What Phenomenology Can Bring to Theatre Sociology, and What It Cannot, with Reference to Radio Muezzin in Aarhus

Abstract

What contribution can phenomenology make to contemporary theatre and performance studies? What sort of critical tasks is it better suited for than other available modes of analysis? In this article, I will address these questions from the perspective of the study of theatre as a social practice in the sense proposed by Pierre Bourdieu: that is, as a set of set-apart, taught and embodied patterns of social striving, which pursue their own values and are constantly subject to redefinition by their participants.1 It may seem at first that phenomenology has little in common with this sort of sociological view of the theatrical field. This is only partially correct. The two are distinct but complementary; neither alone can provide as complete a portrait of what theatre does than the two can together. My argument here is twofold: first, phenomenological methods are limited and cannot in themselves describe the functions that theatre serves for audiences or society; second, the social analysis that can aid in this task still has a particular need for phenomenological methods, particularly if it wishes to avoid the Scylla of rigid determinism and the Charybdis of social psychoanalysis. I will make this argument through an encounter between Bourdieu’s work and a few key contemporary examples of theatre phenomenology (principally, Bert States and Erica Fischer-Lichte). I will then demonstrate the applicability of this argument through an analysis of a specific moment from a performance of Rimini Protokoll’s Radio Muezzin in Aarhus. In so doing, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of how artistic fields such as theatre might be amenable to sociological analysis. I believe that such an approach can offer a more flexible, full and vibrant insight into the function that theatrical events serve for those who make and attend them. But the details of this approach remain only sketchily articulated in the existing literature. Detailing how a sociological method would relate to so central an approach as phenomenology would be a useful contribution to the filling in of that sketch.