What Theatre Can Do When We Know What is to be Done?

Abstract

The fact that discourse on creation methods and production (poiesis) has been overrun by discourse on artistic practice (praxis) suggests that economic rationalization has taken up a space that once belonged to poetic clarity. Institutional binding of praxis with work creates a specific ecology, where the artist becomes less and less present with their artworks and more in and with their labour, a relationality nowadays promoted by various cultural institutions whose mission is no longer the production of art but rather the reproduction of consumer relations with a work of art. Furthermore, the curatorial turn in the performing arts, as exemplified through the appearance of the new role of the curator who stands in for artistic director or programmer, tends to result in a particular care for spectator instead of poetic projection. The audience is not so important for being public anymore or making theatre public, making it official, but by being inserted into a field of vision it renders 'the public' visible, it represents public in the very act of performance. It becomes a part of calculation, spatialization and hegemonization.

Notes

1 Tomislav Medak (BADco.) in a comment on Facebook, accessed September 2014.

2 Symbolization/ Systematization (= spatialization). See Marchart (2002).