Institutionalizing Ensembles: Thinking Theatre,Performance,and “the Law”

Abstract

Prior to recent U.S.-based work about the performance rituals of state killing and “the NEA 4,” Theatre and Performance research demonstrates extensive negotiations with and about “law as a preservative of terror” that in 1966 Theodor Adorno calls “the primal phenomenon of irrational rationality.” Currently, the field shows active interest in three inter-related arenas invoking the practices of “the law's” authorizations. The first involves performances of everyday events, and the complex social spaces in which people test the limits of “the legal subject” in relation to the norms of, for example, national, cultural, and global citizenship. If cultural events, practices, and artifacts of the world provide crucial research materials in theatre and performance projects, the deployment of methodologies in archival documentation collating “the world” and “the past” with the everyday also reach into the rhetorics of evidence. Hence the second, correlating, area of contemporary theatre and performance research concerned with law and the state has to do with “archive fever:” creative methodologies deploying, broadly speaking, the evidences of archival and documentary research. Finally, the third arena takes up questions of the arts, human rights, and cultural policy, with particular focus on the current era of neoliberal governmentality.