eJournals

Inhalt Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Frankfurt am Main) and Gerald Siegmund (Gießen) Editorial - Theatre as Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Aufsätze Shannon Jackson (Berkeley) Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Tore Vagn Lid (Oslo) Institution - Apparatus - Dispositive: Searching for a Reflexive Dramaturgy . . . . . . 20 Susanne Schmieden (Lucerne) “ perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . (Non-) Identity as Critique in Brecht ’ s Man equals Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) More Than Activism, Less Than Art: The Heritage of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno in Contemporary Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism . . . . . . . . . . 47 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0 and Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Sergio Lo Gatto (Rome) Performing Arts Criticism in the Web 2.0 era: Authoritativeness in a process of human/ computer interaction: some initial thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Lisa Wolfson (Bochum) In Search of ‘ the Real ’ - Teatr.doc ’ s Documentary Reflections on Politics, Law and Art 81 Eva-Liisa Linder (Tallinn) Functions and Techniques of Critique in Contemporary Estonian Theatre . . . . . . . . . 90 Isabella Dra ˘ ghici (Bucharest) The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship 98 Elena Yushkova (Vologda) Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history . . . . . . . . . . 108 Rezensionen Milena Cairo, Moritz Hannemann, Ulrike Haß, Judith Schäfer (Hrsg.): Episteme des Theaters. Aktuelle Kontexte von Wissenschaft, Kunst und Öffentlichkeit (Lutz Ellrich) 117 Clemens Risi: Oper in performance - Analysen zur Aufführungsdimension von Operninszenierungen (T. Sofie Taubert) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Autorinnen und Autoren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Umschlagabbildung: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Work / Travail / Arbeid at the Museum of Modern Art, New York © Anne Van Aerschot. © 2019 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · 72070 Tübingen Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, vorbehalten. 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Internet: www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de Satz: typoscript GmbH, Walddorfhäslach Druck und Bindung: CPI Buchbücher, Birkach Printed in Germany ISSN 0930-5874 Editorial - Theatre as Critique Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Frankfurt am Main) and Gerald Siegmund (Gießen) Under the heading “ Theatre as Critique ” , the contributions to this special volume of Forum Modernes Theater examine theatre as a critical practice. With the crisis of the classical groundings of both theatre and critique in mind, the essays aim at a reconsideration of, on the one hand, the history, theory and issues of theatre and, on the other, the concept of critique. At the heart of the debate, therefore, is not just the subject matter of theatre critique but rather critique itself. One quality of the figures of thought reoccurring throughout the discourse of the occidental theatre is that this theatre - especially where it deals with aspects of the political but also with social practices and tradition - can be seen as a critical examination of that tradition. Theatre as critique is a revision of decisions made elsewhere, a negotiation of the myths picked up upon in the theatre, of historical events and of processes. It is a scenic articulation of an It should be different 1 (Theodor W. Adorno) - even when there is no apparent alternative to that which is being propagated as the one and only solution. Philosophers, church dignitaries, dogmatists and guardians of virtue hostile to the theatre have all contributed to this view of the theatre - those who fear the subversive power of the stage, who seek to demonise the theatre and its practitioners - as have those who speak out in favour of the theatre, who in it see a means to criticise both personal and social transgressions, an institution that is able to unsettle authorities that have been constituted elsewhere, that can criticise untenable ideological positions and dissolve patterns of order and doctrines of any kind. Theatre - in accordance with a view widely held until recently by theatre practitioners and commentators - is a critical practice. This consensus has very recently found itself on shaky ground. It has been radically questioned by two schools of thought, both with regard to the concept of theatre that it idealises as well as in relation to the often all too simple definition of the term ‘ critique ’ . The notion of the theatre as a critical entity is idealistic, as it renders a certain concept of theatre absolute. It conceals the material conditions of theatre as well as its, at best, indirectly critical purposes of entertainment, pleasure and cheerful evening activity. On an individual level, it puts aside the satisfaction of one ’ s own narcissism frequently connected with the theatre, and, on an institutional level, it ignores all sorts of aims pursued with the theatre. Moreover, critical theatre - therein comparable with political theatre - must ask itself if its critique, as a rule, is little more than a kind of preaching to the converted. Its references to its own critical potency seem to selflegitimise an institution that not infrequently reaffirms and solidifies norms - precisely in the critical mode. On the other hand, that which marks theatre as an autonomous art form undermines the heteronomous aims it follows, including critique. Thus, perhaps behind the concept of theatre as a critical practice, there lies hidden a charged relationship whose two poles are theatre and critique. Additionally, the generally accepted idea of theatre as critique seems too simple with regard to the concept of critique perpetuated within this idea, which has been radically shaken in the last few decades, and not Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 3 - 6. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen without reason. We refer here to the radical criticism of traditional Marxist ideological critique undertaken by Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno once again takes up in his oft-cited essay “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” . 2 Secondly, we bear in mind Foucault ’ s genealogy of critique, which he carries out as a proponent of, on the one hand, desubjugation in relation to forms of the art of governing human beings and, on the other hand, of the rejection of every fundamentalist critique, which Judith Butler has taken up in more recent times. 3 All three have enquired into the foundations on which critique is based, as well as the possibility of post-fundamentalist critique (Butler). The task of shaking the foundations, for which critical theory and post-structuralism both stand, affects, as they illustrate, not least all traditional forms of even proto-totalitarian critique. Only one sentence from Adorno ’ s essay “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” is usually cited - the one that has been declared a “ dictum ” , according to which it is barbaric “ to write a poem after Auschwitz. ” In the continuation of this thought, Adorno makes it clear that “ this ” , also corrodes “ even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. ” 4 In initially surprising unison with Martin Heidegger ’ s elaborations on the nature of the modern technology established at the beginning of the 17 th century as “ Ge-stell ” , 5 Adorno speaks about the “ absolute reification ” , “ which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements [and] is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely ” . 6 “ Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. ” 7 Michel Foucault and Judith Butler take up this “ Leftist critical tradition ” when they assign the critic the “ double task ” of showing “ how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own ‘ conditions of acceptability of a system, ’ but also ‘ to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence. ’” 8 In the strict sense of the term, critique is closely associated with the Enlightenment. In allusion to Immanuel Kant, Foucault defines critique as “ the art of not being governed quite so much. ” 9 Using one ’ s own reason to ask the question of how one would like not to be governed or, more precisely, not governed “ like that and at that cost ” 10 means using one ’ s reason in the sense of criticising the given state of affairs. Thus, Foucault understands critique as an objection to clerical, state and parental laws, and therefore as a fathoming of the boundaries of governability. “ [C]ritique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth. ” 11 In as much as critique in its resistance to “ every government ” “ [puts] forth universal and indefeasible rights ” , 12 it is subject to the very same danger that Adorno and Horkheimer describe in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The rationality of the Enlightenment, unenlightened in terms of its own limits, will run the risk of deteriorating back into its supposed opposite, the myth, or of degenerating into instrumental reason. Furthermore, critique seems to have implicitly and continuously conducted itself in relation to a norm that it keeps up ex negativo, even when it sets out to work it through and suspend it. This also poses the question of which claim to validity critique can have at all, if it is always in a charged relationship between the general, which must deliver the standards of critique, and the particular, which receives specific criticism. To which normativity is critique attached explicitly or implicitly and how is this attachment problematised? Alongside its relationship to normativity, every form of 4 Nikolaus Müller-Schöll / Gerald Siegmund critique is accompanied by the potential of a utopia of some kind. Those who criticise appeal at least implicitly to something better, to an other, even if it is not the task of critique to develop universally valid alternatives or solutions to that which it is criticising. If critique inevitably draws up an other, how can it prevent itself from terrorising that which resists its ideas? How can critique prevent itself from becoming another of the “ great narratives ” 13 ending in terror and catastrophe, like the great narratives of the 19 th century that Lyotard warned against? Critique opens up a spectrum of tensions between the norm and its degeneration, the general and the particular, the utopia and the given. From this, central observations can be derived with view to artistic practices and the theatre. The question that Judith Butler poses, picking up on Foucault ’ s definition of critique, is that of the possibility of “ desubjugation ” and thus the transformation of conditions. How can critique launch a “ desubjugation ” and thus a “ desubjectivisation ” , considering that subjectivity is not possible without subjugation? Foucault substitutes this mysterious agent with the “ originary freedom ” of the human being, which he cannot ground, but which serves him, according to Butler, as a necessity of thinking - placing a “ not knowing ” inside of discourse 14 , setting the conditions and the subject itself in motion. Freedom is a purely strategic or even, as Foucault says, fictional presumption that has very real consequences for the subject, since it produces actual freedoms. Foucault ’ s description of critique as “ art ” is - against the background of this train of thought - more than just a rhetorical way of speaking. Instead, it is directed at the core of the matter: Critique, which “ risks one ’ s very formation as a subject ” 15 , is an aesthetic practice. As an aesthetic practice it evokes that which it risks and risks that which it evokes. The “ natural freedom ” of the human being is its aesthetic freedom. This is accompanied by the question of whether critique as a practice is first and foremost a question of the individual - of the individual artist, who in his or her unique theatre sets him or herself in opposition to traditional forms and entrenched institutional processes. This involves, in Butler ’ s sense, an ethics of critical practice, for which the individual must take on responsibility. In this sense, theatre as art is a critical practice because it is a practice that suspends truths. Criticising the conditions is thus not primarily dependent on a certain content that the theatre negotiates but rather lies in the way that the theatre itself exists. The task of the critique of the Enlightenment is to “ [have an] idea of our knowledge and its limits ” 16 and thus the limits of knowledge, power and the subject. How does this challenge the limits of knowledge? Which strategies emphasise its constitutive conditions and fractures? Which role do affective, emotional, corporeal or idiosyncratic elements play? Which role does materiality play in relation to the rationality of critique? What would another form of critique look like - one that is not left exclusively to the discretion of the rationality of reason, as Kant wanted it? In opposition to the twofold, radical questioning of the legitimacy of theatre as critique is an increasingly more urgent quest, above all since the turn of the millennium, for new forms of critical practice in the theatre, performance and action art. Theatre as a critical practice is driven by the wish not just to relate to reality in the modus of a contemplative doubling, but rather to assert theatre as a critical examination of untenable conditions, policies and normalisations, as an alternative concept to existing realities, a site for protest, political intervention and utopia. Without forgetting the aporias of the classical grounding of 5 Editorial critique and with view to the questionability of traditional and contemporary approaches in critical theatre today, the question remains of how we can reconceive theatre critique, understood in a double sense: How does theatre criticise? Which kind of critique could be formulated with view to today ’ s theatre practices? Translated from the German by Lydia White Notes 1 Vgl. Theodor W. Adorno, “ Engagement ” , in: Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. M. 1981, pp. 409 - 430, here p. 429. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , in: Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel und Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA 1981, pp. 17 - 34. 3 Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” , in: Judith Buter, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. by Sara Salih, Oxford 2004, pp. 302 - 322. 4 Adorno, “ Cultural Ciriticism and Society ” , p. 34. 5 Martin Heidegger, “ The Question Concerning Technology ” , in: Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York and London 1977, pp. 3 - 35. 6 Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , p. 34. 7 Ibid. 8 Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” , p. 316. 9 Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , in: James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Questions and Eighteenth Century Answers, Berkeley 1997, pp. 23 - 61, here p. 29. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 32. 12 Ibid., p. 30. 13 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis 1984. 14 Butler 2004, p. 319. 15 Ibid., p. 320. 16 Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , p. 35. 6 Nikolaus Müller-Schöll / Gerald Siegmund Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre Shannon Jackson (Berkeley) What does it mean to lament the demise of theater in the same moment that we endure its ubiquitous proliferation? And how do actors - artists and citizens - make sense of theater ’ s precarity in the midst of this performative circulation? The gesture of “ critique ” is to question, not only what we know, but how we know, indeed, how we know what we think we know. As such, critique invites us to examine the contexts that have produced knowledge, exposing its provisionality as well as unanticipated spaces of possibility. What happens when those determining contexts are revealed to us? What happens when theater ’ s contexts change in ways that ‘ theater ’ did not anticipate? Within the visual art world of the late 20 th century, “ institutional critique ” or “ context art ” emerged as an art form based in institutional selfreflexivity. By this point in the 21 st century, a cadre of experimental theater makers have arguably developed theater ’ s version of institutional critique. This article explores the possibility that theater ’ s processes of circulation, erasure, and re-contextualization are enactments of “ critique, ” oddly productive in the midst of theater ’ s undoing. “ Theatre ” and “ critique, ” “ critique ” and “ theatre. ” The relationship between these terms shifts and changes depending upon what one understands their referents to be. Below, I work with a multi-referential concept of ‘ theatre ’ and a fairly specific concept of ‘ critique. ’ Indeed, the relative specificity of the latter is, for me, quite key in exploring the range and ubiquity of the former. But let me back up to contextualize that ubiquity. I often find myself asking what it means to lament the demise of theater in the same moment that we endure its ubiquitous proliferation. Moreover, how do artists and citizens make sense of theater ’ s precarity in the midst of this performative circulation? By “ proliferation ” and “ circulation, ” I am referring to a very wide-ranging set of performance practices that “ may or may not be theatre, ” indeed, practices that produce a self-contradicting concept of what theatre can be. Of course, theatre is often linked to a classical conception of the stage, to the proscenium, to the amphitheater, to the theatron, and to fairly specific traditions of style, character, plot, and spectacle recounted in histories of Western theater. Those traditions also depended upon particular conceptions of public-ness and an espoused, if not fully actualized, link between theater and the public sphere. However, when I and we speak about theatre ’ s proliferation now, we are speaking about forms, emotions, tendencies, disseminations, and economic arrangements that seem to bear little relationship to this classical tradition. It is that apparent non-relationship that might prompt us to lament the demise of theatre in the same moment that we seem to find it everywhere. However, it is precisely by exploring that everywhere, the different ‘ wheres ’ within the ‘ everywhere ’ , that the concept and practice of critique becomes relevant. This is especially so when one embraces critique as a situated position, as a practice located in a particular ‘ where, ’ as a practice immanently conducted in order to demonstrate the dependence of ideas, values, ethics, and art on the space - the where - from which Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 7 - 19. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen they emerge. This is what I mean when I say that I have a fairly particular notion of critique in mind, one that is indebted to those who have wrestled the concept of critique away from its association with ’ judgment ’ and toward a practice of immanent, situated, and self-reflexive revelation. Critique is about context. It is, even more precisely, about exposing the context-dependency of ideas and forms. As this essay continues, you will see that it is precisely theater ’ s strange proliferation across contexts that gives me a continuously altered view of what theater might be. Indeed, if it is possible to sustain a critique of theater, or a critique by theater, such a critique must reckon with this kind of contextual travel and be willing to mine the contexts such travel reveals in its wake. This essay proceeds in two parts. First, I explore this idea of theatrical proliferation, drawing from recent work and critical debates on the relation between the visual arts and the performing arts, where new practices are curated, appropriated, re-enacted, altered, and disseminated. Second, I will look more closely at the term “ Critique ” and recall parallel art movements in “ institutional critique ” that drive theater ’ s proliferation across the visual artworld now. In addition to understanding how institutional critique provoked the performative turn in the visual arts, I also wonder how theatre might appropriate “ institutional critique ” back for itself. On Art Experiences that May or May Not be Theater In my recent scholarship, I have been interested in the acceleration of art museum absorption of theater, dance, and performance. The last decade has seen a great deal of curatorial interest in bringing together the ‘ visual arts ’ and the ‘ performing arts, ’ a conjunction that can be quite different from bringing ‘ performance art ’ into the museum space. Indeed, what happens when traditional durational forms such as theatre or dance appear in the museum? In a special issue of Representations on “ time-based art, ” my co-editor Julia Bryan-Wilson and I explored the stutter or gap in these moments of trans-contextualization. 1 When a work initially staged for a proscenium theater is moved into a white cube gallery, it endures new forms of reception and a new temporality; unlike the durational conventions of the theatre, the gallery work is watched in brief, intermittent intervals with little regard for progression. The disjunctive temporalities of the gallery and the theater have been increasingly forced to sync due to the upsurge in institutional initiatives that facilitate the productive collision between these worlds. In order to track episodes of disjunction, friction, and experimental illumination, I began another research initiative entitled In Terms of Performance. In this coedited online site, Paula Marincola and I commission short reflections on keywords in contemporary art and performance, asking differently positioned artists, curators, and critics to mediate on terms like ‘ composition, ’ ‘ live, ’ ‘ duration, ’ or ‘ character ’ that might have quite different resonances in different artistic domains. 2 I will draw from this ongoing research to do some scene-setting about where and how those cross-art experiments have taken shape. We can take the year 2011/ 2012 as an exemplary moment, one that included experimental performance festivals like American Realness and Crossing the Line that considered the relationship between the gallery and the theater. So too, Performa, a performance art biennial founded by Roselee Goldberg, addresses the conversation largely by focusing on the category of visual art performance as a genre that differs from the traditions of the performing arts. In 8 Shannon Jackson Performa 2011, however, Goldberg decided to explore the category of ‘ theatre ’ in order to grapple with the expansion of performing arts curation, even if, as she said at the time, she “ hates theater ” . 3 The Under the Radar 2012 festival followed by hosting a conversation on the relation between the ‘ black box ’ and the ‘ white cube. ’ In the spring of 2012, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman offered a Whitney Biennial that was lauded in part for the performances curated inside it, including Wu Tsang ’ s Green Room, Michael Clark ’ s Who ’ s Zoo, Richard Maxwell ’ s installed rehearsals, and Sarah Michelson ’ s Devotion Study #1 - The American Dancer. The latter made history for being the first choreographic work to win the Whitney ’ s Bucksbaum Prize. 4 By fall of 2012, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was commissioning and acquiring all varieties of performances - from the maybe parodic, maybe activist, maybe earnest “ events ” of the art group Grand Openings to the siting of works conceived and commissioned by choreographers like Ralph Lemon, Steve Paxton, Faustin Linyekula, Dean Moss, Jérôme Bel, and more. 5 Since taking over directorship of The Kitchen in 2011, Tim Griffin has activated both its gallery spaces and its theater to stage a conversation across art forms. Meanwhile, non-New York-based activity has been approaching those inter-art stakes from different angles. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has reconceived what it means to collect Merce Cunningham ’ s costumes, debating along the way whether their conservation required the preservation or the eradication of the sweat marks and make-up stains of the dancers who wore them. 6 In the United Kingdom, the Tate Modern opened a section of the museum called The Tanks in 2012 - committing “ permanent ” space to the presentation and exhibition of “ temporary ” art forms - by re-siting choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ’ s Fase in its concrete space. 7 Antagonisms remained; Marina Abramovic´ ’ s famous statement that “ to be a performance artist, you have to hate theater ” still lingered in the ears and in the atmosphere of these and many other experiments. Arguably, however, those antagonisms have been the ground for more considered critique - and a host of new experiments that now populate visual and performing arts spaces alike. 8 Though some versions of art history warned against the intrusion of temporality into visual art spaces, conversations amongst scholars of theater, dance, performance, and art are now increasingly hosted by art institutions, especially as they seek to stage live events and exhibit the residue that performance can generate (including but not limited to photographs, ephemera, and sets). Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker has gone on to become a signature figure in this cross-disciplinary - and cross-professional - conversation. Her recent piece of choreographic endurance, Work/ Travail/ Arbeid (2015), premiered at WIELS Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels as part of the Performatik Festival 2015, the Brussels performance art biennial. Performatik itself was a citywide event conceived in collaboration with experimental theater spaces such as Kaaitheater and visual art spaces such as Bozar Centre for Fine Arts and WIELS. Its organizer, Katleen Van Langendonck, strategically decided to market Performatik as both an art “ biennial ” and a performing arts “ festival ” in order to invite and redefine different forms of durational art reception. 9 Work/ Travail/ Arbeid placed an ensemble of trained dancers within the WIELS galleries for six hours each day, inspiring them to move as sentient sculpture deliberately and responsively in and amongst the audience members who rotated in and out of the space each hour. 10 Audience members managed their own relationship to proximate dancers as they moved, some staying at the 9 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre perimeter of the gallery, some entering the center. Some stood, some sat, some walked, and even ran along with the dancers as they rushed across the space. In a public dialogue with fellow choreographer Xavier Le Roy, De Keersmaeker spoke about the paradoxes of dance-art collaborations. 11 Both she and Le Roy remarked on how their disruptions of dance in one context actually appear to reactivate dance in another context. Le Roy noted bemusedly, “ I am non-dance in the dance world, but in the art world, I am dance ” . 12 Even more recently, de Keersmaeker became implicated in a highly political conversation about aesthetic trans-contextualization when Chris Dercon, former Director of the Tate Modern, included her in his first (and last) program as incoming Intendant for the Volksbühne in Berlin. 13 While dance is curated now more often inside the museum, theater can be found as well, de-familiarizing the apparatus of the gallery even as the gallery de-familiarizes the theatrical form. Consider, for instance, the work of theater director and visual artist David Levine who has consistently pressed at the boundaries and corners of theater and Fig. 1: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Work/ Travail/ Arbeid at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Anne Van Aerschot. Fig. 2: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Work/ Travail/ Arbeid at Tate Modern, London. © Anne Van Aerschot. 10 Shannon Jackson the visual art. I am thinking of works like Hopeful (2009 - 2010) in which he displayed the headshots of out of work actors in gallery exhibition. In his ground-breaking piece, Habit (2010 - ongoing), Levine joined the conventions of visual art and theatre arts in a newly potent mix. The piece consists of a house-like structure constructed hyper-realistically to be installed inside a museum gallery space. Lights ‘ really ’ turn on, and the ‘ water ’ really runs through its pipes. Levine commissioned playwright Jason Grote and hired out-of-work actors to play roles in a painfully realistic drama; Marsha Ginsberg did the drawings for the set and lighting, also on commission by Levine. The conventions of dividing labor thus mimicked also deviated from the traditional conventions of repertory theater. Moreover, the performance process did as well. The actors committed to playing out scenes of this drama for several hours throughout the day, putting the performance ‘ on a loop ’ to accommodate the intermittent arrivals and departures of gallery spectators. Meanwhile, the spectators themselves managed their reception from a gallery space rather than a theatrical seat, moving from window to window of the set as the drama changed scenes. Throughout Habit, artists and receivers were challenged by a trans-contextual re-examination of art forms, perpetually asking the question of whether this work was theatre, and if so, why. Exploring this dense swarm of artistic activities and debates suggests a connection to what we might call the economics of ephemerality. Indeed, some critics have cynically interpreted the uptake of performance within museums as a moneymaking enterprise, since it has grown alongside the spectacularization of the contemporary art market. As I and others have explored elsewhere, the performative proliferation coincides, in some minds, with the rise of the socalled experience economy, a network of Fig. 3: David Levine. Habit (2010 - 2012). Installation view from Essex Street Market, New York City. Photo by Marsha Ginsberg. Fig. 4: David Levine. Habit (2010 - 2012). Installation view from Essex Street Market, New York City. Photo by Julieta Cervantes. Fig. 5: David Levine. Habit (2010 - 2012). Installation view from Essex Street Market, New York City. Photo by Adam Reich. 11 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre post-Fordist service practices in which workers are exhorted to ‘ act their roles ’ and ‘ set the stage ’ for late capitalist production. While far more complex, there is of course a relation between economics and the curated experience of duration. 14 If something occurs only for a few hours in the museum, a premium is placed on having been there in person to see it. For those of us used to managing the economies of theater, this premium is intriguing. The movement of performance from the context of the theatron to the context of the gallery somehow produces an added premium, forcing us to reckon with a theatrical durationality that perhaps we have taken for granted. Two kinds of intrigue - economic and otherwise - come with this transfer of context, especially when dance and theater enter into the collecting logic of a place like the MoMA or Tate Modern. The act of acquiring dance or acquiring theater has material ramifications, not only for choreographers and theater practitioners, but also for scholars, other artists, and students. How is access managed by these collecting practices once they are ‘ owned ’ by an institution? And how does that access differ from a repertoire model of performance, one that allows encounter only when permission is granted to re-stage? On the one hand, reperforming or recreating a piece might require a more stringent licensing process that includes a monetary charge, but, on the other hand, important historical documents and archival items might be better safeguarded against the ravages of deterioration and overuse. These institutional experiments force an awareness of a fragile durationality that all art forms share, and in the process, provoke a question about whether and how theater manages its own fragility as well as its own economy. The sweat stains on Cunningham ’ s dance costumes are a poignant reminder of some unresolvable contradictions regarding historicizing the live event. What is erased even as it is preserved? Some would argue that the museumification of the performing arts is a betrayal of its impulse to resist the commodification of art; others understand that performance has always sited itself within and among institutions of different kinds, and that it has, since its inception, been subject to circuits of marketing and circulation. 15 Once again, the switch across contexts forces this kind of artistic self-critique, exposes the contingency of processes and knowledges that might have become naturalized for us. The joining and swapping of contexts across theater and visual art expose professional conventions and habits of thought. Indeed, it exposes differences in how artists organize their work and are paid for it. There are substantial discrepancies with the monetary standards of remuneration for performance depending upon whether artists lodge their work in a museum or a theater; whether they are represented by a gallery or by a talent agent; whether they get paid by the hour or by commission; whether they sell documentation or secure a royalty contract; whether they work in a repertory theatre or do ‘ Project Work. ’ The context swapping also exposes the bodily conditions of labor; indeed, museum curators are constantly newly reckoning with the contingencies of installing embodied work in the gallery, bodies that need access to water, a bathroom, and a green room to change clothes. Beyond labor issues, such delineations around context also affect the organization of reception - whether they know that they can drop in any time, or whether they know they have to show up at a precise time to experience something that may or may not be theater. It affects whether receivers expect to encounter the work from their seats or expect to walk around it. In one context, they sit while the art moves; in another, they move while the art stays in place. In these new experiments, 12 Shannon Jackson audience members find themselves in an entirely new context, one that hybridizes the reception of both the gallery and theater. In that moment of hybridization, in that mix of standing and sitting, I would suggest that receivers are grappling with their contextdependent knowledge of art and of theater. In the mixing of contexts, their tacit knowledge of these art forms becomes explicit. In the momentary confusion about what they are seeing and where they are sitting, the capacity for critique emerges as visitors become attuned to habits and parameters that they always knew, but perhaps did not know they knew. If critique is about foregrounding how we know what we know, then this strategy of aesthetic transcontextualization allows participants to become critical - in the most capacious sense - of how they thought they knew the experiences of art and theatre. Institutions and Critique Above, I have considered how ‘ swapping of contexts ’ in fact exposes artistic contexts; these experiments expose the naturalized conditions and contexts that produce ordinary knowledge of what we think we know about theater, about dance, about the performing arts. They also expose under-theorized differences between performance art and the performing arts in the process. Such tacit differences are part of why ‘ performance artists ’ feel the need to ‘ hate theater ’ when their own processes come close to approximating its condition. Before continuing, I want to approach these examples from another direction by focusing more intently on genealogies of “ critique. ” My own perspective on this term is ‘ situated ’ in my context at UC Berkeley, and in particular our Program in Critical Theory co-founded by Judith Butler and Martin Jay. Butler ’ s “ What is Critique? An Essay on the Virtues of Foucault ” is primarily a piece on the French expat and Berkeley-bound Foucault, but Butler starts by considering other trajectories from Raymond Williams in the United Kingdom and Theodor W. Adorno in Germany. She reminds us: Raymond Williams worried that the notion of criticism has been unduly restricted to the notion of ‘ fault-finding ’ and proposed that we find a kind of response, specifically to cultural works, ‘ which [do] not assume the habit (or right or duty) of judgment. ’ And what he called for was a more specific kind of response, one that did not generalize too quickly: ‘ what always needs to be understood, ’ he wrote, ‘ is the specificity of the response, which is not a judgment, but a practice. ’ I believe this last line also marks the trajectory of Foucault ’ s thinking on this topic, since ‘ critique ’ is precisely a practice that not only suspends judgment for him, but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension. 16 Butler goes on to note that this sense of critique as a practice also informed Adorno ’ s thinking. She writes: For critique to operate as part of a praxis, for Adorno, is for it to apprehend the ways in which categories are themselves instituted, how the field of knowledge is ordered, and how what it suppresses returns, as it were, as its own constitutive occlusion. Judgments operate for both thinkers as ways to subsume a particular under an already constituted category, whereas critique asks after the occlusive constitution of the field of categories themselves. 17 In the case of both Williams and Adorno, critique is highly situated because thinking is a situated activity. It is to mine, not simply what we know, but how we think we know - the conditions that produce ourselves as knowing subjects. Williams called that situatedness, the “ specificity of the response ” , and it was both a clarifying act and a 13 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre generous act to avow that specificity. For Adorno, that specificity often included a degree of occlusion, a degree of repression of contingent factors. Every knowledge order repressed other possibilities, and it was the job of critique both to explore the productivity of an order as well as to ask what it occludes. With Williams and Adorno at her side, Butler continues to clarify the contribution of Foucault to this longer genealogy of critical theory, one that resists evaluation per se in favor of an immanent excavation about how terms of value are produced in the first place: Thus, Foucault seeks to define critique, but finds that only a series of approximations are possible. Critique will be dependent on its objects, but its objects will in turn define the very meaning of critique. Further, the primary task of critique will not be to evaluate whether its objects - social conditions, practices, forms of knowledge, power, and discourse - are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself. 18 If the job of critique then is “ to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself ” , I am interested to bring this proposition back to the domain of theater and to its context of aesthetic circulation. Obviously, we can see a clear link between critique and theater ’ s etymological history; many theorists of the theatre regularly invoke the etymological link between theory and theater — a place for viewing — in order to foreground theater as a space of critique, as a space for ‘ viewing the very framework ’ of social and artistic evaluation. Having started with a review of contemporary performance activity in the art world and returned now to the concept of critique, let me bring both of these genealogies together by focusing on an artworld practice of “ institutional critique ” . Institutional Critique is the moniker given to a group of artistic practices that set their sights - and their sites - on the institutional processes of art organizations, especially the world of museums, as well as its associated systems of gallery, biennial, nationalist, and art market processes. 19 Having been adopted by a variety of artists and critics, institutional critique remains a catchall term for the disparate practices that extended Minimalist art ’ s engagement with the gallery to address the museum ’ s wider network of economic and institutional relationships. 20 Alexander Alberro, one of its many historians, reminds us that the Enlightenment concept of the public sphere — and art ’ s civic function therein — was a primary motivator for ‘ institituionally critical ’ practices. “ The artistic practices that in the late 1960 s and 1970 s came to be referred to as institutional critique ” , Alberro writes, “ revisited that radical promise of the European Enlightenment, and they did so precisely by confronting the institution of art with the claim that it was not sufficiently committed to, let alone realizing or fulfilling, the pursuit of publicness that had brought it into being in the first place ” . 21 Artists identified with Institutional Critique staged that confrontation in a variety of ways. For Daniel Buren, such a challenge meant interrogating the decontextualizing logic of the studio-museum relation as well as the inside/ outside logic of the public museum. For Hans Haacke and Martha Rosler, the investigation of the museum ’ s relation to public space meant understanding and critiquing its economic dependencies, including its embeddedness in the world of real estate speculation. For Michael Asher, “ Institutional Critique ” meant mimicking the museum ’ s didactic processes but turning that didacticism on the institution itself. For Mierle Laderman Ukules, it meant exposing the gendered and classed processes of custodians and conservators that kept the museum clean. For Fred 14 Shannon Jackson Wilson, it meant exposing the race and class processes that kept the museum secure. Dan Flavin and Lawrence Weiner unsettled the object status of the artworks on which the art apparatus depended, turning to the fragile structures of lighting or text as alternatives. For Louise Lawler, Institutional Critique meant “ appropriating ” or re-contextualizing the central props of the museum within defamiliarizing didactics and conventions of display. Andrea Fraser created counter-docent performances. Rather than offering tours of the museum ’ s artwork, she focused on its apparatus, discoursing at length upon the arrangement of the subscription desk, the sculptural proportions of the drinking fountain, or the social and economic function of the museum cafeteria. 22 These works unfolded from the late sixties through the nineties and primarily measured their distance from the visual art world; indeed, they sited themselves within the art world as a proximate irritant within it. Alberro and others have chronicled Institutional Critique as an embedded practice of negation. 23 They were practices that interrupted, foregrounded, short-circuited, or otherwise redirected the apparatus of the museum and visual art world in order to make its processes explicit, in order to make visible processes that were oft-occluded. If art was represented as autonomous and selfauthorizing, Institutional Critique artists exposed the institution that produced that perception of autonomy. Upon considering this art-based trajectory of institutional critique, a few elements are relevant for a conversation about Theatre and Critique. First off, Institutional Critique is about the revelation of context, indeed, about the incorporation of the contextual, the background, the backstage into the art itself. Institutional Critique directed attention to that which was ‘ outside ’ of art, precisely to expose the outside ’ s construction of the inside. Indeed, translations of Institutional Critique in German and elsewhere billed it as “ Context Art ” [Kontext Kunst]. 24 To mine that context was to mine the apparatus of knowledge-production in art; it focused less on what we know about art than on how we know, on the apparatus that undergirded the boundaries and schemas for what we think we know about art. More importantly for this essay, the contextual expansion of Institutional Critique also undergirded the contextual travel of performance and theater - the context swapping that I described above. The shift to context enabled a shift across context; the critique of context opened the door to new inter-art experiments, including those that brought new objects, bodies, actions, and theatrical gestures that further exposed the contextual underpinnings of the institution. Indeed, one might further suggest that theatre was/ is, not only an object of critique, but itself a vehicle for artistic self-critique. As recounted in my gloss of artistic practices above, one finds that the institutionally critical gesture consistently used theatrical techniques to expose that institutional context. Art objects were placed within scenes. Visual artists made art objects into props and sometimes into scripts (Ukules, Lawler). Visual artists hung lights, cast actors, and engaged in ambiguous role-play themselves (Flavin, Wilson, Fraser). Museum didactics started to sound like stage directions (Weiner, Asher, Rosler). The unveiling of the institutional apparatus seemed to require varied forms of theatre and scene-setting (Fraser, Wilson, Haacke, Buren, Rosler). At the same time, those heterogeneous forms worked with different conceptions of what theatre might mean. Theatre became a central vehicle by which to conduct a critique, not only because of its themes, stories, and characters, but also because of the contextual heteronomy of the form itself. Even as the artworld critiqued the ubiquity of theatricality in the experience economy, 15 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre even if performance artists say that they ‘ hate theater ’ , this world deployed (and deploys) theatre to conduct its own selfcritique. As such, Institutional Critique further contributes to the proliferation of performance described above; whether theater-makers noticed or not, the institutional critical gesture readied the visual art world for a wider array of bodily arrangements, spaces, objects and actions. Before concluding, it is worth exploring just how trenchant and just how intimate these philosophical and aesthetic genealogies of critique can be. Such an exploration means foregrounding the situated and internalized position of critique, and of the critic who performs it. If we earlier noted that a contemporary understanding of critique resisted the notion of critique as outside judgment, that same structure applies to the artistically and institutionally-engaged critic as well. The would-be institutional critic recognizes her own embeddedness within the site critiqued. If Institutional Critique has a ‘ place for viewing ’ , it is not positioned outside the apparatus it views and evaluates, but avowedly inside, never fully capable of taking a detached, exterior position. Artists identified with Institutional Critique thus performed a Foucauldian concept of the institution, akin to the scheme Judith Butler described in her own meditations. In many artistic contexts, such Foucauldian principles were enacted in processes that avowed the artist ’ s position within the institution; as Alberro writes, “ they dialectically negated that which was the vehicle for their own voice, yet held on to it at the same time ” . 25 Perhaps no artist has displayed and endured the intimacy of Institutional Critique more than Andrea Fraser. As I argued in Social Works, Fraser consistently embodies and articulates Foucault ’ s institutional construction of the subject, whether in characters such as the ’ counter ’ museum docent Jane Castleton, or in statements like the following: So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a ‘ totally administered society ’ or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can ’ t get outside of ourselves. 26 As I have also argued, it is striking that she uses a decidedly theatrical technique — the technique of acting — to stage this insidedness. For Fraser, this embeddedness, this hyper-contextuality, underwrote an entire oeuvre that redirects theater as a vehicle for Fig. 6: Andrea Fraser. Projection (2008). Two-channel HD video installation. 40 minutes. Video still. Courtesy the artist. 16 Shannon Jackson artworld critique. More recently, it prompted new forms of theatrical and even therapeutic engagement projects such as Projection (2008). Installed in a blackened gallery, with screens projected on either side, Fraser performs ‘ herself ’ and her therapist in an apparent re-enactment of an exchange between analysand and analyst. Inside this dual structure — a two-hander ‘ play ’— she and her therapist face down her embeddedness within the economic institution of the artworld. Here is a sample of her script: Well, yeah, I mean there ’ s, there ’ s a kind of double game, you know. On the one hand, I reject a kind of culture of, you know, money, and, and I don ’ t want to be a part of this market and, and, you know, the gross inequality that it ’ s a product of, and then on the other hand, I like, like a lot of artists, I live in a very, very privileged world that I ’ m a kind of guest in. But we have all these strategies to feel superior to people who have more than we do. 27 Throughout Projection - sometimes weeping on screen - Fraser gives voice to the daily challenge of living in a culture of gross inequality in which she is a ‘ guest ’ , and privileged for being so. We see her living, emotionally and intimately, within the institution that is simultaneously the object of her artwork ’ s critique. Once again, the theatrical technique of ‘ acting ’ provides a means of surfacing a double position, alighting upon the place where one ’ s investment in the art institution coincide within one ’ s desire to leave it. As I conclude this essay, I am mindful that the entire text can be cast as a contextdependent chronicle, one that marks the travels of a theater scholar who now finds herself talking about theater to critical theorists and to visual artists as much as she does to theatrical ones. In my own context swapping, and my own context traveling, I find myself disoriented at times, but also inspired — often at the same moment. Such travels produce productive de-familiarization of what I thought I knew about Theatre - and what I thought I knew about ritique. Indeed, it is by following theater ’ s processes of circulation, erasure, and re-contextualization that I find new opportunities for critique. In the midst of theater ’ s undoing, I find the capacity to redo my own thinking about theater and what it means for it to be, indeed, a place for viewing. Notes 1 Shannon Jackson and Julia Bryan-Wilson (eds.), Time Zones: Durational Art and is Context, Representations, special issue of Representations 136 (Fall 2016). 2 Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola (eds.), In Terms of Performance (January 2017). http: / / intermsofperformance.site/ [accessed 30 September 2018]. 3 Statement from conversations with the author. For a more detailed account of Goldberg ’ s distinction between theatre and visual art performance, RoseLee Goldberg (ed.), Performa 11: Staging Ideas, Performa Publications, 2013. 4 Among others, see: Roberta Smith, “ A Survery of a Different Color: 2012 Whitney Biennial ” , in: New York Times, 1 March 2012, https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2012/ 03/ 02/ arts/ design/ 2012-whitney-biennial.html; Andrew Russeth, “ Whitney ’ s 2012 Bucksbaum Prize Goes to Sarah Michelson ” , in: The Observer, 19 April 2012, http: / / observer.com/ 2012/ 04/ whitneys-2012-bucksbaum-award-goes-tosarah-michelson/ ; and Brian Schaefer, “ Sarah Michelson and the Infiltration of Dance ” , in: Out Magazine, 30 January 2014, https: / / www.out.com/ entertainment/ theater dance/ 2014/ 01/ 30/ sarah-michelson-whitney-museum. 5 See MoMA Press Release, “ The Museum of Modern Art Commission Six International Choreographers to Present Dance Perfor- 17 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre mances at the Museum in a Series Co-organized with Ralph Lemon ” , https: / / www. moma.org/ documents/ moma_press-release_ 389341.pdf [accessed 30 September 2018]. 6 See Abigail Sebaly, “ Cold Storage and New Brightness: The Cunningham Acquisition Moves in at the Walker ” , in: Walker Art Online Magazine, 29 July 2011, https: / / walkerart.org/ magazine/ cold-storage-and-newbrightness-the_cunningham-acquisitionmoves-in-at-the-walker. 7 See “ The Tanks ” , in: Artforum.com, 10 October 2012, https: / / www.artforum.com/ interviews/ stuart-comer-and-catherine-woodtalk-about-the-tate-tanks-35105. 8 For elements of the original interview, see “ Marina Abramovic´: What is Performance Art? ” on the Museum of Modern Art You- Tube channel https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=FcyYynulogY. Also see Chris Wilkinson, “ Noises off: What's the difference between performance art and theatre? ” , The Guardian, July 20, 2010, https: / / www. theguardian.com/ stage/ theatreblog/ 2010/ jul/ 20/ noises-off-performance-art-theatre [accessed 30 September 2018]. 9 “ Performatik 2015 Presents Performances, Exhibitions, and Talks By Over 35 Artists and Curators ” , Biennial Foundation, 26 January 2015 http: / / www.biennialfoundation. org/ 2015/ 01/ performatik-2015-presentsperformances-exhibitions-and-talks-byover-35-artists-and-curators/ . 10 Chris Dupuis, “ In the Move from Stage to Museum, a Dance Becomes Performance Art ” , in: Hyperallergic, 27 April 2015, https: / / hyperallergic.com/ 202056/ in-themove-from-stage-to-museum-a-dance-becomes-performance-art/ . 11 “ Dance and the Exhibition Form: Conversation with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Xavier Le Roy and Elena Filipovic ” , at: WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Belgium, 22 March 2015. 12 Xavier Le Roy in public conversation at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Belgium, 22 March 2015. 13 The political furor over the appointment and subsequent resignation of Chris Dercon as Volksbühne director - in the year after our Frankfurt conference “ Theatre and Critique ” - exemplify the cross-arts frictions I explored in this essay. A detailed examination of that example will require a separate essay. For now, see, for instance, essays collected in, “ We are the Revolution ” in: Texte zur Kunst (December 2017) and a recent special issue of Theatre Survey 59, 2 (2018). 14 The ‘ experience economy ’ has traveled through numerous contexts; amongst others, see: in the realm of art history see Rosalind Krauss, “ The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum ” , in: October 54 (Autumn 1990), pp. 3 - 17; and Hal Foster, “ The Archive without Museums ” , in: October 77 (Summer 1996), p. 97 - 119. For discussion of experience and performance within the contemporary museum, see Robin Pogrebin, “ Once on Fringe, PerformanceArt is Embraced ” , in: New York Times, 26 October 2012; Judith Butler and Shannon Jackson, “ How Are We Performing Today? ” , at: Annual Performance Symposium, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 16 - 17 November 2012; and Dorothea von Hantelmann, “ The Experiential Turn ” , in: Elizabeth Carpenter (ed.), Living Collections Catalogue, Volume 1: On Performativity, Walker Art Center, 2014. For on the experience economy in the commercial marketplace, see Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage, Cambridge, Mass. 1999. 15 Peggy Phelan ’ s Unmarked: The Ontology of Performance offered a now classic argument on the former point; for examples of the latter, see scholarship as varied as Tracy Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, Cambridge et al. 2007, Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains, London et al. 2011; or my essay “ Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity, ” in: The Drama Review Vol 56 (November 2012). 16 Raymond Williams quoted in Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtues ” , in: Sara Silah and Judith Butler (eds.), The Judith Butler Reader, Oxford 2004, p. 304. Also see Raymond Williams, 18 Shannon Jackson “ Criticism ” , in: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London 1983. 17 Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtues ” , p. 305. 18 Ibid., p. 306. 19 See (among others): Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists ’ Writings, MIT Press, 2009; and Andrea Fraser, “ From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique ” , in: Artforum 44 (2005), p. 100 - 106. 20 For more on these disputed origins see my “ Staging Institutions: Andrea Fraser and the ‘ Experiential ’ Museum ” , in: Sabine Breitwieser and Tina Teuffel (eds.), Andrea Fraser: A Retrospective, Museum Moderner Kunst, 2015, pp. 21 - 29. 21 Alexander Alberro, “ Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique ” , in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists ’ Writings, p. 3. 22 For more on Buren, Rosler, Haacke, Asher, Ukeles, Wilson, Flavin and Weiner, Lawler, Fraser, see their writings in: Alberro and Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists ’ Writings. Especially see: Buren, “ The Function of the Museum ” (1970); Haacke, “ Provisional Remarks ” (1971); Asher, “ September 21 - October 2, 1974, Claire Copley Gallery ” (1974); Ukeles, “ Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! ” (1969); Rosler, “ Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience ” (1979); Ivan Karp and Wilson, “ Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums ” (1992); and Fraser, “ From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique ” (2005). 23 Alberro, “ Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique ” . 24 See Peter Weibel (ed.), Kontext Kunst, Köln 1994. Exhibition catalogue produced on occasion of the exhibition “ Kontext Kunst: The Art of the 90 s ” at the Steiermärkisches Landesmuseum Joanneumk, Austria, October - November 1993. 25 Alberro, “ Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique ” , p. 4. 26 Fraser, “ From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique ” , p. 104. For a prior discussion, see Shannon Jackson “ Staged Management ” , in: Social Works: Supporting Art, Performing Publics, New York 2011. 27 Fraser performance script cited in “ Staging Institutions: Andrea Fraser and the ’ Experiential ’ Museum ” , p. 27. 19 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre Institution - Apparatus - Dispositive: Searching for a Reflexive Dramaturgy Tore Vagn Lid (Oslo) In this article I argue that the critical potential of Bertolt Brecht ’ s concept of Verfremdung is no longer reserved for artistic works alone, but facilitates a reflexive sociological insight into a hegemonic theatre-apparatus. The artist gains awareness of the institution not as an “ empty shape ” which can be filled with new (political) intentions, but as content itself. If Verfremdung can be understood as a specific form of aesthetic Selbst-Verfremdung or self-estrangement, the art apparatus ’ s self-confrontation “ from without ” as it were, it is not at all that paradoxical that other supporting pillars for a reflexive dramaturgy are also to be found at quite a distance from the typical discourses and references of traditional aesthetics and theatre research. Foucault, by emphasizing dispositive as “ [t]he said as much as the unsaid ” , points to forces connected to the apparatus - like architecture, images, procedures etc. - which are working behind, or outside, the discursive language, but still are highly influential and powerful. From here a critical thread becomes visible, reaching from Foucault and Agamben ’ s “ dispositif ” back to Durkheim and Weber ’ s views on how institutions create behaviour, but even more so, the young Brecht and his concept of critique are revitalized. Prelude In the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno the philosopher should neither stand above, nor outside of the art. Rather, theory should descend - meaning, take one step down from its philosophical chair hidden behind the academic desk, and instead expose itself to or confront contemporary art and its complex manifestations. Moreover, theory needs to transform itself - to change its forms - in meeting with the arts. In this sense the very notion of critique - in “ critical theory ” - implies the self-critique of aesthetics as theoretical praxis. Aesthetic theory needs the ability to open up and to adapt. Only then can it be possible for art to say what art would say if art could say it. 1 Time and again, Adorno demonstrates the fruitfulness of his theoretical programme. And in his ability to hear Arnold Schönberg ’ s music, to read Samuel Becket ’ s novels and to see Paul Klee ’ s pictures, he largely sets a “ goldstandard ” for a method of close-reading or even close-listening, which has become significant and highly influential for an understanding of the relation between art and art theory to this day. However, no matter how important and fruitful Adorno ’ s approach still is, I will argue that it embodies a potential problem: For if theory ’ s main task should be to open up - to adapt, or to become responsive - to art, an asymmetrical relationship between art and art theory may arise. If given the role of “ the responsive ” - the one that should listen to and “ learn from ” art - theory could in fact lose its critical - or even dialectical - potential as an “ outside eye ” . From here it stands the risk of losing its own potential as a real critical - and hence productive - activity; as a medium that could counterpoint art, asking questions which often can be hard to ask from inside a theatre production, or even inside a large opera house, an orchestra or theatre institution. Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 20 - 27. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Reflexive dramaturgy: When the artist wants what the institution cannot provide It is exactly this mutual dialectical potential which necessitates a search for a reflexive dramaturgy. Or rather, this is the theoretical background to this article. The practical or artistic background, however, lies in more than fifteen years of experience of how the artist often seems to want what the institutional structures cannot provide. Time and again, I have witnessed how good artistic ideas for a new performance and visionary ambitions on how to work and what to create have been obstructed by forces of gravity, powerful enough to override even the strongest of concepts. For example, I have witnessed how modernist conceptions of the “ pure ” or the “ absolute ” musical composition still hinder the musician ’ s ability to think of theatre as an expanded audio-visual room, and hence to compose with theatre as a whole. I ’ ve experienced how the different Stanislavsky traditions, psychological methods to achieve realism or naturalism on stage, at the same time obstruct the actors ’ abilities to realise more choristic, physical and stylistic expressions. I ’ ve witnessed how hard it can be for an actor to combine her “ inner psychological processes ” or “ motivated tasks ” with, for instance, playing an instrument, performing rhetorical shifts in acting styles, or involving herself - as herself - in a real discussion with a contemporary audience. And I ’ ve experienced how these forces tend to manifest themselves even when the musicians or the actors (or even the theatre managers) themselves explicitly aim to move away from - or to break out of - these constraints in order to free themselves of these prerequisites. Reflexive dramaturgy and institutional ‘ subtexts ’ For these prerequisites, these constraints can be seen as kinds of “ gravity forces ” 2 which cannot be reduced to mere material or practical limitations, or identified solely as spatial, temporal or economic structures or preconditions. Rather these special forces of gravity bring along their own (meta)narratives, narratives that actuate their own dramaturgies, strong enough to transform an entire performance, opposing the artistic intentions and concepts planned by the theatre-maker years in advance. Moreover, these are structures with enough power to override the content of a play, to undermine a whole production, and often with a paradoxical result. I see this as one main reason why we time and again can observe how progressive concepts just ‘ do not make it ’ , or performances where the structures “ backstage ” openly contradict the thing going on “ on stage ” . For instance, how shows questioning hierarchical structures in society become hierarchical themselves, or how humanistic or even anti-capitalistic ambitions are contradicted by cynicism in marketing and casting. And as importantly, these are forces, or fields of gravity, which themselves are often not part of the selfconception of the theatre and theatre-maker; forces that tend to fall in the blind spot of the traditional dramaturgy, which exist outside the professionalized dramaturgy, but which nonetheless are crucial in determining the dramaturgy of the performance itself. Hence it is here - so to say when structures cannot do what the theatre-agents want - that it is necessary to (re)think and to expand, the notion of dramaturgy as a specific reflexive dramaturgy, and to call for a type of critical theoretical practice which constantly tries to locate or to become aware of actions of gravity which are highly influential, but still 21 Institution - Apparatus - Dispositive: Searching for a Reflexive Dramaturgy are not sufficiently articulated and made transparent. So this notion of critical practice cannot limit itself just being ‘ open ’ and ‘ responsive ’ to what is going on in the field of art. In order to be able to contribute to the artistic process itself, this practice of dramaturgy needs to engage in a mutually productive and dialectical dialogue with the artistic work, the artistic research. Therefore, the subject or discipline of dramaturgy cannot be restricted to a mere question of how a show is built, a composition is structured or a cast of actors is organized. Instead it must track its roots back to the original Greek meaning of the word, where the term dramaturgy can be understood as actions that work, or actions that have an influence or evoke an effect. Hence a reflexive dramaturgy must be able to explore the dramaturgical forces that are at play beyond or “ outside ” - but that nevertheless have an influence on - the dramaturgy of the artistic process and the artistic work as such. This will require an expanded concept of dramaturgy that needs to be able to understand and to clarify the intimate relationships that always have and will exist between art-form and organizational form. A psychoanalysis of the institution: Brecht ’ s “ Verfremdung ” and its potential for institutional criticism In my book titled Gegenseitige Verfremdungen 3 , I argued for the necessity of psychoanalysis of the (theatre) institution itself. In other words, a reflexive search for why, and how, certain types of dramaturgical “ fields of power ” are able to appear and consolidate over time. Inspired by strategies related to a psychoanalytic tradition, which is dynamically shifting its focus between detailedoriented ‘ here and now ’ -investigations and a search for long-term historical connections, I see a type of critique that neither reduces artistic work to sociological ‘ epiphenomena ’ , nor loses sight of structures and historic-institutionalized dispositions. Here I also argue that rudiments and entrances related to a reflexive dramaturgical practice in fact can be traced within the aesthetic project of the young Bertolt Brecht. Looking at the relationship between Brecht ’ s theoretical practice on the one hand, and the development of the musical Lehrstücke (learning plays) on the other, a distinctive figure of institutional critique - or a reflexive logic - can be located and reconstructed. The core of this reconstruction is what can be spotted as a double movement within the Brechtian concept of Verfremdung (estrangement). The term Verfremdung is, for Brecht, inseparably connected to an understanding of art ’ s potential as a critical human enterprise. In his ongoing development of a concept of Verfremdung, he seeks to understand (and further dramaturgically recreate) phenomena in which the “ obvious ” ceases to be obvious, the “ natural ” ceases to be natural. Wir neigen dazu, den Zustand der Ruhe für das ‘ Normale ’ zu halten. Ein Mann geht jeden Morgen zu seiner Arbeitsstätte, das ist das ‘ Normale ’ , das versteht sich. Eines Morgens geht er nicht [. . .] das bedarf der Erklärung [. . .] nun, das ist eine Störung, da gab es einen Eingriff in den Ruhestand, und dann herrscht wieder Ruhe, indem kein Mann mehr zu Arbeit geht. 4 In the dialectical moment of estrangement, when the immediate loses its immediateness and the natural loses its naturalness, Brecht sees that a reflexive surplus is released in which humans can regain themselves as actively participating actors confronting their social and natural surroundings. 5 Here, when the movement itself creates a standstill and the standstill creates movement, the critical point is the reflexive 22 Tore Vagn Lid (Oslo) moment and vice versa. This dialectic between standstill and movement makes it possible to understand why Brecht ties Verfremdung and criticism to a dramaturgical model in which the dramatic theatre ’ s ideals of organic unity and “ flow ” are replaced by fractures and interruptions: die selbstverständlichkeit, d.h die besondere gestalt, welche die erfahrung im bewusstsein angenommen hat, wird wieder aufgelöst, wenn sie durch den v-effekt negiert und dann in eine neue verständlichkeit verwandelt wird. eine schematisierung wird hier zerstört. die eigenen erfahrungen des individuums korrigieren oder bestätigen, was es von der gesamtheit übernommen hat. der ursprüngliche findungsakt wird wiederholt. 6 An aesthetic-philosophical strategy, in which Verfremdung requires fractures and interruptions, shows just how closely Brecht ’ s critical theatre is connected to the Greek word for criticism - krínein - which can be translated by the active verbs “ to split ” or “ to separate ” . In precisely this light, Brecht ’ s dramaturgic appeal of “ Trennung der Elemente ” (separation of elements) 7 can be understood as a motto for his concept of his critical or philosophical theatre: “ Sätze von Systemen hängen aneinander wie Mitglieder von Verbrecherbanden. Einzeln überwältigt man sie leichter. Man muß sie also voneinander trennen ” . 8 However, the common understanding of Verfremdung as a more or less specific artistic strategy also finds its parallel in Verfremdung as a superior strategy for the relationship between art and art theory, between artistic practice and theoretic-dramaturgical practice. An adequate interpretative encircling of Verfremdung does not, for me, only apply to - as often understood - the development of strategies aiming to evoke the critical reflection of an audience faced with a specific content of a play. Equally, Verfremdung manifests itself within the young Brecht as a reflexive strategy to break loose from the gravity forces of the theatre organization as such. From his double position as an art-practitioner and artcritic, Brecht manages to realize theory and theoretical practice as a form that I will call an institutional ‘ Selbst-verfremdung ’ or ‘ selfestrangement ’ : In the same way that Verfremdung is a strategy to provoke an audience to think over - not only along - a course of staged actions, this meta-level of Verfremdung becomes the strategy of the artist herself to reflect both upon the theatre - and the theatrical organization - so to say, from a self-opposed “ inside-outside ” position. In this way, Brecht can articulate structures that are in play in the theatre, but which are themselves not adequately part of the theatre ’ s self-awareness. And it is from this double strategy of Verfremdung, that Brecht as early as around 1930 identifies the theatre as, and articulates what he himself calls an Apparat, or an apparatus. For Brecht this is an apparatus with an aesthetic, political “ self-upholding agenda ” , a silent, invisible - but still powerful - structure which paradoxically could function as a meta-dramaturgical force by itself. Brecht ’ s understanding of (aesthetic) form as not only shaping reality, but also unconsciously producing certain orders of society, is here transformed into a critical articulation of the institution as “ agent ” . Brecht states: Die Künstler denken meist nicht daran, den Apparat zu ändern, weil sie glauben, einen Apparat in der Hand zu haben, der serviert, was sie frei erfinden, der sich also mit jedem ihrer Gedanken von selbst verändert. Aber sie erfinden nicht frei; der Apparat erfüllt mit ihnen oder ohne sie seine Funktion, die Theater spielen jeden Abend, die Zeitungen erscheinen xmal am Tag; und sie nehmen auf, was sie brauchen; und sie brauchen einfach ein bestimmtes Quantum Stoff. 9 23 Institution - Apparatus - Dispositive: Searching for a Reflexive Dramaturgy Hence, the critical potential of Verfremdung is no longer reserved for artistic works alone, but opens up a reflexive sociological insight into a hegemonic theatre-apparatus. The artist gains awareness of the institution - not as an “ empty shape ” which can be filled with new (political) intentions - but as content itself. Where a philosopher like Hegel would locate the critical-dialectical moment at the point where consciousness breaks out of its immediacy - its self-affirmative circularity - Brecht introduces a selfcriticism, in which the apparatus itself is turned into content or an object for criticalpolitical art. But, contrary to later and more postmodern criticism of institutions, Brecht ties this “ meta-reflection ” to criticism of capitalism and to art-apparatuses as instruments for the hidden class struggles of the bourgeoisie. 10 It is no coincidence that Brecht expresses these thoughts about the apparatus in a text titled Über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater (On the use of music for epic theatre). For it is the role of music in theatre, or more precisely, Brecht ’ s ritual analysis of the abuse of music in the theatre, that becomes a catalyst for Brecht - both for his diagnosis of the theatre as an ideologically effective apparatus, and further in his attempt to re-function this apparatus in an effort to re-think and to re-organize music and musical dramaturgy as such. The premiere of the first Lehrstück at the contemporary music festival in Baden Baden in the summer of 1929 already revealed some important elements: The orchestra is visibly seated and transparent on stage; a wreck of a plane on one side of the podium is flanked by a radio on the other; author (Bertolt Brecht) and composer (Paul Hindemith) sit side by side on a desk, facing the audience; notes are projected on a large canvas and in the very moment the conductor Hindemith sets the tempo, it is the audience which is invited to a sing-along; across the podium the director has placed a large banner, with the slogan “ Besser als Musik hören, ist Musik machen. ” 11 (Making music is better than listening to it). By means of a conscious dramaturgic approach along diverse parameters, this early Lehrstück tries to highlight and hence activate the traditional concert ritual as a selfconscious social space of human practices and actions. The provocation highlights a plan, which will be developed and strengthened in the coming learning play - Die Massnahme (1930). When Brecht first handed over the text sketch for Die Massnahme to be read through for the Baden Baden music festival, it was rejected by the jury and returned to the sender due to formal inferiorities in the text 12 . But, here lies the problem, a problem that I discovered when I had the opportunity to stage Die Massnahme for The Bergen International Festival in 2007, and for The Salzburg Festival the year after. For Die Massnahme is in fact not a theatre play by Bertolt Brecht, neither is it libretto material. What it is, is a shared composition for the theatre venue, composed step by step, moment by moment, by the composer Hanns Eisler, the director Slatan Dudow and Brecht. Hence, the score is the play, or the other way around, the play is the score. And the score is in fact a music-dramaturgic entity and at the same time a performative - almost actionist - plan, in which actors, musicians and chorists, poetic structures and musical structures merge into - and discuss each other - as a strange kind of dialectical oratorium, not for - but with the audience. Verfremdung as an institutional self-Verfremdung I could go into more detail about the transcending implications of this musicdramaturgical experiment, but here I will just briefly present an argument developed 24 Tore Vagn Lid (Oslo) further in my book Gegenseitige Verfremdungen. Brecht ’ s aesthetic diagnosis, his critique of a dominating dramaturgical praxis - where automated forms render both the artist and the audience passive - finds itself counterpointed by the first radical approaches towards Die Lehrstücke ( ‘ The learning plays ’ ) as an artistic model for transcending institutionalized alienation. Therefore it is interesting that Adorno - both in his Aesthetic Theory and in his Philosophie der neuen Musik - remains almost blind to the revolutionary aesthetic and music-dramaturgical potential of Die Massnahme. Against Adorno ’ s credo on aesthetic theory as a kind of ‘ reading with the Art ’ , I would argue that Brecht presents us with some crucial tools for an alternative theoretical strategy, that is Verfremdung not only as an artistic method, but as an option for the art/ artist to use theory to confront itself and its apparatus. Simultaneously it becomes a method for transforming these insights into material or content for modern art itself. In this way, Brecht can be said to open up some important gates and entrances for a reflexive dramaturgy. Still, these entrances are historic fragments from an epoch quite different from the field of gravity created by today ’ s institutions and art organizations. So the question is: If the ambition is to develop a reflexive dramaturgy of our time, how should we then expand or supply our theoretical framework? If Verfremdung can also be understood as a specific form of aesthetic Selbst-Verfremdung or self-estrangement, the art apparatus ’ s self-confrontation “ from without ” as it were, it is not at all that paradoxical that other supporting pillars for a reflexive dramaturgy are also to be found at quite a distance from the typical discourses and references of traditional aesthetics and theatre research. Institution - apparat - apparatus The fundamental substantive and methodological problem of economics is constituted by the question: how are the origin and the persistence of the institutions of economic life to be explained, institutions which were not purposefully created by collective means, but which nevertheless - from our point of view - function purposefully. This is the basic problem of economics. (Max Weber 13 ) Institutions create behaviour: this motif runs like a thread through the works of the German sociologist Max Weber. In other words, the agents do not only create their institutions, but the institutions themselves reflexively create their agents. Max Weber ’ s concept of institution here echoes a French sociologist - Emile Durkheim. This is illustrated by an analysis of what could be called the autonomous lives or actions of houses and buildings. Durkheim writes: For instance, a definite type of architecture is a social phenomenon; but it is partially embodied in houses and buildings of all sorts which, once constructed become autonomous realities, independent of individuals. [. . .] Social life, [. . .] acts upon us from without. 14 At this point these two pioneers of social philosophy open up for a sociological view - also on theatre and on dramaturgy - which in productive ways complements Brecht ’ s suspicion concerning the Apparat. Moreover, because Weber and Durkheim ’ s sociological notions of institutions are still productive when it comes to understanding how slow historic and materialized structures work, not least when it comes to a complex machinery such as the theatre or the opera, often demanding considerable human and financial resources in order to make substantial changes. These are slow-moving structures in which agreements, contracts and infrastructure - together and over time 25 Institution - Apparatus - Dispositive: Searching for a Reflexive Dramaturgy - have been able to shape the gravity fields of today ’ s art institutions. Furthermore, this understanding of the theatre institutions can also be supplied and updated by related and more recent French concepts of the “ dispositif ” , often translated by the term - echoing Brecht - “ apparatus ” . The contribution of the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, is highly relevant, but almost overlooked here. According to Bachelard, a dominating science holds its position as a self-confirming tracery; a closed self-referring circle, which determines what at a given point it is possible to sense and to experience. Only by what Bachelard calls epistemological breaks 15 , are new aspects of reality allowed to emerge. When the philosopher Louis Althusser, in the 1960 s and early ’ 70 s, revitalizes Bachelard ’ s thoughts - within a Marxian tradition - he links the Bachelardian self-referring circle to a specific production of political ideology. When Althusser uses the word apparatus, a Brechtian leitmotif from the 1930 s is once again brought to life. Because what Althusser calls Apparatus produces not only behaviour, but a specific type of behaviour - reflecting the Marxian notion of a ruling class. For the Marxist Althusser, the Apparatus is in fact an ideology-producing one. Here, Apparatus does not represent an “ empty ” institutionalized “ structure ” or framework, but instead bears a specific ideological content - or to quote Althusser himself: “ An ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice or practices. This existence is material ” . 16 These are the ideas which will be developed and corrected both by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and later by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. But I will here just leave it with Michel Foucault ’ s attempt to encircle his own interpretation of the French term “ dispositif ” - here translated by Agamben as “ apparatus ” . In his essay “ What is an Apparatus? ” , Agamben quotes Foucault: What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions-in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus it self is the network that can be established between these elements . . . 17 Postlude Foucault, by emphasizing dispositive as “ [t]he said as much as the unsaid ” 18 , points to forces connected to the apparatus - like architecture, images, procedures etc. - which are working behind, or outside, the discursive language, but still are highly influential and powerful. Here a critical thread becomes visible, reaching from Foucault and Agamben ’ s “ dispositif ” back to Durkheim and Weber ’ s views on how institutions create behaviour, but even more so, the young Brecht and his concept of critique are revitalized. From this perspective, it is exactly when art and artists start fetishizing “ the free ” , “ the spontaneous ” and the “ natural ” , that the unconscious dramaturgy of the apparatus or the “ dispositive ” itself can maintain its position. Hence, critique from this perspective can first be made possible through a reflexive self-critique, a self-Verfremdung from the side of the theatre apparatus. Thus, from fear of “ the academic ” , of “ academic thinking ” , deeply rooted in an artistic tradition cultivating spontaneity, authenticity and emotionality a danger occurs: Because these prejudices can in fact prevent the artist from understanding and articulating the aesthetic-dramaturgic forces of gravity that tend to slip under the radar of the everyday discursive logics of theatre. 26 Tore Vagn Lid (Oslo) Forces that, no matter how, will influence what in the long run can be organized, produced and communicated on/ from the stage. Therefore, to talk about aesthetics without talking about sociology is just as problematic as separating art form from organisational form. The question of a reflexive dramaturgy should therefore not be located outside - nor above - artistic practice, but is in fact a crucial part of this practice itself. Notes 1 “ Deshalb bedarf Kunst der Philosophie, die sie interpretiert, um zu sagen, was sie nicht sagen kann [. . .] ” . (Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt a. M. 1973, p. 113) “ Therefore the art needs a philosophy of interpretation to say what it can not say itself. ” (my translation). 2 Tore Vagn Lid, Gegenseitige Verfremdungen, Theater als kritischer Erfahrungsraum im Stoffwechsel zwischen Bühne und Musik, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 2011. 3 Cf. ibid. 4 Bertolt Brecht, Notizen über die Dialektik auf dem Theater, in: Bertolt Brecht, Über experimentelles Theater, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, p. 152. 5 Brecht ’ s concept of a “ Theater des Menschen ” , as presented in his Dialoge aus dem Messingkauf (Frankfurt a. M. 1963), hence works as a counterpart to the ideologies and artistic strategies of naturalism, to the piscatorial documentarism and to the Lukàcs-version of “ socialist realism ” . 6 Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal 1938 bis 1942, Frankfurt a. M. 1973/ 1970, p. 138. 7 “ Der große Primatkampf zwischen Wort, Musik und Darstellung [. . .] kann einfach beigelegt werden durch die radikale Trennung der Elemente. ” Brecht, Arbeitsjournal 1942 bis 1955, Frankfurt a. M. 1993/ 1970, p. 558. 8 Bertolt Brecht, “ Behandlung von Systemen ” , in: Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden (Werkausgabe), Vol. 12, Frankfurt a. M. 1967, pp. 471 - 472, here p. 471. 9 Bertolt Brecht, “ Über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater ” , in: Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 15, pp. 472 - 482, here p. 478. 10 “ Wer von unsern nur ästhetisch geschulten Kritikern wäre imstande, zu begreifen, dass die selbstverständliche Praktik der bürgerlichen Kritik, in ästhetischen Fragen in jedem einzigen Fall den Theatern gegen die Produktion Recht zu geben, eine politische Ursache hat? ” Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 15, p. 136. 11 In: Stephan Hinton, Weill ’ s musical theater, Stages of reform, University of California Press 2012, p. 183. 12 “ Am 12. Mai 1930 schrieb Brecht einen offenen Brief an die Festivalleitung. Er erschien leicht verändert am 13. Mai 1930 im Berliner Börsen-Courier und wurde im Dezember 1932 in Versuche, Heft 4 aufgenommen; unter der Unterschrift ergänzte Brecht dort den Satz: ‘ Es blieb jedoch bei der Abhaltung des Musikfestes und der Ablehnung einer Aufführung der › Maßnahme ‹ › wegen formaler Minderwertigkeit des Textes ‹ . ’” , http: / / www.suhrkamp.de/ download/ Sonstiges/ Brecht_Notizbuecher/ Brecht_Notizbuecher_NB_24_EE_Anhang. pdf, p. 59 - 61 [accessed 19 January 2018]. 13 Max Weber, “ Economy and Society ” , in: Richard Swedberg and Ola Agevall (eds.), The Max Weber Dictionary, Stanford 2005, pp. 75 - 77, here p. 76. 14 Émile Durkheim, Suicide - A study in sociology, London/ Paris 1951, p. 278. 15 The concept of epistemological ruptures is developed by the French science philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962), for example, Bachelard 1976. For a short definition, see: http: / / www.oxfordreference.com/ view/ 10.1093/ oi/ authority.20110803095755104, [accessed 26 September 2018]. 16 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York 2001, p. 112. 17 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus - and Other Essays, Stanford 2009, p. 2. 18 Agamben ’ s translation of an interview with Michel Foucault from 1977 in ibid. 27 Institution - Apparatus - Dispositive: Searching for a Reflexive Dramaturgy “ perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . (Non-) Identity as Critique in Brecht ’ s Man equals Man Susanne Schmieden (Lucerne) The connection between crisis, identity, and criticism, I argue, plays an important role in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht. As a “ theatre of a-identity ” (Müller-Schöll 2002), it is constantly on the threshold of identity and crisis, it both negotiates and criticizes their interaction and interdependence. Brecht ’ s theatre confronts both the language and the means of the theatre with their possibilities and limitations in the light of their potential to constitute identity, thus placing them in permanent modes of crisis, i. e. they are involved in contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities and - not least - staged as a practice of criticism. Galy Gay from the early play Man Equals Man, I argue, is the theatrical setting and answer to the question of how “ desubjugation ” and “ desubjectification ” (cf. Butler, Foucault) can be set in motion, and to this extent, a literary figure, who anticipates a large amount of later (critical) social and cultural theory avant la lettre, and literally breathes life into Foucault ’ s description of criticism as “ art ” . Desubjugation and desubjectification, understood as the form and practice of liberating the subject, are accompanied by de-identification in a radical sense, which can provide answers - not just historically, but also within contemporary discourses - to the question of what theatre as criticism could mean in general and in particular in the present day. Preliminary considerations Today, flexibility, mobility, and adaptability seem to be the most important character traits of a person. Barely anything is more common than the unopposed opinion that these are values per se and that every individual needs to be trained in skills and manners, which correspond with these attributes, although they paradoxically represent the absence of any firm attribute. 1 At first sight, the ideal contemporary subject should therefore discard both the idea of a stable identity as well as that of personal identity. However, the exact opposite is the case: Contemporary culture is obsessed with questions and issues of personal identity and identity politics in particular. Consequently, the constantly proclaimed imperative of ‘ change ’ in so many areas goes along with its antipode: the frantic search for stability and identity. Rarely do these opposed characteristics call each other into question. Instead, the goal is to increase one ’ s flexibility and adaptability, while simultaneously finding a genuine identity and becoming more and more ‘ authentic ’ . Against this background, the conjunction of theater and critique goes beyond the conventional notion of theatre as an institution of critique, a place where critical subjects are able to play different kinds of roles in order to criticise society as a whole, or to criticise theatre itself as an institution. Today, the conjunction of theatre and critique could rather mean that theatre itself literally takes a ‘ critical ’ standpoint insofar as the primal scene of theater seems to be dissolving. The flexible and adaptable subject desired by today ’ s standards shall ‘ play ’ not only different but constantly changing roles without reflecting upon them properly. From this Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 28 - 36. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen point of view, nearly every situation in which two or more people come together could be signified as ‘ theatrical ’ in some way, and sometimes this really is the case. However, if theatre were simply two people breathing the same air, it would be indistinguishable from everyday life. Nor is the occasional nature of theatre what makes it distinctive: a lecturer and her audience, a politician and a crowd, a preacher and a congregation also breathe the same air, and yet none of them make theatre, exactly. Rather, the essence of theatre is the agreed-upon assumption that one of the two parties in the room is not quite herself - and the only reason the other party has shown up is because they are interested in the thing or the person or the idea that the first party represents, in full knowledge of the fact that representation is in some sense profoundly untruthful. 2 “ The agreed-upon assumption that one of the two parties in the room is not quite herself ” and therefore also the logic of representation are exactly those premises which are no longer clear when nearly everything can be ‘ theatrical ’ . If the idea of personal identity as both something limited and limiting is replaced by the idea of fluid, permanently changing, and not at least replaceable subjects in seemingly undefined situations, then it is no longer possible to distinguish between role-play and assimilation. For political reasons, this cannot be desirable. Eradicating the boundary between personal identity and role-play only neutralizes all transgressive elements inherent to the stage. When everything is theater nothing is. 3 Desubjectifications: Brecht, Foucault, Butler If these considerations are sound, Bertolt Brecht and his early plays especially might still be illuminating in regard to our present age and some of its ongoing and forthcoming developments. Brecht ’ s (early) play Man equals Man from 1926/ 1938 is, as the subtitle says, about The transformation of the porter Galy Gay in the military cantonment of Kilkoa during the year nineteen hundred and twenty five. 4 It is about a man, a worker living with his wife, who one day leaves his house to buy a fish and never returns or merely returns as a different person. When he meets three soldiers, who have just lost a fourth comrade, he is decided to replace him because, in accordance with the regime of the military logic, man equals man. 5 Obviously, Man equals Man is often read as a somewhat critical play about ‘ losing ’ one ’ s identity and about the leveling down of people in war or in military contexts. 6 This is true, with no doubt, but I want to claim that the play is even more than that: Firstly, it asks the question what identity means at all. Secondly, it projects a concept of identity that is inherently connected to the understanding of critique later developed by Michel Foucault and recoined as virtue by Judith Butler. The coherence between identity and critique shown in Brecht ’ s play is meaningful in a way that is almost contemporary. My claim is that in Brecht ’ s theatre and paradigmatically in his play Man equals Man there is a constant contestation between not only different identities but between different concepts of what it means to have or to ‘ be ’ an identity. As a representative of the theater of a-identity 7 outlined by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, it alternates constantly between identity and non-identity. Hence, it is in a literal sense ‘ critical ’ . Michel Foucault ’ s understanding of critique which he develops in his talk “ What is Critique? ” from 1978 and Judith Butler ’ s examination of it are helpful to understand why the questioning of identity and critique in this specific meaning are linked, and how 29 “ perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . (Non-) Identity as Critique in Brecht ’ s Man equals this is paradigmatically reflected in Brecht`s play. 8 In his talk, Foucault defines critique as “ the art of not being governed so much ” 9 . This phrase grasps Galy Gay ’ s strategy concerning his identity well and so it can be seen as an inherently theatrical practice of this kind of ‘ art ’ . The question I am particularly interested in is if Galy Gay ’ s apparent acceptance and affirmation of his new identity not only means submission but also liberation. Furthermore, it might be understood as what Foucault calls desubjectification and what Butler later broadens by focusing on the subject of virtue. My aim is not to read Brecht ’ s play through the lenses of Foucault and Butler. Instead, it is my understanding that all these works equally represent both a specific kind of art as well as a questioning of ‘ critique ’ itself, which places them in one line of political thought. Furthermore, I also want to establish a critical look on Foucault and Butler themselves for not sufficiently taking into account the concrete conditions for critique beyond the subject and its attitude. Although their thoughts must be understood as being political, they disregard the concrete limitations of “ the art of not being governed so much ” 10 . However, it is my assumption that critique can only be articulated concretely beyond the sphere of philosophy. Theatre might be the ideal facilitator of this dimension of critique. Being the Both as primal scene of theater and critique Galy Gay ’ s monologue, which is part of a play within the play, is crucial when discussing the concepts of identity and critique as they are developed by Man equals Man. Here Galy Gay finally transforms into the lost soldier Jeraiah Jip in five acts. This formal imitation of a classical tragedy is part of the greater Lustspiel and not least shows that a tragic hero is not possible in modern theatre anymore. In the fifth act of the imitated tragedy, laconically titled “ Number V ” , Galy Gay gives the following speech: I could not, without instant death Gaze into a crate at a drained face Of some person once familiar to me from the water ’ s surface Into which a man looked who, as I realise, died. Therefor I am unable to open this crate Because this fear is in the both of me, for perhaps I am the Both which has just come about On our earth ’ s transformable top surface: A chopped-off batlike thing hanging Betwixt rubber trees and hut, a night bird A thing that would gladly be cheerful. One man equals no man. Some one has to call him. [. . .] By what sign does Galy Gay know himself To be Galy Gay? Suppose his arm was cut off And he found it in the chink of a wall Would Galy Gay ’ s eye know Galy Gay ’ s arm And Galy Gay ’ s foot cry out: This is the one! ? Therefore I am not looking into this chest Moreover in my opinion the difference Between yes and no is not all that great. And if Galy Gay were not Galy Gay Then he would be the drinking son of some mother who Would be some other man ’ s mother if she Were not his, and thus would anyway drink. And would have been produced in March, not in September Unless instead of March he had Been produced only in September of this year, or already In September the year before Which represents that one small year ’ s difference That turns one man into another man. And I, the one I and the other I Are used and accordingly usable. 30 Susanne Schmieden (Lucerne) And since I never gazed at that elephant I shall close an eye to what concerns myself And shed what is not likeable about me and thereby Be pleasant. 11 In this central monologue Galy Gay establishes a notion of identity that is essentially paradoxical: While (personal) identity can be described as a seamless relation between me and myself, Galy Gay identifies himself with something that even grammatically is impossible both in English as in the German original text. 12 He calls himself ‘ the Both ’ , or more precisely, he tries to justify his inability “ to open this crate/ Because this fear is in the both of me, for perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . From a psychological viewpoint, one could assess the self-description articulated in the monologue as a manifestation of a crisis insofar as crisis literally means a decision or a separation. What is interesting is that the identity of the speaking subject “ has just come about ” . It is in other words not something that is given and static but emerges exactly in the critical moment when Galy Gay is expressing his paradoxical identity by saying: “ I am the Both. ” This means, he is the one and only, and he is both the one and the other one. Only because he is “ one I and the other I ” , he is able to reflect upon himself as somebody who can say “ I ” . Furthermore, he also refers to the myth of Narcisse earlier when he says: “ I could not, without instant death/ Gaze into a crate at a drained face/ Of some person once familiar to me from the water ’ s surface/ Into which a man looked who, as I realise, died. ” However, although he describes the typical narcissistic scenario, he himself cannot be seen as a Narcisse, who died after mistaking his reflection for another person. In fact, it is just the other way around: He fully realizes that he himself is separated, while at the same time being the person lying dead in the crate. Although Galy Gay might identify with this primal scene of both mythology and psychology, he himself has already transcended these contexts. Therefore, I want to describe his crisis as the primal scene of theatre. In this primal scene of theatre, a subject which is ‘ both ’ and at the same time itself and another self speaks to an audience that is fully aware of this division. Consequently, the audience is able to concentrate on the representation of this division rather than the person who merely represents it. Simultaneously, the question if there is any ‘ truth ’ to this division is suspended. Theatre as it is reflected in the play within the play thus teaches the audience to distinguish between the seeming and the real. It is in this sense far more about concentration than about distraction. This might just be a typical Brechtian view, but the primal scene is universal and a necessary condition of theatre, because “ the essence of theatre is the agreedupon assumption that one of the two parties in the room is not quite herself ” . 13 What Galy Gay, or more precisely, what the entire play shows us, are the problems which arise when either the subject or the audience do not know that they are part of an enactment, or when they are forced to believe in the identity of representation and the subject that represents. Consequently, the play is about soldiers in war, because a depersonalized soldier is not capable of representation in the theatrical sense for he lacks the distance that would enable himself to act ‘ as if ’ . Nevertheless, Man equals Man is a Lustspiel and produces several possibilities to dissociate oneself from the play. The gap between acting and performing the impossibility to act is therefore particularly emphasized. Of course, one could counter that these considerations are the keynote of Brecht ’ s Epic theater. However, I would claim that Galy Gay ’ s crisis is more profound and touches the theatrical situation per se. This is what 31 “ perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . (Non-) Identity as Critique in Brecht ’ s Man equals makes Brecht so important in the context of theater as critique. Going back to the monologue, we learn that the “ fear is in the both ” of Galy Gay and that he is of course suffering because he himself did not choose to play the role i. e. to be ‘ the Both ’ . This shows that he is fully aware of his state. Therefore, he does not identify himself with the soldier he is supposed to be. This is important: If he was the soldier he is meant to be, he would not be able to articulate his crisis as he does in his monologue, because he would not be able to remember his preexisting self. What he represents in the monologue is the impossibility of representation in the context of war and every other totalitarian logic. It prevents representation insofar as it operates with only one valid reality and one single logic, which is the law of identity. Therefore, it prohibits acting and role-playing. Representation in the theatrical sense is only possible where the subject is granted enough space between his ‘ inner self ’ and the role he is able to play in a situation that confronts him, because this alone prevents him from losing his very own identity. Theatre in general can be seen both as the art and as the institution where this is done professionally. Galy Gay might remind us of that fact as well as of the political danger of its deprivation. By being both, being ‘ the Both ’ , Galy Gay finally does not transgress the limits of what we would call an identity. Instead, he transgresses the limits of language and of what can be said about himself and his identity in the language which constitutes the new identity given to him by force. Insofar, he is performing a critical practice. He is ‘ critical ’ in the literal sense of the word, and that leads us over to Foucault ’ s and Butler ’ s notion of ‘ Critique ’ and their questioning. Questioning Critique When we say that Galy Gay, who questions a lot of things and most of all himself, is performing a critical practice, we have to notice that Foucault tries to address the subject of critique by posing a question himself, namely: “ What is Critique? ” As it later turns out, the act of asking a question itself is the crucial critical practice for him, beginning with the central question of the Enlightenment: “ What is Aufklärung? ” 14 Because “ critique only exists in relation with something other than itself ” , it is, as Foucault argues, “ an instrument, a means for the future or a truth that it will not know and that it will not be ” . 15 One could also say that it is a kind of medium that is always related to the ‘ something ’ that is criticized, and that due to this relation, it can never be the aim of critique to achieve a state of literally ‘ absolute ’ freedom. Furthermore, Foucault claims that the ‘ art ’ which corresponds with critique is, as mentioned in the beginning, “ the art of not being governed so much ” 16 . This specifically does not mean the art of not being governed at all. Instead, Foucault aims at a “ critical attitude ” as a kind of reluctance, resistance, or even only guardedness when faced with a power that is able to govern. 17 In his own words: Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The essential function of critique would be that of desubjectification in the game of what one could call, in a word, the politics of truth. 18 By his own admission, Foucault adopts the “ politics of truth ” as a regime and power which governs the subject and insofar has to be criticized by the subject from the definition Kant gave of Aufklärung. For Foucault, the form of the question therefore is not only the main technique of establishing a relation 32 Susanne Schmieden (Lucerne) to the world but it also represents the kind of self-relation critique and Aufklärung stand for. Insofar it consequently has to lead to a questioning of critique itself. Viewed in this light, critique - as well as theatre as a regime of representation - implies self-limitation in order to uphold its significance and to distinguish itself from the ‘ politics of truth ’ . Going back to Galy Gay ’ s monologue, we remember that there are also some questions in the middle of the later version from 1938, namely: By what sign does Galy Gay know himself To be Galy Gay? Suppose his arm was cut off And he found it in the chink of a wall Would Galy Gay ’ s eye know Galy Gay ’ s arm And Galy Gay ’ s foot cry out: This is the one! ? 19 These questions do not target the essence of something, of Galy Gay himself in this case, rather they ask for reliable signs and definitions by which he could know for sure who he really is. So, the question here is not: “ Who is Galy Gay? ” , or: “ What is my own identity? ” , but: “ By what signs does the one I know that it is the other I? ” According to this, self-relation is not based on an interrogation of the self but on signs, on something superficial and visible for others. Obviously, the answer, that is not given but shown, is that there are no reliable signs of this kind, only arbitrary attributions and names. This neither means that there can be no identity in the sense that every subject is always already fragmented nor does it mean that the ‘ real ’ identity lies inside the self. It is just the opposite: Limitations are indispensable for evolving an identity and these limitations need to be extrinsic and recognized by the outer world, although they are not naturally given. Asking for signs therefore means to demand a shared sense of reality, which actually does not exist in this situation. By demonstrating the dissent between the one and the other, between being Galy Gay and Jeraiah Jip, Galy Gay insists on the indivisibility of what one could call his personality. Against this backdrop, the practice of critique and the theatrical practice of critique in particular confront the reality given by the politics of truth with another, possibly inferior reality. Thereby theatre discloses inconsistencies without trying to eliminate them - something the politics of truth are inclined to do because as a rational power, they prohibit to go beyond the law of excluded middle. Practices of virtue Judith Butler ’ s reading of Foucault in her lecture from 2000 in which she wants to show “ that both his aesthetics and his account of the subject are integrally related to both his ethics and politics ” 20 leads on to another important issue for my reading of Brecht`s play, namely the practice of virtue. Butler calls attention to the fact that “ paradoxically, self-making and desubjugation happen simultaneously when a mode of existence is risked which is unsupported by what he [Foucault, S. S.] calls the regime of truth. ” 21 Her focus lies on the concreteness of critique and its dependency on its objects, and she concludes that critique “ should bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself. ” 22 If we reconsider Galy Gay ’ s monologue, we get a more precise understanding of what he is doing: By speaking as an individual and by taking into account and reflecting upon this kind of concrete act, he is able to show the contradictions and inconsistencies in apparent tautologies like “ Man equals Man ” . His claim of being ‘ the Both ’ insofar is nothing else than a questioning of the very framework of evaluation that is at work here. This framework of evaluation does not include a 33 “ perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . (Non-) Identity as Critique in Brecht ’ s Man equals man who is ‘ the Both ’ and is even able to articulate it. Nor does it relate to someone who is able to reflect upon these contradictions by depicting the contradictions between different attributions that are given to him by different parties and that do not correspond with his self-conception. Because he himself “ has just come about ” , we can say that Galy Gay ’ s situation is paradigmatic for the simultaneity of selfmaking and desubjugation. The mode of existence he is risking is nothing more than life itself, at least from his point of view from where it is literally impossible to face his own death: I could not, without instant death Gaze into a crate at a drained face Of some person once familiar to me from the water ’ s surface Into which a man looked who, as I realise, died. Therefor I am unable to open this crate Because this fear is in the both of me, for perhaps I am the Both which has just come about [. . .]. 23 In Butler ’ s reading of Foucault, it is finally the aspect of virtue as a critical practice that is crucial for her interpretation and her own point. “ And virtue is not only a way of complying with or conforming with preestablished norms. It is, more radically, a critical relation to those norms, one which, for Foucault, takes shape as a specific stylization of morality. ” 24 She is not only talking about “ a ‘ right ’ to question ” in the context of critique and virtue but also posing a lot of questions herself, concrete questions, which are very often examples for the concreteness of critique I mentioned before, even so she herself is not concrete in a political sense here. 25 One of the questions is: “ What counts as a person? ” 26 Not only is this a good example but the central question in Man equals Man and also in our today ’ s engagement with the ‘ flexibility ’ of a person. Practices of virtue indeed demand “ a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgement in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint ” , 27 but also, I would like to add, to recognise the limits of this kind of critical practice and of any other ‘ risky practice ’ . It is just not always possible to “ yield artistry from constraint ” for there can be constraint to an extent that inhibits any opportunity for action. Insisting on being the Both Critique as a practice of virtue can of course be articulated in different ways, for example literature, theater, essay, theory and so on, but if it is always an art, the “ art of not being governed so much ” , then theater might be its favored form because it is able to include other forms. In this sense, it has maybe become clear by now, why I did not want to interpret Brecht ’ s play with the help of the theoretical writings of Foucault and Butler, but to put it just the other way around: In a properly avant la lettre manner the play shows and somehow practices the kind of critique which is later formulated as and claimed to be a practice. In Man equals Man this has already been done before Foucault and Butler. The text shows us how this critical practice might look like. Not at least, Man equals Man is a play not only about the transgression of given limits, but also about the importance of recognized limits. The very last sentence of the play spoken by Galy Gay suggests even a literal transgression: “ We are now crossing the frontier of frozen Tibet. ” 28 Even so, to cross a frontier one needs to know where exactly the frontier is located, and moreover, it is not always evident if there is freedom beyond or war, as the end of the play suggests. After all, 34 Susanne Schmieden (Lucerne) a transgression is not the same as the dissolution of boundaries. However, today ’ s claim for flexibility is certainly the opposite of a critical standpoint in any way. A concrete practice of virtue in these days might be the questioning of this flexibility by insisting on being both oneself and not always oneself. Theatre, probably more than philosophy, might help a lot to develop such a kind of critical attitude. Notes 1 Due to the omnipresence of this opinion - one could go so far as to call it an ideology - , I refrain from giving concrete examples. However, this notion can be found in any context from employment ads and educational plans to products of pop culture and advertisement. It is my assumption that this thought is just part of our everyday world to an extent that it influences the way we look at others and ourselves even if we are fully aware of its dubiousness and its inconsistencies. 2 Holger Schott Syme, “ How to Kill a Great Theatre: The Tragedy of the Volksbühne ” , in: dispositio.net (http: / / www.dispositio.net/ archives/ 2452) [accessed 20 May 2017]. 3 Syme ’ s phrasing of “ being not quite herself ” does not even go far enough, because he seems to have in mind Eric Bentley ’ s formula: “ The theatrical situation, reduced to a minimum, is that A impersonates B while C looks on. ” See Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama, London 1966, p. 150. For my own argumentation, the important difference does not lie in the difference between “ being not quite herself ” and role-play, but in the awareness of an artificial situation and the possibility to make a distinction between A and B on the one side, and the elimination of B on the other side. My interpretation of Syme ’ s phrasing, in other words, comes to the conclusion that he is in fact talking about role-play and wants to distinguish it from a blurred concept of theater where more or less everything can be denoted as ‘ theater ’ and where we have only A looking on C. 4 Bertolt Brecht, “ Man equals Man ” , translated by Gerhard Nellhaus, in: John Willett and Ralph Manheim (eds.), Collected Plays: Two, London 1994, pp. 1 - 76. The central passage for my argumentation, Galy Gay ’ s monologue, was edited in the later version from 1938 and the translation refers to that later edition. 5 The translation I am working with does not reflect the formal logic of the German title “ Mann ist Mann ” that in fact means “ man equals man ” as well as “ a man is a man ” but most importantly imitates the law of identity and its symbolic representation, “ A=A ” . 6 See especially Klaus-Detlef Müller, “ Mann ist Mann “ , in: Walter Hinderer (eds.), Brechts Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, Stuttgart 1984, pp. 89 - 105; Lothar van Laak, Medien und Medialität des Epischen in Literatur und Film des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bertolt Brecht - Uwe Johnson - Lars von Trier, München 2009, p. 188. 7 Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Das Theater des „ konstruktiven Defaitismus “ . Lektüren zur Theorie eines Theaters der A-Identität bei Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht und Heiner Müller, Frankfurt a. M./ Basel 2002. 8 Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , translated by Kevin Paul Geiman, in: James Schmidt (eds.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Questions and Eighteenth Century Answers, Berkeley 1996, pp. 382 - 398; Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” , in: David Ingram (eds.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, London 2002, pp. 212 - 226. 9 Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” p. 384. 10 Ibid. 11 Brecht, “ Man equals Man ” , pp. 60 - 62. (Scene 9, Number V). 12 The Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie describes it under the lemma “ Identität, persönliche ” as “ relationaler Begriff (etwas kann nur identisch mit etwas sein) ” . Stefan Glomb, “ Identität, persönliche ” , in: Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Metzler 35 “ perhaps/ I am the Both which has just come about ” . (Non-) Identity as Critique in Brecht ’ s Man equals Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, Stuttgart/ Weimar 2013, p. 324. 13 See Syme, “ How to Kill a Great Theatre: The Tragedy of the Volksbühne ” , 2017. 14 Foucault actually uses the German word ‘ Aufklärung ’ even in the French original text, because he wants to refer back especially to the German Enlightenment and Kant ’ s manner of questioning something, especially to his article on the question Was ist Aufklärung? See Immanuel Kant, “ Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? [Berlinische Monatsschrift, Dezember 1784, S. 481 - 494.] ” , in: Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? Ausgewählte kleine Schriften, edited by Horst D. Brandt, Hamburg 1999, pp. 20 - 27. 15 Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , p. 383. 16 Ibid., p. 384. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 386. 19 Brecht, “ Man equals Man ” , p. 61. 20 Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” , p. 214. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Brecht, “ Man equals Man ” , p. 60. 24 Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” , p. 215. 25 Ibid., p. 219. 26 Ibid., p. 220. 27 Ibid., p. 226. 28 Brecht, “ Man equals Man ” , p. 76. 36 Susanne Schmieden (Lucerne) More Than Activism, Less Than Art: The Heritage of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno in Contemporary Theatre Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) One of the goals of engaged I subversive art is to change social anomalies, and to effect political change. However, in the contemporary world, instead of large, global, radical movements or artistic actions, one might rather speak of a collection of micro-changes, especially in elitist art. We should therefore consider the ways in which art prevails over activism, but achieves its ultimate goal just as well: subverting the status quo, undermining normal, legitimate, and accepted models of behaviour, transforming social life and its ethical parameters. Drawing on the legacy of Bertolt Brecht, I will take the activists and directors Christoph Schlingensief and Oliver Frljic´ as examples of contemporary artivism. I would like to start my discussion on “ more than activism, less than art ” , or artivism (a combination of art and activism) 1 , with a famous statement by Theodor W. Adorno: “ It is self-evident that nothing concerning the art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. ” 2 The concept of art has undergone a significant change at the beginning of the 21 st century — a shift that requires new ways of thinking and writing about contemporary performing arts. Rather than creating anything genuinely “ new ” , globalization has produced conditions that might permit us to rethink performing arts in a larger historical and geographical context. One of the goals of engaged/ subversive art is to change social anomalies, that is, to effect political change, which is almost impossible to achieve today on a global level. Therefore, instead of large, global, radical movements or artistic actions, one might speak of a collection of microartivisms, especially in elitist art. To be specific, we should take into consideration the ways in which art prevails over activism, but achieves its ultimate goal just as well: subverting its status quo, undermining the normal, legitimate, and accepted models of behaviour, transforming social life and its ethical parameters. What kind of results may engaged/ subversive art expect/ achieve in the political/ social arena today? What are its aims and limits? The Legacy of Brecht Adorno was adamant that there is no space for freedom in capitalism with consumption prevailing over the whole system including the arts. 3 The relationship between the performing arts and the new logic of the market enables us to observe the functioning of today ’ s artistic scene from another perspective. Its basic feature is not only the widely criticized commodification of culture, but also a less commonly noticed, and perhaps even more important trend in the opposite direction: the ever-increasing culturalisation of the market economy itself, in which cultural performance is primarily determined by its social efficacy. 4 A short circuit between culture and the market results in the disappearance of the old, modernist, avant-garde logic of provoking and shocking the establishment. Basically, that is Adorno ’ s thesis in most of his writ- Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 37 - 46. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen ings, especially in his Aesthetic Theory. Even when hiding under its modernist guise, art is so inseparable from its character as a commodity that its very effort for change remains superficial and imperceptible, rendering excess acceptable. Today, in order to reproduce itself under the conditions of market competition, the cultural-economic apparatus is increasingly obliged not only to tolerate, but also even directly to encourage ever more shocking effects and products. In postmodernism, even extreme excess loses its shock value and is entirely integrated into the arts market, transforming avant-garde radicalism into nostalgia. 5 Historical misunderstandings between Adorno and Brecht 6 aside, the abovementioned words of Adorno ’ s confirm the dialectical aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht, who maintained that art ought to re-examine the world by which it is surrounded. For Brecht, there was no such thing as the essence of timeless art. Instead, individual societies should create their own artworks to best reflect the particular conditions of their current existence. All his life, Brecht fought to prove that theatrical experience was always weaker than real life, and that it was increasingly difficult for the theatre to reproduce the contemporary world. It was this realization that made him search for new artistic methods. As Fredric Jameson points out, critical approaches to Brecht need to categorize his work carefully, and situate each within the context of the political struggles and social changes in which he lived and worked. 7 Brecht, who was also capable of selfcriticism, stated that his “ non-Aristotelian ” playwriting, and the epic style of acting that went with it, did not represent the only solution to the problem of representation. He maintained that the contemporary world could only be presented to contemporary audiences if it was shown as a world capable of transformation. “ People of the presentday value questions on account of their answers. They are interested in events and situations in face of which they can do something. ” 8 In his short essay, “ Can the Present-day World be Reproduced by Means of Theatre ” that was presented at the fifth Darmstädter Gespräche in 1955, Brecht concluded that the present-day world can be reproduced even in the theatre, but only if it is understood as being capable of change. For a Marxist like Brecht, the mission of art was organically bound up with politics as its integral function, which was to transform society through the theatre audience: “ The modern theatre mustn ’ t be judged by its success in satisfying the audience ’ s habits but by its success in transforming them. ” 9 But did he manage to do that? Perhaps he managed to change the theatre audience, but the audience did not change society. However, on second thoughts, what he managed to do was to change the configuration and the language of contemporary theatre and performance. His thesis on the relationship between theatricality and politics has not only survived to the present, but has also evolved in a number of directions, such as in the work of different theatre directors and companies renowned for their regular criticism of representational (or traditional) theatre and the society that provides such theatre with an alibi. Non-representational theatre allows for reconciliation between aesthetics and ethics in the practices of contemporary performing arts and contributes to the concept of inaesthetics as defined by Alan Badiou: By ‘ inaesthetics ’ I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art. 10 38 Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) Therefore, when speaking of the concept of artivism, which could be defined as “ more than activism, less than art ” , one should speak neither of anti-aesthetics, nor of counter-aesthetics, but of inaesthetics, a concept that points to something within aesthetics but at the same time to a deactivation and re-examination of aesthetics. In that sense, Brecht ’ s work in the theatre (his plays and theories) could be crucial for understanding the inaesthetics of artivism. For Brecht, art cannot produce truth, but instead is “ an elucidation [. . .] of the conditions for a courage of truth ” . This courage of truth “ is a therapy against cowardice. Not against cowardice in general, but against cowardice in the face of truth. ” 11 According to Brecht, any theatre that makes a serious attempt to stage new plays risks being “ radically transformed ” . Here Brecht is not thinking about the effect plays have on the audience, but their effect on the theatre and on society. In this sense, Brecht could be seen as a predecessor of what today is considered artivism, since artivists want to change the general political and social conditions by means of art - “ not so much inside the arts system as outside it, that is, change the conditions of reality itself ” . 12 Artivists aspire to change the world and make it a better place, without ceasing to be artists. However, the effort artivists make to combine art and social action is constantly under attack from those who hold traditional views on art and who see activism as artistically inadequate. Many critics say that the social and political activism of artivists is at the expense of artistic quality. Schlingensief ’ s Theatre-Ideas This kind of criticism was often expressed in relation to the work of activist artist Christoph Schlingensief. Often challenged, criticized and even arrested, Schlingensief was first ignored by the establishment and then celebrated as a great artist shortly before his untimely death in 2010. He did not live to receive the Golden Lion that was awarded to the German Pavilion which was entirely dedicated to his work at the Venice Biennial in 2011. But to paraphrase a sentence from Der Spiegel: “ The only good Schlingensief is a dead Schlingensief! ” 13 Schlingensief ’ s anarchism and creativity permitted no objective assessment or definition of his art, because he appeared in every medium, with no prior preparation or a text of the performance, whether in televised talk shows, on the radio, in plays, or performances in terms of action painting. Chaotic, hermetic, and wild, his productions invariably demanded his presence onstage, not only in the capacity of the master of ceremonies, but also in that of the narrator, so that he could explain to the audience all the aspects of the story. He considered working in the theatre “ a kind of social work ” , based on the actors ’ collective experience, improvisation, and mutual relations as well as their relations to the audience who were often put at the heart of the action. One of his notorious performances was his production Ausländer raus - Bitte liebt Österreich (Immigrants out - Please, Love Austria, 2000), made for Wiener Festwochen, in which twelve immigrants were supposed to “ fight ” to be allowed to gain indefinite working and living permits in Austria, while the audience, as in a Big Brother reality-TV show, voted to decide who would win. 14 Eventually the performance revealed the deep roots of xenophobia in Austria. 15 Its subversion and alteration of capitalist media in an experimental performance approximated this performance to what Brian Holmes has defined as “ reverse engineering ” . 16 But as long as Schlingensief was undertaking his “ actions ” inside film and theatre, it looked as though everything was under control. However, under the ever watchful 39 More Than Activism, Less Than Art: The Heritage of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno in eye of the media, each one of his artivist actions caused huge public scandals, which landed him in prison on more than one occasion. In 1997 at Documenta X in Kassel, he issued a call to all unemployed people. He was arrested in the course of the performance when he held up a poster saying “ Kill Helmut Kohl ” , then chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1998 in Baden im Wolfgangsee, he invited the public to jump in the lake to raise the water level so that, potentially, the water would flood the houses of the rich, including that of Helmut Kohl. For the 1998 German federal election he founded Chance 2000, a party for the unemployed, the homeless, prostitutes, and prisoners. In 1999, he sought to collect a million Deutschmarks in five-mark notes, which would then be thrown at those attending the opening of the new Reichstag dome. I consider Schlingensief one of German ’ s most significant contemporary artists, an artist whose entire being and work absorbed and reflected social anomalies of Germany and so-called Western democracies. However, his entire artivist career had been utterly negated until 2004, because many considered him a simple provocateur, perhaps a circus-master, or even a charlatan, until he was embraced by the very same elitist culture he had fought against all his life. The moment when he was diagnosed with cancer marked a turning point in Schlingensief ’ s career, because at that same time he was offered the opportunity to direct Wagner ’ s Parsifal for Bayreuth Festival in 2004, even though he had often ridiculed the festival organizers publicly. It looked as though from that moment onward, Germany ’ s history and current reality had lost all interest for him. His career is therefore one of the most peculiar careers in art over the last twenty years. This is further illustrated by the Bambi Award, Germany ’ s top prize in the field of media, which was posthumously awarded to him in 2010. This paradox of the German public ’ s belated love for Schlingensief does not suggest that something had changed in Germany, or that his critique of German nationalism was finally understood and accepted, but that Schlingensief had been successfully assimilated by his own personal self-depoliticisation in the wake of his illness. Unfortunately, even though Schlingensief is survived by a wealth of material, nothing remains of his artivism. If performance is defined as a piecing together of different elements, material and conceptual ones alike, which exist only in the very act of performing, during an event, a performance, or in representation, this means that the bringing together of these different elements directly produces ideas that Badiou calls theatre-ideas. 17 This implies that theatre-ideas could not be produced by any other means or at any other place. None of the elements used and not even the text of the performance itself, can produce theatre-ideas by themselves. Badiou writes that “ the theatre-ideas come forth only in the (brief) time of its performance, of its representation ” 18 . According to Brecht, “ the theatre becomes a place for philosophers, and for such philosophers as not only wish to explain the world but wish to change it ” . 19 The modern theatre, according to him, does not need to be questioned about its degree of conformity with the conventions of the theatre but about its ability to master the rules that govern great processes of our age: “ not about whether it manages to interest the spectator in buying a ticket - i. e. in the theatre itself - but about whether it manages to interest him in the world ” . 20 Brecht and Schlingensief were interested in a kind of theatre that would be capable of representing political and historical events that shape individual lives. Like Brecht, Schlingensief always worked on the ways of presenting and 40 Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) elaborating relations between individual destinies and impersonal historical developments. What makes them similar is that they showed society not as static but as in constant motion, developing over time, and subject to change. In this kind of dialectics, the individual appears not just as a psychological subject but as an intersection of social and historical relations that are changeable. Behind their radical thinking and actions there was a deep faith in the possibility for human beings to change. Oliver Frljic´: Transforming the Audience Oliver Frljic´, a Croatian theatre director, always confronts his audience with hidden and disturbing taboos, using the theatre as a performative tool, as he has claimed several times. Frljic´ constantly provokes the postcold war societies, e. g. of the former Yugoslavian republics, Poland, and Germany, with all that is difficult to understand and what is suppressed and falsified from their recent past. He is almost a persona non grata in most of the ex-Yugoslav republics for his radical productions and extreme statements. His appointment as manager of the Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka spawned a large public debate in 2014 until he finally left in 2016. He and his collaborators approached the theatre as a “ found object ” , treating it as an alternative theatre space and not as a national theatre. They not only made audacious changes to its repertory, but, by putting various slogans and banners outside of the building, they also tried to communicate even with those members of the public who never go to the theatre. On the first day, over the front of theatre ’ s façade, they installed an enormous billboard stating “ Theatre for the People ” , while for the last season they decided to replace it with a quote from the Croatian constitution, “ Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Speech ” . By means of billboards and a new repertory, Oliver Frljic´ opened a dialogue not only with the city of Rijeka but with the whole Croatian society, which still suffers from many unresolved political and social problems, turning the theatre from a sitespecific into a community-specific theatre. Frljic´ ’ s projects always go beyond the emancipation of the audience, since he is constantly trying to deconstruct society ’ s values, beliefs and traditions. “ What I was trying to do was the performative deconstruction of that institution and its structure; ” he says, “ all norms, all fundamentals were being questioned. ” 21 It is interesting to note that Frljic´ is never concerned with what can be defined as a success. On the contrary, most of his productions give the impression of being unfinished, a kind of mis-performance, a sort of bad amateur theatre, strongly influenced by performance art. The audience has a similar reaction to his productions as it had to Schlingensief ’ s performances: they are disgusted, they protest, or leave the theatre, but they are never indifferent. One of Frljic´ ’ s strategies includes constant and radical changes within the theatre, entailing the permanent questioning and interrogation of existing power structures within the institution. In February of 2017, Frljic´ presented, The Curse (Klatwa) at Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw, a new version of a play by Stanis ł aw Wyspia ń ski, written in 1899. Frljic´ ’ s interpretation of the play was critical of the Catholic Church and included a scene in which an actor performs an oral sex act on a statue of Pope John Paul II, which triggered public outrage, was condemned by the Church, and led to protests. In addition, threats of violence were made against the actors and the director, which also affected Frljic´ ’ s leadership of the Malta Festival in Poznan last year. 41 More Than Activism, Less Than Art: The Heritage of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno in This is not the first time that one of Frljic´ ’ s productions had been censored. Because he is well-known for his productions that ask inconvenient and politically provocative questions, his productions regularly meet with censorship. A few years ago, he was responsible for a production in Rijeka entitled Aleksandra Zec (2014) that dealt with the brutal murder of a Serbian family at the beginning of the war in Croatia in 1991. A few years before that, the production Zoran Đ in đ ic ´ in Belgrade dealt with the assassination of the Serbian Prime Minister in 2003. He also created much controversy with his latest production, Our Violence, Your Violence (2016), using as a premise Peter Weiss ’ seminal essayistic novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Of all of Frljic´ ’ s productions, this one comes closest to debating the role of art in today ’ s society: How much can art contribute to social change of any kind? Can art be an alternative to existing political and economic systems and individual interests? 22 There were also attempts to ban his production of Balkan Macht Frei staged at Munich ’ s Residenztheater, but then it was declared by Nachtkritik to be the fourth best production of 2015. 23 The production originally set out to tell the story of the refugees from the Balkans, but it later developed into a kind of autobiographical story of a Balkan theatre director engaged to work in a German theatre (the program stated that the director had been killed in the meantime, but the theatre management had decided to present the play to the audience anyway). Like most of Frljic´ ’ s productions, Balkan Macht Frei also started with a direct accusation against the audience for their comfortable position and indifference in the face of the suffering of immigrants, who had just begun their mass exodus to Europe. In an extended monologue, the director ’ s alterego, Franz, attacks the audience for enjoying the spectacle on refugees, a speech that already made several people leave the theatre on the opening night. Afterwards Franz/ Frljic´ was subjected to “ torture ” , a scene of “ real water boarding ” to which the spectators started to protest loudly, while some even climbed on to the stage and attempted to stop it. 24 Many reviews after the opening night focussed on the dilemma presented by this scene: Is it ethical to perform torture on stage, or even to watch it, and is this actually theatre or just an act of brutal performance? Some declared the production to be nontheatre because the hyper-realistic scene surpassed the restrictions of theatrical representation and had crossed an ethical demarcation line, which required active resistance by the audience. Frljic´ explained: “ When I want to create a conflict with the audience, my dream is to have antagonism between every audience member. The goal is to divide them as much as possible and thus to reaffirm their uniqueness. The task is not to unite them, not to find a common denominator or a common system of values that we share. ” 25 This leads us back to Brecht, according to whom the most successful theatre will be the one that enters into a risky association between artists and spectators. Its aim is to realise their intellectual as well as emotional abilities, looking for that which may be created in the new context of the performance. This position cannot and may never be neutral. Viewed in this way, artivism comes closest to what can be defined as its “ efficacy ” , which means that the “ real ” essence of art is communicated by its public impact and not by the artworks themselves: the audience ’ s desire to be “ transposed and transformed ” . 26 On many occasions Brecht stressed that “ the audience is a collection of individuals, capable of thinking and reasoning, of making judgments even in the theatre; it treats them as individuals of mental and emotional maturity, and believes it wishes to be so regarded ” . 27 42 Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) Conclusion Many of Oliver Frljic´ ’ s live collaborative practices are made with the aim of motivating the audience to join in, and to activate the social milieu in which these practices unfold. According to Boris Groys, the tendency toward collaborative, participatory practice is certainly one of the main characteristics of contemporary art. “ Emerging throughout the world are numerous artists ’ groups that pointedly stipulate collective, even anonymous, authorship of their artistic production ” . 28 However, only a few postmodern performance artists have tried to regain common ground with their audience by enticing them out of their passive roles using political or social engagement: “ When the viewer is involved in artistic practice from the outset, every piece of criticism he utters is self-criticism. ” 29 This decision by the artists to give up their exclusive authorship would seem primarily to empower the viewer. “ This sacrifice ultimately benefits the artist, however, for it frees him from the power that the cold eye of the uninvolved viewer exerts over the resulting artwork ” . 30 Perhaps the fear of artivists ’ performances results from the fear that all public performances are potential political acts echoing variations of representative democracy, which according to Jacques Rancière, generate and reformulate public life, even if these changes are very slow or marginal. Performances produce an organized public that is an abstraction. Because the public can be mobilized occasionally in moments of crisis, modern democracies continuously count on this effect. 31 This also brings us back to Victor Turner, according to whom what is interesting about live performances is the blend they offer of “ lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship ” . 32 Theatre audience(s) can represent a passage from the spontaneous or existential communitas to the ideological one that can offer a new model of society. According to Brecht, the rapid social and economic development of our period has altered the audience “ swiftly and radically, demanding and facilitating ever new modes of thought, feeling and behavior. ” 33 The strong urge of contemporary artists to make their art useful could be seen historically as a new position and requires new theoretical reflection. The central goal of such reflection should be to analyse with precision the meaning and political function of art. Only then will this dilemma be settled and will such productions be generally accepted, even if outside of mainstream theatre. According to Richard Schechner, today, politically and socially engaged performance artists, activists and scholars could be defined as a New Third World analogous to the political Third World Movement: 34 they are people who practice collaborative performance research and want to change the world. 35 One of the goals, therefore, should not only be to develop new forms of resistance against the endless changes in society and the economy, but also to take over the inherited forms of artistic struggle and solidarity (primarily from the historical avant-garde), to develop them into new instruments, new forms and new concepts that might bring art into antithesis with society, or with what Adorno called the “ social context of blindness ” , because, according to him, [a]rt must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber. Yet art is not to be dismissed simply by its abstract negation. By attacking what seemed to be its foundation throughout the whole of its tradition, art has been qualitatively transformed; it itself becomes qualitatively other. Art can no more be reduced to general formula of consolation than to its opposite. The concept of art is located in historically 43 More Than Activism, Less Than Art: The Heritage of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno in changing constellation of elements; it refuses definition. 36 Notes 1 Artivism is a term recently invented to describe social and political activism by means of art. As well as in traditional media, such as live performance and documentary cinema, artivism can be seen in street art, digital art and on the worldwide web. The American theatre group, Bread and Puppet Theater, which organized and led the biggest antiwar protest in New York in 1981, can be considered to be one of the predecessors of artivism. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, translated into English as: Aesthetic Theory, Minnesota 2007, p 1. 3 For example, see Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory and also Theodor W. Adorno, “ Engagement ” (1962) in: Noten zur Literatur, vol. I, Frankfurt a. M. 1974, translated into English as “ Commitment ” , in Notes to Literature, New York 1992; as well as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklarung, Social Studies Association, 1944, translated into English as Dialectic of Enlightenment, London and New York 2010. 4 For example, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in their seminal work, The New Spirit of Capitalism, (2005) explore how concepts from the world of the arts were integrated and utilized in the “ new spirit of capitalism ” . 5 See Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London and New York 2009. 6 Adorno was always reserved toward Brecht. The first sign of it can be found in a letter Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin in 1935; (see Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics, London and New York 2007, pp 110 - 121). Adorno ’ s critique of Brecht developed most fully in his 1962 radio talk and essay “ Engagement ” , also translated as “ Commitment ” (op. cit). According to Adorno, Brecht ended up as an apologist for Stalinist terror and in the falsereconciliations of “ really-existing socialism. ” Adorno made specific criticisms not only of Brecht ’ s political criteria but also of his artistic works, considering them weak and not up to the times in which he lived. For this, see also Gene Ray, “ Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism ” , Historical Materialism 18, London, 2010, pp 3 - 24. 7 See Alan Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford 2005, and Frederic Jameson, Brecht and Method, London and New York 1998. 8 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, translated by John Willett, New York 1984 [1964], p. 274. 9 Ibid., p. 161. 10 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 2005, p. xii. 11 Ibid., p. 6. 12 Boris Groys, “ On Art Activism ” , in: In the Flow, London and New York 2016, pp. 43 - 60, here p. 43. 13 More precisely, the text reads: “ Only Schlingensief without Schlingensief reveals the true Schlingensief ” ; see Georg Diez and Nora Reinhardt, “ Ressurecting Schlingensief at the Biennale ” and “ The Garbage of German History ” , in Spiegel Online, English site, 3 June 2011. 14 The project was also called Please Love Austria-First European Coalition Week, or Foreigners Out-Artists Against Human Rights and it was presented from June 11 to June 17, 2000, in a container placed at Herbertvon-Karajan-Platz adjacent to the Opera. Twelve people identified as refugees who had applied for political asylum in Austria were asked to live in the container for a week. What happened inside the container was aired around the clock on an Internet TV channel. As in the television show “ Big Brother ” , the audience could call in daily and place their vote for the two candidates they would most like to see deported from the country. The last refugee to stay in the container was promised a prize of 30,000 Austrian Schillings and marriage to an Austrian citizen, by means of which the refugee 44 Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) would attain the status of a legal resident. Biographies of the participants, containing tabloid-style characterizations of each individual ’ s views on sex, money, and family values, were posted on Schlingensief ’ s website. (See Kirsten Weiss, “ Recycling the Image of the Public Sphere in Art ” , http: / / architecture.mit.edu/ thresholds/ issuecontents/ 23/ weiss23/ weiss23.htm Journal #23: “ deviant ” , [accessed 26 February 2018]. 15 See Matthias Lilienthal and Claus Philipp, Schlingensiefs Ausländer raus, Frankfurt a. M. 2000. 16 As an example of reverse engineering, Holmes cites Nike Ground, a performance/ installation by the 0100101110101101.org group, also staged in Vienna, in 2003, which faked the renaming of Karlsplatz as Nikeplatz. Despite at times stormy protests by the public, it all later came down to a kind of symbolic and innocuous action. Holmes asks how we may intensify our responses to ever stronger forms of repression and abuse and how art might develop subversion in a society of strict control. Brian Holmes 2009, p. 28) 17 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, p. 72. 18 Ibid. 19 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 80. 20 Ibid., p. 161. 21 “ Whose National Theatre Is It? ” , Oliver Frljic´ in Conversation with Marta Keil and Agata Adamiecka-Sitek, Polish Theatre Journal Online, (1 - 2, 2017), http: / / www.polishtheatrejournal.com/ index.php/ ptj/ article/ view/ 80/ 530 [accessed 18 October 2017]. 22 It seems that the audience “ saved ” Frljic´ ’ s production Our Violence, Your Violence twice from being banned, first in November 2016, during a theatre festival in Sarajevo, where the public gathered in front of the theatre demanding the right to see the show, even if it was officially cancelled; and then a few months later in May 2017, during another theatre festival in Split, when the audience started chanting a popular children ’ s song to silence the protesters who had managed to enter the theatre and attempted to interrupt the performance. 23 Actually, the only production by Frljic´ which was really banned, was his Un-divine Comedy: Remains, (Nie-Boska komedia. Szcz ą tki) that was to take place in the National Stary Theatre in Kraków, on November 2013. Less than two weeks before the opening, the director of the Stary, Jan Klata, suspended work on the production. Many saw it as the most drastic act of censorship since the abolition of the communist system and abolishment of preventive censorship. With The Un-Divine Comedy: Remains Frljic´ tackled the most sensitive issues and taboos in Polish history, such as anti-Semitism, religious mysticism, fascism, repression and censorship 24 Christopher Balme, “ In-Extremis: Theatre Criticism, Ethics and the Public Sphere ” , in: Critical Stages 12, December 2015, online here: http: / / www.critical-stages.org [accessed 31 January 2017]. 25 Oliver Frljic´, “ Whose National Theatre Is It? ” 26 Richard Schechner, “ Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought ” , in: Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia [1985], 2010. pp 3 - 35. 27 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 78. 28 Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, London and New York 2012, p. 200. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Jacques Rancière makes a distinction between direct (impossible, unattained) and representative (existing, derived) democracy, stating that our age has reached only a certain degree of performed democracy. He defines democracy as an unattainable utopia, because he realizes that the entire system - including education - is predicated on segregating the educated elites from the uneducated masses (the proletariat, the minorities), that is, those who participate in decision-making and those who are excluded from the systems of decision-making, which generates an aesthetic difference between them. However, just as equality is not a goal to be attained but an assumption that 45 More Than Activism, Less Than Art: The Heritage of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno in must be constantly verified and affirmed, so neither is democracy a form of government nor a style of social life; rather, it is a continual, as well as a casual process. Democratic emancipation is a process that affects the entire system of relations, without being able to guarantee an absolute elimination of social inequalities that inhere in every social order rather than in politics. (Rancière also differentiates between politics and what is called a political performance). See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron, London and New York 1995; Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York 2004; Rancière, Jacques. Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran, New York 2006, and Rancière The Emancipated Spectator. 32 Victor Turner, “ Liminality and Communitas ” , in: Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New Brunswick and London 2008, pp. 94 - 106, here p. 99. 33 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 159 - 60. 34 The third world movement emerged at the end of the Second World War, and it took the form of a nonaligned movement at the Bandung Conference in 1955 which was championed by leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno, and Nkrumah, who called for independence, economic development, and Cold War nonalignment while basing themselves on the support of millions of followers in more than 100 under-developed nations. 35 Richard Schechner, Performed Imaginaries, p. 20. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 2. 46 Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ (Rome) Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) The recent massive terrorist attacks committed by religious fundamentalists all over the world give the performing arts a reason for a new kind of self-criticism. From now on, it seems impossible that any performance could credibly manifest, let alone praise, the idea of selfsacrifice as an individual heroic act at any level of interpretation. The political resistance must disregard the possibility of terrorism at the imaginary level as well. If this quite obvious but intuitive conclusion is taken critically, its consequences for our way of considering Western performance aesthetics and performance practices are considerable. First, it raises doubts about the modernist and post-modern attempts during the second half of the last century to revive the sublime as an aesthetic category. To continue the criticism by James Elkins, who has suggested “ the moratorium to the word ” (2009), I would like to submit that “ cryptoreligious ” concept to a deconstruction, which focuses on its “ dynamic ” aspects. The deconstruction of the sublime in performance is directly linked to the capacity of performance practices to deal with their intrinsic anthropocentric presuppositions. Can we encounter, imagine and think a performing body otherwise than through sublime scenarios? 1. The title of the article carries a distant echo of Barnett Newman ’ s famous slogan from the year 1948, “ The Sublime is now ” . Theoretical discussion on the significance of the sublime as an aesthetic category has taken a new turn in the new millennium. Whereas authors writing during the second half of last century, such as de Man, Lyotard, Richir, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, attempted to revive this classical category and divest it of its metaphysical trappings, nowadays many are inclined to suggest that the sublime should be abandoned altogether. This article aims to fuel the debate with evidence from the domain of the performing arts. The discussion in this case is related to the capacity of performances to deal critically with terrorist violence, a political and humanitarian problem that has become global in scale. Terrorist attacks seem quite faithfully to follow certain dramaturgical patterns familiar to the Western theatrical tradition, a historical familiarity that risks compromising artists ’ critical ability to approach the subject. The reasons for this inability are deeply rooted in Western aesthetics and, as I will argue, come back to a certain interpretation of the sublime experience. I will start by quoting arguments from different contemporary thinkers who have adopted a clearly anti-sublime stance. The following series of quotations from James Elkins ’ essay “ Against the sublime ” sums up his criticism on the topic: There is some evidence that the sublime still owns us. 1 The sublime has come to be the place where thoughts about religious truth, revelation, and other more or less unusable concepts have congregated. 2 [T]he essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling or speech, transcend the human. 3 Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 47 - 55. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen It is important not to assume that the sublime, presence, or transcendence, are philosophic masks that can be removed, revealing a hidden religious discourse. They are that discourse. 4 I would suggest that to move forward, contemporary art criticism might begin by acknowledging that the sublime cannot be fully excavated from its crypto-religious contexts. 5 [I]t is an effect of the sublime itself, clear evidence that the sublime cannot be adequately explored unless the writing finds a way to move back and forth from discourse on to discourse of. 6 As a second example of contemporary criticism, I quote Jacques Rancière, who in The Future of the Image criticizes the legacy of Adorno and Lyotard for its “ inflated ” use of the term “ unpresentable ” : Under what conditions can it be stated that certain events cannot be represented? Under what conditions can an unpresentable phenomenon be given a specific conceptual shape? Obviously, the line of inquiry is not neutral. It is motivated by a certain intolerance for an inflated use of the notion of the unpresentable and a constellation of allied notions: the unpresentable, the unthinkable, the irredeemable. The inflated usage [of the unpresentable] subsumes under a single concept all sorts of phenomena, processes and notions, ranging from Moses ’ s ban on representation, via the Kantian sublime, the Freudian primal scene, Duchamp ’ s Grand Verre, or Malevitch ’ s White Square on White Background, to the Shoah; and it surrounds them all with an aura of holy terror. 7 Both of these arguments point to the fundamentally uncritical nature of their object. Whereas according to Elkins the sublime blurs boundaries and escapes the possibility of criticism, for Rancière it leads to the rejection of critique. However, the sublime could also be criticized nowadays for ecological reasons. The disqualification of the idea of “ nature ” as an all-encompassing whole also places the sublime in a questionable light. Allow me to quote Bruno Latour at this point: Let us ponder a minute what is meant by the notion of ‘ anthropocene ’ , this amazing lexical invention proposed by geologists to put a label on our present period. We realise that the sublime has evaporated as soon as we are no longer taken as those puny humans overpowered by ‘ nature ’ but, on the contrary, as a collective giant that, in terms of terawatts, has scaled up so much that it has become the main geological force shaping the Earth. 8 Or as Timothy Morton writes: Two and a half thousand people showed up at the University of Arizona in Tucson for a series of talks on cosmology. Evidently there is a thirst for thinking about the universe as a whole. Why is the same fascination not there for global warming? It ’ s because of the oppressive claustrophobic horror of actually being inside it. You can spectate ‘ the universe ’ as an ersatz aesthetic object: you have the distance provided by the biosphere itself, which acts as a spherical cinema screen. Habit tells us that what ’ s displayed on that screen (like the projections in a planetarium) is infinite, distant - the whole Kantian sublime. But inside the belly of the whale that is global warming, it ’ s oppressive and hot and there is not ‘ away ’ anymore. 9 From this one might already conclude that the sublime has reached a crisis in the new millennium. However, as my following remarks will show, this is not yet all. It seems to me that the issue and its relevance look quite different from the perspective of the performing arts as opposed to the visual arts, which have dominated the post-modern discussion on the sublime. 48 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) 2. The massive terrorist attacks perpetrated all over the world in recent years in the name of ISIS, as well as the simultaneous rise of populism in national policies, give us as thinkers and makers of theatre a reason to develop a new kind of self-criticism. From now on, it would seem quite impossible for a theatre performance credibly to manifest, let alone praise, the use of violence as a means of serving political purposes. It would also be problematic to present self-sacrifice as an acceptable or admirable individual solution, as a manifestation of exceptional and exemplary courage, at any level of interpretation. Simultaneously, the political resistance that raises objections to the fascist and racist agendas of populists has to discard the use of violence at every level of argumentation, even the imaginary level. This is not simply because we are now living under emergency laws, or because we think it is correct to respect the memory of the victims of recent terrorist attacks. Public security has become our common cause, and the majority accepts the measures adopted to maintain it regardless of what one thinks about their rightness, or of whether one is scared or not. By behaving as we do we are not simply censoring ourselves, which would imply that, sometime later and in more secure circumstances, we might return to a rhetoric that better corresponds with our convictions. We, too, are liable to think that the Western way of life and state control are to be overcome, but not like this! The fact that many find it possible to reason in this way shows the basic weakness of our liberal positions and values. To what extent do our aesthetic attitudes, as well as the ethics of artmaking, reflect and thereby promote this same weakness? Considering terrorist actions aesthetically or rhythmically, as we do in theatre and in the arts in general, makes it easy to recognize their general dynamics. On the aesthetic level it is a question of the sublime. At the same time, as art theoreticians continue to re-visit this concept and the corresponding experience, in the name of posthumanism, for example, 10 on the affective level it constitutes one of the strongest driving forces of popular entertainment, populist and nationalist rhetoric, and even Islamist terrorism. Is this a coincidence? What do these two sorts of “ sublime ” have in common? May we even be talking of different things? What sort of critique should we exercise here? As Islamist militants in the Middle East demolish ancient monuments that belong to the world ’ s cultural heritage, impose the burqa on female citizens in the areas they govern, and achieve martyrdom by carrying out suicidal terrorist attacks on civilians they regard as miscreants, are they not throwing back in the faces of their Western spectators the same values the Western world once regarded as fundamental to its own aesthetics and politics? As a reminder of these values, allow me to quote a few passages from the “ Analytic of the Sublime ” in Immanuel Kant ’ s Critique of Judgment from 1790: Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. 11 Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that description above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘ I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil ’ . 12 It is rather in its chaos that most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation, provided it displays magnitude and might. 13 For what is it that is an object of the highest admiration even to the savage? It is a person 49 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism who is not terrified, not afraid, and hence does not yield to danger but promptly sets to work with vigor and full deliberation. Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrates all the virtues of peace - gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person - precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. 14 Even the war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens ’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of a people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. 15 Here Kant lists phenomena that have traditionally been considered susceptible to the evocation of a “ sublime ” experience. Some of them relate to representability, some to the display of “ power ” (Gewalt). In combination, they easily evoke associations with sacrificial violence that nowadays is related to Islamist terrorism. To blame Kant for laying the foundations for the aesthetics of terrorism would be absurd, of course, but it is also hard to keep him outside the affair insofar as he is one of the major theoreticians on the topic. One might suggest that the problem here is precisely such associations, the imaginary amalgam at which Kant himself aimed his criticism. To fight these associations, however, one should know how to stop them and with what one could replace them. Despite the insistence of Paul de Man, 16 for instance, that these and other Kantian examples should be understood not from a psychological perspective but as illustrating the transcendental divide and tension between the faculties, the confusion here is nevertheless hard to avoid in practice. Why is this so? The instance that undergoes some sort of self-sacrifice in Kantian analysis is the power of the imagination in its desperate attempt to bridge reason and perception. The imagination, according to Kant, “ succumbs ” (unterliegen) to the dominance (Gewalt) of nature 17 and “ sacrifices ” (aufopfern) 18 its might and freedom for the sake of Reason. If one tries to imagine how imagination works at the moment it encounters phenomena such as those listed above, one quite spontaneously ends up with fantasies to do with death and resurrection. The inability of the imagination to imagine its own working gives rise to these fantasies. From a longer historical perspective, this strand of the sublime, which in Kantian analysis is referred to as “ dynamic ” , has dominated the tradition of Western aesthetics, frequently also espousing anti-theatrical attitudes. One of the starting points was Pericles ’ funeral oration, in which he called for the public, and especially women, to stop mourning the victims of war who had given their lives for the cause of the polis. It continued with the Platonic philosophical over-writing of the classical tragedies, replacing the tragic catharsis with the sublime elevation caused by the serene death of the philosopher-hero. The Crucifixion followed, as the sufferings of Christian martyrs were secularized and modernized in the writings of Diderot, Rousseau, Winckelmann, Goethe and Lessing. Finally, Friedrich Schiller gave this dramaturgical tradition its fullest theoretical account, basing his analysis on the conceptuality of Kantian aesthetics. In this respect the Schillerian legacy is questionable in two senses. On the one hand, it informs Idealist philosophy, smuggling in motifs that, much later, allowed George Bataille, for instance, to criticize the sacrificial logic of speculative idealism. 19 On the other hand, Schiller ’ s aesthetics soon became the target of his followers ’ artistic criticism. By way of an example, the focal question for Hölderin was the staging of the self-sacrifice. 20 50 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) Regardless of whether we stage the death of a martyr in a Baroque mourning play, or witness the victory of modern over ancient morality in a neo-classical tragedy, or portray a quasi-archaic fertility rite to challenge the values of Western metaphysics, the sublime scenario 21 remains the same: something, or someone, has to die, disappear, so that something else, better, more alive, more infinite, immaculate and innocent, can come forth and manifest itself on stage, in front of us. Rebirth, renaissance, creation and epiphany through destruction, calmness in the midst of struggle, serenity and blessing are reached by going through chaos and dispersion in the history of the Spirit, the Nation, Class or eternal Nature, and in the imagination of an individual participant, spectator or reader. In other words, if Kantian analysis is replaced and applied to stage performance, as Schiller was among the first to suggest, the consequence would unavoidably be psychological, agonistic and heroic for the simple reason that human beings are watching other human beings in theatre, and their imagination in this context tends to be thoroughly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. 22 It seems obvious that, despite the cultural differences, violent Islamism does not escape the logic of sacrificial imagination embedded in the cultural and individual imagination of Westerners. As the facts already imply and as so many experts have argued, 23 Jihadism is deeply intermingled with the crisis of Western citizenship, aggravated by refugee crises, socioeconomic segregation and secularization, and it uses these phenomena as its fuel. However, mere socio-political facts do not explain the ideology, 24 neither does religion nor related traditions. Historically and culturally, the ideals of self-sacrifice and assassination belong to the Shi ’ ite tradition, in other words the branch of Islam to which Sunni militants are violently opposed: suicide is basically prohibited by the Koran. 25 As Navid Kermani points out, Al-Qa ’ ida ’ s ideology takes root among modern urban westernized Muslims, from the “ mixture incorporating anti-capitalism, the cult of martyrdom, Third World rhetoric, totalitarian ideology and science fiction ” . 26 The influence of the Christian tradition, in which martyrdom and self-sacrifice have always had major significance, is not excluded here, either. For the same reason, the main differences between school shootings, Anders Breivig and Islamist terror are not necessarily ideological. As Kermani argues, the “ psychological profile ” of all such attacks is “ a modern, Western one ” : By means of a single act, the crazed killer acquires a surrogate for that which is lacking, almost by definition, in modern society: a comprehensive framework of meaning in which the individual has his allocated place. The act is preceded by a phase of withdrawal, separation, subjectively perceived rejection or conscious isolation - even when the outward forms of bourgeois existence are being maintained. 27 It may be that post-Kantian art critics and philosophers, who in repeated attempts have aimed at distinguishing the true sublime from the false, and the finite and deconstructive sublime from the infinite and metaphysical, have left unguarded a door through which the anthropomorphic and the sacrificial sublime can slip in. How should such an intruder be dealt with? How could imagining be stopped at the right moment? 3. One can easily understand why, in the visual arts, the sublime may have appeared at a certain moment in history to be an emanci- 51 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism patory concept. Most contemporary theories - Newman ’ s revival of the sublime and Jean- François Lyotard ’ s post-modern update in the 1980 s, as well as present-day critiques - have been motivated by attempts to challenge the dominance of the figure and its representation, and to liberate visibility and aesthesis from earlier aesthetic ideals and ideological constraints. The story is not necessarily that different in the realm of the performing arts, and especially in the theatre, given that different genres of art have followed different paths in their sublime logic. In Kantian terms one could argue that, whereas the art critic in the visual arts has placed more emphasis on the socalled “ mathematical sublime ” , based on the loss of form due to a superior magnitude, the critic in the performing arts has found more inspiration in the “ dynamic sublime ” , based on the loss of form to a superior power. Whereas in the first case, the phenomenon challenges the subject of the representation, in the latter case it puts in play her corporality. Let us consider, for instance, the repeated attempts during the past century to revive the Dionysiac origins of theatre in the names of Artaud and Nietzsche, either by staging sacrificial rituals or by returning in the performances to the function of those rituals. Examples are early Grotowski, The Performance Group, Joseph Beuys, or the activists of Vienna. A lot happens in their performances, but the idea of human sacrifice or self-sacrifice remains among their constant reference points. 28 Today it is also legitimate to ask to what extent these examples of scenic avant-garde only re-ritualize and perpetuate the sacrificial logic that characterizes the work of actors in bourgeois theatres where, night after night, they are supposed to satisfy the claim of their spectators for “ authenticity ” , “ self-expression ” and “ presence ” . 29 This kind of aestheticism dating back to Schiller may have been condemned a long time ago in a certain type of ideological critique, but at the level of artistic practice the sublime scenario is still surprisingly insistent. Here is an example, which, like all those that precede it, is universally familiar. In 2007 Erika Fischer-Lichte wrote about Marina Abramovic´´s body art as follows: When Abramovic´ crushed the glass, cut the five-pointed star into her skin, flogged herself, or lay down on the ice cubes, she did not emit the slightest sign of pain. She restricted herself to performing actions that perceivably changed her body; she transgressed its limits without ever showing any external sign of the inner states triggered by it. 30 However, as in the performance thirty years ago, she did not show a single sign of pain, although one could see that she had cramps and her back turned a deep red. 31 It is, in particular, the performance artists above [i. e. “ Abramovic´, Pane, Burden, Acconci, The Viennese actionists, The Fluxus artists, Joseph Beuys, and others ” ] who have paved the way for a redefinition of aesthetic experience as liminal experience. 32 A performance first and foremost, means passing a threshold - entering a state of liminality. 33 My point is not to criticize the aforementioned artists. That would be moralistic and simplistic. It is more relevant to note how, via the intermediation of Abramovic´ and other artists in the genre of so-called “ ordeal art ” , 34 Fischer-Lichte re-positions the sublime logic from the arts field back to the critical field, and how she uses selected artistic examples to sustain her interpretation of the so-called “ performative turn ” . The “ liminal norm ” of performance studies has faced criticism since the beginning of the millennium, notably from Jon McKenzie, 35 but it may be that the aesthetic conditions of that norm have attracted less attention. Nevertheless, the quoted passages go to 52 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) the core of the issue: this, as I will argue, is the performing body and our understanding of it, an understanding that is always entangled with the question of the power (and the powerlessness) of the imagination. At the beginning of my essay I noted how the sublime appears to us today as a suspicious concept on account of its possible uncriticality and anthropocentricism. I then drew attention to how it has been considered from different angles in the Western traditions of the visual and the performing arts. It is, in fact, astounding that these artistic strands of the sublime have rarely encountered one another, even though from a historical perspective they tend to feature in the same periods and the same cities. One fundamental reason for this lack of encounter, or this reciprocal repression, may be that the “ mathematical ” and the “ dynamic sublime ” do not really encounter one another in Kant, either. 36 A more obvious and historical reason is that the relation between the avant-garde and the sublime has remained ambiguous in the visual arts. Although, on the one hand, conceptual art and performance art since the 1950 s have opposed the openly sublime values of modernists (such as Pollock, Reinhardt, Newman, and Rothko), their revolt was not immune to the sublimity and the related theatricality on the other side, such as in body art. 37 One critic who has to be mentioned at this point, among the few who in my opinion have touched on the subject, is Michael Fried, who criticized minimalism in his text “ Art and Objecthood ” precisely for its hidden and disavowed corporality. 38 If we consider the avant-garde in the visual arts (such as conceptual and performance art) as a form of progressive liberation from the human point of view and denomination, we already make a sublime move in the dynamic sense of the phenomenon. The abstraction, no matter whether it takes place in the name of purification, reduction, multiplication, defiguration, destruction, formalization, conceptualization, ascesis or mysticism, cannot necessarily do without a certain simultaneous fantasy concerning the disappearance or dissolution of human corporeal agency, of yourself or your fellow, or of yourself as your inferior fellow, and the related theatricality. 4. Lyotard already raised the question that assumes importance at this point in his essay on the sublime and the avant-garde: “ How to distinguish between hidden figure and non-figure? ” 39 At the time, Lyotard believed that such a distinction was possible. Today I would not be so sure about that. As Navid Kermani concludes: The terrorists ’ appropriation of a religious tradition is fundamentally no different from the way in which the Fascists made use of the obvious construct of an Aryan-German primeval history. It has scarcely more to do with the real history of the Sunni Arab world than the Valhalla mythology of the Nazis with real remembered German history. The images may be old, traditional or archaic, but the use of them is decidedly modern. 40 No matter what we think about the historical or philosophical pertinence of this analogy, on the aesthetic level it is hard to avoid. Terrorists mix these things up anyway! No matter how sophisticated our idea of the sublime is, or how “ liminal ” the nature of our boundary experience is, we are never safe from caricature, which concerns nothing more and nothing less than the human character. The essential characteristic of that character is that it is able to multiply itself, to quote itself, to divide itself into two parts, into an inferior sensible part and a superior supra-sensible part, and to “ sacrifice ” one 53 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism for the other. It may be that there is no longer anything to be represented or imitated at the sublime moment, but what we can still do is to imitate the very act of reaching the limit. In contrast to how it appears, the presentation is not (yet) finished: it continues theatrically. This dramaturgical schema or figure with which we have deeply identified ourselves as subjects has genuinely and intrinsically engaged our imagination, does not cease to haunt it, and does so all the more powerfully the less there is to be seen or perceived. If in your scenic imagination you combine the idea of the white cube or the black box with the idea of bloodshed you can imagine a kind of performance against which we nowadays, as spectators and makers of theatre, might dare to express our reserve. A critical doubt arises regarding the motives at play every time the bodies of the performers are disfigured, mutilated, covered with waste, filth and blood; every time their bodies are reduced spectacularly to “ mere ” bodies, flesh, meat or an informal mass; every time a performance plays with the imaginary threat of violence. Without resorting to Girardian moralism vis-à-vis presumed “ primordial ” or “ fundamental ” violence (because what is that, after all, other than another way of sacralizing violence? ), I would rather argue as follows. The fact that all violent acts are sustained by a certain kind of imagination 41 does not imply that imagination is violent through and through. The link between violence and imagination is always based on the mediation of the human figure, which in turn is an imaginary construct. Therefore, in the age of terrorism, it is our special challenge as artists and critics to liberate our imagination from its anthropocentric and anthropomorphic closure, and to learn to imagine differently even when we are dealing with living human beings and bodies, as we do in the performing arts. Notes 1 James Elkins, “ Against the Sublime ” , in: http: / / www.academia.edu/ 163451/ Against_the_Sublime (2009/ revised in 2013), p. 1. Published in: Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (eds.), Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, New York 2011, pp. 20 - 42. 2 Ibid., p. 10. 3 Ibid., pp. 11 - 12. 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 Ibid., p. 14. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, London and New York 2008, p. 10. 8 Bruno Latour, “ Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics ” . A lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011: http: / / www.bruno-latour.fr/ sites/ default/ files/ 124-GAIA- LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf [accessed 6 February 2018]. 9 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis 2013, p. 132. Morton ’ s remark seems to be based on his psychological interpretation of the Kantian sublime. Cf. Ecology without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London 2007, p. 16, 46, 76, 130 - 132. 10 Cf. Claire Colebrook, “ Not Kant, Not Now. Another Sublime ” , in: Aesthetics in the 21 st Century. Speculations V, New York, 2014, pp. 127 - 157; Daniel Mafe, “ Art and the sublime: the paradox of indeterminacy unknowing and (dis)orientation in the presentation of the unpresentable ” , in: eJournalist, 2009, 9(1). 11 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, transl. by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis 1987 [1790], § 28, p. 135. 12 Ibid., § 49, p. 185. 13 Ibid., § 23, pp. 99 - 100. 14 Ibid., § 28, p. 121. 15 Ibid., § 28, p. 122. 16 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis and London 1996, pp. 122 - 123. 54 Esa Kirkkopelto (Helsinki) 17 Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 28, p. 121. 18 Ibid., p. 129. 19 Georges Bataille, “ Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice ” , in: Œ evres completes, vol. XII. Paris 1988, pp. 326 - 245. 20 Cf. Esa Kirkkopelto, Le théâtre de l´expérience. Contributions à la théorie de la scène. Paris 2008, pp. 235 - 238. 21 Ibid., pp. 141 - 147. 22 Cf. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 141 - 142. 23 Cf. Slavoj Ž i ž ek, “ Are the Worst Really Full of Passionate Intensity? ” , in: New Statesman, 10 January 2015, http: / / www.newstatesman.com/ world-affairs/ 2015/ 01/ slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdomassacre-are-worst-really-full-passionateintensity [accessed 7 October 2017]; Gauchet, Marcel, “ Le fondamentalisme islamique est le signe paradoxal de la sortie du religieux ” , in: Le Monde, 21 November 2015, http: / / www.lemonde.fr/ idees/ article/ 2015/ 11/ 21/ marcel-gauchet-le-fondamentalismeislamique-est-le-signe-paradoxal-de-la-sortie-du-religieux_4814947_3232. html#xc87l8ym0cHJEiEi.99 [accessed 7 October 2017]; Jason Burke, “ L'Etat islamique propose une vie plus excitante que de travailler au McDonald's ” , an interview with Jason Burke in: Le Temps, 8 June 2016, https: / / www.letemps.ch/ monde/ 2016/ 06/ 08/ islamique-propose-une-vie-plus-excitantetravailler-mcdonald-s [accessed 7 October 2017]; Kenan Malik, “ Between Rage and Terror ” , in: Kenan Malik ’ s Blog “ Pandaemonium ” , 7 September 2016, https: / / kenanmalik.wordpress.com/ 2016/ 09/ 07/ betweenrage-and-terror/ [accessed 7 October 2017]. 24 Fethi Benslama, Un furieux désir de sacrifice, Paris 2016, pp. 65 - 91. 25 Navid Kermani, “ Roots of terror: suicide, martyrdom, self-redemption and Islam ” , in: Open Democracy, 21 February 2002: https: / / www.opendemocracy.net/ faith-islamicworld/ article_88.jsp [accessed 8 October 2017]. (Re-published in German: Dynamit des Geistes. Martyrium, Islam und Nihilismus, Göttingen 2002.) 26 Kermani, “ Roots of terror ” . 27 Kermani, Dynamit des Geistes. 28 Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte ’ s account on the function of ritual and (self-)sacrifice in 20 th century theatre in: Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre, London 2005. 29 Cf. Kent Sjöström´s fine analysis on the topic in an unpublished conference paper entitled “ The sacrifice, the copy and the critical gaze - the actor ’ s authenticity and the commodity value of emotions ” in: https: / / www.academia.edu/ 24358691/ The_sacrifice_the_copy_and_the_critical_gaze_- _the_actors_authenticity_and_the_commodity_value_of_emotions [accessed 7 October 2017]. 30 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “ Performance Art - Experiencing Liminality ” , in: Marina Abramovic´, 7 Easy Pieces, Milan 2007, pp. 33 - 45, here p. 34. 31 Fischer-Lichte, “ Performance Art - Experiencing Liminality ” , p. 43. 32 Ibid., p. 39. 33 Ibid. 34 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, London and New York 1993, p. 152 - 157. 35 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance. Oxon and New York 2001. 36 Cf. Kirkkopelto, Le théâtre de l´expérience, pp. 395 - 403. 37 Cf. Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti- Art. Conceptual Art and Performance Art in the Formation of Postmodernism. New York 2005, pp. 38-39, 49, 80, 370 - 371. 38 Michael Fried, “ Art and Objecthood ” (1967), in: Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews. Chicago 1998, pp. 148 - 172. 39 Jean-François Lyotard, L´Inhumain. Causeries sur le temps, Paris 2014 [1988], p. 96. 40 Kermani 2002. 41 Robin Fox, “ The Violent Imagination ” , in: Peter Marsh and Anne Campbell (eds.), Aggression and Violence, Oxford 1982, pp. 6 - 26. 55 Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0 and Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) This essay focuses on the distinct yet related efforts of two contemporary American playwrights to re-read and re-historicize ancient Greek tragedy at the turn of the third millennium. Charles Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0, presented for the first time in 1994, serves as a comment on America ’ s imperial wars in the Middle East and also tests the limits of recontextualizing the Aeschylean classic in the present moment. In a similar vein, Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus, which received its first professional production in 2005, criticizes America ’ s hegemony as the sole world power and reviews the phase of intense volatility and insecurity on a national as well as a global scale that the “ war on terror ” and the “ Iraq War ” marked. The two plays are studied in this paper as self-standing works which prove rewriting a critical practice which challenges audiences to reassess the enveloping sociopolitical and historical context by moving well beyond the confines of straightforward transliteration. In most of Theodor Adorno ’ s pioneering treatises on cultural criticism, the reader is warned that it is indeed a grave mistake to fail “ to recognize the extent to which culture and criticism, for better or for worse, are intertwined ” . 1 Liable to generalizations and idealizations, prone to subservience to the existent economic system and even severe complicity with the dominant social order at any historical moment, criticism constitutes, nonetheless, “ an indispensable element of culture ” . 2 Once attention is restricted to the field of theater as a cultural form, this interrelation emerges even more pronounced. The very word “ theater ” signifies the place which facilitates the practice of representation conceived for the service of yet another practice that may be accurately outlined as no other than the act of reviewing, of examining carefully. Etymologically, the words “ theater ” and “ criticism ” stem from two distinct, yet related verbs in the Greek language, θεάομαι , i. e. to look at as well as to examine and κρίνω , i. e. to inspect, to evaluate but also to examine. Thus, it is instructive to ask not whether theater is able to criticize but rather what type of criticism is possible on stage, to what ends and purposes this practice can be devoted, and last but not least how far such ventures actually reach. One of the primary aims of this article is to examine how valuable these questions prove whenever critical attention is dedicated to the practice of rewriting in theater in general, and rewriting the classics in particular. Interest revolves specifically around the interrogations which become valid each time identified instances of ancient Greek tragedy are re-contextualized and re-historicized on the American stage at the turn of the third millennium. On this plane of inquiry, it is useful to remember that ever since Thespis ’ s initiatory, boundary-breaking gesture, every enactment in the theater is in essence a re-enactment, a moment that allows one to assume a distance from what has preceded, hence a critical distance from which one views matters anew. It is also important to highlight that playwrights, Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 56 - 63. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen theater practitioners as well as theorists, attain this distance in endlessly different ways and for equally diverse purposes. In an overview of the works of the three main tragedians, Michael Walton aptly asks, “ [b] ut what else were Sophocles and Euripides doing than removing that story from Aeschylus ’ 458 BC context, when the fledgling democratic system was seeking to establish itself, and transferring it into the time of the Peloponnesian War fifty years later? ” 3 Valuable for the same reason, yet informative on a totally different moment in the history of Western theater, is Marianne McDonald ’ s comment that, “ this is not Euripides ’ Medea, but Heiner Müller ’ s Medeamaterial 4 [. . .] nevertheless, Euripides is behind it all, and behind him is the myth ” . 5 Equally insightful, while pertinent to yet another aspect of this area of interest, is Hugh Grady ’ s commentary on Aristotle ’ s idealist account of the Athenian tragedy as a product of “ rewriting ” and “ anachronistic [. . .] recontextualization [. . .] developed at a different cultural moment to describe an already antique form ” . 6 In response to these types of reflection on the practice of rewriting, this article pursues intently the following questions: What kind of critique can be expected when a contemporary American playwright undertakes to rewrite a Greek tragedy in an effort to dissect major challenges and severe dilemmas of the present moment? What are the implications of the oft-cited statement that the classics are “ appropriated to serve diverse political causes ” 7 and in what ways are thus audiences engaged? How are these efforts inspired and guided by a cultural form, which, as Olga Taxidou insightfully notes, “ has always been secular and critical, underlying the contradictions and exclusions within the democratic project itself ” ? 8 Furthermore, how do they relate to a genre noted for its ability to accommodate a wide range of “ forms of rationality that are [amply] displayed [but also] critiqued ” ? 9 Ultimately, do these instances of rewriting prove that criticism is a practice which, in Raymond Williams ’ s terms, is defined by “ the specificity of the response ” and not the “ habit or right or duty [of merely passing] judgement ” ? 10 More than any other contemporary American theater work, the numerous, experimental rewrites of Greek tragedy Charles Mee has authored over the course of the past three decades serve to illuminate precisely these questions. Mee launched his multisided “ re-making project ” , driven by the motto that “ the work we do is both received and created, both an adaptation and an original, at the same time. We re-make things as we go ” . 11 Evidently, the playwright ’ s outlook on these issues reflects the positions of dissimilar poststructuralist theorists, from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault and beyond, who argue that there is no such thing as an original text and insist that “ any text is an intertext ” . 12 Furthermore, the fact that it is primarily the playwright ’ s eagerness to establish a candid critical attitude towards the enveloping, present moment that leads him to return to the original source-texts is evident in his own comment that the Greeks “ had a larger understanding of what makes human beings human ” . 13 To a certain extent, this may be seen as a reaction which results from an idealization, an almost essentialist understanding of the particular cultural form, and yet these words disclose the deep and burning need for an adequate assessment of the very notion of the human at present. It is imperative to stress that in practice, Charles Mee ’ s theater work endorses anything but an essentialist approach of Greek tragedy. A case in point, Agamemnon 2.0 (1994), inspired by the work of Max Ernst and in particular by his technique known as Fatagaga (Fabrication de tableaux Gazométriques Garantis), 14 constitutes an uncon- 57 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s ventional take on the first part of Aeschylus ’ s prototypical trilogy Oresteia. Like Ernst ’ s work, which allows varying texts, multiple references and incongruous modes of expression to coexist, the play pays tribute to the original classic and at the same moment distances itself from it in radical ways. In concrete terms, the modern one-act piece invites the audience to trace how the different parts succeed each other as formal divisions are dismissed. Specifically, even spectators who are only elementally familiar with the parent text can easily identify what parts correspond to each different choral section and episode in this seamlessly sustained unit. Even if operative on a surface level, this is a critical practice in its own right for it does attract attention to how the very acts of re-visiting, re-reading, re-casting, and re-viewing are indeed creative. On a deeper level, the modern play showcases the close interrelation between the act of viewing and the act of assessing, θεάομαι and κρίνω , as it invites the audience to engage critically with the actuality of war and its specificity in countless yet identified instances of human history. The work aims at a critical practice which brings history and poetry together, and on these grounds it introduces its own chorus made up of the four outstanding figures of the ancient world that epitomize these two fields of human creativity and ingenuity. Agamemnon 2.0 exemplifies Linda Hutcheon ’ s point that rewriting constitutes by definition both “ a creative and an interpretive act ” . 15 In particular, the theorist argues that adapters are “ first interpreters and then creators ” . 16 In this critical vein, the play prescribes that Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer and Hesiod meet around a small campfire to review the myth of the House of Atreus. The work picks up the anti-war theme from the Aeschylean tragedy and re-introduces it by recasting it through the simple yet disarming poetic lines a trembling Hesiod delivers: if you would lead the children of other men to war to shed their blood then you be the first before any man ’ s child is killed kill one of your own and then the ships may sail to Troy 17 Clearly, these are lines which serve to underline the notion that war begins always at home, but they also betray the playwright ’ s own yearning to formulate a critique or at least to envision a route towards a critical stance that would allow one to reflect on what Mee himself defines as, “ the behavior of America in the world and how that came to damage life and politics in America ” . 18 In her significant work on adaptation and appropriation, Julie Sanders recognizes the political commitment in rewriting as “ often inescapable ” 19 and further contends that appropriation is in essence almost synonymous with “ critique ” . 20 Agamemnon 2.0 is an occasion of rewriting that openly undertakes to fulfill this promise and attain such a potential. Written and presented for the first time in 1994, against the background of the U. S.-led war enterprises in the Middle East that to a large extent corroborated the hegemonic role of the world ’ s sole superpower, the play aspires to articulate a comment on the devastating effects of the historical conjuncture as well as on the detriment on the lives of human beings in the targeted areas. In concrete terms, the work inspects what Howard Zinn outlines as yet another instance of “ the classical imperial situation, where the places with natural wealth [become] victims of more powerful nations whose power [comes] from that seized wealth ” . 21 In particular, the play aspires to an antiwar polemic by juxtaposing Agamemnon ’ s agon against the disparate agons of the two women to whom he is related, Clytemnestra and Cassandra respectively. Foucault ’ s no- 58 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) tion of critique as the agon one undertakes in order to show that it is impossible as well as unethical to accept as true “ what an authority tells you is true ” 22 proves directly pertinent to the distinct cases of these two female characters. Thus, as the general meets his death convinced that civic order is still possible, Clytemnestra brings him face to face with the reality of his atrocious crime: I only wish we had had a chance to talk to one another I wish you could have told me like a human being what brought you to murder your own sweet child. One day, her tears will catch up with you. How could a person kill another human creature? 23 For her own part, Cassandra, reflecting directly her classical counterpart, already sees that what lies ahead for the “ city upon a hill ” is a bleak future: See what comes here to those who put their trust in earthly power to those who take their happy state for granted Here your country stands in ruin, this masterpiece of the gods, brought down with all her towering beauty. 24 The above quoted two extracts serve also to capture the distinctive way in which poetry and its dynamics are being trusted and celebrated but also reviewed in this work, since a political statement is articulated through an experimental, constantly evolving anti-war poetics. In Agamemnon 2.0, anti-war polemics and anti-war poetics inform each other to such an extent that it is pointless to distinguish between the two tasks. This is precisely what Hesiod ’ s closing lines epitomize: Nothing human is forever; everything perishes; except the human heart that has the capacity to remember and the capacity to say: never again or forever. And so it is that our hearts and nothing else are the final arbiters of what it is to be human. 25 The play emphatically contends that theogony, a genealogy of the birth of the gods, in essence a review of what it is to be human, emerges a pressing necessity for the Western world at the dusk of the twentieth century. It is important to highlight that through this experimentation with concurrently evolving poetics and polemics, the whole effort of rewriting takes the form of what Edward Said outlines as “ the practice of writing in progress and less the movement towards another [work] ” . 26 Specifically, in this case the act of returning to the parent text signifies a forward movement thanks to which the play elaborates on a dynamic, developing assessment of its enveloping political and historical context. Furthermore, through the same process the modern work sheds light anew on the dangers Adorno discerns when he notes that, “ the notion of a ‘ message ’ in art, even when politically radical, already contains an accommodation to world ” 27 and thus shows in practice that the effort to attain political effect well beyond the walls of any given playhouse is never an easy mission. In other words, the task of what Adorno instructively terms “ immanent critique ” is indeed demanding, since it seeks to “ synthesize assessment of the validity of [the artistic] forms with that of politics ” . 28 In its own original way, Agamemnon 2.0 illustrates that audi- 59 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s ence engagement and the potential for critique are two major and intricately related challenges for political art. It is precisely this identical preoccupation around which Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus (2005) primarily revolves. McLaughlin, a playwright who has resorted successfully to ancient Greek tragedy on numerous occasions ever since her major breakthrough with Iphigenia and Other Daughters in 1994, admits that she has long been intimidated by the Sophoclean prototype. In 2004, a commission by the Guthrie Theater and a pressing invitation by her collaborator, director Lisa Peterson convinced her to pen a rewriting of Oedipus Rex in an effort “ to grapple with American notions of identity and responsibility in the light of the Iraq War and the ongoing crisis of the Bush presidency ” . 29 Eager not to give in to the “ common practice of simplifying the scale of the play to create an easy contemporary political resonance ” , 30 McLaughlin comes up with a work that remains loyal to the original and at the same time departs productively from it. The playwright explains that her multiple rewrites of Greek tragedy are neither adaptations proper, since she has no knowledge of the language, nor translations as such, and thus she opts for the term “ version ” ; yet, being not totally satisfied with it, she remains open to suggestions. As becomes apparent, the act of rewriting unavoidably engages one in a critical review of one ’ s own ways and methods. Indeed, tragedy as a paradigmatic “ conflictual topos ” 31 emphasizes this type of inspection more intensely than most other cultural forms. This topos is recognized as a source of inspiration and instruction precisely because it does not “ supply tendentious answers ” , 32 and thus the act of returning to it constitutes “ a creative and interpretive ” 33 venture of manifold dimensions. In this vein, Oedipus, a one-act play conceived at the dawn of the twenty-first century, opens with an image of an organic question mark that dominates the stage. In a dim light, “ a naked child is lying in the fetal position [with] his back to the audience ” , 34 who are greeted by an offstage voice that delivers the Sphynx ’ s mythic riddle: Here is the riddle, mortals: What is this thing? It moves on four legs in the morning Two at noon And three at evening. 35 This original stage image underscores the naked vulnerability of the human and serves to introduce in a novel mode Oedipus ’ s agon to see himself in light. Specifically, one of the main questions that the modern play poses is whether this archetypal “ royal hunt ” is possible in present-day America. Tiresias ’ s words, “ the royal hunt is on, but you, sir, are your own prey ” , 36 outline an agon that can hardly scrape into what Tony Kushner, in his foreword to McLaughlin ’ s The Greek Plays, describes as “ our [postmodern] jaded, exhausted sensibilities ” . 37 Indeed, the work sets out to articulate an anti-war political statement and strives to expose the grave consequences of the firmly-established collective attitudes of apathy and amnesia that define the present moment of globalized late capitalism and in which citizens are mired in different places of the Western world. Theorists such as Fredric Jameson argue that the dominant economic policies and central sociocultural phenomena that characterize the phase of globalization 38 are dependent upon the belief that it is safe for anyone to inhabit only the present moment. This is precisely Jocasta ’ s tragic flaw that this rewrite emphasizes and strategically counterpoises to Oedipus ’ s relentless pursuit of the truth, when she is heard pleading: “ This. Just this — now — is all we can lay claim to. This is the only solid ground. Plant your feet on this and be happy. Plant your feet on this and be free ” . 39 60 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) It is important to highlight that Oedipus as an entity is perennially trusted across temporal and generic boundaries precisely because thanks to him, audiences are allowed to assess the redemptive power of the incessant struggle for self-knowledge and selfawareness. McLaughlin ’ s work resorts to the reserves of this very power in an effort to address the actuality of America ’ s imperial wars at the turn of the millennium and the ensuing sensibility crisis for its own people. In this case, Oedipus becomes the “ lens ” through which America is invited to review, in the playwright ’ s own words, its “ deep aversion to coming to terms with [its] own past and the consequences of [its] actions ” . 40 The relationship the modern play establishes with the source text is in essence “ dynamic ” , i. e., in Roland Barthes ’ s terms, one “ endowed with responsibility ” . 41 The play undertakes this exact task since on the one hand it courageously questions its own position as both a receiver and a translator, while on the other it also invites the audience to reconsider the conventional and often restrictive ways in which political questions are formulated and pursued at present. Evidently, McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus aspires to recognize itself — along the lines of what Barthes insightfully notes about all Greek tragedies — as the product “ of a specific period, of a definite social condition, and of a contingent moral argument. ” 42 It is in this sense that the play inspects the severe challenges of its enveloping context and also explores its own potential for critique. Similar to what holds true for Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0, in this play the act of rewriting allows valuable time and space for an ongoing, constantly evolving examination of issues on these two different levels. In terms analogous to those Peter Campbell discerns for Heiner Müller ’ s work, Oedipus avoids “ simple analogy [aiming at] theatrical landscapes that complicate interpretation [and thus] transfers interpretive power to the audience. ” 43 In effect, these modern plays strive to rekindle the critical faculties of standardly dispersed and heterogeneous audiences whose range of reference and experience is varied and rich but also definitely fragmentary and often inconclusive. Thus, in this respect, they stand in sharp distinction to the parent tragedies which addressed the tightly-knit collectivity of the Greek polis. Indeed, Oedipus ’ s cry “ [n]ow I must find out. I ’ m hungry for that knowledge. [. . .] I will know the truth, whatever it is ” 44 is meant to challenge these distant and dissimilar contemporary spectators in multiple ways and on different levels. Primarily, what is thus highlighted for the intended audience is the acute difficulty of coming to terms with the crimes the empire commits and the devastation it brings to foreign lands in the names of its own citizens. The present article argues that these two plays recognize rewriting as a practice which similar to the one established by the parent texts renders possible “ a historical critique that places both ourselves and the victims within a historico-political trajectory that can be accounted for and that, more importantly, is changeable ” ; 45 hence, the investment in constantly progressing and meaningfully evolving poetics. On the other hand, it is also contended here that rewriting Greek tragedy constitutes a practice which allows contemporary theater to engage critically with its own potential for critique. It is precisely in this way that representation today may aspire to a state beyond the realm of what Adorno incisively terms “ self-satisfied contemplation ” . 46 Effectively enough, the above discussed two plays showcase rewriting Greek tragedy as an ongoing critical practice which endorses anew Adorno ’ s valuable insight that “ [t]he more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. [. . .] 61 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to selfsatisfied contemplation ” . 47 Notes 1 Theodor Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , in: Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA 1981, pp. 17 - 34, here p. 21. 2 Ibid. 3 Michael Walton, “ Essence or Perception: Greek Drama for a New Century ” , in: Savas Patsalidis, Elizabeth Sakellaridou (eds.), (Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre, Thessaloniki 1999, pp. 329 - 39, here p. 329. 4 Arguably, this is a work which benefits greatly from returning to the material of both the homonymous myth and Euripides ’ s own rendition of it. Thanks to this multilayered endeavor, Müller is able to elaborate further on his exploration of theater as “ process ” , while at the same moment, as Peter Campbell accurately notes, he “ seriously critiques his own culture and the political, social, and dramatic structures that it represents and propagates, while recognizing the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of escaping from those structures ” . Peter Campbell, “ Medea as Material: Heiner Müller, Myth, and Text ” , in: Modern Drama 51.1 (2008), pp. 84 - 103, here p. 86. 5 Marianne McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage, New York 1992, p. 2. 6 Hugh Grady, “ The Modernity of Western Tragedy: Genealogy of a Developing Anachronism ” , in: PMLA 129.4 (2014), pp. 790 - 98, here p. 792. 7 Edith Hall, “ Introduction: Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth Century? ” , in: Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Amanda Wrigley (eds.), Dionysus since ’ 69. Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, Oxford 2004, pp. 1 - 46, here p. 18. 8 Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, Edinburgh 2004, p. 15. 9 Grady, “ The Modernity of Western Tragedy ” , p. 797. 10 Raymond Williams, Keywords, New York 1976, p. 76. 11 Charles Mee, “ About the Re-making Project ” , http: / / www.charlesmee.org [accessed 7 September 2017]. 12 Roland Barthes, “ Theory of the Text ” , in: Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, London 1981, pp. 31 - 47, here p. 39. 13 Charles Mee quoted in Michele Volansky, “ Forces of History: An Introduction to The Berlin Circle ” , in: Theatreforum 14 (1999), pp. 25 - 26, here p. 26. 14 Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe. New York 1991, p. 65. 15 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, New York 2006, p. 8. 16 Ibid, p. 18. 17 Charles Mee, Agamemnon 2.0., http: / / www. charlesmee.org [accessed 4 September 2017]. 18 Charles Mee quoted in Erin Mee, ” Mee on Mee: Shattered and Fucked Up and Full of Wreckage: The Words and Works of Charles L. Mee ” , in: The Drama Review 46.3 (2002), pp. 83 - 104, here p. 102. 19 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, London 2006, p. 2. 20 Ibid, p. 4. 21 Howard Zinn, A People ’ s History of the United States, New York 2005, p. 569. 22 Michel Foucault, “ What Is Critique? ” , in: The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth, Catherine Porter, Los Angeles 2007, pp. 41 - 81, here p. 46. 23 Charles Mee, Agamemnon 2.0. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Edward Said, “ On Originality ” , in: The World, the Text and the Critic, Cambridge, MA 1983, pp. 126 - 39, here p. 136. 27 Theodor Adorno, “ Commitment ” , in: Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh, London 1980, pp. 177 - 95, here p. 193. 28 Ibid, p. 186. 62 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) 29 Ellen McLaughlin, “ Preface ” , in: The Greek Plays, New York 2005, pp. xiii-xviii, here p. xv. 30 Ellen McLaughlin, Oedipus, in: The Greek Plays, pp. 311 - 94, here p. 323. 31 A phrase borrowed from Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, p. 5. 32 Grady, “ The Modernity of Western Tragedy ” , p. 796. 33 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 8. 34 McLaughlin, Oedipus, p. 333. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, p. 349. 37 Tony Kushner, “ Foreword ” , in: The Greek Plays, pp. vii-xi, here p. vii. 38 In Jameson ’ s understanding, globalization signifies in essence a period of wide-spread Americanization of the world. See “ Globalization and Political Strategy ” , in: New Left Review 4 (2000), pp. 49 - 68; “ Future City ” , in: New Left Review 21 (2003), pp. 65 - 79. 39 McLaughlin, Oedipus, p. 376. 40 Ibid, p. 313. 41 Roland Barthes, “ Putting on the Greeks ” , in: Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL 1972, pp. 59 - 66, here p. 65. 42 Ibid. 43 Campbell, “ Medea as Material ” , pp. 84, 86. 44 McLaughlin, Oedipus, p. 382. 45 Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, p. 16. 46 Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , p. 34. 47 Ibid. 63 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) While stage appearances of the comic figure in the European commedia tradition potentially reflect the act of giving a face, the grotesque mask of white actors in American minstrel shows can be determined as a specific performative defacement othering African Americans to invent whiteness. But how does popular theatre as a potentially reflexive mode of performance become translated into these racist practices? Against the backdrop of the Black Atlantic, the transatlantic slave trade and the global history of racism, my paper focuses on the aesthetics of European and North American popular theatre of the early 19 th century from a comparative perspective. I will look at theatrical forms predating our notions of blackface minstrelsy in order to determine specific relations between marking and masking on stage. The objective of my paper is to contribute to the current German-speaking debate on performances in blackface by extending our focus to hitherto under-researched historical and geographical questions. Performances in blackface can be read as a breaching experiment of our understanding of the criticality of theatre - of its nondramatic as well as representational traditions. 1 In her reading of Michel Foucault ’ s What is critique? , Judith Butler refers to the possibility of an “ ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice ” 2 - a practice addressing the prerequisites of subjectivation. I would like to shift the focus of Butler ’ s suggestion from politics of the self in the later Foucauldian sense to the issue of signification and performativity prominent in her earlier work on queer parody. 3 The history of blackface as a cross-racial stage appearance prompts us, I would like to suggest, to reflect on the foundations of critical perspectives on performance practices in drag, i. e. as masquerade, as either transformative subversion or performative reification of social hierarchies. 4 As the German debate on blackface, which came to a head in 2012, claimed, the discourse on masking needs to be revised, decolonized and provincialized with regard to acts of marking, of othering. 5 However, this critique itself needs to be accompanied by a thorough analysis of differing theatrical forms and the comparative historicization of the uses of a specific mode of ethnic drag. In the 18 th century, blackface-on-black street violence committed by people of European descent became part of political demonstrations in the US. This may be seen as a precursor to the racist defacement of black characters in minstrel shows established as the first American mass culture during the 19 th century and popularized on a broader scale in the wake of the American Civil War in the 1860 s as a means of ex negativo re-defining whiteness. 6 Still, there is more at stake than tabooing black makeup on white skin as an allegedly unchanging hate theatre in reference to these forms of street violence and grotesque othering of dark skin on stage. In this paper, I will focus on the pre-history of minstrel shows: Some of the early prefigurations of blackface tie the dark mask of comic stage figures to aesthetics of referential aberrations subverting the prerequisite of biological racism gradu- Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 64 - 72. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen ally established at a time in which the boundaries of US-American whiteness become contested by the Euro-American underclass. 7 What complicates the critique of blackface is that it does not only stand for racist stereotyping of African Americans, affirming their political exclusion, but also for a strand of popular theatre that actually reminds us of the mechanisms of figuration and the possibilities of resignification. The performing history of blackface thus brings home the necessity of clarifying our notion of theatrical masking and the parameters of the critique of representation. The first section of my paper introduces an early North American coining of blackface, which differs from the overt defacement that determined the later minstrel mask and destabilizes the distinction between face and figure, artist and (stage) persona. The second section turns to its contemporary counterpart, the autobiography of a former slave, which rhetorically establishes a speaking black face calling for abolitionism by quoting blackface performance. Outperforming blackface, its rhetoric calls for a reconsideration of the presuppositions and consequences of our current debates on misrepresentation on the one hand and on non-dramatic theatre as aesthetics of political critique on the other. Face and Figuration In 1844, white comedian Thomas Dartmouth “ Daddy ” Rice from New York City ’ s Lower East Side appears on stage as a parody of Shakespeare ’ s Othello at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, a hotspot of American industrialization and a frontier city between the Northern and Southern states. 8 Rice is already a transnational celebrity of underclass theatre singing and dancing in blackface with several appearances in Britain. 9 He exemplifies the transcontinental entanglement of European popular theatre traditions and the ante-bellum development of a specific American popular culture against the backdrop of what Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic, referring to the transatlantic trade in African slaves in the wake of European expansion and the establishment of the plantation system in the Americas. 10 The geographical in-betweenness of Rice ’ s performances and of his stardom is reflected in his stage appearance as Otello - without the Shakespearean “ h ” - in Philadelphia, of which we do not have any image. Rice ’ s “ illiterate ” Otello reacts to the polished reception of Shakespeare ’ s Trauerspiel by members of the educated classes, who had attacked him for his earlier performances in blackface - evoking expulsions of harlequins from the stage. 11 The argument here is about proper stage appearances and their respectable origin stories. To quote “ Colonel ” George Pope Morris from the New York literary magazine The Mirror in reaction to Rice ’ s performance as the blackface figure Gumbo Cuff: Let no one, however, suppose that Mr. Rice has taken a hint from Shakespeare; far be it from his original genius to borrow from any body; (. . .) we deem it no more than justice to inform the reader, that ‘ Gumbo Cuff ’ is not founded upon Shakespeare ’ s Othello. (. . .) We are staunch friends of native talent (. . .). We are very sincere in wishing manager, author, actors, musicians, supernumeraries, and others engaged in its production, all the success they deserve - a sound and glorious pelting from the stage, to the exhilarating melody of ‘ Jump, Jim Crow! ’ 12 The Mirror refers to what initiated the blackface craze: Rice ’ s New York branding of yet another Southern folklore figure - Jim Crow - in the 1830 s as the burnt cork interlude version of a limping runaway slave in ragged clothes singing and dancing to a syncopated, rather Polka-like melody: 65 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass “ Come listen all you galls and boys,/ I ’ s jist from Tuckyhoe. ” 13 Fig. 1: “ Mr. T. Rice as the Original Jim Crow ” , by Edward Williams Calay (Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library) Rice answers the Mirror critique by signing an open letter as “ the Ethiopian Vocalist, and severely criticized Dramatist, Jim Crow ” . 14 In his response, Rice speaks through the black mask, through the figure of what he calls “ the lowest classes ” , to make fun of the defenders of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in the name of “ New York Desdemonas ” . 15 He mocks the attempt to speak on behalf of a decent audience personified by white women, who need to be protected from rascal theatre, to promote literary drama against a rather corporeal mode of performance considered obscene and therefore to be driven off stage. As Walter T. Lhamon Jr. points out, Rice ’ s Jim Crow figure “ proved too slippery and multisignificant to police. ” 16 Consequently, Rice doubles down on letting referentiality go astray in his letter as well. He extends his stage appearance to a public argument about theatrical aesthetics and the mediality of masking. While assuring the Mirror that his “ representation is as carefully studied from life as any ever brought upon the stage ” 17 Rice underlines his harlequinlike rhetoric, which exposes referential aberrations, by signing the letter in the name of his stage persona. His letter thus questions not only the representational claim of the Mirror, but of his own speaking position. In this sense, the Jim Crow signature can be read as a continuation of the non-dramatic aesthetics of popular theatre exposing the process of figuration Rice stands for. In 1844, he once more responds to the educated defenders of contemporary Shakespearean, i. e. representational, blackface in drama against popular theatre. He appears on stage as the main character in a burlesque opera written by himself, quoting - amongst others - Maurice Dowling ’ s Othello Travesty, one of the many parodies published at the time the Mirror attack came out. 18 Quoting a popular British version of Othello, Rice ’ s black mask is used as a Lumpen trickster against dominant WASP culture. And Desdemona, the icon of an exclusive notion of whiteness in need of protection, is exposed as a spectre. Rice ’ s Otello version doubly inverts racist projections and calls into question who speaks on stage. Singing in an artificial dialect that mingles New York street and Southern plantation slang, his Otello criticizes the black community because of their prejudices against his lover, against Desdemona ’ s whiteness by nature: Otello (second verse) Black folks from sheer vexation Will grumble at me a few; And call dis ‘ malgamation 66 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) Well, I don ’ t care damn if they do. (pause) If i hab no objection, What de debil ’ s dat to dem? You can ’ t help your complexion; Nature made you as well as dem. 19 Othello ’ s stage appearance transposes Elizabethan cross-gender performances and confusion comedies into ethnic drag. Rice not only relocates Othello in a contemporary North American context, but reflects this act of transposition in changing the plot once more. In contrast to Shakespeare ’ s Trauerspiel, Rice invents an offspring of Desdemona and Othello and ends in happy miscegenation bringing Desdemona back to (after-)life. Rice is definitely not a spokesperson for anti-racism. According to Jenna M. Gibbs, he rather exploits “ his local audiences ’ political persuasions ” . 20 And as Douglas A. Jones Jr. points out, there is an 1837 article in the Baltimore Sun echoing a curtain speech, which can be read in defence of slavery against British abolitionists. According to the Sun, Rice calls himself “ a fair representative of the great body of our slaves ” . 21 But even this pun alluding to his fair skin corresponds with his harlequinesque appearances as Jim Crow, reflexively subverting the dispositif of representation by blurring the distinction between actual face and theatrical figure. Rice ’ s burlesque opera harbours what is kept latent in the bourgeois Shakespeare reception of the time: While Othello is translated into dramatic theater of illusion on respectable stages and read as the tragedy of miscegenation, Rice restores Shakespeare ’ s entanglement with popular theatre traditions. As Susan Faherty has shown, Shakespeare ’ s Othello quotes figures of the commedia dell ’ arte. 22 One could even read his puns on race - on the “ sooty bosom ” 23 of a “ horned man ” 24 - as the afterlife of the mask of the Arlecchino, the comic figure of the commedia tradition. The horned and dark mask of the Arlechino is said to refer to carnevalesque depictions of the devil and to the appearance of impoverished farmers in Italian cities, resembling the dirty face of those forced into precarious labour conditions. 25 In the wake of the British expansion around 1600, Shakespeare translates commedia aesthetics into his rhetoric using his puns to explore the gradual racialization of skin colour as marking someone through othering ascriptions. 26 Two hundred and fifty years later, while American society is swept by commercial, transportation and industrial revolutions, 27 Rice continues this exploration by turning blackface into a signifier, a “ mutual mark ” 28 , of the working poor. It is a time of radical change in which the plantation system, rendered possible by the transcontinental slave trade, clashes with the effects of capitalist industrialization and with claims to extend democracy to the entire population. The black mask of Rice ’ s comic figure is racialized in the context of what Achille Mbembe calls the invention of “ the Negro ” as the figure of precarity in modern capitalism. 29 In turning it against drama - queering so to speak the identification of face and figure on stage, i. e. exposing the arbitrariness of referentiality and the foundation of figuration, this still folkloristic form of ethnic drag in musical theatre established prior to the grotesque defacements of racial stereotyping in later minstrel shows destabilizes representational readings of the black mask. Rice ’ s early coining of blackface within the context of a society in turmoil still aligns itself with the commedia tradition quoted by Shakespeare and undermines contemporary drama as well as phenomenological “ knowledge ” production by exposing the act of figuration as uncontainable. However, fooling with referentiality for fun is something not everybody may be able to afford. What does this imply with regard to our understanding of the relation between blackface and critique? 67 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass Defacement and Critique Mediated through their afterlife in backstage movies about vaudeville theatre from the 1920 s, grotesque masks on white actors ’ faces define our image of performances in blackface. As, for instance, a film poster of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer from 1927, shows, this mode of blackface defacement works by stressing eyes, mouth and hands, while, at the same time, turning the dark mask into background. Figuration and defacement coincide in reference to blackness. Its flipside is the individualized face presented in the all-white backstage story framing the blackface act and targeting a specific audience. This mode of framing exemplifies a genre shift from popular theatre tradition to film drama countering Rice ’ s folkloristic harlequin figure in ethnic drag. Michael Rogin shows how the Jazz Singer uses the black minstrel mask to dramatize the story of the integration of a secondgeneration Jewish immigrant actor into white North American popular culture, redefining and thereby extending the notion of US-whiteness in the 1920 s. 30 Figurating “ the other ” grotesquely becomes the precondition for integrating one ’ s so far excluded self as a protagonist into the dominant culture of the white melting pot. 31 The act of masking may be exposed, but it confines the black mask to the stage scenes and the actual face of the actor to the realm of white backstage. In contrast to Rice ’ s non-dramatic aesthetics, the dispositif of this use of blackface is thus representational. By framing the blackface act, the film attempts to produce stable referentiality in contrast to Rice ’ s gig. Read in this context, however, Rice contests our current understanding of political theatre as subverting representation. In a chapter on “ Political Theater ” in her book The Art of Freedom, Juliane Rebentisch discusses contemporary German director René Pollesch ’ s work as criticizing political representation: According to Rebentisch, it exposes representation as representation on stage and underlines that there is no authentic face speaking on behalf of a collective entity. 32 Rebentisch ’ s call for aesthetics as political critique may target some of the arguments of today ’ s blackface critics and their clear distinction between black mask and white face, between racist and proper representation. But what does this critique of representation imply if we look back at a social context in which people are reduced to bare life and are therefore also denied a democratic existence, a political subject position - a social context in which blackness is defined as a non-speaking position, as being excluded from the political stage? In 1848, four years after Rice ’ s Otello debut, the famous abolitionist and former runaway slave Frederick Douglass attacks performers of European descent in blackface in his anti-slavery weekly journal North Star Fig. 2: The Jazz Singer (1927) 68 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) as “ the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature ” . 33 Read in the context of his autobiography published three years before by the Boston Anti-Slavery Society, his article seems to criticize a specific mode of masking that may endanger his efforts to authenticate himself as a valid spokesman of the enslaved and disenfranchised population. From the very first sentence on, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself - the most influential North American ante-bellum slave narrative - stresses the political need for genealogy and individual histories - for a valid position of a speaking I. 34 In his autobiography published in 1845 Douglass turns the rhetorical figure of the narrator into an exemplary figure speaking on behalf of those excluded from political participation. The birth of the former slave's I seems to be secured by the autobiographical genre - a genre like drama concealing its mediality and that is read by Paul de Man and others as a paradigm for a rhetorical masking which dismisses the act of reference production. 35 However, Douglass, who “ took great liberties with the facts of his life ” , 36 knows about the strategical use of staging himself with a black face. In 1846 Douglass tours England on behalf of abolitionism and writes to a friend: “ I find I am hardly black enough for British taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible I make out to pass for at least half Negro at any rate. ” 37 One year before, Douglass opens his autobiography in a way that implicitly gives an insight into the foundations of his own possibility of criticizing slavery in a context in which a strategic speaking position is required: I was born in Tuckahoe (. . .). I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. 38 Douglass translates New York Daddy Rice ’ s Jim-Crow-hit “ I ’ s jist from Tuckyhoe ” into “ the master ’ s ” language for the sake of a political argument. It is not so much his birthday as his birthplace that is at stake here. Rice plays with the toponym of Tuckahoe because it refers to different places in the South as well as in the North, e. g. in the New York area, where Rice himself had come from to stage himself as a Southern fugitive slave in frontier theatre. Douglass reminds Fig. 3: Frontispiece of Frederick Douglass from the first edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845) 69 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass us that there is a crucial difference between being born in Tuckahoe in the North or in the South for African Americans and that fooling happily with referential aberrations may be a luxury not everybody has access to in every place. 39 Still, the prominent quotation also bears witness to his knowledge of the performative character of the speaking black I. Douglass practices the critical art of quoting without quotation marks, mocking the star of burnt cork and using his theatrical aesthetics of destabilizing referentiality to resignify blackface as the birth of the speaking face on behalf of the subaltern. 40 In his response, Douglass proves that Rice ’ s black mask indeed cannot sustainably be policed, but rather produces unexpected offspring. What we can learn from Douglass ’ art of critique inherent in the strategic essentialism of his autobiography is not just that “ the filthy scum of white society ” criminally neglects the violent social preconditions of performing in blackface. Douglass at the same time claims that even in a context of utmost strategic necessity for political representation people are able to reflect on its slippery foundations, on its theatricality so to speak. Against the backdrop of the current debate on performances in blackface we need to keep Douglass ’ blackface legacy in mind, because his art of critique attacks social exclusion by acknowledging the performative precondition of resignification and political change. Notes 1 On distinguishing non-dramatic theatre traditions from drama in the Hegelian sense, i. e. the dialogic representation and illusionary incorporation of dramatis personae, see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, New York 2006. On the alienation effects of breaching experiments, see Harold Garfinkel, “ Studies of the Routine Grounds in Everyday Activities ” , in: Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall 1967, pp. 35 - 75. 2 Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” (eipcp.net/ transversal/ 0806/ butler/ en/ print, [accessed 1 May 2001]; see also Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , in: The Politics of Truth. ed by Sylvère Lotringer, Los Angeles 2007, pp. 41 - 81. 3 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York 1990. 4 See Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag. Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor 2009, p. 12. 5 See Christopher B. Balme, “ Shitstorms and Blackface ” , in: The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge 2014, pp. 168 - 173; Joy Kristin Kalu, “ Dein Blackface ist so langweilig! Was das deutsche Repräsentationstheater von den Nachbarkünsten lernen kann ” (www.nachtkritik.de/ index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=10271: in-sachen-blackfacing-zwischenruf-zu-einer-andauernden-debatte&catid=101: debatte&Itemid=84 [accessed 26 November 2014]; Hanna Voss, Reflexion von ethnischer Identität(szuweisung) im deutschen Gegenwartstheater, Marburg 2014, pp. 85 - 131. Regarding the specific history of German performances in blackface see Frederike Gerstner, Inszenierte Inbesitznahme: Blackface und Minstrelsy in Berlin um 1900, Stuttgart 2017. 6 See Jake Austen and Taylor, Juval, Darkest America. Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop. Foreword by Mel Watkins, New York 2012; Annemarie Bean, James Hatch and Brooks McNamara (eds): Inside the Minstrel Mask. Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, Middletown 1996; Walter T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain. Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, Cambridge/ London 1998; Eric Lott, Love and Theft. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York 1993; John Strausbaugh, Black Like You. Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture, New York 2006. 70 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) 7 On the relation between the establishment of blackface minstrelsy and the “ growing transatlantic acceptance ” of phrenology, see Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty. Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760 - 1850. Baltimore 2014, pp. 208 - 209. 8 See Walter T., Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow. Lost plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge/ London 2003, pp. 31, 70 - 90. 9 On the specific relation between London and Philadelphia in transatlantic theatre history, see Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, on T. D. Rice in particular see pp. 197 - 212. 10 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Cambridge 1995. 11 On the contested status of Shakespeare in 19th-century USA and the nativist, anti- British appropriation of his plays, see Cliff, Nigel: The Shakespeare Riots. Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America. New York 2007. Regarding the distinction between Trauerspiel and Tragödie, see Benjamin, Walter: “ Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ” , in: Gesammelte Werke I.1. Frankfurt a. M., p. 205 - 430 (misleadingly translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama). 12 The New York Mirror, 5 October 1833, p. 110; quoted in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, p. 20. 13 See Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, p. 95. On the use of Scottish and Irish melodies in blackface minstrelsy, see Charles Hayword, Negro Minstrelsy and Shakespearian Burlesque, Hatboro 1966, pp. 78 - 79. 14 The 1833 letter is quoted in full in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, pp. 21 - 23, here p. 23. 15 Ibid., p. 22. 16 Ibid., p. 3. With regard to the class-specificity of multisignificant receptions, see also Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder. Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge 1997, p. 82. 17 Ibid., p. 23. 18 See T. D. Rice, “ Otello. A Burlesque Opera ” , in: Lhamon Jump Jim Crow, pp. 343 - 383 (based on a manuscript copy transcribed by John B. Wright, dated April 1853; New York Public Library, Billy Rose Collection, NCOF +). See also Maurice G. Dowling, Othello Travestie. An Operatic Burlesque Burletta. London 1834. On Rice ’ s quoting of Dowling, see Mahar, William J.: Behind the Burnt Cork Mask. Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture, Urbana/ Chicago 1999, p. 102. 19 Rice, “ Otello ” , p. 357. 20 See Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, p. 209. 21 Quoted by Douglas A. Jones, Jr.: “ Black Politics but Not Black People. Rethinking the Social and ‘ Racial ’ History of Early Minstrelsy ” , in: TDR 57: 2, 2013, pp. 21 - 37, here p. 34. See also Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, p. 210. 22 See Susan Faherty, “ Othello dell ’ Arte. The Presence of ‘ Commedia ’ in Shakespeare ’ s Tragedy ” , in: Theatre Journal 43: 2, 1991, pp. 179 - 194. 23 William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, edited by Michael Neill, Oxford 2006, Act I, Scene 2, Verse 70, p. 213 (Brabantio). 24 Shakespeare, Othello, Act IV, Scene 1, Verse 58, p. 329 (Othello). 25 See Karl Riha, Commedia dell ’ arte. Frankfurt a. M. 1980, p. 29. 26 See Doris Kolesch, “ Wie Othello spielen ” . Jahrbuch der Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 152, 2016, pp. 87 - 103. 27 See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Violent Empire. The Birth of an American National Identity, Williamsburg 2010. 28 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, p. 6. 29 See Achille Mbembe,Critique of Black Reason. Durham 2017. 30 See Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Skin. Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Berkeley 1999. 31 This mechanism seems to be already at work with regard to minstrelsy and its close connection to the Irish community in the later 19 th century. On Irish performers in blackface, see Jennifer Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865 - 1905. New York 2015, pp. 30 - 39; on the relation between black- 71 Blackface and Critique. From T. D. Rice to Frederick Douglass face minstrelsy, the production of a white American working class and Irish immigration, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class, with an Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver, London/ New York 1991, pp. 115 - 163. 32 See Juliane Rebentisch, The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence, Cambridge 2016. 33 Frederick Douglass in North Star, 27. 10. 1848; see Lott: Love and Theft, p. 15. 34 See Fred Moten ’ s problematization of the relation of blackness and performance in his implicit counter-narrative of the slave Betty who refuses to speak up in court, thereby losing the possibility of being freed from slavery: “ Blackness and Nonperformance ” . MoMa Talk: Afterlives, 2 September 2015 (www.youtube.com/ watch? v=G2leiF- ByIIg). 35 See de Man, Paul: “ Autobiography as Defacement ” , in: MLN 94: 5, 1979 (Comparative Literature), pp. 919 - 930. 36 McDowell, Deborah E.: “ Introduction ” , in: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by himself, Oxford 2009 (reissued). pp. vii-xxvii, here p. ix. 37 Douglass quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft, p. 245: fn. 39; in reference to Martin, Waldo E., Jr.: The Mind of Frederick Douglass, Chapel Hill 1984, p. 116. 38 Douglass, Narrative. 39 On the illegalization of teaching African Americans to write in the wake of the violent revolt organized by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, see Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, p. 183. 40 On the African tradition of resignification and its correspondences with literary deconstruction, see, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African- American Literary Criticism, New York and Oxford 1988. 72 Evelyn Annuß (Berlin) Performing Arts Criticism in the Web 2.0 era: Authoritativeness in a process of human/ computer interaction: some initial thoughts Sergio Lo Gatto (Rome) This paper deals with the role of performing arts criticism on the Web 2.0, as encountered in blogs, web magazines and social media. The development of technological tools promotes easy access to Web platforms: a new cultural identity is conveyed through and within virtual communities where the debate is non-regulated and open to anyone. Confronting the philosophical and analytical background with the communication environment that now hosts the critical discourse, my intent is to show to which extent the freedom of publishing and sharing opinions is changing the fundamental categories of critical analysis in terms of language, relevance and management of authority and authoritativeness. The evolution of practices in the digital media environment Social networks nowadays play the main role in the narration of private lives and the treatment of public information: in the social media environment, these two very distant types of feed are streamed on the same wall, with no separation. This process produces a controversial storytelling, mainly profiled by (and on) a group of individuals linked by virtual connections and rarely by a concrete communion of interests and views of the world. What regulates this kind of interconnection is rather a form of negotiation, a process in which the rules of interactivity have come to function as a “ handbook ” . In such an inclusive media environment, where reality is a construct of collective consciousness, spectators and artists and, to the same extent, critics and readers, explore the same complex organism. This paper proposes some initial thoughts on the profound change encountered in those critical practices that use digital media as the main vehicle. The paper attempts to provide an overview of the evolution of certain basic paradigms in the processes of publishing and sharing criticism in Internet-based written journalism. In the last fifteen years, technology has undergone some very rapid changes, keeping pace with a general tendency - in hardware production processes - to abandon the phenomenological orientation of media and instead increase attention to its technical nature; such a focus on “ media technicity ” promotes the decentration of humans towards production of media. The same kind of trend resonates when one observes the modes of production in the field of contemporary performing arts, in which many theatre makers and directors in the Western scene seem increasingly interested in investigating the relations between body and machine. In this article - that aims to focus on the dynamics of publication and circulation of theatre criticism - there is not enough room for a detailed analysis of artistic trends, and yet, the contemporary scene includes plenty of artists interested in re-conceptualizing some basic concepts. In particular, for renowned artists, such as Robert Lepage, Guy Cassiers, Kornél Mundruczó or Milo Rau, but also for a number of emerging theatre makers, it ’ s no longer just about integrating multimedia Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 73 - 80. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen elements into the performances, but more and more about structuring the performances as a complex net of relations between actions and virtual feeds. The mode of interaction requested by the spectators is moving closer to the one requested by the media environment they inhabit. According to Bojana Kunst, “ the artificial is [. . .] inscribed within our understanding of the physical and [. . .] serves as a grounding of different modes of aesthetic and scientific production of physical images, strategies of bodily representation ” . 1 For those who study the connections between arts and technology, such lines of work resonate in the way the software industry is developing the users ’ ability to appoint devices to be the major interface to interpret and narrate reality. Integrated as the mechanical filters are with human agency, the users are experimenting with an apparently total freedom of expression regarding contents and their widespread diffusion. And yet, these contents are being produced and shared through a software structure which - programmed by a machine - imitates, replicates and mocks human modes of agency, with a fundamental homologation of the forms as the inevitable result. Between production, publication and sharing. Changing paradigms It is a truth universally acknowledged that the transition from print to digital challenged many general conventions related to information management and production of concepts and ideas. In the specific area of arts writing and performing arts criticism, this sort of natural evolution is blurring the role of critical writing in the eyes of its readership. Given the universal access to web-platforms, the readership itself has become very mixed and heterogeneous; it basically includes both the audiences of playhouses and festivals, and theatre practitioners and professionals themselves. Those web magazines that were born in the digital era are currently faced with a media environment and a sharing of contents that is redefining many of the paradigms of journalistic language and challenging certain fundamental principles of criticism. The first question is to what degree certain changes in terms of language and the role of criticism are linked to those that are affecting the media environment where journalism-based critical reflection is currently flourishing. All the users of digital web-based communication are apparently involved in a sort of biological mutation that influences the premises of language and of the organization of informational and critical discourse, on the basis of the processes related to production, publication and circulation of concepts, ideas and critiques. At the highest level, the daily and widespread access to social media is the phenomenon that technically allows everybody to select information and encourages everybody to produce a personal storytelling of reality. Since the advent of citizen journalism, the participatory approach to collecting information and sharing comments on reality has been flourishing, often favouring considerable improvements to the accuracy of the news. Nonetheless, in the realm of cultural journalism, this process is endangering the opportunity for an authoritative comment to be distinguished in an ocean of inputs, which has no regulations. If, from the daily stream of news, one focuses one ’ s attention on that content aimed at expressing a precise position on an equally precise subject, such as theatre, the impossibility of tracking an authoritative critique becomes a crucial issue for the sake of the performing arts themselves - and at the same time, for the sake of a functioning arts criticism, able 74 Sergio Lo Gatto (Rome) to enrich cultural knowledge about specific fields. An in-depth analysis of the current media environment might therefore be pivotal to an understanding of to which degree - and following which path - such “ new ” processes of production and publication of critical contents are determining their actual reception by the readership. The major methodological approach used in this research is based on a scrutinized “ media ecology ” 2 and technological deterministic media theory, alongside theoretical philosophy, aesthetics, digital philosophy, performance analysis, theatre and performance studies. The dialogue in virtual communities Especially since the advent of social media, the studies on the so-called “ network society ” 3 are increasingly insisting on the complex role played by virtual communities in establishing what philosopher Byung- Chul Han calls a “ society of opinions ” . 4 A molecular sociocultural and communicative order - fostered by a non-hierarchical discourse - redefines the paradigms related to the circulation of critical thinking and therefore to the value acquired by individual critical statements. Such statements, in the phase of their formulation, are driven to challenge certain criteria from traditional philosophy and aesthetics and instead to embrace others strictly attached to the morphology of digital culture. Howard Rheingold thinks of cyberspace “ as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes ” . 5 Rheingold ’ s metaphorical description of cyberspace is proven to be true when one looks at the technological and rhetorical architecture of social networks. Founded as these are on an individual selection of data to be read and written, they represent very complex instruments in charge of managing a large amount of “ information as social and cultural objects ” . 6 In the specific field of theatre publicity and criticism, the readers ’ massive access to social networks has become problematic because, with no limitations whatsoever, it allows and encourages everybody to participate in the public discourse surrounding the performing arts. If one considers that - especially in certain countries, and Italy is one of them - a great part of the audience can be represented by actual professionals and practitioners, a social network can and perhaps should be seen also as the agora of the virtual community gathered around theatre. The most evident outcome of such free access to comment is that the “ voice ” of a critic is no longer immediately recognizable as authoritative. Thus, for anybody trying to work in theatre criticism, the first obstacle to surmount is the opinion of general readership. Also due to the crisis of the printed press, the quasi totality of the debate migrated to the free browsing Internet, causing a lot of changes in terms of employment positions and the economic structure of the media, which have now lost their direct sales incomes, rely on advertising and often are not able to hire writers for a fixed and adequate salary. 7 This shifting scenario significantly reduces the opportunity to assign to critics a form of authority connected to their acknowledged professional position. Such a new order is certainly playing its part in the decline of the critic as a proper job, which is undergoing a fundamental blurring of its function towards the whole system of performing arts. If, on one side, a text published in an established newspaper somehow guarantees an immediate acknowledgment of authority and authoritativeness, now anybody with the 75 Performing Arts Criticism in the Web 2.0 era: Authoritativeness in a process of human/ computer technological tools and the technical knowhow is able to publish a personal reflection and share it on the Net. As the basic rhetorical philosophy would suggest, the action of sharing an opinion might indeed be considered as critical. According to John Stuart Mill, it ’ s impossible to presume the truth of one ’ s opinion deliberately trying not to be contradicted. As a matter of fact, a total liberty to be discredited justifies the act of promoting one ’ s opinion that was assumed truthful. 8 And yet, in a non-regulated environment, this creates a horizontal and non-hierarchical dialectical system, in which it becomes tricky to tell an authoritative comment from a casual one. Cultural Reconceptualization Such a drift is related to wider sociological aspects and provides proof of the “ cultural reconceptualization ” theorized by Lev Manovich back in 2002. 9 Some sociological implications can also be found in the discussion fostered by Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, who highlights the concept of “ documentality ” . 10 The theory of “ documents as ontological elements of society ” is particularly relevant as soon as one focuses on the kind of writing appointed to think through a specific subject - such as theatre criticism - and then synthesized as a digital document to be shared in the Internet parlour. From a technical perspective, Internet traffic is, in the first place, regulated by search engines and social media feeds on the basis of quantitative criteria such as the abundance of articles published by this blog or the number of shares for that post. Even though the algorithm that decides on the distribution of shared content changes continuously (and opaquely), the opportunities for an article shared on Facebook to be tracked and read by other users are generally calculated by also keeping track of the number of interactions created by a single post and even by the time passed between the second of the publication and that of the first sharing. 11 In such a jungle of algorithms, the user ’ s familiarity with the software - alongside a large number of other incalculable variations - contributes to the final visibility of content, on a platform where a personal point of view shares the exact same space as that of a potentially authoritative comment. This example shows how many passages in web publishing and social media sharing are controlled by a close interaction between human and computer. This might be a perspective from which to investigate the changes in the relation between an authoritative critique and the perception of the readers. The debate on these themes has already gained enormous resonance in the media and the social networks themselves, bringing up general questions on the crisis of criticism in digital society. 12 The cuts to newspaper staff represent the deepest concern: a critic cannot make a living as a writer and is forced to find other ways to make money, most likely in the same artistic field. This downgrades critical writing from a job to a hobby, causes a decrease in quality and creates a conflict of interests. Moving from the pages of a trusted newspaper to personal blogs and social media profiles, a text reaches the readers without a recognizable path of authority. Going back to Ferraris, a liberalized publication launched in a mixed private/ public agora in conditions of open sharing, the “ documental value ” that a digital text holds towards a specific complex of knowledge enters a process of ongoing non-regulated validation. Structuralist and poststructuralist semiotics had already dealt with the new potentialities of reading. In 1970, Roland Barthes scrutinized the “ non linearity ” of new technologies, foretelling the rise of many interactive networks: 76 Sergio Lo Gatto (Rome) [. . .] without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifiers; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one. 13 Exerting leverage on a growing personalization of virtual experiences, and on the basic mix of private and public data, digital media reach a mass community, such as the one that has been theorized by mass media studies and critical theory, less and less. If the active audience studies used to assume a specific spectator, digital media instead addresses a complex of users/ producers that shares the same interests. Unfortunately, this process doesn ’ t create any form of actual collaboration. Jürgen Habermas foresaw “ the end of the communicative action ” 14 : the mass is a sum of individuals, who do not integrate with each other or head to a common agency, but rather shape a special form of dialogue that refuses to be balanced by past models of authoritativeness. A sort of common imagery is thus created, piece by piece, by the users through an interactive kind of agency. The Net that these users are weaving makes them feel close to each other only on a virtual level, while in fact any shared paradigm of knowledge is put to the test of an ongoing negotiation of changing cultural codes that are generated by the very logics of the hosting media environment. Revisiting Barthes ’ s intuitions, David Booth drags the discourse into a more contemporary context, coining the expression “ multimodal texts ” . In this kind of text, the meaning and the signifiers are constructed by a “ combination of messages from different media on the top of the users ’ own personal construct of the world ” . 15 All online media and social networks are, programmatically, open to the reader ’ s agency. Thus, the reader, step by step, reaches the same position as the author of the text he/ she is reading. And this seems to be a breaking new wave in thinking about authoritativeness. In other terms, the adjective multimedia is no longer only related to the single media used for composing contents, but rather to the act of using and affecting those very contents. Following Derrick De Kerckhove, language must here be considered as a mind-expanding technology; digital media must then be seen as a physical support for the export of language. 16 In a system of interconnected and composite competences, “ the more the discourse gets decentralized, the deeper is the change in the conventional definitions and relations ” . 17 Connection and relation are the two main leads of cultural reconfiguration, since the interconnected environment changes the way the text is shared and read. From a philosophical perspective, a great part of “ new rhetoric ” questions the author and his/ her role, trying to keep an eye on the fundamental rhetorical categories which may still provide ground for a reasoning, even in the Internet ’ s unmethodical authorship. The concept of “ redundance ” , the same dialectic quality/ quantity of presence that regulates the traffic in online media, is crucial to this matter. 18 A recognizable author shapes the “ style ” of a contribution - that is to say the selection of the topics and the general slant - considering the potential reproducibility and the sharing opportunities of the content, in the first place. On the other hand, digital rhetoric points out the “ dialogue ” as the first concept to be updated to the dynamics of the current media environment, abandoning the traditional function of mode of persuasion, pursuant to the one of participatory act. Returning to J. S. Mill ’ s early intuitions, online discourse conceives the dialogue “ as a testing of one ’ s own ideas, a contesting of others ’ ideas, and a collaborative creating of ideas ” . 19 77 Performing Arts Criticism in the Web 2.0 era: Authoritativeness in a process of human/ computer Nonetheless, when it comes to social networks, human-computer interaction forces a rethink of most of the terms of this latest statement. Online publication is self-managed by the users/ producers; collaborative software is a powerful stimulus to interaction between users and provides an alternative news source. A critic and his/ her readers contribute to the construction of a sort of collaborative authoritativeness. If this could be seen as a step forward in shaping a kind of knowledge of the arts that is accurate and open to free debate, media technicity is driving the modes of online communication away from dissent and to a form of homophily. One example is the most recent Facebook algorithm that drastically reduced the feed displayed on a user ’ s wall: everyone can now read posts shared by approximately 25 people. This means that any form of critical debate is brought to the attention of a very limited percentage of actual contributors. Thus, the necessary premises for free speech and a compelling critique can only apparently be found whenever one engages virtual communities that are becoming organized in increasingly closed circuits. Cybernetics and human intervention Coining the term “ cybernetics ” , Norbert Wiener defined “ the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine ” . 20 This scheme of control and communication was based on a fundamental analogy - encountered in machines and animals (human beings included) - of certain regulatory systems such as communication processes and information analysis. A large number of new theoretical contributions inscribed in the field of digital philosophy 21 are very close to an idea of the medium in the perspective of cybernetics. The new (augmented) function of digital applications calls into question the material ontology of those devices one is completely used to using in everyday life. Exerting leverage on New Materialism Studies, Grant Bollmer 22 explains why such a perspective might be useful in order to better understand the relation between users and producers of content in online environments, which is crucial for questioning the current concept of authoritativeness. With special regard to automation processes that discipline human-machine interaction, Digital Materialism questions the position of the human factor towards the duality of hardware/ software working behind the digital devices. By investigating the opportunity for something apparently highly human (as a critical comment on such a complex object as contemporary performing arts) to include an actual human element, the researcher gives up taking for granted the fact that a discourse initiated by a human being can keep its qualities of authority and authoritativeness when - in order to be produced and shared - it must pass through a mechanical filter. In questioning the actual influence of a cultural discourse such as criticism, one should wonder to what extent contemporary users and their agency in fact depend on technical devices used to spread any kind of word. Following digital materialism, when one considers the materiality of media, the human becomes an effect of technological storage and information transmission, a product of a semi-anonymous history in which technologies structure possibilities for participation, politics, and knowledge. The human is consequentially embedded in and emerges from a field of material relations. 23 Newsgroups and forums used to represent a form of communal spirit and a virtual gathering place for actual communities, in which authorship in fact belonged to the group itself. The evolution from blog to social networks and the consequent fusion 78 Sergio Lo Gatto (Rome) of the two made a case for authorship. Blogs and social media profiles are spaces for selfexpression and self-narration, they promote a proprietary and individualistic attitude. By using these tools, the author claims a form of direct ownership of the content and its quality; and yet, the rules of its distribution are set by software intelligence, which is based on quantitative factors and data mining logic. In order to understand human intervention in contemporary cultural - and certainly critical - reflection, one might then need to go back to the essence of the machine. By analysis of the media environment and its technical operations, a more aware critical practice might escape the duality of user/ producer and find a new location for a sort of cybernetic authorship. According to the basic assumptions of critical theory, a critic should be able to track all the passages followed by a critical statement, mapping the ground for a transparent discourse. Which is the first step in defining the freedom, accuracy and authoritativeness of an idea. And a critique. Notes 1 Bojana Kunst, The Presence of Body Between the Organic and the Artificial, http: / / archeologia.women.it/ user/ quarta/ workshops/ epistemological4/ bkunst.htm [accessed 15 February 2018]. 2 The definition of “ media ecology ” was introduced by Neil Postman in 1968. http: / / www.media-ecology.org/ media_ecology [accessed 28 July 2017]. 3 Cf. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Malden, MA 1996. 4 Cf. Byung-Chul Han, Razionalità digitale. La fine dell ’ agire comunicativo, Milano 2014, ebook. 5 Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, MA, 1993, Introduction, p XX. 6 Maurizio Ferraris, Mobilitazione totale, Roma-Bari 2015, ebook. 7 Cf. Dora Santos Silva, “ The Future of Digital Magazine Publishing, ” in: Information Services and Use, vol. 31, no. 3 - 4, pp. 301 - 310, 2011; cf. Clay Shirky, “ Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable ” , in: Shirky.com (2009) http: / / www.shirky.com/ weblog/ 2009/ 03/ newspapers-and-thinkingthe-unthinkable [accessed 12 July 2017]. 8 Cf. John Stuart Mill, Charles W. Elliott, Patrick Hayden, On liberty, New York 2004. 9 Cf. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA 2010. 10 Cf. Maurizio Ferraris, Richard Davies, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. New York 2013. 11 Cf. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is changing what we read and how we think, London 2012. 12 Cf. Ismene Brown, “ Only the artists can save the arts critics ” , in: The Guardian, 02. 08. 2013; Lyn Gardner, “ Is theatre criticism in crisis? ” , in: The Guardian, 08-Oct- 2013; Anthony O. Scott, Better living through criticism: how to think about art, pleasure, beauty, and truth, London 2016; Mark Shenton, “ Critics are an endangered species ” , in: The Stage, 07. 08. 2013. 13 Roland Barthes, S/ Z, New York 1974, p.5. 14 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Cambridge 2004, p. xx. 15 David Wallace Booth, Reading Doesn ’ t Matter Anymore: Shattering the Myths of Literacy, Markham 2006, p. 33. 16 Cf. Derrick De Kerckhove, The Augmented Mind, 2010. ebook. 17 Ibid. 18 Cf. Brandon Jones, Rhetorical Criticism on Online Discourse, Tampa, FL 2011. 19 James P. Zappen, “ Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory ” , in: Technical Communication Quarterly 14 (2011), pp. 319 - 325, here p. 321. 20 Cf. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, MA 1948. 21 Cf. Edward Fredkin, “ An Introduction to Digital Philosophy ” , in: International Jour- 79 Performing Arts Criticism in the Web 2.0 era: Authoritativeness in a process of human/ computer nal of Theoretical Physics 42 (2003), pp. 189 - 247. 22 Cf. Grant Bollmer, “ Technological Materiality and Assumptions About ‘ Active ’ Human Agency ” , in: Ramón Reichert, Annika Richterich, Pablo Abend, Mathias Fuchs, Karin Wenz (Edd.), “ Digital Material/ ism ” , Digital Culture & Society (1), 2015, pp. 95 - 110. 23 Ibid., p. 96. 80 Sergio Lo Gatto (Rome) In Search of ‘ the Real ’ - Teatr.doc ’ s Documentary Reflections on Politics, Law and Art Lisa Wolfson (Bochum) Teatr.doc, with its focus on current socio-critical topics, stands out in Moscow ’ s theatre landscape and presents itself as a creative site of negotiation for alternative discourses that have been banished from traditional mass media to social networks. The artists in this small theatre defy restrictions on freedom of speech with brave productions, readings, film screenings and discussions. In the documentary re-productions of grotesque interrogations and criminal proceedings, even the political performances of Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky gain an irritating meta-level on the stage of this off-theatre. The unique combination of real and fictive events truly develops its own specific momentum when members of the police force or religious activists loyal to the government storm theatre events. This article looks into the manifold amalgamations of reality and fiction in the context of Teatr.doc and examines its political significance. Teatr.doc stands out in Moscow ’ s theatre culture due to its focus upon recent sociocritical topics, presenting itself as a creative communication portal for alternative discourses that have been widely banned in traditional mass media. The artists of the small Teatr.doc fight against the suppression of free expression with courageous productions, readings, film screenings and discussions. For instance, the political performances of Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky gain a jarring meta-level on the scene of this off-theatre by the documentary re-staging of grotesque hearings and criminal trials. The unique blend of real and staged events develops its own peculiar dynamics when the police or ‘ religious activists ’ who are loyal to the government storm the theatre. My analysis follows the multitude of amalgamations of reality and fiction in the context of Teatr.doc and examines its political significance. The limitations of the freedom of opinion and expression that we observe in Russia today become especially tangible in art. The media-induced rise of the so-called ‘ patriotic mindset ’ in Russian society, within the political elites and even among the art community, combined with the revival of ‘ state art ’ and its favoured ‘ state artists ’ , results in a growing gap between institutionalised art and its independent, radical alternatives. Teatr.doc represents the free scene and its artistic innovations like no other theatre in the Russian Federation. As emphasized by theatre scholar Molly Flynn, this “ [d]ocumentary theatre company [. . .] has been lauded internationally for its hardhitting plays about contemporary Russia ” . 1 According to her, ‘ Documentary theatre ’ is used as an umbrella term to describe different types of plays that make an explicit claim to being rooted in factual material. Such plays often incorporate verbatim interviews, historical documents, or autobiographical narratives and address topics as varied as romance, family, history, and current events. 2 Despite getting commissions from the Ministry of Culture to produce ambitious social projects involving participation of students Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 81 - 89. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen or convicts, Teatr.doc emphasizes its status as an “ autonomous non-profit organisation 3 and represents an ensemble as well as a specific space of encounter for the audience, the theatre-makers of ‘ the Doc ’ and its diverse guests. In times of limited freedom of assembly, Teatr.doc ’ s stage offers an interactive refuge for meeting and exchanging artistic-intellectual reflections. History and Repertoire The Doc “ was founded in 2002 by a group of writers who couldn ’ t find a theatre willing to stage their documentary-style writing. Practically all its plays are verbatim, created on the basis of long interviews with actual people. ” 4 The theatre ’ s short history reveals an important development: At first, Teatr.Doc ’ s playwrights and directors focused mainly on social issues such as the plight of prisoners, migrant workers, drug addicts and people treated like outcasts after being infected with HIV. [. . .] But from 2010 onwards, the plays became more critical of the government, says John Freedman, a Moscow-based translator, writer and specialist on Russian theatre, 5 and his words can be easily confirmed by the Doc ’ s repertoire, exposing the prominence of political topics: One Hour Eighteen. The Trial that Wasn ’ t but Has to Be (2010) deals with the imprisonment, torture and death of attorney Sergei Magnitsky. Bolotnoye Delo (2015) refers to the so-called Bolotnaya Square case. This “ play [is] about ” the severe consequences of the Bolotnaya Square demonstration of 2012, when tens of thousands protested against Vladimir Putin ’ s return to the presidency for a third term. The work is based on interviews with the families of demonstrators who ended up in jail. 6 I also have to mention the stinging satire about a horrific Berlusconi/ Putin hybrid: Berlusputin (2012) - an adaptation of Dario Fo ’ s L ’ anomalo bicefalo (The Two-headed Anomaly). 7 The Magnitsky Case: The Trial that Wasn ’ t but Has to Be Regarding Teatr.doc ’ s relationship to the social systems of politics and law, we have to keep an eye on its explicit orientation towards reality, which this theatre even carries in its name. The traces of factual events presented by the Doc neither claim a naïve mapping of ‘ reality ’ nor consider ‘ the real ’ as something ‘ pure ’ , monolithic and absolute. Taking into account that reality always appears structured and fragmented to us, each play offers a specifically textured intensification of occurrences. Such a condensation of reality in the Doc ’ s works is not homogeneous but always multi-perspectival and in a certain way relative, although - to phrase it a little more pointedly - arrest, torture and death cannot be challenged (on stage) as real, physically experienced acts. After he had uncovered the biggest tax fraud in Russian history, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested on fabricated charges and held in government custody for over eleven months before he died on 16 November 2009 - eight days before the Russian legal limit of one year ’ s detention without a trial./ The injustice of Magnitsky ’ s arrest, imprisonment, and murder, as well as attempts to cover up the institutional corruption in the handling of his case, were the initial inspiration for playwright Elena Gremina and director Mikhail Ugarov to begin work on One Hour Eighteen, a play whose title denotes the seventy-eight minutes during which Magnitsky was beaten to death by an ‘ emergency medical team ’ who were supposedly attending to his critical medical condition behind the closed doors of a prison cell. 8 82 Lisa Wolfson (Bochum) While this drama takes a firm line pro humanity and contra torture by “ stag[ing] an imagined trial of the prison and medical staff directly involved in the days before the death of Magnitsky ” 9 as well as of the judges responsible for his prolonged preliminary detention and the scornful neglect of his numerous complaints about the awful conditions in jail, other plays proceed in subtler ways and even avoid evaluating the events. Insulted Feelings (2011) thus merely juxtaposes different positions (similar to the arte povera) and illuminates the conflict between enraged orthodox believers and violent religious activists on the one hand and artists who are critical of religion on the other as monologues in a psychologically convincing manner. In this play the viewers are simply observers. In One Hour Eighteen (1 Hour 18), however, the spectators are transformed into judges, and actors appear as accused incumbents justifying themselves to an imaginary court of law. Their cynical and unabashed explanations of the circumstances interlock, relentlessly revealing the whole spectrum of an inhuman system. Unlike with Insulted Feelings, it was not possible to interview the people directly involved in the real events concerning Magnitsky beforehand. Preparing 1 Hour 18 was exceptionally difficult because people were afraid to speak out publicly and asked that all recording devices should be turned off while interviewing. Besides court files, journalistic input and Magnitsky ’ s letters, the material for the play consisted of anonymized testimonies provided by other employees of the penal system, contributions from jail doctors found in internet fora, etc. The Doc always focuses on saving and preserving a multi-layered reality from state censorship and propaganda, which habitually seek to create a one-dimensional and absolute representation of reality. As Flynn has argued, the astonishing blossoming of the documentary genre in Russia is also a desperate attempt to counteract the collective traumata of the past (forced and suppressed narratives, archives that often remain inaccessible to the present day, the lack of a national debate about Stalinism etc.). Accordingly, 1 Hour 18 aims at overcoming this older problematic past that explicitly overshadows the present. 10 Approaching ‘ the Real ’ : The Documentary Method On small independent Russian stages, documentary theatre is not just a trend that has been imported with some delay from the West. The genre emerged in the early 2000 s within the so-called “ New Russian Drama ” (NRD), an extremely fertile movement that only recently has attracted attention of researchers and as yet has not been the object of comprehensive analysis. 11 NRD challenges the textual and performative cultivation of indigenous and international classics, a common practice in Russia, questioning the dusty notion of escapist ‘ beauty ’ . The movement also distances itself from flat entertainment and from (the revival of) that pathos formerly typical of Soviet theatre and society. 12 Instead, it is drawn to the profane and mundane (including things and language of everyday life) as well as to the problematic and marginalized. NRD is interested in what happens here and now and concentrates strongly on ‘ the real ’ - which is exactly what the genre of documentary theatre (and with it Teatr.doc) specializes in. Under the prevailing political conditions, the documentary techniques utilized by the Doc seem especially appropriate, because they allow for informing the audience and inducing spectators to develop their own opinions. Teatr.doc artists strive to achieve these goals without indoctrinating the viewers or persuading them of something contradictory to their own beliefs 83 In Search of ‘ the Real ’ - Teatr.doc ’ s Documentary Reflections on Politics, Law and Art by using suggestive aesthetic or rhetorical means. The Doc refers to the most radical form of this aspiration as “ zero position ” . We should realize that relying on existing material alone is the obvious flaw of a straight documentary approach, for it can bring to light hidden issues and put them under discussion exclusively by way of selection and combination. It is true that Teatr.doc considers the audience smart and imaginative enough to fill up the ostentatious or subtle gaps in the presentation of factual material. Nevertheless, the Doc does not reject fictional expansions and clear aestheticization techniques completely; they are simply used rarely (for instance, in case of deliberately obscured facts) and with great caution, as proved by 1 Hour 18 - its last scene unfolding in the stated afterworld, which appears just like the very substantial hell of reality experienced in jail. Characterized by the desired purity and sobriety of aesthetic presentation, the documentary approach reacts with its formal clarity to a number of diverse processes of making boundaries porous. These processes not only affect social spheres and institutions but also various ideological systems and appear surreal in a European country of the 21st century. The separation of powers is dissolving. Church and State, a religious veneration of the Czar and a renascent Stalin cult are intermixing with each other. Fragments of the USSR ideology and elements of the Russian Orthodox tradition form a new monstrous entity leading to a continuous veiling of perception and creating a fuzziness in people ’ s minds. As a result, society becomes more amenable to manipulation and propaganda. The documentary approach of the Doc counteracts these devastating boundary dissolutions and the absurd events associated with them. Thus, it partly replaces those institutions that have lost credibility as a result of these processes. The small theatre creates a space for convening and for discussion (these are no longer allowed in the public sphere), for an honest report or feature - no longer available on TV - and ultimately for “ The Trial that Wasn ’ t but Should Have Been ” . 13 Witness Theatre. The Pussy Riot Case: A Trial That Was The degree of fictionalization or the configuration of the mixed relationship between reality and fiction depends on the topic presented on stage and varies according to the chosen form of portrayal. Although the Doc team received many play submissions about the Pussy Riot case by young writers in 2012 and 2013, the directors regarded the fictional form as inadequate; having the convicted women be portrayed by actresses appeared to be inappropriate to them. Instead, they opted for the context of the socalled witness theatre. In The Trial. The Sequel, the former Pussy Riot lawyers, two journalists and the husband of one of the imprisoned activists report about the first trial. The young women convicted for their Punk Prayer performance in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral (Moscow) and the resulting viral video clip mocking the unhealthy bond between Patriarch Kirill and president Putin are not able to participate in this witness session; their antagonists involved in the absurd trial would not come. The witnesses sit on chairs placed on the flat stage, two Doc directors - Mikhail Ugarov and Varvara Faer - act as hosts, and the audience is partly involved by posing questions or making comments. Everybody in the overcrowded basement painted in black seems excited. The atmosphere is solemn, humorous and intimate at the same time. Ugarov explains the experimental presentation method chosen for this evening and asks what characters the spectators are interested in seeing portrayed on 84 Lisa Wolfson (Bochum) stage. Members of the audience make proposals: the notorious judge Syrova (who denied meals and sleep to the prisoners during the trial period), a priest (who suggested to burn the three woman) and the Cathedral ’ s female candle keeper (as a representative of the aggrieved all of whom expressed their insulted religious feelings in almost identical words) are among the nominees written down on the wall with a piece of chalk by Faer. These real people seem to have already been transformed into fictional characters, in a trial that was but shouldn ’ t have been. The audience votes, and the witnesses start with the detailed portrait of the judge telling about their absurd experiences with her and describing her ridiculous Soviet habitus (her manner of interacting, of speaking and even of dressing). 14 It is important to question whether this form of presentation should be regarded as theatre essentially - or as a (quite unusual) talk setting instead. In any case, in The Trial. The Sequel the witnesses involved recall their mutual experiences and express them in the public space of the theatre. According to Faer, such a form of portrayal produces “ a fragment of our concentrated life ” (or rather of reality), which can be presented in the same way only once, 15 since any further repetition would prompt the participants of the witness theatre to enact themselves. 16 A few months later, there was a similar session with the activists ’ friends, as well as with a member of the group who had been released on parole, Yekaterina Samutsevich. Pussy Riot. The Sequel portrays, amongst other things, the visit of Maria Alyokhina ’ s and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ’ s friends to the penal colonies far away from Moscow. Video footage is shown in between the reports: there is some material illegally filmed by the visitors as well as footage that is accessible on YouTube, all referring to these colonies and the extensive transport of the convicts. Additionally, the personalities of the three women are presented and reflected through a scheme that is implemented by the host Faer. 17 Reflecting (the Nexus of) Law, Politics and Art Inevitably, Russia ’ s penal system as featured in the disturbing 1 Hour 18 also becomes a topic of Pussy Riot. The Sequel, since it is once again generated by the reality of the case. The prison regime has also been treated as an important societal concern in other contexts of Teatr.doc productions. Reflections on the prisons and the integration of former convicts into the theatrical space serve as proof of the importance of the legal system within the Doc ’ s artistic-intellectual explorations. Scandalous verdicts and the antecedent dangerous accusations of extremism provide topics which are portrayed on the stage of this small, unconventional theatre. The absurd charges result not only in bans of specific media (also theatre-related) contents, but sometimes even in actual imprisonment. It is obvious that Russian politics and law are interwoven in the broadest sense. Especially regarding the political trials, their intimacy cannot be ignored. The interconnection between the political and legal systems is highly important for the Doc ’ s approach. How tightly politics and the legal sphere are really merged is something that becomes apparent more explicitly in the numerous reflected and re-enacted, politically motivated trials and interrogations presented by the Doc - whether it is in the testimony of the Pussy Riot show trial, in 1 Hour 18, Bolotnoye delo or in Petr Pavlensky ’ s interrogation protocols (read out by actors), in which the radical performance artist discusses art with the investigator in charge - right after one of his actions. 18 85 In Search of ‘ the Real ’ - Teatr.doc ’ s Documentary Reflections on Politics, Law and Art Finally, art leads us into the third and central sphere of the Doc. As a theatre (with professional actors and directors) the Doc is rooted in arts. At the same time, this theatre programmatically explores the topics of real, contemporary life. Even productions and plays based on fiction (about historical personalities and contexts) rely on existing sources and bridge gaps to the audience ’ s present-day reality. One could say that Teatr. doc ’ s everlasting search for adequate presentations and representations of reality almost inevitably implies a latent reflection of art and life. But in its broadly diverse productions (both in terms of form and content), the Doc strives for an explicit understanding of the complex relationships between life and art - or reality and fiction, appearance and reality, authenticity and staging. The Doc ’ s actors are meant to perceive and question their position in theatre and in life. For instance, Beyond Theatre. And What if I Don ’ t (2015) is a production about very different actors who reflect on their own occupation. Remarkably, some of them have left the stage to start new careers, but they still come to the Doc to be part of the play. This creates a certain ambivalence concerning their status as (professional) artists. Conversation about Art It is notable that art and artists become protagonists in many plays and events of the Doc. Conversation about Art with Petr Pavlensky is not a play but a talk offering a very ambitious intellectual approach to the topic of being an artist. 19 To watch Pavlensky speak about his notion of art provides a very specific performative experience (based on a significant contrast), for in his voicelessly performed radical actions he reshapes his body into ‘ living images ’ (sewing up his lips, cutting off his earlobe or nailing his scrotum to the pavement of the Red Square) and their representations circulating in the media. The conversation with Pavlensky deals with the definition, meaning and function of art for both the artist and society. As usual, on the stage of the Doc the focus is upon the relationship between art and politics. Pavlensky distinguishes two forms of art: 1. art which, in terms of content or form (or both) illustrates and organizes the societal and political system it inhabits, and 2. a different kind of art which becomes independent in its risky play with meaning and form. This art emancipates itself and the artist. Although all art cannot exist untouched by the system it was born in, only the second form is political - especially when it does not illustrate or decorate the interests of any political party. According to Pavlensky, the meaning of this kind of political art rarely appears in ways which are accessible to the majority of society, simply because it is not bare and ordinary agitation. This kind of art fights to be recognized as art and makes social problems visible (instead of following the predictable and already interpreted conflicts). It serves as a litmus test for the system and unveils, for instance, how constitutionally guaranteed values of freedom are or are not respected in a postulated democracy. It also has the capacity to disclose to what extent state and religion have merged. (This is the case with Pussy Riot ’ s Punk Prayer.) As maintained and shown by Pavlensky, radical political performance art debunks the system by seducing or ‘ forcing ’ representatives of the state to certain actions. Pussy Riot ’ s scandalous performance was involuntarily prolonged - during custody, in trial, in the penal colonies and beyond. In contrast, Pavlensky ’ s actions rely on, and integrate, the reactions of the system. Hence, the real performance is not the spectacular initial living image created by him but the institutional answer to it. 20 86 Lisa Wolfson (Bochum) Different Types of Performance It may be useful to consider the complex aftermath of radical performance art as postperformance and to keep the term metaperformance for the artistic-intellectual reflection of this kind of art in Teatr.doc (and elsewhere). 21 Yet unfiltered reality hit the Doc ’ s meta-sphere quite unexpectedly, and the borders of all these phenomena seem to blur: the so-called orthodox activists undertook a poor attempt, by disrupting the afore mentioned eyewitness theatre production about the Pussy Riot trial. Not quite “ [a]t the end of the show, ‘ Orthodox Christians ’ entered the hall with an NTV crew and started shouting: ‘ Repent! ’ , ‘ Why do you hate the Russian people? ’” 22 In her article Ash reports about another notable event: “ one evening in December, as it started screening clips from a documentary on the political turmoil and bloodshed in Ukraine, police from a special anti-extremism division burst in and marched everyone out into the courtyard. ” Ash cites Yelena Gremina, famous author of 1 Hour 18 and director of Teatr.doc, who tells us: “ The place had been ransacked [. . .] They ’ d kicked a door in, you could see their boot marks all over it - they trashed the office and dressing room, scattered make up on the floor, smashed up our scenery - it was awful ” . During the attack, “ three people from the theatre had been arrested and [. . .] laptops and other material were being taken out of the office ” . The theatre and its director were even officially accused “ of extremism ” , but the “ case [. . .] was [later] dropped ” . 23 This time the Ministry of Culture delivered a cynically staged performance filmed “ by an NTV news team ” . 24 The public screening was cancelled due to an alleged bomb threat, only to be continued in private for the official representatives of the Ministry. Meanwhile, the visitors of the theatre were trapped in the icy atrium as the socalled anti-extremism unit pretended to search for explosives. Conclusion: Relationship of Theatre and Critique In contemporary theatre practice in Western societies as part of the cultural scene, a dominating quasi-ritual critique aims at calming the artists ’ and spectators ’ conscience but not at changing societal contexts. An important intention of the GTW Congress Theater as Critique 2016 was to analyze such pseudo-critical attitudes and to criticize them. 25 In the case of Russia with its partly implicit and partly explicit religious and political censorship, we realize that the critique issue must be evaluated somewhat differently - although questionable forms of critique exist there as well. They might even produce an effect contrary to the original intention, as Gremina pointed out in a panel discussion (1 June 2015, Berliner Schaubühne). According to her, the notorious critique of Putin in opposition circles not only belongs to a cult built around his personality but may actually also strengthen his position. Awareness of the problems provoked by the threatening ritualization of critique could lead to the following questions: Will Teatr.doc ’ s work in the end just vanish ‘ into thin air ’ without further consequences while only addressing an already convinced audience? Has it been integrated into the societal mainstream? And could this theatre paradoxically be instrumentalized by Putin ’ s regime for its own causes? I have tried to show how Teatr.doc prevents such dangers by touching politically neuralgic points with sophisticated and subtle artistic interventions. The Doc is an instructive example of a critique that involves its spectators, their knowledge, atti- 87 In Search of ‘ the Real ’ - Teatr.doc ’ s Documentary Reflections on Politics, Law and Art tudes and possible reactions (approval, indifference or rejection) into the reflection about an appropriate form of presentation and the thrust of each play (or theatrical event) as well as the political conditions under which it acts. Teatr.doc faces the permanent threat not only of being obstructed, disturbed and wrecked by the current political regime but also of potentially being shut down completely at any moment. Each decision for an actual specific topic is a testing, a walk on a fine line between risking the existence of the theatre and betraying one ’ s own moral and political principles. 26 Notes 1 Molly Flynn, “ Lights up: for Teatr.doc, Russia ’ s most controversial theatre company, the show must go on ” , in: The Calvert Journal (12 March 2015), http: / / calvertjournal.com/ articles/ show/ 3739/ Teatr-doc-reopening-doc umentary-theatre-moscow-Mikhail-Ugarov [accessed 21 October 2016]. 2 Ibid. 3 See Yelena Gremina, ‘Театр .Doc ’ : Право славные едва не сорвали спектакль о суде над Pussy Riot, НТВ вела съемку “‘ Teatr Doc ’ : Orthodox Activists Nearly Disrupted the Play about the Trial of Pussy Riot, NTV was Filming ” , in: http: / / www.teatrdoc. ru/ news.php? nid= 354 [accessed 21 October 2016]. 4 Lucy Ash, “ Russia ’ s most daring theatre company ” , in: BBC News. Magazine (16 April 2015), http: / / www.bbc.com/ news/ magazine-32320896 [accessed 15 October 2016]. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 See ibid. 8 Molly Flynn, “ The Trial That Never Was: Russian Documentary Theatre and the Pursuit of Justice ” , in: New Theatre Quarterly, 30 (2014), pp. 307 - 317, here p. 307. 9 Ibid. 10 See ibid, pp. 315 and 317. 11 See John Freedman, “ More than Mere Drama: The Phenomenon of New Russian Drama. An Introduction ” , in: John Freedman (ed.), Real and Phantom Pains. An Anthology of New Russian Drama, Washington, DC 2014, pp. 3 - 15. 12 See also Georg Genoux, “ Die Entdeckung der Realität. Das teatr.doc und das Joseph Beuys Theater in Moskau ” , in: Boris Nikitin, Carena Schlewitt and Tobias Brenk (Edd.), Dokument, Fälschung, Wirklichkeit. Materialband zum zeitgenössischen Dokumentarischen Theater. Berlin 2014, pp. 98 - 109. 13 Flynn, “ The Trial That Never Was ” , p. 307; her translation slightly alters the meaning of the original phrase, see above. 14 See the footage of Свидетельский театр : о суде над группой “ Pussy Riot ” [Witness Theatre about the Trial of the Band “ Pussy Riot ” ] (27 August 2012), D: Mikhail Ugarov and Varvara Faer, in: https: / / www.youtube. com/ watch? v=r9LL2E5lyFo [accessed 22 October 2016]. 15 See Pussy Riot как зеркало раскола [Pussy Riot as a Mirror of Division], D: Mikhail Gutkin and Sergey Gusev, in: https: / / www. youtube.com/ watch? v=okVQXxq_Qbs [accessed 22 October 2016], TC 0: 0: 27 - 0: 1: 04. 16 See Ugarov ’ s introduction to Witness Theatre About the Trial of the Band “ Pussy Riot ” . 17 See the footage of Pussy Riot. Продолжение [Pussy Riot. The Sequel], D: Varvara Faer (9 January 2013), in: https: / / www.youtube. com/ watch? v=VkqFOl8lpL4 [accessed 22 October 2016]. Faer also showed a different version in the USA (at Columbia University in the City of New York) with other participants and including a quite serious but still peaceful debate of the performance (see Pussy Riot as a Mirror of Division). 18 See Павленский . Свобода [Pavlensky. Freedom], RU 2016, D: Daria Hrenova, in: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=FtJuCh- ME_rU [accessed 22 October 2016]. 19 See the footage of Петр Павленский - Разговор об искусстве [Petr Pavlensky- Conversation about Art] (17 September 2016) with Mikhail Ugarov and Petr Pavlensky, in: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? 88 Lisa Wolfson (Bochum) v=YWTywV8S_FI [accessed 23 October 2016], TC 0: 12: 56 - 0: 16: 19. With regard to the later controversy between Pavlensky and Teatr.doc, especially concerning the ethical, juridical and political significance of this obscure issue (which includes sexual assault claims against the artist), see: Sasha Raspopina, “ Pyotr Pavlensky: does a leading Russian art activist deserve unconditional support? ” , in: The Calvert Journal (1 February 2017), https: / / calvertjournal.com/ comment/ show/ 7602/ petr-pavlensky-case-investigation-liberal-reaction [accessed 8 February 2017]. 20 See Petr Pavlensky - Conversation about Art. 21 For a different use of the second term see Milo Rau, “ Pussy Riot ’ s Moscow Trials: Restaging Political Protest and Juridical Metaperformance ” , in: Alex Flynn, Jonas Tinius (eds.), Anthropology, Theatre, and Development. The Transformative Potential of Performance, New York 2015, pp. 279 - 285. 22 Anonymous: “ Attempt made to disrupt documentary theater production of Pussy Riot trial ” , in: Interfax Religion (28 August, 2012), http: / / www.interfax-religion.com/ ? act=news &div=9794 [accessed 22 October 2016]. 23 See Ash, “ Russia ’ s most daring theatre company ” . 24 Flynn, “ Lights up: for Teatr.doc ” . 25 See Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, “ Die Fiktion der Kritik ” , in: Theater Heute 11 (2016), pp. 28 - 31. 26 This article was completed in February 2018 shortly before the unexpected death of Mikhail Ugarov and Yelena Gremina. Playwright, director and Teatr.doc founder Mikhail Ugarov died of heart attack on 1 April 2018 at the age of 62. Yelena Gremina, his wife and co-founder of Teatr.doc, followed him only six weeks later. She died on 16 May aged 61 of kidney and heart failure. 89 In Search of ‘ the Real ’ - Teatr.doc ’ s Documentary Reflections on Politics, Law and Art Functions and Techniques of Critique in Contemporary Estonian Theatre Eva-Liisa Linder (Tallinn) This article examines the techniques of scenic criticism in contemporary Estonian theatre. The examples vary in scale and style from the huge political show Unified Estonia by Theatre NO99 (2010) with 7500 participants, which investigated the crisis of democracy in a posttotalitarian country, to the self-ironic search for identity of the small ethnic community called Setos in How to Sell a Seto? (2012). This theatrical piece tackled tragic autobiographical choices of young Setos: old traditions versus contemporary trends, village versus city, building or selling their symbolic capital. Estonia is an example of a tiny nation state searching for its identity in the conflicting historical experiences affecting Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries: socialism and capitalism, civic and ethnic nationalism, mythical past and modernizing future. Although the political passivity inherited from totalitarian times has influenced the slow development of political theatre in all Baltic countries, some remarkable examples of scenic criticism have emerged, varying in their style from documentary and devised theatre to applied and community theatre. These examples expose different techniques of critique: from minor revealing excursions to hidden places, from self-ironic etudes by ethnic minorities to huge political spectacles (Chart 1). I have had the possibility to witness all these examples as a spectator. On an aesthetic level, all these cases can be classified as postdramatic theatre and mostly also as posttheatrical theatre or “ theatre after theatre ” as described by Hans-Thies Lehmann. 1 These are forms of reflective theatre that adequately articulate the reality of contemporary social life. In the form of research and projects these performances take distance from the world, demonstrating the critical value of theatre. For the following analysis I have chosen two examples that are contrary in scale, focus and professional background. However, both of them expose - as Adorno put it - the sharpest “ thorns of critique ” 2 and present the most clear-cut focuses in contemporary Estonian theatre. I shall analyze the examples in dialogue with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School by asking the following questions: 1) What are the objects and functions of their critique? , 2) Which techniques of critique are used? , 3) What are the effects and outcomes of their respective critical practices? The aim is to observe the structure of critique in different performances from a five-year period, 2010 - 2015. My first example, Unified Estonia (2010), was a fictitious political movement by the state-financed Theatre NO99 from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. During the 44 days of the project, the actors played politicians, exposing the corrupt means of all bigger parties. The performance gathered 7500 people to its ‘ convention ’ held in the biggest arena in Estonia, thus making Unified Estonia one of the largest political theatre events in contemporary Europe. The second example, How to Sell a Seto? (2012), voiced the tragic choices of indigenous Seto girls living in the most remote corner of Estonia. Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 90 - 97. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Performed by non-professional Seto actresses playing barefoot on a sand floor of an old barn at Setomaa (Setoland), this particular piece of applied theatre reflected the tragic collision of the traditional Seto culture with the culture industry through a series of self-ironic studies. The Mouse Trap by Unified Estonia (2010) Theatre NO99 is a state-funded theatre company of ten actors and two artistic directors - Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper - , operating in the city centre of Tallinn. Since its foundation in 2005, NO99 has defined political theatre anew for the Estonian audiences and has toured in European theatre festivals. Its productions have addressed sensitive topics like racism, energy crisis, the demographic crisis and future visions of Estonia. The critics have concluded that NO99 has demonstrated that theatre can provide a place for discussion where values are shaped the same way laws are shaped in a parliament. Although NO99 has refrained from making active political theatre in recent years and has focused more on the aesthetic challenges of the postdra- Chart 1: Examples of critical practices in Estonian theatre 2010 - 2015. Year Theatre/ troupe Title Object of critique Techniques of critique Number of performances Number of spectators 2010 Theatre NO99 Unified Estonia The corrupt power of leading parties A fictive political movement using the technique of subversive over-identification 1 7500 2012 Theatre NO99 First Reading: The Board Meeting of the Reform Party Dictatorial inner hierarchies of parties A quick-reaction “ first reading ” of a political play 1 ~200 2013 The Youth Studio of Taarka Heritage Theatre How to Sell a Seto? Culture industry, commercialization Self-ironic sketches based on real life 7 ~800 2014 A private project Unnamed Nature Project Totalitarian regime A revealing excursion to a Soviet Union ’ s secret military airfield 2 ~100 2015 Theatre NO99 Savisaar Edgar Savisaar, the mayor of Tallinn A play in the form of antique tragedy creating dissonance with the destiny of modern rulers 11 16174 2015 Endla Theatre 45 339 km 2 of Bog Emigration A survey among ~1000 Estonians living abroad 22 2104 91 Functions and Techniques of Critique in Contemporary Estonian Theatre matic theatre instead, it has become a showcase-example of political theatre functioning in a posttotalitarian democracy, praised in the academic field. In 2017, it was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize for New Theatre Realities. The Unified Estonia project by Theatre NO99 was preceded by two years of groundwork focusing on unearthing corrupt practices of all the leading political parties in Estonia. At a press conference in the spring of 2010, Theatre NO99 declared that everything they did from that moment onward was to be considered part of the project. What followed was the actors enacting politicians in public (Fig. 1). They gave interviews to TV and radio stations and commented on corrupt practices in newspapers. Their would-be political party drew 7500 people to its ’ convention ’ that x-rayed the populism and corrupt practices of all the major parties, and at the same time gave an overview of the social illpoints usually untouched by politicians, e. g. the shortcomings of the social system, the poor development of regional politics, etc. By using the technique of subversive over-identification 3 the would-be party practiced affirmation with “ a surplus which destabilises affirmation and turns it into its opposite ” . 4 The aim of the project was: 1) to criticize politicians by uncovering the corrupt mechanisms of power, 2) to enlighten and to activate voters that had been passive due to the Soviet regime ’ s control on the arts and the restrictions of censorship as well as due to the patriotic attitude towards political parties after Estonia restored its independence in 1991, 3) to demonstrate theatre ’ s ability to function as a public sphere, “ a collective echo chamber for social and political concerns ” 5 . Thus, the Unified Estonia project started from criticizing the dominant serf mentality of the Estonian people by announcing that “ if you don ’ t deal with politics, politics will deal with you ” 6 . The show pulled the role of spectators into spotlight by often turning them into spect-actors: projecting the reactions of audience to big screens, organizing an sms-voting, questioning politicians sitting in the audience, etc., thus emphasizing the Fig. 1: Actors enacted politicians during the fictive political movement Unified Estonia, 2010. Photo: Maria Aua. 92 Eva-Liisa Linder (Tallinn) shared space and the active role of all citizens in everyday politics (Fig. 2). In order to keep the border between art and reality blurred, the troupe kept monitoring the situation and giving hints at whether they were merely making theatre or moving seriously into politics. This way, they seemed to be staging a massive Mouse Trap reminiscent of the one in Hamlet. An evidence of the influence of the Unified Estonia project appeared two years later when a prominent member of the Prime Minister ’ s Reform Party revealed illegal funding of his party. In his announcement he admitted being inspired by the Unified Estonia movement. Immediately, a scandal broke out. In the wake of the heated conflict between the party and its members, Theatre NO99 feared that the freedom of political expression in Estonia was being threatened. Therefore they quickly organized a reading of their new semi-documentary play The Board Meeting of a Reform Party, the motto of which was a quotation by an Estonian poet: “ When truth is threatened, it should seek shelter in fiction in order to remain the truth. ” 7 In both cases, NO99 voiced a critical attitude towards the current political situation and towards the passive attitude of Estonian citizens. They practiced critique as the art of “ [. . .] not to be governed [. . .] thusly, like that, by these people, at this price, ” as it was defined by Michel Foucault 8 . Surprisingly, instead of media or civic initiatives, it was a theatre troupe that took the lead in voicing the critical attitude. They pointed out populist strategies used in election campaigns, the use of youth organizations, buying off voters and practicing the dictatorial inner hierarchy of parties, that is called inner-party democracy - another system of domination, comparable to ideologies analyzed by Rahel Jaeggi. 9 With the help of aforementioned projects, Theatre NO99 increased the political activity of the citizens, supported the rise of civic society and started independent poli- Fig. 2: Spectators were turned into spect-actors in the Unified Estonia Assembly, 2010. Photo: Anna Tuvike. 93 Functions and Techniques of Critique in Contemporary Estonian Theatre tical movements that demanded honest politicians. As a result of the events, Kristen Michal, the long-time secretary general of the Reform Party and the Minister of Justice, was named as a suspect. He was accused of money laundering and illegal party financing. Despite the fact that the case was closed due to insufficient evidence, the non-partisan political movements “ Enough of Deceitful Politics ” together with many demonstrations and a declaration signed by public figures, many of whom were active in the field of culture, forced the Minister to resign in December 2012. Thus, Unified Estonia did have a real result. It had enhanced agency of the so-called “ ordinary people ” , responding to the idea of Foucault that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question the power on its discourses of truth. 10 And finally, the weapon of critique had shot down a corrupt minister. In addition, through its enlightening political campaign, NO99 revealed the immanent correlation of knowledge and power by common opinion being simply a myth. During the ’ party convention ’ an actor reflected in a monologue: “ I can ’ t even get a job in a cafe because I don ’ t know Finnish. But what are the conditions for getting into the Parliament? The only condition is your age. You have to be 21. Congratulations, you turned 21. Now you can go to casinos and be elected to the Parliament. ” 11 While Foucault notes that “ [. . .] all exercise of power, even if it is a question of putting someone to death, implies at least a savoir-faire ” 12 , the Unified Estonia project emphasized that the main skill politicians seemed to possess was related to their use of populism and manipulation techniques in their hunt for votes and in supporting their career. The final words in the assembly of Unified Estonia were spoken by Tiit Ojasoo, the Artistic Director of Theatre NO99, who announced: “ You are free! ” This slogan can be seen as a hint at the notion of “ originary freedom ” by Foucault, highlighted by Judith Butler: “ Whatever this is that one draws upon as one resists governmentalization will be “ like an originary freedom ” and “ something akin to the historical practice of revolt ” . ” 13 Therefore, the effect of critique is the same as pointed out by Michel Foucault: “ [. . .] critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially ensure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth. ” 14 To conclude, Theatre NO99 decoded the mechanisms of domination, demythologized the image of “ well-informed politicians ” and gave agency back to “ ordinary citizens ” , indicating that knowledge and power are in their hands. The situation was changed by the help of critique of mentality and demonstrated results for a longer time. Cultural Traditions vs Culture Industry in How to Sell a Seto? (2012) By contrast, in the remote corner of Estonia six non-professional Seto actresses, supervised by a professional stage director Anne Türnpu, told their stories in a small barn, performing barefoot on sand. It was a summer production with an ironic title How to Sell a Seto? (2012), finding its sequel in Seto is Searching for Leelo (2013) and Nonstop SETO (2015). To understand the performance it is helpful to understand the specific situation of Setomaa which is a region in the south-eastern corner of the Republic of Estonia, located on the border of Eastern and Western civilization. It is a place which has been inhabited by Estonians and their predecessors for more than 8000 years. At the moment, Setomaa is home to about 94 Eva-Liisa Linder (Tallinn) 3000 Setos and about 10 000 more are living in other parts of Estonia. Setos are an indigenous ethnic and linguistic minority with old cultural traditions. They have kept their customs of clothing, jewellery and unique ancient multiple-voice singing tradition that is called leelo. In 2009, leelo was officially recognised and added to the list of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. 15 To this very day many melodies, myths and religious motives that date back three thousand years are kept alive in the oral culture of the Setos. Along with Orthodox Christianity, Setos practice and support a vernacular traditional folk religion which worships native gods, amongst whom the most outstanding is the god and mythical king Peko, the god of fertility and brewing. 16 However, the present-day situation of the young Setos is complicated. On the one hand, the new generation is expected to keep up cultural traditions: wearing folk costumes, following customs and carrying out rituals. On the other hand, the young Setos are confronted with the increasing pressures of capitalism, consumerism and commercialization which are endangering the continuity of their cultural heritage (Fig. 3). Fig. 3: To wear or not to wear a folk costume? The continuity of cultural heritage is in the hands of young Setos in Non-stop SETO, 2015. In How to Sell a Seto? we see a series of selfironic studies of the tragic choices of young Seto women as they find themselves at the crossroads of traditional and commercial cultures. For example, in one episode a girl is coming home from university for the weekend just to find out that her father has been drinking vodka since the early morning hours, and when going to the Seto choir singing lesson, she does not even understand all the words in the Seto dialect. The girls are faced with questions: how to react to the building of a new supermarket at the place of an old cemetery or to the fact that services and goods that use Seto symbols bear no resemblance with the traditional Seto culture (Fig. 4). Fig. 4: How to react to the building of a supermarket at the place of an old cemetery, ask Seto girls in How to Sell a Seto? , 2012. As an ironic refrain the girls sing a mixture of traditional leelo songs and contemporary popmusic: “ Super-Seto, Super-Seto, leelo, leelo ” , thus pointing sarcastically to the commercial requirement “ for all contemporary musical life to be dominated by the commodity form, ” as stated by Theodor Adorno 17 . In doing so, the production How to Sell a Seto? left the impression of a mayday call from a sinking ship. Although the girls presented their critique as selfirony, thus making their own lives a target for the “ thorn of critique ” , the problems raised reflect the ills of post-totalitarian societies on a wider level: 1) poor regional politics which leave distant countrysides 95 Functions and Techniques of Critique in Contemporary Estonian Theatre isolated and deserted, enhancing problems of unemployment; 2) deserted places as easy targets for tourism, possibly resulting in whole regions becoming huge open air museums, 3) on a higher level, a question of survival of old cultures. Large parts of the critique of the capitalist world presented by the Seto girls correspond to the problems of industrial society and the culture industry as analyzed by Herbert Marcuse 18 , Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 19 . Here, one can notice more than the contrast of the mythological and the rational worldviews. Setos, who have lived in close contact with nature, feel the pressure of the unleashed market economy to master nature and to use it for profitable aims. Adorno admits that it is the line “ both of destruction and of civilization ” 20 . The uniqueness of traditional cultures is threatened by the increasing assault from the culture industry. The symbols of the ancient Seto culture are used for the benefit of commodities of mass production. Commercialization and the mass culture along with its fetishism, banal repetitions and “ liquidation of the individual ” 21 threaten to destroy the heritage and the cultural continuity that has been kept alive for thousands of years. Here we can see the risk of the “ one-dimensional universe ” (Marcuse) 22 of thought and behaviour. In this way, the historical experience of Estonia can be taken as an experiment - coming with the experience of totalitarian Stalinist regime, a failed attempt to build socialism and trying to prove itself now in the circumstances of market economy, Estonian theatre people voiced the mixed feelings about positive scenarios for future. Despite the possibility of “ positive rationalization ” offered by Unified Estonia where civic society could replace corrupt government structures, the path of Enlightenment does not show many solutions in response to the mayday call of the last Setos. In conclusion, in both of the critical productions explored above, critique itself is a practice that does not only suspend judgement but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension, as indicated by Judith Butler 23 . Furthermore, a characteristic of the essence and of the technique of critique can be noticed here, following the line of thought by Martin Heidegger 24 . Namely, however different the scale of critical practices and however different their modes - from x-raying the mentalities of the society to performing self-ironic sketches - , technique is “ a way of unconcealing ” 25 . In both cases the essence of critique is unconcealed and brought forth. In doing so, critique is not only a comment, a responce, but an ongoing process. It opens up a possibility for practicing new values and for finding new directions. Notes 1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, “ Theatre After Theatre ” , in: Marijke Hoogenboom (ed.): Na(ar) Het Theater - After Theatre? Supplements to the International Conference on Postdramatic Theatre. Amsterdam School of the Arts Research Group, pp. 47 - 55. 2 Theodor Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , in: Prisms, transl. by Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, M., 1997, pp. 17 - 34. 3 Stephen Wilmer, “ Theatrical Nationalism: Exposing the ‘ Obscene Superego ’ of the System ” , in: Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 2009, pp. 77 - 87. 4 Inka Arns and Sylvia Sasse, “ Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance ” , in: Maska, xxi, (3 - 4), Spring, 2006, pp. 5 - 21. 5 Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge University Press, p. ix. 6 #NO55: Ash and Money, a film by Theatre NO99, 2015, vimeo.com/ 130752912 [accessed 20 September 2017]. 96 Eva-Liisa Linder (Tallinn) 7 Eero Epner, The Board Meeting of the Reform Party, in: Eesti Ekspress, 15 June 2012. 8 Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , in: Michel Foucault: The Politics of Truth, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer, introduction by John Rajchman, transl. by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, Los Angeles: Semiotext (e), 2007, pp. 41 - 82, here p. 75. 9 Rahel Jaeggi, “ Rethinking Ideology ” , in: Boudewijn de Bruin, Christopher F. Zurn (eds.), New Waves in Political Philosophy, Basingstoke et al. 2009, pp. 63 - 86. 10 Ibid, p. 47. 11 NO55: Ash and Money, a film by Theatre NO99, 2015, vimeo.com/ 130752912 [accessed 20 September 2017]. 12 Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , p. 71. 13 Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtue ” , in: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vol 5, 2001, www.eipcp.net/ transversal/ 0806/ butler/ en [accessed 20 September 2017]. 14 Michel Foucault, “ What is Critique? ” , p. 47. 15 Setomaa: Unique and Genuine, 2014, p. 4. 16 Ibid., pp. 40 - 41. 17 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture, ed. and with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein, London and New York 2006, p. 37. 18 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, London and New York 2007. 19 Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London 2016. 20 Ibid., p. 92. 21 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture, p. 35. 22 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, London and New York 2007. 23 Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? ” . 24 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, transl. and with an introduction by William Lovitt, New York 1977. 25 Ibid., p. 10. 97 Functions and Techniques of Critique in Contemporary Estonian Theatre The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship Isabella Dra ˘ ghici (Bucharest) Hostility to theatre as a forum for free speaking and thinking was one of the main expressions of the Communist Party dictatorship in Romania between 1948 and 1989. With the introduction of the Nationalisation Law in 1948, private theatre companies disappeared. Theatre became an instrument for communist ideals and political propaganda. A system of surveillance and manipulation involving committees which controlled texts, theatrical performances and directorial visions had a dynamic presence since the beginning. Despite this oppression, we can discover a “ positive ” result of the censorship represented by oases of cultural resistance. This paper explores the Communist Party effect reflected in Romanian theatre under the “ auspices ” of censorship (1948 - 1989), with a focus on the creation of the emblematic director Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu. “ The Stalinist transformation of the Romanian culture and society was the consequence of the military Russian occupation of the country and of the political actions of the new government led by the Romanian Communist Party, who imposed the Soviet model by force, terror and propaganda. ” Gabriel Catalan 1 When considering Romanian theatre under the Communist regime, an image that comes to mind is that of a bloody wound. One can only reconstruct the past before 1990 from the perspective of the present. This wound is still alive: the effects of this tragedy, the presence of the Communist Party dictatorship in Romania for almost 50 years, are still visible almost three decades after the fall of Communism. Today we see censorship in the biggest plague on our society: corruption. Corruption, the main inheritance of Communism, has its roots in the political ideology of lying, the impairment of free speech and thought, the nullification of moral values, the abuse of power, the distortion and the manipulation of the truth and other values for the benefits of the corrupt “ elite ” and its political and economic interests. If this “ elite ” was represented until 1989 by people with a position in the Communist Party, today some of them or their relatives and close friends are still in positions of power, in political parties, in parliament or in government, in the management of theatres or other state institutions. The maleficent strategies of corruption flourished in Romania before and after 1990. State theatres (the majority in Romania), we must say, are touched by this malady. You cannot cure the past without the shield of the truth. If the reality and the distorting mirror of the ruling party was a dual game recognized in a silent complicity between theatre makers and the audience during the communist period, today this game has its players and winners within or outside theatre institutions, but against the authority of the truth. To understand this, we must look at the history of the events between 1945 and 1989, where the plague has its roots. Where, therefore, are the “ auspices ” of censorship reflected in theatre? This paper proposes possible answers for future debates. I will try in this paper to reconstruct the relationship between theatre and politics under the Communist dictatorship, focusing on the work of an emblematic stage director from that period, Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu. It is not an exhaustive study; I merely want to outline a few major aspects in a condensed way, and to emphasize the relevance of Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu for the national and international context. Researchers agree that is very hard to evaluate the huge spectrum of censorship ’ s manifestations, starting with the terrible proletkultist period (1945 - 1958/ 1960) until the “ relaxation ” of censorship (1964 - 1971), and after that the hardening of censorship again accompanied by the development of the monstrous Ceau ș escu cult (1971 - 1989). It is hard to evaluate not only because of the complexity of this phenomenon, but also because many documents disappeared in 1989, when Communism collapsed. * Communist censorship in the theatre began in 1944, after the Second World War. Marian Popescu mentions Article 16 of the Armistice Convention between the Romanian Government and the governments of the United Nations (September 12, 1944): “ The printing, the import and the distribution of periodicals or non-periodicals, in Romania, the presentation of theatre plays and films [. . .] should be executed with the approval of the High Allied Commandment ” , meaning they were “ under soviet control ” , affirms the author. 2 The Communist regime imposed the Stalinist ideology, starting a huge process of political surveillance, control and repression. The leader of the Bloc of Democratic Parties, the Communist Party, manipulated the results of the vote in 1946, and the bloc was declared “ elected ” with a majority of almost 80 %. 3 New laws shocked the country. On June 11, 1948, law no. 119, the “ Law of Nationalisation ” changed property rights. All private companies, including theatre companies, disappeared. The law destroyed private property; the only owner was now the state (Fig. 1). Fig. 1: The Law of Nationalisation (Law no. 119) published in Monitorul Oficial, Year CXVI - No. 133 bis, Friday, 11 June 1948 (first page). Law no. 265/ July 18, 1947 stipulated that all theatre institutions, operas, and philharmonic orchestras were now subordinate to and under the control of the Ministry of Arts, later named the Ministry of Arts and Information. Theatre became an important instrument of political propaganda. Censorship was a major means of controlling cultural productions. In August 1947, a set of 45 rules was given for theatre plays and repertory. The ideology was to create “ art for the masses ” ; the plays had to be controlled by “ committees for lecturing ” in order to respect the principles imposed by the party; the repertory had to include 99 The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship Romanian and Soviet plays. 4 On December 30, 1947, King Mihai of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was forced to abdicate. Romania became the “ Popular Republic of Romania ” . The Communist Party ( “ The Workers ’ Party ” at that time) then became the ruling party for more than 50 years. Theatre managers were replaced by people from within the Communist regime, some of them just workers with no education. Several professors, actors and directors who did not agree with Communist politics suffered persecution by the State Security (The Political Police). In fact, all areas of society were purged of “ dangerous elements ” . Repression of those who did not agree with the Communist Party ideology was terrible. Approximately two million people died, suffered persecution in political jails or became victims during the Romanian Communist Dictatorship. Some of them were “ lucky ” enough not to die, but their lives were destroyed. Alice Voinescu, Professor of Drama and Aesthetics, Doctor in Philosophy conferred by the Sorbonne University, lost her job and was sentenced to jail (1951) for 19 months as “ an enemy of the people ” . Marioara Voiculescu, a famous Romanian actress, was removed from the National Theatre of Bucharest, her house was confiscated and she spent her life persecuted by the State Security. Ion Lupeni, Titus Lapte ș and Ion Ilie (actors at the National Theatre Bucharest) were investigated by the State Security (1949) for “ hostile attitudes against the Communist regime ” 5 . Lucian Blaga, the famous Romanian philosopher, diplomat, writer, playwright and member of the Romanian Academy lost his distinction of “ academic ” and was marginalized by the Communist authorities. It seems that only a few theatre makers were against the new regime; the majority accepted this authority and were rewarded with good positions and careers, as was the case for Lucia Sturdza Bulandra, Marietta Sadova, Beate Fredanov, George Vraca, Dina Cocea, George Calboreanu, Costache Antoniu and Radu Beligan. 6 The professionalism and talent of many of them cannot be questioned, but if one looks at their careers, one wonders if they would have been as successful if they had chosen to defy the monstrous ideology. Theatre had to promote the soviet fight against the “ bourgeois ” and Western culture and thinking and to implement social-realism. The social model was the “ worker ” , the “ comrade ” . This was the proletkultist period. The strong anti-capitalist propaganda involved the banning of several renowned Romanian and foreign playwrights or writers, such as Lucian Blaga, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu, Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux and André Gide. Hundreds of thousands of volumes were confiscated from libraries, bookshops and schools. Many Russian writers and playwrights were introduced. In 1949, censorship meant total control of information (books, newspapers and mass media), control of cultural products and theatrical representations. The Control Committee (which had different names and branches over time) was often present at rehearsals and if they objected to anything, changes had to be made. In any case, the plays were censored beforehand so that they adhered to the ideological lines of the party. A political education series in which Stalin ’ s writings were presented was introduced to every theatre institution. The hardest period for Romanian theatre was the “ proletkultist period ” between 1945 and 1958/ 1960 (several historians considered this period to be between 1947/ 1948 and 1955). After the death of Stalin in 1953, the “ atmosphere ” changed. Starting with the Ceau ș escu regime (1965), a kind of “ liberalization ” was permitted. At the end of the 1960s, censorship became more relaxed. In 1971, with the famous “ Thesis of the Communist Party ” , Ceau ș escu reintroduced cen- 100 Isabella Dra ˘ ghici (Bucharest) sorship. Many plays were forbidden by censors and the directors bore the consequences. After 1971, the most important Romanian stage directors went into exile in Europe or the United States (for example, Radu Penciulescu to Sweden, David Esrig to Germany, Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Ș erban to the United States, Lucian Giurchescu to Denmark). How can we see in this context the “ auspices ” of censorship? Is this only an irony or can we find a “ positive ” aspect as a result of this maleficent system? We can discuss “ auspices ” in this context, in terms of ‘ positive ’ effects of this oppression. It might sound paradoxical, but sometimes terror empowers people and makes them more creative. Sometimes it destroys artists, but sometimes it makes them resourceful. The artist can escape through his art, through metaphor, suggestion and allusion from the imposed and fake reality. This was what happened in Romanian theatre. The theatre makers tried to find a way to express a critique of the system, to form competitive teams and to explore an original aesthetic. Although the theatre was infested with communist plays, topics, ideology and soviet models, several artists were able to create, through their performances, oases of cultural resistance. The critic Olti ț a Cântec asserts: “ The artist - playwright, director, actor - encodes a multiplicity of allusions to the political power which are received in a conspiracy with the auditorium that was hard to supervise. ” 7 One example is Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu ’ s play Diminea ț a ˘ pierduta ˘ (Lost Morning) at the Bulandra Theatre, in which the critique of the totalitarian communist regime was obvious. The Communist regime created forty new theatres all around Romania, with the purpose of creating “ art for the masses ” (the soviet politics of art) and establishing its ideology. The positive aspect was that young actors and directors had the chance to work, to create new teams and to explore new theatrical techniques. In miserable conditions, under surveillance, they resisted and created amazing performances. They had the chance to use their talent in small towns, to create cultural oases of theatrical life (e. g. The Young Generation Theatre in Piatra- Neam ț ). The obsession of the ruling party with using theatre as an instrument for political propaganda can be seen in many provinces where workers were organized by the party in amateur teams and often acted on stage. The censorship isolated Romanian theatre and culture from the Free World (the Western World). The perfect isolation behind the Iron Curtain was broken only by several theatre teams or stage directors who were sent to international theatre festivals for the fame of the Communist regime. Hostility against theatre as a forum for free speaking and thinking as one of the main expressions of the Communist Party dictatorship in Romania, between 1948 and 1989 stimulated the actors ’ spirit of sacrifice: in the 1980s actors played in very cold halls without heating in winter time. They risked not only their health, but also their freedom, because of the roles played against the recommendations of the communist activists. Sometimes the rehearsals with censors differed from what was performed at the premiere. Liviu Mali ţ a offers in Teatrul românesc sub cenzura comunista ˘ 8 significant documentation to show theatre censorship that was exercised in a pyramidal construction all over the country, using organisations, services and censors in a rigorous hierarchical system of surveillance and control. If, at the beginning of censorship, several actors, such as Alice Cocea, Elvira Popescu, Jean Yonnel, or playwrights and authors (Eugen Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran), and other cultural personalities (Ion Perlea, the composer and conductor; Constantin Brâncu ș i, the sculptor) accepted selfexile, later it became almost impossible to 101 The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship leave the country. Several stage directors were able to leave after 1971 because they were renowned. During this exile, they developed important careers in the international arena. Censorship therefore paradoxically stimulated their careers. Even if theatre was no longer a visible form of social/ political critique and freedom of thought was within the limits imposed by the party, several artists discovered a way to rebuild theatre aesthetics on new foundations. * For several directors, for example, Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu (born 1938), censorship was not felt so excessively. At least three of her plays with obvious attacks on communism escaped censorship: Maestrul ș i Margareta (The Master and Margarita) by Bulgakov (The Little Theatre, 1980), Ivona, Principesa Burgundiei (Ivona, Princess of Burgundy) by W. Gombrovicz (The Little Theatre, 1983), and Diminea ț a ˘ pierduta ˘ (Lost Morning), a play inspired by the novel of the same name by Gabriela Adame ș teanu (Bulandra Theatre, 1986). I will analyse one of these plays, but before that I will provide a portrait of the artist. An emblem for Romanian theatre, the most important woman stage director, with more than 100 plays, many of them well known in a European context, Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu obtained, from her early career, national and international recognition. With the support of Giorgio Strehler, who played a crucial role in her artistic life, her career became more international. Poland, Hungary, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Greece, Israel, UK, U. S. A. were only a few countries in which she worked. She has a prolific activity from 1968 until 2009, when she decided to retire. Considered an avant-garde director, Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu staged classical, contemporary plays, dramatizations, or personal scripts, expressing her artistry in different types of theatrical aesthetics: realistic, poetical, expressionist, or theatre of the absurd. A powerful but also sensitive, empathic and creative approach defined her working style. She adhered to an aesthetics focused on the actor, “ the solar plexus ” of the performance. Her plays covered a wide range of interests: from social, political, historical and psychological topics, to those related to myth, anthropology and ethnography. As a prominent professor and dean of the Department of Theatre at I.A.T.C./ U.N.A.T.C. (Theatrical Art and Cinema Institute/ National University of Theatre and Cinema) Bucharest, she inspired many students who became renowned directors. In 2013 she received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Theatre and Cinema (U.N.A.T.C.) for her exceptional teaching. Awarded many distinctions and prizes, including the Prize of the Romanian Academy (1973), the “ Salvo Randone ” Prize for her entire career (Italy, 1995), The National Order “ Faithful Service in Officer Grade ” (2000), The Cross of the Royal House of Romania (2001), Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu always had a modest attitude reinforced by a real passion for theatre. Her career included not only the plays discussed here, but also other revolutionary productions, such as Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare (Special Prize of the Jury at the Theatre Festival in Durham, United Kingdom, 1978), made with her students; The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov (Little Theatre, 1980); Ivona, Princess of Burgundy by Gombrowicz (Little Theatre, 1983); Lost Morning by Adame ș teanu (Bulandra Theatre, 1986); The Pelican by Strindberg (Levant Theatre, 1995); Turandot by Gozzi (Bulandra Theatre, 1999) and Odiseea 21 (an itinerant performance on a ship, recreated in several seaports in the Mediterranean Sea; Bulandra Theatre, Toursky Theatre and The International Institute of Mediterranean Theatre, 2001). 102 Isabella Dra ˘ ghici (Bucharest) * Ivona, principesa Burgundiei (Ivona, Princess of Burgundy) by Witold Gombrowicz, is one of the most appreciated plays in Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu ’ s career. She was awarded the title “ Amicus Poloniae ” by the Polish Government for this outstanding production, and she received the A. T. M. 9 prize for the best play (Fig. 2), the best actor (Rodica Negrea) and the best scenography (Marie Jeanne Lecca). The premiere took place at Teatrul Mic (The Little Theatre) in Bucharest on November 4, 1983. In the theatre journal Teatrul, no. 3/ 1984, Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu confesses: The play Ivona, Princess of Burgundy has meant for me a very special experience. I would say that I worked on it as a mathematical calculus, an algebraic equation. I was concerned about a theatrical language study that would formally correspond to Gombrowicz's theory of Form but also expresses, nearly a clear political attitude, the truth of the feelings and the logic of demonstration to dismantle the orlogy blocked by the ‘ sandwire ’ that is Ivona. 10 The director's preoccupation with subtly reflecting the message of the play, retaining what personally marked her, the monstrous allegory of History, the denunciation of a political system of terror, lullabied by the grotesque of the lie and the cult of the forms augmented by false nobility, can be seen in her directorial workbook quoted in Mnemosina, bunica lui Orfeu 11 . For Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu, Ivona constitutes, first of all, the perfect mechanism that triggers and fixes Gombrowicz ’ s concept of the “ Imperative of Form ” , starting from the idea that people give form to each other. 12 Buzoianu Fig. 2: Diploma for The Best Performance on 1983 awarded to Ivona, Princess of Burgundy from The Little Theatre, conferred by The Association of Theatre and Music Institutions (A. T. M.) from The Socialist Republic of Romania (R. S. R.). The title of the performance was Ivona, Principesa Burgundiei, not Yvonna as the ctitics mentioned. 103 The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship quotes Gombrowicz who explains the essence of his aesthetics: when a man imposes his form, he is the subject of form, he creates form, but in contact with other people, the form is distorted, and man becomes an object, he is, in a way, created by others. 13 Reflections on this concept transpire in her vision, mirroring the communist dictatorship: paradoxically, Ivona, who doesn ’ t talk at all, the only pure expression of the truth, in a fake reality, shows and creates the real Form of the Truth. She is fragile; she will be a victim, but only in a horizontal register. The manipulation, the control is valid and vivid only on the level of words and actions. The reality of silence and feelings has the power to reflect the real, the power to cure the impossibility of free speech, free actions and free thought (Fig. 3). In the play we can discover a “ psychoanalysis of the individual and of the group, an abstract history of a rigid, dehumanized world ” 14 . The rape of conscience is at the centre of the narration, repeating itself indefinitely in the cycle of history: the young King Philip, married to the strange and silent Ivona, reflects the dictatorial and criminal pattern of his father, King Ignatius. Ivona is the victim, the only truth in a structure of feigned values under the artificial incidence of the fake Form, the Power. The royal court is in fact a “ yard of miracles, in which a single spectacle is played endlessly in circles: the spectacle of the structure and mechanism of Form imposed by the Power held by a minority group, perfectly organized into the pantomime of leadership ” , and Ivona is “ the tragic clown by suffering, ridiculous because of the inability to defend herself ” , dangerous because she resembles, on the frozen ground of form, deforming feelings: fear, shame, pity and especially love, compassion, solidarity. 15 The distortion of the real is also exemplified by the proteic scenography designed by Marie Jeanne Lecca: a representation of the crystal ’ s structure made of metal in the exterior and with elastic strings inside, on which the actors climb (Fig. 4). Fig. 4: Ivona, Princess of Burgundy ’ s set design created by Lia Man ț oc. Copyright: The Little Theatre (Teatrul Mic), photo credit: Ileana Muncaciu. Fig. 3: Scenes from Ivona, Princess of Burgundy, directed by Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu. Central-down: The actress Rodica Negrea interpreting the main role Ivona. Copyright: The Little Theatre (Teatrul Mic), photo credit: Ileana Muncaciu. 104 Isabella Dra ˘ ghici (Bucharest) This corresponds to the intimate structure of the text, explains Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu: Rigid and at the same time proteic décor, it contains Form and Deformation. We were not just looking for a décor, but also a carcass for actors. The actor in decoration: a snail wearing his shell on his back. The image of the show had to suggest the actor caught in this cage, in a perfectly enclosed environment, from which he can not go out. Under this carcass there are events, changes, the space is apparently transformable, but there is no way out. 16 Lia Man ț oc's costumes symbolise the contrasts between the two worlds. The blackleather military costumes of the royal court or costumes of various materials that were easily pulled off by Ivona suggest two existential states: terror, in the first case, stunned but cyclic through multiple reflections in the collective character; and the state of humanity, in the latter case, persistent, fragile, exposed to violence, ultimately to crime. The idea of multiplying the conflict is indicated by the scenographic solution of a varnished, reflective floor. A political avant-garde play in which rigour, order and discipline are the housing of a repressive system has an immediate message that is easily recognizable by the audience. How was it possible for a play with such a virulent anti-communist message to withstand censorship? One explanation is that the director of that period, who was very involved in the Communist Party, probably protected the play, as the stage director suggests. The success of the play could be another answer. A canonical performance, a step towards the notoriety for Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu, Ivona, Principesa Burgundiei is one of the most relevant plays against the Communist Dictatorship. “ We are Ivona ” is a favourite expression of Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu, which deeply reflects the entire society at that time (Fig. 5). Fig. 5: The actor Mitica ˘ Popescu interpreting King Ignatius in Ivona, Princess of Burgundy. Copyright: The Little Theatre (Teatrul Mic), photo credit: Ileana Muncaciu. The extraordinary capacity of the director to tackle political-themed pieces that confront the totalitarian communist system and disguise them in forms that can escape censorship, yet remain identifiable to the audience, is also visible in this play. Her imaginative power, the multidimensional vision of the scenic approach, her ability to build human typologies, arousing in the actors the necessary resources for the role, the courage to assume the script and the replies that unleashed communist abuses are only a few aspects that outline the director's strong personality. Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu did not conceptualise her aesthetics, even if she was considered an avant-garde director. Her style was intuitive, feminine-proteic, empathic, anchored in sensations that open the gates of essential thinking: Every single play for me is a devastating experience. First I do not know, but I feel. Organically, sharp, tormenting. Intuitions are crunching in sediments. Much later I can explain, try to represent, break down the suffocating avalanche of sensations. Inevitably, the experience changes the intuition in style. I hate definitions, routine, sclerosis. I try to look, though, lucidly and 105 The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship frightenedly, at the dazzling mirror of the definitions. In a rare space, I plant an essential image. I interfere with the unbearable materiality of a hyper-realist detail, as if viewed through the lens of an optical instrument. 17 The theatre must allow the expression of any theatrical aesthetics, provided that it convinces, by connecting man with universality: Any theatrical aesthetics has the right to exist, to the extent that it is strong enough to convince. Nothing can be convincing unless it manages the contact of a human spirit with the universal spirit at a certain moment in the history of civilization and culture. 18 The theatre created by Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu is a visual theatre. Whether it addresses the genre of psychological dramas (Ibsen or Chekhov), the pre-expressionist (Strindberg), the surrealist (E. Ionescu, M. Vi ş niec), the popular, mythological or fantastic (fairy tales), the image is the engine that drives the creative effervescence of the director, in a tumultuous ocean of sensitivity. This sensitivity reinforced by the power of imagination, and a vivid social consciousness outlines a personal aesthetics of resistance to the dictatorial regime. Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina ’ s plays as oases of freedom and truth in the alienated world of Communism prove the artist ’ s ability to go beyond the vicissitudes of history. * The case study that we have explored above demonstrates that Romanian Communist censorship was not able to destroy the talent and the professionalism of theatre makers. Marina Constantinescu has claimed since 1995 that even if a revival in the Romanian Theatre was visible after 1990, especially with the return of great expat stage directors, such as Liviu Ciulei, Andrei Ș erban, Radu Penciulescu and David Esrig, soon the political nomenclature took back their places and changed the face and the direction of the Romanian theatre. “ Unfortunately, beginning in 1994, the Romanian theatre began to regress ” 19 , she writes in a passage from 1995, and unfortunately this is true of 2016/ / 2018 as well. During the Communist period, the enemy was visible; it is declared. Today, the corrupt system lacks a clear face, but it is ubiquitous. Theatre no longer has the privileged position that it had before, during Communism, asserts Marian Popescu. Artists are marginalized, and the incertitude generated by the political management is generalized. 20 The politicisation of the management of theatres after the fall of Communism makes the flourishing of corruption in state institutions possible. Politics today plays the same significant role in artists ’ careers that it played before: Politics here play an important role because, as before 1989, following the same scenario, attracting famous names from art and culture for the sake of image is a way for The Ruling Party or the Opposition to legitimise itself. But only very few artists have built a career without political support; many are those who wanted or accepted being enrolled in political parties. 21 Romanian theatre as a critical practice of ideological oppression varies between two extremes: the huge courage and humanism of some directors and actors, and the obsession of the restrictive control of all plays by the Communist authorities. Communist censorship isolated but strengthened, in a way, the destiny of Romanian theatre. Face to face with the cultural crimes of Communism, seeing the wounds of the past, you have only one choice, one salvation: to hope that there is always light beyond the darkness. 106 Isabella Dra ˘ ghici (Bucharest) Notes 1 Gabriel Catalan, “ Teatrul ș i muzica în România în primii ani de comunism ” ( “ Theatre and Music of Romania in the First Years of Communism ” ), in: Revista Arhivelor 86 (2009), Vol. I, Issue 1, p. 202. http: / / www. arhivelenationale.ro/ images/ custom/ image/ serban/ RA%201%202009/ 15%20catalan,% 20gabriel.pdf [accessed 25 October 2016]. 2 Marian Popescu, Scenele teatrului românesc 1945 - 2004 (The Romanian Theatre Stages 1945 - 2004). Bucharest 2004, p. 81 (my translation). 3 Florin Constantiniu, O istorie sincera ˘ a poporului român (An Honest History of the Romanian People), Bucharest 2011, p. 458 (my translation). 4 Gabriel Catalan, “ Teatrul ș i muzica în România în primii ani de comunism ” , p. 201. 5 Ibid., p. 196. 6 Ibid., p. 197. 7 Olti ț a Cântec, “ Teatrul postbelic ideologizat ” ( “ The Post War Romanian Theatre Under the Control of Communist Ideology ” ), in: Colloquium Politicum 1 (2010), I, no. 1, p. 61 (my translation). 8 Liviu Mali ț a, Teatrul românesc sub cenzura comunista ˘ (Romanian Theatre Under Communist Censorship), Cluj-Napoca: Casa Ca ˘ rţ ii de Ş tiin ţ a ˘ , 2009. 9 A. T. M. - The Association of People of Art from the R. S. R. (The Socialist Republic of Romania) from the Theatrical and Musical Institutions. 10 Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu, “ A Theatrical Language Study ” , in: Teatrul, 3 (1984), Funda ț ia culturala ˘ „ Camil Petrescu ” , Revista Teatrul azi (supliment) (2005), p. 41 (my translation). 11 Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu, Mnemosina, bunica lui Orfeu (Mnemosyne, Orpheus ’ s Grandma), Bucharest 2005, p. 76. 12 Ibid., pp. 76. 13 Ibid., pp. 76 - 77. 14 Ibid., p. 77 (my translation). 15 Ibid., p. 79 (my translation). 16 Ca ˘ ta ˘ lina Buzoianu, “ A Theatrical Language Study ” , p. 34 (my translation). 17 Ibid., p. 32 (my translation). 18 Ibid. 19 Marina Constantinescu, “ Once Upon a Time in Romania. . . Five Years of Post-Communist Romanian Theater ” , in: Kalina Stefanova (ed.), Eastern European Theatre After the Iron Curtain, Amsterdam 1995, p. 198. 20 Marian Popescu, Scenele teatrului românesc, p. 18. 21 Ibid., p. 19 (my translation). 107 The Communist Party Effect: Romanian Theatre Under the “ Auspices ” of Censorship Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history Elena Yushkova (Vologda) Protest movements in contemporary Russia are being seriously threatened by the state. Nevertheless, some street performances in the last few years have become milestones of artistic resistance to growing authoritarianism. Young talented artists performed all of these actions, although the level of challenge was different - from shocking to public morality to just ironic and theatrical. Between two of the most striking performances: by Pussy Riot in 2012 and Pavel Pavlensky in 2016, there was one less provocative and less resonant performance, created by Amnesty International. It was shown in January 2014 in Moscow and was entitled Dying Swan. The young performer Alexandra Portyannikova danced the famous piece, first staged by the Russian choreographer Michael Fokine in 1907, with handcuffs on her arms in the open air, when the temperature was below -20°C. The performance aimed to draw the attention of the audience to the situation of human rights and freedoms in Russia. All these performances strongly criticized the Russian political regime by means of epatage, challenge and shock. The protest movement in contemporary Russia is seriously threatened by the state. Many laws have been passed to prevent different kinds of demonstrations and protect the regime. Even individual pickets, which are formally permitted, in reality always have unpleasant consequences for people who stand somewhere with a critical poster. The more people want and have reasons to protest in Russia, the fewer actual protest opportunities they have. Under these circumstances, the role of the artistic community is becoming more and more important. These courageous and creative people find a way to express political protest in specific artistic forms 1 . Some street performances in recent years in Russia have become milestones of artistic resistance to growing authoritarianism. Wrapped in the form of challenging and provocative actions, they shook a sleeping society, comforted by the propagandistic mantras pouring out from the state-controlled TV channels. Young talented artists performed all of these actions, although the level of challenge varied - from shocking to public morality to just ironic and theatrical. The most striking performances of the last decade were by Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky. In 2012, Pussy Riot performed their notorious “ punk prayer ” at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow; 2 in 2015, Petr Pavlensky nailed his testicles to the paving stones of the Red Square and in 2016 he burnt the door of the FSB at Lubyanka Square in the centre of Moscow 3 . Between these events, there was a less provocative and less resonant performance, created by Amnesty International. It was shown in January 2014 in Moscow and was entitled Dying Swan. The young performer, Alexandra Portyannikova, danced the famous 1907 piece staged by the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine, with handcuffs on her arms in the open air in winter, when the temperature was below - 20°C. The performance aimed to draw the attention of the audience to the situation in human rights and freedoms in Russia 4 . All these performances strongly criticized the Russian political regime by means of scandal, challenge, and shock. The latter performance had many connotations in Russian art and political history and, equally importantly, did not have any personal consequences for the performer (such as jail, trial or psychiatric facility). It did not break the law and could not be considered simply as hooliganism, but, unfortunately, it did not attract mass attention in Russia and the world. This performance used legal opportunities for expressing protest and not causing harm to the actor. The starting point for this action was the new law about “ foreign agents ” in Russia issued by the State Duma on 21 November 2012 and special measures against Russian NGOs receiving support from abroad that followed. 5 This law and some other legislative acts (criminal liability for slander, insult of religious believers ’ feelings and the law against LGBT propaganda) 6 were recognized by Amnesty International as repressive and provided the impetus for an international campaign. A petition for the revocation of these laws was distributed all over the world, and about 336,000 people signed it. Before delivering the signed petition to the Russian President ’ s office, Amnesty conducted the performance, Dying Swan, and Alexandra opened it by carrying a banner with Putin ’ s own words: “ One of the priorities for the state and society should be support to the human rights movement ” 7 . His words seemed to be a mockery because reality showed the opposite to be true. Moscow authorities permitted this performance to be conducted far away from the crowded sites of the city, at Yauzskie Vorota Square instead of near the monument to the heroes of Plevna (the site chosen by Amnesty), where a bigger audience could have watched the performance. At the authorized deserted square only several policemen, journalists and representatives of Amnesty International were among the audience. The case of Pussy Riot had created a precedent, which made the authorities suspicious of all kinds of theatrical-political protest activities. The performer explained her understanding of these circumstances: “ In general, there is so much truth about Russia in this situation: our climate does not favor to street actions, the only recognizable image of a dancer is a swan, and an authorization could be given only to a performance at an empty place where nobody but journalists can see it ” 8 . However, thanks to Youtube, the performance was watched more than 2200 times 9 , although this amount is incommensurable with the resonance of Pussy Riot ’ s “ punkservice ” and Pavlensky ’ s self-harming actions. Swan Dying and Resurrecting Portyannikova was right in saying that the image of the Dying Swan had a special meaning in Russian cultural tradition. This short lyrical piece was quite revolutionary for the whole system of stiff ballet tradition: it dynamized and modernized Russian classical ballet, which by the time of its appearance had lost its creative potential and become a museum art with long performances, heavy decorations, established codified language and a huge number of dancers and corps de ballet. 10 Dying Swan was the first attempt of the young choreographer Michel Fokine to move in a new direction within the classical ballet 11 . Involuntarily, Fokine challenged Tchaikovsky ’ s “ big ” ballet Swan Lake, staged in 1877 by the patriarchs of Mariinsky Theatre Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (author of the most popular second act), which exploited the image of a swan ’ s mysterious and dichotomous beauty 12 . For Anna Pavlova, this small piece was also of tremendous importance. It had become her beautiful brand and brought her worldwide fame, as well as 109 Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history creating thousands of ballet lovers in many different countries (dance historian Jennifer Fisher substantiates that the Swan was Pavlova ’ s trademark in contemporary understanding) 13 . By the end of the nineteenth century, Russian classical ballet had attained an unprecedented flowering in the works of the great choreographer, Marius Petipa (1818 - 1910). It was recognized abroad and surpassed its French and Italian counterparts, which, during the eighteenth century, had been widely acknowledged as the ‘ parents ’ of Russian professional dance 14 . For more than a century (1779 - 1896) a special ballet school in St. Petersburg prepared about 150 professional dancers for the stage, with a repertoire of two leading opera and ballet theatres. Masterpieces, such as Don Quixote, La Bayadère, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and others, were staged in Russia. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twentieth century, “ the ballet had fallen behind the increasingly rapid pace of Russian cultural life ” 15 , suffering “ from its reputation as an aristocratic bauble ” 16 . For Michel Fokine, its language seemed obsolete. Deeply unsatisfied with the “ old ” ballet and inspired by the American dancer Isadora Duncan ’ s performances in Russia in 1904 and 1905, he started thinking about more simplicity and spirituality on stage 17 . In his short piece, Dying Swan, staged for the young ballerina Anna Pavlova in 1907, Fokine aspired to show the moment of death of a fragile white bird, not able to survive in a brutal world. The image of the swan belonged to the Art-Nouveau style, and the motif of death was critical for the ‘ decadent ’ art movement at the turn of the century. Dying Swan was perceived as something new and revolutionary, although it did not represent a complete break with the established canon. Unlike Isadora Duncan who had completely broken with the ballet tradition, Fokine always stressed that dancers trained in old-school techniques could express much more than a talented dilettante 18 . He used Duncan ’ s innovations: bare feet, flexible upper parts of the body, stage clothes, classical music in performances staged in St. Petersburg and for Diaghilev ’ s project. In this way, then, Dying Swan, together with Fokine ’ s later “ antique ” or “ Greek ” productions, dynamized and modernized Russian classical ballet 19 . This fragile white bird with a long neck inspired artists, poets and critics at the beginning of the 20th century who were “ attracted by its refined beauty, an allegory of fatality, and whiteness ” 20 . The swan had always been depicted in a very romantic way in paintings, drawings, poems, etc. As the representative of this epoch, Fokine used the Art-Nouveau arsenal of emotions and associations. He had no idea that his swan, along with the swans from the Petipa production, would one day be involved in politics. After the Revolution, classical ballet, which was traditionally part of the tsar ’ s court life, became a headache for the new proletarian state. The influential Proletkult 21 called for the destruction of old culture in general and ballet in particular, because it did not fit in a modern avant-garde urban culture and demanded significant funding. Thanks to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People ’ s Commissar for Education and Arts, ballet survived and continued to “ transport the proletariat to a different world ” 22 showing Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and other hits of “ old times ” , which paradoxically turned out to be of great interest to the non-educated proletarian audience. Fairy Tale vs. Reality The development of classical ballet had been part and parcel of the Soviet cultural project, partly because of Stalin ’ s unexplainable love 110 Elena Yushkova (Vologda) of ballet. 23 It was recognized as suitable for expressing the heroic spirit of a new human being, and was supported by the state. In many cities of the Russian Federation and the capitals of the Soviet republics, state theatres for opera and ballet were open. Before the revolution, there were only two theatres in Russia. By 1970, there were already 40, and 16 specialized colleges trained professional ballet dancers 24 . Every republic staged traditional old ballets, adding to the repertoire new ones with a national flavour. Thus, Swan Lake penetrated even into remote parts of the huge country and transported millions of Soviet people of all nationalities to a different world. After Stalin ’ s death, during Khrushchev ’ s Thaw, Soviet classical ballet, which had preserved the strict “ old ” purity due to being isolated from new European and American dance trends, became an object of cultural diplomacy and, to some extent, the face of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 25 Maya Plisetskaya and other renowned ballet dancers successfully presented Swan Lake and Dying Swan staged by Petipa and his opponent Fokine all over the world, destroying the barriers between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. Even during the war, The Kirov Theatre, which moved from Leningrad to Perm, produced a new ballet Gayane, and the Bolshoi Theatre in Kuibyshev staged Alye Parusa (Red Sails) - both in 1942 26 . This shows how much this art meant to the Soviet people and their leaders. The devastating effects of war did not interrupt the development of Soviet ballet; rather, the principal theatres continued their work even during the evacuation. Ballet, in general, was lucky in Soviet times. Loved and patronized by Stalin and other leaders, it survived, even though socialist realism influenced its aesthetics for the worse. Although the version by Petipa-Ivanov had become a classic, there were several revised versions by Alexander Gorsky in the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1920, by Agrippina Vaganova in 1933 in the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and by Yurii Grigorovich in the Bolshoi in 1969. There were some other versions, but most theatres used a modernized classical version. 27 Due to the popularity of Tchaikovsky ’ s ballet in Soviet times, the phenomenon of Small Swans Dance, turned into a mass culture piece, and was often the subject of parody. After perestroika, when Soviet heritage was neglected, and artists felt free to mock it, some pieces from the ballet were included in the repertoire of the St. Petersburg Men ’ s Ballet Theatre, founded by the dancer Valery Mikhailovsky. He showed famous ballet scenes performed only by male dancers. One of his hits was the dance of four small swans, performed by four tall and strong men with a faultless women ’ s technique. This postmodern interpretation, full of irony and parody, was close to the Western way of interpreting Swan Lake and challenged the Soviet tradition of glossing over the truth. Ironically, this romantic ballet about fairy tale swans became symbolic of modern Russian political history. During the political crisis of August 1991, the main federal TV channels broadcast the full version of Swan Lake from the Bolshoi Theatre, which greatly confused the audience. People had no idea why this show was taking place without an announcement and what was going on behind it. “ It was supposed to tune a commoner ’ s spirit for an elevated mood or to announce the revival of the genuine statehood ” 28 . Thus, politics and dancing swans clashed. Isadora ’ s grief Alexandra Portyannikova became a part of the Amnesty International project because of 111 Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history her wide popularity in narrow circles. Although she is not a classical ballerina, her training allowed her to perform the famous piece Dying Swan. She is a product of the tempestuous development of contemporary dance in Russia, which took place after perestroika. Portyannikova graduated from the new experimental department of contemporary dance at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg that was opened in the early 2000 s. Together with her colleague, Daria Plokhova, she created a group called “ dance cooperative ” Aisedorino Gore (which could mean the Grief of Isadora Duncan 29 and, at the same time, a play on with the title of the famous children ’ s book by Korney Chukovsky Fedorino Gore 30 ) and became quite known for their talented dance projects and performances. After the fall of the Soviet Union, lots of free dance forms poured into the country. American modern dance, German expressionist dance and European contemporary dance gave a strong impulse to the new Russian dance, while pure classical ballet was almost neglected, becoming little more than a commercial product for export. Since then and until the early Putin era, dance developed very fast and reflected the formation of the new Russian man - free-thinking, creative, open to the world, interacting with numerous new trends. Contemporary dance became a serious alternative to ballet, which was perceived as an old-fashioned, dead formalistic art unable to express the dramatic change in mentality. Contemporary dance developed in small amateur groups and became so noticeable that a professional magazine Ballet wrote about it in almost every issue in the 1990 s. Festivals of contemporary dance took place in many cities in Russia and the nearby countries (the most popular was held in Vitebsk, in the former USSR republic of Belorussia). By the end of the 1990 s, critics were drawing attention to the high professional level of these groups and their integration into the Russian cultural landscape. In 25 years, this genre has been firmly established, and choreographers received prestigious Golden Mask Awards (the main prize for a theatre production in Russia) many times. As choreographer Gennady Abramov noted, Russian contemporary dance focused on the search for the essence of being, existence, it tried to push the limits of the human body, to overcome the boundaries of consciousness, to reach the Absolute 31 . Abramov himself, who had a background in medicine, explored the human body. He showed the “ miracles of plastic expressiveness ” 32 , presenting surprising body positions not for acrobatics ’ sake, but to awaken philosophical thoughts in the audience. His premise was that ballet had lost its ability to connect movements with the inner life of the human body and spirit. Thus, his experimental performances aimed to restore the wholeness of the contemporary human being. His students continued his work after Abramov ’ s death in many new groups. The most interesting example of the new dance movement is the work of Evgeny Panfilov, a talented dancer-experimenter from Perm; to this day, the theatre named after him is still one of the leading nonclassical dance theatres in Russia 33 . He produced many impressive and sometimes even shocking performances, which his theatre kept in its repertoire after Panfilov ’ s early death in 2002. In 1992, he staged Eight Folk Songs to the music of the contemporary Perm composer, Igor Mashukov. The plastique of the dancers was sharp like the music, which was based on folk music but peppered with irony and arranged in a modern way. They aspired to convey simple, almost primitive life, naïve eroticism, and to free the folk dance from its à la russe clichés. Challenging the polished pseudo-folk joyful acrobatic and balletic dance of Igor Moiseev, this plastique was unpolished, sometimes 112 Elena Yushkova (Vologda) ugly, raw and non-acrobatic. Leg inversions differed from standard ballet practice; movements were not refined as in Western modern dance or Judson Church experiments. It was the essence of people ’ s life, stylized but not glamorous at all. Panfilov ’ s works were not limited to the folk theme. His project The ballet of the fat attracted the attention of the public. Parody and irony penetrated the traditional territory of absolute beauty and technical perfection. He mocked the holy of holies of Soviet art - classical ballet - and did it with great talent and wit. Of course, his target was the formalism of the ballet, presented in numerous repetitive patterns. His very fat women were artful and did the usual balletic work quite skilfully. They danced with subtle young men in lace corsets to music from the ballet Corsair and popular songs. By humiliating Soviet ballet, Panfilov was striving for freedom of expression. Not only did he protest against the strict canons, but he also mocked mass culture, balancing between good and bad taste. In Moscow, Alla Sigalova focused on the intense emotions of outstanding personalities - Salome, Callas, Othello and the Russian peasant rebel Emelyan Pugatchov - whose stormy lives were retold through the medium of expressionist dance. Alexander Pepelyaev, for his Moscow Kinetic Theatre, turned to non-choreographic literature, for example, the prose of Kafka, Cortázar, Borges and the Russian absurdist writers. Pepelyaev ’ s productions impressed critics with their strict graphic lines and a strained nerve. In 2016, the choreographer, who has worked in different countries for the last two decades, received the Golden Mask Award for his ballet Café Idiot based on Dostoevsky ’ s novel. Tatiana Baganova from Ekaterinburg used the palette of convulsive, irrational and spontaneous movements to capture the human being ’ s sense of estrangement from his/ her body, the absence of identity. Her Svadebka to the music of Igor Stravinsky has become a legend of Russian contemporary dance. In 2013, she was invited to the Bolshoi Theatre to stage The Rite of Spring. All these and other notable choreographers have changed attitudes towards the human body, as well as the goals of dance and the lexicon of the dancer. They aimed to express unconscious impulses, the absence of harmony in the human soul, the sense of disconnection between man and the world, disharmonic rhythm, irony, and skepticism. “ Pluralism and openness, a lack of universal canons for ‘ what ’ and ‘ how ’ ; the modernist orientation toward constant novelty and relevance; the negation of all myths and ideologies; and finally, a focus on crossing and blurring boundaries of all kinds are the basic components of contemporary dance ” 34 . By the mid-2000 s, contemporary dance had become a fully-fledged member of the Russian dance world. Nevertheless, contemporary dance has not become a mainstream dance trend in Russia, although there are special venues in several big cities for people who work in this sphere and many specialized dance festivals. The public still prefers classical ballet, but this genre, for all its traditionalism, has undergone some notable changes. Dying Swan in the protest movement The huge mass protests of 2011 - 2012 in Russia were the last attempts of society to oppose the authoritarian regime and to express disagreement with the endless reign and limitless power of Putin. Political actions in 2013 had less resonance and led to mass arrests and lawsuits against protesters. Under these circumstances, the artistic resistance acquired new functions - to wake society and to criticize the regime when there is no other way to do it (except the 113 Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history Internet). Artists can express the idea that “ [i]t should be different (Theodor W. Adorno) - even when there is no apparent alternative to that which is being propagated as the one and only solution ” 35 . The performer, as well as a theatre director or an actor, “ can criticise untenable ideological positions and dissolve patterns of order and doctrines of any kind ” 36 being protected by his/ her scenic images even when acting on the street. The Dying Swan street performance was not widely covered by the press, but it had a certain significance. It illustrated the possibility of challenging the authorities in a less harmful way than Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky did, and shaking the ongoing social lethargy without provoking aggression from ultra-conservative circles. In this case, politics and dance generated a very special energy. In new Russian political conditions, when freedom of speech has become suppressed again, dance could be a very effective form of saying something which cannot be expressed with words thanks to its huge symbolic potential. The Swan in handcuffs successfully represented the process of the death of the last rights and freedoms in the country and protested against it. “ Fokine ’ s Dying Swan depicted the death of a nineteenth-century ballet icon ” 37 , but in contemporary Russia, the Swan showed the death of possibilities for any democratic development in the near future. The “ manifestations of femininity ” of this performance were even more evident than Pussy Riot ’ s, which were “ entirely new ” for the “ hyper-masculine and misogynistic culture ” of the “ petrostate ” 38 , but much less provocative and rude. This short requiem to freedoms performed without an audience in terrible weather conditions was a real theatrical critique accepted even in authoritarian Russia since the critical part was not straightforward but hidden under the layers of historical and aesthetic connotations. Notes 1 For a discussion of Russian art in the protest movement of the last decade, see: Birgit Beumers et al. (eds.) Cultural forms of protest in Russia, London and New York 2018; Lena Jonson (ed.) Art and Protest in Putin ’ s Russia, London and New York 2016; Mischa Gabowitsch, Protest in Putin ’ s Russia, Cambridge 2016. 2 See Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer For Freedom, New York 2013; Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, New York. 2014; Bert Verwelius, Pussy Riot Unmasked, Kempen 2014; see also Alexandra Yatsyk, “ Biopolitics, believers, bodily protests: the case of Pussy Riot ” , in: Beumers, Cultural form of protest, pp. 123 - 140. 3 Much has been written about Pavlensky ’ s self-harming actions. Short descriptions in English can be found here: https: / / www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/ jonathanjonesblog/ 2015/ nov/ 09/ pyotr-pavlensky-is-setting-russias-evil-history-ablaze [accessed 28 September 2017]. 4 Official website of Amnesty International in Russian - https: / / amnesty.org.ru/ node/ 2769, [accessed 28 September 2017]. 5 See the full text of the Russian Federal Law of 20 July 2012 г . 121-FZ https: / / rg.ru/ 2012/ 07/ 23/ nko-dok.html, [accessed 28 September 2017]. 6 See Russian official sources: http: / / www. consultant.ru/ document/ cons_doc_LAW_10 699/ 8a73d26dba7976d6c43cc94aa1515368fef256f0/ , https: / / rg.ru/ 2013/ 06/ 30/ zashitasite-dok.html, http: / / www.garant.ru/ news/ 481391, [accessed 28 September 2017]. 7 See https: / / amnesty.org.ru/ node/ 2769/ , https: / / amnesty.org.ru/ node/ 2782/ , [accessed 28. 09. 2017]. 8 See the official website of the Russian performing group Aisedorino Gore in which A. Portyannikova is an active member: http: / / www.isadorino-gore.com/ #! -arachiveruwinter-spring-/ c1zhl, [accessed 28 September 2017]. 114 Elena Yushkova (Vologda) 9 https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=9suKQh7s5oc [accessed 28. 09. 2017]. 10 See Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: classical revival and modernization of ballet, New York 2005, p. 16. 11 For a discussion of Fokine ’ s innovations, see Galina Dobrovol ’ skaya, Mikhail Fokin. Russky period, St. Petersburg 2004, pp. 39 - 49; Vera Krasovskaya, Istoriya russkogo baleta, St. Petersburg et al. 2008, pp. 210 - 212; Elizabeth Souritz, “ Isadora Duncan and Prewar Russian Dancemakers ” , in: Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (eds.) The Ballets Russes and Its World. New Haven/ London 1999, pp. 108 - 114. 12 There is a vast amount of literature on the Swan Lake ballet. Only a few books can be mentioned here: Cyril W. Beaumont, The Ballet Called “ Swan Lake ” , London, 1952; Alexander Demidov, Lebedinoe ozero, Moscow 1985, and many others. 13 Jennifer Fisher, “ The Swan Brand: Reframing the Legacy of Anna Pavlova ” , in: Dance Research Journal 44/ 1, Summer 2012, pp. 51 - 67. 14 Alexander Plescheev, Nash balet, St. Petersburg 1886, pp. 10 - 20. 15 Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, p. 16. 16 Ibid., pp. 10 - 11. 17 See endnote 11. 18 Dobrovolskaya, Mikhail Fokin. Russky period, pp. 43 - 44. 19 For a discussion of the “ liberating aesthetic of Michel Fokine ” , see Lynn Garafola, Diagilev ’ s Ballets Russes. New York and Oxford 1989, pp. 3 - 49. 20 For a discussion on Art-Nouveau iconography, see Dmitry Sarabianov, Stil ’ Modern: Istoki, Istoriya. Problemy, Moscow 1989, p.150. 21 Proletkult (proletarskaya kultura - proletarian culture) was an experimental Soviet artistic institution which arose in conjunction with the Russian Revolution of 1917. The organization was a federation of local cultural societies and avant-garde artists. Proletkult aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms by creating a new, revolutionary working class aesthetic which drew its inspiration from the construction of modern industrial society in backward, agrarian Russia. 22 Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin. Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia, Pittsburg 2012, p. 20. 23 See Jennifer Homans, Apollo ’ s Angels: A History of Ballet, New York 2010, p. 341. 24 See Elizabeth Souritz “ Balet ” , in Bol ’ shaya Sovetskaya Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Moscow 1970, pp. 570 - 572 25 Homans" Apollo ’ s Angels, pp. 341 - 343 26 Souritz, “ Balet ” , p. 571. 27 For a discussion of different versions of Swan Lake in Russia and USSR, see Demidov, Lebedinoe ozero, pp.215 - 359. 28 Natalia Shadrina, “ Ballet v Rossii bolshe chem ballet ” , in: official website of the Bolshoi Theatre: http: / / www.bolshoi.ru/ performances/ 36/ detai, [accessed 28. 09. 2017]. 29 Isadora Duncan (1877 - 1927) - the American dancer and founder of free dance at the beginning of the 20 th century. In Russia she was called Aisedora Dooncan and was a very important part of Russian and early Soviet culture. Now there is a new wave of interest in her dance in Russia. Duncan hated disharmonic sharp movements and dance clownery. The title indicates the group ’ s anti-Duncan style. 30 The grief of the old woman Fedora was caused by the mass escape of her utensils from her house because she did not clean them. 31 See Elena Yushkova, Plastika preodoleniya: kratkie zametki ob istorii plasticheskogo teatra v Rossii v 20 veke, Yaroslavl 2009, pp. 249 - 250; Ekaterina Vasenina, Sovremennyi tanets: Dialogi, Emergency Exit. Moscow. 2005, pp. 6 - 17. 32 Yushkova, Plastika preodoleniy, p. 249. 33 See the official website of the theatre: http: / / www.balletpanfilov.ru, [accessed 28 September 2017]. 34 Natalia Kuryumova, “ Russian Contemporary Dance ” , in: Joanna Szymajda (ed.) European Dance since 1989: Communitas and the Other. Abingdon et al. 2014, pp.147 - 161, p.148. 35 See the announcement of the conference Theatre as Critique - http: / / www.theater- 115 Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history wissenschaft.de/ theatre-as-critique, [accessed 28. 09. 2017]. 36 Ibid. 37 Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, p. 57. 38 Alexander Etkind, “ Genres and Genders of Protest in Russia ’ s Petrostate ” , in: Cultural forms of protest in Russia, p.7. 116 Elena Yushkova (Vologda) Rezensionen Milena Cairo, Moritz Hannemann, Ulrike Haß, Judith Schäfer (Hrsg.): Episteme des Theaters. Aktuelle Kontexte von Wissenschaft, Kunst und Öffentlichkeit. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2016, 660 Seiten. Der vorliegende Band versammelt die Beiträge zum 12. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft, der vom 25.-28. September 2014 in Bochum stattfand, und dokumentiert den starken Willen des Fachs, sich nicht auf seinen Lorbeeren, die es zwischen 1993 und 2010 (S. 1) angehäuft hat, auszuruhen. 1 In dieser äußerst produktiven Phase, deren Ende man in den letzten (eher durch Stagnation geprägten) Jahren häufig beklagte, wurde eine Reihe forschungsleitender und bemerkenswert projekt-affiner Begriffe wie etwa Theatralität, Inszenierung, Performativität und Liveness teils erfunden, teils mit neuen Bedeutungen versehen. Diese konzeptionellen Innovationen sorgten aber nicht allein für einen innerfachlichen Aufschwung, sondern entpuppten sich als regelrechte akademische Exportschlager. Soziologen, Politologen, Rechtstheoretiker u. a. nutzten das theaterwissenschaftliche Instrumentarium, um Rituale und Darstellungsformen, die in ihren jeweiligen Gebieten eine oft unterschätzte Rolle spielen, zu untersuchen und die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse sogleich an das impulsgebende Fach weiterzugeben. Die Theaterwissenschaft erwies sich als Drehscheibe eines ertragreichen interdisziplinären Zirkulationsprozesses und die ‚ Kulturwissenschaft ’ , die zuvor nur ein provisorisches Dach für äußerst heterogene Theorien und empirische Studien war, erhielt durch prägnante Schlüsselbegriffe ein unerwartet scharfes Profil. Inzwischen haben sich die Zeiten geändert. Die einst so aufschlussreichen Konzepte verloren ihre heuristische Kraft, Krisenstimmung breitete sich aus und die Suche nach neuen Fragenstellungen, Methoden und Modellen, die das Fach und sein Umfeld auf- und vermischen können, begann. Der Bochumer Kongress war ein Versuch, das Fach wachzurütteln und zugleich Lust auf substantielle interdisziplinäre Forschung zu machen. Anders als die ambitionierte GTW-Tagung über Subjektivität von 2010, die vorführte, dass die Theaterwissenschaft kaum eigene Gesichtspunkte zur Erkundung des Gegenstandes ins Zentrum der Debatten rücken konnte, sondern (abgesehen von der Verknüpfung des ‚ dramatischen ’ Theaters mit Prozessen der Subjektkonstitution und des ‚ postdramatischen ’ Theaters mit der Dekonstruktion des Subjekts) nur als Parasit von Philosophie und Soziologie zur Geltung kam, wagte sich die Bochumer Veranstaltung ans ‚ Eingemachte ’ heran. Rücksichtslose Selbstreflexion des Fachs und vergleichende (also auf Differenzen bedachte) Analyse der Welterschließungsfähigkeit seines speziellen Forschungsobjekts - des Theaters - standen auf der Agenda. Es ging folglich 1. um den Status des theaterwissenschaftlich generierten Wissens und 2. um das eigensinnige Wissen, das der Vollzug szenischer Aktionen in sich birgt und nicht per se schon unmittelbar bei der Aufführung (sondern oft erst unter dem sanften Druck der nachträglichen theaterwissenschaftlichen Zugriffe) preisgibt. Beide Unternehmen sollten auf dem Kongress so durchgeführt werden, dass drei klassische Begriffe der Theaterwissenschaft, nämlich Theorie, Geschichte und (Aufführungs-)Analyse, auf den Prüfstand kommen und bei Bedarf auch energischen Revisionen unterzogen werden. Die Gliederung des fertigen Bandes hält sich weitgehend an diesen Plan und ordnet die Beiträge fünf Themenblöcken zu: zunächst vier Texte, welche die zentralen Probleme aufwerfen und erste konzeptuelle Lösungsvorschläge machen, darunter auch das thesenstarke Vorwort, dann das wohl gehaltvollste Kapitel Theatertheorie, Modelle, Konstellationen, gefolgt von den Abschnitten Historiographie, Gedächtnis, Zeit des Theaters und Kritik, Kunst, Forschung sowie dem abschließenden Teil Theaterarbeit, Kontexte, Recherchen, der in mancher Hinsicht wie ein Sammelsurium von Texten anmutet, die nicht so recht ins thematische Raster passen wollten, der aber keineswegs das Niveau des Ganzen absinken lässt, sondern mit dem Beitrag von Husel (S. 597 ff.) sogar eine der klarsten und ergiebigsten Studien des Buches zu bieten hat. Die Orientierung am Leitbegriff Wissen (in seiner doppelten Fokussierung auf die akademische Disziplin und ihren Gegenstand) stimuliert das Fach, das mit sich selbst hadert (vgl. S. 68, S. 139), nun erneut - wie in den alten Zeiten vor dem Theatralitätsboom - auf Begriffsimporte und nicht -exporte zu setzen, also unterschiedlichste Konzepte und Methoden aus anderen Disziplinen aufzugreifen und mit Gewinn für die eigenen Fragestellungen zu nutzen. Die Forschungen von Conquergood, Wirth, Mieg, Fauconnier/ Turner, Reckwitz (um nur einige wenige Beispiele aus dem letzten, so erfrischend heterogenen und materialreichen Kapitel anzuführen) werden in die Theaterwissenschaft eingemeindet, ohne dass je der Eindruck der Beliebigkeit entsteht. Zweck solch einer risikofreudigen Begriffs- und Methoden-Piraterie ist es, das spezifisch Gedankliche oder Erkenntnisförmige der szenischen Vorgänge und Praktiken herauszuarbeiten. Als Ausgangspunkt dient durchweg die Einsicht, dass die Eigenart des theatralen Wissens nur „ in Abgrenzung von logischen, sprach- und schriftbasierten Erkenntnisformen ” (Primavesi, S. 425) erfasst werden kann. Theatrales Wissen unterscheidet sich - so lauten die Befunde - merklich von anderen Wissensformen, die unser Leben bestimmen. Dies gilt nicht allein für das wissenschaftliche Wissen, das auf der Basis methodisch kontrollierter Forschungen kausale Erklärungen liefert, sondern auch für das (sei es implizite, sei es explizite) praktische Wissen, das den Vollzug sozialer Handlungen ermöglicht, der einerseits auf Routinen oder Gewohnheiten, andererseits auf handlungsorientierenden (moralischen oder rechtlichen) Normen beruht. Theatrales Wissen artikuliert sich nicht in Argumenten und theoretischen Sätzen; es nimmt vielmehr „ ein erweitertes Verständnis von Denken ” (Otto, S. 381) in Anspruch. Jede „ auf der Bühne ausgesprochene Wahrheit [ist] mit der Möglichkeit aufgeladen [. . .], sich im nächsten Augenblick zu dementieren ” (Lehmann, S. 38). Zahlreiche minutiöse Aufführungsanalysen, die der Band enthält, zeigen anhand konkreter Theaterereignisse, wie diese Operation des Hervorbringens und Dementierens abläuft, und testen zugleich diverse sprachliche Mittel, mit deren Hilfe sich „ die Problematik der In-Szene-Setzung von Wissen ” (Zimmermann, S. 55) verdeutlichen lässt. So virtuos etliche solcher mikroskopisch angelegten Studien - u. a. zum „ verkörperten Wissen ” (S. 427) des Tanzes - ausfallen, so gespreizt wirken manche konzeptuellen Anläufe zur Ermittlung des geeigneten analytischen Rahmens für die Selbstreflexion des theaterwissenschaftlichen Wissens. Auch hier stehen zunächst Theorie-Importe auf dem Programm. Die Initiatoren des Kongresses schlagen vor, die Sonder- Episteme des Fachs anhand der Arbeiten von Kubler und Rheinberger zu (re-)konstruieren (S. 15), um auf diese Weise der Theaterwissenschaft ein neues intra- und interdisziplinäres Profil zu geben. Rheinberger erhält sogar die Chance, im Starttext des Bandes (S. 17 - 27) sein Konzept der „ epistemischen Dinge ” vorzustellen und die Theaterwissenschaft zwanglos dazu aufzufordern ihr Forschungsobjekt ebenfalls als ein derartiges Gebilde zu verstehen. Allerdings haben die Kongressteilnehmer_innen den Vorschlag nicht aufgegriffen. Rheinbergers Name taucht - ganz beiläufig - nur noch zweimal im Band auf (S. 193, 354). Die Präsentation seiner Ideen verwandelt sich damit in ein Ereignis, das - einer Theateraufführung nicht unähnlich - aufscheint und wieder verschwindet, kaum sichtbare Spuren hinterlässt und ansonsten in der Latenz seine verborgenen Wirkungen entfaltet. Die „ Kongressfrage nach möglichen zukünftigen, die gesellschaftliche Relevanz des Fachs [. . .] gewährleistenden Epistemen ” (S. 539) wird mit dem Rekurs auf Begriffe beantwortet, die Foucault vor vierzig Jahren in die Debatte geworfen hat. Eine entscheidende Rolle spielt der Terminus „ Dispositiv ” , der in mehreren Beiträgen (unter Abgrenzung vom Ausdruck „ Episteme ” ) definiert, operationalisiert und im Hinblick auf seine Leistungen für die Theaterwissenschaft geprüft wird (S. 151 ff., S. 163 ff., S. 193 ff., S. 551 ff.). Obschon die meisten Autoren_innen offenbar vom heuristischen Wert des Begriffs überzeugt sind, ist der Ertrag seines Einsatzes gering. Ist er wirklich nötig, um den „ volatile[n] Charakter ” derjenigen „ Elemente ” , die im Theater Verwendung finden, „ nicht mehr als Nachteil ” 118 Rezensionen (S. 166) wahrzunehmen? Lassen sich die Fragen, ob ein Theater ohne menschliche Akteure auf der Bühne zeitgemäß und erhellend ist (S. 193 ff.), oder ob „ Aufführungen auch ohne Kopräsenz von Akteuren und Zuschauern stattfinden können ” (S. 159) ‘ dispositiv-theoretisch ’ plausibler beantworten als zum Beispiel mit den phänomenologischen Methoden, die Badiou in seiner pfiffigen Rhapsodie für das Theater verwendet? Und könnte Siegmund beim instruktiven Versuch, das westdeutsche Theater der 1960er Jahre Revue passieren zu lassen (S. 171 ff.), nicht einfach von „ Auffassung ” sprechen, ohne auch nur eine einzige seiner Aussagen revidieren zu müssen? Etzold zum Beispiel kommt in seinem brillanten Text über Hölderlin völlig ohne den Dispositiv-Begriff aus, obschon es ihm um „ Zeiten epistemologischer Krise[n] ” geht, die zugleich „ Blütezeiten des Theaters waren ” (S. 219). Bei ihm liefert Kants Transzendentalphilosophie, welche die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von Erkenntnis zu klären suchte, die Analysefolie und nicht eine vage Vorstellung von jenem „ heterogenen Ensemble ” , das Foucault als „ Dispositiv ” bezeichnet. Es ist zu bedauern, dass der Band keinen Text enthält, der die Ansätze von Foucault, Rheinberger und Kubler unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer Tauglichkeit für die Theaterwissenschaft genauer untersucht. Man kann sich über dieses Defizit aber leicht hinwegtrösten. Der Band enthält eine Reihe anregender, wenn nicht gar provokativer Beiträge, deren Lektüre sich auch für diejenigen lohnt, die nicht zwischen Rheinberger und Foucault wählen möchten. Zu nennen ist hier Dreyers Artikel über „ Liveness ” (S. 77 ff.), der ohne Scheu ältere Debatten revitalisiert, sodann Tataris Dekonstruktion der weithin akzeptierten Unterscheidung zwischen prä-dramatischem und dramatischem Theater (S. 110 f.), ferner Müller- Schölls Bemerkungen über die „ Entdeckung des Singulären ” als Ursache einer tief greifenden Krise, die in der Philosophie, ja sogar in der „ Literatur-, Kultur- und Medienwissenschaft ” registriert wurde, in der Theaterwissenschaft jedoch bislang nicht die gebührende Beachtung fand (S. 139 ff.). Entscheidend ist die Behauptung, dass das Singuläre eben nicht etwas ist, „ was mit den Begriffen des Spiels, der Performance, der Inszenierung oder des Handelns zu begreifen wäre ” (S. 143). Die vielleicht wichtigste und folgenreichste Überlegung des ganzen Bandes findet sich allerdings bereits im Vorwort des Herausgeber- Teams. Hier wird die künstlerische Kreativität von dem heute in fast allen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen eingeforderten Innovationspotential abgesetzt. Während dieser Typus der Kreativität sich im Modus des Herstellens (bis zum burnout) erschöpft, fängt die Kunst, die am Puls der Jetzt- Zeit ist, „ Kräfte ” ein und entbindet „ Affekte ” , die nach ästhetischer Gestaltung verlangen. Damit verknüpft ist eine Neujustierung der Vorstellung von theatraler Kritik: „ Künstler_innen stehen [zur Gesellschaft] nicht im Verhältnis einer Aufgabe, Funktion, eines Zwecks oder Nutzens ” . Folglich kann ihnen auch „ nicht die Aufgabe der Kritik, der Kapitalismus- oder Wahrnehmungskritik angetragen werden ” (S. 14). Das sehen mehrere Autor_innen des Bandes anders. Sie wollen von den gesellschaftskritischen Intentionen des Theaters nicht ablassen und beziehen sich dabei zum Beispiel auf Ariane Mnouchkine, die dem Theater „ eine soziale Funktion ” zuweist (S. 535). Die Kontroverse wurde vor Ort leider nicht ausgetragen. Was theatrale Kritik unter den Bedingungen der Gegenwart heißen kann, hat auch der Tagungsband nicht geklärt, aber er hat die Frage immerhin aufgeworfen und hinreichend ‚ dramatisiert ’ . Es ist deshalb auch nicht verwunderlich, dass der folgende GTW-Kongress (Frankfurt 2016) das Verhältnis von Theater und Kritik zum Thema hatte und dass der Philosoph und Theatertheoretiker Christoph Menke mit einer Keynote betraut wurde. Menke hielt in seiner Rede unbeirrt am Spielbegriff fest, weil im Spiel eine Kraft wirkt, die zugleich etwas hervorbringt, auflöst und verwandelt - die Akteure mithin dem „ Selbstwiderspruch ” ihres Tuns ausliefert. Aus dieser Bestimmung leitete er dann die folgende These ab: „ Die Kritik, die das Theater leistet, erfolgt - nicht im Namen der Gleichheit oder Freiheit oder Solidarität, [. . .] sondern - allein im Namen des Theaters: im Namen der Paradoxie des Handelns, die es entfaltet ” . Im Rückblick darf man feststellen, dass der Band Episteme des Theaters eine Wende des Fachs 119 Rezensionen wenn nicht vollzogen, so doch eingeleitet hat, und man kann davon ausgehen, dass die baldige Publikation des Folgebandes Theater als Kritik die Richtigkeit des eingeschlagenen Weges bestätigen wird. Köln L UTZ E LLRICH Clemens Risi: Oper in performance - Analysen zur Aufführungsdimension von Operninszenierungen (Reihe Recherchen 133). Berlin: Theater der Zeit 2017, 230 Seiten. Trotz ihrer 400-jährigen Geschichte und der prägenden Bedeutung für das europäische Kulturleben, nimmt die Aufführungsdimension der Oper in der wissenschaftlichen Besprechung bis heute eine nachgeordnete Rolle ein. Bis heute laufen musikhistorischer Diskurs und theaterwissenschaftliche Ansätze seltsam parallel. Auf dieses Desiderat reagiert Risi mit seiner Studie, die klar dem Paradigma des Performativen - wie es von Berlin aus für die Theaterwissenschaft der vergangenen Jahrzehnte formuliert wurde - verpflichtet ist. Mit Oper in performance entwickelt Risi Begriffe und Blickwinkel für ein generelles Vorgehen der Opernanalyse, konkretisiert diese anhand umfangreicher Beispiele und unter Kenntlichmachung seiner eigenen Rezeptionserfahrung. Das Buch gliedert sich in die drei Abschnitte Einleitung - theoretische Grundlagen - Aspekte der Analyse. Ein abschließendes Resümee führt die aufgespannten Fäden zusammen. Vornehmlich widmet sich Risi Inszenierungen des Regie- Theaters und legt einen besonderen Fokus auf die Bekanntheit der Werke, und die daran geknüpften Erwartungshaltungen, die in jedem Zuschauer, jeder Zuschauerin stets einen Abgleich mit einem Vorbild hervorruft, indem sich die Abweichung von der Rezeptionserwartung als Genuss oder Missfallen äußert. Anders als die Opernforschung, die häufig aus musikwissenschaftlicher Perspektive nach der Kompositionsgeschichte fragt, schlägt Risi eine neue Balance des Verhältnisses von Text (Libretto und Notentext) und Aufführung vor, wenn er die Partitur als „ Material zur Hervorbringung einer Aufführung “ beschreibt (S. 41). In der Einleitung verortet Risi zunächst die Oper innerhalb der Paradigmen ephemerer theatraler Ereignisse. Er zeigt auf, wie neben den hoch planbaren Parametern, die in der Oper durch die Musik und die Kanonizität der Werke so dominant erscheint, emergente Elemente wirken: Stimm- und Körperlichkeit der Sängerdarstellerinnen und -darsteller sowie das Publikum, das mit seinen je spezifischen Stimmungen und Erwartungen einer Aufführung beiwohnt, sind der Tagesform unterworfen, mehr noch als Sprache, bannt Gesang die Rezipierenden in seinen (Atem-)rhythmus. Stets ist Musiktheater ein Phänomen, in dem die Präsenz der Teilnehmenden die Repräsentation durchdringt. Das zweite Kapitel widmet sich den theoretischen Grundlagen, definiert Begrifflichkeiten von Kunstwerk über Aufführungstradition zu Werktreue und Mythos. Davon ausgehend lotet Risi das Verhältnis von Vorlage und Ausführung aus. Er nimmt in den Blick, welche Rolle die Wiederholung von Werken, Stoffen und Aufführungen einnehmen und leitet aus dem Präsentischen der Oper - das Angewiesensein auf die Gegenwart so vieler Beteiligter - die Notwendigkeit einer Aktualisierung von Oper ab. Risi hat dabei keineswegs die Transformation der Visualität in eine wie auch immer geartete Gegenwart im Sinne, vielmehr fordert er das Kollektive der Opernerfahrung in der Analyse ernst zu nehmen. So entzieht sich im Blick auf semantische Strukturen und im Fokus auf die Differenzen zwischen Erwartung und Gegenwart, gerade die leibliche Ko-Präsenz und der Reiz der sich aus der fragilen Beschaffenheit der menschlichen Stimme schöpft. In einem weiteren Schritt widmet sich Risi der Verschränkung der Sinne in der Opernrezeption und der damit einhergehenden Schulung von Wahrnehmungsmodi. Im dritten Teil - Aspekte der Analyse - schlägt Risi Blickwinkel der Aufführungsanalyse vor. Zunächst entfaltet er Beschreibungsmöglichkeiten für das Zusammenwirken von auditiven und visuellen Parametern, von szenischer Bewegung und musikalischen Strukturen und der Legitimierung und Konkurrenz, die sich Szene und 120 Rezensionen Musik verleihen können. Der zweite Schritt fokussiert das Verhältnis von Repräsentation und Präsenz, in dem gerade der Akt des Singens in seiner Artistik Aufmerksamkeit einnimmt. In die Analyse eingebunden wird anschließend, wie die Stimmlichkeit und Körperlichkeit der Sängerdarstellerinnen auch die Rezipierenden affizieren, so zum Beispiel in dem „ Vorweg “ -Hören bekannter Musik ( „ Protention “ , S. 157), in der Rhythmisierung des Körpers oder in spontanem Applaus. Risi füllt mit dem vorgelegten Band ein empfindliches Desiderat. Die aufführungsanalytische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Repertoirebetrieb der Oper - statistisch betrachtet immer noch der häufigste Fall - fand bislang zu wenig Niederschlag in der theaterwissenschaftlichen Diskussion. Oftmals - so legte Stephanie Großmann 2013 nahe - liegt der Grund darin, dass plurale Kompetenzen, die szenischen Künste, die Textkritik, die kulturhistorischen und musikalischen Analysefähigkeiten umfassend, erforderlich sind. Hinzuzufügen ist der Breite der geforderten Analyseparameter jedoch, dass bis in die jüngste Vergangenheit die Anleitung zur Opernanalyse jeweils auf wenige Zeilen im Rahmen allgemeiner Handreichungen beschränkt blieb. So fehlte es bisher nicht nur an Studien, die sich der Oper in ihrer Plurimedialität widmen, sondern auch an einer systematischen Erschließung ihrer Zeichensysteme. In dem in Oper in performance entworfenen Analysedesign liefert Risi nun nicht nur diese Anleitung, sondern schließt das Musiktheater auch für den Diskurs des Performativen auf, der für die wissenschaftliche Analyse theatraler Praktiken, von Sprechtheater und Performance in der deutschen Theaterwissenschaft in den letzten Jahrzehnten so prägend ist. Gerade weil Risi einen so prononciert theoretisch-analytischen Ansatz entwickelt, wäre es wünschenswert gewesen, er hätte auf alternative Modelle hingewiesen, wie sie etwa von Stephanie Großmann (Inszenierungsanalyse von Opern, 2013) oder Daniele Daude (Oper als Aufführung, 2014) vorgelegt wurden. Zum zweiten fällt auf, dass Risi einen versierten Opernbesucher, bzw. -besucherin voraussetzt, der bzw. die so in Theater und unter der Studierendenschaft - und somit den potenziellen Leser und Leserinnen des Bandes - kaum noch als Regelfall angenommen werden kann. Diese Einwände können aber den insgesamt sehr überzeugenden Eindruck nicht trüben. So entwickelt Risi in Oper in performance grundlegende Beschreibungskategorien für die Analyse von Operninszenierungen des klassischen Repertoires, die Kenner wie Neulinge bereichern kann. In ihrer wohltuenden Anwendungsbezogenheit erschließt die Studie die Oper für die in der Theaterwissenschaft prägenden Paradigmen und weist den Weg zu der systematischen Erschließung einer Gattung, die aufgrund ihrer plurimedialen Verfassung bisher nur zögerlich systematisch der Aufführungsanalyse unterzogen worden ist: Sicherlich wird sich das Buch bald zu einer Standardreferenz entwickeln und damit hoffentlich dazu beitragen, der Oper auch in der theaterwissenschaftlichen Diskussion mehr Sichtbarkeit zu verleihen. Köln T. S OFIE T AUBERT 121 Rezensionen Autorinnen und Autoren Evely Annuß, PD Dr., is a DFG-Heisenberg Researcher at the Free University Berlin working on her current book project Nomadic Blackface. She has taught as professor of Theatre at Free University of Berlin and as professor of Theatre and Media at LMU Munich, and was a fellow at the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures as well as at Rutgers University. Her research is dedicated to questions of performative transpositions, stagings of collectivity and the relation between theatre and politics. She has edited special issues on Volksfiguren (Maske & Kothurn), Nationalsozialismus - Raum - Geschlecht (Feministische Studien, with Gabi Jähnert and Sabine Kalff) and kollektiv auftreten (Forum Modernes Theater). Her most recent book is Volksschule des Theaters. Nationalsozialistische Massenspiele, a study on the history of propaganda, media and subject formation (Fink). Konstantinos Blatanis is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is the author of the book Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003) and co-editor of the volume War on the Human (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Isabella Dra ˘ ghici, Research Assistant at the Department "Dramatic Art and Cinema", "G. Oprescu" Institute of Art History, Romanian Academy. She is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, with research focused on the phenomenology of the sacred on stage. She has a B. A. in Acting from U. A. T. C. Bucharest (2001) and an M. A. in Cultural Studies - Religious Studies. Texts and Traditions from the University of Bucharest (2013), with a dissertation on N ā t ․ ya śā stra, the famous Indian treatise on drama. She is an actress, poet and writer. Shannon Jackson, Prof. Dr., Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. She is the first Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design (AVCAD). Erasmus mundus visiting professor in Paris. Her research and teaching focuses on two broad, overlapping domains: collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent book is The Builders Association. Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (M. I. T. Press 2015). Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ is a Full Professor at the Department of History of Art and Performance at La Sapienza University in Rome and a coordinator of the doctorate in Performance Studies at the same university. She is a visiting professor at the University of Arts in Belgrade, where she taught previously from 1993 - 2007. She is a curator of a book series, Politics and Aesthetics of Performance for Editore Bulzoni in Rome, for which she has edited a collection of essays by Richard Schechner in Italian, Il nuovo terzo mondo dei performance studies (Bulzoni, 2017). Aleksandra Jovic´evic´ has published books and essays internationally, and in the period between 1999 and 2001, she was a columnist for the German daily newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, reporting on everyday life in Belgrade. Esa Kirkkopelto is a philosopher, an artistresearcher and performing artist. Since 2007, he has been working at the University of the Arts in Helsinki as professor of artistic research. Currently he is in charge of developing. His research focuses on the deconstruction of the performing body both in theory and in practice. He is the leader of a collective research project “ Actor ’ s Art in Modern Times ” on psychophysical actor training (since 2008), and a member of the editorial board of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training and Performance Philosophy Journal. He is also the initiator of the International Platform for Performer Training and founding member of the Other Spaces live art group (since 2004). Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 122 - . Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Eva-Liisa Linder is a theatre researcher and lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Tartu and is a PhD student at Tallinn University. As a freelance editor and critic, she has edited collections and published several articles. Sergio Lo Gatto, Dr. PhD. candidate at the Sapienza-University of Rome. His research focuses on language, the role and influence of criticism in the contemporary arts, and on analysing digital writing and web-based publications. As a journalist and performing arts critic he is chief editor of Teatro e Critica and works as a freelancer for international publications. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll is chair of theatre studies at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/ Main and head of the master program in dramaturgy as well as of the international master in comparative dramaturgy and performance research. His major research interests are: theatre studies as critical science, the question of alterity, the gesture, the fictioning of the political, theater as work on the evil, potentiality, representation “ after Auschwitz ” , theatre architecture as built ideology, dramaturgy as police and politics, identity politics and institutional critique. Furthermore, he is working on the objects of his PhD and his habilitation: Benjamin, Brecht, Heiner Müller, Kleist as well as the “ comical as paradigm of the experience of modernity ” and the politics of representation. Susanne Schmieden studied philosophy, german and comparative literature in Tübingen und Zurich. Since 2015 she has held a position as a research associate at the SNSF Professorship of Philosophy at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Gerald Siegmund is Professor of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. He studied Theatre, English and French literature at Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. From 2000 to 2008 he was assistant professor at the Institute of Theatre Studies in Berne, Switzerland. Among his research interests are theatre and memory, aesthetics, dance, performance and theatre since the beginning of the 20th century. He was head of the DFG-research group “ Theatre as Dispositif ” where he researched the theatrical dispositifs in Germany since the 1960s. Between 2012 and 2016 Gerald Siegmund was president of the German Association for Theatre Studies (GTW). His most recent publications are Jérôme Bel. Dance, Theatre, and the Subject (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and together with Rebekah Kowal und Randy Martin The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (Oxford University Press 2017). T. Sofie Taubert studierte Theater- und Musikwissenschaft sowie Kulturanthropologie an der Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, wo sie 2017 promoviert wurde. Seit 2010 arbeitete sie zunächst in Mainz und anschließend an der Theaterwissenschaftlichen Sammlung der Universität zu Köln, wo sie u. a. Ausstellungen kuratierte zu »A Party for Will. Eine Reise durchs Shakespeare-Universum« (2014) und »Im Spielrausch. Streifzüge durch die Welten des Theaters und des Computerspiels« (2017). Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Oper und musikalisches Theater, die Shakespeare-Rezeption in kulturhistorischer wie in ästhetischer Hinsicht sowie Formierungsvorgänge visueller und akustischer Wahrnehmungsweisen durch szenografische Räume des 19. Jahrhunderts. Publiziert hat sie unter anderem Aufsätze zu Max Reinhardt und Musik, zu Organisationsstrukturen des Niederländischen Theaters sowie zur Shakespeare- Rezeption im Musiktheater. 2018 erschien ihre Studie Die Szene des Wunderbaren. Die Shakespeare Elfen im Wechselspiel von Musik und Maschine im Metzler Verlag. Tore Vagn Lid, Dr., is professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts at the Directors Department, He works as a director, author, and composer and is artistic director of Transiteateret-Bergen. He received his PhD from the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen. From 2014 to 2017 he was project leader of the artistic research programme “ Knowledge and skills for a post-dramatic theatre ” . He has been Hölderlin- Guestprofessor (summer semester 2018) in dramaturgy at Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, Goethe University, Frank- 123 Autorinnen und Autoren furt am Main, and Professor II. in Dramaturgy/ Text at KhIO (2012 - 16). Lisa Wolfson completed her PhD on semantics and functions of puppets at the University of Cologne: Das Mysterium der Puppe. Semantik und Funktion eines Zwischenwesens, Berlin 2018. She is currently working on political theatre and political performance in contemporary Russia at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Elena Yushkova, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and writer residing in Vologda, Russia. In 2007 - 2008, she was a scholar in residence at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C., USA, investigating Isadora Duncan ’ s influence on Russian culture. She is author of the book Plastique of the Overcoming: Notes on the History of Russian Plastique Theater (in Russian, 2009) and has published academic articles in journals, collective monographs and conference proceedings in Russia, USA, Germany, Norway, Canada, and Poland. Lutz Ellrich, bis 2015 Professor für Theater, Film- und Medienwissenschaft an der Universität Köln, 1998 Habilitation (Verschriebene Fremdheit, Frankfurt/ New York 1999). Von 2005 bis 2008 leitete er am Forschungskolleg SFB/ FK 427 „ Medien und Kulturelle Kommunikation “ das Teilprojekt B7 „ Mediale Latenz und politische Form “ . Im Verbund mit der TU Berlin Leitung des BMBF Forschungsprojekts „ TRUSTnet - Vertrauen und Misstrauen als Motoren von Innovationsprozessen in KMU-Netzwerken “ (2010 - 2012). Forschungsschwerpunkte: Medien- und Kommunikationstheorie, Kultursoziologie und Konfliktforschung. Zahlreiche Publikationen über die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Computertechnik, über ethische und politische Fragen, aber auch über ästhetische Themen (z. B. über Thomas Bernhard und Franz Kafka), u. a. (mit H. Maye und A. Meteling) Die Unsichtbarkeit des Politischen. Theorie und Geschichte medialer Latenz, Bielefeld 2009; Vorführen und Verführen, Bielefeld 2011; Facetten der Gewalt, Bielefeld (in Vorbereitung). 124 Autorinnen und Autoren