Hallowed be the director's name: The structuring power of sanctification in the field of theatre

Just like any other artistic sphere, theatre is a relatively autonomous field of cultural reproduction where the fight for artistic legitimacy is crucial. Insofar as the theatre director is at stake, processes of consecration (critics, awards, staging opportunities) play an important role in this struggle: Not only are they structuring individual careers, but also the status order of the theatrical society (with its more or less renowned venues, its higher or lower ranking positions etc.) as a whole. My paper, which bases on a field analysis and the reconstruction of contrastive trajectories, aims at discerning respective logics of consecration in the domain of German-speaking theatre. It will depict the interdependence between (1) the autonomization of stage directing as a distinct artistic genre (the ‘Mise-en-scène’) and its emancipation from the field of literature; (2) the socio-historical emergence and symbolic alteration of the theatre director’s famousness; and (3) the structuring power of sanctification with regard to the interplay of directors’ habitual dispositions, their artistic positioning and their position-taking in the field. From this integral perspective, the contribution will shed light on two phenomenons: First, it shows that up to nowadays instances and mechanisms of consecration both reproduce the most notably male codification of the director’s profession and the predominance of bourgeois socialized individuals in field-positions linked with the highest normative power. In that sense, consecration processes reproduce some eminent ‘symbolic boundaries’ (Michèle Lamont) demarking the theatrical field. Second, one can trace quite a dramatic change in the logic of artistic consecration itself: Whilst until the 1990ies sanctification used to be subsequent to ones artistic merits, there has been a shift to consecration on credit in recent years, indicating that the ‘obligation to success’ (Sighard Neckel) has infiltrated the art world of theatre production by now.