On Theater Manifestos: A Postscript

Much has been written about the history of the manifesto: political, aesthetic, scholarly, and otherwise.It is a fluid form that speaks to the imagination, turning the present into the past in a gesture to the future, what Peter Osborne names "historical futurity" (Osborne 1998: 193); but in this very transience, we must not succumb to the illusion that the intellectual-historical origins of manifestos are a phenomenon of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.Luca Somigli -connecting modernist manifestos to the genre's broader history -chronicles the etymology of the term, beginning with an early Italian usage in Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedeia (1321): "La tua loquela ti fa manifesto di quella nobil patria natìo alla qual forse fui troppo molesto" [Your speech reveals you to be a native of that noble land, to which I was perhaps too troublesome] (Dante qtd.Somigli 2007: 30).For Dante, the term possesses a revelatory and presentational quality which would remain deeply embedded within the term as it spread across Europe.Manifestos -as is also the case with its early English definition as a list of cargo -relates to the politics of power and visibility, indicative of both what is present and what is not.From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the manifesto-like writings as a concept became increasingly centered around the judicial (i.e., in defense of) or declarative (i.e., from the crown/place of authority) (Somigli 2007: 30-33).Thus, what came to be the manifesto's defining feature was that it was (and is) public.A document that presupposes -by acting with or against -a hierarchy of state, aesthetics, or institutions.It responds to these hierarchies by cutting across these structures, "addressed to one's equals […] and seeks a re-organization of the social system that accounts for the requests of the issuer" (Somigli 2007: 38).Manifestos thus speak to order and (un)acceptability: first from the perspective of the ruler and later from the perspective of those outside power.The major shift that takes place in the manifesto is, as identified by James Martin, a movement away from an appeal for recognition by the accepted order to the "intrinsic unacceptability of that order" (Martin 2015: 53).Looking at historical treatises on theater and various historical and contemporary manifestos, it becomes visible how these documents aestheticize what is otherwise a vehicle for political statements,