Minority/Dominant Culture in the Theatre (With Special Reference to Bakhtin and Bourdieu)
Abstract
Theatre theory encompasses a diverse range of interests and perspectives which cannot be neatly captured in a few words. Nevertheless, we fall back on convenient phrases -take, for example, "from Aristotle to Brook" -because we assume that what has been left unsaid will be understood. Not so long ago the line would probably have stopped at Brecht. Today it extends to semiotics as well as to various theories of postmodernism, or what are described as postrnodemist, this new contribution coming out of universities rather than from theatre artists themselves. The way in which the academy has become the major source of theorizing about the theatre indicates an important slide (or perhaps even shift of power?) away from the site of theatre practice to institutions whose experts do not necessarily have a working expertise in the theatre or a special sensitivity towards it as a living, breathing art. It seems that, until relatively recently, theatre practitioners -Brecht and Brook certainly among them -would have towered over any survey of theatre theory.Downloads
Published
2014-10-01
Issue
Section
Articles