Prologue
It’s 8.30 a.m., and the rehearsal hasn’t been going well. The student performers are lethargic. Some can’t stop yawning through the warm-up exercises. Others, though bleary-eyed and weary, gamely go through the motions. The lecturer is in a similar mood, but makes a valiant stab at appearing enthused and energised. These early-morning starts are a killer, but there’s no contesting the utilitarian logic that claims the new timetable regime makes the most efficient use of university resources. Having dispensed with preliminaries, the students prepare to run through the first scene of the play. One older woman looks a little more agitated, and the lecturer can see that something more than the early-morning blues is troubling her. She fidgets a little before raising her hand to call time-out:
“Can we talk about this, please?”“Of course, what’s the problem?”“This is just so sexist and offensive! Why does he have to use those words? And what is this play about anyway?”
It’s a good question, but before the lecturer can open his mouth, another student, an unruly young man with some kind of attention deficit disorder, pipes up and declares with more than a hint of sarcasm: “The scene is about an absence of character. It’s a line from the fucking play.”
The lecturer intervenes, and concedes that it is important to address the play’s sexual politics: “My bad. We do need to talk about this. I actually posted an article about the play’s gender politics online. Did anybody read it?”
Two students raise their hands. The debate begins. The class talks about irony and the death of character, and the lecturer is pleased the students have come to life:
Irony is just a cop-out. It allows the playwright, if we can call him that, to say, yes, we all know these ideas about women are sexist, but we’re going to keep them in circulation, anyway. And it’s all supposed to be OK because he obviously being ironic. I call bullshit!
Collectively, the class formulates a strategy for signalling their discomfort with the play’s sexism by stopping the performance in media res and asking the audience for their opinions on what they are viewing. The group agrees it might be effective to incorporate the audience responses into the play by using live projections. Basically, they intend to screen live vox pop interviews using a video camera that is fed into a data projector. A young man raises his hand and announces, “That’s too complicated, and it’s going to detract from our time on stage. Remember, we’re being assessed on our performances. Let’s not get carried away.” The discussion continues, and the group resolves the problem by putting a limit on the proposed vox pop strategy.
This vignette summarises many of this book’s themes and tensions: the competing demands of institutional imperatives and creative work, the communication of postdramatic aesthetics, the obsession with educational measurement and learning outcomes, the political and pragmatic consequences of attempting to teach under the sign of equality. But most importantly, this book is about assessing the vocabulary of postdramatic theatre within a pedagogical context. As Gregory Ulmer (1985, ix) noted long ago, there exists a disparity between “the contemporary understanding of reading, writing and epistemology and the institutional framework in which this understanding is communicated (pedagogy, curriculum, evaluation).” But let’s back up a little, and say something about my particular context.
Pedagogy
The process is more or less the same every year. The students gather in the rehearsal room, waiting for me to enter. Their chatter and laughter do not subside as I walk into the space and survey their faces: a few look familiar from previous classes, but most are strangers. I have no idea who the majority of these people are, and what skills they possess as performers, yet I will mount a production with them in ten weeks. I have undertaken this task for the last 15 years within the framework of two production classes: the first, a second-year unit, is concerned with producing a full-scale theatre production from an existing dramatic script. The second proceeds without the security of a pre-existing text, and culminates in a public showing of a group-devised performance. This book engages with the conceptual and pedagogical productivities and challenges generated by my experience of teaching these classes and directing the performances associated with them. With very few exceptions, I have deliberately chosen to work with so-called postdramatic texts in the Page to Stage unit. Moreover, I have adopted an explicitly postdramatic aesthetic in the class devoted to creating devised work, hence the title of this book: Teaching Postdramatic Theatre.
The concept of postdramatic theatre is, as Marvin Carlson (2015) notes, difficult to define in a consistently coherent manner. I use the term “postdramatic ” after Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe contemporary works that reject the primacy of the written text in theatre performance, but do not reject the principles of modernity (formal innovation, experimentation, political engagement). This is why Lehmann (2006, 85) argues, as we shall see in the next chapter, that the term “postdramatic,” rather than postmodern, best describes those contemporary performance works that employ “new” forms of sign usage that privilege presence over representation and process over product and unsettle the status of hermetically sealed fictional worlds situated in a particular time and place. Many of these so-called postdramatic works eschew conventional conceptions of dramatic character—that is, fictional entities driven by psychological motivations and endowed with deep subjectivity. Postdramatic works also unsettle traditional notions of dramatic conflict and teleology, which makes it difficult to employ, say, a Stanislavskian approach to performance—how is it possible to establish character motivation and a logical line of action based on objectives when postdramatic theatre unsettles and contests the necessity of concepts of dramatic character and causality?
Since Lehmann’s formulation of the postdramatic is not epochal, we can find manifestations of postdramatic aesthetics in works from a range of historical periods and a variety of performance genres. For Lehmann , the tendency of much contemporary work to unsettle verities about representation, signification and theatricality is best understood with reference to tensions and developments within the tradition of modern drama, as opposed to the general cultural logic of postmodernism, which some scholars argue manifests in various contemporary performance practices. We are better off looking for postdramatic theatre’s antecedents in the various modernist experiments concerned with unsettling dramatic form than in the discourse of postmodernism. And, as we shall see in my more detailed explication of Lehmann’s work in the following chapter, the Brechtian (1964, 91) objective to maintain a distance between performers and spectators for political purposes, or Antonin Artaud’s (1958, 74) call to abolish literary theatre, arguably provide a better point of departure for apprehending the political valence of postdramatic theatre than postmodern discourses about the cultural logic of late capitalism , or the death of metanarratives, for example.
However, it is important to declare at the outset that I adopt a critical approach to the concept of postdramatic theatre throughout this book. I remain sceptical as to whether Lehmann proffers what Rorty (1989, 174) might call a redescription of an existing set of performance practices, or whether he merely establishes a critical vocabulary that lacks the explanatory force of the postmodern lexicon it contests. In the chapters that follow, I interrogate the utility of Lehmann’s vocabulary as I explore its potentialities for unpacking the complexities and aporias of the texts, performances and pedagogical practices I analyse in this book.
I am not alone in choosing to stage postdramatic theatre with undergraduate students. Regarding the United Kingdom (UK) scene, Julia Wilson (2012, 6) notes that “over the last thirty years post-dramatic devised performance practices have increasingly been taught within Higher Education Institutions.” Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling (2006, 218) also note that postdramatic work is “formally embedded in the syllabi of teaching institutions in the UK as both process and product.” There is a similar commitment to teaching postdramatic theatre in Australian universities. Gaye Poole (2010, 6) suggests that this is partially a consequence of institutional limitations: “the constraints of casting, variable commitment levels and diminishing budgets.” Postdramatic theatre, either written by playwrights or devised by students, is flexible regarding casting requirements and suitable for large groups of students. With respect to postdramatic texts written by playwrights, such as Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, to name two texts regularly performed by student ensembles, the absence of “lead” roles and fluidity of line distribution among actors makes them extremely malleable, and capable of accommodating groups with different levels of skill, experience and enthusiasm (Poole 2010, 6). Yet scholars interested in Lehmann’s work have produced a relative paucity of critical commentary on the practice of staging postdramatic theatre productions within academic contexts—academics working in the areas of applied theatre, devised theatre or theatre in education produce most of the scholarly work concerned with teaching theatre , and few of these works address postdramatic theatre directly. Further, Duška Radosavljević (2013, 22) observes that we need to understand “the link between the educational contexts from which theatre-makers emerge and the actual theatre landscapes they enter.” With reference to the British context, she points out that, while actor-training institutions feed the theatre and film industries:
university drama graduates arguably have a broader range of opportunities: some end up working as actors, directors, playwrights, designer...