‘Constitutive ambiguities’: writing professional or expert performance practices, and the Théâtre du Soleil,

Abstract

The chapter focuses on aspects of Mnouchkine's work with Theatre du Soleil which are under-examined in published writing, namely the required expert/professional mastery of the practitioners, the explicit processes of evaluation central to the devising and staging, and the passionate, existential investment by the practitioners in the production; the interface between the operations of expert intuition in performance-making and production values specific to the discipline.