“Theatre” as a policy optic for recasting the present: aesthetics, accomplishment, excellence

I

Theatre is – more than any other artistic medium – a medium of pragmatics. The permanent possibility of mistakes, glitches, and loss of control are not unavoidable flaws but the core of the medium. Instead of ignoring these obstacles, embracing them is a key strategy for creating a tension that emphasizes its very aliveness. This proximity to the unexpected has conceptional, even philosophical consequences but very concrete reasons: always involving many people, always being collaborative (even though the hierarchies between director, actor, scenographer, technicians etc. might be strong), always trying to create alternative worlds with analogue means, and most of all, always being a medium where the reception of the artwork happens in the very moment it is produced. No photoshopping possible. Theatre refers directly to the shared present, to the time spent together by the artists and spectators. Live arts are always in negotiation. . .

(Florian Malzacher accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00796-x)

Fair enough, but let’s turn the statement inside out. Say in our research we observe situations or events full of glitches and mistakes, involving many people having to negotiate without complete control but pragmatically seeking to realize something major, all in real time right now (as in: “no one can test real-time”). Would we call that theatre, and if so, with what added purchase?

I don’t know about you but I have observed such circumstances in my own research, and if by observer you wish to term me spectator, then fair enough, this too is theatre. But so what? What do we get from seeing such events as “live arts”?

II

Let’s focus on what for me is the most obvious and pressing point: Is there then an aesthetics to the behavior I observe in infrastructure control rooms and field incident command centers when their personnel operate under conditions of systemwide uncertainty and emergency? Certainly, you see virtuosi of skill, timing and improvisation in the midst of scripted and unscripted situations. That’s not news. What is newer, or odder, is to press the question of how to evaluate or judge these “live arts” within the practices of the arts.

As a way into this, Robert Boyers, author and essayist, complicates those two words so important to policy judgments–excellence and accomplishment–from an aesthetics perspective:

In the domain of aesthetics, it seems to me, unless you get down to the nitty-gritty, you are always going to be revolving in an ether that allows for just about any kind of interpretation. Excellence obviously leads us in some contexts to think about accomplishment, right? A term that in the arts, for the most part, most people will no longer resort to. Who wants to be merely an accomplished painter? All sorts of people are accomplished. You can make a good drawing in the studio, and not be regarded by your peers as an artist. When you look at a Soutine painting. . .you’d never think of its excellence as having principally to do with its being highly accomplished. That wouldn’t be what would come to mind. It is of course highly accomplished, but that word itself would seem at once inadequate and misleading.

(accessed online at https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/780-good-taste-bad-taste-no-taste-why-taste)

I for one have spent a lot of time at the nitty-gritty level in arguing why accomplishments (my term) are so important in evaluating the effectiveness (a kind of excellence) of real-time professionals seeking to prevent emergencies or responding to them once they occur. So what else am I to see aesthetically if I shift focus from accomplishment and excellence in these live arts of interest to me?

III

I read Boyers as suggesting an answer: It’s at the granular levels of a really-existing emergency–e.g., “every major forest fire is unique”–that we are more likely to see one (primary) interpretation: This indeed is an emergency requiring immediate and urgent action Now it doesn’t take a genius to focus on one set of implications in treating emergencies as urgent: Saving the forest from burning down, preventing the electricity grid from separating and destroying itself, ensuring the urban water supply from being (further) contaminated by Cryptosporidium or worse–all and more mean saving infrastructures that have been persistently criticized for bias and erasures.

Or to put that charge in the terms offered here: Emergencies, to the extent they reinforce or exploit an aesthetics of erasure and bias, fail the more widely they are seen as misdirection and propaganda. I hope the reader sees how topical this point is in today’s politics.