On November 9 I discussed my paper “Friends or Foes, You’ve Gotta Love ’Em: Reframing Theatre’s Adversaries as Unwitting Allies” during the “Anchoring Historiographies: Hope, Method, and the Future of Theatre History” Working Session at ASTR American Society for Theatre Research Conference “Hope,” in Providence, RI.
Abstract:
Inspired by the theme “Hope,” I argue that, in certain circumstances, adversarial agents can be viewed as paradoxically beneficial for theatre groups or productions, as in the case of the Parisian stagings of Jean Genet’s The Screens (1966) and Copi’s Eva Perón (1970), both targets of threats and violent attacks by the right-wing group Ordre Nouveau and other agents. In 1971, theatre critic Colette Godard noted how such malicious interferences were a boon for companies without a budget. Indeed, for the Argentine group TSE staging Copi, the event made the difference between oblivion and immediate success.
This approach stems from my recently published book’s notion of “actor-network dramaturgy,” which articulates an expanded notion of agency for theatre and performance studies in the context of Actor-Network Theory by highlighting the uninterrupted continuity of the aesthetic with history at large. Because the network is a continuum of associations between “actors,” it makes no sense to distinguish artistic action from action per se. Thus, if “people know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” (Foucault), actions chronologically preceding or parallel to the aesthetic ones can still be seen as pushing towards a theatre production, even without full awareness of their consequences. Hence, even enemies may unwittingly facilitate what they wanted to impede.
More generally, this method invites researchers to develop a more comprehensive actor-network dramaturgical vision by including longer genealogies of humans, things, and events; more numerous types of actors, human and non-human; and both friendly and adversarial actors, successes and failures, as sources of exciting historical accounts.
