Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, Brandon Woolf, Enoch Brater, Mark Taylor-Batty

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350043176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form. Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare. A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.

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, 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 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Form and Postdramatic Theatre
• 2 Drama: The Szondi Connection
• Part One Formal Aspects
• 3 Text: The Director’s Notebook
• 4 Space: Postdramatic Geography in Post-Collapse Seattle
• 5 Time: Unsettling the Present
• 6 Body: Tadeusz Kantor and the Posthuman Stage
• 7 Media: Intermission
• Part Two Social Formations
• 8 Festivals: Conventional Disruption, or, Why Ann Liv Young Ruined Rebecca Patek’s Show
• 9 Galleries: Resituating the Postdramatic Real
• 10 Process: ‘Set Writing’ in Contemporary French Theatre
• 11 Choreography: Performative Dance Histories
• 12 Migration: Common and Uncommon Grounds at Berlin’s Gorki Theater
• 13 Elder Care: Performing Dementia – Toward a Postdramatic Subjectivity
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright