Complementary Spaces: Realism, Performance and a New Dialogics of Theatre

Abstract

Definitions and assessments of dramatic realism have varied widely over the years, but recently a kind of negative consensus has emerged, gathered around several interrelated nodes in the network of theatre, theory, and culture: realism stands in opposition of current experimentalism in the theatre, to the reading strategies of many current literary theories, and to the cultural milieu of the time of the sign. As a reaction against the first of these oppositions, theatre artists working in nonrealist idioms have protested for decades the coercive system (the phrase is Augusto Boal's, but the impulse comes from Artaud as it is filtered through Brecht) of Aristotelian poetics that have shaped the development of not only realist drama but also the positivist theatrical practices and spectatorial habits that accompany it. Derrida ascribes this array of production practices to the theological stage, which translates through speech the primary logos of the author-creator who controls and keeps watch over language and meaning, and who guides representation into the stable and determinate superstructure of the text.1