Political Performances: Theory and Practice (review)
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Political Performances: Theory and Practice is an anthology of eighteen essays from the Political Performances working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). This international collection of scholars offers academic readers a snapshot of current scholarly work on recent and contemporary performances that question dominant ideologies, mostly from Western cultures, including work by Algerian, American, Australian, British, Croatian, French, Irish, and Nicaraguan playwrights and practitioners. The authors use a diversity of approaches that include performance analyses, considerations of individual playwrights, and historical overviews of applied theatre forms. Despite these varied approaches, this anthology finds cohesion in the authors' shared research concerns of ethics, efficacy, and productive dissent.
The authors' first task is to define political performance. Coeditor E. J. Westlake asserts in her preface that all performances can be considered political, since performances are cultural products that either challenge or reify dominant ideologies. In his introduction, coeditor Avraham Oz agrees, but also emphasizes context and action as key for defining political performance, explaining that political performers typically take action by challenging larger contexts of hierarchy, structure, and myth (17). Accordingly, the anthology includes essays on performances that address global concerns in varying contexts, such as civil war in Algeria, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and territoriality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other essays explore how community-based performances, taking up topics like homelessness, faith, and gender stereotypes, can effect local political change. Because the editors focus on action and change as the basis for a definition of political performance, the performances explored in this anthology are ones that challenge existing conditions and "shake ideological certainties" (18).
The anthology is divided into four sections, each representing a framework for exploration. The categories are broad and the divisions between them often seem arbitrary. Westlake admits that the divisions are fluid, because the IFTR working group is itself in process as it continues "to generate new maps based on newly-created visions" and definitions of political performance (14). This recognition of scholarly process complements the emphasis on artistic and political process found in many of the performances discussed. While individual essays offer compelling case studies for undergraduate courses, the book as a whole would be most useful in a graduate seminar that wrestles with notions of the political.
The first section, "Queries," considers "the role of performance in the political process" (9). Under this broad heading are essays about the ethics of ownership in oral-history drama in Northern Ireland, censorship and self-censorship in new Israeli drama, and the humanist political commitment that defines Le Théâtre du Soleil's "people's theatre." Paola Botham's essay "Witnesses in the Public Sphere: Bloody Sunday and the Redefinition of Political Theatre" uses Habermas's notion of the public sphere as a theoretical framework to investigate how documentary drama participates in public debate about community issues, in particular how a playwright's [End Page 145] or director's desire for a compelling dramatic narrative can obscure documentary drama's focus on a diversity of voices. Botham argues that despite the problems with this increasingly popular dramatic form, documentary theatre "permits its audience to be there, offering the simultaneity in space and time that encourages public responsibility" (48; emphasis in original). Botham's topic and methodology are shared by other authors in this volume: her piece is one of several that makes use of the concept of witnessing, cites Habermas, or examines documentary theatre.
The first contribution under the heading "Texts" is Carl Lavery's "Reading The Blacks through the 1956 Preface: Politics and Betrayal." Revisiting Genet's famous play through the lens of the playwright's preface, Lavery's essay is one of the few that examines twentieth-century performance. More typical is Sydney Cheek O'Donnell's study of Aeschylus's tragedy The Persians as presented in New York by Waterwell Productions in 2005. Using gender and postcolonial theory, Cheek O'Donnell analyzes how Waterwell employed Brechtian acting...
