The Dubious Spectacle

Herbert Blau's recent collection of essays treats the practice of theatre, the function of theory, and the work that theatre might perform in the academy. Written for a variety of occasions, the essays nonetheless have a cumulative power, marking the nearly three decades in which Blau has roughened the interface between theatre and theory, writing about the critical work of performance that he calls "blooded thought." Spanning the most recent phase of Blau's career, the essays are haunted by a deeper past, and throughout The Dubious Spectacle, Blau repeatedly recalls the formative events of his artistic and intellectual life: rejecting the lassitude of the Drama department at Stanford to work with the rebarbative, independent-minded critic Yvor Winters; making gritty, elated theatre with the Actors' Workshop of San Francisco; opening the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center; inventing and overseeing the curriculum at Cal Arts, and creating a new performance idiom with his company, Kraken. Blau is everywhere concerned with "the precipitation of theater from whatever it is not, which like the mystery of difference itself may be indecipherable" (17). While this is a palpably political understanding of theatre, it doesn't imply a theatre that can be readily reduced to pious thematics. Ranging widely across contemporary theatre, visual arts, music, and literature, the book is nonetheless driven by a single, maddening irritation: the twin failure of the American theatre to develop a searching, critical art practice, and of American critical culture—specifically American academic culture—to find the voice, and the language, to enable that thinking and its embodiment on the stage

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Dramaturgy · Performance studies · Performing arts · Political theatre · Power (physics · Sociology · Spectacle · The arts · Theatre director · Theatre studies · Visual arts · Theatre and Performance Studies