James R. Ball III’s Theater of State: A Dramaturgy of the United Nations convincingly demonstrates that theatricality is far more than simply a metaphor by which we can understand the work of international diplomacy. Rather, it is a means by which both aesthetics and politics effect real consequences in the world. Many theatre and performance studies scholars might accept this as a given, but Ball’s careful inventory of the ways in which “[i]nternational institutions like the UN focus the world’s attention on publicly staged spectacles of geopolitics by providing a theatrical frame that makes them legible, meaningful, and effi-cacious” (5), along with a “dramaturgy” for understanding these practices, makes this book an excellent contribution to larger conversations about theatre, performance, and governmentality.
Ball’s case studies range from diplomatic performances of editing resolutions and debating nuclear disarmament, to his impressive fieldwork observing the proceedings of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, to actual theatrical performances such as the Globe’s Hamlet (staged in the chambers of the UN in 2014) and Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (which the Secretary General and the high commissioner for human rights attended with the playwright in 2009). Ball also treats plays that more explicitly expose and comment upon UN operations, such as David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004) and Karen Sunde’s In a Kingdom by the Sea (2001). Along the way, Ball directs our attention to sometimes surprising aesthetic representations of the UN and the ICC. For example, German theatre group Rimini Protokoll’s World Climate Conference (2014) is an interactive “model” UN convention that puts audiences into the role of delegates; and Bennett Miller’s installation Dachshund UN (2010) features, yes, a miniature chamber of Geneva’s UN Human Rights Council occupied by 47 wiener dogs, the power of which, as Ball writes of the latter, is “predicated on the structures of theatricality that inhere in public political spaces” (4).
Where Theater of State most vitally contributes to theatre and performance discourse is its exploration and interrogation of spectatorship, not as a passive mode of consumption, but as the very theatrical procedure by which international organizations such as the UN and ICC shape the geopolitical state of the world. Acknowledging this also demands recognizing the links between spectatorship and violence. “When peacekeepers observe,” writes Ball, “their gaze remains on a continuum of militarized looking: observation becomes spying becomes targeting quite easily” (53). Most poignantly, chapter 2, “To Be Seen Is to Be Doomed,” traces spectatorship through Sunde’s In a Kingdom by the Sea and Nottage’s Ruined to accounts of UN peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo perpetrating acts of sexual exploitation and rape of underaged girls and women displaced by the conflict there in the early 2000s.
This exploration leads to one of the book’s darkest musings, in which Ball asks whether we as spectators in the theatre can realistically maintain the distinction between empathy and objectification. He quotes an interview with UN peacekeepers in the DRC who, wanting to “see what it is like” to have sex with underaged girls, “transformed vulnerable people into sexual objects” (59), while theatre invites audiences “to exceed their own experiences by inhabiting the experiences of others: to see what it is like to have another’s mind and body and to be from a distant place” (61). Any celebration of theatre’s ability to transport us into other worlds, then, “must be tempered by a recognition of the violations these operations resemble: the invasion of foreign lands and the abuse of alien bodies” (61).
In this manner, Ball often raises the possibilities of theatre’s potential for empathy and progressive change only to “temper” those possibilities with theatre’s precarities. We might therefore be on guard when Ball describes in chapter 3 how Samantha Power, Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN, brought an international delegation to Broadway to see Fun Home in 2016, in hopes that their empathy with the musical’s characters might prompt official acts in support of LGBTI rights in the General Assembly, Human Rights Council, and Security Council. Sure enough, Ball goes on to link Power’s remarks afterward advocating interventionist LGBTI policies with the US’s “extraterritorial chauvinism.” Thus, he argues, “LGBTI rights become the instruments of a coercive foreign policy and theatrical empathy serves to shore up the ideological rationale for armed intervention” (74).
Yet, Ball entreats us not to dismiss the theatricality of our political institutions as proof of their corruption or illegitimacy, nor, as does Guy Debord, to argue that the spectacle of world politics evidences their inaccessibility. Rather, Ball maintains, while a “dramaturgy of international institutions governs the theater that organizes the world,” it also “provides the structures with which the world pushes back” (19). Theatricality is the means by which these institutions are legible, and a tool with which those oppressed by injustice and inequality are empowered to take action.
Ball argues for the potential of “insurrectionary speech,” after Judith Butler, as a way to use the very tools of spectacle and spectating to undo hegemonic power structures—to reveal the “perviousness of performances of power” (95). Chapter 4’s emphasis on the performative infelicities that occur when popular music performances intended to “produce warm feelings and political action” (94) misfire, then, exposes how failures might precipitate openings for the oppressed to “revise the scripts with which [the UN] writes the world” (106). Secretary General Ban Ki-moon dancing “Gangnam style” with Korean pop star Psy in 2012 was cringeworthy, but far more damaging was Ban’s clapping along with Serbia’s Viva Vox choir’s upbeat rendition of the nationalist song “March on the Drina” at the New Year’s Concert of the 67th Session of the General Assembly in January 2013. The song, slipped into an otherwise saccharine playlist including Abba’s “Mamma Mia” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” seemed innocuous, but to those targeted by the atrocities perpetuated in the Balkan conflict, “March on the Drina” was the soundtrack to ethnic violence and mass sexual assault. The performative act of clapping, writes Ball, demands consensus and “forecloses on disagreement and dissensus” (103). Ban’s unwitting insistence on harmony resulted in counter performances of alienation and displacement.
It is precisely a dramaturgy of international institutions that allows us to see the perviousness of power here, and to more clearly recognize both the potentials and pitfalls of diplomatic performance so that we might more efficaciously and justly use them to redraw relations of power. “Diplomatic theater is our point of entry, where we press back using the images, sounds, and texts produced by diplomats” (161), writes Ball. “The dramaturgy of international institutions invites the insurrections of its spectators” (161).
