Feature: The theatre maker and the institution

If you look back over theatre history, there is an interesting contradiction which emerges: almost all of the ground-breaking innovators in theatre history are in some way anti-institutional. Wilde. Beckett. Stanislavsky. Meyerhold. Piscator. Artaud. Yet look around you now, and almost all of the directors, writers and artists who are held up as aspirational figures often have little about them that is revolutionary. In fact, many of them got a break when they were young and just went with the flow, and became the institutional poster-people and good brands. The very best of the renegades – Ionesco, Brecht, Beckett, Pinter – made arguments, fanatical and continuous, that the individual was in reality a slave to the institution, and that individual autonomy was the first prerogative of theatre.

This wasn’t just an ‘of its time’ 70s Cold War Marxism vs. Capitalism battle. It’s happening now, only exponentially increased and massively more covert, even to the point of being unconsciously executed.

Summing up, we currently have multiple uprisings in the Middle East and Northern Africa, open spying from various first world countries on each other’s citizens, a prevailing xenophobia that keeps people away from ‘our’ wealth, and various human rights violations that ALL of the theatre artists mentioned above would have been shocked to see as part of their legacy. You would think that there is no better time to make a stand against these things, to harness that resistance. As Augusto Boal states: “its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists”. He is speaking about Theatre of the Oppressed specifically, but he need not be so specific – surely that must be close to the urgent goal of all theatre.

Theatre artists are being institutionalised faster than ever. Forced to compete and scrounge for opportunities, they are virtually desperate to conform to save their skins. They are put into ‘emerging programmes’ that do nothing to promote individual autonomy, and just barely do enough to keep them alive, ensuring that they are fed the occasional success story to keep their dreams and ambitions going, perhaps going cap in hand to their parents when things get tough. We are on a drip – and it’s killing us.

Coming from Australia to Europe, I decided to travel overland and make performances and workshops along the way, thus avoiding the carbon cost of long distance air travel and making connections with some theatre companies I wouldn’t ordinarily have the chance to meet. I performed in a theatre in Sydney, a traditional open stage in Yogyakarta, a rooftop in Kolkata, a backyard in Iran, a crumbling, four-storey mansion in Bucharest and an apartment in Berlin, at about half the amount of emissions of a long haul flight. You’d think that this would be met with support, right? Wrong. Despite some 15 applications I submitted to funding bodies whilst frantically assembling my one-man political work, they all considered it too risky (or so I heard from the bodies who did not completely ignore me). The hilarious part is, I’m not even an actor, I’m a director. I find acting embarrassing, I was just doing what should be done.

We should recognise such snubs for what they are – an attempt to control the flow of theatre into something which affirms the status quo. If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the merry-go-round of applications, volunteering and superficial networking that comes with being a young artist. In some ways this is part of the deal and everyone’s had it. Now, this white noise seems to be proliferating faster than Ionesco’s rhinoceroses. It’s designed to deter you from doing the work you should be doing as an artist, and instead maintains the power of institutions. It’s important to recognise this, because if you ever get into one of those institutions, the only ethical action at the moment is to tear it down. All it supports is an absurd hierarchy that keeps people out of the theatre – through money, through class and through social exclusion.

We know theatre is about more than that. As artists, we have a social role to learn, to communicate, to work with communities, and to observe and identify “the others” and invite them in. All the laughable superstructure does is distract you – and maintain itself.

You owe it to those invisible people you work for not to let them win. In other words, now is the time to find your inner activist.

Photo by Flickr user Caelie_Frampton under a Creative Commons licence.