Theatre and Social Responsibility

Abstract

The idea for the current issue came out of musing on linguistics. The noun “responsibility” can be (mis)spelled “responsability” an ability to respond which to our ear sounded truly inspiring. In late 2021, after the gruesome pandemic years, theatre as an ability to react, to create, and to initiate a better adaptation for the changing world, looked like a theme for a new call for papers that might resonate well. The body of scholarship on the subject pointed out to the virtually unlimited conceptions of how theatre can be responsible towards the world, society, audience, and itself. It is interesting to observe how, in the course of the last hundred years, cutting-edge theatre feels first responsible for its own aesthetic value and accessibility focusing on artistic achievement over financial success and decentralisation. The U. S. and France could be a case in point.1 Then comes the age of politically transgressive content as manifested in engaged theatre theories and practices of the second half of the twentieth century. It is especially evident in the development of Scandinavian independent performance, which as volume no. 11 of this very journal, co-edited by Knut Ove Arntzen and Anna Blekastad Watson, points out, was focused not only on formal experimentation but also on an anthropological turn and fusion of the popular and political theatre, thus creating a distinctive and region specific aesthetics.2 In the case of the Baltics, societal responsibility is deeply embedded in local theatre tradition, which developed in the framework of the national emancipation movement of the late nineteenth century. Currently, the responsibility of theatre can address the promotion of values in audiences ranging from risk-taking, individual freedoms, personal responsibility (“the entrepreneurial participation” in Adam Alston’s wording3) to strengthening the social fabric in dislocated communities4. In all the cases however, it is safe to conclude that the social responsibility of theatre dwells on the belief that (to paraphrase David Elliott et al.5) theatre is made by the people for the people.