Last week, we discussed the political horizon of performance as that which proposes new possibilities of being and orderings of the world. This week’s readings further the conversation on performance and politics; while the Brecht and Boal texts take theater as their focus, Taylor’s text addresses the multivalent ways in which performance, through acts of doing, “allows us to see” (6); thus one of the ways in which performance labors can be “showing that change is possible” (20). I found her use of the concept of “frames” to be productive in considering the contexts in which performance lives and would like to discuss the other texts through this notion.
Brecht critiques the theater that represents life “according to the old recipes” (183) due to its inadequacy to “make sense” of the time period he concerns himself with in this text, which is the scientific age. Instead, he argues for the constant evolution of theater as “an art fit for the times” (186), the connection between “art” and the “times” as having a pedagogical purpose: to “awaken” its spectators from the illusion of a consistent world and make possible the recognition of a contradictory one. I understood Brecht’s text to be operating within the frame of historical condition and possibility of action, which he negotiates through a proposal of “new alienations” that work precisely towards “alienating the familiar” (192) through a materialist dialectic (193) that unveils the contradictions/inconsistencies of productive life. The politically activating potential in Brecht’s text finds itself in the transformation from “passive acceptance” to “suspicious inquiry” on the part of the audience; the techniques mentioned, from the actor who is a “character rather than a caricature” (196), to a story that is “knotted together” (201), all seek to mobilize a “higher pleasure” of performance that produces life itself.
Boal’s text invokes Brecht’s work but makes the challenge that Brecht presents the subject as “objeto de fuerzas sociales, no ya de los valores de las superestructuras” (12). His contribution is to frame political theater in the Latin American context, as that which labors towards “la destrucción de las barreras creadas por las clases dominantes” (12), whether it be between actor/spectator, protagonist/chorus, or the theatrical means of production. It is in this way that Boal presents theater as a “liberatory weapon” (11), as that which has the potential to dehierarchize and promote participation when it is in the hands of the people. Embodiment, which is central to the techniques Boal proposes, also finds its way “front and center” (Taylor 1), in Taylor’s text. I’d like to discuss this idea of performance as ontology (Taylor 3) more in class as I find it very productive to think with in terms of durations and becomings.
