DRAMATURGY BEYOND REPRESENTATION:

TEXTS, BODIES, SPACES IN
CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN THEATRE

The Project

While British is neatly boxed in either drama or devised performance, a similar distinction cannot be made about contemporary theatre practices on the European Continent; here, traditional ’text-based theatre’ goes hand-in-hand with experiments in theatrical forms, in staging, directing, and performing these texts. Productions of directors such as Frank Castorf, Guy Cassiers, Michael Thalheimer, Luk Perceval, and also William Forsythe, are no longer interested in theatrical representations of a text as no more than an end in itself in order to enable spectators to spectate actors who act. Their strategies go beyond realism and a conventional theatrical symbolism or metaphorical presentation; the actors no longer portray characters to identify with; music, live video, and references to contemporary pop and media culture are integretated. Consequently effect, these ‘dramaturgies beyond representation’ not only renegotiate assumed hierarchies between texts, bodies, and spaces in live performance, but also challenge customary genre distinctions between drama, dance, and performance art.

This research project has been supported through an AHRC Small Grant in the Performing Arts enabling further research in the period from November 2005 to October 2006.

Continental European Theatre

It may well be a result of the distinct funding structure of theatre on the European Continent that has facilitated the transfer from the new impulses in theatre and performance that emerged in the 1980s, and which Hans-Thies Lehmann has described as 'Postdramatic Theatre', into the institutionalised traditional theatre houses. Not driven by the box office and the urge to please theatre consumer (yet still - and probably: therefore - enormously successful and rarely not performing to full, sold-old houses), the directors mentioned above and their ensembles at ro:theatre Rotterdam, the Volksbühne Berlin, the Deutsches Theater Berlin, and at many other theatres with their standing ensemble structure, have managed to substantially update theatre's most conventional mode - the production of texts - for the 21st century. An established network of international festivals and coproductions has turned this trend into a trademark of contemporary theatre all over Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and other countries (while, so far, only rarely reaching the UK).

Their productions may fit the category ‘text-based’, yet they go beyond conventionally representing texts realistically or symbolically; instead, they embody, visualize and spatialize their narratives. Thus, mises-en-scène are created which are no longer hierarchically structured, dominated by the God-like authority of the TEXT, nor driven by the representation of narratives, thus presenting them not (only) as discourse but (primarily) as site of experience, and no longer in the dull (British) mode of a dutiful representation (fostered in the UK by an outrageously enslaving copyright system that denies the directors and their ensemble any right of intervention in the staging of a text, a system that was implemented in the 1830s when the middle-classes hijacked the control over popular theatre and still remains untouched and unchallenged today), but of a creative presentation.

We may simply chart some important and influential names and productions, yet it seems more relevant to situate this innovate approaches within the wider context of the global popular electronic media culture of the 21st century, and its challenges to the traditional socio-cultural institution of theatre in particular. Principal questions come: What is the relationship between texts, bodies, and spaces in these productions? What are the roles assigned to the director, the performers, and the audience, respectively?· How is this new approach to text-based theatre situated within dichotomies such as dramatic theatre vs. devised/physical/visual (etc.) performance, of texts vs. bodies, fiction vs. reality, discourse vs. experience, and author vs. director? To what extent does it challenge, renegotiate, or even transgress such oppositions, as well as other conventional theatrical forms, genres, and hierarchies?· Are established concepts such as ‘staging’, ‘adapting’, or ‘translating’ a text for theatre, or even more recent notions such as ‘deconstructing the textual layers of a work’ applicable, and sufficient to describe the strategies at work here? Do new concepts of ‘dramaturgy’, ‘intermediality’, and the ‘postdramatic’ provide a more suitable optic?· How do directors, performers, and dramaturgs themselves, yet also critics and the continental academic discourse, voice and frame these new aesthetics of a text-based theatre?· What insight can be gained from this particular theatrical practice for the role and potential of theatre within the present-day cultural formation?

Some Contexts

The ongoing research projects aims at mapping out a fundamental conceptual framework for analysing and evaluating these recent trends in contemporary Continental European theatre. Along the way, this also means exploring the changing roles of actors/performers, directors/editors, and the audience/users within these theatrical strategies,· and on a wider horizon a new positioning of (text-based) theatre within the global media culture of the 21st century.

There are various links to discourses in theatre theory and in a wider philosophical framework on contemporary culture, most of all the critique and deconstruction of the concept of representation as put forward by the phalanx of French post-structuralist thinkers. In the field of theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann's major survey Postdramatic Theatre, originally published in German in 1999, now in 2006 finally available in an abridged English translation, comes to mind; yet his study, inspired by theatre practitioners of the 1980s and early 1990s (from Jan Fabre to the Wooster Group and Heiner Müller), has already become a historical document, as now the next and younger generation who grew up with these practitioners take these ideas further towards a 'post-postdramatic theatre', and even back into 'properly' dramatic theatre (notwithstanding the fact that most practitioners mentioned by Lehmann are still widely unknown on the British theatrical island - not so much in the US, it needs to be stressed!). At this juncture, Patrice Pavis’s concept of mise-en-scène comes in, continuously developed over two decades in various publications, pioneered an optic that saw any performance necessarily adding to and exceeding the discursive level, rather than just ‘realizing’ the text. Similarly, discourses on acting and performing circle around the performer’s corporeality and physicality, a key issue in theatre theory and practice for more than a century now, as charted exemplarily by Phillip Zarrilli (Acting ReConsidered, 1995) and Philip Auslander (From Acting to Performance, 1997). Additionally, bringing in the philosophical debates of Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Agamben, and others, the renegotiation of the relation between the body and subjective identity is central for this research project, especially where it addresses the role of theatre in the contemporary media culture (a debate that was: epitomized in the controversy between Peggy Phelan (Unmarked, 1993) and Philip Auslander (Liveness, 1999), more recently taken further through research into Intermediality & Performance (Freda Chapple, Chiel Kattenbelt [eds], 2006) and and in doing so, adds new perspectives to the debate on a Theatre in Crisis (cf. Delgado and Svich, eds, 2002)

While most of these approaches at least implicitly contrast ‘old’ text-based theatre and acting with ‘new’ postdramatic performance and performing, the recent ‘return of the text’ in the works discussed challenges and adds to existing research. This project consequently reconsiders notions of being ‘true to the text’, and investigates strategies of embodying (rather than acting and incorporating) a character and of spatializing discourses of a text to create sites of experiences, which are closely linked to the spectators’ every-day experiences of contemporary pop and media culture.