The theater of sociologists and anthropologists: the dogma of convention

Summary

The invention of the box stage highlighted with additional vividness the problem of illusion and reality or rather—as it might be reformulated in the language of that epoch—the problem of falsehood and truth in the art of the theater. Through the eighteenth century, it was thought that a theater presenting invented stories is a hotbed of lies—in contrast to such respectable public institutions as the Church, courts, parliament, or academia, which had the vocation of serving the Truth—whether divine or human. Theater is often accused of false imitations of behavior and feelings in acting, and also of an unbecoming manipulation of the experiences of the audience. Repeated attempts have been made throughout history to exclude theater from the domain of culture. This might also be the place to point out the various anti-theater ideologies, such as those formulated by the Church Fathers or those created by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

It is interesting that accusations made through the end of the nineteenth century no longer pertained to theatrical conventions in general, but to a concrete model, which is characterized by extraordinary endurance, and has lasted through the centuries as if in defiance of the logic of history, and certainly in defiance of the logic of succeeding aesthetic revolutions. This is, of course, the box stage. The first attempt to overthrow it was made by the propagators of the New Theater more than a hundred years ago, and their successors, and later the theatrologists and especially those concerned with the sociology of theater. After all, the ineluctable evolution of societies and the necessary impermanence of “aesthetic dictatorships” made it imperative for the representatives of that tendency to formulate such judgments as the following:

“There is a ubiquitous confusion of the concept of theater in general with that of the box stage,” stated Jean Duvignaud. “This stage became at the same time a petrified and sclerotic institution and an intellectual axiom within which, of necessity, dramatic creativity expressed itself … If we question the right of the box stage to play the role of an absolute aesthetic model and the only framework for all methods of presenting man, it is because it strikes us as improper that this type of stage is divorced from the social experiences in which it was formed, as well as from the vital forces that endeavor to perpetuate forms that are already obsolete.”