abstract
The mandate to construct living images which "refuse and refute the established order" (in Marcuse's words) has special meaning in the realm of theatre and live performance, where the image of the human form is always on some level literal. For a performer whose role in the process of production begins with the learned practices and reinforced meanings of his or her own body, the method by which that body is "matched" to a character or to a responsibility or task is very important indeed. The dominant aesthetic in most Western theatrical performance today is one in which an actor naturalistically "becomes" a character, implicitly requiring actors to ignore, forget, or obscure the features and meanings of their own bodies-- in other words, to pretend that their own bodies will have little or no impact on the resulting performative act. This illusion, though, fails whenever the performing body refuses to be "transparent"-- when, for example, it has non-behaved but strongly identifying features such as gender, ethnicity or disability.
In contrast, casting practices that refuse the dominant aesthetic of performance by acknowledging or even cultivating the uniqueness of an individual actor's body can offer rich opportunities to transform even an otherwise mainstream performance into a powerful, even "magical," work of art. Sadly, few performers and even fewer critics are able to imagine casting practices beyond the staid "traditional" casting and the controversial "blind" casting. In this presentation, I will lay out two truly alternative approaches to casting, as well as revisiting both "traditional" and "blind" casting strategies to examine what is at stake and what is implicit in them. By exploring at least four different methods of casting and comparing the theoretical premise to their effects in actual practice, I hope to reveal just how deeply casting decisions are implicated in the politics of representation-- and therefore, how the choices we make about which bodies do what in live performance might become an active site of political or aesthetic refusal.