Not just a mirror. Looking for the political theatre today

Performing Urgency 1

Florian Malzacher, Florian Malzacher

• Publisher: Alexander Verlag
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783895813955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Der englischsprachige Band Not Just a Mirror setzt sich mit grundlegenden Fragen despolitischen Theaters in der Gegenwart auseinander und stellt künstlerisch-politische Strategienund Praktiken von Theatermachern aus aller Welt vor - u. a. Chto Delat, Milo Rau, Kretakör, Faustin Linyekula, Public Movement, Christoph Schlingensief, Akira Takayama.Mit Beiträgen von Julian Boal, Boris Buden, Matan Cohen, Annie Dorsen, Galit Eilat, MonikaGinterdorfer, John Jordan, Alexander Karschnia, Hervé Kimenyi, Beatrix Kricsfalusi, Bojana Kunst, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Judith Malina, Florian Malzacher, Tala Jamal Manassah, Oliver Marchart, Carol Martin, Giulia Palladini, Roman Pawlowski, Jeroen Peeters, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Christian Römer, Sylvia Sasse, Francesco Scasciamacchia, MichaelSengazi, Vassilis Tsianos, Margarita Tsomou, Franck Edmond Yao u. a.

ESSAYS & CONVERSATIONS

FLORIAN MALZACHER

NO ORGANUM TO FOLLOW:
POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL THEATRE TODAY

Some people are yelling at each other with red faces, others try to stay calm whilst convincing bystanders of the threat of foreigners taking over their country. How Austria stands alone against the rest of the world. An old man almost cries while shaking a newspaper that repeats in large letters the same discussion on its front page. Some Korean tourists watch the strange spectacle without a clue.

15 years ago, when German theatre maker Christoph Schlingensief set up his now legendary container-installation Bitte liebt Österreich! (Please Love Austria!, 2000) right in the centre of Vienna, Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel had just made his devil’s pact with the right wing demagogue Jörg Haider, and the other EU-countries were discussing sanctions against the fellow member state. Austria debated passionately about immigration policy, as well as about the limits of art. And Europe watched with some bewilderment.

Under the dominating banner ‘Ausländer raus’ (‘Foreigners out!’) Schlingensief staged a Big Brother-type game show with asylum seekers. The containers housed a group of immigrants who could be watched via CCTV on the internet, and the Austrian population was invited to vote them out of the country one by one. The scandal was enormous: conservatives felt insulted by the seeming parody of their argumentation, and the left was disgruntled by the supposedly cynical display.

If political theatre can only exist in a context in which the world is believed to be changeable, in which theatre itself wants to be part of that change, and where there is an audience that is willing to actively engage in the exploration of what that change should be — then it becomes clear why it is so difficult to think of such a theatre today in a society paralysed by the symptoms of post-political ideologies that tend to disguise themselves as positivistic pragmatism, lachrymose resignation, or cheerful complacency. Where the credo of ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) is considered common sense and the belief in the possibility or even desirability of political imagination is fading, theatre is hit at its core. All its political potential seems disabled.

It was a different time in the 1970s and 1980s when political theatre in Europe actually was (in different ways on either side of the Wall) a relevant factor in many public debates. With ideologies still going strong and the division between east and west clear cut, theatre engaged in everyday politics by representing all the world’s miseries — from the Vietnam War or Apartheid in South Africa to the small daily adversities of a local working class family. Either in new drama or modernised classics, radical interpretations of the text were a key feature of a Regietheater (director’s theatre) which, despite its many new approaches, stayed mostly in the realm of the mimetic. In the east it was a game with hidden messages, in the west open provocations were an important part of the repertoire, and audiences slamming doors while leaving was a rule rather than an exception.

No wonder that large parts of the public still consider this period almost synonymous with ‘political theatre’ itself. But even though the theatre during this period was often able to propose an understanding of the structural reasons behind the presented evils, it couldn’t avoid the dilemma that in the end its representations were just another repetition of the very miseries it wanted to fight. Brecht called this phenomenon ‘Menschenfresserdramatik’ (‘cannibal’s dramatic art’), which he described in the early 1930s in his notes on Die dialektische Dramatik: ‘The physical exploitation of the poor is followed by a psychological one’ when the pitied character is supposed to produce feelings of sadness, guilt or even anger in a spectator, who most likely — at least structurally — is part of keeping the very system of exploitation alive. In the end they continued what Brecht had already analysed in his Short Organum for the Theatre (1949): ‘The theatre we know shows the structure of society (represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium).’ Not only the play onstage but the whole theatrical set up (not to speak of the hierarchies within the institution itself) merely reproduced the system they wanted to criticise.

In the 1980s and particularly into the 1990s new forms of theatre emerged with the aim not just to reform the predominant models but to revolutionise them from outside the established theatre institutions and traditions. Post-dramatic theatre, devised theatre, performance theatre — there are many labels for this genre which is still difficult to clearly define due to its variety of forms and its overlaps with other artistic disciplines. At the centre of the critique of dramatic theatre stood its use of however estranged mimetic representation, which was seen as discredited and was subsequently confronted with the notion of presence. In close exchange with their counterparts in the emerging conceptual dance movement, theatre makers brought to the stage highly self-aware works, continually questioning themselves as products of ideologies, politics, times, fashions, and circumstances. Strongly inspired by de-constructivist and poststructuralist theory, they offered a new complexity of theatre signifiers revolting against the hegemony of the text, undermining the linearity and causality of drama, and experimenting with all possibilities of spectatorship and participation. Instead of representing a (fake) situation in order to critique it the aim was to create a (real) situation in the co-presence of the audience, focusing on the here and now of the experience, as German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann describes in Post-dramatic Theatre (1999):

In contrast to other arts, which produce an object and/or are communicated through media, here the aesthetic act itself (the performing) as well as the act of reception (the theatre going) take place as a real doing in the here and now. […] The emission and reception of signs and signals take place simultaneously.

This focus on the medium and the form of theatre itself, the distrust in narrative content and psychological causality and the interest in creating individual experiences in which each audience member had to find her/his own path of interpretation, also had an impact on the concept of the political potential of theatre. The political effect of theatre was now primarily looked for in ‘the how’ of its representation, not in its concrete political contents. Philosophers like Jacques Rancière offered a broader theoretical base for rethinking the medium of theatre and the notion of performativity by analysing The Politics of Aesthetics (2000) and highlighting The Emancipated Spectator (2007).

It was an important moment of empowering spectators as co-authors of their own experience, but it had a significant side effect: the audience was seen less as a possible collective but rather as a gathering of individuals. Post-dramatic theatre and conceptual dance — once again resonating the changes in society — formed a spectator who, whilst emancipated from the forced-upon imagination of the director, has become akin to the ideal neoliberal subject that seeks its individualism in active consumption.

The consequent reaction of post-dramatic theatre and conceptual dance to the often simplistic or moralistic use of notions like truth, reality, or even politics with a complex game of layers, ambiguities and re-questioning enabled new perspectives and possibilities that also reached far into the field of dramatic theatre. But building on the thoughts of philosophers who derived their theoretical concepts from their own political experiences and engagements (Michel Foucault fighting for human rights in prisons with the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, Alain Badiou being engaged in migration and asylum policies in the Organization politique, Jacques Rancière as a short term member in a Maoist group, to name but a few), the new generations of thinkers, artists, and curators too often forgot to bind their even further abstracted thinking back to their own contemporary, concrete realities. As a result we got too used to calling philosophical theories and performances ‘political’, even if they are only very distantly based on thoughts that themselves were already abstracted from the concrete political impulses that sparked them. A homeopathic, second-hand idea of political philosophy and art has become a main line of contemporary cultural discourse.

It is a thin division between the necessary awareness that everything is contingent and simple laziness. Complexity can become an excuse for intellectual and political relativism. The writings of Rancière in particular have been used as key arguments from very different sides — his scepticism towards any clear political statement in art and his valorising of the power of ambiguity and rupture as the true virtues of art, helped pave the way for wide definitions of the political. In the end, if everything is political, nothing is political anymore.

So where are we today? How can theatre still create spheres where alternatives can be collectively imagined, tried out, discussed, confronted? How can theatre create alternative models of how we might live together, or what kind of society or world we want? A look at the contemporary performing arts scene shows a strong desire for a theatre that not only focuses on pressing political issues, but also becomes a political space — a public sphere — in itself. There is no common organum to follow. We are in a period of trying out, of finding out — artists as well as the audiences. But there are enough bits and pieces (and sometimes even big chunks) of artistic work and political engagement that allow us to imagine the potential of engaged theatre again. A theatre that keeps the necessary self-reflexivity of the last decades but avoids the traps of pure self-referentiality. That understands contingency not as merely arbitrary and an excuse for relativism but as a call for active engagement to counter its consequences.

—

When your trousers are literally glued to your theatre seat in a Serata Futurista (evenings organised by the Italian Futurists from 1910 on, mixing performance, painting, music, and often practical jokes), this kind of participation might not seem particularly desirable. But even though participation — in art and in politics — is not always pleasant, the belief that one can take part in shaping society is a necessity for democracy. On the other hand the putative participation that we are permanently confronted with in an all-inclusive capitalist system (that — unlike Marx’s prediction — has so far always been able to absorb its internal contradictions by affirmation) has rendered the term almost useless: a pacifier which perversely delegates the responsibility for what is happening to citizens that cannot influence it, and thus enables the system to continue more or less undisturbed in its task to maintain itself. Rare elections, basic social care, some small measures against climate change and human rights violations here and there, and our conscience is satisfied. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls this procedure cultural capitalism.

So-called participatory theatre all too often merely mimics such placebo-involvement; offering not only fake, stipulated choices but also forcing the audience to engage in this transparent set-up. This is the real ‘nightmare of participation’ (to use a term by Markus Mießen): not being forced into participation but being forced into a fake participation. A permanent involvement (which basically means we are active only in the sense that we are consumers) that we can’t escape and which merely prevents us from participating in the powers that be. Passivity disguised as activity. The audiences of the Serata Futurista understood that: for them the provocation that came from the stage — a participation forced upon them — was an invitation for a real fight. And many went for it.

A contemporary political theatre has to put itself right in the middle of this dilemma: not only avoiding false participation but at the same time reclaiming the idea of participation as such. A participation that thrives — in politics and art — on its radical potential. A participation that doesn’t merely replace one mode of tutelage with another. Such an involvement does not necessarily have to happen with the consensus of the people involved. It can also aim at direct confrontation, and can experiment with miscommunication or even abuse.

Since, in short, participatory art is — taking the definition from Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (2012) — an art ‘in which people constitute the central artistic medium and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhalt
• INTRODUCTION
• ESSAYS & CONVERSATIONS
• INVENTORY OF ARTISTIC STRATEGIES
• HOUSE ON FIRE
• AUTHORS