Performativity of the Court: Stuart Masque as Postdramatic Theater

Abstract

In times when theory as such has become suspect, and attempts to define or demarcate literary and artistic works are rejected on ideological grounds as ultraconservative, if not reactionary, it is not easy to find conditions suitable for a serious intellectual exchange of thought. An ideological minefield, created in the last quarter of a century, has resulted in an unprecedented gap between the humanist intellectual tradition, with its basic concepts about aesthetics and art in general, and the theory and practice of what today is labeled art. Inevitably, this leads to extreme polarization of opinions, incompatibility of basic concepts and categories, and to mutual misunderstandings of all the sides involved (and there are many more than just two, the radical and the conservative). Art history and criticism have been the first conspicuous battlefield, with many losses and few gains, it seems; now time has come for the theater to take an active role in the ongoing controversy. What is being proposed now is a totally new way of understanding theater, with concomitant rejection of the tradition, both as a theater practice, criticism, and theory. One trend that has played an important role in the dispute is that of the so-called postdramatic theater, which undermines many of the traditional criteria, basic notions, and categories. It is therefore worthwhile to look at what the new line of thought has to offer to theater theory and performance analysis, and to determine in what ways the new is really novel.