Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 30

I’LL DO IT WHEN DAME JUDI DENCH DOES IT.
together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu”
(Deleuze et al. 1994:197). Art cannot be rendered captive�under the civic duty
banner�to the dominant perceptions and affections (existent, unbalanced socio-political
and economic conditions identified by ACE). Art’s role is to surpass discourses
about art, by undergoing a qualitative jump (the search for the possible) onto always a
different axis. Art could not transform Romania’s working classes into communist new
men and art will not be able to save the disadvantaged and marginalised in the capitalist
UK society from their plight.
Diversity must become not an optional extra but part of the fabric of
our discussions and decisions. Let us banish forever the wrong notion
that diversity in the arts is a problem. It is in fact a map to all our futures.
(Unlimited 2016)
An artist’s work must be overshadowed by the requirement for diversity or relevance.
That amounts to a politically driven imposition upon the artistic act, which should not
be confused with the political character of the artistic act. Hannah Arendt identifies
theatre as “the political art par excellence” (Arendt 1998:188). The distinction that I
make is the following: the terrain from which the artistic act shoots off is evidently determined
by economic and socio-political markers. Secondly, the effects of the artistic
act (its echoes) attain, through subsequent interpretation, a political nature. However,
the act itself (the lightning bolt) exists outside and beyond the political. A coin has two
sides, but it cannot be said that the coin is the two sides. The source/terrain of an artistic
act and its subsequent reverberations are political, but the core of the act (the artistic
act itself) is not political. Undoubtedly, any artistic act draws its inspiration, energy
of revolt, and references from concrete political or social circumstances, but these pass
through the filter of artistic freedom, which produces a disruptive, unprogrammable
amalgamation and deterritorialisation, an unhinging and reorientation towards unexpected,
random axes. The effect of this process returns as an echo to the reality on the
ground, as it were, and creates subsequent political reverberations and interpretations.
Fuelled by artistic freedom, the artistic act is political in the way it opposes the political
(or social, etc.) references that it used as launching pad to the possible life and people
that appear thereafter. It may also be noted that to explore new, possible worlds is an act
of criticism of the current world, and therefore a political act. Like Arendt, this argument
appears to say that theatre’s core is political. I argue instead that at theatre’s core lies not
the political, but the random algorithms with which artistic freedom deterritorialises the
political to transfigure it onto a different axis (the effects of the appearance of this new
axis can be interpreted as political). If theatre had a political core, it would cease to be
theatre and would instead be politics.
For the communists, it was important to demonstrate�using art�that their utopian
social system was perfectly valid (thus justifying the violent way the political system had
been imposed on Romania). For ACE (and ultimately the state for whom ACE acts as
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