Whereas the focus of last week’s readings seemed to have resided in an articulation of what ‘politics’ is in terms of what it does, this week’s readings of Brecht, Boal and Taylor aim to articulate what ‘performance’ is in terms of what it does, offering a sort of meta-analysis of the questions of sameness between these two concepts.
If this is the case, then the main arguments of Brecht, Boal and Taylor are located in their articulations of how, as Boal puts it, “… all theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political, and theatre is one of them” (ix). Boal describes Brecht’s poetics as “those of the enlightened vanguard” (155)—his poetics are Marxist, as they assert that social being determines social thought— ‘man’ is an object of social forces; he sees the theatre as a place for entertainment, with ‘productivity’ being the main source of entertainment (186); he wants the theatrical spectacle to be the beginning of action (106).
Boal, in many ways, picks up where Brecht left off. He points out that Brecht’s position is clear: the character is not free to act at all (92) and uses this as a launching pad in a movement that transforms the spectator into an actor. This movement, accompanied by the abolition of the private property of the characters, constitutes Boal’s proposed “poetics of the oppressed” (122).
Taylor moves us forward from this in a tremendous leap, maintaining the structure of the central theory present in Boal’s poetics—that “people absorb behaviors by doing, rehearsing, and performing them…”—while incorporating important questions pertaining to the body from the perspectives of critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and post-humanist theory (13). This leads us to a more nuanced discussion of ‘transforming the spectator to actor’—what Taylor calls the ‘spect-actors’: people capable of acting and interrupting the performance or changing their roles they’ve been assigned (80).
Rather than getting stuck in the tussle between the Hegelian absolute subject and the Brechtian formulation of the character as the object of economic and social forces, Taylor marks the body as both the consuming subject and the object of consumption (97). This understanding of the body, which Taylor takes through complex rethinkings of experience, ‘scenarios’, and context, enables us to engage with a politics/performance that is not anti-history, anti-memory, and oriented towards percepticide, as has been the “American” way (172).