No exit : voice your loyalty. Deconstructing budgetary discourse and constructing a voice for the theatre

The theatre manager went into a hunger strike. After 28 days of harsh and loaded negotiations, felled by intransigence of Ministry of culture representatives who had decided to cut part of the theatre's subsidies, he died of fatigue and despair. This was a play performed in the very theatre were the actual manager started his hunger strike for the same reasons. The performance was putting on a stage the actual fight, endangering the life of the manager, to save the life of this Parisian 35-year-old theatre. In the actual world, the strike lasted eight days and won the temporary maintenance of the subsidy. The hunger strike, the play were the constitution of a voice. Facing the budgetary discourse that only acknowledged the possibility of exit or loyalty, voicing was an attempt to shift from the economics to the political. As Hirschman (1970) pointed out, the voice is costlier, riskier, and more political. But the voice need not only to be uttered, it needs to be constructed. In order to be heard it had to be constituted artistically, as a performance. The play was the epitome of a more encompassing re-staging of the situation. The hunger strike, the making of a play and other actions of the kind were the making of a voice but not as the expression of an opinion or a preference, rather as an address to the society and the policy makers. The attribution of a subsidy was reconstructed into a societal issue. The voice was not solely made of words, it performed through bodies and symbols, and the author was in fact plural. What is especially striking is that the re-staging operated through a series of destructions, deconstructions and reconstructions. By reconstructing on a stage the discourse of the financing bodies, it immediately appeared in its stubborn nakedness. The very narrow framing and postulates of this discourse was deconstructed, and many spectators certainly reconstructed it as political blindness. The hunger strike was a slow destruction of a body; but also its reconstitution as a symbol for theatre to stay alive, the exposition of a fragile body as embodying the threats, a fleshing and a humanizing of a voice. This voice expressed loyalty not towards the Ministry of culture but towards the history of theatre and the origin of this specific 68-born theatre. By opposing its destruction, the theatre was recovering its tradition of political action. If, as Hirschman pointed out, in case of dissatisfaction we have the choice (or to mix) between exit, voice and loyalty, here the case shows a more complex setting. The performance helped the theatre to exit the dual situation, the face to face with the financers. The manager proved to be loyal towards a tradition, towards a public, towards the origins of the place, towards himself. He voiced his refusal to exit, but this voice was addressed to a far broader audience. And the voice was telling much more than a message to the financers. It was a claim, by the means of theatre, to resist the destruction of (this) theatre; and also by means outside of theatre (the hunger strike). The hunger strike was at the same time an act of loyalty, of voicing and of exit, while probably screaming ‘no exit'. If we look at the history of this theatre, we can see a series of such processes of destructions and constructions (although often less dramatic). Each time developments were to be made, with their mixes of exits, voices and loyalties. However, the theatre trajectory does not seem to appear as an evolutionary adaptation to the environment. Each time the theatre was finding new ways of expressing the same old message: fulfill the public's right to sensitivity. Each time it was trying to attract new playwrights, directors, actors, public. Each time several plays were reinventing themselves in order to stay alive. But in all their differences, the new constructions and creations were driven by the repetition of the same spirit. This is this spirit that the theatre, with all its strengths, wants to protect from its destruction. In short, we would like to state that, in this case, the making of a voice was not the expression of an opinion but the construction of a performance, with the ability to re-stage the framing of the situation. That this (re-)staging operated through a series of destructions and reconstructions that required creativity and tact, where art recovered its political role inherited from the origin of this theatre. That the choice and the mix between exit, voice and loyalty was not directed solely towards the financing institutions, but towards several constituents. Finally that the history of this theatre witnessed a series of destruction and reconstruction, but in the difference and repetition of such processes, the same and unique spirit drove the creative deconstruction trajectory.