"Higher Markets"
Post #15: Michael Bogdanov, Pierre Bourdieu, Alan Joseph
Michael Bogdanov. Theatre Director. Now Intendant of Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus, Welsh-born Michael Bogdanov is back in London for a few days. Today he’s visiting the Barbican to lead our arts policy and management seminar. His director’s gaze probes the ten of us like prospective cast members, no doubt divining who’ll go on to play leading parts. Some already have: Alan Joseph at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, and orchestral specialists Haukur Hannesson and Elina Siltanen in Reykjavik and Helsinki, respectively.
Bogdanov opens our minds to a Continental art-world in which his Hamburg theatre commands an annual budget of 45 million pounds, 35m of it coming as direct state subsidy. Wryly describing his escape from the UK’s arts ‘ghetto’, his accession to Hamburg’s Intendancy has followed in the footsteps of Peter Zadek. A funding crisis here at the UK’s National Theatre intersected with Bogdanov’s fortuitous export of the ‘Henry’ plays to the Deutches Schauspielhaus, thereby establishing his reputation across the Channel.
In the UK, heads of major theatres remain obscure public figures whereas Bogdanov walks about Hamburg a ‘supremo’. At the restaurant everyone recognizes him. Fiercely independent, eschewing monarchy, Hamburgers take pride in an affinity for things English. The theatre enjoys ‘merchant’ rather than ‘royal’ patronage. Now they’re furious the Englishman has resigned, effective at year’s end. Hamburg is a media centre, so he’s under blistering attack (said with a grin).
Lessing founded the National Theatre 250 years ago. Fifty plays are permanent draws. An enormous arts infrastructure for a city of 2.5 million. Bogdanov hasn’t before enjoyed such fiscal freedom, but it occasions excess as well as triumph. Without subscribers many theatres run empty. Though more sophisticated in politics and sexuality, German theatre frequently is self-indulgently experimental compared to Britain’s commercially-minded fare. The unions—strong—enjoy representation on boards of directors. Budgets: administrative expenses outweigh artistic costs. Audiences: highly vocal, for or against.
Would a foreign-born director land a comparable top artistic post here, I ask?
Bogdanov chuckles. “England does not employ from the outside. Even in Germany it is a case of fifty or so Intendants revolving around. Jérôme Savary at the Chaillot or Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, that’s ‘European’ theatre. I broke the carousel.”
What brought that about? He moots the endemic lack of post-war Germany play- writing—will re-unification will bring it back? Is there a sense that German introversion needs counter-balance? Might an emphasis on re-evaluating German ‘guilt’ through the old plays have yielded to an appetite for a new more popular repertoire? (London, 20 June 1991.)
Pierre Bourdieu. Sociologist. At first my University of Southern California students are puzzled reading Pierre Bourdieu. For the thinkers among them, though, the pre-eminent French sociologist quickly gets his hooks in. I see questions forming.
I bridled at Distinction when I read it for my Masters’ thesis in 1990-91, rejecting its ineluctable pessimism about the arts as agents for social change. I refused to accept that, by Bourdieu’s lights, my career in performing arts was simply re-enforcing static socio-economic tiers of cultural production and consumption.
I took the opportunity to ask Bourdieu directly about this at a packed session hosted by Terry Eagleton at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in May 1991. Slavoj Žižek, in Mapping Ideology, transcribed that exchange:
Can I shift your attention to the arts...? I am interested in the way the ideology of symbolic capital rests on arts and aesthetics, which you attack in your book Distinction. You argue that people across the social scale subscribe to the universal classification system. They buy into Kantian aesthetics from the top to the bottom of the social range.
What happens to the economy of symbolic goods when taking into account, say, Fredric Jameson’s claim that there is a proliferation of new cultural codes? If it is true that there is a proliferation of new cultural codes, how does it relate to your analysis of symbolic power?
Bourdieu hunched forward, pulling deeply on his cigarette while forming a response. Smoke drifted above the stage in the shoebox black-walled hall.
Remember, he said, in the “higher markets,” (meaning theatres, concert halls, art galleries, etc.) the dominant code remains absolutely efficient. My question, he continued, refers to the current “rehearsal of the old idea that mass culture, popular culture, is growing.” Yet, a “dominant chic” among intellectuals that would valorise, say, cartoons, or rap, is simply a competition to be first in noticing creative value in popular art forms.
“The perception may be valid,” he allowed, “but there is an overestimation of the capacity of these new things to change the structure of the distribution of symbolic capital.”
Exaggeration of popular forms as signs of change “is a form of populism.” Although genres such as rap may be a welcome relaxation of ethnocentrism they don’t mean very much to symbolic capital. He shook his head, “depending on the place in which I speak, I could be on one side or the other.” (March 2011, Los Angeles.)
Alan Joseph. Arts Administrator. Saddened to learn that my friend Alan Joseph passed away suddenly. This tall, quietly capable Indo-South African was a fellow graduate student at the Barbican in 1990-91. Becoming General Manager of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre in in the 1980s, he’d devoted his career to that anti-Apartheid nerve centre.
One of the bravest politicized theatres of the twentieth century, right up there with Welles and Havel, it made a difference. Alan described how it worked: small teams of actors and directors incubated new plays in dispersed rehearsal halls; a success would be nurtured to further success, moving up from smaller to larger performance spaces; otherwise, it was back to the workshop.
“No bullshit; no subsidies; everyone paid from the gate, out of my back pocket.”
Break-out hits toured internationally—e.g. I saw the astounding Asinimali at the Quinzaine festival in Quebec City—rocket fuel for the international movement against Apartheid embraced by many young Canadians.
Alan spoke of racist attacks, vandalism, and the regime’s archaic censorship apparatus. They’d foment a public ‘complaint,’ move in with police to shut down the production, then conduct a formal tribunal on the stage under work lights to determine if the show could proceed or not.
In London, he seemed a little dazed that their theatre had actually succeeded in its mission, unsure what might follow such sheer intensity of purpose. (February 2012, Ottawa.)
The facts about Alan Joseph -- I accept your assertion "it made a difference" as fact, though I suppose a sociological skeptic would want surveys and the ranking and elimination of other causal pathways leading to the demise of Apartheid -- are like a vacuum cleaner sucking away the cigarette smoke of Bourdieu's prestige. Nice contrast.