working papers
No. 26. "Staging Boundaries: Institutional Limits to Legitimate Theatre,"
Loren Kruger, 1989. The purpose of this paper is three-fold.
First, to outline the institutional character of theatre; second, to
show that institutional constraints on theatre contain critical theatre
practice by selectively legitimating those practices that represent and
reproduce cultural hegemony; and, third, to suggest that the force of
these legitimate theatre boundaries derives less from explicitly social
or political exclusion than from the apparently autonomous criterion of
literary or dramatic excellence. Legitimate theatre--including the
abstract expressionism of contemporary performance art as well as the
classical and commercial repertoire--is defined against autonomous
aesthetic or literary standards, while practices such as music
hall or political review that might well be excluded because of
intention and audience are dismissed as essentially untheatrical.
In other words the only grounds for debate legitimated by the
institution are aesthetic; excluded as illegitimate are not only
particular practices known as "entertainment," but also the formulation
of "extra-aesthetic" factors such as material organization and audience
that make such activities possible. Legitimation is thus not just
normal, "legal" aesthetic practice; it is also the site of dispute over
what constitutes those norms (Murray, 1987: 111). Click here to order a copy from the
author.