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

Résumé

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.