Plays in the play : crafting a staged self

In his famous book, The presentation of the self in everyday life, E. Goffman draws on a theatrical metaphor to describe everyday interactions in social life, whereby one engages in performances of the self in a way similar to an actor portraying a character. He refers to such theatrical concepts like character, script, front-stage/back-stage, dramatic realization, performance, representation, mask/face,… Habermas will retain Goffman's theory in his concept of dramaturgical action, emphasizing concerns around credibility/authenticity, style and aesthetic expression. However, contemporary theatre is not the theatre of the 60's and of the 80's. While the premises of such changes date back to those years, more often we see the notion of drama contested, text derived from the performance, the boarders between actors and characters blurred, the ritual dimension emphasized, and so on. So is the theatrical/dramaturgical metaphor less or more relevant, and what does this mean to our understanding of social life as staging? In the theater play Prazer the selves who present themselves alternate between an intimate and reflexive self, a social self, a self in search of itself and of joy, a self in a group, and a ritualistic self. The creation of such selves in the play comes from actor's personal experiences, group improvisations, dramaturgical imperatives and audience's feed-back. The absence of pre-established text and of a director allowed for more room to such role development. There is no backstage. Characters alternate between the display of a self and the transformation of their selves. Two voices will describe and reflect on the making up of the selves and their staging for this play. One emanating from an actress showing the work and the incertitude in the composition of the self staged, the other from an ethnographic eye, watching the play as well as following the actors' lives. Instead of a clear distinction between a front-stage made-up role playing and a more authentic back-stage self, we see both contaminating the other, various degrees of ‘authenticity', and that both ‘authenticity' and role have to be worked out, and are objects of constant questioning. Crafting the role is a way to develop their own selves and much of their selves is constituting the roles acted out. The roles to be displayed are at play, and much of the actors' training is a difficult work on all levels of the self, front-stage and back-stage. Nothing is more difficult than being ‘oneself' on the stage but they try and strive for it, and often it is also very difficult not to play a role when being back-stage. At the end, the concepts of performance, drama, staging, role both become challenged by the evolution of theatrical practices and the observation of the actors' training and prove even more relevant to understand them.