Addressing Urgencies of Democratic Interaction in the Public Sphere: An Attempt to Facilitate Disagreement on Audience Dramaturgies of Disagreement

Abstract

In the research project ‘Dramaturgies of Disagreement in Contemporary Theatre,’ I have examined how theatre performances dramaturgically work with substantial disagreement within audiences and non-audiences. In the first part of this article, I present and discuss the cultural political context, the societal backdrop, and the agenda of this research. I argue for the need to deal critically with normative premises and closures in this research. In the second part, I exemplify how a move from a normative point of departure towards a more descriptive approach may be realised. I start this part by presenting the applied sociological theory of communities of disagreements (Iversen 2014), before I describe, analyse, and compare three Norwegian participatory performances from recent years. I propose the metaphorical terms of theatre as either arena, laboratory, or catalyst for communities of disagreement to highlight differences between the dramaturgical approaches. I further examine how the relation between the limited public space of the theatre and the wider public sphere is conceptualised differently in the three cases. Finally, I relate the analysed dramaturgies to a spectrum of political theory that spans from deliberative to agonistic democracy to further illuminate and facilitate legitimate disagreement on dramaturgies of disagreement.