The organization of performance and the performance of organization

Abstract

This paper considers the interconnection between ‘performance’ and ‘organization’ through an ethnographic study of the art-work of an experimental theatre group. From the basis of this fieldwork, significant parallels are drawn between contemporary developments in the theory and practice of organization and with experimental and radical theatre. These arenas become connected through their shaping by the activity of particular avant-gardes and interrelated by their authoritarian linkage of novelty and nostalgia. The paper is concluded by an examination of the significance of these limiting interconnections for the transitional process of ‘blurring’ and ‘refiguration’ in the Human Sciences.