Theatre and Capital Once Again: An Essay on an Informal Archive

Abstract:

This essay reviews Theatre Journal articles that examine the intersections of theatre and capital, to highlight the challenge of analyzing neoliberal transformations of global and glocal economies, in particular, the trend to financial speculation to the detriment of investment in public resources, and the impact on theatre and performance. Commentators in the “global” North can better understand the scale of transformation—the concentration of wealth for a few and the loss of public revenue for the precarious majority—by examining strategies deployed by this majority in the South, especially Africa, to deal with extreme inequality exacerbated since the 1990s by structural adjustment and reduced aid from the North. The essay briefly notes a critical response to the impact of capital on performance by an African scholar, and a performative illumination of its US impact by an American practitioner. In the first case, David Donkor’s Spiders of the Market analyzes the glocal pressure of financialization on social welfare and performative practices in Ghana while offering critical insights that apply to increasing inequality in the North. In the second, Paul Durica and Pocket Guide to Hell’s site-responsive reenactments illuminate historic conflicts between U.S. capital and labor from the 1886-7 Haymarket Trial to the 2011 Occupy Movement and attempt to clarify the obscure workings of capital as an economic and cultural force in contemporary Chicago, whose nineteenth-century markets were the first to develop derivatives and other instruments that have spawned financial speculation to the present time.