Contemporary Theatre Review, 1994, Vol. 2,t pp.

85-98 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

1994 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in Malaysia

Making Do: Strategies and Tactics in Performance Pedagogy

Susan Melrose
What !S a woman? Hadn't we better ask: 'What does she do (in theatre)'? And then: 'How does she do it?'. In this present context, where we are invited to consider established and possible modes of action by women within the institutions and property/ties of theatre, then we need absolutely to ask whether 'what a woman does' in the 1990s, is usefully categorised in terms of biological identity. That the feminine and the masculine are morphologically bound-in to the female and the male has never been particularly useful to an analysis of modes of action. The first and last terms ('feminine-masculine' and 'modes of action') relate to symbolic practices in and on the world, whereas the middle term differentiates between biological specificities. The first and last can be changed, whereas biological identity cannot. What happens when the two sets are overlaid, and where effective action is conflated with a specific biological identity? Answer: we have bound ourselves in to the very dramas which we thought to subvert, historicize or counter, proving by our political intervention itself that 'we' are indeed reactive. The altemative is to sidestep the anxious categoriser: s/he wastes her energies in and on confrontation. I want to speak up here for the exceptional, singular and successful practitioner of theatre, and to point out that that practitioner may very well already be a woman, as well as an exceptional one. Let me add at once: as singular, and exceptional, a theatre persona signing signature events, she has already forged her place within, and hereafter will expand but also conserve the institutions of theatre. Does that make her complicit with the patriarchy? KEY WORDS action, Antigone, anxiety, auto-eroticism, Barba E., Barthes R., Bennett S., Bigot G., biology, boundaries, Boui-dieu P., cline, classification, contact-processes, Creon, de Certeau M., definition, determinisms, diaspora, Dolan J., Electra (Sophocles/Deborah Warner), energy, energies, eternal return, exception, exceptional, female, femininty. Feral J., film theory, focus-points, fragility, gender, grid, hermaphrodite, -itic, historicisation, im-pertinent, institutions, mainstream, making-do, margins, masquerade, master of knowledge, materiality, Mnouchkine A., Mulvey L., myth, mythologising, negativity, nuclear family, 'oriental', patriarchy, Pavis P., pedestrian, poaching, practitioner, property, properties, proprieties, psychologisation, Shaw F., sociohistorical change, stepping sideways, strategies, subjectivities, symbolic, tactics, the gaze, 'the male gaze', values, 'w(3men's work' [A]s a critic and theorist, does my primary responsibility lie in faithfully reporting the authorial intentions of feminist theatre groups and squelching my own response as a feminist spectator? Or does my responsibility lie in attempting to place the work in a larger cultural, theoretical, and ideological context, in which it becomes part of a movement of ideas? [...] My work here is not about the process of creating feminist performance, although creative considerations impinge on the discussion. I have concentrated, rather, on the process of being of feminist spectator, whom I refuse to idealize as always nurturing of feminist work. (Dolan 1988) If we can do no more than "transgress", "subvert" or be "dissident", the only political goal of art is to shock. The vision of a better world has been lost and we can only "rage against the dying of the light". (Wilson 1992)

This contribution to the cluster of articles gathered here begiris as a series of questions, and goes on to suggest that v^^e shift or dissolve some boundaries and deivelop other focus-points in order to take into account sociohistorical change in the institutions of learning, as well as in theatre and 'in theory'.
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First then, some questions which currently trouble some of us. Just what is 'women's work' (in theatre), as is it a fact (cf. Kruger 1991) that 'woman's work is (almost) never done' (in the institutions of British mainstream theatre)? The questions are loaded. 'Women's work', in this context, seems to need definition for it can't be enough just to 'be one'. Can it? Being is not doing, and we're concerned here, it seems, with action. So - 'women's modes of action in theatre'? 'The active roles of women in theatre's mainstream and elsewhere'? Just what do these formulae entail? The notion of biological specificity here is troubling. 'Women's work'. Isn't a symbolic rendering (nurture) of biological difference (;nature), given here as the basis here for inclusion/exclusion from a category of interest? (Alarm bells go off.) Historically, 'women's work' has generally been defined (on the basis of those observed differences which lead to our being initiated into systems of values, and initiated differently), as something like what men doTft/wouldri^ - or can't I - do. But is this oppositionality any longer sustainable in late-industrialised "societies; and is the theatre institution (which entails a wide range of practices and attitudes and values) necessarily emblematic of wider social injustices based on gender? Biology, biology. If it is basic to the question, the ways we see it ('stage' it) constantly change. Let's bring recent history in to trouble the scene: hasn't it become impertinent and counter-productive, in today's scenes of teaching, to draw on - for example - Mulvey's (1975) classic theory of a culpably dominant 'male gaze', as though it might be a truth of contemporary society, rather than a historically relative drama or myth, produced through a biologising and oppositional conception? Is this theory anywhere less pertinent, besides, than in the present context and practices of teaching theatre performance (cf. Bennett 1990) where subjectivities are equally fragile, oriented to the gaze, and involved in the masquerade, whatever the biological specificty of the subject? Can't we in the 1990s find a more pertinent way of representing - rather than through terms signifying biological difference - what are in essence and in effect dominant cultural institutions and their strategies, exercised through and upon bodies? Within these institutions some women, as well as some men, currently find their place; and the institution, always cunning and self-preserving, effects through the latest intake and what it brings, a slight shift in perspective, I am supposing here that 'the institution' is far from monolithic and rigid, a material 'thing' (which is merely its site of material organisation and property), but a set of strategies which can in the event be both lucid and cunning, rather than wilfully blind or coercive. But this is hardly the image of 'the patriarchy' which seems to have prevailed in feminisms of the 1970s. As system the institution and its strategies can now be seen to be homeostatic, rather than violent. It prefers to absorb and modify difference which might excite and dissipate energy; it prefers to conserve by channelling and directing energies; and it accepts the other on the institution's own terms, 'exporting [the other's] disorder' (Halliday 1987) onto the margins of the system. We can trace this passage in Mnouchkine's work at the Theatre du Soleil, from 'political myths' and collective creativity performed on the margins of Paris and in the factories in the 1960s and 1970s, to the financial mainstream and a universalising or 'transcultural' practice and theatre discourse (cf. Feral 1988; Pavis 1992), From this perspective, is 'the institution of theatre' 'male', or is it appropriate now to lose the biologising term?

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Some men, as well as some women, choose for a time at least to work on the institution's margins, effectively maximising productive energies through this principled opposition to a number of mainstream conventions. They prefer to work by pursuing short-term, tactical, unpropertied or financially precarious objectives. But .are these 'nomads' of theatre necessarily better; 'by definition', not-male, anti-patriarchal? Or are they, instead, no more, no less, than 'different', but equally bound in to the mainstream by their critical opposition to it? 'Difference' , here, is defined by the established norm, as is 'women' by 'men'. IDo we need, still, to retain the nuclear-family kinship scene as the grid through which we observe contemporary practices? If we 'need', pathologically, to spit in the face of the patriarch, thereby negatively affirming 'his' existence (despite our awareness, after Lacan, that this master-of-knowledge has the last laugh, is the Clown), then can we at least recognise - today - just what we are doing even as we cede to its seductions'? If we 'must' view institutions through the grid of the nuclear family scene, taking up as our own the role of Antigone, can we at least acknowledge that we willingly effect, once again, the eternal return? Within this scene we cannot 'set Antigone free', since the role is never discrete, but relational; so that 'Antigone' is a specific irrecuperable function of the fictional transformation of the patriarchal scene of Ancient Greece. There is no escape from the drama, once we accept the given role - as this present volume seems to be doing. JvJow, the patriarchal institution, taken as context of production of Antigone, is not just a set of oppressive laws relating to property ownership (and equally to propriety and cleanliness), but an anxious propertied class. The anxiety is both pathological, a defining condition perhaps of property-ownership in general, as the owner imagines himself (and herself?) to be under eternal threat of change, loss of power/attractiveness, loss of property to the other, and death; and it takes a figure appropriate to a precise historical moment - such as Williams (1981) discerned in th? 'total crisis' of Elizabethan England, inscribed then in Elizabethan tragedy. It is vital to note that real anxieties are transformed in the dramatisations of the imaginary; and that such dramatisations do not then represent real patriarchal domination in the exclusive hands of men, so much as the anxieties of certain strategists acting to sustain certain institutions. If historically these strategists in certain fields were men, it does not follow that all men were such strategists, nor that women were inherently (rather than historically) unable in general to take thfjir place. What I must stress is this: effective oppression would not be anxious, and would have no need to enact and 'resolve' its anxieties through displacement into such a trope as the character-relation Antigone-Creon, and the conflictual plot larded with empathetic conventions. The anxious tyrant in symbolic representations kills or 'causes' death to the threatening-other (depicted variously as woman, slave, monster or devil); achieves self-realisation (this performs to the real spectator a softening and broadening of the institution); and rules on, precisely because this drama is invented in terms of and controlled by the real institution itself, to its own ends. (In other words, symbolic capital comes to the aid of real capital.) If the present collection on theatre work nominally omits male practitioners and writers, can we avoid seeming similarly to imagine a threat within our profession, to be living out a similar anxiety, which obediently produces a gendered enemy? W(2've already been staged in such scenarios by principled activists in the 1970s. The problem for some of us of such stagings is that conflictual plots offer few interesting options. But some of us in our profession actively prefer to work in the

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field of contact-processes, rather than in administration, and I am not certain that this preference necessarily enacts submission, inertia, collusion, assimilation or oppression - the choice of the necessary, attributed by Bourdieu to the dominated classes (Bourdieu 1984). We can sidestep the scenarios of the gendered myth, if we momentarily for the sake of the argument, separate materiality from the symbolic. 'Antigone' now, is a partial value in a system of values, always determined by that relationship of difference. We can see now that it is a mark of the institution of property's cunning, that to achieve certain ends it has projected this relationship of difference across the real biological, anchoring it not just in the symbols of gender difference, but into the system of conventionally-associated social values: Creon/Antigone; male/female; old/young; brother/sister; patriarchy/matriarchy . . . . Stepping sideways, out of the conceit: 'Antigone-Creon' emerges, not as a human complex, but as a divided site, produced as a contingency of a threatened institution which projects it through a specific trope. It is revealed then to stand for something quite other than gender difference, although it may well stand for human fragility and decay within the one whose command is inevitably ceded to the other . . . . In the 1990s 'Antigone-Creon' as trope should now be able to shift freely across the biological cline (or slope), across all systems of established and changing social values, standing for the short-term rebellious aspirations and modes of action of any of us. But it is important to be consistent: taking on 'Antigone' as representative of rebelliousness and refusal of dominant institutions, means necessarily that we take on and acknowledge our 'Creon-ness' as well. Where does that take us? It seems to mean that the work of women theatre practitioners, like that of male practitioners, has within it a conserving, institutionalising function and sets of strategies, as well as an exploratory, im-proper, in-appropriate, un-propertied tactical potential. The dosage will differ, but nothing suggests, a priori, that its difference is conjugated firstly in terms of gender, in the 1990s. If we shift male/female or female/male sideways, viewing it as a strategy of conventional reckoning, and as no more than (but every bit as much as) that, how do we characterise what seems to be the purport of this collection of writing? To resort to the 'masculine'-and-'feminine' reckoning, where these are seen to be values and not monolithic identities, is no less institutionalised as strategy, and the complex set of conventional practices, attitudes and judgements of values associated with these signs still retain morphologically the trace of biological difference. Recently Mnouchkine has adopted the term 'feminine' to describe the actor in general, adding, not unproblematically, the second term 'oriental' (Feral 1988). I prefer to draw on de Certeau's (1984) notion of the strategic and the tactical, which we might suppose to find, always, within what we call cultural practice which works (Melrose 1994). But before I quote de Certeau's use of these terms, I need to better justify this move away from the anxious categorising our general title seems to reveal. Some women in the 1990s, as well as some men, practise eroticisation and objectification of the body through and for the gaze, both in the street, in the pub, and in more intensified cultural practice. As a mode of theatre practice, this can be intensely pleasurable. Secondly, theatre practice in Northern Europe in the 1990s is a minority practice, far from liable in this electronic media economy to be effective in determining contemporary subjectivities, nor to serve as a model to

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such determinations. Objectification of the other by the gaze is quite precisely authorised for all of us in certain sites set aside in part for the purposes of the game (Pradier 1990: 89ff), and regulated by a complex set of empathetical and ethical codes. That we need a science of the work of the present massed gaze in theatre is obvious - where by 'science' I mean (pleasurable and cunning) appraisals of auto-reflexive knowledges (Ulmer 1989: 26). What we don't need is to apply a feminist-film-theory grid to theatre-specific eye-work, practised precisely within the conditions of this ethical 'liveperformance' relation. To extract one aspect of this complex theatre practice of the gaze, to classify it as male, making of it a symbolic penetration, violation or oppression is a curiously inept strategy: to its ignorance of the ethical relation of li\'e performance, we can add its lack of familiarity with the range and diversity of spatial relations between performers and spectators: theatre performance is always more or less a mid-shot equivalence; there is no zoom-capacity; the eye is relatively free to wander and tofixboth within the performance space and within the theatre itself; and the human eye is more complex in its multiple functions than is the camera and the images it produces for editing. Barthes began to explore the diverse aspects of the libidinal gaze in a variety of sites, in his uncompleted 'Right in the Eves' (Barthes 1986). Perhaps this is where we should look, in an attempt to see where strategies and tactics of looking come into play, and whether and where gender is a determiner. I am curious to ask to what extent I might call my theatre eye-work hermaphroditic, regardless of my socially-constructed genderorientation, of my biological specficity. If we fail to take on the shift in perspective such a critique requires, then we are on unsafe epistemological ground in our own terms: if we accept the hypothesis tl-iat there exist both a material order of nature (pre-existing and post-existing human intervention), and a number of human-invented and enforced symbolic orders (languages; social organisations; educational institutions; religions; body skills and practices, attitudes; systems of values), through which we perceive, distinguish, separate, name, recognise, organise and evaluate that materiality, then it would seem that we can accept: 1. that biological difference (genetics; anatomy; hormonal disposition) is material and precedes human intervention; and 2. that the ways in which we distinguish and re-cognise and order on the basis of already-perceived difference are part of human symbolic practices. Now, human materiality cannot be changed, without violence (binding; anorexia; surgical intervention; castration). Women and men will always be that biologically. But the orders of the symbolic, on the contrary, historically relative, njceived, naturalised, and 'forgotten', can indeed be and are constantly modifed. V^fhat this has to do with the 'male gaze', and with 'women's work', is this: the terms (symbolic order) are used here to organise cultural practice (symbolic order), according to human biological difference (material real). What can be changed, that is, is named - wholly metaphorically - in terms of what, without violence, cannot. Ihis signals an epistemological crisis (a crisis of knowledge in its relation to discourse itself), within a political and pedagogic agenda. Can we break with the trope? Tropes are pleasurable, but when taken as truths they can obscure. After both Freud and Lacan - i.e. after the end of the historical

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conditions which enabled their production of hypotheses-as-truth - can we not either put biological difference back in its place, or at least change that place in its relation to theatre's critical scenarios? I teach theatre to ethnically and gender-mixed groups, in the 1990s context in which 'truths', well after Derrida, are less universal than relative: the scene has changed slightly, the divisions seem to be in a state of flux in the teaching scene's relation to the street and the economies (financial, educational, cultural). There seem to be new dangers, not all of which necessarily relate to gender. If the feminisation of poverty is 'everywhere', is it necessarily the dominant and the most perturbing problem in theatre's economies? In the theatre-teaching scene, in the 1990s, few students in my experience, under the age of 35, hoping for a career in some aspect of theatre practice, seem to be comfortable with the agendas and terms of a feminism better positioned to take on the conditions and prejudices of the 1970s. Their mothers did/didn't do it, talked about it. Most importantly, to my own way of seeing the pertinence and practice of theory, many of my students do not experience feminism/s as necessary or useful now, even if they are capable of acknowledging a historical usefulness in the relativisation of the enabling conditions to the production of certain aspects of contemporary subjectivities. Simultaneously some of us perceive a new inertia, dispersal and depersonalisation of those energies which, when goals were clearer, could be directed to the collective committed to large-scale social change. In this sort of teaching context, 'feminism' is historicized and mythologised, rather than derided, but more importantly, rather than felt, by many of our students. The institutionalisation of gender-discrimination has cunningly modified itself, the better to survive (and it does survive: that is the nature of institutions). What's more, there are new problems which 'go with the territory' of student life in outer London, from where I write, in the 1990s. I am reluctant, from within the relative security of another institution, to impose on that scene the lived history of some of us - although I am absolutely concerned to demonstrate to students what moved some of us to certain sorts of critical projects then. This entails comparative analysis - so that recognition and relativisation of dominant codes we naturalise and forget in the everyday, and in the theatre, become our proper subject. But if relativisation does not entail the advocacy of oppositional gender politics, nor does it equate with cynicism or despair (cf. Pavis 1992: 48-73). The Mnouchkine of 1789 differs from the Monouchkine sans scrupules of Les Atrides, 20-odd years later, but she does not give way to middle-aged despair or cynicism: her work continues to take the pulse of Parisian audiences, and literally to excite them. So, sidestepping: is there anything special about 'women' in theatre, today, as a group; or is it rather the case that special women in theatre - like special men are special? We tread a tightrope here, for all sorts of reasons - not the least of which relates to the relative anynomity or 'pedestrianship' (positive, in de Certeau 1984) of the group, and to the exceptional quality of the exception. We tread, here in theatre, in the difficult area of judgements of taste relating to the popular. Theatre isn't 'popular', today, for all that it is social. It is a minority practice, and as such it has its own modes of practice, ethos, attitudes and judgements of value. Once again, we cannot necessarily take it to be microcosmic to the larger human complex. Numerous fields of theoretical discourse of the 1980s note and/or deplore (dependant upon its writer's generation, political background and orientation), a

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diaspora effect which seems to be specific to the socio-economic conditions of that decade: division and dispersal of groups who through weight of numbers found a voice in the 1970s, seem to have proven widely effective strategies, practised by certain institutions (government policy; economic practice; changes in schooling) for silencing group protest. Vinaver (1991) notes of cultural decentralisation in Mitterand's France the dispersal of 'exceptional' directors to the provincial centres producing an octopus-effect, with a central financing head, and solipsistic squabbling for economic attention amongst the tentacles. Doesn't 'women's work' face equivalent dangers: either the weakening effect of the diaspora, or internal wrangling which dissipates energies and effective modes of cultural action? If we cannot speak as a pluralist group, we risk to find ourselves singularised, so that problems we share in theatre are refocused as 'my problem'. Wilson, cited above, attributes to the current scene of theory and practice the feeling (which she goes on to counter), that "the vision of a better world has [thereby] been lost, so that we can only 'rage against the dying of the light' ", transgress and subvert. Can 'we', today, if we are divided by gender polarisation, and equally singularised because 'we' do not 'share the territory' with today's students, usefully celebrate the work of a particular group - e.g. 'women'? Why besides, should we find 'them' inherently interesting? The problem is clear as soon as we ask all students to read certain critical works: wanting to use Dolan in preference to Elam (1980) or Pavis (1982), I expose all students to her biologisation of 'the problem', and we find that we are no longer 'talking about theatre' so much as about gender dramas in the discourse of theory. In Dolan - for example [m|aterialist feminism at least acknowledges the varied responses of spectators mixed across ideologies of gender, sexuality, race and class [. . .]. [But] [b]y admitting to this heterogeneity, strategies for how
to thwart the white, heterosexual, middle-class male's hegemony as the subject of representation can be

formulated [because] [u]under materialism, these formulations will not include subsuming spectator differences under some comfortable, homogeneous classification. (121: my emphases)

By this absolutist strategy, she misrecognises the institutions of culture, and neutralises the potential effectiveness of certain modes of intervention. 'The problem', does not now lie significantly for theatre practitioners with "white, heterosexual, middle class male's hegemony as the subject of representation", even if we were to accept Dolan's own "comfortable, homogeneous classification". 'The problem' relocates itself between practitioners, divided by no means neatly on the basis of liking for/dislike of institution and strategy. In de Certeau's terms (1984), institutions are self-mobilising and perpetuating, characterised by the marking out of spatial and temporal boundaries, property/ies arid strategies, regardless of the mode of organisation or the gender of its organisers. It is not now necessarily patriarchal - this would mean that my own organisational, boundary-marking and conserving practices are not proper to the way I can make do within one or another institution, but rather to my collusion with the patriarchy. They are, instead, a making-do in terms of the institutional, where both aspects derive from human potential. Can institutions be 'softened'? Surely. Are they then less 'institutional'? Not at all. The institution is endemically conserving, even/especially as it softens its borders to let in assimilable change. If we must keep sex in the equation, let's suppose that cultural institutions, in late-industrialised social clusters, are

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hermaphroditic. Let's suppose that they now attract, and permit to enter, all
those who like the particular intellectual-libidinal qualities of their games. Institu-

tions alone provide us with the means to speak and act effectively, and, almost perversely in certain societies, to "make trouble" (Lemke 1984) within their parameters. Who amongst us is less able to get in, today, to - for example the London theatre scene? I am not certain that it is 'women', as a group, although it is certainly those wha for complex socio-economic reasons in
post-80s Britain, have not yet learnt/been able to learn the games.

In the 1990s, when Mnouchkine's work in Paris is subsidised to the tune of more than 500,000 annually; when Talawa have their own theatre property; when Deborah Warner's work with Fiona Shaw wins critical acclaim throughout the UK and France; and when the powerful work of Juliet Stephenson appears across performance media (theatre film/television) where it is not objectified by camera or scene - i.e. when work by singular practitioners who are also women enters into a performance mainstream in Europe - what we need here is a finer set of strategies. If the work of Mnouchkine, Warner, Shaw, Talawa and Stephenson can be approached as both women's work and theatre mainstream (in that they are widely available, funded, propertied, reviewed, applauded), then we might have to accept that the mainstream is newly able, because of 1970s feminisms, to draw together singular practitioners across the gender divide. If it remains the case that some of this work 'seems to be different', I want to suggest that in each instance, wdthout necessary regard for gender but perhaps because at certain times women best combine these qualities in their work with others, it is remarkable because of the ways it blends two complementary qualities of human practice. They have been called 'femininity' and 'masculinity'; but that couplet still binds us in, if 'only' morphologically, to biological determinism. Another option might be 'toughness' and 'vulnerability' - which recalls the distinction and necessity for balance observed by Barba in other traditions eg. between keras and manis (Barba and Savarese 1991: 83), as much as it recalls both the Jungian and the left brain/right brain schemata. I have quoted Mnouchkine, for example, as seeing her own approach to be both tender and 'without scruples'. It consistently provides the enabling conditions for, and exposes, in certain performers (e.g. Georges Bigot) something I semiotise as 'acute actorly fragility and strength' revealed in one and the same instant, through 'the same signs'. Warner, similarly, is tough enough to produce those conditions in which Fiona Shaw, in Electra, briiises and cuts her feet time and time again in performance conditions; but tender enough, we must suppose, to make this self-mutilation not just bearable but performance-useful (i.e. beyond the classic sado-masochistic couplet). For Kruger, this successful, highly visible and mainstream work by practitioners who are also women is 'an exception'. This is problematic to a generalised politic, but there are two things I should want to note about the exception/al, relating to the differences between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Traditionally, the exception 'proves the rule' - which would suggest that the theatre mainstream 'as a rule' remains 'male-dominant' (rather than, by definition, institutionalised). On the other hand, it might be the case that the only male practitioner to win equivalent acclaim is similarly 'exceptional'. In this case, we might have to accept that theatre within this cultural economy, applauds its challenging (but 'acceptable') exceptions, whatever their gender; and is more reticent with regard to the

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less visible, or stereotypical, or 'pedestrian', whatever the gender of the practitioner. If, historically, women practitioners have been less numerous and less visible and vocal, while representations of Woman as the site of conflict in dramatic writing have been legion, the reasons are complex, varied, and historically relative; and both undergo change as more women find the means and the taste for effective work within the institutions of the dramatic-theatre mainstream. To some extent, the 'mean and the taste' are developed by our signalling work already undertaken by the exceptional (woman) practitioner, who is currently more visible, because less numerous; and always visible in gender terms, because that is how the media as institution chooses to display her. Now, it displays her to our best advantage when she stages men as well as women, when she performs with men as well as women, when she writes for men as well as women, because in each instance we see her enter the institution, and work within it; not as a token of the oppressed, but in her insinuating herself into the institution, and thereby broadening it. In this sense, quantity may well follow quality, so that the expansion takes with it the values attributed to what was intially singular. And what seems to be useful in the media-institution's reckoning, is that singular work by a woman practitioner will often be interpreted in strategic, gendered terms. Divided, women are thus not conquered, since the anxious other tends to misrecognise the singular woman theatre practitioner as a member of a veritable army. It is politic, in the light of changing circumstances, to make do - not by advocating radical group action; not by seeking to feed students with one version of 'universal principles' argued in one or another name; but by providing within one or another institution, the enabling conditions to a recognition, comparison, and relativisation of established practices in theatre wherever these may come from. In this sense deconstruction of the institutions and their strategies is constructive: it does not cause a revolution or leave a void, nor cause us to rage, nor to tum in endless circles, precisely to the extent that we eschew both despair and advocacy of one particular solution coming from yesterday's scene (which was once my own). In Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life (1984) he notes two complementary modes of human action. The text remains appealing in its attempt to focus on the "common hero [. . .] walking in countless thousands on the streets", rather than on the larger heroes of classical dramas and the problematised heroes of the master discourses of nineteenth century rationalism (the exploited worker; the 'deviant' subject of psychoanalysis; the superhuman/animal couplet of 'natural selection'). And it appeals in the reasons for its inadequacies (anonymity is not singularly interesting in contemporary theatre; exceptional theatre practice, which holds some of us momentarily enthralled, is not of the order of the everyday; the pedestrian as hero risks, that is, to appear 'utterly pedestrian'). Inadequacies, but not failures: theatre creativity, however singular, is not individual but collective; in peirt it draws on 'everyday' actions and knowledges; to some extent, it always takes up our stereotypical and pedestrian options, and frames and quotes these fo other ends. So that it seems that 'theatre' itself, in this instance, is the "producer of culture" (1984: xvii) - rather than the singular individual - in that it always conjoins our slighter, individual efforts. The shift we find here is not a matter of replacing the either/or strategy linked to the digital and to 'linear logic', with the and-and associative inclusions of the

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analogue (Wilden 1982). It is, rather, a matter of recognising that one cultural value always entails and invokes, and often blurs into, what is elsewhere called its 'other'. De Certeau distinguishes - for the sake of argument - between the strategic and the tactical, the propertied institution and the poacher, in terms which seem to me to relate very closely to different modes of practice in theatres' complex scenes:
I call a "strategy" the calculus of force-relations which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an "environment". A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper [as in both appropriate and property], and thus serves as a basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it [. . .] Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. I call a "tactic", on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of the tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure indepdence with respect to circumstances. (1984: xix)

In line with the historicising outlook noted above, we might well suppose that change has occurred since de Certeau wrote this in the late 1970s. But in general we can suppose that 'women's work' (in theatre, in the classroom, in the House of Commons, in the supermarket), like the work of all other groups and of subjects within and outside of them, is strategic, in certain of its routines; its sites of practice and its actional frames (complex somatic practices activated under headings like 'going shopping', 'making love', 'debating an issue', 'implementing a policy'), and that the performer too always has strategic recourse to these. Even in the 'experimental' or meta-critical practices of 'live arts' and 'new performance', the strategy is dominant over the tactic since decisions are made strategically in terms of what is rejected or critiqued - for example, almost all performance draws on empathetic codes, and the code is an aspect of the institutionalised. But work is also always to some extent tactical, singular, in ways not given in advance, not quantifiable nor readily and universally liable to be qualified, not able to be recorded here, named, broken-down, interpreted, mapped out. But which shimmer suddenly, for one but not another of us, when they are conjured up in performance and pre-performance, decision-making contexts; so that the breath is drawn, suddenly, and held, and I sigh - 'Ah!' - and slightly tilt up my chin, in a moment of (impossible) recognition (I lack a better term). This sudden tactical intervention, and the ways we respond to it, better recalls the hana of Noh theatre, than it does strategies set out in more widely available treatises on aesthetics. Ironically, to some extent the moment of recognition in the spectator also recalls the Lacanian notion of inertia (e.g. Lacan 1977), which erupts into a subject's linear, proto-discursive and praxiological processing - in, for example, the constitution of a narrative structure; the recognition of an actional frame - to produce momentary fascination ("I couldn't take my eyes off her"), heat or chill in the body, prickle in the genitals, anus or back of the neck, small muscular contractions, the urge to cry. It activates 'something else' in us, unexpectedly and not uniformly for all spectators - and we treasure it in its momentary fragility, and want to find it again without knowing quite where to look. It challenges the logocentricist amongst us, in as much as it is relatively 'un-speakable'.

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In de Certeau's "soft-ideology" (Huyghe 1987), institutions and their strategies ('the family'; 'theatre'; 'making dinner') are not to be identified with any particular group, defined by biological or by any other exclusive term. 'Self-mobilising' and self-perpetuating, they are not liable to be 'overcome' through any soit of political intervention; and they are to some extent pleasurable to us all, and function, indeed, in such a way that all subjects find within them their own identity (as a named being; as a family role; as a professional role:; a passport-holder; a property-owner or legitimate user; an advocate of ont." or another recognisable ways of living) - even as/especially as we rail against them. That rebellion 'against' such institutions is itself foreseen as stratsgy, written in to them as coded option, whether we approach this through the Fr(5udian institution, 'the Oedipal complex'; through strategies called revolutionary; through 'student protest', or - in the theatre - through avant-gardist or 'experimental' practices. Each of these strategies is recognisable as such since it quickly and 'legitimately' establishes for itself a name, a history, a number of recognisable moves, an order of procedure, a set of consequences. In short, a s{>ace dominating a time of action, a 'property' 'of its own' which pre-exists and transcends individual subjects' uses - including uses we might name 'feminist'. Is 'feminist theatre' more tactical? Absolutely not, since its strategies are informed by oppositional politics. Is 'women's theatre practice' more tactical? Not so, if we accept that the specific instances of women's work I have referred to above recognise, exploit and make-do with, rather than misrecognise, prevailing institutions and their anxieties. For de Certeau complementary to this identificatory pleasure is the suggestion that "we are all marginalised" by one or another aspect of institutions and their strategies, regardless of gender or ethnic identity. As marginalised, we all atteript, albeit differently, to find the momentary and situation-specific means to insinuate our tactical actions into the gaps and interstices which open up between boundary-marked institutions and strategies. These tactical incursions are instances of metaphoric poaching on the property/properties of the institutional; and they are not just carried out in haste, artful and cunning, but they are ,ilso poetic. De Certeau sees in them and in their practitioners complex but unhusbanded somatic skills (intelligence as spontaneous material actions), which constitute in practice an everyday 'art of making do'. Is 'the good actor', regardless of gender or ethnicity, a tactician, an artis: of making-do, who both embodies the strategies of the institution of mise en scene an(i theatre performance, and insinuates between these, through some sor: of intermittant and always mysterious somatic and interactive cunning, brief but \ ital flickers of that 'something else' which is able to surprise some of us, so that foi' an instant we are transfixed? 'Good acting', in this sense, is the play between the institutional and the tactical - and we need to provide the conditions in which; all of our students can understand and practise both. Tactical practice is only metaphorically 'feminine', only historically the province of 'women' (and gays, and ethnic minorities caught up in others' institution:;) although for Mnouchkine the actor is both 'feminine' and 'oriental' regardlesiS of biology or geography (Feral 1988). The terms are trying, but let's bear with them for a moment, since they seem to relate to something in our experience of the actor's work. Is the actor inherently, or only historically, theatre's oppressed, and hence a highly skilled professional tactician? 'The oppressor', here, is the massed

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and hungry gaze of the audience, rather than that paper tyrant, the metteur en scene - who is a conflation of theatre-strategies providing enabling structures. What we now might realise about this 'oppressor', is that for some of us it animates us, focuses energies by blocking them (cf. Barba and Savarese, op. cit.). In short, and with the proviso that no parallel be drawn between this mode of symbolic oppression and other practices of real violence in the political-material real, this 'oppression' standing for the massed gaze of the audience, is productive in its relation to the actor's auto-eroticism. The theatre institution provides the enabling structures to the productive use of this auto-eroticism in the performer. If the actor's auto-eroticism - which differs from that of the relatively passive model - is to be channelled as a professional work activity, it absolutely requires the theatre institution which guarantees and oversees the relation with the gaze. But why should this make the actor even metaphorically 'feminine' (trace of biological determinism) or 'oriental' (geographical determinism)? Is this poaching by the practitioner? As this point I want to combine Mnouchkine's playful (?) terminology with Pavis' serious observations on Barba's 'intercultural theatre' (Pavis 1992), taking as institutional backdrop that semiological tradition according to which 'a sign' is defined always by what it is not. What emerges momentarily from my piratic blending of strategies of discourse is this. For Pavis, looking not so much East as to Barba's use of it:
[Western semiotics] ought to become a little 'oriental' and try to [. . .] follow this 'thinking in action' (Barba 1982) [. . . in order to] hide and reveal signs in the same moment and the same movement of denegation. (170)

What we find drawn together here, from praised French practitioner and seminal semiologist alike, are three sets of values, articulated not by the white male bastion of cultural conservatism but by the 'radical' woman practitioner, the theatre anthropologist, and the sympathetic theatrologue: - the metaphorically 'feminine' (performer), transcending gender; - the literally 'Oriental' as confounder of European semiological clarity; - the metaphorically 'oriental' (performer), transcending geography. Does this curious conflation mean that the institution (of theatre) is changing, or is it rather the case that the way it is seen and spoken is widening and softening? Whatever we conclude, this chronologically 'new' strategy reveals a poverty and a conservatism of sign-making: the 'oriental and feminine' performer/ance, here, is marked by a simultaneity of 'hiding and revealing', by a movement of denial (of representation: to the rationalist it stands, clearly, for nothing - except itself). Taken together these recall the Lacanian institution according to which 'femininity' is masquerade performed in terms of male anxieties, and the 'oriental' is double, and doubly appealing to those anxieties: marked by silence, the veil, the mask, the oblique or downcast gaze; confounding logic, trance-like, dark, rhythmic, sensuous, eternal, mystical. Artaud merges ahistorically with Lacan, and certain conventions of oppositional feminism (woman is nurture, the body, the cry, the murmur, while the male is linguistic, patriarchal, social) are not far from the scene. What is more startling is the way in which traditional oppositionality is maintained in this 'new' mainstream-serious way of seeing/saying theatre. Some

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of us have always tried, tactically, to intrude this different knowledge (T is new to thee. The Tempest, Vi, 184) into the fissures which have always opened up, for some of us, in semiological discourse on theatre, and have always used it tactically in the scene of theatre teaching. This seems to me to suggest that the discovrses of 'theatre analysis' have always been more rigid than has practice itself (alv/ays tactical at its best, always short-lived and nomadic); and that while those who currently speak it seek for new concepts, the ways in which they stage triem remain faithful to established institutions of thought. The simultaneity of hiding and revealing noted by Pavis as though it were uniquely available through Barba's 'orientalisms' has always been the performer's game, even if the analyst and the critic, despite Ubersteld's seminal work (1981), have been unable to perceive it. The 'Western semiotics' cited above by one of its leading exponents would alv^ays have benefitted in theory from what its actors have always known in practice. But Pavis' concern - like Artaud's, Brecht's and Barthes' before it - remains witli an "oriental", perceived to be the useful and enhancing other of "western semiotics". Mnouchkine's current concern is with something like theatre universals, couched again in terms which might be called reactionary, so obedient are they to established convention. Does it matter that an attempted shift in authoritative discourse comes so late, and remains both oppositional and curtailed? There is a more constructive view: the future - and the future of the institution - is not female (Segal 1987), so much as tactical. The 'tactical' within the institution (unscrupulous but tender; category-maintaining and blurring; cl(;ar about some of its confusions; self-regarding first, before it looks at the oi:her; faltering and direct; relativising but not condemning psychologising tradition; somatic in its focus), rather than the 'feminised' or 'orientalised' institution, is no less 'institutional' in the 1990s - even though it has learnt cunning, is artful, unafraid of compromise, opportunistic and flexible. It still momentarily categorises and conserves, but its rule-giving discourses and implementing practices cat be modified 'in flight'; they are paratactic (joining altemative elements togethtir as equal), rather than rigid and hierarchical, and they are not afraid to flirt, secuce, contradict themselves, declare fidelity in the moment with passionate conviction arid then move on; nor to dance. Plato feared the honeyed muse, but some of us have come a few long and widening ways since then.
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