We understand organizations and consulting as theatric performances that socially construct our views of the world. The Executive Director of the Toronto group, Mixed Company, which does street theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed, and two Academy presenters will co-create three theatric performances. Boje and Rosile will present the relevance of theatrics to ODC, consultation and the conference theme "a new time." Our director Malbogat has agreed to collaborate with us to design and facilitate an audience-involved theatrical experience of spectacle, carnival, and festival time. No special experience or training is required for audience spectators to participate as actors in the three theatric activities. These experiences are adapted from Augusto Boal's work and involve easy to follow instructions to construct large group theatric events. Each theatric theme is designed to accommodate large groups of conference participants (100, 200 or more persons) so they get a sense of how to apply theatrics to organizational change and development.

KEY WORDS: Theatrics, Time, and Performance

We request the symposium be provided with 90 minutes. We have designed a format using three forms of audience-involved theatrics that will reflect spectacle, carnival, and festival. David and Grace Ann will give a brief introduction connecting the session to the conference theme of "time" and define the three types of theatrics to be enacted. We envision very brief segments of introductory presentation (15 minutes total) alternating with three audience-involved "performance" theatrical themes (15 minutes each) punctuated by brief introductions to each. The remainder of the symposium time will be reserved for audience feedback, discussion, and commentary.

 

Introduction - organizations are theatric performances. Our performances allow us to play with time and to experiment with alternative futures as well as rehistoricize events from the corporate past. Organizations are storytelling theaters and storytelling spectacles, not metaphors of sameness, but actualized in the material reality of the global stage (Boje, 1991, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997; Geis, 1993). Modern modes of production materially-produce postmodern spectacles such as Disney theme parks, Las Vegas Mirage, Caesar’s Palace, and NikeTown, and other temples of consumption. Saner (1999) asserts that organizational consulting practice or "Off-Off-Wall street" performances can learn a lot from "Off-Off-Broadway" theater. This is what Currie (1998: 103) calls the "theater of signs and discourse" and Firat and Dholakia (1998: 154-5) call the "theater of consumption," what we call the production and consumption of spectacular ODC praxis.

The purpose of this symposium is to look at how various forms of premodern, modern, and postmodern theater are creating alternative perspectives of ODC awareness as well as consultation practice and intervention. A characteristic of modern theater is one stage actors performing the speaking roles while a passive audience of spectators follows a linear plot from beginning to end. What is unique about postmodern theater is the invitation to the audience of spectators to join the actors on the stage, to play with non-linear time frames, and to improvise beyond any official/authorial script. Everyday people are taking up the roles of actors and spectators (of their own performances) as a way to understand and to change organizational existence.

Relevance - last year ODC hosted a symposium in which the theory of theatrics was developed along modern and postmodern lines of inquiry. The session made the point that every day of our working and consulting lives we take on roles and do performances. This year we would like to follow up with a practical demonstration of how theatrics can be used to shed light on three facets of ODC. The three facets are festival, carnival, and spectacle, theatrics. Our premise is that our Western ways of doing ODC practice have lost the eternal balance between festival, spectacle and carnival, in what many term, the modernist project of rationality and linear design.

Using concepts from "street theatre" and Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, Toronto-based Mixed Company will orchestrate audience participation in the creation of performances to complement the theoretical presentations offered. Performances will also emphasize the session theme of "playing with time." We will explore how performance allows us to play with time, to act outside of performance time, and to speed up, slow down and even replay time. Each performance will last about 15 minutes, and occur between 10-minute presentations, for a total of about 3 performance segments. Our intention is to adapt several of these games to accentuate the themes of festival, spectacle, and carnival in ways we interpret as relevant to ODC and consultation. (See note #1 at end regarding participation of Mixed Company.)

Bureaucratic spectacle dreams of realizing and materializing its abstract ideal-self, through "beyond bureaucracy " transformations into what we call festival. We also believe that carnival theatrics is the fun-house-mirror-stage of spectacle. Each of the three theatrics can be extended into the work of Augusto Boal in Theater of the Oppressed. Here, organizational as well as community participants and other stakeholders learn to act out situations they find oppressive, observe how others interpret their performed stories in for example, statuesque representations, and otherwise experiment with alternative scriptings. The Toronto group, Mixed Company uses theatrics to help participants enact changes in their community. The purpose of the carnival theatrics is to find a way to do work and change that circumvents oppressive power. It offers ways to promote diversity in what Boal more recently terms the "Rainbow of Desire."

DAVID BOJE'S Introduction to the Symposium: "Spectacle, Carnival, and Festival Time" David plans to tie festival, spectacle and carnival to ODC and the theme of the conference "Time." In-the-moment festival time is different from both carnival and spectacle. Carnival retrospectively represents parody and resistance of power, and spectacle time that resituates past journeys and heroes into a romanticized vision of the future. The three theatrics are each places set aside from the chronology of linear work time for an organization to take a new and fresh look at the proficiency and sometimes ethics of its performances.

David will briefly summarize the inter-system dynamics of these three theatric forms. This triad of theatric registers is theorized in dialogic relationship (Boje, 1999). Carnival is in dialogue with spectacle, making reference to its psychic excesses and shadow worlds masked by the univocality of spectacle. Indeed carnival is the mirror-stage to spectacle theatrics. Spectacle incorporates texts that respond to carnival characterizations of corporate power by reasserting vision, mission, omniscience, destiny, and progress. Festival is in dialogue with carnival and spectacle, in theatrics that transcend the separation of nature and organization, seeking a joy of life beyond the duality of carnival and spectacle. Postmodern theater defuses the relation between characters and spectators and their anticipated theatrical roles (actors on the stage, a passive audience)by radically disrupting and violating spectator expectations of how scenes ensue (e.g. inviting spectators to participate and be actors). This playing with theatric expectations provokes spectators to explore the existential crisis behind the spectacle-mask and the carnival of resistance. This stage may provoke spectator self-reflection on parodies of spectacle-acts constructing fetish-as-realism and exaggerated-scenes of materiality equated as happiness. And it may provoke a discovery of festival enactments. Brief Intros to spectacle, carnival and festival applied to Republican convention. When the Democrats have their convention, I expect there will also be combinations of spectacle, carnival, and festival theactrics. 

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GRACE ANN ROSILE'S Introduction: "Management and OD as Poetic Performance" - In addition to the aspects of skills needed to "perform" as a manager, management and OD seeks to develop skills needed to control its environment. This is done by simulated (i.e. off-site and gala celebratory events) testing of their skills in theatrical performances designed to depict the strength and control of the organization. It is more about the aesthetics of the theatrics, than the instrumental performance.

"Organization and OD Theatrics as Time Out Of Time." In theatre, the proscenium arch represents the audience's "willing suspension of disbelief." This suspension of disbelief extends to the matter of time. We "play" with time on stage. We call this theatre or performance art. I want to explore what we do with the time, which we suspend in such performances: 1. In what ways do we alter time in the process of performance art? 2. What purpose is served by this alteration of time? 3. In what other ways is our perception of time subjectively altered for those who are participants in the performance, for those who are spectators, and for those who are spect-actors (Augusto Boal's term for those who are both actors and spectators)? Spect-actors are able to observe themselves in action, to look at and direct their performance. 4. Finally, in what new ways might we "play with time" in the new millenium?

The OD consultation is a theatric performance, which occurs in a time set aside, a time set apart from daily activities, when "real work" is suspended. The purpose of the show and the performance is to demonstrate new proficiency. In ODC work, there are times set aside, out of work time, to demonstrate proficiency and to experiment with new forms of proficiency. These are times of spectacle, carnival, and festival theatrics.

"How do Organizations and Consultants Construct Shows of Proficiency?" Organizations also set aside time, apart from daily activities, to "flex their muscles" in theatric display. The military may have a parade. Attorneys have "moot court." Universities have exams and graduations, and academics have scholarly presentations. Organizations, I think, use several means to demonstrate their proficiency. They use their annual reports and annual shareholders' meetings along with continual public relations efforts. They may have a company sports team or celebrities that endorse the corporate products and practices. They may engage in elaborate community service projects to demonstrate their social responsibility. And they may bring in OD consultants to take a look at the psychic prison of corporate existence, an exhibition of how open the culture is to self-reflection. All this is more about the theatrics of proficiency than performance.

Examples of Proficiency Times. "Theatrics of Managing as Horse Sense"

www.horsesenseatwork.com

Grace Ann will give introductions to each of the three audience-involved theatric performances. She will put spectacle, carnival and festival theatrics into the context of the work and play relationship between horse and rider (Rosile, 1999a, b, c). We hope this will give concrete examples outside the normal halls of corporate offices, thereby freeing the audience to think creatively about the ensuing performances. Much of corporate theatrics is devoted to demonstrations of proficiency.

There are parallels in the relationship between horse and rider, and spectacle. This demonstration of proficiency Foucault calls dressage. In dressage, for example, the spectacle is staging a highly controlled performance of horse and rider that is precisely evaluated by the judges and other spectators. But relations of horse and rider also have carnival and festive performance aspects. An example of carnival is the dollar bareback events. Another example: "Gamblers' Choice," where each participant is allowed more individual freedom of expression. In festive riding, horse and rider stage their own performance for sheer enjoyment, such as in trail and pleasure riding. In festive riding the metrics of spectacle performance are suspended, as is the mirror-stage of carnival resistance.

When something has no practical purpose, as Warhol's depictions of Campbell soup cans, it is artful poetics. With a horse show, showing has become an end in itself in most cases. Thus, while dressage originally was designed for horses to learn complex and unnatural maneuvers to intimidate and defeat enemies in war, now it has become removed from that original purpose, to be just a demonstration of intricate coordination between horse and rider. But the show horse is too valuable to be used for any utilitarian purpose, and often is not even ridden for pleasure, for fear they might become injured.

We academics are in danger of becoming "show horses," we demonstrate the extreme abstraction of performance that is proficiency abstracted from its useful purpose. We perform only for a highly educated and specialized group of "insider" spectators, who usually are also performers in our field. So we scholarly academicians who study management, truly are performing artists who demonstrate proficiency without practical performance results. This is like my friend who rides a Western Pleasure show horse. Ironically, though not uncommonly, her trainer advised her not to take her horse on trail rides for pleasure, for fear the horse would loose her winning edge in the show ring.

In this brave new world of leisure, we do not use most horses for work.

Instead, the show has become an end in itself.

For over 10 years, I owned and operated a 28-horse stable. I raised, trained, and showed my own Arabian stallions. As a performer in horse shows,

I learned to slow down time through intense focus and concentration. This was only possible after much practice to gain my own sense of balance. Also,

I learned to (literally) "smooth out the bumps" in the ride, and feel as though I was floating over a series of jumps, barely moving at all. I will explore the question, in what ways do managers and organizations slow down time, and smooth the bumps, to create aesthetic performances?

As management theoreticians, we also are theatre. As Augusto Boal says, since each of us acts, we are actors. And since each of us observes ourselves acting, we are observers. Actors plus observers equals theatre. Management "performances" are for the benefit of the managers themselves, as well as for the larger audience of peers, superiors, subordinates, and beyond the organizations to customers, suppliers, and competitors in the marketplace. Management "performances" may be satisfaction surveys, awards and ceremonies, and other organizational displays. When are these spectacular displays of proficiency characterized by the tyranny of time, rather than by the liberatory aspects of self-controlled slowing, stretching, or speeding up of time? How might the co-creative aspects of performance supplant hierarchical and oppressive definitions of performance? How are both these rooted in the time dimensions of rhythm, synchronicity, and kairos?

Directing Theatrical Events - Our guest director Simon Malbogat of Toronto's Mixed Company will coach us in three performances where we stretch the limits of the Theater of the Oppressed and ODC. The Theater of the Oppressed is a vast array of theater games, techniques and exercises designed to break down the barriers between "actors" and "spectators." In the late 1970s, Augusto Boal's groundbreaking text on theater theory, Theater of the Oppressed was published. Originally developed to help peasants explore solutions to their own problems, it is now used all over the world for social and political activism. We think it is a great tool for changing entrenched and problem-ridden stakeholder network dynamics. There is a link between Postmodern Theatrics and Festival/Spectacle/Carnival work.

FINAL WRAP led by Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery and Robert Gephart (They will ask the audience to participate in discussion of the theatrical implications for organizational development and change)

Theatric Training Games and Exercises - According to Boal, the separation between the "actor" and the "spectator" in traditional theater is disempowering. Spectacle Theater is inherently oppressive, a cultural form of imperialism that was contributing to the de-intellectualization of the native. Both Grace Ann and David have been applying Boal's teaching to classroom and to consultation. The idea is to work with Simon Malbogat to develop three Postmodern Theatrics experiences for the ODC division. Simon will collaborate with us in adapting be Boal's training games and exercises to our ODC themes. An example of a game is the "Homogenizing Circle." Each person in the circle makes a rhythmic sound and body movement. A volunteer starts it off, and the circle imitates. They are told to "go away" and change and invent something different. Then the director says "homogenize" and the individuals attempt to synchronize their individual expressions and to become aware of how they conform to the collective manifestation. There are other games, such as the "Carnival of Three," in which people are directed to become part of groups of three and then are allowed to leave a group to join what is for them a more provocative group. These are warm up exercises to enact more complex theatric designs such as the "Sound of the Seventh Door" in which spect-actors pretending to be blind are directed by verbal cues (but not word-cues) to pass beneath two people who form body-bridges. Participants learn quickly to use sound and gesture to narrate their images of social experience. For example, in "Image and Counter-Image" spect-actors are invited to tell a story of oppression to another participant designated as "co-pilot." The task of the co-pilot is to listen and ask questions of the (pilot) narrator that affords a vivid image of their story. The co-pilot then develops a freeze-frame sculpture depicting the plot of the story using other spect-actors. Once the human sculpture is set the protagonist or pilot of the narrative is granted "Three Wishes." For example the pilot is told they have ten seconds to change the body sculpture in ways that redress the situation. Finally in the analytic image game, several volunteers tell their story for two minutes to the spectators. The spectators then vote on which story they want to see acted out. The pilot (narrator) chooses a co-pilot, instructs them in the role they are to play (mannerisms, dialogue, expression, mood, etc.) and acts out the scene with dialogue. Spectators - are then asked to decide and to imitate some unique (for them) aspect of what they observed. "One, two, three and freeze-frame" are the instructions as the spect-actors strike a carnivalesque pose. The task of all participants is then to suggest possible matches between protagonists (pilots) and antagonists (co-pilots). Once everyone agrees on the matching pairs, volunteer pairs are asked to act out their improvised scene while the original pilot and co-pilot (first storytellers) observe. Finally, the original team imitates the body and language they see and hear being performed by the various and subsequent spect-actor pairs. They are given the opportunity to step into the performance themselves, and to enact revised characterizations and responses.

Figure One: Nested Depiction of Relations

Spectacle - Spectacle is based on the work of Guy Debord (1967, Society of the Spectacle) and has something important to say about how spectacles of production and consumption could become more festive. By spectacle I mean Debord’s (1967) the Society of the Spectacle, the often violent and oppressive social control that masquerades as a celebration of betterment by recycling pseudo-reforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution, never devolution (Boje, 1999). Spectacle involves both consumption and production: "In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life" (Debord, 1967: #6). Spectacle can be negative or positive. Spectacle is a narrative and a theatric performance that legitimates, rationalizes, and camouflages violent production and consumption. Spectacle can be total manipulation of meaning-making processes through theatrical events to serve the production of power and managerial needs to control and spin a good story in the face of bad news. Spectacle is highly instrumental, the production of a gala event with costumes, art, success stories, team awards, and celebrity appearances to launch a new product, symbolize a change initiative or to put the spot light on positive acts of corporate power (e.g. community service). Spectacle can be quite positive and is part of how OD projects convey vision, foster common culture and symbolize corporate identity. TQM bootcamps, reengineering retreats, and other OD programs often use spectacle theatrics in events led by trainers and consultants to enroll organizational participants in new role performances in transformative journeys. Sometimes these spectacles celebrate the benevolence and progress of power with affirming theatrics and other times the spectacles enact the theatrics that lead to technological or humanistic progress. Spectacle affords access to the symbolic-Theic level of corporate narcissism in expressions of paternalism and the celebration of victorious heroes and accomplishments. Coaching change and development efforts into positive spectacle theatrics is part of OD work, particularly OD work done in the postmodern condition where different groups' after-hours reviews and interpretations of a change program's performance rehistoricize events (Refer to Figure One).

Carnival is more a premodern expression of psychic resistance to power and hierarchy, and stems from the semiotic work of Julia Kristeva (1980) and Mikheal Bakhtin's. Carnival is a theatrics of rant and madness seeking repair to separation and alienation, a call for help from corporate power, a cry of distress and repression mixed with laughter and humorous exhibition meant to jolt power into awareness of its psychic organization. In premodern carnival, participants, for example dressed up in the parodied garb and expression of the powerful, the kings, queens, bishops, and other masters. They also staged theatric events that reversed and otherwise created satire of the feudal hierarchy. Contemporary carnival is a polyphonic (many voiced) expression by those without power, sometimes sanctioned by those in power as a way to blow off steam. In modern times carnival theatrics has lost its contextual meaning, the performances of irony, satire, and parody no longer register the psychic organization. Still today, those disillusioned by corporate spectacle are summoned by carnival to express their resistance. Other times carnival veers out of control to become outright rebellion against all authority. All these three versions of carnival were each co-present in the theatrics of the World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle this past year. Some dressed as Sea Turtles to symbolize their cause, a few broke windows and did other violence, others did not know why they were protesting, but most of the 400,000 participants engaged in peaceful marches and demonstrations to critique transnational corporate power and express their sense of alienation. The media made its own spectacle interpretation of the Seattle events by focusing on the more violent enactments. Carnival can be an overflow valve that makes the controlling and monological and domination aspects of a totalizing spectacle of production and consumption, more tolerable. Carnival in ODC is a time for staging a glimpse at the psychic prison, in a reversal of power relations to shed light on practices creating powerlessness, both states oftentimes masked by the shadow of spectacle. Masked or not, Foucault makes the point that the resistance accompanies power and so carnival is the resistance side show, the mirror-stage to spectacle. Where there is spectacle (i.e. WTO), there is resistance and much carnival. In ODC, carnival theatrics include staged events where employees are invited by management consultants to parody the excesses of corporate power, to act out critical reviews of managerialist practices, and to give expression to alienation. Such ODC theatrics can become ritualized events. In some reversals of hierarchy, such as at Disney, upper management spends one day each year doing the job of the mostly lowly paid of jobs at the theme park. HP had regular events where employees held theatric and comedic "roasts" of its managers (Refer to Figure One).

Festival - In dialogic relation to both carnival and spectacle is festive theatrics. Briefly defined, festival is a third theatrics form that is more related to in-the-moment enjoyment of a thing for its own sake. In ancient times, festival transgressed the boundary of nature and culture. The Rice Moon Festival celebrated the harvest and around the world harvest festival reunitea culture with the rhythm of the seasons and cycles of life and death. In Nietzschean terms, it is the enactment of Dionysis. In Toronto, during our Academy of Management Spectacle, there is a Festival outside, "Canbana." There are spontaneous performances here and there among the floats and staged performances of spectacle.  Festival is the self-management and self-design of our own leisure time and space, the realization of what we need to live and evolve as a species, with the most minimal harm to any other species. Festival at work, is a way of doing business that respects people, communities, and the ecology. In festival the boundary between management and labor, customer and vendor, and other dualities is blurred in theatric moments. A festival theatrics seeks to celebrate community, including affirmation of our living participation on the planet. How do these different theatric experiences of time affect change and organization? We will do an enactment of each of the theatrics, then hold this question up for discussion (Refer to Figure One).

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Four-year-old Mixed Company is subtitled "Theatre for Social Change," and has worked with corporations, community organizations, and educational institutions. Following was Mixed Company's emailed response to my emailed invitation to join this session:

<<On behalf of Mixed Company, I can certainly confirm our interest in being included in your proposal, and would refer you to our website (if you haven't already found it) at www.echo-on.net/~mixedco . We look forward to speaking with you. Best, Anne Frost, General Manager>>

Subsequently, I spoke with Anne and we tentatively planned that their artistic director Simon Malbogat will collaborate with us to create a customized theatrical experience of the session concepts and the "time" theme. Since they typically charge a fee for their performances in order to sustain themselves, we will be seeking funding for their participation, in two forms, 1) the conference registration fee; and 2) the fee for their time spent in preparation and presentation. Regarding 1 (registration fee), they were the ones to request to me that they be permitted to participate in the entire conference. We will ask the Academy if their registration fee may be waived.

Regarding their participation fee, they quoted me $500 Canadian as the fee for their artistic director to co- design 4-5 ten-minute segments, and to perform the design with the audience at the session. The Journal of Organizational Change Management is willing to co-sponsor half this portion ($250 Canadian) of the performance cost. We are hoping the ODC division will put up the other half.

Boje, David (1995). "Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as "Tamara-land." Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4), 997-1035.

(1999). Spectacles and Festivals of Organization: Managing Ahimsa Production and Consumption. Book under review.

Currie, Mark (1998). Postmodern Narrative Thoery. NY: St. martin’s Press.

Czarniawska, Barbara (1997). Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Debord Guy (1967). Society of the Spectacle. La Société du Spectacle was first published in 1967 by Editions, Buchet-Chastel (Paris); it was reprinted in 1971 by Champ Libre (Paris). The full text is available in English at http://www.nothingness.org/SI/debord/index.html It is customary to refer to paragraph numbers in citing this work.

Firat, Fuat A. and Nikhilesh Dholakia (1998). Consuming People: from Political economy to Theaters of Consumption. London/NY: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline And Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Geis, Deborah R. (1993). Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Kristeva, Julia. (1980). "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." Desire and Language. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91.

 

Rosile, Grace Ann (1999a). "Managing with Ahimsa and Horse Sense" Mar 16, 1999 In Spirit At Work Journal. See http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/wtwo/ahimsaweb399.html

(1999b). "Management: Common Sense or Horse Sense?" Spirit at Work Journal. March. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/wtwo/commonsense399.html

(1999b). "Discourse from the Horse's Mouth." Transcript of Presentation at the Language and Organizational Change Conference May 15, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/wtwo/horsediscourse599.html

Saner, Raymond (1999). "Organizational consulting: What a gestalt approach can learn from Off-Off-Broadway Theater." Gestalt Review vol. 3 (1): 6-34.