Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners,

movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance.
Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought
through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work
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that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for
further exploration.

Series Editors
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University of Leeds, UK

Enoch Brater
University of Michigan, USA

Titles
Fiery Temporalities: in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History,
Maurya Wickstrom
ISBN 978-1-4742-8169-0

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space,

James Reynolds
ISBN 978-1-4742-7609-2

Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and off Stage,
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Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis,

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edited by Adam Alston and Martin Welton
ISBN 978-1-4742-5118-1

Watching War on The Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict,

Clare Finburgh
ISBN 978-1-472-59866-0
Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Edited by Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and

Brandon Woolf

Series editors:
Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater
 METHUEN DRAMA
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Copyright © Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, Brandon Woolf and contributors,
2019

Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, Brandon Woolf and contributors

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 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii

1 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre

Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf 1
2 Drama: The Szondi Connection
Elinor Fuchs 20

Part One Formal Aspects

3 Text: The Director’s Notebook

Edith Cassiers, Timmy De Laet and Luk Van den Dries 33
4 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle
Jasmine Mahmoud 48
5 Time: Unsettling the Present
Philip Watkinson 66
6 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage
Magda Romanska 81
7 Media: Intermission
Nicholas Ridout 96

Part Two Social Formations

8 Festivals: Conventional Disruption, or, Why Ann Liv Young

Ruined Rebecca Patek’s Show
Andrew Friedman 115
9 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real
Ryan Anthony Hatch 131
10 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre
Kate Bredeson 147
vi Contents

11 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories

Yvonne Hardt 163
12 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds at Berlin’s
Gorki Theater Matt Cornish 179
13 Elder Care: Performing Dementia – Toward a Postdramatic
Subjectivity Stanton B. Garner, Jr. 196

Notes 211
Index 253
 List of Illustrations

3.1 Page from Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno notebook. 40

3.2 A photo of one of the pages from Guy Cassiers’ theatre script
for his performance Hamlet vs. Hamlet (2014). 43
4.1 The set of BarleyGirl, staged by Implied Violence in 2008 in
a former trolley repair warehouse located in Seattle’s South
Lake Union neighbourhood. 49
4.2 Ryan Mitchell and Mandie O’Connell of Implied Violence in
Come to My Center You Enter the Winter, part of Motel #1
curated by D. K. Pan in 2007 at the now-­demolished Bridge
Motel in Seattle. 57
9.1 Installation view of David Levine, Habit, Essex Street Market,
New York City. 142
9.2 Detail, David Levine, Habit, Essex Street Market, New York
City. 142
10.1 The four actors of Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort’s
Germinal (2013) bask in a glow of light beneath a wall of
words. 158
12.1 A poster for the Maxim Gorki’s 2017 autumn arts festival,
commanding: Desintegriert euch! (De-Integrate Yourselves!). 189
12.2 The poster for Winterreise (Winter Journey), created by Yael
Ronen with Exil Ensemble at the Maxim Gorki Theater in
2017. 194
13.1 Kirk Murphy and puppet Rose in Sandglass Theatre’s
D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks, 2012. 201
 Notes on Contributors

Michael Shane Boyle works in the Drama Department at Queen Mary

University of London as Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance. He is
currently working on two books, a history of postwar West German
performance and a study of how contemporary artists use key technologies
that undergird the logistics infrastructure of global capital, like shipping
containers, drones and GPS.
Kate Bredeson is a theatre historian, a director and a dramaturg. Her books
include Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May ’68 (Northwestern 2018) and
a forthcoming edited collection of the lifetime diaries of Judith Malina
(Routledge). Kate is a recipient of fellowships from the NEH and Fulbright
Commission, and residencies at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France
and the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. She works as a dramaturg in
theatre and dance. Kate is Associate Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Edith Cassiers studied Dutch, Theatre, Film and Literary Studies at the
University of Antwerp. In 2018 she completed her PhD dissertation
‘PROMPT! From Page to Stage. A Theatrical Study of the Postdramatic
Director’s Notebook’ as part of the project ‘The Didascalic Imagination’
(University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel). She has published
several articles on director’s theatre, creative processes and postdramatic
theatre in journals such as Performance Research; Digital Scholarship in the
Humanities; and Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. She furthermore
works as a dramaturge for different theatre companies.
Matt Cornish is Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Ohio University.
He is the author of Performing Unification: History and Nation in Germany
after 1989 and the editor of Everything and Other Performance Texts from
Contemporary Germany; his essays have appeared in Modern Drama, Theatre
Journal, PAJ, and elsewhere. A recipient of Fulbright and DAAD fellowships,
Matt holds a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Yale School of Drama.
Luk Van den Dries is Full Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of
Antwerp. His research deals with contemporary postdramatic theatre,
representations of the body, and the dynamics between directors’ note­­­
books and rehearsal processes. He is supervisor of the research project
‘The Didascalic Imagination’ (funded by FWO – Research Foundation
Flanders).
 Notes on Contributors ix

Andrew Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Ball State

University in Indiana and received his PhD in Theatre from the CUNY
Graduate Center. His essays and reviews on contemporary performance
appear in Theatre Journal, Theater, European Stages and Ibsen News and
Comment. He is currently completing a manuscript on Vegard Vinge and Ida
Müller’s Ibsen-Saga. Andrew works as a dramaturg and is a founding member
of the theatre collective Riot Group.
Elinor Fuchs is the author or editor of five books, including The Death of
Character, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism,
and the family memoir Making an Exit. Her documentary play, Year One of
the Empire, co-­authored with historian Joyce Antler, has been produced in
New York and Los Angeles, where it won the Drama-Logue award for
playwriting. Known for her numerous scholarly articles in dramatic structure
and theory, as well as theatre criticism in The Village Voice, she has taught at
Emory, Columbia and Harvard universities, and at the Institut für
Theaterwissenschaft of the Free University of Berlin. She is presently
Professor Emerita of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School
of Drama, where she taught for twenty-­three years.
Stanton B. Garner, Jr. is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of
Theatre at the University of Tennessee. Author of The Absent Voice: Narrative
Comprehension in the Theater, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and
Performance in Contemporary Drama and Trevor Griffith: Politics, Drama,
History, he has written extensively on theatre and performance. His book
Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theater: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement
was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Yvonne Hardt is a dancer, choreographer and Professor of Applied Dance
Studies and Choreography at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne,
Germany. Her books include Politische Körper: Ausdruckstanz, Choreographien
des Protests und die Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik and
Choreographie und Institution: Zeitgenössischer Tanz zwischen Ästhetik,
Produktion und Vermittlung (with Martin Stern).
Ryan Anthony Hatch is an Assistant Professor of English at California
Polytechnic State University, where he teaches modern and contemporary
drama, experimental writing, contemporary theory and psychoanalysis. He
received his PhD from the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
at SUNY, Buffalo. He is currently working on two book projects: Anyone
Who Trembles Now, on the antitheatricality of the revolutionary event, and a
monograph on Young Jean Lee.
x Notes on Contributors

Timmy De Laet is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University

of Antwerp and the Research Centre for Visual Poetics. His current research
is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the Fulbright
Commission and the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF). His
interests include the reiterative nature of live performance in relation to re-
enactment, archivization, documentation and historiography. He has
published on these topics in journals as Performance Research, Tanz and
Muséologies, as well as in the edited collections Performing Memory in
Art and Popular Culture (2013), Moments: A History of Performance in
10 Acts (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment
(2017).
Jasmine Mahmoud is Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing
Arts and Arts Leadership at Seattle University. Her research examines
relationships among contemporary performance practices, race, and policy
in urban geographies. Her articles and reviews have been published in
Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and Women
& Performance. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from
Northwestern University.
Nicholas Ridout is Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of
London. He is the author of Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical
Problems (2006) and Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love
(2013). A new book, Scenes from Bourgeois Life, will be published in 2020.
Magda Romanska is an award-­winning writer, dramaturg and theatre and
performance theorist. She has taught at Harvard University, Yale School of
Drama, Cornell University and Emerson College. She is the author of five
critically acclaimed theatre books, including The Post-­traumatic Theatre of
Grotowski and Kantor, Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and
Criticism and The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, a leading handbook
of dramaturgy. Currently, Magda Romanska is an Associate Professor of
Theatre Studies and Dramaturgy at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and
the Executive Director and Editor-­in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com. She
graduated from Stanford University and earned her PhD from Cornell
University’s Department of Theatre. Her current research focuses on theatre,
transmedia, new media dramaturgy and posthumanism.
Philip Watkinson is an Associate Lecturer in Performing Arts at the
University of Winchester. He completed his doctoral thesis at Queen Mary
University of London, which examined the experiential interrelations
between space and affect in postdramatic performance contexts. His
 Notes on Contributors xi

work has been published in Performance Research, Theatre Journal and

Contemporary Theatre Review.
Brandon Woolf is a theatre maker and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre
at New York University, where he also serves as Director of the Program in
Dramatic Literature. His writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR: The
Drama Review, Theatre Survey, Performance Research and Postdramatic
Theatre and the Political (Bloomsbury, 2013). Brandon is currently working
on a monograph about contemporary performance and cultural policy in
Berlin after the Cold War.
 Acknowledgements

We thank Mark Dudgeon, Lara Bateman and the entire editorial team at
Methuen Drama for guiding us and bringing this project to print. Magda
Romanska provided essential feedback on our book proposal. Adam Alston
and Elyssa Livergant generously read our introduction and gave valuable
notes.
Finally, we are grateful to all participants and interlocutors who
contributed to spirited conversations at the working sessions on postdramatic
theatre we organized at conferences of the American Society for Theatre
Research: in Portland in 2015, Baltimore in 2014 and Dallas in 2013. Even as
these sessions did not engage explicitly with the topic of form, the discussions
and debates made clear to us that this was an area that needed to be considered
more substantively. Your essays, observations and criticisms helped shape this
volume from inception to production.
 1

Introduction: Form
and Postdramatic Theatre
Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf

To understand theatre, we must understand form. In fact, it is impossible

to think of theatre without also thinking in terms of form. Theatre is not
just a place for seeing, as its etymology suggests. Theatre is also a site of
performance – a place for giving form. But what does theatre give form to?
And who or what, in turn, gives form to theatre?
The possible answers to these questions of formation are varied and
complex. Theatre, of course, gives form to plays, and chief among those
responsible for giving form to theatre are actors, directors, designers and
technicians. What’s more, as some contributors to this volume demonstrate,
theatre can give form to texts not originally intended for the stage, like
archival documents or philosophical reflections; others show that theatre
can give form to activities like long-­term care for elders, or less tangible
phenomena like property markets. Meanwhile, many kinds of forces in
addition to artists can give form to theatre: brick and mortar venues and
international festivals, funding bodies and government agencies, rehearsal
processes and marketing strategies – even time itself. And yet, we cannot
separate giving form to and being formed by: theatre is a subject and an object
of transformation simultaneously.
To state our case most boldly: this book proposes an expanded and
avowedly social understanding of theatrical form, one that requires we shake
off common conceptions of form as mere ornamentation or as something
that seals an artwork off from society. Form is the simultaneous entwinement
of the overlapping social mediations that give shape to theatre, and which
theatre shapes in turn.
Postdramatic theatre – as both a set of performance practices and a
scholarly discourse – is an exemplary site for studying theatre in terms of
form because postdramatic theatre is concerned first and foremost with
interrogating theatrical form. For Hans-Thies Lehmann, whose 1999 book
Postdramatisches Theater is largely responsible for the term’s critical currency,
2 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

the centrality of form is obvious: ‘That a distinct formalism is one of the

stylistic traits of postdramatic theatre’, he asserts, ‘does not require extended
demonstration’.1 Even for the initiated, however, just what Lehmann means
by ‘formalism’ is anything but obvious. Most simply put, he conceives of
postdramatic theatre as a category of performance practice that moves
beyond the convention of representing on the stage some pre-­given content,
such as a story or fable. Lehmann pitches postdramatic theatre as more like
modernist painting; instead of entering a ‘fictive cosmos’ oriented toward a
given authoritative text and organized by causality, psychological motivation
and conceptual coherence, spectators encounter the theatre as just that –
theatre.2 Yet postdramatic theatre is less the theatre’s belated version of the
modernist commitment to medium specificity than a historical shift in
theatrical form, which Lehmann tracks to the 1970s. Artists as disparate
as Robert Wilson, the Wooster Group, Sarah Kane and René Pollesch are
all said to be postdramatic given their shared turn from dialogue, plot,
characterization and a self-­contained fictional world – elements that can
distract from what makes theatre theatre, and which are also conventionally
aligned with drama.
The postdramatic could thus be said to signal a historical shift in theatre
toward form and ‘away from’ drama.3 This distinction between form and
drama is not meant to suggest that drama is without form – quite the opposite.
If nothing else, drama denotes a particular form for encompassing a wide
range of fictional stories, historical accounts and more. And yet, as even this
brief definition makes clear, ‘drama’ indicates a specific dialectical relationship
between form and content, one that emerges under particular historical
conditions.
Lehmann’s own understanding of drama owes primarily to the German
philologist Peter Szondi, whose 1956 book Theorie des modernen Dramas
(Theory of the Modern Drama) posited dialogue between characters as the
essential formal component of ‘Drama’. For Szondi – who draws heavily on
Hegel – drama entails a form for containing a given content; it transforms a
particular story that may exist in another mode, like a folktale, into dialogue.
This is the task of drama, but also its trouble, as not every content is so easily
transformed in such a way. Of particular concern for Szondi was the point at
which drama comes into crisis, namely when its form can no longer contain
the content – the social themes and experiences – available to it. In examining
plays by the likes of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, it became clear to
Szondi that drama was not a timeless entity, but was rather ‘time-­bound’.4 It
emerged and operated under specific conditions and constraints, beginning
in seventeenth-­century Europe. Historically, dramatic form is aligned with
‘bourgeois’ experience, as Elinor Fuchs notes in her contribution to this
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 3

volume.5 Instead of monologic appeals to a higher or external authority, like

gods or monarchs, drama’s dialogic form speaks to a need for, as Szondi
claims, a ‘newly self-­conscious being’ to acclimate to new modes of
interpersonal exchange in a nascent capitalist society.6 Nora, or the person
playing her, should not reveal she knows her life is unfolding on a stage.
Nothing exists outside the drama and its dialogue: ‘to be dramatic, [the
Drama] must break loose from everything external. It can be conscious of
nothing outside itself ’, including the theatrical apparatus, which becomes
‘subservient to the absoluteness of the Drama’.7 This is all to say that for
Szondi there is a difference between dramatic form and theatrical form.
When we talk about dramatic theatre, then, we are not just thinking in terms
of theatrical form, but of how theatrical form serves the relationship between
drama’s literary form (namely dialogue) and its content.
The profound division Szondi posits between dramatic form and theatrical
form leads Lehmann to break from his mentor in a number of ways.8
Lehmann outlines his own formalism through an immanent critique of
Szondi – moving beyond Szondi’s definition of form, which relies on drama’s
hermetic ‘absoluteness’. As Lehmann explains via Szondi, drama is organized
around its content, such that:

the theatrical conditions of perception, namely the aesthetic qualities

of theatre as theatre, fade into the background: the eventful present,
the particular semiotics of bodies, the gestures and movements of the
performers, the compositional and formal structure of language as
a soundscape, the qualities of the visual beyond representation, the
musical and rhythmic process with its own time, etc.9

Lehmann then marks his move beyond Szondi when he writes in the next
sentence: ‘These elements (the form), however, are precisely the point in
many contemporary theatre works – by no means just the extreme ones –
and are not employed as merely subservient means for the illustration of an
action laden with suspense’.10 Thus, to say that postdramatic theatre moves
toward form and away from drama signals a shift toward theatrical form and
away from drama’s particular dialectic of form and content.
As the very choice of terms makes clear, the postdramatic preserves a
relationship to a tradition of dramatic theatre, even as it moves on from
drama. This relationship is one that recognizes postdramatic theatre’s distance
from dramatic theatre – be it temporal, geographic, cultural, etc. – and thus
an awareness of itself and how it has been formed. The ‘post’ indicates that
postdramatic theatre is not some solipsistic enquiry into theatre’s medium
specificity: not just theatre for theatre’s sake, the postdramatic foregrounds its
4 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

own conditions of production and reception. And it does so under specific

social conditions.
While Lehmann distinguishes postdramatic from the ‘epochal’ term
postmodern, he nonetheless follows Szondi in insisting on a historical
understanding of form.11 He even opens the prologue of his book by
connecting the emergence of postdramatic theatre to ‘the spread and then
omnipresence of the media in everyday life’,12 which he dates to the 1960s and
1970s. It is in ‘response to changed social communication under the conditions
of generalized information technologies’ that theatre begins to turn towards
form.13 In part, this is an economic imperative for theatre resulting from
increasing competition with televisual media, chief among them film and
television, which are also in the business of dramatization. What Lehmann
curiously skips over is how his periodization of postdramatic theatre also
corresponds to the emergence of a global division of labour brought on by
deindustrialization and globalization. Several contributors to this volume
take up this blindspot in Lehmann’s historicization of postdramatic form,
tracking for example how postdramatic theatre’s treatment of key formal
considerations like space, time and media owe much to, respectively,
fluctuations in property markets, the short-­term thinking of venture capitalists
and the significance of new communication technologies in post-Fordist
workplaces.
While ‘postdramatic theatre’ has proven a useful means of engaging a
particular history of contemporary performance for both scholars and artists,
given the complexity of Lehmann’s theory of form, it is no wonder that, as he
has pointed out, ‘the formalism of postdramatic theatre . . . still causes
perplexity’.14 Twenty years have passed since the publication of Postdramatisches
Theater, and the category remains more than ever a cause for disagreement
and debate. As conversations about postdramatic theatre have proliferated, so
too have the term’s meanings and the practices it is presumed to describe.
Marvin Carlson observes that the term ‘postdramatic’ has proven so popular
and been so widely applied in recent years ‘that anything like a coherent and
consistent definition . . . has become quite impossible’.15 He continues:

One of the dangers attending upon any critical term is its appropriation
by scholars, artists, and increasingly today by various commercial
interests among them publishers, producers, and publicists, with the
result that the more popular the term becomes the more difficult it
becomes to find any pattern among its various usages.16

Carlson’s treatment of postdramatic theatre is proof of his very claim: in his

essay, he moves between speaking of the postdramatic as a ‘critical term’,17 a
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 5

‘concept’,18 a ‘tradition’19 and a ‘mode’20 of theatre-­making. Yet the imprecision

Carlson describes and simultaneously performs is not only a result of the
term’s broad diffusion; it stems, as we claim above, from the ambitious
theorization that sent the term into circulation in the first place.
As much as it can help clarify, the category of postdramatic theatre also
obscures – not just other ways of viewing performance, but myriad traditions
and histories of performance as well. In a much-­discussed review in TDR:
The Drama Review, Elinor Fuchs takes issue with (among other things) the
range of performance forms Lehmann suggests postdramatic theatre could
cover. ‘With a single term’, she writes, ‘Lehmann re-­creates three or more
generations of theatrical outliers as a movement’.21 According to Fuchs,
postdramatic theatre is but the latest weapon in a ‘war of subsumption’,22 in
which theatre as aggressor aspires to absorb a wide range of performance
forms. Ryan Hatch’s and Yvonne Hardt’s contributions to this volume reflect
on the consequences of this tendency, focusing attention on theatrical
performance within galleries and the impact of postdramatic discourse on
dance studies.
Whereas some critique postdramatic theatre for what it tries to encompass,
others target it for what it excludes. Patrice Pavis, for example, argues that the
nominal connection of the term to Western forms of performance ‘make[s]
it seem suspect and of little use when we are looking at non-European
cultural practices, especially non-­aesthetic and non-­fictional cultural events’.23
Recently, Mary Mazzili in her study of the Chinese playwright Gao Xingjian
has investigated the utility of postdramatic discourse for traditions beyond
Western performance.24 In his chapter for this book on the tensions and
debates around postmigrant theatre in Berlin, Matt Cornish elaborates how
postdramatic practice risks privileging certain issues, experiences and
perspectives, in ways that can be especially charged racially. Postdramatic
theatre is therefore constrained both by what it hopes to include as well as
what (and whom) it excludes.
A third objection to postdramatic theatre comes from scholars who
attribute to its formalism a disengagement with social issues, politics and
history. Across several essays, Janelle Reinelt has argued that the ‘elliptical,
affective engagement’ characterizing postdramatic performance stands in
stark contrast to the ‘direct engagement with issues’ of conventional political
theatre, for which dramatic form (including and inspired by Brecht) seems
especially well suited.25 This strand of critique responds to Lehmann’s position
that ‘questions of aesthetic form are political questions’.26 For the editors of
and contributors to Postdramatic Theatre and the Political (2013), it is the
turn toward form in postdramatic theatre, rather than its content, that holds
political potential: be it by sparking discussion without leading audiences to
6 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

pre-­conceived perspectives, generating alternative kinds of sociality, or even

refusing to engage with the despoiled sphere of politics.27 Such thinking,
however, leads Reinelt to insist that ‘this theatre form is incompatible
with serious politics’.28 Birgit Haas has gone even further, suggesting that
the formal play she sees as characteristic of postdramatic theatre is
both ‘postpolitical’ and politically dispiriting for activists.29 These critiques
maintain that a turn toward form compromises not just content, but, more
crucially, the ability of postdramatic theatre to engage politically. Reinelt
extends this perspective beyond postdramatic practice, describing scholars
who defend the political potential of the postdramatic as espousing a new
‘anti-­political theatre view’, which casts doubt on the potential for theatre to
contribute directly to public debate.30 Reinelt argues that ‘the extremely
influential discourse of postdramatic theatre’ is ‘shifting attention away from
any direct connection between theatre and political life outside the theatre,
and turning attention inward to the processes of the theatrical apparatus
itself and its internal politics’.31 The formalism of postdramatic theory and
practice, she insists, skews entirely too close to theatrical narcissism, as it
would seem to exclude engagement with anything outside theatre. While
aware of this risk, our volume articulates how theatre is always connected in
one form or another to the world beyond it, not just through its political
orientation but through the various other ways it overlaps with social life.
Stanton B. Garner’s contribution here, which charts the use of postdramatic
theatrical forms alongside the practices and institutions of dementia care,
offers a prime example of why one should not limit judgement of postdramatic
theatre to categories like ‘politics’ or ‘the political’.
Postdramatic Theatre and Form neither shies away from nor necessarily
disputes these three critiques of what postdramatic theatre encompasses
or excludes, emphasizes or obscures. Instead of rehearsing the criticisms
above, this book turns attention to the foundational, and often overlooked,
issue on which they hinge: form. What follows, in both this introduction
and the book’s chapters, looks to better understand what postdramatic
theatre is (and isn’t) as a means of understanding what theatrical form is
(and isn’t).
So what do we mean when we speak of form? There is little precision as to
what form actually is when it comes to theatre. Definitions of form that
circulate in our field are themselves clouded by debates that have lingered
since the 1950s – if not much longer. In fact, it is not just what one means by
form that seems up for debate today. Whether scholars and artists should
even be interested in such a thing seems debatable as well. One of the essential
claims in this book is that the varied critiques of postdramatic theatre
have less to do with the postdramatic, than with misgivings about form
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 7

and formalism within theatre and performance studies. By attending to the

longstanding suspicion around – even allergy to – form within our field, we
argue that artists and scholars would benefit from a more capacious formalist
vocabulary.

Formalism in Theatre and Performance Studies

Formalism is passé. As Ric Knowles explains in The Theatre of Form and the
Production of Meaning, an explicit interest in form strikes many as ‘old-­
fashioned’.32 Some find formalist thinking to be not just ‘retrospective’, as Ric
Alssopp gently puts it, but regressive even.33 Alan Ruiz writes: ‘Formalism is a
dirty word – a bad object . . . Plagued by universalist goals of purity, autonomy,
self-­reflexivity, and political indifference.’34 Yet an aversion to formalism is
itself nothing new. As Raymond Williams suggests, be it in religion, politics or
aesthetics, formalism has been ‘predominantly used in negative or dismissive
ways’.35 In the twentieth century, few terms sparked fiercer debate across the
arts, exemplified in the vitriolic exchanges between Bertolt Brecht and Georg
Lukács over modernist literature in the 1930s. In a time marked by the
unprecedented politicization of aesthetics under Hitler and Stalin, ‘formalist’,
Yve-Alain Bois reminds us, became ‘an insult that Lukács and Brecht tossed
at each other’.36 At least insofar as the term indicates a critic’s or an artist’s
explicit engagement with matters relating to formal composition, formalism
tends to be conflated with a disregard for the social capacities and origins of
art. Formalism is presumed to culminate in a celebration of ‘art for art’s sake’
or a politically aloof preoccupation with beauty or the surface qualities of a
work. Too often, however, critiques of formalism hinge on hazy or thinly-­
defined assumptions of what form is.
Does form refer to inherent compositional elements, structures or patterns
of an artwork? How does form relate to other aspects, like content or
function? Is form simply a container or decoration? And what connection, if
any, does form have to the historical and social conditions in which a work
of art emerges? Our aim in this section is not to rehearse the long history of
anti-­formalist thought. Instead, we are interested in tracking a particular
perspective on formalism that has sedimented within Anglophone theatre
and performance studies. This perspective has made it such that form – even
when it is a scholar’s object of study – is rarely foregrounded as such.
There are two primary charges that scholars in our field make against
formalism. First, some argue that the focus on form privileges insular
attention to the performance itself, precluding an understanding of context:
be it the history behind the work, the material conditions of its production
8 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

and reception, or how it speaks to broader social experiences of race, gender,

sexuality, class or disability. Related to this first charge is a second: that
scholars or artists chiefly interested in form inevitably tend toward resigned
apoliticism or elitist escapism. While tensions over form reach back in
Western aesthetic thought to at least Plato and Aristotle,37 we are interested
in how these two particular indictments derive from the more recent
development of theatre and performance studies as a discipline. It is common
sense in our field that form is, if not a distraction from, then certainly an
aside to, the real business of what scholars should study: the social (especially
the political) and the historical aspects of performance.
Suspicions against formalism owe much to the legacy of New Criticism in
theatre and performance studies. As a school of thought, the New Critics
emerged in the United States in the 1930s with ties to a strain of Christian
conservatism committed to defending Southern agrarian values.38 Their
method, which was associated with movements in the United Kingdom,
became most influential during the Second World War and the years
following. At the heart of the New Critics’ project was an emphasis on ‘close
reading’ a literary text, a method that treated a work as having objective
meaning, regardless of context or authorial intent. Likewise, any affective
response elicited in readers by literature was also seen to be beyond the task
of close reading. Focus on the irreducible form of a text would generate a
rigorous and exhaustive analysis of the work itself. New Criticism’s method of
hermetic reading and defence of the literary canon became, as Stephen
Cohen notes, ‘synonymous’ with formalism.39
New Criticism began to go out of favour at the very time theatre studies was
developing as a discipline in its own right, in 1950s America and 1960s Britain.
This coincidence is essential, signalling how the legacy of New Criticism
informed the common-­sense anti-­formalism of theatre and performance
studies. As Shannon Jackson and W. B. Worthen have both argued, it was
primarily against the New Critics that theatre scholars found themselves
pushing back, since the emergence of theatre studies hinged, in part, on
distinguishing the inherently heteronomous practices of the theatre from its
ostensibly autonomous literary siblings.40 In their own influential studies of
dramatic literature, New Critics like Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman
sought to ‘incorporate drama, particularly modern drama, to the canons of
literary study’,41 or, more explicitly, ‘the quintessentially literary conception of
the poem’.42 The task of New Criticism was to identity the ‘purely literary
character of drama’, which required above all distinguishing ‘the literary drama
from theatre’.43 The New Critics helped to bring the study of drama into the
academy, but they did so by excluding much of what makes theatre theatre.
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 9

New Criticism’s emphasis on the formal unity of the work could be said to
resonate with the contemporaneous theory of ‘absolute Drama’ Peter Szondi
developed in West Germany. Yet Szondi’s claim that drama excludes awareness
of both author and audience was meant to describe the experience and
historical function of a play; he did not seek to prescribe how a work should
be studied. Szondi’s theory does share with New Criticism the emphasis on
literary rather than theatrical form, as Szondi pays little attention to matters
of staging, design and acting. The legacy of the New Critics could be said to
have contributed broadly to an alignment of formalism with the literary in
North America and the United Kingdom. However, Lehmann, who is rooted
in the German field of Theaterwissenschaft, builds on Szondi’s formalism as a
way to foreground the theatrical situation.44
Lehmann also cites Michael Kirby, former editor of TDR: The Drama
Review, who worked to champion formalism within Anglophone theatre and
performance studies in the wake of New Criticism.45 As Kirby argues in essays
collected in 1987 as A Formalist Theatre, theatrical form distinguishes the
study of theatre from that of literature.46 Whereas literature requires ‘meaning’
be read from the ‘content’ of a text, theatre, by contrast, is grasped through
the ‘experience’ of ‘performance’.47 And performance, according to Kirby, is
defined not by content but by form: ‘Every performance has form; not every
performance conveys meaning’.48 At first glance, Kirby’s formalist theatre
resembles Lehmann’s attention to postdramatic formalism. But while Kirby’s
notion of a formalist theatre examined ‘performances – whether or not they
are dramatic’, Lehmann’s emphasis on the postdramatic is crucial.49 Lehmann’s
book shares a Western Marxist understanding of form as being historically
shaped – thus the post. For Lehmann ‘the formalism of postdramatic
theatre’, the scholarly and artistic enquiry into what makes theatre theatre,
follows from the historical crisis of drama. In other words, Lehmann tracks
a particular historical transformation in theatrical performance. Kirby,
by contrast, offers what Martin Puchner has described as an ‘ahistorical
formalism’.50 Instead of accounting for how performance forms emerge and
change according to shifting social conditions, Kirby attends to performances
in and of themselves. However, this leads him to compare performances that
appear formally similar while disregarding their strikingly different contexts;
for example, he validates contemporary performance practices according to
how they resemble those of the historical avant-­garde. Our decision to pursue
postdramatic formalism, rather than the whether or not of Kirby’s formalist
theatre, emphasizes the enduring influence of a particular historical genealogy
of theatrical thought and practice – drama – even as we imagine form in other
and more expanded ways.
10 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

This brings us to another critique of formalism in Anglo-American

theatre and performance studies. By neglecting both the context and history
of theatre, a focus on form risks looking past the varied social experiences
and exclusions on which theatre depends. The New Critics have elicited
charges that whiteness and male chauvinism underpin their method.51 These
are indictments that have also been made against the formalism proposed
by Kirby as well as the milieu of performance makers with whom he
associated in the 1960s and 1970s, which relied at times on, as Shannon
Jackson argues, ‘gendered, raced, and classed’ appropriations.52 Moreover, for
Stefka Mihaylova, there is an unsettling tendency among major exemplars of
formalism in the twentieth century generally to ignore race and gender. By
formalism, Mihaylova has in mind both critical practices and performance
practices (like Italian Futurism), which, by shifting focus from ‘social context
to medium specificity’ and ‘the work itself ’, not only assumed whiteness
and patriarchy as dominant social norms, but in some cases actually
championed white supremacy and patriarchal authority.53 Today a number of
artists deploy recognizably postdramatic practices to grapple with complex
questions of identity, like Young Jean Lee and Suzan-Lori Parks. Yet within
the critical discourse on postdramatic theatre there has been comparably
little attention to matters of racialized and gendered difference, as well as to
the assumptions that surround class and social disability.
For all of these reasons, the terms ‘form’ and ‘formalism’ appear quite
sporadically within the annals of our field.54 In fact, it is partly in response
to the deficits of these formalisms that a range of other methodologies for
studying theatre emerged, which, as Jackson puts it, ‘advocates a radically
contextual and socially grounded analysis, that takes seriously feminist, anti-­
racist, and intercultural critiques of identity and globalization’.55 This bent
towards the ‘radically contextual’ is exemplified by approaches that investigate
how performance practices are deeply embedded in the material conditions of
their production and reception. Typically such scholarship embraces tools and
methods borrowed from the social sciences, especially fields like anthropology
and sociology. This turn, which is broadly associated with the rise of performance
studies, has expanded both how and what scholars research.Yet in foregrounding
questions of history and society in relation to performance, our field has
increasingly left behind what it means to think of such things in terms of form.
This leads us to ask: What has been lost? Must there be a divorce between form
and the radically contextual, between the aesthetic and the social? Does a return
to matters of form necessarily entail a backlash against historical enquiry? A
lack of exclusive attention to form in theatre and performance studies has left
us wanting for this lexicon – form as shared language – for examining how
theatre and the social world overlap. In what follows, then, we turn outside the
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 11

field, returning to literary studies of all places, to expand our understanding of

theatrical form in all its social complexity.

New Form(alism)s
As the conversation around form within theatre and performance studies
has stagnated, there has been resurgent interest in re-­theorizing form in
other fields, particularly literary studies. A prominent strand of these recent
formalisms seeks to revive the central tenets of New Criticism, rejecting
contextualist approaches and concentrating once again on the lost pleasures
of ‘surface reading’.56 However, in the face of these ‘backlash’ formalisms, as
Marjorie Levinson labels them, there have also been sustained attempts at
reinventing the study of form so that it foregrounds society, politics,
economics and history.57 Of particular interest for theatre and performance
studies are two new strands of formalism, one that applies formalist thinking
to social institutions and the other that examines the historical conditions
of emergent forms of art. Although neither tendency on its own provides a
full account of the expanded understanding of form we propose – one that
historicizes the formal intersections of art and society – they offer useful
models on which to build.
We begin then with New Formalism,58 focusing on the much-­debated
work of Caroline Levine. In her 2015 book Forms, Levine insists that ‘form’ is
not exclusive to the aesthetic realms of visual art, music, literature and theatre,
but, in fact, ‘belongs equally’ to other fields, from the social sciences to
mathematics.59 Levine posits form expansively as the ‘ordering principles’
that organize and arrange social life.60 Whereas scholars have typically
understood form as that which ‘distinguished’ art from society,61 for Levine,
form is what they have in common. Forms in society, as in art, are means
of giving order – such as the arrangement of desks in a primary school
regulates the behaviour of children, or the separation of the working day into
discrete segments of time to maximize the productivity of labour. The relation
between aesthetic forms and social forms, however, is not simply one of
analogy. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Levine argues that form indicates the
workings of power, since the existence of form at any level – from theatre to
government – is a means of ‘imposing order on the world’.62
Levine’s methodological intervention provides a corrective to the hermetic
concept of form offered by New Criticism, which treats form as that which
severs a work from the social world. By turning to design theory and the
concept of ‘affordance’, Levine explores how different forms overlap and
interact with one another:
12 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

A school borrows the idea of spectators in rows from ancient theater. A

novelist takes from epic poetry the narrative structure of the quest. . . .
A rhythm can impose its powerful order on laboring bodies as well as
odes. Binary oppositions can structure gendered workspaces as well as
creation myths.63

Levine’s New Formalism is useful for its expanded understanding of form,

reminding us that a key formalist task should be to articulate how art and
society – aesthetic and social form – operate together, even when in tension
with one another. What Levine means by the ‘social’, however, should
be distinguished from how other scholars deploy the term when writing
about the ‘social turn’ in recent participatory art and performance. For Claire
Bishop and Shannon Jackson, social relations and systems comprise the very
material of socially engaged and process-­driven performance, and are also
the objects of transformation and avowal.64 While not at all opposed to
Bishop and Jackson, Levine’s concept of affordance implies a less intentional
or unidirectional engagement of art with society.
Nonetheless, significant limits to Levine’s method become evident when it
is extended to the realm of theatre. Most notably, Levine’s approach to New
Formalism is primarily a ‘method for reading’.65 As such, it perpetuates a
literary approach to form, even as it looks to society to expand what we
understand form to encompass. Levine pays little attention to the forms that
govern or impact how art – or, for that matter, society – is produced. She
insists that no form, however powerful, dominates other forms – claiming a
desire to evade the sort of causality she associates with her caricature of
Marxism. In her effort to level the relations of power between art and society,
Levine risks implying that art, in its capacity to shape the world, is on
par with all other social forces, vaguely suggesting that ‘[s]ome forms
dominate others at some moments and then falter or recede’.66 While elevating
literary forms to the level of social forms, Levine collapses instantiations and
institutions of social power – from prisons to corporations – into generic
forms – like containers and networks. If taken to its extreme, this logic risks
placing a rhyming couplet on the same level as a military barrack. As Seb
Franklin puts it, Levine’s approach ignores the ‘preconditions’ for the
emergence and interactions of the various forms she describes, which, when
it comes to a formation like a prison can obscure how the ‘the labor[s] of
forming’ are thoroughly racialized and gendered.67 There is immense value
in embracing the unintended, unexpected and subversive potential – the
affordances – of art’s collision with society, but not without offering a sense
of the conditions of possibility for such encounters, that is, not without
accounting for their histories. Under what conditions, then, do new forms
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 13

like those associated with the postdramatic emerge? How might form be
understood not only as determined by such conditions, but also constitutive
of them?
To address these questions, we turn to another recent formalist tendency,
exemplified in Lauren Berlant’s and Sianne Ngai’s accounts of the historical
mediation of aesthetic and social forms in late capitalist society. This recent
work is in dialogue with a longer, largely Marxist tradition of critical theory,
running from Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno to Fredric Jameson and
Terry Eagleton, which considers the form – rather than the content – of art as
illuminating the historical conditions under which it was produced.68 Berlant
and Ngai, however, hold at arm’s length the temptation to offer ‘symptomatic’
readings of art or treat it as a document of history, choosing instead to
examine how art gives sense to one’s historical experience, putting particular
emphasis on issues of queerness, racialization and social disability.69 As
Joseph North suggests, their work tracks ‘with great precision the specifically
aesthetic means by which subjectivities and collectivities manage to undergo
and respond to the world’.70
Writing in Cruel Optimism about art and culture created since the 1980s
as the welfare state was dismantled, Berlant argues that ‘new aesthetic forms’
register the affective experience of history in process, and thus are part and
parcel of history itself.71 Art, for Berlant, is one way that the ‘affective impact’
of structural shifts ‘takes form, becomes mediated’.72 Aesthetic forms help
constitute the terrain on which history is lived and experienced: new
historical circumstances require new forms. Whereas Berlant actively
describes Cruel Optimism as a ‘formalist work’,73 Ngai is more reserved in
espousing an attentiveness to form, if only because she seeks to reinvigorate
another suspect term often allied with form, ‘aesthetics’.74 While turning to
aesthetics might strike some as a further retreat from real world concerns,
Ngai examines what happens to aesthetic experience in a late capitalist
society where there is an ever increasing ‘interpenetration of economy and
culture’.75 In many ways Ngai’s attention to ‘the close relation between the
form of the artwork and the form of the commodity’ resonates with Levine’s
interest in the formal ‘affordances’ of art and society; but for Ngai, art and the
commodity are not the same. Instead, she demonstrates how art and the
commodity under late capitalist conditions can generate similar kinds of
experiences.76 (Think of an iPhone.) Like Berlant, Ngai maps how aesthetics
gives sense to and shapes one’s experience of a historical moment. Both Ngai
and Berlant, then, require we take seriously how new forms of art emerge in
and alongside history, not simply as documents of, but active in it.
Neither Berlant nor Ngai pay substantive attention to theatre. In many
ways, however, theatre makes even clearer Berlant’s and Ngai’s arguments
14 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

about the co-­imbrication of aesthetic form and historical transformation.

Moreover, their approach could be said to resonate with Levine’s ‘reading
practice’,77 in that their emphasis on affect and experience leads them to
examine works of art from the side of consumption, that is from the
perspective of spectators and readers. While Berlant and Ngai are both
interested in, for instance, how art relates to changes in the labour process
under deindustrialization, they do not extend their formal analysis to how art
actually gets made. They read a film about the tolls of emotional labour on
workers (like The Cable Guy) as shaping how workers experience and make
sense of their working lives, but neither scholar looks into how forms of
artistic production change alongside broader shifts in economic production.
The material conditions of theatre are more difficult to ignore than in
other artistic mediums, because it is a site of performance in which production
and consumption typically occur simultaneously. As Lehmann writes:

Unlike other forms of artistic practice [theatre] 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.78

Yet many kinds of theatre are defined formally by the attempt to obscure
their material conditions. Dramatic theatre strives for a kind of hermetic
‘absoluteness’ in which, as soon as the lights dim, we are asked to overlook the
fact that we are actually in a theatre: watching people work. Postdramatic
theatre, by contrast, is formally distinguished by the insistent appearance
of its own theatreness. One could also say this of Brechtian theatre, which
highlights its material conditions in order to generate critical reflection
on how the situation on stage came to be and thus might be changed. But
postdramatic artists use theatrical production and reception as formal
material for performance itself. They do not necessarily create an ‘outside’
position of critical knowing, though some directors and ensembles do do
that.79 Postdramatic theatre operates with regard to history in a way that does
not try to hide its being with and part of that history. As Berlant might say,
postdramatic theatre is a form of experiencing the ‘contemporary moment
from within that moment’80 – even if it strives to interrupt and transgress.
Since postdramatic theatre is just that, theatre, the kind of formal analysis
Berlant and Ngai encourage must be extended to theatre’s own materiality.
This means expanding formal analysis even further to encompass forms
of ‘maintenance’, ‘organization’ and ‘administration’, forms that a theatre
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 15

requires but which might not appear as such or be immediately reflected in the
performance. Here Levine’s theory of ‘affordances’ gives licence to think these
material and social processes in terms of form. For her, form provides a
language for considering the intimate interrelations between what seem, at
first glance, profoundly disparate processes. What, for example, are the
relations between the organizational structures of a funding agency and the
expressive languages (aural, visual, olfactory, etc.) that appear onstage? And
yet, expanding on Berlant and Ngai, we must keep in mind that funding
agencies do not operate in a historical vacuum, but are themselves shaped by
external political and economic forces; so too could the priorities and practices
of arts funders be said to hinge on the aesthetic proclivities and formal
tendencies of the very arts they support. Formal analysis of the sort we propose
must ask: how are such affordances always also mediated by history?

Postdramatic Formalism
Form, in our definition, is integral rather than incidental to theatre, originating
theatre rather than ornamenting it. Instead of sealing theatre off from society,
form is what theatre and society share. Form names more than just practices
of representation and meaning making within the theatre; it also encompasses
the modes of production, consumption and circulation that give shape to and
are shaped by theatre. Paying attention to matters of form does not mean
ignoring how theatre can be political; at the same time, however, formalism
requires considering how theatre engages with the reproduction of social life
beyond the specific sphere of politics. In their own ways, each of the essays
presented here explores this expanded understanding of form, though none
should be read as conforming to it. Instead, the formalist language we offer
has been shaped by the contributions themselves.
The structure of this volume performs the formalism we propose,
foregrounding what it means to think aesthetic form and social form together,
without collapsing one into the other. The first section, ‘Formal Aspects’, revisits
Lehmann’s own account of the essential aesthetic principles that distinguish
postdramatic formalism – text, space, time, body and media. These contributions
reconceive rather than rehash Lehmann’s schema; echoing Berlant and Ngai,
they pay special attention to how the aesthetics that seem to define postdramatic
theatre are themselves inseparable from the social conditions within which they
emerge. This first section complements the second, ‘Social Formations’, which,
like Levine, turns a formalist eye to matters not conventionally thought of in
terms of form: the organizational structures of ensembles and festivals, the
modes of labour and spectatorship that postdramatic theatre requires, the
16 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

interrelations between social services and theatre, and even the discourses of
academic research and criticism.
Each essay in ‘Formal Aspects’ offers a new perspective on one of the aspects
charted by Lehmann in Postdramatic Theatre, informed by developments in
theatre practice and theory since 1999. Edith Cassiers, Timmy De Laet and Luk
Van den Dries, for instance, contribute to debates over text in postdramatic
theatre by changing the terms of the conversation. Instead of scripts or other
source material for performance, they focus on the director’s notebook, which
for them includes the various written, digital and intermedial working
documents directors today have at their disposal for generating performance.
By using a ‘genetic method’ to examine the notebooks of directors Romeo
Castellucci and Guy Cassiers, they argue that far from disposing of text,
postdramatic theatre actually gives it heightened significance as a means for
creating theatre.
As with Berlant’s and Ngai’s theories of formalism, contributors to this
first section also seek to historicize treatments of postdramatic aspects as
being more than mere revisions to previous theatrical forms, noting how
their novelty owes to structural transformations in society itself. For Cassiers,
De Laet and Van den Dries, the new generative uses of text for performance
become possible when emergent technologies are brought into the rehearsal
room. Jasmine Mahmoud and Philip Watkinson go further by engaging
explicitly with how postdramatic treatments of space and time respectively
derive from and comprise the peculiar spatial and temporal experiences
inherent to late capitalist society. In her essay, Mahmoud tracks how the
collapse of Seattle’s property market during the 2007–2008 financial crisis
shaped the aesthetic practices of the performance ensemble Implied Violence.
By developing a notion of ‘postdramatic geography’, Mahmoud injects
what she calls a more ‘sociological’ method than Lehmann deploys when
studying postdramatic theatre,81 arguing that broader economic conditions
can determine the kinds of spaces available to artists, thereby shaping their
postdramatic styles.
Where Mahmoud examines the impact of financial crisis on theatre’s
spatial form, Watkinson studies how the experience of postdramatic theatre
both resonates and breaks with the venture capitalist temporal logic of
‘disruptive innovation’, which places a premium on short-­term thinking for
gains in the present moment. His essay on work by Deborah Pearson and by
the performance group De Stijle, Want, responds to critiques of postdramatic
theatre’s supposed apolitical presentism, arguing instead that postdramatic
time is saturated by conflicting temporalities of history and futurity.
In addition to updating how we situate particular aspects of postdramatic
theatre in relation to very recent historical transformations, the final two
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 17

contributors in this section mobilize formalist thinking to revise the

origins of the postdramatic paradigm. Magda Romanska’s look at Tadeusz
Kantor’s posthuman theatre interrogates the form that the body can take after
Auschwitz in postdramatic theatre. She details how prevailing performance
practice, including performance art, operates under an anthropocentric
understanding of the body, pinning to the body assumptions of truth,
authenticity, subjectivity and agency. Posthuman representations found
throughout Kantor’s work, by contrast, empty the body of its humanness,
leaving it to function as mere ‘thing’. The possibility of the posthuman body
on stage, Romanska argues, points to a relation between ethical and theatrical
forms beyond the postdramatic.
Nicholas Ridout closes this section by rethinking Lehmann’s claim
that postdramatic theatre emerged as a result of the rise of new media
and communication technologies in the 1960s and 1970s, insisting that
this emergence cannot be separated from the contemporaneous global
restructuring of industrial production and consumption. Turning to Fredric
Jameson’s theory of ‘total flow’ to analyse video art by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan
Trecartin, Ridout explains that the spectator experience generated by the
ubiquity of video in postdramatic performance mirrors formally the social
relations of work and leisure in late capitalist society.
As each of these chapters makes clear in their own way, the shifts that
formally define postdramatic theatre owe to broader social transformations,
be it with regard to financial markets, technological advancements or even
concepts of the human. The formal aspects of a given work of postdramatic
theatre emerge neither in a historical vacuum nor solely on a particular stage,
but in relation to other ‘forms’ – be they aesthetic, social or (inevitably) both.
Essays in the second section, ‘Social Formations’, expand upon but also
complicate ongoing debates about the political stakes of the postdramatic by
arguing that aesthetic forms are always already bound up with broader
societal forces, from public agencies to private enterprises. Like the essays in
‘Formal Aspects’, the contributions to this next section ask how the formation
of postdramatic theatre owes to, affords and even shapes other aesthetic and
social forms.
The first two essays in this section consider how postdramatic performance
practices engage with and are constrained by influential art institutions like
the festival and the gallery. Andrew Friedman, in his consideration of the
controversy surrounding Ann Liv Young’s disruption of a performance by
Rebecca Patek at American Realness in 2014, foregrounds the tendency of
festivals to become a marketplace for experimental performance, defanging
the avant-­garde impulses of postdramatic artists. He tracks how the festival
form has given rise to a contradiction in which curators are required to
18 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

present work that is both ‘cutting edge and market ready’.82 Contemporary
festivals entice audiences and producers with the promise of avant-­garde
disruption without actually challenging the institutional marketability of
performance commodities.
Ryan Hatch considers what happens to theatrical form when it moves out
of theatres and into galleries. Focusing on David Levine’s eight-­hour
performance Habit, Hatch argues that the appeal of theatre for contemporary
visual artists is its promise to provide the ‘real’. Hatch turns to Lacanian
psychoanalysis to insist that what may seem like the ‘real’ in performance –
such as actors smoking or eating – is only to be understood as ‘real’ because it
unfolds in an attempt, however faulty, at semblance. For Hatch, the move of
drama into the gallery reveals a key error at the heart of how postdramatic
form has been theorized: what appears as the irruption of the real in theatre
is simply an appearance of ‘the Real’.
The processes of making theatre – training, design, rehearsal – are themselves
complex social formations that draw upon the institutional resources and
requirements of other disciplines. In her contribution, Kate Bredeson uses
Bruno Tackels’ theory of l’écriture de plateau, or ‘set writing’, to evaluate the
limits and exclusions of postdramatic theatre as a label for contemporary
performance in France. By turning to the work of designer-­directors like
Philippe Quesne and the pair Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort, Bredeson
considers how artists without conventional theatrical training are challenging
key institutional dynamics that have long dominated French theatres. These
artists, Bredeson argues, offer a metatheatrical approach that calls attention to
the interdisciplinary qualities inherent to the theatrical process.
Yvonne Hardt examines the prominence of narration in contemporary
dance, focusing on how artists like Jérôme Bel, Martin Nachbar and Eszter
Salamon incorporate into their work critical reflection on how they create
choreography. Such self-­reflexive narration, Hardt argues, allows these artists
to address dance history while also garnering disciplinary legitimacy for
Dance Studies and support from funding bodies and academic institutions.
Incorporating narration into work like this, Hardt insists, deconstructs the
body/discourse binary so prominent in postdramatic treatments of dance,
showing how the moving body cannot be reduced to what Lehmann calls
‘pure gesture’.83
The final two essays in this section push us to consider ways in which
important and often contested social issues bear upon postdramatic
formalism. Focusing on ‘postmigrant’ performance at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki
Theater, Matt Cornish’s essay asks readers to consider how theatrical form
relates to racial exclusion and migration in Germany. He distinguishes
‘postmigrant’ from ‘postdramatic’, examining what is at stake when critics
 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre 19

classify a performance as one or the other. His essay extends understandings

of the politics of form beyond what appears on stage, using the language
of form to examine as well the Gorki’s governance structures, marketing
strategies and the composition of its ensemble.
Making use of a phenomenological method, Stanton B. Garner, in the
collection’s final chapter, posits how postdramatic theatre presents new
possibilities for expression that are especially suited to engaging with the lived
experience of dementia. His analysis of the ways dementia is performed in the
puppetry of Sandglass Theatre expands Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic
subjectivity. Garner calls attention to how diverse inter-­institutional formations,
such as nursing homes and government health programmes, sustain and
inform postdramatic performance.
The two-­part structure of this collection is not meant to imply that the
formal aspects and social formations of postdramatic theatre are separate
and distinct. Indeed, the authors view them as contributing to a multi-­faceted
understanding that challenges entrenched notions of form. Many of the
essays in the second section could be reframed to fit in the first. Cornish’s
essay on migration, for instance, is also about the body; Garner’s essay on
dementia is also an essay about time. And the essays in the first section are
about social formations of their own: Ridout’s essay about media is also an
essay about galleries; Mahmoud’s essay on space is also about financial crisis.
Before turning to these wide-­ranging studies of postdramatic formalism,
however, it is important to consider drama more substantively. Often, discussions
of postdramatic form gloss over questions of dramatic form – and the relation
between the two. In so doing, they confuse, as we have argued above, a more
literary dramatic form with a more performative theatrical form. What follows
this introductory essay, then, is a chapter from Elinor Fuchs providing essential
context for the formalist approach that undergirds Lehmann’s theory of
postdramatic theatre. Turning back to the work of Peter Szondi, on which so
much of Lehmann’s formalism depends, Fuchs argues that what struck Szondi
as a moment of crisis for drama is actually for Lehmann a ‘liberation’ for
theatrical form. But Fuchs goes on to argue that the rupture between dramatic
and postdramatic form might be even more profound than Lehmann indicates,
leading her to call for a reexamination of both the historical and social roots of
postdramatic theatre – a challenge the subsequent chapters take up.
This volume thus proposes a formalism that requires us to expand our
understanding of form. We seek to forge a shared language that recognizes
postdramatic theatre as a processual and historically contingent site where
aesthetic and social forms intersect, overlap and collide.

Athens (OH), London, New York, 2018

 2

Drama: The Szondi Connection

Elinor Fuchs

In March 1944, Hitler’s troops invaded Hungary. SS Officer Adolf Eichmann,

on orders from Hitler, immediately set about organizing Hungary’s roughly
half a million village and rural Jews into ghettos for transport to Auschwitz.
Soon 12,000 Jews were being sent by rail to their immediate deaths each
day. Approximately another 400,000 Jews remained in Budapest. Despite
Hungary’s harsh anti-Semitic wartime laws, the deportation of Budapest Jews
had been stalled because of a silent struggle between Hitler and his quondam
Hungarian ally, Admiral Miklos Horthy. Some historians believe that Horthy’s
delay of roundups was intended to keep the city’s economy from collapsing
(a quarter of the city’s population was Jewish); others say that Horthy had
been warned by Allied powers that with Hitler losing the war, massive
deportations would lead to his own trial as a war criminal. From Horthy’s
point of view, with the Russian army closing in on Budapest, the issue would
soon be moot. In fact, that spring Horthy made unsuccessful efforts to switch
Hungary’s war allegiance to the Allies.
There was a curious small exception to this hellish indeterminacy in the
spring of 1944: the case of the so-­called Kasztner train, organized by the
Hungarian lawyer, journalist and Zionist, Rudolf (Resző) Kasztner, a leader
who had been active during the war in helping many western European
Jews find refuge in Hungary, where for the time being they were thought to
be safe.
After Hitler’s occupation of Hungary in the spring of 1944, Kasztner and
his Aid and Rescue Committee partner Joel Brand began negotiating directly
with Eichmann and his deputies to stop the already launched deportation of
the rural and village Hungarian Jews. The germ of an exchange proposal may
have come from Eichmann, who seemed to encourage the idea of a ‘buyout’
of Jews in exchange for trucks for the German war effort. As the terms of the
deal constantly shifted, Kasztner and Brand began raising funds from foreign
sources headquartered in neutral countries. Eventually, the scheme boiled
down to a plan to move about 1,700 Hungarian Jews, at about $1,000 a head,
from both Budapest and the hinterland, by train and then by ship, to safety in
 Drama: The Szondi Connection 21

Palestine. The group would include not only affluent and accomplished
professionals, but rabbis, opera singers, industrialists, civil servants, farmers,
housewives and orphaned children. Kasztner claimed that the train would be
a kind of Noah’s Ark of Hungarian Jewry.
The train departed from Budapest on 30 June 1944, its passenger list and
even its destination uncertain, as ports in Spain and Portugal had recently
closed. It ended up in Bergen-Belsen, amidst assurances that the passengers
would soon move on. After several harrowing months in the camp, the
Kasztner passengers were sent onto Switzerland.
Much of this story has been subject to dispute, turning on the character of
Kasztner himself. Was he a saviour – a kind of Oskar Schindler? Or a self-­
serving Nazi collaborator who saved his own family but did nothing to warn
the Jewish community about the exterminations at Auschwitz? Kasztner was
one of the few thought to be aware of the Vrba-Wetzler Report, named for the
two Auschwitz escapees who, in the spring of 1944, brought their eye witness
accounts of the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria to the
Allied powers and Jewish rescue groups.
After the war, Kasztner moved to Israel and worked for the Israeli
government. In 1954, he was charged with collaboration with the Nazis and
was defended by the Israeli government in an eighteen-­month libel trial.
Kasztner was found guilty, accused by the judge of having ‘sold his soul to the
devil’.1 While the court’s verdict was being appealed, a right-­wing activist
group assassinated Kasztner. Four months after his death, Kasztner was
exonerated by the Supreme Court of Israel.
Among the Kasztner train’s passengers were Dr Leopold Szondi, a
renowned Hungarian psychoanalyst, his wife and his son, Peter, then barely
fifteen years old. Remaining in Switzerland after the war, Peter Szondi
completed his doctorate in German literature in Zurich in 1956, writing a
dissertation on modern drama, published that same year with the title Theorie
des modernen Dramas (Theory of the Modern Drama). He was appointed a
professor at Berlin’s Freie Universität (FU) in 1961, where he became the
dissertation adviser of Hans-Thies Lehmann. In 1965, he was named chair of
the FU’s Institute for General and Comparative Literature.
Peter Szondi became the most noted postwar theorist of modern drama
in West Germany, as well as the abiding intellectual influence of Lehmann’s
career. It is through Szondi that one can see how thoroughly Lehmann
represents the continuation of a classicist European critical tradition, and it is
through Lehmann that we may finally grasp the merging of the European
and American ‘avant-­garde’.
On 9 November 1971, while working on a book about his friend, the poet
and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan, who had drowned himself in the Seine
22 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

six months earlier, Szondi committed suicide. He was forty-­two. The shock to
his young student, Lehmann, can scarcely be imagined. The following essay
traces close similarities between Szondi’s and Lehmann’s theories of dramatic
form, and the implications of their differences.

Szondi
In the opening pages of her English translation of Postdramatic Theatre,
Karen-Jürs Munby writes that ‘Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre is
in part a response to Peter Szondi’s seminal Theory of the Modern Drama’.2 In
his own ‘Prologue’ that follows, Lehmann offers a somewhat convoluted
tribute to his mentor, yet opens a significant space between his own project
and Szondi’s theorization of drama: ‘On the one hand, following Peter Szondi,
I want to read the realized artistic constructions and forms of practice as
answers to artistic questions,’ he writes. ‘On the other hand, I will claim here
a certain (controlled) trust in a personal . . . reaction.’3 Lehmann implies – an
implication only to be teased out at the end of his book and by familiarity
with Szondi – that he intends to rely at least as much on his own personal
responses to theatrical practice as on traditional analyses of the dramatic
theatre that are ‘subordinated to the primacy of the text’, an approach for
which Szondi has been criticized.4
Szondi’s drama criticism was not published in English until 1987,
appearing finally in Michael Hays’s translation as Volume 29 of the University
of Minnesota Press’s now discontinued Theory and History of Literature
series. For years before that, Hays was notably impatient with the pace at
which Szondi was being introduced to English-­speaking readers. In 1983, in
an introduction to a special issue of the journal boundary 2 dedicated to
articles on Szondi, Hays grumbled that: ‘Translations of his works have
appeared in French, Italian, Polish, Swedish, and, no doubt, other languages as
well, other, that is, than English.’5 Almost none of Szondi’s work had by then
been made available to the world of Anglo-American criticism and literary
theory, an absence Hays lamented as ‘surprising and unfortunate’.6
Hays should not have been surprised. It is hard to break into a discourse
dominated for centuries by Aristotle, and even harder to convince a British or
American student of theatre that Shakespeare – of all playwrights! – didn’t
write ‘drama’. Entire economies are built on the opposing premise. Szondi,
however, was raised in the school of Hegel. The historicization of the dramatic
form was a natural extension of his theoretical training. Like Hegel in his
three-­part theory of the dialectic – thesis, antithesis and synthesis – or
his three-­part adventure of the ethical ‘collision’ as it evolved from the Greeks
 Drama: The Szondi Connection 23

to the Romantics, Szondi proposes a tripartite unfolding of the dramatic

form over time. While he does not actually resort to the prepositions pre- and
post-, as does Lehmann, it is clear that his understanding of drama relies on
such an evolutionary model.
Pre-­drama, in Szondi’s terms, would include all scripted stage works that
were created and performed before the advent of true ‘drama’ in seventeenth-­
century France. These works included various rhetorical forms that slowly
disappeared during and after the Renaissance: the chorus was already gone;
following it went the prologue, the epilogue, the aside and, more slowly, the
monologue.
After Shakespeare, what Szondi calls the ‘absolute’ drama begins to appear:
drama written entirely in dialogue. ‘It was the result of a bold intellectual
effort made by a newly self-­conscious being,’ Szondi writes,

who, after the collapse of the medieval worldview, sought to create an

artistic reality within which he could fix and mirror himself on the basis
of interpersonal relationships alone. . . . The verbal medium for this world
of the interpersonal was the dialogue. . . . The absolute dominance of
dialogue – that is, of interpersonal communication, reflects the fact that
the Drama [now] consists only of the reproduction of interpersonal
relations, is only cognizant of what shines forth within this sphere.7

The word ‘absolute’ dominates Szondi’s argument. ‘The Drama is absolute,’

he writes. ‘To be purely relational – that is, to be dramatic, it must break loose
from everything external.’8 Among the rejected external temptations (my
word, not his – though in fact Szondi’s ‘drama’ does suggest the discipline of
abstinence) are the dramatist, the spectator, the physical ‘house’, the bare
physical stage (as against the illusion), the actor (as against the character) and
even the past itself. The drama can be ‘conscious of nothing outside itself ’.9
Szondi was influenced by George Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel. In
addition to the almost identical titles of their books, both men theorized a
modern literary form and brought back into current critical discourse
Aristotle’s counter-­term to tragedy, epic. While Lukács sees the novel as the
modern form of the epic, however, Szondi is concerned about the novelization
of drama.
It is interesting that Szondi does not name the dialogic form of drama
‘bourgeois’. Yet he implies that this new dramatic form contains all that is now
necessary to the explication of this emergent class. Gone are God, heaven,
hell and royalty. Only that which interpersonal conversation will contain –
issues of family, livelihood, community and love – is now essential to the
depiction of the human.
24 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Yet to Szondi, writing in the 1950s, modern drama, that is the drama of his
own past half-­century or more, has entered a crisis, caused by the outbreak of
suppressed epic material. In all (then) contemporary playwriting – from Ibsen
to Arthur Miller – he finds the eruption of the past or future into the seamless
present of dialogue. Every major playwright from Ibsen forward struggles
with this problem, Szondi argues. He goes on to trace a number of ‘tentative
solutions’ to this crisis of form.10 The way forward is shown in the methods of
contemporary playwrights, their deliberate opening up the absolute present
of dialogical drama by wandering away from interpersonal conversation that
dialogue presupposes, back into the past (Ibsen’s unearthing of family secrets)
or into the future (Chekhov’s utopian dreams about a better future) through
flashbacks or dream scenes (Arthur Miller), and other methods that bring the
expanded time frame of the epic into the dialogic form.
Though it is especially in the Anglo-American tradition that the bourgeois
drama theorized by Szondi continues to flourish, his theorization never
caught on in the United States as it has in Europe. In 2009, the scholar Peter
Höyng wrote that Theory of the Modern Drama was in its twenty-­sixth edition
and had sold more than 100,000 copies in German alone, making it a
‘justifiable classic’.11 That has hardly been its fate on the list of the University
of Minnesota Press, where it has been out of print since 1999. I suspect
that today’s students of dramatic theory and criticism are still in the stage
of knowledge I myself was in as a graduate student at the Graduate
Center, when my professor Andrzej Wirth, newly hired from Berlin, came to
class one evening having the night before witnessed a Robert Wilson
production in downtown Manhattan. Excited, he announced that he had just
seen his first work of ‘postdialogic’ theatre. Wirth’s insight very likely derived
directly from the general European acceptance of Peter Szondi’s dramatic
theories.

The Logic of Three?

My principal graduate school mentor, the late Dr Daniel Gerould, took
delight in teaching what he called the minor genres. Among these was the
‘Fairytale Play’. ‘Why’, he asked, when teaching this form, ‘does everything
come in threes?’ Three brothers, three caskets, three suitors, three little pigs,
three bears. ‘Why three?’, he asked. In the silence, we all thought seriously
about the Trinity. ‘Because three is enough’, he replied to his own question,
getting a laugh.
Philosophical criticism resorts frequently to patterns of threes. Szondi
and Lehmann continue the tradition. We recall that Aristotle says that all
 Drama: The Szondi Connection 25

tragedies need a beginning, a middle and an end, and that the plot of tragedy
has three ‘parts’ – reversal, recognition and suffering. Aristotle no doubt
encountered the pattern in Plato, for instance in the Parable of the Cave, in
which the cave dweller undergoes a three-­stage insight into reality, from
shadows on a screen, to manipulators creating those shadows, to the brilliance
of the true light of the sun outside the cave. Skipping forward two millennia,
the triadic thought pattern was elaborated by Hegel into a universal dialectical
theory of history, governed by thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It repeated
itself in his evolutionary theory of the dramatic ‘collision’, in which two
external ethical principles come into conflict, as in Antigone; when an internal
and an external principle (such as love and honour) collide in Le Cid; and
when, in the period of the ‘infinite interiorization’ of the Spirit, two internal
principles conflict, as in Hamlet. In each instance, the third part of the
three-­part pattern functions as a kind of resolution, as used in tonal
composition.
The musical resolution is usually the third move in a three-­chord
progression that ‘resolves’ from an unstable, or anticipatory, sound, to a stable
or complete one. The need or even the desire for a chord to resolve is
somewhat historically and stylistically governed, one should add, as the
listener demands resolution more or less in proportion to her ear’s acceptance
of atonality.
In Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann seems to accord unquestioning
acceptance to Szondi’s three-­part theorization of the dramatic form, and
especially to its central premise. ‘Ancient tragedy, Racine’s dramas and Robert
Wilson’s visual dramaturgy are all forms of theatre’, he writes. ‘Yet, assuming
the modern understanding of drama, one can say that the former is
“predramatic”, that Racine’s plays are undoubtedly dramatic theatre, and that
Wilson’s “operas” have to be called “postdramatic” ’.12
The second leg – drama, without a ‘pre’ or ‘post’ – here takes its place in
what Lehmann acknowledges as the ‘modern understanding’ of the dramatic
form, an understanding that can no longer be debated as a theory because it
is ‘undoubtedly’ true and has become a fact. I want to linger over Lehmann’s
continuation of Szondi’s three-­part theorization of the evolution of drama, as
well as Lehmann’s assertion that the dialogic stage must be understood as the
‘undoubted’, core structure of the modern dramatic form.
The logic of historicization supplies the reason that phase two, the phase
of pure dialogue, is ‘undoubtedly’ the new definition of drama. Lehmann, and
Szondi before him, comes out of a critical tradition in which, with, and since
Herder and Hegel, and on through Marx to Brecht, historicization is essential.
Thus his phase two, Drama, is not only the core constituent of an historicized
paradigm, but in itself emerges from the evolution of Western class relations
26 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

over several centuries. In ‘Drama’, in Lessing’s mid-­eighteenth-century plays,

for instance, servants begin to speak to their masters as their near equals, and
sometimes as their moral superiors, such as Norton, servant to Mellefont in
Miss Sara Sampson.
Both Szondi and Lehmann continue the traditional progress-­of-three
even as the first dramatic phase crumples into the second, while the third
phase no longer plays a resolving role. For Szondi, this third phase signals not
a resolution, but a ‘crisis’ of literary form, a rupture; while for Lehmann, the
third phase radically positions itself as able to re-­accept all banished forms of
speech and action, permitting all the theatrical gaiety, illogic and recklessness
tamed by the ‘absolute’ to return. One might therefore question why Lehmann
does not simply propound a two-­phase theory: one dramatic, including the
long evolution from the Greeks into the bourgeois dialogic form, and the
second performative, in which all the playfulness dismissed by the ‘absolute’
comes flooding back onto the stage and into the theatre itself.
Lehmann does not question the criteria by which Szondi separates pre-­
drama from drama, or his own acceptance of these first two stages of the
dramatic form (pre-­drama and drama) as distinct from each other. Since
both stages – in Szondi – are defined by their acceptance or rejection of
certain forms of language, and Lehmann’s third stage constitutes a radical
break with such linguistic and scholarly formalism, one can wonder why
Lehmann doesn’t simply propound a two-­stage theory, the first a narrowing
of theatre to an abstemious ‘absolute,’ and the second – the reaction or
rebound – to an undoing of this same dialogic absolute, in which all that has
been rejected is welcomed back, and all that is retained is discarded.
If Lehmann endorses and follows Szondi in the first two phases of his
definition of Drama, he radically departs from Szondi in his third,
‘postdramatic’ phase. While following Szondi’s commitment to periodization,
he also corrects his mentor’s deficiencies, seeing clearly that Szondi’s vision
is limited by its classicist devotion to the dominance of the dramatic
text.
Drama and theatre have long been on a trajectory of uncoupling, Lehmann
points out. In the postdramatic phase, theatre finally shakes off the control of
the text and declares its independence. ‘Postdramatic theatre . . . wants the
stage to be a beginning and a point of departure,’ he writes, ‘not a site of
transcription/copying. . . . [I]t seems it is exactly the omission of an originary
source/agency of discourse combined with the pluralization of sending
agencies/sources onstage, that lead to new modes of perception’.13 Instead
Lehmann sees the new theatre, postdramatic theatre, as embracing the
‘theatre situation’, meaning the real existing relationship of stage to house,
and actor to spectator. ‘In postdramatic theatre . . . the theatre situation as
 Drama: The Szondi Connection 27

such becomes a matrix within whose energy lines the elements of the scenic
fictions inscribe themselves. Theatre is emphasized as a situation, not as a
fiction’.14 This ‘situation’ is the ‘real’ that Lehmann talks about, within which
anything vital and alive can erupt. One could argue that the postdramatic
describes a new kind of realism.15

The Logic of Two

One may ask at this point of analysis, why it is self-­evident that the dialogic
form should be the ‘undoubted’ form of modern drama. While drama’s
precursor, as described by Szondi, bears an intimate developmental
relationship to dialogue, its successor, the postdramatic, frees the theatre
from drama to ‘do its own thing’. The postdramatic is permitted to re-­embrace
every form of discourse banished by dialogue, as well as reach out across the
divide between stage and house to make direct contact with the spectator. It
is obvious to Lehmann that once the interpersonal conversation is no longer
the mandatory glue of the dramatic form, Szondi’s ‘epic’ is no longer a
sufficient gateway for the stage’s new freedoms: ‘This answer can no longer
suffice’, he writes.16 Rather, Lehmann seems to suggest, Szondi’s recourse to
the classical, Aristotelian opposition of epic and dramatic (encouraged no
doubt by Lukács) is more an artifact of the classical lineage of Szondi’s
training, which ‘has led to outright blocks in perception and an overly hasty
agreement about what matters in “modern” theatre’.17
To summarize where this discussion has led us, we can see that Hegel’s
reliance on arguments-­of-three – ending with the stable ‘synthesis’, which
once more launches the pattern – seems to have led to Szondi’s argument-­of-
three, ending with the ‘crisis’ that also offers ‘solutions’. This Three – it can be
argued – in turn appears to lead to Lehmann’s pre- and post- argument-­of-
three, with pre-­drama, and the crucial term ‘drama’, unchanged in meaning
from mentor Szondi to student Lehmann. The third, ‘post’ phase for Szondi
abandons the classic shape of the pattern, and suggests decay, while the ‘post’
phase for Lehmann suggests a liberation, and even a starting over.
Yet what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘post’ has two opposing logics, one
developmental and historical, as in Szondi’s attempt at a linked pattern, and
the other ‘post’ in the sense of ‘beyond’. In this latter sense, postdrama can
keep or reject its link to drama: it is rudderless. It is not necessarily even
linked to drama, and it doesn’t need the classicist logic-­of-three. Having
abandoned its connection to drama, especially dialogic drama as both Szondi
and Lehmann define drama, it can go in any direction. But abandoning the
rudder is to also abandon the classicist model of three that we have been
28 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

following since Aristotle. In truth, even Szondi did not exactly complete the
model, as his epic third phase is to him more of a problem than a resolution.
So did Lehmann complete Szondi’s project?
It is here, at this point of independence from Szondi – perhaps somewhat
puzzling given Lehmann’s simultaneous ‘undoubted’ dependence – that
Lehmann has made such a wide and startling impact on the world of theatre
scholarship. Lehmann’s very naming of the theatre groups, and their locations
on both sides of the Atlantic, that inspired his work finally allowed scholars
to find a unifying principle and a name for the widely diverse new theatrical
forms since the 1970s, as well as a critical language in which to describe this
work. Translated into twenty-­six languages, already a ‘justifiable classic’, as
Peter Höyng says of Szondi, Postdramatic Theatre has in twenty years become
an established successor to the best-­known work of Lehmann’s mentor.
A sigh of critical relief has been almost audible, as scholars and students
alike, struggling with the difference between the new forms and drama, have
been released from the myriad choices available to describe the new theatre
(performance, performance art, art performance, performance piece, avant-­
garde theatre and many others) and have been able to connect it to drama. In
this way, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s third stage of drama, postdrama, while far
from finding a ‘resolution’ as in classical theory or tonal practice, nevertheless
plays the same role, for it offers a vision of a completed journey of the beloved
form of drama. It is like a map. It tells us where we came from and where
we’ve arrived.
There remains a nagging scruple, and it is the same cloud of a doubt that
circles over Szondi’s own clarification and re-­naming. Even on encounter
today, more than half a century after its publication in English, the first two
parts of the tripartite theory adumbrated in Theory of the Modern Drama
have a seamless appeal. Everything hangs together around the theme of the
ineluctable progress of the dialogic form. One must wonder, nevertheless: is
there any other way to theorize the evolution of the dramatic form that would
still allow Shakespeare to have written ‘drama’? And what about Sophocles?
Similarly, with postdrama, it would take major re-­consideration to reenter
the wide and varied terrain of the new theatre, and ask whether there is any
other way to theorize and name it that is as satisfying as the ‘postdramatic’,
even if much of it is not dramatic.
I can think of one other avenue, which I propose not as a conclusion or
decision, but an approach to this question. It is an historicization of the new
theatre not through ‘drama’, but through the revival, dissemination and
normalization of the pre-­war European avant-­gardes. Futurism, Dada,
Surrealism and Constructivism all had performance flanges that were
interrupted by the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and finally by the war.
 Drama: The Szondi Connection 29

They were marked by such avant-­garde discoveries as cubist composition,

collage, montage, mixed media and ‘paroles libres’.
American performance groups revived these forms, combining and
modernizing them. In the wave of what is now being embraced as the
‘postdramatic’, a new international style of performance theatre is recognized.
Americans take the lead – Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman,
Richard Schechner, the Wooster Group and Meredith Monk. But this story
progresses by a logic-­of-two, not of three. The dialogic form is taught in
every course on playwriting. These two constitute separate theatre cultures,
either ‘drama’ in Szondi’s sense, or performance theatre in Lehmann’s
postdramatic sense. The two have different design interests, performance
techniques, audiences and physical theatres. They even stake out different
zones in urban centers. New Yorkers do not expect to see what are known as
‘straight plays’ at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street, nor did they see
them at the St Mark’s Church-in-­the-Bowery in the years when Foreman’s
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre was in residence there. Two different theatre
cultures, two different parts of the city, with some overlap in such catholic
venues as the Public Theater. Broadway remains largely the domain of the
dialogic.
If contemporary theatre history were to abandon the tripartite histories
that have long been with us, and were to promote the study of two theatre
traditions and not one, the story of dramatic and theatrical form would be
increasingly interesting and complex as the two strands attempt to
accommodate each other. Without capitulating to drama, the performance
tradition has reached out to embrace drama for years (for instance, the
Wooster Group’s interest in O’Neill, Eliot, Racine and Shakespeare), while
drama increasingly permits itself intermezzi of performance riffs, such as
choral effects in the plays of Sarah Ruhl, the dancing in the Elevator Repair
Service’s The Sound and the Fury or – long ago now – the tap dancing ‘knee
plays’ Robert Wilson inserted into his production of Ibsen’s When We Dead
Awaken.
A logic of two is what we have been increasingly seeing in contemporary
theatre training. Versions of performance theatre have emerged from the
Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, where Hans-Thies Lehmann
taught alongside Wirth, and where several prominent European performance
groups – for instance Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop and Gob Squad – were
formed.
In Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann honours his former mentor
by accepting Szondi’s developmental analysis of Western text-­based drama,
comprising two stages, running from the Greeks to the seventeenth century,
and from the seventeenth century into modern bourgeois theatre, two
30 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

movements of his three-part evolution. He then puts Szondi aside,

disregarding his ‘solution’ of the Epic, and anatomizes contemporary theatre
into its many ‘aspects’. Postdrama represents a sharp break from drama, while
predrama, which is characterized by the deployment of non-dialogic forms
of speech, such as the chorus or the prologue, would seem, by comparison, to
lack sufficient definition to be thus separated from the second stage, drama.
But wait! We have only just now composed ourselves into the relief, or, in
musical terms, the ‘resolution’ offered by the postdramatic. We are still
explaining to non-theatre professionals that the word is ‘postdramatic’, not
‘post-traumatic’. Isn’t it too early to rethink a formula that has finally offered
us such clarity?
On close examination, Lehmann really describes only two phases of the
dramatic form, not three as the ‘pre’ and ‘post’ suggest. These are the text-
based and the performance-based. This begins to sound very much like the
old Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns of dramatic theory textbooks. In
some tellings, it is a battle between the French and the English. Shakespeare
was the contended object of that competition. And slowly, we recall, it was
Shakespeare, with his mixture of comedy and tragedy, his low classes and
nobility, his wild jokes and even his occasional dog, who won over the
wavering German Romantics, the Spanish Golden Agers and even, on
occasion, the French themselves.
So Lehmann does not so much complete Szondi’s project as mark the end
of drama’s two-century-long dialogic phase and then goes on to theorize a
kind of variety theatre – the postdramatic.
 Part One

Formal Aspects
 3

Text: The Director’s Notebook

Edith Cassiers, Timmy De Laet and Luk Van den Dries

More than anything else, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal identification of a

postdramatic theatre is steered by the radical displacement – if not the
ultimate dethronement – of the dramatic text, in favour of other theatrical
parameters, such as body, space, sound or image. In the course of Lehmann’s
book, however, text continues to re-­emerge as the nagging spectre that seems
to attenuate the allegedly innovative aspirations of postdramatic theatre,
compelling him to characterize postdrama rather ambiguously as both a
rupture with and a continuation of traditional drama.1 In this respect, text
seems to constitute the turning point where dramatic and postdramatic
theatre are at once most closely related and most different: whereas the
medium of the written word is of vital importance to both traditions, it is
primarily the manner in which text is used that grounds their difference.
Opposing drama’s penchant for totalizing narratives and the transparent
communication of meaning, postdrama experiments with textual fragmentation
and the deficit of discursive interpretation.
Especially in the wake of the English translation of Lehmann’s Postdramatic
Theatre in 2006, scholars have continued to explore the renewed function
of text in Western theatre from the 1960s onwards. Most of this research,
however, focuses solely on the script in its finished form and/or its
actualization in performance.2 What these accounts fail to address is not only
the classical function of text, but also how its material forms have profoundly
changed in the postdramatic era. No longer restricted to the size of the page,
postdramatic text writing has become strikingly intermedial as it assumes a
great variety of formats and techniques. Next to the continued interest in
the expressive possibilities of the written word, numerous other modes of
representations (such as drawings, sketches, videos, lists, Dropbox files,
scores, annotations, diagrams, etc.) have become, arguably more than ever,
vital means of theatrical creation.
In this chapter, we aim to shed light on the expanded forms postdramatic
writing by analyzing a largely overlooked aspect of theatrical practice, that is,
the creative process and how it is charted – whether consciously or not – in
34 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

the multifarious ‘writings’ that are produced along the way. Looking beyond
the script in its finalized stage and beyond the actual staging of the text, we
want to delve into how working documents offer illuminating insights into
postdramatic stagings, precisely because they contain the seeds of the
formal aesthetics for particular performances. Insofar as various forms of
writing correlate to whatever form postdramatic theatre might take on stage,
it is necessary to look more closely at these traces of creative labour, which
often escape attention as they remain only latently present in the eventual
work.
Theatre scholars have only recently begun inquiring into the genesis of
performance, adapting the considerably well-­established tradition of genetic
research in literary studies to their own field.3 Yet, despite the increased
importance of drawings, pictures, digital resources and other media in
postdramatic creative processes, genetic theatre research largely restricts its
focus to textual or written resources.4 Strangely enough, by privileging script,
narrative or even the chronology of theatrical creation, genetic studies on
theatre continue to cling to characteristics that are foundational of classical
drama, forsaking the expanded aesthetics that typify postdrama. Against this
essentially drama-­driven orientation of genetic research, we choose to follow
the path laid out by Josette Féral in her programmatic text ‘Towards a Genetic
Study of Performance – Take Two’. Distinguishing between ‘textual’ and
‘scenic drafts’, Féral argues that genetic research should not only focus on
‘everything that relates to the text proper’, but also include ‘all the written,
visual and aural documents related to the rehearsal work itself ’.5 Even though
Féral acknowledges that ‘the genetic analysis of performance can never be
exhaustive’, it does allow one to single out certain ‘preliminary steps leading
to the definitive choices that characterize the final stage event’.6
Amidst the vast realm of working documents that instantiate new forms
of writing in postdramatic theatre, we will focus in this chapter on one
specific category: the director’s notebook – or, as it is called in German, das
Regiebuch. Director’s notebooks traditionally contain the dramatic text,
accompanied by notes written in the margins of the script. The position of
these notes poignantly illustrates their status: literally situated at the side,
they are mere amendments to the text, which retains its primordial
importance. A canonical example is Max Reinhardt’s notebook for Macbeth
(1916), with the printed text on the left side and annotations, drawings and
comments related to Reinhardt’s directorial choices on the right. By contrast,
the notebooks of directors commonly aligned with postdrama (such as Jan
Fabre, Heiner Goebbels and Robert Wilson)7 strikingly prefigure the
increased emphasis on visuality, musicality and corporeality by expanding
the primarily textual modes of writing to the graphical qualities of text, the
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 35

production of imagery or the inclusion of technological media that – strictly

speaking – exceed the boundaries of what we commonly understand by a
‘notebook’. Our discussion here will centre on two leading directors, Romeo
Castellucci and Guy Cassiers, each of whom has been instrumental to the
development of postdramatic theatre, despite profound differences between
their respective approaches. Juxtaposing their notebooks will therefore not
only bring into relief the specific characteristics of their postdramatic
practice, but also – and most importantly – how these distinct aesthetics
germinate in the working documents.

Creating Constellations out of Chaos: The Notebooks

of Romeo Castellucci
Italian director Romeo Castellucci (born 1960) and his company Socìetas
Raffaello Sanzio are known for presenting an enigmatic and sometimes dark
universe on stage, challenging spectators to yield to a world in which actions
seem to have no reasonable cause and human figures are only faintly
reminiscent, if at all, of theatrical personages.8 A quick look at the titles of
some of the most important productions that established Castellucci’s
reputation, such as Amleto (1992), Oresteia (1995) or Giulio Cesare (1997),
readily shows that his infamous iconoclastic poetics explicitly inscribes itself
onto the dramatic canon, albeit to create distance from it. For Castellucci,
these foundational texts are more of a starting point than a final aim in
themselves, but the connection he draws between the classical tradition of
theatre and his own work should not be overlooked.
The manifest absence of a coherent narrative in Castellucci’s theatre masks
the fact that language continues to play a key role in his theatrical imagination,
as can been seen by examining his creative process. In contrast to the visual
dramaturgy or the concrete and often shocking corporeality for which
Castellucci’s work is known, the written word actually plays a key role in his
artistic research. Practically all his performances originate, genetically, in
small notebooks in which he writes down ideas, observations, remarks and
comments. These notes gradually grow into a loose assemblage of private
thoughts that might, or might not, be present on stage in the eventual works.
As Castellucci himself once explained in a conversation with Michelle
Kokosowski:

When I prepare a work, I start with a small book of notes I have collected
day by day. It’s a daily exercise. On these pages, I jot down all the
sensations that the day brings. The book is full of notes, sensations, ideas,
36 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

and constitutes the raw material for the work to follow. Leafing through
it, one immediately sees that it is chaotic, a collection of scraps, something
just thrown on to paper.9

Not coincidentally, Castellucci calls these notebooks his ‘books of chaos’.10

However, when one puts together Castellucci’s various notebooks,11 it
becomes apparent that his scribbling down of observations and ideas always
follows the same pattern: rather than extensive texts, his notes are always
brief, often containing only one or a few words, which he writes down one
after the other, as if he wants to make a list of themes, topics or images that
should be kept in mind while creating the piece. For example, in the notebook
for Purgatorio,12 a piece he made in 2008, Castellucci included the following
list:
l Fuga
l Theft
l 1920
l Discotheca
l Solitude, Palace in a big city
l Isolation in a house in the mountains
l racecourse
l brothelhouse, 1920
l club of fetishists
l fetishist of rubber
l a story of an old woman in a city
l a story of. . .
l torture not visible, television is on
These notes show the artistic imagination at work, which follows an
associative logic centred on crafting place, time and atmosphere, instead of
building a story with a clear beginning, climax and end. Obviously, these
basic lists are only the beginning of what eventually amounts to a more
elaborate and complex structure of theatrical creation. This is acknowledged
by Castellucci, who says there is a second stage, in which:

I reread the notebook several times and I discover that certain things
begin to surface more strongly than others. Through a process of
parthenogenesis lines and constellations are created. I simply have to
follow this constellation.13

Castellucci’s reference to the idea of ‘constellation’ as a guiding principle in

the reworking of his notes resonates with Walter Benjamin’s peculiar
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 37

characterization of the image as ‘that wherein what has been comes together
in a flash with the now to form a constellation’.14 This kind of ‘flash’, which
ought to be understood as an illuminating recognition of a meaningful
conjuncture among a number of apparently unrelated elements, appears to
be the next step in Castellucci’s creative process. Yet, again, this second stage
happens solely within the confined space of his notebooks. It only emerges
while rereading the ‘notebook of scraps and rubbish’15, which he restructures
by adding coloured lines, numbers or symbols. Still working on a purely
textual basis, Castellucci ‘groups’ his ideas into thematic clusters, bringing
together words and utterances that were scattered throughout his notebook
by using additional annotations to connect them.16
According to Castellucci and other key members of the Socìetas Raffaello
Sanzio, these initial stages of making notes and adding annotations constitute
the most vital steps in the creative process. Besides being the most important
part of the creative process, it is also by far the longest one, since the moment
when the preconceived ideas are tried out on stage is, in fact, only the ultimate
test. Quite remarkably, then, in the case of Castellucci and the Socìetas
Raffaello Sanzio, the written word is neither prescriptive nor restrictive, but
elevates the function of text to a level it has arguably never reached in the
dramatic tradition. Words, notes and annotations serve instead a primarily
instrumental function that helps to activate the artistic imagination, even
beyond the constraints of the stage.
Notwithstanding the importance of the written word for the work of
Castellucci and his company, the director himself claims to have a rather
ambivalent relation to speech and language: ‘The spoken word is always
outside me. It has no more contact with my body. Speaking is not a happy
experience and has never been. Words always express a detachment, a
coldness. While I speak, I am not myself. It is not my place.’17 Even though
Castellucci seems to voice a negative attitude towards language by stressing
the disembodiment it allegedly effectuates, the very idea that there is a certain
‘detachment’ or ‘coldness’ at the heart of words is also what allows him to
discover constellations of meaning within the myriad notes he jots down on
paper. The fact that he describes his quest for these constellations as ‘a deeply
impersonal technique’ suggests that words establish the distance necessary
for transitioning from the virtually unlimited realm of ideas to the start of
theatrical creation. Moreover, the sense of detachment that, in Castellucci’s
view, belongs to the world of words can be linked to another key principle at
the heart of his poetics, which can also be traced back in his notebooks.
In the archive of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, one can find a notebook
that bears no title and is marked only by a red Japanese stamp, and which has
been catalogued under the entry ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’. While this
38 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

particular notebook could easily slip into the cracks of the extensive archive,
it contains a document that demands our attention. Clipped inside the
notebook, there is a tiny article cut from an Italian newspaper that reviews a
literary novel and features an abundance of annotations, added by Castellucci.
The manner in which Castellucci reworked the article while reading it is
immediately striking: appropriating the text to his own needs, he underlined
different parts in blue and red, while a thicker red line underscoring the word
‘tsimtsum’ indicates what interests him the most. Tsimtsum appears to be a
notion introduced by Isaac Luria, a Hebrew mystic of the sixteenth century,
and stands for the idea that God vacated a region within himself in order to
create the world. Through this act of ‘shrinking’, ‘withdrawal’ or ‘contraction’
(the literal meaning of tsimtsum), God brought into being a vacuum in which
to create something other than Himself. We could regard tsimtsum therefore
as a kind of void within the infinite light.18
It is telling that exactly the term tsimtsum attracts Castellucci’s attention,
who considered the small article in which he encountered the term important
enough to include it in one of his notebooks. The dynamics of ‘shrinking’ or
‘contraction’ reoccur in nearly all Castelluci’s notebooks. To name just one
example, in one of his notes for Inferno (2008), which is the first part of a
trilogy based on Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Castellucci sketches out his
ideas for the costumes by marking what should be left out: ‘No suits. No black.
No t-­shirt. No bright colours’. We could call this a process of elimination,
insofar as the eventual form is only reached through the elimination of
possibilities, rather than through a more affirmative exploration of what, in
this case, the costumes could be.
As Castellucci turns the primarily negative elimination of ideas into a
constructive working principle, his creative process can be regarded as a
quest for what Georges Bataille describes as ‘l’informe’, the formless – a notion
Bataille developed very briefly as an entry for his Critical Dictionary. In
Bataille’s view, l’informe does not designate the absence of form, but rather
constitutes its performative underside, revealing itself through the undoing
or dismantling of form: ‘a term that serves to bring things down in the
world’.19 According to Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Kraus, Bataille’s notion
of the formless is what they call an ‘operatio’: ‘It is not so much a stable motif
to which we can refer, a symbolizable theme, a given quality, as it is a term
allowing one to operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and
of taxonomic disorder.’20 Theatre scholar Konstantina Georgelou adds that
‘the formless is a dynamic concept that becomes perceived only through an
experience of “touching the limits” of form, and through that touch form is
transformed’.21 This paradoxical operation, in which form cannot exist
without the undoing of form – or what we could also describe as its
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 39

‘contraction’ – appears central to Castellucci’s artistic imagination, but it also

begs the question as to how this process might proceed.
The search for form within the unformed or contracted can be usefully
aligned with what the French theatre scholar Lydie Parisse terms the ‘via
negativa’ of theatrical practices. According to Parisse, this via negativa entails
a literal reversal of the relationship between subject and object: instead of
directing the material, in the sense of enforcing one’s autonomous will onto
it, artists allow themselves to be formed by the material, thereby opening
their body to the unformed energy of the whole.22 Somewhat counterintuitively,
then, the first step to giving shape and meaning to the creative material that
is always already, albeit sleepily, present, is to withdraw oneself. This view,
which runs counter to the typically Romantic idea that art is the expression
of the artist’s individual genius, is what Castellucci seems to have in mind
when he says of his creative process, ‘this does not involve my personality’,23
or when he claims that ‘my creations do not actually belong to me at all. I bid
them farewell, as I watch them move away.’24
Language seems to aid the detachment Castellucci is seeking in both his
creative process and the eventual work. In Castellucci’s theatrical universe,
every creative act sprouts from words, as his notebooks clearly demonstrate.
His reliance on language as a means of creation, however, is informed by the
detachment that words are said to instigate, a kind of detachment that we link
to notions of the formless, via negativa and emptiness. Likewise, in his
performances, words tend not to refer to any specific meaning but rather
incline to transform into obsolete matter.
The artistic strategy Castellucci adopts most often in his use of language on
stage is precisely the process of negativity, which is closely linked to this
ambivalence of matter versus meaning. Because language detaches words from
their creative force, their meaning should be inverted – or, perhaps, perveted – in
a theatrical fashion. This negative inversion of language takes on many forms in
the work of Castellucci, including reducing the rhetorical quality of language to
its physical roots, as he did with his performance of Shakespeare’s Giulio Cesare
(1997), which starts with an actor inserting an endoscopic camera into his throat
to reveal the vocal cords; or, in another scene, when Castellucci presents the
character of Anthony played by an actor with a tracheotomy. In both examples,
speech becomes a Fremdkörper (foreign body) in the body of the actor and
disrupts the spectator’s perception. Another inversion strategy is to bring
language down to the level of unknown, incomprehensible matter, as he did in
BR.#04 (the fourth episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia, created in Brussels in
2003), in which he confronted an infant with the authority of the alphabet.
In Castellucci’s notebooks, one can find echoes of this obsession with the
materiality of language, as he seems to transform words into purely graphic
40 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Figure 3.1 Page from Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno notebook. This illustration
from the notebooks of Castellucci is part of the digitalization Project ARCH:
Archival Research and Cultural Heritage: The Theatre Archive of Socìetas
Raffaello Sanzio, University of Athens – Aristeia II supervised by Eleni
Papalexiou. Notice the graphic quality of the language on this page and how the
list is structured with pluses and minuses. (Used with the permission of Project
ARCH.)

design. Words become a form, a set of lines and colours: the more you look at
them, the more they become meaningless, a code without a key, a series of
dots and lines, a repetitive stammering. This theatrical inversion of language
is also used very literally: words are turned around, used in their negative
form, mirrored, negated – as, for instance, in the use of the inverted neon
letters of ‘INFERNO’.
Castellucci’s obsession with the materiality and graphic qualities of
language can be interpreted as a kind of tracing of negativity, writing
emptiness. Castellucci’s theatre operates through signs of absence, from
everything that exists or has been created. Theatrical presence resides in the
void and emerges, paradoxically, through the ruination of form.25 It is here, in
the negative, where the creative act starts and imagination takes shape.
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 41

Postdrama as Palimpsest: The Pencil of Guy Cassiers

Internationally acclaimed artist Guy Cassiers (born 1960) is best known for
his intermedial theatre performances. Through a remarkable blend of theatre,
video, visual art and literature, his performances generate a dialogue between
different media in order to challenge the senses of the audience.26 Cassiers
expands the possibilities of the theatrical medium by means of live and
pre-performance video and audio recording, as well as video projection,
including close-­ups and voice distortion of his actors, live editing of
corresponding or contrasting images, and more.27
Guy Cassiers consciously chooses novels and literary texts for his
adaptations, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras (1996),
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1999), Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
(2011), Orlando by Virginia Woolf (2013), and Caligula by Albert Camus
(2015).28 His work is a case example for how postdramatic theatre draws on a
broad range of source material: in addition to dramatic texts, pre-­texts for a
production can include diaries, letters, essays, screenplays, poetry and novels.
This broadened perspective on the functions of text in postdramatic
theatre brings to mind French literary theorist Gérard Genette’s concept of
the ‘palimpsest’. In his influential book Palimpsests, Genette uses the term
palimpsest to describe ‘literature in the second degree’,29 including texts that
have been reworked, adapted, modified, elaborated or reduced – in short:
transformed. The often fascinating choreography of montage, reference and
superimposition leads to a ‘hypertext’, which discloses an underlying
‘hypotext’ that, through the very gesture of retelling, creates a palimpsest and
– most importantly – a ‘conversation of time’.30 According to literature scholar
Günther Martens, many theatre directors are indeed attracted by the typically
modernist fascination with representing as well as rethinking temporality.
For these theatre directors, such as Guy Cassiers, a modernist novel no longer
functions as an autonomous score or prescription. It rather becomes a
‘workshop’, a ‘work-­in-progress’ wherein a text and a (newly found) author
can meet. The result will always be a ‘recompilation’, a rewriting, a palimpsest
that always already brings back the modernist legacy to mind.31
In rewriting the requirements, function, use and status of text within a
theatrical performance, the process of adapting or modifying a source text in
preparation for the stage plays a crucial role. Strangely enough, Lehmann
gives little attention to these processes in his book.32 It is safe to assume,
however, that these artistic methods of adaptive writing are intertwined with
the use of new media. Not only theatre aesthetics, but also creative processes
have been profoundly influenced by developments in new media. Partly
because of the decreasing importance of the dramatic text (and in that sense
42 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

the implied medial carrier of notes and text and language), and partly because
of the increasing number of multi- and intermedial procedures within
postdramatic theatre, the mediality and materiality of a director’s ‘writing’
fundamentally changes. In addition to notes and conceptual reflections in the
margins of a script, directors introduce a diversity of formats, often borrowing
from other artistic fields (films, video, music, the visual arts).
The Belgian director Luk Perceval, for example, does not make any notes
during rehearsals, but captures everything with his camera. After rehearsal,
he edits his video material, only to share and discuss these ‘videographic
notes’ with his team the next day.33 In contrast, even though video constitutes
a crucial element of the performance poetics of Guy Cassiers, his creative
process is strikingly non-­digital, as he does nearly all of his writing on paper.
During rehearsal, he makes annotations in pencil in the margins of the script,
in order to remember instructions on acting, light, costumes, etc. After giving
these comments to his team, he erases all his notes. This idea of erasure is
closely linked to the ‘via negativa’ discussed above, the transformation of
negative elimination of ideas into a constructive working principle. Although
Cassiers erases his notes, he does this ‘in such a way that I can still read
them’.34 Cassiers describes it as follows:

My scripts are layers of erased comments. This I cannot do with the

computer. Perhaps it has also to do with my need for physical contact.
Theatre for me is in the first place a physical dialogue, though all my
performances themselves seem to contradict this.35

Indeed, when we look at Cassiers’ theatre scripts, we recognize a landscape of

lines and layers. As this multilayered collection of both visible and invisible
notes accumulates, the idea of Bataille’s ‘formless’ emerges again: these notes
are unstable, unstructured, undone. Cassiers also alternates each day between
sides of the paper, so he can keep track of comments up until three days back.
As he says: ‘The erased comments are unreadable – except for me. . . . All the
history remains behind them. Everything that at one point mattered resides. . . .
Everything that disappears stays within me, stays alive.’36 The eraser hides a
long prehistory. Cassiers calls his erased notes ‘very dear’ to him, because they
represent an entire creative process.37 What reveals itself is a paper palimpsest.
In his study on the history of the written word, Matthew Battles argues
that writing is intrinsically linked to the theoretical concept of the
‘palimpsest’.38 Writing and rewriting, noting and annotating ultimately serve
to mark and map a thinking process. Creating is editing, while the actual
working documents resulting from this process make time visible and even
tangible. Just like Castellucci’s notebooks, there is a strong physical quality to
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 43

Cassiers’ piles of continually revised scripts and papers. These are not
director’s notes in a classical sense – also known as ‘didascalia’;39 Cassiers’
annotations genuinely play with time. Contrary to what Cassiers states above,
it would be possible to do something similar with a text editor program on a
computer. Yet, it is true that the physical and thus performative quality of this
way of writing would be irretrievably lost. As is the case with the ‘formless’
materiality, according to scholar Georgelou, the ability to touch, to both
materialize and immaterialize at the same time, seems crucial.
Even though Cassiers’ personal methods of annotation and writing suggest
otherwise, his creative process turns out to be deeply intermedial. When using
texts from novels as the source material for a theatrical performance, a
transformation across medial borders is always necessary. One could argue that

Figure 3.2 A photo of one of the pages from Guy Cassiers’ theatre script for his
performance Hamlet vs. Hamlet (2014). The annotations are all made in pencil
and partially erased, showing how Cassiers made different comments at different
moments. (Used with the permission of Guy Cassiers.)
44 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Cassiers’ notable preference for non-­dramatic texts can be explained as a desire

to approach the theatrical medium from an outsider’s perspective. Through
word (in the form of literary texts) and image (in the form of new media such
as video projection), he tries to redefine the borders of the theatrical medium.
In an interview with his dramaturg Erwin Jans, Cassiers states that he needs all
the technology at his disposal, from pencil to video camera, to adapt literary
texts for the theatrical stage.40 He describes how one cannot read literary texts
such as Proust’s novels as traditional theatre texts. Only through visual
technology can a script like that receive its meaning.41 In our own interview
with Cassiers, he further elaborates on this statement, explaining that by using
these technologies, he can shift between different locations and different forms
of narration:

Technology makes it possible to translate a novel to theatre. Some codes

to represent or narrate something can also be used in the theatre. In that
way, we are no longer dependent on classical theatre conventions, such as
limited times and locations. Through the combination of theatre, film
and prose, we can (re)create a flashback on the stage, or switch between
dialogues and inner monologues.42

When adapting a text for the stage, Cassiers first creates a framework, ‘a kind
of direction, a possible way of telling the story’.43 Technology proves crucial in
finding this form of narration. Indeed, the result is that Cassiers brings
elements to the stage that were typically part of literary or filmic narration,
such as point of view or perspective, jumping in time, editing, different
narrators, a large number of characters and locations, zooming in and out,
and close-­ups. Cassiers speaks about a double bind: not only does he look at
other art forms to develop his theatre aesthetics, but the novelistic texts
themselves also need theatre. ‘It is the sensibility of theatre that is necessary
to get to language, to reach the essence of the content of a text’.44 In a way,
through the negation of the dramatic text, Cassiers actually confirms the
power and potential of writing and text within (postdramatic) theatre.
This idea of the negative as constructive within the creative process keeps
ghosting postdramatic theatre. In her recent book Writing and the Modern
Stage, Julia Jarcho makes a similar claim. She identifies a ‘negative theatrics’ in
modernist and especially postdramatic theatre texts. Theatre as a medium
with a heightened exposure to the present is equally ‘a site for the contestation
of the present’.45 Certain writings, such as those by Gertrude Stein and Samuel
Beckett, constitute an alternative platform that undermines the totality of
performance’s here-­and-now. In these texts, theatricality stands in a negative
relation to the actual, by prioritizing formal experimentation over suspenseful
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 45

storytelling. Jarcho identifies the postdramatic as a theatre that actually

rejects presentness, with text given a heightened (instead of diminished)
importance. In Cassiers’ theatre, text indeed plays an important role.
Furthermore, by mixing both live and previously filmed footage, Cassiers
thematizes – or even theatricalizes – (the (im)possibility of) presentness.
For the technical side, Cassiers relies entirely on his artistic and technical
team. During the creative process, Cassiers is surrounded by various
technicians, video artists (Peter Missotten and Arjen Klerkx), lighting
designers (Enrico Bagnoli), sound designers and composers (Diederik De
Cock).46 His dramaturg, Erwin Jans, compares Cassiers to Kaspar Hauser: in
spite of his elaborate intermedial performances, Cassiers is techno-­illiterate.
He might be able to name the possibilities of the technological tools at hand,
but hardly anything more. Jans suggests that this attitude might be a conscious
artistic strategy.47 Indeed, Cassiers does continue to emphasize the importance
of erasing, omitting and deconstructing within his creative process48 – of
which his erased comments are the clearest example. By remaining a passive
outsider within the technological machinery, he can easily select, remove
and purify. Nevertheless, even this process can never be completely controlled
by the director. As Battles writes: ‘The palimpsest is evidence that there is
no true erasure. Some remnant trace will always escape the grasp of the
author-­eraser.’49
The influence of new media on theatre aesthetics has been amply studied;50
how technology has transformed the creative process, however, has been
hitherto little researched. Even though Lehmann calls the emerging media
society one of the most decisive contexts for postdramatic theatre, he is less
concrete on how these intermedial tendencies materialize within the new
theatrical practices that fall under this label.51
Irina Rajewsky’s three categories of intermedial relations can be of help
when analysing Cassiers’ use of intermediality on and behind the stage.52 As
most of his performances contain video projection, they are clear examples
of ‘media combination’, which occurs when mixing ‘at least two conventionally
distinct media or medial forms of articulation’ within a certain text.53 In
doing so, his work also fits the category of ‘intermedial reference’, which
Rajewsky defines as follows: ‘in intermedial references a text of one medium
evokes or imitates an individual work produced in another medium, a
specific medial subsystem (such as a certain film genre) or generic qualities
of another medium’.54 The net result of intermedial reference through media
combination is what Rajewsky calls an ‘illusion-­forming quality’. This quality
is inherent to the techniques of a certain medium, but now emerges through
a form of intertextuality between media. This becomes clear in Cassiers’
highly appraised performance Under the Volcano (2009), where an illusion of
46 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

close-­ups is created through film: at one point, the main character, Geoffrey
Firmin, an alcoholic British consul, indicates he wants a drink. One of the
projection screens shows a close-­up of a shot being poured and a hand
grabbing the glass. The actor does not move, but when the screen shows the
glass being emptied, his acting demonstrates how the alcohol enters and
influences his body. By disconnecting the movement of the actor and the
presentation of the action on screen, a sphere of uncanniness, instability and
detachment is created – resembling the inside of an alcoholic’s head as well as
emphasizing the aspired cross-­over between the theatrical and the filmic
medium. In the words of Irina Rajewsky: ‘the spectator is constantly reminded
of the “source-­text” ’.55 The audience is watching not only theatre, but also a
theatrical version of a book or film.
The medial layering or palimpsest that emerges accentuates the boundaries
of the theatrical medium. In this manner, the work of Cassiers reflects Regina
Schober’s concept of ‘intermedial translation’.56 She writes that within an
intermedial exchange the boundaries of a medium are challenged and, at the
same time, the essence of a medium is emphasized, creating a self-­reflexive
focus on the medial nature. By pushing the boundaries of the theatrical
medium, Cassiers paradoxically also affirms it by isolating its ontological
qualities. Echoing Rajewsky’s notion of the ‘illusion-­forming quality’, Schober
states that within an intermedial translation a reproduction of the medium is
not possible, but the reproduction of the effects of a medium is: ‘Not the
medium itself, but an “imagined” version of the medium, realized by means
of another medium, is the outcome of the intermedial translation process’.57
However, not only the medium of the source material is ‘imagined’, but also
the medial status of the theatre performance. Cassiers realizes he cannot turn
a novel into theatre, but he can bring the effects of the literary genre on stage,
while the flipside of this operation is that he emphasizes the theatrical
medium.
Hans-Thies Lehmann names ‘palimpsestuous intertextuality and
intratextuality’ a significant characteristic of much postdramatic theatre.58 In
the work of Cassiers we can see how this palimpsestic structure becomes
concrete. If the very term palimpsest points to a process of ‘letters overlaying
letters’, postdramatic theatre effectuates this through rewriting and editing
(classical) texts, combining different materials in a montage or collage. We
move beyond drama by writing palimpsests: compiling and assembling
words above, beneath and next to each other. Moreover, the medial hybridity
of both the source material and working documents prefigures an intermedial
transformation. The result is an often highly visual, musical and corporeal
theatrical performance that, as a result of its medial layering, emphasizes
constitutive characteristics of the theatrical medium.
 Text: The Director’s Notebook 47

Conclusion
By closely examining the notebooks of Romeo Castellucci and Guy Cassiers,
we can trace these carefully constructed constellations and palimpsests back
to the simple pencil lines with which they began. These working documents
contain the seeds of the formal aesthetics of particular performances, and,
thus, offer deeper insights into the actual staging of postdramatic theatre.
Furthermore, even though they represent how dramatic conventions are
challenged, they often do so by means of the very same instruments wherein
dramatic theatre is rooted: by writing in notebooks, placing pen or pencil on
paper. These seemingly paradoxical processes bring forth the premise – or is
it the promise? – of postdramatic theatre: a new form of theatre that does not
simply come chronologically ‘after’ drama, and thus ‘forgets’ and ‘moves away’
from this dramatic past. Rather, postdramatic theatre goes ‘beyond’ dramatic
theatre by still referencing and remembering it.
Karen Jürs-Munby calls postdramatic theatre an ‘anamnesis’ of dramatic
theatre.59 Indeed, this Platonic philosophical concept perfectly describes the
postdramatic creative process. Anamnesis refers to the rediscovering of
knowledge already inside us, the re-­emerging of knowledge generated during
past incarnations. Benjamin’s idea of the constellation that lights up in a
momentary flash as well as Genette’s theorization of the palimpsest as a
hypertextuality that connects different times through various layerings of
texts evoke the intermedial dynamics we have been tracing in this chapter.
In both instances, past, present and future meet, breaking through the
boundaries of form to reveal a new (re)incarnation and (re)presentation of
knowledge. In Phaedo, Plato suggests methods to reach this anamnestic state.
One of these methods is the katharsis, in Greek literally ‘cleansing’ or
‘purification’. Both Castellucci’s and Cassiers’ creative processes resemble this
cathartic cleansing: by erasing or selecting (un)wanted material in their
notebooks, they sift and distill, refine and reveal. These acts of elimination
and destruction prove to be a fertile ground for creation. As such, they
accomplish one of Lehmann’s most vivid descriptions of postdramatic
theatre’s aesthetic core: ‘the unfolding and blossoming of a potential of
disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction within drama itself ’.60
 4

Space: Postdramatic Geography

in Post-Collapse Seattle
Jasmine Mahmoud

A tuft of grass sits centre stage; four vertical poles, each headed by a round
light bulb, surround and illuminate the tuft’s rich greenness. Just feet away,
another yard-­length knot of grass with straws of barley rises two feet tall, as
if it had been plucked from a field of grains. Also dotting the space is a herd
of horses – about a dozen four-­legged animals with cartoon-­like features
made of papier-mâché. Collectively, these objects seem like artefacts from a
dream.
The oversized venue – a former trolley repair warehouse – only exacerbates
the dream-­like state. Sunlight streams in through twenty-­foot windows that
frame the expansive warehouse now used as a temporary theatre. Much is
also oversized elsewhere, like the sixty industrial light domes, each eight feet
in diameter, that hang low overhead. Beneath these domes are not only the set
and the orchestra, but also the audience, who sit among various clumps of
grass. Amidst those clusters move members of Implied Violence.
In one scene, six performers, dressed in Civil War-­era outfits, repetitively
enact a series of movements before moving elsewhere in the space. At the
front, a performer jumps up and down several times. At the rear, one
performer picks up another and holds him upside down. In the middle, two
turn to each other, and one hurriedly performs a nonsensical monologue
about kingdoms and trees. A sixth performer records all of this on tape, walks
to the audience and replays what has just been said. In a different scene, seven
performers dressed in marching band attire sternly dance to upbeat, jazz-­
tinged music; in another, live baby chickens scuttle across the floor; and later,
performers gut the horses, stabbing their papier-mâché bellies. The pastiche
of scenes defines this dreamlike work as aesthetically composed while also
rendering it dramatically nonsensical.
BarleyGirl was performed in July 2008 in South Lake Union, a
neighbourhood immediately north of downtown Seattle.1 The work was part
of ‘Our Sequence in Series’, a triptych staged that summer by the experimental
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 49

Figure 4.1 The set of BarleyGirl, staged by Implied Violence in 2008

in a former trolley repair warehouse located in Seattle’s South Lake
Union neighbourhood. (Photo by Implied Violence.)

collective Implied Violence. Performed during the Great Recession, BarleyGirl

captured critical attention, so much so that later in the year, Implied Violence
won a 2008 Genius Award from The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly
newspaper. BarleyGirl was, as The Stranger’s Brendan Kiley wrote,‘exhilarating
and exhausting’ and ‘a big bang of carefully choreographed chaos’.2 In another
review in The Stranger, Christopher Frizzelle described the area containing
the warehouse as ‘the middle of that no-­man’s-­land’.3 Read together, these
reviews emphasized BarleyGirl as an example of postdramatic experimentation
given meaning, in part, through its location on a geographic fringe.
What is the connection between BarleyGirl’s postdramatic aesthetics
and its geography? How does an attention to geography and early twenty-­
first-century political economy, shaped by the Great Recession, animate the
collective’s postdramatic practices? These questions guide this chapter, which
considers work by Implied Violence, who made performances in Seattle
from 2003 until 2010. Found objects, nature motifs and grotesque imagery
marked Implied Violence’s endurance-­laden and non-­narrative postdramatic
performance practices.
‘[P]ostdramatic theatre’, Hans-Thies Lehmann suggests, ‘develops – and
demands – an ability to perceive which breaks away from the dramatic
paradigm’.4 This chapter rereads Lehmann’s theories to analyze works by
Implied Violence as examples of early twenty-­first-century postdramatic
practices taking place in marginal Seattle spaces. The very spaces used by
50 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Implied Violence – be they huge lofts or intimate rooms – were, to draw on

Lehmann’s theorization, ‘dangerous to drama’5; their use of unconventional
spaces disrupted the function of dramatic signs central to dramatic theatre
and thus heightened postdramatic aesthetic practices. What the performances
relied upon – foul smells, disjointed texts, immense or small sets – dialogues
with how Lehmann suggests that postdramatic theatre transgresses the
dramatic paradigm.
But if Implied Violence’s performances are only read through Lehmann’s
schema, the choices made by the collective – including their use of post-­
industrial venues, non-­narrative arcs and found materials, all of which
yielded a distinctive postdramatic aesthetic – appear only to have been
shaped by the artists themselves. By contrast, in this chapter, I reveal how
postdramatic aesthetics are also conditioned by broader geographic and
political economic forces beyond artist control; in the case of Implied
Violence, I explore how Seattle’s early twenty-­first-century geography and
political economy shaped the collective’s postdramatic practice. Prior to the
Great Recession, the political economic conditions that structured the
impending collapse led to a drastic reduction of mid-­sized theatres in Seattle.
The Great Recession, which first landed in 2007, was marked in Seattle most
notably by the collapse of Washington Mutual and increased foreclosures and
unemployment. These conditions produced cheap and temporary spaces,
such as abandoned warehouses that became the fringe geographies essential
to Implied Violence’s postdramatic aesthetics. Implied Violence’s postdramatic
use of space, thus, was not merely a matter of creative decision – as Lehmann’s
theory might imply – but rather was produced in part by the geographies of
collapse in Seattle.
Performance and its entanglements with geography and political economy
are not a focus of Postdramatic Theatre. Lehmann himself writes: ‘This study of
postdramatic theatre does not aim to trace the new theatrical modes of creation
to sociologically determined causes and circumstances.’6 This omission, I argue,
can lead to a misunderstanding of the causes of postdramatic aesthetics and
institutions. In contrast to Lehmann’s anti-­sociological approach, this chapter
attends to aesthetic practice within a particular geography and political
economy. I build upon the concept of ‘performance geography’ from Sonjah
Stanley Niaah, who defines it in her 2010 book Dancehall: From Slave Ship to
Ghetto as ‘an integral and unexplored dimension of cultural studies and cultural
geography’.7 If performances, as Elin Diamond articulates, are ‘embodied
acts . . . framed in time and space’ and geography is, by its root meaning,
‘earth writing’, then performance geography situates how embodied actions
write meanings on the earth and how geographic meanings frame embodied
actions.8 Performance geography, also, as I’ve written elsewhere, ‘enables us to
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 51

examine and theorize both how performance makes meaning within theatrical
space and also makes meaning that exceeds theatrical space and shapes broader
geographic space’.9 And if performance geography, for Stanley Niaah,‘include[s]
the ways in which people living in particular locations give those locations
identity through certain acts’,10 then, as I argue in this chapter, we can think
about a postdramatic geography as a space that makes room for aesthetics that
disrupt dramatic paradigms, fragment perception and heighten the overall
performance sensorium. Moreover, postdramatic geography describes how a
space is given identity through postdramatic aesthetic acts.
This concept of postdramatic geography – which suggests that postdramatic
aesthetic practices are also geographic practices informed by political
economy, and which entangles meanings made by aesthetics, political economy
and space – frames my methods. In addition to drawing upon performance
documentation and theatre reviews to document Implied Violence’s aesthetics,
I pay particular attention to ethnographic interviews with Mandie O’Connell
and Ryan Mitchell, the co-­founders of the collective, to situate how their lived
and aesthetic experiences leading up to and during the Great Recession
framed their artistic actions. In doing so, I suggest we can only understand
Implied Violence’s postdramatic work through attention to their postdramatic
geographies, that is through the spaces where (due to the collapse) geographic
meanings were in flux in ways that fragmented perception and semiotics,
making space for postdramatic aesthetic practices. In what follows, I first
chronicle the founding of Implied Violence in 2003 and their initial work in
fringe geographies. Next, I describe the political economy of the economic
collapse in Seattle, before closing with a study of how Seattle’s geography and
political economy shaped how conceptions and practices of race, materiality,
and venue animated the 2008 staging of BarleyGirl.

Before the Collapse

Implied Violence (hereafter IV) was founded in 2003, growing out of work by
Ryan Mitchell and Mandie O’Connell, then both undergraduates at the
Seattle Cornish College of the Arts. IV began rehearsing in a loft in an old
rubber factory in Pioneer Square. Mitchell found the loft through friends in
a band and chose the space because it was cheap, ‘maybe $600 or $700 a
month’.11 The loft functioned as a low-­cost alternative to the spaces available
at their art school. O’Connell told me:

It was really important to us that we could access that space anytime we

wanted to. We would have rehearsals starting at midnight when our
52 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

other rehearsals for school were over, because we had to do these [sic]
dumb, fucking standard Ibsen shit for school. . . . We’d have to rehearse
that, and then we would get to go to our own space. It was very liberating.

The loft fuelled an intimate culture where interactions with neighbours

inspired ideas. Neighbours included ‘a whole bunch of different artists who
were a little bit older than us, who did really weird stuff . . . lots of butoh and
very experimental music, graffiti and stuff like that and some of them ended
up becoming performers or collaborators’.
In the early 2000s, the loft in Pioneer Square was, according to O’Connell,
in ‘a really grimy part of town . . . skid row, basically’. The space barely
functioned as a residence. It had, O’Connell told me, ‘no electricity, no kitchen
and no amenities’. It often lacked plumbing, so members went to a gym where
a friend worked ‘to take showers’. At one point even, the landlord ‘had a crack
stroke and was gone for six months’. As a result, ‘no one paid rent in that
building for one year’. The building, as Mitchell described it, ‘got super insane
and super derelict’. He told me, ‘we lived controlling the entire floor. . . . We
ended up creating culture and making a lot of work’.
To O’Connell there was ‘a sort of lawless feeling’ in the building with ‘all
sorts of crazy things happening’. That and the gritty location ‘unified’ the
ensemble. She recalled:

It was an experience of just walking through the neighbourhood to get

to our loft, and then our loft also had no heat. . . . It was very dirty. There
were drug dealers. . . . There were prostitutes. . . . It was quite extreme,
and . . . it matched up that the work that we were doing at the time was
quite extreme as well. Our lifestyle and our environment supported the
work we were doing. . . . A homeless guy would be singing a beautiful
song, and you’d come to rehearsal and say, ‘Gosh, I saw this weird stuff ’,
and somehow it would end up in the production.

Their early work included a workshop production of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah

Kane. In 2005, IV presented Everything Without Exception, an adaptation of
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Steve Wiecking reviewed the
performance in the Seattle Weekly, connecting the trek to the ‘dauntingly
remote’ studio to the cluttered set design, which included ‘dangling from the
ceiling . . . old shoes, cassette tapes, toys’. This attention to meanings made by
the location of the performance, he suggested, realized new meanings in ‘the
tattered anguish buried in . . . O’Neill’s bruised family recollection’. For
Wieckling ‘[t]he piece’s adamant oddness, its insistence on rattling you with
half-­sentences and off-­kilter pas de quatre, ha[d] a striking braveness’.12
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 53

As Ryan Mitchell explained, near the end of 2005, after IV had produced
four shows, they ‘started experiencing trouble with the landlord’.13 O’Connell
told me:

The building got sold and a new landlord came and was trying to clean
the place up. . . . They wanted to cut [the studios] up into smaller pieces
and charge really high rents because the neighbourhood was starting to
be renovated and classied up. They wanted what they called legitimate
artists . . . like painters. . . . They didn’t want performers, they didn’t want
musicians, they didn’t want any of that shit.

Although IV ‘took the company to court’ and won, they were still evicted.
They received ‘relocation money’, O’Connell said, ‘which we put towards our
next space that we found . . . a loft warehouse space in SoDo. We took what we
needed, left a huge amount of stuff, trashed the place a little bit, and left’. In
2006, members of IV moved to the space in SoDo, a mostly industrial
neighbourhood directly south of Pioneer Square.
Where the Pioneer Loft was, according to O’Connell, ‘neutral and raw’
with ‘red brick everywhere’, the SoDo warehouse resembled ‘a living room or
office’; their space was ‘smaller’ and ‘more cozy’, with carpet. Character-­driven
work flowed from the space, including the air is peopled with cruel and
fearsome birds (2006). Brendan Kiley of The Stranger described a 2007 version
of the performance as ‘Implied Violence’s homage to 1920s German
Expressionism, vaudeville, and Gertrude Stein’, with his review emphasizing
banality, fragmentation, and a transmission of energy – rather than structured
narrative – as characteristics of IV’s work.14
In 2007, IV was kicked out of the space in SoDo. O’Connell suggested
the reasons were similar to their first eviction. The landlord ‘didn’t want
performers in there’, she told me: ‘He didn’t want people to be presenting
performance.’ At the time of the eviction, IV was slated to perform a newer
version of air is peopled with cruel and fearsome birds at the 2007 Northwest
New Works Festival, part of On the Boards – the presenting house formed
in 1978 that, by the early twenty-­first century, had become the main venue
for experimental performance in Seattle. Because of the eviction, IV lacked
a steady rehearsal space. Mitchell, who worked during the day delivering
produce, found a vacant warehouse in the International District, a
predominately Asian-American neighbourhood wedged between Pioneer
Square and SoDo. It was ‘called Brothers Express’, O’Connell told me, ‘and it
was an old cannery or leather factory’. She continued: ‘It was next door to an
Asian produce store. We broke into it, and we held rehearsals there for the
show that we were doing at On The Boards.’ These spaces – cheap lofts and
54 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

illegally occupied vacant factories – were necessary to the work IV produced.

The International District/Chinatown was shaped in the twentieth century
by geographic violence sanctioned by the state against mostly Asian-
American residents, which included internment and the construction of the
I-5 interstate highway that cut through the neighbourhood. This historical
racialized violence, I want to suggest, also laid conditions that permitted the
illegal occupation by the predominately white group.
Writing for The Seattle Times, Brangien Davis described air is people as
‘combin[ing] shattered cake plates, an armada of windup toys, and a pie in the
face – what your company picnic might look like if organized by Samuel
Beckett’.15 Christopher Frizzelle of The Stranger wrote:

Their piece . . . originally began with text by Stein – some of which is

tattooed on the arm of Implied Violence’s Mandie O’Connell – but none
of Stein’s text survives in the current version. What has survived: vivid,
emphatic scenarios that repeat with slight variations, each variation
giving you a slightly fuller idea of the scenario while yielding little of the
overall story. Very Stein. Plus, pies, cakes, a bullhorn, toys, an orchestra,
and other random objects. Also very Stein. And then it just sort of ends.
I loved it.16

These reviews suggest the show generated postdramatic aesthetics, such as

by fragmenting perception with seemingly random props and by avoiding
reference to a source text. When I asked O’Connell why IV seemed to always
produce shows in nontraditional spaces, she explained:

We were very clear that we were working outside of the normal

traditional theatre world, dance world, music world . . . as well as the fine
art world. . . . Site specificity is more interesting and challenging.

Whether from landlords or the political economy of neighbourhoods, each

space posed site-­specific challenges that nevertheless tied into the type of
work that IV produced.
Through illegal occupation that relied on both poor economic conditions
and IV’s own ingenuity, the group continued to find space to experiment and
rehearse. Each of the venues – an abandoned rubber factory in Pioneer
Square, a loft in SoDo, an illegally occupied leather factory in the International
District – was, in O’Connell’s words, ‘a weird different place’ that the audience
had ‘never been before’. Each venue in its cheapness supported the poor
economies of IV’s work; each venue in its misuse beyond the venue’s original
industrial function supported experimentation; each venue in its location
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 55

near but on the edges of downtown heightened the audience’s sensorial

relationship to that experimentation.
I theorize postdramatic geography as both a space given meaning by
postdramatic aesthetic acts and as space where, due to collapse or other
political economic conditions, geographic meanings are in flux in ways that
fragment perception and semiotics providing space especially suitable
for postdramatic practices. Despite Lehmann’s reticence to sociologically
frame postdramatic theatre, the concept of postdramatic geography does
dialogue with several of his theorizations. First, he suggests that postdramatic
theatre enacts a collective time and space that connects performance
with reception, the aesthetic with the quotidian. He writes, ‘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.’17 Second, Lehmann maintains that aesthetic performance practices
that do not prefer a ‘ “medium” space’, and instead use a ‘huge space’ or
‘very intimate space’ can be ‘[t]endentially dangerous to drama’. With non-­
medium spaces, ‘the structure of the mirroring is jeopardized’.18 Most
venues staging work by IV were not medium spaces; instead, they were, in
Lehmann’s theorization, huge or intimate spaces that jeopardized mirroring,
allowing for performance dangerous to the structures of drama. Finally,
Lehmann theorizes how postdramatic theatre ‘dedicates itself to the tragedy
of transgression’ and, as such, it ‘must risk touching something – painfully,
embarrassingly, frighteningly and disturbingly – which has been forgotten
and repressed and no longer reaches the surface of consciousness’.19 The
concept of postdramatic geography, then, not only frames how aesthetics
(including transgressive acts that link the aesthetic and quotidian) give
meaning to non-­medium venues; it also reveals how those venues have been
developed by particular political economies.
In 2007, IV presented a string of shows at more non-­medium spaces,
where the borders (or spatial conceptions for theatre) were overstepped: a
‘roof of an apartment building in the middle of the night before it was razed
for development’, and a motel room before the motel was razed as part of
Motel #1.20

Motel #1
The buzz on Motel #1 had grown so loud that, even before the event opened
on 15 September 2007, it seemed as if a discursive roar preceded the
performances and installations that would take place at the Bridge Motel.
Before the event, DK Pan, the curator, wrote:
56 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Originally a place frequented by tourists and traveling salesmen, the

Bridge Motel has over time become more a place for those living from
paycheck to paycheck, and whose lives involve drug use, prostitution. . . .
For one night, its last night of existence, the Bridge Motel will be dressed
up and called to shine and dance. . . . Numerous installation/performance
artists have been given full rein the week prior, to transform each
dilapidated pocket into whatever they could imagine. The opening evening
will reveal the Bridge’s final blossom before its inevitable razing. . . . This
night is not to be missed.21

Pan connected three factors: the motel’s own poor economies (with guests
who often lived ‘paycheck to paycheck’); the motel’s disreputable character;
and the potential of performance artists to heighten these poor economies
and this repugnant character, transmogrifying the motel into a space full of,
as Pan also wrote, ‘the animation and energy of truly ephemeral art’.22 It was
as if the motel’s previous uses provided the best stage for performance art
marked by experimentation and ephemerality.
An Asian-American performance artist, Pan grew up in Seattle motels
managed by his parents. A year before Motel #1, Pan had moved into the
Bridge Motel after ‘friends bought the property (with plans to tear it down)
and offered him the job’. Pan accepted the job with one condition: ‘that, before
it was demolished, he could turn the entire motel over to artists for a night of
installation and performance art’.23
Among the performers were Ryan Mitchell and Mandie O’Connell of IV.
They took over a motel room and drenched it in gold and red.24 Their outfits
matched the walls: both were spray-­painted in gold and, eventually, covered
in blotches of red liquid. At one moment during the five-­hour performance
Come to My Center You Enter the Winter, Mitchell stands pouring a blood-­
like red liquid into his mouth; as he talks the liquid spills onto and saturates
his gold costume. Later, O’Connell lies on the stained and soiled carpet as
Mitchell pours a brown substance over her chest. Jen Graves described the
odour from the performance as ‘a mysterious metallic-­sweet smell coming,
reportedly, from a series of microwaves “cooking a bunch of shit” ’. Graves also
described the ‘psychotic’ performance as being ‘most at home’ in the motel.25
The grotesque effect of IV’s performance resonates with how Lehmann
describes the way intimate space jeopardizes the role of drama in theatre.
Through ‘physical and physiological proximity (breath, sweat, panting,
movement of the musculature, cramp, gaze)’, Lehmann suggests, intimate
performance spaces disrupt the theatre as a space where theatrical signs are
transmitted from the stage to spectators, instead allowing for performance to
emphasize ‘shared energies’.26 Closeness to dirt, spilled liquid, and the smell of
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 57

Figure 4.2 Ryan Mitchell and Mandie O’Connell of Implied Violence

in Come to My Center You Enter the Winter, part of Motel #1 curated
by D. K. Pan in 2007 at the now-­demolished Bridge Motel in Seattle.
(Photo by Keith Johnson.)

‘shit’ imbued the performance – staged in a small motel room – with a shared
energy of sadness. That perhaps was the point.
But the broader economic conditions in Seattle also provided the
conditions for how the venue structured aesthetics. In an interview advertising
the performance, Mitchell said: ‘Our performance will be fun, but it’ll also
be wrought with sadness. Seattle’s at the brink of destroying itself. It’s
saying, “We love the art, but we hate the artists”. All the empty space, all the
affordable, accessible spaces are being turned into condos.’27 The sensorial
affect produced in the small room, which was marked by dirtiness and
smelliness, commented on both the motel’s imminent destruction and the
impending changes to much of Seattle’s geography, slated for more expensive
apartments. Moreover, the affective space created by Mitchell and O’Connell
effected sadness about the changing political economy in Seattle and its effect
on geographic spaces and artists.
‘Seattle’s at the brink of destroying itself ’. Mitchell suggested that
marginal spaces like Motel #1 would soon cease to exist because of neoliberal
development. The reputation of Bridge Motel allowed for a geographic
underbelly that, during this event, supported poor economies and the
ephemerality of performance art. By contrast, the motel’s destruction would,
many predicated, immediately make way for condos to be sold according to
the market-­rate neoliberal political economy.
58 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

But something else happened first. Three months later, in December 2007,
the Great Recession began. A year later, Washington Mutual folded. The
economy in Seattle, and across the United States, was collapsing.

The Great Recession and Seattle’s Geographies

of Collapse
In September 2008, Washington Mutual (WaMu) folded. The bank was
founded right ‘after Seattle’s devastating fire in 1889’, and was ‘dedicated to
helping Seattle rebuild,’ growing to become the ‘largest savings-­and-loan in
the nation’. In the 2000s, ‘powered by a boom in housing prices and home
loans’, WaMu ‘became the country’s largest mortgage originator and the
country’s largest savings-­and-loan bank’.28
But the bank’s policies that sparked its growth in the early 2000s – such as
subprime loans and adjustable rate mortgages – also sparked its demise. Also
part of that demise was ‘greed, fraud and toxic incentives . . . including the
infamous no-­documentation loans’.29 In September 2008, WaMu’s ‘[d]epositors
quietly and methodically withdrew $16.7 billion in deposits in just over a week’
which ‘created what the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) called
“severe liquidity pressure” . . . the bank ran out of money’.30 After federal
regulators seized the bank in September 2008, JP Morgan Chase bought WaMu
for $1.9 billion from the government. WaMu’s then-­unimaginable closure
increased unemployment in Seattle; this unemployment along with a growing
number of foreclosures contributed to drastically increased poverty levels
across Washington State. In April 2008, the unemployment rate in Seattle was
2.5 per cent; by September 2009 it was 8.7 per cent.31
This rising inequality and loss of space also hit the theatre scene. When,
in interviews with Seattle theatre makers and arts administrators, I asked,
‘how did the recession affect your work?’, there was a common refrain in the
answers.32 Pamala Mijatov of Annex Theatre told me, ‘The biggest and most
crucial change I see is the loss of the mid-­size theatres’. Charlie Rathbun of
4Culture said, ‘we still have a pretty large and small problem. We have big,
giant organizations and then we have a lot of grassroots organizations, and
we don’t have a lot of in between.’ Similarly, Randy Engstrom, director of
Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture told me, ‘middle-­size organizations . . . don’t
have access to some of the really big resources but they’re too big to depend
on the resources the tiny organizations can rely on so they were squeezed’.
The Great Recession contributed to the loss of the mid-­sized venue. Engstrom
suggested that the mid-­sized theatres closed because they were neither
small enough to manoeuvre through crisis nor large enough to accumulate
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 59

resources to ride out the crisis. If mid-­size theatre institutions made space for
dramatic practices, then the loss of the medium theatre, read through
Lehman, entailed a loss of geographies for dramatic theatre.
But spaces suited to postdramatic performance during the economic
collapse were produced not only by how the Great Recession reduced mid-­
sized theatre spaces, but also by how the Great Recession produced new
geographies in Seattle. Titles of newspaper articles in The Stranger included
‘Condo Collapse’ and ‘Nobody’s Home’; the latter citing a report that found
that ‘3,878 condos in Seattle (including new condos and condo conversions)
remained unsold in 2008’.33 During the Great Recession, Seattle was marked
by empty, unrented, or foreclosed spaces.
The loss of mid-­sized theatres and the geographies created by the Great
Recession, therefore, created pockets for experimental aesthetic practices:
abandoned buildings and other spaces made marginal by the economic collapse.
When used for art making, these spaces had a short lifespan as they were
redeveloped once development resumed in 2009. But their geography, however
temporary, revealed how the crisis of capitalism produced space that, for a time,
could be used by groups not committed to capitalist growth, groups like IV.
And even though IV sought a stable residency, the performance group
was forced to constantly move from venue to venue in the 2000s. IV’s
itinerancy was, O’Connell suggests, a manifestation of the impending Great
Recession: ‘I guess the recession . . . was also why we got displaced from our
first performance space’, she told me. ‘They wanted to make more money . . .
trying to grasp the last possible opportunity to make money, seeing that the
crash was going to come’. According to O’Connell, it was also in movement
and temporality that IV found space incompatible with neoliberal economies
where they could experiment. One of those spaces was a former trolley repair
warehouse used by IV to stage BarleyGirl.

BarleyGirl
Five performers stand upstage centre, in front of a three-­foot-tall grassy
mound that extends much of the length of upstage. In the back are two white
men dressed in Civil War-­era soldier costumes. In front of them are two
white women: one (BarleyGirl) wears a barley sack as a dress; the other,
played by O’Connell, wears a white lace dress. In front of them is another
woman; she wears a grey Civil War-­era soldier costume, with a series of
horizontal golden bars. Elsewhere in the space is a sixth performer. She, Lily
Nguyen, wears red tights and an oversized, navy blue, Civil War-­era army top
on which golden fringe hangs from one arm.
60 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

The orchestra plays; the musicians are dressed mostly in black and include
a trombonist, trumpeter, several violinists, a cellist, drummer and an oboist.
The ambient music includes jazz-­infused horns and high-­pitched string
sounds. To this music, the five performers slowly walk downstage in a vertical
line as if in a trance. At one point, the taller man in the back of the procession
picks up the other man and holds him upstage. The woman in front jumps up
and down. And BarleyGirl turns to the woman in white and says, ‘I’m the
greatest BarleyGirl in the kingdom, I’m there, I’m the being, I’m the falling
tree, do you believe me don’t you? Fuck you!’34 Nguyen, now standing
downstage, plays a recording of some of what was just said; on tape, the
audience rehears BarleyGirl saying ‘I’m there, I’m the being, I’m the falling
tree, do you believe me don’t you’, while the five others stand centre stage in a
semi-­circle that centres Nguyen.
All of a sudden, BarleyGirl begins to yell. Her yell is rhythmic and loud;
it almost sounds as if she is laughing. ‘HAA HA! HAA HA HA!’ she howls
over and over again, ‘HAA HA! HAA HA, HA!’ To these sounds, seven
performers dressed in red and white marching band outfits enter the stage
and walk hurriedly, weaving through the other performers.
Moments later, a man standing upstage on a mound of grass speaks to
BarleyGirl. His tone is strict and ominous. He says: ‘Are you asking chick-­a-
dee? Doesn’t sound like asking to me. Quite the opposite, actually. There
is something of a command in your tone. Asking me to surrender to the
plague. This little plain will be yours and yours alone to rule and command
as a king slash queen. Is there no please in your asking?’ Moments later,
the performers begin to yell ‘chick-­a-dee-­dee-­dee! chick-­a-dee-dee-dee’
and together dance a choreographed sequence that abstractly evokes the
movements of a chicken.
The above description suggests the difficulty of writing about BarleyGirl.
The performance strings together a series of evocative, often nonsensical but
nevertheless affective scenes. The difficulty also implies that BarleyGirl lacks
a coherent dramatic structure, even as it contains an excess of aesthetic
structures. This lack of dramatic structure evokes the breakdown in meaning
that took place during the Great Recession, as economic structures broke
down for many.
Lehmann offers another way to make sense of BarleyGirl’s structure – this
breakdown in meaning reveals the artificiality of representation. He writes:
‘Even though this kind of theatre may investigate human relationships –
and therefore prove dramatic – it is never “natural”, much less naturalistic.
Instead, the spectator is offered a kinaesthetic, gestic and mimic repertoire to
“read.” Freed from their naturalizing fusion . . . speaking and gesture are
registered in new ways.’35 In BarleyGirl, the nonsensical succession of scenes,
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 61

and the nonsensical language spoken, allowed for the audience to read
the performance with an attention to gestures, senses and affect, instead of
narrative or drama.
Lehmann also suggests that postdramatic performance includes
performative moments – what he calls the ‘theatre of the speech act’ – in which
spoken words enact meanings and doings into space.36 BarleyGirl was
performative as the seemingly nonsensical utterances about kingdoms and
chickens incited meanings and actions in the trolley repair factory, disrupting
discursive ideas of language and allowing for postdramatic reading – a reading
attentive to gesture and presence – in the space.
Much of that meaning also came from how Seattle’s political economy
structured racial dynamics, materiality, and the venue. First, the cast was mostly
white except for Lily Nguyen, an Asian-American woman, Rachael Ferguson,
an African-American woman, and several Asian-American members of the
orchestra. The presence of non-­white performers in BarleyGirl only exacerbated
aesthetic fragmentation. In fact, Mitchell told me: ‘I think that it’s sad and
surprising that Implied Violence . . . [was] one of the most diverse companies’,
suggesting that racial diversity is rare among performance companies in
Seattle. He continued:

We want it to be and it’s important to us, but I think diverse without

being like, ‘Oh, and now, this is a black play, and this is this play.’ We were
making this effort to be diversified, ‘Well, Paul is just beautiful onstage,
and he is going to do these things that are not about [race] . . . that are
like art, like real-­life talking, like friends.’

Mitchell suggests that he values non-­white performers but does so through

colourblindness. His articulation recalls debates about nontraditional casting,
especially what Angela Pao calls the ‘cultural pluralist’ view articulated by
Joseph Papp of New York’s Public Theatre, who said: ‘I was thinking of ways
to eliminate color as a factor in casting, but be on the other hand . . . very
aware of color on stage’.37 This idea contrasts with that of African-American
playwright August Wilson who, in his 1996 speech ‘The Ground on Which I
Stand’, rejected colourblind casting by arguing:

Colorblind casting is an aberrant idea that has never had any validity
other than as a tool of the Cultural Imperialists who view American
culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as beyond reproach in
its perfection. They refuse to recognize black conduct and manners as
part of a system that is fueled by its own philosophy, mythology, history,
creative motif, social organization and ethos.38
62 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Read against Wilson, Mitchell’s positioning of raced bodies as merely aesthetic

refuses to recognize ‘conduct and manners’ and the histories of people of
colour. Those racial erasures are perhaps fitting in Seattle, where a logic of
geographic development has long erased non-­white people.39 In BarleyGirl,
then, the use of racialized bodies as merely aesthetic broke down racialized
meanings made on and of artist bodies. These meanings, I want to suggest,
indexed broader trends in Seattle’s histories and practices of racialization.40
This includes twentieth-­century redlining efforts that denied communities of
colour first-­rate loans and segregated them into certain neighbourhoods
marked as less valuable, leading to persistent but often-­ignored segregation
in the early twenty-­first century and contributing to the Great Recession,
as banks targeted non-­white communities with subprime loans – an issue
often ignored in discourses about the collapse. Those geographic meanings
resonated in BarleyGirl, which also sought to look past the cast’s racial
signifiers.
Second, BarleyGirl was also defined by its materiality: the civil war
costumes, the mounds of grass on which the audience and orchestra sat, the
papier-mâché horses, fake blood and real baby chickens and their excrement.
Audience members felt soil underneath their feet as they experienced
BarleyGirl. Lehmann writes:

Theatre is not to be defined as a dramatic process, but as one that is

corporeal, scenic, musical, auditory and visual – in space and time: a
material process that implies its own being-­seen or participation, even as
it displays a certain opacity that resists full perceptive penetration . . . just
as much as it refuses complete rationalization.41

As a material process, BarleyGirl both allowed for ‘being-­seen’ and a refusal of

rationalization.
However, that materiality was also a marker of the Great Recession
as most of the materials were found by or created by members of IV. The
venue itself, an ‘old trolley-­repair-shop-­turned-City-Light-­warehouse’, was
unfinished, so, according to The Stranger’s Christopher Frizzelle, the group
‘had to create everything, including a place for the audience to be. Instead of
investing in tiered platforms, which is what any other theatre group in the
city would do, they just sawed the legs off wooden chairs to varying heights’.42
Frizzelle suggests a link between the recession economy and the fact that the
collective had to create everything themselves. Impressive to Frizzelle were
not just the materials (including a ‘mountain of sod molders’, ‘crushed remains
of a herd of life-­size papier-­mâché horses’, and a ‘wedding dress ruined by
fake blood’), but also the space, which was produced by the Great Recession:
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 63

‘It’s fitting that Implied Violence came about because of a housing crisis
(Mitchell’s), and that the raw material for the first project was construction
debris, because in the ensuing years members of the group have lived in,
made theatre in, and been evicted from lots of different places people aren’t
supposed to live or make theatre in.’43 The collapsing economy and occupation
of poor geographies by IV broke down affective and geographic meanings
and made space for new aesthetic meanings to be made. This affective/
aesthetic breakdown appears in BarleyGirl where the object-­filled work
lacked coherent narrative and as such begged the audience to make meaning
from its disjointed, dreamlike series of moments.
Third, the venue for BarleyGirl was made possible by the Great Recession.
Mitchell told me ‘the recession itself allowed me probably to live in spaces
longer and create things that I wouldn’t have been able to create’. In fact, as
O’Connell explained:

During the recession time we also started getting a little bit more
involved with [the] city council and petitioning for space. We ended up
getting the space in the Denny Triangle, on Aloha, which was an old . . .
tram repair workshop . . . a beautiful space [where] we presented Barley
Girl. That was . . . the pinnacle of our career in Seattle.

The venue was actually obtained very cheaply – for one dollar a month.
O’Connell continued:

[Mitchell] noticed that it was empty, and through the years he had gotten
good at tracking down who owns what spaces, because we were always
looking for a space and looking for an interesting place to do performance,
or a fundraiser, or whatever.
Ryan found out that it was owned by the city, the transportation
department or whatever, and then he came up with documents that . . .
begged our case, pleaded our case for why we should have access to
this building and why we should have it for free. We didn’t end up
getting it for free. We got it for $1 a month, I think. Effectively it was a
pittance.

To O’Connell, BarleyGirl was the pinnacle of IV’s work in Seattle; the

production’s fragmented aesthetics, poor economies and venue in ‘no-­man’s-­
land’ dialogued with the broader collapsed economy that created opportunities
for the group to make such grand work so cheaply. The postdramatic geographies
IV sought and found were shaped by the very conditions of economic collapse
that made certain spaces cheap, empty and available.
64 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

O’Connell told me that as IV continued to produce work in nontraditional

spaces, the group was noticed by the press and gained increased notoriety. ‘I
think . . . as with any avant-­garde or experimental group or artist, you always
start out on the fringes, and you start out as an outcast’, she told me. ‘Then
suddenly there is some kind of shift, and somebody somewhere says that you
are important or that . . . you should be listened to, or you are legitimate’.
In 2008, IV won a Genius Award from The Stranger for ‘Best Organization’.
The article for the nomination described IV, saying they:

Are not afraid of using:

Fake blood, live chickens, fresh produce, intimidation tactics, buildings
no one else is using.
Are afraid of:
What’s happening to theatre all around them.
Care about you:
‘At first, most of the complaints we got were that it was too cold.
Because the building we were doing the shows in had no heat. So the
next show, we served tea.’44

This 2008 text aligned bodily materials comprising the group’s aesthetics
with the recession-­era political economy, wherein IV could only afford cold
buildings. Despite IV’s success, the geography of their work in funky,
marginal spaces, which was crucial to their success, also framed their fear of
‘what’s happening to theatre all around them’. Each of their spaces posed site-­
specific challenges that eventually displaced IV. And yet in each of these often
empty spaces marked by the failures of capitalism, IV used material-­rich
postdramatic aesthetics to fill them with shared energies.

Conclusion
Across this chapter I have argued that postdramatic performance practices
are also geographic practices. For IV, geographic margins (including former
warehouses and buildings the groups broke into) marked by collapsing
economies structured and heightened postdramatic experimentation. To
close, I offer two more ways to think about the space that bounds postdramatic
performance.
First, I want to consider On the Boards, and its differing local, national
and international resonances. IV performed the air is peopled with cruel and
fearsome birds at On the Boards as part of the 2007 Northwest New Works
 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle 65

Festival; Ryan Mitchell’s group Saint Genet performed Paradistical Rites at

On the Boards in 2013. And yet, to Mitchell, most programming at On the
Boards is not relevant to him. He said:

On the Boards, because they’re the only game in town, the competition
is really high, but then you get into these cycles that, if you want to be
presented in the Northwest Artist Series, you actually have to go through
a program, and the program begins at Twelve Minutes Max. . . . There’s
some inherent problems with that system . . . because, one, it means that
you’re creating for a structure that may not be facilitating your vision,
right? . . . The other is that it gives a small, a select group of people
determined what they do and do not like . . . and then third, is that they
don’t even fund this . . . you self-­fund.

Mitchell believes that the problem at On the Boards is a problem many US

venues have because ‘the institution’s agenda is actually not to support artists,
the institution’s agenda is to sustain itself by way of showing art’. He continued:
‘That is apparently at odds with artists that are making experimental and
difficult work, right?’ Nationally and internationally, On the Boards is often
marked as the experimental venue for Seattle artists, but, within Seattle, its
prominence as the experimental performance institution undoes its relevance
to much postdramatic work.
Second, I have suggested that political economies of collapse made room
for geographies that heightened postdramatic aesthetics. But I also offer
that postdramatic aesthetic practices may structure a consciousness of how
political economies shape geographies. Always eventually kicked out of their
venues – either as renters or presenters – IV produced performances that
shocked and disorientated audiences in spaces that had been made empty or
foreclosed upon, spaces that were slated for new market-­rate development
in a precarious economy, or large institutional spaces such as On the
Boards. In making work that put postdramatic aesthetics in dialogue with
collapsed geographies, IV worked to heighten, at the very least, an aesthetic
consciousness of collapse.
 5

Time: Unsettling the Present

Philip Watkinson

‘Will we live on the moon? Will we have phones as small as stamps? Will we
still be here? The science of particle acceleration meets bizarre Dutch theatre
to sweep you back to the future.’1 I glanced up from the programme and saw
a spectator emerge from a small, shed-­like structure looking very joyful
indeed. The structure was dressed with images of futuristic electronics and
‘TIME MACHINE’ was written in large block letters above the entrance. A
nearby chalk sign stated the performance was for one person at a time and
would last approximately thirty seconds. Every so often a performer
announced that I was queuing for ‘an experience unlike any other on this
Earth!’ What could happen in such a tiny space to make people so happy in a
mere thirty seconds?
I was handed a hard hat and a small swipe card, and it was my turn to
enter the structure. Having stepped through a black curtain, I was met by a
middle-­aged man in uniform sitting in a kiosk. ‘Good morning! How are you
today?’ he enquired. I muttered a brief reply and he asked me to swipe the
card in a slot on the wall. ‘08:58’ flashed on a screen next to the kiosk. I moved
through another curtain, only to be met by the same man in what appeared
to be a mirror image of the previous kiosk. The man was asleep in his chair,
snoring loudly. When I entered he awoke abruptly and instructed me to swipe
the card once more. ‘17:03’ appeared on another screen. ‘See you tomorrow’
he said as I stepped back out into the daylight. It had been a day’s work.

Unsettling the Present

That was my experience of De Stijle, Want’s performance installation Time
Machine, performed at the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival,
London, 2014. I left the time machine feeling elated and a little unsure as to
the aesthetic value of what had just happened. I began in the present (as we
must always do), but with a sense of anticipation: I had been promised a
transformative and wondrous experience of futurity. My naïve first impression
 Time: Unsettling the Present 67

had been that I was going to encounter an intense, effects-­laden, multisensory

experience that would successfully simulate time travel. Despite this
anticipation, common sense suggested that Time Machine’s modest structure
and the limited timeframe could not deliver on such an extravagant promise.
After the performance, I was proven right in this respect and quickly returned
to the everyday present of a sunny afternoon in Greenwich – but I soon
realized there was some truth in the initial appearance all along.
A classic trait of time travel is the instantaneous return to the present;
for observers, it appears as if the time travellers were gone for a few seconds,
but those travelling have experienced time differently. In the case of Time
Machine, this was precisely the relation between the observers who were
queuing or passing by and myself as a spectator. What seemed to be a fanciful
appearance masking some hidden reality (the reality behind the illusion,
the thirty-­second theatrical experience behind the promise of genuine
time travel) turned out to conceal the reality of the appearance itself (the
reality in the illusion, the affective resonances of the theatrical time travel
experience).
The aesthetic experience of Time Machine centred around a return to the
present, which appears fitting when describing the piece as postdramatic
theatre, characterized by Hans-Thies Lehmann as ‘a theatre of the present’.2
In such theatre, attention is frequently drawn to the here-­and-now of the
performance event and the shared nature of the time experienced by
performers and spectators. Whereas the Aristotelian dramaturgy of time that
prevails in dramatic theatre seeks ‘to prevent the appearance of time as time’,
postdramatic theatre tends to seek the opposite, to present the appearance of
time as time.3 But what temporal processes are at work in such an experience
of the present? I begin this chapter with Time Machine as it poses a pressing
question: if a performance can be regarded as postdramatic, how are we to
account theoretically for its temporality and the implications of such a
theatrical exploration of time for the spectator?
To answer this question requires recalibrating our understanding of
temporality in postdramatic theory, a task that both questions and emboldens
the postdramatic’s critical traction in theatre and performance studies. In this
chapter, I summarize the role of time in recent postdramatic scholarship, and
argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of ‘the present’ in
postdramatic aesthetics. I then subject this scholarship to a critique via analysis
of two case studies, postdramatic performances that seemingly privilege the
present in their respective aesthetics and framings of spectators. Along with
De Stijle, Want’s Time Machine, addressed in more detail below, I examine
Deborah Pearson’s The Future Show (2012), in which Pearson presented her
own future as a tenuous narrative of personal history continually rewritten for
68 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

each performance. I claim that when postdramatic theatre seemingly places an

emphasis on the present, what is in fact emphasized is an unsettling of the
present, where historical events and explorations of futurity are shown to be
constitutive of a contradictory present that holds conflicting temporalities
together in the here-­and-now.
For time to be experienced as unsettled in any significant sense, the context
that frames time must also become unstable. In the theatre, spectators
experience a tension between the time of the performance and the time of
broader social, political and economic processes. Whilst this tension is
inherent to all modes of theatrical performance, its self-­reflexive use is crucial
in the spectatorial experience of postdramatic time, where the present moment
is formally emphasized as the dominant temporality and also disturbed by
contradictory temporalities. Through this process of unsettling, postdramatic
time renders visible the tensions between the formal staging of a performance
and the socio-­political conditions that surround and constitute it. Drawing
on the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou, I claim that postdramatic
time is characterized by a dialectical interplay of ‘necessity and surprise’,
where the states of being certain and uncertain about the future coexist
simultaneously.4 As a means of addressing the limitations of postdramatic
time, I explore the correlation between the use of time in my two examples and
the hegemonic, socio-­political condition of capitalist time, and point to how
postdramatic time might respond to capital’s temporal processes. I conclude
with a brief examination of how postdramatic temporality differs from the
temporality of a closely related form, epic theatre.

Postdramatic Time
In a study examining the re-­emergence of mise en scène as a theatrical
concept and practice, Patrice Pavis claims that postdramatic theory suffers
from a ‘presentism’. Surprisingly, Pavis does not relate this presentism to the
aesthetic present that postdramatic practices so often privilege, but to the
conceptual desire ‘to allude to what comes after without tackling what or
why.’5 He argues that the postdramatic ‘label’ results in a theoretical process
unable to grasp progress effectively, ‘as if history was frozen . . . as if there were
no dialectics left’.6 Pavis sees this misapprehension of dialectics as part of a
broader ‘cult of the present’ taking hold in contemporary society, where ‘the
advance towards technological and commercial profit, the lack of awareness
of past experience and its devaluation and decline’ have led to a ‘suspicion of
the past’.7 With regard to theatre, Pavis clearly frames the postdramatic as a
key manifestation of this presentism, worrying that postdramatic theory
 Time: Unsettling the Present 69

elides the historical and political aspects of theatrical processes. Pavis finds
such elision unsatisfactory, maintaining that ‘[p]resentism will not last
forever. The postdramatic is surely just a passing moment’, thereby implying
that the inability of postdramatic theory to break out of the present moment
will eventually be its conceptual downfall.8
But what exactly does postdramatic time consist of and how might it be
defined?9 Notable scholarly contributions from Rachel Fensham and David
Barnett address this question directly. Fensham maintains that in postdramatic
theatre ‘[a]ll time is “shared” by the performers and audience as a process,
based on the principle of an open structure for the sequence of beginning,
middle and end’.10 Thus, regardless of whether time is sped up, prolonged or
disjointed, the performers and audience both ‘endure the live quality of time
as the same reality’.11 This shared temporality means that time is made an
‘object of direct experience’ for the spectator, and the present moment
becomes the space and time where aesthetic and political experience
primarily takes place. Due to the prominence of repetition and objects that
‘store time’ (such as an hour glass, a set which steadily disintegrates, or De
Stijle, Want’s time machine) in postdramatic aesthetics, Fensham claims that
a ‘continuous present’ characterizes the spectator’s experience of time.12 In
terms of staging, then, ‘the management of time [in postdramatic theatre] is
not for illusion but a constant reminder of the collective limits of the
experience’.13 Fensham’s reference to collective limits and emphasis on the
present implies the ‘presence over representation’ relation used by Lehmann
to characterize the postdramatic, where self-­reflexive attention is drawn to
the constructed nature of the theatrical situation and the contingency of
signifying processes.14 Still, despite her conceptual clarity, Fensham does not
take into account the contradictory nature of the postdramatic present.
Consider, for example, De Stijle, Want’s Time Machine, a postdramatic
performance that explicitly aimed to make time an ‘object of direct experience’
for spectators. The piece focused on the material and conceptual aspects of
time, but time was not shared by the performers and audience. The performers’
work centred exclusively on the creation of a different time for spectators, on
the curation of an experience of time travel which they themselves did not
partake in. The relatively instantaneous (i.e. after thirty seconds) emergence
of the spectator from the machine was positioned so that it could be seen on
each occasion by those in the queue for the performance. As I noted earlier,
this immediate return to the present is a trope from science fiction; the time
travellers enter the time machine, the machine briefly flickers and whirrs, and
they immediately step out again, usually to accusations that ‘nothing has
happened’ from those observing. De Stijle, Want emphasized the present as a
70 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

kind of ‘proof ’ that time travel into the future had taken place, and not just as
a reminder of the collective limits of the experience. In other words, the
spectator’s experience of the future was constituted by an emphasis on the
present.
Furthermore, the simulated journey of Time Machine was infused with a
different temporality, that of nostalgia. The structure contained clear
references to popular tropes from historical science fiction, most notably to
George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960), through the presence of a large disc
similar to the one built into the time machine from the film.15 Thus my
supposed journey into the future, which in fact consisted of an immediate
return to the present, was also facilitated by the fictional history of the
medium through which performance functioned (time travel). Although
Fensham clears the path for a more nuanced account of postdramatic time,
her analysis does not adequately account for the role of futurity and nostalgia
in the spectator’s experience of such performance.
In his writing on the topic, Barnett notes how postdramatic practices often
elide such dramatic mainstays as ‘structured time . . . plotting, development
and tension’ in order to ‘present an atmosphere in which nothing actually
changes’.16 He cites Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Sarah
Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis (2000) as examples, where the experience of time ‘is
more akin to Traumzeit (time in a dream) as opposed to Alltagszeit (time in
everyday life)’.17 In his insightful analysis of René Pollesch’s theatre, Barnett
makes clear the interconnections between postdramatic aesthetics and socio-­
political processes such as globalization and postmodernity. Barnett’s analysis
falls short in not adequately attending to the temporal implications for
spectatorship. For example, Barnett links the continuous present in Pollesch’s
works, where ‘nothing actually changes’, to free-­market capitalism, where
‘despite surface changes through time’ the underlying system remains the
same.18 He does not, however, reflect this temporal relation back into the
aesthetic sphere to modify (as Fensham seeks to do) our understanding of
postdramatic spectatorship. Barnett argues that Pollesch’s works create ‘a
dynamic in the auditorium that may challenge the present [capitalist] system’,
but his analysis of postdramatic temporality goes no further than noting the
implications of the aesthetic present created by Pollesch.19 By complicating
the aesthetic present, I can extend Barnett’s analysis, not only ‘demonstrating
that any given situation is the product of socio-­political processes’, but also
examining how spectators become embroiled in contradictory temporalities
that span aesthetic and socio-­political contexts.20 Crucially, my analysis also
evaluates the capacity of spectators to respond to these socio-­political
situations via their temporal engagement.
 Time: Unsettling the Present 71

The Instantaneous Present in Time Machine

De Stijle, Want explored a specific socio-­political process in Time Machine:
work, or more specifically, the working day. Their use of ‘08:58’ and ‘17:03’ as
the times at which the spectators clocked in and clocked out related the
performance to both the eight-­hour-day movement, which had its origins
in Britain during the industrial revolution, and the more recent ‘Working
Time Directive of the European Union’. In addition to the content of the
performance, the context of Greenwich (the location of Greenwich Mean
Time) framed the event as a material exploration of time. In other words, De
Stijle, Want did not explore time abstractly but rather in relation to the daily
processes which mediate and dictate spectators’ experience of time.
The measure of time under capitalism is, as Marxist geographer David
Harvey outlines, ‘flexible, it can be stretched out and manipulated for social
purposes’.21 De Stijle, Want manipulated time, distilling an entire working
day to a single moment. In Capital, Karl Marx quotes a factory inspector’s
report from 1860 that addresses just such a temporal manipulation: ‘Moments
are the elements of profit.’22 Marx’s concise formulation underlines the
importance of each moment in the capitalist labour process. As Harvey
explains, ‘[c]apitalists do not simply buy a worker’s labor-­power for twelve
hours; they have to make sure every moment of those twelve hours is used at
maximum intensity.’23 Harvey’s claim allows us to ascertain what is at stake in
the spectator’s experience of a working day in Time Machine. By condensing
a working day to a moment, De Stijle, Want left out the work itself. The
performance dealt not so much with the act of labour but the temporal
experience of labour, with how it can be ‘stretched out and manipulated’ by
capitalist processes. In fact, Time Machine could be thought of as a literal
staging of the quote from Marx’s inspector, giving the spectator an impression
of how a moment may be experienced when it becomes embroiled with
capital.
Time Machine prompted me to reflect on my own varying experiences of
working days, as well as how the performance took place outside of the
working hours it depicted, which in turn encouraged a consideration of the
relationship between leisure time and labour time. However, it is crucial to
note that these relations with socio-­political processes were not developed or
explored by the performance but were instead immediately mapped back on
to the spectator. The realization that De Stijle, Want had equated the effects of
a time machine to the experience of a working day coincided with the end of
the performance and my leaving the performance space. We should modify
our conceptions of postdramatic spectatorship accordingly. Time Machine
shows how, for the spectator, the experience of time as an ‘object of direct
72 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

experience’ need not rely on performer and audience experiencing a shared

time, extended repetitions or other such typical postdramatic temporal
processes. Time may be made an ‘object of direct experience’ via an
instantaneous (rather than a continuous) present imbued with specific
histories and futures.
The present of postdramatic theatre is far from straightforward. Rather than
being experienced as an ahistorical present, it is in fact an unsettled present,
fraught with contradictory temporalities. Pavis makes a methodological error
by claiming that postdramatic theory succumbs to presentism, overlooking the
aesthetic practices of this ‘theatre of the present’. Through examining the
aesthetic present, I claim that a performance’s postdramatic character does not
necessarily obscure history and politics; in fact, postdramatic works formally
engage these topics in precisely the ‘concrete terms’ Pavis advocates.24 I will now
turn my attention to The Future Show to examine in greater detail how an
experience of the present can be unsettled, as well as how postdramatic form
and socio-­political context interact.

Making the Future Present

In The Future Show, Deborah Pearson performed an account of what was
going to happen to her between the end of that evening’s performance and
her death. Before each performance, she rewrote the script, removing what
had become irrelevant and inserting her latest predictions. The Future Show
was scenographically simple. Pearson sat at a desk, leaned in close to the
microphone and read steadily from a three-­ring binder containing the
evening’s script, along with all the preceding scripts. Placing herself in what
she terms ‘the tension between retrospection and hypotheticality’, Pearson
explored perception, memory and habit through an extended repetition
of the same act.25 The content of each performance varied, but its structure
and staging remained largely unchanged, as can be seen in the detailed
performance score Pearson published for those who wish to recreate The
Future Show.26 The performance may be described as a continual rearticulation
of personal histories that have yet to happen, where the formal aspects of the
piece remain more or less static. Pearson’s exploration of prediction and
memory used postdramatic form as a theatrical tool of experimentation,
where a tendency to privilege the present was brought into contact with an
autobiographical past and future.
A characteristic formal trait of postdramatic theatre is an emphasis on
narration over narrative. The spectators’ attention is directed towards the
present, on the act and moment of delivery rather than on the content. Such
 Time: Unsettling the Present 73

an emphasis on narration was evident in The Future Show, where Pearson’s

use of theatrical devices to embellish the narrative was minimal. However,
the central role of narrative in the performance cannot be overlooked; indeed,
The Future Show consisted of nothing but Pearson proposing a hypothetical
narrative of the remainder of her life. In this tension between narration and
narrative, there was an attempt to reconcile the present as it existed then with
another time frame as it may exist or may have existed. The future Pearson
proposed had never existed except as narrative, yet she made the future
present through the act of narration, giving the narrative a material, theatrical
existence in the present of the performance space. Alongside the repeated,
inevitable failure of reconciling different temporalities (the present Pearson
narrating her future and the future Pearson who lives those events can never
be conclusively experienced by the spectator), each repetition was nonetheless
an active attempt at reconciliation. Pearson’s hypothetical narrative existed as
a ‘potentiality’ in José Esteban Muñoz’s understanding of the term, as a mode
of nonbeing that is present but does not actually exist in the present.27
Postdramatic form allowed Pearson to place herself in ‘the tension
between retrospection and hypotheticality’. As Pearson outlines in her score,
there is always a section where

a woman with a short black bob wearing a trench coat approaches me

and says, ‘So, you think you know about the future?’ She goes on to open
the trench coat, I worry that she is getting a gun, and then she shows me
that she has a small animal in her left breast pocket. In every script this
is a different small animal, usually specific to the local climate. In Austin
it was a bat, for example, while at the BAC [Battersea Arts Centre] it was
a pigeon, and in Vancouver it was a squirrel. The animal always has the
same name, which is ‘Ricky’ . . . and she says something to the effect of, ‘I
bet you didn’t predict Ricky’, at which point I remind the audience that I
am predicting Ricky right now.28

Pearson, through repetition, placed herself in the temporal tension she posits.
While most theatre involves repetition to a certain extent (not least in the
repetition of the same performance throughout the duration of a production’s
run), postdramatic theatre frequently makes repetition an explicit aspect of
its aesthetic and uses it to modify spectators’ experience of time. Pearson’s
interaction with the woman and Ricky remained hypothetical; so long as it
was being predicted by Pearson, this event never passed from potentiality to
actuality. However, this interaction also involved retrospection: it functioned
as a memory of past events, as a continual remainder of and reference to
previous performances in which the same interaction was predicted. Thus,
74 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Pearson’s encounter with the woman and Ricky privileged the present
through its formal mode of presentation, but this present was constituted by
the tension between retrospection and hypotheticality.
Repetition in The Future Show also engaged directly with nostalgia,
rendering visible the latter’s contradictory nature, which resides in an
irresolvable tension between two different time frames. Through the act of
repeating, Pearson addressed the perception of nostalgia as a fiction as well as
how this fiction relates to the way reality is understood. Susan Stewart
conceives of nostalgia as ‘sadness without an object’, where the past being
sought ‘has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that
past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack’.29 Stewart implicitly
distinguishes between ‘object’ and ‘narrative’, designating the former as
something objective and actual, and the latter as something subjective and
fictional. The Future Show unsettled this object–­narrative binary by making
the ‘narrative’ being sought the ‘object’ of the performance. Given the repeated
nature of the piece, it was as if Pearson had acknowledged the ‘threat’ Stewart
identifies and sought to repeatedly reproduce it. In other words, rather than
featuring a narrative which was nostalgic, The Future Show formally enacted
and rendered visible the process of nostalgia.
Pearson’s frequent references to obsessive-­compulsive disorder in her
predictions underlined the stakes of such a hypothetical engagement with
personal narrative. For example, during a performance in Lisbon, Pearson
predicted the following:

On October 15th I will take the train to my university and worry that
someone on the panel will ask me about Phenomenology of the Spirit
[sic] in detail. I will decide that no one will do this if I sit in the very last
seat on the very last carriage all the way there. I will not sit in the very last
carriage, but I will sit in the very last seat of the most convenient carriage,
and this will feel like a good compromise.30

Moments such as this, which were not dwelt on but mentioned in passing,
made it clear that the very act of mapping out one’s future in meticulous
detail is a distinctly obsessive-­compulsive act. The process of prediction
allows for preparation: an act that appears to look forward and exercise
control over the future actually functions as a remedy to present anxieties. As
Tim Etchells states in his introduction to Pearson’s text: ‘The act of prediction,
of seeking knowledge ahead of time, of articulating or claiming knowledge
in advance of events puts the subject above or outside the constraints in
which humans are usually expected or burdened to operate.’31 Thus the
act of prediction not only shapes the present but also renders visible the
 Time: Unsettling the Present 75

contradictory relations between these temporalities, as the subject is both

‘above or outside’ their current space-­time whilst self-­reflexively working
from within it.
To explain these contradictory relations further, it is useful to consider
again the act of repetition. In his discussion of trauma, Slavoj Žižek suggests
that ‘what we are unable to repeat, we are haunted with and are compelled to
memorize. The way to get rid of a past trauma is not to rememorize it, but
to fully repeat it in the Kierkegaardian sense.’32 Here Žižek refers to the
autobiographical narrator in Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition, who tries and
fails to repeat a past experience in all its original intensity. Žižek draws
attention to the positive potential of such failed repetition, as ‘fully repeating’
a past experience allows the subject to come to terms with the temporal split
between past and present that is inherent in the act of repeating.33 In Žižek’s
reading, this temporal split is read as constitutive of trauma rather than a
result of it, and so the act of ‘fully repeating’ formally addresses traumatic
processes rather than addressing their content. The contradictory stakes of
‘fully repeating’ become clear when we note that the object into which
Pearson introduced a temporal dialectic was herself; indeed, the content of
the performance consisted of the tension between her present and future self.
Despite the confidence with which Pearson presented her predictions,
prefacing each with the phrase ‘I will’ – as opposed to the more tentative
speculation involved in the phrases ‘I might’ or ‘I could’ – the two temporalities
were never resolved for the audience. As a spectator of a particular
performance, I was never able to see whether the predictions came true. Even
when I went to see the performance for a second time, I was presented with
just another modified set of predictions. Pearson’s rewriting rendered visible
the possibility of repeating an experience of impossibility.

‘To See (What Is) Coming’

To theoretically connect the postdramatic experience of time and the socio-­
political contexts this work engages with, I turn to the philosophy of
Catherine Malabou. She describes the temporal experience of reading Hegel
as an interplay of ‘teleological necessity and surprise’, where the reader is
certain and uncertain about the future simultaneously.34 According to
Malabou, the reader is able ‘to see (what is) coming’, and this subjective
position ‘denotes at once the visibility and the invisibility of whatever comes’.35
The reader waits for what is to come (due to the linear logic of reading a text),
while also presupposing that the outcome has already arrived (due to the
circular nature of Hegel’s philosophy). Malabou’s formulation usefully
76 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

describes the subjective experience of time in postdramatic theatre, where

an analogous interplay of ‘necessity and surprise’ characterizes the form of
such work.
For example, in Time Machine the spectator experienced an immediate
return to the present which, on the one hand, was foreseeable and could be
known conclusively before experiencing it, but which, on the other hand,
entailed the surprising unsettling of this present through its connection to
capitalist time structures and specific temporal histories. The presentism of
the performance was thus unsettled by its socio-­political context, which in
turn was shown to be inherent to the spectatorial experience of this present.
Pearson’s temporal position in The Future Show can also be understood
through reference to Malabou. When elaborating on the subjective experience
of ‘to see (what is) coming’, Malabou claims ‘the process that unfolds is both
retrospective and prospective.’36 There is a notable similarity with Pearson’s
claim that, through performing The Future Show, she placed herself in ‘the
tension between retrospection and hypotheticality’.37 In the many narratives
that Pearson produced, her present self knew exactly what would happen to
her future self, and yet her artistic process remained open to contingent
events that could not be predicted through the continuous rewrites it entailed.
Things become even more interesting when we realize that ‘to see (what is)
coming’ also accounts for the postdramatic form of the piece. The mode
of delivery, Pearson’s postdramatic use of narration, presented spectators
with the ‘continuous present’ to which Fensham refers, where ‘time is “shared”
by the performers and audience as a process’.38 The hypothetical narrative
arrived at the spectator through a visually still and aurally unmodulated
aesthetic. This certainty rubbed up against uncertainty, insofar as the
spectator could have no certain knowledge of what they were about to hear
next as Pearson jumped forward through times and topics, at seemingly
random intervals, until her sudden death. The postdramatic staging of the
performance placed the spectator in a dialectical interplay of ‘teleological
necessity and surprise’; the present Pearson (the narrator) was experienced in
a ‘continuous present’, whilst the future Pearson (the narrated) was
experienced as an uncertainty that continually intervened in the present.
Pearson’s predictions were presented with certainty in each iteration of
the performance, and yet the very fact that they were continually rewritten,
that there were iterations rather than one definitive iteration, places the
experience of time for the spectators between certainty and uncertainty. The
repetition in The Future Show did not simply draw attention to the present (to
the conditions of performance rather than what was being performed), but
formally foregrounded the subjective processes of nostalgia and obsessive-­
compulsive disorder. Again, the ‘continuous present’ of the performance
 Time: Unsettling the Present 77

aesthetic was unsettled by the unpredictability of an individual’s social and

political life, and this unpredictability was made constitutive of the experience
of a ‘continuous present’. Reading postdramatic work in this way reveals the
extent to which the emphasis on an aesthetic present in no way entails a
presentism as Pavis understands the term. Rather, the artists’ use of time
simultaneously emphasized and unsettled the aesthetic and political
manifestations of what spectators experienced as the present.

Does Postdramatic Time Equal Capitalist Time?

Working with ‘to see (what is) coming’ allows me to examine the relation
between postdramatic time and capitalist time. There is a notable equivalence
between these two temporalities. The postdramatic temporality in Time
Machine and The Future Show could be said to reproduce the venture
capitalist emphasis on hypothetical futures, a focus that dominates our
present economic and historical moment. I will take a specific example, that
of ‘disruptive innovation’, as an emblematic mode of capitalist temporality.
Developed by neoliberal thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter and Clayton
Christensen, disruptive practices hold that long-­term plans based on a
knowledge of the past will fail due to new innovations disrupting the markets
and networks that the practices function within. As Benjamin H. Snyder
summarises, ‘[r]ather than wait for the inevitable crisis, the [disruptive]
narrative goes, one should proactively dismantle what is fixed and constantly
reinvent’.39 The reach of disruptive practices is not limited to financial settings
but, as Jill Lepore notes, now permeates higher education, healthcare and
media outlets.40 Disruptive innovation characterizes the incessant capitalist
focus on the short-term future, a focus that continually places importance on
ruptures with the past and so remains, paradoxically, obsessed with the
present. Here we see an example of the ‘suspicion of the past’ that Pavis
associates with ‘the advance towards technological and commercial profit’.41
The dubious consequence of short-term, future-­oriented practices is that
they not only predict the future but shape it. As Lepore observes, disruptive
innovation in the financial services industry, in the form of selling subprime
mortgages and collateralized debt obligations, resulted in the 2008 financial
crisis. However, rather than serving as an indictment of disruptive innovation,
the crisis bolstered its success, as these questionable financial products
‘contributed to the panic on which the theory of disruption thrives’.42
The temporality of disruptive innovation resonates with the temporality
of the performances I have addressed in this chapter. The Future Show
consisted of a continual focus on and reinvention of its creator’s future life,
78 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

meaning that the present moment of the performance space could be thought
of as existing purely as a short-term, hypothetical future. Similarly, Time
Machine condensed a present moment to an experience of the future, and
furthermore equated the spectatorial experience of this moment with the
experience of labour time. In other words, an unsettling of the present
characterizes both postdramatic temporality and disruptive innovation; any
future development might at any point disrupt (or unsettle) the stability of
the present moment. As Malabou writes, in a passage that reads as a
description of disruptive and capitalist temporalities, ‘[s]uch a future is both
beautiful and terrible. Beautiful because everything can still happen. Terrible,
because everything has already happened.’43 If extrapolated to what Michael
Shane Boyle terms postdramatic theatre’s ‘social function’, one might argue
that Time Machine and The Future Show offered spectators an opportunity to
become accustomed to (and thus less likely to resist) the disruptive conditions
of a capitalist society.44 As Boyle states succinctly, ‘[a]ny new form theatre
takes is shaped by and also shapes the conditions capital sets for it’.45 As such,
unless the reproduction of capitalist relations and conditions is addressed
directly by a theatrical form, the form may be political in a reductive way that
reproduces the processes of capital. From this perspective, theatrical
engagement with temporalities that are analogous to capitalist temporalities
may normalize the problematic aspects of the latter.
However, the full implications of ‘to see (what is) coming’ unsettle such a
straightforward reading. Malabou argues that ‘[i]nterpretation is a production
that presupposes the accident which gave it birth, which by the same token
accepts that it cannot be definitive.’46 In other words, the connection between
the contingency of an event (that the future is uncertain and cannot be
known beforehand) and the constitutive role the subject’s involvement plays
in producing an event renders visible the possibility of an alternative event,
or more radically, an alternative system that determines how an event is
defined. As Malabou states in relation to interpreting Hegel, ‘[h]aving become
experienced through the speculative ordeal of a shared speech, the reader is
from now on able to respond to the reading.’47 If ‘reader’ is replaced with
‘spectator’, this thinking speaks to the potential of the postdramatic to engage
with theatre’s social function. Both The Future Show and Time Machine
rendered visible the constitutive role of the spectator in the creation of
postdramatic (and thus capitalist) time. This is a commonly identified feature
of postdramatic theatre, where spectators take on an expanded role in the
meaning-­making process.48 The dialectical twist that Malabou enables us to
recognize is that, if postdramatic time does correlate to capitalist time
through its formal modes of staging, then this correlation also entails the
spectator’s potential to modify this time. In Time Machine, the spectator’s
 Time: Unsettling the Present 79

instantaneous return to the present and capital’s emphasis on the continuous

present via short-term futures depended on the spectator’s participation in
the performance. The very mode of participation entailed an unsettling of the
present, a rendering visible of the contradictory temporalities that any
present consists of. Similarly, The Future Show emphasized the split between
a continuous present and hypothetical futures, underlining how such a split
characterizes the subjective experience of daily life (in this case, Pearson’s).
Put simply, the act of ‘seeing (what is) coming’ in Time Machine and The
Future Show facilitated a spectatorial experience of time’s social function,
where the temporal processes at work in capital were both reproduced and
unsettled.

The Role of Time in Postdramatic and Epic Theatre

Despite the useful prompt to consider what the concept of the postdramatic
hides, Pavis fails to acknowledge the dialectical nature of postdramatic time
in his charge of presentism. Although the present is without a doubt the
temporal dimension that postdramatic theatre most frequently privileges,
this present does not become fetishized but is unsettled by being subject to
investigation and critique. By way of conclusion, and to frame this unsettling
of the present further, I will briefly examine the relationship between
postdramatic time and how time is configured in the closely related form of
epic theatre.
Barnett has critiqued Lehmann’s designation of postdramatic theatre as a
‘post-Brechtian theatre’, arguing instead for ‘a more holistic definition’ of the
latter that underlines its political import and diminishes the political potential
of the former.49 In a revealing piece of analysis, Barnett contrasts Einar Schleef’s
post-Brechtian production of Brecht’s Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Mr.
Puntila and His Man Matti) with Michael Thalheimer’s postdramatic production
of the same play. Although Barnett sees ‘the tragedy in [Schleef’s] production is
an epiphenomenon of a particular type of society’, he reads Thalheimer’s
production as a ‘postdramatic Puntila outside history’.50 In other words, Barnett
argues that Schleef’s post-Brechtian theatre renders specific socio-­political
histories visible via theatrical means, whereas Thalheimer’s postdramatic
theatre transforms these concerns into an ahistorical ‘atmosphere of menace
and despair’.51 Barnett makes this point again in his analysis of a small detail of
Thalheimer’s production: ‘Brecht preferred to historicize the Bible in his works;
Thalheimer views Brecht’s Bible references unironically as a source of
information about “the human condition”’.52 But as I have shown through my
study of Time Machine and The Future Show, through rendering time an ‘object
80 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

of direct experience’, postdramatic theatre is in fact able to attend to specific

socio-­political histories through dialectical and formal means.
In the epic theatrical form (by which I refer to theatre that features a
Brechtian impulse, and so include both Brechtian and post-Brechtian
practices), the temporal emphasis is primarily on the process of historicization;
that is, on making visible the contingent and dialectical historical processes
through which specific situations came into being. As Sarah Bryant-Bertail
states, the spectators’ experience of meaning-­making in epic theatre ‘is always
dialectical, with every sign pointing in two contradictory directions: the way
taken and the way not taken’.53 Rather than primarily being concerned with a
critical approach to historicization, the spectatorial experience of time in
postdramatic theatre is characterized by the interplay of Malabou’s ‘to see
(what is) coming’. Here the experience of the spectator is concerned, echoing
Bryant-Bertail’s terms, with the way taken, the way not taken and the way that
could be taken. Instead of making visible the contingent historical processes
through which specific situations came into being, as in the epic form,
postdramatic form investigates how specific historical processes constitute
experiences and understandings of futurity in the present. The performances
I have examined in this chapter, while remaining a ‘theatre of the present’,
involve an exploration of time in its social and historical manifestations, an
exploration that places the spectator at the heart of this process.
Barnett argues that formal epic elements such as Verfremdung and Gestus
aim ‘to reveal the truth behind the veneer: the dialectic. . . . The epic drives a
wedge between the experience of the event and a reflection on it.’54 I argue that,
as well as revealing ‘the truth behind the veneer’, postdramatic form can render
visible the contradictory relationship between the ‘truth’ and the ‘veneer’. For
example, Time Machine not only revealed that our daily experience of time
conceals processes of capital, but also utilized the fictional pretence of time
travel to explore how our experience of time is constitutive of capitalist time. In
other words, the performance both exposed a ‘truth’ behind a ‘veneer’ and
formally explored the constitutive relationship between these two categories.
Thus spectators gain a sense of how the situation came into being as well as
participate in an exploration of how the situation could be in the future.
Similarly, The Future Show not only revealed the ultimate contingency of future
events, but also emphasized the dialectical interplay between the (spectator and
Pearson’s) experience of the present and historically-­grounded processes of
futurity. Again, the performance opened for exploration what we consider this
‘truth’ to be. In contrast to the ahistorical present that Pavis and Barnett claim
postdramatic theatre tends to stage, postdramatic form can be more accurately
regarded as privileging an unsettling of the present, where the here-­and-now of
the aesthetic experience is emphasized only insofar as it is questioned.
 6

Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the

Posthuman Stage
Magda Romanska

The Postdramatic and the Posthuman:

What is the Difference?
In Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann positions Tadeusz Kantor’s
work as one of the central signposts of postdramatic theory and practice.
Unravelling the traditional models of dramatic structure, character, plot and
the very notion of stage presence, Kantor challenged both the definition of
dramatic theatre as well as devised work that specifically responded to and
captured – in both form and content – the postmodern condition. As
Lehmann argues, ‘the postdramatic theatre of a Tadeusz Kantor with its
mysterious, animistically animated objects and apparatus [is] crucial for
understanding the most recent theatre’.1 However, what makes Kantor’s
dramaturgy even more essential for understanding contemporary theatre is
that, in addition to being classified as postdramatic, it can also be classified as
posthuman. Using Kantor’s theatre as a case study, I illustrate how the two
critical and aesthetic paradigms – the posthuman and the postdramatic –
differ in their representation and understanding of the human body, agency
and subjectivity within and outside of the limits of dramatic and performance
theory. In my exploration of this difference, I work to answer the following
questions: What is the position of postdramatic theatre in the posthuman,
anti-Kantian flat world of speculative realism, which ‘denies that all reality is
grounded in the human-­world relation’, and ‘in which any thing, sensu stricto,
is equivalent to another thing’?2 Can the analysis of this difference help us
delineate the historical and theoretical boundaries of postdramatic theatre –
and post-­postdramatic theatre?
With its focus on the authenticity of the body in performance, the legacy of
the performance theory of the 1960s continues to spark fascination with quasi-­
religious, pretextual and predramatic performance rituals, seen as the original,
authentic source of theatrical experience. This anthropocentric approach,
82 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

which developed in conjunction with J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity, has

focused on the presence of the marked body as the source of theatrical and
performative truth, and performative signification.3 These ‘human-­centered
social “performances”’ operate through dramatic emplotment4 – rearranging
aleatory historical events into Aristotelian dramatic structure – of the histrionic
body. On the posthuman stage, however, the performative epis­temology of the
body, which dominates dramatic, predramatic and much of the postdramatic
theatre and performance, has been unravelled by the technological progress
altering our very (anthropological) perceptions of what is and isn’t a ‘human’
body and even questioning the very need for such a category, along with the
anthropocentric model and its hierarchy.5
Lehmann argues that the unravelling of a body-­centred epistemology is
one of the central pillars of postdramatic theatre: the body no longer serves
as a central (and centralized) semantic field of a coherent human subject.
However, the body serves as a signpost for a broader signifying landscape in
which the potentiality for such a subject still exists. As Lehmann suggests:
‘The dramatic process occurred between the bodies; the postdramatic process
occurs with/on/to the body.’6 On the posthuman stage, however, the human
body as a source of humanist ethics disappears. In The Politics of New Media
Theatre: Life®TM, Gabriella Giannachi describes the posthuman body as a
site of ontologically unstable semiotic constructs:

A space of discourse and materiality, the post-­human body continuously

reconstitutes itself between dichotomous discourses. No longer
ontologically stable, it is a body that must always express itself through
performance. . . . This means the post-­human body is no longer fixed,
unchangeable, but rather that it can be rewritten like a blank canvas.
Both signifiers and genes can be altered. The post-­human body is scarred.
Not only is it modifiable semiotically but also medically. Unquestionably,
at once terrifying and sublime, the post-­human body is already the most
crucial and controversial site of aesthetic, biopolitical, ethical and
economic dispute in the twenty-­first century.7

The posthuman body thus crosses the boundaries at the very foundations of
Western man’s self-­perception, like a palimpsest on which the centuries of our
culture have etched their forces and tensions. For theatre and performance
scholars, the issues involved in defining the posthuman body on the posthuman
stage must necessarily be also connected with Lehmann’s concept of the
postdramatic theatre – comparative study of both can help us delineate their
historical and theoretical boundaries as well as help us clarify the nuances
surrounding the controversial (and unclear) relationship between the body,
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 83

text and performance in postdramatic theatre. What is the difference between

the postdramatic and the posthuman body, and, for that matter, between
postdramatic and posthuman (and thus also post-­performative) theatre?
In ‘Posthuman Perspectives and Postdramatic Theatre’, Louise Lepage
suggests that postdramatic theatre ‘is a necessary response to the modern
mediatized world. . . . The form of postdramatic theatre shares with
posthumanism a more chaotic and emergent structure than is known by
either drama or humanism’.8 Juxtaposing Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern
Drama and Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre with N. Katherine Hayles’s How
We Became Posthuman, Lepage draws a parallel between Drama as a historical
form that emerged in the seventeenth century as an Enlightenment expression
and repository of humanist ethics and aesthetics, and humanism as an
historical category that emerged at the same time as an expression and
repository of ‘human’ – also ‘a historically specific construction’.9 Just as the
‘human’ is now ‘giving way to a different construction called the posthuman’,10
Lepage suggests that Drama – starting in the early twentieth century – has
been giving way to the postdramatic. Since ‘Drama’ as a historical category is
dependent on the ‘human’ as a stable construct (Drama is dialogic; hence,
there can be no Drama without humans), posthuman theatre can be thought
of as always already also postdramatic. Drawing on Lepage, we can conclude
that the process of unravelling the concepts of ‘human’ and ‘Drama’ is
therefore codependent (even if that codependency doesn’t imply causality).
Although we can argue that all posthuman theatre is postdramatic, not all
postdramatic theatre is automatically posthuman.
In the postdramatic performance space, the body is no longer a site of
performative epistemology but merely one component of the theatrical
landscape. As Peter M. Boenisch reminds us, ‘postdramatic theatre, at its very
heart, challenged the earlier paradigmatic aim for synthesis, coherence, and
closure’.11 This includes the concept of the human body as a stable signifier.
Postdramatic theatre, Cathy Turner argues, encourages us ‘to encompass
processual and open-­ended structures, admitting the aleatory, entropic and
chaotic, examining the potential for multiple narratives, frames and forms of
textuality, and including non-­hierarchical consideration of both subjects and
objects’.12 The contemporary, globalized dramaturgical process, Turner writes
elsewhere, requires an awareness of interconnectivity – between ‘materials,
words, bodies, sounds, spaces, times, concepts, audiences, socio-­political
context, subjects, objects, ideologies [and] aesthetics’.13 Or, as Robin Nelson
puts it: ‘[P]aralleling the displacement from centre stage of “Man as the
measure of all things”, the actor’s agency and centrality are further diminished
by her demotion from the apex of the hierarchy of stage signs. The performer
today is just one of many signifiers in a complex, multi-­layered event’.14
84 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

The posthuman stage, however, resists any sort of historical and bodily
dramatic or postdramatic emplotment, any narrativization of aleatory signs
and events that could suggest the existence of a coherent human subject.
Postdramatic theatre unravels the concepts of Drama, plot, character and
even the human body, but posthuman theatre unravels the very notion of
human agency and subjectivity. Analysing Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre can help
us illustrate this difference. When Kantor’s work is juxtaposed with Jerzy
Grotowski’s, for example, both Grotowski’s and Kantor’s ‘poor theatres’ can be
thought of as postdramatic (both resist the dramatic form’s impulse to unfold
according to Hegel’s historical model), but only Kantor’s theatre can be also
thought of as posthuman. If in Grotowski’s theatre dramatic texts and objects
disappear under the weight of the performer’s human body (which is present
and presented as a central site of the performance event and an epistemological
source of theatrical experience), in Kantor’s theatre the performer’s human
body disappears under the weight of texts and objects. If in Grotowski’s work
the performer’s body is still a human body inasmuch as it’s always connected
to the human subject that feels or enacts the emotions it is asked to perform,
in Kantor’s theatre actors’ bodies are posthuman bodies inasmuch as they’re
always connected to and equivalent to an object – performing gestures and
movements disconnected from any stable emotions with no localized source.15

The Posthuman and its Discontents

The postmodern philosophical concept of the ‘posthuman’16 developed in the
late 1990s and early 2000s in the poststructuralist lineage, and in response
to the traditional Renaissance-­era humanist ethics and aesthetics, which
presupposed a coherent vision of the human being imbued with certain
essential characteristics (i.e. ‘soul’ and ‘human nature’) and visually
represented by the intact body. The notion of the ‘posthuman’ refers to the
technological disruption of that paradigm, but the concept itself questions
the validity of the previously established categories of ‘human’ – and, most
important, ‘subhuman’ – thus also questioning other definitions: of human
rights, life and death. Giorgio Agamben, for example, invented the concept of
‘bare life’ to demarcate the ethical perimeters of the living body.17 The
posthumanist vision of the future (as envisioned by modern philosophers
and science fiction writers and filmmakers) often entails a nightmarish
landscape populated by creatures of undefined origins and ruled by the
relativist ethics of a flat world where lines of life and death are no longer
drawn according to a hitherto established anthropocentric hierarchy, and
where monsters, cyborgs and mutant animal-­men destroy humans and their
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 85

civilization. Hayles argues that ‘at the inaugural moment of the computer age,
the erasure of embodiment is performed so that “intelligence” becomes a
property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the
human life-­world’.18 If ‘machines can become the repository of human
consciousness’, Hayles continues, ‘[then they] can become human beings. You
are the cyborg and the cyborg is you.’19 By destabilizing the category of what
is and isn’t ‘human’, the concept of ‘posthuman’ also provides a destabilized
and destabilizing view of the human body, its capacities and its status in the
hierarchical order of things.
Historically, anything not shaped as ‘human’ was typically deemed
monstrous (from hybrid mythological creatures to severely disabled ‘elephant
men’). In a sense, the stage has always served as a place where we’ve enacted,
defined, and seen our humanity vis-à-vis all other ‘nonhuman’ and ‘subhuman’
others. The main characteristic of posthuman aesthetics, then, is the
dissociation between the body and human consciousness. Pramod K. Nayar
defines posthumanism as ‘an ontological condition’ in which humans live
with ‘technologically modified bodies and/or in close conjunction with
machines’.20 Nayar argues that postmodern, posthuman art works:

emphasize the blurring of bodily borders, identities (gender, species,

race) and even consciousness, in which isolating the ‘human’ from a
human-­machine assemblage, cadavers or another form of life is
impossible. Critical posthumanism . . . is the radical decentring of the
traditional, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate
how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and
constitutive of multiple forms of life and machines.21

Essential for this new construction of the posthuman is the connection

between the human body and its various inorganic prosthetic extensions.
Hayles notes that ‘[t]he posthuman view thinks of the body as the original
prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body
with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before
we were born’.22 Thus, the posthuman body is always already a bionic body
prepared to integrate with, to be augmented or impaired by, the organic and
inorganic matter surrounding it.
Theatre has also always been intrigued by the permeability of the
boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the
material worlds. Tadeusz Kantor’s visual ‘manipulations of symbols’, his bio-­
objects and stage-­objects, are some of the most complex interrogations of
this process. Analysing Kantor’s theatre can help us understand the difference
between posthuman and the postdramatic bodies.23
86 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

By creating BIO-OBJECTS, theatrical forms that join the living actor

with inanimate objects, Kantor formed the first quasi-­bionic theatrical
bodies.24 As he writes: ‘BIO-OBJECTS were not props which the actors used.
They were not “decorations” in which you “act”. They made indivisible wholes
with the actors. They exuded their own autonomous “lives”, not related to the
FICTION (content) of the play.’25 Estranged from their theatrical roles,
Kantor’s actors ‘act as if automatically, out of habit; we have even the
impression that they ostentatiously refuse to own up to these roles, as if they
were only repeating somebody else’s sentences and actions, tossing them off
with facility and without scruples; these roles break down every now and
then as if badly learnt’.26 The actors do not live their roles; they don’t perform
them or enact them in any way. They wear them temporarily, as if by accident,
repeating lines and gestures like broken, discarded machines, programmed to
mimic human subjects, playing the characters like a musical instrument.27
Many contemporary critics, including Kenneth J. Gergen, have argued that
the postmodern self is caught in ‘a continuous state of construction and
reconstruction’, where ‘each reality of self gives way to reflexive questioning,
irony and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality’. In that context,
‘the center fails to hold’.28 Kantor’s postmodern actors structure their roles
within roles as if playing themselves playing someone else. The centre doesn’t
hold because there is no centre, only words, gestures and movements,
independent of one another and the actor who performs them: ‘The very
condition of BEING ESTRANGED, which places [the actors] on a par
with the condition of an OBJECT, removes biological, organic, and natural­
istic [expressions of] life.’29 Lehmann elaborates on the antinaturalistic
mechanism behind Kantor’s actors/objects within the decentred hierarchy of
stage signs:

In Kantor’s theatre, however, the human actors appear under the spell of
objects. The hierarchy vital for drama vanishes, a hierarchy in which
everything (and every thing) revolves around human action, the things
being mere props. We can speak of a distinct thematic of the object,
which further de-­dramatizes the elements of action if they still exist.
Things in Kantor’s lyrical-­ceremonial theatre appear as reminiscent of
the epic spirit of memory and its preference for things.30

By disrupting the hierarchy between humans and objects, Kantor’s theatre

foreshadows the posthuman stage in which the body belongs no longer to the
character but to the interconnected landscape of mapped signs and symbols.
In Kantor’s theatre, the body is no longer a site of performative truth. On the
contrary, Kantor’s stage is posthuman insofar as the human subject disappears
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 87

into the materiality of his body, which, in turn, disappears into the materiality
of the stage-­object. As Kantor himself wrote:

The image of a human being, which up till then was regarded as the only
truth-­telling representation, disappears.
Instead, there gradually emerge biological forms of a lower kind,
almost animals, with few remaining traces of their past ‘humanity’ or,
perhaps, a few traces foreshadowing their humanity.31

By deconstructing the human body, Kantor seems to want to deconstruct the

very image of humanity itself. Without agency, meaning and intention, he
reduces humanity to ‘bare life’.
The prototype of the BIO-OBJECT was an idea of ‘human emballage’
developed during the earliest stage of Cricot 2, the Informal Theatre. In the
1960s, Kantor organized a series of happenings during which ‘living human
insides’ were packaged, individually or together, in rolls of paper or other
materials. The point of an emballage was to transform a human body so that
it would lose all of its natural abilities. Up until the premiere of the Dead
Class in 1975, each of Kantor’s performances assembled a ‘Human Nature
Preserve’, a gallery of BIO-OBJECTS. Figures such as the Man with a Suitcase,
Man with a Sack and its Unknown Contents, the Woman Drowned in a
Bathtub, the Man with his Door, the Helpless Man with a Table and Man with
a Chair would reappear time after time in subsequent productions. Describing
one of his BIO-OBJECTS, The Man with Two Bicycle Wheels Grown Into His
Legs, Kantor writes:

[he] is completely separated from reality of a different kind

and is enclosed in
an inhuman,
but at least for him natural,
feeling for speed
and motion
that can be realized with the help of his legs,
with the consciousness of vehicle.32

Mutating the actor’s body, the wheels transform his sense of reality and of
himself. Kantor wrote about another BIO-OBJECT, the Man with a Wooden
Plank on His Back:

on the borderline of madness

[he] demonstrates
88 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

this unusual case

of absurd anatomy,
completely absorbed internally
by the objective offshoot
of his body,
like a martyr nailed
to his own self.33

There is also A Man with Two Additional Legs, whose additional pair of legs
transform his ethical and ontological condition:

unfolds in front of the dumbfounded crowd

the whole spectrum
of completely new and unknown
benefits, advantages, privileges, and possibilities of
nature’s whimsical generosity,
of expanded psychological processes,
and even moral consequences,
side effects, and
surprises.34

These three examples of Kantorian BIO-OBJECTS illuminate the

posthuman aspect of Kantor’s theatre. In the posthuman condition, as Nayar
emphasizes, ‘previously taken-­for-granted categories of the human/non-­
human are now subject to sustained, controversial examination’.35 By
connecting an actor to an object, Kantor’s BIO-OBJECTS offer such an
examination of the boundaries between organic and nonorganic matter. In
the BIO-OBJECT, Kantor wrote: ‘The actors became its live parts, organs.
They were, one could say, genetically joined to it. . . . [They tried] to adjust to
it physically, “relate” to it, “find measure”, get in touch with it’.36
Both the actor and the character they play become estranged from their
bodies and enclosed within their own space, inaccessible for either fiction or
reality: neither human, animal nor object. ‘The demonstration and
manifestation of the “life” of the BIO-OBJECT was not tantamount to
representing some kind of set-­up existing outside it. It was autonomous, and
therefore real!’, Kantor wrote. Or, as Michal Kobialka puts it:

[The actors’] bodies could be treated as an intricate field of interplay

between two parallel systems, that is, the illusion of being another
character and the actor’s own Self. Because illusion ‘was merely a
reflection, / just like a moonlight, / a dead surface’, actors in this system
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 89

needed to eliminate dependence on the arrangement that existed outside

them and to gain autonomy by exposing only themselves, rather
themselves than their characters.37

Kantor’s theatrical experiments suspended his actors in a liminal space

between fiction and reality, which, as Giannachi points out, is the ontological
predicament of the posthuman condition: ‘As post-­humans, we are at once in
social reality and in fiction – in the real and in the world of the “spectacle”.’38
Kantor forces his actors into the posthuman space ‘where the human
confronts itself with and indeed incorporates the other-­than-human’.39 His
theatrical system of symbolic signs functions within the landscape of
posthuman ‘representations of corporeal-­physiological fluidity, ontological
liminality and identity-­morphing’.40 It is the ambivalence of representation
that creates the borderline state between reality and fiction; it is also ‘the
materiality of the body, not only or exclusively its abstract and metaphoric
meanings’, that brings forth the question of what is and isn’t human.41
What, then, is the difference between postdramatic and posthuman
subject as represented on the postmodern stage? According to Hayles, ‘[t]he
posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components,
a material-­informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous
construction and reconstruction’.42 Likewise, when talking about the
posthuman semiotics of the self, Sadeq Sahimi asks us to

imagine a system of meaning wherein the act of self-­identification (as

traditionally done by humans) is unfeasible, [because of] a constant state
of flux, a seamless ocean of meaning, a state traditionally considered
pathological and diagnosed schizoid: a ‘smooth space’, which is ‘in
principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction’; and which ‘has
neither top nor bottom nor centre’.43

The posthuman self is decentred, unstable and undefined: it is entangled in

the web of signs and things – itself both a sign and thing. If the dramatic self
is a character (the human self), and the postdramatic self is an abstract figure
(and not a character, as Elinor Fuchs notes), the posthuman self is a sign
(neither character nor figure). To elaborate: in The Death of Character,
Fuchs characterizes postmodern theatre as populated by characters who are
no longer characters as such (as understood in the dramatic sense) but who,
like Samuel Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, are abstract figurations, ‘decentered
figures’ staring blankly at ‘a vanished world’.44 According to Lehmann, Beckett
marks a breaking point between Drama and postdramatic theatre (mostly
because Beckett’s plays resist Hegel’s theological impulse to see history as
90 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

drama).45 Although Kantor’s ‘characters’ share some of the decentring of

Beckett’s ‘figures’, they are fundamentally different: unlike Didi and Gogo,
the members of Kantor’s ‘Human Nature Preserve’ do not speak to each
other; they don’t engage in a dialogue of any kind but speak at and past each
other towards something and someone somewhere else. Their true
interlocutors are either the dead, or memories or never existed in the first
place. They acknowledge one another’s existence only as material presence:
there is no awareness of either the self or the other. In this sense, Kantor’s
figures – unlike Beckett’s – are not just postdramatic but also posthuman.
They are an amalgam of metaphors, symbols and textual and visual references
that create a secondary layer of meaning – above and beyond the mere
limits of a dialogic exchange. They don’t just exist on equal footing with
things and objects surrounding them; they exist in a world where agency,
intentionality and interrelationality are no longer relevant. They are a mere
foci of signs.
Following Szondi’s theory of Drama, which he defines as both dialogic
(it ‘consists only of the reproduction of interpersonal relations’) and absolute
(it is ‘conscious of nothing outside itself ’),46 Lehmann defines postdramatic
theatre first and foremost as post-­dialogic: it no longer reproduces the
social and personal relations between character or between audience and
performers. Since Didi and Gogo are abstract figurations, their exchange
is no longer grounded in the subjective relationship with the world
that surrounds them. Yet, Didi and Gogo still speak to each other, and
their dialogue, though circular, still advances the resolution of the plot,
even if that resolution is their very realization of its circularity and lack
of resolution (Godot will not come, but they will keep on waiting). Kantor’s
‘characters’, however, have no discernible purpose or intentionality; thus,
their actions can have no resolution of any kind. There is no plot that we can
speak of: only movements, gestures and words. Writing about Kantor’s visual
language, which defines his productions’ structure, Lehmann poignantly
notes:

Kantor’s scenes manifest the refusal of a dramatic representation of the

all too ‘dramatic’ events that are the subject of his theatre – torture,
prison, war and death – in favour of a pictural poetry of the stage. The
‘sequences of images, often as from a slapstick movie, “dead funny” and
at the same time immensely sad’, always move towards scenes that could
occur in a grotesque drama. But the dramatic disappears in favour of
moving images through repetitive rhythms, tableau-­like arrangements
and a certain de-­realization of the figures, who by means of their jerky
movements resemble mannequins.47
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 91

Kantor’s theatrical language creates a ‘seamless ocean of meaning’ with

moving images framed within the object-­stage where aleatory signs and
gestures become the very essence of the form.
For Kantor, language and gesture are material tools that serve to unravel
the anthropocentric hierarchy of the Enlightenment by dehumanizing his
characters with cyclical, robot-­like repetitions. In Wielopole, Wielopole (1981),
family members brought back to life do not carry any objects, yet their
repetitive, robot-­like movements make them a different kind of BIO-
OBJECT. They are connected to their function within the family just as the
pupils from the Dead Class are connected to their objects. The two uncles,
Karol and Olek, argue cyclically about the arrangements of the room (‘busy
making certain intriguing calculations: measuring distances by paces, or with
utmost precision lining up three chairs next to one another’); Aunt Manka
‘periodically goes through a religious crisis’, mindlessly quoting passages
from the Gospels; Grandma, ‘doing her morning exercise stretched out on the
bed [with numb oblivion] . . . pauses for a moment, then gets carried away
again to the point of sheer exhaustion’.48 In Today Is My Birthday (1990), the
status of the work as a non-­play becomes even more evident as Kantor
includes elements from his real life: ‘The Priest-­actor listened to the voice of
the real Priest and repeated some of those phrases. The Cleaning-­woman
prompted the missing words. The birthday celebration resumed. The Mother
and the Father interminably kept repeating the gestures registered on the
family photograph’.49 Through this stubborn ‘REPETITION OF ACTION’,
Kantor places his characters on the border between life and death, living
being and marionette, object and subject. ‘They will keep repeating those
banal, / elementary, and aimless activities / with the same expression on their
faces, / concentrating on the same gesture, / until boredom strikes’, Kantor
wrote.50 In Let the Artists Die (1985), all of the inhabitants of the common
room hold on to the one thing that defines them. As Pleśniarowicz describes
them,

[t]he ‘Comedians’ present typical Kantorian Bio-Objects of the lowest

rank: a Pimp Gambler with a ‘speakeasy stool’, a Hanged Man ‘with his
gallows, which has grown together with the site of his suicide, a filthy
drain, into a single whole’, an individual washing his dirty feet in ‘his
vulgar bucket’, a Bigot ‘with her prie-­dieu rosary’, a Dishwasher ‘with her
sink in which she constantly scrubs dirty pots and plates’.51

Simultaneously, the scene of the author’s death repeats itself with regularity
over and over again until the final reunion of the author and his double.
Endlessly performing the same activity, each character becomes identified
92 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

with it completely; all the rest of their personalities dissipate in the absurdity
of movements they chose to repeat with mechanical oblivion. During the
final scene, the actors, separated from their objects, are pilloried on the
strange machines. Tortured, they congeal in ‘the convulsive poses, turning
into the living sculptures of Mariacki Altar’.52

‘The Thingness of the Thing That Has Been Forgotten’

In almost all the productions of the Theater of Death, Kantor creates a
collection of characters who form a lookalike homogeneous group. In the
Dead Class, it is the students dressed in their black uniforms; in Today Is My
Birthday, it is a group of war cripples dressed in the same white gowns; and
in Wielopole, Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, I Shall Never Return (1989) as well
as Today Is My Birthday, it is a marching group of soldiers. The uniforms, like
objects, entrap actors in a particular identity, implying a certain pattern of
behaviour and thinking. In the director’s notes to Wielopole, Wielopole,
Kantor wrote:

Army. Mass. One does not know if it’s alive or mechanical, with hundreds
of the same heads, hundreds of the same legs, hundreds of the same
hands. In rows, columns, diagonals regularly attached heads, legs, hands,
arms, shoes, buttons, eyes, lips, rifles. Identically performed movement
by hundreds of identical individuals, hundreds of organs, of this
monstrous trained geometry.53

Dressed alike, the actors naturally become the generic clones of each
other. The actor becomes ‘reduced to an external being, to an object, to the
DEAD’.54
Kantor’s theatre disturbs classification of subjects as human and
nonhuman as well as the very concept of the ‘human’ and the historical
context in which it developed. Historically, the human body, as represented
and defined on stage and in art, has maintained a strictly defined visual
integrity. The category of the ‘human’ was used to circumscribe the boundaries
of belonging and the categories of valuation: groups that were racialized as
‘subhuman’ at different historical moments were so designated for the
purposes of commodification or extinction. The category of the ‘human’ was
a protective category marked by visual signposts. In Western culture’s
anthropocentric worldview, the human body has always been given a central
position; it has been imbued with special rights and privileges, both human
and divine. When placed outside the category of the ‘human’, one loses agency,
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 93

the right to self-­determination and often the right to life itself. The concept of
the ‘posthuman condition’ disturbs this classification, and, most importantly,
it disturbs the hierarchy of valuation that it establishes.
In Kantor’s theatre, the interrogation of this hierarchy was prompted by
the experience of the Second World War. In one of his short essays, Kantor
poignantly writes about how war had transformed his relationship to
European culture and its anthropocentric foundations. As Kantor notes, the
ideological context of Nazi genocide – its elevation of ‘human’ over ‘subhuman’
species – was firmly rooted in Western humanism and its peremptory
glorification of the ‘human’ subject:

The time of war and the time of the ‘lords of the world’ made me lose my
trust in the old image, which had been perfectly formed, raised above all
other, apparently lower, species.
It was a discovery! Behind the sacred icon, a beast was hiding. . . . This
was the explanation I offered in the postwar period.
I still remember the dislike and indifference I felt towards all those
human images, which populated museum walls, staring at me innocently,
as if nothing had happened, while they were playing, dancing, feasting,
and posting. . . .
A distrust of the allegedly ‘higher forms’ of the human species and
civilization was steadily growing in me.55

Thus, by blurring the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, subject

and object, Kantor makes explicit the reduction of ‘subhumans’ to things. The
ideological and historical ramifications of Kantor’s aesthetic gesture, however,
have theoretical underpinnings as well. In postdramatic theatre there are
objects and subjects; on the posthuman stage there are only things. Kantor’s
theatre is thus proto-­posthuman in the literal sense: it responds to that
moment in history when the ‘human’ could no longer assert its supremacy. If
any group can be arbitrarily designated ‘subhuman,’ then, the category of
‘human’ has lost all validity; it no longer has meaning.
The distinction between postdramatic and posthuman in Kantor’s theatre
parallels the philosophical distinction between an object and a thing, one
existing in a relationship with other objects, other existing in-­itself – (as
postdramatic figures and posthuman signs). In his first essay on thing theory,
Bill Brown points out that ‘object’ always exists in relationship to ‘subject’,
whereas ‘thing’ exists outside this boundary. The object always has the
potential to regain its lost subjectivity; the thing does not. An object becomes
a thing when it breaks, and when it loses its usefulness, its utilitarian value.
Brown writes:
94 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working

for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get
filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution,
consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.56

In Signéponge/Signsponge, Derrida makes a similar point, asserting that the

‘thing is not an object [and] cannot become one’.57 For Baudrillard, likewise,
the object exists only as the ‘alienated, accursed part of the subject’ – the
‘individual subject or collective subject, the subject of consciousness or the
unconscious’.58 Following Hegelian dialectic between in – and for – itself, for
Brown, Derrida and Baudrillard, the thing and the object have different
ontological properties. Brown argues further that ‘the subject/object dialectic
itself . . . has obscured patterns of circulation, transference, translation, and
displacement’.59 Always connected to a subject, an object loses its thingness –
its material ontology that defines its own separate inter- and intra-­relationships.
Brown reminds us that ‘Latour has argued that modernity artificially made an
ontological distinction between inanimate objects and human subjects.
[Whereas] Benjamin makes it clear that the avant-­garde worked to make that
fact known . . . modernism’s resistance to modernity is its effort to deny the
distinction between subjects and objects, people and things’.60
For Kantor, one of the foremost avant-­gardists of the twentieth century,
the distinction between subject and object is blurred, but the distinction
between thing and object is always pronounced. In Kantor’s theatre, a thing is
a discarded and broken object; it belongs to the ‘Degraded Reality’ or ‘Reality
of the Lowest Rank’. An object, on the other hand, is suspended ‘between
garbage and eternity’.61 An object is attached to a human being in a dialectical
relationship (as in BIO-OBJECTS); but an object becomes a thing when –
like in the Dead Class, for example – it is discarded and it loses its usefulness.
They are then both the postdramatic figures and posthuman signs. The
discarded objects of BIO-OBJECTS, the discarded child mannequins in the
Dead Class, the ragdoll of a mother left like rubbish after the rape in Wielopole,
Wielopole – these are all things. They are turned into things by the violence of
the gesture – thrown away like trash. In Wielopole, Wielopole, the actress
playing the mother is replaced by the ragdoll during the rape – literally, the
rape turns her into a thing. In the posthuman theatre, things are signs with
meaning disconnected from their signifiers and signified. In the postdramatic
theatre, objects are, to use Fuchs’s words, ‘decentered figures’.
The dialectic between object and subject defines postdramatic theatre;
even when the subject is reduced to an object, their dialectical relationship
makes the disappearance of the subject visible. On the posthuman stage,
however, that dialectic becomes irrelevant as both objects and subjects are
 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage 95

turned into things, a transition that, as Derrida notes, is irreversible. In What

Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe points out that the concept of the posthuman
can mean both the reduction of the human subject to an object and the
human subject’s transcendence of its material body (its objectness). In that
second sense, Wolfe notes, one becomes more ‘human’ by becoming
posthuman (i.e. by leaving the human body behind): ‘ “the human” is achieved
by . . . transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment all together’.62
Wolfe’s two definitions of posthuman depend on what one assumes to
constitute the ‘human’ – the body or the subjectivity. In postdramatic theatre –
as in Grotowski – the two are dialectically connected: the ‘human’ is both
the body and subjectivity. In posthuman theatre – such as Kantor’s – the
‘human’ is neither subject nor object, but a thing: the thing then transcends
its ‘thingness’ into the realm of the posthuman. The piles of things left behind
by the victims of the Holocaust emanate the absence of their owners. The
piles of discarded things in Kantor’s theatre emanate their own absences, of
people and their bodies. On the crossroads between postdramatic and
posthuman aesthetics, Kantor’s work can help us illuminate the difference
between the two, and thus it can show us the way towards post-­performative
theory.
 7

Media: Intermission
Nicholas Ridout

Form (or Genre)

Form is a relationship. When writers, painters or theatre-­makers choose,
adapt or even fabricate from nothing a form for their work – a world, frame
or register in which their work has its being and communicates whatever it
communicates – they do so with a relationship in mind. It is when that
relationship is instantiated, in the act of reading or viewing, that the form of
the work is realized. Until that moment, form does not really exist. This may
not be obvious in the case of a painting or a sculpture, of which it might make
some kind of sense to say that the object or product, in either two or three
dimensions, possesses a form in-­itself: it is just this shape or this arrangement
of marks on such and such a surface of these particular dimensions that
constitutes the form of the work.
But in the case of theatre it seems clear that form is a relationship. Of
course there are examples of theatre practice in which the performance that
is the work appears, or perhaps pretends, to behave as though its spectators
did not exist. But this appearance or pretence is always just that, since it is
always embedded in a framing recognition that, even if it is being ignored or
excluded, the audience is there and the work would not be there without
them. Nor is the audience an abstract audience. Each member brings with
them their own ‘content’, ranging from their ‘brain’ to their social and
economic circumstances, none of which they leave in the cloakroom (see
Brecht). Form, we might suppose, then, is the relationship instantiated in the
performance among the actions, objects and images, the spectators, their
‘brains’ and the institutional circumstances under which all these elements
are brought together. This is not simply a relationship of simultaneity,
circumscribed by the ‘live’ co-­presence of all these elements, but one in which
histories, memories and returns also play their part. The form may be partially
achieved before the performance in question, then, in that both production
choices and a larger set of historical experiences will have determined the
range of possible forms that might appear in any given performance. But the
 Media: Intermission 97

form cannot be achieved until it is activated in its relationship with a

particular historical audience.
Form, like genre, then, with which, as a technical term in literary and
artistic theory, it often seems interchangeable, arises out of a specific
institutional and performance situation.1 As Fredric Jameson – a leading
exponent of the form–­genre equivalence – writes of genre in the literary field:

Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his [sic] readers; or
rather, to use the term which Claudio Guillén has so usefully revived,
they are literary institutions, which like the other institutions of social
life are based on tacit agreements or contracts.2

This way of thinking about genre oddly depends upon performance in the
first instance, but then proceeds to exclude performance from the
considerations of genre that follow. In Jameson’s account, genre comes into
being as an attempt to compensate for the absence of the signals provided by
tone and gesture in an everyday live speech, or ‘performing’ situation, such as
in the mythic scenario of oral storytelling as the origin of literary production.
In a specific performing situation of this kind, tone and gesture are socially
recognizable. Consider how sarcasm or irony rely upon a high degree of
mutual recognition between speaker and listener, and how such speech so
often fails when speaker and listener have too little, socially, in common with
one another. Literary genre, Jameson argues, following Guillén, is the effect of
the work writing does to construct a sociality-­in-common between writer
and reader sufficient to sustain the communicative act, or to make the absence
of any communication recognizable as such, rather than as simple mutual
incomprehension. What this account does not quite capture is the extent to
which tone and gesture and all the other attributes of a specific ‘performing
situation’ are themselves, in theatre obviously, but in all kinds of other
performance as well, already constituting form or genre in their negotiation
of a relationship with an audience.3 Tone and gesture are in fact markers of
genre rather than precedents. In other words, a theory of genre which finds
its origins in performance has a tendency to relegate performance itself to the
pre-­generic. In the specific case of theatre, which, as has often been argued, is
the most social, convention-­bound and institutionalized of all the artistic
practices regularly considered by critics such as Jameson, this is clearly
nonsense (and not what Jameson intends). There is more form to the most
conventional bourgeois drama (almost by definition) than in almost any
other instance of contemporary cultural production. Indeed, this may start to
explain why Jameson, whose essay on genre aims to restore a consideration of
genre to literary history in the face of an ‘ideological modernism’ that insists
98 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

instead upon the ‘singularity’ of each individual work (as though each work
were its own unique form), neglects theatre in this instance: it is so obviously
‘conventional’ that there is no need to rescue it from the genre-­deniers. So
although he does not say so, the logic of Jameson’s argument is that form in
theatre may be more thoroughly a social question than in any other field of
cultural production and reception. As a ‘performing situation’ it is the proto-­
generic, and as an ‘institution’, it is the hyper-­generic.
Form (or genre) is a relationship, and in the theatre that relationship is
social, historical and unfolding. To continue to think of this relationship as
genre (at the risk of appearing to embrace an outmoded academicism) avoids
the ahistoricism in which each artistic form is somehow sui generis, and, at
the same time, insists upon the social dimensions of the relationship, which
extend far beyond the field of ‘art’ and into all the byways of culture inhabited
by the obviously generic genres, above which the term art (and its attendant
‘form’) seeks to raise its referents. For the present purposes – which will
eventually reveal themselves as having to do with an early twenty-­first-
century video installation by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin – to think about
genre is one way of facilitating a discussion in which the ‘art’ of postdramatic
theatre and questions of its ‘form’ can accommodate material so low and so
trashy that it has always been considered in terms of genre.

Lehmann (or Jameson)

One general consequence of the historical emergence of the theatre and
performance practices presented and theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann in
Postdramatic Theatre is a renewed critical attention to form (what we might
call theatre’s theatreness) rather than content (the action on stage in the
drama). Of course, only the most wilfully anti-­theatrical dramatic criticism
ever failed entirely to speak of the relationship between the dramatic action
on stage and the audiences and theatres that received and contained such
action – the theatreness of theatre was never entirely eliminated from view –
but both the work Lehmann catalogues, and the logic of his designation of
that work as ‘postdramatic’, invite consideration of form (including ‘dramatic’
form) in terms of a theatrical relationship. In other words, they invite the
theorization of form, in drama and theatre, in terms of the social. This
involves making a move that Lehmann himself is reluctant to make, but
which Fredric Jameson, were he ever to write about theatre, would be
compelled to make: to enquire into the politics inherent in contemporary
theatrical forms, not only within the theatres (and other institutions) in
which they appear, but in the specific late capitalist relations of production
 Media: Intermission 99

that constitute part of their conditions of possibility. Form is a relationship to

relations of production. It is not only that, but it always is, even if the relation
might be oblique, obscure or even invisible.
To what extent does Lehmann see form as social, and taking shape in
relationship to relations or modes of production? Lehmann certainly sees the
theatre practices he theorizes as arising from (or at least correlated with, if
not caused by) a rupture after which it becomes possible to speak of a new
kind of society. This is what he calls the ‘caesura of the media society’, whose
consequences for theatre he summarizes thus: ‘the spread and omnipresence
of the media in everyday life since the 1970s has brought with it a new
multiform kind of theatrical discourse that is here going to be described as
postdramatic theatre’.4 In this formulation, theatre is seen to be either part of
or responding to a more general consolidation of a ‘media society’ in which
social relations are increasingly maintained through the mediations of
television, to begin with, and subsequently the internet and its attendant
social media. To call such a society a ‘media society’, as Lehmann does, and to
begin the book itself with an allusion to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Gutenberg
galaxy’ is to make a strong claim for both correlation and periodization. But
it falls some way short of causality, let alone any kind of economic
determination, and it does so as a matter of choice. For as Lehmann explains
towards the end of the book, as his attention turns, in the ‘Epilogue’, to
questions of politics, he is sceptical of theorization that moves too eagerly
towards grand claims about a present that is still unfolding:

This study of postdramatic theatre does not aim to trace the new
theatrical modes of creation to sociologically determined causes and
circumstances. For one thing, such deductions normally fall short, even
in the case of subject matter to which scholars have more of a historical
distance. They can be trusted even less when it comes to the confusing
and ‘unsurveyable’ present (Habermas) in which highly contradictory –
but therefore no less ambitious – large scale analyses of the state of the
world are chasing each other.5

Lehmann wishes to avoid insisting upon any meaningful connection, let

alone a causal or determinate relation between aesthetic form and economic
‘circumstances’ such as changes in modes or relations of production. However,
while generally avoiding reference to production as such, his entire project
arrives, as we have seen, framed by assumptions about the production of
representations. The question that Lehmann chooses not to address is to what
extent the production of representations, and any historical changes in such
production (especially of the epoch-­making kind he attributes to the ‘caesura’)
100 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

might be understood as part of broader changes in economic production.

This is precisely the sort of question Jameson wants to ask.
In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson is
working with a very similar periodization to Lehmann’s. Like Lehmann,
Jameson observes a decisive transformation in cultural production making
itself available to consciousness during the 1970s. Many of the distinctive
features of Jameson’s postmodern cultural production are of the same kind
that Lehmann identifies with postdramatic theatre: such as narrative and
subjective fragmentation, surfaces being privileged over depth, the
predominance of images over language, calculated incoherence. Beyond
these coincidences of timing and effect, there is a further affinity between
Lehmann and Jameson which is of particular significance here. For Jameson,
too, ‘media’ is the keyword:

We postcontemporary people have a word for that discovery [that

culture is material] – a word that has tended to displace the older
language of genres and forms – and this is, of course, the word medium,
and in particular its plural, media, a word which now conjoins three
relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific form of
artistic production, that of a specific technology, generally organized
around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social
institution.6

This observation comes at the beginning of Jameson’s chapter on video in

Postmodernism. Jameson preserves here his earlier insistence upon the
historicity of ‘forms and genres’, in which genres rise to and fall from cultural
prominence in proportion to their capacity to function (to communicate,
express or sell something) in a specific historical period, which is itself
defined by its mode and relations of production. From this it follows, he
proposes, that ‘the most likely candidate for cultural hegemony today’ is, of
course, video.7 Video is understood here as both the globally pervasive
technology of television and also the experimental artistic practice. Jameson
suggests that experimental video makes visible the full scope of a medium
which, in its mass communication form, does not make the fullest use of its
expressive or communicative potentialities. Jameson sees the emergence, and
subsequent dominance through pervasiveness – in other words, the
hegemony – of media, as a defining characteristic of the postmodern, just as
Lehmann does for the postdramatic. What Jameson does, though, which
Lehmann does not, is to identify this ‘caesura’ or periodization with
‘sociologically determined causes and circumstances’ or, something that he
might want to claim as a further, first-­order, periodization: ‘late’ capitalism. In
 Media: Intermission 101

other words, Jameson insists on both the possibility and the value of relating
changes in aesthetic form, understood as medium and therefore also as a
social relation, to changes in economic production and its relations:

If we are willing to entertain the hypothesis that capitalism can be

periodized by the quantum leaps or technological mutations by which it
responds to its deepest systemic crises, then it may become a little clearer
why and how video – so closely related to the dominant computer and
information technology of the late, or third, stage of capitalism – has a
powerful claim for being the art form par excellence of late capitalism.8

For Jameson, then, there is a specific relation between media and

capitalism, or between the production of representations and production as
such. This relation becomes apparent once the ‘materiality’ of culture is taken
into account. The media for the production, distribution and consumption of
representations, be they books or televisions, are themselves produced under
specific historical conditions in which specific relations of production obtain.
Might we imagine, then, that postdramatic theatre is theatre in the age of
video’s cultural hegemony, that it is a theatrical ‘form or genre’ that understands
itself as a medium, and that it bears at least some meaningful relation to
responses to a systemic crisis in capitalism for which Jameson, following
Ernest Mandel, uses the term ‘late capitalism’?
Mandel became significant for Jameson because he thought Mandel’s
work represented the first major Marxist attempt to theorize, as a revolution
in capitalist production, the technological transformations wrought by the
mass production of electronics in the second half of the twentieth century – a
development that had hitherto received much more attention from theorists
of the pro-­capitalist right, such as Daniel Bell, than it had from theorists in
the Marxist tradition, who were rightly sceptical of the tendency among most
such theorizations to claim that capitalism had suddenly transcended the
very class conflict upon which it is in fact founded. Mandel’s periodization of
this third stage of capitalism complements other work that was to follow it,
such as David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, which also sees the
transformations in capitalist production commonly identified as fully under
way in the 1970s as involving a response on the part of capital to a systemic
crisis. In this view, developments such as factory automation, the mass
production of electronics including the personal computer, as well as the
reorganization of production logistics to facilitate just-­in-time fulfilment of
orders and coordinated political campaigns against labour unions, were all
part of an attempt to reassert the power of capital over labour and to secure
for capitalism a new phase of dynamism at the expense of the social and
102 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

political gains achieved by workers over the preceding decades of the postwar
boom.
The extent to which video and related digital and screen-­based
technologies were part of this reorganization of capitalist production is far
clearer today than it was when Jameson was writing, as these technologies
have been introduced into almost every corner of most people’s working and
non-­working lives in the advanced capitalist society Jameson discusses. This
is an aspect of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have named the ‘new
spirit of capitalism’9 and will also turn out to have been responsible, as we
shall see below, for the interpenetration of work and leisure under the rhetoric
of participation for which Fitch and Trecartin, in the installation to which I
shall shortly turn, have adopted the term ‘the audience revolution’. Even in the
two decades since Lehmann’s book was first published, it has become much
easier to imagine that, whatever his own reservations about such a ‘large scale
analys[i]s’, Lehmann’s ‘media society’ is actually another way of describing
‘late capitalism’. This is precisely what Jameson implies in his remarks on the
significance of Mandel’s work for his own project: ‘media society’ is offered,
along with Bell’s ‘postindustrial society’, ‘information society’, ‘electronic
society’ among the terms for which Mandel’s ‘late capitalism’ is viewed as a
welcome replacement.10 If we were to follow Jameson in being ‘willing to
entertain [this] hypothesis’, too, in this expanded form, might we not further
suppose that the most meaningful relations a postdramatic theatre practice
might entertain with late capitalism and its systemic crisis will turn out to be
those relations – be they critical, affirmative or merely submissive – carried
on in some sense under the sign of video, and on terms shaped, if not fully
determined by, the ‘omnipresence of media’?

Theatre (or Video)

Is there any evidence to support this theoretical proposition? What sort of
evidence might we look for? Does postdramatic theatre exhibit the
characteristics of video, for example? There’s no shortage of evidence of this
kind, including numerous instances in which video is used as a significant
compositional element, as well as a production tool. Video is not just
integrated into public performance, but its presence within the production
process has permitted the development of ways of working that had not
previously been possible. More generally, it could be argued that all kinds of
multimedia or intermedial production depend to some extent upon the
availability of technologies such as video for their conceptualization as such,
rather than merely as a medium to be used within the theatre. In other words,
 Media: Intermission 103

it is the fact that video is palpably a medium that enables theatremakers to

conceive of theatre as a medium, or to imagine the possibilities of
intermediality. At a third remove, there is much theatre that may make no use
of video as a technology, but which makes use of aesthetic strategies and
effects that can plausibly be attributed to the pervasiveness of video and to
the resulting capacity of spectators to think and feel in response to material
that shares some of video’s aesthetic features.11 Among the features of
postdramatic theatre that Lehmann identifies as characteristic, those that
strongly suggest a special affinity with video might include: the undoing of
the voice–­body suture; scenic composition determining textual composition;
tone and gesture not being subjugated to meaning or communication;
montage of visual and aural elements; a preference for real over fictive time;
repetition; duration; image-­time; and, perhaps most important of all, as we
shall see, flow.
But this is not really the point. It would be entirely reductive to seek to
identify, by means, for instance, of a similar survey, to what extent this or that
production exhibits features that resemble those we attribute to video, and
then to propose that any correlations thrown up by such a survey amount to
evidence of how theatre production is affected by the cultural hegemony of
video. Much like readings of Lehmann that use what was intended as a
theoretical proposition about a historical development of a form, genre or
medium to conduct a kind of survey of contemporary theatrical production
to determine whether this or that example qualifies as postdramatic according
to some checklist of features or effects. There is no logical or theoretical
reason to suppose that theatre made under conditions shaped by the cultural
hegemony of video should necessarily resemble video in any way. Nor is it
necessarily the case that those numerous theatre productions that make use
of video technologies in a range of inventive ways are, simply by virtue of the
use of the technology, either postdramatic by definition, or engaged in any
meaningful way with the problematic posed to theatre production by the
cultural hegemony of video, let alone the politics of late capitalism. Indeed,
one of the most obvious consequences for a theatre-­maker of identifying
video’s cultural hegemony might be, instead, to insist upon those aspects of
theatrical production that seem to resist, negate or at least avoid replicating
the appearance and effects of video. Such resistance or negation could register
as evidence of theatre responding to the hegemonic power of video, perhaps
much more strongly or plausibly than work that makes use of video in its
composition in a carefree manner, as just one expressive tool among others.
Whether theatre uses or looks like video or not, then, is not my primary
concern here. Instead, what interests me is what the cultural hegemony of
video in late capitalism does for the human subjects living in this historical
104 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

moment, and, in terms of theatre specifically, what sort of spectatorship it

produces. Jameson describes the primary spectatorial experience of video, in
both its mass media and its experimental art registers, as ‘immersion in the
total flow of the thing itself ’.12 This is effected, in part, by the way the act of
viewing video locks the viewer and the video (subject and object) together in
a material, machinic time:

The living room, to be sure (or even the relaxed informality of the video
museum), seems an unlikely place for this assimilation of human
subjects to the technological: yet a voluntary attention is demanded by
the total flow of the videotext in time which is scarcely relaxed at all, and
rather different from the comfortable scanning of the movie screen, let
alone of the cigar-­smoking detachment of the Brechtian theatregoer.13

Here the theatre, making one of its rare appearances in Jameson’s work
(appearances which are nearly always Brecht) stands as some kind of
antithesis to the experience of ‘total flow’. Elsewhere in his discussion of ‘total
flow’, Jameson notes that it is an experience without ‘intermission’: ‘Turning
the television set off has little in common with the intermission of a play or
an opera . . . when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its
mysterious work.’14 He seems to be suggesting that there is something about
at least some kinds of theatre and its spectatorial conventions that might
resist this kind of immersion. It is worth noting briefly that since at least the
second half of the nineteenth century successive phases of theatrical
experimentation have sought to do away with some if not all such conventions,
in what was once seen (by Adorno on Wagner, for example) as an attempt to
bring theatre closer to the condition of cinema, and which might now,
perhaps, be regarded as an attempt to make it more like television (without
commercials, of course, and therefore not really like television at all). In any
case, what these conventions of theatrical spectatorship seem in principle to
offer Jameson, even if he does not pursue them through any extended
consideration of theatre as such, is some possibility that ‘what used to be
called “critical distance” [which] seems to be obsolete’, might somehow be
restored, at least for the duration of some kind of ‘intermission’.15
Jameson’s sense of the significance – aesthetic and political – of the ‘total
flow’ of the video experience has been emphatically confirmed by
technological and socio-­economic developments in the decades since the
publication of his Postmodernism. Today subjection to this flow is not
confined to the living room or the ‘video museum’ (I am not quite sure what
Jameson is thinking of here), but is extended throughout the fabric of
everyday life in late capitalism. This is almost too commonplace to comment
 Media: Intermission 105

upon. Simply to note the range and ubiquity of video flow components in
everyday urban life might involve reference, at minimum, to the screen-­time
of labour (from the call-­centre to the graphic design studio), the almost
seamless minute-­by-minute alternation between work, social life and
entertainment afforded by internet-­enabled tablets and phones, and pervasive
video-­surveillance in public, quasi-­public and privatized spaces. Sticklers for
a certain brand of technological specificity might object here that many of
these interactions do not involve video, per se: Instagram and WhatsApp,
they might insist, are not really video at all. But their logic, and, in particular,
the logic of their fluid entanglement, is the logic of video. The flow in
which these technologies – finely attuned as they are, through data mining
and algorithms, to the operations of the late capitalist economy – now
immerse their subjects is almost oceanic. Just as, for Jameson, the logic of the
‘videotext’ renders the idea of the autonomous art-­work effectively obsolete,
so the coalescence of all the various components of the immersive video
environment tends to dissolve the need to make meaningful distinctions
between the various apps, sites and devices across which the flow of the late
capitalist spectacle is experienced. These are the conditions under which
postdramatic theatre is produced, and, perhaps more importantly, they
determine how it will be experienced by spectators whose lives are lived in
at least partial subjection to late capitalism’s video-­flow. What kind of
intermission might it make?

Video (or Theatre)

An intermission comes from within. It is not an alternative to that which it
interrupts or pauses. It is not a case of simply doing something else instead
and imagining that one is magically freed from the power of whatever it is
you are turning away from. Nor is it an exodus, a withdrawal from the noise
of late capitalism or a retreat into some earlier way of being and doing.
Inasmuch as it is a kind of negation – and that’s the way I want it – it goes
with the flow in order to interrupt it. To take a gesture from video itself, it is
the pause button. It’s used to pause and also to resume.
This is why I choose as an example with which to illustrate at least one
version of the intermission of late capitalist immersion, not a work of theatre,
in the sense of a production presented in a theatre, or within the institutional
framework of that industry, but rather a work of video art, produced,
according to its author, as a ‘movie’ but presented in the institutional setting
where ‘art’ versions of video production are most commonly found: the
contemporary art gallery. Rather than find some theatre that might intervene
106 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

to arrest the flow of the videotext, I choose instead to identify a passage of the
videotext itself in which an intermission or interruption is directed against
itself by theatrical means. The movie in question, Comma Boat, was first
shown in an untitled installation as part of the 2013 Venice Biennale’s main
Arsenale show, The Encyclopedic Palace (curator Massimiliano Gioni), and
was subsequently remounted as Priority Innfield (and comprising, alongside
Comma Boat, the movies Center Jenny, Item Falls and Junior War) at the
Zabludowicz Collection in London in 2014.16 Ryan Trecartin was credited as
director of the movies, but the show as a whole, in which the movies were
presented in custom-­designed ‘sculptural theatres’ (about which, more
shortly) was the work of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin. While the work
is not marked institutionally as theatre, it will, I think become clear in the
description and analysis that follows that these theatrical viewing
arrangements align it in more than merely superficial ways with the historical
development of theatre to which Lehmann gave the term postdramatic.
In Comma Boat, Trecartin takes centre stage as the director of a movie in
mid-­shoot. The movie-­in-the making seems to involve, inter alia, a trio of
singers apparently checking their own sound quality in a repeated melodic
riff (‘Do I sound goo-­oo-ood?’), the launch of a boat, and the inauguration of
a group of young women into their roles as various kinds of ‘Jenny’. But, of
course, the actual movie being made is the movie we see on screen, directed
by Trecartin, rather than any movie that Trecartin’s on-­screen director
might be making. In this movie, his own movie, Trecartin, a slight and
somewhat gender-­neutral figure wearing a grey sweatshirt with the logo
‘Witness’ on the front, a black bob wig and two-­tone face make-­up (white
above, purple beneath) alternates to-­camera comments and self-­disclosures
with instructions and harangues directed at his fellow performers and crew.
Throughout the half hour of the movie he / they / this persona is urgently,
even desperately concerned to be sure that ‘the camera’ – a camera that is
capturing all this ‘making-­of ’ footage – should be filming them:

‘Fucking shut up right now. Why aren’t you filming me?’ (4.57)
‘I thought that was the camera’ (5.50)
‘Why isn’t anyone filming me?’ (6.13)
‘What the fuck are you not filming me for. Is your hand getting tired,
motherfucker?’ (7.57)
‘Second camera, get the fucking cut-­away’ (11.59)
‘Why the hell are you not filming anything?’ (12.37)
‘Where the hell did that camera person go?’ (13.07)
‘Why the fuck weren’t you filming me?’ (17.39)
‘Why aren’t you filming me, fuckface?’ (18.17)
 Media: Intermission 107

‘Where the fuck is all the camera?’ (22.08)

‘Why the fuck are you filming Jenny and not me?’ (26.56)
‘Why aren’t you filming me, you fuck-­nut?’ (30.36)

This is not simply the egomania of a movie star or the dictatorial tendency of
a cinema auteur, although it may be both of these things; it is also a heightened
expression of a subjectivity formed under the cultural hegemony of video,
whose pathologies include an acute fear of abandonment by the apparatus of
the flow. Trecartin offers a clue to the historicity of this kind of subjectivity,
commenting on how different the figures who appear in Junior War are from
the figures in Comma Boat, Item Falls and Center Jenny. The teenagers in
Junior War, which uses footage Trecartin shot in 2000 during his senior year
at high school, lived at a time when people had not yet acquired, as a core
dimension of their everyday consciousness, the sense that they might be on
camera at any time, their entire lives documented as part of an ever-­expanding
ocean of user-­generated videoflow. Fifteen years later, in a world where
almost every American high school student owns a cell-­phone, a whole new
generation is conscious of being always ‘on’, and it is this generation which
populates the later videos.
Even when they are juiced up to their ears on the flesh-­eating kool-­aid of
their all-­night postwar martial-­law live-­streaming total-­confession narco-­
animation apparatus, they seem to register, from time to time, through some
residual neuro-­pathways with no real purpose any more, that there was once
a time before ‘the audience revolution’, and that back then, before the
catastrophic fall into the immersive world of the total studio, before they
learned how to act as though everyone were watching all the time, even
though no one was, before the state of total social performance kicked in,
there had been an ancient technology developed over thousands of years that
allowed people, usually upon payment of a small fee, to get out of that feeling
of being watched all the time and to become, for a short and blessed period
of blissful relief, merely spectators. The name of this technology was stadium
seating. Here is Trecartin’s persona introducing their desire to have it back:

Because the last time we liked something as authentic as stadium seating,

which, by the way, we haven’t had since the audience revolution, I
remember loving how much I used to like talking in front of people, but
now no one watches, I do all of this in vain. I love stadium seating. Bring
back the masses. I want to see fans. I don’t want to pick them. I want them
to just pick me, you know, like the Top 40 bullshit I used to be. (20.40)

Here are some fellow-­performers echoing that sentiment in a kind of chorus:

108 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

‘Oh, shit ’n balls, I love stadium seating.’ (22.48)

‘Oh, shit ’n balls, I love stadium seating . . . I loves me some stadium
seating . . . I love authentic stadium seating . . . I love it.’ (24.04)
‘I love stadium seating . . I love stadium seating . . . I love authentic,
authentic stadium seating.’ (29.50)

Stadium seating refers, of course, to the seating arrangements in a stadium,

but also, by extension, to those of all sorts of performing arts venues, including
concert halls and theatres, in which spectators are organized into rows of
seats each of which is set a little higher than the one in front of it in a
configuration designed to maximize the number of spectators enjoying
a good (monetizable) view of the spectacle being presented. It is a seating
arrangement preferred in venues and for entertainment forms (or genres)
where a performance or some other action is presented to spectators who are
expected to limit their activity to spectating (watching and listening). It can
accommodate various forms of limited participation ranging from applause,
speaking back to or joining in with performers when invited to, or even
coming on stage if forced to do so. But these are always recognized as
exceptions, playful engagements with the format, not as violations or
challenges to the social and spectatorial relations stadium seating is designed
to encourage (or enforce). Stadium seating is an arrangement – a technology
of spectatorship, even – that was not designed to facilitate immersion and
flow. Its origins lie far back in time, before the cultural hegemony of video,
before late capitalism, before the audience revolution. It has to do with
theatre, also, rather than drama.
When was the audience revolution and what happened in it? There are at
least three ways of answering this question, depending on who you ask. Ask a
theatre historian and expect an account of the numerous theatre-­makers who
either called for it or claimed that they and their work were bringing it into
being. Most versions of this list will look remarkably like the syllabus for a
conventional twentieth-­century university course on modern or avant-­garde
theatre – Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud, Handke, Grotowski, Kaprow, Boal –
suggesting that the audience revolution has been a defining characteristic of
the theatre taken most seriously by those who, consciously or unconsciously,
develop and maintain genre hierarchies and reproduce the social relations
and hierarchies to which they are so intimately related, including those who
have ensured that such canons continue to be dominated by white men. Most
versions of this list will also resemble the compilation of prehistories to the
postdramatic presented by Lehmann. As Jacques Rancière has observed,
the paradigmatic examples of this audience revolution in the theatre, the
proposals of those whom Rancière calls ‘reformers of theatre’, such as Brecht
 Media: Intermission 109

and Artaud – notwithstanding the differences between their practices – want

to activate their audience into a participation that goes beyond a merely
‘passive’ spectatorship. In this sense, the audience revolution signifies a desire
for the abolition of stadium seating, or, in Rancière’s language, theatre itself is
revealed as ‘a mediation striving for its own abolition’.17 One of its most recent
manifestations, among theatremakers, is the interest in immersion as a
theatrical experience that empowers the audience by seducing or compelling
them into a supposedly self-­directed navigation of an environment of
theatrical actions, narratives and mises en scènes, producing experiences
that, for some analysts, more closely resemble video-­based games than any
other cultural form (or genre).
If you were to ask a media theorist, it is more likely that the answer will
have something to do with user-­generated content. This is an audience
revolution that, rather than abolishing the medium in which it has its being,
appears to be in the business of abolishing the audience itself, by eradicating
the distinction between audience and performer. (Of course, in the case of
theatre, the abolition of this distinction might amount to the same thing.) In
many well-­known examples of this development in mass-­media culture, this
is, of course, neither its true purpose nor its real consequence. In fact, this
apparent audience revolution is all about maximizing audiences for the
purposes of revenue-­generation. Reality TV, for example, presents its
audience with a selection of people who are conventionally understood to be
real precisely because they resemble and even in some cases represent the rest
of the audience. This ‘realness’ is then leveraged to build an audience with an
affective investment in imagining itself translated from the status of audience
to that of TV star. In some more ‘home-­grown’ phenomena, like personal
YouTube channels, the entire apparatus explicitly foregrounds, through its
registration of ‘views’, the fact that it is in the business of ‘growing’ rather than
abolishing the audience and the category of spectatorship. The model for
success in such scenarios is that a certain amount of media control is handed
over to or seized by a small selection of a mass audience, who then exploit
their special status as ‘real people’ to direct large selections of the remaining
mass audience (of which they are still a part of course) towards the
performance or self-­presentation they offer. In the less immediately
commercial sphere of news media, there are claims that audience material
and user-­generated content have revolutionized the production of news. But
other analyses suggest that most uses of user-­generated content remain
firmly within the normative framework of broadcasting established before
this supposed audience revolution.18 There are, of course, exceptions to this,
models where success might be measured in other terms. There’s a long
history, for instance, in which the tools of representation, with the video
110 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

camera being one of the most significant, are taken up and used by people
habitually regarded by the professional elites of late capitalism as ‘the public’
and used for counter-­hegemonic purposes. There are even theatrical
performances of a postdramatic nature that have thematized aspects of this
practice. But if we are considering the audience revolution in relation to the
cultural hegemony of video, such work might be understood as emergent or
resistant in relation to the dominance of the forms that have elsewhere
contributed to the installation of a reality TV character as President of the
United States.
And if you were to ask Danny Iny, entrepreneur and author of The
Audience Revolution, you’d learn that the audience revolution is a new
approach to business, exemplified by new media corporations such as Netflix:

The big idea that I teach in the book is that – unlike the traditional
strategy of a lot of old-­school businesses – you don’t start by thinking of
something to sell, and then looking for people who want to buy it. Instead,
you start by finding the people who resonate with your message and
connect with your ideas, attract them to you, and then – once the audience
is there – offering them the things that will help them the most.19

In this example, too, the revolution is a change in relations between the

audience (or in this case, quite clearly, the consumer) and the producer of the
‘message’ or product. In Iny’s case, the idea that this is a ‘revolution’ depends
upon a dubious characterization of previous business practice: ‘thinking of
something to sell, and then looking for people to buy it’ is a description of
pre-­revolutionary business that is hard to square with the existence of a
whole industrial sector known as market research, let alone theories of
economic relations that trouble the banal notion that demand is what drives
business innovation. So while Iny’s slogan may not be much more plausible
than its antithesis, ‘If you build it they will come’, it does seem to refer to the
experience described by Trecartin’s persona in Comma Boat, who complains,
you’ll recall, that ‘I don’t want to pick them. I want them to just pick me, you
know, like the Top 40 bullshit I used to be.’ What it also reveals is an at first
paradoxical fact about the audience revolution: it involves a change in power
relations in which those in whose name the revolution is made lose rather
than gain power, even in the narrow terms offered by the discourse of
consumer choice. Rather than choosing the products, messages or experiences
they want, they are instead first chosen by the producers who then deliver
whatever it is they are assumed to want based upon an algorithmic calculation
of their desires, preferences and vulnerabilities. In this account the audience
revolution looks very much like an Ideological State Apparatus 2.0.
 Media: Intermission 111

Inside the videotext, then, there’s someone who wants out. Is this just
something that a ‘character’ in the very tightly scripted scenario of Comma
Boat wants, and a desire with which a potential spectator might fleetingly
identify? Is there anything else in there that might add up to an intermission
from within, something that offers that critical distance that the ‘media
society’, ‘late capitalism’ and the ‘audience revolution’ threaten to make
obsolete, and that offers it in more than merely ideational form? In other
words, what does it feel like to encounter this work? My recollections of the
installation as a whole in London may as well begin with the experience of
the space through which you navigate to encounter each of the individual
works. The lighting is low. The walls are painted in a dark colour, purple
perhaps. There’s a pervasive, almost intrusive background music. Each
individual work is installed within its own ‘sculptural theatre’, each of which
seems to gesture towards the condition of stadium seating, in that it provides
seats, benches or ledges on which spectators can sit to watch the video. The
audio for each individual video comes through headphones within the
sculptural theatres. Each sculptural theatre contains within it what look like
traces or remnants of material from within the mise en scène of its respective
video, and each suggests a different kind of possible real-­world, suburban
American environment As you move between these theatres you can
sometimes be fooled into thinking there’s a passageway where there is in fact
a mirror in which you foolishly catch sight of yourself heading nowhere.
There are passageways, though, at least one of them painted in the kind of
green associated with green screen, and which will also appear in the opening
sequence of Center Jenny. In addition to the four named video works, there’s
an additional screen which seemed, on my visit, to be showing extended
credit sequences. This does not all become apparent at once, of course,
especially if you move quite quickly to take a seat, put some headphones on
and get up close with one of the videos. As I did.
You can get really close to the screen. With the sound feeding directly into
your ears you can make it so that the images feel like they are right in your
eyes, with nothing much, like space or air, in between. You can sort of wedge
yourself down one end of the screen, sitting quite comfortably, and get what
feels like the visual equivalent of being right up by the speakers in a club or a
concert. As though the images which explode through rapid cuts and across
a spectrum of hypercolours were vibrating on a special frequency inside your
body. It’s exciting and alien, even a little repellent. Someone’s talking about
raising stunt chickens (this video turns out to be Item Falls). It takes a while
to make any sense of it, which is not an altogether unusual experience with
videos in galleries, where you are often coming in part way through, and
you’ve no idea whether this is near the beginning or the end, or how long this
112 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

thing might be. But it’s more difficult than usual on this occasion, not just
because of my decision to sit so close to the screen that I just can’t get a
perspective on it, but also because, as it turns out, these videos, even once
you’ve seen them in their entirety, don’t feel like they have beginnings and
ends. They really do flow.
Eventually the language of the work starts to get a little more familiar.
Images and ideas recur, and a picture of an imaginary world begins to
assemble itself that promises to link the scenarios of each video in such a way
that they seem to be part of the same flow, the same shoot: people seem to be
animations based on partly-­remembered humans from the past, and they’re
in some kind of school or audition situation in which they are trying to
progress upwards from ‘Basic Jenny’ capacities to the far superior condition
that is ‘Center Jenny’. It starts to be funny. The precision of the script starts to
kick in. The musicality of the editing is exhilarating, in that special way that
watching people trash stuff can be. I try to repeat the initial experience of
Item Falls with each successive video, although not all the seating arrangements
and headphone dispositions offer quite such an intense version of the
experience as this first encounter. But in each case there’s something about
being captured and immersed from a position in a kind of theatre that feels
both distinctive and peculiar. In trying to name this feeling, I describe it as
being beside myself in my own immersion. I am in it, at sea in it, even, but at
the same time I can sense myself to be in an intermission. The intermission
does nothing to diminish the affective impact of the flow, and the
powerlessness I experience, pleasurable as it is (and perhaps because it is
becoming more and more pleasurable as I learn how to enjoy it), does not go
away. The intermission doesn’t put me outside anything. If I am looking in on
this, it is from an outside I’ve not imagined yet, but whose conditions of
possibility might be, I think later, generated by the sculptural theatres. I am in
the flow and I am in the theatre. I am both before and after the audience
revolution. This immersion in late capitalism is thrilling as all hell, but it
knows that I know there’s something gone terribly wrong. The remedy, it
seems clear to both of us, lies in some reorganization of social relations.
 Part Two

Social Formations
 8

Festivals: Conventional Disruption, or,

Why Ann Liv Young Ruined Rebecca
Patek’s Show
Andrew Friedman

The Underground Theatre at Abrons Art Center is a seventy-­seven-seat,

cinder-­block bunker. Entering the space, a flight of stairs leads down to the
trapezoidal stage, which audiences must cross to find a chair. Everything is
on view in this sunken pit; you can even hear ushers shuffle programmes
across the room. So, when Ann Liv Young disrupted Rebecca Patek’s
Inter(a)nal F/ear (which premiered in 2013) in the Underground Theatre, the
performance ground to a halt. Dressed as her performance alter ego ‘Sherry’,
Young first stalked across the stage, accosting the assembled audience: ‘All of
you are dressed the same. You’re all from Williamsburg. You’re all her [Patek’s]
friends. None of you question anything you’re watching.’ The insularity of
experimental theatre audiences is an old gripe, but what sparked Young’s ire
was the performance itself: a disquieting collage of film and dance that
sardonically sends up the forms and sentiments of rape narratives. Having
commandeered the room, Young now interrogated Patek, who performed in
the piece: ‘Have you actually been raped? . . . I feel like you’re making fun
of being raped, and I think we should question what’s happening right
now.’ Ben Pryor, who programmed the show as part of his American Realness
Festival in 2014, ushered Young out of the room as she responded:
‘Maybe you should be a part of this conversation since you booked this.’1
Patek and her co-­performer Sam Roeck attempted to restart the show, but
Young returned from the lobby, forcibly shoving a bullhorn through the
auditorium door to announce that she was willing to provide Patek with
free ‘Sherapy’.2 Pryor blocked Young from reentering the room as Patek and
Roeck left the stage to recompose themselves before returning to finally
finish the show.
Young’s disruption inspired artists, critics, curators, programmers and
audience members to pen dozens of articles and hundreds of blog posts. Patek
and Young offered corroborating accounts of the event while refuting each
116 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

other’s motives. For Jay Wegman, then artistic director of the Abrons Art
Center, the issue was cut and dried: he banned Young from the institution.
This escalated the discourse that flooded Patek’s Facebook page, which
Young repurposed for her show, Ann Liv Young in Jail (2014) – an act of self-­
imprisonment for her ‘crimes against performance’.3 The question animating
these sprawling responses, was, in the words of Gia Kourlas, what ‘is and
isn’t acceptable in live performance’?4 But the event raises two far more
pressing questions for contemporary experimental performance: what are the
formal intersections and ideological distinctions between postdramatic and
avant-­garde disruptions? And how does the festival marketplace frame and
shape these aesthetics within contemporary practice? I offer that Young’s
disruption of Patek’s performance highlights the variable currency and
ethics of disruption in postdramatic and avant-­gardist performance within
the paradigm of the experimental performance marketplace. Occurring at the
American Realness festival – held during the annual Association of Performing
Arts Professionals (APAP) conference in New York City – Young’s avant-­
garde disruption of Patek’s postdramatic performance is a limit case of how
conventions of disruption are contextualized and marketed within the festival
system. I contend that festivals invoke the legacies of avant-­garde disruption,
but deliver the ameliorated disruptions of postdramatic ambiguity to satisfy
a seemingly contradictory agenda of presenting works that are both cutting
edge and market ready.
Reading this event through postdramatic and avant-­garde lenses deliberately
reframes Patek and Young’s aesthetic lineages. Both artists are choreographers
working under the broad umbrella of performance, and neither identifies
with the avant-­garde or the postdramatic. Moreover, I acknowledge Liz
Tomlin’s caution that the term postdramatic often flattens distinctions between
performance, live art and theatre – a process, I would add, similarly at work
with the broad application of the avant-­garde.5 Nonetheless, Patek’s and Young’s
art carries the ethos of those aesthetic forms and discourses as well as their
conflicting characteristics. In differentiating avant-­garde and postdramatic
practices through their suitability to the festival marketplace, I include the
postdramatic in James Harding’s observation that ‘avant-­garde gestures tend to
be socio-­political formulations as much as they are aesthetic formulations’.6
Both Young’s disruption and Patek’s performance are socio-­political symptoms
of the festival. I do not, however, forward any blanket claims of avant-­garde (or
postdramatic) anti-­institutionality. As Paul Mann and others have shown,
provocative acts depend upon institutions to reject, critique or revile.7 While
I largely agree with Mann’s claim that ‘art against the institution of art ends
by advancing the institution’s interests’, these exchanges are not mutually
beneficial.8 Responses to Young’s interruption underscore that some forms
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 117

of provocation remain beyond the pale of contemporary sensibilities.9 Even if

such behaviours accrue symbolic capital, they can result in the loss of actual
income: the stuff that pays the rent. While the link between institutions and
provocation may be continual, some works actually and purposefully risk
the destruction of their institutional relations. The scarcity of such examples
underscores Tomlin’s claim that market pressures on artistic development
means ‘anything that might historically have constituted the next generation of
avant-­garde practice, will be rejected by the market as it represents a threat to
the predicates of the existing marketplace and those who currently benefit
from it’.10 American Realness, along with other festivals aligned with APAP,
constitute ‘marketplaces’ that determine artistic production.
Key to this market’s preferential treatment of some performances over
others is the seemingly analogous aesthetics of avant-­garde and postdramatic
performance. The conflation stems from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s assertion that
the postdramatic’s destabilization of drama develops out of the avant-­gardes,
where ‘the conventional classical dramaturgy of unity was first disrupted’.11
Avant-­garde and postdramatic practices are bridged by this shared purview of
disruption which, in contemporary performance, allows for the evocation
of one aesthetic while delivering another. The commonality necessitates
definitions of these forms be based on artistic intent rather than periodization
or aesthetics. In my use of avant-­garde, I take up Mike Sell’s definition:
‘a minoritarian formation that challenges power in subversive, illegal, or
alternative ways, usually by challenging the routines, assumptions, hierarchies
and/or legitimacy of existing political and/or cultural institutions’.12 Crucial to
my claims is this oppositional self-­positioning, a tact central to Young’s work.
I contrast avant-­garde oppositionality with ‘indecidability’, which, according
to Lehmann, is postdramatic theatre’s ‘theatrical effect’.13 Indecidability, in
contrast to oppositionality, is not only endemic to Patek’s work but ultimately
more suitable to the demands of the contemporary experimental performance
marketplace. At its extreme, the postdramatic represents the total absorption
of avant-­garde practices into the market place. The evidence for this process
is embarrassingly clear. Lehmann’s foundational example for postdramatic
aesthetics is experimental theatre’s most recognizable and reliable global
commodity, Robert Wilson. Since 1990 alone, Wilson has directed ninety-­five
different productions in twenty-­five countries.14 If Wilson is synonymous with
the postdramatic, then the postdramatic is equivalent to an experimental
theatre that not only survives but thrives within a global marketplace. In this
regard, Lehmann’s articulation of an aesthetic of parataxis – the multiplicity of
sensory input that relegates text to one of many components – is a move
towards a theatrical universalism suitable to the festival market’s desire to
cross cultural borders.
118 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

The Festival Market

Disruption is predicated on challenging convention. The newest norm in
United States experimental performance is the festival. The US – and New
York City in particular – has experienced a rapid increase in experimental
theatre and performance festivals over the past twelve years. In 2005, Mark
Russell began New York City’s Under the Radar Festival to showcase
experimental works to industry professionals. Today, in 2017, eleven festivals
have joined the January fray, presenting over a hundred productions each
winter.15 The location and timing of these festivals is designed to correspond
with the annual APAP conference held in New York each January. Mario
Garcia Durham, the organization’s CEO, estimates that APAP is ‘the largest
gathering of performing-­arts curators and administrators in the country,
possibly in the world’.16 This delegation of nearly four thousand includes
international professionals, characterized by critic Helen Shaw as ‘Scandi-­
glam presenters shopping for their European seasons’.17 Elizabeth Zimmer,
perhaps more accurately, sees these presenters as ‘the venture capitalists of
the performing-­arts world, investing in new collaborations and assembling
tours to defray high costs’.18 By virtue of their selectivity, festivals – touting
their rosters as the best, most innovative, or most topical – offer prestige and
access to presenters and producers, conduits to larger regional and global
marketplaces. For early and mid-­career experimental artists in the US and
abroad, these festivals are a critical opportunity to tap those markets.
Audiences, artists and cultural tourists benefit from these offerings, but the
rush of consumable culture assembled for the performing arts industry
results in what The New York Times calls a ‘Jamboree and Meat Market’.19 To
simply bemoan this reality is to ignore the opportunities and material benefits
these structures can provide artists who ‘really are small-­business people’,
according to Jonah Bokaer.20 Nonetheless, the centrality of these festivals to
the livelihood of artists means that they now significantly determine the
experimental performance aesthetics of our given moment. It is therefore
imperative to ask: how does the paradigm of the festival marketplace shape
avant-­garde and postdramatic aesthetics in US performance?
Scholars of the historical avant-­gardes have documented the synergy
between experimental practice, institutions and marketplaces. Paul Mann
dubbed this reciprocal relationship ‘perpetual institutionality’.21 More
recently, the collusion between provocation and artistic notoriety results in
what Richard Schechner calls the ‘conservative’ avant-­garde, an experimental
theatre that apes rather than attacks institutional limits and values.22 What
is notable about the experimental festival marketplace then is the extent
to which the relationship between institution and art is foregrounded. As
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 119

artist and curator Trajal Harrell explains, the American Realness Festival is
successful because the ‘curatorial approach and the branding are a perfect
marriage: it works because it is transparent’.23 If avant-­garde disruption
depends upon an anti-­institutional agenda – no matter how feigned – then
what constitutes avant-­garde performance within such transactions? And
what role does postdramatic aesthetics play in facilitating the transparency
of the festival? Answering these questions requires parsing the distinctions
between the conventions of avant-­garde and postdramatic disruptions.

Conventions of Disruption
The historical avant-­gardes’ legacy of provoking and performing disruptions
is central to Lehmann’s conception of the postdramatic. Avant-­garde
provocations initiate the ‘shift from work to event’24 that postdramatic theatre
reprises by emphasizing reality as fiction’s ‘co-­player’.25 Despite sharing
these foundations, conflicting ideological aims underlie their disruptive
aesthetics. For postdramatic theatre, foregrounding reality within fiction
renders the boundary between the two categories porous, producing a sense
of uncertainty in spectators, Lehmann’s ‘indecidability’.26 In contrast, avant-­
gardism’s ‘minoritarian’ oppositionality suggests that the integration of reality
and theatrical fiction distinguishes an artwork from social conventions and
institutional power.27 Postdramatic and avant-­garde theatres’ disruptions
are, therefore, discernible through their contrasting intentions rather than
their analogous aesthetics. Lehmann sees this split – pace Michael Kirby –
emerging from the postdramatic theatre’s ties to the ‘hermetic’, rather than
‘antagonistic’ modes of avant-­gardism.28 The hermetic strain of the avant-­
gardes – namely the Symbolists – offered a rejoinder to the centrality of
‘dramatic plot and story’ while abandoning overtly antagonistic tones and
behaviours.29
The antagonistic avant-­gardes earned their descriptor from their forced
erosion of the boundaries between art and reality. The Italian Futurists are
perhaps the clearest example. The group’s variety-­theatre-inspired serates
aimed to infuriate and activate audiences. F. T. Marinetti’s instructions were
to ‘offer free tickets to men or women who are known to be a bit off their
heads, irascible, or eccentric, and who are likely to provoke a scene with their
obscene gestures, their nipping of women’s bottoms, or other objectionable
behavior’.30 The mere title of the Russian Futurist 1912 manifesto, ‘A Slap In
the Face of Public Taste’, decrees the antagonistic position these artists took
towards their publics.31 What these writings announce is not only a new art,
but a new ethics for art’s evaluation. Only under a revised ethics could André
120 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Breton surmise that, ‘The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the
street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into
the crowd.’32 The new standard for the antagonistic wing of the avant-­garde is
summarized by Alain Badiou as ‘a passion for the real’, manifest through ‘the
provocative intervention of the group, which alone ensures the salvation
of the instant and the ephemeral against the instituted and established’.33
Disrupting ethical boundaries and artistic convention is rationalized for its
supposed ability to reclaim experience from routinization.
Within postdramatic theatre, avant-­garde disruption is replaced with
ambiguity. Here the borders between fiction and reality are supplanted
by a refocused attention to the totality of the theatrical ‘event/situation’.34
Postdramatic works foreground their own processes through a host of
aesthetic signs enabling the theatre’s ‘capacity to be not only an exceptional
kind of event but a provocative situation for all participants’.35 A common
means of highlighting the co-­construction of the event is to destabilize the
drama’s fiction through the ‘irruption of the real’.36 The cultivation of the real
as an aesthetic instrument constitutes the critical shift from the dramatic to
the postdramatic. The aim, Lehmann explains, is ‘the unsettling that occurs
through the indecidability whether one is dealing with reality or fiction’.37 As
a result, audiences ‘wonder whether they should react to the events on stage
as fiction (i.e. aesthetically) or as reality (for example, morally)’, bringing the
certainty of the spectatorial practice into question.38 Postdramatic theatre
produces an ambivalent reflection on the real rather than an avant-­garde
‘passion’ for it. The dependency of disruptive aims on audience responses
makes the distinction tenuous, but all the more crucial. Under the broad
parameters of disruption, specific intentions – that is to say politics itself –
are easily elided.

Conventional Disruptions
Young’s disruption of Patek’s Ineter(a)nal F/ear reveals the slippage between
postdramatic and avant-­garde intentions. Since 2008, Patek has created four
large-­scale live performances and over a dozen works for video. Patek’s art fits
the American Realness festival’s interdisciplinary purview as, according to
the artist, it ‘synthesizes dance, theatre and comedy’ and primarily employs
satire to ‘incorporate the marginalized facets of performance’, most notably,
‘inter-­relational dynamics both onstage and between performer and
audience’.39 Key to Patek’s production of ambiguity is the use of sexual content
to trouble divisions between reality and fantasy. This is also a source of
sustained conflict for her work, which is often censored due to its allegedly
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 121

pornographic nature. Patek’s Art, Anxiety, and Censorship at MoMA PS1:

A Panel (2016) was planned as a staged pornography shoot with Patek
having intercourse with a male escort, before Mark Beasely, curator of MoMA
PS1’s Sunday Sessions, nixed the concept. Meanwhile, a performance film of
Patek masturbating, which she uploaded to the pornography site PornHub,
was deleted because menstrual blood appears in the video. The website’s
administrator (bafflingly) noted that ‘menstrual blood is not part of sex’,
rendering the content inadmissible.40 Patek cites this censorship as evidence
of the projects’ successful transgressions of unarticulated cultural boundaries
within varying institutional contexts. This is a result of Patek’s ability to elicit
the ambiguity Lehmann proffers as central to postdramatic works in which
audiences are forced to question whether they should understand the work as
fictional or real.
Ineter(a)nal F/ear is emblematic of how Patek’s postdramatic ambiguity
operates within the festival context. The performance featured Patek and Sam
Roeck in a series of skits, choreography, and films linked by satirical treatment
of rape, sexual violence, and HIV. One segment, for example, is a faux-French
documentary chronicling how Patek’s rape impacted her artistic ambitions.
Complete with subtitles and accented voiceover narration, the film satirized
how re-­enactments shuffle between minutia and hyperbole to humanize
their subjects. The purring French voice comically noted Patek’s struggles to
make art while ‘living on the undergrowth of the urban jungle [while she]
finds small oasis of solace in the local organic bodegas and the scattered yoga
studios’. The rape itself is undercut by detailed narration of Patek’s favourite
food. Correspondences between Patek’s life and the character (their names,
occupations and residences) clash with the stylized inauthenticity of the
documentary, bringing the veracity of the film’s seemingly autobiographical
subject into question. Patek’s deadpan commentary in the films is equally
disorienting. Patek explained that if she were to encounter her assailant again,
she would ‘probably just want to give him a hug; say it’s OK’. The calm
reflection seemingly ameliorates if not condones the criminal act.
The show’s ambiguity is compounded by a parallel narrative of Sam
Roeck’s rape, from which he contracted HIV. This section is parodically
intercut with the song ‘No Day But Today’ from the musical Rent (1994).
Following her co-­star’s story, Patek sat in the audience and questioned the
felicity of Roeck’s narrative, bolstering suspicion of the account. These elisions
between fact and fiction are prepared for at the performance’s outset, when
Patek and Roeck distributed comment cards to the audience, thanking
those in attendance for their ‘feedback’ and promising to incorporate any
suggestions into future shows. Given Patek’s ironic tone, dance critic Siobhan
Burke reflects that the show, ‘ “deals with” [rape], I mean satirizes. Or was it
122 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

satire? That’s the thing: you couldn’t really tell. I couldn’t, at least.’41 In
satirizing the ‘popular semantic[s]’ of rape, Patek produced a postdramatic
indecidability.42
It was at this early stage of the performance that Patek’s gesture was tested
by Young, who recounts:

[F]irst I reprimanded the audience. I was like, ‘All of you are dressed the
same. You’re all from Williamsburg. You’re all her friends. None of you
question anything you’re watching,’ and then I looked at [Patek] and said,
‘Have you actually been raped?’ She was really clearly thrown. She said,
‘You’re really fucked up’ or ‘fuck you’ or something like that, and I was
like, ‘I am just telling you that what I have just seen, I don’t feel like you’ve
been raped. I feel like you’re making fun of being raped, and I think we
should question what’s happening right now. You handed me a piece of
paper saying you want to know how I feel about what I’m watching – I’m
telling you how I feel.’43

Patek’s irreverence towards the boundaries of reality and fiction instigated

Young’s disruption. The uncertainty Patek conjured is not simply over the
authenticity of the events depicted, but also the interactive structure that
presumably invited feedback. Young’s rebuttal – or at least the initial one –
would seem to be the result of that participatory license. That is, of course,
only true if we believe Young’s behaviour to be sincere. Young’s return to the
theatre with a megaphone strains the idea that her actions were a spontaneous
reaction but, rather, as Patek and others have suggested, an opportunistic
hijacking of a (rival) performer’s performance.
If Patek’s ambiguity was the seed of Young’s response, Young’s avant-­garde
performance ethos offers some explanation. A survey of Young’s thirteen-­
year catalogue of performances attests to how discomforting her work can be.
Despite their blunt depictions of sexuality and violence, Young’s early works,
Melissa is a Bitch (2004), Michael (2005) and Solo (2006) are notable for the
imprint of her dance training from Hollins University. Inspired by popular
culture, especially dance and music, Young’s choreography recreates the
tropes of femininity in confrontational and explicit productions. Young’s
early works largely remained sealed behind the fourth wall, their intensity felt
by proxy. Subsequent performances, Snow White (2006) and The Bagwell in
Me (2008), engaged audiences more directly with live sex acts and excreta,
which often elicited audience responses. Young’s real-­time interactions with
often-­unhappy spectators increasingly became part of the shows.
The character of Sherry distils the confrontational aspects of Young’s work
into a singular figure. Beginning with Sherry Show (2009), the character
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 123

operates as a litmus test for the institutional contexts in which she performs.
Young explains:

‘Sherry’ is a tool that I made when I was pregnant. I thought, ‘How am

I going to make art and support a child?’ I decided that if I made
something indestructible then I could do it. And it really is working,
which is amazing. Sherry is indestructible. Her show cannot be ruined.
There’s this idea in theatre that we have to impress the journalists and
that people have to like the performance. And Sherry’s just like, ‘Fuck all
of you. This is my show.’44

Young extrapolates that the persona was designed to withstand the variability
of international touring. By basing each performance on the reactions of
audiences, Young confronts and thus frees herself from the architectural,
technological and financial inconsistencies of venues, as well as the fatigue of
touring. As a result, the performances make explicit how institutions shape
artistic production, through their regulations, material conditions and audience
demographics. What a Sherry performance produces, therefore, is a grotesque
reflection of the frames that comprise theatrical production and consumption.
A cross between a Disney princess and a Real Housewife, Sherry is
identifiable by her flowing, platinum-­blonde wig, high-­necked gowns, pearl
necklaces, long-­sleeved gloves, occasional Tierra and colour palette of treacly
pastels. The songs, skits and dances in Sherry’s performances give pretext for
her interactions with audiences or venue staff. Sherry searches her audiences
for signs of resistance, annoyance and discomfort. When these responses are
not forthcoming, Young derails her own performance by demanding that
the sound be adjusted or restarted, enabling her to be more present to her
performance. Whether these adjustments – which also include the direction
of her co-­stars – are technically necessary is difficult to discern. Frequently,
the theatre’s staff or administrators are (unfairly?) challenged or berated
for (perceived?) technical inadequacies. These disruptions tend to unsettle
and irritate audiences and employees unaccustomed to Young’s work. The
antagonism and amateurism of these digressions thwarts expectations of
theatre as an audience-­centred entertainment. The disjuncture between
spectator expectations and the theatrical event provides openings for Sherry
to confront the institutional contexts and cultural conventions that produce
those assumptions and desires.
Common among all of Sherry’s performances is her demand that audience
members be available and honest. When called upon, spectators are expected
to answer questions or perform tasks. This plays to one of Young’s chief
talents: the ability to sniff out pretence in her own audience members. The
124 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

shows centre on Sherry’s efforts to question and reveal the fraudulence of

others’ affectations through Young’s own phony persona. These encounters
begin with Sherry asking audience members innocuous questions and
quickly proceed towards invasive lines of inquiry, including one’s relationships,
sexuality, or – equally troubling – thoughts about the show itself or art in
general. Young summarizes Sherry’s method as ‘clear and direct. She acts like
a mirror to whoever she’s looking at and she wakes people up.’45 Young’s
desire to forcibly engage her audiences echoes the assaultive language and
methods of the antagonistic avant-­gardes.
Young’s authority to challenge her audiences stems from Sherry’s
self-­assigned outsiderhood. Like Patek’s characters, Sherry is vaguely
autobiographical. Originally from North Carolina, Young imbues Sherry
with regional and cultural affiliations like an overt Southern accent and
mannerisms. Sherry’s mythology, which parallels some of Young’s own life,
trades in stereotypes of Southerners as culturally unsophisticated. Sherry
plays ignorant to the whole of performance art, including notable precursors
in Young’s own medium like Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle and Penny
Arcade.46 Sherry explains that she previously worked in churches and
community centres, but now ‘gets booked in art venues’.47 Although Sherry’s/
Young’s outsiderhood within the performance world is feigned, the conviction
with which it is held is powerful. As Claudia La Rocco notes, what is ‘most
intriguing about Young these days is the extent to which her onstage persona
is impossible to fully separate from Sherry’.48 The assumption is that Sherry’s
outsiderhood authorizes her to wake people up; in playing this character,
Young is more truthful than you are in playing yourself.
Young’s construction of Sherry as an outsider truth-­teller is in keeping
with Sell’s contention that the avant-­garde is foremost an act of oppositional
and minoritarian self-­positioning. The central opponents for Young/Sherry
are the values of the art world, which is ‘full of people that think that they
have the authority to say, “This is good, this is bad. This is art, this is not. This
is worth fifty thousand dollars, this is worth nothing.” Sherry goes deep
into those problems and tries to tear them apart.’49 Sherry’s outsiderhood
affords the persona the critical distance to see and expose the duplicities of
performing within the institutional context. This strategy is embedded in
Sherry’s accusation that Patek’s work is enabled by the uncritical insularity
of the performance and festival scenes. The allegation is that the audience,
curator and festival should be held accountable for their complicity in Patek’s
postdramatic ambiguity. Most objectionable to Young is accepting an
aesthetic that seemingly renders sincerity impossible.
Young’s instigations produced a range of responses. The debate centred on
the ethics of Young’s behaviour, the institutions that support her work, the
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 125

insularity of the American Realness Festival and the ethical, aesthetic and
political make-­up of the critics, artists and audiences of this work. Andy
Horwitz, founder of the popular performance blog Culturebot, took the
larger community to task for cultivating a climate in which Young’s ‘bullying
and brutality’ were supported.50 More specifically, he condemned, ‘how
fantastically hypocritical is it that a festival purporting to support the voices
of ‘transgressive’ artists . . . would allow an artist like Ann Liv Young, who
exists with the support of major institutions and curators, to violate the art
work and physical person of an artist possessed of none of those resources?’51
Horowitz’s suggestion – that the cliquishness of this aesthetic turf war was
cover for the unequal distribution of material resources – sparked its own
round of critical responses.52 The chief question raised in the responses
to Horwitz’s article and Young’s behaviour was: who is responsible? Who
is responsible for the artwork, its surrounding culture of audiences,
critics and artists? Who is responsible for the economics of such a system?
Horwitz focuses on institutions and structures, what he calls the ‘spectacularly
vertically integrated closed ecosystem’ of downtown performing arts.53
Horwitz’s detractors point out the nuance and specificity within such systems.
While Horwitz criticizes American Realness for its payment model of box-­
office splits and advertisement, many artists champion the festival as a vital
platform for their work. No consensus emerged from the debates, but their
impassioned and frequently contentious tone reflects the fact that festival
engagements are high stakes marketplaces for artists.
Patek also joined the debate. Her essay,‘I Wish She Were Right’, was published
shortly after the confrontation with Young/Sherry on Claudia La Rocco’s blog,
Performance Club.54 Patek refutes Young’s insinuations that the show was
insincere by detailing her personal experience with sexual assault and referring
to the show as autobiographical. Patek concedes that she ‘employ[s] provocation
perhaps, but a provocation that is also in my audience’s hands: I don’t make all
of it. I leave a lot out there for you to construct a reflection on how you feel’.
Patek dismissed Young’s actions as ‘not the critique of a work, it was someone
silencing another’, and the type of ‘bullying and harassment’ that unfortunately
occurs ‘[w]hen we speak about sexual violence in an honest way’.55 According to
Patek, Young parasitically co-­opted and thereby destroyed her show, a gesture in
opposition to the experimental theatre’s celebration of free expression. But
artists – like Young – who follow in the antagonistic line of the avant-­gardes
have routinely called for the destruction of others’ art. Marinetti and Artaud’s
writings are among the most notable in the long fantasy of creative destruction
that looms over the history of experimental practice.
Moreover, the professional critics’ confusion over Patek’s ambiguous
intent and other audience members’ initial uncertainty whether Young’s
126 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

disruption was part of the show, contradict the suggestion that anything was
spoken of in ‘an honest’, that is to say, a forthright way. I do not want to
trivialize Patek’s personal experience, but rather look to highlight how the
truth content of the show creates an ethical roadblock to considering how
postdramatic aesthetics elicit avant-­gardist ethics. Patek’s aim to destabilize
the audience’s relationship to rape narratives through formal and thematic
experimentation makes Young’s response difficult to pin down. Because
Young was dressed as Sherry at the time of the interruption, many commenters
suggested that the disruption was premeditated self-­aggrandizement. More
complex, however, is Young’s claim that had she not been ‘in character’ she
would have acted differently: ‘I’m a purist, in that if I’m dressed as Sherry,
I am Sherry. . . . If I hadn’t been, I would have just gotten up and left.’56 What
at first sounds like an excuse turns out to be harder to dismiss.57
Young addressed the outcry over her behaviour in her performance Ann
Liv Young in Jail. For four hours a night on four consecutive nights, Young
‘locked’ herself in a makeshift prison cell at JACK, an arts space in Brooklyn,
where she offered herself to the interrogation of the audience. Young oscillated
between performing as Sherry (usually in the form of karaoke) and speaking
as Young (usually in the form of conversations with audience members).
Young would announce her imminent transition into Sherry, after which
she gleefully enquired if we noticed the difference. The difference (or lack
thereof) between the two figures became the show’s overriding theme.
Young’s belief in the distinction between self and character extends to a
broader division between art and life. The permissibility Young affords herself
under the banner of art is the source of her many detractors and admirers.
La Rocco summarizes the strength of Young’s performances as their ability
to create ‘a fractious, truly public space, the sort that rarely exists within art
that promises to create the very same thing’.58 To participate in these spaces
requires conceding authority to Young’s ethically dubious methods, what
Alastair Macaulay calls her audiences’ ‘gruesome compliance’.59 Whatever the
process of buy-­in entails, the two artists use the aesthetics of disruption to
different ends. Patek wants the postdramatic ambiguity of her works to
register emotionally and intellectually to ‘construct a reflection on how you
feel’.60 Young’s disruptions, conversely, are designed to get audiences to engage
physically and verbally or, to ‘wake people up’.61

Contextual Disruptions
Postdramatic and avant-­garde intentions co-­exist in the context of the festival
marketplace. Started in 2010 by curator Benjamin Snapp Pryor, the American
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 127

Realness festival represents an innovation on a burgeoning form. Unlike

other festivals running concurrent with APAP’s annual conference, Realness
focuses on US dance and performance. More specifically, it purports
‘to shock such quandaries [contemporary dance/performance] into the
contemporary moment [with a festival that is] loud, queer, disturbing,
hilarious, critically engaged, beyond post-­modern and undeniably present’.62
Its inaugural season featured works by notable US-based choreographers like
Miguel Gutierrez, Jack Fever, Luciana Achugar and Trajal Harrell. Ann Liv
Young was included in the Festival’s first season and each subsequent year
through 2014. For his efforts, Pryor’s festival was listed as #1 in ArtForum’s
‘Best of Dance 2010’ and amassed accolades for its attention to an underserved
performance community. With each year, the festival has grown, drawing
international artists of similar ilk while retaining its focus on developments
in US practice.
In addition to its relationship to the discourses of performance studies
and queer theory, the festival’s self-­description encapsulates the language of
avant-­gardism and market capitalism. In fact, the festival seems to manifest
Mann’s claim that ‘the attack on the institution of art made the attack itself a
work of art susceptible to commodification, circulation, exchange’.63 It is in
this sense that Realness’ ability to ‘shock’ – an avant-­garde buzzword if ever
there was one – corresponds directly to its self-­description as ‘instigating
cross-­cultural exchange, connecting experimental artists with the culture
hungry audiences of New York City, and changing the landscape of the
performing arts marketplace known as APAP’.64 Shock is part and parcel
with ravenous consumers and a humanist agenda of cultural exchange.
Nowhere is this more evident than in American Realness’ subsequent three-­
stop tour through France in the spring of 2016. Partnering with the Centre
national de la danse (Pantin), Les Subsistances (Lyon) and Théâtre Garonne
(Toulouse), Realness took seven of its productions abroad to ask: ‘How are
we to understand this context and these works in another country with a
different culture, its own social codes, aesthetic priorities and canonical
histories?’65 Here the critical language of contextualization is aligned with the
globalizing impulses of the broader festival market.
A boon for artists promoting new works, the festival season has also been
criticized for parading commercialized offerings for the global theatre trade.
The initially anonymous essay ‘Shit-Show Circus on Ice’, later retracted by its
author Kevin Doyle, cuts to a persistent critique of the festivals. Doyle argues
that the festivals exist ‘to assist the beleaguered arts professional in their
shopping choices while also commodifying [sic] and contextualizing to an
extent the contemporary, experimental performing arts scene’.66 The result is
the deliberate production and curation of ‘a “predictable” dramaturgy within
128 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

“edgy” and/or “experimental” methods or language’.67 The proscribed techniques

that Doyle details overlap with Lehmann’s taxonomy of postdramatic aesthetics.
Doyle’s complaints capture a nostalgia for contemporary practice’s relationship
to a – seemingly – greener, more politically and aesthetically radical past.
This sentiment is shared by Richard Schechner, who summarizes the current
landscape as populated by a ‘conservative avant-­garde’, which shed its ties to the
historical and neo-­avant-­gardes in favour of a ‘style-­left’.68 Doyle and Schechner
differ in that the former longs for a performance scene in line with a European
formalism, while the latter yearns for a leftist politics. They agree, however,
that the current market neutralizes both aesthetics and politics in favour
of conventionality, what Doyle calls ‘predictability’ and Schechner sees as
performance that is ‘known before it is experienced’.69 Within a UK context, Liz
Tomlin diagnoses this familiarity as a new phase in the relationship between
experimental performance and the market, in which performance is now
‘fertilized and incubated within the economy’s ideological predicts and
structures.’70 In short, contemporary performance has lost its ability to produce
the political or aesthetic disruptions that American Realness and other festivals
promise to deliver.
I disagree with Doyle’s and Schechner’s conclusions. The nostalgia for a
European formalism or political radicalism too frequently overlooks the
material conditions under which those works are made. Meanwhile, the
categories of ‘shock’ and ‘newness’ are more rigorously subjected to a longer
history, insuring their dismissal as passé. I agree, however, with Doyle’s,
Schechner’s and Tomlin’s assessments that these trends in performance
are traceable to the codification of experimental performance in the US
(and UK) through the growth of festivals and other institutions that usher
work into the marketplace. If the aim is to produce work for a national or
international market, as the promotional copy for festivals like American
Realness professes, the need for a predictable product is a foregone conclusion.
Postdramatic ambiguity is, therefore, an ameliorated avant-­garde offered for
the performance market. Postdramatic performance promises to destabilize
sensibilities without disrupting institutional service. Despite the aesthetic
similarities, the intentions of postdramatic and avant-­garde theatre are
neither synonymous nor interchangeable. It is this contradiction that creates
the greatest frustration for Doyle: ‘we are being marketed and hyped one art
form; and yet witnessing an entirely different art form’.71
The debate over Young’s disruption of Patek’s performance became
rancorous because it exposed this seeming contradiction – the marketing of
innovation and the production of consistency – while gesturing to the desire
for an antagonistic avant-­gardism. Critic David Velasco’s response to the
event unwittingly reveals how fractured this logic becomes within the
 Festivals: Conventional Disruption 129

marketplace. Velasco writes: ‘this latest incident seems to undercut the ethics
that gave [Young’s] prior actions such force. Young is most extraordinary
when she uses her performances to put pressure on institutional protocols, to
demonstrate (and prick) our passivity.’72 What is unacceptable to Velasco is
that Young’s actions took place in the context of another artist’s show, which
‘occurred during APAP, at Patek’s expense, when presenters were in town
scouting talent, [which] makes the whole thing especially contemptible’.73
While at the expense of Patek as well as herself, Young’s outburst highlights
the market forces (presenters and scouts) that constrain artistic expression
within experimental performance festivals. Seen in this light, Young’s
disruption was a continuation of, not a departure from, her agenda to
challenge ‘institutional protocols’ and ‘our passivity’. Young’s disruption
foregrounded the institutional limits of simultaneously accommodating the
ideals of the market (APAP) and the avant-­garde as well as the festival’s
complicity in the marketplace’s divided logic of desiring the consumable and
cutting edge. Whether Young had the ‘right’ to interfere with another artist’s
work, however, depends on how one allocates ownership of a live event,
a question that both the postdramatic and avant-­gardes deliberately render
ambiguous.
Young’s avant-­gardism forces one into ethical stances. In my conversations
with Patek, she expressed disbelief at the fluidity of ethics within the
performance scene. She questioned how anyone could think Young’s
behaviour acceptable. Patek extended this suspicion to me, bluntly asking if I
thought what Young did was okay. It is hard to remain theoretical while sitting
across from someone whose art and reputation were steamrolled by an avant-­
garde gesture. My answer to Patek’s question has changed while writing
this chapter. Young’s behaviour was a violation of the etiquette and ethics
of contemporary performance. It had emotional, social and economic
consequences for Patek. While Young should be – and by some measures has
been – held accountable for her actions, I understand them as symptomatic
of an art form’s history rather than an individual. If Young’s actions have
not earned universal condemnation, it is because they fulfil a century-­old
promise of experimental performance: the historically conditioned desire for
performance to shock us. This desire is increasingly under attack. As Horwitz’s
concludes, ‘[t]he entire construct of “transgressive”, the entire notion of “risk”
in art as it exists in the context of “contemporary performance,” is a lie, a
posture, a consumer identity in the closed economy and rigged system of not-­
for-profit performing arts.’74 Postdramatic theatre fills the void of transgression
with no means of delivering on its promises, leaving the system rigged. But
disruption, as evidenced by Young’s behaviour and Horwitz’s outrage at it, is
anything but posturing. Convention aside, disruption still produces shocks.
130 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Whether disrupting a performance is the best means of attaining this

avant-­gardist goal is questionable. Yet Young’s behaviour undeniably rattled
the insular festival culture, forcing it to debate the role of provocation within
it. The arguments recall Alastair Macaulay’s stubborn critique that ‘American
Realness too often hunts down examples that are unoriginal and clique-­ish.
Rather than enlarging the world of New York performance, it shrinks it.’75
These suspicions echo in the aftermath of the Patek/Young standoff. Even
before the event spurred so much debate, Macaulay drew a parallel between
Patek and Young’s work: ‘the labored cheapness of the offerings by Ms. Young,
Ms. Patek and others drags the festival into the determinedly banal’.76
Macaulay correctly points to the common ground between not only Patek
and Young’s work, but much contemporary experimental performance: the
persistence of an avant-garde belief that the conventions of disruption are
still most powerful, like ‘firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into
the crowd’.77
 9

Galleries: Resituating
the Postdramatic Real
Ryan Anthony Hatch

So Bad, It’s Good

Good art equals bad theatre. According to interdisciplinary artist David
Levine, this equation functions as an important doxa across an array of
contemporary visual arts practices, particularly those that involve the
performing body. In his important 2006 text ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’, Levine
observes, not without wonder, the extent to which contemporary art delimits
itself by way of an attitude of widespread antipathy toward the theatrical
medium.1 Granted, hatred of the theatre (of something about theatre) is
nothing new. On the contrary, as is well known, antitheatricality is a ‘red
thread’ that reaches back to Plato.2 What is new here, and what Levine is right
to have us wonder at, are the specific means by which a significant number of
contemporary artists express what Levine identifies as their ‘horror’ of
theatre: namely, by making bad theatre. From Mike Kelley to the collaborations
of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, from Jibz Cameron to Jaimie Warren (to
name just a few key examples from the United States), this antipathy finds
its precise form in works made out of conspicuously poor, intentionally
unconvincing performances. In such works, ‘characters’ so inconsistent
and ‘plots’ so incoherent that they threaten to fall apart altogether find
themselves set against shoddily constructed sets and among derelict props
that combine to heighten the sense of generic failure. A consensus about
theatrical form is thus borne out in practices that, by bringing the elements
of theatre out of their native darkness and into the foreign and typically
unforgiving conditions of visibility proper to modernist gallery space, take
their object of critique from bad to worse. Bad theatre, it would seem, makes
for good art.
Why should this be the case? There is, we should note, nothing natural in
the leap from hatred or horror of the theatre to an aesthetic strategy that
engages with the ‘stuff ’ of theatre primarily in order to out-­under-perform it.
132 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

One does not, after all, express distaste for French cooking by preparing and
serving a purposefully unpalatable coq au vin. Clearly, something more
ambivalent and interesting than mere negation is at play here; the sense of
this strategy needs to be accounted for, and so Levine asks, ‘how did good art
become a repository for bad performance’?3 Probably the more precise
question to pose at this juncture would be: what specific ‘good’, proper to or
constitutive of the domain of contemporary visual arts practices, does ill-­
made theatrical performance permit the artist to access? Here, good must of
course be taken in all three of its senses: what is in question here is at once an
ethical, aesthetic and market value.
If theatre at its worst is today so highly prized, this is, Levine wagers,
because it represents, or seems to represent, the royal road to the real; realness
is the good to which theatre’s failure would promise a unique access. In
making this wager, Levine draws a line from the ethos of the current situation
back to the sensibility that governed an earlier generation of performance
artists. Citing the efforts of artists like Marina Abromavić, Chris Burden and
Allan Kaprow, Levine insists that, different from theatre makers, ‘all [these
artists] really wanted to say is that their stuff is really real’.4 To this end,
performance artists once tended to undertake forms of action that – in their
unrepeatability, spontaneity and/or reliance on the active participation of the
beholder – the conventions and limits of the theatre apparatus rule out.
A half-­century on, artists are more likely to lampoon the conventions and
techniques of theatrical artifice themselves, often by grossly misperforming
or failing extravagantly to master them. These two procedures only seem to
oppose one another. In fact, they converge in bearing witness to the enduring
centrality of the real as a value and structuring principle of contemporary art.
Whether the performance artist lays claim to a zone of the real beyond what
is possible on stage, or allows the highly scripted, ‘inauthentic’ realm of
theatricality itself to come apart at the seams, so that the real, as it were, shines
through the cracks, we are confronted with an ideological formation that
links a certain way of thinking the place of the real in aesthetic experience to
a certain way of thinking the relation between theatre and the visual arts. At
stake in this, Levine observes, is the allegedly ‘superior realness of performance’,
which would, the argument goes, index performance art’s aesthetic superiority
over theatre.5
Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal definition of postdramatic theatre relies
on precisely the same configuration – on the greater realness it attributes to
performance, and the supreme value it confers on this realness itself. His
account of the form locates postdramatic theatre at ‘a common borderland’
between traditional dramatic theatre and performance art, since it involves
‘not a representation but an intentionally unmediated experience of the real’.6
 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real 133

Indeed, a close reading of Postdramatic Theatre reveals that nearly all the
claims through which Lehmann relays the ontological and ethical specificity
of the postdramatic pivot on the question of this experience. We will have
understood nothing of what is at stake in postdramatic theatre, Lehmann
argues, if we fail to understand where and how the real comes in, its place and
mode of action within the formal logic of the genre.
What follows will critique the basic assumptions that sustain this
configuration, which, in granting aesthetic and ethical privilege to a real
construed in strict antithesis to theatrical illusion, yields a theory of
postdramatic form rooted in a contempt for the order of semblance. I argue
that Lehmann’s text suffers from an impoverished conception of the real, and
that there is another way to articulate the place of the real in the work of
art. This argument will proceed in two steps. First, we will turn to the thought
of Jacques Lacan, where the real – central to the psychoanalytic experience
articulated in his clinic – is given a more precise formulation. This excursus
will allow us to determine where and to what extent Lehmann’s theory
of the postdramatic real errs and how it might be rethought. Second, we will
undertake a reading of David Levine’s durational performance installation
Habit (2010), which, in proposing a novel permutation of theatrical,
performative and sculptural logics, issues a formidable challenge to the
fetishization of the real that dominates gallery performance and postdramatic
theatre alike.
In Habit, three trained, professional actors perform a stereotypical
kitchen-­sink realist drama on a continuous loop within the confines of a fully
functional home, itself set within a larger gallery space. The work’s duration
is coterminous with the gallery’s hours of operation; spectators come and go
as they please and take in however much or little of the work they like, from
whichever and however many vantage points they choose. Conversely, the
ensemble of actors-­turned-performance-­artists remains confined all day
long within both the fictive ‘space’ of the dramatic text (from whose dialogue
they may not deviate) and the shabbily outfitted domestic enclosure that
figures as this genre’s ‘natural habitat’. Their task is not so much to perform a
play, nor even to undertake the task of ‘marathon performance’, but rather to
enter into a zone of ontological indistinction, to live their lives as characters,
to inhabit and be inhabited by fiction long enough for this very fictiveness to
begin to falter, that is to say, to fold into itself that reality which dramatic
space, in order to constitute itself, designates as its outside. The work is, in a
certain sense, constituted by its lack of an outside.
Habit is a realization of the challenge with which ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’
concludes. ‘[I]f you’re going to critique [the theatre]’, Levine writes, ‘and if
you’ve got the benefit of working in a context that can alienate anything,
134 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

wouldn’t you want to throw the best gladiators into the arena? Wouldn’t you
want to dare your spectators to be seduced?’7 Of course, the metaphor of
combat at play in this passage resonates with the polemical hyperbole of
Michael Fried’s seminal declaration, from the essay to which Levine’s title
cheekily refers, that ‘the success, even the survival, of the arts has come
increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre’.8 Levine is less interested
in attacking or allying with Fried’s war cry than with pointing out that, far
from heralding the theatre’s defeat, performance art’s bad theatre signals
that the real battle has not yet even begun. Instead of actually taking the
seductive threat of theatricality seriously, artists have been guilty of ‘showing
[beholders] what they already know to be false’.9 Levine’s aesthetic practice
involves the kind of ‘good theatre’ that, in its commitment to fiction and the
specific mode of attention that fiction solicits – seduction – most embarrasses
the art world; Habit is, to remain within the framework of Fried’s war rhetoric,
a Trojan horse (or Trojan house) by which the theatre’s ‘best gladiators’ –
actors trained in the virtuosic techniques of dramatic realism – infiltrate the
hostile terrain of the gallery and compel their enemies to enjoy, or at least
share in its creator’s fascination with, the lure of theatrical semblance. If
Levine’s work has something to say about or to postdramatic theatre, this is
thanks to its singularly eccentric status as a work of post-­theatrical drama. In
its spatial closure (its objecthood) and near-­permanence, Habit performs the
becoming-­sculpture of theatre, and in this way insists on the real of semblance
itself. To the extent that Levine locates the real not outside but on the side
of semblance, we must approach him as a reader of Lacan and a critic of
Lehmann.

Topoi of the Real

For Lehmann, the difference between postdramatic theatre and the dramatic
tradition it comes to subvert can best be figured in terms of the relations
between aesthetic structure and its ‘other’. The being of the dramatic work
constitutes itself by way of a founding exclusion: the reality of the performance
event is excluded from the space of the fiction it supports. On the other hand,
the postdramatic work, in opening itself to the very otherness that the first
excludes, invites its own dis-­integration. Again, Lehmann is adamant that
there is nothing incidental about this distinction; in the course of a gloss on
Hegel’s aesthetics, he suggests that ‘what motivates the internally necessary
exclusion of the real’ from the dramatic work ‘is nothing less than the
[dialectical] principle of drama itself ’.10 Dramatic form is this exclusion. The
pivotal section of Postdramatic Theatre, ‘Irruption of the Real’, elaborates on
 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real 135

this dramatic principle and its postdramatic subversion in detail. Whereas

‘the traditional idea of theatre assumes a closed fictive cosmos, a “diegetic
universe” ’, postdramatic theatre, by contrast, ‘turn[s] the level of the real
explicitly into a “co-­player” . . . the irruption of the real becomes an object not
just of reflection (as in Romanticism) but of the theatrical design itself ’.
Welcoming or willing such an irruption, postdramatic theatre gives rise,
Lehmann concludes, to ‘the experience of the real’.11
Who is the subject of this experience of the real? Though Lehmann’s
reader might assume the subject in question is the spectator, we should note
that the syntax of his formulation bears witness to a radical indeterminacy
vis-à-vis this experience – an indeterminacy that, as we will observe, becomes
particularly clear in his reading of an exemplary moment from Jan Fabre’s
The Power of Theatrical Madness. The spectator’s access to the real would in
fact seem to have to emerge in tandem with the spectacle’s own experience of
its irruption. Would not a true instance of the real’s irruption by definition
disturb the integrity of the spectacle’s fictive cosmos not only for its spectator,
but also for the actors and designers who have summoned the real to be their
‘co-­player’? Would it not thereby herald an unprecedented collapse of the
distinction between spectator and actor altogether, by making both positions
equally vulnerable to its fundamentally traumatic intrusions? Such questions
lead us to wonder whether it is possible to make the real into the object of
‘theatrical design’, that is to say of an intention (aesthetic or otherwise),
at all.
But we have already skipped ahead; the moment for such questions has
not arrived, and will not have arrived until we attend to a simpler one, the
simplest and probably most essential one: what is the real? I will not have
been the first to remark on the centrality of the real to Lehmann’s critical
project; its currency in subsequent work in the field of postdramatic studies
bears witness to its cardinal importance.12 However, what has not yet been
sufficiently examined – and this lacuna should, I think, strike us as profoundly
unsettling – is that Lehmann never sufficiently defines his key term, but
rather deploys it in ways that suggest his readers will intuit what he means
when he claims, for instance, that ‘postdramatic theatre means: theatre of the
real’.13 Without a rigorous conceptualization of what the real entails, such an
equation remains meaningless.
When we cease taking the signification of the postdramatic real for
granted, and give Lehmann’s central concept the serious scrutiny it deserves,
we discover a reductive and thus misleading approach to the position
(ontological) and function (ethical) of the real in postdramatic theatre. The
insufficiency of Lehmann’s conceptual model comes down to the relation it
proposes between the real and the order of semblance in which any given
136 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

theatrical event unfolds. It posits the real as standing behind and beyond the
domain of semblance, that is to say, as extrinsic to the aesthetic as such, as the
‘extra-­aesthetic materiality’ that supports the play of illusion.14 This is never
so clear as when, in the course of his argument, Lehmann identifies ‘the
experience of the real’ with ‘the fact that no fictive illusions are created’.15
Ultimately, this orientation errs in that it conflates the work of the real with
the literal reality of the work. Just as the figures depicted in an oil painting
depend on their medium’s material facts – stretched canvas, pigment, oil,
frame – so too is theatrical illusion obviously inconceivable apart from the
hard facts of the performance event: the bodies ‘behind’ the characters, the
actual spatial structure of the playing space ‘underneath’ the illusory scenic
arrangement, the actually fake prop gun propping up the fake real gun one
character uses to pretend to shoot another. Postdramatic theatre equals
theatre of the real, we are told, insofar as these literal supports manage to
burst through in their irreducible facticity and thereby disrupt the fictive
surface of the stage scenario. Conceived thus, Lehmann’s real intrudes onto
but, crucially, cannot be said to belong sensu stricto to the order of semblance.
The naive materialism this topological model implies needs to be
challenged. Resituating the concept within the theoretical context from
which it has been uprooted, I suggest that the real is not a substance beyond
and thus foreign to semblance, but instead a foreignness immanent to,
because produced by, the order of semblance. Rather than name something,
that is, it must be understood to index the structural fact that the becoming
of the theatrical work inevitably generates a remainder, its own surplus,
which renders the realm of semblance other to itself in an absolute sense.
Approaching it in this way allows us precisely what Lehmann’s argument
forecloses: a real proper to semblance, inextricably bound up with the
movement of theatrical form. From this vantage point, we will come to
understand that what in Lehmann’s discourse seems like a full-­throated
affirmation of the fact of the real is really an attempt to escape the real of the
aesthetic itself.

A Certain Materialism
Although Postdramatic Theatre invokes the real throughout in ways that
assume its reader will know what this term implies, it is important to recall
the obvious fact that this substantive belongs neither to common usage (in
English or Lehmann’s native German) nor to the lexicon of theatre studies.
Rather, it is a term Lehmann inherits from the teaching of Jacques Lacan,
where it names one of three interrelated ontological registers – imaginary,
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symbolic, real – in relation to which the psychoanalytic subject is situated.

This psychoanalytic inheritance has not gone entirely unnoticed. In their
introduction to Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, editors Jerome Carroll,
Karen Jürs-Munby and Steve Giles note that ‘the fact that Lehmann . . . refers
to postdramatic performance as allowing an “irruption of the real” suggests a
Lacanian dimension to his thinking’.16 Given that, as Tom Eyers writes, the
real ‘must be understood as the central, determining concept of Lacan’s work,
early and late’, one might well expect this theoretical orientation to play an
important role in Lehmann’s analysis of the postdramatic.17 Yet a careful look
in the index of Postdramatic Theatre frustrates this expectation; Lacan
appears explicitly only once in the text, in a superficial reference to his notion
of the voice as object a (that is, as one of the partial objects of the drive).
Lehmann seems to want to deploy this concept in a quasi-­intuitive sense,
detaching it from the theoretical and practical contexts from which it derives
its meaning. This results, unsurprisingly, in a misrecognition whose
consequences play out across his theorization of the postdramatic.
To grasp what is truly at stake in Lacan’s real requires that we first remark
on what it is not: the real is in no way synonymous with reality. On the
contrary, whereas what we refer to and experience as the reality principle is
for Lacan always a matter of symbolic mediation – an effect of the subject’s
being situated within the differential network of signifiers – the real involves
something strictly unsymbolizable, which the symbolic order that frames
and constructs our reality cannot but fail to capture. Hence, what Lacan
names ‘the real’ is in no sense a part of reality; strictly speaking, it has no place
there. Yet – and this is absolutely crucial – neither has it any proper place
elsewhere. To speak of the real as a something-­beyond the reality principle that
the signifying chain engenders is not quite right, or not quite enough. Indeed,
such an approach implies a misleading notion of the real either as a
primordial, presymbolic, undivided substance (‘beyond’ insofar as it is ‘before’
the signifier) or as an infinitely deferred transcendental ideal whose horizon
recedes as the field of signification attempts to grasp it (‘beyond’ insofar as it
is ‘after’ the signifier).
Against these approaches, Lacan insists on the real as an irreducible surplus
in excess of, yet immanent to the symbolic order, a kind of inassimilable waste-­
effect of the chaining of signifiers that structures experience. Now, to claim that
the real is the surplus without place in the symbolic is thus also to mark it as the
limit internal to the network of signifiers, that lack which renders the symbolic
fundamentally incapable of closure. ‘The absolutely crucial point of . . .
psychoanalytic realism’, Alenka Zupančič argues,‘is that the real is not a substance
or being, but precisely its limit . . . the zone of the real is the interval within being
itself, on account of which no being is “being qua being,” but can only be by being
138 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

something else than it is.’18 Hence, what the real names in Lacan’s discourse is not
some substance but rather a fundamental structural fact about the symbolic
order. Split from within, this order cannot coincide with itself, insofar as it
generates its own beyond-­within. This is precisely what Lorenzo Chiesa means
when he insists that ‘the Real that psychoanalysis deals with is the Real-­of-the-
Symbolic, which is not to be confused with everyday reality and should also be
clearly differentiated from what Lacan calls “the primitive Stoff,” matter
unmediated by the Symbolic’.19 A seeming paradox: there is (for the subject) no
beyond the field of the Symbolic; yet this field is ‘not all’.
What does it mean for the real to be both immanent and inassimilable to
the symbolic? To answer this question, we should return to the observation
the editors of Postdramatic Theatre and the Political make in their introductory
remarks concerning the seeming Lacanian resonances of Lehmann’s
argument. For it is not only the frequency with which the latter avails himself
of the resources of Lacan’s central term that prompts them to make this
connection. Much more to the point, it is the fact that Lehmann speaks of the
postdramatic real in the explicitly Lacanian terms of ‘irruption’. It is precisely
the real’s irruptive force that Lacan wants to stress when, in The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, he refers his audience to Aristotle’s
concept of ‘tuché’. Commonly rendered as ‘luck’ or ‘fortune’, Lacan translates
tuché as ‘the encounter with the real’.20 That Lacan construes the real in terms
of an event bears witness first of all to psychoanalysis’s decisive rejection of a
transcendental-­obscurantist approach that would situate the real beyond and
thus inaccessible from within the prison house of signification. Yet it is critical
we underscore that the encounter with the real is, for Lacan, a definitively
missed encounter, ‘an appointment to which we are always called with a real
that eludes us’.21 This missed encounter must be carefully distinguished from
a missed appointment, insofar as the latter is defined by its not taking place.
Paradoxical though it may sound, the encounter with the real takes place as
missed, because what the subject is confronted with in this event is something
that from within the symbolic field that gives consistency to her life is, strictly
speaking, impossible. In Lacan’s thought, Zupančič writes, ‘the Real is
impossible, and the fact that “it happens (to us)” does not refute its basic
“impossibility”: the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as “the
impossible thing” that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to
the reconfiguration of this universe’.22 We are effectively dealing with a
conception of the real as the traumatic limit to the subject’s experience, the
experience of this immanent limit, which introduces a split in the subject and
throws into question the very coordinates of her experience.
What, then, is the precise nature of Lehmann’s error? Let us turn to
Lehmann’s reading of a minor, albeit key moment in Jan Fabre’s The Power of
 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real 139

Theatrical Madness, through which he fleshes out the claim that the
postdramatic makes the traumatic force of the real’s irruption into a ‘co-­
player’ and ‘object . . . of the theatrical design itself ’:

[T]he houselights come on in the middle of the performance after an

especially exhausting action by the performers (an endurance exercise
à la Grotowski). Out of breath, the actors take a smoking break while
looking at the audience. It remains uncertain whether their unhealthy
activity is ‘really’ necessary or staged. The same holds true for the
sweeping up of shards and other stage actions that are necessary and
meaningful from a pragmatic point of view but which, in the light of the
theatrical signs’ lack of reference to reality, are perceived on an equal
footing with the more clearly staged events on stage.23

Is the smoke break real or staged? Notwithstanding the odd intrusion of the
concept of necessity, the problem with such a question is that it depends on a
stark distinction between, on the one hand, the realm of fiction and, on the
other, the realm of reality that supports it insofar as it is characterized by its
absence. It depends, that is to say, on the very division between semblance
and ‘raw’ reality that the Lacanian concept of the symbolic displaces and
nullifies. In his theory, the Other, the symbolic locus of the subject’s reality,
is a field without an external-­transcendental guarantor; it is ontologically
groundless: ‘there is’, in other words, ‘no Other of the Other’.24 To be sure,
this does not imply that a Lacanian approach requires we dispense with
the obvious difference between the theatrical event and our ordinary
experience of reality. What it is meant to highlight is that Lehmann’s recourse
to the facts behind or between the stage fiction fails to take into account
the extent to which the theatrical event and our ordinary realities are not
entirely different. That is to say, it requires we forget that the theatrical
medium allegorizes the extent to which any given reality depends for its
consistency on a symbolic framing and is thus, in a certain sense, the work of
fiction.
Fabre’s dramaturgy of the real yields, Lehmann contends, an ‘aesthetics of
undecidability’, which he sees as unsettling the spectator’s capacity to decide
‘whether one is dealing with reality or fiction’.25 Setting aside Lacan, we can
also challenge this from a less theoretical, and more ‘intuitive’ perspective.
The question real or fake? gives rise to another: is it really so uncertain? Is the
status of this scene any more undecidable than any other moment in which
the theatre at once solicits our belief, or at least our investment, in the event
it stages without ever really expecting us to forget its having been staged just
so and for us? Consider that, for this moment to not have been staged, in
140 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

order for it to truly fall outside and disrupt the frame of Fabre’s work, the
actors involved would have to have met prior to the performance to plan (to
stage!) an insurrection, to stop the show with their activity. If it is clear that
this interval must to some degree have been staged, it is also clear that an
actual cigarette break on stage would be a staged cigarette break, and a staged
cigarette break will have been an actual cigarette break. Here the distance
between the order of theatrical illusion and the material reality that stands
behind or beneath it as its support collapses. What is in question here is thus
not, as Lehmann claims, the undecidability of the action’s status, but rather
the zone of indistinction to which it bears witness. ‘Real’ in a certain limited
sense, its realness is ultimately enfolded and transformed by its placement
within the aesthetic structure.
The notion that the real could be the object of a strategy, aesthetic or
otherwise, is a contradiction in terms. Lehmann’s approach implies the
unproblematic partition of the postdramatic theatre artist who actively wields
the traumatic force of the real (who themself irrupts the real) and the
traumatized spectator who passively suffers the surprise of this force. Yet the
real, defined precisely by its excess over and unavailability to any subject’s
calculations, nullifies this scene of unequal distribution. In this sense, Zupančič
argues, ‘the very opposition active/passive (our waiting for the Event/our
exertions designed to make it occur) is misplaced. This is because the Real . . .
does not have a subject (in the sense of a will that wants it), but is essentially a
by-­product of the action (or inaction) of the subject – something the latter
produces, but not as “hers.”’26 One should hardly wonder, then, that when the
real does irrupt in the course of the theatrical event, it takes the form of an
accident; not ‘usually’, as Lehmann wants to claim, but exclusively.27
Those who wish to construe the real as a substance lying in wait just
behind the veil of theatrical semblance, and would force it to the surface,
inevitably find that the real thus summoned to the stage is never real enough.
Lehmann contends that the experience of the real, defined as the absence of
fictive illusion, ‘is often accompanied by disappointment about the reduction,
the apparent “poverty” ’ of the postdramatic scenario.28 Yet the true
disappointment, which might more precisely be called an anxiety, attending
postdramatic theatre involves the fact that an experience of unmediated
presence, from which the fictive has been eliminated – never really comes to
pass. Unless, again, something goes wrong – but then, this is just as much the
case in the dramatic work, indeed in any aesthetic structure. ‘The paradox of
the Real . . . lies in the fact that as soon as we turn it into the direct goal of our
action, we lose it.’29 Surfaced, the real cannot but lose its realness, and prompt
performer and beholder alike to wonder whether there is not perhaps a more
real real beyond this one. Clearly, we find ourselves caught up in a bad infinity.
 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real 141

Yet there is a further and more important paradox to consider, which follows
from the first and is poised to turn Lehmann’s approach to postdramatic
ontology on its head. To claim to give the spectator unmediated access to the
real is itself the supreme illusion, the most extreme gesture of deception. Far
from subverting drama’s supposedly retrograde commitment to semblance,
in staging the semblance of the irruption of the real, postdramatic theatre (as
this is conceptualized by Lehmann) in fact redoubles this commitment by
expanding its reach, fortifying theatrical illusion by seeming to weaken it.
It is in this sense that we should read Slavoj Žižek’s polemic against the
‘return of the real’ in contemporary art. In Less Than Nothing, Žižek likens the
ethics of this return to the strategy the Catholic Church devised to discourage
its (male) congregants from succumbing to the temptations of the flesh.
‘[W]hen tempted by a voluptuous female body, imagine how it will look in a
couple of decades – the wrinkled skin and sagging breasts. . . (better still,
imagine what lurks even now beneath the skin: the raw flesh and bones,
bodily fluids, half-­digested food and excrement . . .).’30 In asking the believer
on the brink of giving himself over to the seductive force of beauty to
remember what revolting realities teem under the skin, the priest’s position is
strictly analogous to that of the postdramatic auteur who, intent on preventing
his spectator from being taken in by the dazzling lure of theatrical semblances,
reminds him of the mundane material that lies under the skin of the fiction.
For Žižek, ‘such procedures amount to an escape from the Real, the Real which
announces itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body’.31 Here we
see that the Lacanian real, far from opposing the seductive force of
appearances, is in fact on the side of appearances. ‘In the opposition between
the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in
decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the Real, while the decaying body
is merely reality.’32 Žižek makes the link to postdramatic theatre explicit:

The same goes for contemporary art, where we encounter often brutal
attempts to ‘return to the real’, to remind the spectator (or reader) that
she is perceiving a fiction. . . . [I]n theatre, there are occasional brutal acts
(like slaughtering a chicken onstage) which awaken us to the reality of
the stage. Instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian
dignity, perceiving them as versions of [alienation], one should rather
denounce them for what they are: escapes from the Real, the exact
opposite of what they claim to be, desperate attempts to avoid the real of
illusion itself, the Real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle.33

One should, I think, see in this analogy between ecclesiastical and

postdramatic recourses to (mere) reality something more than a structural
142 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

isomorphism, insofar as it invites us to read its two terms as participating

in the same moral logic, a vulgar Platonism within which semblance is
always already suspect. Philippe Sollers put it best: ‘There is nothing more
metaphysical, as everyone knows, than a certain materialism.’34

Figure 9.1 Installation view of David Levine, Habit, Essex Street

Market, New York City. (Photo by Marsha Ginsberg.)

Figure 9.2 Detail, David Levine, Habit, Essex Street Market,

New York City. (Photo by Marsha Ginsberg.)
 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real 143

The Becoming-Sculpture of Theatre

A collaboration of Levine, scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg and playwright
Jason Grote, Habit is situated at the intersection of theatre, performance
(specifically endurance performance), installation and sculpture. Singularly
radical in its unembarrassed engagement with conventions of dramatic
performance, the work is uniquely positioned to investigate what forms of
production and perception are at stake in the making of theatrical semblance,
and to determine how much or little any of this has to do with the enquiries
that comprise contemporary art.
Habit involves, but can in no way be reduced to, the performance of a play
called The Children of Kings, a stereotypically ‘gritty’ kitchen-­sink-realist
drama that Levine commissioned Grote to write in strict accordance with
both the genre’s stock forms and the larger work’s unique parameters. Grote
notes that when he considered trying out a minor ‘twist’ on realist drama’s
typical gender breakdown, ‘David instructed me to follow the conventions.
He wanted the context of the piece to defy conventions, not the script.’35
Levine submits the raw material of Grote’s drama, a compendium of realist
clichés, to the institutional/perceptual conditions of the visual arts. Thus the
action unfolds, not on a stage facing a stationary audience, but instead inside
Ginsberg’s fully-­enclosed, fully-­functional and hyper-­realistically outfitted
ranch home (equipped with working plumbing and running water, stove,
refrigerator, stocked pantry and media centre). But for its lack of cladding
and roofing, this domestic space is structurally complete. Real, not realist,
Ginsberg’s ‘set’ is in turn installed at the centre of a large gallery space, where
the tension of its double status – as both the site of a performance event and
a sculptural object that, in its closure, mutely resists the spectator – is
unequivocally at play. That this set is an enclosed working structure is not an
extraneous gimmick; it’s what makes possible the ontological provocation at
the heart of Levine’s work. A practical matter, too, this functionality is linked
to the most distinctive feature of Levine’s work, namely, that its cast must
perform Grote’s roughly hour-­long play continuously for the duration of the
gallery or museum space’s hours of operation. Levine traps these endurance-­
actors within Habit’s fictive confines for roughly eight hours of daily, non-­
stop acting. Unable to exit the set or the script, they realize in a cannily literal
way the pseudo-­psychology at the heart of American Method acting, which
exhorts the actor to somehow become, to live as, the character. Spectators
orbit this event-­object, cluster at windows, spy what action they can from its
various, mostly restricted, vantage points. They come and go as they please,
without this coming-­and-going in any way disturbing or disrupting the
performance. At moments when no one is watching, the work continues on,
144 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

as unmoved by the absence as by the presence of the beholder. In this way,

Habit stages the asymptotic becoming-­sculpture of the theatrical event. It
demonstrates that, taken to their limit, the conventions of dramatic
performance yield, not the ‘ultimate’ theatrical spectacle, but rather a
resolutely antitheatrical object, something that is, in its closure and quasi-­
permanence, a paragon of absorption. As such, Habit proposes a novel way of
thinking the interplay between stage and gallery, semblance and real.
As Amy Holzapfel remarked, ‘allowed to speak only their given dialogue,
the actors “inhabit” the genre of contemporary realism’ itself.36 Yet while the
restriction of the actor’s speech is the most obvious way in which she is
constrained, the work effects the collapse of her reality into the fiction she is
tasked with bringing to life in an even more profound and subtle way –
namely, by dispensing altogether with blocking, stage business and stage
directions. It is thus not exactly right to say that Grote’s play loops; it certainly
repeats, but each playing of the drama differs from the last – in sometimes
minor, sometimes drastic ways. It is left to the performers to determine, from
one moment to the next, and from one iteration to the next, the relationship
between its scripted necessities and the improvised contingency of their
placement in and interaction with the space. This absence of staging is a
direct consequence of the work’s antitheatrical organization; it is not
arranged, not placed, in relation to any viewpoint whatsoever. There is no
stage business because there is no stage; if Levine forgoes the perspectival
illusions of the mise en scène, this is because the beholder is effectively in
the presence of the very actuality (a real house) whose illusory effect this
apparatus exists to produce. Habit aims to solve for x, where x equals drama
minus theatre.
Might x have something to do with the irruption of the real? Might not
the absence of staging cede to the real the space from which, or in which, it
can irrupt? To properly address such questions, we must consider how the
work’s spatiality intersects and interacts with its temporality. Crucially, the
extended duration of Habit means that the actors involved must address
the very real exigencies of their bodies within and in relation to the space
of the work. The needs to eat and drink, to relieve oneself, to wash up, even to
drift, to succumb to the inevitable moment of boredom are, under the
temporal circumstances of a typical theatrical performance event, easily and
necessarily deferred. It is never too long until the actor is once again offstage,
where she need not pretend she isn’t hungry, that her bladder isn’t full, that
she doesn’t have a terrible itch that her character wouldn’t dare scratch. For
the duration of Levine’s work, however, there exists absolutely no offstage
where, or interval during which, the actors’ needs might be dealt with out of
view, and the performance simply lasts too long to ignore them all. At some
 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real 145

point in the course of the day’s work, each actor will need to ‘cross’ to the
kitchen and find or prepare something to eat. The actor is satiated; her real
needs are met, yet it is the character who eats. Likewise with other corporeal
needs. Whatever the performers in Habit do must be done in character. Or,
more precisely, whatever they do will have been done in character. The
freedom the actors are granted to navigate the space of the work as they see
fit in fact amounts to total retroactive capture by their roles, which of course
means that, in Levine’s work, the real such as it figures in Lehmann’s text is
always-­already neutralized. This is perhaps not so difficult to understand:
where, at a certain level, everything is permitted to the actor, nothing the
actor does can register as a transgression. If one’s only habitus is the set and
text of a play, one cannot but be in character. There is, strictly speaking, no
place to be out of it.
Habit performs a specifically Lacanian intervention by rendering a logic
central to Lacan’s thought in architectural terms. Recall that our excursus on
Lehmann’s theory of the postdramatic began with the distinction he
establishes between the opposing ways that theatre positions the real in
relation to the order of semblance. While, for Lehmann, the fictive cosmos of
the dramatic work necessitates the exclusion of the real, the postdramatic
work opens itself to the shattering effects of the real’s irruption. This would
appear to correlate with the crucial ontological distinction at stake in Lacan’s
thinking of sexual difference (in his understanding, that is to say, of being
itself as sexuated). As developed in his late work, ‘sexual difference’ names
neither biological nor cultural phenomena, but rather the fact that there
exist two different and irreconcilable logics by means of which the subject
gets inserted into the field of being (that is, of the signifier).37 On the
–
masculine side, we find two formulas, or logical propositions – ∃x Φx, ∀x Φx
– which together ‘say’: there exists one x that is not submitted to the phallic
function; all x’s are submitted to the phallic function. The formulas on the
– – –
feminine side – ∃ xΦx, ∀xΦx – can be read: there is not one x that is not
submitted to the phallic function; not-­all x is submitted to the phallic function.38
To do real justice to the nuances of these formulas simply will not be possible
here.39 For our purposes, we will simply observe that, on what Lacan calls the
masculine side of sexual difference, an all – a cosmos – indeed exists, but only
insofar as something escapes and exists beyond the law of the all, insofar as
there is an exception that frames and founds its rule. By contrast, on the other
(feminine) side, there exists no such point beyond, no exception, no outside.
And yet, in spite of this lack, or rather, precisely because of it, that which is
turns out to be not-­all. Which is to say that the field of being fails to form a
cosmos, but rather remains open – not to some(thing) outside, but rather
(with)in itself.
146 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Does this ontology of sexual difference actually correlate to the distinction

Lehmann seeks to establish between dramatic and postdramatic? Though, as
we know, Postdramatic Theatre never directly addresses this dimension of
Lacan’s thought, it seems likely that its author would read the masculine logic
as isomorphic with dramatic structure, and the feminine as isomorphic with
the postdramatic. However, this reading would be a serious misreading. For
whether a theatrical form excludes the real from semblance or invites the real
to disrupt semblance, both come down to the same thing: in both instances,
the real is positioned beyond the aesthetic, in an other realm. Indeed, when it
comes to the real, dramatic and postdramatic theatre (at least as Lehmann
articulates them) are different only in that in the former, the real remains
elsewhere, whereas in the latter, this other realm intrudes on and interrupts
the work of semblance. By real contrast, Habit is one answer to the question,
what would a work that refuses the vulgar materialist fetishization of the real
look like? What would it look like to insist on semblance itself as the proper
domain of the real?
If postdramatic theatre is marked by an irruption of the real meant to tear
and tear itself free from the veil of semblance, and if this event of rupture
correlates with the intrusion into theatrical space of an aesthetic logic that
originates in the visual arts, Habit offers us something like postdramatic
theatre’s negative image. It not only does not subvert the protocols that
engender theatrical illusion; crucially, it performs a hyperbolic affirmation of
precisely those norms and conventions that the postdramatic most wants to
undermine. Habit supplants the fictive cosmos with a real one. In a space
constituted thus, there can be nowhere and no way for the so-called extra-
aesthetic real to irrupt. Ultimately, the work models, at the formal level,
Lacan’s fundamental insight: there is no outside-­of-semblance, no beyond
where the real would appear to us in its ideal purity, and that the real always
emerges as an immanent and inassimilable excess from the domain of
appearances that is the subject’s sole habitat.
 10

Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary

French Theatre
Kate Bredeson

In French artist Philippe Quesne’s 2008 La mélancolie des dragons, a group of

rock musicians converge in a painstakingly recreated forest on a proscenium
stage, and, amidst the towering trees and buoyant snow drifts, the group
crafts vivid and inspiring new worlds from the materials in their onstage car
and trailer. In its staging of punk theme parks and the grand visions of a
group of wanderers, La mélancolie invites audiences to witness wonder
through scenographic feats that unfurl in real time on the stage. French and
Belgian, respectively, artists Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort’s 2013
collaboration Germinal enacts a similar creation process. In Germinal,
the artists use the conventions and vocabulary of theatre to build, in front of
an audience, a physical world and new language from scratch using what
begins as an unadorned black box set. Germinal’s bare stage evolves into
a luminous landscape where figures bask in glowing light and communal
song.
The dramaturgy of Quesne, Goerger and Defoort – all of whom came to
theatre from the visual art world – is ‘scenographic-­led’, as Richard Allen
describes Quesne’s work.1 Moreover, this dramaturgy positions each audience
member in the role of what Maaike Bleeker calls the active ‘seer’, instead of
passive ‘spectator’.2 Engaged participation and community, on stage and off,
are key in both productions. Quesne’s, Goerger and Defoort’s scenographic-­
led worlds highlight the ways some contemporary French theatre makers rely
on metatheatrical stages to draw attention to seeing, and to amplify the role
of process for both the onstage and audience communities of their
performances. These twenty-­first-century French artists invite scholars,
students, artists and critics to both reassess and expand Hans-Thies Lehmann’s
framework of postdramatic theatre, so that it can account for not only
aesthetics and form on the page and stage, but also the pre-­production
processes that Ric Knowles calls a part of the ‘material theatre’.3 This
reassessment and expansion is at the heart of what some twenty-­first-century
148 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

French theatre artists – and Quesne, Goerger and Defoort specifically – offer
ongoing conversations about postdramatic theatre.
In addition to making performance that can be categorized as
postdramatic, Quesne, Goerger and Defoort work in a contemporary
paradigm that some contemporary French critics call l’écriture de plateau, or
‘set writing’. Philosopher and theatre critic Bruno Tackels proposed the
concept of l’écriture de plateau in 2001 to describe changes he observed in the
theatre of his contemporaries, including an absence of the actor, diminished
spoken text and the presence of scenic ‘writing’.4 While Tackels points to
many of the same phenomenon Lehmann observes in Postdramatic Theatre,
he seeks not to reiterate, but to extend the idea of the postdramatic to include
contemporary French performance and theory. Indeed, Tackels published his
study one year before the publication of the French translation of Lehmann’s
book. In his oeuvre of l’écriture de plateau studies, Tackels investigates what
French artists are doing, alongside notable artists from Italy and select other
countries, in this postdramatic turn in theatre history. His national scope is of
particular importance given how, even in France, the concept of the post­
dramatic has long been associated with the Germans, the Belgians, the North
Americans, the Polish and the English. In Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann
addresses the work of Peter Handke, Tadeusz Kantor, Robert Wilson, Pina
Bausch, the Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Jan
Lauwers, among many others, and he draws frequently on a large number of
French theorists from Antonin Artaud to Julia Kristeva – while largely
overlooking French theatre practitioners. What Lehmann did and did not
include in his book has come to define the postdramatic, and the omission of
France has spilled over into even recent French studies of postdramatic
theatre. In his 2013 book Le Théâtre Postdramatique: vers un chaos fécond?
(Postdramatic Theatre: Towards a Fertile Chaos), for example, French theatre
scholar Gérard Thiériot looks not to fellow French theatre artists, but to ‘the
Germanic sphere’ as the centre of his investigation.5
In France, theories of language and space are fundamental to the
longstanding and rigid sense of national identity. Since 1635 the Académie
Française has dictated and shaped the French language and theatre. The
famous 1637 controversy over Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid instigated a national
debate about language, rules and dramatic structure. In the twentieth century,
writers and theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord studied how
the urban landscape of the French capital city articulates key principles about
the way French society and thought is organized. Likewise, Gaston Bachelard
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized space and semiotics from within a
French national context. Jean Genet staged similar work in the theatre,
provoking relationships between space and character in the panopticon
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 149

world of Haute Surveilliance and the metatheatrical Le Balcon. These writers

and artists made clear that space creates meaning, and that there is a difference
between an abstract concept of space and space that has been directly
experienced. Bachelard argued, ‘A house that has been experienced is not an
inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.’6
In his theory of l’écriture de plateau, Tackels extends this space and
language investigation into contemporary French theatre by looking at how
scenography has emerged as a primary driver of dramatic worlds, particularly
in those where traditional written dramatic text is largely absent. Tackels
focuses on theatre where the scenography propels the work, hence the term
‘set writing’. His body of writing on l’écriture de plateau includes monographs
on French artists Ariane Mnouchkine and François Tanguy, as well as select
international artists, such as directors Romeo Castelluci, Rodrigo Garcia,
Anatoli Vassiliev and Pippo Delbono, whom he invites French readers to
consider in light of his theorization of scenography-­driven writing. Tackels
proposes that these set writers are doing the work of ‘deconstructing’ the
work of the previous century of theatre.7 The implications of his proposal are
that, by extension, l’écriture de plateau challenges the rigid and omnipresent
institutional categories which have long dominated and divided French
theatre practice. His framework, then, is not just a theory, but a challenge to
the staid institutions that continue to govern French theatre practice.
French theatre translator and director Anne Monfort’s recent writing
about l’écriture de plateau further expands the category of the postdramatic.
In her 2009 essay, the title of which can be translated as ‘After the postdramatic:
narration and fiction between set writing and neo-­dramatic theatre’, Monfort
juxtaposes Tackels’ l’écriture de plateau against ‘neo-­dramatic theatre’ as one
of ‘two major orientations on the European scene that can be seen as the
legacy of post-­drama theatre’. In dialogue with Lehmann’s work, Monfort
proposes that l’écriture de plateau:

places the notion of writing (not exclusively textual) at the centre of the
creative process; this type of writing uses basic forms that can be plastic,
choreographic or transdisciplinary. Writing, and possibly narration, is
taken on by the staging in the broad sense, that is to say, by all the media
constituting the spectacle. On the other hand, the notion of ‘neo-­
dramatic theatre’ refers to a theatricality in which text, characters and
fiction remain the basis of stage work, even if the text is deconstructed,
character is dislocated and the fiction put in question.8

Monfort writes from the perspective of having created and carried through
productions from initial idea to closing strike. From this vantage, she
150 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

highlights how writing – whether textual or choreographic – is not just

product, but also an active and extended process. She ties her comment about
‘creative process’ to a variety of options for how work is made – via plastic
arts or choreography, for example. Monfort identifies l’écriture de plateau
as more than just an aesthetic category, but also as an embodied manner
of making work. For Monfort, l’écriture de plateau is not just a part of
postdramatic theatre, it is the ‘heir’ – the continuer of the legacy – of the
postdramatic.9
Monfort’s observations lead me to my argument in this essay, that
Lehmann’s term ‘postdramatic theatre’ describes a fixed object or category,
while Tackels’ concept of ‘set writing’ describes an action of creation. In this
way, ‘set writing’ invites a reconsideration of the category of the postdramatic.
Through ‘set writing’, critics and scholars encounter a new framework not just
of aesthetics and onstage product, but also the way in which the work was
created. ‘Set writing’ is a shift, to draw on Bachelard’s example above, from an
analysis of the house as an ‘inert box’ to one that can be viewed through the
experience of having inhabited it. I propose that l’écriture de plateau extends
Lehmann’s ideas to recognize and include the creative process and thus offers
a new way of thinking about postdramatic theatre.
Philippe Quesne, Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort, all of whom live
and work in France, are expanding the parameters of twenty-­first-century
French theatre through their set writing projects. Their works offer clear
examples of ‘set writing’ and invite new considerations of what the
postdramatic is and can be. The work of Quesne, Goerger and Defoort shows
how l’écriture de plateau encompasses not just product, but creation methods
as well. While Quesne, Goerger and Defoort have numerous examples of
works that could be analysed in terms of the postdramatic and l’écriture de
plateau, in Quesne’s La mélancolie des dragons and Goerger and Defoort’s
Germinal the onstage performance at the centre of each work highlights
the offstage pre-­performance creation methods. Quesne, Goerger and
Defoort’s projects are about innovating both the onstage product as well
as the way in which the works are made. In the worlds that Quesne, Goerger
and Defoort craft on stage in their productions, they enact the discovery,
collaboration and the physical construction and assembly of objects
that typically happen offstage, before the final stage product is presented.
From the initial idea to the collaborative work with a team to make
spectacle, these metatheatrical productions stage and draw attention to
the very process of making theatre. In this way, these productions
exemplify current theories of l’écriture de plateau and shed new light on the
postdramatic.
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 151

Philippe Quesne Stages Artistic Process and Wonder

Philippe Quesne’s creation process exemplifies how l’écriture de plateau is
both part of the postdramatic and also extends Lehmann’s concept. In
conventional theatre-­creation methods – those taught and practiced as
standard in most graduate training programs and professional theatres in
France, Canada, the UK and the US – the written dramatic text comes first,
as scenographers and various designers craft designs in response to the
written words. In the work of Quesne, by contrast, a strong singular image
propels the entire endeavour. In my interview with Quesne about La
mélancolie des dragons, he reported that the starting point for the production
consisted of the central images and the title:

The first idea was to talk about knights and to situate the piece in the
Middle Ages. And the question was, what are the quests today? Who are
the knights and dragons today? What dragons are in villages that we go
in and destroy? This is evident in La mélancolie with the car on stage, and
the group of knights (heavy rockers) inside the car. So the birth of this
project was the idea of the car, the group of knights in the car and Isabelle
entering into it. It’s St. George and the Dragon. Then I bought these wigs
for the actors. They became hard rockers.10

Quesne started La mélancolie with the specific image of knights, an association

with a particular time period and the idea of a real car on a proscenium stage.
Quesne’s postdramatic process is marked by his studies in visual arts and
scenography, his refutation of theatre conservatory training as a prerequisite
for making professional performance, and his obsession with making
painstakingly detailed life-­size stage terrariums in which to pose sprawling
philosophical questions. In both his onstage compositions and his offstage
reimaginings of the material conditions of making stage work, Quesne shakes
up convention. He came to theatre through work in exhibition design, music
videos, audiovisual projections for events and set design for opera. His
ongoing projects blend his ruminations and experiences into large-­scale
performances composed of film, digital media, theatre and visual arts. His
particular eye for detail marks his stage worlds, so much so that his
productions look like large-­scale museum display cases. When Quesne
started his company in 2003 as a way to engage in interdisciplinary research
about art and life, he christened it Vivarium Studio. In a 2007 interview with
Tom Sellar in Theater, Quesne reflected on his audiences: ‘You watch as if you
were looking into a vivarium – like a living aquarium, with humans instead
152 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

of insects. The public becomes voyeurs into the process of art making, seeing
artists like little animals’.11 Quesne’s statement underscores his desire for his
audiences to actively see artistic process. The name of Quesne’s company
reflects the ways that, in his art practice, he creates enclosed worlds where
human bodies and objects meet, and into which he invites others to look.
In La mélancolie des dragons, Quesne amplifies the sense of voyeurism by
putting on stage as a central figure Isabelle, through whom the audience
members see the entire onstage world and watch artistic creation unfold.
Instead of obscuring what Maaike Bleeker calls the ‘visuality in the theatre’ –
as is typical of dramatic theatre – the figure of Isabelle draws attention to the
audience member’s complicity in attending to the stage world. Through
Isabelle, the audience members of La mélancolie discover real time stage
tricks and innovations. Audiences first see Isabelle shortly after the pro­
duction’s opening. A tiny woman in a blue parka, she arrives through the
spindly trees on the vast and snowy forest set with her bicycle, observes the
onstage music-­blaring Volkswagen Rabbit full of male rock musicians, and
crosses to the driver’s window to peer at the quartet inside. One by one, the
men exit the car. Then three more men, previously unseen, emerge from the
trailer. All greet Isabelle with French bises – which takes considerable time for
the seven men, with two-­cheek kisses each. After one man opens the vehicle
hood, he gestures helplessly at the inside of the car and implores Isabelle with
a begging look. Recognizing his request for help, she peers closely at the
smoking engine. She then speaks the first words, nearly a quarter of an hour
after the production began: ‘No.’ With Isabelle’s arrival on the scene, the
situation becomes clear: the septet is stranded in the middle of nowhere with
their vehicle having broken down, and they have called their friend for help.
Through Isabelle, Quesne sets up the convention of what Elinor Fuchs
calls the ‘single, perspectival “point” ’ in order to subvert the idea of the central
human character as focus of the production.12 Isabelle stands as a proxy for
those viewing La mélancolie. She becomes the lens through which Quesne’s
world is seen. Her back is frequently to the audience; instead of focusing on
her facial expressions and wondering about her own experience, the audience
is invited to experience awe as they observe the onstage landscape through
Isabelle’s eyes. Quesne observes: ‘Isabelle is really another object in the show.
It’s as if the spectator has a remote control and directs Isabelle around to
investigate the stage.’ This experience is created through her repeated
questions and moving through the space. After diagnosing the car engine as
kaput, Isabelle wanders toward the trailer. ‘What is this?’ she asks. ‘This here?
It’s a trailer’, responds one of the men. ‘It’s the first attraction of the park, the
mobile park, the touring park.’ ‘A stage?’ she asks, ‘No, it’s not really a stage, it’s
an installation.’ A quartet removes the trailer’s side panel, revealing seven
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 153

rock star wigs dangling from wires. In the trailer they turn on a red light, a fog
machine and loud metal music. Isabelle watches, her back to the audience,
her silhouette framed by the light from the trailer; the audience is invited to
watch her watching this marvellous red-­light hair museum on wheels. ‘Wow,’
Isabelle admires. Isabelle’s action of moving from wonder to wonder enacts
Quesne’s creation of La mélancolie through a series of rehearsal discoveries.
In crafting the work, he and his company devised unusual ways to play with
quotidian objects like cars, books and garbage bags. Isabelle’s marvel at every
turn stages for the audience members La mélancolie’s creation process of
revelation and discovery.
Isabelle is Isabelle Angotti, a former lawyer, a friend of Quesne’s, and a
central figure in the company’s work since Vivarium’s inception. Her casting
highlights another of Quesne’s offstage innovations that distinguishes his
work and marks his postdramatic process. Since casting his mother, a
philosophy teacher, in his first production, Quesne has always borrowed
performers from his personal life, uninterested in traditional casting practices
or acting training. What Quesne calls his ‘not much sacredness’ toward acting
and dramatic text forms just one part of the way he works; he not only turns
away from polished written text as a starting point, but also conservatory
training and disciplinary specialty. In addition to working outside of the
conventions of acting and directing training – in a country where national
conservatory training remains standard in professional theatre practice –
Quesne’s creation methods are marked by devising and improvization.
Isabelle and her seven merry friends often look like Snow White and the
Seven Dwarves as they travel around the stage in a pack, sharing great
affection as they explore and encounter the rocker men’s travelling theme
park. After the trailer is opened, all eight squeeze inside the foggy gallery. ‘It’s
a sauna also’, one of the men states, and ‘a library’, ‘you can cook’, ‘a food cart’,
‘a factory’, ‘it can be used for many things’. The men explain that this trailer is
‘the first show we present when we arrive somewhere because it is . . .
mouthwatering’. The revelation of the trailer interior surprises the audience
and is the first in a series of visual revelations that form the production’s
structure. Quesne’s wandering rocker knights have become stalled in the
forest while on tour. The objects in their truck and car are their tools for
installing pop-­up amusement parks. Their quest: to provide people with the
experience of joy and awe through low-­budget means, and with genuine
kindness and enthusiasm. Quesne’s distinct language is representative of his
larger experiment. La mélancolie’s clipped dialogue is the opposite of the
elevated, trained diction on display at the Comédie Française; performers
speak with a lilting inflection, delivering the lines in staccato bursts and with
a matter-­of-fact tone. Like the tempo of the whole event, the linguistic
154 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

landscape of Quesne’s world is spare, informal and unhurried. Quesne’s

research interests focus on how devoid of traditional French theatre hallmarks
his large scale productions can become; in his work, he employs not just
nonacting, but nontheatre language as core elements of his process and
productions.
The ultimate questions that Quesne presents on stage in La mélancolie are
the same ones that Isabelle encounters while navigating the stage during the
production: in today’s expensive, high-­tech world, what can still inspire
genuine wonder? What can create community? He poses these questions to
both the community he creates on stage, and those gathered in his audiences.
Quesne runs his experiment to answer these questions through both the
content of his productions and the way he makes them. In La mélancolie, as
the rockers show their few possessions to Isabelle, they remark that they have
everything they need in the world. They display their guitar, a projector, skis,
a bubble machine. These objects are worn. They give her a tour of their library,
which includes books about nature, dragons, philosophy and theatre theory,
as well as a children’s pop-­up book. Through these books they display for the
audience research subjects considered during the creation of this production.
At one point, the rock musicians inflate an enormous plastic bag that takes up
about one third of the stage; as they inflate and deflate it gently, the bag lilts in
an undulating dance, set to a delicate piano tune. Richard Allen remarks how
the objects function metatheatrically:

In Quesne’s theatre, subtle inter-­animations between objects, people and

contexts appear to replace dramatic structure altogether. Objects are
used to expose the nature of theatre as a machine of representation,
setting up the moments of breakdown and rupture that become the very
things we find theatrically pleasurable. This happens through their
activation within the exchange of animation.13

When six figures pick up the bag and perch it atop their extended hands,
they perform what they call ‘choreography’ for Isabelle, carrying the looming
inflatable around the stage above their heads. These men may look tough in
their torn vests, band T-shirts and leather pants, but every one of them is
enthusiastic and tender as they work together to show Isabelle the worlds
they love to create. They invite her to carry the inflatable along with them.
They jump atop the car and perform melodramatic scenes for her. They invite
her to climb a ladder, where they shower her with fog, fake snow and movie
music; this moment is her star turn in their amusement park of happiness.
Isabelle is a rapt and adoring spectator, encountering every object and
anecdote with patience and pure delight. ‘Wow’, she says repeatedly. ‘It’s
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 155

incredible.’ And it is astonishing for the seer, too, that a gigantic inflatable bag
can hold potential for so much awe. Ultimately, through Quesne’s meticulous
construction of the stage space, La mélancolie des dragons proposes that,
amidst all the detritus of contemporary life, simple human presence and
creativity hold radical potential – a proposal that is enacted through Quesne’s
work on and offstage as he redefines what it means to make twenty-­first-
century French theatre.
In Quesne’s core research that he returns to again and again in his work,
from L’Effet de Serge (2007) to Big Bang (2010), he tests out the idea that
simple pleasures, like a bubble machine or an old projector, and, most
important, people gathered in community, can provide happiness even when
we are lost. Quesne’s formula relies not on cynicism or consumerism. Through
his postdramatic process, he argues that we can construct our own amusement
parks from scratch, we can make theatre with nonactors and everyday texts,
and we can keep coming together. As Quesne puts it: ‘On stage, it’s always my
topic to talk about what as artists we can do with catastrophes, with problems
in society. I don’t want to propose solutions through the work. But we can use
the poetry and the art to try to propose new worlds. It’s a simple and big
message.’ For Quesne, the way the work is made is as important to this inquiry
as is the final product. La mélancolie des dragons affirms through its process
that our common quest – as artists, audiences, researchers, humans – is to be
and work together to experience wonder and joy.

Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort’s Real Time

World Building
Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort share with Quesne this thematic quest
to make community and to highlight creation process as part of the onstage
product. In the stage world of Germinal, they focus on staging artistic
creation, while their offstage work is marked by similar postdramatic
creation methods. Like Quesne, their work can be considered part of l’écriture
de plateau. When beginning Germinal, Goerger notes that theatre, as a form
and idea, ‘became a subject of investigation, of reflection. And that’s the very
way we work. We have new interests, and we try to make them into something
that is of interest for a larger audience. That is what drove us.’ He elaborates:
‘We wanted to build something that did not rely on the contract of what is
usually obvious between the audience and what is happening on stage.’14
Despite their lack of theatrical experience or training, theatre was the best
possible medium for Goerger and Defoort to tell the story of Germinal,
partially because of the subject matter and also because of the creation
156 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

opportunity it provided the artists. In making Germinal, and in the

ruminations presented on stage during the production, Goerger and Defoort
draw attention to the processes behind the aesthetic innovations of post­
dramatic theatre.
Germinal is, in fact, Goerger and Defoort’s first stage creation. Both are
adamant that they know nothing about theatre. These co-­creators identify
primarily as visual artists who have strong solo careers, and they have
collaborated on several largescale interactive installations, such as &&&&&
& &&& (1999) and Les Thermes (2012). ‘Our bodies are always on the
line. We love to perform, that’s where we come from,’ Goerger said in my
interview with him and Defoort. The pair formed their company L’Amicale
de Pro­duction to produce ‘artistic transversal objects, halfway between the
realms of theatre, visual and performing arts. Born in 2010, the company
defines itself as a ‘project cooperative’ trying to respond to aesthetic,
technological and economic challenges related to new forms of authorship
and aesthetics.’15 Through both the company’s composition and working
methods, Goerger and Defoort redefine conventionally taught and practiced
dramatic creation processes in contemporary French theatre.
The pair’s creative work is marked by devising, discussion and exper­
imentation – hallmarks of the postdramatic process. Goerger notes that for
him and Defoort, they work together as if they were making ceramics: ‘We
tend to spend a lot of time talking. It’s very related to psychoanalysis. We try
to make something. It’s like using a potter’s wheel. You think it’s going to be
great and the clay is going to build up and then . . . shit . . . it’s bad . . . it’s
falling. That’s the way we work.’ Defoort continues:

To go on with this awkward metaphor, at one point this clay thing tells us
how to deal with it. ‘I want to be an installation.’ So we try to become its
servant. It’s not the text first – everything is put on the same level,
including our bodies. So, basically, we ask ‘what do we want to work with?’
. . . In Germinal it was about having other people onstage besides us. We
wanted to work with actors. And so we discovered in a way directing. . . .
For Germinal it was the first time we worked as directors with actors.

They see theatre buildings too as particular sites with great potential for
working with technology. Defoort notes of Germinal: ‘So on stage, first, we
know how to think, then to speak, and so on, and to categorize, and to
progress. So quite naturally we ended up with computer tools – the most
recent ways to help us communicate.’ He continues, ‘This would be a piece
that would build itself. Everything we would need to do the thing would
come from the stage.’
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 157

Germinal opens in pitch darkness. As in La mélancolie des dragons, key to

Germinal is that the production takes place in a traditional proscenium
theatre space, and that the audience sees the onstage space open into a series
of revelations. The metatheatrical subject of artistic creation is one of the core
ideas driving the work. Germinal’s initial silence is interrupted by clunky
sounds reminiscent of an Atari joystick in motion. Lights flash, and through
the intermittent light pools two human figures emerge, each seated on the
floor and hunched over a controller. From within the opening soundscape,
Goerger and Defoort begin to visually guide the audience through the phases
of discovering the auditorium’s physical space, along with the elements that
go into mounting a stage production. As the lights come up, Goerger, Defoort
and the other two performers, Ondine Cloez and Arnaud Boulogne, are
revealed to be manipulating small light boards. As they wrench the controls,
more lights flash – from bright washes to colourful travelling gobo specials.
When the lights come up more fully, the empty stage is revealed: a large
proscenium black box with thick, dark curtains along the upstage wall, all
four people sitting on the floor working with their boards. From this earliest
moment, Germinal is rooted firmly in the recognizable world of the
conventional theatre, revealing aspects like technical equipment and the bare
stage that are not often seen by spectators. That the performers on stage are
using actual boards to manipulate lights adds to the palpable energy of
revelation; this sense of real-­time discovery is crucial to Goerger and
Defoort’s work. Just as the audience members experience La mélancolie’s
space through Isabelle’s wonder, in Germinal they see through the eyes of the
four figures on stage who are playing with the technology. When, shortly after
the opening, a red swirl zooms across the stage, performers and spectators
audibly share a sense of wonder. From the audience’s vantage point, these
opening light games look like a glimpse of a theatre technical rehearsal.
Germinal’s main preoccupation is a journey through different ways of
communication. As the four figures realize that they are the ones who can
control light, they also discover that their thoughts can be projected on the
upstage wall. The first lines of the production appear in white letters on the
black wall. Each sentence spells out the inner thoughts of someone on stage
and is located near the figure whose thought it is. No words are spoken aloud.
Goerger and Cloez exchange the following transmission of thoughts:

And what’s that?

Never tried that one.
Doesn’t seem to do much.
What’s it assigned to?
Nothing by the looks of it.
158 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

But hang on.

Hang on.
Am I the one doing the . . .
So every time I . . . .
Goerger discovers that he is the one
making the lights go.
Every time I . . .
It displays . . .
Alright, then
So I can express myself.
I can go abstract.
I can conceptualize
Ondine, look, we can transfer thoughts
outside our head.

In the world of Germinal, it is a revelation that thoughts can be made

manifest and shared, a step towards dialogue and understanding. Inverting
the Aristotelian imperative of dramatic theatre, Goerger articulates that he
and Defoort were interested in making art that was not based in conflict:
‘Drama is overrepresented in art. The dynamics of writing conflict are easy.

Figure 10.1 The four actors of Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort’s Germinal
(2013) bask in a glow of light beneath a wall of words. (Photo by Bea Rogers.)
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 159

It’s a challenge to write something that does not go in this direction without
being too hippie-­ish.’ Defoort agrees: ‘We decided to put the heat on
consensus.’ In Germinal, this ‘heat’ is generated through the four figures
collectively encountering and discovering the stage space, and then building
new both a language and a physical world. This effect is compounded by the
knowledge that, offstage, the artists making this work about discovery in the
theatre are themselves making a theatre production for the first time.
Revelations physically open up Germinal’s landscape, and, as in La
mélancolie, they form the production’s structure. In Germinal, however,
Goerger and Defoort rupture the actual confines of the stage to draw attention
to the particular way theatre works as both form and working method. When
Cloez grabs a pickaxe from the upstage wall and uses it to impale the floor,
she opens the physical boundaries of the stage to something beyond the basic
black box for the first time. In this action, and in what follows, Goerger and
Defoort make clear their core aim: to use the stage to investigate community
and draw attention to creative processes as a way of researching the world
and how humans live in it. When Cloez extracts a microphone from under
the stage floor, she helps the group gain the abilities to communicate vocally
and with amplification. As the physical space cracks open, the humans move
from just seeing each other to reading and speaking with each other. Later
they sing and, ultimately, communicate via a discovered laptop, which they
initially mistake for a ‘control manual’ for their new world: ‘But it only has two
pages!’ Cloez exclaims when opening the laptop for the first time. From the
microphone to the laptop, the tools used on stage in Germinal are the ones
used offstage as means of making the theatre production.
In the world of Germinal, language emerges as a powerful implement for
investigation and analysis. The language is conversational and casual, but also
technical and specific. As the group discovers and gathers tools for world-­
building, they begin – in a sort of onstage production meeting – to categorize
their discoveries. Cloez asks the others: ‘What were the other communication
modes we had before?’ Goerger responds: ‘Surtitles, phonation, phonatory
transfer and clip-­on mics.’ They project these words onto the upstage wall.
Discovering an impulse to create order, Defoort exclaims: ‘Hey, I know. Let’s
make a big list. A list of everything.’ After enumerating the communication
forms they’ve used so far, the quartet writes down everything else in their
world: ‘Hole, pickaxe, cable, floor, mixing deck, Halory, Antoine, Ondine,
rubble, Arnaud, ambiance, idea, heap, hand-­holding, corner. . .’ When Defoort
asks them to circle up and join hands, they continue the list: ‘Cheerfulness,
insistence, conspiracy,’ and, when Boulogne does not follow suit,‘stubbornness.’
As the wall grows too full, the group subdivides the list. Here, Germinal
highlights the human impulse to categorize; what follows takes that impulse
160 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

to an absurd level as the group arranges and rearranges the categories,

changing labels and shuffling things so that the words jump around on the
upstage wall. Soon everything is divided into things that go ‘poc poc’ and
things that do not go ‘poc poc’ – ‘poc poc’ being the sound made when a
microphone hits an object. When the ability to go ‘poc poc’ is determined by
hitting things, Goerger asks whether ‘the joy of being together’ counts. After
Defoort tries to tap the microphone on the air in between the group, he
determines: ‘Not poc poc.’ In Germinal, the division of the world into ‘poc
poc’ and ‘not poc poc’ makes perfect sense, and at the same time is a deeply
funny mediation on the simultaneous delights and drawbacks that language
offers humans in their efforts to communicate. In this way, Goerger and
Defoort’s language echoes that of earlier theatre artists Eugène Ionesco,
Samuel Beckett, Suzan-Lori Parks and Tom Stoppard.
Germinal enacts the discoveries that form the core of creating a theatre
production. The performers start with an empty black box, discover a shared
language, gather and use tools, make lists, experience conflict and, at the end,
sit back and bask in what they’ve made. At Germinal’s end, the quartet sits in
a glowing pool of haunting light and styrofoam packing peanuts, all the
words of the evening projected on the wall above them, a retrospective of the
previous ninety minutes. ‘Thanks to a little ritual. We think we managed to
create a series of events. Answering to coherence criteria regarding space
and time,’ the four sing, finding melody and grace in clipped and formal
language. The harmony invites an awareness of time and linear progression
within this large looming stage world. As Germinal’s structure barrels towards
its conclusion, the pool is lit blue and then white. A wash of light engulfs the
stage, then funnels down around the pool as ‘End’ comes up over the actors’
heads. Out of darkness and nothingness, this lush moment of coming
together emerges after a detailed exploration of how and why we connect and
make art in and outside the theatre. Germinal proposes that direct
communication and innovation are the keys to creation, that theatre spaces
offer powerful language and tools for community, and that all of us have the
capacity to build both new ways of communicating and new worlds out of
our immediate surroundings.

The Postdramatic Process

Goerger, Defoort and Quesne share a deep interest in theatre making as a way
of making work, and, through their productions, they stage questions about
aesthetics and form. They join the loose grouping of artists including Joël
Pommerat, Xavier Le Roy and Jérôme Bel who work within the paradigm of
 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre 161

l’écriture de plateau. Although this assembly is distinctly multidisciplinary

and draws from visual arts, performance, theatre and dance as creation tools,
they are united by a shared questioning of conventional training and formal
dictates. Quesne notes: ‘Finally, it’s a bigger family, of these kinds of artists,
now in France.’ He credits the dance artists for not only the new aesthetic on
stage, but also leading the new way of making work: ‘The choreographers in
France, like Bel, came up with this nondance form, and not only the form but
a new way of producing.’ As the work has changed and the family of artists
grown, financial support for them has transformed too. Many of the younger
directors are now taking over France’s national theatres, and Quesne himself
is the current co-­artistic director of Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, one of
France’s prestigious national dramatic centres. Quesne notes: ‘My aesthetic is
what it is because I had no support.’ The écriture de plateau artists have moved
as a group from the fringe to the mainstage, taking their aesthetic and
creation innovations with them. In Quesne’s case, this means that the
celebrated co-­director of a prestigious national dramatic centre not only
works with untrained actors and without a script, but himself does not have
conservatory training in theatre. For these reasons alone, he is challenging
what it means to create theatre on the French national stage. His work, like
Goerger and Defoort’s, does not just break with aesthetic and formal dramatic
tradition, but with accepted creation processes.
There is thus a hopeful and political promise at the heart of both La
mélancolie des dragons and Germinal in terms of the onstage worlds and the
offstage creation processes. Quesne, Goerger and Defoort’s on and offstage
organizations of their companies and their productions extend and innovate;
they create new power circulations and ways of making performance within
French theatre institutions. They open up access to theatre-­making on a
grand international scale, and also on a French national level, to artists to
whom these levels have long been inaccessible. They make possible new
working methods that are not dependent on a particular set of qualifications
or adherence to traditions. Quesne spoke of his early observations of French
theatre-­making methods:

When I was a set designer, I worked with directors who followed a

restrictive traditional method: choosing the text, choosing the actors and
then bringing the set designer along as a partner who would then help to
define the aesthetic. I stopped everything to work on this production,
without any guaranteed commission or grant. I just started doing it
without making official arrangements within the French cultural system.
I began by composing little objects and scenes. At first I think there was
only one actor, and finally there were ten people onstage.16
162 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

In a country where students are rigidly tracked into professions before

high school, and performing arts workers come through regimented
conservatory training, Quesne’s upheaval and his ascent to the co-­artistic
direction of one of the country’s prestigious dramatic centres signals a
decisive rupture. In their inversion of conventional French theatre training
and creation methods, Vivarium Studio and L’Amicale de Production propose
and impose new orders.
In this way, these artists’ creation processes and onstage productions
signal a larger stakes conversation in twenty-­first-century French theatre. The
stakes of the postdramatic extend outside the theatre into the politics of how
the works are made. As Ric Knowles notes, this is not just about offstage
creation methods, but also about the ways that institutions are structured in
terms of hiring and support. A significant progression of the French
postdramatic theatre – one that is evident through an analysis of l’écriture de
plateau – is that of the artists working outside of conventional theatre training
moving into high profile, professional, internationally-­touring theatre and
performance spheres. This development – in and outside of France –
destabilizes traditions of who does and does not have access to making
theatre, and who is invited into what lineage and histories. And yet, in France,
postdramatic theatre remains, like French dramatic theatre, a form dominated
almost exclusively by white men. The postdramatic shift in French theatre
holds a tremendous amount of radical potentiality, but little has yet happened
on an institutional level to dismantle white male supremacy of French theatre.
Through its acknowledgement of offstage process, set writing highlights the
room that exists to further destabilize and open French theatre, and to carry
it forward from tradition. The trajectories of Quesne, Goerger and Defoort
indicate room for possibility. This is necessary work, and their accom­
plishments so far are a beginning.
 11

Choreography:
Performative Dance Histories
Yvonne Hardt

Dance plays a crucial role in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic

theatre: one could even say that dance epitomizes some of the main
characteristics of postdramatic theatre, such as the absence of clear
signification and the importance of the body, especially in its ‘interactions’
and sensuality that make it an ‘agent provocateur’.1 Yet, even as Lehmann cites
several dance protagonists as key referents for this new form of theatre, he
mostly discusses dance under the category of the ‘body’, or, what he calls
(relying on Giorgio Agamben) ‘pure gesture’.2 Dance, conceived as such,
embodies a potentiality for Lehmann. A similar understanding of the body,
especially with regard to states of transgression, bodily becomings and de-­
figurations – which cannot be simply semantically captured – has been
significant in refiguring dance studies since the end of the 1990s.3 However,
these studies, which focused on a phenomenon using the contested term
‘concept dance’, also foregrounded other aspects of dance that are less present
in Lehmann’s work, even though they would fit perfectly under his analytical
umbrella; these include the (self-)reflective potential of dance, its challenges
to concepts of knowledge, a critical impetus towards the modalities of
(re)presentation and dance institutions, the inclusion of media or reflection
of mediality, as well as new forms of narration and dramaturgy in
contemporary dance.4 The absence of concept dance in Lehmann’s work
might be due to the fact that this phenomenon only gained prominence
at the end of the 1990s as Lehmann was publishing his book. Artists
like Jérôme Bel, Eszter Salamon, Xavier le Roy, Isabell Schad, Mette
Ingvartsen, Martin Nachbar, Vera Mantero and many more have exposed
and researched the mechanisms of creating, performing and reflecting
dance both with regard to the physicalities of bodies as well as their absences.
Like no other dance form, this development has inspired the rise and
(institutional) establishment of dance studies in the German and European
context.5
164 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

By taking a phenomenon like concept dance as a central focus, this new

dance studies discourse was able to develop and test a specific theoretical
framework that Constanze Schellow has identified in her recent genealogical
analysis of the dance studies field Diskurs-Choreographien (Discourse
Choreographies) as the productiveness of ‘no’.6 According to Schellow,
establishing aspects of ‘absence’, ‘still-­act’ or ‘withholding’ as central
characteristics for this new dance practice allowed critical dance scholars a
double manoeuvre: it not only legitimized and gave authority to this ‘new’ or
‘unconventional’ understanding of dance and its accompanying scholarship,
but it provided a point for dance studies to break from the theatre studies
discourse in Germany that was shaped by Lehmann and Erika Fischer-
Lichte’s work on the performative turn. Resisting notions of ‘presence’ or
‘realness’ as a central phenomenon through categories of ‘still-­act’, ‘absence’,
and ‘withholding’, dance scholars carved out a different theoretical approach
that aligned dance studies – as Schellow and also Susan Manning and Lucia
Ruprecht have pointed out in their anthology New German Dance Studies –
to a more philosophical approach.7 This strategic positioning of dance studies
is embedded in the disciplinary conflict that Kate Elswit has identified as
being marked by the hegemonic tendencies of theatre (studies) to subsume
other practices – especially dance.8 Accordingly, there have been only a
few studies in dance studies that actively draw on Lehmann or the term
postdramatic.9 As Elswit points out, this may have something to do with the
fact that since modernity dance was already identified as having postdramatic
characteristics; dance, in other words, has never been ‘conventionally’
dramatic.10 Thus, I would argue that how one speaks of certain phenomena of
dance or postdramatic theatre depends on the strategic positions one takes
both within the field and the academic discourse more broadly. With this
said, my aim in this essay is not to widen the definition of the term
postdramatic theatre; nor do I ponder questions directly about the relation
between dance and (postdramatic) theatre. Instead, I do two things: first,
I will make active use of some of Lehmann’s central notions – specifically the
use of narration, the potential of self-­reflection and institutional power – as
an analytical lens for researching dance forms that work to destabilize
conventional borders of the field. Second, I would like to further deconstruct
the binaries of discourse and body, making-­sense and sensuality, which
surface not only within Lehmann’s schematic differentiation of dramatic and
postdramatic theatre, but also in a tendency of dance studies that understands
the body as a site of permanent becoming and resistance (e.g. to classical
concepts of knowing and representing). The focus on how productions and
bodies are made to appear through the use of narration and media, how
different forms of bodily practice overlay each other, and how dances are
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 165

embedded and work with forms of reflection, can render a more complex
scenario that resists clear categorizations. I will focus on performances from
within this extensive field of conceptually driven dance that critically
appropriate and work with their self-­understanding of dance history on
stage, or what I have called elsewhere a ‘performative history of dance’.11

Performing Dance History and the Dance Studies Field

The past two decades of European contemporary dance has been marked by
a remarkable interest in (re)construction and (re)enactment. Jérôme Bel’s
Véronique Doisneau, Martin Nachbar’s Urheben Aufheben (Undertaking
Uptaking), Boris Charmatz’s idea of a centre for choreography as a museum,
Fabián Barba’s imaginative (re)construction of a full evening of work by
Mary Wigman, and Olga de Soto’s performances based on interviews
with those who watched dances decades earlier – all are exemplary of the
(re)appropriation of dance history from a critical standpoint.12 Moreover,
this development has considerably broadened the spectrum of what
(re)construction or (re)enactment encompasses. Working with the past is no
longer considered a field for highly specialized dance historians trying to
reconstruct old dances based on rare and fragmentary archival sources with
the aim of rendering performed dance histories as close as possible to an
ostensible original. Instead, the recognition that presenting the past on stage
will never be possible has allowed artists and scholars alike to foreground
both the critical potential of (re)construction and artistic acts implied in
this process.13 While these performances expose different modes of taking
up historical dance references, they all engage a concept of history that
understands itself as a construction based on the needs of the present.14 As
such, this artistic practice can be placed within a context where theatre and
the arts more generally have worked to explore what can be considered ‘the
production of historicity’, contributing to a wider academic discourse that
brings the understanding of memory and history into motion.15
In this context, (re)construction has been perceived as an ideal field
for combining the seemingly incompatible realms of academic and artistic
practice.16 In both scholarship and art, the past is no longer conceptualized as
something static to be retrieved from the archives; instead, the process of
remembering in itself is considered a performative process,‘which establishes,
stages, restages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously
creating new models and media of commemorating’.17 It is no surprise, then,
that this form of ‘performative history’ has been of interest to critical
scholarship in dance studies over the last decade.18 In Germany, research on
166 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

critical forms for dealing with the past on stage has become pivotal in
developing the discipline of dance studies, as scholars draw on tropes
and discourses that are crucial for investigating the so-­called conceptual
dance scene more generally. In Diskurs-Choreographien, Schellow pointedly
described this as being marked by the ‘no’ – practices that are distinguished
by notions of withholding, standing still or absence.19 I propose that this
paradigmatic framing of the field has also carried over into the study of how
the past is dealt with in dance performance, namely in the focus on the
critical potentials of inherent failure, difference, diversion and transgression
that these performances present in relation to the past. Krassimira Krushova
is exemplary in this regard, as she claims that (re)enactments should be
understood as a kind of reading ‘again and against’ (wieder und wider).20
While there is – ever since Mark Franko’s pivotal essay on repeatability21
– a shared understanding that one should talk about constructions rather
than reconstructions, little academic attention has been paid to the
construction processes of performative histories like these. Yet focusing on
the productive part of ‘doing history’ may help demonstrate the link between
performative dance history and critical historiography even more, not only
in the sense that the past is always implicated in or the product of the present,
or that different histories exist simultaneously,22 but in understanding the
importance of narration and materiality in authenticating and legitimizing
both historical and artistic research. Moreover, this allows for questioning
of the epistemological implications and categories that postdramatic theatre
has for dance, especially when theatre scholars conceptualize dance primarily
as ‘pure gesture’. My focus in this essay on plots, processes of physical
appropriation and (de)learning, and inherent structures of power and
authentication not only will emphasize the critical potential of a highly self-­
reflective dance practice, but will also challenge the divide between narration
and sensuality, and de-­mystify the essentializing assumptions that underpin
some theories of the performative in regard to the body.23 Last but not least,
by asking how the critical potential of bodies and plots are made to appear,
this chapter focuses attention on the political, ethical and institutional
questions entailed when working with the past – which Lehmann sees as a
crucial aspect in defining postdramatic theatre. Despite – or because of – its
critical impulse,24 the development of this approach to performing the past
has become institutionalized through festivals, conferences and funding
institutions that support such endeavours. For instance, the Tanzfond Erbe
(Dance Heritage Fund) is one of only two federal subsidy programmes for
dance in Germany, and it explicitly provides support both to state theatres
and smaller projects for archiving or reflecting on the modern dance heritage
of the twentieth century.25 This raises several key questions: How do these
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 167

institutions focused on exposure, funding and research help to establish

new canons, deciding what to include and exclude? How do they interact
with the chosen materials, including the performance and the critical
discourse that surrounds and legitimizes this practice of performing history
in dance? Although the answers to such questions are beyond the scope of
this essay, I do try to address them by analysing the wider implications
of three performances: Jérôme Bel’s Véronique Doisneau (2004), Martin
Nachbar’s Urheben Aufheben (1999–2008) and Eszter Salamon’s Magyar
Táncok (Hungarian Dance, 2004). These performances may stand in for the
wide range of this field and are also acknowledged as central players in this
approach to working with dance history. They allow me to focus specifically
on how narration, materiality and media each expose, in very different ways,
(historical) strategies for authenticating how to ‘work’ with the past. Moreover,
conceptualizing this dominant trend in dance (not only in regard to these
categories) will reveal how dance is a complex domain in the field of
postdramatic theatre, one that extends far beyond how Lehmann and others
have reduced it to simply the potentiality of bodies or of ‘pure gesture’.

Recontexualizing and Emotional Narration

as Strategies for Reflection: Jérôme Bel’s
Véronique Doisneau
Jérôme Bel is considered one of the most important players in the
contemporary European dance and performance scene. While once called an
enfant terrible of the scene as his work refused classical notions of dance
and virtuosity, Bel has become an established figure working in varying
institutional contexts and with different artists whose ‘personal’ dance
histories he stages in cooperation with them. The first of these artist portraits
was with Véronique Doisneau of the Paris Opera.26 This piece can be
understood in terms of an ethnographic look at Western dance, as Bel
foregrounds and de-­constructs – with the help of Doisneau – ballet’s
representational codes and hierarchical mechanisms. Bel said that entering
the Paris Opera was like entering a new world, in which everybody worked
according to mysterious codes he could not decipher. To achieve his critical
reading of ballet, Bel deployed devices from previous pieces in which
Doisneau had performed – many marked by her own absence of movement
as an ensemble member – and to which he added narration.
Véronique Doisneau recounts Doisneau’s story as a dancer at the Paris
Opera. She informs her audience that she is forty-­two years old and will soon
168 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

be retiring from the Opera. Doisneau opens up about herself to the audience
by revealing the choreographers she likes, including George Balanchine and
Jerome Robbins, those she dislikes, including Maurice Béjart, and those from
whom she has learned a lot, including Merce Cunningham. While Doisneau
begins the piece standing alone on the huge stage, she eventually alternates
between talking and demonstrating, or sometimes doing both simultaneously.
In this way, an audience that otherwise might have been unable to recognize
La Bayadère by Marius Petipa or Points in Space by Cunningham gains an
impression of these choreographies. Doisneau tells of her preferences for
certain roles like Giselle, which she was not allowed to perform because of
her status as a sujet. Being a sujet, she explains, means being situated in the
ballet hierarchy between etoile, the star or prima ballerina, and the corps de
ballet, the mass of dancers. Her status gave her the opportunity to dance small
solo parts, but also restricted her in many sequences to the corps. Doisneau
draws attention to her voice as audiences hear her being out of breath while
simultaneously talking, moving on point and dancing routines that demand
virtuosity. The performance looks like ballet, but one that informs the
audience about its history and working structures.
In the most striking and emotionally evocative scene, Doisneau performs
the role of a swan in the corps de ballet of Swan Lake, in which she remains
still for most of the time, only occasionally changing position. Before the
demonstration, Doisneau explains that although she considers these some of
the most beautiful scenes in all of ballet, at times she feels compelled to
scream when dancing a part of the famous second act. Despite its beauty, the
passage is ‘torture’ for performers in the corps. And in the performance that
follows, this becomes emphatically clear for the audience. While Doisneau
stands still on the Paris Opera’s massive stage, Tschaikovsky’s emotionally
charged score mounts to a climax. Conventionally, audience attention would
be directed towards the etoile dancing centre stage while framed by the
thirty-­two swans of the corps. Doisneau’s stillness, turned with her back to
the audience, one leg crossed behind the other, and arms neatly folded, plays
with the audience’s memory since it is very likely that they can imagine how
the spectacle of Swan Lake would normally look. The past is evoked as an
imaginary, as a backdrop that is not present, but which informs the perception
of the present. Even if one has never seen Swan Lake as a conventional
production, the audience probably has an image of ballet that is not
characterized by the immobility that Doisneau performs. This scene exposes
not only how much ‘not dancing’ is part of classical dance, but also the
hierarchies involved in that structure, which align mobility both literally
and symbolically with those on the higher levels of the hierarchy. It also
highlights the difference between perception and production. Citing and
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 169

de-­contextualizing repertoire leads an audience to reflect on how ballet

is produced in hierarchical structures. The sequence also changes the
ostensible ‘original’ for audiences who may no longer be able to look at it in
the same way as before. Following the anthropologist Nelson Goodmann,
who has extensively discussed quotation as a wider cultural practice, a
re-­contextualization like this can be understood as a ‘double reorganization’,
as the new version not only gives a different meaning to the quoted dance
material, but also changes how we see the original.27 What once might have
looked like a kinesthetically interesting group dance can no longer be viewed
so simply, but is troubled by an awareness of the hierarchies and immobility
inscribed within it.
The citation process is embedded in a double strategy wherein narration is
both crucial for establishing the framing of the quoted scene and for evoking
sympathy and understanding toward Doisneau. This is a rather classical
storyline, one that draws the audience into having revelations through
empathic involvement. If an audience member does not identify with
Doisneau, they might just be annoyed or find the performance boring.
Intellectual revelation in this case is tightly linked to the emotional, not as
something that is embodied or expressed, but as something produced through
the dramaturgical set-up that strives to draw us intimately to Doisneau.
This importance of emotionality for prompting reflection and as part
of the choreographic strategy challenges the understanding of conceptually
driven dance as breaking with emotional identification by compelling
audiences to reflect on their own viewing. Questioning representational
codes and deconstructing classical narration belong to an attack on illusionist
or dramatic theatre. Véronique Doisneau, however – as with most of Bel’s
more entertaining pieces – stimulates reflection by involving both emotion
and narration (a strategy Bertolt Brecht had already explored in his writings
on epic theatre and his calls for entertainment as the basis for intellectual
insight and stirring the audience to social protest).
The specific use of narration in Véronique Doisneau tackles yet another
element of representation: the dichotomy between fiction and reality. The
emotional strategy in narration does more than make us identify with and
reflect on Doisneau, as it is also embedded within fictional traditions of
theatre. As such, it raises the following questions: To what extent is Doisneau’s
story true? Is this a lecture? Do I learn something about Doisneau and the
mechanisms of ballet and the Paris Opera? Who has chosen the examples
that Doisneau performs and how did they knit together? These are not
questions we necessarily anticipate when we go to a conventional theatre
performance or attend a lecture. While Véronique Doisneau could be aligned
with other performance contexts, such as postdramatic theatre and its
170 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

emphasis on ‘realness’ or the ‘expert’ performing herself on stage, the

piece also exposes – in its highly formalistic and reduced performative
approach – how these characteristics are the product of a mise en scène. As
such, the performance reflects on narration and the border between fiction
and reality, especially as it relates to a broader rethinking of memory and
culture. Mieke Bal, for instance, understands the dissolving boundaries
between fiction and reality as an essential project of cultural analysis.28
And along similar lines, Hayden White has re-­shaped the understanding of
historical writing and the relevance of narration for it.
In his groundbreaking book The Content of Form, White exposed how
narration is part of a political foundation for history that not only allows for
historicity to appear, but which is also the compositional device that links
single events to a structure. This is a structure and a symbolic meaning that
is not possible without a subject and which has a social law as the point of
reference at its core. As such, narration is bound up in a double strategy:

Precisely insofar as the historical narrative endows sets of real events

with the kinds of meaning found otherwise only in myth and literature,
we are justified in regarding it as a product of allegoresis. Therefore,
rather than regard every historical narrative as mythic or ideological in
nature, we should regard it as allegorical, that is, as saying one thing and
meaning another.29

Just as White is able to demonstrate the potential of the imaginary aspects of

narration for the construction of history and for making meaning, the artists
I study offer a chance to understand White’s concepts while also taking up
the challenge to reflect on the function of narration on stage. Moreover,
performances like Véronique Doisneau provide a performative understanding
of these concepts of narration, which are the basis of my analytical lens for
conceptualizing a performative aesthetic of memory. What, then, are the
multiple uses and functions of narration in these performances, and how
do they bring about specific points of view and sensations of the body
(as historic)?

Narrating the Expert and Failure: Martin Nachbar’s

Urheben Aufheben
Martin Nachbar’s Urheben Aufheben has become an exemplary site in the field
for a critical investigation into the possibilities of (re)construction; moreover, it
demonstrates how dance artists actively rework narrative strategies while
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 171

developing their pieces.30 Nachbar, a Berlin-­based contemporary choreographer

who trained mostly in release-­based techniques at the School for New Dance
Development in Amsterdam, has been working to appropriate Dore Hoyer’s
dance cycle Affectos Humanos (Human Affections, 1962) since 1999. Dore
Hoyer (1911–1967) belonged to the second generation of German expressionist
dancers. Although originally influenced by the first wave of modern dance in
Germany, having been taught by Gret Palucca and Mary Wigman, Hoyer also
broke new ground. Her highly technical and abstract movement compositions
set her apart from the empathetic and ecstatic work of Wigman, for whose
company she danced. Hoyer’s interest in the precise formal structures of the
dances inspired Nachbar to work with material of hers that was professionally
filmed by public television in 1962. This footage has secured lasting interest in
and life for Affectos Humanos in various reconstructions, most prominently
in the version by Susanne Linke, which she produced to commemorate the
twentieth anniversary of Hoyer’s death.
From the start, Nachbar was interested in exploring what happens when
he worked with movements generated by someone who comes from a
different tradition and is of a different gender. As he proclaimed in a lecture-­
performance framing the first versions of his appropriation: ‘Such a type of
re-­enactment is, according to Elisabeth Grosz, never a reproduction of the
same thing, but a driving force for something new.’31 By working with a video,
Nachbar perceived himself as creating the copy of a copy.
However, to be granted permission to use and perform the dances,
Nachbar had to get in touch with those who held the rights to the dances, the
German Dance Archive and Waltraud Luley. Nachbar embarked first on
studying three of the dances – Eitelkeit (Vanity), Hass (Hatred) and Angst
(Fear) – with Luley. It was the attempt to work with the material as precisely
as possible that allowed for difference to appear. Nachbar’s failure to reproduce
in detail the exact physical challenges posed by the tense, virtuosic and dense
movements in Affectos Humanos when learning the dances hardly precluded
him from gaining insights and revelations, which he shared with audiences in
the lecture-­presentation, the first form that Urheben Aufheben took. In this,
Nachbar frames his performing of the dances by explaining the working
process and showing videos, both of Hoyer’s video version of Hass as well as
his own rehearsals of the piece.
In Nachbar’s narration, which includes not only stage and video work, but
also accompanying publications, Luley’s contributions take on an important
position. According to Nachbar, the following happened when he showed
Luley his version of Hass for the first time. The dance recorded on the video
of Hoyer begins by showing bent fingers and clenched hands, one of them
moving rapidly up while the other moves down, as the elbows are tightly
172 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

arrested to the torso. At first when working with Luley, Nachbar executed this
movement in a rather relaxed, almost ungainly fashion, at which point Luley
started attacking him verbally, shouting: ‘Mr. Nachbar this is hatred! The
whole body is in tension!’32 This marked the beginning of a work process in
which Nachbar attempted to embody every detail of the choreography, from
the movements of his little finger to holding his head in a specific manner. It
is such small details that Nachbar points out when he says Hoyer focused
energy and movements on very specific areas of her body. It is this complete
commitment demanded by Luley that is required by anyone who wants to
learn this material. Those who think it doesn’t look that difficult and believe
that ‘they can do it, too’ are, in her opinion, not motivated enough.33
Here very different perspectives are juxtaposed through the potential of
working with different narrational forms. There is the form of the lecture
performance, which frames the event as a process and points to the material’s
historicity and the impossibility of its ‘true’ restaging. As such, the lecture
performance is a site of critical distance and self-­reflection. There is also the
story of Luley, which serves a double function. Luley stands in for a history
that demands careful attention to the specificity of the ‘original’, which is
opposed to Nachbar’s more open and reflective approach. On the one hand,
including both voices gives credit to different perspectives on history – it
allows a more positivistic understanding of reconstruction within the piece
that departs from the performer’s perspective. On the other hand, including
Luley in this way functions also as a form of authentication, as the ‘expert’ is
integrated with their status as an expert put front and centre. It adds a
humorous element to the narration, albeit one that sidesteps the fact that
‘expert narration’ is a constant topic and problematic for many (re)enactments
in the dance scene.34 Common to many of the (re)enactments that have
become iconic is the use of an expert’s narration.
This trend to include ‘experts’ is also fostered by the application criteria of
the Dance Heritage Fund that supports many of these projects. The Dance
Heritage Fund explicitly grants money for experts and also insists on
‘copyright’ for dance works – categories that are often in tension with the very
project proposals themselves. Such criteria foster a sense that dance history is
best transmitted by those who have practiced it. This has led to a tendency in
which the inclusion of an expert attests to the seriousness of the artist’s
investigation. There exists, then, the simultaneously different historiographical
understandings and practices of (re)enactment both within the field and also
even within individual performances or projects. To point to the contradiction
in these narrative strategies is not meant to devalue these works, but rather to
encourage a more complicated perception of them and to focus attention on
how sources and their narrational framing might tell a different story than
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 173

the overarching critical narration provided by the artists and scholars

reflecting on them suggests.
As such, this coexistence of different historical narrations is bound to
different notions of authenticating and institutionalizing historical memory.
Thus, by focusing on academic reflections on the critical aspects and alternative
understandings of history that are proposed by these performances, one
might also consider how including multiple narrations, their contradictions
and their entanglement with institutionalization and authentication processes
can actually exhibit the critical potential and perspective inherent to both
these performances as well as analyses of them.
That the question of narration and the format of lecture performance
constituted a point of debate within Nachbar’s continuous reworking of this
reenactment became even more apparent when in 2007 he took on the
challenge of learning the remaining two pieces, Eitelkeit and Angst. The
growing interest in reflecting on the past combined with a change in Berlin’s
funding policies to allow subsidies for artists reworking their pieces, enabled
Nachbar to receive public support to revisit this work. The result was an
evening-­long production that kept the title of the lecture performances, but
dissolved the strict demarcation between lecture and dance, and, in so doing,
exposed the very artificiality of these divisions. While the piece drew on the
earlier lecture performances for its narration and material, it now incorporated
the critical reflection into a storytelling that no longer oscillated between
lecturing and dancing. Nachbar performed lecturing as he marked and
charted on a blackboard in a way that looked like dancing, demonstrating
how practices usually associated with intellectual reflection and bodily
appropriation are, in fact, intertwined.35
The interrelatedness of learning and creating movement is also highly
pertinent to memory in dance. The more of an interaction between all
dimensions of dance there is – its teaching of technique and movement,
language, charts, video – the more the continuity of a certain practice, or the
livelihood of a piece can be ensured. This is made clear in Nachbar’s reflection
upon his failure to reproduce the dances of the Affectos Humanos. The
inability to easily and mimetically inhabit the movement material encourages
a deeply analytical approach to the dances, which allows one to develop the
tools necessary to make the movements accessible and danceable for someone
trained in a different technique. This encouraged Nachbar to develop
pedagogical tools and exercises for communicating these dances to other
dancers of his generation. This indicates a belief in the power that reflection
and analytical understanding can have as an archival tool. Moreover, this
links to yet another strand of theory on memory, largely from cognitive
science, which proposes that learning things through multiple approaches
174 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

leads to more stable memory in the long term.36 In this light, then, it might
not seem surprising that Luley entrusted Nachbar with rights over Hoyer’s
dances, despite their different historiographical perspectives. This coexistence
of the historical and the contemporary, which does not make for a single
critical voice, focusing instead on the productivity of diverse ways of
‘doing’ history, could also be instructive for the academic debate about such
appropriations. To acknowledge forms of knowing that do not operate in
terms of failure, but in terms of inheritance, can help us appreciate how
bodies achieve the status of historicity on stage while also troubling the belief
that there is just ‘one’ possible form for understanding history.

Archiving and Imagining Dance Communities:

Eszter Salamon’s Magyar Táncok
The question of inheritance is also at stake in Eszter Salamon’s Magyar
Táncok. Although it draws on the form of the lecture performance and treats
archiving as something that takes place in performance, Magyar Táncok
focuses on how narration structures a dancer’s identity and how this narrated
identity is interlinked with political and ethical dimensions that can be
brought to the surface. One could say that, like Bel, Salamon turns an
ethnographic eye towards contemporary European dance by integrating a
dance style considered to be local and traditional. By placing contemporary
dance strategies in conversation with dance styles usually excluded from
contemporary dance performances, Salamon asks us to re-­evaluate divisions
between tradition and modernity, and encourages dance historians to venture
into unconventional dance fields. Moreover, her work allows one to reflect on
how issues of identity and historical narration are intertwined in processes of
artistic identification and as part of a historical strategy.
Archiving while performing informs Salamon’s Magyar Táncok, in which
she (re)presents the Hungarian folk dances of her youth in the context and
format of a contemporary dance and lecture performance. Salamon, who first
received formal ballet training in Budapest before engaging in contemporary
dance in France, aims in this production for a documentary restaging of yet
another part of her dance training: the Hungarian folk dances that she
learned from her mother. In her presentation, she is supported by her family
and friends – both dancers and musicians – from her home village in
Martonvàsàr, Hungary. Her mother, who has taught folk dance all her life,
joins Salamon in this production for her first stage performance. At the
same time, Salamon incorporates contemporary performance strategies and
frames the dances with reflective texts that describe them and deal with
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 175

issues of politics, regional identity, her own bodily formation, gender and
cultural hybridity. As such, the performance shows and re-­works Hungarian
folk dances by (re)contextualizing and questioning them. In doing so, it
demonstrates a sincere interest in archiving the dances by granting them a
new platform and by enhancing understanding and appreciation for them.
Salamon accomplishes this by proposing a notion of archiving that does not
arrest the dances in a static form but presents their questioning and re-­
working as essential to safeguard the dance form in a contemporary world.
Salamon’s performance also contributes to an understanding of how
dance is implicated in different historical discourses. Both contemporary
dance and folk dance seem to inhabit different temporal realms. Folk dances,
for instance, tend to be considered the repertoire of a local memory. They
ostensibly represent custom and a culture frozen in time. Such a viewpoint
denies folk dance the complexity and capacity for development typically
afforded to other dance forms in the theatrical tradition. The avant-­garde in
dance, by contrast, is considered in terms of ephemerality and progress. By
seeing these two dance forms brought together – the traditional and the
avant-­garde – the audience is asked to question the stability of such mutually
exclusive characterizations.
Principally, Magyar Táncok alternates between solo, duet and trio
dances, accompanied by Salamon speaking, contextualizing, explaining and
questioning each dance. The piece is also framed by two further contemporary
interventions. In one, the audience is invited to participate in disco dancing
on stage, and, in the second, Salamon concludes the dance by performing her
own contemporary movement phrases that draw on the folk dance idiom
performed earlier. Over the course of the show, the audience is introduced to
a variety of dances including circle dances, dances for men and dances with
sticks. The selection of the dances, Salamon informs us, is influenced by her
own preferences for dances that require virtuosity and that are marked by
fast, spontaneous and swirling movements. Salamon directs the audience’s
attention towards footwork, rhythm and spacing as she circles feverishly with
her partner changing directions at an amazing speed. Thus, the virtuosity of
the steps and performance becomes apparent at the same time as the circling
and musical accompaniment kinesthetically arouse the audience.
The textual framing of these dances allows a contemporary dance
audience – that might be sceptical of folk dance, for either aesthetic or
political reasons – to appreciate their movement qualities. The framing
moves the focus toward an aesthetic perception of folk dances. Salamon also
encourages – though not actively – the audience to see parallels with the
virtuosity of ballet, such as when she extensively kicks her legs or spins in
circles, which is similar to dancing endless fouettés. While this aspect of the
176 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

performance potentially destabilizes the borders between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art,
the ethnographic and documentary aspects keep the distinction alive.
Alongside the notes in the programme, video projection of footage
created by Salamon suggests a continuity with tradition in what Salamon is
presenting, and contributes to a larger project of authenticating the dances
and research presented. One of the most compelling scenes in regard to this
tension between tradition and modernity, between creating a sense of
authenticity and restaging, is evoked by film footage from Salamon’s travel to
Transylvania. When commenting on the film Salamon presents herself as an
ethnographer on a field trip. She conceives of herself as a visitor in a cultural
setting that has been sheltered from Western culture by Cold War boundaries.
Salamon approaches this situation like researchers who visited the area in the
1930 and 1940s did, bringing with her a team of dancers and a cameraman.
They learn the dances from the ‘locals’ and then bring them back to teach to
others. In addition, she also presents the newly learnt dances on stage. The
difference between the poorly dressed locals who are filmed dancing in a
muddy square in front of shabby huts and the neat stage performance could
not be more striking. Salamon plays with this difference and presents herself
as working in the tradition of Belà Bartok, who was crucial for initiating
the preservation of folklore from this region, but who was also aware that
such a task inevitably included transforming the cultural practice. Such an
acknowledgement of a failure to restage dance tradition as it ostensibly was is
a common trope and practice of dance (re)enactment, one we encountered
also with Nachbar. In Salamon’s case, it performs the double function of
authenticating and giving the aura of a self-­critical perspective. Even while
questioning the material, this manoeuvre gives credibility to the author or
performer in a context where the pursuit of ‘truth’ has become understood as
impossible.
One of the central issues in Salamon’s reflective appropriation are gender
relations as they are represented in the dances, which she both exposes and
alters in her version. She does this by omitting movement or re-­contextualizing
it, which is a central choreographic strategy in contemporary dance. Such a
re-­contextualization is obviously apparent when Salamon demonstrates, all
by herself, a simple side step in a circle dance that women usually perform
as a group holding hands while their male counterparts perform intricate
footwork. Presenting first the film footage of the group dance and then
performing the action alone on stage, barely moving, Salamon makes the
simplistic and mundane nature of these steps strikingly apparent. She laments
and exposes the women’s immobility caused by the dance’s gendered
hierarchy. Even though Salamon does not draw this connection, one could
conclude that the women dancing in a circle perform a function similar to
 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories 177

that of dancers in the corps du ballet; they stand as a supporting backdrop, in

this case to their male counterparts. While this re-­evaluation resonates with
Véronique Doisneau, Salamon does not leave with a changed perspective. It
comes as no surprise, then, that in her re-­appropriation of Hungarian folk
dance, Salamon has also learned the male parts. In the act of actualization
and re-­contextualization, she questions the relationships between group,
individual and the performance of gender.
Interestingly, there are also different narrational strategies at work in
Magyar Táncok that complicate this act of appropriation. Salamon’s act of
archiving draws on a discourse of folk dances as an art form outside of the
contemporary mainstream and seems to re-­stabilize distinctions between
tradition and modernity by taking up an identity that is marked by her own
individuality. Archiving reveals the strategic, political and artistic biases
and reasons behind Salamon’s choreographic choices. Nonetheless, the
piece is, with its ambivalence and the ethnographic discourse on which it
draws, highly interesting for understanding how history is written and
performed. This is especially important because folk dance has a rather
marginal status within the growing field of dance studies; the predominant
realms for studying folk dancing continue to be in area studies, ethnology
and anthropology.37 Salamon takes up these topics of national, local and oral-­
mimetic culture and combines them with a documentary approach. She
demonstrates the competing and coexisting interpretations of Hungarian
folk dances with alternating ‘imagined communities’.38 Rather than aligning
Hungarian folk dances with a singular political discourse of national identity,
one can detect competing nationalist and regionalist perspectives. Both,
however, attribute to the dance form an ability to constitute identity and
represent political positions. More specifically, while Salamon criticizes the
communist appropriation of the dance form as a national project, as well as
its codification and mis-­en-scène, she shares with this nationalistic view an
anti-­capitalist perspective, aligning the regional identity she sees in the dance
form of her childhood with a subversive move against globalization and
universalism, both of which are not only the cornerstones of capitalist
development, but also, for her, inherent to ballet.
It almost seems surprising that Salamon is drawn to a nostalgia that
positions folk dance in opposition to ballet. For Salamon, folk dances include
improvization and are rooted in a locality, while ballet signifies a form of
bodily training that cannot be linked to any democratic notion of the body,
but is highly international. The reason for Salamon’s nostalgic view might
be rooted in an attempt to imbue her performance with a personal note.
Her investigation and historical presentation is in a double sense marked
by a ‘vested interest’. It legitimizes preservation but also places her within a
178 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

tradition of contemporary dance that challenges both codes of presentation

and what is considered contemporary dance. The affiliation with the
Hungarian folk dance tradition offers Salamon an alternative vision of social
and artistic alliances. Moreover, she raises the question of how identifying
with a dance form is also part of imaging one’s own dance community.
As such, the narration – even when performed as an expert talking about
‘oneself ’ – is not so much about ‘realness’. Instead, presenting something as
being imbued with the status of ‘realness’ and embedded in identity politics is
crucial for being identified as an artist who challenges conventional norms of
dance making. This is the double function of narration: it yields a specific
perspective on dance and history that is aligned with questions of the
political, ethical and institutional as they relate to both the practice we see
and the wider academic discourses on dance and theatre.

Multiple Narrations – A Conclusion

The complicated workings, strategies and functions of plot and narration that
shape how dance movements are perceived or influence how both body and
material are worked with in the process and presentation of dance, clearly
complicate any reduction of dance to, what Lehmann calls, ‘pure gesture’.
Contemporary dance is a highly reflective practice that warrants detailed
analysis of how its strategies let bodies appear with what then becomes
considered a historical quality. The coexistence of intermedial and often
contradicting practices (bodies in action, videos and other materials, sayings
and discursive framings) challenges dramatic traditions of theatre as much as
an understanding of dance that is simply bound to the immediateness of the
body and the effects it generates through movement (for both the dancer and
the audience). The challenge then for contemporary dance performances is
both to question the immediateness of the body and to situate this practice in
historic, institutional, political and ethical dimensions.
 12

Migration: Common and Uncommon

Grounds at Berlin’s Gorki Theater
Matt Cornish

Postmigrant Theatre and Form

The audience watches, shocked, as the teacher grabs the gun, considers it for
a moment, then shakes it, terrified, at her Turkish-German students.1 They’ve
been cursing and spitting, these teens, insulting one another and their teacher,
in a language that barely resembles Hochdeutsch (standard German). But
now, with all the focus of fear, they perform, at their teacher’s request, scenes
from Friedrich Schiller’s classic eighteenth-­century plays Die Räuber (The
Robbers) and Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love). The students slowly
transform, sensing intuitively the Sturm und Drang emotions of the
characters, becoming Ferdinand and Louise, Karl and Franz. They become,
perhaps, more German.
Verrücktes Blut (Crazy Blood), created by Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje,
constantly upsets our balance by introducing new information and new
layers. It is fractured, with German folk songs interrupting the main action: a
teacher, who is revealed to have Turkish roots herself, taking control of her
classroom with the threat of violence, compelling her immigrant students to
integrate. The actors present themselves as actors, putting on their costumes
in front of us and taking off their characters’ masks, so to speak, during the
songs and again at the end of the play, when they address the audience
directly. They make use of their real bodies, marked to German eyes as
foreign, to tell and to shatter the stories, both Schiller’s and their own.
Verrücktes Blut is politically clever and emotionally jarring, incorporating
Turkish-German bodies into deutsche Kultur and expanding the canon to
include Turkish-German stories, while also showing the racism of
canonization. With its interruptions and its sharp, multilateral critique, in
thinking and writing about Verrücktes Blut I have wanted to argue that it is
‘postdramatic’. But why? What are the stakes – aesthetically, politically and
historically – of such a classification?
180 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Verrücktes Blut premiered in 2010 in a small black box space called

Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, in the Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg. Though
Kreuzberg has now gentrified (so many Americans live there that sometimes
you need to order your coffee in English), it was, in the 1970s and 1980s,
home to artists and immigrants, especially immigrants from Turkey.
Established in 2006, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse calls itself postmigrantisch,
‘postmigrant’; the artists who work there have settled in Germany, are no
longer completely Turkish, no longer foreign, but do not always feel
completely German either. At Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, I saw many artists
creating documentary theatre – telling on stage, essentially, their stories and
the stories of neighbours and friends. In 2013, Shermin Langhoff, the
Intendantin, or managing artistic director, of Ballhaus Naunynstrasse,
departed and became co-­leader, along with dramaturg Jens Hillje, of the
Maxim Gorki Theater, located across the Spree River on Unter den Linden.
Unlike Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, a freies or independent theatre, the Gorki is a
Stadttheater, a municipal theatre, much of its budget provided by the city of
Berlin, which also owns the building. The guaranteed budget of Staats-
(national) and Stadttheater allows them to keep an ensemble of actors and
other artists on salary, and to run their houses in true repertoire, meaning
that a given production will appear only several times a month, but may stay
in rep for several years. (For ease of use, I will from now on refer to Staats-
and Stadttheater as state theatres.) In exchange for a reliable source of
funding, the Berlin government chooses (at the recommendation of its
Minister of Culture, an elected politician) the artistic leadership of its
municipal theatres. The Gorki is the smallest state theatre in Berlin, residing
in a Prussian building along a Prussian boulevard, neo-­classical, its façade
like the entrance to a Greek temple, with pilasters above four Corinthian
columns. During the division of Germany, Unter den Linden was the seat of
the East German government; today, the Gorki sits next to the German
Historical Museum and across from the Berlin Stadtschloss, a reconstruction
of a Prussian palace scheduled to open in 2019. This is a site, in other words,
deeply intertwined with German identity: Prussia, communist East Germany
and the Berlin Republic.
In my book Performing Unification, I closed by studying Ballhaus
Naunynstrasse and Langhoff ’s first two years at the Gorki, describing
how Verrücktes Blut, and productions like it, imagined the possibility of a
hybrid and hyphenated Turkish-German identity. In this chapter, I return to
the Gorki to address how the theatre, now in its fifth season under Langhoff,
has developed. Since I wrote Performing Unification, scholars, like me,
have shown a tendency to categorize Verrücktes Blut and other postmigrant
productions as postdramatic. At the same time, other scholars lament
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 181

that postmigrant theatre is not aesthetically experimental enough. A series

of questions has been troubling me. Why do scholars prefer postdramatic
forms and radical aesthetics in theatre made by migrants? Do we need
new, postdramatic forms to address systemic racism and the denial of the
lives of refugees, or can experimental forms in fact reinforce such racism?
How do we account for changes at the Gorki, from an institution that
imagined integration to one that, this season, commands: ‘de-­integrate
yourselves!’2
To address these questions, we need to develop a deeper understanding of
form: theatrical, institutional and social. Here, drawing on the formalist
vocabulary developed in the introduction to this collection,3 I will explore
the Gorki and its postmigrant theatre praxis as aesthetic object and as made
product, shaped by society and shaping, afforded and affording.4 Postmigrant
theatre wants to be political, to defend the humanity of all humans in
Germany, to assert the belonging of diverse names, colours, languages,
genders, gender expressions and sexual orientations in the body politic, and
to proclaim the responsibility of Europeans to rescue and shelter refugees.
Does postmigrant theatre become political through its form, and if so, how?
By incorporating the bodies and stories of postmigrant artists into dramatic
structures, as when the Turkish-German students in Verrücktes Blut
performed Schiller? Or only in challenging and breaking existing systems
and hierarchies, experimenting with postdramatic forms and interrupting
the illusionary wholeness of drama?
In asking these questions, particular to Germany in the 2010s – just
after the broadening of the legal definition of German citizenship, and during
the European refugee crisis – I am also exploring ideas with expansive
consequences. How have race and ethnicity resonated in contemporary
experimental theatre? What happens when we try to fit art and artists into an
a priori category: beginning with theory and only then approaching a process,
a performance, a moment? In other words, in addition to studying the theatre
itself, I want to study the scholarly criticism surrounding postmigrant and
postdramatic theatre, showing how the contradictions in these classifications
are endemic to the form of postmigrant theatre, especially at the Gorki.
After beginning with a survey of definitions of ‘migrant’ and ‘postmigrant’
theatre, I lay out the relationship between theatre made by first- and second-­
generation immigrants and postdramatic theatre – the former with its
(often personal) narratives of exile, travel and belonging, the latter with
its rejection of narrative. I conclude by returning to the Maxim Gorki
Theater. ‘Common Ground’ is an essay about institutions, unacknowledged
structures and encounters with difference in the still-­developing postmigrant
theatre.
182 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Defining Migrant Theatre

Postmigrant theatre is riven by tensions: the need for migrants to be sheltered
by and accepted into European nations, and the desire that national borders
be challenged, if not destroyed. While some scholars see documentary theatre
– non-­fiction stories performed using the means and methods of journalism
– as helping open society to migrants and refugees, while giving them voices
in their new communities, others see postdramatic theatre as the best means,
within the theatre, of challenging the systems that created refugee crises in
the first place. More confusingly, what some scholars see as documentary,
others see as postdramatic.
Postmigrant theatre, a term introduced in and still specific to the German
context, can be understood as a type of ‘migrant theatre’. Jacqueline Lo and
Helen Gilbert, in their essay ‘Toward a Topology of Cross-Cultural Theatre
Practice’, place ‘migrant theatre’ under the rubric ‘big M multicultural theatre’:
‘a counterdiscursive practice that aims to promote cultural diversity, access to
cultural expression, and participation in the symbolic space of the national
narrative’.5 In migrant theatre, specifically, Lo and Gilbert see ‘narratives of
migration and adaptation’, aimed not just at the migrant group but also ‘wider
audiences’, narratives that, through language, content and aesthetic form,
emphasize ‘cultural in-­between-ness’ and ‘hybridity’.6 Immigrants make theatre
to tell their own stories and assert their belonging in their new public sphere,
even as they preserve, through the performances, some of the identity of their
origin culture, not melting completely in the melting pot. Building off Lo and
Gilbert, Emma Cox, writing in Theatre & Migration, finds that ‘[t]he episodic
or vignette mode of storytelling appears frequently in theatre of migration’. In
this dramaturgy, Cox sees a ‘mythopoetic envisioning of migrants’ and ‘an
aggregate picture of “types”, emphasising commonality over individuality’7.
Narratives that follow the form of The Odyssey are typical: episodic and mythic,
not just the story of a particular person, but often the story of an entire people.
These definitions of migrant theatre largely match the aesthetics of
Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and now the Maxim Gorki. Postmigrant theatre
distinguishes itself by adding an element of some stability to the liminality of
the migrant: for the most part, these artists have immigrated permanently, or
are the children of immigrants. They do sometimes tell stories of migration,
but they focus on negotiating between a culture that has not quite accepted
their presence and an old ‘homeland’ that may never have actually been their
home. Unlike the migrant theatre described by Cox (whose research focuses
on Australia), rather than creating allegorical characters, the artists of the
German postmigrant theatre mostly tell stories about specific individuals, in
a style similar to that of documentary theatre.
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 183

Scholars looking at postmigrant theatre have especially focused on

Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins), which premiered in 2006 at a festival
curated by Langhoff, before she became Intendantin at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse.
Feridun Zaimoğlu (a Turkish-German immigrant) and Günter Senkel
(German) adapted Schwarze Jungfrauen from interviews with young Muslim
women in Germany, using but also modifying German documentary theatre.
Katrin Sieg writes that Schwarze Jungfrauen employed ‘the tropes of
documentary, factual authenticity, insisting that new truths are already out
there’.8 Agreeing with Sieg about the production, Lizzie Stewart, in an essay
on Schwarze Jungfrauen and documentary theatre, adds, echoing Lo and
Gilbert: ‘This theatre often thematizes migration and postmigrant life in
Germany and aims to redress the lack of postmigrant representation on
German stages by promoting postmigrant artists and perspectives.’9 Stewart
finds the artists’ label of their production as ‘semi-­documentary’, fact mixed
with fiction, to be apt, offering audiences a sense of the Muslim experience in
Germany.10
Stewart and others see many benefits in semi-­documentary drama, which
gives migrants the opportunity to share their stories with broad audiences.11
Yet Sieg expresses misgivings about the form. The primary problem Sieg
identifies is that documentary drama is mimetic: it represents. ‘Are Turkish
Germans,’ Sieg writes, ‘now eligible for naturalization (German citizenship),
co-­opted into the logic of mimesis, reproducing therefore the exclusions and
hierarchies of the cosmopolitan, European transnation’ at the expense of
more recent migrants, especially refugees?12 While Lo and Gilbert find the
cosmopolitan impulses of Multicultural theatre to be consistent with Homi
Bhabha’s ‘hyphenated hybridity’, Sieg (who was not responding to Lo and
Gilbert specifically) has strong reservations:

I wonder whether that particular dramatic form, organized around the

autobiographical, humanist self, fully endowed with the capacity to
reason among equals and persuade without recourse to violence, as
cosmopolitan thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition have envisioned
it, is actually able to register conditions of living under the contemporary
structures of absolute sovereignty and bare life described by [Giorgio]
Agamben.13

For Agamben, human rights are something called into being by the sovereign
nation state; they are not natural or universal, but, as a legal category, exist
only if a state recognizes an individual’s citizenship. While Aristotle saw polis
and oikos as autonomous spheres, with zoē (the mere fact of being alive)
separate from bios (a way of life, like political life), Agamben worries that the
184 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

distinction has now been eroded. He writes that ‘the entry of zoē into the
sphere of the polis – the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes
the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the
political-­philosophical categories of classical thought’.14
Turkish-Germans, eligible since 2005, as Sieg notes, to become naturalized
citizens,15 try to create with their theatre the conditions through which
others, including refugees, might also be recognized by the state. This may
seem an unambiguous ethical good. But Agamben argues that the sovereign
state exists only as it excludes. Refugees ipso facto belong to no state and
cannot be recognized. Without bios they are also without zoē. Human rights
are a contradiction in terms for the refugee: denied access to the state, they
have no rights. Indeed, for our international system, they are not human.
They exist as bare life (their existence is that of non-­existence) and can die or
even be killed in the Mediterranean without anyone being held responsible
for their deaths. In other words, Agamben argues that the short-­term gain of
some few refugees, given shelter by nation states (or organizations of the
nation state, like the European Union), in fact just reinforces the circumstances
by which many more refugees are denied protection or even basic recognition
of their lives, left to drown anonymously at sea. So where Olivia Ryan Landry
sees in Telemachos, a 2013 production at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse by Greek
artists, ‘engagement, reflection, and discussion – all criteria for change’,16 Sieg,
drawing on Agamben, fears that the narratives and realist representation of
semi-­documentary theatre reinforce (‘reproduce’) the exclusions of the
European Union. She argues that artists must disrupt and transform theatrical
structures: she prefers the postdramatic theatre of Elfriede Jelinek, René
Pollesch and Caryl Churchill.17
Sieg is not alone in maintaining that migrant theatre requires postdramatic
aesthetics. In Performing Exile, Performing Self, Yana Meerzon finds that for
Eugenio Barba, an Italian director who works in Denmark, and Josef Nadj, a
Hungarian-Serb theatre artist working in France, ‘the condition of exile
triggers the rejection of verbal communication in preference to stage-­image
and stage-­metaphor’: the aesthetics of postdramatic theatre.18 Throughout
the chapters on Barba and Nadj, Meerzon sprinkles citations to Hans-Thies
Lehmann’s book, and she concludes by arguing that exilic theatre ‘prefers the
disjoint structures of post-­dramatic narrative’.19 But how different is this
‘exilic’ theatre from postmigrant semi-­documentary theatre? Meerzon finds
in Barba and Nadj engagement with ‘the notions of “real” and “auto” ’ alongside
‘shaky fictional worlds’.20 Their productions, Meerzon argues, ‘constantly
oscillate between the reality of the author’s exilic experience, memory, and
trauma; and his/her need to raise this experience to the level of today’s
mythology’.21
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 185

Jonas Tinius, an anthropologist who has worked closely with German

independent theatre groups, comes to a similar conclusion, though without
referencing postdramatic theatre specifically, in his essay ‘Rehearsing
Detachment’. Profiling the Ruhrorter theatre group, which works with
refugees at the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim, Tinius coins the term
‘dialectical fiction’ to describe how the refugee actors cultivate ‘detachment
and reappropriation of subjectivity during theatre rehearsals by building up
fictional characters’.22 In other words, the artists (exiles from an array of
African and Middle Eastern nations) draw on their histories in devising a
performance, but use those histories to create fictional characters, distanced
from their actual selves. This practice enables dialogue with audiences and
creates ‘a political critique’ that offers, Tinius argues, ‘a corrective to realist
documentary theatre’.23 Like Sieg, Tinius draws on Agamben, in particular
Homo Sacer, to articulate this political critique: the Ruhrorter project had as
its explicit goal that refugees not be ‘marked off from other subjects of the
state’ and thereby ‘reduced to a merely “tolerated” precarious and bare life’.24
In the conversation I have created here between Sieg, Lo and Gilbert, Cox,
Stewart, Landry, Meerzon and Tinius, a contradiction in how critics address
aesthetic form and political meaning becomes apparent. The same aesthetics
that Lo and Gilbert, Cox, Stewart and Landry champion in their analyses of
migrant and postmigrant performances, Sieg laments as not experimental,
not radical enough – while the productions Meerzon and Tinius describe as
postdramatic and Agambian seem quite similar to Schwarze Jungfrauen.
Critics see postmigrant theatre as advancing, or not advancing, the critics’
own politics, either through a production’s embrace of new forms, or in the
failure to do so. Scholars clearly face confusion in the definition of
postdramatic theatre, alongside confusion about the politics of postmigrant
theatre. But the confusion goes still deeper.

Postdramatic Form and Migrant Theatre

If postmigrant theatre ought to be postdramatic, the question must be raised:
can postdramatic theatre address the conditions of bare life? Can it upset
cosmopolitan transnationalism? Or even more basically, can it combat
racism, that fear of others that inspires the building of border fences to
preserve the supremacy of the people inside, keeping out those othered as
undesirable, the perhaps less-­than-humans? While Agamben worries about
the potential of humans to be reduced in the public sphere to zoē, ‘life as mere
biological existence’, as John Lechte and Saul Newman put it, theatre,
especially postdramatic theatre, celebrates bodies.25 What happens to a body
186 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

on stage may be a representation of an action, but also, crucially, actually

happens to the body. Ryan Anthony Hatch, reversing the typical equation,
writes in his contribution to this book: ‘The actor is satiated; her real needs
are met, yet it is the character who eats.’26 Postdramatic theatre often attempts
to be a theatre of zoē, of biological existence – unlike the posthuman theatre,
as Magda Romanska defines it in this volume, drawing on Agamben and with
Tadeusz Kantor as her prime example, in which ‘the human subject disappears
into the materiality of his body, which, in turn, disappears into the materiality
of the stage-­object.’27 And it is performed in public, or for the public, or even
as part of the public sphere in the case of a state theatre like the Gorki.
Zoē and bios coexist. I also wonder whether there can truly be a theatre
that embraces Agamben, given that Agamben’s writings resist practical
implementation.28 Or whether any theatre can assume the responsibility of
upsetting a global order with century old roots.
Perhaps the form of postdramatic theatre is at least well suited for fighting
racism? In Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, Mike Sell,
writing about the Black Arts Movement, reminds us that ‘the avant-­garde
possesses an uneasy and at times embarrassing proximity to racism’.29 This is no
less true in the contemporary German context than it was in 1960s America or
turn-­of-the-­century Europe, though in Germany the racism tends to be less
explicit than that of the Italian Futurists, for example. There is a latent racism
of exclusion at many state theatres in Germany: a lack of roles for non-­ethnic
Germans (or a lack of roles that directors will cast with non-­ethnic Germans)
and a paucity of productions given to plays written by non-­ethnic Germans.
And there is a somewhat unintentional but nonetheless blatant racism,
most obviously in the casual use of blackface by some of the most important
directors working in the Regietheater tradition, including Michael Thalheimer,
Nicholas Stemann and Sebastian Baumgarten. In an essay on the debate around
Thalheimer’s 2012 production at the Deutsches Theater Berlin of Dea Loher’s
Unschuld (Innocence), in which white actors wore minstrel-­style blackface to
depict African migrants, Katrin Sieg blasted ‘the assertion [by German directors
and critics] that blackfacing in German theatre, in contradistinction to other
national traditions (especially the American one), serves to deconstruct racial
identity and difference’.30 I also picked apart such assertions in an article for
Theater der Zeit, discussing how ‘blackfacing’, rather than deconstructing racial
identity, elides and denies the long history of anti-Black racism and minstrelsy
in Germany, including: the 1904–1908 genocide of the Herero and Nama
peoples by German colonialists in what is now Namibia; Kurt Weill’s ‘Nigger
Song’ from 1927; and the persecution of Afro-Germans by the Nazis.31
In recent years, Frank Castorf, former Intendant of the Volksbühne am
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin and long-­time postdramatic innovator, has
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 187

thematized colonialism in productions including La Cousin Bette (adapted

from Honoré de Balzac’s novel, at the Volksbühne in 2013), Reise ans Ende der
Nacht (Journey to the End of the Night, adapted from Louis-Ferdinand
Céline’s novel, at the Munich Residenztheater in 2013), and Faust (at the
Volksbühne in 2017). In these productions, Castorf has not examined racism
or the legacy of colonialism in Germany; indeed, Castorf insists on using the
word ‘Neger’, almost the rhetorical equivalent of the English n-­word, in
interviews and on stage.32 Meanwhile, the anti-­colonialism, which appears in
small moments amid the several-­hour deranged disorder of his productions,
lacks depth: for instance, actors (Bernhard Schütz in La Cousin Bette, Fatima
Dramé in Reise) read from Heiner Müller’s play Der Auftrag (The Task), a
fractured text that interweaves stories of Jacobins sent to participate in a
Jamaican slave revolt. The institutional form of the state theatre, which
emphasizes the artistic vision of the (mostly male, almost entirely white)
director and is thus well-­suited for postdramatic theatre, but where there are
few if any people of colour in the room, has contributed to carelessness with
how race functions as sign, in history and in the everyday lives of people of
colour.33
We should also question, along with Liz Tomlin, ‘the premises for the
postdramatic’s narrative of radicalism’.34 In her book Acts and Apparitions,
Tomlin identifies ‘the most common poststructuralist charges levelled at the
dramatic theatre’,35 a list that reads like an explication of Sieg’s unease in
watching postmigrant theatre. A poststructuralist critique of drama argues:
‘firstly, that [drama] upholds the origin myth through its mimetic repetition
of reality; secondly, that it upholds the origin myth through its dependence
on a theological playwright; and, finally, that it offers an illusion of original
presence that conceals its reliance on repetition and representation’.36 Tomlin
argues that these concerns apply to the ‘social-­realist’ model of drama, rather
than drama itself.37 Drama and mimesis, Tomlin argues, need not reproduce
‘the exclusions and hierarchies of the cosmopolitan, European transnation’,38
any more than postdramatic forms will inevitably challenge those exclusions
and hierarchies.
I do not want to suggest that postdramatic theatre in Germany cannot be
anti-­racist. Most notable among treatments of the refugee crisis in the
postdramatic German theatre is probably Austrian playwright Elfriede
Jelinek’s playtext Die Schutzbefohlenen (Charges, first published 2013, with a
series of epilogues and codas added through 2016). Unrelentingly furious,
Die Schutzbefohlenen begins by asserting the humanity of its chorus, refugees
who have fled to Europe, sleeping on the cold stone floors of churches: ‘We’re
alive. We’re alive. The main thing is, we’re alive’.39 Throughout Jelinek’s
postdramatic choral ode of suffering, displacement and loss, the refugees
188 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

demand recognition of their being. ‘Who will take care, that we beings
[Seienden, Heidegger’s term, sometimes translated entities] are also seen, and
seen without disgust’.40 This chorus desires regular (even bourgeois) lives: ‘We
want work, school, free time’. But while they address the audience specifically
– ‘Look, Sir, yes you!, we turn to you as supplicants’ – the audience sees them
only as a group: a ‘Barbarian swarm’ and ‘shockingly cursed spawn, spawn,
spawn! Like animals! Foreign spawn!’ There are no autobiographical selves in
Die Schutzbefohlenen – but this is its tragic experience. The chorus in Jelinek’s
looping, perseverating text demands recognition over and over – as humans,
as individuals – which their audience, the Austrian public, or the public for
which the text is performed, refuses them.
At the University of Vienna in April 2016, refugees from Syria, Afghanistan
and Iraq were performing Jelinek’s text for a crowd of 700 when an extreme-­
right ‘identitarian’ group stormed the auditorium and attacked actors and
audience.41 This assault illustrates how theatre functions counter to Agamben’s
ideas: the performers enacted Jelinek’s text about refugees pushed out of
society, and they were actually stateless, with actual bodies that were actually
under attack. To paraphrase Ryan Anthony Hatch, this was an unsummoned
real that got too real.42 And yet it was a real simultaneously staged. For the
production was already using its performers (and the performers used
themselves) to trouble divisions between the citizen and the refugee, private
and public, biology and ontology. When the identitarians attacked, they were
folded into an ongoing cycle of representation and real, through which the
refugees became more human in the artifice of performing someone else’s
words. Die Schutzbefohlenen, as a text and in production, could itself be the
subject of a sustained formalist study, in the terms laid out in the introduction
to this collection, an analysis of how it was written, disseminated and
appropriated by community groups, directors and institutions, a process quite
different from what happens at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and the Gorki. For
now, I will close this discussion by noting that Jelinek’s postdramatic text-­
landscape finds its politics in asserting the humanity of refugees.

The Maxim Gorki from Afar

I would like to return now to the Maxim Gorki Theater, under the leadership
of Shermin Langhoff. I no longer live in Berlin and can travel there only
occasionally; rather than simply lamenting this fact, I hope that my distance
from the Gorki can help me better see the full landscape of the institution, its
place in Berlin and Germany, its repertoire, ensemble, advertisements and
artistic statements. The tension that we noticed in the scholarship on migrant
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 189

and postmigrant theatre – between old and new forms, humanism and
Agamben – is embedded in the theatre itself, and scholars should observe the
contradictions, not attempt to resolve them. By studying the form of the
Gorki, we can see the essential conflicts of postmigrant theatre.
In a recent interview with the radio programme Deutschlandfunk Kultur,
Langhoff, alongside Jens Hillje, introduced their upcoming 2017–2018 season
with a new motto (also the title of their fall arts festival): desintegriert euch,

Figure 12.1 A poster for the Maxim Gorki’s 2017 autumn arts festival,
commanding: Desintegriert euch! (De-Integrate Yourselves!). (Image by Maria
Jose Aquilanti.)
190 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

de-­integrate yourselves!43 ‘[T]he “integration” rhetorical strategy’, Langhoff

writes in promotional material for autumn 2017, ‘urges incorporation and
homogenization’. ‘But’, she counters, ‘the question remains: integration into
what? Into the outdated narrative of a nation, into a “people” or into a linguistic
community?’44 The Gorki, Langhoff and Hillje said in the radio interview,
will now take up the mantle of the Volksbühne Berlin. Founded by workers,
who collected their pennies to erect the building, located in the former East
Berlin, and with the East German Frank Castorf as Intendant since 1991,
the Volksbühne refused integration into reunified, capitalist Berlin. Equally,
Volksbühne artists refused to be trapped in nostalgia for the German
Democratic Republic, refused to accept any specific politics, refused the
gentrification that transformed their street. Refused, that is, until Castorf was
replaced as Intendant at the end of the 2016–2017 season by a Belgian
museum curator, Chris Dercon. The Gorki, Langhoff and Hillje have
announced, will replace the Volksbühne as the Dissonansraum for Germany,
a space for dissonance: all clanging tones, upsetting narrative, jarring the
eyes, ears and bodies of audiences.
So has the Gorki become more postdramatic? One way of addressing this
question would be to examine the theatre’s repertoire as a whole. Back during
the Gorki’s first two seasons, 2013–2014 and 2014–2015, the repertoire was
split almost evenly between productions of classic plays, new plays and
devised theatre – not dissimilar from other German state theatres, like the
Deutsches Theater Berlin. At the beginning of the second season, in August
2014, the Gorki’s repertoire stood at twenty-­one, including seven productions
that were scheduled to premiere before the end of December. Eight
productions in the repertoire were of classic plays, or plays standard to the
repertoire of German national theatres; three of the classics were heavily
adapted. Six productions were devised (one based on a classic play), and eight
productions were premieres of new plays, by which I mean texts written by
playwrights and available for other theatres to produce after their premiere,
including new adaptations of books or movies. Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard
and Maxim Gorki’s Children of the Sun shared the Gorki’s mainstage with the
premiere of contemporary playwright Sibylle Berg’s Es sagt mir nichts, das
sogenannte Draussen (The So-Called Outside Means Nothing to Me), and re-­
mounted productions of Verrücktes Blut and Schwarze Jungfrauen. One
premiere from the previous season, Yael Ronen’s Common Ground, had been
invited to the prestigious Theatertreffen festival, and the Gorki had just been
named ‘Theatre of the Year’ by Theater heute, a huge honour for their first
season. Postmigrant artists told their own stories in new plays and devised
productions, and they reimagined canonical plays to include their stories. At
the Studio Я, Marianne Salzmann, curator at the time, scheduled events, such
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 191

as book readings, discussions of politics and aesthetics, and Theater ist endlich
ist Theater (Theatre is Finally is Theatre), an adaptation of the twenty-­four-
hour play festival format. The overall theme of these early seasons, as I argued
in my book, was captured by Common Ground, which ‘advocated a pluralistic,
welcoming conception of Germanness, with good-­heartedness replacing
accusation, camaraderie prevailing over antagonism’45 – though Studio Я was
notably more confrontational and direct than the mainstage.
Since 2014, the Gorki’s repertoire has expanded and transformed, as can
be seen by examining both the repertoire itself and critical response: it seems
that the Gorki has become a more postdramatic space, and its repertoire, with
a heavy emphasis on new, devised and adapted work, more closely resembles
that of the Volksbühne under Castorf than the stereotypical German state
theatre. There are now (as of autumn 2017) forty productions in the repertoire
– only four remain from the repertoire at the beginning of the 2014–2015
season – playing both on the mainstage and in Studio Я; a few more
productions will be added during the 2017–2018 season, which runs from
mid-September until late June. Of the forty, thirteen, or almost one-third, are
devised performances, seven of which were directed by Ronen. Despite the
expanded repertoire, only six productions are of classic plays; of those six,
four have been changed so much by their directors that the Gorki advertises
them as adaptations. (Brecht’s Im Dickicht der Städte [In the Jungle of Cities],
directed by Sebastian Baumgarten, is advertised as an adaptation, the title
given only as Dickicht [Jungle], but critics noted that the text itself was not
adapted.46) The two classic plays left are both by Heiner Müller, who largely
wrote postdramatic texts: Der Auftrag (The Task) and Zement (Cement).
There are eleven new plays in the repertoire (three of which are holdovers
from 2014). Seven of these new plays are by Falk Richter, Sibylle Berg and
Marianna Salzmann, all of whom write texts that, while not as dissonant as
those by Elfriede Jelinek, take the Verfremdung effect to an extreme, fracturing
characters and narrative. The Gorki responded directly to the refugee crisis in
Germany by establishing, in 2016, an ‘Exil Ensemble’, an ensemble of seven
professional artists in exile, hailing from Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan. In
spring 2017, the Exil Ensemble premiered Winterreise (Winter Journey),
created with Ronen, and in autumn 2017 their production Skelett eines
Elefanten in der Wüste (Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert) opened in the
Gorki’s studio.47
Even as it seems that dramatic theatre is being squeezed out at the Gorki,
a closer look at the productions through reviews of premieres from the 2016–
2017 and 2017–2018 seasons reveals a more complex situation. Critics have
noted the ‘absence of narrative hierarchies’48 in Erpulat’s Hündesohne (Sons
of Dogs, an adaptation of three novels by Ágota Kristóf) and the ‘very flat
192 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

text-­surfaces [Textfläche]’49 in Sebastian Nübling’s production of Berg’s Nach

uns das All (After Us Comes Space). Gorki artists have been able to avoid
clichés, even while exploring the same themes, as in Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’,
a new play by Necati Öziri developed at the Gorki: ‘Though it begins like the
cliché of a cynical migrant-­background story, the most recent premiere of
this season at the Berlin Gorki Theater is exactly the opposite’.50 In Dickicht,
Baumgarten filmed the action, which was projected in performance, and
used live actors to speak Brecht’s text, a performance in ‘classic Brecht-­style’,
that, according to critic Gabi Hift, introduced new Verfremdung effect
methods.51 Ronen is responsible for adding one or two new productions a
year, and her style has not changed since Common Ground. In Winterreise,
writes Tobi Müller, ‘[t]he new-Berliners play, as before, themselves, but they
also play themselves as actors’.52 Another critic, Anke Dürr, writes of
Winterreise: ‘That the actors use their real names does not mean that
Winterreise is documentary theatre’.53 The most recent Ronen premiere,
Roma Armee (Roma Army), still generates ‘this alternation between broiling
statement-­theatre and ice-­cold, emphasized joke, this percussive directness
and then again boulevardesque tricks. And the tears, when a recognition hits
close to the heart’.54 And Ronen is still playing with history: the actress
‘Simonida Selimović revises Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” and
demands a collective memory-­culture for the encounter between the Roma
and the “Gadje” (not-Roma).’55 This is much bigger than just the Roma, or just
Roma Armee, Christian Rakow argues. ‘To tell European history through
the minority perspective, and thereby inject a truly pluralistic thinking in the
ruling discourse, this impulse rocks the evening – and the work at this
theatre’.56 Even as the Gorki is increasingly celebrated, critics still criticize it
for emphasizing politics over aesthetics (for being too postmigrant, in other
words, and not postdramatic enough): in Verräter (Traitors), ‘Richter is not
interested in “theatrical quality”, but rather “attitude” ’, writes André Mumot.57
Postmigrant theatre at the Gorki has become somewhat more experimental
theatrically – less reliant on playtexts, less dramatic dramaturgically on
stage – since the first season, but it is clear that the Gorki is not entirely, and
sometimes not at all, in the postdramatic aesthetic mode of Castorf and
Jelinek.58
To more fully understand the form of the Gorki, we need to widen our
field of view. Much of the formal experimentation happening at the Gorki is
happening at the institutional level, though it is far from the Agambian space
some critics would like it to be. In order to address race and ethnicity,
migration and exile, the Gorki must be a space that little resembles the old
Volksbühne. Under Langhoff, the Gorki has always worked to engage a wider
range of audiences than other state theatres, including people who do not
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 193

speak German. It is the only theatre in Berlin that includes English supertitles
for all performances; and when multiple languages are spoken on stage,
it is done to connect with diverse audiences, not distance them with
incomprehensible polyglossia.59 Their posters, displayed on the website and
plastered on walls and construction sites throughout Berlin, focus on the
actors and the actors’ bodies. Even the poster for Remote Mitte (created by
Rimini Protokoll in 2013), an audio-­tour of central Berlin, which does not
include any actors, only spectator-­participants who follow instructions given
to them through headphones, puts people in the foreground.60 A focus on the
individual human extends to their remarkable and intimate portraits of the
actors in the ensemble, which were used as advertisements when the Gorki
first opened under Langhoff and Hillje, and can still be seen on the website,
in promotional materials and on a wall the audience passes by while entering
the mainstage auditorium.61 The portraits focus tightly on the actors’
expressive faces, their shoulders bare, a celebration of humanity, differences
in skin tone, eye colour and shape, hair, age and gender. Reduced to their
‘mere’ biology, stripped of identifiers other than their bodies, the actors
become only more human. Light reflects and glints in their vivid eyes. We do
not know them, but we would like to. This is decidedly not a posthuman
theatre.
In the same promotional material for the 2017–2018 season that I quoted
above, Langhoff also talks about how they are providing educational support
for the members of the Exil Ensemble, including language classes. (I am
reminded of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘On the Aesthetic Education’, used extensively,
though not entirely uncritically, in Verrücktes Blut.) Langhoff writes that the
Gorki is thinking through how to tell stories for an increasingly diverse
Germany – rejecting not narrative, but an ‘outdated narrative of a nation’ –
and she proposes ‘a counter model’ to how integration is currently practiced
in Germany: ‘integration into a new narrative of a truly plural democracy, a
learning process for all’.62 In other words, everyone in society must continually
(re)assimilate, not just the newcomers. In the 2017 festival Desintegriert euch!,
held over two weeks in November, showcasing mostly contemporary fine
arts, critic Claudia Wahjudi writes: ‘The open-­minded parkour of the artworks
produces an essay about segregated societies in crises or even wars, arguing
undemonstratively for human rights.’ Even when farthest from drama, the
Gorki expresses belief in the human and human rights.
The institution mixes models, incorporating elements of the independent
scene. It is, as I wrote above, a municipal theatre supported by the Berlin
government, with major funding also from the Federal Cultural Foundation,
the Federal Foreign Office and Stiftung Mercator, a private foundation that
promotes ‘mutual understanding and exchange between people of different
194 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Figure 12.2 The poster for Winterreise (Winter Journey), created by Yael Ronen
with Exil Ensemble at the Maxim Gorki Theater in 2017. (Photo by
Esra Rotthoff.)

cultures’ as well as ‘a unified Europe’.63 This funding allows it to support an

ensemble and offer a repertoire – and sometimes commits the institution to
the projects of its funders. Within the permanent ensemble, names, faces and
birthplaces are quite diverse. Yet all but two of the nineteen actors currently
in the theatre’s ensemble attended a traditional training academy in Germany,
Switzerland or Austria; six actors, or nearly one-­third, studied at the Ernst
Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, with a curriculum grounded, for
 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds 195

over fifty years, in Stanislavsky and Brecht.64 Yet the Gorki also employs
performers and co-­produces performances from the independent scene (like
Remote Mitte), who generally attended universities (especially the Giessen
Institute for Applied Theatre Studies), not professional training academies.
The scene tends more toward the postdramatic, with productions created by
groups in rehearsal. Within the security afforded it as a state theatre, the
Gorki tries to generate space for freedom and play as well. Like Agamben,
artists at the Gorki mistrust the sovereign state, which will always regulate
individuals in the name of safety. But they react against ‘absolute sovereignty’
pragmatically, with bodies, with new narratives and with dissonance.
Uncertainty and belief in change; postdramatic events and semi-­
documentary theatre; de-­integration and German language classes for
refugee-­artists: this grinding of aesthetic and institutional forms, constantly
under revision, generates friction. While the institution experiments with the
form of the German state theatre, much of what is performed on the
mainstage is still in the semi-­documentary mode praised by some, condemned
by others. In an interview with Theater der Zeit, Langhoff mentions recent
talks given at the Gorki by Hélène Cixous and Jean-Luc Nancy, and she says:
‘We’re always stumbling across this dialectic of order and disorder’.65 De-­
integration for the Gorki does not actually mean separation from society, or
outright rejection of the European Union, or an attempt to generate a new
politics of the non-­political. Postmigrant theatre at the Gorki means
engagement and reengagement over common and uncommon grounds. It
means concrete social actions followed by disorder and discord, then a new
play or a text by Heiner Müller, or a reimagined Brecht, then returning again
to social action. It means hiring people, on permanent contracts, who would
not otherwise find employment at state theatres – while also producing wild,
playful events with freelance artists. It is not by accident, no coincidence or
misfortune, that scholars and critics find in postmigrant theatre their
proclivities reflected: all these forms are there, coinciding and colliding, both
the tide that covers and exposes, and the pebbles the water jostles about. The
conflict we observed in the critical engagement with postmigrant theatre, the
push and pull of new and old forms, of institution, society and aesthetics, that
conflict, that pull and push, that is the form of postmigrant theatre.
 13

Elder Care: Performing Dementia –

Toward a Postdramatic Subjectivity
Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Dementia and the Postdramatic

Among its many contributions to our understanding of contemporary theatre
and performance, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre provides a
framework for thinking about this theatre’s engagement with subjectivity,
consciousness and narrative. By setting the postdramatic in dialogue with the
dramatic model it supersedes, Lehmann challenges the matrix of character,
plot, fiction and dialogue that has conventionally oriented the perception of
subjectivity in theatrical performance toward the singular, coherent individual.
He further undermines this unitary notion of subjectivity by displacing the
dramatic actor and distributing agency within a decentered scenic field. As
Lehmann insists, however, the rejection of unitary subjectivity in its singularity
and depth does not entail an abandonment of the human subject altogether.
Addressing what Gerda Poschmann called the ‘autonomization of language’
in contemporary theatre works – which is directed against the principles of
depth and mimesis – he writes, ‘Is it not rather a matter of a changed per­
spective on human subjectivity? . . . [R]ather 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 repre­
senting the individual human subject sketched in these texts.’1
In order to explore these ‘new possibilities of thinking and representing’,
one has to read beyond – and sometimes against – Lehmann’s limited
theorization of postdramatic subjectivity. Louise LePage observes, ‘[W]here
postdramatic theatre locates film and voice-­altering techniques in juxtaposed
and equal roles with the live presence of the performer on stage in ways that
hybridize and reformulate the (post)human subject, the question arises as to
what, precisely, are the new ontological formulations being conceived?’2
Postdramatic Theatre’s relative neglect of this and related questions con­
cerning subjectivity limits its theoretical generalizations and its otherwise
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 197

provocative observations on specific texts and productions. The present

essay’s contribution to understanding what we might mean when we think
about subjectivity in a postdramatic context is twofold. On one hand, it will
consider the experiential or ‘lived’ dimension of a performance subjectivity
unmoored from its traditional grounding in personal consciousness. Whereas
Lehmann claims that post-­epic narration is about ‘the foregrounding of the
personal’ and ‘the closeness within distance’, he offers little account of what
the personal consists of in this new theatre.3 Similarly, when he points out
that Peter Brook’s production The Man Who . . .? ‘presented examples of
pathological dysfunctions of perception’, the notion of perception he refers to
seems restricted to basic cognitive operations.4 What I propose to do is bring
a phenomenological sensibility to the non-­unitary field of consciousness that
Postdramatic Theatre gestures toward but fails to theorize with the nuance it
merits. Understanding the experiential contours and operations of post­
dramatic subjectivity clarifies the perceptual stakes in Lehmann’s theoretical
project, and it underscores the opportunities that contemporary performance
presents to phenomenological accounts of consciousness, particularly those
recent accounts that interrogate this tradition and its conceptions of
subjectivity, perception, presence and embodiment in light of contemporary
theory, new performance practices and an increasingly technologized/
mediatized world.5
On the other hand, if Postdramatic Theatre has little to say about the
experiential and perceptual dynamics of the decentered subjectivity it alludes
to, it is also silent on the social and institutional structures in which subjectivity
manifests itself and through which it circulates. While this contextual
dimension may seem different from the experiential givenness of subjectivity,
the two are intimately related. An infant becomes aware of itself as a subject
through intersubjective entanglements with those around it and through the
position it occupies in a network of social relationships and institutional
backdrops (nursery, home, school, medical institutions and consumer
infrastructures). What may appear entirely personal in the lens of experience,
in other words, is also a product of subjectivity’s social context. Indeed, while
Lehmann’s notion of the ‘postdramatic’ pays relatively little attention to this
dimension of the personal, the fragmentary and dispersed subjectivity he
discerns in the postdramatic lends itself to materialist and sociological forms
of analysis. Understanding the contours and operations of postdramatic
subjectivity not only clarifies the perceptual stakes in Lehmann’s theoretical
project; it opens the door for a more socially-­situated understanding of
postdramatic theatrical form and the institutional practices that produce it.
As a way of accepting Lehmann’s invitation ‘to explore the new possibilities
of thinking and representing the individual human subject’ offered by
198 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

postdramatic texts, I will consider the perceptual and interactive dynamics of

Sandglass Theatre’s 2012 production, D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks.
Sandglass, an award-­winning Vermont puppet theatre company, devised this
theatre work using stories collected through workshops with individuals
suffering from dementia. While this production employs features and devices
that Lehmann would call ‘dramatic’ – its actions follow a linear sequence,
and it proceeds from a recognizable conception of character – its use of the
puppet theatre form and its narrative/theatrical staging of dementia con­
sciousness offers postdramatic openings in its otherwise dramatic matrix.
Puppet theatre and dementia performance extend Lehmann’s theory of the
‘postdramatic’ into phenomenological, institutional and ethical areas largely
undeveloped in Postdramatic Theatre. By foregrounding the interaction of
artists and performing objects, puppet theatre offers an intricate exploration
of animation, subjectivity and their distribution across agencies. Puppet
handlers animate crafted objects that carry an imagined subjectivity in their
painted faces and eyes. When puppets move and speak, they do so with
borrowed gestures and words, drawing kinetic and verbal agency from the
human figure that manipulates them while also asserting themselves as
quasi-­autonomous subjects as a result of this transfer. Subjectivity crosses
subjects, one animate and one animated, in an ontological ambiguity that
signals one and two points of consciousness at the same time.6
Dementia performance has a similar effect of expanding the postdramatic
and clarifying its implications. For one thing, the phenomenological insight
that D-Generation and similar works provide into the embodiedness of
subjectivity underscores the place of disability – particularly, neurological
disability – in postdramatic theatre. On the whole, disability occupies a
troubling place in Postdramatic Theatre. When Lehmann mentions disabled
bodies, he focuses on their deviance and irregularity. An example of his
theory’s unacknowledged normativism can be found in his discussion of the
body’s physicality in postdramatic theatre: ‘In addition, there is often the
presence of the deviant body, which through illness, disability or deformation
deviates from the norm and causes an “amoral” fascination, unease or fear.’7
The subjectivity of those with physical or cognitive disabilities and the impact
of non-­normative experiences and representations on theatrical form seem
not to concern him.8 This is a surprising omission given that neuroatypicality,
in particular, maps well onto the postdramatic’s concern with divergent
subjectivities. Robert Wilson’s collaborations in the 1970s with autistic poet
Christopher Knowles are an example of this affinity, as is Jérôme Bel’s 2012
performance piece Disabled Theatre, which was created in collaboration with
cognitively impaired actors from Zürich’s Theatre HORA. The discon­­­
tinuous mental landscape of dementia presents particular challenges and
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 199

opportunities for contemporary theatre practice, as attested to by the

proliferating field of performances for, about and with Alzheimer’s individuals
and those with other forms of dementia. Much of this work originates in care
facilities in addition to, or instead of theatres, and includes individuals with
dementia as well as their caregivers. Often multimedia in nature, dementia
theatre tends to be intensely collaborative, and it engages an inter-­institutional
infrastructure including care and treatment facilities, therapeutic regimens,
arts organizations, medical funding agencies and media outlets as well as
theatrical institutions. In 2010, for example, the London-­based company
Spare Tyre developed a series of participatory workshops entitled Once Upon
a Time at a London residential care facility for people with dementia. These
workshops engaged participants in interactive and multisensory storytelling
through the use of coloured lights, music and multimedia projections that
responded to clapping and voice. Residents who had previously shown little
expressive capacity were able to tell stories in a range of performance
modalities. Once Upon a Time was subsequently conducted at other dementia
care facilities and centres across the UK.9
Spare Tyre describes itself as a ‘participatory arts charity’ rather than a
theatre or performance group,10 and the difference in terminology may
suggest why its work and the work of community-­engaged organizations like
it have largely been neglected in more formally and aesthetically grounded
theatrical models such as Lehmann’s. The participants in Once Upon a Time
do not perform in a public theatre space, nor do actors stand in for them in a
performance based on their experience. But their creative engagement is
performative nonetheless, and it shares aesthetic principles that postdramatic
theatre defines itself by: the retreat from synthesis, simultaneity, irruption of
the real, impulse and improvisation, intermediality. With Once Upon a Time
and other socially-­situated performance work, these principles manifest
themselves at the meeting point of theatrical and non-­theatrical institutions
and practices. As D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks illustrates, the
institutional contexts of dementia performance remain in place when it
migrates from the activity room of a care facility to more public stages. The
final section of this essay will explore this inter-­institutional dimension of
postdramatic subjectivity.

D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks

D-Generation was developed in 2012 by Sandglass Theatre’s Eric Bass, Ines
Zeller Bass and Kirk Murphy. The production was based on stories generated
by people with late-­stage dementia and the collaborative interaction that was
200 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

used to elicit them. Bass, Zeller Bass and Murphy gathered these stories at a
number of care facilities in Vermont using a creative-­storytelling method
called TimeSlips, which was developed by Anne Basting in 1996 and is now
practiced by trained facilitators throughout the world. As part of this method,
circles of people with dementia are shown a picture and asked to share what
they think is going on in it. Anything they say is acceptable, and every
statement they contribute becomes part of the collaborative story. Facilitators
prompt them by asking questions and write down what they say in response.
The purpose of this activity, which involves residents and staff as well as
certified trainers, is to direct attention away from the narratives the individ­
uals with dementia can no longer remember and engage their resources of
imagination and creativity.11 The term ‘timeslip’ refers to a temporal dis­
location, often in fantasy or science fiction, through which a person finds
herself travelling between different points of time; it can also refer to the
bringing together of different points of time so that the events of one time
can be experienced at another time. The relevance of a process bearing this
name to individuals who have undergone severe memory and cognitive
impairment is apparent. In 2008, Sandglass was approached by Parapro­
fessional Healthcare Institute (PHI), a New York-­based nonprofit that works
to improve services for long-­term care for elders and those who care for
them, to see if they were interested in creating a theatre piece based on the
TimeSlips technique. As Renya Larson of PHI observed:

There’s sort of a double nature with TimeSlips stories. You have the
experience of the facilitator with the participants who are creating
the stories, and there’s this other reality, the make-­believe reality of the
stories themselves. And because Sandglass works with puppets, there’s
this lovely opportunity to have multiple layers of reality functioning at
the same time.12

Members of the company worked with TimeSlips facilitators for ten weeks at
two Vermont nursing homes and developed D-Generation based on their
experiences.
D-Generation recreated a residential care setting and the TimeSlips
creative interaction with puppets standing in for the residents. The play’s
residents – Henry, Rose, Mary, Elwood and Florence – were rod puppets,
approximately two feet in length and realistically detailed to resemble elderly
people. For most of the play they sat in raised chairs, which were wheeled
around by the three puppeteers. In addition to operating the puppets and
delivering their lines, Bass, Zeller Bass and Murphy played caregivers to these
dementia-­care residents. The play’s action, which consisted of interactions
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 201

between the caregivers and the residents and sequences focused on individual
residents, was organized around two creative storytelling sessions and the
collaborative narratives produced in them. Framed by mobile curtain screens
that were rearranged in changing relation to each other, the play’s interactions
were supplemented by brief scenes or tableaux involving the puppet operators
and the residents, animated video sequences projected on a large background
screen, and a sound score featuring music and the occasional voices of unseen
family members trying to communicate with the residents.13 At one point in
the middle of the play, the residents were shown a toy-­theatre stage on which
Murphy and Zeller Bass presented the story they had just created using
simple stick puppets and cardboard-­and-paper props. At several other points
during the production, one or more of the puppeteers stepped forward to talk
about Alzheimer’s disease and those who have it.
In her discussion of applied performance and dementia by contemporary
groups such as Spare Tyre, Magic Me and Entelachy Arts, Nicola Shaughnessy
points out the ability of trauma and dementia (which she considers a form of
trauma) to destabilize identity constructions.14 While the physical coordinates
of time, space and action in D-Generation were conventionally delineated – the
residents and their caregivers occupied a scene that was externally identifiable
and coherent – the subjective dimension of this dramatic world was radically
destabilized by the dementia that formed its subject. In contrast to the three

Figure 13.1 Kirk Murphy and puppet Rose in Sandglass Theatre’s

D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks, 2012. (Photo by Laura Bliss.)
202 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

caregivers, who maintained coherent dramatic selves despite the fact that they
stepped out of these roles to address the audience, the inner world of the
dementia residents was fragmentary and often inaccessible – an ‘empty hole’, as
the puppeteer/caretakers characterize it.15 The residents often spoke in non-­
sequiturs, repeated themselves, or withdrew into inaccessibility. Any sense of
coherent subjectivity was splintered apart in a neurodivergent landscape of
unpredictability, discontinuity and absence. With memory and recognition
impaired, subjectivity was cast adrift, and all that seemed apparent were its
residua. Some of the residents provided suggestions about the lives they led
before entering the care facility: Rose’s father, she claims, built a sawmill and
paid for her dance lessons; Henry seems to have been a painter; Florence
speaks about having travelled the world. The precise outlines of these
experiences were hard to determine, and even the most articulate recollection
(such as Florence’s in the play’s closing moments) felt oddly detached from
the present. The dynamic of this detachment shifted when the residents
participated in the group storytelling sessions. Because they were invited to
create story details concerning the pictures they were shown, the focus shifted
to their collaborative exercise of imagination. Some of the details they pro­
vided were clearly autobiographical, memories transmuted into fiction;
other glimpses of their former lives – the song line ‘I’ll be seeing you in all the
old familiar places’, for example – came out of nowhere, or (perhaps more
accurately) from untraceable areas of their experience. The narratives
that resulted from this process were disjointed, funny, surreal – like this story,
which they collaboratively generated in response to a photo of a dancing
couple:

He is going to kidnap her. They are dancing on the roof. On the railroad
tracks. Look at her shoe, up in the air! The music is coming from the
building behind them.
I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine
embraces all day through . . .
They’ve taken off, to the airport. They want to go to Paris. They are going
to a dance. They’re behaving themselves. They just got married. They’re
celebrating, but they’re still stuck on the rail.
This will be the end of them.
The air feels wonderful.
They’re on the balcony, overlooking the city.
Hello and goodbye, he says. Watch your step on the roof.
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 203

I love you, my dear.

Let’s have a cup of tea when we’re done.
If she doesn’t watch her step, she’ll fall down and go gooey.
Can we have another drink?
They’re going to Paris to go shopping and to see the Mona Lisa. Shopping
for a tux and something bright and different. They have cocktails. Gin
and bourbon. Whaaa. He’s a dance teacher (or a doctor). Maybe with a
circus. She works in a bakery. He went into the bakery and ordered a
croissant.
Want a donut, Honey?
Hello.
It’s elevating really quick.
She is Rose.
He’s not worth a name.
Find a room.
Jack and the rabbit came together.16

Rose’s dance lessons and Florence’s time in Paris found meaning in this new
pastiche, which was open to additions and transformation. The narrative
was further transformed as it moved from the residents’ separate contributions
to a collaborated narration and then was converted into its own staged
puppet play.
The concept of narrative engaged in this exercise suggests another
important contribution of dementia theatre to Lehmann’s theory of the
postdramatic. In a brief section of his chapter ‘Panorama of Postdramatic
Theatre’, Lehmann lists narration as ‘an essential trait’ of postdramatic theatre.
‘Lost in the world of media’, he writes, ‘narration finds a new site in theatre’.17
Taking several theatre works where narration foregrounds itself in the
performance field as examples, Lehmann argues for a postdramatic practice
different from that of Brecht’s epic theatre. Rather than distancing the events
of the stage, as epic theatre seeks to do through the technique of narrativization,
postdramatic narration asserts presence over representation, and personal
encounter over mediatized distance. The presence that narration brings to a
mediatized performance space is evident in a 1997 performance that Lehmann
refers to in which the Danish company Von Heiduck explored the subject of
eros using dance, Hollywood film music, scenic design and provocative erotic
gestures. At one point during the production in question, a man took the stage
and retold Hans Christian Andersen’s tale ‘The Metal Pig’ for thirty minutes in
204 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

an undramatic voice. In this and similar performances that Lehmann refers to

by Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Bernhard Minetti, the moment of narration
‘returns to the stage and asserts itself against the fascination of bodies and of
media’.18 Aristotle’s opposition of tragic drama and narration is undone, in
Lehmann’s account, and the latter becomes a vehicle for the intimate in
theatrical performance. The contrast with Brecht is important:

[W]hile epic theatre changes the representation of the fictive events

represented, distancing the spectators in order to turn them into
assessors, experts and political judges, the post-­epic forms of narration
are about the foregrounding of the personal, not the demonstrating
presence of the narrator, about the self-­referential intensity of this
contact: about the closeness within distance, not the distancing of that
which is close.19

Postdramatic narration, in the examples Lehmann uses, is associated with

speakers who transform the stage into the site of a narrative act; while there
may be interspersed episodes of dialogue, ‘the main things are the description
and the interest in the particular act of the personal memory/narration of the
actors’.20 But the personal – in this section and elsewhere in Postdramatic
Theatre – is not necessarily the same as the individual, the autobiographical,
or even the subjective. In WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a 1989
theatre project directed by Renate Lorenz and Jochen Becker, German
students documented their daily lives (going shopping, meeting with friends
and other activities) through a variety of forms and media (pictures, films,
photos, performed dialogue). While this performance offered a mediatized
presentation of its performers’ lives, Lehmann suggests it achieved an ‘anti-­
media-effect’ through the actors’ presence, which keeps theatre ‘in the pro­
ximity of personal encounter’. By transforming objective documentation into
self-­narration, in other words, the actors endowed WYSIWYG with a
subjective intimacy not present in ‘the arbitrary exhibitions of biographical
“realities” ’ in confessional TV shows.21 While it is anchored in the performing
subject, though, the act of narration produced by performances such as this
is not merely personal in the sense of a direct communication between
speaker and audience. Refracted through its media and human formats,
collective rather than singular in its overall presentation, the subjectivity at
play here is multi-­channelled and multi-­referential. The personal, in such an
environment, becomes a matter of orientation rather than one of origin,
expression or singular subjectivity.
What happens when we consider Lehmann’s concept of narration in the
context of dementia subjectivity and the storytelling method of TimeSlips?
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 205

What happens when dementia narrative takes the stage as performance? An

obvious first step toward answering these questions is to recognize that the
cognitive conditions associated with dementia, particularly memory loss,
complicate any simple notion of the personal or the subjective. As
D-Generation reminds us, dementia dismantles the narrative through which
selfhood constitutes itself in time. The narratives we tell ourselves about
ourselves establish our place in a community of parallel and intersecting
stories; they constitute a point of intersection between the personal and the
public, the subjective and the intersubjective. When these narratives are
robbed of their detail and coherence, a radical disjunction occurs between
the individual, the past and one’s established community. Individuals with
dementia retain memories, but these are fragmentary and discontinuous, and
the line between memory and other forms of mental content (imagination,
non-­personal events) is precarious or non-­existent. Thomas DeBaggio, who
wrote about the onset of his dementia, observed at one point during the
progression of his disease, ‘I now lack enough mental security to be sure I
remember memories of actual events; they might belong to someone else and
I have stolen them for the moment, unknowingly.’22 Reflecting later in the
same book on the dissociation he often felt from himself, he wrote: ‘Clouded
memories flit through my brain, wandering moments in a jumble of events
only half-­remembered. Faces smiling and sullen rise through a mist of years.
Is any of this true? Can memory lie? It is too late for me to judge. Days are
numb with forgetfulness and verbal stumbling.’23 For a besieged subjectivity
such as DeBaggio’s, the ‘personal memory/narration of the actors’ that
Lehmann identifies with the postdramatic exists entirely and ambiguously in
the slash mark that separates these terms.
As noted earlier, the group exercise developed by TimeSlips redirects
attention from personal memory loss to the collective creativity of those
freed from the need to make individual sense out of what they produce. By
replacing inability with play, this shift allows individuals with dementia to
free-­associate in response to a photographic image and the responses of
others without worrying about the referentiality of what they say to the
personal history they have limited access to. The result, as D-Generation
demonstrated, is a pastiche of the remembered and the imagined, the relevant
and the random. The two stories that the puppet residents collectively
authored included details that clearly came from their personal lives but also
included fabulous realities, abrupt exclamations and observations that came
from who knows where. The aleatory narrative that resulted from their
contributions was richly subjective, but the subjectivity it brought into play
was fragmentary and collective rather than coherent or bound to a unitary
subject. It offered a hybridized field that gestured toward individual
206 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

consciousness while recognizing that consciousness under the shadow of

dementia is characterized by indeterminacy and inaccessibility.
D-Generation and the therapeutic process behind it demonstrate that the
dismantled landscape of dementia narrative offers new possibilities for
storytelling, expression and community. If Lehmann’s ‘dramatic theatre’ is
predicated on traditional notions of coherence, then dementia narrative opens
a recognizable subjective space within postdramatic theatre – a theatre, as
Lehmann writes, that ‘renounces the long-­incontestable criteria of unity and
synthesis and abandons itself to the chance (and risk) of trusting individual
impulses, fragments and microstructures of texts in order to become a new
kind of practice’.24 By trusting these impulses, fragments and microstructures,
D-Generation gestures toward more experimental versions of the postdramatic
that have used dementia and other neurological disorders in their development
of innovative theatrical works: Brook’s The Man Who . . .?, Robert Wilson’s
work with Christopher Knowles, and Melanie Wilson’s Autobiographer, for
example.
Autobiographer, which was first performed in 2011, exemplifies the
postdramatic possibilities of dementia performance, and its immersive strategies
provide a useful counterpoint to Sandglass Theatre’s puppet aesthetic. Wilson –
a London-­based writer, sound artist and performer – was drawn to dementia
because of its connection with notions of identity: ‘My interest in dementia
stems from the very particular way that stories and narratives are picked away at
and unraveled by the disease, creating a constantly shifting and illusive
understanding and retention of the self.’25 Autobiographer, the outcome of her
research on this disease, explored the consciousness of a woman in her late
seventies named Flora. Performed by four actors who played Flora at different
stages of her life, Wilson’s play staged a disintegrated subjectivity peopled by
separate selves and voices. Memory fragments, recurring words and images
were voiced by different performers as they walked around and sat down largely
unaware of each other. Their words and sentences followed each other in shifting
and ambiguous relationship. Sometimes the Floras spoke of seemingly different
things as if they were different personalities; other times they repeated words or
parallelled each other as if they spoke to or for each other. The play’s richly
poetic text, as a result, hovered uneasily between dialogue, monologue and
parallel monologue, refusing to demarcate the subjectivity it sought to express.
The experiential registers of this subjectivity – what it felt like to be Flora,
wandering lost in her psyche – were conveyed through Wilson’s use of immersive
technologies. Hanging light bulbs throbbed, flickered, went on and went off
during the performance like synapses firing and failing to fire; at certain points
they went off entirely, subjecting performers and spectators to momentary
blackouts. In keeping with Wilson’s interest in ‘the use of sound as a distinct and
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 207

subjective agency’, the play’s soundscape played an important role in this

cognitive and visceral immersion.26 Speakers, positioned behind the curtains
that enclosed the playing space, produced an environmental base line of sonic
effects, unworldly in their acoustic synthesis, sometimes frightening in their
intensity. At times voices could be heard, oscillating on the edges of compre­
hensibility. One of the play’s reviewers noted, ‘Voices whisper and mutter as
though they may be solely in your head and there are snippets of dialogue which
you can’t quite catch. It’s a haunting recreation of being mentally detached, but
connected to your own inner world.’27 In Part Four of Autobiographer, the space
succumbs to ‘an overwhelming auditory environment of real world sounds, like
a shopping centre, supermarket or public space. Augmented by fragments of
other sounds. Familiar sounds becoming alien’.28 As the performers engaged in
repetitive, agitated movements, the audience underwent a version of the
disorientation that caused their distress.

Animacy and Subjectivity

Whereas Autobiographer used the resources of multiple casting, fractured
discourse and immersive staging to probe the contours of dementia
subjectivity, D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks engaged the question of
how, or whether, one can ever know this terrain from the outside. As I have
already suggested, the interior world of D-Generation’s dementia care
residents was largely impenetrable, available in glimpses but otherwise
inaccessible. This aspect of dementia subjectivity was foregrounded through
the play of animation intrinsic to puppet theatre. When the play began, Zeller
Bass wheeled out the puppet named Mary and handed her a doll that was
lying on the floor. While a video played on the screen, Mary began to move
under Zeller Bass’s guidance, stroking the doll, looking around, slowly rocking,
then holding her head. Unlike the doll she held, which remained inert
throughout the production, Mary and the other puppets were performing
objects that acquired life and imagined subjectivity when animated by the
puppeteer’s manipulations through the process of what Jiří Veltruský termed
‘vivification’.29 But even the liveliest of puppets remains an object; its life, when
it comes to life, is a borrowed one. When puppets cease to be manipulated,
their thingness, or object-­status, threatens to take over their aliveness; when
this happens, puppets become partially or fully desubjectivized. Phenome­
nologically, this dynamic involves the presencing and de-­presencing of a
consciousness imagined into the object-­brought-to-­life.
The objectness of puppets taken out of aliveness acquires different
meanings when the subjectivity in question is conditioned by dementia.
208 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

When the puppets of D-Generation were left on their own or were otherwise
still, they did not necessarily exit the characterological field. Instead, they
were there and not there at the same time. As the puppets remained seated in
their chairs on the stage of D-Generation, their inanimate stares suggested the
inaccessibility that frames and often overtakes dementia subjectivity. Their
motionless impenetrability was poignantly intensified when the voices of
family members addressed them without receiving responses or signs of
recognition (‘Florence, where are your pearls? You’re not wearing them. Did
you forget them? Hi Dad, it’s me, Frank, your son. Don’t you remember me?
I’m your son. See, we’re in the picture together.’30). At one point in the play, the
human performers brought the question of animation and subjectivity
directly to the audience. Before Murphy put on his separate puppet show for
the resident puppets dramatizing their first collective story, the puppets were
placed on spectators’ laps where they could watch the makeshift production.
As the puppet-­show-within-­a-puppet-­show went on, some spectators in the
performances I observed sat awkwardly with their puppets; others moved
them as a way of animating them. In these different states of movement
and non-­movement, the puppets appeared alternatingly conscious and
unconscious of what was being acted out in front of them. In another
sequence, a curtain was moved aside to reveal a tableau of Murphy standing
with a piece of cake on a plate between Elwood and Florence, who were
seated in their wheelchairs. All three wore party hats. Elwood and Florence
stared forward with unseeing eyes, and the force of their inanimacy
threatened to subsume Murphy as he joined them in immobility.
Animacy, in this case, implies subjectivity: not to move, not to see bespeaks
a vacancy at the seat of agency and identity. In his phenomenologically-­
insightful study of puppets, Kenneth Gross notes this uneasy association
between humans and things: ‘[Puppet theatre] may also remind us that we do
not yet know what it means to be inanimate, that we do not know fully the
different kinds of death that humans own, or the shapes of the lives that can
be lived by inanimate things.’31 D-Generation employed additional means to
question what we can know about the puppet residents we observe. At three
points during the play, videos were projected onto the viewing screen while
individual residents were alone on stage. While these videos, which consisted
of figural and abstract painterly sequences, were clearly related to the figures
they accompanied, the nature of this relation was unclear. Did the videos
represent the difficult-­to-articulate subjective world of each resident (as
when the screen turned black when the resident Mary became agitated), or
did they represent an external viewpoint on the characters? At a later point
when Henry was alone on stage with Zeller Bass and Murphy manipulating
his body, Henry painted an imaginary painting in the air in front of him.
 Elder Care: Performing Dementia 209

Images appeared on the screen behind him that initially represented the
painting he was executing, but when he dropped his brush the video
proceeded on its own. A figure resembling him, paint brush in hand, climbed
a ladder on the screen but started to fall at the point when Henry rose in his
seat. The unclear relationship between figure and moving image marked the
uneasy boundary between the internal and external products of Henry’s
mind. Was what we were seeing a representation of Henry’s thoughts, an
independent meditation on his character by the production’s video composer
Michel Moyse, or some hybrid of the two? Like the stories that were fashioned
from the residents’ scattered contributions, the subjectivities we glimpsed
were collaborative – the result of external fashioning as well as individual
expression – and they took the form of pastiche, mixed with other products
of an intersubjective creative process.
Through its combination of puppet theatre, multimedia presentation and
storytelling with material gathered in clinical settings, D-Generation demon­
strated that aesthetic fragmentation has a subjective register, whether the
subjectivity in question is located in a consciousness that produces its elements
or the consciousness that works to make sense of it. Throughout the Sandglass
production, the products of consciousness fell apart, reconstituted themselves in
new ways, and refracted themselves through different sites and media. The
audience’s perceptual role in processing D-Generation’s divergent materials was
phenomenologically complicated by the production’s unwillingness to reduce
the residents’ inner worlds to anything but a provisional narrative cohesion and
by its desire to destabilize the spectators’ access to the residents’ imagined
interiority. Dementia presents its own phenomenologies to those who live its
dislocations, those who care for them, and those who witness its expressive
representations. What results – here as in other works we might locate within
Lehmann’s ‘postdramatic’ category – is an elusive, non-­unitary subjectivity that
fits squarely within the postdramatic paradigm. In the end, the narrativity
intrinsic to this subjectivity provides continuity and important disjunctions
between postdramatic theatre and the dramatic model against which it defines
itself. If narrative is the process by which the human subject constitutes itself in
time, it is also the medium through which subjectivity breaks apart, bares its
gaps and joins its voice with others not its own.

Practices, Institutions, Disciplines

In the final analysis, this ‘not its own’ may be one of the most important
contributions of D-Generation – and similar productions – to our under­
standing of postdramatic theatre. The personal, this production makes clear, is
210 Postdramatic Theatre and Form

also public, and its performance inside and outside the theatre is enabled and
conditioned by institutional frameworks. As noted earlier, the blurring of
institutional boundaries between theatre, clinic, research facilities and funding
agencies is particularly evident in performance work being conducted around
dementia, autism and other forms of neuroatypicality. Anne Bastings’s
TimeSlips project, which earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016, was
developed almost by accident when she tried to get residents involved in
improv games as a volunteer in a nursing home.32 Similar activities that engage
the experiences of dementia have been aimed at caregivers as well as residents.
Tanya Myers’s Inside Out of Mind, which premiered at Nottingham’s Lakeside
Arts Centre in 2013 and subsequently toured England, recreated the experience
of living and working with dementia. Drawing upon field work conducted by
researchers at the University of Nottingham and oscillating between the
disorienting perspective of dementia sufferers and the differently disorienting
perspective of their caregivers, the play was performed for audiences that
included dementia professionals. Some National Health Service (NHS) trusts
purchased tickets for their care assistants and ran workshops for their staff in
connection with the performance.33 Sponsors of the production included the
Nottingham Institute of Mental Health and IDEA (Improving Dementia
Education and Awareness), which provides information and accredited
courses for people living with dementia and their caregivers.
Tracking the collaborations, funding streams, venues and audiences of
productions like Once Upon a Time, Autobiographer, Inside Out of Mind and
D-Generation suggests a different provenance of the postdramatic and its
engagements with subjectivity. Rather than defining the postdramatic
performance field in terms of the theatrical models it seeks to displace, this
perspective considers its aesthetic within a broader infrastructure of practices,
institutions and disciplines. That these non-­theatrical fields generate ‘individual
impulses, fragments and microstructures of texts’ from their own engagements
with neuroatypicality suggests that postdramatic subjectivity is much more
institutionally diverse than we have allowed. The British company Sound &
Fury’s 2005 show Ether Frolics, which explored the history, contemporary
practice and experience of anaesthesia using postdramatic and immersive
performance techniques, was funded by the Wellcome Trust, which funds
projects connected with medical science and by BOC Medical, one of Britain’s
leading providers of medical gas products. D-Generation’s narrative framework
came from therapeutic exercises conducted in a nursing home. Dementia and
its performances, I propose, are particularly suited to unsettling the boundary
between the personal and the institutional, the subjective and its social
manifestations. That the postdramatic also exists in, depends on, and orients
this inter-­institutional space is one of its under-­told stories.
 Notes

Chapter 1
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 114.
2 Ibid., p. 22.
3 Ibid., p. 27.
4 Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hays,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 5.
5 Elinor Fuchs, ‘Drama: The Szondi Connection’, in this volume, 2019,
pp. 20–30, here p. 23.
6 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, p. 7.
7 Ibid., p. 8.
8 For one, Lehmann enlarges the tent of drama to include a range of figures
Szondi excludes. Chief among them is Bertolt Brecht, whose work, Lehmann
argues, still culminated in a ‘fictive cosmos’. See: Lehmann, Postdramatic
Theatre, p. 22, emphasis in original.
9 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, pp. 34–35, emphasis in original.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 21.
12 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 22, emphasis in original.
13 Ibid., p. 23.
14 Ibid., p. 95.
15 Marvin Carlson, ‘Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance’,
Revista Brasileira Estudos da Presença 5.3 (2015), pp. 577–595, here p. 578.
16 Ibid., p. 583.
17 Ibid., p. 578.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 590.
20 Ibid., p. 579.
21 Elinor Fuchs, ‘Postdramatic Theatre (Review)’, TDR: The Drama Review 52.2
(2008), pp. 178–183, here p. 179.
22 Ibid., p. 181.
23 Patrice Pavis, The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary
Theatre, trans. Andrew Bowen, London and New York: Routledge, 2016,
p. 189.
24 Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and
Postdramatic Theatre, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015.
25 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Generational Shifts’, Theatre Research International 35.3
(2010), pp. 288–300, here p. 290.
212 Notes

26 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Karen Jürs-Munby and Elinor Fuchs, ‘Lost in

Translation?’, TDR: The Drama Review 52.4 (2008), pp. 13–20, here p. 16,
emphasis in original.
27 See: Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles (eds), Postdramatic
Theatre and the Political: International Perspective on Contemporary
Performance, London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013. In this collection, see
especially: Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles, ‘Introduction:
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political’, pp. 1–30; and Brandon Woolf,
‘Towards a Paradoxically Parallaxical Postdramatic Politics?’, pp. 31–46.
28 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Review of Postdramatic Theatre and the Political:
International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance’, Theatre Research
International 40.2 (2015), pp. 201–203, here p. 201, emphasis added.
29 Birgit Haas, Plädoyer für ein dramatisches Drama, Vienna: Passagen, 2007,
p. 31. All translations are by the authors unless otherwise noted.
30 Janelle Reinelt, ‘“What I Came to Say”: Raymond Williams, the Sociology of
Culture and the Politics of (Performance) Scholarship’, Theatre Research
International 40.3 (2015), pp. 235–249, here p. 242.
31 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Performance at the Crossroads of Citizenship’, in Shirin M.
Rai and Janelle Reinelt (eds), The Grammar of Politics and Performance,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, pp. 34–50, here p. 35.
32 Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning:
Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies, Montreal: ECW, 1999, p. 15.
33 Ric Alssopp, ‘On Form/Yet to Come’, Performance Research 10.2 (2005),
pp. 1–4, here p. 1.
34 Alan Ruiz, ‘Radical Formalism’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist
theory 26.2–3 (2016), pp. 233–240, here p. 233.
35 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 138.
36 Yves-Alain Bois, ‘Formalism and Structuralism,’ in Hal Foster, Rosalind
Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (eds), Art Since 1900:
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York: Thames & Hudson,
2004, pp. 32–39, here p. 33. For further background and analysis on this
debate from within theatre studies, see: Janelle Reinelt, ‘A feminist
reconsideration of the Brecht/Lukács debates’, Women & Performance: a
journal of feminist theory 7.1 (1994), pp. 122–139; Fredric Jameson,
‘Reflections in Conclusion,’ in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. and ed. Ronald
Taylor, London: Verso, 1980, pp. 196–213.
37 For a useful overview of key debates specifically in literature, from Aristotle
to the Russian Formalists and beyond, see: Stephen Cohen, ‘Form and
Formalism in Western Literature and Theory’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia
of Literature, 2017, available at: http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/
acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-127 (accessed
1 March 2018), archived at https://perma.cc/TMN8-KYU8. For a concise
and sweeping intellectual history of ‘form’ since Immanuel Kant, see: Angela
 Notes 213

Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 1–29.
38 On the history and legacy of New Criticism in literary studies, see: Cohen,
‘Form and Formalism’; Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political
History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 21–55; Raman
Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker, A Reader’s Guide to
Contemporary Literary Theory, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005,
pp. 15–28.
39 Cohen, ‘Form and Formalism’.
40 See: Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from
Philology to Performativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004;
W.B. Worthen, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance, Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
41 Worthen, Drama, p. 37.
42 Ibid., p. 39.
43 Ibid., p. 37. As Elin Diamond writes, it was ‘impossible, in the case of drama
scholarship, not to “go outside the text”. Performance is that messy,
historicizing moment that interrupts the integrity of the written document’.
See: Elin Diamond, ‘Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama’, in Ric Knowles,
Joanne Tompkins and W.B. Worthen (eds), Modern Drama: Defining the
Field, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 3–14, here p. 4,
emphasis in original.
44 As Marvin Carlson explains, the theoretical investments of German
Theaterwissenschaft can be traced back to longstanding conversations in
European aesthetic theory, which focus on the centrality of aesthetic
experience. See: Marvin Carlson, ‘Perspectives on Performance: Germany
and America’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of
Performance: A New Aesthetics, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008,
pp. 1–10. This claim is bolstered by the fact that one of the central
methodologies and introductory courses in German theatre studies is
‘Performance Analysis’ (Aufführungsanalyse), which focuses almost
exclusively on ‘staging’ or ‘mise en scène’ and, in contrast to Anglo-American
departments, is not much interested in the ‘manifold non-­aesthetic
dynamics at play during a performance’. See: Christopher B. Balme, The
Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008, p. 132.
45 Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1987.
46 Today, scholars would be justified to dispute the strict separations Kirby
drew between terms like theatre and literature, not least because, as Julia
Jarcho reminds us, this division too casually ignores much of what such
terms have in common formally. See: Julia Jarcho, Writing and the Modern
Stage: Theater Beyond Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017, pp. 3–22.
214 Notes

47 Kirby, A Formalist Theatre, p. ix

48 Ibid., p. x.
49 Ibid.
50 Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the
Avant-Gardes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 257.
51 The irony of the critique of New Criticism for its apoliticism is that it was
a deeply conscious political project. Cleanth Brooks and others used
formalism to defend a very particular canon and the right of certain men to
determine that canon, and thereby determine social and political values.
52 Jackson, Professing Performance, p. 132.
53 Stefka Mihaylova, ‘The Radical Formalism of Suzan-Lori Parks and Sarah
Kane’, Theatre Survey 56.2 (2015), pp. 213–231, here p. 219.
54 There are, of course, exceptions to this, most notably Ric Knowles’ The
Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian
Dramaturgies, quoted above. Yet Knowles’ approach to form remains rooted
in a semiotic tradition concerned primarily with how dramaturgical form
shapes meaning creation on stage. As we explain below, our understanding
of form in relation to theatre is not limited to how meaning is produced in
an interpretive community, but focuses more on how forms in theatre
overlap and intersect with social forms more generally.
55 Jackson, Professing Performance, pp. 80–81.
56 See: Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’,
Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21.
57 Marjorie Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, PMLA 122.2 (2007),
pp. 558–569, here p. 559.
58 For helpful critical overviews of ‘New Formalism’, see: Cohen, ‘Form and
Formalism’; Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the
Critical Present, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017, pp. 21–28;
Seb Franklin, ‘The Contexts of Forms’, world picture 11 (2016), available at:
http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_11/pdfs/Franklin_WP_11.pdf
(accessed 1 March 2018), archived at https://perma.cc/X6WA-T5SK;
Carolyn Lesjak, ‘Reading Dialectically’, Criticism 55.2 (2013), pp. 233–277;
North, Literary Criticism, pp. 140–147.
59 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 2.
60 Ibid., p. x.
61 Ibid., p. xi, emphasis in original.
62 Ibid., p. x.
63 Ibid., p. 7.
64 See: Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectatorship, London and New York: Verso, 2012; Shannon Jackson, Social
Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, London and New York:
Routledge, 2011.
65 Caroline Levine, ‘Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural
Studies’, Victorian Studies 48.4 (2006), pp. 625–657, here p. 627.
 Notes 215

66 Levine, Forms, p. xii

67 Franklin, ‘The Contexts of Form’, emphasis in original.
68 See, for instance, Fredric Jameson’s classic works Marxism and Form,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, and The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983.
69 For Berlant’s treatment of this tradition, see: Lauren Berlant, Cruel
Optimism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 63–69.
70 North, Literary Criticism, p. 176
71 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 7.
72 Ibid., p. 10.
73 Ibid., p. 13.
74 The following account of Ngai’s work owes to a reading of several recent
essays, as well as the book Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute,
Interesting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
75 Sianne Ngai, ‘Our Aesthetic Categories’, PMLA 125.4 (October 2010),
pp. 948–958, here p. 951.
76 Ibid., 949.
77 Levine, Forms, p. 21.
78 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, pp. 16–17.
79 For more on the difference between postdramatic theatre and Brechtian
theatre, see: David Barnett, ‘Performing dialectics in an age of uncertainty,
or: Why post-Brechtian ≠ postdramatic’, in Postdramatic Theatre and the
Political, pp. 47–66.
80 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 4.
81 Jasmine Mahmoud, ‘Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse
Seattle’, in this volume, pp. 48–65, here p. 48.
82 Andrew Friedman, ‘Festivals: Conventional Disruption, or, Why Ann
Liv Young Ruined Rebecca Patek’s Show’, in this volume, pp. 115–130,
here p. 116.
83 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 164, emphasis in original.

Chapter 2
1 Anna Porter, Kasztner’s Train, New York: Walker & Company, 2007,
p. 348.
2 Karen Jürs-Munby, ‘Introduction’, in Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic
Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, pp. 1–15, here
p. 2.
3 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 21.
4 Ibid.
5 Michael Hays, ‘Introduction’, boundary 2 2.3 (1983), pp. 1–5, here p. 1.
6 Ibid.
216 Notes

7 Peter Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, ed. and trans. Michael Hays,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 7–8.
8 Ibid., p. 8.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 63.
11 Peter Höyng, ‘Peter Szondi’s Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956/63): From
Absolute Drama to Absolute Theory’, Monatshefte 101.3 (2009), pp. 314–322,
here p. 314.
12 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 34.
13 Ibid., p. 32, emphasis in original.
14 Ibid., p. 128.
15 For this insight into the possibility that Lehmann’s theatrical ‘real’ might
represent a new kind of realism, I am indebted to the DFA dissertation of
my Yale Drama School student Ilinca Todorut, on the robust revival of the
realist tradition in contemporary theatre.
16 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 29
17 Ibid.
18 I am indebted to Yale Drama School DFA candidate Ilya Khdosh for
research assistance with this article.

Chapter 3
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 44.
2 See: David Barnett ‘When is a Play not a Drama: Two Examples of
Postdramatic Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly, 24.1 (2008), pp.14–23; Karen
Jürs-Munby, ‘The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing
Elfriede Jeline’s Sprachflächen’, Performance Research 14.1 (2009), pp. 46–56;
Claire Swyzen and Kurt Vanhoutte (eds), Het statuut van de tekst in het
postdramatisch theater, Brussels: ASP, 2011; Luule Epner, ‘Theatre in the
Postdramatic Text: A Phenomenological Approach’, Nordic Theatre Studies
24 (2012), pp. 66–75; Matt Cornish, ‘Kinetic Texts: From Poetry to
Performance’, Modern Drama 58.3 (2015), pp. 302–323.
3 Genetic criticism is often somewhat loosely defined as ‘research into the
dynamics of writing processes’. See: Dirk Van Hulle, De Kladbewaarders,
Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2007, p. 7 (translation by the authors). Or it is the study
of what is called ‘the “avant-­texte”: a critical gathering of a writer’s notes,
sketches, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence’. See:
Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden (eds), Genetic Criticism:
Texts and Avant-Textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
See also: Josette Féral, ‘Towards a Genetic Study of Performance – Take 2’,
Theatre Research International 33.3 (2008), pp. 223–233; Almuth Grésillon,
Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux and Dominique Budor (eds), Genèses
Théâtrales, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010.
 Notes 217

4 See Almuth Grésillon and Jean-Marie Thomasseau, ‘Scènes de Genèses

Théâtrales’, Genesis: Manuscrits, Recherche, Invention 26, Special Issue
‘Theâtre’ (2005), pp. 19–34; Julia Bernard, ‘“Un drame est ce que je nomme
un drame”. Heiner Müller: Quelques brouillons de Bildbeschreibung’,
in Almuth Grésillon and Nathalie Léger (eds), Genesis: Manuscrits,
Recherche, Invention 26, Special Issue ‘Theâtre’ (2005), pp. 141–143; and
Michel Contat, ‘La genèse sociale des Séquestrés d’Altona de Jean-Paul
Sartre’, in Grésillon and Leger (eds), Genesis: Manuscrits, Recherche,
Invention 26, pp. 91–100.
5 Féral, ‘Towards a Genetic Study of Performance – Take 2’, p. 224 and p. 226.
6 Ibid., p. 229.
7 These directors also constitute the corpus of the interuniversity research
project The Didascalic Imagination: Contemporary Theatrical Notebooks as
Genetic Documents of the Artistic Process, from which the present chapter
derives. This project started in January 2013 under the supervision of Luk
Van den Dries (University of Antwerp), and aims to trace the heritage of the
Regiebuch in contemporary postdramatic theatre. For more information, see
the website of the project: http://dighum.uantwerpen.be/didascimagination
(accessed 12 September 2018), archived at https://perma.cc/3P3B-YQ8C.
8 In his essay ‘The Iconoclasm of the Stage and the Return of the Body’,
Romeo Castellucci elucidates how ‘the return of the body’ in his theatre is
intended as ‘an objective act of truth that puts an end to the chatter of
comedy’, and allows ‘turning the “as if ” of theatre, its fictional essence, into
an ambivalent or amphibio-­logical dimension’. Romeo Castellucci, ‘The
Iconoclasm of the Stage and the Return of the Body: the Carnal Power of
Theater’, Theater 37.3 (2007), pp. 37–45, here p. 38.
9 Michelle Kokosowski, ‘Pilgrims of Matter. Romeo Castellucci in his own
Words’, Janus (June 2000), pp. 25–28, here p. 26.
10 Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher and
Nicholas Ridout, The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, London and New
York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 235–236.
11 The archive of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is in the process of being
digitized and catalogued by Prof. Eline Papalexiou (academic advisor,
curator), Dr Avra Xepapadakou (documentation advisor, curator) and their
team within the European project ARCH: Archival Research and Cultural
Heritage Aristeia II. Our own research on Castellucci’s notebooks has
benefited greatly from the archival work done by Papalexiou and her team.
We wish to express our gratitude for granting us access to this documentary
material. For more information, see the website of the ARCH research
project: http://www.arch-­srs.com (accessed 12 September 2018), archived at
https://perma.cc/JC46-URNE.
12 This notebook is numbered 123_01_05_038 and is part of the digitalization
project ARCH: Archival Research and Cultural Heritage: The Theatre Archive
of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.
218 Notes

13 Kokowski, ‘Pilgrims of Matter’, p. 26. ‘Parthenogenesis’ is a form of asexual

reproduction that can be found in some species, such as amphibians and
reptiles. Castellucci’s reference to this term indicates that he is searching to
draw connections between seemingly incommensurable categories (such as
the animate and the inanimate) in order to compose his own idiosyncratic
theatrical universe.
14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 463. It is
perhaps meaningful that Benjamin provides this definition of the ‘image’ in
what has come to be known as his ‘Notebook N (On the Theory of
Knowledge, Theory of Progress)’, which is included in The Arcades Project.
For an insightful discussion of Notebook N and specifically the idea of the
image Benjamin proposes here, see Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
15 Kokowski, ‘Pilgrims of Matter’, p. 26.
16 For a more extensive analysis of the function of annotation in director’s
notebooks and creative processes, see Timmy De Laet, Edith Cassiers and
Luk Van den Dries, ‘Creating by Annotating: The Director’s Notebooks of
Jan Fabre and Jan Lauwers’, Performance Research 20.6 (2015), pp. 43–52.
17 Kokosowski, ‘Pilgrims of Matter’, p. 28.
18 On the notion of contraction within Isaac Luria’s philosophy, see: Daphne
Freedman, Man and the Theogony in the Lurianic Cabala, New York: Gorgias
Press, 2006, pp. 27–30.
19 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927–1931, ed. Allan
Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr.,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
20 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Kraus, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York:
Zone Books, 1997, p. 18.
21 Konstantina Georgelou, Performless: The Operation of l’informe in
Postdramatic Theatre, dissertation, Utrecht University, 2011, available at:
https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/212939 (accessed 27 March, 2018),
p. 41, emphasis in original.
22 Lydie Parisse, La ‘Parole Trouée’: Beckett, Tardieu, Novarina, Caen: Lettres
modernes Minard, 2008.
23 Kokosowski, ‘Pilgrims of Matter’, p. 26.
24 Ibid.
25 Timmy De Laet and Edith Cassiers, ‘The Regenerative Ruination of Romeo
Castellucci’, Performance Research 20.3 (2015), pp. 18–28, here p. 20.
26 Guy Cassiers was one of the crucial figures of the well-­known ‘Flemish
Wave’ – a fruitful period during the 1980s characterized by a generation of
Flemish directors, choreographers, actors and dancers who developed a
unique artistic stage language based on breaking through any purist
boundaries of theatre, dance, visual and performance art. See: Christian Biet
and Josette Féral (eds), La vague flamande: mythe ou réalité? Théâtre/Public
211 (2014); Lourdes Orozco and Peter M. Boenisch, ‘Editorial: Border
 Notes 219

Collisions – Contemporary Flemish Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review

20.4 (2010), pp. 397–404. Cassiers’ intermedial theatre was one of the
emerging forms of performing arts, next to the experiments of, amongst
others, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre, Jan
Lauwers, Jan Decorte, Luk Perceval, Ivo van Hove and Alain Platel. Some of
Cassiers’ most noteworthy productions include: the Proust performance-­
cycle (2002–2004), a triptych based on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(2010–2012), Blood and Roses. The Song of Gilles and Jeanne (2011),
MCBTH (2013), Hamlet vs Hamlet (2014), Caligula (2015), Borderline
(2017). He also staged the complete cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen in Berlin and Milan (2010–2013).
27 See: Sigrid Merx, ‘Swann’s Way: Video and Theatre as an Intermedial Stage
for the Representation of Time’, in Frieda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt
(eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Amsterdam, New York:
Rodopi, 2006, pp. 67–80; Sigrid Merx, ‘Theater, Video en Kristallisering van
de Tijd’, in Maaike Bleeker, Lucia van Heteren, Chiel Kattenbelt and Rob van
der Zalm (eds), Theater Topics 4 – Concepten en Objecten, Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 61–70.
28 Guy Cassiers is not alone in his preference for novelistic texts as the textual
basis for his performances. Other postdramatic directors are also inclined to
choose a novel to adapt for the stage, such as Klaus Michael Grüber
(adapting, for instance, the novella Rudi by Bernard von Brentano) and
Romeo Castellucci (adapting Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la
nuit). It should also be noted that Cassiers sometimes stages a classical
theatre text, such as Hamlet vs. Hamlet and MCBTH. For the adaptations of
these theatre texts he often engages a playwright, such as Tom Lanoye, or
reworks the texts himself with the aid of his dramaturge, Erwin Jans.
29 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinsky, Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997.
30 Sayyed Ali Mirenayat and Elaheh Soofastaei, ‘Gerard Genette and the
Categorization of Textual Transcendence’, Mediterranean Journal of Social
Sciences 6.5 (2015), pp. 533–537, here p. 536.
31 See: Günther Martens, ‘Palimpsest en hercompilatie: Alexander Kluge, de
“laatste modernist”? Alexander Kluges herschrijving van het modernisme
(Mann, Proust, Joyce en Musil)’, in Jan Baetens, Sjef Houppermans, Arthur
Langeveld and Peter Liebregts (eds), De erfenis van het modernisme,
Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2010, pp. 219–235.
32 See Thomas Crombez and Edith Cassiers, ‘Postdramatic Methods of
Adaptation in the Age of Digital Collaborative Writing’, Digital Scholarship
in the Humanities Journal 32.1 (2017), pp. 17–35.
33 See: Zoë Svendsen, ‘Luk Perceval – Platonov (2006) – Rules for a Theatre of
Contemporary Contemplation’, in Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender (eds),
Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 222–241; Crombez and
220 Notes

Cassiers, ‘Postdramatic Methods of Adaptation in the Age of Digital

Collaborative Writing’; and Frederik Le Roy, Edith Cassiers, Thomas
Crombez and Luk Van den Dries, ‘Tracing Creation: The Director’s
Notebook as Genetic Document of the Postdramatic Creative Process’,
Contemporary Theatre Review 26.4 (2016), pp. 468–484.
34 Erwin Jans, interview with Guy Cassiers, ‘De i-Pad van Kaspar: gesprek met
regisseur Guy Cassiers en video-­ontwerper Arjen Klerkx’, De Witte Raaf 153
(2011), available at: http://www.dewitteraaf.be/artikel/detail/nl/3686
(accessed 13 March 2013), archived at https://perma.cc/K5TA-Q6C8.
Translations by the authors unless otherwise noted.
35 Ibid.
36 Edith Cassiers, Frederik Le Roy and Luk Van den Dries, interview with Guy
Cassiers, 5 December 2013, Toneelhuis, Antwerp.
37 Ibid.
38 Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word, New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
39 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans.
Christine Shantz, Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1998,
p. 267.
40 Two revolutionary objects that Cassiers’ collaborators have developed for his
intermedial theatre are the so-­called mediaserver and hippotizer. Cassiers
has been using the mediaserver since 2008 and calls it a kind of ‘photoshop
program for video’. This computer program can play and edit live images
(cropping, changing colours, distorting effects, etc.) on three screens. The
hippotizer was used for MCBTH and makes it possible for video images to
follow actor’s movements – creating shadows and other light effects. Cassiers
et al., interview with Guy Cassiers. See also: Jans, ‘De i-Pad van Kaspar’.
41 Jans, ‘De i-Pad van Kaspar’.
42 Cassiers et al., interview with Guy Cassiers.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Julia Jarcho, Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 30.
46 Most of the work is done in advance of the rehearsals, the so-­called
pre-­production process, around the table with the director, dramaturg and
technical crew. Scenography (decor, light, costumes and video projection) is
designed in advance, so the actors can start the first day of rehearsal in a
technical ‘playground’. Cassiers et al., interview with Guy Cassiers.
47 Jans, ‘De i-Pad van Kaspar’.
48 Cassiers et al., interview with Guy Cassiers.
49 See: Battles, Palimpsest, p. 18.
50 See: Peter M. Boenisch, ‘coMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality
in Contemporary Theatre’, Theatre Research International 28.1 (2003),
pp. 34–45; Chiel Kattenbelt, ‘Intermediality in Theatre and Performance:
Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships’, Cultura, Lenguaje y
 Notes 221

Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008), pp. 19–29;

and Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson
(eds), Mapping Intermediality in Performance, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2010.
51 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 22.
52 See: Irina O. Rajewsky, ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: A
Literary Perspective on Intermediality’, Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des
arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality : History and Theory of the
Arts, Literature and Technologies 6 (2005), pp. 43–64.
53 Ibid., p. 52.
54 Ibid., p. 16.
55 Ibid.
56 See: Regina Schober, ‘Translating Sounds: Intermedial Exchanges in Amy
Lowell’s “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques’, for String Quartet” ’, in Lars
Elleström (ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 163–174.
57 Schober, p. 166.
58 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 7.
59 Karen Jürs-Munby, ‘Introduction’, in Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre,
pp. 1–15, here p. 2.
60 Ibid., 44.

Chapter 4
1 The description for this performance is drawn from online video footage:
Implied Violence, Barley Girl (2010), available at: https://vimeo.
com/9291839 (accessed 2 February 2016)
2 Brandon Kiley, ‘Heavy-Metal Theatre’, The Stranger, 14 August 2008, available
at: https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/theatre-­news/Content?oid=643682
(accessed 2 February 2016), archived at https://perma.cc/Q8DE-BEV7.
3 Christopher Frizzelle, ‘Implied Violence,’ The Stranger, 11 September 2008,
available at: https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/implied-­violence/
Content?oid=668965 (accessed 2 February 2016), archived at
https://perma.cc/FV29-X7TH
4 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 31.
5 Ibid., p. 150.
6 Ibid., p. 175.
7 Sonjah Stanley Niaah, DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2010, p. 32.
8 Elin Diamond, ‘Introduction’, in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and
Cultural Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 1–12, here p. 1.
9 Jasmine Mahmoud, ‘Brooklyn’s Experimental Frontiers: A Performance
Geography’, TDR: The Drama Review 58:3 (2014), pp. 97–123, here p. 104.
222 Notes

10 Stanley Niaah, DanceHall, p. 32.

11 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Mandie O’Connell are from an
interview with the author conducted in 2014.
12 Steve Wiecking, ‘Everything Without Exception’, Seattle Weekly, 9 October
2006, np.
13 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Ryan Mitchell are from an
interview with the author conducted in 2014.
14 Brendan Kiley, ‘The First Week: Halfway Through Northwest New Works,’
The Stranger, 14 June 2007, available at: https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/
the-­first-week/Content?oid=242745 (accessed 2 February 2016), archived at
https://perma.cc/8RHK-GCDJ.
15 Brangien Davis, ‘Northwest New Works | Performance, parody and pie’, The
Seattle Times, 19 June 2007, available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/
entertainment/northwest-­new-works-­performance-parody-­and-pie/
(accessed 2 February 2016).
16 Christopher Frizzelle, ‘Nightstand’, The Stranger, 14 June 2007, available at:
https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/nightstand/Content?oid=242641
(accessed 2 February 2016), archived at https://perma.cc/NVX4-CFGQ.
17 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 17, emphasis in original.
18 Ibid., p. 150, emphasis in original.
19 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, p. 429.
20 Frizzelle, ‘Implied Violence.’
21 DK Pan, ‘Motel #1’, 2007, available at: http://www.motelmotelmotel.com/
bridge.html (accessed 2 February 2016).
22 Ibid.
23 Brendan Kiley, ‘Motel #1’, The Stranger, 13 September 2007, available at:
https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=316770 (accessed
2 February 2016), archived at https://perma.cc/BEW8-VK8X.
24 The description for this performance is drawn from online video footage:
Derrick Mitchell, ‘Implied Violence: Come to My Center, You Enter the
Winter’, 25 January 2008, available at: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=EJjB3DcCexw (accessed 2 February 2016).
25 Jen Graves, ‘What’s that Smell?’, The Stranger, 17 September 2007, available
at: https://slog.thestranger.com/2007/09/whats_that_smell (accessed 4 June
2015).
26 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 150, emphasis in original.
27 Mitchell quoted in Haley Edwards, ‘Artists bid farewell to a seedy city
landmark’, The Seattle Times, 15 September 2007, available at: https://www.
seattletimes.com/seattle-­news/artists-­bid-farewell-­to-a-­seedy-city-­landmark
(accessed 2 February 2016).
28 Jim Kershner, ‘Washington Mutual (WaMu)’, Historylink.org, 21 October
2008, available at: http://www.historylink.org/File/8821 (accessed 2 February
2016), archived at https://perma.cc/PGM4-CBNW.
 Notes 223

29 Jon Talton, ‘Five years later, WaMu’s collapse remains an outrage’, The
Seattle Times, 25 September 2013, available at: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/
jontalton/2013/09/25/five-­years-later-­wamus-collapse-­remains-an-­outrage/
(accessed 2 February 2016).
30 Kershner, ‘Washington Mutual (WaMu)’.
31 See https://usaunemploymentrate.com/us-­unemployment-rate-­seattle-city-­
wa-u-­from-2008-to-2017 (accessed 17 April 2018), archived at https://
perma.cc/3Z3F-9DJS.
32 All quotations from Pamala Mijatov (18 March 2014), Charlie Rathbun
(24 April 2014) and Randy Engstrom (21 May 2014) are from interviews
conducted by the author.
33 Dominic Holden, ‘Nobody’s Home’, The Stranger, 19 March 2009, available at:
https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/nobodys-­home/Content?oid=1177409
(accessed 2 February 2016), archived at https://perma.cc/R7VR-H5WA.
34 These lines are from video footage of a recording of the performance,
available at: https://vimeo.com/9291839 (accessed 2 February 2016).
35 Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, p. 425.
36 Ibid., p. 426.
37 Joseph Papp quoted in Angela Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-­casting Race, Ethnicity,
and Nationality in American Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2010, p. 46.
38 August Wilson also said: ‘The idea of colorblind casting is the same idea of
assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years.
For the record, we reject it again. We reject any attempt to blot us out, to
reinvent history and ignore our presence or to maim our spiritual
product. . . . We will not deny our history, and we will not allow it to be made
to be of little consequence, to be ignored or misinterpreted.’ August Wilson,
‘The Ground on Which I Stand’, Speech at Theatre Communications Group
Conference, 26 June 1996, available at: https://www.americantheatre.
org/2016/06/20/the-­ground-on-­which-i-­stand (accessed 4 April 2018),
archived at https://perma.cc/GS7F-TFG8.
39 Historian Matthew Klingle argues that, by the end of the nineteenth century,
an influx of newcomers and the Panic of 1893 prompted a change in the role
of Native Americans ‘from vital laborers to nostalgic symbols even as many
continued to work and live hidden in plain sight’. Matthew Klingle, ‘Frontier
Ghosts Along the Urban Pacific Slope,’ in Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund and
Adam Arenson (eds), Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of the
Empire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, pp. 121–146,
here p. 126. Early twentieth-­century urban development also furthered racial
segregation. Downtown Seattle was full of steep hills, making transportation
difficult. In 1907, R. H. Thomson, a city engineer, led Seattle to complete the
Denny regrade, a process that levelled Denny Hill, a hill in downtown that
was too steep for traffic. This and other regrades contributed to displacement
and racially segregated geographies in Seattle. See also ibid., p. 141.
224 Notes

40 See, among other articles and resources: Jamala Henderson, ‘Why is Seattle so
racially segregated?’, KUOW News and Information, 20 September 2016,
available at: http://kuow.org/post/why-­seattle-so-­racially-segregated (accessed
4 April 2018), archived at https://perma.cc/E9XZ-LLBK.
41 Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, p. 424.
42 Frizzelle, ‘Implied Violence’.
43 Ibid.
44 Christopher Frizzelle, ‘2008 Stranger Organization Genius,’ The Stranger,
2008, available at: https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Special/Genius?
view=geniuses&oid=668965 (accessed 2 February 2016), archived at
https://perma.cc/E8XZ-MLBJ.

Chapter 5
1 ‘Time Machine’, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, available at:
http://www.festival.org/whatson/108/time-­machine (accessed 12 April
2017), archived at https://perma.cc/LG6H-PF9P.
2 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 143.
3 Ibid., p. 161.
4 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic,
trans. Lisabeth During, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, p. 13.
5 Patrice Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today, trans. Joel
Anderson, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, p. 305.
6 Ibid., p. 240; pp. 305–306.
7 Ibid., p. 212.
8 Ibid., p. 240.
9 Aside from the research I discuss in this section, the role of time in
postdramatic staging is a topic that recent surveys of the field have
overlooked. In Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, the first book-­length
consideration of the postdramatic paradigm since Lehmann’s own study, the
absence of any critical investigation of temporality in relation to
spectatorship is conspicuous. The area is only addressed indirectly, via
Brandon Woolf ’s explication of Lehmann’s dialectical process, for example.
See Brandon Woolf, ‘Towards a Paradoxically Parallaxical Postdramatic
Politics?’, in Jerome Carroll et al. (eds), Postdramatic Theatre and the
Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance, London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013, pp. 31–46. In Theatre & Time, David
Wiles only mentions postdramatic theory on one occasion, and it is to
emphasize how the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen prolong the experience
of time ‘in order to create a kind of time sculpture’, as opposed to ‘the
tendency of Aristotelian theatre to erase our experience of “time as time” ’.
Wiles simply reiterates Lehmann and does not seek to add to or critique the
 Notes 225

efficacy of a postdramatic theory of time. See David Wiles, Theatre & Time,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 62.
10 Rachel Fensham, ‘Postdramatic Spectatorship: Participate or Else’, Critical
Stages 7 (2012), available at: http://www.critical-­stages.org/7/postdramatic-­
spectatorship-participate-­or-else/ (accessed 23 March 2017), archived at
https://perma.cc/4DV8-5AKX.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. Fensham, following Lehmann, is drawing on Gertrude Stein for this
phrasing. See Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 63.
13 Fensham, ‘Postdramatic Spectatorship’.
14 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 109.
15 The Time Machine, directed by George Pal, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1960.
16 David Barnett, ‘Political Theatre in a Shrinking World: René Pollesch’s
Postdramatic Practices on Paper and on Stage’, Contemporary Theatre Review
16.1 (2006), pp. 31–40, here p. 34.
17 Ibid. Barnett is paraphrasing Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches
Theater, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999, p. 330.
18 Ibid., p. 33; p. 34.
19 Ibid., p. 40.
20 Ibid., p. 34.
21 David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, London: Verso, 2010, p. 140.
22 Reports of the Inspectors of Factories for 30 April 1860 quoted in Karl Marx,
Capital: Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London:
Penguin Classics, 1990, p. 352.
23 Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, p. 142.
24 Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène, p. 240.
25 Deborah Pearson, talk delivered at Visual Cultures Forum, School of
Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary University of London,
13 October 2015.
26 Deborah Pearson, The Future Show, London: Oberon Books, 2015.
27 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity,
New York: New York University Press, 2009, p. 9.
28 Pearson, The Future Show, pp. 130–131.
29 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984,
p. 23. Stewart is referring here to Vladimir Jankélévitch’s L’Irréversible et la
nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 2011).
30 Pearson, The Future Show, p. 70.
31 Tim Etchells, ‘Introduction’, in Deborah Pearson, The Future Show, pp. 5–10,
here p. 7.
32 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism, London: Verso, 2012, p. 614.
33 See Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Repetition’, in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard
Hong and Edna Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000,
pp. 102–112, here p. 108.
226 Notes

34 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, p. 13.

35 Ibid., p. 184.
36 Ibid., p. 17.
37 Pearson, Visual Cultures Forum.
38 Fensham, ‘Postdramatic Spectatorship’.
39 Benjamin H. Snyder, The Disrupted Workplace, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016, p. 8.
40 Jill Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine’, The New Yorker, 23 June 2014, available
at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-­disruption-
machine (accessed 2 May 2017).
41 Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène, p. 212.
42 Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine’.
43 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, p. 192.
44 Michael Shane Boyle, ‘Brecht’s Gale: Innovation and Postdramatic Theatre’,
Performance Research 21.3 (2016), pp. 16–26, here p. 22.
45 Ibid.
46 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 185.
47 Ibid.
48 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 136.
49 David Barnett, ‘Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty, or: Why
Post-Brechtian ≠ Postdramatic’, in Jerome Carroll et al. (eds), Postdramatic
Theatre and the Political, pp. 47–66, here p. 47.
50 Ibid., p. 60.
51 Ibid., p. 61.
52 Ibid., p. 62.
53 Sarah Bryant-Bertail, Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy,
Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2000, p. 14, emphasis in original.
54 Barnett, ‘Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty’, p. 50.

Chapter 6
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 59.
2 Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Allan
Ohm and Jon Cogburn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014,
p. 5.
3 Both Victor Turner’s anthropology of performance and J. L. Austin’s linguistic
concept of performative speech derived from human-­centered post-Kantian
philosophies which are based on the anthropocentric hierarchy of meaning.
See: Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ, 1986;
and J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina
Sbisa, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
4 I use this term following Hayden White, who defined emplotment as ‘the
encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific
 Notes 227

kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the
case with “fictions” in general’. In other words, emplotment, as White defines
it, means arranging historical events into narrative with plot. Dramatic
emplotment, then, would mean arranging historical, performance and
performative events into classic Aristotelian dramatic structure (which
privileges plot). Historical emplotment, then, would be akin to Hegel’s
dramatic concept of world history, which happens as if ‘in the theatre’.
Postdramatic emplotment, on the other hand, would mean arranging
historical, performance and performative events into postdramatic form (i.e.
nonlinear, nonchronological structure). In that sense, we can propose that
there can be no posthuman emplotment, but rather posthuman deplotment,
as posthuman aesthetics decentres all narrative historical, dramaturgical and
ontological models. See: Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary
Artifact’, in Geoffrey Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader,
London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 221–236, here p. 223.
5 Hans-Thies Lehmann notes that the hegemonic trope of the performing
body, which has long dominated Western culture and performance, is
undergoing a dramatic shift:
Images of the body are a dominant feature of mass media in neoliberal
Western societies. The human body is praised as a value in itself, however
manipulated, trained, gendered, and over-­sexed, advertised as a product
for consumption and abused as a battleground of ideologies, sacrificed for
economic profit and for religious or political ideas of every kind. In the age
of technical and scientific progress, the ideology of perfected bodies has its
counterpart in the elaboration of more and more effective ways to destroy
and extinguish the physical existence of whole populations. The very
distinction between human beings and animals or machines, an essential
precondition of humanist ethics and aesthetics, is radically questioned by
the logic of technical progress itself.
Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi, ‘Dramaturgy on Shifting
Grounds’, Performance Research 14.3 (2009), pp. 3–6, here p. 5.
6 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 163.
7 Gabriella Giannachi, The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life®TM, New York:
Routledge, 2006, p. 63.
8 Louise Lepage, ‘Posthuman Perspectives and Postdramatic Theatre: The
Theory and Practice of Hybrid Ontology in Katie Mitchell’s The Waves’,
Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008), pp. 137–149, here p. 138.
9 Ibid.
10 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999, p. 2.
11 Peter M. Boenisch, ‘Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience:
Reflexive Dramaturgies and Classic Texts’, Contemporary Theatre Review 20.2
(2010), pp. 162–172, here p. 162.
228 Notes

12 Cathy Turner, ‘Mis-Guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of

Public Space’, Contemporary Theatre Review 20.2 (2010), pp. 149–161, here
p. 150.
13 Quoted in Peter Eckersall, Paul Monaghan and Melanie Beddie, ‘Dramaturgy
as Ecology: A Report from the Dramaturgies Project’, in Katalin Trencsényi
and Bernadette Cochrane (eds), New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives
on Theory and Practice, New York: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014, pp. 18–35,
here p. 21.
14 Robin Nelson, ‘Prospective Mapping’, in Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt,
Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson (eds), Mapping Intermediality in
Performance, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, pp. 13–23,
here p. 23.
15 See also: Teemu Paavolainen, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing
Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
16 The concept of the posthuman was first introduced in The New International
Encyclopedia (published in 1905 in New York) in the context of gods
(superhuman) and the dead / ghosts (as posthuman). It was, however, first
conceptualized in the modern sense by Ihab Hassan, a literary critic, who
wrote in his 1977 article ‘Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist
Culture’:
We need first to understand that the human form – including human
desire and all its external representations – may be changing radically, and
thus must be revisioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of
humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into
something that we must helplessly call posthumanism.
Ihab Hassan, ‘Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?’,
The Georgia Review 31.4 (1977), pp. 830–850, here p. 843.
17 Defining his concept of ‘bare life’, Agamben describes a ‘zone of indistinction
and continuous transition between man and beast’. Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 109. Elsewhere, Agamben writes about
‘bare life’ as that which belongs only to those excluded from the ‘human’
race: ‘In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that
whose exclusions found the city of men’. Ibid., p. 7.
18 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. xi.
19 Ibid.
20 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014, p. 4.
21 Ibid., p. 2.
22 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, pp. 2–3.
23 In performance theory, one of the first authors to grapple with the ‘end of
human’ was Richard Schechner in his 1992 collection of essays The End of
Humanism. Although Schechner acknowledges that rethinking humanism
 Notes 229

provokes a conceptual shift, he doesn’t engage with the theoretical nuances

between performance art, postdramatic theatre and posthuman theatre (nor
the difference between posthuman and posthumanist). For Schechner, all
modern avant-­garde by its very nature is ‘posthumanist’. Richard Schechner,
The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance, New York: Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982.
24 Although Oscar Schlemmer’s experiments with geometric costumes that
both constrained and augmented the human body preceded Kantor’s work
with bio-­objects, Kantor was the first to specifically address the unique
relationship between human body and objects.
25 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Further Development: The Object,’ trans. William Brand,
unpublished manuscript in Cricoteka – the Centre for the Documentation
of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor.
26 Tadeusz Kantor, Cricot 2 and the Theatre of Death, Peter Hulton (ed.),
Devon, England: Darlington College of Arts Department of Theatre, 1978.
27 The contemporary Bulgarian director Galin Stoev wrote of his own
postdramatic actor that he’s ‘not to play the character, but “play upon the
character” in the same manner as a musician “plays upon his instrument”’.
Quoted in Joseph Danan, ‘Dramaturgy in “Postdramatic” Times’, in
Trencsényi and Cochrane (eds), New Dramaturgy, pp. 3–17, here p. 14.
28 Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary
Life, New York: Basic Books, 1991, p. 6.
29 Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine: Tadeusz Kantor’s
Theatre of Death, Cracow: Cricoteka, 1994, p. 67.
30 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 73.
31 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘My Work, My Journey (Excerpts)’, in Michal Kobialka (ed.
and trans.), A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–
1990, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 17–32, here p. 19.
32 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘The Impossible Theatre (1969–1973)’, in Michal Kobialka
(ed.), Further On, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 174–192, here p. 188.
33 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘The Impossible Theatre’, unpublished manuscript in
Cricoteka – the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor.
Translations by the author unless otherwise noted.
34 Kantor, ‘The Impossible Theatre,’ in Further On, Nothing, p. 188.
35 Nayar, Posthumanism, 3.
36 Tadeusz Kantor, notes to Balladyna (1942), trans. William Brand,
unpublished manuscript in Cricoteka – the Centre for the Documentation
of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor.
37 Michal Kobialka, ‘The Quest for the Self: Thresholds and Transformations’, in
A Journey through Other Spaces, pp. 269–310, here pp. 289–290.
38 Giannachi, Politics of New Media Theatre, p. 65.
39 Ibid., p. 64.
40 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 2.
230 Notes

41 Katherine Ott, David Serlin and Stephen Mihm (eds), Artificial Parts,
Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, New York: New York
University Press, 2002, p. 5.
42 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 4.
43 Sadeq Rahimi, ‘Identities without a Reference: Towards a Theory of
Posthuman Identity’, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000),
available at: http://journal.media-­culture.org.au/0006/identity.php (accessed
17 February 2015), archived at https://perma.cc/DG3V-EDPK.
44 Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after
Modernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 96.
45 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 39.
46 Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hays,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 8.
47 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 72. Lehmann is quoting Georg Hensel’s
review in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 June 1995.
48 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘To Save from Oblivion (1988)’, in A Journey through Other
Spaces, pp. 166–171, here p. 166.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Pleśniarowicz, Dead Memory Machine, p. 76.
52 Kantor, ‘To Save from Oblivion’, p. 170.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Kantor, ‘My Work – My Journey’, in A Journey through Other Spaces, p. 19.
56 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001), pp. 1–22, here
pp. 4–5.
57 Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 14.
58 Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J.
Niesluchowski, ed. Jim Fleming, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990,
p. 111.
59 Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 12.
60 Ibid.
61 Kantor, ‘My Work – My Journey’, in A Journey through Other Spaces, p. 19.
62 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010, p. xv.

Chapter 7
1 Consideration of recent literary scholarship yields numerous examples of
the practical equivalence of form and genre. This, from the second edition of
a standard textbook on genre: ‘What these two radically different readings
reflect, of course, is the significance of literary form or genre’, Heather
 Notes 231

Dubrow, Genre, London and New York: Routledge, 1982 (2014), p. 2. Two,
from recent scholarly essays: ‘The more standardized the literary form or
genre, the easier it travels’, Andreas Hedberg, ‘The Knife in the Lemon:
Nordic Noir and the Glocalization of Crime Fiction’, in Louise Nilsson,
David Damrosch and Theo D’haen (eds), Crime Fiction as World Literature,
London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 13–22, here p. 21; ‘The resulting question of
the proper role of literary form or genre in a postcolonial state is of interest
principally because it situates literature coming from former European
colonies in a larger global discussion of the evolution of form in literary
studies and the proper place for aesthetics in nation-­building’, John C.
Hawley, ‘Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form’, in Anna
Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray (eds), What Postcolonial Theory
Doesn’t Say, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 67–86, here p. 71.
Another, from a recent book on an emergent literary genre offers a clue as to
the possible origin, within the scholarly literature, for this equivalence:
‘[Fredric] Jameson was the first theorist to link postmodernism not to a
particular form or genre, but to socio-­political circumstances, or history’,
Megan L. Musgrave, Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First Century Young Adult
Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. xx. Finally, in texts
spanning the period 1991–2016, here are some examples of Jameson himself
doing it: ‘The content of the Utopian form will emerge from that other form
or genre which is the fairy tale’, Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future,
London and New York: Verso, 2005, p. 85; ‘But perhaps two deeper
theoretical trends need to be mentioned in any discussion of this much-­
maligned form or genre called “universal history,” to which Karatani makes
so interesting a new contribution here’, Fredric Jameson, ‘Ancient Society
and the New Politics: From Kant to Modes of Production’, Criticism 58.2
(2016), pp. 327–339, here p. 330; and, most appropriately, as will soon be
evident, in the opening sentence of the chapter entitled ‘Video’ in
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, ‘It has often been
said that every age is dominated by a privileged form, or genre, which seems
by its structure the fittest to express its secret truths’, London and New York:
Verso, 1991, p. 67.
2 Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary
History 7.1 (1975), pp. 135–163, here p. 135, emphasis in original.
3 Ibid.
4 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 22, emphasis in original.
5 Ibid., 175.
6 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 67, emphasis in original.
7 Ibid., p. 69.
8 Ibid., p. 76.
9 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2007.
10 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 3.
232 Notes

11 There is now a large body of critical work, within theatre and performance
studies alone, that addresses these and related questions of what is often
called theatre’s ‘intermediality’. For just some of the most recent relevant
interventions in this expanding field, see Andy Lavender, Performance in the
21st Century: Theatres of Engagement, Abingdon and New York: Routledge,
2016, especially chapters 3 (on hybridity and intermedial theatre) and 6 (on
YouTube performances); Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and
David Saltz, Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015, which is especially useful for its
clear survey of the state of the (changing) field; and, for work to which I owe
some of the general critical disposition of the present chapter, two essays by
Martin Harries: ‘Theatre and Media Before “New” Media’: Beckett’s Film and
Play’, Theater 42.2 (2012), pp. 7–25; and ‘Theater after Film, or Dismediation’,
ELH 58.2 (2016), pp. 345–361. A further and highly pertinent contribution
is Matthew Causey’s essay, ‘Postdigital Performance’, Theatre Journal 68.3
(2016), pp. 427–441, which includes valuable analysis of work by Lizzie Fitch
and Ryan Trecartin whose ‘postdigital’ nature is exemplified for Causey by
the sense that their work is ‘at home in the reality of the virtual’, p. 432. For a
consideration of Fitch and Trecartin’s work as ‘postcinematic’, see Lisa
Åkervall, ‘Networked selves: Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s postcinematic
aesthetics’, Screen 57.1 (2016), pp. 35–51. Clearly my consideration of their
work in what follows as ‘postdramatic’ is far from original.
12 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 78.
13 Ibid., 74.
14 Ibid., 70.
15 Ibid., 70.
16 It was at around this time that supporters of a call from Palestinian cultural
and academic organizations began to work on a campaign to boycott the
Zabludowicz Collection on the grounds that the Zabludowicz Art Trust,
which owns the collection, is involved with Israeli companies that supply
services and maintenance to the Israeli Airforce. See https://
boycottzabludowicz.wordpress.com (accessed 28 March 2018), archived at
https://perma.cc/X77W-ECYP.
17 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London
and New York: Verso, 2009, p. 8.
18 For a good summary of these positions and the evidence that supports
them, at least in a UK context, see Andy Williams, Claire Wardle and Karin
Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘ “HAVE THEY GOT NEWS FOR US?” Audience
revolution or business as usual at the BBC?’, Journalism Practice 5.1 (2011),
pp. 85–99.
19 Marketing material for Danny Iny, The Audience Revolution: The Smarter
Way to Build a Business, Make a Difference, and Change the World, Montreal:
Firepole Marketing, 2015, available at: https://www.amazon.com/Audience-
Revolution-Smarter-Business-Difference-­ebook/dp/B00V14UTWI
(accessed 20 September 2017).
 Notes 233

Chapter 8
1 Ann Liv Young, interview with Gia Kourlas, ‘Ann Liv Young goes behind
bars at Jack’, Time Out New York, 23 November 2014, available at: http://
www.timeout.com/newyork/dance/ann-­liv-young-­goes-behind-­bars-at-­jack
(accessed 4 September 2015), archived at https://perma.cc/7GKQ-EZL9.
2 Sherapy is an outgrowth of Young’s Sherry persona, in which the titular
character offers in-­character therapy sessions. These performances/therapy
sessions are offered privately and in public forums including in Young’s
mobile ‘Sherapy Van’ and her appearance at the 2014 World Psychiatric
Conference in Madrid. She is not a certified therapist.
3 Siobhan Burke, ‘Imprisonment for Her Transgressions, Karaoke for Her
Audience’ The New York Times, 7 December 2014, available at: https://www.
nytimes.com/2014/12/08/arts/dance/ann-­liv-young-­in-jail-­for-crimes-­
against-performance.html (accessed 6 January 2018).
4 Young, ‘Ann Liv Young goes behind bars at Jack’.
5 Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourse on the Real in Performance
Practice and Theory, 1990–2010, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2013, p. 70.
6 James Harding, Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theatre
and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013, p. 14.
7 Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991; see also, Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing
Art, Supporting Publics, New York: Routledge, 2011.
8 Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, p. 82.
9 Young, for example, received a ban from Abrons Art Centre – a highly
influential venue that had presented the artist’s previous work – and lost the
backing of Oslo’s Black Box Theatre, which was slated to co-­produce her
next show, Elektra. And while Young undoubtedly accrued capital in some
circles, this essay being one such example, there is no guarantee that such
stock will retain its value.
10 Liz Tomlin, ‘The Academy and the Marketplace: Avant-Garde Performance
in Neoliberal Times’, in Kimberly Jannarone (ed.), Vanguard Performance:
Beyond Left and Right, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015,
pp. 264–282, here p. 277.
11 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, New
York: Routledge, 2006, p. 57.
12 Mike Sell, The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War, New York: Seagull Books,
2011, p. 41.
13 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 101.
14 Robert Wilson, ‘Chronology – Performing Arts’, nd, available at: http://www.
robertwilson.com/chronology-­theater/ (accessed 19 July 2017), archived at
https://perma.cc/SX27-CGSN.
234 Notes

15 The twelve festivals that run concurrent with APAP are: American Realness,
COIL, The Exponential Festival, The Fire This Time Festival, Fresh Grind
Festival, Live Artery, New Ear Festival, PROTOTYPE, Special Effects,
Squirts, STEM Fest, and Under the Radar.
16 Mario Garcia Durham, quoted in Elizabeth Zimmer, ‘Venture Capitalists of
the Performing-Arts World Gather for One of the Year’s Most Influential
Showcases’, The Village Voice, 3 January 2017, available at: https://www.
villagevoice.com/2017/01/03/venture-­capitalists-of-­the-performing-­arts-
world-­gather-for-­one-of-­the-years-­most-influential-­showcases (accessed
8 June 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/JA7T-BFD3.
17 Helen Shaw, ‘January Theatre Festivals Guide’, Time Out New York, 5 January
2017, available at: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/january-­
theater-festivals (accessed 24 June 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/
Q2YE-TXQR.
18 Zimmer, ‘Venture Capitalists of the Performing-Arts World Gather’.
19 Siobhan Burke, ‘January Is a Dance Jamboree and Meat Market,’ The New
York Times, 3 January 2017, available at: https://www.nytimes.
com/2017/01/03/arts/dance/apap-­january-is-­a-dance-­jamboree-and-­meat-
market.html (accessed 3 June 2017).
20 Jonah Bokaer quoted in ‘Curating Contemporary Performance: New York in
the Twenty-First Century’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 34.1
(2012), pp. 183–197, here p. 196.
21 Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, p. 63.
22 Richard Schechner, ‘The Conservative Avant-Garde’, New Literary History
41.4 (2010), pp. 895–913.
23 Trajal Harrell quoted in ‘Curating Contemporary Performance: New York in
the Twenty-First Century’, p. 188.
24 Lehmann. Postdramatic Theatre, p. 61.
25 Ibid., p. 100.
26 Ibid., p. 101.
27 Sell, The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War, p. 41.
28 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 57.
29 Ibid., p. 59.
30 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Variety Theatre’, in Günter Berghaus (ed.), F.T. Marinetti:
Critical Writings, trans. Doug Thompson, New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 2006, pp. 185–192, here p. 190.
31 David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky and Victor
Khlebnikov, ‘Slap in the Face of Public Taste’, in Anna Lawton and Herbert
Eagle (eds and trans.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestos, 1912–1928,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 51–52.
32 André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1969, pp. 119–194, here p. 125.
33 Alain Badiou, The Century, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007, p. 134.
34 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 104.
 Notes 235

35 Ibid., p. 106.
36 Ibid., p. 99.
37 Ibid., p. 101.
38 Ibid., p. 104.
39 Rebecca Patek, ‘Artist Statement’, nd, available at: rebeccapatek.com/about
(accessed 2 October 2015), archived at https://perma.cc/EM8E-D253.
40 Personal email correspondence between Rebecca Patek and unnamed
Pornhub Support Team member, 5 October 2015.
41 Siobhan Burke, ‘Acting’, The Performance Club, 22 January 2014, available at:
http://theperformanceclub.org/2014/01/acting (accessed 5 October 2015),
archived at https://perma.cc/7GCC-XFGB.
42 Rebecca Patek, ‘I Wish She Were Right’, The Performance Club, 7 March 2014,
available at: http://theperformanceclub.org/2014/03/i-­wish-she-­were-right
(accessed 29 September 2015), archived at https://perma.cc/F4AF-5S55.
43 Young, ‘Ann Liv Young goes behind bars at Jack’.
44 Ann Liv Young interview with Miriam Katz, ‘Ann Liv Talks About Sherry’,
Artforum, 3 December 2011, available at: http://artforum.com/words/id=29687
(accessed 13 September 2016), archived at https://perma.cc/C4HS-JLP2.
45 Young, ‘Ann Liv Talks About Sherry’.
46 Anna Watkins Fisher, ‘Like a Girl’s Name: The Adolescent Drag of Amber
Hawk Swanson, Kate Gilmore, and Ann Liv Young’, TDR: The Drama Review
56.1 (2012), pp. 48–76, here p. 64.
47 Ann Liv Young, Ann Liv Young Interviews Sherry (2011), available at:
https://vimeo.com/19985855 (accessed 6 January 2018).
48 Claudia La Rocco, ‘Jail Bait’, ArtForum, 17 December 2014, available at:
http://artforum.com/slant/id=49552 (accessed 9 October 2015), archived at
https://perma.cc/PT2H-E7LZ.
49 Young, ‘Ann Liv Talks About Sherry’.
50 Andy Horwitz, ‘Considering Alastair, Questioning Realness’, Culturebot,
19 January 2014, available at: http://www.culturebot.org/2014/01/20493/
considering-­alastair-questioning-­realness (accessed 29 September 2015),
archived at https://perma.cc/6L6J-7AE8.
51 Ibid.
52 See the comment section connected to Andy Horwitz’s ‘Considering
Alastair, Questioning Realness’. Commenters included critics Siobhan Burke,
David Velasco and Claudia La Rocco, producers Meredith L Boggia, Ben
Pryor, Zvonimir Dobrovic and Vallejo Gantner, and artists such as Ishmael
Houston-Jones, RoseAnne Spradlin and Keith Hennessy, among many
others.
53 Ibid.
54 Patek, ‘I Wish She Were Right’.
55 Ibid.
56 Young, ‘Ann Liv Young goes behind bars at Jack’.
57 Young was running her ‘Sherry Shop’ in the lobby of the Abrons Art Centre
as part of the American Realness Festival. The Sherry Shop, run by its titular
236 Notes

character alongside other collaborators, is a pop-­up store that merges retail

and therapy. The shop’s characters attempt to woo or cow customers into
purchasing jewellery and clothing through small talk, pseudo-­therapy, and
aggressive salesmanship.
58 La Rocco, ‘Jail Bait’.
59 Alastair Macaulay, ‘This Time the Trouble Isn’t Wicked Stepsisters’, New York
Times, 5 September 2010, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/
arts/dance/06cinderella.html (accessed 9 May 2017).
60 Patek, ‘I Wish She Were Right’.
61 Young, ‘Ann Liv Talks About Sherry’.
62 American Realness Website Archive, ‘A R2010’, available at: http://
americanrealness.com/archive/2010-2 (accessed 1 May 2017), archived at
https://perma.cc/9BKQ-VYT4.
63 Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, p. 62.
64 American Realness Website Archive, ‘A R2014’, available at: http://
americanrealness.com/archive/2014-2 (accessed 3 May 2017), archived at
https://perma.cc/J3SZ-9ZQW.
65 American Realness Website Archive, ‘On Visibile Invisibility and Queer
Ecstatic Futurity’, available at: http://americanrealness.com/portfolio-­type/
on-­visibile-invisibility-­and-queer-­ecstatic-futurity (accessed 10 September
2017), archived at https://perma.cc/56D5-JR6V.
66 Kevin Doyle, ‘Shit-Show Circus on Ice’, reposted on Culturebot, 24 October
2012, available at: http://www.culturebot.org/2012/10/14867/the-­shit-show-­
circus-on-­ice (accessed 20 July 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/
YR5Y-4XQP.
67 Kevin Doyle, ‘Retraction-January Shit-Show on Ice’, Scrib, 17 January 2013,
available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/120725322/Retraction-
January-Shit-Show-­on-Ice (accessed 18 July 2017), archived at https://
perma.cc/8C7C-R8ZY.
68 Schechner, ‘The Conservative Avant-Garde’, p. 909.
69 Ibid., p. 895.
70 Tomlin, ‘The Academy and the Marketplace’, p. 264.
71 Doyle, ‘Shit-Show Circus on Ice’, p. 13.
72 David Velasco, comment in response to Siobhan Burke’s essay ‘Acting’, The
Performance Club, 22 January 2014, available at: http://theperformanceclub.
org/2014/01/acting (accessed 28 September 2015), archived at https://
perma.cc/W24H-2CPB.
73 Ibid.
74 Horwitz, ‘Considering Alastair, Questioning Realness’.
75 Alastair Macaulay, ‘Magical Crockery, Pop Music Parody, a Hula Hoop and
Other Experiments: American Realness Festival Begins Performances’, The
New York Times, 10 January 2014, available at: https://www.nytimes.
com/2014/01/11/arts/dance/american-­realness-­festival-­begins-
performances.html (accessed 4 May 2017).
 Notes 237

76 Alastair Macaulay, ‘A Place Where Kitsch Gets All Dressed Up in Avant-

Garde Clothing: At American Realness Festival, a Range of “Fringe” ’, The
New York Times, 16 January 2014, available at: https://www.nytimes.
com/2014/01/17/arts/dance/at-­american-realness-festival-a-­range-of-­fringe.
html (accessed 4 May 2017).
77 Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, p. 125.

Chapter 9
1 David Levine, ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’, Art/US 13 (2006), pp. 22–25.
2 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, p. 28. See also: Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical
Prejudice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
3 Levine, ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’, p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 23.
5 The guilty party Levine has in mind here is Steven Henry Madoff, whose
2005 review of the Festival d’Avignon for Artforum bears particularly vivid
witness to ‘art world’ prejudices against the contemporary theatre. See:
Steven Henry Madoff, ‘Mediating Circumstances’, Artforum 44.2 (2005),
pp. 77–80.
6 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 134.
7 Levine, ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’, p. 25, emphasis in original.
8 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ in Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 148–172, here
p. 163, emphasis in original.
9 Levine, ‘Bad Art and Objecthood’, p. 25
10 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 43, emphasis in original.
11 Ibid., p. 100, emphasis added.
12 See, for instance, Marvin Carlson, Shattering Hamlet’s Mirror: Theatre and
Reality, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2016; Elinor Fuchs,
‘Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century
Plays’, in Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner (eds), Against Theatre:
Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006, pp. 39–57; Julia Jarcho, Writing and the Modern Stage: Theatre beyond
Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017; Carol Martin,
Theatre of the Real, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Liz Tomlin, Acts
and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
13 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 103.
14 Ibid., p. 102.
15 Ibid., p. 100.
238 Notes

16 Jerome Carroll, Steve Giles and Karen Jürs-Munby, ‘Introduction:

Postdramatic Theatre and the Political’, in Jerome Carroll et al. (eds),
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on
Contemporary Performance, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 1–30, here
pp. 5–6.
17 Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012, p. 1.
18 Alenka Zupančič, ‘Realism in Psychoanalysis’, in Lorenzo Chiesa (ed.), Lacan
and Philosophy: The New Generation, Melbourne: re.press, 2014, pp. 21–34,
here p. 28.
19 Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of
Lacan, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007, p. 127.
20 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), trans.
Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, p. 52.
21 Ibid., p. 53.
22 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, Brooklyn: Verso, 2000,
p. 235.
23 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 100.
24 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in
the Freudian Unconscious’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English,
trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 671–702,
here p. 688.
25 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 101.
26 Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, p. 238.
27 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 101.
28 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, pp. 100–101.
29 Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, p. 237.
30 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism, Brooklyn: Verso, 2012, pp. 31–32.
31 Ibid., p. 32.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 32–33.
34 Phillipe Sollers, The Friendship of Roland Barthes, trans. Andrew Brown,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017, p. 43.
35 Amy Holzapfel (interview with Marsha Ginsberg, Jason Grote and David
Levine), ‘The Habit of Realism’, Theatre 42.1 (2012), pp. 95–107, here
pp. 96–97.
36 Ibid., p. 95.
37 We might wish to note that Lacan first presents the formulas of sexuation in
his eighteenth seminar. See: Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVIII: D’un
discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris:
Le Seuil, 2007.
38 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (Encore): On Feminine
Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain
 Notes 239

Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. See also:
Joan Copjec, ‘Sex and The Euthanasia of Reason’, in Read My Desire: Lacan
Against the Historicists, Brooklyn: Verso, 2015, pp. 201–236; Bruce Fink, ‘Hors
Texte – Knowledge and Jouissance: A Commentary on Seminar XX’, in Lacan to
the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004,
pp. 141–166.
39 You will have noticed, for instance, that the masculine and feminine logics
are not only irreconcilable with each other, but also within themselves, that
is to say, each side constitutes a logical antimony.

Chapter 10
1 Richard Allen, ‘The Object Animates: Displacement and humility in the
theatre of Philippe Quesne’, Performance Research 18.3 (2013), pp. 119–125,
here p. 120. Thank you to the MIT Press and PAJ for permissions to reprint
excerpts from my essay ‘Germinal’s Brave New World’, PAJ 37.3 (2015),
pp. 77–84. And thanks also to Duke University Press and Theater for
permissions to reprint excerpts from my essay ‘Philippe Quesne’s Modern
Quest for Wonder’, Theater 46.3 (February 2017), pp. 115–121.
2 Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 18.
3 Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
4 Bruno Tackels, Fragments d’un théâtre amoureux, Besançon: Les Solitaires
intempestifs, 2001. In this essay, all translations from French are my own
unless otherwise noted.
5 Gérard Thiériot, Le Théâtre Postdramatique: Vers un chaos fécond? Monts:
Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2013, p. 11.
6 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969, p. 47.
7 Bruno Tackels, Les Écritures de plateau (état des lieux). Besançon: Les
solitaires intempestifs: 2015, p. 14.
8 Ann Monfort, ‘Après le postdramatique : narration et fiction entre écriture
de plateau et théâtre néo-­dramatique’, trajectoires (2009), available at: http://
journals.openedition.org/trajectoires/392#authors (accessed 19 May 2017),
archived at https://perma.cc/6A4S-D7US .
9 Ibid.
10 Interview with Philippe Quesne by the author, Portland Institute for
Contemporary Art, Portland, OR, 18 September 2015. Unless otherwise
noted, quotes from Quesne are drawn from this interview.
11 Philippe Quesne quoted in Thomas Sellar, ‘Flight Paths’, Theater 37.1 (2007),
pp. 39–45, p. 42.
240 Notes

12 Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After

Modernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 12.
13 Allen, ‘The Object Animates’, p. 125.
14 Interview with Halory Goerger and Anotine Defoort by the author, Portland
Institute for Contemporary Art. Portland, OR, 19 September 2014.
Subsequent quotes from Goerger and Defoort are drawn from this
interview.
15 See http://www.amicaledeproduction.com/en (accessed 20 May 2017),
archived at https://perma.cc/2LSK-MTAJ.
16 Quesne in Sellar, ‘Flight Paths’, pp. 39–40.

Chapter 11
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 163. From the perspective of dance – at least
ever since the beginning of modern dance at the beginning of the twentieth
century – no fixed story but pure physicality as a means of expression was
central to the art. As such the caesura that Lehmann establishes with
postdramatic theatre needs to be reconsidered for the field of dance.
2 Ibid., p. 164.
3 See Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters (eds), de figura. Rhetorik
– Bewegung – Gestalt, Munich: Fink, 2003; Gerald Siegmund, Abwesenheit.
Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes. William Forsythe, Jérome Bel, Xavier
Le Roy, Meg Stuart, Bielefeld: transcript, 2006.
4 André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of
Movement, New York: Routledge, 2006; Susanne Foellmer, Am Rand der
Körper. Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im zeitgenössischen Tanz, Bielefeld:
transcript, 2009; Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren (eds), Original und
Revival: Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz, Zurich: Chronos-Verlag, 2010;
Yvonne Hardt and Martin Stern (eds), Choreographie und Institution:
Zeitgenössischer Tanz zwischen Ästhetik, Produktion und Vermittlung,
Bielefeld: transcript, 2011.
5 One can draw here a parallel to the combined influence that the Judson
Dance Theatre and other avant-­garde dance practices of the 1970s had on
the development of American dance studies. If one looks at the publications
and especially the series as they appear for instance in Germany the focus is
directed predominantly to this small avant-­garde which is rather marginal
in regard to the number and established dance forms at the state theatre, but
has a clear dominance in theoretical discourse nonetheless.
6 Constanze Schellow: Diskurs-Choreographien: Zur Produktivität des ‘Nicht’
für die zeitgenössische Tanzwissenschaft, Munich, e-­podium, 2016.
7 Ibid., p. 32; Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht: ‘Introduction. New Dance
Studies/New German Cultural Studies’, in Susan Manning and Lucia
 Notes 241

Ruprecht (eds), New German Dance Studies, Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 2012, pp. 1–16, here p. 10.
8 Kate Elswit, Theatre & Dance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 59.
This can be seen, for instance, in attempts to establish theatricality and
performance as the main analytical lenses for all wider social phenomena.
9 See, for example: Peter Boenisch ‘Spectres of Subjectivity: On the Fetish of
Subjectivity in (Post-)Postdramatic Choreography’, in Karen Jürs-Munby,
Jerome Carroll, and Steve Giles (eds), Postdramatic Theatre and the Political,
London: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 147–164. Even Pirkko Husemann, who
wrote her PhD with Hans-Thies Lehmann, does not choose to use the term
postdramatic when describing the work of Le Roy under the premise of
choreography as a critical practice. See Husemann, Choreographie als
kritische Praxis: Arbeitsweisen bei Xavier Le Roy and Thomas Lehmen,
Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.
10 Elswit, Theatre & Dance, p. 59.
11 Yvonne Hardt, ‘Engagement with the Past in Contemporary Dance’, in
Manning and Ruprecht (eds), New German Dance Studies, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2012, pp. 217–231; Yvonne Hardt, ‘Staging the
Ethnographic of Dance History: Contemporary Dance and Its Play with
Tradition’, Dance Research Journal 43.1 (2011), pp. 27–42; Yvonne Hardt,
‘Pedagogic In(ter)ventions: On the potential of (re)enacting Yvonne Rainer’s
Continuous Project – Altered Daily in a dance educational context’, in Mark
Franko (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 247–265. This essay combines and
reworks these articles in the light of the discussion on body and narration
that seems pertinent to widening the discussion on postdramatic theatre.
12 For further information on Boris Charmatz, see http://www.
museedeladanse.org/fr (accessed 9 September 2016); Fabián Barba, A Mary
Wigman Dance Evening (2009); Olga de Soto, histoire(s) (2004) and Débords:
Reflections on the Green Table (2012).
13 Mark Franko, ‘Epiloque: Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond’, in Dance
as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993, pp. 133–152; Hardt, Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History;
Hardt, ‘Engagement with the Past in Contemporary Dance’; Thurner and
Wehren, Original und Revival; Timmy de Laet, ‘Wühlen in Archiven’, tanz
3.10 (2010), pp. 54–59.
14 See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und
politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005; Aleida
Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006.
15 See: Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of
Theatrical Reenactment, London: Routledge, 2011.
16 See, for example, Gerald Siegmund, ‘Affekt, Technik, Diskurs: Aktiv passiv
sein im Angesicht der Geschichte’, in Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren
242 Notes

(eds), Original und Revival. Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz, Zurich:

Chronos-Verlag, 2010, pp. 15–26.
17 See the special issue ‘Inszenierungen des Erinnerns,’ Erika Fischer-Lichte
and Gertrude Lehnert (eds), Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für
Historische Anthropologie 9.2 (2000), p.14. All translations from German are
my own, unless noted otherwise.
18 Mark Franko (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Mark Franko’s Handbook on
Dance and Reenactment brings together a plethora of recent international
research in the field.
19 Schellow, Diskurs-Choreographien. While she focuses predominantly on
German dance studies, this also resonates with the studies of Lepecki,
Exhausting Dance.
20 Wieder und wider (Again and Against) was a performance and lecture series
at the Tanzquatier Wien, which Kruschkovoa co-­curated. She asked: ‘Ist
Aneignung immer schon eine Wiederaneignung wider den Strich? (Is
appropriation always already an re-­appropriation againt its grain)’.
Krassimira Kruschkova, ‘Tanzgeschichte(n): wieder und wider. Re-­
enactment, Referenz, révérence’, in Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren
(eds), Original und Revival. Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz, Zürich:
Chronos-Verlag, 2010, pp. 39–45, here p. 40.
21 See Franko, ‘Epiloque’.
22 For a wider discussion on these critical concepts of history and a broader
theory of the performative, see my articles: ‘Engagement with the Past in
Contemporary Dance’, ‘Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History’, and
‘Pedagogic In(ter)ventions’.
23 This tendency to perceive the experience of the body as something that stays
outside of hermeneutic understanding is, for instance, also present in Erika
Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics,
trans. Saskya Iris Jain, London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
24 Mark Franko and Annette Richards speak of these practices as storing the
past ‘in and as a critical performance’ (emphasis added). See ‘Actualizing
Absence: The Pastness of Performance,’ in Mark Franko and Annette
Richards (eds), Acting on the Past. Historical Performance Across the
Disciplines, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000, pp. 1–12, here
p.1.
25 tanzfond.de (accessed 15 January 2018).
26 In addition to Doisneau, this includes, for instance, Lutz Förster (2009) – a
former dancer of Pina Bausch; Cédric Andrieux (2009) – a former
Cunningham dancer – and others who only performed once. Generally Bel
only decides after a first performance if he wants to continue performing a
piece.
27 Nelson Goodmann, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1978, p. 8.
 Notes 243

28 Mieke Bal (ed.), The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary

Interpretation (Cultural Memory in the Present), Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
29 Hayden White, The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990,
p. 45.
30 On this topic, see Ramsay Burt, ‘Memory, Repetition and Critical
Intervention: The Politics of Historical References in Recent European
Dance Performances,’ in Performance Research 8.2 (2003), pp. 34–41;
Susanne Foellmer, ‘What Remains of the Witness? Testimony as
Epistemological Category: Schlepping the Traces’ in Mark Franko (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2017, pp. 269–284; Hardt, ‘Engagement with the Past in Contemporary
Dance’.
31 Martin Nachbar, ‘ReKonstrukt’, in Janine Schulze and Susanne Traub (eds),
Moving Thoughts – Tanzen ist Denken, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003, pp. 89–95.
32 See transcript of an interview at the Tanzkongress: ‘Yvonne Hardt:
Reconstructing Dore Hoyers Affektos Humanos. Über eine Diskussion mit
Waltraud Luley, Susanne Linke und Martin Nachbar’, in Sabine Gehm,
Pirkko Husemann and Katharina von Wilcke (eds), Wissen in Bewegung:
Perspektiven der künstlerischen und wissenschaftlichen Forschung im Tanz,
Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, pp. 201–210, here p. 205.
33 Ibid.
34 In ‘What Remains of the Witness?’ Susanne Foellmer points to the specific
trend of the expert under the category of ‘testimony’.
35 For a longer discussion on Nachbar see also Hardt, Engagement with the Past
in Contemporary Dance.
36 Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis, München: C.H. Beck, 2005.
37 For instance, in one of the most prominent and growing dance studies series
in Germany published by transcript, out of the twelve volumes published
within the last five years only one is minimally investigating folk dance
traditions and this only in the context of a postcolonial perspective on dance
in Jamaica. For an exception in the North American context that deals with
folk dance in the context of American culture, see Linda Tomko, Dancing
Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920,
Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.
38 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991.

Chapter 12
1 Special thanks to the Department of German Studies at Stanford University
and the Department of Modern Languages at Ohio University, where I
presented early versions of this essay; the participants in the ‘Beyond the
244 Notes

Postdramatic’ working session at the American Society for Theatre Research

in Baltimore, 2015, organized by Shane Boyle, Brandon Woolf and myself;
and the participants in the ‘(Post)Migrant Theater’ seminar at the German
Studies Association in Atlanta, 2017, organized by Ela Gezen, Olivia Ryan
Landry and Damani Partridge.
2 Maxim Gorki Theater, Spielzeitheft 14 (September–November 2017), p. 32,
available at: https://issuu.com/maximgorkitheater/docs/gorki_zeitung__14_
rz_pdf_x1a_wan_if (accessed 19 March 2018).
3 See: Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf, ‘Introduction:
Form and Postdramatic Theatre’, in this volume, pp. 1–19, especially p. 15.
4 In writing about affordance in her book Forms, Caroline Levine draws on
design theory: ‘Each shape or pattern, social or literary, lays claim to a
limited range of potentialities. Enclosures afford containment and security,
inclusion as well as exclusion. Rhyme affords repetition, anticipation, and
memorization.’ See: Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy,
Network, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 6. Drama on stage, I
would add, with a strictness in form closer to a sonnet than a novel, affords
conflict and resolution, as well as imaginative world-­formation (wholeness)
– and the ever-­present threat of interruption. Unlike Levine, who writes an
entire chapter on The Wire without mentioning HBO, I am interested in the
overlapping, interpenetrating forms of institution, society, text and
performance.
5 Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, ‘Toward a Topology of Cross-Cultural
Theatre Practice’, TDR: The Drama Review 46.3 (2002), pp. 31–53, here
p. 34.
6 Ibid.
7 Emma Cox, Theatre & Migration, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 63.
8 Katrin Sieg, ‘Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body in Europe’,
New German Critique 37.1 (2010), pp. 147–185, here p. 185.
9 Lizzie Stewart, ‘Schwarze Jungfrauen’, in Seyda Ozil, Michael Hofmann and
Yasemin Dayioglu-Yücel (eds), In der Welt der Proteste und Umwälzungen:
Deutschland und die Türkei, Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015, pp. 107–122,
here p. 82.
10 See ibid., p. 98.
11 See, for example, Olivia Ryan Landry, ‘Greek Dispossession Staged, or When
Street Politics Meets the Theater’, Transit 10.2 (2016), pp. 1–15, especially
p. 13.
12 Katrin Sieg, ‘Class of 1989: Who Made Good and Who Dropped Out of
German History? Postmigrant Documentary Theater in Berlin’, in Marc
Silberman (ed.), The German Wall: Fallout in Europe, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011, pp. 165–183, here p. 173.
13 Ibid., p. 180.
14 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 4.
 Notes 245

15 German naturalization laws have become increasingly open to people with

Turkish roots since 2005, and especially since 2014.
16 Landry, ‘Greek Dispossession Staged’, p. 13.
17 Sieg, ‘Class of 1989’, p. 180.
18 Yana Meerzon, Performing Exile, Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film,
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 10
19 Ibid., p. 297.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Jonas Tinius, ‘Rehearsing Detachment: Refugee Theatre and Dialectical
Fiction’, Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 5.1 (2016), pp. 21–38, here p. 21.
23 Ibid., p. 35.
24 Ibid., p. 22.
25 John Lechte and Saul Newman, Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights:
Statelessness, Images, Violence, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015,
p. viii.
26 Ryan Anthony Hatch, ‘Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real’, in this
volume, pp. 131–146, here p. 145.
27 Magda Romanska, ‘Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage’, in this
volume, pp. 81–95, here pp. 86–87.
28 Lechte and Newman write, for example, of their attempt to think through
Agamben’s ideas on human rights, that ‘a pragmatic, project-­oriented,
means-­ends approach would be against this book’s intentions’. Lechte and
Newman, Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights, p. xi.
29 Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 278.
30 Katrin Sieg, ‘Race, Guilt and Innocence: Facing Blackfacing in Contemporary
German Theater’, German Studies Review 38.1 (2015), pp. 117–134, here
p. 119.
31 Matt Cornish, ‘Echt kein Brecht: Blackfacing ließe sich als
Verfremdungseffekt nutzen – wenn der Rückgriff darauf reflektiert würde’,
trans. Lilian-Astrid Geese, Theater der Zeit (October 2014), pp. 22–23.
32 For interviews, see: ‘Presseschau vom 21. Oktober 2015 – Frank Castorf im
Interview mit den Stuttgarter Nachrichten und mit der Stuttgarter Zeitung
über totalitäre Kunst, Bert Neumann und die Nach-Volksbühnen-Zeit’,
Nachtkritik, 21 October 2015, available at: http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11666:presseschau-­vom-21-
oktober-2015-frank-­castorf-im-­interview-mit-­den-stuttgarter-­nachrichten-
ueber-­totalitaere-kunst-­bert-neumann-­und-die-­nach-volksbuehnen-­zeit&
catid=242:presseschau&Itemid=0 (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at
https://perma.cc/HZ6B-DBBJ; and ‘Presseschau vom 6. Mai 2014 – Frank
Castorf beichtet in der Bild Zeitung’, Nachtkritik, 6 May 2014, available at:
http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&
id=9485:presseschau-­vom–5-mai–2014-nfrank-­castorf-beichtet-­in-der-­bild-
zeitung-&catid=242&Itemid=62 (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at
246 Notes

https://perma.cc/V3S9–9MJE. Actors have shouted ‘Neger’ in Reise ans Ende

der Nacht, for example.
33 There is a repetition of this carelessness or ignorance of race and
performance in the discourse of German critics and theater scholars, as can
be noted especially in the debate around blackfacing. Theaterwissenschaft is
not currently well ­equipped to address the topic.
34 Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance
Practice and Theory, 1990–2010, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2013, p. 52.
35 Ibid., p. 54.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., p. 57.
38 Sieg, ‘Class of 1989’, p. 173.
39 Elfriede Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen, www.elfriedejelinek.com, 2013.
Translations by the author unless otherwise noted. There is a recent
translation of Die Schutzbefohlenen by Gitta Honegger, published by Seagull
Books – In Performance, which I am not using here.
40 Ibid.
41 ‘Rechtsextreme stürmen Jelinek-Aufführung in Wien’, Zeit Online, 15 April
2016, available at: http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2016-04/
identitaere-­bewegung-wien-­theater-elfriede-­jelinek-die-­schutzbefohlenen
(accessed 19 March 2018).
42 Hatch, ‘Galleries’, p. 140.
43 Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hilje, interview by Susanne Burkhardt, ‘Neue
Spielzeit am Maxim Gorki Theater: “Desintegriert euch!” ’ Deutschlandfunk
Kultur, 2 September 2017, available at: http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.
de/neue-­spielzeit-am-­maxim-­gorki-­theater-desintegriert-­euch.2159.de.
html?dram:article_id=394964 (accessed 19 March 2018).
44 Shermin Langhoff and Team, ‘3. Berliner Herbstsalon’, in Spielzeitheft 14,
p. 31.
45 Matt Cornish, Performing Unification: History and Nation in Germany after
1989, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, 186.
46 See: Gabi Hift, ‘Bums’, Nachtkritik, 11 March 2017, available at:
https://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=
article&id=13732:dickicht-­am-maxim-­gorki-­theater-­berlin-braucht-­
sebastian-baumgarten-­mit-brecht-­das-chaos-­auf&catid=52:maxim-­gorki-
theater-­berlin&Itemid=100476 (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at
https://perma.cc/VH3U-RDA9.
47 An open question: How is the exilic theatre of the Exil Ensemble formally
different from postmigrant theatre?
48 Irene Bazinger, quoted in Simone Kaempf, ‘In der Einsamkeit der
Baumwollwäsche’, Nachtkritik, 18 October 2017, available at: https://www.
nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14529:
hundesoehne-­nurkan-erpulat-­inszeniert-agota-­kristofs-romantrilogie-­
ueber-entfremdung-­und-exil-­am-maxim-­gorki-theater-­berlin&catid=
 Notes 247

38&Itemid=40 (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at https://perma.cc/

G3DL-K8HG.
49 Michael Wolf, ‘Völlig schwerelos’, Nachtkritik, 24 September 2014, available
at: https://nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=
14437:nach-­uns-das-­all-am-­berliner-maxim-­gorki-theater-­gehen-sebastian-­
nuebling-und-­sibylle-berg-­mit-einer-­science-fiction-­farce-in-­runde-
drei&catid=38&Itemid=40 (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at: https://
perma.cc/4SJM-BMST.
50 Kirsten Riesselmann, ‘Grabrede auf den Vater: Premiere von Get Deutsch or
Die Tryin’, taz, 23 April 2017, available at: https://www.taz.de/!5408187
(accessed 19 March 2018).
51 Hift, ‘Bums’.
52 Tobi Müller, ‘Auf kultureller Klassenfahrt: Winterreise am Maxim Gorki
Theater’, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 8 April 2017, available at: http://www.
deutschlandfunkkultur.de/winterreise-­am-maxim-­gorki-theater-­auf-
kultureller.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=383440 (accessed 19 March 2018).
53 Anke Dürr, ‘Premiere des “Exil Ensembles” in Berlin: Expedition in die neue
Heimat’, Spiegel Online, 9 April 2017, available at: http://www.spiegel.de/
kultur/gesellschaft/exil-­ensemble-expedition-­in-die-­neue-
heimat-­a-1142557.html (accessed 19 March 2018).
54 Christian Rakow, ‘Freigeister deluxe’, Nachtkritik, 14 September 2017,
available at: https://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&
view=article&id=14396:roma-­armee-yael-­ronen-gelingt-­am-gorki-theater-
mit-­ihrem-roma-­revolutions-abend-­eine-grandios-­funkelnde-
zumutung&catid=38&Itemid=40 (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at
https://perma.cc/TPX6-G3DF.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 André Mumot, ‘Verräter – Die letzten Tage im Gorki-Theater: Lieber
selbstgerecht als stumm’, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 28 April 2017, available at:
http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/verraeter-­die-letzten-­tage-im-gorki-
theater-­lieber.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=384934 (accessed 19 March
2018).
58 It would be worth considering, though I do not have the space to do so here,
whether the aesthetics at the Gorki might be usefully described as post-
Brechtian, as defined by David Barnett: theatre after the epistemic certainty
of Brecht, using a radicalized V-effect, not in order to directly inspire
political action, but rather to incite social debates. See: David Barnett,
‘Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty, or: Why Post-Brechtian ≠
Postdramatic’, in Jerome Carroll et al. (eds), Postdramatic Theatre and the
Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance, London:
Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014, pp. 47–66.
59 For polyglossia in postdramatic theatre, see: Hans-Thies Lehmann,
Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006,
pp. 147–148.
248 Notes

60 See: http://www.gorki.de/sites/default/files/styles/large_l/public/remote.
jpg?itok=uMihp4vY (accessed 19 March 2018), archived at https://perma.
cc/4F48-ZZE5.
61 To see the portraits, visit: http://gorki.de/de/ensemble (accessed 19 March
2018), archived at https://perma.cc/22NY-QYKG.
62 Langhoff and Hilje, interview by Burkhardt, ‘Neue Spielzeit am Maxim
Gorki Theater’.
63 See: https://www.stiftung-­mercator.de/en/our-­vision/our-­guiding-vision/
(accessed 19 March 2018), archived at https://perma.cc/48D5-E3H3.
64 Here, too, we might ask: With an acting ensemble steeped in the style of
Brecht, how is the Gorki post-Brechtian?
65 Shermin Langhoff, interviewed by Gunnar Decker, ‘Die Identität an sich ist
die Krise’, Theater der Zeit, April 2017, pp. 12–15, here p. 15.

Chapter 13
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 18.
2 Louise LePage, ‘Posthuman Perspectives and Postdramatic Theatre: The
Theory and Practice of Hybrid Ontology in The Waves’, Culture, Language
and Representation 6 (2008): pp. 137–149, here p. 138.
3 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 110.
4 Ibid., p. 113.
5 Recent examples of this work include: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006; Susan
Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007; George Home-Cook, Theatre and Aural Attention:
Stretching Ourselves, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Maaike Bleeker,
Jon Foley Sherman and Eirini Nedelkopoulou (eds), Performance and
Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, New York and London:
Routledge, 2015. Phenomenology, which was introduced by Edmund
Husserl in the early twentieth century, considers the ways in which
phenomena disclose themselves in consciousness and experience. As a
method for exploring the lived dimension of phenomena, it has made
important contributions to fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology,
medicine and architecture. Lehmann mentions phenomenology on a couple
of occasions in Postdramatic Theatre: he refers to a ‘phenomenology of
postdramatic signs’ (p. 86) in his discussion of the performance text and
later states that postdramatic theatre ‘realizes its own “phenomenology of
perception” marked by an overcoming of the principles of mimesis and
fiction’ (p. 99). Lehmann’s use of this term and the related word phenomenon
seems largely restricted to the appearances of that which discloses itself to
 Notes 249

perception without considering the subjective dimension of such

appearances. For other attempts to apply phenomenology to postdramatic
theatre, see: Jerome Carroll, ‘Phenomenology and the Postdramatic: A Case
Study of Three Plays by Ewald Palmetshofer’, in Jerome Carroll et al. (eds),
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on
Contemporary Performance, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 233–254; Luule
Eppner, ‘Theatre in the Postdramatic Text: A Phenomenological Approach’,
Nordic Theatre Studies 24 (2012), pp. 66–75.
6 Lehmann acknowledges this ambiguity in relation to Tadeusz Kantor’s use
of mannequins: ‘In a kind of exchange with the living bodies and together
with the objects, [the mannequins] change the stage into a landscape of
death, in which there is a fluid transition between the human beings (often
acting like puppets) and the dead puppets (appearing as if animated by
children).’ Other than a brief mention of Bread and Puppet Theatre,
Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre otherwise neglects puppet theatre as a
potential medium of the postdramatic. Adding puppet theatre to this
category suggests, among other things, the roots of what Lehmann considers
postdramatic in popular theatre forms, many of which, of course, have
pre-­dramatic origins. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 73.
7 Ibid., p. 95.
8 Theron Schmidt’s analysis of Back to Back Theatre’s Food Court, which
employs neurodivergent and physically disabled performers, is another
recent attempt to engage disability within Lehmann’s postdramatic model.
See: ‘Acting, Disabled: Back to Back Theatre and the Politics of Appearance’,
in Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, pp. 189–207.
9 For more information on Once Upon a Time, see ‘Once Upon a Time’, Spare
Tyre website, http://www.sparetyre.org/whats-­on/projects/once-­upon-a-­
time (accessed 18 May 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/3DTN-ULR;
Nicola Shaughnessy, Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged
Theatre, and Affective Practice, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012,
pp. 70–75.
10 ‘Who We Are’, Spare Tyre website, http://www.sparetyre.org/about-­us/
who-­we-are (accessed 18 May 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/47ZM-
TYCV.
11 For more information, see the TimeSlips website, http://www.timeslips.org
(accessed 18 May 2017).
12 Joel Brown, ‘Puppets Tell Story of Dementia in ‘D-Generation’, Boston Globe,
8 November 2012, available at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theatre-­
art/2012/11/08/puppets-­tell-story-­dementia-sandglass-­theatre-generation/
uKZ1xNCaUwOvpwl8qErA5J/story.html (accessed 18 May 2017), archived
at https://perma.cc/35MU-P85A.
13 Additional information on D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks, which was
directed by Robert Salomon, and a five-­minute video including excerpts
from the production can be found on the Sandglass Theatre website, http://
sandglasstheatre.org/d-­generation (accessed 18 May 2017). I attended
250 Notes

performances of D-Generation at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta on

20 March 2015 and at the Clayton Center for the Performing Arts in
Maryville, Tennessee, on 29 March 2015.
14 Shaughnessy, Applying Performance, p. 70.
15 Eric Bass, Ines Zeller Bass, Kirk Murphy, Roberto Salomon and Residents of
Pine Heights Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, Brattleboro, Vermont,
‘D-Generation’, unpublished typescript (dated 15 January 2013), p. 20.
I would like to thank Eric Bass for providing me with a copy of this text.
16 Ibid., pp. 2–3.
17 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 109.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 110.
20 Ibid., p. 109.
21 Ibid.
22 Thomas DeBaggio, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with
Alzheimer’s, New York: Free Press, 2002, p. 85.
23 Ibid., p. 113.
24 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 57.
25 Wellcome Trust Blog, ‘Q&A: Melanie Wilson: Life through the Lens of
Dementia’, 31 August 2011, available at: https://blog.wellcome.ac.
uk/2011/08/31/melanie-­wilson-life-­through-the-­lens-of-­dementia (accessed
18 May 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/7X5M-TDLJ. Autobiographer
was funded by Arts Council England and the Wellcome Trust.
26 Melanie Wilson website (n.d.), http://www.melaniewilson.org.uk/about-­
melanie (accessed 18 May 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/83SK-W28F.
27 Daisy Bowie-Sell, ‘Review of Autobiographer (Toynbee Studios, London)’,
Telegraph, 30 April 2012, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/
theatre/theatre-­reviews/9236310/Autobiographer-Toynbee-Studios-­review.
html (accessed 18 May 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/7LSU-T8FU.
I am indebted to Bowie-Sell’s review for some details of this production. A
trailer with sequences from Autobiographer can be viewed at https://vimeo.
com/29224448 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49okdnlXfWY
(accessed 18 May 2017).
28 Melanie Wilson, Autobiographer, London: Oberon, 2012, p. 50.
29 Jiří Veltruský, ‘Puppetry and Acting’, Semiotica 47.1–4 (1983), pp. 69–122,
here p. 88.
30 Bass et al., ‘D-Generation’, p. 3.
31 Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011, p. 47.
32 Kelly McEvers, ‘Theatre Artist Anne Basting Named MacArthur Fellow’, All
Things Considered, 22 September 2016, available at: http://www.npr.org/
2016/09/22/495069555/theatre-­artist-anne-­basting-named-­macarthur-
fellow (accessed 18 May 2016), archived at https://perma.cc/AG3P-VHDR.
33 Inside Out of Mind was produced by the Meeting Ground Theatre Company.
For information on the production, see: Matthew Reisz, ‘Dementia Care
 Notes 251

Research Becomes Basis for Touring Play’, Times Higher Education, 1 March
2012, available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/dementia-­
care-research-­becomes-basis-­for-touring-­play/2018823.article (accessed
18 May 2017), archived at https://perma.cc/83PT-VQH6; and Nottingham
Institute of Mental Health, ‘Inside Out of Mind’, n.d., available at: https://
exchange.nottingham.ac.uk/blog/inside-­out-of-­mind/ (accessed 18 May
2017), archived at https://perma.cc/NA5S-ZSE6.
 Index

Abrons Art Center 115, 116 Archival Research and Cultural

absolute drama 9, 23 Heritage (ARCH) project 40
Académie Française 148 archiving and imagining, of dance
acting/actors communities 174–8
agency and centrality of 83 Aristotle 23, 25, 138
American Method acting 143 Art, Anxiety, and Censorship at
audiences and 135 MoMA PS1: A Panel 121
as objects 92 Artaud, Antonin 109, 125
postmodern 86, 88 art(s)
Acts and Apparitions 187 the commodity and 13
aesthetics drama and 158
aesthetic forms 11, 12, 13–14 posthuman 85
avant-garde/postdramatic 116, the real and 133
117 society and 11, 12
migrant theatre and 184 theatre and 134
politics and 185 Association of Performing Arts
postdramatic 50, 70, 184 Professionals (APAP)
socio-political processes and 70 conference 116, 118, 127,
Affectos Humanos (Human 129
Affections) 171 The Audience Revolution 110
affordances, theory of 12, 13, 15 audiences
Agamben, Giorgio 84, 183–4, 185, as active seers 147
186, 228n.17 actors and 135
the air is peopled with cruel and audience revolution 102, 108–10
fearsome birds 53, 54, 64–5 challenging of 121–4
Allen, Richard 147, 154 empathic involvement of 169
Alssopp, Ric 7 immersion of 109
ambiguity 120, 121, 125, 128 Auschwitz 20, 21
American Method acting 143 Autobiographer 206–7
American Realness Festival 17, 115, autonomization of language 196
117, 119, 120, 125, 127, 128 Avant-Garde Performance and the
L’Amicale de Production 156, 162 Limits of Criticism 186
Amleto 35 avant-garde(s)
anamnesis 47 aesthetics 116, 117
Angotti, Isabelle 153 conservative 128
Angst (Fear) 171, 173 in dance 175
animacy, subjectivity and 208 disruptions 17–18, 116, 119, 120
Ann Liv Young in Jail 116, 126 festivals and 118–19
anthropology, folk dance and 177 normalization of 28–9
Antigone 25 racism and 186
254 Index

Bachelard, Gaston 148–9 BR.#04 39

‘Bad Art and Objecthood’ 131, 133 Brand, Joel 20
Badiou, Alain 120 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 14, 79, 108–9, 204
The Bagwell in Me 121 Bredeson, Kate 18
Bal, Mieke 170 Breton, André 119–20
ballet 167–70 Bridge Motel, Seattle 55–6
Ballhaus Naunynstrasse 180, 182, 184 Brook, Peter 197
Barba, Eugenio 184 Brooks, Cleanth 8
Barba, Fabián 165 Brown, Bill 93–4
bare life 84, 87, 184, 228n.17 Bryant-Bertail, Sarah 80
BarleyGirl 48–9, 59–64 Burke, Siobhan 121
Barnett, David 69, 70, 79, 80
Bartok, Belà 176 Capital 71
Bass, Eric 199–200 capitalism
Basting, Anne 200, 210 aesthetic experience and 13
Bataille, Georges 38 capitalist temporality 77, 78, 80
Battles, Matthew 42 crisis of 59
Baudrillard, Jean 94 form and 98–9
Baumgarten, Sebastian 191 free-market 70
Beasely, Mark 121 late 102
Becker, Jochen 204 measure of time under 71
Beckett, Samuel 70, 89–90 media and 101–2
Bel, Jérôme 160–1, 165, 167–70, 198 video and 104–5
Benjamin, Walter 36–7, 47, 148, 192 Carlson, Marvin 4–5
Berlant, Lauren 13–14 Carroll, Jerome 137
Bhabha, Homi 183 Cassiers, Edith 16
BIO-OBJECTS 86, 87–8, 91, 94 Cassiers, Guy 35, 41–7, 219n.28,
Bishop, Claire 12 220n.40
Black Arts Movement 186 Castellucci, Romeo 35–40, 47
blackfacing 186 casting
Bleeker, Maaike 147, 152 colourblind 61, 223n.38
bodies of Philippe Quesne 153
category of the body 163 Castorf, Frank 186–7, 190
deviant 198 Celan, Paul 21–2
performative epistemology of 82 Center Jenny 111, 112
postdramatic 82, 85–6, 185–6 Charmatz, Boris 165
posthuman 17, 82, 84, 85–6, 88–9 Chiapello, Eve 102
Boenisch, Peter M. 83 Chiesa, Lorenzo 138
Bois, Yve-Alain 7, 38 The Children of Kings 143
Bokaer, Jonah 118 choreographers, French 161
Boltanski, Luc 102 Christensen, Clayton 77
Boulogne, Arnaud 157, 159 citizenship, Germany 181, 183–4
boundary 2 22 class
bourgeois drama 2–3, 24 drama and 23
Boyle, Michael Shane 78 Western class relations 25–6
 Index 255

Cloez, Ondine 157, 159 dance

Cohen, Stephen 8 archiving and imagining of dance
colonialism, Germany 187 communities 174–8
colourblindness 61, 223n.38 ballet 167–70
Come to My Center You Enter the concept dance 163
Winter 56–7 contemporary 18, 167–70, 176–7
Comma Boat 106–8, 110, 111 copyright for dance works 187
Common Ground 190, 191 Dance Heritage Fund 166, 172
communication dance studies 163–4, 165–7
social 4 folk dance 175, 177
video and 100 gender relations in 176–7
computer age 85 identity and 174, 177
concept dance 163 performing dance history 165–7
The Condition of Postmodernity 101 politics and 177
conflict, dramatic theatre and postdramatic theatre and 163
158–9 as pure gesture 163, 166, 178
constellations, idea of 36–7, 47 Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto
contemporary dance 18, 167–70, 50
176–7 Davis, Brangien 54
The Content of Form 170 De Stijle, Want 16, 66, 69–70, 71
contraction, dynamics of 38, 39 Dead Class 87, 91, 92, 94
copyright, for dance works 172 The Death of Character 89
Corneille, Pierre 148 DeBaggio, Thomas 205
Cornish, Matt 5, 18–19 Debord, Guy 148
Cox, Emma 182 deconstruction 47
creative destruction 125 Defoort, Antoine 147–8, 150, 155–62
creative process 33–4 deindustrialization 4
of Guy Cassiers 42–6 dementia
of Romeo Castellucci 35–9 D-Generation: An Exaltation of
Cricot 2, the Informal Theatre 87 Larks 198, 199–207
critical historiography 166 dementia theatre 199, 203
criticism identity and 206
genetic 216n.3 memory and 205
New Criticism 8–9, 11 postdramatic theatre and 19,
philosophical 24–5 196–9
Cruel Optimism 13 puppet theatre form and 198
culture subjectivity and 207–8
cross-cultural exchange 127 Dercon, Chris 190
cultural production 100 Derrida, Jacques 94, 95
materiality of 101 Desintegriert euch! (De-Integrate
migrants and 182 Yourselves!) 189–90, 193
Culturebot 125 Deutschlandfunk Kultur 189
dialectical fiction 185
D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks dialogic form 27–30
198, 199–207 Diamond, Elin 50
256 Index

Dickicht (Jungle) 191, 192 Eitelkeit (Vanity) 171, 173

Die Schutzbefohlenen (Charges) Elswit, Kate 164
187–8 emballage, human 87
director’s notebooks 34–5 embodiment, erasure of 85
of Guy Cassiers 41–7 emotionality, reflection and
of Romeo Castellucci 35–40, 47 169
disability, neurological 198 (see also The Encyclopedic Palace 106
dementia) engagement, audience 147
Disabled Theatre 198 Engstrom, Randy 58
Diskurs-Choreographien 164, 166 epic material 23, 24
disruption(s) epic theatre, role of time in 79–80
avant-garde 17–18, 116, 119, 120 Erpulat, Nurkan 179, 191
contextual disruptions 126–30 Etchells, Tim 74
conventional 120–6 Ether Frolics 210
conventions of 119–20 ethics
disruptive innovation 16 disruption and 129
disruptive practices 77 external ethical principles 25
ethics and 129 new for art’s evaluation 119–20
in experimental performance ethnology, folk dance and 177
116–17, 129 Everything Without Exception 52
documentary theatre 182 exclusion
Doisneau, Véronique 167–70 dramatic form and 134
Doyle, Kevin 127–8 postdramatic theatre and 5
drama sovereign states and 184
absolute drama 9, 23 theatre and 10
art and 158 Exil Ensemble 191, 193, 194
bourgeois 2–3, 24 exilic theatre 184
form and 2–3 experimentation
as a historical category 83 experimental festival marketplace
historicization of 25 118–19
modern 24 experimental performance 17,
postdrama and 27 116–17, 118, 129
poststructuralist critique of 187 On the Boards and 65
pre-drama 23, 26 postdramatic 49, 54–5
scenographic-led dramaturgy 147 Eyers, Tom 137
theatre and 3, 26
theory of 90 Fabre, Jan 135, 138–40
theory of dramatic collision 25 Fairytale Plays 24
time-bound nature of 2, 4 Federal Deposit Insurance
true drama 23 Corporation (FDIC) 58
Durham, Mario Garcia 118 Fensham, Rachel 69, 70, 76
Dürr, Anke 192 Féral, Josette 34
Ferguson, Rachael 61
l’écriture de plateau 18, 147–62 festivals 17–18
Eichmann, Adolf 20 avant-garde and 118–19
 Index 257

avant-garde disruption and 116 The Future Show 67–8, 72–5, 76, 77–8,
critique of 127–8 79, 80
the festival market 118–19 futurity, role of 70
fiction
dialectical 185 Garner, Stanton B. Jr. 6, 19
reality and 169–70 gender
financial crisis (2008) 16, 77 (see also formalism and 10
Great Recession) gender relations in dance 176–7
Fitch, Lizzie 102, 106 postdramatic theatre and 162
flow, total 17, 104, 112 Genet, Jean 148–9
folk dance 175, 177 genetic criticism 216n.3
Foreman, Richard 29 genetic studies, on theatre 34
form/formalism Genette, Gérard 41
arguments against 7–8 Genius Award 2008 64
dialogic form 27–30 genres, form and 97
drama and 2–3 geography
as a form of giving order 11 performance geography 50–1
historicity of 100 postdramatic 16, 49, 50, 51, 55,
new 11–15 63
in performance studies 7–11 Georgelou, Konstantina 38, 42
politics and 98–9 Gergen, Kenneth J. 86
postdramatic 2, 3, 15–19 Germany
postmigrant theatre and citizenship 181, 183–4
179–81 colonialism and 187
production and 98–100 racism and 186–7
as a relationship 96–8 Turkish immigrants in 180,
as shared language 10–11 183–4
and the social 11, 12, 98 Germinal 147, 150, 155–60, 161
term 6–7 Gerould, Daniel 24
theatre and 1, 3, 7–11 gesture 97
A Formalist Theatre 9 Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’ 192
formless, notion of the 38–9, 42 Giannachi, Gabriella 82, 89
Forms 11 Gilbert, Helen 182, 183
4.48 Psychosis 52, 70 Giles, Steve 137
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Ginsberg, Marsha 143
Psychoanalysis 138 Giulio Cesare 35, 39
France, theatre in 148, 153–4, 155, globalization 4
161–2 Goerger, Halory 147–8, 150, 155–62
Franklin, Seb 12 Goodmann, Nelson 169
Franko, Mark 166 Gorki Theater. See Maxim Gorki
Fried, Michael 134 Theater
Friedman, Andrew 17 Graves, Jen 56
Frizzelle, Christopher 49, 54, 62 Great Recession 49, 50, 58–9, 62–3
Fuchs, Elinor 2–3, 5, 19, 89, 152 (see also financial crisis
funding agencies 15 (2008))
258 Index

Greenwich + Docklands Horthy, Miklos 20

International Festival, London Horwitz, Andy 125, 129
2014 66 How We Became Posthuman 83
Gross, Kenneth 208 Hoyer, Dore 171–2, 174
Grosz, Elisabeth 171 Höyng, Peter 24, 28
Grote, Jason 143 human emballage 87
Grotowski, Jerzy 84 ‘Human Nature Preserve’ 87, 90
‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ 61 human rights 183, 184
Guillén, Claudio 97 humanism 83
human(s)
Haas, Birgit 6 category of the 92
Habit 18, 133, 134, 142, 143–6 nonhuman and subhuman and
Hamlet 25 92–3
Hamlet vs. Hamlet 43 objects and 86–7
Harding, James 116 Hündesohne (Sons of Dogs) 191
Hardt, Yvonne 5, 18 Hungary, Jews in 20–1
Harrell, Trajal 119 hypotheticality, retrospection and
Harvey, David 71, 101 73–4, 76
Hass (Hatred) 171–2
Hatch, Ryan Anthony 5, 18, 186, 188 I Shall Never Return 92
Hayles, N. Katherine 83, 85, 89 ‘I Wish She Were Right’ 125
Hays, Michael 22 Ibsen, Henrik J. 24
Hegel, Georg W. F. 22–3, 25, 75, 78, identity
89–90, 94 dance and 174, 177
Heilman, Robert 8 dementia and 206
Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti French 148
(Mr. Puntila and His Man migrants and 182
Matti) 79 politics 178
hierarchical structures, ballet and Turkish-German 180
168–9 Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle
Hift, Gabi 192 of Cities) 191
Hillje, Jens 179, 180, 189, 190 immersion, as a theatrical experience
history 109
aesthetic forms and 13–14 Implied Violence 16, 48–55
historical memory 173 BarleyGirl 48–9, 59–64
historical narrative 170 Come to My Center You Enter the
historicization of drama 25 Winter 56–7
performative 165 inclusion, postdramatic theatre and 5
postdramatic theatre and 14 (see also exclusion)
process of historicization 80 Inferno 38, 40
Hitler, Adolf 20 l’informe 38
holocaust 20, 21 innovation, disruptive 77–8
Holzapfel, Amy 144 Inside Out of Mind 210
Homo Sacer 185 Institute for Applied Theatre Studies,
HORA theatre 198 Giessen 29
 Index 259

Inter(a)nal F/ear 115, 120, 121 Langhoff, Shermin 180, 183, 188,
interconnectivity 83 189–90, 192–3, 195
intermedial reference 45, 46 language
intermediality, Guy Cassiers’s use autonomization of 196
of 45 materiality of 39–40
intratextuality 46 meaning and 39
inversion strategies 39 and Romeo Castellucci 37
Iny, Danny 110 Larson, Renya 200
Italian Futurists 119 Le Cid 25, 148
Item Falls 111, 112 Lechte, John 185
Lehmann, Hans-Thies
JACK 126 artificiality of representation
Jackson, Shannon 8, 10, 12 and 60
Jameson, Fredric 17, 97, 98, 100–1, avant-garde/postdramatic
102, 104–5 practices and 117
Jans, Erwin 44, 45 dance and 163
Jarcho, Julia 44–5 form and 9, 15, 98–102
Jelinek, Elfriede 187–8 French theatre practitioners and
Jewish people, transported to 148
Auschwitz 20 Implied Violence and 49–50
Junior War 107 material conditions of theatre
Jürs-Munby, Karen 47, 137 and 14
narration and 203–4
Kane, Sarah 52, 70 palimpsestuous intertextuality/
Kantor, Tadeusz 17, 81, 84, 85–95, 186 intratextuality 46
Kasztner, Rudolf (Reszõ) 20–1 Peter Szondi and 21–2, 25–8,
Kasztner train 20–1 29–30
katharsis 47 post-epic narration and 197
Kierkegaard, Søren 75 Postdramatic Theatre. See
Kiley, Brendan 49, 53 Postdramatic Theatre
Kirby, Michael 9, 10 postdramatic theatre and 1–2,
Knowles, Christopher 198 3–4, 90, 132–3, 134–6, 140–1
Knowles, Ric 7, 147, 162 the real and 135–6, 139–40
Kobialka, Michal 88 Samuel Beckett and 89–90
Kokosowski, Michelle 35 subjectivity, consciousness,
Kourlas, Gia 116 narrative and 196
Kraus, Rosalind E. 38 Tadeusz Kantor and 81, 86, 90
Kreuzberg, Berlin 180 venue size and 55, 56
Krushova, Krassimira 166 Lepage, Louise 83, 196
Lepore, Jill 77
Lacan, Jacques 136–8, 139, 145, 146 Less Than Nothing 141
Laet, Timmy De 16 Let the Artists Die 91, 92
Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham Levine, Caroline 11–12, 15
210 Levine, David 18, 131, 132, 133–4,
Landry, Olivia Ryan 184 142, 143–6
260 Index

Levinson, Marjorie 11–13 La mélancolie des dragons 147, 150,

Linke, Susanne 171 151–5, 161
literary genre 97 Melissa is a Bitch 121
literary studies 11 memory
literature, theatre and 9 dementia and 205
Lo, Jacqueline 182, 183 folk dances and 175
logic of threes 24–6 historical 173
logic-of-two 27–30 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 148
Loher, Dea 186 Method acting 143
Lorenz, Renate 204 Michael 121
Lukács, Georg 7, 23 migrant theatre 182–8
Luley, Waltraud 171, 172, 174 Mihaylova, Stefka 10
Luria, Isaac 38 Mijatov, Pamala 58
Miller, Arthur 24
Macaulay, Alastair 126, 130 ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ 37–8
Macbeth 34 mirroring, spaces and 55
Magyar Táncok (Hungarian Dance) Miss Sara Sampson 26
167, 174–8 Mitchell, Ryan 51–5, 56, 57, 61–2,
Mahmoud, Jasmine 16 65
Malabou, Catherine 68, 75–6, 78, Monfort, Anne 149–50
80 Motel #1 55–8
male chauvinism 10 Müller, Heiner 191
The Man Who . . .? 197 Müller, Tobi 192
Mandel, Ernest 101, 102 Multicultural theatre 183
Mann, Paul 116, 118, 127 Mumot, André 192
Marinetti, F.T. 119 Munby, Karen-Jürs 22
market pressures, on artistic Muñoz, José Esteban 73
development 117, 128–9 Murphy, Kirk 199–200, 201, 208
Martens, Günther 41 Myers, Tanya 210
Marx, Karl 71
material theatre 147 Nach uns das All (After Us Comes
Maxim Gorki Theater 180, 181, 182, Space) 192
188–95 Nachbar, Martin 165, 167, 170–4
Mazzili, Mary 5 Nadj, Josef 184
meaning, language and 39 narration
media in contemporary dance 18,
capitalism and 101–2 167–70
in everyday life 4 emotional 167
form and 100 Magyar Táncok and 177
media combination 45 narrative and 72–3
media society 99, 102 postdramatic theatre and
Netflix 110 203–4
postdramatic theatre and 99 postdramatic use of 76
theatre aesthetics and 45 technology and 44
Meerzon, Yana 184 in Véronique Doisneau 169
 Index 261

narrative(s) Pal, George 70

in Castellucci’s theatre 35 palimpsest, postdrama as 41–6
dementia 205 Palimpsests 41
disruptive 77 Pan, DK 55–6
historical narrative 170 Pao, Angela 61
of migration and adaptation 182 Papp, Joseph 61
narration and 72–3 Parable of the Cave 25
the past as 74 Paradistical Rites 65
Nayar, Pramod K. 85, 88 Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute
Nelson, Robin 83 (PHI) 200
neo-dramatic theatre 149 Paris Opera 167–8
Netflix 110 Parisse, Lydie 39
New Criticism 8–9, 11 participation, audience 147
New Formalism 11–13 Patek, Rebecca 17, 115–16, 120–2,
New German Dance Studies 164 124, 125–6, 128–30
Newman, Saul 185 patriarchy 10
Ngai, Sianne 13–14 Pavis, Patrice 5, 68–9, 72, 77, 79
Nguyen, Lily 59, 60, 61 Pearson, Deborah 67–8, 72–5, 76
North, Joseph 13 Perceval, Luk 42
Northwest New Works Festival 2007 performance
53, 64–5 avant-garde/postdramatic 117
nostalgia 70, 74 experimental 17, 116–17, 118, 129
Nübling, Sebastian 192 form and 9
performance art, theatre and 132, 134
object(s) Performance Club 125
actors as 92 performance geography 50–1
BIO-OBJECTS 86, 87–8, 91, 94 performance studies, formalism in
humans and 86–7 7–11
narrative and 74 performance theory 81–2
subhumans as 92–3 performers. See acting/actors
subject and 39, 94–5, 104 performing dance history 165–7
things and 93–4 Performing Exile, Performing Self 184
O’Connell, Mandie 51–5, 56, 57, Performing Garage, Wooster Street 29
59, 63 Performing Unification 180
On the Boards 53, 64–5 personal, the 204, 209–10
Once Upon a Time 199 Phaedo 47
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre 29 philosophical criticism 24–5
Oresteia 35 Pioneer Square, Seattle 51–2
others/otherness Plato 25, 47
nonhuman and subhuman 85 Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof 91
postdramatic work and 134 politics
reality and 139 aesthetic form and 185
‘Our Sequence in Series’ 48–9 dance and 177
outsiderhood, of Ann Liv Young 124 disruption and 120
Öziri, Necati 192 form and 98–9
262 Index

identity 178 presentism 68–9

political theatre 5–6 Priority Innfield 106
postdramatic practice and production
political economies 50 cultural 100
postmigrant theatre and 181 form and 98–100
The Politics of New Media Theatre: video and 103
®
Life TM 82
Pollesch, René 70
Pryor, Benjamin Snapp 115, 126–7
psychoanalysis, the real and 137–8
Poschmann, Gerda 196 Puchner, Martin 9
postdrama puppet theatre (see also D-Generation:
drama and 27 An Exaltation of Larks)
as palimpsest 41–6 dementia and 198
postdramatic geography 16, 49, 50, Sandglass 19, 198, 200
51, 55, 63 pure dialogue 25
Postdramatic Theatre 1–2, 4, 16, 25, pure gesture, dance as 163, 166, 178
28, 29, 33, 83, 98, 133, 134–5, Purgatorio 36
136, 137, 146, 148, 196–7, 198
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political Quesne, Philippe 147–8, 150, 151–5,
5, 137, 138, 224n.9 160–2
postdramatic theatre, term 1–2, 4–5
postdramatic theory, temporality in race/racism
67 colourblindness 61, 223n.38
Postdramatisches Theater. See formalism and 10
Postdramatic Theatre Germany and 186–7
‘Posthuman Perspectives and postdramatic theatre and 186
Postdramatic Theatre’ 83 racial erasures 62
posthuman/posthumanism radicalism, postdramatic theatre and
concept of 84–92, 228n.16 187
defined 85 Rajewsky, Irina 45, 46
postdramatic theatre and 82–3 Rakow, Christian 192
posthuman bodies 17, 82, 84, Rancière, Jacques 108–9
85–6, 88–9 Rathbun, Charlie 58
posthuman theatre 17, 83, 84, 93, re-contextualization, in
95, 186 contemporary dance 176–7
postmigrant performance/theatre re-enactment 171
18–19, 179–81, 185, 189–95 reading practice 14
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic Real-of-the-Symbolic 138
of Late Capitalism 100 real/realness 135
poststructuralist critique, of drama art and 133
187 escape from the 141
potentiality 73 impossibility of the 138
The Power of Theatrical Madness 135, interruption of 134–5, 146
138–9 in performance 18
pre-drama 23, 26 the postdramatic 135–6
prediction, act of 74–5 psychoanalysis and the 137
 Index 263

the symbolic and the 138, 139 Salzmann, Marianne 190–1

theatre and 132 Sandglass Theatre 19, 198, 200
realism, the postdramatic and 27 scenography 147, 149, 151
reality Schechner, Richard 118, 128
fiction and 169–70 Schellow, Constanze 164, 166
others/otherness and 139 Schleef, Einar 79
Reality TV 109 Schober, Regina 46
(re)construction 170 Schumpeter, Joseph 77
recontexualizing, in contemporary Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins)
dance 167–70 183
reflection, emotionality and 169 Seattle (see also Implied Violence)
refugees Bridge Motel 55–6
European refugee crisis 181, 182, Great Recession and 58
187, 191 International District/Chinatown
human rights and 184 53–4
theatre groups 185 Pioneer Square 51–2
‘Rehearsing Detachment’ 185 racialization in 62
Reinelt, Janelle 5–6 SoDo warehouse 53
Reinhardt, Max 34 South Lake Union 48–9
Remote Mitte 193, 195 The Seattle Times 54
repeatability 166 Seattle Weekly 52
Repetition 75 Second World War 8, 93
repetition self, posthuman 89
nostalgia and 74 Selimović, Simonida 192
the past and present and Sell, Mike 117, 186
75, 76 Sellar, Tom 151
Tadeusz Kantor and 91–2 semi-documentary theatre 183, 184
representation, artificiality of 60 Senkel, Günter 183
research, genetic theatre 34 set writing (l’écriture de plateau) 18,
retrospection, hypotheticality and 147–62
73–4, 76 sexual difference 145–6
rewriting 41 Shaughnessy, Nicola 201
Richter, Falk 191, 192 Shaw, Helen 118
Ridout, Nicholas 17 Sherry Show 121–2
Roeck, Sam 115, 121 ‘Shit-Show Circus on Ice’ 127
Roma Armee (Roma Army) 192 shrinking, dynamics of 38
Romanska, Magda 17, 186 Sieg, Katrin 183, 184, 185, 186
Ronen, Yael 190, 192 Signéponge/Signsponge 94
Ruhrorter theatre group 185 ‘A Slap In the Face of Public Taste’
Ruiz, Alan 7 119
Russell, Mark 118 Snow White 121
Snyder, Benjamin H. 77
Sahimi, Sadeq 89 social communication 4
Saint Genet 65 social forms 11, 12, 98
Salamon, Eszter 167, 174–8 social function
264 Index

of postdramatic theatre 78 Szondi, Leopold 21

of time 79 Szondi, Peter 2, 3, 4, 9, 19, 21–4, 26,
social sciences 10 27–8, 83, 90
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 35, 37
society, art and 11, 12 Tackels, Bruno 18, 148, 149, 150
socio-political context, of the Time Tanzfond Erbe (Dance Heritage
Machine 76 Fund) 166, 172
socio-political processes, TDR: The Drama Review 5, 9
postdramatic aesthetics and technology(ies)
70 screen-based 102
SoDo warehouse, Seattle 53 translating novels to theatre and
Sollers, Philippe 142 44, 45
Solo 121 Telemachos 184
Sound & Fury 210 television, Reality TV 109
South Lake Union, Seattle 48–9 temporality
sovereign states capitalist 77, 78, 80
exclusion and 184 postdramatic 70, 73, 77, 78
mistrust of 195 text
spaces dramatic and postdramatic
mirroring and 55 theatre and 33–4
unconventional 50, 54 in postdramatic theatre 41
Spare Tyre 199 and Romeo Castellucci 37
spectatorship (see also audiences) Thalheimer, Michael 79, 186
postdramatic 71–2, 78–80 Theater 151
spectators as active seers 147 Theater an der Ruhr, Mülheim 185
stadium seating 108 Theater der Zeit 186, 195
temporal implications of 70 Theater ist endlich ist Theater
video and 104 (Theatre is Finally is Theatre)
St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery 29 191
Stadttheater 180 Theater of Death 92
Stanley Niaah, Sonjah 50, 51 theatre
Stewart, Lizzie 183 antitheatricality 131–2
Stewart, Susan 74 art and 134
storytelling, vignette mode of 182 audience revolution in the 102,
The Stranger 49, 53, 54, 59, 62, 64 108–9
Studio Я 190, 191 the becoming-sculpture of 143–6
subhuman, category of the 92–3 Brechtian 14
subject, object and 39, 94–5, 104 dementia theatre 199, 203
subjectivity documentary theatre 182
dementia and 207–8 drama and 3, 26
postdramatic 19, 197, 210 exilic theatre 184
in theatrical performance 196, 198 form/formalism in 1, 3, 7–11
Swan Lake 168 French 148, 153–4, 155, 161–2
symbolic, the real and the 138, 139 Great Recession and 58–9
Symbolists 119 material 147
 Index 265

migrant theatre 182–8 The Time Machine (1960) 70

Multicultural theatre 183 TimeSlips 200, 205, 210
neo-dramatic 149 Tinius, Jonas 185
performance art and 132, 134 Today Is My Birthday 91, 92
political 5–6 Tomlin, Liz 116, 117, 128, 187
post-Brechtian 79 tone 97
postdramatic 93, 95, 99 total flow 17, 104, 112
posthuman 17, 83, 84, 93, 95, 186 ‘Toward a Topology of Cross-
postmigrant 179–81, 182–3, 185, Cultural Theatre Practice’ 182
189–95 ‘Towards a Genetic Study of
postmodern 89 Performance – Take Two’ 34
the real and 146 trauma, dealing with 75
semi-documentary 183, 184 Trecartin, Ryan 102, 106–7, 110
Theatre & Migration 182 tsimtsum 38
Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers 161 tuché 138
The Theatre of Form and the Turkish immigrants, in Germany 180,
Production of Meaning 7 183–4
‘theatre of the speech act’ 61 Turner, Cathy 83
Le Théâtre Postdramatique: vers un
chaos fécond? (Postdramatic Under the Radar Festival 118
Theatre: Towards a Fertile Under the Volcano 45–6
Chaos) 148 Underground Theatre, Abrons Art
Theorie des modernen Dramas Center 115
(Theory of the Modern Unschuld (Innocence) 186
Drama) 2, 21, 22, 24, 28, 83 Urheben Aufheben (Undertaking
Theory and History of Literature Uptaking) 165, 167, 170–4
series 22
The Theory of the Novel 23 Van den Dries, Luk 16
Thiériot, Gérard 148 Velasco, David 128–9
thing theory 93–4 Veltruský, Jiří 207
time Venice Biennale 2013 106
instantaneous present in Time venues, unconventional spaces 50,
Machine 71–2, 76 54
postdramatic 68–70, 73–4, 78 Véronique Doisneau 165, 167–70
postdramatic and capitalist 77–9 Verräter (Traitors) 192
role of in postdramatic/epic Verrücktes Blut (Crazy Blood)
theatre 79–80 179–81
to see (what is) coming 75–7, 80 via negativa 39
social function of 79 video 100, 101, 102–12
spectator’s potential to modify videographic notes 42
78–9 Vienna, University of 188
unsettling of the present 68, 72, Vivarium Studio 151, 162
76–7, 78, 79, 80 vivification 207
Time Machine 66–7, 69–70, 71–2, 76, Volksbühne Berlin 190
78–9, 80 Von Heiduck 203
266 Index

voyeurism 152 Winterreise (Winter Journey) 192,

Vrba-Wetzler Report 21 194
Wirth, Andrzej 24
Wahjudi, Claudia 193 Wolfe, Cary 95
Waiting for Godot 70 Wooster Group 29
Washington Mutual (WaMu) bank 58 words, detachment and 37, 39
Watkinson, Philip 16 Worthen, W. B. 8
Wegman, Jay 116 Writing and the Modern Stage 44
Weill, Kurt 186 WYSIWYG (what you see is what you
What Is Posthumanism? 95 get) 204
White, Hayden 170
white male supremacy, French Young, Ann Liv 17, 115–16, 122–6,
theatre 162 128–30, 233n.9
whiteness 10 YouTube 109
Wiecking, Steve 52
Wielopole, Wielopole 92, 94 Zaimoðlu, Feridun 183
Wigman, Mary 171 Zeller Bass, Ines 199–200, 201, 207,
Williams, Raymond 7 208
Wilson, August 61, 223n.38 Zimmer, Elizabeth 118
Wilson, Melanie 206 Žižek, Slavoj 75, 141
Wilson, Robert 117, 198 Zupančič, Alenka 137, 138, 140