Work in organizations involve clocking in so many working hours as well as less quantifiable dimensions such as playing a part and putting on an act to secure one’s position in the group. As has already been documented in management research, attempts to align the organizational stage with the strategic goal of the firms have regularly involved forms of management that deal with common culture and individual commitment in relation to an expected performance. Actors’ feelings, their work together and their socialization, the purpose of their work are used for this purpose. This organizational control, in return, can lead to alternative modes of organization and resistance when workers perceive this new mode of subordination and decide to implement alternative ways. However, attempts to limit performance to “fair results” and “actual facts «and to deny the influence of power relations and symbolic representations, often proves deceitful and short-termed. One reason, among others, seems to be that relations and representations are shaped in each and every day act (as part of its meaning) and incorporated to human activities (as part of the collective and its intentions). Reaching an agreement about what they should do and how they should be with each other is more difficult than pointing at what they should not want to do and be. Another attempt at objectivizing control via representations is possibly more radical in nature, or so theatre directors and comedians claim it is. It involves focusing on the representations themselves and their collective production so as to instantiate them by putting them in the spotlight. For such purposes, time and space are required for actors to collectively reflect and imagine. One such “heterotopia”, “free space” is described and analysed in this paper: we take the case of the rehearsals of “Lear is in Town”, a play first staged in the 2013 Avignon festival. Acknowledging that no work situation is ever free from power relations, we wonder in what ways working on power issues in an artistic stage safeguards actors from domination and favours spontaneous commitment and cooperation.
