Just posted in the last day or two at the Web site for Yale Theater magazine is an essay by German critic Robin Detje that first appeared in Theater heute Jahrbuch 2010, “Post-Dramatic Theater and the Bleeding Heart of the Seventies.” It requires a closer reading, but it’s also a rather remarkable examination of post-dramatic, post-post-dramatic, post-modern, and post-post-modern drama and performance theory and practice (and the slightly ridiculous repetition of all those “post”-isms is deliberate). “Drama has fallen asleep,” Detje writes. “The greatest achievement of our time is a freedom we perceive as all-encompassing, although it has no liberating qualities. The cultural techniques of the great emancipation movements have turned themselves against us.” Detje concludes:
Post-dramatic theater, with its emotional anaemia and its absence of euphoria, is precisely the theatre we deserve. This kind of theatre is highly modern and irrefutably smart — but it no longer gets to us. The theatre of the 1970s was still able to play with a bourgeois body wanting ecstatic de-bourgeoisification, and able to romanticize the act of ecstasy as a political act of liberation, a revolutionary deed. Post-dramatic theatre is bodiless: if we prick it, it doesn’t bleed. Its narcissism is all in its concept, in the desire to prove its own modernity — which is all too easily done. It simulates just enough dissidence for us not to run away in fear. But above all, post-dramatic theatre hums the tune we want to hear — the great song of compliance.
Again, all this deserves additional response, and with luck will provoke a most necessary controversy, but for now the essay itself is required reading.
Thanks for sharing that George. You’re right, it bears a bit more consideration than I’ve had time to give it. That said, I’m partially skeptical of its conclusions. It’s not that I don’t agree with the validity of its complaints, it’s just that (a) its criticism itself is rather theory based and risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater (no moment of theatrical production has been without its mediocrity; the mediocrity of one practitioner or another doesn’t invalidate the rest); (b) it argues that in essence we continue to work in the same paradigm 40 years later, which I rather disagree with; and (c), which has a bit to do with (a)…I’m very skeptical of people who approach live performance from an exclusively theoretical approach. Theorists and to some degree critics tend to want to objectify performance. This is certainly valid as a form of engagement, and I certainly wouldn’t argue that just because an artist’s intent differed from the critical interpretation or response, that the former invalidates the latter.
With that said, critics who don’t appreciate that there’s a difference between the work itself and its means of productions, and the experience of the work, risk falling into a historicist trap. The author here seems to want to dodge this point entirely at the end by falling back onto the old cynic’s out of “if you want better art, you need to want a better world”. Well, I tend to think better worlds require good art less, but whatever. Fundamentally, his complaints seem directed at the Baby Boomer generation’s narcissism and self-actualization. This is totally fair. Again, that was a while ago, and I think that artists today deserve a bit more engagement than simply lumping them in together with the Living Theater. If Rimini Protokoll is the only example of theatrical failure he can name, well, that’s just sort of weak.
Jeremy, the crypto-Marxist in me wants to question your consideration that “there’s a difference between the work itself, and its means of production, and the experience of the work,” historicist trap though it may be; all of these, along with critical response, revolve around each other in a close constellation; though the work is inevitably the product of the social forces controlling its production and presentation, it can operate in critique of those forces as well as in mute acceptance of them. I can’t speak at all to the quality or content of the work at UTR, for example, but it does seem to me that if The New York Times praises it and the artists accept and then leverage the praise (whatever they privately think or say about the Times) to their own professional and personal benefit, the question of opposition or absorption in the culture becomes relevant. (And so far as messianic narcissism goes, there’s plenty of that to go round in the younger generation of theatre artists too, as well as audiences to feed that narcissism.) I believe that Detje may have had something like this in mind as well when he writes about the “great song of compliance” in the culture in which this work is generated and presented.
But yes, these are early thoughts.
The crypto Marxist in me says theory and art worthless to the revolution, all that matters is your blood and passion (and aim, less romantically). But that puts me out of step with the majority of remaining Marxists, crypto- or otherwise.
That’s not to say you don’t make a quite good point, just that my general response–based in my unreconstructed postmodernist skepticism–is that I’m confident I can find radical interpretations making the opposite argument. Even when it comes to radical theory, Bourdieu may well apply. Again, the substantive part of my complaint is that there’s assumption of accuracy never demonstrated in this piece, and we should all be skeptical of an essay that lumps 40 years of work under the same paradigm. What other avant-garde lasted that long? This feels to me like par for the course—I’ve met many would-be radicals in the current moment who are nevertheless incapable of formulating a proper manifesto and instead default to gross generalizations about everything else to set themselves apart,
You’re quite right — you’d have to argue with Marcuse on that first point (see especially his book The Aesthetic Dimension). But I don’t think you have to be a Marxist or materialist, crypto- or otherwise, to admit the constellation of production into a critique of contemporary performance, either.
In terms of your second point, I’m a modernist myself and believe that to take a post-modernist stance in defense of multiple interpretation is a bit of surrender that denies the possibility of meaningful critique — some approaches and critiques are more valid than others, period, otherwise criticism is a meaningless pursuit. It’s not that manifestoes are even necessary from artists or anyone else, but that the decentering of text in postdramatic theatre suggests an inability to express through spoken and written language what one wants to express in movement or scenography. Perfectly valid, of course. But throwing out language as inadequate in a culture of images (even if, as Adorno perceived, the way that language has been co-opted by the administrative culture has rendered it suspect) is, once again, another baby/bathwater analogy. A lyrical dramatic language needn’t be abandoned altogether — indeed, it can be wrested from the culture and reconceived for the stage. A post-theatrical drama, perhaps?
You actually touch on one of my issues with this piece in your response above when you write: “that the decentering of text in postdramatic theatre suggests an inability to express through spoken and written language what one wants to express in movement or scenography.”
I think that actually the relationship many of these artists have to text is much more complicated than that, which is really my critique: this author cast a big tent and lumped many things together, whatever else the validity of his critique of 70s performance practices.
At a more general level, I guess my point is that I, insofar as I’m a critic, don’t ascribe to some set of theoretical approach or practice, whether it’s post-dramatic theater or devised theater or whatever. In fact, I engage with a wide variety of work demonstrating diverse uses and approaches to text and, in fact, dramatic texts, too. My insistence on “performance” is born, rather, out of the sense that in order to approach a theatrical work, we’re always dealing with a performance rather than just a text. My complaint about “playwrights these days” isn’t because I reject the idea of creating dramatic or theatrical texts, it’s just that most, I think (and I don’t count you among them btw) have a rather naive approach to their practice. When a text is performed, it subjects itself to the ideologies of the other practices that go into creating that live performance: the scenography, the direction, the acting. If I wind up concentrating on a small subset of practitioners, a particular scene, I guess, it’s because that’s where I see artists asking the most provocative questions about those other practices. But that shouldn’t be read as a rejection of text in general or an endorsement of one set of practices, let alone those that defined an approach from the 1970s.
I believe that Detje is also delivering a critique of contemporary performance practices born from those of the 1970s — but your own perspective is well-described and points well-taken. And of course my own description, which you quote in your comment, isn’t to be applied across the board to all performance practice, either.
I don’t think Lehmann’s book advocates for one kind of performance over another by the way; it was an attempt to discuss and define a critical vocabulary for writing about a performance practice that decenters text (and, indeed, it’s important to note that it is not eliminated). Of course, Lehmann wrote his book 15 years ago, and it’s been some time since, and the situation and vocabulary continues to evolve.
I am very flattered to find such a classy response to my little manifesto here; I haven’t seen that in Germany and it makes me want to move back to New York.
It was interesting to me that you read this as a purely theoretical intervention from a critic. I am not an academic, I started out as a practitioner, then became a critic, and now I have put myself back on stage and try to understand the world around me. So for me this is text is mostly a letter to myself: WTF do I do now?
And for me, this is also not so much an attempt to criticize the narcissism of the baby boomers. This is written in shock about encountering audiences who are much younger and who seem to be unable to see anything but themselves in what is presented to them on stage. And who are rather helpless when you go beyond this framework.
In two of the performance pieces we did with our company bösediva we had long passages were I or my partner Elisa Duca and I just sat and confronted the audience, in weird costumes, as strange characters. Five or ten minutes of silent staring. I totally loved doing that. Maybe this is what I was trying to say then: Look. There are two bodies. They are there. They are not you. They don’t want to be you. They come from a different world. An aesthetic reality. If you want to connect with them, you have to make an effort. If you experience a gap, you actively have to help closing it. But for now I’m fine if you simply feel uncomfortable and force yourself not to run away.
I do believe that creating this gap is my job as an artist. Cognitive dissonance. (I’m not saying I’m already good at it.)
Berlin is a city with a government subsidized underground (flooded with young Americans on a Fulbright who think it is soooo “authentic” – what do they all WANT here?). There is an “independent” theatre mainstream, and it is totally gap-free. It is all about consensus. Post-dramatic theatre in Berlin says: Look, don’t worry! I am just a discussion group! I am just a newspaper! I am just a clip from the education channel! All of us on stage look just like you! We dress like you! We play the music you like! And we have all vowed not to scare you.
I am sure post-dramatic theory also has a toolbox for meaningful deconstruction. For creating gaps instead of closing them. I don’t see it in use here. And that is why what I’m trying to say most to my fellow theatre artists is: Can we all go and take some risks now? Hence my nostalgia, possibly misguided.