficacy” (63)? Can community theatre and performance practitioners take the political effectiveness of community for granted? Or is community’s efficacy always paradoxical? The politically charged atmosphere of the years leading up to May 1968 provides good examples. Paris-based theatre company Théâtre du Soleil’s 1967 production of 64
Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen is a perfect illustration of the conundrums of theatre and community. The Théâtre du Soleil was founded in 1964 by a collective of artists whose vision of theatre was nourished by their rejection of commercial Paris stages. Wesker’s depiction of the exhaustion experienced by workers in the kitchen of a busy London restaurant channeled the company’s own criticism of capitalist exploitation; but The Kitchen also symbolized their growing interest in community. First, the production’s choreography emphasized a choral quality to reflect the standardized bodily movements and forced collectivity demanded by the kitchen. Second, the company performed the play in factories for working-class audiences and invested in creating a collaborative community of politically conscious artists and workers. Third, the events of May 1968 took these commitments to a new level, pushing the company to adopt equal pay for all members and promote the “collective creation” of future performances. In many ways, then, Théâtre du Soleil’s early career is tailor-made for inclusion in a book on theatre and community. A closer look at Wesker’s play, however, reveals that the kitchen is a space where neither collaboration nor physical proximity guarantee effective consciousness raising; rather, The Kitchen depicts moments when “cause and effect” do not exist in tandem and a space where active participation hardly guarantees community. This is seen in the character of Kevin, a newcomer who struggles to adapt to the kitchen’s routines and to perform his own task amid the repetitive communications that take place around 65
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him. As Kevin screams “Have you all gone fucking, raving, bloody mad?” (54), Wesker’s stage directions tell us that the kitchen’s collective frenzy has acquired a “stylized” quality, a hint that the 1967 production explored by miming the food preparation. In contrast, the workers’ movements acquire individual qualities during the afternoon breaks, when another cook, Peter, rearranges a bunch of dustbins to create a makeshift arch and then sits idly gazing at his creation. In moments like these, Peter’s sensory capacities lose their regular “destinations,” in Rancière’s terms, recalling his definition of aesthetic efficacy as the worker’s ability to give their labor new meanings (71). The result is neither the communication of a political project nor the creation of a collective body of workers. The Kitchen’s political effect is visible in those fleeting moments where it rearranges “the relation between bodies, the world they live in and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ to adapt to it” (72). Of course, Théâtre du Soleil seeks more than these moments of fleeting sensory experience. Rather, they are conscious of the parallels between the kitchen and the theatre—in other words, how easily the promise of a work environment featuring artisanal, fulfilling, and dignified forms of labor can become its opposite. Shocked at the lack of quality and time that characterizes the labor performed in the kitchen, Kevin states that “It must be possible to run a small restaurant that offers good food and also makes money” (39). His statement resonates with Théâtre du Soleil’s early questions: How can theatre artists produce artworks that speak to high aesthetic standards, maintain their 66
collectivist visions, and nonetheless survive in a capitalist economy? The fullest expression of this question is their 1978 film Molière, which is directed by the company’s longterm artistic director Ariane Mnouchkine and portrays the turbulent career of seventeenth-century French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière. As the film depicts the fledgling actor’s meeting with the Béjart theatre family, the forming of the Illustre Théâtre, their nomadic struggle for financial survival, and the eventual attainment of royal patronage, Mnouchkine joins Théâtre du Soleil’s own questions to those of their early modern predecessors: Can an aspiring theatre company that thinks of itself as a quasi-pastoral community survive without private financial sponsorship? When such support does arrive, will it require individual celebrity figures? And how does an ensemble fare in the face of individual professional achievement? In Molière, the playwright’s sociopolitical critiques are at their most powerful when the company’s experience is at its least collective. Efficacy is thus a paradoxical achievement, with no direct link to community. Formed approximately a decade after Théâtre du Soleil, famed Indian street theatre company Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Forum) provokes a different set of q uestions as to the connection between political e fficacy, collective creativity, and financial survival. Jana Natya Manch, or Janam for short, was founded in Delhi in 1973 and grew out of the network of activists associated with the Delhi branch of the formerly active Indian People’s Theatre Association. The group’s politically left orientation led to 67
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the creation of a series of plays that Rancière might associate with the passivity/activity aspect of political effectiveness. Indeed, Arjun Ghosh characterizes Janam’s performances as an “activist intervention” (77) that is meant to raise the audience’s awareness of labor struggles, capitalist exploitation, religious violence, and gender inequality. At the same time, a brief glance at Janam’s turn to street theatre, a strategy that was born of the political repressions that accompanied Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule (1975–1977) and that rendered proscenium productions a financial impossibility, reveals that “the suspension of any direct relation between cause and effect” serves as a liberating theatrical experience only when theatrical expression itself is not under immediate political attack. As a theatre company operating under fragile political circumstances, Janam demonstrates a different relationship to efficacy: Its work and politics are directly aligned with the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Thus political intentions and efficacy cannot be pried apart; instead, the challenge of street theatre is to avoid treating “theatre as mere enacted pamphlets” (80), in Ghosh’s words, by highlighting the aesthetic experience. Where does community fit in? In interviews and statements from long-term Janam participants like Moloyashree Hashmi or Sudhanva Deshpande, references to collective decision-making or collective artistic creation abound, but the term “community” is rarely used as an idiom for an active or enlightened public. In some ways, this a mere lexical coincidence. After all, the Euro-American tendency to study politically engaged theatre through the rubric of 68
community cannot account for the wide-ranging vocabularies that accompany international practices. But the absence of the term might also reveal the specific connotations of community in the Indian context: communalism and communal violence—that is, the treatment of Muslim and Hindu populations as autonomous (and oppositional) groups, as opposed to populations united by common secular citizenship. In postindependence India, where communal (anti-Muslim) violence has accompanied the rise of the Hindu Right, references to community theatre might thus risk reopening the very wounds that the work seeks to heal. In Janam’s 2002 play Yeh Dil Maange More, Guruji (The Heart Desires More, Guruji), written as a response to the mass killings of Muslims in the state of Gujarat the same year, the company uses what Ghosh calls metaphors and abstractions to depict communal difference, and the result is that audiences are as receptive to the play’s p olitical message in the Muslim neighborhoods of Old Delhi as they are in the mixed student environment of the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. In a context where community formation is not an ideal for politically progressive t heatre, aesthetic strategies nonetheless have a direct bearing on theatre’s ability to generate collective responses across ideological lines. Before we turn to the question of agency, our discussion of efficacy in Janam’s work must mention the tragedy of founding member Safdar Hashmi’s death. The actor was killed by anti-union hooligans in Sahibabad in 1989, during a performance of the play Halla Bol, which promoted 69
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worker unionization. The following day, Janam members returned to the same village square to finish their play, performing before the hundreds of spectators who had gathered together in protest. More recently, Hashmi’s death has been remembered alongside the loss of another community theatre activist, the Palestinian-Israeli actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis. Mer Khamis was the director of the Freedom Theatre, which had been founded by his mother Arna Mer Khamis in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank. It had been reopened by Mer Khamis in 2006, following its destruction by the Israel Defense Forces. The Freedom Theatre offered courses in drama therapy and a rigorous training in theatre, film, and related creative arts, and it had its own complicated relationship with ideals of community. When Mer Khamis was shot to death inside the theatre in 2011, he had just finished working on Alice in Wonderland, a production whose sexual content was deemed “immoral” by the Palestine Education Ministry (Mee, 13). I mention Hashmi and Mer Khamis’s deaths here to underline the fragility of ideals of theatrical community, and the often-inverse relationship between political efficacy and pragmatic survival for community artists active in a volatile global landscape. “If the ontology of live performance is disappearance,” Shayoni Mitra writes, referencing Peggy Phelan’s famed statement on how performance’s very nature is to disappear, “political performers like Hashmi and Mer Khamis exacerbate this extremity through their own tragic effacement” (14). In such contexts, the relationship between community and efficacy no longer functions in predictable 70
ways. There is no direct connection between community and the political effectiveness of artistic projects that seek to draw on the power of this grouping. Contingent Agency
While efficacy is a frequent reference point in scholarship on community-based theatre, it is ultimately the question of agency that has oriented critical approaches from theatre and performance studies to art history. What is agency in the relationship between theatre and community? Agency refers to self-expression, to an individual or a community’s ability to articulate their viewpoint about a particular experience, and to their opportunity to exercise influence over the process of communal artmaking. This does not mean, however, that agency is always easy to define or recognize nor that individual and communal agency exist on a continuum. For example, agency becomes far more difficult to identify when the experiences of marginalized groups are expressed, but only to promote social needs that have already been prescribed in advance. Similarly, the ideal of communal agency always risks producing harmful expectations of commonality, promoting what Miwon Kwon calls “a mythic unity that gathers into its folds a range of particular persons and their experiences” (120). Theatre history features many examples of individual figures being adapted into emblems of collective agency. Margaret Litvin’s work on Arab adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an excellent example of this process: Litvin argues that modern Arab commentators 71
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have appropriated one of Western civilization’s most recognizable emblems of individual agency, the dispossessed character of Hamlet, as a figure for communal agency. In Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, Litvin argues that this development is partly a product of Arabic grammar, which lacks the infinitive form and thus transforms the classic question of “to be or not to be” into “shall we be or not be?” (18). But the resilience with which the figure of Hamlet resurfaces in twentieth-century Arab thought points to a broader questioning of “the very grounds of a continuous [Arab] collective identity” (19), a question for which Hamlet’s existential crisis appears a comfortable analogy. The point here is that a figure whose story has become synonymous with the search for an authentic selfrepresentation is easily appropriated to become a symbol of communal homogeneity. Individual self-realization and communal self-realization can indeed look similar in certain circumstances but assuming that this is always the case risks homogenizing the community in question. Postcolonial drama is an excellent space for considering this risk, and Wole Soyinka’s seminal play Death and the King’s Horseman, first performed in New York in 1975, is a good example. Soyinka’s play is based on a real incident that took place in the Yoruban city of Oyo, in present-day Nigeria, in 1946, when the British colonial authorities stopped the horseman of the recently deceased Yoruban king from dying by ritual suicide in honor of his former sovereign. In Death and the King’s Horseman, the events are adapted to coincide with the turmoil of the Second 72
World War and symbolize the conflict between the British authorities, embodied by the clumsy district officer Simon Pilkings, and the Yoruban community, whose seemingly shared traditions are represented by the horseman, Elesin. At first glance, the play appears to oppose two approaches to the relationship between community and agency. Soyinka presents us with the British settlers’ colonial community, for whom Elesin’s act is a barbaric custom, not the act of a free agent. In Pilking’s imagination, Yorubans are “sly, devious bastards” (29) who are cagey about their community’s internal affairs, thus cementing Pilking’s feeling that they compose an extended family fastened or even coerced together through tradition and custom. Soyinka also gives us the colonized population, for whom Elesin’s ritual sacrifice is a symbol of their collective’s historicity and well-being and meaningful for their unity because it is an act of individual will. Indeed, in the scene that forms the conceptual fulcrum of the play, Jane Pilkings and Elesin’s son Olunde, who has traveled to Oyo to attend his father’s funeral, debate the virtues of an individual’s decision to end their own life. Olunde points out that the captain of a British warship loaded with ammunition has recently decided to take his own life to ensure the well-being of a larger population. Although Jane insists that “life should never be thrown deliberately away” (51), this act of self-sacrifice does not appear to cause her as much consternation as Elesin’s ritual suicide. The problem then is one concerning the relationship between individuality and community: the decision to end one’s own life is only 73
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recognizable as a form of agency when undertaken by a solitary subject faced with events of world-historical magnitude. Conversely, individual ritual suicide involves a community whose (seeming) coercion denies the individual’s autonomy and agency. In his author’s note to the play, however, Soyinka famously refuses the label of a “clash of cultures,” adding that the play captures “the universe of the Yoruba mind” experiencing a metaphysical transformation through the sacrifice of Elesin. What is important for our purposes is that Soyinka does not identify this experience with a Turner-like communitas: the Yorubans are not a collective with shared metaphysical aspirations, no matter Elesin’s symbolic role. Instead, Elesin, the very figure whose passing represents communal rebirth, is depicted as a failed individual, and his ritual’s interruption is caused not by British intervention but by his own delay, his last-minute weakness for worldly pleasures. Throughout the play, versions of Elesin’s contradictions are reflected in both the European and the Yoruban characters, and few figures enjoy an authentic, coherent identity. This includes the British-educated Olunde, whose self-conscious decision to perform his father’s aborted suicide cannot re-create a failed “gesture of will” (86) as Olakunle George argues. Why might this be important for thinking about collectivity and agency? What Soyinka demonstrates is the difficulty of identifying acts of willful agency: acts that are spurred by unmediated motivations meant to display the values and desires of authentic individuals or collectives. 74
Where postcolonial theory in particular is concerned, Soyinka is not interested in showing a colonized community whose ahistorical unity is preserved through mythical actions. Rather, as George argues, Soyinka’s play dramatizes the difficulty of seeing the Yoruba worldview as a “collective protagonist” (85) and retrieving an authentic Yoruban culture that existed before colonial intervention. Simply put, communal agency cannot be taken for granted in postcolonial modernity, what George calls a “global village” (84), where “the universe of the Yoruba mind” is no longer an isolated sphere but shaped by forces other than the Yoruba worldview. Instead, agency is contingent and vulnerable, and despite the fact that an individual, tragic protagonist like Elesin can, at times, represent the aspirations of a larger collective, the relationship between the individual and the collective will always remain fraught with contradiction. Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project’s documentary play The Laramie Project chronicles an entirely different historical moment and geographic context, but its relationship to questions of violence, retrieval, and the agency of collective representation resonate with Soyinka’s world. Much like Death and the King’s Horseman, The Laramie Project’s starting motivation is to chronicle the circumstances that surround a tragic loss, that of twenty-one-yearold gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, who was beaten, tortured, and abandoned by two young men whom he had met in a local bar in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. In the weeks and months that followed Shepard’s 75
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murder, members of the Tectonic Theatre Project traveled to Laramie to conduct interviews with those who had known Shepard, as well as residents who sought to give meaning to the brutal event that had put their small town in a global media spotlight. Drawing on the cumulative data of more than two hundred interviews and using a Brechtian aesthetic that divided the narrative into separate episodes, The Laramie Project premiered in Denver, Colorado, in 2000, eventually traveling back to Laramie, where it was performed later that year. The Laramie Project highlights the question of agency and collectivity in a number of ways. The project satisfies the elemental requirements of “community-based theatre” because it features the inhabitants of a locality narrating the history, norms, and meaning of their town. The members of the Tectonic Theatre Project form a second “community,” and their discomfort with their ethnographic fieldwork in Laramie permeates the play’s narrative as much as the voices of the Laramie residents. Formally, then, the question of agency arises from the tension between these two communities, and the play’s editorial choices reveal the fraught nature of collective representation. An expert collective edits hours of ethnographic data and oral historical testimonies into a composition, and their artistic concerns modify these incoherent narratives into familiar genre conventions. In the play, the residents of Laramie appear every bit as aware of the limits of theatrical agency as the Tectonic actors. For example, university student Zubaida Ula is both surprised and concerned by the role 76
of documentary theatre: “You’re gonna be on stage in New York and you’re gonna be acting like you’re us. That’s so weird” (24), she tells company member Stephen Belber, drawing attention not only to documentary theatre’s uneasy claim to authenticity but also to the literal distance that separates Laramie (“us”) from New York, the home of the theatre company. Jill Dolan has noted that the binary between a quasi-pastoral Laramie community and an urban New York associated with “virtuosic, redeeming allure” (129) reproduces the Romantic narrative of community and ultimately undercuts the play’s claim to an immediate collective, the transparent “we” of the spectator community gathered in condemning violence. The Tectonic Theatre Project is likewise aware that their artistic aspirations are in fact producing Laramie as such. In other words, much like Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, which features a stage manager whose meta-theatrical commentary allows the audience to witness the constructedness of the fictional yet folksy Grover’s Corners, Laramie emerges as a definite geography with a definite meaning as a result of the Tectonic Theatre Project’s artistic project. In The Laramie Project, then, community and agency are rendered unstable on several layers: the “community” on display is a product of the Tectonic Theatre Company’s formal choices, and the very idea of the Wyoming prairie as a space of pastoral community takes place within a binary in which community opposes urbanity. Finally, the limits of theatrical agency are embodied by the absent presence of Matthew Shepard himself and the way in which 77
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his imaginatively reconstructed story is made to speak to a broader struggle. Matthew Shepard’s death becomes meaningful and mournable, in other words, when he is positioned as the symbol for a broader community of victims. Where then does The Laramie Project leave us with regard to the relationship between theatre and community? Interestingly, the play itself offers idioms of both individual and collective transformation through performance. For example, University of Wyoming student Jedediah Schultz wants to become an actor and picks a monologue from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play about the AIDS crisis, simply because it lends itself to virtuosic acting. By the end of the play, his involvement in performance has transformed his capacity for empathy, pushing him to shed his former homophobia and indifference. Likewise, Laramie residents Harry Woods and Matt Galloway speak of the awe they feel when a homecoming parade turns into an impromptu march in honor of Matthew Shepard; both men interpret the “mass of people” (61) to be the sign of a transforming community. Jill Dolan writes of having been moved by these narratives of transformation and yet is quick to note that they cannot represent agency or efficacy in the relationship between actors and spectators. Dolan recounts that at the Austin, Texas, performance of The Laramie Project, the actors wanted to extend the theme of collective transformation into the audience, asking each spectator to reach beneath their seats for a pre-planted candle to enact “the sparkling lights of Laramie” (98) mentioned in the play’s closing line. She adds that whereas some audience members participated in this 78
fleeting experience of communitas to “metaphorically represent the citizens of Laramie” (131), others resisted, choosing not to hold their candles. Their reasons for doing so could be multiple, she notes, from refusing an overtly sentimental invitation, to denying their connection to queer lives. Moments like these embody the very contingency of agency in community and the limitations of an analytic lens that binds the realization of one to the affirmation of the other. Judith Butler has drawn attention, in her recent work (2015) on public assembly, to the power of bodies assembling in public space, arguing that the plurality of these forms of bodily presence enact a claim, whether or not this declaration is ultimately vocalized in a coherent and collective form. These forms of assembly represent a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity. (11) Butler goes on to argue that this assembly’s spontaneity, its ephemerality, silence, or disappearance do not take away from its fundamental importance as a form of political enact ment. As the example of the Austin performance makes clear, we must imagine the (equally spontaneous yet ephemeral) space of theatre as one of plural performativity, where 79
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both artists and spectators can “act in concert” to call the political field into question. But what the example of Austin also demonstrates is the difficulty of ascribing a political will to this space and the unpredictability of a theatrical field where efficacy and agency are shifting targets. The relationship between theatre and community is characterized by the flexibility and unpredictability of both terms, and this conjunction ultimately demonstrates theatre’s fundamental openness to possibility: As I hope to have shown, theatre looks like an exemplary space of community formation and collectivity, yet a closer look at both historical and contemporary examples demonstrates that it complicates rather than confirms this expectation. What remains in the place of this confirmation is theatre’s critical function, as a space that pushes us to pose questions even as we need, demand, and pursue answers.
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further reading
All of the scholars that I have cited in this book are listed below. Here, I would like to draw attention to several important texts. The scholarly literature on community spans a number of disciplinary traditions: W. Richard Goe and Sean Noonan’s “The Sociology of Community” provides a good overview of sociological approaches to community. Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community remains the primary reference point for anthropological attention. JeanLuc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, and Etienne Balibar’s We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, have been central to recent continental debates on the philosophical question of community. Meanwhile, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek’s Contingency, Hegemony, Universality and Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers work through a series of concepts related to community, such as cosmopolitanism, conviviality, and the relationship between political universality and particularity. 81
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In theatre and performance studies, the dialogue has ranged equally widely. Petra Kuppers’s Community Performance: An Introduction is an excellent textbook that provides an introduction to the broad range of artistic activity that has been classified under “community arts practices.” Its companion volume, The Community Performance Reader, is edited by Kuppers and Gwen Robertson and serves as an anthology of critical approaches to community performance. Key texts on community-based theatre include Jan Cohen-Cruz’s Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States, Sonja Kuftinec’s Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, and Harry J. Elam Jr.’s Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Whereas Robert H. Leonard and Ann Kilkelly’s Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted in Eight US Communities provides a good overview of the American context, Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus’s Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance provides a much-needed international perspective. Miwon Kwon and Grant Kester’s work serve as excellent entry points into related discussions on site-specific and public art in art history, and Shannon Jackson and Claire Bishop’s work encapsulates the interdisciplinary debates about participatory art. Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. M inneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
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Appiah, Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational C itizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso, 2012. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Groups, 2001. Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana. Calgary: Broadview Press, 2014. Brady, Sara. ‘Welded to the Ladle: Steelbound and Non-Radicality in Community-Based Theatre.’ TDR:The Drama Review 44.3 (2000): 51–74. Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom 1850–1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Buckley, Matthew S. ‘Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity’s Loss.’ Theatre Journal 61.2 (2009): 175–190. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London and New York: Verso, 2000. Cˇ apek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama. Trans. Paul Selver. New York: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1928. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Chekhov, Anton. The Three Sisters: A Drama in Four Acts. New York and London: Samuel French Ltd, 1941. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Cole, Catherine, and Tracy C. Davis. ‘Routes of Blackface.’ TDR: The Drama Review 57.2 (2013): 7–12.
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Dinçer, Fahriye. ‘Afife Jale on the Stage: Questioning Female Identity in Theatre, Late Ottoman and Early Republican Modernization P rocesses.’ Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World. Eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014. 393–409. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Eakin Moss, Anne. Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860-1940. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, Forthcoming 2019. Elam Jr., Harry J. Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.’ Social Text 25–26 (1990): 56–80. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989. George, Olakunle. ‘Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.’ Representations 67 (1999): 67–91. Ghosh, Arjun. ‘Performing Change/Changing Performance: An Exploration of the Life of a Street Play by the Jana Natya Manch.’ Asian Theatre Journal 27.1 (2010): 76–99. Goe, W. Richard, and Sean Noonan. ‘The Sociology of Community.’ 21st Century Sociology: A Reference Handbook. Eds Clifton D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2007. 455–465. Goldhill, Simon. ‘The Audience of Athenian Tragedy.’ The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Ed. P.E. Easterling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 54–69. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Haedicke, Susan C., and Tobin Nellhaus. Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
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Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York and Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 1997. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1999. Hugo, Victor. ‘Hernani.’ World Drama: Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Russia and Norway. Ed. Barrett H. Clark. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1933: 293–345. Ibsen, Henrik. Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen. New York: The Modern Library, 1957. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Kaufman, Moisés, and Members of Tectonic Theater Project. The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project Ten Years Later. New York: Vintage Books, 2014. Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Interven tion. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1971. Kuftinec, Sonja. Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Kuppers, Petra. Community Performance: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Kuppers, Petra, and Gwen Robertson, eds. The Community Performance Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2004. Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2001. Leonard, Robert H., and Ann Kilkelly, eds. Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted in Eight US Communities. New York: New Village Press, 2006.
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Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm. Ed. William Steel. London: Dent, 1967. Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Mee, Erin. ‘Juliano Mer Khamis: Murder, Theatre, Freedom, Going Forward.’ TDR: The Drama Review 55.3 (2011): 9–17. Mitra, Shayoni. ‘The Unimaginable Impact.’ TDR: The Drama Review 55.3 (2011): 14–15. Mizrahi, Daryo. ‘Language and Sexuality in Ottoman Shadow-Puppet Performances.’ Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World. Eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014: 275–293. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: W ritings by Radical Women of Color. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Mnouchkine, Ariane. Molière. Paris: Bel Air Classiques, 2017. Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 2008. Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Nye, Robert. ‘Savage Crowds, Modernism, Modern Politics.’ Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Eds Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 42–55. Öztürkmen, Arzu. ‘The Park, the Penguin and the Gas.’ TDR: The Drama Review 58.3 (2014): 39–68. Potuog˘ lu-Cook, Öykü. ‘Hope With Qualms: A Feminist Analysis of the 2013 Gezi Protests.’ Feminist Review 109.1 (2015): 96–123. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. L ondon: Verso, 2009.
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Ridout, Nicholas. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015. Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 1997. Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. New York and London: W. W. Norton Company, 2002. Tönnies, Ferdinand. ‘Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.’ The Sociology of Community. Eds Colin Bell and Howard Newby. Portland: Frank Cass and Company, 1974. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Wesker, Arnold. Arnold Wesker’s Social Plays. London: Oberon Books, 2009. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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index
Brecht, Berthold, 62 Brooks, Daphne, 32 Brown, Wendy, 27–28, 44 Buckley, Matthew S., 28 Butler, Judith, 13, 44, 46, 79–80, 81
abstract individual, 24, 42, 43 Agamben, Giorgio, 81 agency, 16, 19–20, 21, 61, 71–79 Ancient Greece, 58–60 Anderson, Benedict, 11 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 13 Appiah, Anthony, 81 Artaud, Antonin, 62 autonomy, 12, 42–43, 51, 60, 74
Cˇapek, Karel, 56–57 Chatterjee, Partha, 34 Chekhov, Anton, 48–50, 52 Chicanx Theatre, 15 Cohen-Cruz, Jan, 14, 15, 82 Cole, Catherine, 32 collective creation, 65 colonialism, 11, 24, 72–75 communitas, 17, 22, 74, 79 community and capitalism, 9–10, 19 and identity politics, 13 and immanence, 50–51 and liberalism, 11–12 and modernity, 7–9, 36–37
Balibar, Etienne, 12, 81 bildung, 24–25 Bishop, Claire, 19, 82 blackface, 32 Boal, Augusto, 17 Boccioni, Umberto, 54–55 Bog˘aziçi Gösteri Sanatları Toplulug˘u, 41 Boucicault, Dion, 30–32 bourgeoisie, 33–34, 38 Brady, Sara, 18–20
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Goldhill, Simon, 58–59 Gündüz, Erdem, 44–47
and nationalism, 11, 28–32, 40 and race, 2–4, 30–32 and society, 7–8 and universality, 24–27 community theatre, 14–21, 23, 61–64, 76–78 Cornerstone Theatre, 19 crowd, 49, 52–55 Crown Heights, 1–4
Habermas, Jürgen, 33–34, 39 Haedicke, Susan C., 82 Hartman, Saidiya, 31–32 Hashmi, Moloyashree, 68 Hashmi, Safdar, 69–70 Holy Roman Empire, 25, 29 hooks, bell, 13 Hugo, Victor, 28–30
Davis, Angela, 3 Davis, Tracy, 32 Deshpande, Sudhanva, 68 Dinçer, Fahriye, 40 Dolan, Jill, 22, 77–79
Ibsen, Henrik, 35–37 India, 67–70 Jackson, Shannon, 19, 82 Jana Natya Manch, 67–70 Joseph, Miranda, 8–10, 81
Eakin Moss, Anne, 49–50 efficacy, 16, 19, 21, 61–66, 67–68, 70–71 Elam Jr., Harry J., 82 El Teatro Campesino, 14–15 enlightenment, 24–25, 27 Ertug˘rul, Muhsin, 41
Karagöz, 39 Kaufman, Moisés, 75 Kershaw, Baz, 15 Kester, Grant, 20, 82 Kilkelly, Ann, 82 Kuftinec, Sonja, 15, 82 Kuppers, Petra, 21, 82 Kwon, Miwon, 20–21, 71, 82
Fanon, Frantz, 11 France, 27–30 Fraser, Nancy, 34 Freedom Theatre, 70 Free Southern Theatre, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 53–54, 55, 57 Futurism, 54–55
Laclau, Ernesto, 81 Le Bon, Gustave, 53, 55 Leonard, Robert H., 82 Lessing, Gothold Ephraim, 25–27 liberal political theory, 43–44, 51 liminality, 17 Litvin, Margaret, 71–72 Lott, Eric, 32
George, Olakunle, 74–75 Germany, 24–27 Ghosh, Arjun, 68–69 Goe, W. Richard, 81
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race, 24, 27, 28, 30–32 Rancière, Jacques, 62–64, 66 realism, 33, 35 Ridout, Nicholas, 51–52 Robertson, Gwen, 82 Russia, 48–49
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 54–55 melodrama, 28–32 Mendelssohn, Moses, 26 Mer Khamis, Juliano, 70 Mitra, Shayoni, 70 Mizrahi, Daryo, 39 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 67 mob, 55–57 Moi, Toril, 36–37 Moraga, Cherríe, 13, 15 multiculturalism, 12 Muñoz, José, 22–23
Shakespeare, William, 41, 71–72 Shepard, Matthew, 75–78 singularity, 50–52 Smith, Anna Deavere, 2–4 Sophocles, 59 Soyinka, Wole, 72–75 spectatorship, 62–64 Steelbound, 18–20
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 50–51, 81 Nellhaus, Tobin, 82 neoliberalism, 44, 45 new genre public art, 20 Nigeria, 72 Noonan, Sean, 81 Nye, Robert, 52–53
Tectonic Theatre Project, 75–77 Théâtre du Soleil, 64–67 Theatre Rhinoceros, 9–10, 13 Touchstone Theatre, 18, 19 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 8 Turkey, 38–42, 44–45 Turner, Victor, 17
Ottoman Empire, 37–42 Öztürkmen, Arzu, 45 Palestine, 70 participatory art, 18–19 people, 35–37 Potuog˘lu-Cook, Öykü, 45 primitivism, 55 public opinion, 34 sphere, 33–35, 39 versus private, 33–34, 35
Van Gennep, Arnold, 17 Warner, Michael, 34 Wesker, Arnold, 65–66 Wilder, Thornton, 77 Williams, Raymond, 5, 7–8 Workers Theatre Movement, 16 Zizek, Slavoj, 81
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acknowledgements
M
any of the ideas presented here were first discussed in the context of my graduate seminar under the title “Framing the Modern: Theatre and Community,” which took place in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Bog˘aziçi University. I am grateful to my students for thinking through my case studies and sharpening my early questions. Charlotte McIvor and Rüstem Ertug˘ Altınay provided invaluable suggestions on the first draft, and Jen Harvie and the anonymous reviewer provided the key feedback that gave the manuscript its final form. I thank them all. Finally, Bog˘aziçi University Research Fund Grant Number 13361 supported the writing of Theatre & Community.
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