Privilege and Mimesis

As a theatre director, I occupy, in a professional sense, a place somewhere between the actor and the audience. My workplace is primarily in the rehearsal room, not at the performance.

I go to work with performers and teams of technicians, designers and dramaturgs to construct, moment for moment, what an audience will be presented with in front of their eyes when our preparations are completed. Audiences and performers alike know that very little is left to luck or chance. Yet, without doubt, there is that special moment when things come ‘alive’ - when performer meets the audience in real time, and that ‘empty space’, the theatre or the arena, becomes electrified...

But it is not just the arts which is aware of the link between performance, power and ethics (or anti-ethics). We encounter it in the field of politics. A very similar dynamic plays out between citizens and politicians as between audiences and performers in theatre or cinema. The differences are also clear as politics is not mimesis. By this I mean that politics is not an interpretation of power but the actual manifestation of power in the world. Well, if that is what we think we are wrong.

Politics is as dependent on placing the citizen in a position of privilege as the cinema is its audiences. The very same grammar of dramaturgy is at play in any encounter between a politician and citizens as in the art/mimesis examples we have examined so far.

For the full text, visit Chris Baldwin on Substack.