Documentary Vanguards in Modern Theatre

Timothy Youker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367735562
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351623964
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Practitioners and critics alike often attribute great authenticity to documentary theatre, casting it as a salutary alternative not only to corporate news outlets and official histories but also to the supposed "self-indulgence" and "elitism" of avant-garde theatre.

Documentary Vanguards in Modern Theatre, by contrast, argues for treating documentarians as vanguardists who (for good or ill) push, remap, or transgress the margins of historical and political visibility, often taking issue with professional discourses that claim a monopoly on authoritative representations of the real. This is the first book to situate documentary theatre's development within the larger story of theatrical experimentalism, collage art, collective ritual, and other avant-garde dramaturgical and performance practices of the late 19th and 20th Centuries.

Part I

Sordid actuality (1835–1922)

1 Georg Büchner and the breakdown of the history play

In 1835, Georg Büchner, a young biology student and failed political vanguardist from the German state of Hesse, inserted sizeable verbatim excerpts from historical sources into his first play, Danton’s Death, a drama about the fatal divisions among the French Revolution’s political vanguard during the Reign of Terror. Danton’s Death was published (with substantial cuts) in 1835 in a journal edited by Büchner’s friend Karl Gutzkow, but Büchner could not find a theatre willing to mount it, and after his death from typhus at 23, his small, strange body of work fell into obscurity for over half a century. When a group of Naturalist playwrights including Georg Hauptmann discovered his work in the 1890s, Büchner became written into theatre history as a kind of fossilized missing link between Romanticism and Modernism. His work influenced the German Naturalist school, as well as early Expressionist playwrights and, later, Brecht. What’s more, Gary Fisher Dawson, in one of the first monographs on documentary theatre, dubbed Büchner the “Copernicus of documentary theatre.”¹ Büchner, an amateur historian and self-trained dramatist with no practical knowledge of theatre, had been retrieved from the margins of culture, cut out of his own historical and political context and finally given a meaning by being inserted into the aesthetic and political discourse of another era.

However, though Büchner’s cultural influence depends on his appropriation by artists of a later generation, Danton’s Death remains very much a product of its own time. Like a scrap pasted in a collage or a document cited by a historian, Danton’s Death still indexes its original context. It reflects a crisis in historical consciousness that took place in the early nineteenth century, as well as shifts in the science and philosophy of perception that took place during and shortly after Büchner’s own lifetime. The play itself uses historical figures to voice critiques of the idealist dramaturgy and political theatricality of Büchner’s own era.

With Danton’s Death, Büchner suggests that when a historical dramatist takes the claims of empiricism seriously, classical dramatic forms and conventions of historical explanation fall apart. Verbatim excerpts from the historical archive jostle against vertiginous verbal eruptions from sources that professional history written in his time either neglected to or could not properly represent: women, crowds, the private thoughts of public figures. In Danton’s Death we also see an early example of stereoptic collage revealing the limitations of different artistic and historiographic realisms. By picking apart his sources’ analytical and moralistic accounts of the Revolution, Büchner calls into question historians’ ability to sum up the past as a story with clear lessons. By estranging the flatness and ambiguity of documentary sources, he also calls the documentary value of analog copying into question. Finally, he demonstrates how documents may not always record what happened so much as preserve past actors’ false consciousness of what happened.

Empiricist science and idealist dramaturgy

The classical history play is premised on the assumption that a poet, by virtue of his personal insight into natural principles, can emend fractured or discontinuous archives. Natalie Crohn Schmitt notes that Western dramatic theory and criticism up to the early twentieth century largely takes for granted Aristotle’s essential assumptions about the relationship between drama and observable reality: first, that “reality is a given – that is, that we possess means that are not problematic both for knowing as fact what exists or happens and for representing it in art”; and second, that humans, the Observing and Understanding species, create theatre to distill their observations of nature – and especially the natural process of human understanding – into a poetic form in which the logic of the plot maps directly onto the logic governing nature.² Drama can present a poor reflection of nature in Aristotle’s model, but only if it is made by a shoddy poet, or if it disrupts the unity of the composition – and thus its logical integrity – by lingering too much on incidental details. In his widely-read sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics, Lodovico Castelvetro explains a poet’s proper relationship to the fragmentary records of the historical past through an extended analogy to sculptural reconstruction, describing an incident in which Michelangelo was invited to reconstruct the lost beard of a newly-excavated ancient statue:

[It] was apparent from the art preserved about the jaw that if it had been whole and well-proportioned [the beard] must have reached to the navel. Yet its tip, which could still be seen on the upper part of the breast, clearly indicated that it had not extended below that point… . Of those present only Michelangelo Buonarroti, a sculptor of very rare genius, succeeded, after pondering the problem, in understanding how the matter stood. He called for some clay, and when it was brought to him he gave it the shape of the missing beard, making it of a size commensurate with the dimensions of the part preserved. He then attached it to the jaw and having stretched it to the navel tied it into a knot. The tip of the beard he had just made now touched the tip of the broken beard on the upper part of the breast.³

For Castelvetro, artistic genius consists not only of the capacity to create, but also of the capacity to know the intentions of other creators, because of the essentially objective, universal principles of both art and nature.

Friedrich Schiller’s 1798 prologue to Wallenstein, his dramatic trilogy about the controversial seventeenth-century Austrian military commander Albrecht von Wallenstein, provides an example of Crohn Schmitt’s point and also echoes Castelvetro. Venturing an explanation for why theatre serves as the most apt medium for presenting Wallenstein’s story, Schiller states:

Partisan hatreds and affections shroud / His character, as history portrays it; / But art shall bring him closer, as a man, / Both to your eyes, and to your feeling hearts. For art, that shapes and limits all, will lead / All monstrous aberrations back to nature.⁴

Clearly, the decade that Schiller had spent writing about history as a professor at the University of Jena had not fostered much trust in the capacity for historical scholarship to do justice to Wallenstein. Schiller associates academia not with scientific impartiality, but with “partisan hatreds and affections” that step between the present-day reader and the historical Wallenstein. Schiller earlier suggested in his lecture “What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History?” (1789) that philosophical understanding can transform the historical record’s “aggregate of fragments” into “a reasonably connected whole” precisely because of “the uniformity and invariant unity of the laws of nature and of the human soul.”⁵ Schiller suggests that drama can emend the “monstrous aberrations” of the archive because of an inherent synchronicity between historical truth and dramatic form. Leading a subject “back to nature” is therefore a poetic operation for Schiller, not a scientific one.

By Büchner’s time, however, changes in academia and professional culture called into question the role of imagination and abstract reason in producing historical truth. In the early nineteenth century, a variety of emergent professional classes began to assert their authority to identify and measure truth according to largely secular and empirical standards. In the 1830s, Leopold Ranke led the professionalization of history as a discipline centered on subjecting archival texts to painstaking philological scrutiny. Treating the past as an object of study in its own right rather than as a gallery of moral exemplars or evidence of providential narratives, Ranke and his students helped assert the independent value of the fact in accounts of reality, while also pushing for what cultural historian Kathia Maurer calls a “de-rhetoricization” of history.⁶ Concurrently, practitioners of the emergent human sciences, such as Auguste Comte, who coined the terms sociologyand positivism in the 1830s, sought to document proof positive that cultures and social behaviors were governed by objectively observable laws.

This promotion of empirical methods stemmed in part from the historical crisis caused by four decades of political upheaval on the European continent. The successive revolutions and counter-revolutions of 1789 to 1830, in which the press had played an unprecedented role, had made intellectuals more conscious of the problems posed by partisan documents. The political instability of France had also led to the destruction or neglect of great bodies of historical documents. As a result, attempts at reconstructing a non-partisan history of the French Revolution had forced many writers to rethink their assumptions about the nature and conditions of historical knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, the experience of discontinuity caused by the revolutionary period had made intellectuals more cognizant of the fact that historical periods do not necessarily unfold according to the same eternal patterns – that the past may not be knowable purely through comparison to the present.⁷

Standardized professional discourses and methods also became especially important as scientists of that same period, in their quest to observe objective truths, had observed how much the act of observation itself was contingent on the positioning and physiological limitations of the observer’s imperfect body. According to Jonathan McCrary, “What takes place around 1810 to 1840 is an uprooting of vision from the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura… . [Visual experience] is given an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability; abstracted from any founding site or referent.”⁸ Vision was recognized not as a product of simple geometric relationships in space but, rather, a complex physiological process dependent on the still murky operations of the nervous system. And, as Amy Holzapfel notes in her scholarship on drama and nineteenth-century visual science, these discoveries had a significant influence on approaches to visual culture and the theatre. Countering critiques of realism by Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan, which equate realism with hegemonic illusions of fixed, unified perspective, Holzapfel argues that realism “sought to stage the all-too-human irrationality, fallibility, and subjectivity of the embodied observer.”⁹ The technologies developed over the course of the nineteenth century to compensate for the limitations of embodied vision, such as the photograph, stereoscope, diorama, panorama, and zoetrope – and, eventually, the cinematograph – did not betoken a naïve belief in an objective individual gaze but, rather, a hunger for technological solutions to the problems implicit in perspectivalism. Büchner, as a biologist specializing in the nervous system, was in a position to know about the major changes in how European scientists and philosophers understood perception and especially vision in the early nineteenth century. The structure of Danton’s Death itself also suggests that Büchner, who complained in his correspondence about the “idealist” dramas of Schiller and argued that the work of a historical dramatist “can be neither more moral nor more immoral than history itself,” was interested in the dramaturgical implications of empiricism and perspectivalism.¹⁰

While neoclassical drama, with its fixed perspective, unified action, and lucid dialogue calls to mind the projections cast in a camera obscura, Danton’s Death calls to mind the instrument that McCrary associates with nineteenth-century visual experience: the stereoscope. Though it was not invented until a year after Büchner’s death, the stereoscope emerged from scientific studies of binocular vision that began in the 1820s. A stereoscope creates the illusion of depth and tactility by presenting the viewer’s eyes with two flat images depicting the same subject from a slightly different point of view. However, the stereoscope’s illusion of “immediate, apparent tangibility” comes at the cost of a unifying perspective.¹¹ McCrary explains: “Our eyes follow a choppy, erratic path into its depth: it is an assemblage of local zones of three-dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity, but which when taken together never coalesce into a homogenous field.”¹² Danton’s Death is, in a sense, a stereoscopic play; its scenes strike a reader like the flat zones of clarity that McCrary describes, which seem individually sharp but never quite hold together when you try to scrutinize the complete picture. Danton’s Death, in short, rejects the Aristotelean presumption of an unproblematic relationship between the real and its observation, and in doing so becomes a semi-documentary precursor to later documentary vanguards.

Büchner and Danton’s Death

Germany in the 1830s had multiple cultural centers, but Büchner’s hometown of Goddelau, in Hesse, was not one of them. Büchner gained most of his early knowledge of drama from his local secondary school. Following in the footsteps of his physician father, Büchner went to study medicine in Strasbourg, where he was exposed to the plays of Victor Hugo and to revolutionary social and political thought, and then in Giessen, where he met the radical pastor Friedrich Ludwig Weidig. With Weidig, Büchner wrote the political pamphlet The Hessian Courier (1834), a revolutionary manifesto calling for the end of aristocratic exploitation of the rural poor. Büchner was dismayed to find that his cry for revolution garnered little response, least of all among the peasants he wished to help, and he and Weidig soon found themselves in trouble with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Sordid actuality (1835–1922)
• Part II Vanguards of revolution and reform (1917–1984)
• Part III Documentary theatre after postmodernism (1977– )
• Conclusion: “This is not a story about failure”
• Bibliography
• Index