Places of Becoming Gathering Urgency in Contemporary Political Theatre

Abstract

This thesis focuses on a strong contemporary movement of urgency that lies in contemporary society and expresses itself in the motivation to “do something”. This notion is located within the practices of theatre in order to examine whether theatre projects with a political intention behind them can and do contribute to this sentiment in a certain way. With the help of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (Of Other Spaces), Chantal Mouffe’s theory On the Political, and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Transformative Power of Performance, a concept is developed that describes the possible motivation inherent in theatre projects that deal with political issues. The definition is refined by Deleuze’s concept of ’becoming’ and Claire Bishop’s thoughts on participation in combination with Jaques Rancière’s theory of The Emancipated Spectator. Contextualised in the contemporary, the concept of metamodernism – meaning neither postmodernism, nor modernism itself but at the same time neither of them – serves as a useful indicator for both the sentiment and the performances for a new structuring of sensuality of which the urge for action is characteristic. The concept is put into use by analysing two theatre projects of different sorts: Unified Estonia (2010) by the Estonian collective Theatre NO99 and the project Web of Trust (2016) by Amsterdam-based director Edit Kaldor. While one of the projects focuses on the forming of a fictional party and thus already obviously operates on a political level, the other project start off on a personal level of distress and moves further to bigger political structures as it progresses. The thesis concludes with and analysis of the usability of the concept of Places of Becoming and argues for new theories and strategies in order to emancipate an audience, appeal to their reason and motivate an action that leads to the change of the current system.