For a Skeptical Dramaturgy

This essay situates dramaturgy at the intersection of performance processes, aesthetics, and the political framework within which theatrical propriety finds its expression. I assume a dramaturgy that stands in a critical relation to an exclusive politico-cultural rationality and the normalizing role that the theatre plays in it, the dramaturgy of a skeptical performative. To unfold this phrase, let me begin with a series of questions: What kind of discursive authority links itself to the aesthetic, creating the perception of what theatre is and what it is supposed to be? What kind of accord does it strike? And what kind of displacements, perhaps of other modes of theatre, does this raison d’être produce while creating a unified subject—of theatre, of dramaturgy—with its craft? Leaning on these questions, my essay addresses the consensual rhetoric, the rationalized space and conduct of political discourse in the United States, which, in turn, impairs other forms of the sensible, particularly those in which it understands the political as conducted by aesthetic means. Contextualizing the work of dramaturgy in relation to the consensual dimension of “liberal rationality”—what is reasonable, how the political sphere is rationalized, meaning both conceptualized and distributed—I am also contextualizing the crisis that dramaturgy has been caught in: dramaturgy has less been asked to “think” for itself than to conform to what has been “thought” for it, to its own domestication by a theatre tamed by the discursive and affective coherence of the cultural sphere, a theatre assigned to the innocuous sphere of an “apolitical” art.

Much as the political field has already been rationalized, so too has the artistic field, the field in which a consensual process sustains and is legitimized in theatrical production. As Chantal Mouffe has argued, liberal rationality desires an inclusive public sphere animated by the presumption of “noncoersive consensus.” Yet, at the same time, the fact that the space and terms of liberal discourse have been rationalized, tends to circumscribe consensus, excluding nonconsensual voices and perspectives as outside the proper arena of political engagement. “Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion” inherent in this sense of liberal rationality, “democratic politics requires that they be brought to the fore, making them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation” (2013a, 127). Such “traces of power and exclusion” are not only intrinsic to democratic representation, they also inform artistic representation, the art-making of theatre. Making these “traces of power and exclusion” entwining the theatre with liberal rationality “visible” is, I believe, a compelling function of dramaturgy, the dissent of dramaturgy.

I take here an admittedly ambitious vision of dramaturgy: the dramaturg impels a searching inquiry into the material conditions and cultural work of theatre animating each production. More specifically, what concerns me, as a dramaturg, is how to bring that which must be thought to rupture the rationalized political and aesthetic consensus, to contest what the dominant discourses assert as the illusion of the unthinkable. Contemporary liberal (and neoliberal) rhetoric capitalizes on notions of individual liberty as a freedom from political influence. In terms of theatre, if the theatre is already constituted within the rationalized consensual sphere of this liberal polity, even its most overt critique—if it is recognized as theatre at all—reproduces that order. What dramaturgy is able to offer, then, is a vision and practice for a critically independent theatre. This conception of dramaturgy is skeptical toward the normative notions of theatre in two ways. First, it defamiliarizes and so intervenes in the illusory singularity of both the theatrical landscape and the inevitability of mise en scène, estranging the consensual assumption of what an ideologically dominant “we” understands theatre to be and what it can be. Second, it others what has been assumed and produced by that consensus as a simulacrum, displaying its relation to hegemonic coercion. In this sense, both “the human” onstage and in the auditorium becomes what we must rethink as dramaturgs. A sustainable dramaturgy needs to work to make known the indiscriminate conjunction between the hegemonic political and aesthetic pressures on the theatre, its stage, its auditorium.

Theatre is...