Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's champs and habitus for a sociology of stage productions

This article examines closely the concepts of champ and habitus and relevant aspects of Bourdieu's theory in relation to theatre practice, specifically productions. The latter, although viewed in terms of historical cross-reference and institutional status, are primarily identified as creative constructions that cannot be reduced to mere illustrations of objective social relations, notwithstanding their necessarily sociocultural character. The question of how directors and their work are creative and embody individual, subjective, artistic decisions is discussed in the context of issues to do with sociocultural signs (via Bakhtin), genre, imagination, performance and culture. Feter Stein's Uncle Vanya and Lev Dodin's The Queen of Spades provide the main examples for the argument as a whole.