The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy: Analysing Theatre as a Social Practice 9789048530274

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The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy

The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy Analysing Theatre as a Social Practice

Joshua Edelman Louise Ejgod Hansen Quirijn Lennert van den Hoogen

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration and frontispiece: Members of the Dolls’ Party at the City Hall in Aarhus. The Doll’s Party negotiates the balance between politics and performance by being a political party subsidized by the Danish Arts Foundation. (Credits: Dukkepartiet) Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. 978 94 6298 079 2 isbn 978 90 4853 027 4 e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789462980792 nur 670 © J. Edelman, L.E. Hansen, Q.L. van den Hoogen / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Acknowledgements The position that this book takes in the fields of theatre studies and art sociology—as well as the collaborative relationship between its three authors—owes its primary debt to our mentor, Hans van Maanen. Intellectually, our thinking has been greatly shaped by his mixed-method perspective on art sociology. We also follow his argument in How to Study Art Worlds (2009) that the study of art from a sociological perspective needs to be complemented with philosophical concepts in order to fully understand the importance of the arts to society. The book has grown out of our work with the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP), a group of sociologically-minded theatre scholars from seven smaller European countries, which aims to understand theatre as a social system as it differs between countries, under the leadership of Professors Hans van Maanen and Andreas Kotte. STEP has been our intellectual and personal support in developing this project. The three of us came together as the ‘politics section’ of STEP in its first book, Global Changes, Local Stages (2009), alongside our friend and colleague Ott Karulin, who has helped shape and critique this project from its early days. Thus, this book draws its examples largely from smaller European theatre systems; many of them were provided by our STEP colleagues. Our work with STEP has showed us just how powerful and yet ill-described the concept of autonomy has been. In The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy, we try to offer a particular lens for the systematic comparisons of theatre systems, which is STEP’s ultimate goal. We hope this contribution is a small gesture towards our gratitude to STEP—and Prof. Van Maanen in particular—for all the wisdom and support they have offered us over the years. A great many colleagues have offered detailed readings and critical feedback of drafts of all or portions of this book. These helpful interlocutors include Peter Eversmann, Tony Fisher, Pascal Gielen, Lynne Kendrick, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Thijs Lijster, Sigrid Merx, Lucia van Heteren, Barend van Heusden, Anneli Saro and Kees Vuyk. We are grateful for their time and wisdom. While the insights that this book might offer owe a great deal to their advice, responsibility for any mistakes remains our own.



Table of Contents

Introduction 11 1. How can we define autonomy? 1.1. The formula 1.2. The development and nature of specific capital 1.3. Actions of agents in theatre fields: Position-taking 1.4. Agents in theatre fields 1.5. Is theatre different? 1.6. Conclusion

25 27 34 42 44 47 50

2. The concept of artistic autonomy 2.1. The functional perspective on art 2.2. Dickie, Danto and Becker: Art as an institution 2.3. Actor-Network Theory: Critique of field theory 2.4. Boltanski and Thévenot: Art and value regimes 2.5. Conclusion

51 52 62 66 68 73

3. Autonomy in the contemporary theatre 3.1. Two forms of the argument against theatrical autonomy 3.2. Post-dramatic and immersive theatre 3.3. Verbatim and documentary theatre 3.4. Applied and community theatre 3.5. Commercial theatre and stand-up comedy 3.6. Conclusion

75 76 79 83 87 90 96

4. How agents in theatre fields make use of claims to autonomy 97 4.1. Claims to autonomy influence the shape of the theatre field 97 4.2. Things that autonomy allows agents to do 107 4.3. Conclusion 122 5. How theatre organization shapes claims to autonomy 5.1. Funding systems 5.2. Training 5.3. The relationship between production and distribution 5.4. Internationalization 5.5. The relationship between national and regional subsidy 5.6. Conclusion

127 128 152 155 158 161 163

6. How claims to autonomy serve those outside theatre fields 6.1. Moral betterment and education 6.2. Issues of self-representation 6.3. Economic development 6.4. Social inclusion 6.5. Conclusion

167 169 172 181 189 195

Conclusion 199 References 205 About the Authors

217

Index 219



List of Figures and Tables

Figure 1. Relationships within and beyond the theatrical field 17, 201 Figure 2. Bourdieu’s representation of the French literary field of the second half of the 19th century (Bourdieu 1993a, 49) 35 Table 1. Table 2. Table 3. Table 4. Table 5.

How contemporary forms of theatre critique and use claims to autonomy Reasons why agents in theatre f ields make claims to theatrical autonomy (non exhaustive list) Different types of funding arrangements and the values they entail Impact of organizational features of theatres system on theatrical autonomy How claims to theatrical autonomy can be useful to agents outside theatre fields

94 124 149 164 196

Introduction When we go to the theatre, we understand that we are doing something different. It is not just that sitting and watching others for two hours (or performing for others’ gazes) is different than other daily activities; it is that theatre itself is a particular social setting, obeying its own rules and operating by its own standards. That difference makes theatre feel free and unencumbered by many of the things that tie us to society and the world in the rest of our lives. Of course, this feeling is misleading. Theatre may be distinct, but it is still connected to the wider world. Performances may be built out of the forms, ideas and material from the ‘real world’, and as audience members, we may take the experiences, stories and insights we find in the theatre with us when we leave, and make use of them in our daily lives. How is it, then, that theatre is distinct from—and yet connected to—the social world around it? This book explores that question. We aim to describe the particular relationship that theatre has to the larger social world, how that relationship works, what it enables theatre to do and how it can change. When scholars want to refer to the difference between an art form like theatre and the rest of our lives, they refer to artistic autonomy. The concept makes intuitive sense to us as theatregoers: we recognize theatre’s difference from other aspects of our lives. Theatre makers also recognize their field’s autonomy. They know that, when they engage in their work, they ‘play the game of theatre’ and make conscious and unconscious decisions according to or against the rules of that game. But they are also aware that this autonomy is not absolute. They still need to earn a living, communicate with others, vote, eat, make ethical decisions and so on. And even a theatrical performance itself is not completely free: to work, it needs to be funded, produced, distributed, advertised, attended and comprehended, all of which involve links with the outside world. And yet, the particularity of theatre remains. There is a tension here. On the one hand, theatre makers and theatregoers want theatre to be something distinct from ordinary life. On the other hand, they know that theatre depends on a web of relationships with the rest of the world. How those relationships are, or ought to be, negotiated, is what we call the problem of theatrical autonomy. All the arts share this problem, to some degree, and it is one that has been debated at length by philosophers, sociologists, artists and policymakers for centuries. Debates about autonomy have been one of the central ways that scholars have come

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to discuss the roles that the arts can play in the larger social world. There has, however, been relatively little attention paid to the autonomy of the theatre. This is a pity, as the theatre has a particularly rich and complex set of relationships to the world around it, which merit description and analysis. With this book, we aim to provide theatre scholars, practitioners and students a workable understanding of the dynamics of theatre’s negotiation of the problem of autonomy. We do this in two steps. First, we will examine the concept of autonomy itself, and how that concept manifests itself in theatre’s relationships (Chapters 1 and 2) and why it is relevant to the analysis of theatre, even those contemporary forms that seem to deny its existence altogether (Chapter 3). Second, we will provide examples of how these negotiations operate in concrete theatrical settings in order to provide our readers with a clearer understanding of how the struggles over autonomy act as powerful and effective mechanisms within and around theatre fields (Chapters 4 to 6). It is our view that a good understanding of these mechanisms is a useful tool in efforts to understand theatre as a social practice. Autonomy, as an organizing concept, helps us to understand the role of theatre in society, the way that theatre relates to other activities, and the nature of theatre as a social art form. It is an idea that is ‘good to think with,’ in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s phrase (1969). Studying the negotiations over autonomy will help contribute to the continuing effort to analyse theatre not just as an artistic craft, but as a particular sort of social practice with a particular set of social functions. Contemporary theatre studies has increasingly found great value in such an analysis. The ‘theatrical event’ approach of Willmar Sauter (2000) is, in part, based on using a wider and more nuanced social view of the practices of theatre-making and theatre-going in order to paint a more detailed and accurate portrait of theatre’s aesthetic qualities and formal developments. Others have followed in his wake (see Cremona et al. 2004). Increasingly, scholars and artists realize that it is simply not enough to describe the work theatre does without describing its place in, and relationships to, the rest of society. We hope this book will contribute to that effort.

A first understanding of theatrical autonomy Through the centuries, many different thinkers have tried to specify exactly what it is that differentiates theatre—or the arts in general—from the rest of human activity. Some have defined that difference as the gap between accurate testimony and unreliable imitation, or between effective action

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and symbolic behaviour, or between rationality and emotionalism, or between the sacred and the profane.1 We have a different idea. We see the distinction between theatre (and other art forms) and the rest of social life as a consequence of the autonomy of theatre. This means that the distinction is not primarily a property of this or that work of art, but rather an idea that flows from theatre’s status as a social field, an organized area of human endeavour with common understandings, values and practices. Field is a meso-level concept: it does not refer to the whole of human society or culture (the macro) or to an individual artwork or act of artistic engagement (the micro), but to a level between the two. A field is an area of social activity that is relatively stable and exists alongside (and in contrast to) other areas of social activity. Autonomy, in general, is what makes one field distinct and separate from others. This view will be fleshed out in the following chapter, but two important points now. First, because no social field is completely separate from all others, autonomy is always a matter of degree—which is why negotiations over it are so dynamic and illuminating. Second, the arts are not unique in this. Any field that is (to some degree) distinct and separate from others can be said to have (some degree of) autonomy, and this is frequently the subject of debate. In the legal and academic fields, for instance, one finds debates over the appropriate relationships between that field and others (such as the political field), how those relationships should be organized, and what standards should govern. While other fields may have similar debates, the problem of artistic autonomy is particularly acute and important, and it has attracted a great deal of philosophical attention. The reason for this is that, since around the mid-eighteenth century, the arts have been understood as a special realm, where the practical, political and ethical concerns that dominate modern life did not apply. We will address this in Chapter 2, where we present different philosophers’ understandings of the function of art in modern society and how they are closely related to the concept of autonomy. Within the arts, 1 Each of these distinctions has a particular name and intellectual history. Roughly, the first is Plato’s notion of mimesis and the reason for his distrust of poetry (Plato, Republic, Book X); the second comes from J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory in which he explained how the theatrical context makes those performative utterances which occur within it necessarily ‘infelicitous’ or, ineffective (Austin 1975, 17–20); the third references the modernist (and pre-modernist) antitheatrical prejudice as described by Jonas Barish (1981) and analysed by Martin Puchner (2002) amongst others; and the last refers to the supposed ritual origins of theatre as put forward (quite differently!) by both Nietzsche (1999) and the Cambridge Ritualists (see Segal 1997) and criticized by Eli Rozik (2002).

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the case of theatre is, again, particularly difficult. It is often considered a less autonomous art form than, say, poetry or contemporary classical music. It requires more people and more resources than other art forms, its audience is much broader than an educated elite, and its material is the day-to-day realities of human life and human relationships. For some, that makes any claims it might make to autonomy more suspicious (see Chapter 1). These problems, in our minds, simply make the relationship between the theatre and the rest of society all the more flexible and responsive, and the issue of its autonomy all the more interesting. Let us be more precise as to the area of our study. Like autonomy, the concept of theatre will make intuitive sense to most readers, though this does not mean that it does not need to be specified more precisely. The idea that one or more people (theatre makers, performers) perform some actions (often for pay) for the viewing pleasure of one or more (often paying) others (the audience) in a way that is somehow different from the rest of our daily life forms the core of the notion of theatre.2 The elements of simulation, play and performativity are key in such a notion and can be witnessed in many concrete social situations that will be seen as ‘theatre’ by most participants in society, whether they are in specifically designed buildings or outdoors, whether they are for a general audience that has bought a ticket or for specific audiences (such as school children or prison inmates) who have been assembled for this occasion, whether they are realistic dramas or abstract pieces involving music, song, dance and movement. Even concrete practices that seem to defy these essential characteristics of theatre such as documentary theatre (denying the idea of simulation), ‘invisible’ theatre (denying its separateness from everyday life) or participatory theatre (denying the distinction between performer and spectator) can intuitively make sense to us as ‘theatre’. It is not our aim here to rigidly define what theatre is (or could be). But we do want to be clear that the dynamics of autonomy that we are describing here remain relevant to the contemporary, expanded world of theatre and performance. As we will describe in Chapter 3, contemporary performance practices do question traditional notions of autonomy and use them in new ways, but they still participate in the negotiation of theatre’s autonomy from, and relationships to, the rest of our social life. The concept of autonomy still has an influence, one which we will trace throughout the book with examples of how both contemporary 2 This idea resembles Eric Bentley’s classical definition of theatre, which reads ‘A impersonates B while C looks on’ (Bentley 1965, 150), though note that it does not require the mimetic portrayal of a character that Bentley calls ‘impersonation’.

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and more traditional, performances make use of the financial, intellectual and social systems around them. We present autonomy here as a problematic claim, not as a formal characteristic. Autonomy is a claim about the relationship between one field and another; it is not a property of a field. While it is very hard to define precisely, some conception of autonomy is a necessary prerequisite to notions such as freedom and the ability for self-direction, which are central to western philosophy. Philosophers refer to such a line of reasoning as an argument of presupposition. Without a clear definition of a concept of autonomy or a logical proof of its existence, it needs to be assumed as a ‘fact of reason’ because such a concept is a required prerequisite to any discussion of intelligent human action based on independent reasoning and self-direction. In such a vein, we see the concept of autonomy as filling a self-regulatory function in social fields: without some notion of autonomy, one simply cannot speak of specific fields of human activity.3 It is our contention in this book that the concept of autonomy, and its failure to fully manifest itself, underlies any description of how theatre functions. We cannot make sense of the social practices that constitute the theatrical field without an understanding of the dynamics of its autonomy. Thus, the negotiations of autonomy are an essential part of understanding the particular social position that the theatrical field holds. In this book, we make use of a philosophical tradition of understanding, defining and debating the concept of artistic autonomy. However, we are theatre sociologists, not philosophers. As such, our inquiry draws its methods not from philosophy but from social analysis and, in particular, from the thought of the great French cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). Bourdieu was an anthropologist and social theorist whose thinking was strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim, Marx and Pascal. His initial fieldwork in colonial Algeria in the late 1970s led him to cast a sceptical eye over many aspects of French society and the totalizing conception of culture that was prominent at the time. After the Algerian war, he returned to home and turned his attention to the cultural, educational and academic worlds of contemporary France. His analyses of 3 The argument is that while one cannot prove that freedom or autonomy exists, we nevertheless need to presume its existence if we want to speak about, for instance, the possibility of morality or ethics. Though we are not ourselves philosophers, we are in good philosophical company here, as Kant himself relies on such an argument when discussing human action. See Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1996, 5:30ff), and the voluminous philosophical discussion of this passage, including that of Łuków (1993), O’Neill (1984) and Allison (1990, Chapters 11 and 12).

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these fields were penetrating, controversial and useful; they showed how they were organized and structured, how they maintained themselves between generations, the structure of relationships to other fields (most crucially, the economic and political fields), and the space for action that individuals had within them. Autonomy was a key element of those stories. Rather than presenting a full analysis of Bourdieu’s theories, this book will discuss how the concept of autonomy applies to the theatre. Bourdieu regarded theatre as much less (and more problematically) autonomous than other art forms, because it is heavily dependent on both financial support and on a great deal of practical and material preconditions in order to be produced.

Autonomy in different theatrical fields Bourdieu’s argument that theatre’s high level of economic entanglement makes it less autonomous than other art forms renders it even more interesting for us to try to understand and describe the particular claims of artistic autonomy that are at stake in the theatrical field. But our ambition goes further. Since we understand the autonomy of theatre as a property of the relationships between a theatrical field and its social setting, we also have to pay attention to the concrete—and different—social settings in which theatre exists. This means our analysis of theatrical autonomy will need to address the question of how claims to autonomy function in different national contexts. In each case, and in each country, the mechanisms of autonomy are renegotiated to account for the particular relationships that exist between that field and others. These differences are interesting and important. The question of subsidy, for instance, is a major structural relationship of most national theatre fields, each of which confronts it somewhat differently. Subsidy can serve as a means of defining and defending a theatrical field’s autonomy, or as a tool with which to chip away at it. Changing the means by which funding is allocated—even if there is no actual change in the amount of funding—can thus influence the way a theatrical field asserts or negotiates its position with respect to other fields. Studying these national differences not only helps us gain a deeper knowledge of how claims to autonomy function, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it helps us see why theatrical traditions differ between countries and why their theatre fields have different outcomes, both in aesthetic terms (the number and types of performances, for example) and social terms (theatre’s relation to and effects on society in general).

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Introduc tion

Figure 1. Relationships within and beyond the theatrical field

D. Society (4)

C. Arts/Theatre Funding B. Theatre Field (Theatre Organizations) A. Performance

(2)

(3)

(1)

Therefore, when trying to discuss the ways in which a particular theatrical field negotiates its autonomy, our focus should be on the specific relationships that link that field to others. These, of course, are the contested sites in which negotiations take place and they will be different for each field. As a frame for the analyses and discussions in the following chapters, we offer the diagram above (Figure 1) as a preliminary map of the relationships that characterize the theatrical fields this book will consider. These relationships overlap and influence one another, of course, but an initial taxonomy may offer a helpful overview. We will refer back to this Figure throughout the book. First, note that theatrical events themselves (A) are embedded in and are made possible and comprehensible by the theatre organizations that contextualize them. These organizations, alongside the social, intellectual and aesthetic patterns and expectations of theatre-going, comprise the

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theatre field (B). This theatre field is made possible by public and private funding system (C), as well as legal and educational systems (D), all of which serve to link the theatre field to what Bourdieu would denote as the field of class relations and power—that is, to the market and to politics. Together, these fields make up society as a whole (D). Our understanding of the social study of theatre involves paying attention to relationships produced by theatre on a minimum of four levels, as marked in the diagram: (1) Theatre production. Theatre makers take subject matter and ideas from the larger society and make imaginative use of them in producing performances.4 This relationship between theatre and society represents an important part of the concept of autonomy, here understood as the freedom of speech: most societies tend to allow artists freedom in the choice of subject matter and the form in which they represent it, i.e. theatrical artists are free to explore theatre aesthetics. As we will demonstrate in more detail in the following chapters, this relation is, to a large extent, conditioned by the media. It is obvious that the media serve as a channel for the relationship between theatre, its audience and society at large; often, more people will read about a performance in a newspaper or blog than will attend it as an audience member. The media, to a large extent, shape larger debates about the relationship between theatre and religion, politics and ethics. (2) The aesthetic communication that takes place in the concrete performance situation and the meaning that spectators take form these experiences. This level is based on the aesthetics of theatrical performances, and has been the traditional province of theatre phenomenology and performance analysis. But the relationship between a performance and its audience is a social one, and thus describing the nature of the performances as experienced by their spectators is a necessary part of studying theatre sociologically5 . Studying concrete performance 4 This sentence might seem to imply that the work of theatre makers, or artists in general, consists of formulating an idea and then giving material form to it, i.e. their works will always be representations of reality and have a mimetic quality. However, we know this is not necessarily the case. In many cases artists will start by exploring the expressive material of their medium— in the case of theatre movement, sounds and speech produced by the human body—and as a consequence create meaning. 5 While this book focuses on the study of theatre as a social practice, we recognize that such an analysis ought to be complemented with, and can be complementary to, the historical analysis of theatre.

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situations is not merely a question of studying theatre aesthetics, it inevitably entails a sociological perspective as well. In other words, audience research should make clear what meanings attendants attach to performances, and how they do so. This has been the traditional province of theatre semiotics, but that, too, is a social relationship. This includes, but is not limited to, how the audiences are constructed from the general public (through marketing, for instance) and their particular demographics. Autonomy at this level should be understood as the ability of any performance situation to allow audiences the proper attention to theatre performances, i.e. to allow audiences to follow the sign systems offered up to them without interference of other factors. Within this relationship, autonomy refers to the autonomy of the aesthetic experience. (3) The effect these experiences have in the lives of those attending and the conversations they give rise to in their communities. This is the process of contextualization of the theatrical event (Van Maanen 2009); it involves the lingering effects that performances have on the wider society. Studying this level requires studying whether people talk about their theatrical experiences with others, whether reflection on theatrical experiences is organized, e.g. in educational settings or social groups and how meaning in such groups is constructed. The organization of the relationship between theatre and other domains of life, greatly affects how theatrical experiences are contextualized. As a feature of the organizations of theatre fields, autonomy may even hamper contextualization. (4) The organization of theatre in society. Finally, the relationship between theatre and society is mediated by the way that theatre institutions and systems (B) are organized, governed, managed and funded (C), within a given society (D). This figure makes clear that the problem of autonomy is multi-layered. At each of these points, autonomy presents itself in a different manner and needs to be negotiated differently, with different criteria and by different agents in (and around) theatrical fields. Each of these relationships requires attention if we are to come to a full understanding of theatre as a social practice. Relationship (1) refers to the autonomy of the artist; in essence, their freedom of speech and the freedom to produce whatever work they find suitable using whatever aesthetic means. Relationships (2) and (3) refer

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to the autonomy of the art work: the piece of theatre being permitted to engender a specific (possibly artistic) reaction in audience members, on its own terms, which may have specific consequences in their lives and that of others. Relationship (4) usually is referred to as the autonomy of the field of art or theatre. This field autonomy ultimately allows for the autonomy at the other levels, though it cannot be equated with these levels. We will explain this further in Chapter 1. This, then, is the motivation for this book: in order to understand theatre as a social practice, we need to understand what is behind claims to autonomy at each of these levels and how those claims function. Developing this understanding is the task we set for ourselves here. The structure for this book reflects this perspective. In order to make sense of the debates about autonomy, one needs to understand something of the workings of the concept and its intellectual heritage, who actors in the field are and how they deploy their claims to it, how these claims (made explicit or implicitly) influence theatre’s relationship to politics (including cultural policy), and how the concern for autonomy is negotiated aesthetically. We will elaborate our conception of autonomy in Chapter 1, and explain its relationship to the contemporary situation of theatre and performance in contemporary societies. In doing so, we will make use of Bourdieu’s notion of social fields and the specific forms of capital at stake in them. In Chapter 2 we will present various views on autonomy from arts philosophy and sociology, most notably Bourdieu’s critics to (a) get a deeper understanding of the concept and (b) investigate how productive use can be made of the criticisms voiced to Bourdieu’s field theory. From then onwards we take a less theoretical approach. In Chapter 3, we will look at contemporary forms of performance, such as documentary theatre and stand-up comedy, which may seem to reject any claim to autonomy, and explain why the concept is still important to make sense of these forms’ role in the larger social fabric. As a result, this chapter focuses on how theatre aesthetics affect the possibilities to claim theatrical autonomy. In Chapter 4, we turn to the social agents themselves by asking ourselves how agents in the theatrical field make claims to autonomy and why these claims are useful for them. From there, we will discuss how autonomy functions in the concrete situations of the theatrical field; that is, how organizational arrangements in and around theatre fields encourage and/or hamper the effect of claims to autonomy. This will be discussed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, we will discuss the relationship between theatre fields and society from the opposite perspective: how can theatre’s claims to autonomy clarify and strengthen the function theatre serves for the wider society? In the

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conclusion, we will look again at the problem of autonomy as a useful means of teasing out, critiquing and developing the relationships theatre holds to contemporary society, even in an age that seems sceptical of bold and abstract claims to absolute artistic autonomy, and finally, what this claim entails for future theatre research.

Theoretical approaches As mentioned above, the core of the analysis in this book rests upon the work of Bourdieu. His field theory, which is our starting point, has been highly influential both in the study of the arts and in art practice itself. However, because our aim is to understand what theatre does in society —and neither to understand the power dynamics inherent in aesthetic activities nor to construct an abstract model of what theatre is as a social practice—we require a mix of theoretical approaches. When necessary, we will use philosophical notions to understand the concept of autonomy, or complement Bourdieu’s field notions with other sociological theories, such as the Actor-Network thinker Bruno Latour’s insistence on a more singular perspective to the sociology of the arts and the systems approach of Niklas Luhmann. When we turn to examples of practices in particular theatre fields, mostly those of smaller European countries, we will make use of more general sociological and political science methodologies. In particular, we will attempt to integrate the value sociology of Boltanksi, Thévenot and Chiapello into our Bourdieusian framework. Their concept of value regimes allows for a far more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between theatre practices and other social actors than either Bourdieu or Luhmann can provide. While a full integration of the concept of value regimes and Bourdieusian field theory is more than this book can offer, we see the need for the two to be in dialogue and we hope to contribute to this developing conversation. Throughout the book, we refer to a number of examples, largely from the national theatre systems we are most familiar with: Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands. However, we also refer to other systems, such as the Estonian, the American and the British.6 We include these examples for 6 As a consequence, this book does have a bias towards the theatre systems of Western Europe. Although we think that the analytical concepts offered up in this book would also be useful in the study of theatre systems in other parts of the world, we will need to leave the task of applying our concepts to those systems to others with greater expertise in that area.

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two reasons: first, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of our conception of autonomy to the study of contemporary theatre fields with all their diversity and complexity; and second, we want to give theatre students and non-sociologically oriented theatre scholars a better understanding of the sociological concepts used in our analysis. Thus, the examples are chosen because they illustrate our concepts most clearly; they are not systematic. In this book, we cannot offer a full description of any particular theatrical field, or a systematic portrait of the autonomous relations within it. Here, we merely hope to demonstrate that the concept of autonomy will be a helpful tool for future researchers who can aspire to draw such comprehensive portraits in their own work.

Why is this important? This book emerged out of a discussion amongst the authors and our colleague Ott Karulin, a theatre scholar and organizer in Tartu, Estonia. Why, we asked, were there such different means of (and responses to) official state evaluation of theatre in our different countries? In the Netherlands and Denmark, the government had made formal efforts to articulate the criteria by which theatre would be evaluated. There were debates about how well this was being handled, but not about the right of the state to undertake it. In Estonia and Ireland, in contrast, this kind of evaluation was shunned on principle; it was seen as inappropriate and foolish for the state to even attempt to make such an artistic evaluation. Why such a difference? After discussion, we came to understand that it reflected national differences in the understandings of the autonomy of the arts in each society. Different nations recognized theatre as its own field of endeavour in different ways, and with different political consequences. As scholars of cultural policy and theatre sociology, we found this idea intriguing. What other differences between the way theatre works in different countries could be illuminated by a discussion of autonomy? Why do theatre fields function as they do and why do they produce the social outcomes that they do? We came to see the problem of theatrical autonomy as a key concept not only for arts sociology, but also as one that theatre scholars, in particular, have not made use of as much as they could. Our goal in this book is primarily explanatory, not prescriptive. We are not interested in developing an ideal model of how the theatre ought to build its relationships to the rest of the social world. We intend instead to offer a critical description. We note how different conceptions of theatre autonomy

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can lead theatre to acquire different social functions, and that politicians, artists and democratic citizens might prefer some of these functions to others. One thing our description demonstrates is that each theatre system necessarily negotiates its own form of autonomy, and relations from one system cannot simply be imported into another. But our goal is not to argue that autonomy ought to work in a particular way, only to observe the ways in which it appears to do so. We would argue that describing the power relations that surround and shape theatre is helpful in understanding its social roles. But such a description also has a more practical use. As it is the distribution of social roles and various forms of power in theatre systems that sustain, support or undermine certain claims to autonomy, a clearer view of these dynamics will help in devising better more effective theatre policies.

1.

How can we define autonomy?

In ordinary English, the word ‘autonomy’ is used to mean something very close to ‘freedom’. So, for many people, the term ‘the autonomy of the arts’ would seem to refer to the freedom of artists to make the work they wish to, how they wish to and where they wish to, without political or ethical constraints. But this is not what we mean by autonomy in this book. Here, we propose autonomy as a structural property of social fields. This is an essential difference. We want to propose that autonomy is a part of the basic structure of an area of human activity that we will call a social ‘field’. These fields are social spaces in which people come together to pursue the same sorts of practices so that they all understand, more or less, what others are doing, and thus are able to work with one another cooperatively, competitively and creatively. Autonomy, then, is what separates one field from others: what makes the field of law different from the business world or the art world, for instance. A social field that does not have a certain degree of autonomy simply does not exist as a field at all. Elements within that social field may have different relationships to that field’s autonomy or exemplify it to a greater or lesser degree, but it only makes sense to talk about their autonomy in relationship to their membership of (and place within) a field.1 We need to make use of this understanding of autonomy—and not the more general concept of artistic freedom—if the concept is to be useful in shedding light on the role of the arts in society. If autonomy is simply a question of the rights of artists, the concept may be useful for engaging in political debates but will do little to move beyond them. A rights-based discourse will do little to help us once these rights clash with the rights of others or with other values (such as justice or democracy) that a society holds dear. A fuller, more genuinely social concept of autonomy, such as the one we propose here, will be a more helpful tool in understanding the function that theatrical events have in and for society. It is not just that we acknowledge that an artist requires a zone of freedom in which to operate, 1 It is also worth noting that, while we prefer the term ‘f ield’ because of our intellectual grounding in the thought of Pierre Bourdieu (for which, see the second part of this chapter), the term can easily be replaced by others that other arts sociologists have used for the social structure of the arts, such as ‘world’, ‘network’ or ‘system’. What is common to these cases is that autonomy describes a property that these meso-level entities (that is, those that are smaller than the whole but bigger than the individual) have with respect to one another and to macro-level social forces.

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though of course we do. What is more important is that we recognize that the practices of theatre-making and theatre-going are social activities of a different sort than others we participate in every day. Without this social difference, the arts would not have been given the social permission to operate in the aesthetic manner that they do, and thus they could not even attempt the effects they aim for. So, to be clear, our notion of theatrical autonomy is built on three key steps: (1) an initial degree of separation between the theatrical field and others serves as (2) a necessary precondition for making and perceiving theatre as art, which then (3) makes possible the specifically artistic outcomes of theatre systems. One important consequence of our view is that, because we see autonomy as structural property of a field, in itself it does not hold a positive or negative value. Agents within the field may see it (implicitly or explicitly) as a key standard by which to judge those in the field, but that is not our goal as observers. It is important that our analytical perspective does not lead us to treat standing in a more autonomous position as necessarily better than standing in a less autonomous one. They are simply different positions, with different consequences. This does not imply, however, that the notion itself is entirely valueneutral. As artists require a certain degree of autonomy to do their work, and as in Western societies freedom of speech is an important value, autonomy has a necessary function; its existence is thus a positive, and as researchers we support and affirm this. But that does not imply that we would always support the pursuit of more autonomy. It is important to understand this difference. Our position is that autonomy—which has a necessary and positive function—can be claimed legitimately to various degrees and in different ways, and these differences may have important effects. Our purpose in this book is explanatory, not normative; we are describing how autonomy works and can be used analytically, not advocating for more or less of it. While the arguments that justify and undergird the quest for increasing autonomy are an important part of how autonomy functions, our job here is to report on those arguments, not make them. Confusing these two tasks—advocating for more autonomy and understanding how it works—would be the equivalent of mistaking a nutritionist’s study of the dietary effects of a certain food with a campaign to get the public to eat more (or less) of it. The two have an obvious relationship, but one needs to logically precede the other. This chapter’s focus is the (problematic) concept of theatrical autonomy itself. It would be tempting to provide a definition for theatrical autonomy, one that can be used as a point of reference and a critical check. But first, a

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qualification: in both sociology and the arts, definitions are rarely definitive, and that is okay. Other voices, including the theorists discussed in this and the next chapter, will have their own views, and these might differ from ours to the point where they appear incompatible. It can be tempting to put more weight on these differences than they warrant. Sociological concepts, unlike (some) philosophical ones, are recognized before they are defined, and productive use can be made of them even without precise definitions. Even if there were only what Wittgenstein would call a ‘family resemblance’ between instances of autonomy, that would not mean that autonomy did not exist or that, as a concept, it does not hold meaning and importance for those in the field or who are attempting to describe it.2 So, rather than a formal definition of autonomy, we present a conceptual formula for it: Theatre is autonomous to the extent that it pursues its own value The first part of this chapter will deconstruct this formula word by word, particularly that f inal diff icult phrase. The second part will look at Bourdieu’s development of the concept of a field’s ‘own value’ (or ‘specific capital’) and tease out some of the difficulties it implies. The third and fourth parts will discuss the agents involved in this pursuit of specific value and the difference between the concept of autonomy of theatre and of the arts in general. The next chapter will compare our Bourdieusian formulation of the concept of autonomy to that of other theorists.

1.1.

The formula

Theatre is autonomous ‘Theatre’ here names not a particular building, institution, practice or act of theatre-making,3 but rather the larger social field that draws them together with some level of coherence. So our formula claims that autonomy is a property that can be claimed about the theatrical field. 4 Nor are we 2 The notion of ‘family resemblance’ comes from Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 67 (2009 [1958], 36–37). 3 See, for instance, the definitions offered by Christopher Balme in the opening page of his Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (2008, 1). 4 Do note—as indicated in the first footnote to this chapter—that a field is a meso-level sociological concept and it is not easy to precisely delineate where it ends and thus who is part of it and who is not. Bourdieu’s principle is that anyone who adheres to the rules of the field

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saying anything about theatre as an art form here. Describing the nature of theatrical art is a job for other researchers; here, we are concerned with theatre as a social practice. We are not claiming that autonomy is a unique property of the arts or of theatre in particular. In theory, any social field can be autonomous in the same way that theatre is. Since the Romantic era, however, the arts have functioned as a paradigm of a socially autonomous field. So our example is neither unique, nor accidental. Our formula does imply, though, that it makes no sense to talk about the autonomy (in our sense) of something that is not a field. For example, a claim that poetry operates autonomously from the rest of society is to claim that ‘poetry’ denotes a field of human practice and not just, say, a (set of) linguistic forms. It would make no sense to say that the sonata form is (or is not) autonomous. It does make sense to say that about the f ield of classical music. Moreover, it is possible to talk about different parts of a field as being more or less autonomous than other parts, and these distinctions are often relevant in describing the internal shape of a field. It also means that our notion of autonomy is a sociological one, and thus importantly distinct from a Kantian notion of autonomy as a necessary correlate of the will and the law of reason. In our sociological conception, we do not speak of the autonomy of the individual, but rather, the autonomous position that an individual can occupy in this or that social field.5 This is not because we think we can critique the Kantian understanding of autonomy—we are sociologists, not philosophers, and make no such claim. Instead, our focus on the social aspects of theatre requires a different concept of autonomy. It is entirely possible that the Kantian notion of autonomy is necessary before any social action could take place, such as the creation of social fields. It is also possible that the different authorities granted to different people based on their positioning in a field that underlies our notion of autonomy conditions how Kant’s more existential autonomy can be expressed. These are larger questions (doxa) is inside it and anyone who does not is outside. The ‘anyone’ here would include human actors, organizations and—contra Bourdieu—objects as well, which function in accordance with the field’s doxa. However, this ‘adherence’ hardly makes for a clear line, and it is precisely our point that delineating the borders of the field is an ongoing problem (for instance, does the theatre field include or exclude, say, museum-based live artists, or stand-up comedians?). It is this struggle over borders and definitions that interest us, not the specific line being drawn. 5 Individuals, then, may have different levels of autonomy with respect to different fields in which they participate. A renowned painter may occupy a highly autonomous position within the art field, but if she receives a speeding ticket and is forced to interact with the judicial field, she will occupy no more autonomous a position than anyone else.

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than we can answer here. We acknowledge that the term ‘autonomy’ has strong philosophical resonances, and our use of it here may jar with those readers who are more conversant with philosophical than sociological discourse. But we maintain that our formulation of the concept is useful for description and analysis of theatre as a social practice, even if it differs from the way the term is used in the Kantian tradition. to the extent that Social autonomy is necessarily a matter of degree. No field is completely autonomous, and no field (to the extent that it is a field) is completely heteronomous. The same can be said of positions within the field; while some are more autonomous than others, all hold some level of autonomy. That is, some positions allow those who occupy them to act as if all that mattered were the values of the field, while other positions necessitate them to take other values into account as well. It is important to remember two things about the marking out of the relative levels of autonomy. First, these levels are always contested and changing, as a universally-agreed and objective measure of autonomy virtually never exists. Any measurement is only provisional, subject to the constant movement of agents around the field and changing views of how autonomy ought to be measured. Second, as mentioned above, more autonomy is not always ‘better’. Autonomy has its uses (see Chapter 4) but that does not mean that more of it is always more useful or better, or that more of it leads to work that is somehow more ‘genuinely theatrical’. it pursues This phrase might give a reader pause. The ‘it’ here is our field, theatre, which, as already said, is a theoretical construction. How can such a construction ‘pursue’ anything at all? Does the theatre chase something down, the way a dog pursues a rabbit? Does this imply that this is a conscious strategy on the part of some sort of field leader? Is this phrase simply nonsense? Importantly, we are not claiming that there is any necessary conscious intention here. The idea that theoretically postulated social groups—classes, organizations, guilds, fraternities, societies, markets—can structure themselves to do things without conscious guidance or intention is one of the basic assumptions of modern sociology and economics. Economists, for instance, say that markets pursue the maximization of efficiency in exchanging value. This is not to say that the market is a conscious being

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with desires and goals. Nor is it to equate the market with those individuals and organizations that do make conscious efforts to make their enterprises more efficient. When we say that the field as a whole ‘pursues’ certain aims, we are making a structural claim. We are saying that the field is organized in such a way that has certain tendencies, whether or not those within the field are conscious of them or act strategically to encourage them. One of the key properties of the contemporary artistic field is that artists tend to be quite self-conscious of their social position, as we will discuss in Chapter 3. But the contemporary arts are not unique in this. Anthropologists and sociologists have long struggled to articulate a place for individual agency within the context of observable social tendencies and patterns. These tendencies are not set in stone. A social field is not an immutable fact; it can grow, develop and reorient itself over time, whether in response to internal dynamics, revolutionary change or external pressures. But any individual member of a field finds herself always already enmeshed in a social structure that exerts forces in certain directions. That is what we mean by the field ‘pursuing’ its own values. its own values This is the most crucial phrase. Two seemingly simple questions are relevant here: first, what are values, and second, what makes a value particular to a given field (its ‘own’)? These two questions, and especially the second, will bring us to the core of what we mean by autonomy. Values The term ‘values’ is intentionally very broad. A value can be described as something that is recognized to be of worth and therefore worth pursuing. That something could be a physical object (bread, gold), but more often, it is a quality (prestige, truth, beauty) or experience (love, the sublime) that has positive effects. Having more of a valued quality generally enables one to do or experience things that one could not otherwise. Values need to be pursued not only because they are useful, but because they are both commonly accepted as important and are difficult, scarce or inaccessible. If artistic beauty, say, were plentiful and easily available, there would be no need to go through the work of art-making in order to bring it about. Money is the paradigmatic case here. Firms spend tremendous energy trying to make money not simply because money is a store of value that allows them (and their shareholders) to do other things they wish to, but also because it is scarce, prestigious and not immediately there for the taking.

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Most sociologists and social philosophers have some term that stands for this pursuit of value. Luhmann uses the term ‘function’, while others use terms like ‘interest’ (Kant) or ‘impulse’ (Schiller). The American philosopher Theodore Schatzki (1996, 98–100) uses the awkward but helpful phrase ‘teleoaffective structures’, which is so precise that it perhaps needs an explanation of its own. Briefly, the term refers to the social-structural patterns that are felt to be (i.e. are affectively linked to) the ends (Greek telos) that a social practice—in fact, a field—pursues. This more specific definition is useful, because it clarifies what it means to pursue a value. Schatzki specifically contrasts these teleoaffective structures to overt goals that a social actor aims to achieve through their participation in a practice. For example, a business may seek to expand to a new market and dominate it, which would be an overt goal. The teleoaffective structure at work, in contrast, is the tendency of capital to expand. The push to accumulate more—which is not a personal desire but a tendency built into and rewarded by the structure of capitalism—is the value at stake here. That value might still be operative if another business made the decision not to expand. A field is not a straightjacket; individuals can act against the grain, if they wish to. The point is simply that if they do so, there is a grain they are going against, and they must face the loss of social value that entails. Values are necessarily general, and this generality has consequences for how we understand the ways fields operate. Because values are not tools to achieve specific ends, but rather those things that tend to be useful and are felt to be of worth, they are ordinarily not specified with a great deal of precision. A ‘feel for the game’ is required to recognize what sorts of things are worth pursuing and what not. Developing this feel is an important part of the training initiands need to join a field, and it is notoriously difficult to put into words.6 From the perspective of someone inside the field, value is recognized intuitively; they know it when they see it. Outsiders may, with difficulty, be able to describe the contents of that intuition and show how it was taught, but they do not have the power to define or determine it themselves. This might make values sound private, as markers of personal worth that is unrelated and inexplicable to the larger world. A passion for seventeenthcentury Dutch painting, for instance, could be seen as nothing more than a personal idiosyncrasy that does not involve the larger world. The understanding of field we present here rejects that view. Implicit in our argument is the claim that values are never anything other than social. They are 6 Bourdieu spells this out most clearly in the first half of The Logic of Practice (1990 [1980]).

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realized in situations of interaction between people or that bear the legacy of interaction between people. They may be internalized, debated or be enjoyed in solitude, but they remain artefacts of social bonds. Another way of putting this is to say that a value needs to be recognized by some community for it to be valid. Gold and paper money are only valuable because they are recognized as such. Anyone is free to enjoy hoarding seashells, but it is not possible to value them as currency if only one person does so. In claiming this, we are placing ourselves in this broadly Marxian tradition of cultural analysis, one that is shared by most cultural sociologists regardless of their political perspective. There are, however, other traditions of cultural analysis that take a different basis. There is, for instance, the Freudian tradition of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, who would identify the object of desire with an element of need in the psychoanalytic unconscious.7 Such conceptions of value are very different from ours and would lead to a very different concept of autonomy—or to no such concept at all. There is also a tradition derived from the Frankfurt School and the work of Theodor Adorno, who pursues an autonomous, high modernist aesthetic programme in specific response to the horrors of World War II and the dominant commodifying influence of late capitalism. Per Adorno, the more completely an aesthetic object was freed from the corrosive culture industry, the more of a (slim) chance it would have to embody and remind others of genuine human freedom and possibility and thus earn the title ‘artwork’.8 Though in the end the purpose of an artwork was social (to reveal the possibilities of the human social existence, rather than for the glory of the gods), in order to serve that function it needed to be as detached as possible from actual social life. While this tradition also bears Marxian influence, it differs from our perspective by locating value in the separation of art from its social context, rather than from within that context. Particular values In his writings on the arts, Bourdieu uses the term ‘values’ in the manner of Schatzki and other Marxian theorists, but he does so more or less interchangeably with the term ‘capitals’. We will follow him in treating these terms as synonyms. This shows Bourdieu’s debt to the economic logic of the Marxian tradition, but it is also a term chosen to help define the 7 This area of thought is vast, but a good starting place is Žižek (2006). 8 This is the case even if the freedom of the aesthetic is illusionary. ‘It is this illusory being-initself which makes possible the thought of real freedom from naked coercion, total dependence’ (Jarvis 1998, 117).

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vaguer concept of value. Capital is not just a measure of worth; it is a store of generalized value that can be accumulated, stored up, and invested for the future. You do not need to know what you will spend your capital on to know that capital is worth acquiring and amassing. Bourdieu, however, makes a key innovation on standard economic notions of capital by insisting on the plural. There are many capitals, Bourdieu argues, and individual actors in a field may amass several of them. What makes the multiplicity of capitals an important innovation is not just that they come from different sources but, except in the long term, they cannot easily be exchanged for one another (Bourdieu 2001 [1986, 1983]). In fact, in the case of the field Bourdieu calls ‘cultural production’, one of the key capitals is diametrically opposed to economic capital; the more one has stored up of one, the less one can hold of the other, and so he calls the field of cultural production the ‘economic world reversed’ (Bourdieu 1993a, 311). This is an important difference. Economists treat most stores of financial value as essentially convertible. Whether a piece of capital is in the form of currency, part-ownership of a company (i.e. stocks), real estate, durable goods, educational credentials or something else, the economic notion of capital assumes that capital can change its form at will. This is the job of markets: stock exchanges, markets for goods and services and labour markets. While real-world markets may be inefficient, illiquid or unstable, in the ideal economic environment smoothly functioning markets ought to allow people to convert their capital from one form to another with ease and a minimum of transaction cost. There is no essential difference between a stack of yen notes and a small part of a corporation, though there may be practicalities that inhibit their conversion. Bourdieu’s capitals do not necessarily work that way. What makes it possible for him to talk about a capital being specific to a field is that it does not have a general value. Within the field, it is a store of value that can be accumulated and invested. But in a different context, it is not valued at all; it is not useful or desired. As a result, it is not easily convertible to other capitals.9 The social space in 9 Bourdieu argues that all forms of capital must be ultimately convertible into economic capital, though this need not be straightforward or quick. He writes: it has to be posited (…) that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words – but only in the last analysis – at the root of their effects. (Bourdieu 2001, 106) Bourdieu makes a somewhat inconsistent claim here: though in the end all capitals (cultural and social) are reducible to economic capital in the sense that they can ultimately be exchanged for

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which a specific capital functions is thus a key part of what defines a field, and the valuing of that capital over another is the centre of our definition of autonomy. This is why we claim that the field of theatre is autonomous to the extent that it pursues its own values, or specific capital. To summarize, our statement that a field is autonomous to the extent that it pursues its own values is not a definition of autonomy, in the sense that we can point at something and say that it fits the definition. Rather, it is a formula that spells out a social process that can be witnessed in a field and that can be subject to internal critique and sociological analysis. This analysis can be helpful in understanding a field such as theatre, the actions of those who are active in and around it, the products that are relevant in it, its internal dynamics and the contribution it makes to society as a whole. However, without delving deeper into what a field’s ‘own values’ or specific capital actually refers to, this formula contains a lacuna at its centre. We will now turn our attention to that problem.

1.2.

The development and nature of specific capital

In order to make better sense of the concept of specific capital, it is necessary to go back to its first articulation in Pierre Bourdieu’s work. The next chapter will offer a critique of this articulation on the basis of a number of philosophical debates around Bourdieu’s work and the concept of autonomy. In turn, that critique will influence how we apply the concept of specific capital in the remainder of this book. But for the sake of clarity, we will more economic capital (‘at the root of their effects’), at the same time they can never be entirely defined by economics: they have their own specific ways of working which economics (and hence economic capital) cannot grasp. On the one hand, Bourdieu calls out economists for their reduction of social reality to one type of capital. On the other hand, he calls out social scientists (specifically structuralists, symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodological anthropologists) for ignoring this (Marxian) economic underpinning of other fields of social reality. The universal conversion metric, according to Bourdieu, is the labour time put into both the accumulation of capital in whatever form and the conversion of one form of capital into another. Both parts of this can be complex. As a result, it is hard to point to specific mechanisms through which cultural and social capital can be converted into economic capital. Employment and salary negotiations have a heavy class component and do not exclusively value social and cultural capital. Specifically, institutionalized forms of capital—that is, capitals certified by the state such as university diplomas—are easier to convert to economic capital, but for other forms, it may be quite difficult. Bourdieu, here, uses a fact of reason (rather than Lizardo’s (2006, 780) statement that he formulates a hypothesis), because without supposing that capitals can be converted into one another in the long run, social reality cannot be reproduced from generation to generation, which is required by his (and most other social scientists’) theories.

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Figure 2. Bourdieu’s representation of the French literary field of the second half of the 19th century (Bourdieu 1993a, 49)

start at the beginning, setting out Bourdieu’s views here before we go on to critique them. The French example We can get a better understanding of this concept of specific capital by looking at Bourdieu’s central example: the French literary field in the late nineteenth century. Figure 2 is his representation of this field. In this f ield, three capitals are at stake: economic (separating the rich from the poor, represented horizontally), prestige (or ‘consecration’, separating the revered or established artists from the ‘young’, represented vertically) and cultural (separating the artistically pure from the artistically compromised, which is represented horizontally in the opposite direction as economic capital). The first capital is clear enough: it represents the financial rewards offered to each form of cultural production. The second, for Bourdieu, is just as clear: it represents not popularity in general, but specific recognition by formal and state-appointed guardians of the field: teachers, critics and, above all, the luminaries enshrined in the Académie Française (we will elaborate on the agents in theatre fields in Section 1.4).

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The last capital is specific to this particular field, as it is defined as a field of cultural production. Note two things about the way Bourdieu labels this last capital in the chart. First, it is defined by what it is not (‘no audience, no economic profit’), rather than by what it is. Second, it is this capital, and not the other two, that Bourdieu equates with autonomy. Economic rewards and prestige are not specific to cultural production, even if they are awarded on different bases. Cultural capital is something different. Bourdieu sees the development of this capital—and thus, of artistic autonomy—as rooted in the Romantic era. For him, this was a truly revolutionary moment in time when a few heroic artists, such as Manet, ruptured the system of Académie-defined art by beginning: the process which led to the universe of artists ceasing to function as an apparatus hierarchized and controlled by a corps, and beginning to constitute itself little by little as a field of competition for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy. (Bourdieu 1996 [1992], 132)

Bourdieu’s claim that the field pursues a ‘monopoly on artistic legitimacy’ highlights an important aspect of the way multiple capitals interact in a field. Yes, there might be more than one value for which a field’s participants compete, and these other capitals may have more control over the field’s material conditions. But the capital which is specific to the field has a key importance that the others cannot have, as it is the one that justifies and legitimizes the field as a whole. Certainly, that top capital’s exact shape and its presence in this or that work or person can be debated within the field, but its importance cannot. That is what Bourdieu means by a ‘monopoly’; this top capital has no competitors. A field’s top capital is the one that makes it into a field, and the degree to which that top capital is controlling measures the field’s autonomy. Nevertheless, some parts of the field will be more interested in specific capital than others. There are always parts of the theatrical field that choose a less autonomous position, finding an overreliance on specific capital unsuitable for their particular needs. The Netherlands, for example, has a rich tradition of cabarets that engage in political satire. These cabarets are an important part of the Dutch theatrical field; they make up the second largest category in the programming of Dutch theatre venues, comprising 16 per cent of both the number of performances and tickets sold (VSCD 2012). Their political intent and their commercial objectives tie them more tightly to capitals external to the theatrical field. This is neither good, nor bad, but it is a choice. Later chapters will explore how autonomy can be emphasized or de-emphasized in different parts of the theatre field (and in the field as a whole), who can

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do that and what effect it has, but for now, it is important to remember that while specific capital is what characterizes a field and leads to autonomy, for individual theatre makers or groups, other capitals may be more important. This claim—that specific capital is what characterizes a field—has an important corollary. If a specific capital is defined uniquely by the field in which it operates, it cannot be defined outside of it. Artistic value can only be defined within the artistic field. Field members can (and do) debate it amongst themselves, but the power to define it must be theirs alone. From the outside, then, a specific capital can be hard to pin down. In fact, from outside of a field, it might look as though it were not there at all. Bourdieu calls this (paradoxically) the ‘institutionalization of anomie’ (1996, 132, italics original, see also 1993b)—that is, the formal establishment of social rootlessness. It reflects the way that this refusal to accept external standards has to move from a ‘heroic’ act of personal rebellion to a formalized idea or belief (Bourdieu’s word is doxa) that is structurally constitutive for the artistic field. Manet’s rebellion against the Académie and its systems of rewards for authorized art had to, in time, become a formal force for the defence of this new ‘artistic’ capital, no matter the difficulty of seeing or defining what that capital actually is. Defining specific value The issue now is how to define the specific value that the theatrical field pursues and how it differs from other values that might be at stake in the theatrical field. Economic vs cultural capital: The denial of the pursuit of money Bourdieu is clear in his claim that economic capital and cultural capital are diametrically opposed, to the extent that the pursuit of economic capital seems to amount to a discredit in the ‘cultural capital bank’. But our view is that things are more complicated. Above, we distinguished between prestige and cultural capital and placed the two on different axes, implying that they are not the same. However, they are related. Cultural capital is the more general term, and prestige is a particular social form of it. Specific to prestige is the fact that one cannot invest in it oneself. Instead, it is awarded by others in a position to do so through a process that Bourdieu calls consecration.10 For other forms of cultural capital, however, such as 10 In other words: the possession of a certain capital (the consecrating authority) allows certain people (critics, academics, prize committees) to award prestige to others. These agents in

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that acquired through formal education, this is not the case, though even these capitals need to be recognized by others as valuable in order to be useful in a field of practice. An education that is not recognized confers no cultural capital. Thus, cultural capital, at least as much as economic capital, is a socially defined currency. Moreover, while these cultural capitals may align with the specific capital at stake in a field, they are rarely identical to it, as at any point in the history of a field the specific capital at stake in it can be discredited and become a marker of a different capital, as indeed happened when Manet rebelled against the Académie. In short, while the denial of the pursuit of economic gains certainly is a marker of prestige in the theatre field, the accumulation of cultural capital also may be so, but not in every case. The fact that education levels (and other institutional forms of cultural capital) in most Western societies to date are the most reliable markers for economic success should warn us that cultural capital does not automatically indicate the specific value at stake in the theatre field. Social capital: The pursuit of the right relationships One question should be asked of Bourdieu’s example: Why did Manet and his fellow revolutionaries need to establish a new capital anyway? What was wrong with the existing social capital of prestige? Prestige was not given out whimsically. By this era, prestige had long distanced itself from any idea of court favour. This was, after all, the rational Republic, and it styled itself as a supremely enlightened nation, in its arts policy as anything else. The standards that the Académie was upholding in its granting of titles were not arbitrary or capricious. They represented a negotiated academic consensus of aesthetic norms and standards, a consensus made in the light of centuries of aesthetic practice and theory. The imposition of these standards were justified philosophically and critically by those deemed best equipped to make such decisions. Certainly, these standards were debated and revised, but as a whole, they represented the artistic field’s idea of best practice and the height of enlightened thinking on aesthetics and the social position of the arts. Why not simply accept them? Or, at the least, debate their details but accept the general wisdom of institutionalized tradition and, in essence, align oneself with the right persons in the tradition of the Académie? In more theoretical terms: why not rely on one’s social capital, the relations one upholds with those in power? The Bourdieusian tradition offers two positions of authority may be artists themselves, but need not be. As the authority to consecrate is different than the prestige such consecration conveys, there is no necessary connection between the top critics and the top artists.

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answers to that question. There is no need to choose between the two; both can be correct, and both can be instructive. First, the revolutionaries might not have embraced the academic art world because they could not do so. Bourdieu describes the ways that educational and cultural institutions that are authorized by the socially powerful tend to reinforce existing social hierarchies through the teaching of particular norms and tastes that are seen as sophisticated. In such a society, education becomes a means of replicating and naturalizing the class structure by transforming cultural capital into social and ultimately into economic capital (Bourdieu 1979, see also 2001). This works perfectly well for the scions of established families, but artists, as a rule, tend to stand just apart from that role: The literary and artistic fields attract a particularly strong proportion of individuals who possess all the properties of the dominant class minus one: money. They are, if I may say, parents pauvres or ‘poor relatives’ of the great bourgeois dynasties, aristocrats already ruined or in decline, members of stigmatized minorities like Jews or foreigners. (Bourdieu 1993d, 165, italics original)

Unable to find a place in the artistic establishment, but needing validation for their own work, such artists found more success in staking their claims on new ground, in acts of what Bourdieu calls ‘position-taking’. By placing themselves within the field but in a new and unestablished place within it—that is, by asserting a new set of values—these artists warped the shape of the field. Each new move in the game changes the position that all the other players face. If they are repeated or influential (or both), these acts of position-taking can be utterly transformative. For the revolutionaries, this was very effective. By establishing their own norms, they were able to achieve a prominence and success that had eluded them from within the Académie. This led them to learn a distrust for any established set of values—after all, another set of rebels could come and undermine them. This necessary scepticism towards official declarations of value led easily enough to the refusal to take up any value system from outside the field, which encourages the artistic field to stay autonomous for all of its changes. Second, there might be something inherent in the arts (or at least our modern conception of them) that demands the overturning of all sociallyauthorized norms, no matter how correct they are. Hans van Maanen (2009), writing in the Kantian tradition, sees the quintessential artistic function as the creation of new metaphors—that is, of new ways of representing the

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world and the human condition—so they can be seen and understood in new ways. If this is the basic function of the arts, then it would logically follow that they cannot pursue any stable end externally defined value without sacrificing something basic about what they are. There is an inherent tension between the artistic pursuit of novelty as such and any established capital—be that economic, social, or even cultural. In contemporary art fields, autonomy thus implies a push against not just the pursuit of not just economic capital, but, in fact, the pursuit of all established capitals as such.11 Field specific capital or value Defining economic capital and objectified cultural capital is easy. Both are currencies ‘minted’ by the state, and ones that, in some form or another, apply in many different fields. They are established and can be known in advance, and their utility is clear. Thus, a first way to define the capital specific to a field is a negative way: by pointing at what it is not, as Bourdieu did in his graphic representation of the French literary field (Figure 2). Because specific capital does not function like the other capitals, it therefore resists establishment, is committed to novelty and is only defined by acts within the field. Otherwise, the field would simply not have any level of autonomy, and thus would not exist. Yes, we can (and ought to) say that field-specific value is opposed to other capitals, but any positive definition of it an observer or critic might pose is necessarily incorrect, at least in the long term. Aristotle and Schiller, for instance, may have set out criteria that they think define the notion of artistic merit, and for a while these may influence those cultural producers whose acts of position-taking define artistic-specific capital. But in time, those cultural producers will move on in pursuit of newer metaphors, and these ideas will be left behind. Specific capital in an artistic field, then, is both ever-shifting and impossible to pin down outside of the field-specific acts which establish it. This is the ‘negative’ definition; specific capital is defined by its opposition to other capitals. Now, this certainly does not mean that we have to accept that the notion of specific value is somehow indefinable or even fundamentally unknowable. 11 Do note that here we are staying very true to our Bourdieusian starting point. We will address the criticism of Bourdieu’s field theory expressed by Actor-Network theorists, or those inspired by them, in the next chapter. Here, it suffices to note that such critics would argue that (1) specific value does not exist permanently in a field regardless of who occupies positions within it but rather is (re)established every time social connections are made (implying that its central force can be changed more easily than Bourdieu indicates); and (2) that with this more flexible view of the nature of social relationships, aligning different sorts of capital is clearer and easier.

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There is a way in which can we can define the specific value of the field, though this does not involve a standard conceptual definition that attempts to establish a verbal standard against which a thing can be checked. We can only use what Wittgenstein calls a definition by ostension. Such a definition involves pointing out an example of a category, and then generalizing from it.12 We cannot say, then, that the specific value at stake is defined by having this and that properties. We can say, however, that having specific capital is like that example (from within the field) we can point to, and like that other example, and that one, and—crucially—others like them. Such a definition, at the very least, establishes a family grouping without the necessity of conceptual rigidity. This definition is one that can be made from within the field, through the examples of those in a field who are pursuing it, and one that can develop in response to new artistic attempts to find novel metaphors. We have to keep the two modes of definition in productive tension. Both the positive and negative definitions of specific value can be institutionalized. For instance, theatre industry groups (such as Ireland’s Theatre Forum) both lobby funders and the public to support the uniqueness and independence of theatre (the negative definition) and convene seminars and conferences of theatre professionals to highlight standards of best practice (the positive definition). Field-wide awards and training, and the debates that surround them, can also serve this dual definitional function. Without the negative definition, there would be no specificity to the pursuit of this capital and thus no autonomy. But without the positive, ostensive definition, there would be no field there to be autonomous. We can see this tension in a quotation from Theodor Adorno (who will be discussed more fully in the next chapter): ‘Art remains alive only though its essential social powers of resisting society; unless it submits to reification, it becomes a mere commodity’ (1984, 321). Adorno argues that art needs to use its powers of ‘resisting society’—that is, asserting its own values against those of the social world. But to do so, it needs to ‘submit to reification.’ That is, individual acts of art-making need to understand themselves not just as a disconnected push against but as a part of a real (reified) social entity which presses for its goals. This is the balance that needs to be maintained, in Adorno’s words, for art to ‘remain alive.’ Bourdieu expresses a similar tension with his phrase ‘the institutionalization of anomie’—anomie, because of an antipathy for the established order, and institutionalization, because of the need to reify that opposition into an order of its own. 12 The classic explanation of an ostensive definition comes from Wittgenstein (2009), Philosophical Investigations § 30f.

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Autonomy, then, is not itself a capital or an acceptance of this or that value or function for theatre. Rather, autonomy as a social phenomenon is the theatre’s pursuit of its own values. We have tried to show in this section some of the paradoxes and difficulties that idea implies. Much of the rest of this book will tease these paradoxes out through a look at the way autonomy is implemented in the theatres of Europe.

1.3.

Actions of agents in theatre fields: Position-taking

One might conclude from the above that all agents in theatre fields at all times act in order to gain as much field-specific capital as possible, or that their actions are completely determined by their position in the field, rather than their free will. However, this is not the case. Some of Bourdieu’s critics—who we will discuss in the next chapter—claim that his social theory is overly deterministic and essentially suppresses the role of individual choice and free will. We disagree. Bourdieu does allow for the concept of choice and a space for free action. He does so by paying attention to the act of position-taking (1993a, 57–59). For Bourdieu, different positions in a field are defined by the distribution of capitals in the field at any given moment. Take, for example, children’s theatre. In many European countries, children’s theatre is a well-loved and prominent form of theatre. But, often, it operates at a certain remove from the rest of the field. Often funded through a different scheme (or even different government ministry) than ‘mainstream’ theatre, children’s theatre artists have fewer opportunities to earn the plaudits of their peers or the respect that comes with innovation. Part of this may be that it is often assumed that children’s theatre has a primarily educational aim, which is not seen as a specifically theatrical or artistic goal. This educational goal can even be seen as standing in opposition to specifically artistic value, and thus is something that true artists ought to fight. It is a foreign capital valued by a different field (which can make its own claim to autonomy if it wishes), and the arts do not wish to be judged by it. Such a sense might also be encouraged by the way that the state takes on a general responsibility for education in a way it (apparently) does not for the arts. Also, the audience for the more autonomous theatrical productions are either fellow professionals, theatre makers, or experienced theatregoers who have a better understanding of the specific value of theatre than the general public does. Almost by definition, children’s theatre audiences are not made of such knowledgeable spectators. Thus, children’s theatre presents a much more challenging context in

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which to pursue specifically theatrical values. A parallel argument can be made for amateur or for community theatre, which also rarely receive the respect of their professional counterparts. Nonetheless, there are scores of theatre makers who specialize in children’s theatre, in directing amateurs rather than professionals or working in city districts with ‘disadvantaged youth’ or other specifically targeted audiences, mixing educational, social and artistic ambitions. These forms of theatre suit their particular skills, intentions and motivations. Because of this, they choose to take up a less than autonomous position in the field; that is, they take up positions that allow them to claim autonomy in a different, less straightforward manner (see Chapter 4 for more examples of position-takings). Ultimately, such acts of position-taking will question the definition of field-specific capital and thus can change the structure of theatre fields. The different interpretations of Bourdieu’s work involve the question whether the field’s flexibility is found in the positions themselves (i.e. the objective structure of the field) or the acts that agents perform in taking them up. Either way, the structure of the field (be it the objective structure or the structure of relations between agents in the field) can change based upon the actions of agents both inside and outside of the field. For instance, in the German-speaking countries, the appointment of a young theatre director as Intendant of a major theatre warps the structure of the field in a noticeable way, whereas in the Netherlands the appointment of a new director to a theatre company will have a far smaller influence because of the Dutch touring system which brings all productions to all major cities. In addition, for example, funding bodies’ adoption of neo-liberal policies which emphasize small government and market success in making funding decisions can enhance the autonomy of those theatre makers who adhere to aesthetics that are more easily accepted by mass audiences. These artists’ ability to attract larger audiences can thus become a more important factor in the field, in fact awarding capital to previously less autonomous positions. As a result, the structure of the field changes. These examples show both that the pursuit of the value specific to the theatre field implies an opposition to the pursuit of various other values, and that, as a consequence, positions that artists take up can be autonomous with respect to one set of values but heteronomous with respect to others. While artists can take up a relatively autonomous position by opposing certain social norms and values, they can, at the same time, overtly pursue market values, as the politically critical but commercially successful Dutch cabaretiers do. One can also do this by combining educational and artistic intentions as theatre makers specializing in children’s theatre do, or by

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linking social norms of equality to theatrical value as is done by those who work in community theatre. The different positions these agents take up within the field give them access to different kinds of claims of autonomy that allow them to do different things and shape the development of the f ield in different ways. Investigating these actions of position-takings comprises the main thrust of the argument in this book. One of the great insights that Bourdieu borrowed from Lévi-Strauss and the anthropological tradition was that, when faced with a difficult theoretical problem about human society, it is usually more helpful to make a close observation of the way that those ‘on the ground’ solve the problem for themselves than it is to trust in one’s own theoretical speculation. The alternative is the ‘mapmaker’s fallacy’, the mistaking of the drawn lines on a map for the territory they represent. Bourdieu specifically calls out overly theoretical social theorists for this error (Bourdieu 1990 [1980], 81–82). We will not, then, try to offer our own theoretical answer as to how the impure, fully-social medium of the theatre ought to articulate its own values and assert an autonomy for itself, or as to the necessary consequences of it doing so. It will be far more useful and interesting to look at examples of it happening in practice by studying the actions of agents in the theatrical field. In this sense, our approach is based on a rather poststructuralist reading of Bourdieu that is influenced by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) scholars and their insistence on the importance of the agent. But as both Bourdieu and others argue, the historical shape of the field limits the possibilities of agents’ actions. This also means that questions about positioning and consecration will be central to our analysis. In Chapters 4 to 6 we will provide examples of how the actions of agents in and around theatre fields affect claims to autonomy or are informed by them.

1.4.

Agents in theatre fields

But who, in fact, are the agents in theatre fields? Note that in the discussion above, we alternated between terms such as ‘artists’, ‘agents’, ‘theatre makers’ and ‘caberetiers’ on the one hand, and ‘theatre’, ‘cabaret’, ‘community theatre’ and ‘children’s theatre’ on the other, i.e. between terms that reflect individual agents and terms that reflect a collective. In Figure 2 above, Bourdieu’s own rendition of art fields, the agents he lists are all both subfield as a whole—poetry, novel, drama—as well as individual artists, as exemplars of types of art works or styles: the naturalist novel (Zola), the Symbolists (Mallarmé) and the Decandents (Verlaine). In other

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words, Bourdieu indicates styles and genres of art works as possessing more or less of the capitals distributed in the field more than individual human agents. This marks out the objective structure of the field. For Bourdieu, choosing a certain style makes individual human agents eligible to take up specific positions, indicating that cultural institutions—such as the novel form or style of theatre—wield power in social fields. Indeed, they do, as these established patterns enable individuals to do things, or disallow them to from doing other things. Here, we find great use for ANT’s notions of the actor in social situations, a category that, for them, includes social constructions and physical objects. In ANT’s view, anyone or anything that makes another act is an agent, which is an argument that we will follow. However, for clarity, we will use the word ‘agent’ rather than ‘actor’, which normally refers to the person performing on stage. It is impossible to provide an exhaustive list of agents: theatre fields are dynamic, differing from place to place and over time. Nonetheless, we can point to some of the central agents of theatre fields and the different roles these agents have in them, specifically in relation to the distribution of specific capital. Individual agents On the individual level we obviously find the artists; that is, actors, directors, playwrights, set, music and light designers, etc., i.e. the people giving their creative input to the artwork we call the performance. In addition, many other people involved in producing, distributing and consuming theatre are agents in the theatre field, e.g. theatre technicians, dramaturges, repetitors, acting or voice coaches, programmers, marketers and education personnel of theatre companies and venues. Theatre critics are prominent as well in Bourdieu’s analysis of the cultural field as they make public evaluations of performances and thus are active in defining cultural capital. Furthermore, audience members are important agents in theatre fields. While Bourdieu would see them as representing the economic field through ticket sales (he squarely places audiences outside of the field—see Figure 2), we see them as agents in the field. In Chapter 4 will discuss the role of the audience in more detail. We see that role as larger than only distributing economic capital. Non-human agents In addition to human agents, we also have to take into account non-human agents. The challenging part of considering non-human agents is to understand how they can influence the shape of theatre fields. Firstly, we should

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consider performances themselves as agents, as a certain performance can transform the structure of the field. This happens when a performance acts as a revolutionary introduction to a new style of theatre, as it was the case with the first night of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in 1896 in Paris, where the riot among the audience ended the performance already after the first scene, giving the Theatre of the Absurd its notorious beginning. It is the performance—and the nexus of meanings it represented—that provoked the actions of the human agents present. The resulting riot secured the reputation of the genre (i.e. giving it legitimacy) and, hence, the structure of the field was changed permanently. But these cases are rare. It is more common that the reputation of the playwright affects the actions of human agents: well-known names such as Chekhov or Shakespeare may attract the attention of audiences and of artistic personnel, and their field-specific capital influences the actions of other agents. This also occurs for important drama-texts, even by the same author: the specific capital of Hamlet, the performance of which is considered as a test of mastery for both directors and actors all over the world, is obviously much higher than that of Twelfth Night, even though the latter is staged often enough. Finally, for ANT-inspired scientists it is not uncommon to regard technology as an agent. The invention of electric light and thus greater possibilities for stage lighting not only influenced the artistic expression of theatre, but also the social dynamics of theatre going (Booth 1995, 302–303),13 hence human agents are influenced by a non-human agent. In the same way the advent of information technology today has made possible forms of theatre that seem to violate one of its central characteristics, the co-presence of actors and spectators. Some of the performances of the German theatre collective Rimini Protokol are a case in point, such as their piece Call Cutta (2008), which is performed via telephone and internet between a European audience member and a performer in a call centre in India. Technological changes thus have effect on the positive definition of specific capital. The internet also provides power to audiences in theatre fields (we will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 5). Technology thus can be considered as an agent in the theatre field. However, it is more common to regard technological developments as (changing) conditions for the actions of human and institutional agents (Van Maanen 2009, 207–208).

13 Before this the auditorium was a place for activity, a highly social event, a dimension that was replaced by a more private experience where the spectator could immerse in the stage actions (see also Butsch 2007, 67).

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Companies – a collective agent When we watch a live performance, we are watching the art of people working together. Even in productions where the playwright, director, designer and actor are all one person, there are usually other people involved in presenting the performance, for instance technicians or ticket-vendors. Hence, the theatre company as a collective is a key agent in theatre fields. A company can take up a specific position based on national or international norms and the group’s artistic profile, i.e. its possession of field-specific capital. As companies are always made up of individual agents the question of the relation between the claims to autonomy of a company and of an individual agent is interesting. In Ireland, subsidies for productions are given on the basis of the artistic profile of the company. For this reason, directors safeguard the artistic profile of the company very much and would rather establish a new company than make a performance that does not fit into their existing company’s profile (Edelman 2010, 212), i.e. the company’s capital limits the possibilities of individual agents. In the German-speaking countries, once appointed the artistic managers of a city theatre can change the institution as their personal artistic goals demand (Bremgartner 2012). In this case, the position of the theatre in the field is more dependent on the artist in charge than on the institution as such. We will discuss more examples of this intricate relationship in Chapter 4.

1.5.

Is theatre different?

Thus far, we have treated the autonomy of theatre as a species of the larger autonomy of the arts. But is this fair and correct? Though it makes social and intellectual sense to talk about the field of the arts in general—we recognize them as a common area of human activity—the different art forms operate differently. These differences are more than just the material with which the art form works: line and colour for painting, sound for music and movement for dance. Each art form also occupies a slightly different place within the greater artistic field, and, therefore, within society as a whole. Amongst other things, this means that the way these art forms articulate and use autonomy will be different. So we ought to ask how theatre, in particular, can make a claim to the autonomy, and how this may differ from other art forms. Many, including Bourdieu, have argued that theatre finds it more difficult to claim autonomy than the rest of the artistic field. Look again at Figure 2 (page 35, above), Bourdieu’s chart of the French literary field. It places theatre as a form (under the name of drama) in the least autonomous part

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of the field.14 Why is it that Bourdieu sees the theatrical form as occupying less autonomous a position than poetry or the novel? Largely, this is because theatre it is far more dependent on market forces than other literary forms. Because of the sheer number of people involved in the production and presentation of a piece of theatre, on both sides of the footlights, there is an inherently public, communal nature to theatre that other art forms do not share. One can read (or write) a book, look at (or paint) a painting or listen to (or write or play) a piece of music alone, but that cannot work for theatre. Theatre requires the physical presence of performer(s) and audience(s)— however small their numbers may be—and thus acts much more like an organized, public practice than a site of private, solitary creation. The fact that theatre has social relationships internal to it in a way that other art forms do not means that it is harder for it to resist the values of the general forces at work in society, such as economics or politics. As the recent work of scholars such as Jen Harvie (2013) and Nicholas Ridout (2013) has made clear, theatre-making is an economic and social enterprise at least as much as it is an art form, and the social conditions of work and leisure relevant to the social world as a whole will necessarily also apply to this particular industry. Does this mean that theatre cannot make use of a concept of autonomy? From our perspective, no. An art form, which is also a (set of) social and economic organization(s), can still pursue its own values. There are market systems that structure the visual arts—and have for centuries—and yet the visual arts have still made convincing claims to an autonomous position. But from the perspective of other understandings of autonomy, this social aspect of theatre is more problematic. Conceptions of autonomy that require the arts to be somehow ‘pure’ find the sociality inherent in the theatrical art work itself highly problematic, in a way that is not the case for practices like poetry and painting in which there (appears to be) more of a separation between the industry and the art works themselves. It is hard to see, for example, how a social institution like theatre could serve as a conduit for the space of total freedom from the modern, commodified social order that Theodor Adorno sees as the definition of autonomy. Adorno wrote far more about music than theatre, but he was famously hostile to jazz, the musical 14 The placement (in the small ovals) is of drama as a literary form, as opposed to poetry and the novel. Particular examples of theatre, especially those which differ from so-called ‘boulevard’ theatre may occupy different places within the field. Notably, Bourdieu places André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in a very different, far more autonomous position than drama as a form. Bourdieu adds an arrow, noting that Antoine’s work and the boulevard theatre can and do influence one another. But this does not change the relative position of the three literary forms.

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form that has most in common with the collaborative, social and public aspects of theatre.15 Furthermore, the economic logic of the performing arts makes them dependent on outside forces in a way that the visual arts and literature are not. It is specifically the performing arts that suffer from the high labour costs which make support by means of patronage, sponsors and subsidies necessary for them to exist (Baumol and Bowen 1966; Abbing 2002; Van Maanen 2009). This produces the need to justify these expenditures on a social basis. Usually, such justifications require references to values that are not specific to the theatre field (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, theatre in practice requires public buildings that cannot be erected without the help of the state or city authorities, thus firmly entangling theatre in the public sphere.16 The theatre is rarely asked to step outside of place and time in the way that poetry, abstract painting, or twelve-tone music sometimes are. In fact, historically, most of those who have tried to name or describe theatre’s particular value have placed it squarely in the realm of practical, contemporary social action. The Romantic-era German poet, playwright and theorist Friedrich Schiller famously called for theatre to be a ‘moral institution’; that is, one that can function as a preserver of and advocate for civic morality (Schiller 2004 [1784]). That is a wholly social value, and this function is one that cannot be conceived of in isolation from a community at a particular point. The twentieth-century Marxian theatre theorists Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud identified similar functions for theatre, though of course they differed on the nature of the moral lessons they wished their theatre to impart and the means by which it could do so. Even the oldest extant theory we have of the purpose of dramatic tragedy—Aristotle’s idea of the tragic creation of katharsis through pity and fear—is a fully social function that can only be realized within a polis and for its benefit. In the contemporary era, the social philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre (1984) has suggested theatre as a useful means of moral instruction. This explains the popularity of theatre for those who which to edify the population, including the social movements of the early twentieth century, the educational theatre movement of the 1970s and its prominence in the more recent community arts. 15 For more of Adorno’s distaste for jazz (or at least what he thought of as jazz), see Adorno (1981 and 1989 [1937]) and Lewandowski (1996). 16 This is not to say that other art forms are never entangled in the public sphere. One need only look at national galleries to see to what extent the visual arts can be entangled in non-field rationales. However, theatre as an ephemeral art form requires such institutional arrangements by definition, while the visual arts can exist without them, though contemporary visual art worlds may look just as institutionalized as theatre.

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Theatre, then, has a very hard time being pure. It is always already enmeshed in social relations, and its autonomy is thus always already compromised by those relations. And yet, if it were not able to assert an independent value for itself, we would not be able to recognize it as a distinct social practice. This tension only makes the ways in which theatre defines and defends its own value, and the way its autonomy is asserted, encouraged, used or diminished all the more interesting and important to study.

1.6. Conclusion In this chapter, we have presented our view of how we can identify the autonomy of the theatre and describe the debates that surround it. Theatre is autonomous to the extent that agents in and around theatre field pursue the specific value of that field. This formula implies that while it is impossible to provide a definition of theatrical autonomy, as it is a social process rather than a particular object, studying the actions of agents in and around theatre fields—hence the social value of theatre—is greatly aided by the use of the concept of theatrical autonomy. This pursuit of theatrical autonomy can be defined negatively, as the pursuit against other than the specific value of theatre, and positively, by a definition by ostension in which acts of agents in theatre fields affirm a certain notion of theatrical value, however temporary and fleetingly this may be. However, this is not the only possible perspective; others have considered the notion of artistic autonomy in ways quite different from our Bourdieusian perspective. Can we complement Bourdieu’s notion with the views of his predecessors and critics? This is the task we take up in the next chapter. In Chapter 3, we will examine how different forms of contemporary theatre still make use of claims to autonomy, even as they critique them. While we try to be clear in our use of it here, autonomy is far from a simple concept, and the debates that surround its nature are reflected in the debates about how it can be applied.

2.

The concept of artistic autonomy

The American philosopher Casey Haskins (2000) has noted that the debate over artistic autonomy has received more attention and provoked more passion than this relatively narrow question of aesthetic theory might seem to warrant. He argues that the reason for that is that questions of the aesthetic realm and its freedom have served as metaphors for morality and politics, explicitly or otherwise. The intellectual history of the notion of artistic autonomy is extensive. In this chapter we will position Bourdieu’s notion of specific value within this rich history of philosophical and sociological thinking, as Bourdieu did not somehow magically think up this idea of specific value. On the contrary, he stands in a long line of philosophers and social scientists. In this chapter, we will look at how some of the participants in this debate have described art’s autonomy and what we can learn from the differences with Bourdieu. We will put Bourdieu’s views into dialogue with thinkers both before and after his time. Thus, the chapter does not present a full philosophical history of the concept of autonomy. This task, we leave to philosophers. Here, we merely expand our understanding of the concept so productive use of it can be made when analysing theatre systems. We do this by first comparing Bourdieu’s thoughts to the functionalist tradition in the philosophy of art, which is based on the Kantian aesthetics that Schiller applied to theatre. This line of reasoning focuses on the effects aesthetic experiences have on the observer. We will also avail ourselves of Niklas Luhmann’s system theoretical perspective, as his theory of art as a social system contributes to the functional perspective with an understanding of what the arts do for audiences and thus in society (Van Maanen 2009). In our view, understanding this perspective is necessary, especially for our analysis of the relationship between the theatrical field and cultural policy. In addition to the functionalist understanding of the autonomy of art, we present the institutionalist tradition represented by Danto, Dickie and Becker. They locate the social specificity of arts not in the effects it has for its audience, but in the institutional arrangements in and around the acts of art making and art perceiving.1 This will gain us a broader perspective on the notion of specific value and how it affects theatre fields, and will also help us understand how claims to theatrical autonomy might limit art’s social functioning.

1

See Davies (1991 and 2001) for a concise description of both strands of art philosophy.

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Furthermore, we discuss the critics of Bourdieu’s field theory, most notably the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, which has critiqued Bourdieu for having too rigid an approach to the analysis of fields. Keeping this critique in mind may sharpen our analysis of the dynamics of the theatrical fields, but we will show that a full-on version of ANT cannot account for what Bourdieu denotes as ‘objective structures’ of social fields and thus for autonomy. For this reason, we argue for an intermediate stance between Bourdieu and ANT that makes it possible to pay attention both to the structural relationships in theatre fields and to the actions of individuals in these fields that constantly work to undermine and change them. The pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006 [1991]) provides such a middle ground. We will use their notion of multiple values that either stand in opposition to each other or can be brought into alignment as a means to unpack Bourdieu’s somewhat outdated strict opposition of economic and artistic values. This constitutes a productive expansion of Bourdieu’s grand récit when analysing theatre fields.

2.1.

The functional perspective on art

Plato and Aristotle: Art’s impacts on society Like many philosophical debates, the contested concept of artistic autonomy has roots in the thought of ancient Greece. Both Plato and Aristotle differentiated between the narrative presentation of facts in testimony, philosophy or history (which Aristotle called diegesis) and the aesthetic form of representation used by artists (which he called mimesis). Most famously, Plato wrestled with the social role of artists in The Republic, banishing dramatic poets from his ideal state because their mimetic form of representation was a form of deception. The images that mimesis offered were not mere derivative copies of ideal forms, as a table is a lesser imitation of the ideal form of a table. They are, in fact, copies of those copies, and thus twice removed from the truth and extremely unreliable as a source of moral or political inspiration. Moreover, the demonstrative, spectacular nature of the art of the actor (in Greek, hypokrites) encouraged the portrayal of heightened, indulgent emotion, rather than the valorous self-control that was seen as appropriate for a good citizen. An ideal state could ill afford its citizens being distracted by such unhelpful lies (Plato 2012, Book X). Plato may not have intended his thoughts to be a direct political programme against theatre, but they do represent the opening salvo in the philosophical

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debate between artistic values and those that govern (or ought to govern) the worlds of politics, philosophy or ethics. Aristotle argued in opposition to Plato for the positive value of art in society. His concept of catharsis is one of the first formulations of the value and function of tragedy for individuals and thus indirectly for society. The concept of catharsis is not very precisely defined and its exact meaning has been disputed ever since, but the main point here is that, in opposition to Plato’s idea about a negative impact on society, Aristotle begins a long tradition of thinking about the positive value of art in society.2 But even though these thoughts are central today, one should bear in mind that the ancient Greek understanding of the arts was different than our own, since the concept of the arts as a distinct field of human endeavour had not yet developed. The Greeks’ primary term for art, techne, is closer to what we would now call craft, and is the root of our term technology. There was no separation here between ‘artistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ acts of creative making; both a painting and a chair were examples of techne. This makes applying Greek ideas of the appropriate role of techne to a contemporary understanding of the arts problematic. From our perspective, the key change occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, when a notion of the fine arts as something more than (and distinct from) merely skilful craftsmanship began to emerge. By this point, it was possible to point to a set of creative pursuits that served no clear utilitarian purpose, but were nevertheless highly valued; these, the fine arts, had an obvious and celebrated importance to what were emerging as modern societies, particularly in intellectual circles. ‘The aesthetic’ became a key concept for Enlightenment philosophy, and art developed into an autonomous field of modern society. As a part of that development, the arts left the workshop and entered the academy; if they were no longer useful, they now demanded to be studied, evaluated and analysed by skilled and recognized experts. Kant and Schiller: Art as an aesthetic experience The most important articulation of this change comes from Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Briefly, Kant argues that people have several distinct means of perceiving and evaluating what they experience; he calls these faculties of 2 Belfiore and Bennett (2008) based their analysis of the intellectual history of the ‘social impacts of the arts’ in exactly these two traditions: a negative tradition originating from Plato and a positive one originating from Aristotle.

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judgement. What is unique about our faculty of aesthetic judgement is that it is disinterested. Most of the time, when we are attracted to something, it is because we wish to derive pleasure or profit from it in some way. Food might satisfy our hunger; a piece of clothing might keep us warm or make us feel better about ourselves; an expensive car might display our wealth; an argument may offer us moral or intellectual insight; a person we care for might provoke in us feelings of love and belonging. All of these, Kant would say, are examples of an interested gaze; we are drawn to them because of a benefit that they offer to us. This benefit ties the object and our relationship to it into a network of social values and systems of exchange. In contrast, the aesthetic gaze is disinterested. This means that the pleasure gained by aesthetically perceiving an object is not related to an interest in the object. Instead, this gaze appreciates the object in terms of form, not in terms of its particularity. This means that this gaze is both subjective—arising from the subject and not the object—and universal— independent of the particular desires and needs of that subject. The pleasure the aesthetic gaze takes in this contemplation of form is a different sort of pleasure: one wholly wrapped up in the form of the object and without use in the wider world.3 As there is nothing personal about that gaze, it can be subjected to learned investigation and evaluated on the basis of that scrutiny. The disinterestedness and purposelessness of the relationship between the perceiver and the object can be seen as a gesture towards a sense of artistic autonomy, but it is not yet the definition by the arts of their own value. Kant is not talking about the nature of art, the causes of it or the means by which it is valued. He is instead describing the means by which the observer encounters, receives and understands the aesthetic object and the nature of the delight that she takes from it. What is autonomous about the aesthetic experience, according to Kant, is the way aesthetic objects are perceived and judged. This is obviously related to the reasons for or nature of art, but it stands a step prior to it. Most Kantian scholars have argued that when Kant discusses the aesthetic, he is thinking about the encounter with the beautiful and the sublime in the natural world at least as much as he is in the arts. 3 To be precise here, it is the pleasure that is disinterested, not the object itself. The object itself may have practical use for us, i.e. a consumer might be interested in owning it. Frequently, art objects are immensely coveted. But the experience of its form leads to a disinterested pleasure, a pleasure which feels disconnected from the object and therefore ownership of the object is not an issue in experiencing the pleasure. Furthermore, in many cases this disinterested pleasure is mixed with other interested pleasures that do serve a specific purpose. In such cases, the pleasure is not ‘pure’ (see Vuyk 2011, 25).

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Even so, Kant’s concept of the aesthetic has influenced the understanding of a modern concept of the arts that begins to develop in exactly this period. The aesthetic gaze as a particular discerning faculty that applies only in aesthetic cases also necessitates something particular about the nature of art works (that is, of human-constructed objects meant for aesthetic reception): that they are purposeful without having a purpose. This is the central difference between a modern concept of the arts and the ancient Greek concept of techne. The idea of purposelessness means that art works are intentional constructions, but ones that serve no particular interest for the viewer and are instead intended to be perceived with a disinterested gaze. For Kant, what makes the arts unique is not their content or context, but the means by which they are received by an audience. And because the interest in the object is not related to the subjective interest of the perceiver, Kant argues that the faculty of judgement is something universal, something that all human beings are capable of. The consequences of the last point have been major; they have formed the basis of, for instance, the much taken for granted assumption in cultural policy that art is good for all people. It is also an assumption that has been much criticized, amongst others by Bourdieu, who sees this specific artistic autonomy not as an a priori, ontological difference between faculties of judgement, but rather the historical development of what he calls an ‘aesthetic disposition’ that is founded ‘in the history of the artistic institution’ (Bourdieu 1993c, 255). 4 This disposition may be a way of seeing art, yes, but there is nothing ‘natural’ or universal in it. Its apparent self-evidence comes from ideas, beliefs and philosophical claims that are particular to our historical moment. They have been reified into unstated basic assumptions (doxa) and passed down from teachers to students and from established artists and audiences to new ones through a historically particular form of intellectual training: What is forgotten […] is the fact that although appearing to be a gift of nature, the eye of the twentieth-century art lover is a product of history […]. The pure gaze, capable of apprehending the work of art as it demands to be apprehended (i.e. in itself and for itself, as form and not as function), is inseparable from the appearance of producers of art motivated by a pure artistic intention, which is itself inseparable from the emergence 4 Interestingly, this view leads Bourdieu to be critical of philosophers of art, such as Danto, who use the notion of an art world to distinguish between artworks and ordinary objects (see Section 2.2). This, Bourdieu claims, would bar sociological analysis of the arts from the field of philosophy, a field in which he wishes to locate his own work.

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of an autonomous artistic field capable of formulating and imposing its own ends against external demands. (Bourdieu 1993c, 256)

The key historical development is an artistic field that is not just differentiated from others, but able to ‘impos[e] its own ends,’ as opposed to those imported from outside (Ibid.). From a theatrical perspective, one of the philosophers who has participated in the social institution of the disinterested aesthetic gaze was the great German playwright and theorist Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805). Schiller applied Kant’s insights into the encounter with the aesthetic object to his interest in the social role of theatre, particularly in his lecture Theatre As a Moral Institution (1784) and his book Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). He agreed with Kant that the faculty of aesthetic judgement was different than other means of judgement, but he pushed further, arguing that the aesthetic judgement is necessary for the sake of the full emergence of our human freedom and political enlightenment, as ‘it is only the aesthetic disposition of the soul that gives birth to liberty’ (Schiller 1784, 54). Schiller, following Kant, sees a gap between two sides of human personhood: reason and nature. The Kantian faculty of reason is a ‘formal impulse’ that pushes us to objectify and abstract the world, understanding it systematically in terms of laws, rules and patterns. In contrast, as natural beings, we respond particularly, subjectively, sensuously and emotionally to that which we encounter. One way to put it is that, as rational beings, we subject the universe to our understandings and intellectual systems. As natural beings, our understandings are subjected to the universe and its events. But our particular identities—that which makes us a particular person and not just a human-being-in-general—are also something that, for Schiller, comes to us from our status of being subject to nature’s whims, not from our subjecting nature to our own understandings. For Schiller, the natural and rational faculties are not reconcilable. The understanding of one cannot be carried over into the other. For Schiller, there was a pressing need to find a way to mediate between the two faculties, as they are both genuine aspects of our humanity. And as moral progress and human flourishing in the modern age depend not on a honing of our faculty of reason but on a better understanding of our own nature, this need to find mediation becomes not simply a personal imperative but a social and moral one. What could provide that mediating? In the midst of the formidable realm of forces [read: nature], and of the sacred empire of laws [read: reason], the aesthetic impulse of form creates

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by degrees a third and a joyous realm, that of play and of the appearance, where she emancipates man from fetters, in all his relations, and from all that is named constraint, whether physical or moral (Schiller 1784, 62, our comments)

The aesthetic impulse is thus the means of human emancipation; it is in the play of aesthetic form that we are released from the limitations of both our particularity and our universality. Note also that when Schiller talks about the aesthetic impulse, he does not seem to be restricting the application of that impulse exclusively to the reception event, as Kant does. Play, appearance, and the aesthetic impulse instead mark out a ‘realm’, a space not unlike Bourdieu’s field. The work of this realm has a distinct function—human emancipation—and in order to properly serve this function, it needs to be distinct and autonomous from other realms governed by forces or laws. This may seem a long philosophical diversion for the sociological analysis of theatrical autonomy, which is what we attempt in this book. But there is a close link between the development of new understandings of art and thus of art’s autonomy and the situation in which the arts find themselves. As Lijster writes: [T]he institution and the concept of art as we know it, and take for granted, is of a relatively young age, and has its origin in specific (social and economi[c]) conditions. Kant’s and Schiller’s theories of the ideal of autonomous art emerge at a moment in history when the autonomy of art also became a social fact. (Lijster 2012, 50–1)

The ‘social fact’ Lijster refers to is the shift in arts patronage from the courts of kings, princes and popes to the market and the bourgeoisie, a move that took place in the same era as the propagation of Kant’s philosophy. That shift did not quite yet establish the arts as a fully autonomous field of their own; this would happen later. Instead, Lijster’s shift demanded an initial step towards that: a new way of making sense of the relationship between the arts and social and economic power. Kant and Schiller’s ideas about artistic autonomy, Lijster argues, require that political and economic relationship; they do not lead to it: Paradoxically, therefore, art becomes autonomous the very moment it becomes a commodity. The idea of art as autonomous […] can be understood as a response to the commodification of art. As Bourdieu argues, the economic logic of the art industries is complemented with an anti-’economic’ economy of pure art. (Lijster 2012, 35)

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There is a paradox here: On the one hand, autonomy is an absolute value, which is the ultimate aim of ‘every’ artist’s striving; that is, it is set up as a pure idea by the social practice of art, even if it is never fully attainable in reality. On the other hand, asserting a claim to autonomy is a practical and even useful response to the economic situation with which artists are confronted. It is precisely the working-out of this struggle in concrete theatre fields that we wish to explore. We will use the notion of autonomy to explain how practitioners in theatre fields deal with this tension. But before we do that, we need to address a common misreading of Kant’s notion of disinterestedness. Both Lijster (2012, 24) and Belfiore and Bennett (2008) argue that the early nineteenth century saw mistranslations and misunderstandings of Kant’s work. In particular, this model of appreciation without direct benefit or utility that Kant called disinterestedness was taken to imply a complete separation between the beautiful and the moral by such writers as Madame de Staël in her 1810 work De l’Allemagne. These (mis)readings lead to the notion of l’art pour l’art, or art for its own sake, but it is worth hesitating before making that jump to explore the conception of the autonomy of the arts that pertained in Kant’s own moment. Kant himself makes no claim that disinterest implies a break with the idea that art can have social functions and values (Belfiore and Bennett 2008, 181).5 And Schiller did actually take the opposite stance: that it is precisely the autonomy of the aesthetic experience that gives arts its social function and value. Luhmann: Art as a system of communication The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) developed this notion that art’s value and function in society are closely related to its autonomy. Luhmann builds up a system theory based, amongst others, on the social differentiation within modern society that originates with the Enlightenment. In this, he focuses on the same historical moment as Bourdieu, who described the revolutionary act of Manet, though he conceptualizes the change quite differently. Rather than thinking of the social world as a set of fields, each defined by its own capital, Luhmann describes society as being made up of systems of communication in which 5 See also Lijster, who also does not see the l’art pour l’art movement as denying any function of art in society. Rather, it is the refusal of specific functions dictated by either the church, the court or by bourgeois taste. As a result, he does not see autonomous and critical art (or pure and committed art) as standing in diametric opposition, (Lijster 2012, 51) as is often thought.

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the actors are not people or institutions, but rather the communicative acts that they produce.6 Luhmann’s arts system consists of (primarily) artistic communications, and (secondarily) observations on these communications—that is, primarily of art works (whether objects, performances, or something else) and secondarily of critical reviews and art historical analyses (which he calls ‘second order observations’). These are the central ‘actors’ of the arts as a social system. In essence, he regards works of art as combinations of forms and, in his theory, these forms are observed and combined and moulded into acts of communication (Laermans 1998). As the modern art system developed, these communications become increasingly self-referential. Luhmann thinks that art became an autonomous system at the moment when in artistic communications self-reference took precedence over references to other sorts of communications. He identifies the historic moment of this change at the time when art develops into a market independent of the former close relationship to either the church or the royal courts. As Lijster argued, there is thus a clear link between material and philosophical changes in the art system. Luhmann argues that the rise of an art market did not only mean that the previous accepted criteria for good art based on aristocratic ideals disappeared (Luhmann 2000 [1995], 164), it also made possible a great diversification of art forms, subject matter and styles. As a consequence of the diversification, intermediaries between the artist and consumers became necessary and so art historians, critics and distributors claimed their place. This is an important step, as these intermediaries are the driving force of second-order communications. They played an important part in establishing new, self-referential criteria for the evaluation of artistic works. This meant that the novelty of artistic expressions as related to previously produced works of art became the crucial distinctiveness of artistic communication, and the second-order critical voices were necessary to define and clarify this distinctiveness. Thus, the autonomous art systems develop only when art begins to take reflection on itself as its primary concern. As Luhmann writes: The interaction between artists, experts, and consumers differentiates itself as communication, and it takes place only in the art system, which established and reproduces itself in this manner. What romanticism called ‘art criticism’ is integrated into the art system as a ‘medium of 6 We will not give a full introduction to Luhmann’s system theory, but mainly introduce the way he thinks about art and its function in society.

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reflection’, and its task is to complete the artist’s work. In fact, romanticism was the first artistic style to embrace the new situation of an autonomous art system. (Luhmann 2000 [1995], 166)

The development of art movements—that is, alliances between groups of artists and like-minded critics—offered security from the market conditions. The key and defining element of artistic communication becomes reflection on the artistic act itself. The information that artistic communication conveys and the details of that act of conveyance are no longer distinct from one another; in fact, they become increasingly identical.7 This development is important for understanding modern notions of aesthetic experience: it is exactly because of the development of art into an autonomous system that art can serve a specific function in society. It is the specific nature of the experiences that these self-referential works afford that are the core of the value of art in society according to Luhmann. The differences between the ways Bourdieu and Luhmann conceptualize the autonomy of the arts are important because they point to a different understanding of the specif ic function of an autonomous art world in society. In Bourdieu’s account, a key function of the field is the markingout of social boundaries between the positions different artists occupy, both between esteemed and disreputable art forms and between those that focus on aesthetic properties and those that focus on economic gains. This struggle for position, argues Bourdieu, both organizes the art field so audiences can find their way within it and creates the free space for new artistic developments. Bourdieu does not explain why the arts as such are so valued by and valuable to society. This presents a problem, as we discussed in the opening of this chapter with reference to Casey Haskins: the problem of autonomy is important for artists and philosophers because of what it illuminates about the arts’ function in wider human life. While Luhmann’s systems theory also does not offer a simple explanation of the arts’ social function, his focus on the communicative nature of art brings 7 This self-referentiality does not necessitate that the art system is autonomous in the sense that we put forward in the previous chapter: that it is no longer subject to pressures from outside, even with the understanding that we always see autonomy as a matter of degree, rather than a fixed state. Luhmann does not need to engage in the question of outside pressures because of his view of art as a specific form of communication. This perspective, however, prevents him from analysing the pressures that remain present and relevant for the people making, distributing and experiencing art, however specific their means of communicating may be. Luhmann would simply dismiss communications about the financing of art, for instance, as external to the art system, no matter their effects on the working lives of artists and audiences.

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him closer to one. We will finish our examination of Luhmann with a look at two points his theory can offer to address this problem. First, the experience of either production or consumption of the arts, because they are experiences of form, have the ability to make one aware of the existence of other possibilities than those that have actually materialized in society, though not an infinite variety of them (Luhmann 2000 [1995], 148). This development of alternatives, however, requires a spectator or art-maker to have a critical awareness of their act of spectation or creation—that is what Luhmann calls a second-order observation. Thus, the self-referential character of artistic communications aids in experiencing that the world can always be different than what it is. Or, in Luhmann’s words: The function of art, one could argue, is to make the world appear within the world […] The paradox unique to art, which art creates and resolves, resides in the observability of the unobservable. Today, this no longer means that art must focus on Ideas, on ideal form [….]. To our contemporary sensibility, it makes no sense to show the bright side of the world. […]. But it does make sense to broaden one’s understanding of the forms that are possible in the world. (Luhmann 2000 [1995], 149–50)

Second, as Van Maanen argues, the arts make perceptions available for communication (Van Maanen 2009, 111). This function rests upon the fact that relations—Luhmann calls them structural couplings—are created between the art system and the bodily systems of memory, cognition and perception. Though perceptions are unique to every person and cannot be shared with others themselves, the arts present an opportunity to offer up what is perceived in a transformed state. They are no longer incommunicable perceptions, but rather communications that can and seek to be shared. The sharing of (derivatives of) private perceptions is an important step for the building of sociality. Luhmann argues that the art system can produce this function precisely because of the way it can assert a claim to autonomy. In this way, Luhmann offers a contemporary understanding of an idea based in the thinking of Kant and Schiller, an idea about the function of art and of autonomy— and thus a functionalistic understanding of autonomy. This idea is central in our analysis in the next chapters about the value of theatre in society, a core question as soon as we start linking autonomous theatrical fields to the field of cultural policy, which has a strong influence on the shaping and dynamics of contemporary European theatre fields.

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2.2.

Dickie, Danto and Becker: Art as an institution

The functionalistic understanding of autonomy needs a supplement that takes developments in the field from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries into account. It needs to be supplemented with theories that address the questions of the relevance of autonomy even for forms of theatre that do not adhere to the idea of a specific perception-based experience as the core of the artistic experience. We need these theories to help us make sense of the forms of theatre, such as post-dramatic, immersive, documentary, verbatim and applied theatre that seem to deny its autonomy altogether. We will discuss these in Chapter 3. The institutionalist understanding of the autonomy of art can help us here, insofar as it offers a view of why the autonomy of an artistic field is not dependent on the characteristics of the art work itself, but on the institutions that frame them. By the twentieth century, the defining difference between art and other activities was to be found less in spectators and the means through which they engaged with the artwork and more in the person of the artist and the social relationships that surrounded them and conditioned their work. Some of this shift in focus derived from an economic awareness of the importance of the division of labour and from Marx’s concept of the alienation of a work force under capitalism from the products of their work. The differentiation of society into separate fields based on economic function was such a powerful force in the development of modern society that there was no reason to think that the arts would escape it. Art-making fields, like every other, had their own internal structures, hierarchies and ways of operating, their own values and means of recognition, and their own internal assumptions. This structural specificity made for a different understanding of autonomy that was not dependent on any particular aesthetic function for the arts. This view, often called institutionalism, was taken up by such writers as Arthur Danto and George Dickie. It holds that what makes the arts distinct from the rest of life is not any inherent characteristic of the activities of art-making or art viewing, but rather the social and intellectual structures that define and sustain them. In a famous 1964 article in the Journal of Philosophy, Danto was the first to coin the term ‘art world’, indicating that knowledge of art theory and history is necessary to declare something as art and this knowledge was located in ‘an atmosphere’ surrounding art works (Danto 1964, 577). As Van Maanen writes: Danto deliberately aimed to shift the attention of art historians, critics and other professionals from the traditional idea that artworks have intrinsic and typical features which make them art, to the view that works become

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art on the basis of their position in the (historical) context, in other words, because of their position in an art world. (Van Maanen 2009, 19)

Dickie took up the debate about how to understand art as an institution. In explicit contrast to Danto, he tried to include the context of art works within his very concept of what defined an object as a work of art. He thought Danto’s conception failed to adequately speak ‘about the institutional nature of art as art’ (1984, 17, our italics), while his institutional theory ‘is an attempt to sketch an account of the specific institutional structure within which works of art have their being’ (Ibid.). Dickie defines the arts by means of a set of institutional relationships between artists and artworks, but also grants agency to the public in his theory. He concludes that his ‘institutional theory sets works of art in a complex framework in which an artist in creating art fulfils a historically developed cultural role for a more or less prepared public’ (Ibid., 66). The next step was taken by Howard Becker,8 who, in his book Art Worlds (1982), took the wider field of art-making to be the definition of art and artistry. For Becker, artists and those whose work supports them—dealers, critics, publishers, producers and (again) art audiences—create something that is understood as art through their actions, thus shifting the focus from the single creative act of art-making to the wider, diverse and collective effort that is needed to sustain the concept and institution of art in society.9 Indeed, in doing so Becker tried to fill out the content of what philosophers denote as an art world, explicitly referring to Danto and Dickie (Becker 1982, 149). Becker uses the term art world: 8 Becker cannot quite be regarded as an institutionalist in the sense that Dickie and Danto can. Rather, he belongs to the school of symbolic interactionism, a strand of thinking that investigates the meanings people adhere to theirs and others actions. 9 Becker’s understanding of the nature of art-making may make him difficult to apply to the theatre. He separates out the act of art-making, the core activity of the art world, into two tasks: the generation of an idea and the execution of this idea in a material form. ‘Once conceived an idea must be executed’ (1982, 3) he writes, glossing over the fact that in many art forms, such as modern dance and contemporary devised theatre, the two activities are so closely linked that they cannot be meaningfully separated. It is through the exploration of the material (movement or performance) that forms are created that may turn out to have a meaning, but not necessarily one conceived in advance and then be ‘translated’ into movement or performance, as Becker seems to imply. This criticism, however, does not discredit the notion of art as a collective social activity and thus the importance of the institutional relations within an art world. We here refer to Eldridge’s ‘formula’—as opposed to definition—for describing art works as presenting ‘a subject matter as a focus for thought and emotional attitude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration of material’ (Eldridge 2003, 259). See also footnote 4 in the Introduction.

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to denote the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joined knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art worlds are noted for. (Becker 1982, 398)

The most canonical demonstration of this concept of ‘art world’ is Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculpture Fountain. What made the piece a work of art was not the work Duchamp did in crafting it (he did none; he found it ready-made), or its aesthetic uniqueness (it had none; it was an ordinary urinal) or the value it holds or function it serves for society (at least at first glance, it holds neither). What makes Danto’s definition of the art world on the basis of its ‘atmosphere’ distinct—and different from our value-based view as laid out in the previous chapter—is that this ‘atmosphere’ is not a reason to do things, but rather a means of bestowing them with meaning. It is an intellectual capacity, a technology of sorts, a means of reading certain objects and practices (such as Duchamp’s) that would otherwise be meaningless or trivial. At their core, these institutionalist views of what makes the arts distinct have become so accepted as to become conventional wisdom. Most art sociology today begins from the institutional contexts in which a work of art is made, distributed and experienced. There is nothing particular to the arts about this; all sociology is interested in is the institutional settings in which its subjects operate. The degree of independence that these fields have from one another and from society at large is generally considered a measure of their degree of autonomy. As such, the institutional perspective can help us fill out and better understand Bourdieu’s theory. In the previous chapter, we described the mechanisms through which artistic fields mark out their autonomy by defining their own values. It is important to note that this Bourdieusian mechanism is related to, but distinct from, the institutionalists’ line of thought. Like the institutionalists, Bourdieu recognizes that one cannot explain what makes an object into an artwork without reference to the artistic field that contains it. This is exemplified by contemporary forms of performance that question their location within the theatrical field, such as applied theatre and stand-up comedy. This idea that an object is defined by its institutional context is not unique to the arts. But unlike the institutionalists, Bourdieu also sees a radical aspect of the arts’ claims to autonomy, one that cannot be made from other fields. In the contemporary era, Bourdieu argues, the uniqueness of the arts’ claim to autonomy is that they are valued precisely for their unassimilability into other values. One could say that the institutionalists are content with a positive (if somewhat circular) definition of the arts, such

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as that recognized by the institutional context of the art world. Bourdieu, in contrast, adds a negative definition: the arts must be also defined as that which refuses to accept any other set of values. This constant refinement and rearticulation of the nature of artistic value is both the arts’ mode of operation and their reason for being. Certainly, Bourdieu’s notion of the arts is a theoretical model that no actually existing art field can fully embody. But the possibility and attraction of this model make the debates and struggles over autonomy in the artistic field far more heated, influential and important than similar struggles in other fields. We should not, however, mistake Bourdieu’s negative addition to the institutionalists’ understanding of the definition and value as a larger and more radical claim to artistic autonomy, such as those associated with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School that we mentioned briefly in the last chapter. For Adorno, the existential freedom of a genuine artwork—its ability to shake off all determination from anything outside of itself, whether that is an economic system, a social structure or even other artworks in its field—is the surest sign of a lingering spark of human freedom and the possibility of meaningful social improvement in the capitalist era. Adorno’s artwork, like Bourdieu’s specific value, refuses to be measured by external criteria. For Bourdieu, this speaks to the right of the artistic field to always rearticulate its own sense of value. But for Adorno, this speaks to the inherent negativity of the artwork as such: that is, its complete functionlessness, or its status ‘as plenipotentiary for the in-itself that does not yet exist.’ (Adorno 1984, 341). This strong view of autonomy depends on a certain philosophical understanding of the aesthetic nature of art. Bourdieu’s more sociological view does not require such a specific philosophy. To briefly summarize these two sections, we can say that while the functionalist perspective dovetails with Bourdieu’s notion of specific value as a historic development from the romantic era based on the disinterested nature of artistic pleasure, the institutionalist perspective points to the inner-field debates over the specific value of art (its positive definition). To the institutional perspective Bourdieu adds the notion of a negative definition, that artistic value is defined against other values. Discussing the functionalist perspective gives us insight into the particular value of the arts for society. This is especially true when drawing from Luhmann’s systems theory, which argues that the arts provide the dual opportunities to experience that the world can always be different than it presents itself to us and to share our perceptions of the world which would otherwise be incommunicable. The functionalist perspective draws our attention to

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the fact that artistic autonomy is maintained based on how the arts are contextualized in society; that is, on how the relationship between the art fields and other social fields is organized. These perspectives are not mutually exclusive, and both are necessary to gain a full insight into the social role of theatre.

2.3.

Actor-Network Theory: Critique of field theory

Like the institutionalists, Bourdieu’s analysis of the autonomy of arts is based on the idea of the existence of a field (or art world or art system). His focus on this meso-level social entity has led to criticism for being too structuralistic in his approach. An important critique has come from scholars inspired by Actor Network Theory, such as Nathalie Heinich (see e.g. Heinich 1997 and 2000). ANT’s vision of society is one of modular actors making links between one another and, by reiterating and reinforcing these connections, building up networks. These networks are always built locally, step by step, from one connection to another, and they will instantly begin to atrophy if the connections that make them up are not reliably reinforced. Anything that we could possibly call ‘society’ can only be understood by following—ant-like—each individual network connection and putting these pieces together; hence the title of Latour’s key ANT text, Reassembling the Social (2005). There is no theoretical limit to the size or shape of these networks, but they do require constant reassertion and are always provisional and changing—they tend to bud off and atrophy. ANT is a method of examining this process of growth and decay; its analytic process is based on the imperative to ‘follow the actor’. But it is important to note that the term ‘actors’ here does not only refer to human beings; in ANT, the category also includes animals, objects and machines. ANT grew out of the social study of science, and the idea that an interaction between a person and an object or animal was a genuinely social interaction was one of its key early insights. This is even more the case when the object in question is an intentionally-designed piece of machinery, which testifies to past social interactions in its very structure and means of use. Latour’s major claim against Bourdieu is that ANT can account for social change and development far more robustly than field theory is able to. Bourdieu freely acknowledges that his fields can and do change, but he does treat them as relatively stable and objective social entities. Such stable, observable entities simply have no parallel in ANT, and so for Latour,

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there is no field (or analogous meso-level social entity) for which a claim to autonomy can be made. This is, perhaps, part of why Latour declares that ANT is not, in fact, a social theory at all, in the sense that other theories are, as it struggles to posit no entity—institution, structure, habit or so on—that is not observable in the network of interactions between actor and actor. However, this stance is hard to maintain. When trying to account for human intentionality, Latour rightly notes that we need not conceive it as a single transcendent property, and that it may, in fact, be a set of patterns learned from prior interactions. In time, these patterns can take a shape that looks quite institution-like. This problem of dealing with patterns persists in the arts as well. Van Maanen (2009) points out that ANT-inspired arts sociologists cannot dispense with a notion of predetermined rules that limit the possible actions of agents. Furthermore, Van Maanen argues that there are more similarities between field theory and ANT than may be apparent, through the former’s concept of position-taking. The field theorist who focuses on the actor’s act of taking up a position within the field resembles the ANT scholar who adheres to the prescription to ‘follow the actor’. When the field is studied at the level of the occupiers of positions and their acts of position-takings, rather than at the level of its supposedly rigid objective structure, the work of ANT- and field-based analyses begin to overlap in significant ways (Van Maanen 2009, 139). This is not to say that we think that the student of theatrical autonomy can dispense with ANT entirely. There are insights to be gained from it. One useful idea from ANT is a division between two types of agents: intermediaries and meditators. Intermediaries transport meaning from one site to another without transforming it, while mediators ‘transform, translate, distort and modify’ information as they move it from site to site (Latour 2005, 39). It is this second kind of agent that is of interest to us. In fact, Latour sees one of the goals of ANT as understanding the ways in which as many agents as possible are mediators, rather than intermediaries. He sees any adequate account of social action as ‘a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled’ (Ibid., 44). For our purpose here—which is to explain how and to what ends autonomy is claimed, deployed, or appealed to, rather than simply treating it as a pre-existent property of a field—this distinction between mediators and intermediaries is useful. When agents make use of autonomy, they are not just transmitting it. In fact, by each time they use it, they change the meaning of the term autonomy and the situation from which the next claim can be made. Bourdieu refers to this as actions of position-taking, which

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‘warp’ the field. But ANT helps us keep our focus on the novelty of each claim to autonomy in itself, and not just on its effect on a larger structure such as the field.

2.4.

Boltanski and Thévenot: Art and value regimes

We recognize that we need a more dynamic and flexible understanding of the concept of specific value and of the relationship between that and values in other fields, i.e. the ANT notion of translation is helpful here as it allows for the transition from one type of values to another. But ANT does not provide tools to analyse how this is done systematically. Nor does Bourdieu with his description of conversion of capitals. While each field may have its particular value, it seems implausible that values that operate in one field of our lives have no bearing on other fields. In their book On Justification: Economies of Worth (2006 [1991]), Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot present the notion of a ‘value regime’: a structure of value that is relatively durable and capable of offering up socially acceptable justifications for actions in a number of fields. This means that they offer a more nuanced and complex understanding of the relationship between the specific value within a theatre field and other values. Looking at turn-of-the-millennium French society, they see not just two or three value regimes, but six. In Boltanski’s later work with Eve Chiapello (2005 [1999]) a seventh value regime emerging at the end of the twentieth century is added. Different social situations call for different value regimes, of course, and appeals to one or another of them may succeed or fail depending on how and where they are used. These seven structures of value (the French term is cité, in the sense of Augustine’s City of God) need not be opposed; in certain situations, they can reinforce, defer to, or compromise with one another. But they can, of course, conflict. One can dominate over the other, or (as is more frequently the case) each grows to dominate a different sphere of human social activity (what Bourdieu would call a field). Boltanski and his colleagues offer two ways of refining field theory. First, the notion that all value regimes are present in each field—at least potentially—fills out the Bourdieusian claim that autonomy can never be absolute. It is the degree to which a field can refract pressures from outside (i.e. values alien to it) that determines the possibilities of agents to claim autonomy. It is not in every position in a field that agents can neglect other values: moral, religious, political or economic. Specifically, in the heteronomous parts of the field, agents have to deal with these other values.

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Second, there is a value regime that Boltanski and Thévenot describe that is particularly important to us. Called the ‘inspired regime’, it dominates in the areas of art, religion and personal charisma. It often stands opposed to the market and civic regimes, which dominate much of contemporary life under capitalism. Because of its deference to individual, charismatic authority, the inspired value regime frequently does not admit to outside challenges to its underpinning logic. Many of the appeals to autonomy involve an invocation of the authority of the inspired value regime. In the coming chapters, we refer to the value regimes of Boltanski and Thénevot whenever we need to address the question of how agents relate the different values to each other or try to mitigate the influence of one or several of them. For this reason, we offer a short explanation of the seven value regimes here. The examples of the individual value regimes we use here represent clear-cut cases of distinct values. Most real world cases (including in the theatre) are more complex than this, and make use of a mix of value regimes. For the sake of offering a clear explanation, the examples below are not overly nuanced and do not represent a balanced sample of cases. It is precisely our point that currently theatre worlds are characterized by situations in which multiple values compete. The inspired polity The arts feature prominently in this polity that values inspiration and creativity. Romantic notions of artists as conduits of the mystical and profound are key in their prominent position within the inspired polity. The religious world is also part of this polity and is a major referent for Boltanski and Thévenot in describing it. Religious inspiration, like its artistic counterpart, is unique to and expressed in ways tightly bound to the person of the prophet. Art works, like prophecy, are paradigmatic for the products of this polity, since they are characterized by a great deal of personal investment and are perceived as linked intimately to their creator, in the sense that Walter Benjamin (1968 [1935]) referred to as the art work’s ‘aura’.10

10 Though the inspired polity and Bourdieu’s notion of specific value seem to be related, they cannot be equated with each other. For Bourdieu the pursuit of a single (specific) value—and hence the denial of the relevance of other values—is what structures a field. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s worldview, it makes no sense to talk about this or that value as ‘irrelevant’. Different values simply exist alongside each other, and actors can choose to appeal to this or that set of values as seems appropriate and strategically useful in each context. This may explain conflicts between agents but not the structure of society. Moreover, though claims to theatrical autonomy

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The domestic polity The domestic polity is based on concepts of home and family. It values the old over the young, the male over the female and ties of blood over ties of volition. In it, the father, king or bishop is the most important figure. In this polity, spontaneity and innovation are not highly valued, while consideration, politeness and tradition are. In the performing arts, performance traditions (such as certain acting styles or music practices) in which masters pass on their capability to newer generations represent domestic values. Alumni of a certain academy or school might perpetuate specific performance traditions as a kind of ‘artistic heritage’. The fame polity The polity of fame is based on public opinion; in it, the unknown has no value. Unlike in the domestic polity, cultivating gossip and rumour are useful strategies here. In the arts, the key players in this polity are journalists, press agents and celebrities. This polity helps to describe how different forms of capital can be converted into one another, as Bourdieu claimed. Renown (which Bourdieu defines as a social capital) can lead to financial rewards in salary negotiations or ticket sales. However, Bourdieu wishes to differentiate between two sorts of renown. The first, which is more field-specific, refers to an artist’s positive reputation amongst their peers, experts and connoisseurs. The second, mass-market fame, represents a conjunction of the fame and market polities. Bourdieu would dismiss the pursuit of this sort of fame as a less-than-fully-artistic goal; Boltanski and Thévenot’s project, importantly, does not allow them to make such normative judgements between values. The civic polity The core value of this polity is the ‘general interest’. In this polity, the most valued people are representatives and civil servants, who ‘sacrifice’ their personal interest in the name of the group they represent and serve. A civic leader may serve society as a whole or a specific subgroup of it (blue-collar workers, middle managers or the unemployed). Political parties, unions and labour associations are the central organizations in this polity. Relations certainly may be based in the inspired polity, they can also be based in the other polities as well. Our examples in the following chapters will demonstrate this.

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between agents are determined by membership and representation, and consent of the group (as expressed through the ballot, for instance) is the key test. Schiller’s defence of the theatre as a ‘moral institution’, serving as the conscience of a society and facilitating its moral development, is a justification of the arts under the civic polity. In contemporary performing arts policy, the attempt to use the arts to promote social cohesion is an appeal to this value regime, even if that appeal only serves to mask a more autonomous (and thus inspired) justification for the arts. The industrial polity The central values of this polity are efficacy and efficiency: systems perform as they should with a maximum of speed and reliability and a minimum of cost. This polity demands investment to improve working methods to make operations more efficient, controlled and predictable and, as a consequence, places a high value on standardization. This sets it against the inspired polity, a tension reflected by Adorno’s and the Frankfurt School’s critique of the commodification of the arts and the culture industry (Adorno 1991). From the inspirationist perspective, the products of the culture industry are debasingly inauthentic and impersonal. From the industrial perspective, however, Broadway is simply an efficient and reliable provider of entertainment. The liveness of the performing arts means that they struggle with this polity, as a performance is far more difficult and expensive to reproduce than a CD or book. However, this does not imply that the industrial value regime has no relevance to the performing arts. The standardized operational processes of long-running commercial musicals, professional acting standards, vocal techniques and technical developments in sound and lighting design can all be regarded as means of increasing the industrial efficiency of performance. The market polity The market polity seems most closely related to Bourdieu’s economic capital. However, the core value of the market polity is not money itself but competition, rivalry and the pursuit of profit. Money is the measure of success in such pursuits, as are luxury goods and other displays of wealth. The key test in the market polity is the negotiated business deal, and its most valued members are those able to best their rivals, to maximize their profits, or to seize opportunities. Opportunism in this polity is a virtue not a vice, and detachment to objects is needed to be able to use them for

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financial gains. As a result, value cannot be bound to the person in this polity, which provides an inherent tension with the inspired polity. Both tensions and alignments are possible between the market, industrial and inspired polities. The recognition of an artist’s unique and remarkable skill (either by the general public or by specialists) can be used as a selling point, giving the artist a stronger hand in negotiations. But the ephemeral quality of the audience experience makes negations more difficult, as there is no change of ownership taking place. This personal, hard-to-reproduce quality—a strength in the inspirational polity and a weakness in the industrial one—can be used as a negotiating tool in the market polity. The project polity The seventh polity was introduced eight years after the others, in The New Spirit of Capitalism by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005 [1999]). It is a ‘new’ polity in the sense that it has only recently emerged as a stable compromise between the inspired, industrial and market polities. The central value in this polity is the flexibility to move from one project to another, making a valuable contribution to each of them. Individuals have a store of expertise, skills and contacts from which they can contribute to one project, which will both help the project to succeed and help them build their networks. While authority under the industrial polity is held by technocratic managers who set and followed established rules, under the project city authority rests with coaches who build temporary, project-specific teams and motivate participants. We see this occurring in contemporary theatre fields, e.g. when careers of actors consist of a series of engagements for specific projects rather than being hired on a permanent contract by theatre companies. Boltanski and Thévenot argue that no single set of evaluative criteria can account for all possible justifications. In this, they concur with Bourdieu’s theory of multiple capitals. However, their breakdown of values is more nuanced than Bourdieu’s trio of social, cultural and economic capitals. Instead, they found seven, and these seven value regimes are potentially active in all social situations. Boltanski and Thévenot refer to situations where a social action is evaluated as a test. Each value regime has specific types of tests, called for in different moments, which make use of different sorts of evidence and justification. The struggle over which test is appropriate in which situation and the consequences of repeatedly failed tests are, in Boltanski and Thévenot’s views, key drivers of social change and thus also

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of developing an understanding of how relatively autonomous theatrical fields relate to and interact with other fields. So to summarize the critique on our Bourdieusian point of departure: as we already indicated in Chapter 1, we will include the ANT prescription to ‘follow the actor’ when researching theatre’s role in and for society. However, as ANT does not explain how translations occur (or in Bourdieu’s terms how capitals are competing with each other or—in the long run—are converted into each other) we avail of the ‘intermediate stance’ between field theory and ANT provided by Boltanski and his colleagues. Their relatively stable set of value regimes allow a more nuanced distinction between values than Bourdieu’s set of three values, and hence allow us to analyse the claims to autonomy made by agents in and around theatre fields.

2.5. Conclusion By introducing other theorists who have contributed to the intellectual history of artistic autonomy, we hope to have shown why we opt for a version of Bourdieu’s field theory as our primary theoretical lens. Because a field is not a homogeneous space, but rather consists of a number of positions that actors can take up, it becomes easier to treat autonomy as something that can be appealed to in this or that position. Recall our list of the four relationships in the introduction: they not only exist in the theatrical field, but between it and others as well: not just theatrical production and its aesthetic communication, but also spectators’ senses of meaning and value, the effect of theatre on wider society, its (re)mediation, and the organizational and structural patterns that characterize theatre as an industry. We cannot describe these relationships adequately by reducing them to communications or to local networked interactions between agents, because the work done in these relationships is dependent on the links between the field of theatre and the fields of economics, politics, the media and so on. Nor can we reduce the specificity of the arts (even when aesthetically they can be indistinguishable from ordinary objects) to their context rather than to the types of values they pursue, and thus allow in society, though we also recognize that the institutions that constitute theatre fields in society, to a certain extent limit theatre’s function in society. We are trying to unpack the way that theatre fields allow for claims to autonomy as a step in our larger sociological project: to make sense of the functions that theatre holds for contemporary society. Field theory—augmented with the theory of value regimes—is the most suitable theoretical tool available for this task.

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In the chapters that follow, we will put that theory to work, tracing the workings of autonomy that a field perspective can offer. We will explore the way that claims to autonomy shape the field (and are shaped by it) and the useful work those claims can do for interested parties both within the field and outside of it. In doing so, keep in mind that autonomy is not an objective property; rather, it is a claim about a social position that can be made by actors of all sorts, implicitly or explicitly, and with more or less success. As this chapter has shown, the nature and aims of those claims differ depending on one’s understanding of what the arts are. Because contemporary claims to autonomy can draw on any part of this large (and not always consistent) set of concepts, they have a useful ambiguity. They have the flexibility to work in a number of different ways. But that practical flexibility, which we will describe, is grounded in a philosophical ambiguity that shows no signs of going away any time soon.

3.

Autonomy in the contemporary theatre

Based on the idea that claims to autonomy can work in different ways, we move forward by introducing analytical examples at work. We start out by discussing an objection towards the argument that we advance in this book—that the problematics of autonomy provide a key tool for the development of a sociology of theatre. The objection is that, while the notion of autonomy may have been a useful tool in the past, it is simply not relevant to theatre in its contemporary form. Does contemporary theatre, with its keen awareness of itself as a social activity and its frequently critical stance towards that, still make a claim to autonomy? This chapter sets out our response to that argument. Through the analyses of different types of contemporary theatre forms, we will demonstrate that much contemporary theatre depends on a claim to autonomy, even if those claims are critical or implicit. In this chapter, we will focus on the aesthetics of contemporary forms of theatre and investigate how these allow agents in and around performances to stake claims to autonomy. First, through a pair of examples, we will examine two forms of the argument against the importance of autonomy for contemporary theatre—the strong and the weak form. We will relate these objections back to our conception of the relationships within and around the theatrical field as presented in Figure 1 in the introduction. Then, we will discuss three different forms of contemporary theatre that seem to weaken or question the pursuit of specific value in theatre practices: post-dramatic and immersive theatre; verbatim and documentary theatre; and applied and community theatre. We will also take a closer look at the heteronomous part of theatre fields that, though not relying on a direct claim to autonomy, have developed specific forms that do still participate in the field’s autonomy in meaningful ways. These forms include the commercial musical and stand-up comedy. They present their own compromises between value regimes that are sustained in an implicit (and sometimes more explicit) claim to theatrical autonomy. Through these examples and analysis, we will demonstrate that autonomy continues to be a necessary and useful intellectual tool for understanding the place that the theatre occupies in our contemporary society, even if claims to it are more opaque than they once were.

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Two forms of the argument against theatrical autonomy

To give a sense of why some contemporary theatre-makers might find claims to autonomy outdated or unhelpful, consider a pair of recent examples from the UK of theatre works that, at least at first glance, appear to have no need of a claim to autonomy. First, consider artist Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001), an aesthetic re-enactment of a key battle in the UK miner’s strike of 1984–1985 in the South Yorkshire village of Orgreave, where thousands of picketers clashed with thousands of anti-riot police, at times violently. Deller’s re-enactment used local residents, many of them veterans of the original battle, as well as experienced hobbyist battle re-enactors (who are far more likely to re-enact medieval or early modern battles than twentieth-century ones). While the 2001 event was photographed, filmed for a television documentary and followed eagerly by both local residents and the arts community, it was far too large for it to have spectators in any traditional sense. This was an act done with and for a particular community to address its grievances, but it located itself within the artistic field more than in the political one. Second, consider World Factory, a 2015 production by the collective METIS, co-produced by London’s Young Vic Theatre, the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich and London’s Company of Angels. Halfway between a performance and a live game, the show examines the political and social issues surrounding the manufacture of clothing in Chinese factories. Audience members are ushered into a breeze-block room, where they are seated at tables of five or six. Each table represents a factory, and the audience members at that table are given the task of running that factory for a year. With a tempo and attitude that resembles a fast-paced poker game, they are presented with a stack of (fake) money and a set of decisions to make: cut wages or fire workers? Maintain quality standards or cut costs? The human and financial consequences of these decisions are tallied up on a receipt handed to every audience member as they leave. These factories are fictional, of course, but the problems faced by them are based on research carried out by METIS and its collaborators in China. There are four live performers dealing out cards with decisions to make, overseeing the game and presenting historical and social context. Videos of interviews with actual Chinese factory workers and owners are shown on the walls between rounds. Most critics noted how difficult it was to run a factory effectively and ethically, even with the best of intentions. Though the political relevance of the issues dealt with by this production is apparent, the audience’s engagement with those issues is only possible because of the fictionalized game format made possible by the theatrical context.

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From these two examples—and there are far more available, of course— one could argue that this whole discussion of autonomy has become obsolete, eclipsed by the development of new forms of post-dramatic performance that are built not on a Schillerian notion of the ‘third realm’, as we discussed in the previous chapter, but rather on the basis of an aesthetic interest in the relationship between artworks and their audiences, which Nicholas Bourriaud (2002 [1998]) describes as ‘relational aesthetics’. Unlike a previous generation of theatre-makers, so this argument goes, today’s performance artists are aware of their social position and have no desire to make any sort of claim to autonomy. Certainly, METIS’s and Deller’s performances do not make the kinds of claim to autonomy that were common in art worlds of the past. Liesbeth Korthals Altes and Barend van Heusden, in their introduction to a volume on aesthetic autonomy, note that the contemporary world does not encourage artists to take up the (seemingly) socially distant position that Bourdieu and others associate with the autonomous part of the field. They write: In light of urgent social-political and ethical questions, art has been challenged to relate more directly to ‘the world’, and artists themselves feel the need […] for an ‘engagement’ with reality, often rejecting established conventions of aesthetic expression and representation. (Korthals Altes and Van Heusden, 2004, x)

These ‘established conventions’ are, of course, what in a Bourdieusian model would be denoted as markers of claiming an autonomous position, ones that focus on the field’s specific value rather than the values of other fields. But Korthals Altes and Van Heusden do not think this means that the particular function of the arts is no longer relevant for contemporary society. In fact, it is more so, even if it is not expressed through traditional markers of artistic autonomy. ‘Intriguingly, the specific function of the artistic perspective seems to be valued more than ever,’ they write. (Ibid., ix, italics original). It is useful to break the argument against theatrical autonomy down into a weak and a strong form. The weak form is that autonomy is literally antiquated, like aristocracy; it presents an organizational pattern that once described how we organized society’s relationship with the arts, but no longer does so. But as Korthals Altes and Van Heusden have shown, the fact that autonomy has changed does not mean it no longer applies. In a number of ways, autonomy remains a key concept in explaining how artists negotiate their relationship with the society, and vice versa. Though the term autonomy might not be used by practitioners in discussions of

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theatre-making or theatre policy, we hope to demonstrate how it can be usefully applied by scholars to describe relationships that continue to shape the way that theatre is made, distributed, and seen in the contemporary world. The strong form of this objection cannot be dismissed so easily. It makes the case that the diminished importance of autonomy for those in the contemporary theatre field reflects a genuine change in the way that field conceives of its specific value and its relationship to the rest of society, and this change is visible in the performances the field generates. Contemporary theatre-makers might not enjoy the same clear—seemingly natural—claim to autonomy that their modernist predecessors had, but rather than fight this, it is welcomed as an opportunity to build a different sort of theatre, one that contains the possibility of a fairer, more open encounter with audiences that allows for a new kind of engagement with political and social agendas. Insofar as artistic autonomy was a keystone of the modernist project, and that project is now one that many artists would like to reject, these artists have good reasons to consciously move away from an autonomous position. From their point of view, autonomy is not simply antiquated; it is consciously rejected. There is a kernel of truth to this argument, in that it acknowledges the ways in which contemporary performance demonstrates an awareness of its (more or less) autonomous place with respect to the non-artistic world. This includes that artists are conscious of the claims to autonomy which could be made from their position, even if they do not make those claims themselves. It is not uncommon for them to make work that addresses or questions the autonomy of their position directly, often through an investigation of its limitations. However, the sorts of challenges contemporary theatre pose to claims to autonomy would not be possible if they were not put forward in a context from which such claims can be meaningfully or plausibly made. Recall, we argued that, because autonomy involved the pursuit of values specific to a field and thus defined by that field, it was virtually impossible to define a field’s specific value from outside of it, to predict how it will develop, or to exclude anything from it on principle. An investigation of its own relationship to society, we would argue, has become part of the value particular to theatre-making. That is, in the theatre (or the arts in general), questioning autonomy has become a sign of an autonomous practice. What has developed is thus a kind of autopoietic cycle: contemporary performances enable and encourage the questioning of the field’s autonomous position. By doing so, they reinforce those values and gather more field-specific capital for the agents involved in the production. In the

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terms of our introduction, we see this as acts by theatre-makers that assert the autonomy of their work by seeming to question the field’s autonomy; and yet, in doing so, they reinforce the field-specific value of questioning and, thus, reassert the autonomy of the field itself. So our argument is that autonomy remains relevant, not despite the fact that it is questioned, but because it is. We can use METIS’s and Deller’s examples to underpin this argument. World Factory does not overtly claim to be true; audience members are not given actual factories to run. And yet, through the researched script, the archive of research material presented on the website accompanying the production, and the video interviews shown during the performance (which, of course, appear to have the veracity of documentary film), the production seems to be making a claim to some sort of truthful relationship to the world. And yet, the engagement that audience members are asked to have with that truth is one specific to the theatre: a sense of participatory emotional engagement, regardless of the veracity of particular details. In so doing, METIS relies on a positive definition of the specific value of the field of theatre. For Deller’s Battle of Orgreave the negative definition of autonomy applies. When stating the intention of the performance, he explicitly claims not to do politics, nor to do the social work of reconciliation. Even though there is no audience during the performance in a traditional sense and the performance is not detached from social place (it literally takes place at the site where the historic events occurred), the work still presents itself as a performance and thus lays claim to a position in the field of theatre that can be valued as such based on the field-specific criteria rather than (for instance) as an act of political protest. Moving on from the two examples into a more systematic investigation of the ways contemporary performances challenges and negotiates the autonomy of the theatrical field and the way this field relates to other fields, we take a closer look at three major currents in contemporary theatre that pose a challenge to traditional notions of autonomy.

3.2.

Post-dramatic and immersive theatre

The f irst major current in contemporary theatre to reject a notion of autonomy is a reconfiguration of the relationships between the dramatic text, performers and spectators. This has taken a number of forms. One is the development of the so-called ‘post-dramatic theatre’ (see Lehmann 2006 [1999]), in which the dramatic model of a narratively-controlling

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playtext, interpreted by the performers and communicated to an audience, has broken down. The dramatic model of artistic communication set up a (relatively) clear division between artists who spoke and an audience which listened, and within that relationship (which we labelled (2) in our diagram in the Introduction), it was the artists who held the authority. This gave them an opportunity to assert the values of the performance over the values of the audience, and thus demonstrate the autonomy of the play in this relationship. Of course, the highest level of autonomy was held by the dramatic text, with the playwright given the social (and often legal) authority to ensure that performers correctly followed the instructions they laid out in the script.1 But that changed with the renegotiation of the power relationship between texts and performances in the mid-twentieth century. At first, this led simply to a new master: the conceptual, director-driven theatre of the mid- to late twentieth century substituted the director for the playwright as the authoritative, autonomously-positioned artist at the centre of theatre making.2 But under the influence of late-twentieth century conceptual visual art, the post-dramatic goes further. It leaves that central authoritative position intentionally vacant. Instead of a coherent narrative (or other performative object) being offered up by artists for an audience, the artists present a fractured set of references and other performative information, which means that the audience are given the responsibility for piecing together an artistic experience and giving it some kind of—often personal—meaning or coherence. This move—sharing responsibility for organizing a piece of theatre and determining its meaning and import between artists and audiences—does, in fact, affect the autonomy of the work. This is even more the case in the so-called ‘immersive’ theatre movement, where performances are not so much actions presented on stage but interactions that performers invite visitors to engage in.3 We need to be clear about what this move towards shared responsibility for shaping the theatrical event and making it meaningful actually means for our understanding of the concept of autonomy. In the Introduction, we discussed the difference between three kinds of autonomy: that of 1 The estate of Samuel Beckett is particularly well-known for making use of this power, ensuring that productions of Beckett’s work strictly follow every direction and line in the script. For more, see Rimmer (2003). 2 Of course, in the regie or Regietheater the autonomous position might be a collective rather than an individual. For more on this, see Boenisch (2015). 3 See, for example, the works of companies such as Punchdrunk (UK) and Ontroerend Goed (Belgium) and the recent and useful book by Gareth White (2013).

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the art work, that of the artist and that of the artistic field. The changes we are describing in this chapter do challenge the first and weaken the second, but they do not diminish the power of the third. This means that the claims to or against autonomy can only be understood within the context of the autonomy of the field that still enables and delimits possibilities for action. So, even when the post-dramatic performances do not emerge as autonomous works of art anymore, the post-dramatic theatre f ield still shows all the signs of operating with a good deal of autonomy: it pursues its own values at the expense of those outside of it. And that fact—that we are still recognizably within a theatrical field, with the values and norms that come with that—means that the concept of autonomy is still relevant. For instance, it would be a mistake to be too sanguine in accepting postdramatic and immersive theatre’s claims that their work of meaning-making is shared between audiences and performers. In many cases, audiences are not so much responsible for the performance as they are complicit in it. One excellent example of the audience being complicit in immersive theatre is the production of Saló, by Danish art group SIGNA. The piece, which was performed continuously for four one-week periods at the beginning of 2010, re-imagined the eponymous Passolini film in a house in residential Copenhagen. Visitors were invited to be members of the ‘Black Libertine Society’ and to participate in the Society’s practices of power-based sexual violence and humiliation. Rather than simply observing it, visitors were issued a place within the villa’s hierarchy and could participate in it as long as they wished, staying for hours or even days at a time. There was little visitors could do to disrupt this hierarchy, though, even when they found the violence profoundly distressing. So the power balance still was in favour of the performers. The ethical and aesthetic issues raised by this performance are discussed in detail in Skjoldager-Nielsen (2011). This is a case where a claim to artistic autonomy is used to make some actions ethically permissible that otherwise would not be. 4 In examples of immersive theatre like this, the performer stands in a far more powerful position than the spectator, even if the situation forces those spectators to be complicit in the construction of the event. This also occurs in 4 Ethics are difficult to place in Boltanski and Thévenot’s value regimes. They are not a value regime in and of themselves but can be derived from a combination of their regimes: inspired when religiously derived; domestic when derived from history and tradition; and civic, such as norms of equality between sexes and races. See Chapter 4 for a more concise analysis of ethical issues in theatre.

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typically post-dramatic performances such as the 2014 production Fight Night by Flemish company Ontroerend Goed. The performance was advertised as a commentary on elections and popular televised talent competitions such as the Idol franchise. The stage depicted a boxing ring.5 Five performers appear on stage and the spectators are asked to vote for one of them via a device distributed at the beginning of the performance. Each performer has a specific platform he or she presents to the audience, one arguing for a politics in which harmony is strived for, the other trying to win the audience over by claiming she is the perfect average of the audience members and thus can represent them well. A third candidate even suggests that spectators quit voting, urging them to hand in their voting devices. After each voting round, the performer with the least votes leaves the stage. While this is obviously work prepared in advance, the outcome and flow of the performance appears determined by the order in which the performers are voted off. Or consider the British play The Author by playwright Tim Crouch, performed first in and around the audience of London’s Royal Court Theatre. Through simple acts such as the sharing of sweets and asking audience members their names, Crouch makes his audience members (seated around and indistinguishable from the performers) complicit in the story that his drama plays out, even as it takes a turn towards a horrifying form of child abuse at its end. But despite his repeated question ‘Shall I go on?’, often answered by spectators with a resounding negative, these spectators have no ability to stop the play’s narrative. All they can do is walk out, and though the script explicitly encourages them to do so, the physical and social conventions of the theatre make it extremely difficult for them to do this.6 This leads to a key point: an audience may attend a particular performance, but when they do so, it is also taking part in the social practice of theatre. Spectators’ behaviour is influenced both by the particularity of the performance, and by the general expectations of theatre as a practice. This latter includes witnessing or even taking part in actions that otherwise would have been unacceptable. As we stated in the beginning of the book: When we go to theatre, we understand that we are doing something, and it is something different from our ordinary lives. All three of these examples invite audience response—and, in fact, depend on it for the meaning-making work that they seek to do—but they also rely heavily on the conventional right of the artist to control 5 This may be a reference to a portion of the popular TV show The Voice, in which two singers perform on a stage which resembles a boxing ring and one of them is voted off. 6 The journal Contemporary Theatre Review devoted a special issue to discussions of Crouch’s The Author in 2011 (vol. 21, no. 4).

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the terms and experience of the artistic work to the exclusion of others, including spectators. Nicholas Ridout (2013) has written penetratingly about the ways in which contemporary theatre involves an interrogation and re-appropriation of notions of time, labour and the appropriate boundaries between work and leisure, particularly with reference to Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1899) and Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s No Dice (2007). While these performances may interrogate the power dynamics between the labouring performer and the spectator-at-leisure, they necessarily begin from the assumption that this dynamic is in place. That dynamic is a consequence of the autonomy of the theatrical field, a space that resists the ordinary rules of work and leisure (that ‘the customer is always right’, for instance). So, this social game is not one established by any individual performance, though they can try to modify it. Rather, it is an assumption built into the field of theatre and doxically accepted by those who participate in it. This assumption can be useful to audience members, who are made more comfortable by knowing what to expect, and to artists, who require and enjoy the control over the theatrical event that this assumption facilitates. As Dennis Kennedy has observed (2009, Chapter 3), even when the artists of the historical avant-garde sought to attack the audience’s passivity, they were very hesitant to actually give those audiences power to determine the course of performances. When the audience is invited to break out of their traditional passive role and influence the performance, the horizons within which they are allowed to do so are generally extremely narrow (see White 2013, 64).

3.3.

Verbatim and documentary theatre

The second major current, however, does not alter the power relations between performers and audience members. Instead, it attempts to use the theatre in order to serve social or political values that thus seemingly replace artistic values. By de-emphasizing the artistic status of theatrical work, it appears to eschew any claim it may have to autonomy as a part of the theatrical field. There are several forms in which this work can come. One of the most important, especially in the British and American contexts, is verbatim theatre.7 Tracing its roots back to the Living Newspaper productions of the US Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s, which used a mix of journalists and 7 For a full study of verbatim, which offers a level of analytical detail that we cannot here, see Radosavljević (2013, Chapter 4). From our perspective, the important thing to note is that

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performers to present issues of political relevance to the public, verbatim theatre goes one step further towards its embrace of journalism, constructing its script solely out of documentary sources such as judicial proceedings, correspondence and interview transcripts. While the texts are edited, no new material is added to them; the verbatim play depends on (and performs its dependence on) this technologically-produced archive. Like the Living Newspaper, they make a journalistic claim to a non-fictional status, and like much journalism, they are often accused of reinforcing a bias shared between maker and audience. One of the most performed and controversial of these verbatim texts is My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005), adapted by the actor Alan Rickman and the journalist Katharine Viner from the emails and journals of Rachel Corrie, a young college student from Olympia, Washington who travelled in 2003 to Gaza to work with the International Solidarity Movement, where, after a few months of work with local residents, she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to prevent a home demolition.8 While the play received praise for its inspiring portrayal of the heroism of both Corrie and the Gazans who hosted her, it also received criticism as a one-sided polemic that gave inadequate context to the events she witnessed. Corrie, of course, was a 23-year-old student and not a Middle East expert during her time in Gaza, and she openly admitted to a lack of expertise and political acumen.9 As a piece of political reportage, then, My Name is Rachel Corrie is not particularly useful. It offers helpful testimony to events in Gaza that few Western reporters had access to, but that testimony stands on its own without context. It does not provide an account that would be considered journalistically acceptable in terms of objectivity or comprehensiveness. But this flaw—which the production readily acknowledges—is not particularly relevant. Like the Living Newspaper, the play concerns itself with contemporary political issues, but its goal is not mere description and analysis but the encouragement of affective resonances between the audience and the material being staged—in this case, with Corrie herself. In fact, the first half of the play follows Corrie’s life before her arrival in Gaza, and serves to build up our understanding of and empathy for Corrie as a character. This Radosavljević describes verbatim as a dramaturgical choice amongst others. It is made to achieve certain aesthetic effects, and not in order to make verbatim theatre into a form of journalism. 8 The script was published as Corrie (2005). 9 For example, the script includes this line from her email, shortly after arrival: ‘I’m really new to talking about Israel-Palestine, so I don’t always know the political implications of my words’ (Corrie 2005, 22).

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is the traditional work of text-and-character-based theatre, and it operates here in a manner analogous with a Shakespearian soliloquy. Importantly, the play is no less political because it operates by means of affect, imagination and identification. The creation (or nurturing) of collective understandings of the past, effects of solidarity and emotional hopes for the future are supremely political acts; they are the daily work of politicians and their speechwriters. Carol Martin describes documentary theatre as ‘staged politics,’ explaining that they use archival material to ‘construct the past in the service of a future that the authors would like to create’ (Martin 2006, 10). The use of archival material (transcripts, letters, recordings, etc.) is a tool that facilitates this affective work. Martin argues that: [Verbatim] practitioners use the archive as evidence to create a performance of testimony; audiences understand what they see and hear as non-fiction […]. This allows an audience to forget that creating any work out of edited archival materials relies on the formal qualities of fiction as much as on archival evidence. (Martin 2010, 20)10

In other words, in order to accomplish their affective political work, verbatim theatre makes a claim to the status of non-fiction. This claim may be plausible and justifiable or not in particular cases, but to say that such a claim is incompatible with any claim to artistic autonomy is to mistake the fictional for the artistic. The affective and imaginative means and methods of verbatim theatre, as well as the freedom to construct a narrative out of archival material in a way that suits it best, is a property of its implicit claim to autonomy. Its relationship to public discourse is closer to the free play of Schiller’s ‘third and joyous realm’ than it is the scholar or journalist’s rigorous search for true facts. Of course verbatim theatre does aim to communicate facts that may be hard to come by through other means. In their legal analysis of three British verbatim plays (including Rachel Corrie), theatre scholar Harry Derbyshire and legal scholar Loveday Hodson emphasize that what makes such plays effective are not their accurate portrayal of facts but: 10 Of course, verbatim theatre need not have a political end; verbatim sources can be used for entertainment alone. In the Netherlands, Diederik van Vleuten has developed a form of memoire theatre based on recollections from World War II that uses its non-fictional status as a means of adding to the poignancy of its affective appeal. Though there is no direct political aim here, its use of verbatim methods is quite similar.

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their capacity to arouse a compassionate response to the suffering dramatized that acts as a spur to action. Precisely because there is a medium that invites an imaginative rather than a practical response, the dramatic representation of human suffering allows for a sustained empathetic engagement with the issues explored. (Derbyshire and Hodson 2008, 211)

Now, of course, the choice to make a claim to non-fiction imposes certain restrictions on how performances take part in the process of positiontaking within the theatrical field. But there is nothing unusual about this. Our understanding of autonomy is that it is always a ‘to some extent’, and autonomy is not a uniform property. At every position within the theatrical field, autonomy manifests itself differently, and there are always claims to autonomy that can be more plausibly made from one part of the field than another. In the UK and the US, theatre’s most common means of making a claim to non-fiction in order for performances to intervene in politics is through the use of archival material. But there are other ways of making this claim. One of them is through the creation of (what appears to be) a genuine political campaign. The Danish group Dukkepartiet (Dolls’ Party) is an example of the way that performances can blur the lines between theatre and politics to such an extent that a concept of performative fiction may no longer apply. The actors appeared in Denmark making political actions and interventions in the spring of 2014, discussing the way in which politics in Denmark has developed into theatre. The actors in the Party are known for taking part in the public debate (on squares in cities throughout Denmark, in national media, etc.) wearing identical masks, making it impossible to identify the individuals. They argue that this focuses attention on the politics, rather than the person, and that ordinary politicians wear masks as well. At first, the individuals behind the project were not identified and, through well-organized events, they attracted enough media attention to start a debate about the political system and the democratic processes in Denmark. Their work received support from Søren Hviid Pedersen, a well-known conservative debater and political scholar from University of Southern Denmark (Pedersen 2014, 24). In many ways, the group behaves like any other protest movement seeking to establish itself as a political party, albeit a slightly strange one. Its website (www.dukkepartiet.dk) solicits donations and the signatures it would need to formally run for Parliament. But is there still a claim here to participate in the autonomy of theatre? Slowly, it became clear that one of the persons behind the Dolls’ Party was

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playwright Christian Lollike, and that the project received funding from the Danish Arts Foundation and, as such, became recognized by some of the central actors within the theatrical field as theatre. In addition, the Sort-Hvid Theatre (with Lollike as artistic manager) hosted and produced the project and organized its national tour (again a word that connotes both theatre and a political campaign). When Dukkepartiet received further funding from the Arts Foundation, politicians from the right wing began to complain about the use of art subsidy for political purposes (Lynghøj and Strøyer 2014). The group’s dual status as non-fictional political party and theatrical performance allowed it to make claims to autonomy as well as relevance that it could not make with one or the other alone. In short, though these forms of theatre deny the fictional nature of performances, they do rely on a notion of theatre as an autonomous sphere in society, i.e. field autonomy, and, indeed, in most cases are recognized as valuable agents in theatre fields by central agents within the field.

3.4.

Applied and community theatre

The third current we will discuss is another sort of socially-minded theatre work that looks askance on its claim to the status of artistic autonomy. Ordinarily called applied theatre or community theatre, this work seeks to exist outside of the artistic world of established theatres, regular audiences and the sale of tickets. It is made with and for the benefit of specific communities, and often refuses to participate in the existing theatre structures that would allow ‘ordinary’ theatregoers (often urbanized, wealthy and well-educated) to attend it. In fact, sometimes it has no space for an audience at all. Diller’s Battle of Orgreave certainly fits in this category, as do examples of theatre for development, theatre in the criminal justice system, and performance that seeks to facilitate the appreciation of audience with differing abilities (such as autistic children). This engagement is often political in the broad sense: it seeks to use a theatrical intervention to shift power dynamics towards those who are ignored, marginalized or disempowered by existing social and political systems. It also can have a therapeutic goal, at either an individual or collective level, offering healing to those who have suffered trauma or are in need of rehabilitation. It often emphasizes the creative work of role play in the rehearsal room over the final presented project, and it usually works with those who would not consider themselves theatre professionals. It owes its development over recent decades to a number of sources: the politically-charged theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1964

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[1949]),11 the pedagogical Theatre of the Oppressed of Brazilian artist and activist Augusto Boal (1985), and the interest in the aesthetic analysis of human relationships collected in Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’. But many applied theatre artists would argue that the form has a much longer, traditionally dramatic history, one that can be traced through Brecht back to Schillerian and Aristotelian ideas of the social function of theatre, as we described in the previous chapter.12 Despite this relation to a long-existing tradition in theatre, applied theatre has not always been valued as art. Some recent theorists have hoped to change that. In her book Social Works, Shannon Jackson states her intent to treat the: social aspirations of socially engaged projects less as the extra-aesthetic milieu that legitimates or compromises the aesthetic act and more as the unravelling of the frame that would cast ‘the social’ as ‘extra’. (Jackson 2011, 16)

Conceptually, this represents a challenge to the notion that applied theatre can maintain any claim to a position within an autonomous field. But the notion of autonomy on which this challenge rests is considerably more restrictive than the one we use here. Jackson defines autonomy as ‘“selfgoverning,” opposing itself to objects and subjects who are heteronomously “governed by external rules”.’ (Jackson 2011, 15)13 As such, she treats the term ‘autonomous’ as the opposite of ‘interdependent’. By that standard, of course, applied theatre is not autonomous; but as Jackson points out, neither is performance in general, as ‘the art form’s inter-dependence with ensembles, technologies and audiences has always been hard to disavow’ (Jackson 2011, 15). Our understanding of autonomy—that of a particular relationship between a field and the wider society, one characterized by the ability to pursue one’s own values—means that autonomy and interdependence can exist alongside one another. The fact that one field relies on the collaboration of another—as the legal field relies on the political field, for instance—does not in itself challenge autonomy. 11 This, by the way, is also very relevant for the tradition of documentary and verbatim theatre described above. 12 Philip Taylor opens his primer on applied theatre with the observation that ‘throughout time theatre has been applied or rendered as a powerful educative tool’ (Taylor 2003, 1). 13 Despite her use of inverted commas here, it does not appear that Jackson is in fact quoting from another source.

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But it is also possible to see in applied theatre not just a relationship of interdependence, but a genuine clash of values. And here it is important to note that, because applied theatre often does not involve public performances, it rarely attracts an audience or the attention and prestige that go along with it. Because critics and fellow artists cannot see it, it has a hard time participating in the field’s collective work of self-definition; in fact, non-applied theatre artists may not even be aware of the work that applied theatre makers are doing. And frequently, applied theatre is funded on a very different basis than other theatre. Rather than being funded by arts councils or philanthropic funds with an arms-length principle, which discourages them from getting involved with the content of the work, applied theatre pieces are frequently commissioned by particular organizations or agencies for a specific purpose. These purposes are usually socially beneficial—addressing trauma, building social cohesion, aiding in education and rehabilitation (i.e. they represent civic rather than aesthetic values)—and frequently it is a state agency (or a NGO such as a housing corporation) that commissions the work. Even so, there is a large difference between receiving arts funding, with the assumptions of autonomy that come with it, and being commissioned by a housing, education or corrections department to do work for a specific end. The power dynamics between funder and artist, as well as the standards by which the work will be evaluated, are quite different (we will describe this in more detail in Chapter 5). The right to set one’s own aims and criteria for evaluation, both rights that derive from a claim to autonomy, are drastically reduced here. And because of its preference to seek out values external to the field, applied theatre has often been denigrated by ‘pure’ theatre artists. In introducing the 2009 Applied Theatre Reader, Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston write, ‘[t]he assumption often lurking within the “applied” in applied theatre is that theatre (assuming general agreement on what that is) is being attached to some other activity as a bandage might be applied to a wound’ (Prentki and Preston 2009, 10). It is not hard to hear a tone of resentment in their analogy. The bandage is somehow demeaned by its link to ‘some other activity’, and is rarely seen in its own, self-sufficient glory. Jackson, Taylor, Prentki, Preston and other applied theatre scholars are clear that they consider applied theatre an art form, and they are interested in discussing its aesthetics at least as much as they are its healing properties. Some artists who might be seen as applied practitioners, such as Zina (discussed in Chapter 6) reject the ‘applied’ label, asking to be called simply ‘artists’. In fact, there has recently been an effort to articulate the aesthetics of applied theatre, so that it can be evaluated on the same sort of criteria that are used for other sort of

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theatre. This is a move, of course, to assert the always-threatened autonomy of applied theatre through an effort to define its specific value. Gareth White’s Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (2013) focuses specifically on an aesthetic analysis of participatory and immersive theatre, but importantly, it treats applied and non-applied theatre together as colleagues in the same field. The above discussion has made clear that applied theatre practitioners may value social and ethical norms over aesthetic ones, they still rely on the autonomy of the theatre field to be recognized as effective social agents, i.e. as applied or community theatre practitioners rather than welfare workers or social interventionists. Moreover, they often take part in the inner-field struggles over the definition of theatrical value, fighting for their position within the theatre field.

3.5.

Commercial theatre and stand-up comedy

If the example of post-dramatic performance seemed to question the role of autonomy and the examples of verbatim and socially engaged performance seemed to reject it and applied theatre fought for it, our final example seems to ignore it entirely. Commercial performances are designed to make money on either a large- or small scale, and usually do not ask for (and would never receive) subsidy. We will look at two cases: the large-scale example of the mass-market musical, as seen on New York’s Broadway, London’s West End, or countless touring houses across the world, and the small-scale example of stand-up comedy, as performed with little more than a performer and a microphone, in tiny clubs, but also on major international stages and on television. At first glance, these seem to be classic cases of heteronomous performance: theatre that primarily pursues the values of money and fame, and only secondarily any overt artistic ambition. This is certainly correct: neither of these modes of performance takes up a particularly autonomous position within the theatre field, or pursues the sorts of values and rewards on offer to those who take up such autonomous positions (see also Chapter 4 where we discuss how autonomy can help agents earn money). But this is not the question. Even if it does not pursue autonomous, field-specific values to the exclusion of others, does commercial theatre nevertheless participate in them? Any honest answer to that question needs to be yes. At the most basic level, commercial theatre is quite expensive and time consuming; Broadway

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average ticket prices routinely exceed $100, making it one of the most expensive forms of evening entertainment that is regularly available. Why, then, would audience members attend commercial theatre by the tens or hundreds of thousands? Clearly, they find something there that they do not anywhere else, and they place a value on it that they are willing to pay for. All theatre—commercial or otherwise—is given permission to spend time and money in ways that we would consider wasteful if they were not placed under the (autonomy-marking) banner of the artistic field. Though they are pieces of popular culture, commercial theatre often violates contemporary sensibilities of ethical or appropriate behaviour and is permitted to do so, even where this would be frowned upon in other elements of popular culture. Indeed, some of the most popular and successful musicals of contemporary (and historic) Broadway lean the most on this autonomous right to violate political and ethical standards. The Leonard Bernstein musical On The Town opened in 1944, when Japanese-Americans were still confined in internment camps. The primary love interest of the (white) sailors on shore leave, Ivy Smith, was played in the original production by Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato, whose father was in an internment camp at the date of the production’s opening.14 The musical Chicago (original run 1975–1977, revival 1996–present) is based on the sexualized celebrity of criminals, and is one of the longest running productions on Broadway to date. The Book of Mormon (2011–present), one of the most critically and commercially successful musicals currently on Broadway, is also one of its most overtly offensive, with a portrayal of the Latter-Day Saints Church and of the nation of Uganda that push well past the boundaries of what would be considered acceptable discourse in contemporary American culture. But this is hardly a problem; in fact, that shocking distance from the acceptable is the source of the production’s humour. It appears that commercial theatre audiences, like other theatre audiences, are not looking for a theatre that obeys the ordinary rules of the use of money, time and offence. They want those rules to be extravagantly broken; often, that is the entertainment they seek. If the producers of such commercial ventures merely make use of that desire for an experience of theatrical autonomy to line their own pockets, so be it. This is still a participation in and use of the autonomy of the theatrical field, even if it is quite instrumental. In addition to this, commercial theatre takes part in the theatrical field in another way: It is dependent on the more autonomous agents for the delivery of new blockbusters. Commercial theatres tend to seek out the financial successes of subsidized theatre, 14 For more on the racial and collaborative politics of this production, see Oja (2014).

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which it can either take over or copy while subsidized, more experimental theatres move on to new productions. On a much smaller scale, stand-up comedy could also be understood as a heteronomous part of the theatre field. Stand-up comedians seek out fame and fortune, and they use their autonomous position as performers as a tool in doing so. However, this view is debatable. For while commercial theatre identifies itself as theatre, with the autonomous benefits that label provides, stand-up comedy does not. Indeed, there are clear signs that stand-up comedy does not operate under the same assumptions of autonomy enjoyed by theatre, including commercial theatre. Audiences for stand-up shows do not defer to performers in the way that theatrical audiences do. They are not still and silent; they get up, leave, drink, chat with one another and heckle the performer. Most often, both performers and audience members are lit during a stand-up performance, and conversation and interaction between them (including mutual heckling) is much more common and open than is the case with theatre proper (whether amateur or commercial). Nor do authoritative voices such as critics, scholars, funders and prize committees show as much interest in stand-up comedy as they do other genres of performance. Stand-up comedy is rarely taught in schools, whereas drama frequently is. And the institutional structures and patterns that have been set up to guard the autonomy of the arts—such as a distinction between the artistic and marketing positions, the distancing of artists from direct financial risk, and the role of producers—do not exist in stand-up comedy to the extent that they do in theatre, commercial or otherwise.15 It would be reasonable to conclude that stand-up comedy exists, at best, at the margins of the theatrical field, if, in fact, it is within it at all.16 However, this is a situation that might vary from country to country and that may change over time. The popularity of stand-up comedy, especially amongst young people, has made it interesting for theatre as well, and so attempts have been made to combine the two and thus recognize stand-up 15 This clearly distinguishes stand-up comedy from cabaret, especially in the Dutch tradition (see Chapters 4 and 5), which does involve stage- and set-design and a division of labour between performers and e.g. impresarios. Furthermore, cabaret audiences behave similarly to commercial theatre audiences, cabaretiers frequently pick on those who enter the auditorium too late. 16 It is worth noting that what marginalizes stand-up comedy within the theatrical f ield is not its lack of fictional characterization. While it is true that stand-up performers are not seen as representing fictional characters to the extent that dramatic performers are, this in itself does not affect stand-up comedy’s autonomy. Many artistic pursuits with high levels of autonomy—painting, classical music—are not fictional in any meaningful sense. And poetry, which also enjoys high levels of autonomy, shares stand-up comedy’s combination of a narrative voice that is largely identified with the artist with, at most, a thin veneer of fiction.

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comedy as a part of the theatrical field. One example is the state-subsidized theatre Nørrebro Teater in Denmark. In 2007, the management team of Kitte Wagner and Jonathan Spang took over. Spang was known both to have graduated as an actor from one of the official acting schools in Denmark and to have made a career as a stand-up comedian. Nørrebro Teater started producing performances starring stand-up comedians and thus challenging the borders between the two, a border so well established that stand-up comedy is not recognized as something that can be subsidized on equal terms with other types of performances. One emblematic example of the way their performances challenge the borders of the theatrical field was the performance Linda P på bjerget (2010) an adaptation of the perhaps most well-known canonical Danish drama Jeppe på Bjerget by Holberg (1722). The most famous scene in this work involves the poor, abused and uneducated drunkard Jeppe waking up in the bed of the baron as a part of a practical joke initiated by the baron himself. The symbolic meaning of the stand-up comedian waking up in ‘the real theatre’ was obvious. So even if stand-up comedy is, at best, a marginal case of participation in the autonomy of the theatrical field, there are still ways in which that small, residual claim to autonomy is necessary for its continued operation. The most obvious case is its ability to violate ethical rules. In fact, the violation of the ordinary social rules of acceptable discourse—certainly those that would be accepted of a public speaker—is a great part of the attraction of many of the most successful of stand-up comedians. Some violate rules about how culturally sensitive issues such as race and sex ought to be discussed (such as Richard Pryor and Sarah Silverman), while others violate rules about what is considered too personal, trivial or embarrassing for public discussion (such as Jerry Seinfeld).17 Comedians are also allowed to insult their audiences in ways that would be considered highly offensive in other public contexts (such as Joan Rivers or Don Rickles). Audiences relish these violations, both for the sheer pleasure they offer and for the ways in which they suggest new ways of thinking about socially awkward topics. In addition, stand-up comedy also is able to make (satiric but effective) interventions into the political field without having to operate under the rules of that field, another right given by a degree of autonomy. This pattern is especially pronounced in Britain, where stand-up-based political satire is extraordinarily popular, especially on television programmes such as Have I Got News For You, and those politicians who are able to successfully 17 Using the scheme of competing values as presented in the previous chapter, we could say the former offend against civic norms, the second against domestic.

In 20th century theatre performances, the director rather than the playwright determines the theatrical communication, weakening the play-text’s claim to autonomy. As a result, the aesthetic decisions of the director become the basis for claims to autonomy of performances.

Text is demoted to just one of the materials with which a performance works. Artists and audience members share the responsibility for meaningful theatrical communication based on the performative information offered up by the performers, which is no longer a coherent whole.

As audience members are not static spectators but characters themselves physically immersed in an artificial environment, the stage does not provide the basis for a claim to theatrical autonomy anymore. Performances become interactions audience members are invited to participate in.

The fictional character of the theatre text is denied. What is presented on stage, comes from the real world: court records, personal testimony and journalism. At times, performers portray themselves rather than fictional characters.

Regietheater18 (Director’s theatre)

Postdramatic theatre

Immersive theatre

Verbatim and documentary theatre

How claims to theatrical autonomy are critiqued or weakened

Table 1. How contemporary forms of theatre critique and use claims to autonomy

The theatrical frame still implies a claim to the status of art as it separates the performance from the real facts or occurrences, inviting a different type of reaction to them. In fact, performances operate through means not allowed in courts or in journalism: affect, imagination and identification, rather than formal and convincing argument

These environments are still created and recognized as such. The theatrical frame of a performance, however it may be presented, does not allow audience members to participate in the same manner as performers, i.e. field autonomy still allows for a dominating concept behind a performance (and for the dominance of theatrical value over ethical values).

The claim to autonomy is just as strong, even if held by the director rather than the playwright. Owners of author’s rights can still (to some extent) exert influence by allowing or disallowing the use of their texts.

How theatre forms still make use of a claim to autonomy

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Overtly ignores theatrical autonomy as it is designed to make money (i.e. pursue market and fame values).

Performances ‘offend’ against the doxa of theatre fields by resembling the setting of a public speech rather than a performance: performances do not involve stage- and set-design and ‘regular’ division of labour in theatre systems; audience members are loud, leave the auditorium as they see fit and frequently heckle performers.

Commercial theatre

Stand-up comedy

Commercial theatre participates in the struggle over particular theatrical value as it frequently violates contemporary sensibilities of ethical or appropriate behaviour and is permitted to do so (i.e. it places theatrical values over ethical ones). It is part of their commercial appeal that they break such norms (and why audience are willing to devote serious economic capital to them).

Applied theatre merely holds a different position in theatre fields; it does not negate their existence. Social efficacy of these theatre forms can be the result of their aesthetic functioning. What separates applied theatre artists from other social workers is their particular artistic techniques and their status as artistic ambassadors.

How theatre forms still make use of a claim to autonomy

18 As there have long been theatre forms that do not use a written script (e.g. commedia dell’arte), we cannot claim that autonomy in the theatre before the twentieth century was always held by the playwright. However, a full historical analysis of autonomy in theatre is beyond the scope of this present book, as our aim here is only to provide methodologies to study contemporary theatre fields.

1

Artists actively seek to work outside the theatre world, placing their artistic work in service of social objectives (civic norms) over - or equal to - aesthetic norms (inspired values).

Applied or community theatre

How claims to theatrical autonomy are critiqued or weakened

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navigate their appearances on such programmes (such as former London mayor Boris Johnson) gain popularity in the ‘real’ field of British politics outside of comedy.

3.6. Conclusion In this chapter, we have shown that while the autonomy of theatre has become problematic and questioned by contemporary theatre-makers, it has not simply gone away or become irrelevant. These interrogations would not be possible if the works of art did not occupy that very autonomous position they intend to critique. Of course, theatre artists—like other citizens—see their lives and their work as part of the larger world around them, and attempt to use that work to benefit from that world or address its problems and challenges (relationship 1 in Figure 1 in the Introduction). This does not imply, however, a hermetic seal between the artistic work of theatre makers and their role as citizens. Instead, it is a claim that artistic work is a particular pursuit, which pursues its own values, and ought to operate under its own assumptions and standards of evaluation. The following table reiterates how, in each form of theatre discussed above, artists both critique and still make use of a claim to autonomy. The claim to autonomy (however disguised), if accepted, gives theatre artists certain abilities, which they can use for the ends they choose: including interrogating the conditions that make their work possible, drawing attention to events that warrant it, the amelioration of social problems or the making of money. There is no contradiction here. Autonomy need not be the dominant property of a performative form which wishes to make use of it; as always, autonomy is a matter of degree. As we will discuss in the following chapters, autonomy need not be used only to further itself; it can be deployed to serve a range of ends. The next chapter will discuss some of the ways that those within the theatre field can make use of claims to autonomy.

4. How agents in theatre fields make use of claims to autonomy A central idea of this book is that claims to autonomy are important for the agents in theatre fields, but for a variety of reasons; autonomy is useful, but different agents will use it differently. This chapter is devoted to analysing how agents claim theatrical autonomy and to what ends. We begin this chapter with a closer look at how agents, through their claims to autonomy, can change the dynamics of a theatre field, including an examination of those agents who serve in the important and distinct role of consecrators. This also includes a look at agents who are not able to make a successful claim to autonomy because of the position they take within the f ield. As our examples will demonstrate, the dynamics of the field cannot be understood simply as a question of claiming as much autonomy as possible from a position that is as autonomous as possible. A successful claim to autonomy might also be made from the more heteronomous parts of the f ield. In the last section of the chapter, we analyse what agents in the theatre field gain by claiming autonomy. First, we analyse how their claims offer them possibilities inside the theatre field. This largely regards how agents position themselves (or take up new positions) within the field. But these possibilities are not limited to the theatre field itself. Claims to autonomy also make for possibilities to influence and interact with other fields—and thus other value systems—such as the political and economic field.

4.1.

Claims to autonomy influence the shape of the theatre field

By their actions, agents can affect and thus change the dynamics of a theatre field. However, they cannot do so arbitrarily. As we argued in Chapter 1, we understand the theatre field as historically constructed and continuously reconstructed by the agents within it. In this section, we will examine how agents claim and thus use autonomy when positioning themselves within the theatre field.

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Consecrating agents A quite particular means by which some agents can change the theatre field’s dynamics is the process of consecration. Such agents are able to influence the distribution of capitals between the agents in the field (and thus their ability to claim autonomy) by serving as gatekeepers, ensuring that uninitiated outsiders do not make specious claims to theatrical autonomy. But they also serve as gate-openers, chipping away at the walls that defend elite privilege but prevent entrance for hopeful newcomers trying to enter. Sometimes, an individual’s interest in gate-keeping may conflict with their organization’s interest in gate-opening, or vice versa. When we ask how claims to theatrical autonomy are made, we need to remember that the agents making these decisions often have conflicting motives, loyalties and positions. The important function of the gatekeepers is not to be directly engaged in production (even though some may also do so), but to evaluate other agents as valued members of the field, mere outsiders or something in between. In doing so, they implicitly or explicitly formulate the standards of the field (i.e. the positive definition of specific value), as well as clarify what is excluded from those standards (i.e. the negative definition of specific value). The role of theatre critics is to make a public evaluation of performances and, in that process, articulate and enforce the standards of the field as the main scale against which performances ought to be measured. Theatre critics are usually either journalists with a special knowledge about theatre or graduates in theatre studies (or both). The implicit comparison between individual performances and ‘the state of the art’ that is included in the reviewing process clearly indicates that good or bad reviews do not only mean the difference between sold out or empty seats, but most importantly a positioning of the performance and the artists involved in it within the theatre field.1 The development in media during the last twenty years in most European countries has caused a decrease in the number of reviews and of theatre critics.2 This does not necessarily mean that the few that are left have lost their influence, but the changes in the media system that have come with social media, blogs, etc. imply that the professional theatre 1 Indeed, reviews can have very little bearing on audience numbers. See e.g. the production of the musical The Producers in 2011 in the Netherlands, which met with favourable reviews but closed quickly due to poor ticket sales. 2 Pia Strickler (2009) has written about the development in different types of newspaper articles about theatre in Switzerland and has documented a drop in the number and length of the reviews.

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critic has been supplemented by lay critics, some of whom are seemingly typical theatre-goers who make their evaluations accessible to the public on the internet, while others are particularly avid or experienced fans who write for a particular subcultural audience. So far, we do not see a tendency that these new critics have the same prominent position in the process of distributing field-specific capital as their newspaper predecessors. Whether or not they have more influence on the choice of the spectator is a separate question, one which is not relevant to our current project. Other agents who take part in the consecration process are members of prize committees and theatre scholars. Prize committees may distribute financial rewards, but the recognition that comes from prizes or prestigious grants is where the work of consecration is most apparent. Where prize committee members, as theatre critics, are prominent in the consecration process in the short term, the influence of theatre scholars is more in the long run as their writings are usually for specialized academic media, which can only influence the content of the specific theatrical value at stake in a field over time, via students and the percolation of research down to the popular press. However, the attention awarded to specific theatre-makers by being the subject of scholarship might gain them more field-specific capital. If you are being researched, you must be important! The audiences themselves are also important distributors of capital. Attracting a larger audience, or the correct audience, can be an important sign of the presence of a certain sort of capital and can thus act as gatekeepers. The audience’s responses within the auditorium itself—whether laughter, tears, heckles, or applause—also serve to validate or undermine performers’ claims to field-specific capital. The increase in the number of gatekeepers, and the ways in which technology can allow the audience to act as gatekeepers themselves, are important developments in the way the field polices its boundaries. In this respect, the fact that the permanent ensembles are becoming rarer and are replaced by more project-based forms of organization (Gran 1996; Sirnes 2001), is an important development. This means that an actor or actress during a year might perform not only at the national theatre, but also as a part of a new underground company and in a popular film. This makes it more difficult and important to specify exactly which agents are recognized as authorized and consecrated by the field, and whose participation only derives from their collaboration with otherwise consecrated agents. When agents reposition themselves, they normally do so in pursuit of different values, including artistic and economic. The repositioning thus also becomes a more or less strategic attempt to achieve different values.

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The process of repositioning raises the question whether agents who were admitted to the field by gatekeeping authorities in one position, but then move around the theatre field, maintain that admission and their field-specific capital in the wildly different positions they later occupy. It is important to remember that, as we already indicated in the first chapter, it is not necessarily the case that all agents at all times strive for as much autonomy as possible. Whether or not it is possible for an agent to make use of the field-specific capital that was obtained through a successful claim to autonomy in one part of the field in another position in the theatre field cannot be answered in general, but should be considered in each individual case. Claiming autonomy in a geographically decentralized position As the cultural policy researcher Nobuko Kawashima (2004 [1996]) points out, it is not uncommon for artists to be sceptical towards a decentralization of theatre production. This scepticism towards a cultural political objective can be understood as agents protecting their status in the theatre field from the heteronomous values of cultural policy: in this case, the value of cultural democracy, i.e. the right of inhabitants of peripheral parts of a country to cultural access. This presents a clash of the inspired and the civic value regimes within cultural policy: the reason why theatre production should be geographically dispersed is the promotion of the value of equality and not of artistic quality (Kawashima 2002). This scepticism also marks that it is easier for agents in a geographically central position to successfully claim autonomy. Because of the geographical centralization of gatekeepers, it is easier for agents physically placed in the theatre capital of a country to claim autonomy. The dynamic of centre and periphery is, for instance, prominent in the Danish theatre field. In Denmark, many of the newly educated actors and actresses from the theatre academies in the provinces (such as the Aarhus Acting School) move to Copenhagen after graduation.3 This is even the case with actors who have their first contract for a professional job in a provincial city such as Aarhus signed before the graduation, meaning that they will have to travel back and forth when the rehearsal period begins one-and-a-half months later (Hansen 2013). This demonstrates the necessity 3 In 2015 all official theatre academies in Denmark including the Aarhus Acting School were merges into the Danish National School of Performing Arts. The decentralised structure has been maintained (see chapter 5).

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of newcomers to a theatre field to submit to the existing dynamics of the field in order to position themselves within it. In Denmark, as well as other countries, the competition between actors and actresses is fierce; the unemployment rate is high and some have to give up the dream of becoming an acknowledged artist. For this reason, it is important to behave in a way that gives the newcomer the best chances of gaining field-specific capital. One strategy is to physically place oneself as close to the central agents in the field as possible. This means that the heteronomous value of having a job (and not being forced to commute or being away from home for months) is outweighed by the value of autonomy, which they hope that they will successfully be able to claim in the capital of the country. In this case, the agents accept the rules of the game and act accordingly. In other cases, agents act actively to change them. This is the situation when theatre managers in the provinces work together to promote opportunities for work in the provinces as took place in the Region of Central Denmark where Scenekunstnetværket Region Midtjylland worked for the promotion of regional theatres. The goal was to not only secure a higher level of subsidy for theatre outside Copenhagen, but also to be acknowledged for their contribution to the national theatre field. 4 This demonstrates that the heteronomous values of cultural policy and economy were not enough; there was also a need for autonomy. The regional theatre producers wanted to become a recognized part of the autonomous theatre field, and be recognized for their field-specific value. Another example of agents trying to change the balance between centre and periphery in relation to the possibility of claiming autonomy is the Nomad Theatre Network, which cooperates on theatrical production and touring between nine provincial theatres in the more sparsely populated midlands of the Republic of Ireland. This makes touring these areas economically easier and more prestigious (because it is more visible to critics and colleagues), attracting artists who might otherwise be shy of working outside of Dublin. While the previous examples show that heteronomous values, such as securing a geographical distribution of theatre, might work against the pursuit of autonomy, this is not always the case. The following example shows that the use of the heteronomous value of economic capital might contribute to a successful claim of autonomy even when this is opposed by central agents in the field. This was the case with the Slovenian director Thomas Pandur, who established himself as an important, but also controversial figure within the Slovenian theatre field during the 1990s. Pandur’s style of directing was 4

For a further analysis see Hansen (2013).

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post-dramatic, which caused debate and resistance inside the Slovenian theatre field where it was questioned whether or not he was the right person to be in charge of the Slovenian National Drama Theatre in Maribor, both because of his artistic style and his international orientation. He avoided what Maja Šorli (2009: 433) describes as economic censorship from the Ministry of Culture by raising enough money to continue producing his expensive performances from international sources, as well as using his foreign touring to raise the field-specific capital of the company. Here, we have a clear example that field-specific capital does not always stand in diametric opposition to economic capital. Financial independence can offer one the freedom to occupy a more autonomous and less populist position in the field, precisely because one is neither dependent on box office, nor on subsidy allocations. It is a central point in this case that Pandur succeeded because he was able to combine access to financial support with the claim to autonomy made within a European theatre field, where the post-dramatic style was valued higher than in the Slovenian theatre field.5 Claiming autonomy while pursuing publicity Another example of the complex interaction between inner-field recognition and economic success is the use of soap opera actors in subsidized theatre. For instance, the Dutch theatre company Het Zuidelijk Toneel in 1993 produced Hamlet and announced that Antonie Kamerling (1966–2010), at that time the most popular male soap opera star in the Netherlands, would be part of the cast. Kamerling had applied for the theatre academy, but was denied entrance. Apparently, Het Zuidelijk Toneel was also unsure of his acting abilities, as he was cast as Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who comes to the scene of the Danish court when all main characters are already dead. Het Zuidelijk Toneel was scorned by theatre critics for leaving young girls pining in the audience for more than two hours to see their hero on stage for just the closing three minutes of the performance.6 The example shows a double interaction between the theatre field and a broader field of entertainment. The theatre company as an agent firmly positioned in the Dutch theatre field connects to an agent, Antonie Kamerling, who is not a part of the 5 In fact, Pandur followed a heteronomous strategy to gain recognition in the autonomous part of the Slovenian theatre field. We will discuss such strategies in more detail in Chapter 5 (Section 5.1). 6 The incident did not harm Het Zuidelijk Toneel, but it certainly helped Kamerling, who went on to be recognized as an important Dutch actor, albeit mainly in film and television. His theatre work was restricted to musicals. He also performed as a singer.

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field but possesses the value of mass market fame. This is attractive for the theatre, mainly because it increased box office sales. For Kamerling, this was a chance to become a part of the theatre field that was attractive for him because it is a part of the inspired regime. But it also shows that the theatre company in the end was afraid that they might have lost their ability to claim autonomy if they embraced the values of the fame polity too fully, hence the decision not to give Kamerling a prominent role. The complexity and changeability of contemporary theatre fields makes it a difficult task to determine what type of moves will entail this loss of autonomy. Traditionally, ‘selling out’ would be understood as choosing to pursue heteronomous forms of capital (i.e. money) by, for instance, performing in popular, commercial shows, television or even commercials. This risk has changed, however, with the breakdown of a fixed separation between high and popular art. Claiming autonomy in a subfield As we see with the example of Kamerling, a successful claim to autonomy might also have value for actors in more heteronomous parts of theatre fields; that is, parts of theatre fields that combine the inspired values with other values. First, let us consider an example from a field that is deeply entangled in fame or market values: the Dutch cabaret, which is largely composed of single-performer shows which satirize Dutch society and politics through sketches, songs and monologues.7 The production of cabaret is and has always been market-oriented. In it, artists choose a relatively heteronomous position while clearly marking out their difference from political forces. But also in this specific subfield there are different types of values that are being negotiated: critical forms of cabaret are valued over the more ‘commercial’ forms of entertainment. One example of this is Gerard Cox, who started his career as a singer, but became a member of the acclaimed critical cabaret group Lurelei in 1966. That year he rose to fame as he was fined for defamation of the Queen in his song Arme Ouwe (Poor Old Lady), which was part of the Lurelei programme.8 His collaboration 7 In the earlier days of cabaret, the 1960s through 1970s, cabaret groups were more common, such as Lurelei and Donquichocking. Though the 1980s and 1990s saw some new groups appearing (such as Purper (1981 to 2012) and Niet uit het Raam (starting in the 1987), the genre nowadays is dominated by solo performances including music, song and a specifically designed set. Therefore, the genre should not be confused with stand-up comedy. 8 In fact, the song was not defamatory to Juliana (who reigned between 1948 and 1980) but to the revolutionaries of the sixties. In the song, Cox personifies a young revolutionary who comes to the conclusion that the Queen cannot be held at fault for the corrupt and bourgeois

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with Lurelei, his run-ins with the authorities and further critical songs and conferences (amongst others against Nixon) earned Cox a huge amount of field-specific capital within the subfield of cabaret. He became a hero for a younger generation of cabaretiers, amongst them Kabaret Ivo de Wijs. However, when Cox continued his career in the 1970s as a singer of easylistening songs such as 1948 (a Dutch text set to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again) and ’t Is weer voorbij die mooie zomer (Summer has ended, a Dutch text to Steve Goodman’s song City of New Orleans, which achieved an 18-week run in the Dutch pop charts in 1973),9 he lost the field’s respect, prompting Ivo de Wijs to write the song Pak de poen ome Gerard (Take the loot, uncle Gerard), criticizing him for pursuing commercial success and aligning with very people in the pop industry he used to scorn. A dispute between Cox and De Wijs ensued, which ended when, in 2009, De Wijs presented a CD collection of the songs he had written for Kabaret Ivo de Wijs between 1968 and 1980. At the presentation, Gerard Cox sang the song about himself. The example shows that the values of the inspired regime in this case is complemented by market, fame and civic values and that it is the dominance of fame values over civic values that causes the conflict. It also demonstrates that disputes over specific value—in this case cabaret’s specific value of being critical to ‘the powers that be’, including commercialization—are immensely helpful for both parties as they frequently are waged in the press, thus giving public recognition (fame) to both parties involved, helping box office revenues and sales of CDs and DVDs for both Cox and Ivo de Wijs. At the same time, the example demonstrates how a subfield of the theatre field can present its own combination of values as the ‘correct’ value to pursue and that such combinations change over time. This is also the case for children’s theatre, a subfield of national theatre systems we already mentioned in Chapter 1. To see how the dynamics of the relationship between different subfields in a national theatre field work, we take a closer look at the Danish children’s theatre. It has been promoted as ‘the best kept secret in the world’ because of the lack of acknowledgement from the rest of the theatre field in Denmark (Dahl 2008). These small-scale performances are produced by many small, independent theatre companies. This subfield has established its own values, meaning that consecrated institutions. She is merely the product of them and rioting against her in fact is fighting the wrong enemy. This was a nuance to which the 1960s authorities remained oblivious. 9 Neither of the Dutch lyrics were translations. Cox merely used the music of the songs to write his own easy-listening hits that were in no way critical or profound but apparently resonated with a broad public sentiment. The Dutch versions are about happy and cosy memories when life was simple (1948) and a beautiful summer (’t Is weer voorbij die mooie zomer).

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agents from the general theatre field cannot expect to be valued in this subfield. The large national theatre institutions, when performing productions for children, have frequently been criticized for their low quality by the key agents within the subfield of children’s theatre. The converse is also true: even highly recognized artists from the subfield of theatre for children may have a hard time entering the rest of the theatre field. During the last few years, some signs of a higher level of interaction and cooperation between these two subfields have emerged, such as co-productions, the use of directors from the field of children’s theatre within an institutional context and more actors performing in both performances for children and for adults. The lack of interaction between the two subfields might be explained by differences in the way the two interpret different value regimes. One is the inspired regime and thus the attribution of field specific capital: In Denmark, most performances for children are played at schools or for school classes far away from public attention and away from the usual agents who have the consecrating authority to attribute specific values. Moreover, agents firmly embedded in the subfield of the children’s theatre hold a different view on what quality is than agents from the ‘regular’ theatre institutions. This is why disputes over quality arise. The second is the polity of fame: A consequence of the distribution system is not only invisibility to the theatre critics and other agents capable of granting field-specific capital, but also from the media that allows for fame, a value that is quite important for especially the larger theatres, which need stars to sell tickets (Klaic 2012, 74–75). The third is the close link between theatre for children and the school system, which causes discontent between the two fields of theatre and education. Regardless of the question of artistic quality, theatre for children is easily associated with the heteronomous, non-artistic value of education, which belongs to the domestic and civic value regimes. It is not that theatre-makers in the other subfields do not value education, but they see it as a foreign capital, one valued by a different field. Such a feeling might also be encouraged by the way that the state subsidizes theatre (and arts) for children based on different criteria (generally, more moral and instrumentalist ones) than those used for theatre for adults.10 We will revisit the example of children’s theatre when we discuss the relation between theatre fields and the field of education in Chapter 6. 10 See Bjørnsen (2009) who documents that the discourse on professional arts for children in Norway is dominated by the concept of Bildung. Another example is Stavrum (2013), who reports an emphasis on knowledge and learning outcomes in the political discourse.

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The examples demonstrate that theatre f ields consist of different subfields whose forms of specific capital differ from each other. In some of the more established subf ields audience success does not present a problem. In others there is, as popularity is considered a marker for poor quality. We would argue that there are specific types of quality at stake in specific parts of the field. This is why one should be wary of the use of the word quality when discussing the concept of autonomy. It is not quality per se that is a marker of autonomy; it is the fight over which type of quality is preferred over other types. In essence, claims to autonomy come down to claiming that others are doing ‘something different’ and that each should be evaluated according to his/her own standards. Per Mangset (2002) has described how the Norwegian artistic field is divided into four different subfields: a nationally-oriented subfield, an avant-garde subfield, a cultural-democratic subfield and an amateur subfield. His point is that these different subf ields operate relatively independent of each other, and that each has its own form of field-specific capital. Consequently, the possibility of a successful transportation of the field-specific capital an agent has earned in one subfield to another depends on the different subf ields’ willingness to accept capital earned in each other, and this depends, amongst other factors, on the level of interaction between them. If the general practice within a theatre field is that agents—and by this we mean both companies and individual artists—habitually move between subfields, then the subfields will be more closely tied to each other, which means that the chances for a successful transportation of capital from one subfield to another are good. In other words, moving around in the theatre field is possible for agents. Especially in the time of economic recession with downward pressures on state subsidies, heteronomous values interact with autonomous values in different ways. Previously frowned-upon strategies, including using popular actors from film and television, are now common practice in subsidized parts of the field, and cross-overs between cabaret, musical, theatre, film and television are more prominent nowadays. This situation is facilitated by changes in the organizational structures of theatre companies that have reduced the number of actors on the payroll. As a result, theatre life has become a practice of short-term and project-based engagements enhancing the possibilities to move around in the field and to pursue different values including market values. Both ANT and Boltanski and Thévenot allow for an understanding of heteronomy as the key to providing autonomy for an agent. By entertaining liaisons with a variety of actors, not only those with large amounts of specific capital, agents can gain autonomy as they

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can change allegiances more easily.11 This is, for instance, the case in the American theatre system, which is largely dependent on private donors and business sponsorship, combined with small (and usually local) subsidies and ticket income. This is in contrast to European subsidized systems, where up to 80 per cent of costs are financed by state subsidies. However, as the Pandur example demonstrates, such heteronomous strategies can also be found in subsidized systems.

4.2.

Things that autonomy allows agents to do

What becomes clear from our previous examples is that claims to autonomy are attractive for agents in very different positions within a theatre field. So let us take a closer look at why this is so. Claims to autonomy can act as a powerful facilitator, enabling those agents who have access to it to take up a far wider variety of positions within the field and with respect to the rest of the social world. Claims to autonomy also enable the making of works that would otherwise be impossible or even inconceivable. In the following, we will first discuss how different claims to autonomy allow agents in the field to do different things in relation to other agents within the field. However, as one aspect of the fact that agents use claims to autonomy for their own ends is the struggle between autonomous and heteronomous forms of capital, we will end this chapter with examples how claims to autonomy allow agents to take up specific positions with regard to pressures from outside the field. Autonomy allows for popular performances Even with the increased dynamics between more autonomous and more heteronomous subfields, it can be a challenge for established agents in theatre fields to engage in activities considered too popular. Popularity in itself may be considered a sign of poor artistic quality and thus cause a loss of prestige. This is Bourdieu’s classical opposition of cultural and economic capital. One example that demonstrates the challenge of balancing artistic standards and the need to attract a high number of attendants is the Royal Danish Theatre, which in 2010 decided to stage the musical My Fair Lady. This caused a public debate about the legitimacy of the decision. 11 Gielen (2005 and 2012) has observed the same situation for visual artists. Paradoxically, the most heteronomously connected agents experience the highest levels of autonomy, not the subsidized artists.

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Critics claimed that this was a performance that should be staged only by commercial producers because it is a popular musical. The theatre itself argued that it was a perfectly legitimate choice made on the basis of artistic considerations. However, as the context of the decision was a situation where the theatre had a deficit, it was suspected that the reasons for staging the musical were financial rather than artistic. Interestingly, the theatre did not use economic arguments to defend their decision. The importance of the internal valuation of an agent based on autonomous criteria in this case is demonstrated by the fact that not just one, but all three artistic directors at the Royal Danish Theatre in a chronicle presented their version of the case. Their main point was that the Royal Danish Theatre was not in an artistic crisis and they defended their choice of My Fair Lady on an artistic basis: It is not new that the Royal Danish Theatre performs operettas and musicals and naturally we both can and must be able to perform an excellent work as ‘My Fair Lady’. It should not be disqualifying for the piece that many people consider it good—or should it? (Holten et al., 16 April 2010, our trans.)

This quote shows that representatives of the Royal Danish Theatre need to stress the autonomous value of artistic quality to legitimize their production of this ‘commercial’ musical in the theatre field and the case raises the interesting question of whether popularity and artistic quality are indeed always oppositions. Similar disputes arose in the UK around the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), one of the most high-status theatre companies in the UK, if not in Europe. The directorship of the RSC is one of the most prestigious posts in the UK theatre field. The prestige is also of a very particular type: highcultural-capital, field-specific, but also ‘old’, in Bourdieu’s language and ‘domestic’ in Boltanski and Thévenot’s. Director Adrian Noble ran the RSC between 1991 and 2003, which was a difficult time for the company. Noble introduced what was called ‘Project Fleet’. This involved changing the RSC’s longstanding company policy, where roles were cast from within a pool of actors hired for the year, to facilitate the hiring of stars on a short-term basis for particular productions. He also planned to demolish the RSC’s home theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to build a £100m complex, which the press referred to as a ‘theatre village’, to encourage tourists to take the long train journey to that (frankly rather isolated) area of Southwest England. Needless to say, this provoked ire and concern. It looked suspiciously commercial, and most of it never happened. The final straw, however, was

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Noble’s long-planned sabbatical leave in 2002 from his directorship to direct a West End production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, an American musical about, ironically, a magical train. Though Noble did not make a great deal of money on his commercial work—contemporary musical directors rarely do—there was considerable concern that, because of his apparent taste for more commercial work and the commodification of Shakespeare as a product and experience, he could no longer unproblematically make claim to the elitist, field-based autonomy on which the RSC relied for its reputation and its funding. After a rather chilly final two years, Noble left the company in 2003 (see Christiansen 2004). The claims to autonomy of the RSC prevented Noble from acting as commercially as he wanted, but conversely, his commercial intentions —which might have been meant as a sincere business strategy aiming at the RSC’s growth and survival—made it problematic for Noble to function in such a high prestigious position. Here, the types of autonomy the institution and the individual agent lay claim to clearly do not align. It is telling that Noble could not direct the musical while effectively running the RSC but only during a sabbatical leave. Autonomy allows agents to make money In a strictly Bourdieusian worldview, the conversion of cultural capital into economic capital is only possible in the long run. This has been the case with Samuel Beckett, whose heirs have made a flourishing business out of the right to his work. However, one need not die before money can be made from one’s theatre work. Commercial producers definitely make money on theatre, as per Bourdieu they use the short production cycle. However, they do not overtly use heteronomous strategies: they rarely point to their sales revenue as an indicator of their success. Rather, they more frequently talk about the quality of the productions they make. This is the case with Joop van den Ende, owner of one of Europe’s largest commercial theatre production companies, who never speaks about the box office publicly. He talks about the quality of the productions and the technical abilities of the performers who star in them. The idea of theatre as a quality product can, in fact, sell tickets. Producers also need consecration by theatre critics too to sell tickets. Also in Denmark the most prominent commercial producer, Nils-Bo Valbro from Det Ny Teater, is known for an ongoing fight for the recognition of the artistic value of his performances, a fight fought at every possible arena from public speeches to comments to public hearing processes on theatre policy. Furthermore, it is interesting to see that theatrical value can be deployed to make money. This is, for instance, apparent in the staging of the Broadway

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premiere of Spiderman: Turn off the Dark (2011) for which the director Julie Taymor made use of her experimental theatre background as a guarantor for the artistic quality of the show, as well as its box-office potential.12 Here, inspired credentials are used to gain market value. So even heteronomous agents in theatre fields make use of claims to theatrical autonomy, even though their position in the field or their intentions would suggest otherwise. Autonomy allows you to be political outside the political field Agents within the theatre field can claim their right to state more or less overt political messages as a part of a performance without necessarily entering the political process itself, something most political speech is unable to do. This complicated relationship between the field of theatre and the political field became clear in a Danish debate about the political messages presented in opera productions at the Royal Danish Theatre. A prominent member of the right-wing Danish Peoples Party accused Kasper Bech-Holten, artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera (part of the Royal Danish Theatre), of politicizing his productions, especially his staging of Verdi’s Don Carlos in 2007. To understand this example, it is important to know that the artistic freedom of state-subsidized theatres is protected by the Danish Theatre Act, which means that legally politicians have no right to intervene in their staging. Many Danish theatres have politicians as members of their board, and to avoid the appearance that the theatre is used as a tool for propaganda, it is the prerogative of the management to plan the repertoire without interference from members of the board. But the right to artistic freedom does also mean that it is considered problematic if politicians comment directly on performances as it can put indirect pressure on the artistic manager. However, this does not mean that politicians always refrain from it. In this case, the question of artistic freedom became complicated because it was used both on the side of the politician and on the side of the theatre. What happened was that the politician, Morten Messerschmidt (since 2009 a member of the European Parliament), criticized the Royal Danish Theatre for politicizing its work and stated that the national opera should be free of political statements; this should be something only private/commercial theatres should do: Don Carlos is Verdi’s excellently carried through rebellion against the Catholic Church and on our national stage it should not be devaluated to Kasper Bech-Holten’ political playground. I am sure that private theatres 12 For more on this fiasco, see Berger (2013).

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on Nørrebro would find Holten’s interpretation interesting and inspiring. But we must ask that this does not again take place at the Royal Danish Opera. Verdi’s Don Carlos should not be reduced to Holten’s Don Castro—especially not on our national stage. (Messerschmidt, 22 December 2007, our trans.)

The example is interesting because of the intriguing relationship between policy and art. If we believe that Kasper Bech-Holten has made an opera with an overt political message (and it was generally recognized that he did; one of the costumes used in the performance was an orange prison uniform, in reference to the Guantanamo prison and the US war on terror), he himself seems to have moved away from a purely autonomous position. In this sense, Messerschmidt’s dissatisfaction with the production is understandable; what he argues is that art, especially subsidized art, should be free of political messages. On the other hand, Messerschmidt himself shows no respect for the autonomy of the arts in that he, as a politician, tries to influence the work of an artist. An interesting element in this discussion is the fact that it concerns the Royal Danish Theatre, which has a very specific position in the Danish theatre field. It is clear that it is positioned in the consecrated part of the field, but it is also clear that it has a special relationship to the political field. The Royal Danish Theatre is the only theatre in Denmark that is a state-owned company and is regulated by four-year political agreements negotiated amongst the parties in Parliament. In addition, it receives almost 50 percent of the total state subsidy to theatre. For these reasons, there is more political attention given to the Royal Danish Theatre than to any other theatre in Denmark and, as the example shows, at least some politicians think that they should have a special influence on its artistic work; not that it should be used for direct political propaganda for the government, but that it should at least not promote opinions opposed to the political strategy of the country. Messerschmidt uses autonomy as an argument for state subsidy, claiming that the role of the Royal Danish Theatre is not to participate in political debate. Kasper Bech-Holten uses autonomy as a tool for influencing the political process, but from the outside and without needing to address the normal rules of political engagement. To him, autonomy facilitated political engagement of a certain sort, not disengagement. Autonomy allows you to ignore the audience Despite theatre’s inherent communicative character, there are examples of theatre-makers who resist communicating with the audience, at least with a

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mass audience. As an example, consider the Dublin-based theatre company Pan Pan. It occupies a place in the Irish theatre field that Bourdieu would call the ‘field of restricted production’ or ‘production for producers’. That is, rather than seeking out a mass audience—as its work is less engaged with Irish theatre traditions than on how theatre is made in London and New York—it designs performances for a specialized audience of fellow art-makers, students, critics and highly specialized regular festival-goers. Unusually for an Irish company, they perform far more outside of Ireland than within it. In fact, the company’s meagre public appeal in Ireland itself serves as a marker for their autonomy. International recognition gains the company a highly autonomous position in the Irish theatre system, allowing them to be indifferent to local audiences. In the Netherlands, where because of language issues international recognition is not common for theatre agents, theatre-makers have nonetheless used a variant of these claims to autonomy as a last recourse when discussing possibilities to enlarge audiences. For instance, in a discussion on the limited audience appeal of his (admittedly experimental) performances, Jan Joris Lamers claimed he did not regret the loss of audience members who come to the theatre to be entertained (Brouwer 1980). For him, the remaining intellectually-oriented audience is far more interesting as it better suits his aesthetic needs. During a discussion with PR and marketing staff of Dutch city theatres in 1992, Gerardjan Rijnders, at the time director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the most prominent Dutch theatre company, was accused of making too difficult performances for audiences in rural areas. In exasperation he exclaimed that he had no obligation to the audience whatsoever, his obligation was to the arts.13 But taking up such positions has become extremely rare, firstly because theatre-makers do have (admittedly artistic) intentions they wish to convey with audiences and secondly, because marketing has gradually become an accepted part of the operations of theatre companies in the Netherlands (Joostens 2012). Clearly, subsidies allow theatre-makers not to care excessively about the number of audience members. The principle that a director as an agent within the field has the possibility to neglect the audience’s understanding of the play (or can claim to do so), or rather to ignore perfectly reasonable other values audience members seek in theatre going, such as being entertained, is a sign of the strength of the autonomy of the field. However, it is quite impossible to think of theatre (and art more generally) without thinking of communication. So, having no interest in whether the audience understands a performance 13 One of the authors was present at the discussion.

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is a rather untenable position. Even in the most incomprehensible works, something is being communicated: e.g. the incomprehensibility itself or the inability of humans to communicate properly,14 or simply the aesthetic form or playfulness as such. So, we would rather argue that claims of theatremakers who ignore the audience, or claims for the value of ‘incomprehensible works’, are really claims to theatrical autonomy. Pan Pan must find its international audience and the likes of Lamers and Rijnders must find some form of public acclaim in order for their companies to survive. In essence, such claims to autonomy seem to be a powerful piece of rhetoric. Autonomy allows you to act unethically However, there is another possibility than not caring whether an audience understands performances: offending the audience. It is the autonomy of the theatre field that makes it possible to make amoral or unethical performances: works that resist a moral evaluation and insist on being evaluated on aesthetic criteria alone. When a theatre critic judges a performance as good, the criteria are artistic and not moral or ethical.15 However the struggle between aesthetic and ethical values has been—and is still—difficult and complex. The discussion of an amoral concept of art is closely related to the question of autonomy and to the efficacy of theatre in society (see the next section), and refers back to the Schillerian idea of the autonomous theatre as a moral good in the broadest sense, but one that requires a certain zone of freedom to achieve that good. The fact that the relationship between aesthetic and ethical criteria is the subject of ongoing negotiations indicates that the autonomy of the artistic field remains relevant and contested. During the last years, we have seen several cases in which works of art have been evaluated as unethical or offensive and the display of them in the public has been limited or at the very least problematic. The question of the relationship between works of art and Islam has been prominent in the public debate. In the summer of 2015, the director of the festival in Aix-en-Provence has been criticized for prohibiting overt references to the so-called Islamic State group in the production of 14 This certainly is present in the works of the Theatre of the Absurd, including Beckett and Ionesco. 15 Sigrid Røyseng analyses the relationship between the morally good and the artistically good in Norwegian theatre policy in her article Godhet og galskap [Goodness and Madness]. She includes an interview with a director and consultant from the Norwegian Cultural Council and concludes: ‘A good artistic project cannot be based on moral correctness or truisms. The projects must be based on art’s own premises’ (2009, 13).

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Mozart’s Die Entfürung aus dem Serai, an opera which seems to ridicule Muslim rulers as uncivilized. He said that he thought such references would be inappropriate in France so soon after the attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo (Van der Lint 2015). Perhaps a more well-known example is the staging of Mozart’s Idomeneo at Deutsche Oper in Berlin 2006 that was first cancelled and then carried through (Woddis 2010), due to its depiction of the severed head of the prophet Muhammed (alongside the heads of Jesus and the Buddha). Another is the performance of Aisha and the women of Medina, which Onafhankelijk Toneel (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) was to perform as part of the Rotterdam European Capital of Culture event in 2001. In the show, the youngest wife of Mohammed, Aisha, was to be depicted on stage, which led to threats to the performers of Moroccan decent who withdrew from the production. Onafhankelijk Toneel then decided not to perform the show with an exclusively white cast as the ethnic mix of the cast members was part of the artistic plan of the performance. Do note that such religious objections to theatre are not restricted to Islam. In 2012, Roman Catholics in Paris, Brussels and Breda (the Netherlands) protested against the performance On the concept of faith regarding the son of God by Italian director Romeo Castalucci, because in the performance a picture of Jesus was shown at which school children throw stones. Questioning the autonomy of a performance is not limited to religious reasons. The Danish playwright Christian Lollike caused a major debate in 2012 when he made public that his next play would be based on the manifesto of Anders Bering Breivik, the right-wing terrorist who killed 77 people in Oslo and at the Norwegian island of Utøya in 2011. The main arguments raised against Lollike’s plans considered (1) that is was too early, that the tragedy was too recent, and (2) that the play would effectively give Breivik and his words more attention and prominence than they deserved. At their core, the arguments against the performance were moral, but so was Lollike’s reason for writing the play.16 For this reason, this might be a poor example with which to understand the question of autonomy, but examining it further, the question of autonomy is a part of the debate. For some of the play’s opponents, the mere fact that it is a play is part of the immorality, because it means that the performance will be valued for its artistic qualities, but also because it seems to give a higher social status to the manifesto. Without his autonomous positioning as a playwright, however, Lollike would have no social sanction whatsoever for presenting 16 Articles and interviews in Danish national newspapers about the play include Hybel (2012), Goul (2012) and Lilleør (2012)

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this material to an audience; the question is whether or not he is using that particular position appropriately and fairly, rather than whether he has a right as a citizen to be drawing attention to the manifesto. Civic norms of the inherent equality of all humans, against which Breivik seems to offend, thus can cause tensions with theatrical autonomy. It is a matter for debate whether French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala uses or misuses the frame of theatre to make anti-Semitic comments in his cabaret show Le Mur (2013/2014). On several occasions, his performances have been cancelled by theatre directors, especially when the theatre venues are owned by city governments. The production Audience (2011) of the Belgian theatre collective Ontroerend Goed is another case in point. The performance includes a section in which a performer insults an audience member in the front row in the most crude and sexist terms while an image of her face is portrayed on a large video screen at the back of the stage. The insults continue until the audience intervenes.17 Furthermore, using animals in theatre productions can cause a stir. Within a theatre production it was possible for Jan Fabre to throw cats and fold little canary birds in toilet paper and tie them to a rope and drag them along the stage as he did during his epic eight-hour performance Het is theater zoals te verwachten en voorzien was [It’s theatre as expected and foreseen] in 1982, which was recreated in 2013. In ‘real life’ such behaviour would be punishable because of animal cruelty laws; the theatrical frame ‘shielded’ Fabre from this fate, though in November 2013, when the cat-throwing was repeated in the Antwerp City Hall for a documentary on Fabre’s work, he was assaulted by anonymous citizens when jogging in the park.18 Fabre is not only cruel to animals in his performances. Physical (self-)mutilation of performers to the point of actual bleeding and extreme exhaustion also frequently occur in his work. In such cases, claims to autonomy are claims against morality, political correctness, human and/or animal rights; in short, ethics. Conflicts between claims to autonomy and ethical issues can be very complex. To analyse this issue further, we will discuss one of the biggest rows in modern Dutch theatre history.19 It is a story with two chapters, one from 1987 and one from 2002. Thus, this case also illustrates how the 17 In fact, the (artistic) purpose of this section in the performance is to make audience members think about why they do not intervene in such situations in real life. 18 A good discussion of the aesthetic problems of the animal on stage can be found in Ridout (2006, Part IV). 19 Much of the information in this section has been derived from the master thesis of Heinink (1991) who provides a day-by-day reconstruction of the affair.

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relationship between autonomous aesthetics and ethics changes over time. In 1987, the young theatre director Johan Doesburg presented a performance of Het vuil, de stad en de dood (The Garbage, the City and Death20) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as his final project for his theatre academy training in Amsterdam, in the Rotterdam theatre venue Lantaren/Venster in November 1987. Written in 1975, from its beginnings Het vuil, de stad en de dood has been accused of anti-Semitism because of its stereotypical presentation of the unsympathetic character of the rich Jew. The production was cancelled due to massive public critique. Doesburg stated that he did not find the play interesting because of its German anti-Semitism, but because it addresses the more general mechanism of how a society deals with stereotypes, a mechanism Fassbinder demonstrates to be at the root of fascism (Heinink 1994, 104). Doesburg’s choice was controversial not just because of the German debate, but also because, a year before the play’s premiere, it was introduced in a public reading in De Balie, Amsterdam. The reading was followed by a panel with, amongst others, employees of the Anne Frank Foundation. The panel concluded that the subject matter of the play prevented its production. However, the text was translated in Dutch and published the same year. The production met heavy critique amongst others from Leonard Frank, the artistic director of Frascati theatre in Amsterdam. After attending one of the rehearsals of the play, he asked his board to cancel the performance in his theatre as, in his view, the group was not able to present the delicate subject matter of the play convincingly. He here takes a stance that mixes both artistic (i.e. inspired) and civic values. This brought the tour of the production in the spotlight and debates about the appropriateness of the play waged in newspapers. The Foundation Against Anti-Semitism asked the mayor and alderman of the city of Rotterdam to prohibit the performance. The mayor and aldermen refused to ban the play as they argued that freedom of speech was paramount and, if discrimination occurs, this can only be ascertained in retrospect. The Minister of Justice also refused to prohibit the performance, however sending a high official to the premiere and stating publicly he thought the troupe would be wise to abandon the performance as the controversy was national by now and emotions had been provoked. Doesburg refused to cancel the performance, claiming that the play was not being judged by its true merits. This can be considered an appeal to a field-specific value (‘merit’) and thus a claim to autonomy, or as a classical strategy when confronted with a test as described by Boltanski 20 Original title: Die Müll, die Stadt und der Tot (1975).

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and Thévenot. Doesburg argued that the heated emotional debate ‘is veiling the theatrical and aesthetic qualities of the play’ (Boender 1988, n.p.). In effect, Doesburg claims that the performance is evaluated based on the wrong values.21 But the production’s fate was already sealed. Different groups united against the performance out of a feeling that at least they would be able to stop this type of hatred towards Jews.22 They bought a large number of tickets to the premiere and lay siege to the stage so the performance could not be carried out. As a compromise, the theatre academy organized a new performance to a selected audience, to be able to evaluate the graduation work of Doesburg and his colleagues. The performance was not shown to the press and people attending were asked not to speak to the press. As a result, how Doesburg and his colleagues in fact treated the delicate subject matter artistically never became known to a wider audience. The row did not harm Doesburg’s career as a theatre director.23 He subsequently worked for various major Dutch theatre companies. In fact, the row probably strengthened his reputation as an important theatre-maker from the beginning of his career and demonstrates that the theatre system is able to function according to its own criteria, even when not all productions are feasible as a result of moral constraints. After several years, Doesburg was even able to produce Het vuil, de stad en de dood in the Netherlands again. In 2002, a production was staged in The Hague directed by Doesburg. The production met with mixed reviews and only half-hearted reactions from the protagonists of the protest against its staging in 1987. The protesters claimed the piece was still a provocation and that Doesburg knew what they thought of performing it. The tour of the production did not produce much attention. 21 Boltanski and Thévenot claim that in social situations when agents are dissatisfied with the outcomes of a test, they ‘unveil’ the test as not being sincere, i.e. they claim that the test is done based on the wrong type of legitimacy. So when Doesburg claims that the play is artistically good but this fact is overlooked in the heated debate, he reveals that the debate is about moral arguments but should be about aesthetic ones. In the quote he uses Boltanski and Thévenot’s term literally. 22 At that time in the Netherlands anti-Semitic sentiments were agitated because of press attention to so-called ‘black widow’ Rost van Tonningen—the widow of Dutch Nazi-collaborator Rost van Tonningen—who publicly denounced Jews and praised the Holocaust, something the Jewish community felt unable to prevent. 23 It did harm one of his opponents, though. Prominent Dutch actor Jules Croiset, member of a Jewish family of actors and directors, sent threatening letters to some prominent Dutchmen and untruthfully claimed to have been abducted and assaulted by neo-Nazis. This demonstrates the fierceness of the debate. When his deceit emerged, Croiset effectively lost his job as an actor because for several years he was not cast in any roles in theatre or film.

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The affair demonstrates some of the dynamics between art, ethics and politics. It also demonstrates that events taking place in the autonomous field of theatre can cause reactions outside the field. In this case, it instigated public protests against the performing and publishing of a play. Second, it demonstrates that the dynamics of artistic autonomy and ethical considerations change over time. Apparently, those who had protested in 1987 considered subsidized Dutch theatre a harmless platform fifteen years later, as the Dutch theatre world only attracts scarce public and media attention. In this way, thirdly, the affair demonstrates a growing marginalization of Dutch theatre, which may, in fact, strengthen its autonomy. And fourth, the example demonstrates that the interpretation of the freedom of speech in Dutch society had changed. Whereas in 1987 it was still possible to silence unwanted messages based upon their alleged immoral nature—in this case a racist depiction of Jews—in 2002 the interpretation of the freedom of speech had evolved into a situation in which such unwanted messages may be given a stage. Finally, looking at the reception of the play elsewhere, this example also demonstrates that the autonomy of the theatre field varies in different countries: In Denmark the play was performed by Mammutteatret in Husets Teater in 1987 without problems, though not without debate (Flygare 2004, 14–17). The reception of this production was eventually positive, a reaction that was partly caused by the artistic quality of the performance: ‘Mammutteatret’s performance created due attention. A unanimous press acquitted Garbage, the City and Death of anti-Semitic overtones and proclaimed it the performance of the year’ (Flygare 2004, 14). Once again, the mixture of artistic and ethical values thus became clear. The complexity of theatrical autonomy and ethics Now let us use our analytical tool of the problem of theatrical autonomy with more precision to see what is going on in these examples. A first conclusion is obvious: making a stink as a theatre-maker clearly is a marker of autonomy, as it is a sign that the theatre-maker chooses criteria specific to the field over ethical ones. Doesburg, for example, talks of theatrical and aesthetic qualities of the play, while Fabre is doing things to animals to develop an aesthetic sign, and M’Bala M’Bala seems to utilize the theatrical frame for messages about Jews. This is autonomy at the individual level of the artist, but made possible by the autonomy of the field as a whole. This is clearly effective, as is indicated by the fact that Doesburg was initially allowed to produce the play by the theatre academy and was able to follow a career in Dutch theatre despite of the affair and Fabre’s plays with animal

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cruelty and physical abuse of performers were in fact staged. But it does not work in all cases: M’Bala M’Bala’s performances are often cancelled by civil authorities. To analyse what is going on at a broader level, we should be clear on two things: which values are competing and through which means? The answer to the first question is obvious: here, aesthetic values (or the specific value of the theatre field) clash with ethical values, though they have various backgrounds. Ethical and moral issues can arise from a variety of the value regimes Boltanski and Thévenot have introduced. Ethics can arise from the inspired regime when they are religiously motivated, from the domestic regime when they are motivated by tradition, and from the civic regime when motivated by norms of equality. It is important to keep such differences in mind when analysing the impact of theatre systems. The second question is how values are competing, and this is more difficult. Here, relationships (1) and (4) in Figure 1 from the Introduction are relevant. Financial and legal arrangements (relationship 4) allow theatre-makers to act differently than the rest of society and offend against its norms. To the extent that unethical behaviour societally is defined as art—and thus as ‘not real’—it can be condoned by society; that is, the autonomy of the field allows for it. But the more recent reactions to Doesburg’s and Fabre’s work demonstrate that the extent to which the art status of reprehensible statements or activities, which prevents them from being morally evaluated and correspondingly punished, can change over time. The Fabre example demonstrates that contemporary theatre is being viewed as ‘something different’ regarding matters of animal cruelty to a lesser extent. On the other hand, the 2002 tour of Doesburg’s production seems to testify to a growing autonomy of the theatre system, to the point that it is considered harmless. In other words, the claim to autonomy is strengthened. But performers such as M’Bala M’Bala do not share such a position.24 Though the current interpretation of the freedom of speech may allow more leeway for discriminatory statements, his performances still 24 Note that after the terrorist attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, M’Bala M’Bala was arrested, ironically in a police action in support of the freedom of speech, when tweeting: ‘Je suis Charlie Coulibaly,’ mixing the protest slogan against the attack on freedom of speech, ‘Je suis Charlie,’ with the surname of one of the assailants who attacked the Jewish supermarket. However, here M’Bala M’Bala cannot lay claim to theatrical autonomy, as he tweeted this message. Had he included his criticism of the Western double standards towards Muslims in a performance, as he did earlier with his song Shoah-nanas (combining the French words for the Holocaust and pineapple), the police might have had a more difficult time in stopping him.

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meet difficulty in being executed. It is telling that M’Bala M’Bala does not perform in the field of restricted production, but rather for a mass audience. Furthermore, we cannot but notice that the media system has a very important role in these value confrontations. The media to a great extent determine the outcome of such conflicts. The media here should be regarded as an ‘intermediary’ system’—a mediator in ANT terms—between performances and the general public. This also means that the value regime that dominates the media system becomes a central aspect of the story. According to Van Maanen (2009), the dominant code in the media system is entertaining or not entertaining, or, in the terms of Boltanski and Thévenot’s fame polity, attracting attention or not attracting attention. Though the Fassbinder and Breivik examples demonstrate that in cases where the aesthetically relevant actions of theatre-makers are provocative, they are very suited to the entertainment value of the media system and this helps that system to ‘act’ in the ANT sense of instigating actions by others. But it is questionable whether this is based on the aesthetic merit of these performances alone. It is telling that both rows occurred as a result of press releases and not as a result of actual performances being seen by audience members (in one of these cases this was even prevented). Nevertheless, it is our view that it is precisely the autonomy of the theatre system that allows it to function as art in society (see the section below), though the mediating role with respect to larger audiences that the media system takes on to a large extent usurps theatre’s aesthetic effectiveness. Claims to autonomy allow you to influence the wider culture Before concluding this chapter, we will look at how claims to autonomy help theatre fields to function as such, i.e. to realize their specific value in society. For this, a final incidence of how claims to autonomy allow agents to do certain things needs to be discussed. As autonomy allows for works being created according to the specific standards a field upholds, it also allows for a specific type of communication, i.e. artistic communication. In Chapter 1, we already discussed the fact that autonomous fields are open to society, in the sense that they are subject to pressures from outside the field and, conversely, they can also influence agents outside of the field. Their autonomy is measured by the extent to which the field is able to ‘refract’ these pressures to the field’s own standards. For one, as we already demonstrated, the claim to autonomy of heteronomous agents can enhance their social prestige and thereby influence the way they are perceived in society. But more importantly, we should take a look at the

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communication taking place in relationships (1), (2) and (3) in Figure 1. They represent a feedback loop between society and artists, in which artists take subject matter from society, develop this aesthetically (in our case through theatre) in order to give back to a portion of that society: the actual spectators of performances. And the meaning these spetators take from these performances can, in turn, alter their lives and society. In Luhmann’s terms, the influence of a theatre field on the fields around it occurs through the specific type of communication taking place. The fact that the arts are a means to make other realities perceivable is ultimately dependant on the autonomy of the field. The new metaphors and ways of perceiving that artistic communication offer can ultimately change a culture. Without autonomy this specific type of communication is not possible. Examples of theatre’s influence on society are hard to find as this regards broad social changes that cannot be easily linked to single performances or productions. However, anecdotal evidence of the changing power of theatre is available. A trivial example involves Buckler, the non-alcoholic beer brand introduced by Heineken, which was so effectively ridiculed by cabaretier Youp van ‘t Hek that Heineken decided to discontinue the brand in 1993.25 However, this trivial example indicates that it is entirely possible that theatrical experiences change people’s perceptions, which may prompt them to act differently. A more fundamental social change occurred in 1830 when a performance of Auber’s opera La Muette di Portici in the Brussels city theatre allegedly started the rebellion against the northern Netherlands, which ultimately led to the independence of Belgium, as Ruitenbeek (1996, 378) claims in one of the most important volumes on Dutch theatre history. However, this is a misrepresentation of the actual historical events which persists in Dutch theatre history.26 Ever since 1930 the opera has been regarded as a symbol of the Belgian unity. So, in 2011, when Belgian politics was in a deep crisis over the formation of a new national government,27 the 25 It is questionable, however, whether this decision was solely based on the image damage Van ‘t Hek managed to impart on the brand. Heineken claims that the introduction of a betterflavoured brand of non-alcoholic beer by its competitor was the reason why Buckler was taken from Dutch shelves. Nonetheless, Van ‘t Hek’s rantings on the beer effectively equated Buckler with deceitfulness in Dutch society. 26 The mistake dates back to a passage in a Dutch book on theatre history from 1967 by Keller and De Lange. Studying the actual historical documents makes clear that the performance merely was seized as convenient opportunity by the separatist movement because its subject matter suited their cause (Van Maanen 1997, 12–13). 27 As a result of the rise of Flemish nationalism, the formation of the Di Rupo administration (2011 to 2014) took more than a year and holds the world record in coalition government formation.

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governors of the Brussels Muntschouwburg found it too difficult to stage a performance of La Muette for fear of effectively dissolving Belgium. The production was moved to Paris, a testimony to the presumed power of theatre in society (Donker 2011). The most obvious examples of how agents can influence society through taking an autonomous position perhaps should be searched for in those parts of the field that specifically aim at influencing the development of their audiences. Youth theatre is a case in point here, but also the political theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, which was, for instance, directed towards blue-collar workers. More modern variants of this type of theatre include applied theatre, as described in Chapter 3. It should be noted that it is specifically these more ‘fringe’ activities within theatre fields that are aimed towards specific audiences that openly strive for art’s influence on society. We will return to examples of community theatre in Chapter 6, where we address the question of how autonomy can serve outside values.28 It must suffice here to mention that audience research, also in more conventional theatre settings, could focus on registering whether theatrical values indeed have been realized for theatre audiences.

4.3. Conclusion In this chapter, we have demonstrated both how agents assert claims to autonomy by acting in certain ways, and how it is possible to pursue different goals through these appeals to autonomy. The flexibility and dynamic nature of the current theatre fields make it possible for agents to move around in the field taking up different positions and transferring field-specific capital from one position to another. This also means that the structure of the field of theatre is quite complex, and the workings of autonomy are not as simple as ‘the economic world reversed’.

28 Such an influence is the main tenet of arts policy legitimizations (see e.g. Van den Hoogen 2010). In that light, it seems strange that the well-established theatres proclaiming a more autonomous position than these fringe groups usually are the ones so heavily subsidized. Efforts to demonstrate the effects of community arts are present in the academic literature of a variety of countries (see e.g. Matarasso 1997; Trienekens and Van Miltenburg 2009; Hampshire and Matthijsse 2010; Burnell 2012; Sardu et al. 2012; Sloman 2011; Stuiver et al. 2013); however, consensus about the way in which such effects can best be demonstrated has not been reached, and research on the impact of ‘mainstream’ theatre on their audiences is unfortunately far more limited.

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The analysis in this chapter has pointed to a few issues to keep in mind when studying theatre systems: – Claims to autonomy are usually based on the possession of f ieldspecific capital, but can also stem from heteronomous values, such as fame or money. As a consequence, agents in different parts of theatre fields—both heteronomous and traditionally ‘autonomous’ parts—can make claims to autonomy, though they may do so differently. – Claims to theatrical autonomy can encourage different actors in the field to develop their understandings of the specific value at stake in the field, and different sorts of claims may lead different actors to different understandings. As a result, subfields can emerge, such as the field of cabaret or children’s theatre, which articulate the values by which they demand to be evaluated in their own ways. The level of autonomy of such subfields in respect to market, political and educational forces can differ. – Possession of specific capital allows for gatekeeping activities (barring others the entrance to the field) but also to gate-opening, i.e. allowing others to enter a specific (sub)field. – The advent of the internet is changing the power dynamics of theatre fields, specifically between critics and audiences. The ability of professional critics to award specific capital has diminished, which can weaken a traditional means of claiming theatrical autonomy. Currently, it is unclear how the new role of the audiences will develop and affect the dynamics of theatre fields. This is an interesting issue for future research. In short, the fact that autonomous fields can set their own values and distribute capital accordingly allows agents in the field to use autonomy for several goals. We have listed these goals—and the value conflicts that can be associated with them—in the following table in an effort to summarize and categorize how our perspective on theatrical autonomy is helpful in analysing actions of agents in theatre fields. We discern three basic types of goals: field-internal goals (objectives which are mostly bound to the notion of specific theatrical value), economic goals (to reach large audiences and to make money), and political goals (to use theatre as a forum for political, moral or ethical statements or to try to change structures in society). However, we should stress that this list is not exhaustive. Inevitably, because of the always-changing nature of artistic value, agents in theatre fields will find other goals for which claims to autonomy can be useful that may not fit the categories distinguished here. Researchers of theatre fields should be aware of this.

Political29 objectives

Economic objectives

Field-internal objectives

Market and specific value

Making money

Specific value and civic values

Entertainment versus artistic prestige

Making political statements (while not entering the political field)

Points of note

This ability depends on the formal recognition of the independence of theatre institutions. Heavily subsidized institutions thus may find it difficult to make political statements, and may be particularly criticised when they do so.

Established agents need to assert an artistic (i.e., field-specific) legitimization while trying to cater to larger audiences, or even (temporarily) move outside their established institutions. Commercial producers publicly use aesthetic criteria to measure the quality of their productions to heighten the status of work.

Specific value versus democracy – Subsidy, critical acclaim, and/or foreign recognition allow agents to of culture make works that are only comprehensible for (or relevant to) very limited audiences. – Meagre public appeal serves as a marker of autonomy. – Agents can cater only to specific needs of audience members (i.e. mostly intellectual needs rather than entertainment). – Though making these claims is a clear marker of autonomy, it is questionable whether those who make them really want to achieve them in practice.

Values involved / competing

Making popular performances

To define the meaning or value of a performance, regardless of an audience’s understanding

Goal

Table 2.  Reasons why agents in theatre fields make claims to theatrical autonomy (non exhaustive list)

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–

–

Change a culture

Specific value

–

Through the novel experiences theatre offers to its spectators, they may develop new perceptions which will in turn encourage social change (relationships (1), (2), (3) and (4) in Figure 1). The gatekeeping role of the media between theatre and the general public (relationship (1) in Figure 1) often usurps the efficacy of theatre by focusing on entertainment values.

Theatre professionals claim their work should be evaluated aesthetically and not ethically, but separating the two can be difficult. – Organisation of theatre in society can allow the freedom to act amorally or present amoral statements (freedom of speech) but theatrical autonomy may not always be powerful enough to resist legal objections and public opinion. This can change over time. – The media plays an important role in negotiations between different values, often amplifying the conflict (relationship (1) in Figure 1). The conflict may not even be based on actual theatre performances. – (Mediatized) conflicts may strengthen the future claims to autonomy of the theatre professionals involved.

Points of note

Aesthetic value and freedom of Moral or ethical transgressions (offense to the audience or other speech versus: – Religious norms sectors of society) – Traditions (domestic values) – Human rights / equality (civic values) – Animal rights (civic values) – Ecology Conflicts can be amplified because of fame value (media system)

Values involved / competing

29 The term ‘political’ here not only refers to the formal field of politics but to any activity that shapes the power and knowledge structures of society. By this broad definition, not only politicians are engaged in politics; so too are lawyers, CEOs, managers, teachers, web designers and artists, as they shape (respectively) legal behaviour, organization structures, knowledge exchange, the interaction between pupils, interfaces, communication channels and the content of communications. As such, their work helps to shape the interactions of people with each other and with objects, thus helping to shape society. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière (2004[2000]) uses a similar notion of the political, one which ultimately derives from the Foucauldian relationship between power/knowledge and structures of governmentality.

29

Political29 objectives (continued)

Goal

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5. How theatre organization shapes claims to autonomy Now that we have discussed the concept of autonomy, the agents in and around the theatre field who make claims to it, and the reasons why they do so, we need to turn our attention to autonomy’s relationship to the shape of theatre fields as a whole. The aim of this chapter is to describe the ways in which organizational forces shape and mediate autonomy in theatrical fields, and are, in turn, shaped by the autonomy they mediate. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the formal and informal structures that organize, fund and maintain theatrical infrastructure (i.e. the relationship between B and C in Figure 1). Changes in organizational features of theatre fields provide rich study material for the sociology of theatre. In his analysis of artistic fields, Bourdieu never offered an extensive discussion of public subsidy, as he considered it to be a political force heteronomous to the field. Nonetheless, in an interview included in the Norwegian translation of Réponses. Pour une anthropologie reflexive, he suggested that other types of capital, such as political capital, might be relevant for the Nordic countries with their tradition of a strong, intervening welfare state (Bourdieu 1993e [1992], 246–247). Building on this, cultural policy researcher Per Mangset suggests that the introduction of modern cultural policy has influenced and shaped the artistic field, at least in Norway (Mangset 1998, 117–123). We have extended this idea to include other European countries with a strong cultural policy tradition. This necessitates that we address the question of how different countries’ political structures deal with the notion of autonomy of the field in both the subsidy-based funding systems and the theatrical training systems. There is no doubt that the state and its recognition play an important role in the process of claiming autonomy, but it is not always a simple one. This is a paradox in cultural policy, which we will address continuously throughout this and the next chapter: though the political field on the one hand is obviously outside of the theatrical field and has its own valued capitals (social betterment, promotion of national or local identity or economic prosperity, for instance), it often does not intervene in the theatrical field to advance its own values directly. Rather, it does so in order to reinforce or protect the autonomous values of the theatrical field from third (social, political or economic) forces. Cultural policy often echoes Schiller in attempting to guard the autonomy of theatre not for its sake, but so it can

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serve society in the way that only it can (see Chapter 6 for an elaboration of this argument). One field can infringe on another’s autonomy, or it can serve as guardian and champion of it. These two relationships are, of course, difficult to distinguish, are not mutually exclusive, and can change through time. Working out the details of these relationships is what makes theatre sociology so interesting and useful. As a result, we start our analysis of the relationship between autonomy and the organization of the theatre f ield by looking at the economics of theatre and what might be the most central structural influence on European theatre systems in the modern era: public subsidy. Based on the value regimes of Boltanski and Thévenot, we discuss how both public and private funding influences the autonomy of the field in a more nuanced and systematized way than other approaches can offer. But funding systems are not the only relevant organizational feature to consider. In addition, we look at one of the institutions Bourdieu mentions as highly influential: the training system for new entrants to the field. Again, training systems mediate the relationship between theatre fields and society. Subsequently, we will look at more ‘internal’ organizational features of theatre fields: the relationship between production and distribution of theatre in each country, the relation of a national theatre system to the international theatre scene, and the centre-periphery distinctions within theatre fields. We investigate how such organizational features of theatre systems affect agents’ possibilities to claim autonomy.

5.1.

Funding systems

Systems of arts financing, both public and private, frequently reinforce power relations within art fields, but they do so in very different ways. The prominence of specific criteria within each financing system needs to be studied in order to assess the impact of public and private donors on art worlds. The inclusion of non-artistic criteria in financing systems—either openly in cultural policy with explicitly stated criteria, or implicitly through the lack of formal criteria or the inclusion of non-public donors, such as private sponsorship and crowdfunding—means that artistic autonomy, understood as the extent to which artists are able to pursue their own values, always needs to be re-negotiated, and always in different ways. Certainly, diminishing levels of public subsidy and the inclusion of marketoriented criteria can mean a growing dependence on box office receipts and the continued goodwill of sponsors with their own agendas. But a stronger

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emphasis on other value regimes need not mean an end to the power of the inspired value regime within art worlds. There may be ways to refract such ‘outside’ pressures to the benefit of the theatrical field’s specific value. There is a paradox at the centre of the functioning of the vast majority of European theatre fields. Autonomy from heteronomous forces, most notably market forces, is gained through f inancial support from the government or private benefactors. While the level of subsidy is of course important—an inadequate subsidy provides inadequate protection against market forces—the mechanisms that guide and control that subsidy also have an enormous role in influencing the possibilities to claim autonomy. Different national theatre systems have both different levels and different structures of subsidy. In this section, we will discuss the levels of non-market funding, its organization and the criteria by which funds are allocated to provide instruments for comparative analyses of national theatre systems. Level of public subsidy The levels of subsidy offered to theatre vary greatly. At the high end are relatively wealthy northern European countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands. In Denmark, the high level of subsidy has caused an almost total absence of private theatres with the exception of some musical producers and the stand-up comedy scene. In the Netherlands, musicals, cabaret and stand-up comedy tend to be privately produced, though the venues where they perform usually are publicly financed.1 In (spoken) theatre and dance, the subsidized circuit is dominant, though some privately funded theatres exist (e.g. De La Mar Theatre in Amsterdam). Dutch subsidized theatre production companies receive up to 80 per cent or more of their total income from public funding.2 Eastern and southern European countries, many with strong traditions of theatregoing, have public subsidies that represent a 1 In the Dutch touring system, theatre venues are the responsibility of municipal governments. They own or provide direct subsidies to venues whose management is responsible for programming the theatre. Some municipalities only provide funds for maintaining and running the theatre building, which then requires theatre venues to finance the programme based on ticket sales. Others also subsidize programming that carries a greater financial risk. In this scheme even commercially produced theatre, such as musical and cabaret, can be subsidized by municipalities as in some cases local theatres are not able to negotiate a favourable deal. As a result, ticket sales may not be enough to compensate for the high price of programming the performance. It is not uncommon for smaller city theatres to subsidize the tour of successful cabaretiers such as Youp van ‘t Hek. 2 As a result of the austerity measures prompted by the economic crisis of 2008 to 2013, this percentage may drop considerably. Part of these measures consist of the obligation for the

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smaller part of the theatre sector’s income. In England, state support is much less, but is still very high compared to the US, where government grants and awards represent at best a symbolic part of non-commercial theatres’ income. However, it is not only the overall level of subsidy that indicates the extent to which the political field supports the autonomy of the theatrical field. It is perhaps even more important to look at how the subsidy system is organized (that is, the relationship it has to the formal political field) and at the criteria used to determine subsidy. If state support is based on the logic of the market—as is the case with a tax refund-based or a purchase-based subsidy system—the political field only strengthens the influence of the economic field on the theatrical one. What makes the question of the subsidy system highly relevant for a discussion of autonomy is that the money is quite often distributed on the basis of a different set of values than those of the market. In a country with extremely low subsidies, such as the United States, this hardly matters; in countries with high levels of subsidy, however, this becomes the most effective tool a state has for influencing the shape of the theatrical field. But, to paraphrase Balfe (1993), the freedom from the market comes at a price. As subsidies come from politically-allocated budgets, government ministries and private and semi-state bodies, they can represent impositions of the political field on the theatrical field. In theory, exchanging one set of criteria (market) for another (political) may or may not lead to greater autonomy (see Vestheim 2012 and Vuyk 2010). In practice, virtually all modern states with an arts subsidy system build them around autonomy as a central principle. But this principle cannot be absolute. The subsidy system carries its own values, and while there are organizational ways to align these with the field’s values (or misalign them), the details of this alignment are both very important and highly varied from country to country. An exploration of these differences will help us to better understand the relationships between inter-field organizations and autonomy. Models for public funding There are a wide variety of agencies, ministries and councils that are in the business of allocating subsidies. These different agents tend to have different sets of criteria that they use to replace the dominance of market forces. In cultural policy research, the classical way of describing the differences between cultural policy systems is based on Hillman-Chartrand and country’s eight largest theatre production companies to reach at least 25.5 per cent earned income by 2016 to be eligible for state funding.

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McCaughey’s four models (1989): the Patron, the Facilitator, the Architect and the Engineer. These concepts are now widespread in cultural policy research as a basic way of distinguishing between different national models of cultural policy; however, it is clear (and is stated already in the original article) that using these models for analysis of actual national cultural policies will demonstrate that, in practice, cultural policy is always a mix of the different models. Interestingly, these models do not only describe the organization of the relationship between the political and the artistic field, but also which objectives and standards tend to be prioritized within each model. This means that the models can be useful in describing the influence of the political field on the artistic field and also how the relationship between autonomous and heteronomous values is negotiated. We will discuss and use the models as a part of our comparison of the way in which different national subsidy systems deal with the question of autonomy. In that analysis, it will also become clear that the models presented by Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey are slightly outdated in their linkage between the type of model and the standards for subsidy. The Patron State subsidizes the arts through an arts council, based on the arm’s length principle of a set organizational distance between political appointees and those making subsidy decisions (this is the British model). The political objective of this model is to promote artistic excellence, and the values are the professional standards of the field. This is organized through an arts council that ordinarily consists of artistic peers or recognized experts who decide on how to distribute the available subsidy. This means that the core of this model is to leave the definition of the standards to the field itself. Do note that this does not preclude the possibility that the state provides certain guidelines for arts councils to function, thus impeding their autonomy. In reality, this frequently occurs. The Architect State subsidizes the arts through a central arts or culture ministry with a responsibility to guide and develop the artistic f ield. France is the most-discussed case, and the Nordic countries would be other examples. The strength of an Architect State model is that it relieves arts institutions from the pressures of the box office and it secures training and career structure for agents in the theatre field. The focus of this model is to provide social welfare for artists and sustenance for the industry (Craik 1996). However, the creative directives of an architect state can stifle innovation and lead to resistance in arts fields. Do note that Architect States, when allocating subsidies based on expert advice, can be just as effective

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as Patron States in allowing theatre fields to pursue their own values. Therefore, the criteria used for subsidy allocation need to be studied when analysing theatre fields. Nonetheless, the Architect State is more prone to direct political interference in the theatrical field as it can be more easily made subservient to other than aesthetic agendas.3 This is precisely the downside of the Engineer State model which, according to Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey (1989) and Craik (1996) focuses creative energy to attain political goals. The Engineer State owns the production of the arts and the Soviet Union is used as the (now-outdated) example of this model of cultural policy. The arts here are used to help enforce the state’s political ideology on its population. 4 In the case of theatre, this is done by demonstrating the artistic excellence of collaborative work. Do note that currently in the Russian Republic, theatre institutions such as the Bolshoi Ballet are still owned by the state and run by civil servants. This means that their organizational features may have changed little after the 1989 revolution. Nonetheless, their ideological role has changed markedly. It is primarily the ideological control over cultural institutions that led Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey to label this model as the Engineer State. As long as there is some formal arrangement that stipulates that the managing bureaucrats have autonomy in artistic decisions, some sort of theatrical autonomy can be considered to exist. This is, for instance, the case for theatre venues in the Netherlands that are owned by and exploited by municipalities. Usually, there is a contract between the city’s main administrative body and the director of the theatre who runs it as a separate business unit within the government bureaucracy stating the director has autonomy in programming decisions. He or she also is autonomous in marketing decisions (e.g. whether to cater to a general audience or to more specific groups). The same type of safeguards for aesthetic autonomy exists for Intendanten of Stadttheater in the German systems. They are even more important than in the Dutch system as they also take production decisions and hire the artistic staff (see Bremgartner 2012, 485). In the last model, the Facilitator State, there is only indirect subsidy of the arts through tax expenditures and incentives. This model is mostly 3 We will discuss these other agendas in detail in Chapter 6. 4 It is worth noting that such propagandistic intentions—though with a different organizational structure—were also present in the West. For examples of American theatre’s ideological work during the Cold War, see McConachie (2003).

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associated with the system of the United States. Private donors to the theatre receive ‘support’ from the state in the form of reduced taxation in exchange for their donations. Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey argue that the Facilitator State aims for diversity and that the artistic standard is random as the state has no influence whatsoever on the standard of the arts that is subsidized and the arts are sponsored by many different agents. As a result, a wide range of different artistic expressions will be subsidized. Theatre in such a funding system becomes subservient to the interests of private donors. We will discuss private sponsorship in a separate section below. Though the model aims for diversity, highly controversial artists will have a difficult time achieving funding and chances are that the arts that receive (indirect) subsidy will be quite similar to the commercial art that are able to exist without subsidy. Van Maanen (2009), for example, argues that the diversity aimed at will only be achieved in densely populated areas. In this model, there is no centralized control over artistic standards, however this also means these standards are highly influenced by the different sponsors and foundations and how they define their criteria.5 So, in theory, the last two models value artistic standards least, prioritizing social and political values. Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey argue that the value of artistic standards is only prominent in the Patron State model, based on the arm’s length principle as used in England, Ireland and similar systems. However, as indicated above we would argue that it is not only the model itself, but rather the relationships between the models used and values and standards that these models promote which are important. These relationships are not simple. In systems that make use of an architect model, the value of high artistic quality—that is the field-internal and thus most autonomous value in cultural policy—can be dominant.6 Indeed, 5 Craik (1996) and Cummings and Katz (1987) distinguish a fifth model: the Elite Nurturer or Elite Gambler. This model aims at encouraging artistic excellence and financial stability to arts organizations as it focuses on the art forms that are favoured by an elite. However, the model tends to encourage isolation of arts organizations from external influences and forces. If these are market forces, the model in fact coincides with the patron and architect models, as these models also focus on artistic excellence (specifically the patron model), and when allowing subsidy allocation to be handled by independent advisory bodies consisting of experts from the field itself, this also fosters the isolation, i.e. autonomy, of the field. Therefore, this fifth model does not seem to shed specific light on our discussion of autonomy in theatre systems and will not be used here. 6 Blomgren (2012) argues that the central objective of the cultural policy of Sweden—regarded as an Architect State by Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey—has always been artistic quality. The same can be said for the Dutch cultural policy which, though open to other policy objectives

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within any of these models levels of theatrical autonomy can be organized, even though some models (such as the facilitator one) have more difficulties than others in doing so. Subsidy criteria Let us now turn our attention away from the organization of the cultural policy to the criteria upheld within these different models. In countries such as England, the last twenty years have seen the addition of new criteria for subsidy that are heteronomous to the artistic field itself and of more relevance to the political and economic field, as discussed recently by Hewison (2014). For this reason, we propose that a comparison of the relationship between the cultural policy system and the artistic field itself is better described by using the concept of autonomy. In Ireland, where cultural policy is based on the Patron State model, subsidy is given by an Arts Council formed and operating on the basis of the arm’s length principle. By Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey’s logic, this should mean that Irish cultural policy prioritizes artistic standards and thus Ireland has a highly autonomous theatre field. But this is not entirely the case. In recent years, the Irish state found it useful to implement somewhat more explicit, politically-derived criteria as the basis for arts funding along the lines of the architect model. The Arts Council changed the way it described its work from ‘supporting’ the arts to ‘developing’ them, implying a more active, instrumentalist approach. The period 1993–2004 has been described as the ‘era of the Arts Plans’ (Edelman 2009, 237), a period in which the Arts Council was active in formulating objectives and strategies for subsidies. The Irish case demonstrates two things clearly: The first is that the traditional view of the arm’s length agencies as being members of the artistic field and thus defenders of its autonomy is not necessarily the case. As soon as a council accepts tasks such as writing arts plans or strategies they might be better understood as mediators between the political and artistic field that negotiate the values of the different fields (Ibid., 256). The second is that the question of whether or not autonomous or heteronomous values will be imposed amounts to a test of the relative strength of the artistic and the political field. In 2004, the Arts Plan system such as social inclusion, until recently has used artistic quality as the prime criterion for subsidy allocation. As of January 2013, management and marketing considerations have become equally important as the government aims to redirect the extreme subsidy dependence of the Dutch arts sector.

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was abolished due to a large resistance from the field and within the council itself. Edelman concludes on this failure: The prime reason for the Plans’ failure, then, was that the values they put forward for the field—coherence, rational development and planning—did not match the values that the field held for itself: stability, collegiality, creativity, and so on. The field may have been willing to accept them as a part of the necessary system of accountability that comes with government funding, but this is very different from incorporating them into the doxa of the field. (Edelman 2009, 257, italics original)

In the Irish case the artistic field does have a great deal of influence on the subsidy system, thus confirming the idea that cultural policy systems based on the Patron model have artistic standards as their main value. But the field’s near-total dependence on a single political patron means that the relation between artistic and political values is subject to constant negotiation. The Dutch cultural policy presents a combination of the Patron, and the Architect models, and when including the local government level also the Engineer State.7 Thus, the question of the status of artistic standards becomes more complex. Artistic quality is stated as the most important criterion for subsidy,8 but this rhetoric does not always reflect practice. The Dutch system has a ministry of education, culture and sciences, which has either a State Secretary or Minister for Culture. The ministry makes four-year policy plans based on advice by the Council for Culture. Based on these plans, theatre production companies make subsidy plans for this period and submit these either to the ministry or the National Fund for the Performing Arts. The national fund functions as an arts council, stipulating its own policy and distributing subsidies based upon this policy to theatre companies. The Fund subsidizes the smaller institutions and is aimed at furthering artistic excellence, though in the 2013–2016 policy cycle, management and marketing criteria have been introduced as well. This 7 There are those who consider the Netherlands as an Architect State (see e.g. Alexander 2003) as this country indeed has a central ministry for culture which directly finances the arts. However, the Netherlands should be regarded as a mix of the models, as parts of Dutch arts financing are delegated to independent funds that function similarly to arts councils and frequently local governments own theatres; i.e. they represent the Engineer State model. 8 In the Netherlands, this criterion is regulated by law as the second article of the Law on Specific Cultural Policy stipulates that the decisions of the minister for culture will be guided by ‘principles of quality and diversity’. However, as stated above, with the policy plan for 2013–2016 criteria of management and marketing of theatre institutions have become equally important.

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last change has led to the end of subsidies for some well-respected theatre companies that did not provide ample marketing plans or a realistic vision on audience development. The large theatre companies, which comprise the backbone of the Dutch theatre system, are spread (as) evenly (as possible) over the country. They are part of what is called the Basisinfrastructuur (base infrastructure). Their position within the system is ‘safe’ meaning that their subsidies will never be abolished as the national government thinks there should always be theatre companies spread over the country. However, in the policy plan for 2013–2016, their number has been decreased and their budgets have been pruned.9 Their task is to produce high quality repertoire theatre, to develop the repertoire, to provide the link to the international arts scene within their discipline and to enhance audiences for the repertoire in their respective regions. Both the fund and the ministry use peer evaluation of the artistic standards to allocate subsidies, so peer review plays an important role in the system, but cannot be considered the sole objective. This Dutch system tends to be very explicit and systematic in the formulation and evaluation of the cultural policy objectives. There is a tendency that every minister or state secretary favours a specific theme in the policy plans ranging from internationalization (1993–1996), cultural education and social cohesion in a multicultural society (1997–2000), cultural diversity and cultural entrepreneurship (2001–2004), the creative economy (2005–2008), artistic excellence and amateur arts (2009–2012) to cultural entrepreneurship as a means to diminish subsidy dependence (2013–2016).10 This can be seen as 9 Originally, the Base Infrastructure consisted of nine theatre companies (now reduced to four large and five small companies), seven dance companies (now reduced to four), 13 youth theatre companies (now reduced to eight) and three opera companies (now reduced to two). Furthermore, 21 production houses were financed in order to facilitate young theatre makers in the development of their career. As these production houses turned out to be very inefficient (a meagre ten per cent of the young theatre-makers produced by them after several years still was active in the theatre field) their position has been abolished entirely. However, as these production houses were for a large part responsible for international co-productions and touring, it is feared that Dutch theatre will become even more isolated in the future. 10 Do note that these themes are more a question of stress than the sole objective of the policy. State Secretary Van der Ploeg (who was politically responsible for the 2001–2004 plan), for instance, was scorned in Parliament for having too much interest in the social implications of the arts (he argued for a fairer representation of ethnic minorities in the arts world) and Parliament passed a motion that directed him to take artistic quality as the starting point for subsidy decisions, a motion that was, in fact, welcomed by Van der Ploeg. Ironically, this motion only reiterates the core criterion of the Law on Specific Cultural Policy, and it was Van der Ploeg who followed the Council for Culture’s advice on subsidy allocation meticulously. His predecessors and successors always ‘amended’ the advice, mostly based on budgetary considerations but

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going against the autonomy of the field, where the idea that field-specific capital is something that can only be recognized from inside the field. It is an important research question whether cultural institutions actually follow such objectives or merely write them down in their subsidy applications but, once subsidy has been secured, go about business as usual. The latter could very well be a valid way to describe what is happening in Dutch theatre, indicating that agents in the theatre field have found ways to circumvent these outside pressures (or, in Bourdieu’s terms, refract them). The Danish cultural policy system has generally been described as an Architect model, where most of the subsidy given to art institutions comes from a Ministry of Culture on the basis of different laws passed in the parliament. However, a smaller part of the subsidy is given through the Danish Arts Foundation, which is an arm’s length agency. Artistic quality is the main objective for subsidy given through the ministry as well as through the Arts Foundation. But the practice of the distribution of the subsidy and the evaluation of the artistic standards is very different for the two types. The subsidy given through the ministry is based on the Act for the Performing Arts, which states which institutions are entitled to subsidy. The Act also formulates the objectives behind this subsidy. The main objective is artistic quality. So when the Royal Danish Theatre receives a yearly subsidy of more than 500m DKK (about €67m), it is stated in the Act that the theatre should ‘without one-sidedness produce a repertory of high artistic quality of ballet, opera, and drama’ (LBK nr. 526 af 04/06/2012 §2). It is important to note, though, that the political system does not make any systematic evaluations of the artistic standard of any of the theatres subsidized through the Performing Arts Act (with the exception of local theatres). In contrast to this, the subsidy distributed by the Arts Foundation is given on the basis of an on-going peer-based evaluation performed by the Performing Arts Committees under the Arts Foundation. The difference in these two practices can be understood as a difference in the level of cultural capital of the different theatres: In the logic of the political field, there is no doubt that the large theatres produce theatre of a high artistic standard, which means that this is something that does not need to be monitored. For the smaller theatres the situation is different: there are plenty of them, they compete for subsidy and this part of the field evolves all the time. For sometimes also based on political perspectives. See Van den Hoogen (2010, Chapter 2) for a detailed description of these policy objectives and the way they represent notions on how the arts affect society. The double appearance of cultural entrepreneurship as a policy objective indicates that some of these objectives are themes running through Dutch cultural policy for many years.

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this reason, the cultural political system needs peer-evaluators to make the decision about the distribution of subsidy. In Estonia, the use of artistic quality as a cultural policy objective is treated with skepticism. Ott Karulin (2009, 210) describes the cultural policy of the Ministry of Culture as a bottom-up cultural policy, meaning that there are very few explicit expectations from the state about which objectives and criteria the theatres should fulfill. Subsidy for the city theatres is given on the basis of audience numbers and other quantitative, economic criteria. There is also a rather complex system for calculating the need for subsidy as the difference between the actual cost to produce and present performances and the expected box office. The objectives of cultural policy in Estonia (and thus the political views about the value and functioning of the arts) are articulated in very broad terms as creativity and significance to national culture (Saro 2009, 56). In contrast with the country’s Soviet past, with strong traditions of censorship and political control over artistic content, this vaguer system can be seen as a protection of the freedom of the theatrical field. But how can it be conceived from the perspective of the question of autonomy? For one, the near-automatic subsidy based on quantitative, non-artistic criteria enhances the autonomy of the field, since there is no attempt from the politicians to intervene in artistic matters. On the other hand, the automatism of the system tends to preserve the situation as it is and discourage change and development. In Estonia (as in many other countries), there is a very big difference between the situation for the city theatres and the unattached theatre companies, known as free groups. The level of subsidy for the free groups is much lower and the lack of evaluation of artistic and cultural value of the different theatres and their productions tends to preserve the existing structure of the field, whether or not that is advantageous politically or artistically. In conclusion, it can be said that when cultural policy is explicitly formulated and those formulations are enforced—which tends to be the case in architect cultural policy models—political considerations creep into the system more easily and infringe on the possibilities of the theatre field to pursue its own values. The Dutch theatre system here is a case in point though it is a matter for further research whether the explicitly formulated policy plans of theatre institutions are actually carried out in practice, or if they are used as a means to refract political pressures without meaningfully influencing theatre companies’ day-to-day business. This also is the case for the Irish Arts Council’s policies. As Edelman indicated, subsidy increases or decreases are most often ‘warning signs’, as unexpected funding cuts are usually limited to symbolic decreases of 1–2 per cent, never endangering the

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existence of entire institutions11 (unlike in the Dutch system where production companies are literally shut down when subsidy is withheld). Within different systems (such as Denmark), different theatres can take up different positions, reflecting differences in both the field-specific capital and political capital of these theatres. Thus, the subsidy system and the criteria upheld within it demonstrate a complex relationship between the reinforcement of theatrical autonomy and the inclusion of criteria external to the field. As we discussed in Chapter 2, the notion of value regimes is useful to expand the simple aesthetic-versus-market distinction that dominates Bourdieu’s field theory. Clearly, there are conflicting value regimes at play in the art world, including those introduced (or encouraged) by funding systems, and they cannot all be equally accommodated. There can, however, be some sort of compromise between them, in which the original values are overcome by a mutually agreed upon ‘higher common good’, which encompasses all of the different values at stake in a test (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006[1991], 277–278). The formulation of such a compromise may or may not be stable, democratic or fair, but the means by which it can be achieved are of particular relevance because they help to clarify which values are being negotiated in different types of financing systems. In this way, Boltanski and Thévenot offer a different analytical approach to the institutionally-based model of Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey. In the following, we will unpack this, but first we need to expand our analysis of funding to include different types of private funding as well. This expansion is based on an understanding of the relationship between autonomy and funding possibilities that acknowledges the complexity of this. As Pascal Gielen (2012) has argued, no matter which singular funder an artist is dependent on, that funder will always push the artist to adjust to the values of that funder. For this reason, it is the possibility to link to several different funders that creates the optimal possibilities for a (more) autonomous artistic practice. Private funding It is useful to distinguish between different types of private funders so that their influence on theatrical autonomy can be studied systematically. 11 Should these warning signs not be heeded, however, the threat is there that more substantial cuts will follow. While relatively few companies saw those cuts between 1995 and 2008, the massive financial crisis that has gripped Ireland since 2009 has seen the slashing of the Arts Council’s budget and a complete de-funding of a great many established Irish theatre companies.

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According to Judith Balfe (1993), the securing of patronage, whether private or public, leads artists to specialize in the particular sort of work which suits the patron’s taste, regardless of their own strengths and weaknesses as artists. Based on a series of empirical case studies on arts funding, Balfe distinguishes between elitist and populist forms of support. With this distinction she indicates the types of values that patrons pursue. In Balfe’s system, elitist and populist patronage represent ideal types, and most patrons will fall somewhere between. Elitist patronage flows from ancient theocracies and aristocracies, building from these hierarchical principles of distinctiveness and perpetuating them. […]. Such patronage is often for private enjoyment, of course; when it is not, it is understood as noblesse oblige—in contemporary parlance, as philanthropy. On these terms the arts are supported as an investment in the future through the activities of unique and superior individuals, whose creative and interpretive expressions are needed both to sustain the quality of today’s civilization and to advance it. (Balfe 1993, 309–310)

This tradition is older and favours ‘masterful’ art, either the classical art forms such as symphony orchestras and opera in which the virtuosity of the performer is a key element in the attraction to patrons, or avant-garde work aimed primarily at other artists and experts in a position to influence the development of the field. Elitist donor support may happen to align with artistic values, but it need not. These donors consider the appeal of art forms to the audience, as they are interested in the civilising influence that the arts can offer, a point that we will return to in Chapter 6. In contrast, Balfe defines the populist tradition of patronage as more egalitarian and communitarian. […] the arts are supported as ‘social glue’, as the means of the social inclusion of everyone in the collective here-and-now. The assumption is that art’s purpose is to secure and enhance the health and safety of society as it is […]. From this perspective, both private and public patronage should help people to have more of the art they already want. (Balfe 1993, 310)

Funders who seek to promote community development and social cohesion stand in this tradition. They favour more accessible art forms—craft and folk art, amateur creation, community-based and subcultural forms—and

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they ask artists to justify their work in the language of social integration and public wellbeing. Balfe writes: Paradoxically, while contemporary patrons who stand on populist principles are often politically radical, the art they support is likely to be conservative in both style and content, if it is to speak to the anonymous masses or the subcultural groups with whom they identify. (Balfe 1993, 312)

Balfe’s distinctions make clear that it is the values pursued by the donors and how they interact with the values within the theatrical field that should be the focus of an analysis of the autonomy of a theatrical field in relation to funding systems. In his book How to Study Art Worlds, Van Maanen (2009) discusses the influence of funders on arts production and dissemination. He distinguishes between four types of financing of the arts apart from public subsidy: selffinancing, patronage, sponsorship and market financing. Self-financing is the ‘hidden subsidy’12 of artists holding jobs on the side or relying on family support or doing without to continue their work. Patronage is a situation where an artist is employed by a donor and thus the donor can easily exert influence on the content and style of the works.13 By contrast, sponsors do not directly employ artists but merely provide funds to them (or to arts organizations) without necessarily applying direct influence. Marketbased funding comes from the box office. Furthermore, Van Maanen links the different types of funders to the freedom artists may experience in producing and disseminating their work and to the values that are likely to be realized in society (see the chart at Van Maanen 2009, 220). As public subsidy systems tend to limit aesthetic values to a small proportion of the population, Van Maanen favours a combination of both public and private financing schemes, and of financing both production and distribution facilities. To provide a comprehensive analytical tool for the analysis of the relationship between values and forms of funding within specific theatrical fields, we propose to expand these studies in the following three ways. First, private financing can take the form of individuals and corporations donating to the arts, but also can be organized in the form of a fund that raises money from private sources and distributes it to artists according to 12 The term has become a mainstay of Irish cultural policy discourse. See, for example, Hibernian Consulting (2005, 42). 13 As stated above, public funders can also employ theatre professionals, thus acting as patrons.

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their own criteria, potentially including artistic quality. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Van den Ende Foundation and Fonds 21 are private funds that have similar application procedures to the National Fund for the Performing Arts. In Denmark the Bikubenfonden promotes artistic quality and is engaged in the development of the theatrical field. Major American philanthropic funds such as the Ford, Luce, Carnegie, and Mellon Foundations function similarly. These private funds do not have the obligation to legitimize their spending to democratic institutions, potentially leading to greater efficiency and flexibility in decision making. Unlike private sponsorship, these funds are not set up with the aim of promoting business interests. Second, we argue that Balfe’s distinction between elitism and populism is not enough, and that nowadays we ought to conceive of a third kind of private donor. Such a donor would value the arts for their ability to build networks and create alignments between specific people and organizations.14 This draws on the network-centred logic of the post-Fordist economy in which much work, especially in the knowledge-based industries, has become ‘performative’. As many contemporary employees are tasked with the circulation and development of information rather than material objects (creating new ideas for products or services, for example), they no longer work in a factory or office. The whole city has become their working space, and they need to ‘perform’ in this space, in the sense of presenting their ideas to others and developing networks with them. Creativity grows in a constant testing of ideas and connecting to others who might help to realize a project. The arts create an ideal setting to meet these other creatives, and to be seen on this scene (see e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999] and Gielen 2009). These ‘network donors’ favour specific art forms or styles as markers of with whom they wish to associate. This position thus has its particular intentions towards the arts, even if their artistic preferences do not neatly align with either elitism or populism. Third, the above-mentioned studies do not address crowdfunding. We contend that this is a new form of funding that creates a new kind of relationship between f ield-specif ic values and other values. When crowdfunding online, artists themselves collect money from a host of small private donors in order to produce performances, exhibitions or other works. Internet-based crowdfunding began as a way to help musicians turn to their fans directly for financial support, without intermediaries such as record labels (Agrawal et al. 2013). Economists Agrawal et al. (2010) 14 This addition to Balfe’s distinction was first proposed by Marleen Elshof (2011) in a smallscale study on donors’ influences on symphony orchestras.

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have empirically researched how crowdfunding works in the arts. They have found, somewhat unsurprisingly, that crowdfunding campaigns can attract donors from a wider geographical area than other methods, and thus this type of financing has greater potential than support from family and friends. However, they found that first donations tend to be derived from local sources. They also noted that crowdfunding has a strong ‘winner takes all’ aspect: people visiting crowdfunding websites tend to donate to those causes that have already received money (Agrawal et al. 2013). Thus, the support of family and friends can be used as a trigger for wider support, which can only grow as long as word of the project is spreading. Crowdfunding would seem to have a democratic character, giving voice to people who were formerly outside of decisions on production and distribution of art forms. Because of its personal and direct appeal to current and potential audiences, crowdfunding gives artists a feeling of autonomy. Burgstra (2012) argues that the success of a crowdfunding campaign depends on the artist telling a compelling personal story that addresses potential donors. Based on a study of crowdfunding in performing arts through Kickstarter, Boeuf et al. conclude: ‘Crowdfunding should be seen as a community-based phenomenon [and not as simply a commercial exchange of money for certain goods or perks] in which the actors take part publicly in a reciprocal exchange’ (2014, 45), suggesting that this a distinct type of financing imparting its own specific set of values on art worlds. Taxonomy of public and private art funders With this expansion of the forms of private subsidies, we are able to present a taxonomy of forms of funding. We distinguish three main types of funders in the arts: public, private and market. Within each type, one can find different organizational forms that may lead to the promotion of different value regimes. The relationship between the different values and the ways in which a value compromise is negotiated is central to the understanding of the autonomy of any theatrical field. We would like to repeat our point in Chapter 1 that autonomy is always a matter of degree and by including Boltanski and Thévenot’s concept of value regimes in the analysis of theatrical autonomy we are not only able to see autonomy in relation to several other values, but also to see different ways of negotiating it. Public funding can take three forms: a public arts fund (such as the Arts Council England), subsidies by state or local authorities, or a patronage system in which state or local authorities employ artists directly or own

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venues where art is presented. The traditional justification for subsidies and other forms of public funding is as a ‘correction to market forces’. While this is a clear statement against the market value regime, it is not in itself a positive assertion of another one. Which value regime is to be asserted depends on the (implicit or explicit) policies that determine how public funds are distributed. The correction to market forces can be interpreted as allowing artists to pursue their own values against audience tastes. It can also be seen as a means of ensuring that the field’s internal quality judgements, rather than assessments of profitability, control what art is being made. In both instances, this funding system encourages the realization of the specific value at stake in the theatre field (inspired logic in Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s terms). Crucially, any form of publicly-allocated funding will somehow need to broker a compromise with civic values as any form of legitimization of public cultural policy entails some sort of statement as to why cultural policy is good for society as a whole (Vestheim 2012). These statements (or implicit claims15) can take the form of cultural education (allowing aesthetic values to be attainable for all, i.e. a compromise between inspired and civic values), social inclusion or cultural democracy. These goals can be considered to fall in the populist tradition. But such legitimizations can also contain fame and market values when cultural policy is justified less through a sense of civic good and more through an appeal to the international image of the city/country and to the imperative of economic development (we will return to the analysis of this in Chapter  6). Such justifications fit the elitist tradition and the network tradition. – Indirect public art funds which make allocations based on advice given not by politicians but by experts recognized by the field tend to promote the inspired value by operating on an arm’s length from the political system. This is the classic understanding of the Patron model, as defined by Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey. But even this system is fundamentally a political system and as such it requires a political legitimization, often based in the civic value regime. A downside of this type of financing is that public appeal of the arts can be very limited as the aesthetics deployed may be accessible only to small proportions of the population. As a result, appeals to other regimes such as the fame regime are hard to maintain. – By policy or legislation, direct public arts funds given through a Ministry of Culture can also be structured so as to take non-inspired 15 See Edelman (2010) for an analysis of Irish theatre policies where the inexplicit subsidy criteria have greatly favoured the inarticulable nature of the inspired polity.

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values into account. But as we have seen in the analysis of the Dutch and Danish policy system, the objective of artistic quality belonging to the inspired value regime may be highly prioritized within an Architect model of direct subsidy. – In the case of public patronage, again, the specific values promoted vary by stated or unstated policy. The model itself can be characterized as an Engineer model, except that in democratic societies the purposes promoted are not the propograndistic development of a correct ideological attitude. Patterns of which purposes are promoted can be observed: Large, elegant city centre theatre venues and concert halls (falling in Balfe’s elitist tradition) can be seen as a public display of aesthetic values and thus a compromise between the inspired and fame polities. When these facilities are built in poorer, less prominent areas for the sake of social integration, they testify to the priority of the civic polity. When patronage supports infrastructure that facilitates the production process but is less visible to the general public—when it offers reducedprice housing to artists, for example, or builds scene shops or rehearsal studios—it can be considered an investment in the efficiency of the system in terms of the industrial polity. When public patronage aims to build the creative potential of a city as a whole, especially in the context of a showpiece event such as a festival, this is an application of the values of the project polity. It is important to note that, because of the civic value regime which necessarily forms part of the justification for public patronage, art works that raise tensions between different segments of society, such as through moral or religious offence, can cause significant problems for this funding structure (we discussed examples of this in Chapter 4). Private funding can take five forms: subsidies from private arts funds, private patronage, corporate (or individual) sponsorship, donors’ circles and crowdfunding. – Private art funds may have similar characteristics to public art funds: they can employ comparable application procedures and have expert committees that advise the board on subsidy allocations. However, there are some important differences. For one, a private fund may not be obliged to account publicly for its distribution of money, whereas under new public management public arts funds may be required to provide information on their efficacy. Private fund managers may also not feel the obligations of the civic value regime to the extent that public cultural agencies do. As a result, these funds are able to promote inspired values

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more than other funding arrangements might. Hence, it is sensible to distinguish between the two, though from an arts organization’s point of view the funds may appear very similar, requiring detailed submission plans in order to obtain subsidy, which are weighed against certain sets of criteria. However, these funds may have bylaws that dictate the realization of other types of values, i.e. fame values for a fund named for its founder, civic values for socially oriented funds and domestic values for funds oriented towards cultural heritage. – Private patronage occurs when a person employs an artist or when art works are commissioned. While the direct hiring of artists is no longer common, the corporate commission of art works remains an accepted practice. In such cases, the patron’s personal values will tend to dominate over the inspired values internal to the art world. This domination means that the level of autonomy might be low compared to other forms of funding. The patron’s values will vary with the reason for their patronage; they can include the self-interest of promoting a civilized image, populist interest when art practices are used to address a specific segment of society or project values when art works are used to build connections with specific people. (This is why, for instance, the private patronage model is more common for applied theatre than other forms of performance.) Patrons thus pick the types of art forms that align with these interests. – Corporate or private sponsorship has a less direct impact on artistic values as sponsors will pick artists or art forms based on the specific target groups they wish to connect with. This implies that artists are encouraged to pursue the work they are already doing, allowing inspired values to dominate. However, this also implies that there are enough corporate and private sponsors to go around, which is rarely (if ever) the case. When corporate sponsors withdraw funds from art worlds at times of economic weakness, competition between artists and arts organizations will become fiercer and those artists and arts organizations whose values align with specific target groups of the remaining sponsors tend to be at an advantage. Elitist sponsors who have an interest in projecting a civilized image will encourage fame values to dominate. Populist donors (such as those who favour education and outreach programmes) will have an interest in projecting an image of corporate responsibility to society.16 As a result, they will promote civic values. This is not to say 16 See e.g. the Dutch Rabobank which is until 2014 was a bank without shareholders, founded by farmers. As a result, local branches sponsor local cultural initiatives (as well as local sports).

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that populist sponsors do not care for their public image. Fame values remain important. Network-led sponsors will try to connect to specific types of people and will sponsor those art forms that will attract them, aligning fame and project values. Elitist and network funders here are closely related categories. – When art organizations do not avail of single sponsors but bring together several—sometimes individual—sponsors into so-called donors’ circles, personal interactions between artists and sponsors are encouraged. However, as they organize a wide variety of small sponsors with no single overriding interest, such donors’ circles allow artists to pursue their own values to a great extent. Here, Gielen’s (2012) argument that combining different funders allows for more autonomy becomes apparent immediately. However, even in this situation, autonomy is far from guaranteed. If the members of the circle share a common set of values, these can be imposed on their client. Even if no particular sponsor seeks to impose a test foreign to the inspired value regime on artistic production, the class of available sponsors may choose to use such a test in deciding which artists to sponsor (or whether to sponsor at all). A theatre company with a conservative donors’ circle may, for instance, shy away from producing a play on gay themes out of concern that this might fail the (implicit) test from the domestic polity that their circle of donors would impose on them. – Lastly, we see crowdfunding as a distinct form of private funding. Crowdfunding, like private sponsorship, is initiated and run by artists or arts organizations. While private sponsors may donate for fame, project or civic reasons, crowdfunders are more likely to be motivated by inspired values. Successful crowdfunding campaigns are designed around many values central to the inspired polity: the feeling of a personal connection to the artist and the process of creation through a compelling personal story. Access to rehearsals, meet-and-greets and other perks may help to strengthen this personal connection as well. Crowdfunding is thus more individual, decentred, small-scale and linked to the inspired polity than other forms of private funding (Boeuf et al. 2014). However, to be successful artists need to develop a compelling story and they need the support of a circle of family and friends to launch their funding campaign. Usually, such circles are found in close geographical proximity to the artist or arts organization. Thus, domestic values play a role in this type of financing. And, as crowdfunding is organized on the basis of single projects rather than organizations over the long term, project values are important as are

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fame values to allow for campaigns to gain momentum. Viewed from Balfe’s perspective, the compelling story may either be based on the specific merits of the artistic work (elitist tradition) or on a societal relevance (populist tradition). Further research into the practice and possibilities of this mode of sponsorship is necessary, but thus far it seems that crowdfunding allows inspired values to dominate in negotiation with fame, domestic and project values. Market-based financing aligns artists with the specific values of ticket buyers or collectors of art works. Of course, market values dominate as saleability of products is of key importance. But fame values are hugely influential due to marketing pressures.17 Conspicuous consumption earns buyers social esteem and aligns with the elitist tradition, while social values of arts consumption can be viewed as falling within the populist tradition. Other forms of arts consumption—such as gallery openings and theatrical performances—can be a way of liaising with specific people who share similar tastes and can thus be placed under the logic of the network tradition. But it should be remarked that in market financing the three traditions of funders do not seem to be very distinct, as arts consumers can easily combine them. However, such differences may be useful for understanding market segmentation. This discussion has been summarized in Table 3. When reading the table horizontally, it immediately becomes clear that different organizational arrangements of funding will not always align with a single value regime, though some patterns are visible. Even the public funders do not align with a single value regime, though public funding has traditionally been considered the type that best allows for the realization of the inspired values of aesthetic practice. As the table shows, we do not see a fundamental difference between direct and indirect public subsidy when it comes to the way in which the inspired value regime (and thus the value of autonomous art) is combined with other value regimes. In this, our understanding of the funding systems differs from Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey’s model. Furthermore, it becomes clear that some forms of private funding (specifically donors’ circles and crowdfunding) will allow for inspired values as well. When reading the table vertically, it becomes clear that network logic only occurs in public funding when authorities act as patrons, as well 17 Moreover, fame values may be important in cases where performances are rare and tickets are re-sold on the market. In theatre this may occur only rarely, but it is common in pop music. In the visual arts the secondary market of collectors selling to other collectors also represent fame values.

Public funding

Elitist tradition

Inspired values are not necessarily explicitly encouraged. Prominent public venues in Public city centres promote fame patronage: and market values. authorities employ artists Investment in facilities may / own facilities promote industrial values (smoothly functioning creative/artistic milieus).

Will hardly ever occur for public funders.

Civic values can dominate in democratization of culture strategies. Inspired values are aligned with civic values in cultural education.

Community centres promote civic Venues (both in city centres and dispersed localities) can values (social inclusion). Prominent architecture of venues promote network values. in dispersed areas promotes fame and market values.

Network tradition

Populist tradition

Impact on values realized per funding tradition

Usually inspired values are Direct through allowed to dominate (artistic ministry or development as goal of department the policy), unless policy dictates otherwise. Reach of such values in society can be Indirect severely limited. through public arts fund

Organization of funding

Table 3. Different types of funding arrangements and the values they entail

Offending against civic, religious or traditional norms is difficult in this form of financing.

Theoretically, this is the organizational form of public funding that most allows inspired values to dominate.

Remarks

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Private funding

Uncommon; largely through commissions by corporations / wealthy individuals.

Project values dominate as patrons use arts to liaison with specific people.

Domestic and civic values dominate: patron uses art practices to address a specific segment of society. Promoting fame and civic values: those art works that dovetail with the sponsor’s notions of social good are favoured.

Variety of donors allows inspired values to dominate. Donors demonstrate commitment to civic values by membership.

Fame values dominate: Self-interest to project ‘civilized image’

Promoting fame and civic values: those art works that dovetail with the taste of the funder’s target audiences will be favoured.

Variety of donors allows inspired values to dominate. Donors’ circles Donors gain social prestige (fame) from membership.

Corporate or private sponsor: picks artists

Private patronage: employs or commissions artists

Donors benefit from networking opportunities with other donors and artists. Donors’ circles can be set up to maximize such opportunities.

If there are a large number of donors, each individual donor will have very little influence over the content of artistic works.

If the artist can pick between many Fame values dominate sponsors, the inspired value may but project values are also important. Those art works that dominate. In practice, this is rare. attract the right networks (i.e. those of economic use to the sponsor) are favoured.

Comparable to public art funds, but less prone to political interference and have less accountability. May allow for high levels of artistic autonomy.

Will hardly ever occur for private funds.

Private arts fund allocating subsidies

Inspired values can dominate though others may appear: i.e., civic (socially oriented funds) and domestic (heritage oriented funds).

Remarks

Inspired values can dominate though others may appear: i.e., fame (fund in name).

Network tradition

Populist tradition

Impact on values realized per funding tradition

Elitist tradition

Organization of funding

Table 3. (continued)

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Private funding

Market

Elitist tradition

Ticket buyers, buyers of art works for private consumption

Market and fame values dominate over inspired values. Conspicuous consumption can be relevant (next to personal taste).

Personal engagement with the artistic process or artists is made both possible and necessary. Linked to the particular taste of the funder. Emphasis on initial strong networks (friends and family, i.e. domestic values) and compelling story. Alignment with taste patterns and habitus of consumers is important. Speculative market may develop for collectors. In large cities niche markets might develop to nurture inspired values.

Not particularly relevant tradition for crowdfunding, unless the individual crowdfunders become a group with networking opportunities (which is difficult for online crowdfunding).

Market and fame values dominate over inspired values. Project values (when arts consumption is meant to liaise with (specific) other audience members) might be important as well.

Inspired values dominate in negotiation with domestic, fame and project values. Compelling story may be based on the relevance of the work to wider notions of civic society.

Market and fame values dominate over inspired values. Social values behind arts consumption might be important as well.

Remarks

Network tradition

Populist tradition

Impact on values realized per funding tradition

Inspired values dominate in negotiation with domestic, fame and project values. Compelling story may be Crowdfunding based on the specific merits of the artistic work or the personal charisma of the artist.

Organization of funding

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as in private sponsorship and donors’ circles. For direct public funding and public or private arts funds, this type of funder does not seem to be particularly relevant. The other ideal types (populist and elitist) do apply to all other funding arrangements, though in reality in some cases they may be rare. However, this can change over time. Furthermore, there may be differences between theatre systems. The taxonomy presented in Table 3 may be helpful in guiding further empirical research of such differences.

5.2. Training Training systems are an important instrument to create and maintain a theatrical field that supports notions of autonomy. Specialized institutions for the training of stage performers, directors, set designers, and so on are both strong indicators of a field’s autonomy and a means of preserving it. In both their formal training and in their culture, they instil the field’s doxa in its future participants. This includes not only aesthetic doxa (what sorts of productions are worth making, for instance) but also the doxa of the assumptions and expectations generally present in the field as to how its business ought to be conducted. Therefore, studying the curricula and practices of arts training schools can provide much information on the shape of the field. Questions regarding such studies involve not only which notions of art are being taught but, moreover, which notions about being an artist and a member of the artistic community are being passed to students. Training institutions may provide a barrier to new entrants to the field, and thus act as gatekeepers. However, the barrier is relatively weak compared to the way education functions as a gatekeeper to other professional fields, such as the medical or legal ones. While one cannot be a doctor without a proper medical education, it is possible to become a self-taught theatre artist. The barriers in the theatrical field are also lower than in some other artistic fields, which are far less open to those without formal training. In the f ield of classical music, for example, the value placed on superb renditions and specific interpretations of canonical musical scores makes training much more of a necessity. In contrast, the inclusion of untrained actors in the theatre field has become common practice in many countries with soap opera actors using their popular acclaim as an entry lever to stage work (see Chapter 4). Do note that in some countries, formal training constitutes hardly any entrance barrier at all. In Ireland, few actors were formally trained until quite recently. Instead, actors learned through apprenticeships and the gradual movement up from smaller roles

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to larger ones. These junior positions at prominent companies were rare and valued, and the socialization in the field’s doxa that these young actors received from their colleagues was every bit as strong as the habituation that formal training provides. These close, personal links between old and new agents in the field tend to have a conservative effect as practices and values are passed on from one generation to another; that is, it perpetuates the domestic value regime. Moreover, formal education institutions might not have the same effect in every country. This depends also on these schools’ position within the field. If we look at the structure of the theatre education system in Denmark, it becomes clear that there is a close link between the education system and the state as well as between the education system and the larger theatres, which tend to privilege a realistic acting tradition and script-based performance.18 Two of the official state-supported theatre schools are currently a part of two of the large Danish regional theatres, and thus the students appear in performances at these theatres and socialize with the professional artists working there. In 2015, these schools merged with the National School of Theatre and Contemporary Dance, to create only one single official theatre education institution. The National School of Theatre and Contemporary Dance is independent of any single theatre and has in the last years expanded the curriculum for acting students to include other acting styles as well. This means that, in the curriculum, the so-called ‘psycho-physical method’ of actor training is now supplemented with the ‘physical-visual method’, thus signalling that the theatrical field is developing its aesthetics, but still considers the psycho-physical method to be foundational.19 The idea that the more experimental forms of theatre are something one can learn only after being trained as a ‘proper’ actor becomes very clear in a report on the restructuring of the theatre education system in Denmark. In the report, the need for an education based on a more experimental and physical expression is made clear. But the committee members disagree whether this new education should be at a Masters level—that is, as a supplement to the achievement of competences from more traditional actor training at Bachelors level—or if it should be a Bachelors level degree in and of itself. The latter recommendation is made 18 These are the National School of Theatre and Contemporary Dance, as well as the two Academies associated with the Odense and Aarhus theatres. In addition, there are schools for ballet (at the Royal Theatre), for musical theatre (The Musical Academy at Fredericia Teater) and opera (at the Academies of Music). 19 See http://scenekunstskolen.dk/en/acting-programme (last accessed 17 September 2014)

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from a minority of the committee consisting of the representative from the organization Independent Performing Artists. In an appendix to the report she argues: during the working of the committee I have used the concept ‘the script/ playwright paradigm’ as a way to express the fact that the dramatic paradigm of script-based theatre is taken as a norm for the whole of the performing arts. […]. This means that the professional skills of the traditional actor are seen as the core of all performing arts education and that essentially different, specif ic sets of professional skills are not acknowledged and recognized. (Udvalget vedr. udredning om de videregående uddannelser på scenekunstområdet 2013, 65)

Thus, the structure of the educational system helps maintain both the central position of the large theatre institutions and their connection to a realistic acting style. In this manner, the training system in Denmark contributes both to the consecration of a certain type of theatre and to a hierarchy amongst actors and institutions.20 It is more prestigious to hold a degree from one of the recognized acting schools, and this means that the type of theatre promoted by those institutions is valued more highly than others. In addition to the official theatre schools, there are a number of smaller ‘unofficial’ acting schools in Denmark, which are not statesupported (and thus charge tuition), and tend to be connected to a broader, more physical and visual performing arts tradition. These institutions have less of a link to the state and its sources of legitimacy and prestige, but this does not necessarily mean that it is more distant from all other sources of culturally-recognized value. The Irish example reminds us that autonomy is never a simple matter of one field against another. In 2010, economic pressure (and private donation) was a key to the establishment of the Lir, the country’s first-ever national performing arts academy, as an independent institution that was potentially more autonomously positioned than the Bachelors degree course in acting studies within Trinity College, Dublin which it replaced. In setting up these distinctions between forms of theatre recognized as more and less valuable (that is, by more precisely defining theatre-specific capital) and solidifying distinctions between insiders and outsiders of a field, training academies can reinforce the theatrical field’s autonomy. But 20 For a critical analysis of how the education system in Norway has privileged the realistic acting style see Arntzen (2007).

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they can chip away at it as well. One can find important heteronomous influences in theatre curricula as a consequence of the influence of the political or economic fields. For instance, theatre training in most countries is considered a course of higher education and thus must fit into structures designed for higher education in general, which may be inappropriate for the training of theatre professionals. The restructuring of theatre training to align with the Bachelor-Master-Doctorate structure of the field of education is the primary example. The Danish government’s recent, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to consolidate artistic training under the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education was a concern to many. It seemed to signal that artistic training had a closer affinity to the educational field than to the artistic field. Another adjustment of training caused by heteronomous pressure is the inclusion of courses in business development, marketing and entrepreneurship in an effort to improve graduates’ career prospects. Such courses might be wise and helpful to graduates, but as they grow in prominence, they represent a reorientation of theatre training to heteronomous—in this case, market and entrepreneurial—values.

5.3.

The relationship between production and distribution

The question of how the systems of production and distribution are organized within theatre fields is an organizational feature that could be regarded as more ‘internal’ than the questions of funding and training. Van Maanen (2009) regards this as a crucial issue in theatre fields. There are two common models. In the first, production and distribution are closely linked, as is the case in Germany and most of Central and Eastern Europe. In this model, the theatre company is responsible for both production and distribution of performances, as they present their productions in their own venue. Two important consequences of this system are that the venue as a place has a distinct artistic profile known to its audience, and that the company knows its audience and its preferences because it has established a long-term relationship with them. The second model puts an organizational separation between production and distribution and is essentially a touring system, as it is the case with the Dutch theatre system and a good part of the English system, especially outside of London. This means that production of theatre is not linked to consumption and that the profile of the theatre venues is far less distinct. In the Netherlands, most venues present a production for one or two nights and then something else (which may be very different) the next day. This gives the venues a

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greater marketing challenge both to reach different target groups and to communicate the specificity of each performance without depending on word of mouth that functions in the repertory system. One of the central critiques of the Dutch separation between production and distribution is that the artists who make theatre do not have the responsibility of thinking about audiences, as that is seen as the venues’ job. This makes it easier for artists to produce ‘whatever they like’ and thus to position themselves in a more autonomous part of the theatrical field with less regard for the opinions of their audiences.21 Most countries’ theatre systems fall between these two models, with some companies which are resident while others tour, thus providing a greater supply of theatre especially in those smaller cities which have only one (or no) theatre company of their own. This is the case in Denmark where either local audience associations or the local, professional theatre company present touring performances from different companies that combine presenting in their own venue and touring. The two types of distribution differ, however, because touring performances presented by an audience association are not necessarily linked to an artistic profile of the association (apart from the taste of the purchasing members), whereas guest performances at the local theatre would normally be related to the artistic profile of the company, hence providing more opportunities to claim autonomy. Another part of the distribution system that influences the possibilities of claiming autonomy is the way theatre tickets are sold. The central question here is whether tickets are sold in bulk or individually. Bulk ticket buying occurs when associations of consumers buy tickets for their members. In some cases, such associations are organized on the basis of Schillerian notions of the theatre as a forum for moral education, and they are seen as a means to provide aesthetic experiences to those who would otherwise miss them. Their members pay a regular monthly fee, which is saved and pooled for attending the theatre. In Dutch society, such associations used to be closely linked to the so-called ‘pillars’, i.e. the different (political and

21 Van Maanen argues that the close link between production and distribution makes it easier for theatre to function in society because the performances are not only a part of a closed circuit of producers, but are closely linked to the consumption by citizens. In several publications, Van Maanen has identified the strict split between production and distribution as one of the key problems in the Dutch theatre system, which is characterized by a huge proliferation of theatre producing companies that supply a high variety of theatre aesthetics, but are not geared to the needs of audiences, nor are audiences outside of a highly professionalized elite able to follow such differences. See e.g. Van Maanen (1998, 753 and 2002, 184).

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religious) denominations that structured the free time of Dutch people.22 With the demise of these pillars during the 1970s and 1980s, audience associations were abandoned. Another form of ‘bulk’ theatre buying occurs when venues sell a series of tickets to individual consumers. As a result of the touring system, this is a frequent practice in the Netherlands. In essence, in such series subscriptions it is the programmer of the theatre venue who chooses the performances for the audience members. Different strategies are possible: theatre venues can try to sell ‘difficult’ performances as part of a package together with more popular performances or focus on a specific discipline. Again, the practice is becoming obsolete as ticket buyers tend to want to make their own evaluations of performances without so much advance planning, a desire that online reviews, bookings and discussion have made much easier.23 Generally, consumer behaviour has shifted away from subscription and group ticket sales and the linked long-term planning and has moved towards more spontaneous and self-directed forms of consumption. This makes it more difficult for the theatres to plan their season ahead and makes theatres more susceptible to short-term market pressures. With the mediatization of society and the advent of the internet we should acknowledge that the relationship between theatre and its audiences will continue to change. We would expect that audiences will gain more agency in theatre systems as their ability to react to performances is enhanced and the internet facilitates last-minute ticket buying. How theatre going is understood (or art perception in general) changes as media habits of audiences change. This affects relationship (1) in Figure 1 in the introduction. Currently, research on how mediatization affects this relationship in theatre fields is developing, but further research would be welcome. In conclusion, we argue that the organization of distribution within a theatre field is an important organizational factor in the way that field 22 These pillars (the Protestant and Catholic Christian pillars and the socialist) not only organized theatre consumption. They were present in amateur arts and sports associations, had their own political parties and, until recently, to a large extent dominated Dutch media policy. 23 A last form of ticket buying should be mentioned briefly. This occurs when commercial companies or organizations buy theatre tickets for their employees as a way of promoting social cohesion between them. Social considerations here take precedence over aesthetic. Especially in cabaret, this can cause difficulties, as popular performers, such as Youp van ‘t Hek, found they were performing for elite audiences who, during performances, started making fun of the director’s bald spot, which became clearly visible to them from an upper gallery. Furthermore, Van ‘t Hek found he was talking to a crowd of business managers, i.e. the people he usually berates during his performances, and individuals were no longer able to get tickets to his performances. Therefore, he explicitly forbids bulk ticket sales in the contracts he signs with local theatre venues. He also determines maximum ticket prices in order for those with less earning power to be able to buy a ticket to his performances.

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functions in the larger society. On the one hand, theatre systems which provide a distance between production and distribution tend to allow theatre makers more room to claim autonomy, as they are not directly asked to respond to audience tastes because the venues take on this burden. On the other hand, recent developments such as the decline of bulk ticket buying, which implies an intervention of taste specialists between theatres and consumers, increases market pressures in theatre systems. The same can be said for the growing use of the internet in informing audiences about performances and allowing them to react to them directly, (including the advent of lay critics online). Online ticket sales encourage audience members to decide whether or not to go to the theatre at the last minute, making market and fame values become more important and limiting artists’ possibilities to claim autonomy based on specific theatrical value.

5.4. Internationalization We have taken nationally-based theatre systems as our point of departure for the analysis in this chapter, but there are international influences that such systems exert and receive that deserve discussion. With the rise of globalization and the internationalization of culture, cultural policy researchers have argued that importance of the nation-state level of cultural policy is declining, and thus a purely national perspective on cultural systems is becoming less relevant (Johannissson and Trépagny 2004). We remain convinced that, both in relation to the subsidy system and in relation to the impact on the organizational structure of theatrical fields, the national level is key. Of course, both the local and the international perspectives on how theatrical fields claim autonomy are relevant. Globalization in general has been described as a double process of homogenization and diversification (Barber 1995). This applies to theatre as well. Internationalization has begun to lead to a bifurcation of the theatre field at an international level into two distinct, but increasingly coherent forms. On the one hand, globalization has led to an ever-wider distribution of global, mainstream blockbuster shows (Harvie 2009, 32–36), a development that has favoured the commercial and English-speaking part of the global theatre scene and especially those producers who are best known for developing this work on New York’s Broadway or London’s West End. These shows (such as Stomp, Blue Man Group, Chicago) are designed for the large international tourist market and, as a consequence, try to assume very little specific cultural knowledge (or even language fluency) on the part of

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their audiences, so that the experience can easily be translated to different cities and for different crowds. Very often, when such shows do have a more conventional plot, it is drawn from an extremely well-known film or set of pop songs (as in The Lion King or Mama Mia!). On the other hand, globalization has given rise to an international experimental theatre circuit, within which a variety of companies from different countries and cultures have developed a common understanding of what theatre scholar Knut Ove Arntzen (2007) has called a marginal theatre. This circuit is centred around a few major theatre festivals (Avignon, Edinburgh, Berlin, Dublin, Adelaide, etc.) and a certain set of high-cultural-capital venues in major cities known for programming this internationalized work (New York’s BAM, London’s Barbican, and so on), though there are far more smaller festivals and venues that aspire to this status. Often, works will tour around a number of these festivals and venues, and the aesthetics of such work will more closely resemble that of fellow-travelers on that circuit than they do the aesthetics of other productions in any national theatre field. The audience for these festivals is not the mass of tourists who attend Broadway and West End, but the cosmopolitan cultural elites of each country, who often resemble each other in lifestyle and aesthetic taste more than they do their countrymen. The taste of these elites is shaped by global media, facilitated by international blogs and online sources. Globalization has facilitated the growth and development of this circuit by making these productions—and information about them—far easier and cheaper to transport around the world. For theatre systems in non-English speaking countries, taking part in these international circuits is more difficult, but just as prestigious. It is also interesting to look at the position of international productions within smaller, non-English-speaking countries. Looking at the Danish theatre statistics there is clear evidence that at least a part of the international productions presented in Denmark represent a part of a popular and quite commercial international theatre export. The average number of spectators for a performance in Denmark (subsidized and non-subsidized) was 188 in the 2012–2013 season. In contrast, the average audience for international productions presented in Denmark’s so-called concert and culture houses, which present the main part of the commercial repertory was 989.24 This does not seem to be the case in the Netherlands. Dutch national theatre statistics demonstrate that international productions amount to 10 per cent of the performances staged in Dutch theatre venues (VSCD 2012). 24 The term in Danish is ‘koncert- og kulturhuse’. Statistics available at http://statistikbanken. dk/TEAT13 and http://statistikbanken.dk/TEAT15 (last accessed 17 December 2014).

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They also represent 10 per cent of total ticket sales. However, these national statistics may hide differences between cities in the Netherlands as some of the theatre venues have specialized in bringing the international offering by joining national co-operations such as Stichting Raamwerk that scout international productions and organize tours in theatres. Theatre venues can choose to be part of such networks. Usually, the theatres in larger cities co-operate in this way as they can secure the audiences for such tours. Also, the most prominent international performances are organized by the Holland Festival, which is based in Amsterdam. So the international presence could well be restricted to a few Dutch cities. Thus, the Dutch theatre seems to function in relative isolation where the rare foreign theatre-makers that hold prominent positions within the field come from Flanders. However, the Dutch modern dance field provides an opposite picture as Dutch dance companies are saturated with foreign dancers and choreographers and dance academies hardly train any Dutchmen. However low the general public’s interest in international performances might be, it certainly gives theatre producers some opportunities to work internationally, because it can be a way to earn more field-specific capital. As Bourdieu describes, the specific capital of the art field does not derive from the raw number of people who attend and are interested in this or that performance, but rather, from the interest of the right people who are already recognized as insiders or experts within the field and thus have the power to consecrate work as worthwhile. This is exactly the audience attracted by the international festival circuit. The mere fact that a theatre company is touring to international festivals might be seen as a sign of a high artistic standard by domestic colleagues and authorities, an argument that Danish children’s theatre has used in their fight for a higher subsidy and higher national recognition. Irish theatre company Pan Pan (introduced in Chapter 4) in a similar way uses its international appeal as argument for subsidy and thus to claim an autonomous position. Such international recognition can also be used to secure economic capital. In this way, theatres that are typically positioned in the subfield of limited production can use international cooperation and touring strategically not only to enhance their status, but also to make it possible to produce what they want without deferring to the values of the national subsidising body or local audience numbers. This is, for example, how the Dutch modern dance companies operate. One of the most established international organizations that have effectively promoted the internationalization of theatre production is the international network for contemporary performing arts known as IETM, a network whose members are primarily defined as experimental and

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independent theatre makers and companies. (The name used to stand for ‘informal European theatre meeting’, but no longer does.) The mission of IETM is ‘to stimulate the quality, development and contexts of contemporary performing arts in a global environment’ (IETM 2012) thus signalling that the basis of the network is the promotion and development of an internationalized, field-specific value of theatrical quality. IETM is funded primarily by the European Union. The EU and other international agents do influence the dynamics of national theatre fields. However, as the EU cultural budget is relatively low compared to national cultural budgets, the impact from direct funding is quite modest. Nonetheless, through organizations like IETM and through its prestige as an international institution associated with high-culture cosmopolitanism and international cooperation—which are valued by the theatrical, political and economic fields—the EU can have an influence larger than its relatively meagre funding might suggest. This is especially the case for dance and other art forms less dependent on language than spoken drama. In summary, we can say that by taking part in the international theatre field, agents enhance their possibilities to claim autonomy in their domestic theatre field. Such claims can be based on market and fame considerations—when taking part in the production circuit of mass tourism of Broadway and the West End, though theatre-makers from these systems rarely also have the ambition to play a role in the national theatre systems—or on field-specific value when taking part in the international avant-garde theatre circuit. Specifically, the latter operates in accordance with theatrical autonomy. In fact, this circuit shapes the notion of specific value in domestic theatre systems. Clearly, non-English spoken theatre is at a disadvantage in its efforts to claim autonomy on the basis of this globalized network.

5.5.

The relationship between national and regional subsidy

In addition to subsidy given by a national government or arts council, many local governments also support theatre financially, whether at the level of a county, region or municipality. The division of responsibilities between central and local authorities varies from country to country, but what interests us here is how the relationships between these levels of governance relate to the theatrical field and to the possibility of making claims to autonomy. In relation to the question of decentralization, we mentioned in Chapter 4 that artists tend to be sceptical of decentralization of arts policy. According to Kawashima, this is especially the case with political decentralization,

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because the artists see the central state as the guarantor of artistic quality, thus of the autonomy of the artistic field (2004 [1996], 60–61). In Ireland, a country without a strong tradition of local government, the national Arts Council funds arts offices at the city and county level in order to ensure a spread of arts outside of the capital and to stimulate local government’s involvement in arts policy. Apart from the condition that the money is spent on the arts, there are no restrictions from the Arts Council, which means that practices vary between localities. While these local arts offices are an increasingly important part of a number of theatre company’s balance sheets, most artists do not consider this source of funding to have the field-specific prestige that only funding from the national Arts Council can offer. Whether this is because the local councils are thought to make decisions on instrumental, rather than purely artistic, criteria is not clear, but what research has demonstrated is that these local arts funds are not recognized as having the authority to confer field-specific capital in the way that the national agency is.25 Cultural policy researchers Jenny Johannisson and Veronica Trépagny (2004) have analysed this issue in the Swedish context, where a great deal of power was transferred from the national to the regional level which also meant that cultural policy became subject to a higher degree of accountability and instrumentalism: ‘the cultural policies of the region and the city seem to be instrumental in that they have to define concise goals for their cultural development’ (Johannisson and Trépagny 2004: 14). Van den Hoogen’s (2010) study of municipal cultural policy in the Netherlands also indicates that municipalities more frequently are concerned with economic and social impacts of the arts than the national government. Moreover, as in the Netherlands the responsibility for production and distribution is split between the national government (subsidizing productions) and municipalities (sustaining theatre venues), the evaluations of quality differ greatly between the national and local levels. This fuels fears of instrumentality of local cultural policies and makes national subsidy allocations stand out as especially important markers of field-specific value in the Dutch theatre system. This ambiguity and suspicion towards the local authorities can also be seen in Denmark, where the municipalities hold the primary funding responsibility for local theatres. These theatres are co-subsidized by the municipalities and the state, but since 2007 it has been a condition for state subsidy that each local theatre participates in a national evaluation of its artistic standard. This test seems to demonstrate a suspicion of local 25 For details, see the research in Edelman (2010).

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theatre companies based mainly on the fact that they are administered by the local authorities and are producing and presenting their work in the (geographical) periphery of the national theatre field, rather than on a confirmed idea about a general low level of quality in their work. On the contrary, it is interesting to see that the local theatre system in Denmark, which is characterized by a high degree of political decentralization, has managed to promote artistic quality and artistic development to a great extent and has suffered less from a devaluation and a pressure to adjust to national standards for organization and production than its Swedish equivalent.26 To summarize, we conclude that, ordinarily, subsidies from the national level allow agents to claim autonomy based on the specific value of theatre. Apart from conferring economic capital (money) to theatres, they also confer symbolic capital, in Bourdieu’s terms. Local governments have less ability to influence the status of their subsidy recipients as their policies are perceived to be governed by instrumental values more frequently than national cultural policies, and they less frequently avail of independent expert advice in subsidy allocation decisions. However, as the Danish case indicates, it is also possible for them to gear subsidy systems to the values specific to theatre fields.

5.6. Conclusion In this chapter, we have discussed how various structural features of theatre systems sustain certain claims to theatrical autonomy. It is important to keep in mind that such structural features change over time, in responses to changes in the larger cultural, political and social landscape. They may have some institutional stability, but they are not set in stone. As they are effectively politically-sanctioned instruments, these structures are also susceptible to direct involvement from the political process, even though the major purpose of them is often to minimize such involvement. Nonetheless, such interventions have existed through history and continue to exist. Studying theatre fields therefore includes describing the organizational features of theatre or arts policy and examining which criteria are used in funding decisions. 26 Hansen (2011) analyses the local theatre system in Denmark. Her Chapter 8 touches on the question of position in the national theatrical field in particular. Rikard Hoogland (2005) has analysed the situation for the Swedish regional theatres.

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Table 4. Impact of organizational features of theatres system on theatrical autonomy Organizational features of theatre fields

How they shape possibilities to claim autonomy

How other values gain significance

Funding systems

Overall levels of non-market funding, and the criteria by which they are allocated, determine the importance of specific value with respect to market values. Public funding is usually is geared towards strengthening claims to theatrical autonomy, but mechanisms differ. Implicit criteria in public funding enhance possibilities to claim theatrical autonomy.

Both public and private funders encourage a variety of values in theatre systems (a taxonomy of funders and the types of values they promote is provided in Table 3).

Training systems

Typically training systems impose the specific conceptions of theatre as an art form in agents, i.e. specific values are passed on. (These can align with domestic values when acting/performing traditions are passed on.)

Training systems are linked to the educational system of a country and therefore can include heteronomous values in curricula. Courses on management and management and marketing will instill market and entrepreneurial values.

Relation between production and distribution

The more that decisions on production are detached from distribution, the more theatre agents can claim theatrical autonomy (but this can come at the cost of isolation of theatre in society).

The organization of ticket sales can augment possibilities to claim theatrical autonomy, although the current trend towards last-minute individual ticket-buying increases market considerations over aesthetic. The Internet and the mediatization of society seem to enhance agency of individual spectators in theatre systems which affects possibilities to claim theatrical autonomy, more research is needed to assess how exactly.

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Organizational features of theatre fields

How they shape possibilities to claim autonomy

How other values gain significance

Internationalization

International acclaim of theatre agents can enhance their abilities to claim theatrical autonomy based on a fieldspecific notion of theatre. Furthermore, their acclaim shapes the notion of specific value in the national theatre field.

International acclaim also enhances possibilities to claim autonomy based on market and fame values Non-English spoken theatre is at a disadvantage in a globalized market.

Regional versus national theatre

Usually, national subsidies are regarded as a marker of aesthetic quality and thus allow for more claims to autonomy than subsidies by regional and local authorities.

Social inclusion, image building and economic returns frequently are the focus of local policies. Local authorities are less likely to avail of independent expert advice on subsidy decisions, weakening claims to autonomy.

Social movements and political changes can uproot the certainties that sustain the political arrangements that prevent theatre from being at the mercy of market forces or being used as political tools. While at first glance the parliamentary democratic model seems most well-poised to ‘defend’ theatrical autonomy, changes in this direction can be double-edged for theatre practitioners: while freeing their aesthetic possibilities, they are faced with diminished social relevance, and the political discourse within democracies that embrace neoliberal market values can quite easily superimpose political priorities or market forces on theatre. Even when organizational features of theatre systems appear relatively stable, as is the case in the Eastern European counties, theatrical autonomy must be constantly renegotiated within those structures and their changing values. In her examination of the effect of the seismic changes of 1989 on Eastern European theatre systems, Anneli Saro concludes that: the empirical material [on the changes in the theatre systems of Estonia, Slovenia and Hungary] confirms the often-neglected fact that even in the face of globalization and other major international changes, cultural life is highly dependent on local socio-cultural conditions and historical background, which in Europe represents diversity and plurality. It means

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that every theatrical field has its unique features and deserves special attention. (Saro 2009, 21)

In this chapter, we have discussed several organizational features of theatre systems that allow for or impede to possibilities to make claims to theatrical autonomy. Table 4 summarizes the main points discussed, which ought to be considered when the impact of national theatre systems on the notion of theatrical autonomy.

6. How claims to autonomy serve those outside theatre fields In the previous two chapters, we have discussed how autonomy can be used by actors within the theatrical field and how autonomy is influenced by and influences the organization of a theatrical system. In this chapter, we discuss how autonomy can serve the purposes of actors outside the theatrical field. In other words, our interest here is in how claims to autonomy of theatre—that is, theatre’s assertions of its own value—can be useful in other fields or in society at large. This is an idea that provokes debate, as the notion of art’s autonomy is often interpreted in a way that precludes the usefulness of art to other ends. In Chapter 2, we discussed the (incorrect) theoretical underpinnings of the notion of l’art pour l’art and concluded that the fact that agents pursue a specific value within a field does not imply that their actions have no consequences outside that field (see relations (1) and (3) in Figure 1). As a consequence, our notion of autonomy does not exclude societal functioning of art; rather, it facilitates it. Autonomy is not opposed to sociality. It is a form of social functioning. Do note that the position we take up here aligns with views on the inevitability of instrumentality of cultural policies discussed by Vestheim (2007 and 2012), who claims that: cultural policy is […] by definition instrumental because from a cultural policy point of view it has no intrinsic value—it may only be of value for different groups of citizens. Nor has culture in policy-making terms any intrinsic value—public support for culture can only be argued for in terms of different effects it might have on or values it may have for groups of citizens and society at large. All cultural policy is therefore directed towards goals that are beyond culture itself, namely to the producers, distributors or recipients of culture. (Vestheim 2007, 233)

This is part of the nature of policy; it would be incoherent for a political system to articulate a cultural policy that did not make reference to the value of culture for a wider group in society. Our point is that making a claim to the autonomy of theatre can be useful in asserting and defending a claim to the value of the theatre for those who stand outside of it. But such claims can also limit art’s usefulness as the examples below will demonstrate. Please note, however, that we are not concerned here with the question of whether such claims are valid and can be substantiated with sound

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evidence of theatre’s efficacy. Of course, when research is available on theatre’s eff icacy, it will be mentioned, but ultimately, the question of whether theatre in fact generates economic or social impacts is not what concerns us here. Rather, our interest is in the potential conflicts between such values and the values specific to the theatre field and the way these conflicts can be resolved. Such resolutions can be found in compromises based on a ‘higher common good’ (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006[1991], 277–278), which amounts to a reformulation of the values at stake encompassing both (or all three) of the values of the regimes present in the conflict. The formulation of such a higher common good may or may not be stable. If it is not, the underlying conflict will only be resolved temporarily and agents will return to their original values whenever they can. If it is stable, a new value regime may emerge over time.1 If no compromise is reached, one value regime will simply overrule the others or agents in a social situation will not come to agreement on the value of persons, objects or courses of action. As already discussed in Chapter 2, the arts are normally justified on the basis of the inspired regime. This could be taken to mean that applications of the arts to other fields—which are generally justified under one of the other regimes—will necessarily reduce the autonomy of the theatrical field. Our point is that such an application would not mean that the field’s autonomy disappears, but that the purpose of it is transported into other fields. There appear to be three possibilities, though they are not always distinct: 1. The inspired regime, i.e. the value of autonomous art, overcomes the others in a conflict, which would imply that the autonomy of the theatrical field is strengthened. The inspired regime thus is the dominant one. 2. The inspired regime becomes subservient and reinforces the values of another regime. This is when a higher common good is found, stable or unstable. Here, the inspired regime is the ministerial one, serving the purpose of others. 3. The inspired regime is overcome by other regimes, i.e. it is dominated. In each of the sections in this chapter, we will discuss reasons why claims to the autonomy of the theatrical field can be useful for agents outside the field and how this affects this autonomy. So we are most interested in the second possibility, where theatrical autonomy serves agents outside the field. Thus, we are concerned with theatre’s ability to serve as a moral lodestar and 1 This is the case, for example, for the project polity introduced in Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005 [1999]) that we already have introduced in Chapter 2.

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teacher. We will discuss overt and implicit goals behind subvention of theatre, which can be behind the decisions of various funders of theatre.2 Arguments that relate to development of theatre-goers will be discussed first, as they underpin most democratic cultural policies. Then, we will discuss overt and implicit issues of self-representation of nations and cities. The chapter closes with a discussion on how claims to theatrical autonomy can serve economic development and social inclusion.

6.1.

Moral betterment and education

Moral betterment has been a central argument for the value of theatre for a very long time. As we presented in Chapter 2, this way of thinking about theatre goes back to Kant and Schiller (and, further, to Aristotle). Moral betterment is a societal function of theatre that is not a part of the field; it is, however, central to cultural policy and debates about the value of cultural education. The argument was, for instance, used recently by Martha Nussbaum claiming that education is too focused on learning skills that are easily transferable to economic profit, while critical reflection and empathy—capacities built both by the arts and the humanities in general—are neglected, despite being necessary for democratic life (Nussbaum 2010). In The Social Impact of the Arts (2008), Belfiore and Bennett describe several theoretical traditions of justification for the arts, which are based on exactly this argument: the arts can make you into a more moral and civilized person. In current political discourse, this argument is prominent. But even before modern cultural policy of nation states began, the moral betterment argument was behind private efforts to erect and sustain performing arts facilities. In more privately organized theatre fields, such as that in the US, moral betterment is an important argument behind private patronage, though patrons might also have less altruistic arguments (see the next section). These are instances where theatrical autonomy becomes ministerial to outside agendas: the higher common goods at stake here, as formulated in most cultural policy strategies, are democratization and citizen empowerment.3 2 The impact of different types of funders on theatre fields has been discussed in Section 5.1. 3 ‘Empowerment’ is a translation of the Danish dannelse (German Bildung). In and of itself, this is not a value that is central to any of the worlds described by Boltanski and Thévenot. However, it can be considered as the common good that unites the values of the inspired and civic value regimes. On democratization see Duelund (2008) and Nielsen (2003).

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It is important to note that the moral betterment argument is often predicated on the autonomy of theatre. Van Maanen (2009) and Van den Hoogen (2010) argue that autonomy is a precondition for theatre’s moral function. Both claim that, though theatre can serve other purposes in society, its essential intrinsic function is to challenge the perception schemes of audience members. This challenging and reforming of perceptions is a basic social good, as it is a building-block of empathy and mutual understanding. Once challenged, this opens up the possibility for new ways of understanding society, empowering not only the individual audience member, but also generating tolerance in society. It is precisely because of the pursuit of specific value that theatre is able to do this. In this sense, the moral betterment argument is not only used to impose heteronomous values on the theatrical field, but also to argue for the autonomy of art. The use of art for the purposes of moral education represents a (relatively stable) compromise between inspired and civic values. Let us turn to the question of how such a compromise is sustained. Recall that in Chapter 5 we argued that theatrical autonomy depends on organization. To a large extent, organizational arrangements in and around theatre fields sustain these compromises or mitigate the conflicts between values. In this respect, the most important organizational feature is how evaluations are handled in a theatre system; more specifically, how aesthetic and non-aesthetic criteria are weighed against each other. Below we will give an example of how such evaluations take place. One case in which the relationship between moral betterment and autonomy is questioned is the case of theatre for children. As we have already argued in Chapter 4, theatre for children often stands in a heteronomous position within the theatrical field, simply because of the fact that it is aimed at children. A central discussion within this subfield of theatre is whether theatre for children should promote artistic (i.e. autonomous) values or educational (i.e. heteronomous) values. In Denmark, the state has a reimbursement system for professional theatre for children, which means that public schools, kindergartens, libraries, etc., receive a refund of half the costs when they present a performance.4 The system is constructed in a way that secures the promotion of the autonomous value of artistic quality. Artistic quality is guaranteed by the fact that subsidized theatre companies who engage in children’s theatre are expected to deliver performances of a high artistic standard. As a result, their performances are automatically 4 Danish Theatre Act: LBK no. 536 of 4 June 2012 § 25 and Ministry of Culture order no. 366 of 26/04/2006 (both available at www.retsinformation.dk).

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included in the reimbursement system. The productions of non-subsidized companies, however, are evaluated by a national reimbursement committee before they are included in the reimbursement system. This committee is comparable to an arm’s length institution and its members are all theatre experts, mainly established practitioners who are a part of the subfield of Danish children’s theatre. The committee has clearly expressed the fact that performances are evaluated purely on the basis of the artistic value.5 Taking this into consideration, the purpose of the system is to introduce children to the value of theatrical art while in school. In other words, in the system, theatrical value takes precedence over educational considerations, in effect assuming that theatrical values automatically also have educational value. This is an assumption that is not without merit if we follow the arguments of Nussbaum, Van Maanen and Van den Hoogen explained above. However, this is not the only possible understanding of the value of art in school, which can be heavily debated. The central question in the debate is whether the purpose of educational theatre is to introduce arts of a high quality to the children or to use the arts for educational purposes, so that a theatre performance serves as a fun and entertaining way to develop a curriculum topic such as World War II, health, sexuality or, indeed, morality. This discussion has from time to time been quite heated, which was also the case in Norway where the system of the so-called Cultural Rucksack aims at presenting arts for all school children in the country.6 This system also includes an evaluation process in which performances with a clear educational value but without artistic quality are excluded (Kleppe 2009). The system has been evaluated by Anne Bamford (2010–2011), who states that it has a key problem: the arts are not well integrated in the school system and the main reason for this is that too many teachers are not competent to do so: Despite the overall view that the cultural climate in Norway had improved markedly over the past decade, almost the reverse could be said of the provisions in school and in teacher education. Teacher education and professional development needs to be enhanced to develop teachers who are more confident and able to include arts and cultural education in their 5 The basic criteria are professionalism and whether this is theatre (performing arts). These criteria are supplemented with a comment that ‘campaigns’ are not acceptable, which means that performances produced with an educational purpose that does not live up to the criteria of artistic quality will not suffice. (http://www.kunst.dk/kunststoette/puljestamside/tilskud/ godkendelse-til-refusion/, last accessed 21 March 2013) 6 http://denkulturelleskolesekken.no/english/ , last accessed 31 October 2012.

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teaching. […]. Many new teachers leave the teacher education without the skills and knowledge needed to teach the arts and culture, or to use creative and cultural-rich methods of instruction. (Bamford 2011, 10)

This criticism is interesting since it points to the fact that the ability to see the value of art and integrate that into an educational setting is dependent on learning and socialization, or what Bourdieu would call the possession of enough cultural capital. In other words, two problems arise. First, it is a matter of debate whether artistic values themselves are—or should be—the core of what is being taught to children. Second, one should wonder how effective cultural education focussing on transferring knowledge on artistic quality can be when teachers themselves are hardly trained to do so. Our evaluation of the situation would be that claims to theatrical autonomy have been effectively deployed in the production of children’s theatre, which, from the point of view of the theatre field itself, is logical; however, too little attention has been paid to the question of how such values can be effectively disseminated in other social fields that do not focus on the specific theatrical value. Though it is assumed that theatrical value will automatically align with other fields’ specific value, and thus can dominate the values of other fields, it should be questioned whether more attention to aligning theatrical value with other values by contextualizing the theatrical experiences offered to children would be helpful. To summarize, the supposed civilizing role of theatre is a major building block for cultural policy and cultural education. Of course, these arguments come to the fore most prominently in children’s theatre, with its natural link with the education system. Theatre here is used for its educational value. This is a compromise between the inspired, civic and industrial value regimes that is sustained through various organizational features in and around theatre systems, most prominently by advisory bodies whose members weigh the various values against each other. However, that does not imply that there will never be conflicts over these compromises.

6.2.

Issues of self-representation

Promotion of ideology Let us start with a controversial statement on the function of autonomy. Vuyk (2010) argues that promoting artistic autonomy served Western political objectives. The reason that artistic autonomy gained a central position

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in cultural policy in Western countries in the period from World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall was the political wish to promote the liberal democratic ideology of the West, and thus was a direct consequence of the global political and ideological struggle against the Eastern Bloc. He writes: […] during the Cold War, even in the West the arts were employed in the ideological struggle, here in favour of the case of liberal democracy. […]. It is fortunate—but no coincidence that during the twentieth century, the arts in the West developed features that excellently matched these political ideals. The idea of autonomy, for instance, as embodied by modern art, can be seen as a symbol of democratic citizenship. (Vuyk 2010, 176)

In other words, even the most astutely autonomous art—by the very virtue of its autonomy—could be instrumental in serving ideological purposes. During the Cold War years, it appears that the specific value of the arts in general aligned perfectly with geopolitical values of promoting one’s political position as the (morally) superior one. With the demise of the Soviet Union, Vuyk argues, Western arts quickly fell into crisis and the broad political agreement on the necessity of an autonomous art sphere in society started to crumble.7 This demonstrates a situation where the inspired regime seems to be able to dominate other regimes, but in fact serves another. Freedom of speech can be considered here as the ‘common good’; so rather than being the dominant regime, the inspired polity here is ministerial to objectives of geopolitics. Current political trends appear to threaten the stability of this common good. Vuyk argues that this happens because of shifts in geopolitical power. His idea that cultural politics have always been instrumental is challenging, and can be understood to suggest compromise between different value regimes. However, the relationship 7 Evidence of this can be found, for instance, in analyses of the cultural politics in the Netherlands (Hoefnagel 1992; Winsemius 1999), which demonstrate that though cultural politics may have led to debates about individual measures or subsidies to specific institutions, the underlying principles of it have never been heatedly discussed in parliament. With the advent of a populist right-wing party in the Netherlands, which overtly expresses its desire to abolish all subsidies to the arts (though not to historic museums and libraries, as they promote a notion of Dutchness), this agreement in Dutch politics seems to have ceased to exist. This party’s support to the Rutte administration of 2010 to 2012, a minority government of liberals and Christian democrats, led to severe budget cuts to the arts (of up to 20 per cent) and abolishment of tax exemptions such as a lower VAT rate. The latter measure was instantly revoked when the populist party withdrew its support of the government in the spring of 2012 demonstrating that the ‘older’ parties still seem to adhere to the idea that the arts warrant specific support from the government.

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between the theatrical field and the political field is more complex than a simple compromise. In his analysis, Vuyk disregards the ways in which cultural politics developed into an instrument of economic development, a move that had already gained prominence in Western cultural politics during the 1980s (i.e. before the Soviet demise). The description of art’s autonomy in relationship to the political field is largely an expansion of the notion of the freedom of speech. In totalitarian regimes, cultural policy tends to be aimed at reinforcing the desired ideology in society (Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey 1989). We discussed this in Chapter 3, where we argued that autonomy allows one to practice politics without entering into the political field. There are scores of theatre-makers whose work holds overtly political aims, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Miller being two well-known examples from the twentieth century. However, such overtly heteronomous intentions are not always unproblematic, even in supposedly democratic and free societies. Brecht and Miller both were questioned before the US House of Representative’s Committee on UnAmerican Activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The debates caused by these artists, as well as more contemporary cases like Christian Lollikes staging of Breivik’s Manifest 2083 (as discussed in Chapter 4), show that the relationship between the artistic field and political ideology is complex, and that claims to theatrical autonomy based on the notion of freedom of speech are not always successful in society. Nevertheless, it can be argued that, in most cases, theatrical autonomy interpreted as a form of freedom of speech is the dominant value, which neatly aligns with the principle of personal freedom that is valuable to Western societies. But do note that there are those who would consider this to be a merely ministerial position for theatrical autonomy, as autonomy is not used for its own ends, but rather to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist, Western societies. In effect, this is the argument laid out by Vestheim (2012) that all cultural policies are necessarily instrumental. Social prestige: National cultural diplomacy Supporting the arts can have a more modest justification than the promotion of ideology. Rather than being a sign of freedom, the arts in this tradition are seen as promoting a civilized image, thus lending social prestige to those involved with them. The tradition of supporting the arts in order to gain social prestige has a long history and has been central to national cultural policies. For smaller countries like Denmark or Estonia, it was important to be able to present, for instance, a national opera of a certain standard

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that demonstrated that the nation was not uncivilized or underdeveloped (Engberg 2005, Pappel 2009). In the longer historical perspective, cultural policy has been about the social prestige of the king or emperor. To put it more bluntly, art has often been used to demonstrate the power of the rulers and this continues to be the case in the age of democratic states (see, for instance, Wilmer 2008 and Tindemans 2011). Iconic cultural institutions, such as Het Nationale Ballet or the Netherlands Dance Theatre, frequently accompany the Dutch royals on their official visits abroad to represent the high cultural standard of the country. In the wake of the 2006 crisis over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, the Danish government initiated The Arab Initiative, a programme in which culture is seen as a tool to promote democratization and mutual understanding (Det Arabiske Initiativ 2015). Usually, this work is referred to as cultural diplomacy. The role of the arts, including theatre, is only a small part of these efforts. However, the arts are certainly understood as an important contributor to the development of democracy, freedom of speech and the strengthening of civil society. The role of theatre in these efforts is based on the assumption that the high artistic standards of the theatre are evidence of a civilized, or modern, country (again, Nussbaum’s argument is used here). As spoken language can create difficulties in cultural export, most often dance, music and opera are employed in cultural diplomacy. In this context, it becomes very clear that the value of the arts—including theatre—is not just the autonomous value of the inspired regime, but also other values that are reflective of a broader political and societal context. One example of a theatrical contribution to Danish cultural diplomacy is the theatre project C:ntact. C:ntact started in 2004 as an audience development project at the Betty Nansen city theatre in Copenhagen. Throughout its existence, C:ntact has specialized in creating and developing theatre and other art products via a cooperation between professional artists and young people with different backgrounds, thereby promoting ethnic, cultural and social inclusion (issues we will discuss in more detail in the last section of this chapter). From a Danish origin, it now also has global activities and has especially been active in the Middle East with six projects in the period from 2008–2013 (C:ntact 2015a). These projects are very easily linked to the more general objective of stimulating democratization in the Middle East, an objective central to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the Centre for Culture and Development (CKU), two agencies which share a national responsibility for cultural cooperation between Denmark and developing countries. The CKU states in its mission:

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CKU believes that art and creativity are central parameters for sustainable human and social development and that they are determining factors for democracy, human rights and economic growth. We therefore aim to strengthen a vital, free and inclusive cultural life in developing countries and to broaden knowledge thereof in Danish society. (CKU 2015)

C:ntact’s theatre projects in Jordan and Palestine are subsidized by the CKU. C:ntacts understands its mission and results in terms of contributing to civil emancipation and democratic debate: Applying theatre as a method to empower local communities and strengthen cross-cultural dialogue was the essential emphasis. […]. The process of working with their own stories while inevitably reflecting on their own life situation was indeed very successful. The opportunity to communicate and debate directly with an audience was clearly a very positive experience for the youngsters—they suddenly felt that they had a platform where they could debate the major concerns in their lives. Moreover, the audience at the local schools and camps where the performances took place experienced the liberating effect too. In this setting, they could freely discuss difficult and delicate aspects of their society. (Contact 2015b, n.p.)

Such statements clearly demonstrate that claims to theatrical autonomy are useful in other fields too, in these cases the field of international cooperation. Claims to theatrical autonomy can both affirm a civilized image of a nation and link directly to efforts to develop mutual understanding. Social prestige: Local cultural branding As we live in a world where cities are becoming increasingly important as hubs for innovation, creativity and leisure and where the balance between city- and country-dwellers is shifting towards the former, 8 attempts to establish a cultural ‘brand’ are not restricted to national governments. Cities tend to focus on large-scale festivals that can produce a positive image for their hosts. Art festivals are hugely popular, as are international 8 Urban economist Edward Glaeser (2011) speaks of the triumph of the city, which he regards as the major human invention which makes us smarter, healthier, happier and richer. From his analysis one might expect that major cities will surpass national governments in deploying cultural diplomacy.

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sporting events such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup. Despite the economic downturn, which has hit some cities particularly hard, they still devote considerable money to large-scale festivals, both to actually execute them, but also simply to secure events such as the European Capital of Culture.9 But it is not only special events that are used in city cultural diplomacy. There exists a veritable circuit of annual or bi-annual performing arts festivals, such as the Festival d’Avignon, the Prague Quadrennial and the Salzburger Festspiele. Furthermore, London’s West End and New York’s Broadway are major tourist attractions making these cities universal cities, rather than nationally embedded entities. It is telling that the same musicals and a small group of musical producers seem to dominate the international market, akin to Hollywood’s film industry. It is not only large and internationally-oriented cities that made use of the values of art for social prestige. Smaller cities have done so as well; the question of whether or not to have a local theatre company or theatre venue is also a question about social prestige: How would the rest of the world (or the rest of our country) consider our town if we were able to show them that we can maintain a high standard in the arts? One example is Holstebro, a city located in the Western, rural part of Denmark with 34,000 residents, that consciously worked on changing the image of the city by investing in experimental arts as early as in the 1960s. The municipality bought a sculpture made by Giacometti and promised Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret a small subsidy if they would move from Norway to the city. When Holstebro did this in the 1960s, it was rather unusual and caused public controversy, but over the years it has influenced the city’s reputation in the rest of Denmark as well as the residents’ understanding of their city.10 In the Netherlands, the touring theatre system encourages cities to invest in large-scale theatre venues to be able to host not only the large-scale subsidized theatre (such as opera and modern dance), but also non-subsidized productions such as musical and cabaret. Small rural cities, such as Hoogeveen (57,000 residents, located in the rural northern part of the country), will happily take a financial loss on programming the nation’s most important cabaretiers (such as Youp van ’t Hek) in order to be attractive to high-end residents. 9 For instance, the costs of the unsuccessful Maastricht bid for the title of European Capital of Culture for the year 2018 were estimated to run up to €8m (estimate of 2010) (Rekenkamer Maastricht, 2010). Leeuwarden, the city that will host the event in 2018, calculates that it will require an extra investment of €74.3m, €52.3m of which are expected to come from public sources. (Stichting Kulturele Haadstêd, 2013) 10 See Skot-Hansen (1998) for a further analysis of the cultural policy of Holstebro.

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Social prestige: Private patronage Foundations and private sponsors also support theatre for the sake of social prestige. Being seen at the theatre may influence one’s image in the public eye. The rarer theatre tickets are, the more exclusive the event and the more prestigious it is to attend it. This might explain why socialites such as Bianca Jagger can be seen at relatively experiential performances such Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican Theatre in London in 2012.11 In small provincial towns, but also in larger cities, theatre may be a place where the local elite meet and mingle with one another. Being part of that crowd rewards one with social capital, in Bourdieu’s terms, or fame in Boltanksi and Thévenot’s. However, much theatre does not have this fame-bestowing capacity as audiences have become very specific and restricted to a small proportion of the population. Performances, therefore, rarely attract media attention. This seems to be the case for much of the subsidized theatre in the Netherlands, where prestige is only won when visiting performances of very high level or international productions. This means that theatre has become too specific to allow for this translation of values towards the general polity of fame. But do note that being seen at theatre events still awards prestige capital, but only within the field of theatre specialists. Attending performances of the Holland Festival, for instance, is a must for Dutch theatre critics, as their specific capital is dependent on these events. However, in other countries theatre might have this capacity for a more general audience and in smaller cities, such as Debrecen in Hungary, local politicians may have a need to be seen in their city theatre. Such differences between countries are important to include in one’s analyses of these systems.12 It is important to note here that social prestige is not only rewarded to those who visibly attend theatre performances (and are seen to do so). It can also be awarded to funders. In the previous chapter, we already introduced distinctions between funders. Especially funders with elitist 11 While Jagger is an environmental campaigner, she has not expressed much interest in theatre. Her use of photography during the performance led to an altercation with theatre critic Mark Shenton, who wrote up the incident in his blog for the theatre industry journal The Stage (Shenton 2012). 12 Such differences will be included in the comparative study of the STEP research group, which is comparing theatre in smaller European cities: Berne (Switzerland), Debrecen (Hungary), Aarhus (Denmark), Tartu (Estonia), Newcastle (England) and Groningen (the Netherlands). A first presentation of these results was published in the journal Amfiteater , 3:1-2 (2015). The journal is available to download (in Slovenian and English) at https://www.agrft.uni-lj.si/en/ amfiteater-journal. See Edelman, Van Maanen and Šorli (2015).

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motives (Balfe 1993) make use of the social prestige theatrical autonomy provides. In these cases, theatrical autonomy may be encouraged as it is ministerial to social prestige. For populist and network funders, theatrical autonomy might have to compete with other values. The discussion about the fact that theatres are becoming more dependent on private sponsorship during times of public cutbacks shows a worry that these developments could lead to a less autonomous theatre field, which has to compete for audience numbers and public attention. Bikubenfonden, one of the largest foundations in Denmark, has had theatre as a main focus point for several years and its former manager Søren Kaare-Andersen rejects this criticism by claiming that they base their decision on a qualitative evaluation: ‘The fact that something is small and experimental does not necessarily mean that it is good. And the same goes for the large institutions’ (Redder 2011, 14). For this foundation, the support for theatres is given on the basis of the values of the field. It argues that its funding work facilitates theatrical autonomy by providing money to those who can legitimately claim it. This does not mean that the foundation does not want anything in return for their support, it just points to the fact that the foundation is dependent on the autonomous values of the theatre field to fulfil these heteronomous values.13 A good example of how this sort of private funding can work is the case of prominent American playwright Charles Mee and his relationship with his friend Richard Fisher, an investment banker who at one point was chair of Morgan Stanley’s board and who was a major patron of the arts, especially the fine arts and contemporary theatre.14 In the 1990s, Mee was extremely successful as a playwright, working with directors such as Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff, but still struggled to support himself financially. He took jobs as an editor and teacher to support his creative work. His writing, both for the stage and elsewhere, began to examine the question of the artist’s relationship to private donors, the market, and state funding bodies, and how an artist could remain a critical voice while being dependent on these rich and powerful forces. In his play Full Circle, he mocks this dependence in a scene in which Heiner Müller, as director of the Berliner Ensemble, tries to simultaneously flatter and plead with Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany. Searching for a way out, Mee wrote to his multimillionaire friend Fisher in 1998. Mee’s initial proposal was for a joint playwrighting venture in 13 The purpose of the foundation is formulated as follows: ‘We wish to make Denmark greater by promoting insight and outsight in society. We do that by supporting and developing projects of high quality in Danish cultural life and social work’ (Bikubenfonden 2012, n.p.). 14 The best narrative of this relationship can be found in Schlueter (2007).

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which Fisher would provide the money and Mee would provide the labour, but Fisher was uninterested. Instead, he proposed simply becoming a patron of Mee’s work, providing him with an income sufficient to support him and his family. There were, apparently, no conditions of content, form, quantity, or any other limitation on Mee’s artistic output. Fisher and his wife did not commission Mee’s work; they simply paid for it. While Mee retains ownership of his writing, his published scripts and programmes do note that his work is ‘made possible by’ Fisher and his wife Jeanne. Mee himself described it to Jennifer Schlueter in 2007 as follows: Dick [Richard Fisher] said to me, ‘I want to see what you do if you don’t have to worry.’ And then you need to try to imagine that he really meant what he said, that he and Jeannie really intended to give me complete freedom to do whatever I wanted to do, without even the hint of a remark that would in any way inhibit me, that they were patrons of the arts in a way that neither you nor I can quite conceive. (Schlueter 2007, 99–100)

Why Fisher did this, aside from friendship, love of the arts and sheer generosity, is hard to say. Fisher died in 2004, but left Mee a bequest and his widow continues to support his work. It is fair to say, though, that in the circles of bankers and executives in which the Fishers moved, there were far more expensive houses and cars than there were Medici-style patrons of the arts. That distinctiveness is itself a quite specific (and valuable) form of capital. Summary: Theatrical autonomy and issues of self-representation When theatre is used to gain social prestige, its claims to autonomy can be helpful in service of other values. These other values vary, such as civic image and economic development when used for cultural diplomacy by cities and nations or fame and self-image in the case of private patronage. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms, the value regimes of fame and market and the inspired polity in cultural diplomacy can come together for the common good of social prestige. However, it is possible that in such situations the autonomy of theatre becomes dominated when theatre practitioners are not allowed to pursue theatre’s own specific value. Purely aesthetic criteria can clash with cultural diplomacy. This is easy to image when asking oneself why a royal would want to have his or her foreign visits to be accompanied by the national ballet or symphony orchestra but not by a performance of an experimental dance group including bodily mutilation or nudity. It is only specific parts of the theatre system that are of interest

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for cultural diplomacy, though in some cases their specific appeal may be the very autonomy of their work (e.g. in opera and dance). These tensions are also relevant for personal social prestige and sponsorship. Depending on the interests of sponsors or the rich and famous, the autonomy of the theatrical field can align with the core values of the fame value regime (e.g. when projecting a cutting edge image or when using classical theatre forms to project a luxurious or civilized image), but they can also do the opposite (when theatre offers a critique of the existing social order, for instance). This clash of values may impede theatrical autonomy considerably.

6.3.

Economic development

Bourdieu describes art fields as economic worlds reversed. This might lead one to think that the most obvious tension within these fields is that between the internal-field values held by peer artists and external values of the market; that is, between the inspired and market value regimes. And clearly, that tension is real and apparent. In the inspired regime, objects derive their value from their personal link to an inspired person (normally, that object’s creator). In the market regime, in contrast, objects have value as useful or tradable products and are stripped of personal ties. Their worth lies in their saleability: one will immediately say goodbye to an object when one can fetch a better price. Personal affections stand in the way of making profit. However, in Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory the economy (or what is commonly referred to as ‘the market’ or ‘the laws of the market’) is not only represented in the market value regime. Besides saleability, the economy also values efficiency, a prominent value in the industrial regime, and publicity as that which is well known might also be desired (making fame values important). And even inspiration is important for thinking up new products or services or improving the methods to produce them. As a result, the notion of value regimes provides a more nuanced perspective to understand the tensions between art fields and ‘the market’. No matter what form they take, cultural policy measures aim to at least mitigate economic pressures in theatre fields. If that is the case, then how could we conceptualize the opposite: theatrical autonomy serving the economy? This issue has been discussed frequently since economic justifications for cultural policy came to the fore in the 1980s (Belfiore 2004). We do not intend to repeat these debates here, or to evaluate whether these claims are economically sound. Instead, because these justifications are commonly expressed, we will examine how claims to theatrical autonomy can be used to serve them.

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There are two distinct types of economic justifications for cultural policy. The first type represents classical economic impact arguments; the second type aligns the arts and cultural sector with the creative economy. Both types of legitimizations make use of the figure of a city with a culture and economy supported by specific art forms, in our case theatre. Standard economic impact analysis Standard economic impact arguments treat theatre (or other arts) as a means to enhance economic growth in a city or region.15 Theatre organizations themselves engage in economic activities, in that they hire personnel and buy equipment. The salaries they pay and the goods and services they buy from other industries are, of course, a direct contributor to a city’s economy. Furthermore, they may also attract visitors to a city, either by directly selling them tickets or contributing to the city’s positive image as a good place to visit. Visitors spend money when visiting the theatre, e.g. they take a taxi, hire a baby-sitter and may eat a meal in a restaurant in the city prior to the performance. In some cases, they even need to spend the night in the city where they visit the theatre. As a result, the taxi driver, the baby-sitter, restaurant owner (and cooks and waiters) earn a living. These are called additional expenditures; that is, they are additional to the price paid for the theatre ticket. Both direct and additional expenditures are calculated as the direct economic impact of the arts, and are then multiplied by a factor to account for the ‘knock-on effect’ in the local economy to measure the indirect economic impact. This knock-on effect occurs because of the fact that employees of the theatre company, the taxi driver, the baby sitter, etc. will spend their salary in the city as well, thus earning the local bakery and home decoration shops money. So €1m in theatre subsidies will, in the end, make the local economy grow by more than €1m.16 Myerscough’s 1988 study of the British cultural sector is generally regarded as the starting point for impact analysis.17 Such analyses have been done for cities such 15 For the sake of brevity, we will not refer to specific sources in this section. For thorough discussions of these arguments see e.g. Van den Hoogen (2010, Chapter 8), Van Klink (2005), Throsby (2001) and Van Puffelen (2000). 16 Impact analysis involves very intricate measurement methods and so-called ‘input-output’ tables that take all sorts of factors into account, the most important being the connectedness of the local economy to the economy of other regions. Once regional economies are interconnected, the impact effects may `leak’ to other regions, lowering the multiplier. 17 In 2013, the economic impact of the British cultural sector has been studied again, see CEBR (2013).

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as Amsterdam (KPMG, 1996) and Leuven/Louvain, Belgium (WES 2010), as well as for cultural institutions in Gothenburg in Sweden (Armbrecht 2012). Impact studies can also be targeted at assessing the impact of specific cultural events such as festivals e.g. for Bruges, European Cultural Capital (WES 2003) and the historic exhibitions in Mechelen in 2003 (Mechelen, Stad in Vrouwenhanden, 2006). There are few instances where the theatre sector has been researched specifically (Hansen 1991; Shellard 2004). Though many economists have misgivings about the validity of these calculations claiming that they either overestimate impacts (as a result of unfair calculation methods) or underestimate them (as they do not take into account the transfer of the arts sector to the creative economy, as detailed below), they are largely accepted as valid measurements.18 When analysed as a value conflict, claims to theatrical autonomy are most often used to lend social prestige and fame to a city’s image in order to attract visitors. Obviously, large facilities or large scale festivals are at an advantage here. However, niche programming or a more diverse community of artists can be very effective too when targeting specific audiences. The National Opera in Amsterdam, for instance, attracts opera fans to the capital city because it represents the best quality opera in the Netherlands, and many theatre fans visit London for the vibrancy of its diverse experimental theatre scene, or come to Stratford-upon-Avon for the particular high culture offered by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Such visitors will combine their cultural visit with a dinner or lunch (specifically matinee performances on Sundays are effective here). The exclusive nature of the performances here is key in realizing this effect. In other words, claims to theatrical autonomy (here in the form of quality of the productions) align with fame and market values, though such claims still are clearly ministerial to other values. Furthermore, the presence of theatre in a city may affect the decisions of firms to settle in a city or develop a branch there. The idea is that theatre facilities add to the image of a city and that this image is taken into account when settlement decisions are being made. Hence, the theatrical supply in a city is used as a means to attract inhabitants to a city as well as visitors. However, for small countries the argument may be hard to sustain 18 This does not imply, however, that they are accepted as valid justifications for public cultural policies. Impact calculations can never determine whether spending money on art or theatre is the most efficient way to stimulate an economy, which would be required for an economic justification for the arts. Few economists believe that the arts are, in fact, the most efficient possible means of stimulating an economy. Of course, the justification for arts funding may not be expressed primarily under the economic logic of the market value regime.

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as travelling distances are small and changing jobs may not always imply moving to another city. Nevertheless, it is a generally accepted idea that firms take the supply of cultural amenities into account, not in the least promoted by Richard Florida’s notion of the creative city, which brings us to the second type of economic legitimizations. The Creative City argument Much has been written about Richard Florida’s concept of creative cities (2002), but there is no doubt that his analysis and those of related theorists such as Pine and Gilmore (1999) and Landry (2008) have fundamentally changed the arguments for subsidy for theatre and the arts in general. A proper supply of art and cultural experiences has become an important parameter in the competition between cities trying to attract the highly educated citizens that constitute the ‘creative class’ whose essential role in the economy, Florida argues, is to engage in creative problem-solving.19 This has become a prominent argument for the subsidy of arts on a national level, but even more so on a local and regional level.20 Employers place a high value on the creative class, as they think that these are the workers who will come up with new products and services and thus drive up profits. These jobs therefore tend to be quite high-paying. As their key assets are their creative and knowledgeable workforce and they have little need for raw materials, industries that employ creative classes are free to locate themselves where workers want to live, rather than forcing their workers to move to a less desirable places. These workers tend to be mobile and flexible, and do not ordinarily think of their careers in terms of permanent jobs. They are happy to change jobs frequently or to be self-employed. The creative class demonstrates a preference for city life with abundant amenities and ‘authentic’ scenes (see Bille 2010). Florida sums up his argument thusly: Essentially my theory says that regional economic growth is driven by the location choices of creative people—the holders of creative capital—who 19 Florida lists the occupations of the creative class as artists, designers, architects, computer specialists (including the gaming industry) and university teachers, but he also includes research and development specialists, accountants and marketers. These are all people involved in creative problem solving as the core of their job. 20 Johannison (2010) has documented Swedish examples, Van den Hoogen (2010) studied the cultural policies of Dutch cities, concluding that even cities of the size of Groningen (186,000 residents) and Arnhem (140,000 residents) refer to Richard Florida, while he developed his theory using American cities which are orders of magnitude larger.

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prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas. (Florida 2002, 223)

Cities with cultural heritage, abundant natural and sports facilities as well as a vibrant cultural scene hold a distinct advantage. Gielen (2009) argues that the ‘scene’ should be taken literally: it is the place where people go to see and to be seen, exchanging their creative ideas. Thus, the city itself becomes the factory for knowledge production, and boundaries between work-time and leisure start to blur, a distinct feature of the post-Fordist economy. It should be noted that Florida’s argument offers both an intrinsic and extrinsic legitimization of cultural policy. Intrinsically, the argument runs along the lines of theatrical autonomy that we have presented earlier with reference to Van Maanen (2009) and Van den Hoogen (2010). As Florida argues that tolerance is a major factor in settlement decisions of the creative class, it is precisely because of its autonomy that theatre fields can contribute to such a strategy. Because of the artistic function of theatre—that is, because the experience of it is able to propose new metaphors for human interaction—the boundaries of what a society can make sense of and thus tolerate may expand. Renowned cultural economists such as Throsby (2001) also argue along these lines, though Thorsby himself is not interested in the specific difference between intrinsic and extrinsic functions. However, Van den Hoogen (2010) points out that the creative city argument to a large extent is extrinsic as it is the diversity of amenities that attract the creative class, including high-profile, large cultural institutions as well as small, experimental ones—hence the allure of the creative class argument to city cultural officials. Theatre here is considered just one amenity amongst others, and a relatively minor one at that.21 Several criticisms have been levelled at the so-called creative class thesis. While we cannot discuss them all here, a few of them are instructive as they help to clarify the underlying value regimes behind Florida’s thesis as a justification for cultural policy. First, the creative city strategy has the disadvantage that it benefits the already affluent. Blue-collar workers and especially low-skilled service workers will have to contend with merely the crumbs of the creative economy (see McGuigan 2009). As a result, policies based on the creative class thesis would pose a threat to civic values as 21 Bille (2010) has studied whether the creative class in Denmark indeed has a preference for culture and art facilities. She found that they do, however they tend to be more active socially anyway, so they also play more sports, go on hiking trips and vacations more than other classes groups.

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they may increase inequality. Second, creative work itself is not necessarily an unalloyed good. The blurring of boundaries between work and private life leads to a rise in work-related disease such as burnout (Gielen 2009). Furthermore, the project-based nature of creative work effectively destroys the concept of job security. Again, civic values here are under pressure. It is interesting to pursue this criticism a little further. In their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005[1999]), Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue that the arts have served as a laboratory for new ways of organising and controlling work since the social revolution of 1968. Capitalism has exploited the central value of the inspired regime by essentially commodifying creativity. Thus, the project value regime has emerged combining the central values of the inspired, market and industrial regimes in a new and intriguing way. In this new polity values, central to the inspired value regime, personal expression and creativity are placed in a context of goal-drivenness that is alien to the inspired regime, in effect making autonomy—which only appears to be valued highly in the project city—subservient to other goals. A third criticism regards the validity of the creative class thesis. As urban economist Edward Glaeser (2005 and 2011) points out, Florida is obviously right: cities boost creativity and economic performance. So statistical links between city cultural provision and economic growth can be found, but that does not provide proof for the causality of the relationship. In a review of Florida’s The Creative Class, Glaeser (2005) tested Florida’s data and found no additional explanatory value for the tolerance and bohemianism that Florida sees as key to economic success. It simply is city size and hence the availability of large amounts of human capital that drive economic growth. So Florida has not come up with anything new; rather, he has rephrased and popularized patterns already well known to urban economists.22 However, a different approach to supplying statistical evidence of Florida’s claims does offer support for the notion that cities are more attractive—to both knowledge-workers and others— when they offer a large supply of theatre. Gerard Marlet (2009) has performed a regression analysis linking real estate 22 It should therefore be questioned whether a theory that has been developed for cities in America has any relevance for smaller European cities. As Florida himself has indicated at several conferences, size does matter as it allows cities to finance the diversity of the amenities needed either through direct subsidy or through the availability of several niche markets of such a size that they can sustain this diversity economically in a geographical location. This is why Van Maanen (2009) indicates that large cities are the natural habitat for the unsubsidized arts. But do these strategies also have relevance for smaller regional cities of the size of Dordrecht, the Netherlands (120,000 residents), Holstebro, Denmark (33,500 residents), or Tartu, Estonia (97,000 residents)?

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values of houses in Dutch cities to the availability of amenities. He was able to establish a statistically relevant link between the availability of performing arts facilities—measured as the number of shows and concerts put on in a city—and real estate values, while sport facilities and museums had no clear influence. This link is independent of other settlement factors such as accessibility, crime levels and the quality of houses in a city. To sum up: people are willing to pay more for a house when it is close to music and theatre.23 Thus, theatrical activity can have real economic effects, at least when measured in terms of real estate value. Theatrical autonomy and the city economy Clearly, there is a tension between most claims to theatrical autonomy and the use of theatre for economic development. It is the high profile and more easily accessible kinds of theatre that have the ability to attract large amounts of visitors to a city, particularly the musicals of the West End and Broadway. But it is also possible that theatrical autonomy and economic values can align: it can be the aesthetic quality of theatrical productions (as defined within the field) that attracts visitors to a city in the long run. This is the case for the high-cultural capital theatre festivals in cities such as Avignon, Glyndebourne and Bayreuth. These cities make use of high art to build social prestige for their city, which can have a pronounced economic effect. A part of Holstebro’s ambitious cultural policy (as described above) was to attract highly educated citizens, which means that this is an early example of a Floridian strategy. The same can be witnessed in the Dutch city of Enschede, a former textile industry town of around 156,000 residents in the eastern part of the country. In an effort to project a musical image—largely justified by Floridian arguments—the city opened the largest opera facility in the Netherlands outside of Amsterdam in 2008, naming it the National Music Quarter. At the moment, the cultural institutions which are housed in this building, including the National Opera Touring Company, remain puzzled as to how to ‘fill in’ such a strategy. While the building is geared towards opera, the institutions feel this more autonomous mode of performance to be alien to the local population, which is demographically 23 Note that an earlier study in the city of Utrecht (Marlet and Tames 2002) was used to legitimize the extensive renovation of the city’s classical and pop music venue Vredenburg (it re-opened in 2014). The total costs of this refurbishment ran up to €20m. Relating theatrical offering to real estate values is very important for local cultural policy legitimization as the taxes of local authorities are related to the value of real estate and not to income of house owners. Higher real estate values thus benefit a city’s budget directly.

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skewed towards less educated and lower earning groups. For many of these institutions, a focus on rock music or musical theatre would seem more appropriate. Recent studies of Enschede’s image have indicated that the city has become renowned in its region for music, but on the national level the city has no cultural image whatsoever, being mainly known for its now defunct textile industry and a firework explosion in 2001. Though the creative city argument can be understood as a compromise aligning inspired, market and industrial values—which may have the effect of making some room for claims to theatrical autonomy—the economic goals that the argument contains clearly demonstrate that autonomy here is claimed as a useful means, but not as an end to pursue in itself. As a result, we cannot but conclude that the use of theatrical autonomy for economic purposes places autonomy in a subservient relationship to social prestige and economic development. Market and fame considerations may indeed lead to overemphasis on high-profile facilities with more popular offerings and on festivals rather than structural cultural facilities. Thus, the cultural resources of a city may be depleted in the long run as ongoing attention for developing theatre and nurturing its liaison with the local public is neglected. However, Bourdieu’s strict opposition between artistic work and the economy needs to be nuanced. In the cases where theatre festivals are able to attract visitors based on the aesthetic values of the festival—including high professional quality and diversity of the performances—theatrical autonomy may not be compromised. Furthermore, it should be noted that when arguments for economic development are only used to legitimize theatre policies rather than determine them, or when economic development is treated as a mere positive side effect of otherwise artistically oriented policies, theatrical autonomy is not necessarily compromised. This is frequently the case, as most cultural subsidies are allocated implicitly or explicitly based upon the advice of experts from the field and not on (evidence of) economic efficacy, even if the language of economics is used in parliaments and in public-facing reports. The recent the economic downturn has, however begun to prompt theatre institutions to look harder to ensure that those claims are backed with evidence that is adequately persuasive. A very different question is whether theatre does in fact promote economic prosperity. The answer to this is not yet clear. It seems that performing arts in general primarily engage with local citizens and thus may feature prominently in the creative city arguments. It is rather museums (both for heritage and visual arts) that are the main attractors of outside visitors. But some examples of performing arts attracting visitors can be found, primarily in the commercial sector (Broadway and the West End),

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although it still remains a question to what extent it is the theatre scene that attracts visitors to London and New York or if it merely one of the many activities available in these global cities.

6.4.

Social inclusion

Theatre-makers have always had intentions of being socially relevant. Some would even equate social relevance with artistic relevance. In Chapter 4, we already discussed theatre makers choosing to take up such seemingly heteronomous positions as part of their artistic profile. Here, we are interested in how actors outside theatre fields, such as politicians and social welfare professionals, make use of theatre’s claims to autonomy for their own purposes. Especially in Britain, but also in other European countries, the arts have been used as a tool to promote social inclusion (Kawashima 2006; Belfiore 2002). For example, in 2001 in Dutch cultural policy, the community arts have been hailed in as a cure for the alienation between the artistic community and less-privileged groups in society. The National Fund for Cultural Participation, set up in 2009, specifically focuses on community arts.24 With social inclusion theatrical values are opposed to civic values such as the representation of underrepresented groups and reach of theatre in society. It is the general interest of the underprivileged groups that they are represented and community theatre can accomplish that. And it is the general interest of society as a whole that these groups are not too alienated from society, immediately turning the argument into a paternalistic one. Development of these social groups can serve as the common good between theatrical and civic values. This immediately makes clear that use of theatre for social purposes can be problematic. So first we will discuss problems that should be levelled at these attempts. But we will also discuss how our understanding of autonomy allows theatre to 24 In Dutch cultural politics this should not be regarded as a novel development. Rather, it is a return to the ideals of 1970s politics which aimed to enhance the inherent creativity in people and to make the arts socially relevant as a response to the 1968 social revolution. In theatre of that time the so-called ‘vormingstheater’ (educational theatre) was a prominent movement aiming to reach diverse audiences and develop performances that address themes relevant to them, such as domestic violence. During performances, audience members could be asked to take the place of a performer in order for them to act out their solution to a societal problem. This is a variation of the model of ‘forum theatre’ developed by Brazilian theatre director and theorist Augusto Boal (1985). Frequently, performances were followed by discussions with audience members. With the advent of neo-liberal government in the 1980s the cultural politics shifted back to artistic quality as a major aim and social relevance was abandoned as an evaluation criterion.

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function in this manner, and how this is limited in practice. We will give a concrete example of this when describing the project Zina neemt de Wijk, performed in Groningen in 2010. Theatre as a means to alleviate social problems? An important point in Bourdieu’s understanding of social reproduction, mostly discussed in La Distinction (1979), is that a cultural habitus and art consumption are used as a marker of class distinction, or as it is formulated above, for the purpose of determining social prestige. This only works if the arts are considered something that not everyone is capable of appreciating. This can be said to be the greatest conceptual challenge to the cultural political project of the democratization of culture,25 but it should also be considered a complicating factor in the specific examples of actually promoting social inclusion through the arts (Mangset 2012). Thus, theatre forms which are able to attract and include socially marginalized groups will be considered suspicious because this audience does not have the right cultural capital to appreciate artistic values, casting doubt as to the artistic quality and relevance of these art forms from an autonomous perspective. Another reason to be sceptical about the ability of art to solve these types of social problems is that such problems are complicated and that there is no chance that one artistic intervention should solve anything. For this reason, it is often the case that an arts project serves merely as an excuse for politicians and civil servants who are not able to solve these problems through other means. This leads to what we would call ‘performative policies’ that enable politicians to claim to the concerned public that they are actually doing something in this problematic neighbourhood. Of course, they will not add that as a result of neo-liberal politics during the 1990s, all social facilities, such as community centres, health centres and libraries, had been taken out of these neighbourhoods. Thus such efforts can be regarded as cynical. However, if policies are implemented on a structural basis and envisioned in such a way that the results of projects can be built upon, e.g. participants are offered educational opportunities after the project, things might not turn sour (Matarasso 1997).26 A third reason to be sceptical about the use of art 25 Mangset (2012) has discussed whether or not equal use can be meaningfully considered a central objective of cultural policy when there is so strong evidence of the failure to fight unequal participation and use. 26 Matarasso’s study into the social efficacy of the arts has been heavily criticized (see e.g. Merli 2002 and Belfiore 2002) on a methodological level. However, his contention that artistic activities may be a first step in combatting social exclusion, a step that needs to be built upon

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or theatre to combat social exclusion relates to efficiency. Though it may be argued that the arts indeed bring about social effects, they may not be particularly effective when used to pursue non-artistic goals. In such a vein, Belfiore (2002) argues with merit that art might not always be an efficient tool to combat alienation, and other efforts may be more useful or effective in this. Thus evaluating art based on its social efficacy is dangerous. A fourth difficulty concerning such politics concerns the community arts specifically. It arises from the way community art projects are organized and funded. Using the example of a project created by Benjamin Verdonck concerning illegal refugees in Antwerp (the so-called sans papiers), Gielen (2011) questions how effective community arts can be. He sees two major problems. First, community artists themselves may be geared towards the goals that are prominent in the art field in which they operate, instead of being genuinely motivated by the problems of the people with whom they work. In a reference to Bourriaud’s term ‘relational aesthetics’ he describes such artists as auto-relational rather than allo-relational. Second, he points to the fact that funders of these projects may not be in fact interested in any form of eff icacy of the project. It is not just politicians who apply performative policies but also off icials of public housing corporations and welfare institutions. Once projects point to the shortcomings of such interested parties, for instance the insufficient repair programme of a housing corporation, they may swiftly withdraw their support for the project. Such situations clearly point to what Marcuse would denote as ‘repressive tolerance’: Funders constrain community art projects to the extent that they can no longer be socially subversive. Theatre’s efficacy in the social domain Our view on autonomy suggests that, at the personal level, community theatre can work to change views of people on their situation.27 Participants do not need to defer to the intentions of the community artists nor to those of their funders, but can find community theatre’s efficacy in its ability to engender challenging experiences in audience members. Through such experiences they may change their outlook on their situation, a view which conforms with the perspective on theatrical autonomy that is central to this with proper educational or other offerings to alienated groups, has—rightfully—not been under attack. 27 See the contribution of Van den Hoogen and Van Maanen (2011) in Gielen’s volume on community arts

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book. Such a challenge can occur as a result of the theatrical aesthetics that are used being new for the participants, but also as a result of the collective nature of the experience. In essence, Van den Hoogen and Van Maanen (2011) claim that representing underrepresented groups on stage can be a means of emancipating them. Thus, they concur with Matarasso (1997), who also points to the fact that it is crucial that underrepresented groups are represented through the arts, and with Rancière’s thinking on the politics of aesthetics as a question of the division of the sensible (Rancière 2004 [2000]). They point to the basic question of the possibility—and difficulty—of representation. This is important in community art because one of the things that art can do in fighting social exclusion is to raise the visibility of those normally rendered invisible by the established patterns of who and what ought to be seen. Nonetheless, though such artistic functioning of community theatre is possible on the personal and collective level, it is the organizational conditions under which the projects are organized that determine whether they will also be socially effective. An example of how this can work is the project carried out in Groningen by the Amsterdam based Zina Platform in May 2010. Zina Platform is a cooperative of female artists centred around the well-known Dutch actress, Adelheid Roosen. They try to engender ‘gentle’ confrontations with the difficulties and joys of everyday life of women from all walks of life.28 The members of the platform come from various ethnic backgrounds and have their own specific artistic practices: text writing, acting, storytelling and cooking. The platform was invited to do a project in two ‘problem’ neigbourhoods in the city of Groningen (187,000 residents). This invitation came from four institutions: the local creativity centre, the local theatre company NNT (Noord Nederlands Toneel, North Netherlands Theatre Company), the foundations for Social Legal Services (MJD in Dutch) and the local refuge for women experiencing domestic violence. In the words of these welfare professionals, they wanted to experience their ‘clients’ through the eyes of an artist. Furthermore, they wanted to raise public awareness of domestic violence. On the one hand, the involvement of these welfare institutions guaranteed access to the communities in the neighbourhoods. On the other, it offered the potential for a meaningful effect outside of the community. The Zinas devised strategies to organize the ties with the community, amongst others what they called ‘adoption’ by the targeted neighbourhood. For two weeks, each member of the platform lived either with a homeless 28 Details can be found at http://www.zinaplatform.nl/overzina.php?l=en (last accessed 27 December 2014)

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person, with a woman in the refuge, with an immigrant family or with a voter for the anti-immigrant party in the Netherlands. They collected these experiences as material for a performance which was made in the theatre venue of the NNT.29 Thus allo- and auto-relational tendencies were mixed in the project. During the performance, the Zinas played and recounted the stories of the people they had met, and some of them represented themselves on stage, such as two women from the refuge, a lonesome elderly man and a transgender person. The performance was concluded by the arrival of a group of people from the neighbourhood who, during the performance, had walked from a central point in the neighbourhood to the theatre venue in a silent procession. Each of them shook hands with two members of the audience and invited them to come to a table which had come down from the ceiling of the theatre. The performance ended with actors, audience members and people from the neighbourhood talking to each other and eating and drinking the food that was set out on this table. The performance made poignantly clear that families labeled as ‘multi-problem households’ do not consider themselves to fall under that label. They focus on their strengths while professional welfare workers only see their weaknesses. Furthermore, it asked striking questions about the decline of public facilities in these neighbourhoods and about alienation, stating that some of the indigenous Dutch in these neighbourhoods are more alienated from society than ethnic minorities. Seeing their lives represented on stage as valid and interesting stories, the people from the neighbourhoods were invited to reconsider their social position. As the officials of the welfare institutions were also present during performances, this might have led to meaningful changes in the social economies of these neighbourhoods. Theatrical autonomy and civic values To conclude, our view on autonomy in theatre systems does make it possible to think of theatrical efficacy in the social domain. However, the organizational circumstances of theatre to a great extent dictate whether theatre is, in fact, effective for ‘non-theatrical’ purposes. For ‘regular’ theatre productions, it is difficult to imagine how they can be socially effective for 29 Note that Zina’s productions do not always occur in standard theatre settings. The group also produces neighbourhood excursions (e.g. the audience members are transported on the back of a scooter driven by Moroccan youth or take place in allotment complexes). This might lead one to conclude that Roosen and the Zinas are not part of the Dutch theatre field proper. However, in 2012 they received the Prosceniumprijs, the most important prize of the Dutch theatre association affirming Roosen’s position as a recognized theatre-maker.

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underprivileged groups as they tend not to be among the audiences. On the level of representation and content these institutions are, not unjustly, accused of only representing the standard white and middle class (see e.g. Teaterudvalget 2010; Davies 2007).30 Thus, theatrical autonomy seems to be a disincentive to the societal functioning of theatre. As a dominant value, theatrical autonomy surpasses civic values. When considering theatrical practices which are specifically geared towards underprivileged groups, efficacy in the sense of allowing for challenging experiences is possible. Whether social efficacy also follows is dependent on the organizational setting of such projects. For one, it can be the case that community artists themselves may not be particularly interested in societal efficacy, as they may aim primarily at goals that align with the theatrical field itself rather than being motivated by the concerns of the community they work with. Second, through repressive tolerance, politicians and funders of projects can prevent socially-involved theatre from critiquing the very social forces that require critique. And third, small effects that are realized on a personal or small group level may not be properly developed so as to be made larger or more permanent (for instance, a suitable educational offering may not be available for the community at stake). In such cases, even positive effects may turn sour, as Matarasso explained. For our discussion of theatrical autonomy, this means that the organizational structures that sustain the field can simultaneously impede and facilitate societal functioning. While at the level of rhetoric it is easy to express that inspired and civic values align perfectly, using development of underprivileged groups as a common good, in practice this may be hard to achieve. Furthermore, we cannot disregard the inherent tensions concerning ‘engaged’ theatre makers such as Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal (see also Chapter 2), who are seen as paradigmatic figures by the contemporary theatre field. We already referred to this in Chapter 4, where we discussed how claims to autonomy could allow artists to participate in politics without entering the political field. This also involves those theatre-makers who trouble the exclusively fictional and dramatic status of the theatrical work, as we described in Chapter 3. Many of these theatre-makers try to strike a 30 For a recent discussion, see Moss and Greer (2014): ‘Does it matter that [British] arts audiences are white, metropolitan and middle class?’ The Arts Council of England is concerned enough about this that one of the tasks it assigns its Cultural Leadership Programme is to ‘strengthen the diversity of the leadership of the creative and cultural industries’ in England (Hopkins and Reid 2011, 20).

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balance between aesthetic and civic intentions, in fact seeing the two as a single project. Holding an overtly political agenda has from time to time caused artists to claim the end of the autonomy of the arts, a stand that has clearly been taken by the different avant-garde movements throughout the twentieth century, who announced their intention to merge art, politics and daily life.31 We would argue that the impact of the avant-garde has been highly dependent on the autonomous position it assumed as part of the arts field, even if avant-gardists then chose to deny that position. In this section, we have made use of practices that are usually not considered as comprising either the core of theatre systems or the theatrical avant-garde. The recognition of Adelheid Roosen and her Zina Platform by Dutch peer theatre-makers indicates, however, that the distinction between cores and peripheries is not clean. The field is constantly changing, and we should understand that the lines we have drawn in this chapter are easily crossed and moved.

6.5. Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen how agents outside of the theatre field can make use of claims to the autonomy of theatre for their own purposes. We have argued that this does not mean that the autonomy of the theatrical field disappears, but it can mean that other value regimes can impose on autonomy, forcing its claims to be made subservient to other values. By analysing how theatrical autonomy is ministerial to outer-field considerations or, on occasion, is even allowed to dominate other values, this chapter supports our statement that the relationship between field-specific capital and others forms of capital today is far more complex than the simple ‘economic world reversed’ Bourdieu postulated. The discussion in this chapter made clear that the efficacy of theatre in other social fields can depend on how theatre is organized. The organizational arrangements of theatre in society may limit its appeal to large audiences and thus compromise the achievement of social prestige for private sponsors. Educational values may be hard to attain when theatrical experiences either are too hard to understand because pupils (and teachers) are unfamiliar with theatrical aesthetics or when theatrical experiences are not contextualized in education. Cultural diplomacy and economic values may be realized more easily with accomplished theatre aesthetics, 31 For a classic example see Marinetti (1901) and the discussion of it and others like it in Puchner (2006).

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though when subsidies or sponsorship is allocated based on aesthetic criteria, this ensures alignment of social prestige and economic on the one hand and theatrical values on the other. Furthermore, socially excluded groups usually are not represented in general theatre audiences, leaving theatre’s civic efficacy to specifically designed productions or community theatre that, in some countries, have developed into a different branch of theatre with its own (sometimes stigmatized) specific value. The discussion above is summarized in the table below in which the values served by theatrical autonomy are listed systematically, as well as the shortcomings the use of theatrical autonomy might have for realization of such values. Table 5. How claims to theatrical autonomy can be useful to agents outside theatre fields How the argument can be formulated in practice

Moral betterment

Self-representation (or social prestige)

Which common Specific attention should be paid to the following when analysing theatre systems good is at stake?

Civilization

Theatrical value is assumed to engender (mental or moral) development of the audience members, so claims to autonomy align with outside agendas.

Cultural Education

Theatrical autonomy is preserved when aesthetic criteria are prevalent in selecting performances for cultural education. Crucial question: how are theatrical values contextualized in the education system?

Freedom of speech

Theatrical autonomy dovetails with the dominant position of the West, representing it as politically (and morally) superior.

Civilization / Cultural Diplomacy

Theatrical autonomy represents a civilized image of a nation of city (i.e. national or local cultural branding). Iconic performing arts are most frequently used; experiments with theatrical aesthetics can be problematic. Theatre projects can be used for specific goals, such as engendering mutual understanding based on their artistic quality to challenge perceptions.

Social prestige

Being seen at (or sponsoring) artistically important theatrical events lends one social prestige. However, when theatre becomes too marginal to attract media attention it may be hard to realize these values. In other words, theatrical autonomy may also ‘work against’ this type of functioning.

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How the argument can be formulated in practice

Economic development

Social inclusion

197

Which common Specific attention should be paid to the following when analysing theatre systems good is at stake?

Attracting visitors and businesses (i.e., social prestige)

Claims to theatrical autonomy are clearly ministerial to other purposes. Large scale facilities and classical theatre forms are at an advantage though specific niche activities may be helpful too. Measurement of these effects occurs through impact analysis.

Creativity (i.e., attracting knowledge workers because of a city’s diversity of cultural amenities)

Though seemingly aligning with claims to theatrical autonomy (as a common good between inspired, market and industrial values) the economic aim to which creativity is harnessed contradicts this.

Dovetails with claims to theatrical autonomy when artistic values of theatrical experiences are used to promote the development of such groups. Objection: artistic intentions of professional theatre makers are ultimately different from the civic objecDevelopment of tives of underprivileged groups. underprivileged Objection: because of claims to autonomy, theatre (in groups regular venues) has an exclusionary nature and thus does not reach underprivileged groups. Crucial question: Do theatrical programmes include appropriate educational or other opportunities for underprivileged groups?

Conclusion Over the course of this book, we have developed our initial claim that the concept of autonomy and the debates that surround it are key tools for studying the social structures and dynamics of theatre systems in different countries. Because theatre is so wholly a place- and time-based art form, the comparative study of its social function might require researchers to be present at very different types of events across nations and at the same moments in time, while also grasping a basic knowledge of the social significance of theatre to each society, of theatrical languages and of local ways of connecting to theatre. Such a task is, of course, so massive as to be impossible. This is why comparisons between theatre fields are often largely restricted either to comparing quantitative data on production, dissemination and reception of theatre (see e.g. Van Maanen and Wilmer 1998) or to (case study) comparisons of theatrical aesthetics by describing certain performances, performance practices or specific use of internationally acclaimed playwrights or directors (see, amongst many others, Shevtsova 2004). While such comparisons are often insightful, in our opinion they are necessary of limited use to research on theatre as a social practice. Beyond the figures and aesthetics, there are social relationships between those in and outside theatre fields. Paying attention to the debates surrounding theatrical autonomy is helpful in discerning these relationships, describing how they come about and understanding how they both allow for and restrict theatre’s position in society. In this book, we have tried to demonstrate how analysing actions of agents in theatre fields as claims to autonomy can help us understand theatre as a social practice. The problem of theatrical autonomy adds a structural feature to the study of theatre. By proposing our formula for autonomy—that a theatre field is autonomous to the extent that it pursues its own values—we have offered something like a piece of grammar to describe and analyse the social embeddedness of theatre. Pursuing one’s own value implies the notion of specific (theatrical) value, which we have derived from Bourdieu’s field theory. We have not set ourselves the task of describing or defining this value specific to the theatre field. This is for three reasons. First, we argue that any formulation of the nature of specific value can be only temporary as the very nature of theatre fields—or art fields in general—is that they resist strict definitions. As soon as such definitions are formulated, agents in the field immediately start to undermine, challenge and change them.

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Second, as we discussed in Chapter 1, we argue that it is only possible to either define specific value negatively, that is in opposition to the pursuit of other values, or by ostension, by pointing to instances where one can indicate that theatre’s specific value is like this, or like that. This, however, is the job of theatre historians and those who have expertise in performance analysis. And still, though their efforts to point out the nature of specific theatrical value may be insightful, compelling and interesting, they can never be more than temporarily and fleeting picture of the status of the theatre of a specific nation at a specific point in time.1 Third, in our view, a concise description of theatrical value is not required to understand how agents in and around theatre fields lay claim to autonomy, why they do so and what this might gain them. Our job in this conclusion is to present this ‘grammatical tool’ systematically as a way of summarizing our thinking about the study of theatre in society. We do so by revisiting the first diagram we presented in the Introduction as a map of theatre fields and the relationships within them. (That diagram is reproduced below as Figure 1.) Theatrical autonomy implies not just that theatre is free to develop without the binds of market demands or government censorship. A more nuanced understanding of autonomy should be articulated at a number of levels, with reference to the different values present in the different social relationships within and around theatre systems. The tool we have presented in this book is designed as a way for researchers of theatre to be sensitive to the negotiations of value that are going on at all of these levels. As a result, we do not see theatrical autonomy as something absolute. It focuses attention to the question how both the values specific to the field and those which come from outside of it are negotiated within these relationships. At each level of this figure, the problem of theatrical autonomy occurs in a different way: Relationship (1) concerns the way in which theatrical performances are related to society, a relationship which—in current societies—is unavoidably channelled through the media. Theatre-makers choose subject matter from 1 This does not imply, however, that we can say absolutely nothing about theatre’s specific value. In Chapter 1, we did provide a definition of theatre as an object of study and its core elements—the live presentation of actions by members of a society to other members of that society, somehow separated from reality—will always form a part of the specific value pursued in theatrical fields, though even some of these elements at some points in time can and will be contested by agents in theatre fields.

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Figure 1. Relationships within and beyond the theatrical field

D. Society (4)

C. Arts/Theatre Funding B. Theatre Field (Theatre Organizations) A. Performance

(2)

(3)

(1)

society based on media coverage, amongst other reasons, and they may even pass these ideas on to other agents in the theatre field through their work. Furthermore, the media provide information on performances to audiences, and potential reviewers pick theatrical performances to report about and review based on the interest they might have for their audiences. This critical attention may amplify value conflicts in which theatre makers find themselves entangled. In Chapter 4, we provided examples of such conflicts. Relationship (2) regards the communication between theatre performers and the audiences immediately in front of them. This communication is influenced by the cultural competence of audiences, the values they are seeking to realize in attending theatre, and by the expectations they might have of performances (which, again, may have been set by media coverage of these performances or others).

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Relationship (3) is the relation between theatrical events and society. It involves the functions theatre has in society: its position within the larger structure of society and the function it holds for individual audience members. The realization of such functions is conditioned by the way theatre fields and structures relate to society, which is relationship (4). This relationship has developed out of the organization and funding of theatre systems and the way they have been creatively managed over the years in different countries. In Chapter 4, we discussed how actors present in theatrical events and in theatre systems (A and B) make use of claims to autonomy. Table 2, at the end of that chapter, lists the types of value conflicts that can occur with different kinds of theatre agents with different aims. We can distinguish between three types of tensions: – Tensions internal to a field, such as when theatre agents claim that they do not care about the audience’s needs or about its understanding a theatrical performance. Often this brings them in conflict with notion of cultural democracy. – Anti-economic claims, when theatre-makers claim not to care about saleability of their performances. This brings them in conflict with entertainment and market-oriented values. – Political claims: when theatre-makers use theatre to make political statements.2 In Chapter 4, we provided examples of moral and ethical transgressions of theatre makers, which turned out to be complicated cases. Here, the freedom of speech of artists (in itself a compromise between inspired and civic logics) clashes with religious (i.e. a different kind of inspired logic) or ethical considerations (which can be based on both domestic and civic notions). Moreover, it should be mentioned that with their political statements theatre makers can come into conflict with established powers, but they can also align with the interest of specific groups in society. As a result, the specific value of theatre can be (but need not be) aligned with civic values. In short, theatrical autonomy does not always imply the superiority of inspired values or the conflict between one value and another. Value alignments are possible and important to study, even though it is usually the value conflicts that attract our attention and which are amplified by the media. 2 The term political here indicates any action that determines how people and objects interact, thus shapes society. It is not restricted to politics.

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Chapter 5 discussed how theatre systems relate to the wider society (relationship B to C), mainly through funding and organizational arrangements. Its central claim was that theatrical autonomy is shaped by theatre organization, or rather, how organizational arrangements facilitate or impede possibilities to pursue values specific to theatre. Usually, this relationship is the domain of theatre policy researchers. These relationships are intricate and delicate, and similar-looking organizational arrangements in different countries may not have the same effects. Nevertheless, some general observations are possible: First, in cases where (a) funding is organized at a remove from government (what is called the ‘arm’s length’ principle); (b) distribution systems build a distance between artists and audiences; or (c) theatre-makers are located closer to the cultural centre of a country, theatre artists generally have an enhanced ability to claim autonomy. Second, various types of funders exist and each type may promote a variety of values (not just one single type), and so it would seem that when theatre-makers depend on a variety of funders rather than on a single funder, this improves their possibility to claim autonomy. This is Gielen’s argument (2012) that more heteronomously connected artists will experience higher levels of autonomy. We would refine this to say that it is not just the heteronomy of funders or their values but the particular ways in which these other values relate to the field’s specific value which is key. Even those values which are ‘foreign’ to a field like theatre can, at times, align with or support the field’s specific value, though of course at other times they can conflict. This claim provides an important grammatical device when studying differences between theatre systems of different countries. In each country, such value differences will be negotiated in a different manner. The table ending Chapter 5 lists how several funding and organizational devices of theatre field shape such value negotiations. In Chapter 6, we discussed the relationships between society and theatre (D to A and B) in asking how values specific to the theatre might serve outside agendas and by analysing how the relationships between field-specific values and other values are negotiated in these cases. We listed a number of common types of agendas: moral betterment, self-representation (or social prestige), economic development and social development, and discussed how each of these represents a compromise between field-specific and other values. It turned out that there is a close alignment between internal theatrical and external values in the moral betterment and social inclusion agendas as both rely on Schiller’s notion of theatre as an instrument of

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public education. In agendas of (self-)representation and economic development this alignment is more difficult to establish, though in all agendas both tensions and alignment may occur. We demonstrated this in Table 5. To summarize the argument in this book, studying theatre and its place in society requires an approach which draws from various disciplines: arts philosophy, theatre studies itself and cultural sociology. We advocate a methodology which includes attention to agents’ actions, but also to the intra-field and inter-field dynamics which guide and make such actions possible. For each of these, different tools are needed. In this book, by applying a socially critical concept such as theatrical autonomy to the study of theatre, we hope to have demonstrated how the aesthetic study of theatre can be complemented with a sociographic description of theatre-makers and audiences and a sociological analysis of the structural features that make up and surround theatre systems in order to paint a fuller picture of theatre as a comprehensive social practice. Moreover, such analyses should be sensitive to the fact that theatre systems change over time as a result of technological, political, artistic and social developments in society. Even when the structural features of theatre fields seem resistant to change—such as has been the case in the former Eastern European countries after 19893—the relationships between theatre and other aspects of society change and thus theatre’s function within and impact on society. Furthermore, such a methodology is sensitive to the fact that theatre systems and their function, meaning and power differ between countries. As a result, comparisons of national theatre fields require thorough and vast empirical investigations, providing quantitative and qualitative data on the outputs of theatre systems (including the number and nature of performances, attendance figures and data on audience experience, to start with). They also require descriptions of how theatre is organized systemically in each country and how that fits within larger social structures and patterns. And, they require an understanding of the actions of agents in theatre systems as claims to theatrical autonomy—issued from a variety of value perspectives—in order to contextualize such data sensibly. Such a methodology will make it more difficult to make easy reductionist comparisons based on theatre statistics, particular performative aesthetics or organizations alone. Thus, even in those instances when theatre makers seem to deny its existence altogether, the notion of theatrical autonomy foregrounds theatre as the specific, potent, and exhilarating social activity it ultimately is. 3 See the contributions of Saro, Lelkes and Pappel in the volume Global Changes, Local Stages (2009).

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About the Authors

Joshua Edelman ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he writes on the intersections between theatre, religious practice and political activity in the contemporary West. He received his PhD in theatre from Trinity College, Dublin in 2010, and has taught at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Birkbeck, University of London. He is a member of the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP) and is founding co-convener of Performance, Religion and Spirituality Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He is the co-editor of Performing Religion in Public (Palgrave, 2013) and his articles have appeared in journals including Performance Research, Amfiteater, Nordic Theatre Studies, Ecumenica and Liturgy. Louise Ejgod Hansen ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology, Aarhus University. Her main research areas are cultural policy research, qualitative audience research and theatre studies. She is a member of the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP) and was engaged in a research and development project with Scenekunstnetværket Region Midtjylland 2010–2013 and is currently (2013–2018) functioning as Project and Research Manager of the researchbased evaluation of Aarhus as European Capital of Culture in 2017. For more information see http://pure.au.dk/portal/da/[email protected]. Quirijn Lennert van den Hoogen ([email protected]) has worked as an official for cultural policy in the Netherlands at provincial and municipal levels. Currently, he is university lecturer in art sociology and arts policy at the University of Groningen. His research interests include evaluation of cultural policies, theatre systems, the cultural policy of cities and their societal impacts. He has written articles on the cultural participation of ethnic minorities, community arts and on cultural policy evaluation. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Dutch Handbook for Cultural Policy, and currently is a member of the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP) and a member of the Research Centre for Arts in Society (http://www.rug.nl/ research/arts-in-society/ ). For more information see: http://www.rug.nl/ staff/q.l.van.den.hoogen/.

Index Theatre companies are indicated with their name in original language, the country of origin is indicated between brackets. Absurd, Theatre of the 46, 113 (n14) Académie Française 35-39 Academy (performing arts or theatre) 70, 102, 116-118, 153 (n18), 154 Actor / actress 45-47, 52, 72, 76, 84, 86-87, 93, 99-102, 105-106, 108, 117 (n23), 152-154, 192-193 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 21, 40 (n11), 44-46, 52, 66-68, 73, 106, 120 Adorno, Theodor 32, 41, 48, 49 (n15), 65, 71 Affect 20, 31, 84-85 Agents in the field 19, 26-27, 29, 35, 37 (n10), 42-47, 50, 67-69, 69 (n10), 71, 73, 75, 78, 87, 90-91, 97-125, 127-128, 131, 137, 153, 161, 163-165, 167, 199-202, 204 Amoral 113, 125 Anti-Semitism 116 Antoine, André 48 (n14) Applied theatre 62, 64, 87-90, 95, 122, 146 Arabiske Initiativ, Det (Arab Initiative, the) 175 Architect State / Model 131-135, 137-138, 145 Aristotle 40, 49, 52-53, 169 Argument of presupposition 15 Arm’s length principle 89, 131, 133-134, 137, 144, 171, 203 Art 11-14, 16, 20-22, 25-28, 30, 32, 36-42, 45, 47-49, 51, 57, 60-61, 67, 73-74, 77-78, 88, 92, 94, 111-113, 118-121, 134, 140, 167-170, 172-176, 190-192, 195 Art, functional perspective on 52-54 Art, institutional perspective on 62-66 Artaud, Antonin 49 Artist 11, 18-19, 23, 25-26, 28 (n4), 30, 35-36, 38 (n10), 39, 42-45, 47, 52, 55-60, 63, 69-70, 72, 77-78, 80-83, 89, 92, 94-96, 98, 100-101, 103, 105-107, 111, 118, 121, 125 (n29), 128, 131, 133, 139-148, 149-154, 156, 158, 161, 174-175, 179, 181, 183, 184 (n19), 191-195, 202-203 Artistic criteria / Aesthetic criteria 40, 59, 113, 124, 128, 134 (n6), 135, 138, 162, 171 (n5), 180, 196 Artistic excellence 131-132, 133 (n5), 135-136 Artistic experience 62, 80 Artistic quality 100, 105-110, 118, 124, 133, 134 (n6), 135-138, 142, 145, 162-163, 170-172, 189-190, 196 Artistic value 37, 42, 52-53, 65, 83, 105, 109, 123, 140, 146, 171-172, 190, 197 Arts plan 134 Arts Council 89, 130-131, 134-135, 138, 139 (n11), 143, 161-162, 194 (n30) Associations of consumers 156-157, 193

Author, The 82 Autonomous position in / part of the (theatre) field 26, 28-29, 36, 43, 47-48, 77-78, 80, 88, 90, 92, 96, 102, 107, 111-112, 114, 122-123, 154, 156, 160, 195 Autonomy of the (artistic) field 28-29, 34, 39, 41, 50, 53, 56-57, 61, 73, 87-88, 101, 118, 120, 123, 134, 173, 179, 199 Audience 115 Audience 11, 14, 18-20, 36, 42-43, 45-46, 48, 51, 55, 60, 63, 72, 76-85, 87-89, 91-95, 98 (n1), 99, 102, 106, 111-113, 115, 117, 120-125, 132, 136, 138, 140, 143-144, 150-151, 155-160, 170, 175-176, 178-179, 183, 189 (n24), 190-196, 201-204 Audience Research 19, 122 Austin, John Langshaw 13 (n1) Avant-garde 83, 106, 140, 161, 195 Balfe, Judith 130, 140-142, 145, 148, 179 Balme, Christopher 27 (n3) Barish, Jonas 13 (n1) Basisinfrastructuur (Base Infrastructure) 136 Battle of Orgreave 76, 79, 87 Bech-Holten, Kasper 108, 110-111 Becker, Howard 51, 62-64 Beckett, Samuel 80 (n1), 109, 113 (n14) Belfiore, Eleonore 53 (n2), 58, 169, 181, 189, 190 (n26), 191 Belgium 80 (n3), 121-122, 183 Benjamin, Walter 69 Bennett, Oliver 53 (n2), 58, 169 Bentley, Eric 14 (n2) Bernstein, Leonard 91 Bikubenfonden (Denmark) 142, 179 Bildung 105 (n10), 169 (n2) Blockbuster 91, 158 Blue Man Group 158 Boal, Augusto 88, 189 (n24), 194 Boltanski, Luc 52, 68-73, 81 (n4), 106, 108, 116, 117 (n21), 119-120, 128, 139, 142-144, 168, 169 (n3), 180-181, 186, Bourdieu, Pierre 15-16, 18, 20-21, 25 (n1), 27, 28 (n4), 31 (n6), 32-52, 55-60, 64-73, 77, 107-109, 112, 127-128, 137, 139, 160, 163, 172, 178, 181, 188, 190, 195, 199 Bourriaud, Nicholas 77, 88, 191 Book of Mormon, The 91 Boundaries 60, 83, 91, 99, 185-186 Box office 102-104, 109-110, 128, 131, 138, 141 Branding 176, 196 Brecht, Bertolt 49, 87-88, 174, 194

220  Breivik, Anders Bering 114-115, 120, 174 Broadway 71, 90-91, 109, 158-159, 161, 177, 187-188 Bulk ticket buying 156-158 Cabaret 36, 43-44, 92 (n15), 103-104, 106, 115, 121, 123, 129, 157 (n23), 177 Capital, cultural 33, 34 (n9), 35-40, 45, 72, 107-109, 159, 172, 187, 190, Capital, economic 33, 34 (n9), 35-40, 45, 72, 95, 101-102, 107, 109, 160, 163 Capital, field-specific 27, 33-38, 40-43, 45-47, 78-79, 99, 100-102, 104-106, 108, 122-123, 137, 139, 154, 160-163, 195 Capital, social 33, 34 (n9), 38-40, 70, 72, 178 Capital, symbolic 163 Castalucci, Romeo 114 Central Europe 155 Centre-periphery 100-101, 128, 163 Chekhov, Anton 46, 83 Chiapello, Eve 21, 68, 72, 142, 168 (n1), 186 Chicago (musical) 91, 158 Children´s theatre 42-44, 104-105, 123, 160, 170-172 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 109 Christian / Christianity 114, 157 (n22), 173 (n7) City theatre 47, 112, 121, 129 (n1), 138, 175, 178 Citizen empowerment 169 Commercial (theatre) 36, 43, 71, 75, 90-92, 95, 103-104, 108-110, 124, 129 (n1), 130, 133, 157 (n23), 158-159, 188 Communication (artistic) 18, 58-61, 73, 80, 120-121 Communications, systems of 58-61 Community theatre / art 43-44, 49, 75, 87-90, 95, 122, 189, 191-196 Companies, theatre 43, 45, 47, 72, 99, 102-104, 106, 108-109, 111-113, 117, 129, 130 (n2), 135-136, 138-139, 147, 153, 155-156, 157 (n23), 159-163, 170-171, 177, 182, 192 Conscious intention 29, Consecration 35, 37, 38 (n10), 44, 98-99, 109, 154 Consumption 61, 148, 151, 155, 156 (n21), 157, 190 C:ntact (Denmark) 175-176 Conventions 64, 77, 82 Convertibility of capital 33, 34 (n9), 70, 73 Council for Culture, Dutch (Raad voor Cultuur) 135, 136 (n10) Creative city 184-185, 188 Creative class 184-186 Criteria, field-specific 40, 79, 89, 105, 117-118, 128, 142 Critic / criticism (theatre) 35, 37 (n10), 38 (n10), 40, 45, 59-60, 62-63, 76, 89, 92, 98-99, 101-102, 105, 108-109, 112-113, 123, 158, 178 Cross-over 106 Crouch, Tim 82 Crowdfunding 128, 142-143, 145, 147-148, 151 Cruelty (animal-) 115, 119

The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy

Cultural diplomacy 174-175, 176 (n8), 177, 180-181, 195-196 Danish Arts Foundation 87, 137 Danto, Arthur 52, 55 (n4), 62-64 Decentralisation 100, 161, 163 Definition of autonomy 15-16, 25-27, 48, 50 Definition (of theatrical / specific value) 37-43, 46, 50, 64, 78-79, 90, 98, 154, 199-200 Degree of autonomy 13, 25-26, 29, 36, 60 (n7), 64, 68, 93, 96, 143 Deller, Jeremy 76-77, 79 Democratization 149, 169, 175, 190 Denmark 21-22, 86, 93, 100-101, 104-105, 109, 111, 118, 129, 139, 142, 153-154, 156, 159, 162-163, 170, 174-175, 177, 179, 185, 186 (n22) De Staël, Madame, De L’Allemagne 58 Deutsche Oper (Germany) 114 Dickie, George 52, 62-63 Diegesis 52 Director 43, 45-47, 80, 94, 101, 105, 108-110, 112-117, 132, 152, 179, 189, 199 Discrimination 116 Distribution 101, 105, 128, 141, 143, 155-158, 162, 164, 203 Distribution of capital(s) 42, 45, 98 Distribution of subsidies 137, 138 Documentary theatre 14, 20, 62, 75-76, 83, 85, 88 (n11), 94 Doesburg, Johan 116-119 Don Carlos 110-111 Donor´s circles 145, 147-148, 150, 152 Doxa 28 (n4), 37, 55, 95, 135, 152-153 Drama / Drama text 14, 44, 46-47, 48 (n14), 49, 79-80, 82, 92-93, 137, 161 Duchamp, Fountain 64 Dukkepartiet 86-87 Dutch theatre touring system 43, 129 (n1), 136 (n9), 155-157, 177 Eastern Europe 129, 155, 165, 173, 204 Economic development 144, 169, 174, 180-189, 197, 203-204 Economy 101, 142, 181-189 Education (the field of) 153-158, 170-172, 196 Ende, Joop van den 109 Engagement 76-79, 111 Engineer model, the 131-132, 135, 145 England 130, 134, 178 (n12), 194 (n30) Enlightenment, the 53, 58 Ensemble 99 Entertainment 87 (n10), 102, 124 Entertainment Value 120, 124, 202 Entfürung aus den Serai, Die 114 Entry lever 152 Estonia 22, 138, 174, 178 (n12) Ethic(al) 11, 13, 15 (n3), 18, 25, 53, 77, 81, 90-95, 113-119, 123, 125, 202

221

Index

European theatre systems 42, 61, 98, 102, 107, 127-129, 165 Explicit claim to autonomy 20, 74-75 Experience 30, 53-65, 80, 91 Experiment(al theatre) 92, 110, 112, 153, 159-160, 183, 185, 196 Fabre, Jan 115, 118-119 Facilitator model, the 131-134 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 116, 120 Festival 113, 145, 159-160, 176-178, 183, 187-188 Field of theatre/ theatrical field 13, 37, 40-41, 73 Fight Night 82 Florida, Richard 184-186 Formal training 41, 116, 127-128, 131, 152-155, 164 Foundations 133, 142, 178-179 Frame 88, 115 Freedom of speech / Artistic Freedom 18-19, 26, 110, 116, 118-119, 173-175 Freedom 15, 25, 32, 48, 51, 56, 65, 113, 125, 130, 138, 141 Fringe theatre (Fringe position) 122 (n28) Full Circle 179 Funding 16, 18, 43, 87, 89, 109, 128-152, 161-164, 179, 202-203 Gatekeeper 98-100, 123, 125, 152 Germany / German-speaking countries 43, 47, 116, 132, 155 Globalisation 158-161, 165 Have I Got News For You 93 Hamlet 46, 102 Harvie, Jen 48, 158 Haskins, Casey 51, 60 Heinich, Natalie 66 Hek, Youp van ’t (the Netherlands) 121, 129 (n1), 157 (n23), 177 Heteronomous part of the (theatre) field 29, 43, 68, 75, 92, 97, 110, 123, 189 Hillman-Chartrand, Harry 131-134, 139, 144, 148, 174 Hungary 165, 178 Identification 141 Idol 82 Idomeneo 114 Institutionalization of anomie 37, 41 Institutionalism 51, 62-66, 92, 105, 139 Intendant 43, 132 Imagination 85, 94 Immersive theatre 62, 75, 79-81, 90, 94 Immoral 114, 118 Impact analysis 119, 122 (n28), 128, 162, 183, 197 Implicit claim to autonomy 20, 74-75, 85, 144 Independence 41, 64, 124 Inspired polity (see Value regime, inspired) Instrumental (value/policy) 105, 134, 162-163, 167, 173-174

Intendanten 43, 132 Internationalization 158-161, 165 International theatre scene 47, 90, 102, 112-113, 128, 136, 176-178 Internet 46, 99, 123, 142, 157-158, 164 Ireland 21-22, 41, 47, 101, 112-113, 134, 139, 144, 152, 154, 160, 162 Islam 113-114, 119 (n24) Jarry, Alfred 24 Jews 39, 116-119 Journalism 70, 83-84, 94, 98 Kant, Immanuel 4, 13, 33-34, ch 2 n 3 Kawashima, Nobuko 100, 161, 189 Lacan, Jacques 32 Latour, Bruno 21, 52, 66-67 Lay criticism 99, 158 Levi-Strauss, Claude 12, 15, 44 Legitimacy 36, 46, 88, 107, 117 (n21), 154 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 79 Level of subsidy 101, 128-130, 138, 164 Lion King 159 Lijster, Thijs 5, 57-59 Literary field of France, nineteenth century 40, 47 Lir, the (Ireland) 154 Living Newspaper 83-84 Local authorities 107, 135, 143, 149, 161-165, 178, 184, 187 (n187), 196 Lollike, Christian 87, 114, 174 Luhmann, Niklas 21, 31, 51, 58-61, 65, 121 MacIntyre, Alisdair 49 Mallarmé, Stéphane 44 Mama Mia! 159 Manet, Édouard 36-38, 58 Manifest 2083 174 Mangset, Per 106, 127, 190 Mapmaker’s fallacy 44 Market forces 48, 123, 129-130, 133 (n5), 144, 165, 179 Marketing 19, 92, 112, 132-136, 148, 155-156, 164 Martin, Carol 85 Marxian tradition 32, 34 (n9), 49 Matarasso, François 122 (n28), 190, 192, 194 M’Bala M’Bala, Dieudonné (France) 115 McCaughey, Claire 131-134, 139, 144, 148, 174 Mediatization 125, 157, 164 Meaning 18-19, 27, 46, 53, 63 (n8 and n9), 67, 73, 80-82, 93-94, 121, 134, 204 Media (media system) 18, 86, 98-99, 105, 118-119, 125, 157, 159, 164, 178, 196, 200-202 Mee, Charles (USA) 179 Metaphor 39-41, 51, 121, 185 Meso-level phenomenon 13, 25, 27 (n4), 66-67 Middle East 84, 175 Miller, Arthur 174

222  mimesis 13 (n1), 52 Ministry of Culture 102, 131, 135-138, 144, 149, 155 Morality 15 (n3), 49, 51-52, 54-58, 105, 113-119, 123, 125, 145, 156, 168, 202 Moral betterment 169-171, 196, 203 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 114 Muette di Portici, La 121 Musicals 71, 75, 90-91, 98 (n1), 102 (n6), 106-109, 129, 153 (n18), 177, 187-188 Mutilation (self-) 115, 180 My Fair Lady 107-108 My Name is Rachel Corrie 84-85 National Fund for the Performing Arts, Dutch 135, 142 National models of cultural policy 131-135 National School of Theatre and Contemporary Dance 153 National theatre systems 104, 129, 131, 158-159, 161-166 Nationalism 121 (n27) Narrative 52, 79-80, 82, 85, 92 (n16) Nature Theatre of Oklahoma (USA) 83 Negative definition 40-41, 50, 65, 79, 98, 200 Netherlands, the 21-22, 36, 43, 85 (n10), 98 (n1), 102, 112, 114, 117, 121, 129, 132, 135 (n7 and n8), 142, 155, 157, 159-160, 162, 173 (n7), 175, 177, 183, 187, 192-193 Network donor 142, 147-151, 179 Nietzche, Friedrich 13 (n1) Noble, Adrian 108-109 Nomad Theatre Network (Ireland) 101 Non-artistic criteria 105, 128, 138, 191 Noord Nederlands Toneel (the Netherlands) 192 Norway 105 (n10), 106, 113 (n15), 114, 127, 154 (n20), 171, 177 Nussbaum, Martha 169, 171, 175 Ny Teater, Det (Denmark) 109 Nørrebro Teater (Denmark) 93, 111 Odin Teatret (Denmark) 177 On the Town 91 Onafhankelijk Toneel (the Netherlands) 114 Ontroerend Goed (Belgium) 80 (n3), 82, 115 Operetta 108 Oppressed, Theatre of the 88 Organization, of the theatre field 19-20, 73, 127-167, 170, 172, 192-195, 202-204 Outsider (of the field) 31, 98, 154 Pan Pan (Ireland) 112-113, 160 Pandur, Thomas (Slovenia) 101-102, 107 Parents pauvres 39 Patronage, elite 133 (n5), 140-152, 178 Patronage, popular 140-141, 144, 146-152, 179 Patron model, the 131-132-135, 144 Pedersen, Søren Hviid 86

The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy

Peer evaluation 136-138 Perception 26, 51, 54-55, 61-62, 65, 121, 125, 170, 196 Performing Arts Act, Danish 137 Performers 14, 48, 76, 79-84, 90, 92, 94-95, 99, 109, 114-115, 119, 140, 152, 189 (n24), 201 Periphery 100-101, 128, 163 Plato, The Republic 13 (n1), 52-53 Playwright 45-47, 49, 56, 80, 82, 87, 94-95, 114, 154, 179, 199 Plot 159 Political capital 127, 139 Political message 110-111 Political field 13, 16, 88, 93, 110-111, 127, 130-131, 134, 137, 174, 194 Political theatre 122 Political value 83, 133, 135 Politicians 23, 85-87, 93, 110-111, 125, 138, 144, 178, 189-191, 194 Popular(ity) 35, 49, 82, 91-93, 96, 99, 102-103, 106-108, 124, 152, 157, 159, 176, 186, 188 Position (in the field) 15-16, 26, 28-30, 36-45, 47-48, 51, 60, 63, 67-69, 73-74, 77-81, 86, 88, 90, 92, 95-103, 107, 109-115, 119, 122, 136, 139-140, 142, 153-154, 156, 159-160, 163 (n 26), 167, 170, 172-174, 189, 193 (n 29), 195-196 Position-taking 67 Post-dramatic theatre 79, 81 Power 18, 21, 23, 31, 37-39, 41, 45-46, 57, 80-81, 83, 87, 89, 104, 121-123, 125, 128-129, 157, 160, 162, 173, 175, 202, 204 Prize (committee) 37 (n 10), 92, 99, 193 (n 29) Prestige (social prestige) 30, 35-89, 107-108, 120, 124, 150, 154, 161-162, 174-181, 183, 187-188, 190, 195-197, 203 Private funding 18, 128, 139, 145, 147-148, 150-151, 179 Private sponsorship 128, 133, 142, 146-147, 152, 179 Producers, The (musical) 98 (n 1) Production 18, 33, 35-36, 42-43, 47-48, 61, 73, 76, 78-79, 80 (n 1), 81-84, 91-92, 98 (n 1), 100-101, 103, 105, 108-122, 124, 128-130, 132, 135, 136 (n 9), 138-139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 152, 155-156, 158-164, 171-172, 177-178, 183, 185, 187, 193, 196, 199 Professional standards 131 Programming decisions 132 Province (provincial) 18-19, 100-101, 178 Pryor, Richard 93 Puchner, Marin 13 (n 1), 195 (n 31) Public funding 129-130, 143-144, 148-149, 152, 164 Public opinion 70, 125 Public subsidy 127-129, 141, 148 Rancière, Jacques 125, 192 Racist 118

Index

Recognition 35, 62, 72, 99, 102, 104, 109, 112, 124, 127, 160, 195 Re-enactment / Re-enacting 76 Regietheater 80 (n 2), 94 Relational aesthetics 77, 88, 191 Repertory system 156 Representation 18 (n 4), 35, 40, 52, 71, 77, 86, 136 (n 10), 189, 192, 194 Rickman, Alan 84 Ridout, Nicholas 48, 83, 115 (n 18) Rijnders, Gerardjan 112-113 Rimini Protokoll 46 Roosen, Adelheid 192, 193 (n 29), 195 Royal Shakespeare Company (England) 108, 183 Royal Danish Theatre 107-108, 110-111, 137 Rozik, Eli 13 (n 1) Salo 81 Sauter, Willmar 12 Schatzki, Theodore 31-32 Schiller, Friedrich 31, 40, 49, 51, 53, 56-58, 61, 71, 77, 85, 88, 113, 127, 156, 169, 203 Scholars 5, 11-12, 22, 44, 48, 54, 66-67, 78, 85-86, 89, 92, 99, 159 School (School system) 14, 70, 92-93, 100, 105, 114, 152-154, 170-171, 176 Script 79-80, 82, 84, 95, 153, 154, 180 Seinfeld, Jerry 93 Self-representation 169, 172, 180, 196, 203 Shakespeare, William 46, 109 SIGNA (Denmark) 81 Silverman, Sarah 93 Slovenia (Slovenian) 101-102, 165, 178 (n 12) Soap opera 102, 152 Social cohesion 71, 89, 136, 140, 157 (n 23) Social inclusion 134 (n 5), 140, 144, 149, 165, 169, 175, 189-190, 197, 203 Social hierarchies 39 Social prestige 120, 150, 174-181, 183, 187-188, 190, 195-197, 203 Social value 31, 49-50, 54, 148, 151 Social welfare 131, 189 Solidarity 84-85 Sort-Hvid Theatre (Denmark) 87 Southern Europe 129 Specific capital 27, 34-38, 40-43, 45-47, 78, 99-102, 104-106, 122-123, 137, 139, 154, 160, 162, 178, 195 Spectators 14, 18, 42, 46, 61-62, 73, 76, 79, 81-83, 94, 99, 121, 125, 159, 164 Spiderman: Turn off the Dark 110 Sponsorship, corporate 107, 141, 145-146, 181, 196 Sponsorship, private 128, 133, 142, 145-147, 152, 179, 196 Stadttheater 132 Stand-up 20, 28 (n 4), 64, 75, 90, 92-93, 95, 103 (n 7), 129

223 Standards (of the field) 13, 37-38, 41, 71, 76, 89, 96, 98, 106-107, 120, 131, 133-137, 163, 175 Status 83-85, 87, 94, 95, 100, 108, 114, 119, 124, 135, 159-160, 163, 194, 200 Stomp 158 Stratford-upon-Avon 108, 183 Structure of fields 16, 25, 29, 43, 45-46, 48, 52, 62-63, 66-69, 122, 125, 138, 202, 204 Structures of subsidy 127, 129, 132 (n 4), 144-145, 158, 163, 165, 194 Subsidy system 130-131, 135, 139, 141, 158, 163 Subfield(s) 44, 103-107, 123, 160, 170-171 Subsidy 16, 87, 90, 101-102, 111, 124, 127-139, 141, 144-146, 148, 158, 160-163, 165, 177, 184, 186 (n 22) Switzerland 98 (n 2), 178 (n 12), Tax incentive / refund 130, 132-133 Taymor, Julie 110 techne 53, 55 Technology 46, 53, 64, 99 Testimony 12, 52, 84-85, 94, 122 Theatre festivals 159, 187-188 Theatre Forum (Ireland) 41 Théâtre Libre (France) 48 (n 14) Thévenot, Laurent 21, 52, 68-70, 72, 81 (n 4), 106, 108, 117, 119, 102, 128, 139, 143-144, 168, 169 (n 3), 178, 180-181 Truth 30, 52, 79 Toneelgroep Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 112 Training systems, theatrical 127-128, 152, 154, 164 Trinity College 154 Ubu Roi 46 Understanding 12-13, 15, 18-23, 25-26, 28, 31, 34-35, 42, 48, 51, 53, 55-63, 65, 67-68, 73-75, 80, 84-86, 88, 106, 112, 122-124, 139, 143-144, 148, 159, 170-171, 175-177, 189-190, 196, 199-200, 202, 204 Unethical 113, 119 United Kingdom 76, 86, 108, 130 United States (of America) 83, 86, 107, 130, 169, 174 US Federal Theatre Project 83 Unveil(ing) 117 (n 21) Value regime 21, 68-69, 71-73, 75, 81 (n 4), 119, 128-129, 139, 143-144, 148, 168, 173, 181, 185, 195 Value regime, civic 100, 105, 144-145, 169 (n 3) Value regime, domestic 153 Value regime, fame 181 Value regime, inspired 69, 129, 145, 147-148, 186 Value regime, project city 72, 186 Value regime, market 144, 181, 183 (n 18) Value regime, industrial 71, 172 Value sociology 21

224  Van Maanen, Hans 5, 39, 61-62, 67, 120, 133, 141, 155, 156 (n 21), 170-171, 185, 192 Venue 36, 45, 115-116, 129, 132, 144-145, 149, 155-160, 162, 177, 187 (n 23), 193, 197 Verlaine, Paul 44 Vestheim, Geir 130, 144, 167, 174 Verbatim theatre 62, 75, 83-85, 88, 90, 94 Viner, Katharine 84 Voice, The 82 (n 5) Vuyk, Kees 130, 172-174

The Problem of Theatrical Autonomy

West End, London 90, 109, 158-159, 161, 177, 187-188 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15, 27, 41 Youth theatre 122, 136 (n 9) Zina (the Netherlands) 89, 192-193, 195 Zina neemt de Wijk 190 Žižek, Slavoj 32 Zola, Emile 44 Zuidelijk Toneel, Het (the Netherlands) 102