Artistic Extractivism

Building a show in a rehearsal room, transporting it and coming to play it in the homes of people of whom nothing has been retained follows a logic of extraction that ecology calls extractivism. I propose to question this way of working, which seems so natural that it is never questioned, by taking seriously the models of ecology, permaculture and robustness.

Questioning an obvious feature of theatre practice

What I propose here is to raise a question about something that is not usually questioned. Building a show in a rehearsal room, transporting it, playing it identically from place to place, all this seems so natural that we see no possible problem in it, it seems almost intrinsic to theatre practice. Deconstruction, in this field as in many others, consists in making visible the processes we have naturalised. These processes are not hidden, they are perfectly visible, but they seem natural to us, intrinsic to the craft, as if there were no other way of doing things. It is this quality of obviousness that I want to look at, because it applies to a way of working that is very widespread in the performing arts.

I recently saw, in a small house in the northern Paris suburbs, a show devoted to the contradictions of industrial agriculture. A small audience, transported lighting installations, a sound system rigged that very morning, a stage box set up and then taken down. The word “extractivism” recurred in the text of the play, naming the agricultural practice of drawing resources from an environment without regard for what is left behind, without entering into any relationship with its ecosystem. The critique is just, documented, necessary. Looking at the apparatus deployed in front of me, I wondered whether this word might not apply just as well to the way the show was built and brought to us. This show serves me as an example and I am not trying to judge it, it serves me as a starting point.

Extracting a reality to make an object for distribution

Extractivism, in its original field, names a relationship to an environment founded on extraction. One enters a territory to draw from it what one needs, one transforms what one has drawn, one distributes the transformed product, and the environment from which one has taken receives nothing in return. One place is impoverished so that others may be enriched, without the slightest reciprocity. And because nothing comes back towards the place of extraction, because nothing is cultivated there, that place grows a little poorer with each passage. This is the problem of extractivism, in this one-way relationship that exhausts what it exploits.

One can choose to look at the making of theatre with the same kind of logic. A company carries out an inquiry among farmers, residents, people who live a reality that the team comes to collect, then this reality is brought back into the rehearsal room and turned into dramaturgical material, characters, dialogue, devices, before the show is built and distributed in houses, halls, territories. The people met have provided the raw material, they appear now only as characters whose names have disappeared, and the real has served as a seam to be mined.

Paulo Freire named a neighbouring mechanism, in another context, which he called “banking education”, where knowledge descends from the one who knows towards the one who does not, where the professional deposits in the public what they have extracted elsewhere. In theatre, it is not knowledge that is deposited but representations of a reality whose true protagonists are absent. The most troubling part lies in what happens when the show is played in front of the very people who were interviewed. They gave the raw material, they are neither named nor respected, and yet they often consider themselves fortunate to have brought something to these artists. Because it is our shared culture, they do not know that one could do otherwise, and they take a kind of pride in having been legitimised by those who dispossessed them. Domination thus operates even within the gratitude of those it has plundered.

The technical rig that contradicts what the show is saying

To this extraction of the real is added another dimension, which has to do with the material object of the show. A show that speaks of ecology, of the interdependence of environments, of responsible production, deploys to say so a whole technical rig made of rarely virtuous equipment, LED garlands and lighting units most often produced in China under conditions one would rather ignore, transported by truck with the weight and consumption this entails, then stored and maintained between dates, which again ties up space and energy. This apparatus carries an incoherence that the show’s own tools of analysis ought to make visible.

Jean Dubuffet had put it with a radicalism one may find excessive but which points to something real. In Asphyxiating Culture (1968), he described the way the professional artistic milieu manufactures its own needs, its own devices, its own aesthetics, and makes itself dependent on them to the point of no longer being able to think outside them. Official art, he wrote, repeats its own forms and has lost all living relationship with its environment.

The equipment is not bad in itself. It is its naturalisation that raises the question, the fact that it escapes the critical reflection the show nonetheless directs at agricultural practices. And one could make an entirely different choice, which would be an aesthetic choice, a choice of method, a choice of representation. One could conceive the staging without professional lighting, arrive a little early at the place, compose the lighting with the lamps people have at home and adapt the piece to what is found there. This would be a true act of creation, one that would bind the piece to the place where it is played, where today it is merely set down, made for small venues but identical everywhere, never marked by any of them. It will be objected that this would require an extra stage technician each time, and therefore a budget one does not have. Not necessarily. Working on this dimension can be part of the performers’ training, one is entitled to be multidisciplinary, it is no failing. It would have to be anticipated so that it is experienced not as a constraint but as a contribution, and the spectator would feel it at once, knowing themselves to be in a singular place, before a gesture that dialogues with the place rather than an apparatus stuck onto it. The very method of building the technical apparatus would then become, in itself, an ecological approach, and the piece would say its subject through its way of being made as much as through its text.

Why should a show be a fixed form?

Why should a show be a fixed form, made once and for all, then replicated identically from place to place? This way of doing things has a history, but it is in no way self-evident.

The commedia dell’arte did not work this way. Troupes played from a canvas, what the Italians called the canovaccio, a bare outline that set the entrances and exits, the major articulations of the plot and its resolution, without any dialogue being written. Within this structure, the performers improvised from their mastery of the masked characters and situations, which allowed them to react to the audience present and to incorporate local news, so much so that the troupe could adapt its playing to a new audience within a few hours. The most robust canvases were recorded in notebooks, the zibaldoni, passed from troupe to troupe and enriched over time, so that the form itself stayed alive and transformed with its uses. The show was not an object that one transported, it was a matrix that reinvented itself at each performance, in contact with those who were there.

Peter Brook touches on the same point in The Empty Space (1968) when he sets against the “deadly theatre”, ossified in the repetition of dead forms and the reverence for classics, a living theatre that remakes itself each time. Every form, he writes, is already moribund as soon as it is created, and must be thought anew. I am not proposing a return to improvisation in the traditional sense of the term, but I recall that there exists a demanding theatrical tradition in which the link between the place where one plays, whether an apartment, a house or a hall, and what one offers people was constitutive of the work, and not an accident of touring.

When one transports a closed form and forces it into a house, one replicates something that imposes itself on the place instead of composing with it. It is this replication that I find, in principle, anti-ecological, not because of the carbon footprint of the garlands but because of the relationship to the environment it assumes, a relationship in which the place is no more than an interchangeable container. It will be objected that the encounter is singular each time, that there is often, after the performance, a discussion with the audience. But this discussion is almost always codified. The public asks questions, the performers answer them, in an entirely top-down relationship. No one would imagine that what a spectator has thought, what they bring, could modify future performances, that would be almost a crime of lèse-majesté towards the artists. It is participation within an apparatus of domination, a false reciprocity. That one shares a drink together afterwards, that the moment is warm, changes nothing, the exchange remains one-way. A real encounter would require that the team itself could be enriched by what is said, and take it into account when it is relevant.

Replicated performance against the robustness of the living

Olivier Hamant, a biologist, sets against each other in Antidote au culte de la performance (2023) two logics of the living. Performance aims at optimisation, the maximal yield of a single function in an environment assumed to be stable. Robustness is the capacity of a system to maintain itself in a changing environment, and it requires redundancy, slowness, heterogeneity, a measure of apparent inefficiency. Hamant shows that the living, contrary to what one imagines, is not performant but robust, and that it is its robustness that allows it to last in a fluctuating world.

A show conceived to be the best possible, perfectly set, then replicated as is, belongs to the logic of performance. It optimises a form and distributes it, in the confidence that the house, the audience and the territory will remain stable enough for the form to work everywhere. It is efficient, and one can make theatre this way, but it is fragile in Hamant’s sense, because a form optimised for a standard environment cannot withstand the variation of real places and audiences, it crushes them or breaks against them. Transposed to the show, robustness would require a form able to absorb this variation, to transform itself according to the place and the people, and to last not because it resists its environment but because it composes with it.

What a permaculture of the show would be

The word “permaculture” was, as it happens, in the play I saw, and it is a good word. Permaculture is an agriculture that works with the forces of the environment rather than against them, that reuses what it finds, that creates cycles where industrial agriculture creates linear flows of extraction and discharge. Transposed to theatrical creation, it sketches a practice rather different from the one most often seen.

It would require, first, working with the place where one plays rather than using it as a provisional hall. This does not necessarily take more time, it is a different approach. Composing with what this house, this apartment, this neighbourhood hall has that is irreplaceable, with its history, its materials, its inhabitants, can be done very quickly when one is truly present to the encounter. If one is ready to receive what is there, attentive to the place and the people, two hours are often enough to adapt a proposal, far more than one believes. It is a matter of concentration, it is a work in itself, and it is already work.

It would require, next, making the people met visible rather than dissolving them into composite characters, showing who they are, naming their names, letting their voices exist in their singularity, which is an artistic choice in its own right. John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), recalls that aesthetic experience arises from the encounter with something resistant, irreducible. The singularity of a real being resists, a composite character does not.

It would require, finally, asking oneself regularly whether what one is doing is coherent with what one is saying, not out of moralism but because the coherence between form and content makes the strength of a work. A show about the interdependence of environments that ignores its own dependencies says less forcefully what it means to say.

Giving up a certain control

Nothing of what I describe is a criticism of the talent or the sincerity of the teams who work this way. If I write about theatre and the performing arts, it is because I believe in their virtues, and it is for that very reason that it seems important to me to be able to bring a critical eye to our own practices. Without this examination, we risk unwittingly perpetuating things that run counter to our values. It is a matter of method and of relationship to mastery. Extractivist shows are often very well made, and they might be more so if their authors agreed to give up a certain control, to let the real environment be genuine material rather than a backdrop.

Michel Schneider, in La comédie de la culture (1993), described with implacable dryness the pact between political power and cultural power, each legitimising the other to the detriment of the citizens in whose name both claim to act. An extractivist show takes part in this pact, since it produces legitimate content on legitimate subjects, funded by legitimate funds, for a small and already convinced audience. It disturbs nothing, and it is in this the opposite of the extractivism it criticises, perfectly adapted to its environment of distribution, perfectly integrated into the institutional ecosystem that produces it.

We often believe that questioning ourselves in this way is tiring, that it would be simpler to transport a form already made. It is the reverse. Not questioning ourselves amounts to depriving ourselves of all that the place, the people and the encounter could bring, and to manufacturing each time, at great cost in transport and equipment, what was already there. To break with artistic extractivism is to accept the risk that something happens that one had not foreseen, that the environment resists, that the people met bring something irreducible. It is this risk that transforms those who make the show as much as those who receive it.