Democratic Performances: How Theater Creates the People

Abstract

This work offers the concept of “democratic performance” as a corollary of “people’s theater.” “People’s theater” is a branch of the performing arts that aims to engage a particular audience, which is made of new spectators, and it sometimes goes as far as involving them into the show. Thus, it subverts the parts of the actor and the spectator. It is a corpus of texts that are open, a set of productions that wait for an ending. Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan is a typical work of people’s theater that requires the audience to write its ending. In chapter I, I provide a genealogy of the play going back to its parabolical roots in ancient Europe and a geography of its reception in distant parts of the world today. This preliminary analysis serves as a point of entry into a comparative study of traditions of people’s theater in India (chapter II), France (III), and China (IV). Each of these three chapters centers on close reading, production analysis, and ethnographic work revolving around “democratic performances” which occur in liminal spaces (on the street, in a remote theater, on the internet) in critical times (enactment of discriminatory laws, crisis of political institutions, shutdown of massive protests) and give an opportunity for individuals to both play an artistic part in a show and have a voice in a political debate; therefore, they turn into full-fledged citizens. My contention is that an anti-representational movement in the arts speaks to an anti-representational movement in politics. Ultimately, I show that democratic performances give shape to the much-discussed concept of the “people.”