Postdramatic theatre, p.4
Postdramatic Theatre, page 4
I would like to express my thanks to Kate Newey, Clare Grant and Tim Moss for feedback on draft chapters and the introduction, to the virtual community of fellow translators in the LEO dictionary forum, to our readers Erika Fischer-Lichte and Heike Roms for their enthusiastic and constructive comments on the project, to Minh Ha Duong for her careful reading and intelligent editing of the whole manuscript, to Frances Brown for meticulous copy-editing, to Jonathan Munby for his loving support behind the scenes, and finally to Hans-Thies Lehmann for his generosity and encouragement in a productive and inspiring collaboration.
Prologue
The stakes
With the end of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ and the advent of new technologies the written text and the book are being called into question. The mode of perception is shifting: a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving is replacing the linear-successive. A more superficial yet simultaneously more comprehensive perception is taking the place of the centred, deeper one whose primary model was the reading of literary texts. Slow reading as much as theatre, which is laborious and cumbersome, is in danger of losing its status compared to the more profitable circulation of moving images. Literature and theatre, which are aesthetically mutually dependent on each other in a productive relation of repulsion and attraction, are both being demoted to the status of minority practices. Theatre is no longer a mass medium. To deny this becomes increasingly ridiculous, to reflect on it increasingly urgent. In the face of the pressure created by the attraction of the united forces of speed and surface, theatrical discourse emancipates itself from literary discourse but at the same time draws nearer to it in terms of its general function within culture. For both theatre and literature are textures which are especially dependent on the release of active energies of imagination, energies that are becoming weaker in a civilization of the primarily passive consumption of images and data. Neither theatre nor literature is essentially characterized by reproduction but rather organized as a complex system of signifiers.
At the same time, the cultural ‘sector’ increasingly falls prey to the laws of marketability and profitability, and here an additional disadvantage becomes apparent: theatre does not produce a tangible object which may enter into circulation as a marketable commodity, such as a video, a film, a disc, or even a book. The new technologies and media are becoming increasingly ‘immaterial’ – ‘Les Immatériaux’ was the title of an exhibition organized in 1985 by Jean-François Lyotard. Theatre, by contrast, is especially distinguished by the ‘materiality of communication’. Unlike other forms of artistic practice it is marked by the especially heavy weight of its resources and materials. Compared to the poet’s pen and paper, or the painter’s oils and canvas, it requires a lot: the continuous activity of living people; the maintenance of theatre spaces; organizations, administrations and crafts; in addition to the material demands of all the arts themselves that are united in the theatre. Nevertheless, this seemingly antiquated institution still finds a surprisingly stable cultural place in society next to technically advanced media (which are increasingly often incorporated into theatrical performance).
Theatre is the site not only of ‘heavy’ bodies but also of a real gathering, a place where a unique intersection of aesthetically organized and everyday real life takes place. In contrast to other arts, which produce an object and/or are communicated through media, here the aesthetic act itself (the performing) as well as the act of reception (the theatre going) take place as a real doing in the here and now. Theatre means the collectively spent and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of that space in which the performing and the spectating take place. The emission and reception of signs and signals take place simultaneously. The theatre performance turns the behaviour onstage and in the auditorium into a joint text, a ‘text’ even if there is no spoken dialogue on stage or between actors and audience. Therefore, the adequate description of theatre is bound to the reading of this total text. Just as much as the gazes of all participants can virtually meet, the theatre situation forms a whole made up of evident and hidden communicative processes. This study concerns itself with the question of how scenic practice since the 1970s has made use of this basic given of theatre, has specifically reflected on it and directly turned it into the content and theme of its presentation. For the theatre shares with the other arts of (post)modernity the tendency for self-reflexivity and self-thematization. Just as, according to Roland Barthes, in modernism every text poses the problem of its own possibility (can its language attain the real?), radical staging practice problematizes its status of illusory reality. At the mention of ‘self-reflexivity’ and ‘auto-thematic structure’ one may at first think of the dimension of the text, since it is language par excellence that opens up the free play of a self-reflexive use of signs. Yet in theatre the text is subject to the same laws and dislocations as the visual, audible, gestic and architectonic theatrical signs.
Its profoundly changed mode of theatrical sign usage suggests that it makes sense to describe a significant sector of the new theatre as ‘postdramatic’. At the same time, the new theatre text (which for its part continually reflects its constitution as a linguistic construct) is to a large extent a ‘no longer dramatic’ theatre text. By alluding to the literary genre of the drama, the title ‘Postdramatic Theatre’ signals the continuing association and exchange between theatre and text. Nevertheless, the discourse of theatre is at the centre of this book and the text therefore is considered only as one element, one layer, or as a ‘material’ of the scenic creation, not as its master. In no way does this involve an a priori value judgment. Important texts are still being written, and in the course of this study the often dismissively used term ‘text theatre’ will turn out to mean a genuine and authentic variant of postdramatic theatre, rather than referring to something that has supposedly been overcome. However, in view of the wholly unsatisfactory theoretical analysis of the newly produced scenic discourses (in comparison with the analysis of drama), it seems appropriate to consider even the dimension of the text from the perspective of theatrical reality.
The ‘principles of narration and figuration’ and the order of a ‘fable’ (story) are disappearing in the contemporary ‘no longer dramatic theatre text’ (Poschmann).1 An ‘autonomization of language’2 develops. Retaining the dramatic dimension to different degrees, Werner Schwab, Elfriede Jelinek, Rainald Goetz, Sarah Kane and René Pollesch, for example, have all produced texts in which language appears not as the speech of characters – if there still are definable characters at all – but as an autonomous theatricality. With her ‘theatre as an oralic institution’, Ginka Steinwachs tries to create the scenic reality as a heightened poetic-sensual reality of language. A concept that may illuminate what is happening here is Elfriede Jelinek’s idea of juxtaposed ‘language surfaces’ (Sprachflächen) in place of dialogue. As Poschmann explains,3 this form is directed against the ‘depth’ of speaking figures, which would suggest a mimetic illusion. In this respect, the metaphor of ‘language surfaces’ corresponds to the turning point of painting in modernity when, instead of the illusion of three-dimensional space, what is being ‘staged’ is the picture’s plane-ness, its two-dimensional reality, and the reality of colour as an autonomous quality. The interpretation that this autonomization of language bears witness to a lack of interest in the human being,4 however, is not a foregone conclusion. Is it not rather a matter of a changed perspective on human subjectivity? What finds articulation here is less intentionality – a characteristic of the subject – than its failure, less conscious will than desire, less the ‘I’ than the ‘subject of the unconscious’. So rather than bemoan the lack of an already defined image of the human being in postdramatically organized texts, it is necessary to explore the new possibilities of thinking and representing the individual human subject sketched in these texts.
Intentions
This study does not aim to be a comprehensive inventory. Rather it attempts to develop an aesthetic logic of the new theatre. That this has hardly been undertaken yet is – among other reasons – due to the fact that theoreticians whose thinking could correspond to the tendencies of radical theatre rarely encounter this theatre and engage with it. Philosophers, while contemplating the ‘theatre’ as a concept and idea with conspicuous frequency and even turning ‘scene’ and ‘theatre’ into key concepts of theoretical discourse, rarely write concretely about specific theatre forms or practitioners. Jacques Derrida’s readings of Artaud, Gilles Deleuze’s comments on Carmelo Bene or Louis Althusser’s classic text on Bertolazzi and Brecht are the more notable exceptions confirming the rule.5 The affirmation of a theatre-aesthetic perspective may, however, necessitate the remark that aesthetic investigations always involve ethical, moral, political and legal questions in the widest sense. Art, and even more so theatre which is embedded in society in multiple ways – from the social character of the production and the public financing to the communal form of reception – exists in the field of real socio-symbolic practice. While the common reduction of the aesthetic to social positions and statements remains empty, inversely all aesthetic interrogation is blind if it does not recognize the reflection of social norms of perception and behaviour in the artistic practice of theatre.
The description of all those forms of theatre that are here considered as post-dramatic is intended to be useful. What is at issue is, on the one hand, the attempt to place the theatrical development of the twentieth century into a perspective inspired by the developments of the new and newest theatre – developments which are obviously still hard to categorize – and, on the other hand, to serve the conceptual analysis and verbalization of the experience of this often ‘difficult’ contemporary theatre and thus to promote its ‘visibility’ and discussion. For it cannot be denied: the new forms of theatre have certainly marked the work of some of the most significant directors and companies of our time. They have found a significant, mostly younger audience who have flocked and continue to flock to venues like the Mickery Theater (Amsterdam), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Kampnagel (Hamburg), Mousonturm und TAT in Frankfurt, Hebbel-Theater (Berlin), Szene Salzburg, the Edinburgh Festival, the Barbican’s BITE series, Riverside Studios, BAC and the ICA in London, Arnolfini (Bristol), Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff), Nuffield Theatre (Lancaster), Tramway (Glasgow), PS122 (New York), Walker Arts Centre (Minneapolis), Wexner Centre for the Arts (Ohio State University), MCA (Chicago), PICA (Portland), On the Boards (Seattle), Highways Performance Space (Los Angeles) and Performance Space (Sydney) to name but a few. They have received an enthusiastic reception among a number of critics and some of their aesthetic principles have managed to ‘infiltrate’ the established theatre (albeit mostly in a watered down form). Yet the majority of spectators, who – to put it crudely – expect from the theatre the illustration of classic texts, may well accept the ‘modern’ set but subscribe to a comprehensible fable (story), coherent meaning, cultural self-affirmation and touching theatre feelings. With this audience the postdramatic theatre forms of a Robert Wilson, Jan Fabre, Einar Schleef or Jan Lauwers – to name but a few of the more ‘accepted’ theatre practitioners of the 1980s and 1990s – have met with little understanding. But even spectators who are convinced of the artistic integrity and the quality of such theatre often lack the conceptual tools to articulate their perception. This is demonstrated by the predominance of purely negative criteria. The new theatre, one hears and reads, is not this and not that and not the other, but there is a lack of categories and words to define or even describe what it is in any positive terms. This study aims to go some way towards correcting this situation and at the same time encourage ways of working in the theatre that expand our preconceptions of what theatre is or is meant to be.
Furthermore, this essay aims to facilitate an orientation in the variegated field of the new theatre. Much of it is only briefly sketched and would already serve its purpose if it inspired more detailed analyses. A comprehensive ‘overview’ of the new theatre in all its variants is obviously impossible anyway, and not only because of its limitless diversity. This is indeed a study dedicated to ‘contemporary theatre’6 but only in so far as it attempts to define theoretically how we recognize what makes it truly contemporary. Only a fragment of the theatre of the last thirty years is being considered here. The goal was not to find a conceptual framework that accommodates everything. The task in each case was to decide whether an aesthetic attests to true ‘contemporaneity’ or whether it merely perpetuates old models with technical accomplishment. Classical idealistic aesthetics had the concept of the ‘idea’ at its disposal: the design of a conceptual whole which allows the details to concretize (to grow together) as they unfold simultaneously in ‘reality’ and in ‘concept’. Every historical phase of a particular art could thus be regarded by Hegel as a concrete and specific unfolding of the idea of art, every work of art as a special concretization of the objective spirit of an epoch or ‘artistic form’. The idea of an ‘epoch’ or a historical state of the world gave idealism its unifying key, which made it possible to place art historically and systematically. If the confidence in such constructions – for example in that of ‘the’ theatre, of which the theatre of a particular epoch is a specific unfolding – has disappeared, then the pluralism of phenomena forces us to recognize the unforeseeability and suddenness of the invention, its indeducible moment or event.
At the same time, the heterogeneous diversity of forms unhinges all those methodological certainties that have previously made it possible to assert large-scale causal developments in the arts. It is essential to accept the coexistence of divergent theatre forms and concepts in which no paradigm is dominant. A conceivable consequence would be to leave it at a purely additive description, which would at least seemingly do justice to all the variants of the new theatre. But we cannot be satisfied with restricting ourselves to an atomizing historico-empirical listing of everything that exists. This would only be the transferral of a historicist contentedness – according to which everything is worth attending to simply because it once existed – to the present. As theatre studies scholars, we must not approach our own present with the gaze of the archivist. Therefore we must find a way out of this dilemma, or at least an attitude to it. The academic industry only seemingly solves the difficulties arising from the disappearance of overarching historical and aesthetic ordering models: mostly through the splintering into pedantic specializations. These in themselves, however, can be nothing more than increasingly laboriously packaged pieces of data collection, no longer of interest or support even to theorists in neighbouring fields. Another answer consists in theatre studies placing its bets on the much called upon interdisciplinarity. The impulses resulting from this orientation are certainly very important. Yet it has to be stated that especially under the banner of an interdisciplinary approach scholars often evade the very cause and raison d’être for the theorizing – namely the aesthetic experience itself in its unprotected and unsecured experimental character. The latter is often sidestepped as a disturbing element in favour of large (and, in the name of interdisciplinarity, increasingly larger-scale) strategies of categorization.
Not wanting to succumb to the metamorphosis of thought into the equally meaningless exercises of either archiving or categorizing, I propose a double path. On the one hand, following Peter Szondi, I want to read the realized artistic constructions and forms of practice as answers to artistic questions, as manifest reactions to the representational problems faced by theatre. In this sense, the term ‘post dramatic’ – as opposed to the ‘epochal’ category of the ‘postmodern’ – means a concrete problem of theatre aesthetics: thus Heiner Müller could state that he found it increasingly difficult even to articulate himself in a dramatic form any longer. On the other hand, I will claim here a certain (controlled) trust in a personal – or, to quote Adorno, ‘idiosyncratic’ – reaction. Where theatre caused me ‘shock’ through enthusiasm, insight, fascination, inclination or curious (not paralysing) incomprehension, the field marked by my experiences was carefully surveyed. However, only the course of the explication itself will justify the leading selection criteria.
Trade secrets of dramatic theatre
For centuries a paradigm has dominated European theatre that clearly distinguishes it from non-European theatre traditions. For example, Indian Kathakali or Japanese Noh theatre are structured completely differently and consist essentially of dance, chorus and music, highly stylized ceremonial procedures, narrative and lyric texts, while theatre in Europe amounted to the representation, the ‘making present’ (Vergegenwärtigung) of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play. Bertolt Brecht chose the term ‘dramatic theatre’ to designate the tradition that his epic ‘theatre of the scientific age’ intended to put an end to. In a more comprehensive sense (and also including the majority of Brecht’s own work), however, this term can be used to designate the core of European theatre tradition in modern times. Inherent in it is a certain conglomeration of motifs – partially conscious and partially taken for granted as self-evident – that is frequently still unquestioningly regarded as constitutive for ‘the’ theatre. Theatre is tacitly thought of as the theatre of dramas. Among its consciously theorized elements are the categories of ‘imitation’ and ‘action’/‘plot’, as much as the virtually automatic intimate connection of the two. As an associated, rather unconscious motif of this classical theatre conception we can point out the attempt to form (or strengthen) a social bond through theatre, a community uniting the audience and the stage emotionally and mentally. ‘Catharsis’ is the displaced theoretical name for this – by no means primarily aesthetic – function of theatre: the bringing about of affective recognition and solidarity by means of the drama and the affects represented and transmitted to the audience within its frame. These traits cannot be separated from the paradigm of ‘dramatic theatre’, whose significance therefore reaches far beyond the validity of a simple genre classification.
