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.