The Ideology of Collaborative Theatre: The Auteur Director and the Anticapitalist ‘Good Soul’

Authors

  • Richard Pettifer

Keywords:

state, horizontality

Abstract

Today’s theatre artists working collaboratively position themselves as outsiders to a system of institutions, hierarchies, and structures. However, Alain Badiou states that theatre has historically been and presently continues to be an extension of state power, meaning that collaborative theatre may be just delivering the state’s mantra in a different guise. The propensity to avoid aesthetic definition further dilutes the potential for such theatres to truly generate change – in fact, they may be dangerously close to simply becoming agents for a neoliberal agenda, perfect examples of unwitting agents who have internalized the messages of the system to the point of invisibility. How might we examine the ideology of collaboration?
This paper argues for a self-analysis of the ideology of collaborative work existing ‘outside the system’. Furthermore, the auteur model is proposed as a counter-system, one in which certain proximity to power actually serves to (theatrically) threaten it.

References

ARENDT, Hannah, 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism, World Publishing Company.

BADIOU, Alain, 2008. Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise. [Bruno Bosteels trans.]. Theatre Survey. 49(2), p. 187-238, DOI: 10.1017/S0040557408000124.

BISHOP, Claire, 2006. The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents. Art Forum, (February 2006), p.179-185.

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Published

2017-12-22

How to Cite

Pettifer, R. (2017) “The Ideology of Collaborative Theatre: The Auteur Director and the Anticapitalist ‘Good Soul’”, Symbolon, 18(2(33), pp. 5–11. Available at: http://uartpress.ro/journals/index.php/symbolon/article/view/73 (Accessed: 29 April 2024).

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 2(33) (2017)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License
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