Flourishing on the Stage: Embodied Reflexivity and the Effacing of Work Boundaries in Contemporary Performing Arts

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on individualised and reflexive processes taking place in contemporary cultural work by considering Italian theatre actors’ experiences. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, the analysis focuses on work as the affective and reflexive site where subjectivities are formed. Performing artists display an embodied reflexive stance in which disciplinary practices and self-care instances are configured as both dispositives of an entrepreneurial ethos of work and as reflexive self-affirmative processes. Recognizing the embodied and emotional experiences that tie theatre actors to their professional activities, the paper considers the reflexive circularity that takes place between subjective meanings, affects and embedded experiences of work. Within this ongoing interpretive circle, cultural work emerges as positioned beyond traditional boundaries of work.