D through Z: Politics in the Making

This text is inseparable from the way in which I am striving to create art as a theatremaker.Its words are a part of each production I participate in, for they attempt to set political standards for my work.By "political" I mean to denote the continually in flux process of recognition and individuation of a body within a collective.Therefore, as I understand the concept, the political is not definitively State determined.Political relations, rather, make up a multiplicity of territories-the State is but one of them.To engage with theatre's political possibilities, its possibilities of engaging with and contributing to this process of recognition, I argue that we must go beyond a consideration of human bodies interacting or communicating with simply other human bodies.We must investigate the ways in which we humans collaborate with material 'bodies' of all kinds, and think about the different roles that these different bodies play in the process of theatre production-I use 'production' here to straddle the categories of rehearsal and presentation.A consideration of materiality in theatre production, I believe, reveals a certain structureone subtending much of our practice-that encourages the exclusion of certain materials and their meanings.I ask: is resistance to such exclusionary methods possible in this art?Can we expand the territory of political theatre to include the production as a whole, to include those things we so often deem superfluous?To explore these questions, I draw upon certain concepts of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, such as assemblage and difference, and on theatre discourse.I also draw on my own experiences of learning the theatrical ropes in Canada and the United States.The theatre I have learned while playing in these ropes finds no better articulation than in Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the assemblage.The authors write: "We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flowselected, organized, stratified-in such a way as to converge [. ..] artificially and naturally" (406).Like the celestial constellations we see from Earth, composed of great gaseous stars flying at high speeds, the assemblage Deleuze and Guattari describe is not fixed, nor are its components.Bringing this concept into theatrical discourse (something many theatre thinkers did before I ever did) enables one to conceive of the way that we produce theatre to be a process of assembling various kinds of malleable material bodies.In the making of theatre, different elements collide and combine over a period of time, changing themselves and each other.At no point does this assembling really stop.Even in presentation, new materials join the party, and others connect in slightly different ways.And yet, despite the flow of assembling, its instability and spontaneity, we theatrophiles, for the most part, and without a pause for thought, organize our production materials into two camps: humans and non-humans.There are many different kinds of human materials, whose significance and differences are greatly respected.On stage we find the human performer.To these people, who are often TRIC / RTAC • 35.

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