The canonical modernist theatre is still the norm in theatre studies, performance studies and institutionalized nowadays theatre all over the Western world (including Eastern Europe ). Why? I try to answer this tough question by looking at one concept: originality. The modernist ideas of acting/staging/writing are still treated as strikingly original or fashionable. That happens while other contemporary forms of theatre are described as derivative, deviant, old-fashioned and second-rate (for example, feminist theatre is often described as a pale/boring copy of Brechtian political theatre).
My assumption is that in order to assure the existence of various hierarchies through the discourse of modernism in the theatre world nowadays, there is a need to reinforce the primacy of originality or novelty. The binary opposition original/copy functions in theatre as a complex mechanism with exclusionary effects, “for differentiating between and evaluating various forms of deviance and marginality”.[1] One of the effects of original/copy dichotomy marks the masculinity/femininity separation and becomes essential in masculinist reconstructions of the modernist theatre. Some authors such as Rosalind E. Krauss identified the theme of originality as the only constant in the discourse of the modernist avant-garde. I have to agree with them when it comes to theatre. Modernist theatre depends exactly on the repression of the second term of the binary. Originality, daringness or being-interesting are valorized in the modernist discourse as masculine features with no critical attention to the social implications of such reconstructions. While the unoriginal or repetitive work was feminized, modernist avant-garde was constructed in the masculine. Contemporary theatre is modernist to the bone and promotes same exclusionary practices. Especially the margins of contemporary theatre follow the modernist formula and become feminized while those actors, directors or dramaturges stay insignificant unless they accept a masculine individualist approach and produce acceptable original work.
Ezra Pound’s expression to “make it new” never left Western theatre and is here to stay because theatre people don’t give any critical attention to the political/social engagements that they reproduce through their novelty/originality. The obsession to be original as an exclusion of the copy has other not-so-innocent implications: the unqueering of theatre practitioners and reinforcement of heteronormativity. From Peter Brook to some of my friends too afraid to affect their work by coming out, the obsession of an “original” is still at work: queer sexuality and cross-dressing are regarded as pale copies of heterosexual norms when they form the basis of artistic production. And no one wants to be an unoriginal artist, right?
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