Theatre and its contradictions

Theatre is one of the oldest forms of pooling human experience, and it is perhaps precisely because it comes from so far back that it deserves to be examined in depth and without complacency.

For a very long time now, I have been working alongside artistic teams, venues, mediation teams, heads of organisations and funders, and I observe that the performing arts carry within them a contradiction we hardly dare look in the face. Their proclaimed intentions (reaching all audiences, creating connection, emancipating) are sometimes contradicted by their actual arrangements: the hierarchy between playwrights, directors, actors, technicians and spectators, which can unconsciously reproduce what we mean to deconstruct; welcome protocols that stage distrust rather than openness; programme notes that assign spectators the place of dominated admirers when they could make them partners; and so on.

And in the creative process itself, we often reproduce, without meaning to, relations of domination and class: in our ways of working, in the form of the works, and even in what we choose to call a work. John Dewey showed, in Art as Experience (1934), that aesthetic experience is rooted in ordinary life, that the separation between consecrated works and the rest of human experience is a historical construction, not a given, and that this separation, without our realising it, has nothing democratic about it.

These contradictions do not stem from bad intentions, but from psychosocial mechanisms that an ethnological approach brings to light. We can only see them by agreeing to look at ourselves with the lucidity we usually reserve for the outside systems we criticise. This is the work of methodical investigation I am inviting here.

I write for actors who sense that something eludes them in their relationship with spectators, for directors who doubt the coherence between their forms and their intentions, for mediation teams looking for methods to connect genuinely with “audiences”, for heads of organisations who want to understand why their auditorium does not look like their city, for funders who wonder what they are really supporting, and for elected officials intent on carrying projects that serve their constituents — all without giving up anything of artistic rigour.

I believe theatre can be a practice of democracy, and not merely a traditional service of cultural democratisation. Organising the circulation of a work without questioning the arrangement — Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated this implacably — sustains social reproduction rather than emancipation. But theatre can, on the contrary, create the conditions for a real encounter, and trust performers, participants, residents and the unforeseen as living material. It is a demanding path, and I propose to explore it here, with constructive, workable questions and proposals rather than ready-made answers or opinions.