MONSTERS
MONSTERS
O F O FR REEAA LLI TIYT Y
A PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL ON ‘DRAMATURGIES OF THE REAL’
A performance festival on ‘Dramaturgies of the real’
22 - 25 mars 2012 Dramatikkens Hus
Published by
Siri Forberg (Oslo) and
The Danish National School of
Performings Arts – Continuing
Education (Copenhagen)
Edited by
Siri Forberg and Miriam Frandsen
Graphic Design/Layout
Timon Botez
Photos by
Chris Erichsen (unless otherwise stated)
Printed by
Livonia Print, Latvia, 2013
All rights reserved.
Material from this publication may only
be reproduced with acknowledgement of
the source.
Festival initiated and developed by Siri
Forberg in collaboration with The Danish
National School of Performing Arts –
Continuing Education, Dramatikkens
hus in Oslo, and the Norwegian Arts
Council.
This publication supported by the
Norwegian Arts Council and The Danish
National School of Performing Arts –
Continuing Education
Copyright © 2013
Siri Forberg
The Danish National School of
Performing Arts-Continuing Education
Individual texts, the authors
Typeset in Arnhem and Bulo
ISBN 978-82-999325-0-9
ISBN 978-87-994225-1-7
Siri Forberg
has a background in performing
in different kinds of theatre and
performance. She now works as a
dramaturge and producer, in addition
to pedagogical theatre-work. She
initiated and curated the Monsters
of Reality festival in March 2012, and
a follow-up to the festival, which
is currently being planned, is due
to take place in Oslo in 2014. Her
dramaturgical work includes En
Folkefiende in Oslo directed by Rimini
Prototkoll (Haug/Wetzel) for the Ibsen
festival at the Nationaltheatre in 2012.
Her work as a performer includes Burn
baby Burn by Karen Røise Kielland
(Blood for Roses) and Punch Drunk by
choreographer Wendy Houstoun (DV8,
Forced Entertainment). Siri considers
the ‘playing’ quality of theatre as a
key factor in enabling reflection and
interaction on the question of human
existence. She is keen to facilitate
events where this is the primary focus.
Miriam Frandsen
holds an M.A. in Theatre Studies
(2003). She works as a freelance
dramaturg, most recently on War—
you should have been there (Lukas
Matthaei 2013), Sidste Skrig &
Spejl—Hvem er køn? (Tali Razgá,
2012 & 2011), and DK Ultra (Caroline
McSweeney, 2012). Besides being
the dramaturgic consultant at
CaféTeatret’s Summer Readings since
2005, she has also been coordinator
and dramaturg at the Royal Danish
Theatre on the project Nye Stemmer
concerning new writing (2008–2009).
Since 2009 Miriam has also been the
President of the Society of Danish
Dramaturgs. Miriam teaches at The
Danish National School of Performing
Arts on subjects such as ‘new
playwrights’, ‘post-dramatic theatre’,
‘devising’ and ‘site specific’. Miriam
has also been engaged as a Special
Consultant by The Danish Arts Agency
in 2011. Since 2004, Miriam Frandsen
has been employed as Project Manager
and Developer at The Danish National
School of Performing Arts’ Department
for Continuing Education.
The Danish National School of
Performing Art - Continuing Education
Since 2003 the Continuing Education
has provided knowledge, inspiration
and new skills to the professional
theatre and dance environments. The
Continuing Education is constantly
looking for and introducing new
tendencies, methods and ways
of working for the benefit of the
Danish performing arts scene. The
Department is striving to build a bridge
between theory and practice and
create platforms for interdisciplinary
collaboration. Managed by a
small team, Continuing Education
develops and hosts courses in close
collaboration with other performing
arts organisations, artists and The
National School of Performing Art– as
well as developing its network with
collaborators nationally and abroad on
an ongoing basis.
www.scenekunstskolenefteruddannelsen.dk
ContentS
Friday 23 March
Saturday 24 March
Sunday 25 March
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY
False awakening
page 7
by Carol Martin
by Trine Falch
page 27
page 75
Reality ’s referents:
forms of the “real” across
the arts
as real as it gets
Riding the Monster
High on reality
by Siri Forberg
by Pia Maria Roll
by Toril Goksøyr & Camilla Martens
page 9
page 41
page 81
Introduction
Down with Profession! Dialectics of the document:
Rhetoric and counterrhetoric in “Almenrausch”
by Shannon Jackson
Preface
page 123
PrometheUs In Athens by Rimini Protokoll(Haug/Wetzel)
The Monsters of Reality
by Siri Forberg & Miriam Frandsen
by Ole Johan Skjelbred
page 49
a Radio Hearing by Tore Vagn Lid
page 13
Thursday 22 March
Questions After
Manifest 2083
The rise and fall of
StorKunstsolteddystaten
by Julian Blaue
page 53
by Christian Lollike
page 19
Staging authenticity by Imanuel Schipper
Point Blank
Really fantastical by Bjørn Rasmussen
page 89
page 143
(Dis-)Believe. in search of
a lost reality or Playing
with illusion Program page 150
by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll
page 99
page 59
by Edit Kaldor
page 25
page 137
CMNN SNS PRJCT
by Kalauz/Schick
Logobi 02
by Gintersdorfer/Klaßen
page 119
page 71
Coupè Decalè Afterparty Black Box venue
page 121
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Monsters Of Reality
Monsters Of Reality
5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We want to thank all those who participated in the
festival for joining us and also to thank everyone
who presented their work at the festival, and for
contributing to this publication.
A big thanks goes to the Norwegian Opera & Ballet
for letting us present, at very short notice, one of
the performances—LOGOBI 02 by Gintersdorfer/
Klaßen—at their venue. Thanks also to artistic
director Jon Refsdal Moe, Hedda Abildsnes and Sara
Wegge at Black Box theatre for letting us host the
afterparty at their venue, and in cooperation with
Black Box’ festival Oslo International Theaterfestival.
We want to thank Kirstine Finneman and Nigel
Ritchie for their great help with proofreading this
text.
We want to thank Chris Erichsen for providing us
with photos from the festival.
We want to thank Timon Botez for the layout. Not
only has he taken great care in creating a visually
stringent and focused ‘frame’ for the diverse ‘attacks
on reality’ of all these texts, but he has also been
patient and perceptive towards their content.
A big thanks goes to the people at Dramatikkens
hus for helping with all the logistics, and to Marit
Grimstad Eggen in particular.
A very special thanks to Kai Johnsen, former leader
of Dramatikkens hus. His knowledge of, and
thinking around what text and theatre can be, turned
Dramatikkens hus into a dynamic and vital arena for
practitioners of all kinds in the field.
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Monsters Of Reality
Monsters Of Reality
7
Preface
AS REAL AS IT GETS
by Siri Forberg
Dramaturgies Of The Real
This is a publication containing material produced by international scholars and
artists during the “Monsters of Reality” performance festival at Dramatikkens
hus in Oslo in March 2012. The festival was a four-day long combination of
performances, lectures, artist talks and panel-discussions, and the festival
aimed to present the participants with different notions of “Dramaturgies of
the real”. This refers to an artistic strategy that has been growing in importance
once again. For the last decade or so, the theatre has been bombed with the
real and concrete, and challenging audiences to reflect on how they perceive
everyday realities.
The focus was not on whether this strategy should be branded ‘documentary
theatre’, ‘reality theatre’, ‘verbatim theatre’, or even ‘new documentary theatre’.
We did however want to encourage reflection around this tendency, so we asked
the simple question of ‘how to stage reality and why’.
Theatre will always seek a version of truth, a sense of realness. This search
for ‘the real’ has taken different routes through history; Ibsen, for example,
wanted to write in a “truthful reality language” and Stanislavsky strived to
instill “organic principles of acting” in the student actor in order to be able to
act what’s “real and true” on stage. The perception of what is real will of course
differ depending on one’s position—as the ‘speaking’ artist, or the ‘listening’
spectator.
In our post(post)modern contemporary world, it seems problematic to
point to reality without framing it as ‘reality’. There still exists a strong tendency
within our society to develop different strategies to grasp this everyday, but still
complex, notion of reality. We witness different cultural phenomena that express
strategies to (re)present it, evoking a kind of “reality-effect and -affect” within
the spectator—and we are seduced by a surface of authenticity that somehow
surrounds products and phenomena. There exists a “hunger for reality” in our
contemporary world. The different ways in which the new documentary theatre
has been searching for methods of drawing closer to the immediate social
reality can be seen as part of this tendency. It is a positioning away from a kind
of illusionistic realism and at the same time, part of an institutional criticism. In
this way it connects to other historical documentary theatre-projects.
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Monsters Of Reality
Monsters Of Reality
9
The discourse of reality theatre
With Monsters of Reality, we wanted to point to the phenomena also
by looking at the language that surrounds this theatre of the real. The
theoretical discourse surrounding reality theatre shares this concern by
questioning the notion of whether, and how, reality—the Real— is what
is really ‘present’ in this theatre.
As we experienced, the concept of ‘reality’ is highly ambiguous.
On the one hand, we have its everyday connotations—everything that
surrounds our daily existence, from the physical presence of objects
to constant media sound bites. On the other hand, you have the
complicated language of philosophy where reality is questioned from
different theoretical perspectives, and this same language is also used by
scholars discussing different art practices that try to engage directly with
social reality. All these different layers of ‘reality-perceptions’ guarantee
a dynamic yet confusing ground for the spectator, something we also
encountered during the Monsters of Reality festival.
The event was organized out of a wish to create a forum for the theory
and the practice of theatre, thus joining the ranks of other such attempts
to let the two camps meet. At times we experienced a certain resistance
from elements of the practical theatre field towards the theorizing of
theatre. There could be several reasons for this.
One might be that when the artists attending seminars and
symposiums encounter a “detached gaze” on their own practice, there
is an understandable resistance against being boxed in and framed by
someone else, someone from the outside, who hasn’t actually created the
piece of work but who still claims the right to describe “what it is we see”.
Put simply, the artist will use whatever means they find best to express
their artistic ideas, and if others decide to label this as, for example,
‘documentary theatre’, the urge to push out of these boundaries might be
tempting. Artists attending Monsters of Reality vocalized their resistance
in different ways. Despite this friction, we still believe that both academic
and artistic contributions to theatre can benefit from common meetingpoints. This is particularly true in Oslo, where the University Theatre
Studies department has been closed down.
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Monsters Of Reality
Reality is not enough
The dramaturgical strategies of staging ‘the real’, or of framing our
social reality, thereby claiming that “all the world’s a stage”, are diverse
and ambiguous. The one thing all these varied strategies might have in
common is their activation of a certain kind of ‘spectator-effect’—or
rather, that the effect of these strategies is to create an affect within the
spectator. The use of documentary elements, whether in theatre, film,
literature, or arts in general, induces a certain way of connecting to our
social reality—it creates destabilizing images within the spectator’s mind
that can be both seductive and challenging. All communication, such as
theatre, is built on certain kind of conventions, and a break with these
conventions can lead to a kind of ‘noise’. For the spectator witnessing
different kinds of artistic strategies using documentary, we might call
this noise a ‘reality-noise’.
Reality is never enough though. Infusing the stage with elements
from our immediate social reality does not make theatre more important
or more real. It is not the document as such that creates the ‘realness’,
since it always involves a certain kind of manipulation from the theatre
maker. By asking how to stage reality, we simply ask for reflections from
scholars and practitioners alike on how we can continue to search for
ways of engaging with and reflecting on our reality, our existence and
the human condition. During Monsters of Reality we experienced many
different ways of communicating, both artistically and theoretically,
around the relationship between theatre and social reality. One of the
important aspects of this relationship is the realization that theatre
is part of social reality and not something outside of, or parallel to, it.
The inherent presence of the esthetic and the social in a theatrical
setting opens up the potential for a vibrant meeting of minds—it allows
us to reconsider, reflect, interact, and question the social and political
condition of the everyday in a way that is particular to theatre. And that’s
as real as it gets.
Oslo, May 2013
Siri Forberg
Monsters Of Reality
11
Introduction
the monsters
of reality
by Siri Forberg & Miriam Frandsen
This publication contains contributions from all the lecturers and artists
involved but not the panel discussions. While it follows the order of the
festival, we have also incorporated two contributions that were not part of
the original event. Danish director and playwright Christian Lollike took part
in the opening panel, but his text about the performance “Manifest 2083”
was written on request for this publication. Bjørn Rasmussen (professor
at the Department of Art and Media Studies, NTNU, Trondheim) was also
a participant, and his reflections on the Monsters of Reality festival was first
published in the Norwegian journal “Norsk Shakespeare-og teatertidsskrift”.
The contributors do not represent a homogenous group but are all
independent artists and theorists whose views on the festivals’ overall theme
are based on their own specific point of reference. The result is a wide variety
of artistic and research-related perspectives on dramaturgies of the real.
The first entry by playwright and director Christian Lollike questions
the position of theatre as social arena by asking what the theatre should be
allowed to do? He encountered a huge backlash from the media, theatre
critics and the public in general after announcing that he was going to stage
a performance based on Anders Behring Breivik’s manifest. The consequent
‘noise’ showed society’s limitations for theatre and what theatre should be
‘allowed’ to treat. The tragedy of 22 July might be the one incident in postwar
Norway that clearly shows what is at stake when theatre and art use esthetic
strategies to discuss ‘the real’. Lollike’s own point of view is that theatre is
the natural place for dealing with tragedies—both real and fictional ones.
Theory
In Carol Martin’s lecture “The Reality-based community”, she juxtaposes
the theatre of the real with the theatre of the world, so to speak. She claims
that world leaders stage and reinvent reality in a similar way to theatre
makers, and that we all have the power to manipulate reality to a varying
degree. The global centers of power use staging strategies that suit their
own agenda, and the makers of reality theatre often use their artistic power
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Monsters Of Reality
Monsters Of Reality
13
to expose and question these power mechanisms. Martin shows that this
theatre can both explain and question the relationship between fact and
fiction, esthetic innovation, and political ideas. The artistic practices she
refers to, treat fiction as non-fiction and non-fiction as fiction, and by
openly acknowledging this, they destabilize the spectators’ perceptions by
questioning the validity of different truths that might otherwise be taken
for granted. The ‘theatre of the real’ thus questions both global power
mechanisms, and the involvement and positioning of the spectator by
esthetic inventions that challenge our conventional notions of theatre and
society.
When speaking of perceptional processes within the spectator, the
concept of authenticity must also be brought into discussion.
In his lecture “Staging Authenticity”, Imanuel Schipper approaches this
slippery concept by firstly giving an overview over how different philosophers
and cultural thinkers have approached it, and then by putting emphasis on
the fact that when it comes to theatre and performance, authenticity is best
understood as something that is not inherent in the object as such, but is
the result of perceptual processes within the spectator. He also points to
the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of the concept—our longing for
authenticity brought on by the fact that it does not really exist.
With his contribution “(Dis-)Believe. In search of a lost reality or playing
with illusion”, Nikolaus Müller-Schölls raises the discourse around the
‘theatre of the real’ onto another level when he asserts that while reality
theatre has been on a quest for the real, it has uncovered instead the
“inextricable ambivalence of the belief in illusion”. Artists can only present
reality as real when they mediatize and stage ‘it’. So when the spectator
experience something as real, the impression does not come from the “real
in itself” but from its artistic manipulation. Müller-Schöll underlines that
the impression of real life does not originate in the archive but is made
believable by the artist’s work. The tendency of contemporary theatre
makers is to “deny illusion but to constantly play with its possibilities”.
And illusions are in themself a reality, even if the real is missing. We are
all entangled in illusions in different ways and can never eliminate them
completely. But by playing with the “(dis)belief in illusion”, artists can make
visible how we are all inextricably entangled in them.
Shannon Jackson addressed the confusion and ambiguity that
might occur when speaking about notions of reality in her lecture. She
decided to change her talk at the last minute, in order to create some vital
common ground for the speakers—the understanding that we all share
a basic ‘thought-structure’ when reflecting on reality and that reality is
not something that exists prior to representation. Rather, that the actual
representational process, such as the one inherent in the performing arts,
is constitutive of the very reality it is seeking to represent. The word ‘real’
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Monsters Of Reality
has been used to characterize very different performance forms, and works
of art can be understood differently depending on the context you place
them in. A piece of work might be considered as a break with convention
in one context but might be viewed as reproducing conventions in another
context, so the reception of these reality effects will be decided by the
context. We also perceive and refer to reality in ways that are quite personal
and linked to different value-systems. One might say that everyone has their
own “ideology of reality”. It is therefore important to recognize the various
different kinds of references, and make our position clear from the start
when we want to discuss the staging of reality.
The publication ends on Bjørn Rasmussen’s text, “Really Fantastical”.
The dialogue with the audience will always be an important factor for such
an event, but it is also a difficult one to establish. If we could program the
festival over again, we would have created more time and space for the
audience to raise questions and take part in discussions. So it is important
to present his qualified reflections as a spectating participant.
He starts off by stating that it was hard to grasp what kind of
“monsters” we are dealing with in contemporary reality theatre. He learned
little about monsters and more about the ambiguities that arise when
contemporary cultural practices are combined with the mindset of the past.
Rasmussen sees theatre as a linguistic device that constructs reality but
is also constitutive of the reality it constructs. Rasmussen places the new
documentary approach in theatre as part of an overall cultural tendency,
suggesting that concepts of play, myth, and art are on their way of becoming
part of normal existence again.
Lecture performances
The theoretical perspectives presented at the festival all pointed to examples
of performance that somehow seek to connect theatre directly with social
reality. Some of these artistic strategies were presented here through the
format of lecture performances. The coining of this reveals a theatrical
playing around with the concepts of both ‘lecture’ and ‘performance’. We
are not getting a lecture in performance theory, but rather a performance
in lecture format. It suggests a more loose and open form that enables the
artist to shift between different modalities of performance. The artists that
presented their work as part of this format did so in many different ways—
from giving a kind of overview of their work to presenting small scenarios
or ‘performed commentaries’, so to speak, on the subject of staging reality.
In the lecture performance “Riding the Monster”, Pia Maria Roll attempted
to recreate her initial meeting with someone whose expertise lies outside
the theatre. Matthew Landy is Vice President and Head of International Tax
for Norwegian oil company, Statoil. He was invited to join Roll on stage for
a factual exchange regarding Statoil’s expanding global operations. Part of
Monsters Of Reality
15
this lecture performance involved his two daughters Alina (8) and Astrid
(1). For this publication, Pia Maria Roll has transcribed and edited some
brief excerpts of what took place on stage, and it is presented here as a kind
of ‘photo story’. Here, the spectator witnesses how two different kinds of
roleplay are contrasted against each other—Matthew Landy stands onstage
in his social role as a high-ranking oil company employee, and Pia Maria
Roll also stands onstage as her social role as professional performer. This is
a meeting where the open exchange of dialogue becomes the focus.
In his article “Down with profession!”, actor Ole Johan Skjelbred gives
valid arguments for rethinking the actor’s role. Instead of continuing a
tradition where one’s performance is measured by perfectly honed acting
skills, he urges the actor to focus instead on representing the idea of a
performance. Skjelbred advises actors to simplify relations to their own
presence on stage by stating that there is nothing more ‘ready-made’ than
the human being.
Julian Blaue’s “The rise and fall—Storkunstsolteddystaten” takes the
reader on a brief tour de force through his work from 2008–11. It describes the
development of a state of his own, and the journey towards its destruction.
In his art, the blurry line of reality and illusion appears in the distinction
between the artist himself and the art he creates.
Trine Falch’s lecture-performance takes direct action towards the
audience by guiding it through seven theatrically playful steps of ‘false
awakenings’. She uses theatre history as the underlying basis for creating
a mischievous text where the whole discourse of ‘relationism’ is taken for
a spin. The performer flips the situation on its head by taking on the role
of the audience and thus staging the audience as the performance. She
concludes by stating that, “It might be hard to tell who’s looking at whom,
and if you ever wonder who’s looking at you: I am too”.
Performance-project Goksøyr&Martens start their contribution
“Relational realism” by presenting us with alternative titles, such as “Dear
God, don’t ever let me do documentary theatre again” or “Fuck realism,
get real!”, thus showing the artist’s resistance towards being boxed in and
labeled as, for example, documentary theatre. They do not want to define
their work as either fiction or reality but rather insist on playing with the
blurred boundaries between these two notions, seeing in it a potential for
creating enhanced situations ultimately leading to existential tales about
the human condition.
Theatre director Tore Vagn Lid gave a critique of those who see
Documentary Theatre as just another trend, stating that the journalistic
stupidity of branding documentary as ‘in’, or the curatorial strategic
evil of deciding that documentary is ‘out’ is actually undermining of
artistic practice. In his lecture, Tore Vagn Lid explains how he develops a
dialectical-dramaturgical form where the conflict between the documents
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Monsters Of Reality
is the real object. The document will always be linked to a context, and it is
that context that in the end decides how the document should be valued.
The different documentary approaches towards staging or framing reality
should thus be considered as open, polyphonic, and dynamic parts of a
dramaturgical arsenal for theatre artists wanting to reflect upon our social
reality.
Guest Performances
The guest performances all share a direct engagement with social reality,
although they employ different dramaturgical strategies. Each in their own
way show contemporary theatre’s turn towards the audience: either by
engaging directly with the audience in an alternative trading situation like
Kalauz and Schick’s “CMMN SNS PRJCT;” or as seen in Rimini Protokolls
“Prometheus in Athens”, where a contemporary Greek chorus is made up
of a hundred citizens of Athens—members of the public placed on stage
instead of being seated in the audience. At the festival we were presented
with a lecture-performance showing a film of this event. Five performers
from “Prometheus in Athens” appeared live on stage, and in dialogue with
the film.
In German duo GintersdorferKlaßen’s work, we meet two dancers from
very different backgrounds who meet on an empty stage to begin a dialogue
in front of the audience. Here the perceptions of European and African
dance collide, and the meeting that apparently revolves around different
styles of dancing is also a meeting where the audience is challenged to
question their own perceptions of ‘otherness’.
Edit Kaldor’s performance on the opening night of the festival showed us
contemporary theatre’s tendency to play with illusion. Mixing documentary
and fictional elements in her work, her performance is an example of
reality theatre’s practice of questioning the validity of a document, whether
presented in the media or via an esthetic framing-device, such as the theatre.
The development of new documentary or reality theatre points to
a questioning of the function and effect of theatre in society. The artistic
strategies shown and discussed here can be seen as a form of dramaturgical
playing with our social reality. Theatre will always find other ways of
‘framing’ reality, and the ways in which this is done reveal aspects of
theatre’s possibility as a social and dynamic arena for reflection and action.
We hope this publication will be of further inspiration for the
participants, and anyone else interested in the topic of “dramaturgies of the
real” in the performing arts.
May 2013,
Siri Forberg & Miriam Frandsen
Monsters Of Reality
17
Thursday 22 March
Christian Lollike
is an internationally acclaimed
playwright and director. He is
currently Artistic Director of the
established theatre CaféTeatret
in Copenhagen. His artistic
drive derives from wanting to
understand events, social trends
and changes in society that
threaten to undermine democratic
values and/or personal freedom,
inflict on human rights and the
role of citizenship, with focus on
social dynamics, psychological
and political issues from a
contemporary, social point of view
and stimulate valuable public
debate.
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QUESTIONS
AFTER MANIFEST
2083
by Christian Lollike
When Copenhagen’s independent theatre,
Café-teatret, announced that we would perform
a monologue based on Anders Breivik’s ‘Manifest’, and that it would be staged one year after
his crimes, the theatre and I were subject to a
massive media firestorm. The public, the politicians, the press—everyone—all queued up to
condemn the theatre. This makes me want to
ask the following questions: if we were discussing a picture or a book, and not a theatre performance, would the same people—politicians,
press, and other theatre professionals—have
been as eager to comment on and condemn
this work? What is the theatre allowed to do?
And what is it not allowed to? What are the
conventions that prevent theatre from being the
natural place for tackling real tragedies?
Monsters Of Reality
19
“Manifest 2083” is performed as a monologue in the basement of a
restaurant with an audience of 48 people. The performance begins
every night at 9 pm, in consideration to the restaurant setting, and
during December there will be no performances due to Christmas
events. Production costs have been minimal.
“Manifest 2083” is about a man, an actor, who decides to play
the role of Anders Behring Breivik, and is based around the large
compilation of texts, dubbed “2083”, which Anders Breivik sent
out just before his actions. The actor plays ‘himself’. Through the
play we follow the actor from his first readings of the manifest to
his thorough work on understanding the texts, the personality,
and characteristics of Breivik etc. The play resembles a process
of research on a man’s work, but at the same time examines the
radicalization process of Anders Breivik. The actor uses several
stylistic methods in order to get closer to, to understand, and
to be the man most people prefer to distance themselves from.
Although the performance can at times be uncompromising, it
is not in itself unacceptably provocative.
People do not applaud when the performance is over.
They are not certain how to respond. Etiquette obliges them
to applaud, but their emotions make them resist. Afterwards,
several write e-mails and letters, declaring that they wanted
to applaud to acknowledge the work and performance of the
actor, but that they found themselves in a ‘shocking’ situation
where applause seemed inappropriate.
I understand them. It’s not a play to applaud.
I tell myself that the reason why people still buy tickets to the
play is that they want to learn; that they have a need to build
knowledge on the observations of others; that they are touched
and at some points frightened; that they are truly worried about
the future of Europe; that they grasp the necessity of why the
actor tries to be Breivik, and tries to see the world from his point
of view; and that they understand why the actor sometimes
feels afraid of himself in those moments where he identifies
with xenophobia and a fear of Europe’s future. I tell myself that
they are scared about the fact that Anders Breivik is actually
capable of expressing a more or less coherent understanding
of society. I also tell myself that people recognise themselves in
the lack of historical knowledge, and in the longing for a cause
or a movement that goes beyond individual projects of self-
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Monsters Of Reality
“From my perspective, the
theatre is the natural place for
dealing with tragedies, both
the real and the fictional”.
realisation. In other words, I tell myself that the audience, at
moments, sees itself in the Breivik portrayed in the play. But of
course I can’t be sure.
However, I do not tell myself that the performance is capable
of competing with the ‘idea’ of the performance. That is, the
idea that has taken place in the minds of people since the Caféteatret announced on 19th January 2012 that we would do a
performance based on ‘Manifest 2083’. The idea, which people
created in their minds, was an individual internal experience
nourished by fear. This idea took place on the biggest stage of
all, namely the intense, violence-glorifying, uncensored private
stage of the imagination, where projections of fear and anxiety
merge into grotesque and surreal ideas.
We knew we would never be able to compete with this idea.
Several times we thought about abandoning the project.
Especially after the trial began, and new material was put at
our disposal every day. It became the biggest live theatre show I
have ever seen. Incidental performances took place in the media
on a daily basis. The actor Anders Breivik gave a magnificent
performance. He proved to be mercilessly evil, deliberate, and
changeable—all at the same time. The media took a more or
less sensational view on the trial—the strongest points of view
should be found, the most outrageous statements published—
it was about competing for sales. Writers and researchers also
wrote about Breivik. Several were urged to do so by others, and if
they declined they were deemed as “uncommitted”. Seen in this
light, the criticism of the play “Manifest 2083” seemed ridiculous.
How could this performance, not even in production at the time,
be found guilty? What is it about the medium of theatre that is
so threatening? Is it the visual power of the medium? Is it the
fear that fictionalisation of the man means a fictionalisation of
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reality (if this is possible), which would somehow make it easier
for us to forget the severity of the situation? Did we just want to
make money?
From my perspective, the theatre is the natural place for
dealing with tragedies, both real and fictional. I see it partly
as an expression of naivety, and partly as a lack of faith in the
possibilities of theatre, to think that it was too soon for us to
tackle the 22nd July tragedy on a stage.
It is the most difficult play I have ever created. Not just due to
the external pressures, but to a greater extent because the case
evolved over time. In other words, we were dealing with a kind of
vivisection, that is, an attempt to describe or dissect something
living, which was always moving. People’s views on Anders
Breivik continually changed and probably still do. Hence, what
seemed crucial to present to the public one day changed the
next day. Further, I think that the process of the performance
became part of the performance, which is also why it is difficult
to interpret the performance without taking into account the
circumstances, reactions, and discussions, and see them all as
part of the performance, even though these reactions were never
intended.
The question of timing is also relevant. There is no doubt that
works based on the 22nd July tragedy will take on different forms
of expression according to the distance in time from the event
when the artist creates the work. To deny theatre the possibility
of staging this kind of performance expresses a suspicious view
of the performing arts as a mode of expression.
I don’t know if this performance will succeed. Will I continue
working with it? Should I have found a more original approach?
Should I have treated Anders Breivik as a Hollywood star, and
more explicitly, focused more on the performative aspects?
Should I have gone further into the descriptions of the attraction
and fascination of violence and evil? Should I have made a
comparison with Don Quixote? Should I have made a comedy?
“To deny theatre
the possibility of
setting up this kind
of performance
expresses a
suspicious view on
performing arts as a
mode of expression”.
The work of processing this tragedy, and society’s response to it
continue to intrigue me, and hence the work must go on.
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Thursday 22 March
Edit Kaldor
The director Edit Kaldor is a unique
voice in the contemporary theatre
landscape. She combines conceptually
strong forms, rarely seen in theatre,
with a personal approach to existential
themes. She mixes documentary and
fictional elements in her work, and
often integrates the use of various
digital media in a sophisticated
but straightforward way. Her work
has been presented in theatres and
festivals worldwide. She lives and
works in Amsterdam.
Frank Theys is a Belgian philosopher,
visual artist and filmmaker. His
work is part of collections of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York,
the Museum for Contemporary
Art in Ghent, the Centre National
de la Cinématographie, Paris and
Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai.
His documentary series Technocalyps
has generated a lot of response and
discussion across the scientific,
cultural and political world. He
currently lives in Brussels and
Amsterdam.
Nada Gambier is a dancer, performer,
choreographer, performance maker
and artistic advisor and a founding
member of Action Scénique vzw. She
has worked with a.o. Charlotte Vanden
Eynde, Cristian Duarte, Edit Kaldor
and Kate McIntosh. In 2013 Nada is
working on a series of videos called
‘mechanics of emotion’ as well as
performing in the new productions
of Diederik Peeters (BE) and Forced
Entertainment (UK). Nada currently
lives in Brussels.
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POINT
BLANK
by Edit Kaldor
Point Blank is a visual theatre performance
in which the narrative is constructed by using
paparazzi-style photographs of everyday
situations. The 19-year-old Nada has been
secretly observing people for years, taking
‘spy-photos’ of them, capturing their private
moments. The core of her interest is to trace the
various life-strategies that people follow. She
wants to map out the options for herself. Driven
by this curiosity, she becomes witness to a wide
range of – at times extreme - human behaviour.
The performance is an occasion for Nada to
structure her ‘archive of possibilities’. Together
with the audience she contemplates the images,
and looks for the implications and patterns
that emerge. She aims to get a comprehensive
overview and to reach a conclusion: “the vision
of a life worth pursuing”.
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Saturday 24 March
Carol Martin
Professor of Drama at New
York University. Recent books
include Theatre of the Real and
Dramaturgy of the Real on the
World Stage (both published by
Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays
and articles have been translated
into French, Chinese, and
Japanese. Martin is the General
Editor of “In Performance”, a book
series devoted to international
performance texts and plays.
THE REALITYBASED COMMUNITY
by Carol Martin © All rights reserved
In an article in The New York Times, an aide to the then
President of the United States told journalist Ron Suskind:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we
call the reality-based community”, which he defined
as people who “believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality”. I nodded
and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s
not the way the world really works anymore”, he
continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act,
we create our own reality. And while you’re studying
that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re
history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do”.
1
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The two performances I discuss in this essay represent real events
onstage by both disrupting and constructing aesthetic authenticity
and documentary certainty. They are examples of theatre, that, in the
words of Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, “situate historical truth as
an embattled site of contestation” (2009:6). The Builders Association’s
“House / Divided” (2011) and Rabih Mroué’s “The Pixelated Revolution”
(2011) show how theatre of the real can both explain and question the
relationship between fact and fiction, aesthetic innovation, and political
ideas.
“House / Divided” treats fiction as nonfiction by using the novel The
Grapes of Wrath as historical source material and combines it with images
of homes from the housing foreclosure crisis that followed the stock
market crash, fictional stock market trader talk, and verbatim text from
Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987–2006.
The “Pixelated Revolution” assembles a fictional aesthetic manifesto
built from nonfictional sources through an analysis of YouTube videos
of the Syrian revolution. Both of these productions construct powerful
and entertaining inquiries into the relationship between aesthetic
conventions, the positioning and involvement of spectators, and
government policies.
House / Divided
The burst of the housing bubble in the US in 2007, the stock market crash,
the bank and industry crisis, and the recession that followed prompted
the creation of “House / Divided”. Members of The Builders Association
researched and considered the relationship among spaces, places, and
material goods as physical objects, as well as virtual realities. What have
houses come to mean as commodities in the global marketplace? How does
something as abstract as stock market fluctuations affect something as real
as a family’s home? How does the extreme loss of the stock value of very
wealthy people and corporations affect ordinary people? Have events like
these happened before? The last question led company members to read John
Steinbeck’s 1939 Great Depression novel, The Grapes of Wrath. By using The
Grapes of Wrath, The Builders Association suggests that the same monster that
terrorized the world during the Great Depression in the 1930s has come back
to life in the first decade of the 21st century. There is a sense of foreboding, a
dread of a looming financial monster, an unseen predator consuming people,
their livelihoods, and their homes. “House / Divided” is inhabited by cultural
memory and narrative recycling.
The onstage house the spectators see exists both in the present and
in the past, as a representation of something material and real and as a
digital construction. So too, the characters are contemporary and historical,
real and fictional. The short, episodic, and fluid scenes are connected by
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transformations between past and present, of the house, of other digital
images, and of sounds. At the end of scene 1, for example, the bell that Ma
Joad rings for dinner morphs into the opening bell of the New York Stock
Exchange that begins scene 2. The illuminated stock ticker numbers that
crawl across the traders’ desks are like an army of termites, which also
crawl over the house to envelop and consume it.
According to Weems, The Builders Association began their work on
“House / Divided” by rethinking notions of property and territory, and by
looking at what happens to houses that are abandoned as the consequence
of unpaid mortgages. The production includes interviews with realtors
explaining their professional relationship with foreclosed homes, and
portions of the testimony given by Alan Greenspan to a congressional
committee on 23 October 2008 in which Greenspan admitted errors in
regulation that may have been a catalyst for the recession. Just before
the video footage of Greenspan’s testimony is projected onto the house
at the end of the production, the scene cuts to the Omniscient Narrator
who laments a sudden onslaught of rain strong enough to bring down
great trees and threaten everything in its path. In response, the fictional
Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, scramble to save themselves. The
scene cuts to a looming image of Greenspan, as if he were speaking from
a secreted place on high. His testimony is projected onto the central
surface of the set that also serves, at other times, a wall of the house, both
on North 4th Street and in The Grapes of Wrath:
Before I begin by discussing the role of the Federal Reserve in
our system, and the steps we’ve taken over the last ten years to
respond to emerging questions in the housing and credit markets, I want to make this preliminary statement: Policymakers
cannot predict the future. There is no way that the subprime crisis could have been predicted, and even now, there is no way of
knowing how many more homes will end up underwater. (The
Builders Association 2011)
Juxtaposing The Grapes of Wrath with Greenspan’s speech established the
relationship and relevance of the past to the present and created an eerie
déjà vu perspective to the most recent foreclosure crisis. The Builders
Association uses theatre as a way of producing awareness of the repetition
of traumatic events. The past that “House / Divided” portrays—a past of
ordinary people, poor people suffering from an inequitable system, as
the Joad family did—is a past that is recurring. The frame of the house,
with everything “house” implies—home, shelter, security, longevity,
belonging, family, childhood, love, food, permanence, continuity, loss,
and trauma—becomes the sign of the troubled foundation of the nation,
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and a representation of the spectators in the theatre and all those, who
bore the consequences of Greenspan’s miscalculations.
In performance, The Builders Association treats The Grapes of Wrath
as a historical object that they recycle in the same manner that they
manipulate the onstage house; the novel is animated, enacted, redacted,
and transformed in ways that associate it with the contemporary economic
crisis. Steinbeck began writing The Grapes of Wrath in response to a
journalism assignment for Life magazine. Documentary photographer
Horace Bristol and Steinbeck traveled together to California labor camps
in the winter of 1937/38. Once on the ground in the midst of the misery
he had come to document, Steinbeck dumped the Life magazine project
in favor of writing a novel. Bristol’s work was eventually published in Life
magazine many years later, next to stills from the 1940 film adaptation of
Steinbeck’s novel for which the photographs were used as reference for
casting and costumes. Later in life, Bristol titled this series of photographs
The Grapes of Wrath to identify it with Steinbeck’s 1939 novel and even
retitled an image of a man chopping wood Tom Joad Chopping Wood after
Steinbeck’s main character in the novel.2 The historical object that “House
/ Divided” performs is a work of fiction but one based on actual people and
their historical situation which was then photographed. Bristol used the
text from the fictional account of the people he photographed to label the
real people and situations on which the fictional account was based. The
Grapes of Wrath is inseparable from the real time and people it represents
and The Builders Association positions it as the American Ur-story of
economic and social reality of the twenty-first century.
The Builders Association made “House / Divided” by integrating
technology with live performance. “No one in the company thinks
textually”, Weems explains (Schechner 2012). Co-creator, writer, and
dramaturg James Gibbs, who trained as an architect at Cornell University,
brought the technical knowhow of his D-Box company—which specializes
in animation, web design, architectural photography, and graphic
design—to the conceptualization of the work from the very beginning. By
fusing architecture, fabric such as tent cloth, objects from a foreclosed
home, digitized imagery, interviews, and excerpts of pre-existing text, The
Builders Association reconstructed the lost ethos of the nation. Who have
‘we’ become? This question is answered by including found domestic
objects in the set and recycling an old story that describes a current
situation in the service of creating an awareness of history repeating
itself. Close to the end of “House / Divided”, Greenspan appears again
and cautions: “Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual
framework for the way we deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to
exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not”
(The Builders Association, 2011).
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“House / Divided” avoids the many biblical allusions in The Grapes of Wrath
favoring instead the alternation of literary, statistical, and architectural
languages. Post-2007 Crash stockbroker fast-talk, the Joad family’s rural
Oklahoma drawl and Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve jargon predominate.
In performance, Steinbeck’s poetic language was set against the powerful
language of stock market numbers flickering on many of the set’s surfaces
as if they were generating the statistics that doomed countless individuals
and families. The physical house onstage contrasted the virtual numeric
abstractions signaling fluctuations in the value of stocks and bonds. This
juxtaposition of languages is not unlike Steinbeck’s strategy in The Grapes
of Wrath where the scenes with the Joad family are contextualized by the
omniscient narrator’s explanation of the era to which they belong. Steinbeck
blamed the plight of the Joads on big bosses, unregulated capitalism, and
God, for sending drought and dust storms, and he provided some human
compassion to balance the abundance of human cruelty in his narrative of a
family’s suffering and loss. A classic “on the road” novel whose form is as old
as The Odyssey, the main characters—Ma, Jim Casy, and Tom—articulate
some unorthodox humanist ideas about human relations that counter the
world in which they find themselves. Jim Casy, a former preacher, proclaims
that he does not believe in Jesus but instead loves people. Like Jesus,
however, Casy lives among the poor and rejected and sacrifices himself
for others. Alternating scenes from the novel with scenes of stock market
number crunchers gives the work a larger-than-life meaning, biblical in feel.
The title of the work is taken from Abraham Lincoln, one of the most biblical
American presidents. Weems explained that the title, “House / Divided”
refers to the repurposed, foreclosed house in Columbus, Ohio, that became
a physical and metaphorical space onstage and from the oft-quoted statistics
of the Occupy Wall Street movement referring to the economic disparity
of the 1% versus the 99% in the US.3 The source of the phrase, however, in
Lincoln’s famous 16 June 1858 acceptance speech for his nomination to the
Senate, cannot be discounted. In that speech, Lincoln used a phrase from
the New Testament that would have been recognized by those listening:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the
house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will
become all one thing or all the other. 4
By titling their work “House / Divided”, The Builders Association suggests
that just as the unity of the US once hinged on the question of slavery, it
now hinges on the question of economic disparity. The institutionalized
and legal inequity of slavery in Civil War–era America has become the
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income and opportunity inequity of the twenty-first century. The poverty
and cruelty of the Great Depression is seen again in those who have
suffered foreclosure and been forcibly divided from their homes. The
poverty of today, the title proposes, has antecedents in the way the nation
is economically structured. Inequality reinvents itself for different but
analogous reasons: chattel slavery, wage slavery, foreclosure slavery.
The 99% versus the 1%, the rich few against the many poor, the number
crunchers against the humanitarians, employers and administrators
against laborers, banks against those whose homes have been foreclosed.
“House / Divided” tries to resurrect a long-promised, idealized, and stillpending vision of America. The Leviathan, the huge untamed creature
that rattles the playhouse, is finally a body of ideas. These are ideas that
we may already know, that we may have heard somewhere, ideas that may
make us remember something, ideas that may invoke a state of déjà vu in
spectators about what they know and what they value.
The Pixelated Revolution
In “The Pixelated Revolution” Rabih Mroué notes that both professional
and freelance journalists are absent from the Syrian revolution, making
it impossible to know what is going on, at least from the vantage point
of Beirut where Mroué lives.5 At the time Mroué made “The Pixelated
Revolution” in the autumn of 2011, the only available information
about the demonstrations came from Syria’s official news channel and
protestors’ images uploaded to the Internet—images originating outside
governmental and institutional regulation. Mroué’s lecture/performance
is part investigation, part explanation, part operating manual, and part
homage to those who have lost their lives fighting for change in Syria.
Originating from a detailed and forensic analysis of the Syrian protesters’
uploaded YouTube videos and images, “The Pixelated Revolution” is an
exegesis on the aesthetics of revolution in a post-9/11 Internet world. The
importance of the videos and images is not to be underestimated, Mroué
told his spectators, as there is an increasing demand for them by media
outlets whose journalists are denied direct access, and an increasing
willingness to broadcast them on official programs.
Walking casually onto the stage, Mroué seats himself at a downstageright white table with the upstage-left corner artfully angled toward
the large screen that occupied the back of the stage. A Mac laptop was
to Mroué’s right, and a reading light and glass of water were to his left.
Mroué began his lecture/performance by stating that it all began with the
sentence: “The Syrian protestors are recording their own death” (2012).
So I found myself inside the Internet traveling from one site to
another, looking for facts and evidence that could tell me more
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“The pixelated Revolution” by Rabih Mroué. Photo © Ernesto Donegana
about death in Syria today. I wanted to see and I wanted to know
more, although, we all know that this world, the Internet, is
constantly changing and evolving. It is a world that is loose, uncontrollable. Its sites and locations are exposed to all sorts of
assaults and mutilations, from viruses and hacking procedures
to incomplete, fragmented, and distorted downloads. It is an
impure and sinful world full of rumors and unspoken words.
Nevertheless, it is still a world of temptation and seduction, of
lust and deceit, and of betrayal.
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Throughout his performance, Mroué sat at the table, sometimes looking at
the spectators, sometimes at his computer, sometimes at his manuscript, and
sometimes glancing over his left shoulder at the large upstage screen where the
images and videos, that were the subject of his performance, were projected.
Mroué, an excellent actor, shaded his performance with many subtle and
fleeting emotions: a flicker of sadness when first mentioning the deaths of
Syrian protestors; tenaciousness in his efforts to find some fragments of truth
about the protestors’ plight; anger at the injustice. Mroué’s style of acting is to
present himself as an entirely trustworthy performer and researcher. Stunning
ideas were casually explicated with unassuming modesty; Mroué barely
looked up as he pointed out the similarity between the camera tripod of the
establishment and the tripod that stabilizes their automatic weapons—one of
many exceedingly precise observations. He easily won over his spectators to
the uniqueness of his vision, his ideas, his art.
Focusing on the moments of the Syrian uprising that can only be known
from what has been uploaded to the Internet, Mroué scrutinized the images
and YouTube videos as fleeting testaments to unseen protesters’ deaths and
brief digital memorials. At the same time, he posed the question, “How should
we read these videos?” Mroué’s answer to this question was in the form of a
proposal that we consider the videos as a new kind of aesthetic weapon that
articulates ideas beyond the evidence of the actual places and occurrences of
the revolution. There are two kinds of shooting, Mroué informed us: shooting
with a camera and shooting with a rifle. “One shoots for his life and one shoots
for the life of his regime” (2012). Both can have dire consequences. Protesters
who used the recording capacity in their mobile phones to document
demonstrations and conflict were targeted and killed by government soldiers
for doing so.
One video that Mroué narrated was only one minute and 23 seconds
long.6 He pointed out a sniper on a low floor of a building in a residential
neighborhood. Another ‘shooter’ was on a high floor of a building across the
street, in what was probably the inside of an apartment, using his mobile
phone to film what was happening outside. The video began with the sound
of a gunshot, followed by a rapid succession of images of rooftops, balconies,
walls, windows, and different buildings, until the eye that was the camera
spotted the sniper lurking behind a wall. The eye that was the camera creating
the vision of the man behind the camera lost the sniper. Then the sniper came
into view again with his military rifle in a ready position. The image shook as
if the eye could not believe what it was seeing. Abruptly, the sniper saw the
eye, the man, the mobile phone watching him. Their eyes seemed to meet
and then the sniper matter-of-factly raised his gun and aimed. He took a shot,
hitting his target. The eye, the man, the mobile phone fell to the ground as the
image spun toward the ceiling. Mroué translated the voice of the cameraman
who had been hit as saying, “I am wounded, I am wounded”.
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Then silence. The image stopped. It was not clear whether or not the
cameraman was dead. It is as if spectators had witnessed, if not death
then near death, without ever seeing the person who was hit. Spectators
were placed in the subjective position of the person with the mobile
phone camera and saw what his eyes saw. The double shootings yielded
double meanings. The YouTube uploads attempted to make the details
of the resistance known to the world via the Internet and to provide
evidence of the government’s intent to kill. Through his performance
as both a professional actor trained to modulate emotions, and as a
social actor a member of society, Mroué looks at the politics of what is
happening in Syria by means of aesthetic analysis.
The Internet revises and sometimes obscures the possibilities of
memory, history, and memorialization that have been associated with
place. Besides lacking location, some Internet sites such as YouTube are
deemed illegitimate sources of information precisely for the reasons that
Mroué states. The Internet is not fact-checked, no sources are verified,
and there is no governing ethical code of reportage or information. It
is subject to hacking, its images can be unauthored and unauthorized.
The Internet is its own Greek tragedy; it is, “a world of temptation and
seduction, of lust and deceit, and of betrayal” (Mroué 2012). What Mroué
performs has no connection to a specific physical place in Syria. He does
not mention the names of any cities such as Homs or Damascus. Nor does
he mention the delicate balance between Christians, Alawites, secularists,
and Islamists. This is because Mroué’s subject is the aesthetics of the
resistance in Syria as a deliberate product of an uncensored eye that one
cannot get from official sources:
I assume that what the protesters in Syria are seeing, when they
are participating in a demonstration, is the exact same thing
that they are filming and watching directly on the tiny screen
of their mobile phones that they are using “here and now”. I
mean that they are not looking around and then they choose a
certain scene or angle to shoot. But they are all the time looking through the camera and shooting at the same time. So the
eye and the lens of the camera are practically watching the same
thing. It is the exact same thing that we will see later, on the Internet or on television but at a different time and place. It is as
if the camera and the eye have become united in the same body;
I mean the camera has become an integral part of the body. Its
lens and its memory have replaced the retina of the eye and the
brain. In other words, their cameras are not cameras but eyes
implanted in their hands; an optical prosthesis. (2012)
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“The Pixelated Revolution” reveals how everyday recordings can
suddenly become acts of resistance and treated as transgressions that
have to be eliminated. The surveillance Mroué refers to is not constant
and panoptic. The surveillance, of and by both the Baathists and their
opposition, is a surreptitious pop-up surveillance. There is not one eye
scanning the landscape but many eyes, all looking for and trying to
capture other eyes. The target of the security forces is no longer people
with guns with the intent to kill, but people with mobile phones with
the intent to record. The target of people with mobile phones is people
with guns, and their intent is to stop the killing by recording it. Instant
posting of recordings has become lethal to both its users and its subjects.
The gun is pitted against the camera as a weapon of war and revolution,
and this confrontation of both weapons and of aesthetics has resulted
in ideological shifts. Mroué reads the aesthetics of the images that the
Syrian protestors create, both Muslims and secularists, as an assertion
that death is not solely in the hands of God, it is also in the hands of
people with their hand-held recording devices. The protestors’ images
consistently aim to show the faces of their killers; to show them as
murderers. Mroué concludes that this aesthetic technique reveals that
even though the revolutionaries are sometimes referred to as Salafists,
the revolution in Syria is neither an Islamic revolution nor a resistance
driven by religious ideology; it is a revolution driven by the desire for
democracy as evidenced in the mobile phone recording of death as
murder committed by men, not by an act of God.
But there are two competing approaches to the aesthetics of the
image, Mroué tells his audience. One approach posits that a clear image
can become official, eternal, and immortal. This was the approach
and the aim of the timed attacks on the World Trade Center. The first
plane that slammed into the North Tower summoned recorders to the
site in time for the second plane’s attack on the South Tower. The other
approach holds that a clear image is antagonistic to the revolution, that
there should be no preparation, no possibility of a tripod standing as a
symbol of recording readiness. No staging for the media. Mroué told his
audience:
The protesters are aware that the revolution cannot and should
not be televised. Consequently, there are no rehearsals in their
revolution, and no preparations for a larger and more important event. They are recording a transient event, which will
never last. Their shots are not meant to immortalize a moment
or an event but rather a small portion of their daily frustration,
fragments of a diary that might one day be used in the writing of
an alternative history. (2012)
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Mroué’s belief that Syrian protesters are filming the same thing they
are seeing results not only from what the cameras capture but also
from the repeated aesthetics of the images. Near the beginning of his
performance, Mroué informs his spectators that he will compare digital
and low-resolution images with professional footage in order to distance
them from an immediate emotional reaction. His analysis leads him to
create a cinematic manifesto, “a fictional list of advice and directions on
how to film manifestations”, which is also a reflection on the methods of
the Syrian protestors’ short films (2012).
The list includes: shoot from the back to hide the identity of
protestors; carry banners backwards so cameras shooting from the back
can see what they say; take long-shots from afar so as not to reveal the
identity of the protestors; film assailants’ faces; write the date and place
of the manifestation; music should not be used; the sounds must be real;
filming must be done on location in the here and now; do not use tripods;
use handheld cameras; and, do not use special lighting. He also offered
more general advice, including: use mobile phone cameras because
they are lightweight; be wary of surveillance cameras on government
and institutional buildings; try to film the street address for the sake of
veracity; do not care about the quality of the image; and place the strap of
the camera around your neck in case you have to run.
Mroué’s fictional manifesto—fictional because it is an aesthetic
manifesto based on the practices of the filmmakers already in use—
positions itself far from the conventional aesthetics of filmmaking in
order to highlight the veracity of handheld, homemade, low-resolution,
and unpremeditated images of the Syrian revolution. The manifesto’s
assertion is that the spontaneously made and minimally produced
YouTube videos of the Syrian demonstrations documented what was
happening through a combination of aesthetic conventions, portable
devices and politically streetwise survival techniques. Conventional
journalistic credibility is absent because authenticity in this context
exists only in opposition to official organizations and sanctioned sources.
The grainy, low-resolution panning shots of the two short videos that
Mroué shows his audience not only counter the surveillance of the state
but upend assumptions about the aesthetics of credible images. Similarly,
the purpose and aesthetic implications of ‘looking’ are transformed. Mobile
phone cameras are sold as devices for making positive and friendly images
of friends and family for friends and family. In “The Pixelated Revolution”
however, phone cameras are a means for documenting death, even one’s
own death, and the reality of social and political events—what is happening
(or has already happened). The recordings uploaded to YouTube are a new
form of anonymous testimony that is sanctioned precisely for its anonymity
and its refusal of silence and invisibility; what Mroué refers to as video letters
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37
to the world. The digital images in combination with Mroué’s presence as an
actor, researcher, and writer, claimed the possibility of truth and authenticity
and their abiding absence at the same time.
Mroué presents terrible violence without showing it. Toward the end
of “The Pixelated Revolution”, Mroué projects a 14-second video uploaded
to YouTube by Syrian activists.7 Spectators see a slow-moving tank enter
an intersection at the end of a road, stop midway, and rotate its big gun 45
degrees. Behind the nozzle of the gun are the invisible eyes of the man in the
tank. The invisible man in the tank faces the lens of the cameraman from
whose position the whole scene was shot. The gun fires and the camera, the
eye, the man falls and appears to have died. A flash of color erupts. What is
this? A descent into death? Then the scene is over; the video finished. The
only sound was the sound of the tank cannon shooting the cameraman. The
scene was real but incomplete, Mroué told us. The spectators in the theatre
and the cameraman witnessed the tank and its gun, its eye, its lens, and the
invisible man inside. They both experienced the power of the state through
the actions of the man in the tank. The cameraman, Mroué led his spectators
to believe, recorded his own death.
Like The Builders Association, Mroué and the protesters, whose images
he analyzed, created an aesthetic intervention in the representation of the
real in order to tell a version of the truth, while openly acknowledging the
simultaneous use of fiction to do so.
Artists who document and challenge conventional notions of accuracy,
authenticity, and fact, by analyzing, disrupting, and subverting the aesthetic
conventions that underlie documentary certainty, are on the cusp of a realitybased community different from the one that Ron Suskind described in the
epigraph to this article. They are a part of a reality-based community creating
unique ways to understand personal, social, and political phenomena
through aesthetic invention, intervention, and implementation that shows
how empiricism has been compromised. Today’s world—and the world
of the future—works in ways similar to theatre of the real. Theatre makers
invent, reinvent, and stage reality. And so do politicians, business leaders,
priests, and mullahs. Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” has never been
more... real.
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Endnotes
1 Suskind, Ron. 2004. “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency
of George W. Bush”, New York Times, 17 October.
2 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.
html (accessed 19 November 2010).
3 http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/bristol/ (accessed 27
January 2012). Email to author, 23 January 2012.
4 http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/abrahamlincolnhousedivided.html (accessed 28 February 2012).
5 The performance about which I am writing was at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, as part of Performance
Space 122’s Coil festival. All information is from my
observation of that performance and the unpublished
script by Rabih Mroué.
6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0pFYXHy9CY&feature
=related (accessed 27 January 2012).
7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8-_wQYA-IA (accessed
27 January 2012).
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Friday 23 March
Pia Roll
Performer, director, and deviser
of texts for theatre. Roll has for
many years been investigating
documentary practice within the
theatre. Her latest work, Ship
O’Hoi! was an investigation of the
Norwegian oil business and the
consequences of Norwegian state
oil company Statoil’s international
operations.
Riding the
Monster
by Pia Maria Roll
Performance lecture with Matthew
Landy (47) Vice President and
Head of International Tax at
Statoil. With him on stage is Alina
Landy (8), Astrid Landy (1), and
artist Pia Maria Roll (41). The
perfomance was made as part of
Roll’s preparatory work towards her
theatre piece “Ship O´Hoi!”, which
opened in October 2012.
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41
PROLOGUE:
When humans meet, it’s often a bizarre mixture of
ideology and chemistry that comes into play. When I first
met Matt, one of the top executives in the Norwegian
state oil company Statoil, I had been researching
the company’s international investments for quite
some time. It was a beautiful spring day, we went for
a walk in the park, and while I was carrying his lovely
baby girl, he was telling me all about Statoil’s quest
for drilling licenses in every possible corner of the
world. Horror and tulips! Matt ended up participating
on video in my performance, “Ship O´Hoi!”, but the
lecture performance we did at Dramatikkens hus was an
attempt to recreate this first sun-infused meeting.
The following are brief excerpts edited from Landy’s speech.
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This is a… what is it
called?… a lecture
performance, and yeah,
Pia and I have had a
conversation over the
last couple of weeks, and
Pia assured me that if I
come in here and talk to
you about the oil industry
from my perspective
as a.. worker in the oil
industry… that you´ll find
it interesting and relevant.
That’s a little hard to
believe, but I´m just gonna
start talking.
My name is Matt Landy and
I’m head of international
tax at Statoil. What that
means is that I handle all of
Statoil’s tax affairs outside
the NCS—The Norwegian
Continental Shelf. And if
you think about Statoil and
the Norwegian oil industry,
you have the NCS, which
is huge, and a tremendous
productive asset for us as a
whole. But we also have a
corner of the world, which
is international, and that’s
what I’m in charge of, from
a tax perspective. And even
though it’s much smaller
than the Norwegian part
of Statoil’s business… it is
quite interesting.
Even though I said that
international production
is a small part of our total
production, it’s still millions
of kroners in revenues. And
from all the revenues that
we produce overseas, 50
% of Statoil’s production
outside Norway is in
Angola. So maybe a lot of
people don’t realize that
Angola is actually quite
an important country
for the Norwegian oil
industry. And I think it is
safe to say that Norway is
an important country for
Angolan industry, and for
the Angolan economy—
whether for good or evil.
And I suppose you know
that the question of good
or evil is something that
might come up, but I am
sort of here to talk about
reality and what I do. And
whether we are pro or con
the oil industry, I think
regarding all the energy
that’s streaming through
this room, I think it’s a
reality that the oil industry
exists (…).
So. If this is one oil field in
Angola… you see that´s a
rig…
thank you Astrid, Astrid is
gonna get a job in Statoil as
a rig producer.
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43
pay what we owe, not a
penny more and not a
penny less (…).
So this is one rig in Angola,
and this is another rig in
Angola.
This rig will have a tax rate,
say its 75%, and this rig
will have another tax rate,
say its 85%. The Angolan
government basically
keeps the oil for itself, and
it pays a contract prize to
the producer. From Statoil’s
perspective, of course, we
want to pay as little tax as
possible, but our objective
is not to go into a country
and take as much oil we
can and pay as little tax as
we can. Our objective for
going into these countries,
as it is everywhere, is to
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So let’s talk about tax—
does that sound good to
you? She loves it when
I talk about tax. Astrid?
Astrid? Can you hear your
dad? Oh no, she´s busy!
This is great…
You know, I´m on Pappa
Leave this month, and this
is the biggest break I´ve
had from childcare since
it started. Now I can just
carry on talking about the
oil industry, I can do that
for weeks now. (Audience
applaud him)
Okay, so let’s talk about
Statoil’s tax strategy,
because the question that’s
burning in the back of our
heads when we talk about
the “Monsters of Reality”
and the oil industry, is,
of course, that the oil
industry is a monster. It’s
there, there’s nothing we
can do about it, it’s real,
it will exist for ever, and
from Statoil’s perspective,
we´re gonna be in Angola.
From a pure corporate
perspective, there is no
reason for Statoil not to be
in Angola. Of course there
are ethical questions and
legal questions. Legally
it’s absolutely good and
fine for Statoil to be
in Angola. The ethical
perspective concerns the
corrupt regimes that exist
in Angola and Nigeria, or
rather, that reportedly exist
in Angola and Nigeria and
other places, and that’s
another story, ah, and it
affects the question of
whether Statoil should be
in these countries? But
I´m not here to answer
that question, I´m here
to say that from a purely
corporate point of view, of
course we should be there,
we´re in business to find
and produce oil, and that’s
what we’re doing.
I have to remember where
I am now… I am standing
on the west coast of Africa.
And now I´m in Brazil. And
here is our platform in
Brazil (…).
Brazil has hit a bonanza.
I think the numbers that
have been speculated
about the Brazilian oil
industry suggest there’s 50
billion barrels of oil that´s
gonna be recovered from
Brazil. Brazil is the 10th
largest economy now, it´s a
major player right, it´s one
of those BRICS (…). Brazil is
still very much in flux, and
this is still a critical, critical
question for geopoliticians,
and world bodies, and the
oil industry, and for me as
a tax person, cause the tax
system is… I can say this
in front of Brazilians, and
I’ve done it a million times,
so it´s not just between
us—the tax system is really
screwed up there. (Sound
of crash)
And so is the Angolan
platform! Yeaayh!
Ahh… I don´t know how
I´m gonna keep my chain
of thought on this one.
By the way, 13 months old
and she can’t crawl yet
but she scoops extremely
quickly!
(Continues describing
Statoil’s activities in
Nigeria, Mozambique,
Tanzania, Kenya, Algeria,
Venezuela, Canada, Russia,
China, and Azerbaijan.)
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45
Pia: Do you have some
advice for us, in terms of
dealing with reality?
Matt: I would say, keep it
real! It’s a tough question. I
think it’s a really legitimate
question about the role of
oil companies—and even
though I am American,
I have lived here long
enough to say, with a lot
of love in my heart, that
Norwegians think that
everything is better if it’s
associated with Norway.
To some extent that might
be true, but if you think
about Angola, the amount
of money we pay to the
government is probably
many times greater than
the entire Norwegian
foreign aid budget for the
whole continent of Africa,
it really is huge—billions
and billions of dollars.
And we don’t see exactly
where that money is going.
It’s obvious that there is
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something… I guess I’ve
already used the word
corrupt, but just to be a
little more diplomatic,
there is some sort of gap
between all the money
going in, and what’s being
done with it, and we don’t
know what’s in the middle.
Talking to me is one of the
smartest things you´ve ever
done!
“I have lived here long enough to say,
with a lot of love in my heart, that
Norwegians think that everything is
better if it’s associated with Norway”
Statoil has been sort of in
the forefront of “Publish
What You Pay”,—we
provide full information
about what we hand over
to governments, but that
is only useful if every oil
company does the same
thing. But I think the most
important thing is to ask
honest questions and use
the facts, I mean, I was a
little worried when I first
spoke to you that there was
gonna be a lot of attacks
on the oil industry, but it
wasn´t like that. It was a
real honest exchange and a
real honest dialogue.
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47
Friday 23 March
Ole Johan Skjelbred
Trained as an actor at the
Oslo National Academy of
Dramatic Art. Worked for
various theatres and projects,
mostly at the National Theatre
in Oslo. He translates, edits,
dramatizes, and directs plays
for theatre. He writes for
theatre journals, such as Norsk
Shakespearetidsskrift, where
he is also a board member.
Down with
Profession!
This article has been translated from Norwegian and was previously published in
the Norwegian theatre journal Norsk Shakespeare-og teatertidsskrift(1/2005)
by Ole Johan Skjelbred
There exists a concept in the Norwegian theatrical tradition—‘the
Profession’. The Profession is the the ultimate seal of approval on
the craft of acting. The Profession is a set of experiences and rules
on how theatre should be made and performed. One talks about
mastering or not mastering the Profession, and of the importance
of protecting the Profession. In Norway, the theatre has always
been dominated by actors. This is in contrast to the German/
Russian tradition of scenography and direction, and the British/
American tradition, which prioritizes the playwright. In Norway,
it is the self-image of the actor as ruler of the eternal Profession
that keeps the hegemony alive. If actors let go of this idea of the
Profession, the actor-dominated theatre would cease to exist. In a
paradoxical way, I think our actor-dominated theatre diminishes
the work of actors and has encouraged stagnation and a uniformity
in the language of theatre. There is something imprisoning and
impersonal about the whole idea of the Profession. Norwegian
acting-culture has become crystallized within a stereotype of ‘good’
theatre, with clear ideas about what is right and what is wrong.
Every production and every concept is always viewed through the
same prism —the Profession. In consequence, too much of the
theatre’s energy is expended over the battle between concept (art)
and tradition (profession), with actors protecting tradition.
Arguing over ‘right’ theatre is anachronistic and condemnatory.
Our idea of ‘right’ theatre is also a kind of marketed psychological
realism. It is the work of acting. No matter how strange a foreigner
or director wants you to act on stage, the Profession will always
show through a good Norwegian actor’s performance. He may do
as he is told, but he will work in some of the Profession into his
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49
performance. He will never let go of the Profession or be lured into
some kind of nonsense. Whether the foreigner is called Wilson,
Hartmann, or Houvardas, the Professionals will reject him, saying
“this is not theatre”, or “this is an insult to the Profession”. Here
you are, on the outskirts of Europe, protecting simple and eternal
truths. The Profession is not just a prerequisite for crafting fine
and classic performances, it is also a tool for creating “innovative”,
“relevant”, and “ground-breaking” art. The Profession is everything
and has everything. It needs nothing more. To be an actor is a great
way to live—poetically speaking, you are a kind of wandering
metaphor for human life. You leave nothing behind but clear air
after a working day, or a working life. Your performances only
exist in the moment, or in memory. This kind of carelessness
can be hard to bear, and actors need to find some way to protect
themselves. The most normal and most natural kind of protection
is to dissociate the real person from their onstage presence , by
pretending to be an actor. For this kind of acting, the Profession is
excellent. When there are general rules to follow, when you know
what works and what does not, you will always feel safer. You ‘work’
like other people, and you get some kind of meaning as a person.
You fit in, you master your profession. You are protected. This kind
of protection is connected with the isolation of actors through the
tradition of the Profession.
“After all, there
is nothing more
‘readymade’ than
the human!”
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When actors see the criterion of success for their own performance
as the criterion of success for the whole performance, one problem
will solve the other. By representing the idea of the performance,
and not some kind of tradition, you are protected by the idea of
the performance. As such, I think each actor will become freer,
and each performance will find an opportunity to find its own
specific language. An actor’s balance between love and hate for
yourself is embedded in the nature of this kind of work. You have
no distance to your work. You are trapped, which can feel very
claustrophobic. Where other people can merge into their work
and forget themselves, the work of an actor requires that you look
for, and hopefully find, yourself. In a role. In a performance. The
commonplace idea of the actor as self-assertive and self-centred
is encouraged by the theatre as a profession, because it is based
around personal performance. It is also encouraged through
theatre marketing departments, since it is easier to sell faces than
to sell ideas. And of course other media that run a business based
on selling faces also play a role in enhancing this impression of
actors. It is almost a century ago since Marcel Duchamp displayed
his infamous urinal, forever changing the self-image of art. He
tried to destroy the subject in art by removing the idea of artistic
intervention, so that the artwork itself would become more visible.
In the same way, actors should also destroy their subject to create
a more simple relation to their own presence on stage—after
all, there is nothing more ‘readymade’ than the human! The very
definition of concept art is that the idea becomes more important
than the performance of the idea. Our current theatre-tradition
ensures that we remain at a superficial level. It is a theatre without
self-knowledge. By self-knowledge, I think of the ability to discuss
one’s existence, one’s tradition, one’s systems—both political and
artistic. Break with the structures surrounding you. Examine your
own patterns and put yourself in the pillory. Do this in order to see
yourself differently, and more clearly. And thus also to see the world
more clearly, and for the world to see you more clearly. A theatre of
Profession is not capable of real reflection, or of asking interesting
questions. It is only capable of reproduction.
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Friday 23 March
Julian Blaue
The rise and fall of
Storkunstsolteddystaten
Performer and essayist writing for
the Norwegian and German press.
He founded a dictatorial state and
several national institutions in
Oslo (Black Box, Kunstnernes Hus,
Kulturkirken Jakob, 2007-2010).
He then closed down the state and
staged a last judgment (Dramatikkens hus, 2011). In Germany he has
performed in the Deutsche Oper
Berlin, Theater Bonn, and Deutsches National Theater Weimar. His
next project on the massacres in
Oslo and Utøya will be staged at
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter..
by Julian Blaue
Photo © Ida Muller
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Monsters Of Reality
Photo © Endre Tveitan
The ’state’
Government-in-exile
In 2008 I founded a sovereign nation in a
square in Oslo. I was the national leader of
this state. It was intended as an antithesis
to the Scandinavian welfare state. We
proceeded to our future territory. A holy
procession. To establish a new society.
I painted the borders of our state and
formulated the national law—women
were not allowed to enter the territory,
nor were immigrants.
Suddenly a group of anti-fascists came out
of nowhere. The punks understood the
fascist nature of the project and wanted
to stop it. They expropriated my brush and
painted on me. Made me fall in the valley
of absurdity. With great satisfaction, they
threw me out of the state. They eliminated
the nation of the teddy, the big Iron Man.
As a consequence, I founded a
government-in-exile at the Artist‘s House
in Oslo. I commented on the territorial
loss. The state was reduced to a historic
film. The Iron Man was now an Iron Man
in absentia—and made of wood. I burnt
the papers that had reduced our state to
an artistic event. The black man was now
a black plastic man. I made the exiled
government become reality with a sevenhour ceremony of worship for the Iron
Man in absentia.
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53
State religion
Photo © Beate Pedersen
In 2009, I founded the state religion at
Kulturkirken Jakob, a church in Oslo.
I explained the religious basis of its
constitution. On the altar, Christ was
already born. I didn´t notice. I worshipped
the wooden Iron Man in absentia. I
kneeled by his feet. The black man was
at the center of power. I made fish soup. I
now know that fish is a symbol of Christ.
But at that time I was still stuck in the Old
Testament. I gave an angry sermon from
the pulpit. God commanded Abraham to
kill his son and Abraham was about to
obey. I whipped myself. For I tried to prove
the holy pain. I wanted to say yes to all the
pain in the world. I was crucified by the
black man I had thrown out of my state.
But I couldnt bare the pain. I left the skull
hill behind me. I didn’t carry my cross. I
followed the Iron Man instead.
State university
In 2010, I founded the National University
of Bestiality at the Black Box Theatre
in Oslo. I didn’t follow the beautiful
woman, I followed the Iron Man. The Zen
Buddhist meditated. I conversed with
the humanistic philosopher Arne Johan
Vetlesen. I tried to be consistent and
forgot my heart. The soup was not fish
soup. It was poultry. A chicken doesn´t
symbolize Christ. A chicken doesn‘t
symbolize anything. They only cry and
cry and cry. They bleed and bleed and
bleed. They try to fly. In vain. The flesh
is prepared for the soup. Grace for the
poultry. The birds were sitting in a row
with our flags in their hands. The Zen
Buddhist was now a sadomasochist. Pain
and charity became one. Was love still
possible? We tortured the audience. And
tortured ourselves. The Chorus didn’t sing.
They were just dumb birds and flew away.
I was a zombie on the screen, present in
absentia. They said that pain was charity.
But it was not passion. Not the passion of
Christ. The cruxifixion was unreal. It was
only theatre, nothing more. The director
told me his opinion about fiction and
faction. The final victory was the final
defeat. The smile was lost, the heart was
cold. It stopped beating inside the old
Iron Man.
Photo © Ylber Gashi
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55
Photo © Julian Blaue
End of the state
Abdication of the head of state
In 2011, I erased the state in Oslo. The
Iron Man had lost. I removed the flag. One
month earlier, the terrorist Anders Behring
Breivik had bombed government buildings
in Oslo. He disliked the power of women
and the influence of immigrants. I went
with our flag to the destroyed government
buildings near the ‘lost’ state. I was
ashamed. I too had stigmatized the weak
and celebrated the strong. On my knees
in front of the destroyed government
buildings, I wanted to erase the past. I
prayed for forgiveness. And I went to the
island of the lost Iron Man.
In 2011, I abdicated as head of state in
front of Utøya island. I burnt the flag. I
bowed for the victims. I took off my laurel
crown. I placed it as a wreath next to the
flowers and candles of the families. I took
off my state uniform. I jumped into the
water. I swam to the island where the
terrorist had killed 69 people. The sun
made a cross. It became darker. After an
hour, I returned from the island. I was
exhausted. I put on a T-shirt, jeans, and a
jacket. Forgive me. I´m not an Iron Man.
Photo © Endre Tveitan
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57
Friday 23 March
Imanuel Schipper
Dramaturg, curator, producer, and
a teacher, lecturer, and researcher
at the Zurich University of the
Arts. He was Director of SNFresearch-projects like “Longing for
Authenticity”, “re/occupation”
(examining the production of
“publics” in urban spaces through
theatrical performances), and
finally “reART: theURBAN”
conference (2012). As a dramaturg,
he has collaborated with, among
others, Rimini Protokoll, William
Forsythe, and Luk Perceval. He is
currently working on a PhD project
on “staged authenticity“.
Staging
Authenticity
by Imanuel Schipper
My contribution is titled “Staging Authenticity”.
It is the result of a 15-month research
project funded by the Swiss National Science
Foundation. The project, a critical study of the
concept and experience of authenticity in the
context of contemporary theatre settings, is
divided into three parts:
1) A study of the use of the concept in the
last century and today within the context of
performing arts
2) A study of different strategies for staging
authenticity by accompanying several
productions during the production process
3) A study of the reception of authenticity by the
public through qualitative interviews
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59
Therefore my paper will focus on three points:
1) Strategies of staging authenticity
2) Thoughts about the concept of authenticity within the
context of performing arts
3) The act of authentication by the public
But before I begin, I want to say a few things about myself,
not because I think I’m particularly exciting, but because I
think it is quite important to note the context from which I am
approaching this problem.
did not know what it meant: I could not even pronounce that
word correctly, and I can still remember people’s confused
expresssions as they tried to explain this term to me.
After some years working as a dramaturg with Rimini Protokoll,
I have been confronted with this subject more and more: in
the press and public discussions, with theatre directors and
journalists, and mostly, with theatre theoreticians. When they
were talking to me, I always acted as if I knew exactly what they
meant. However, this was not the case.
Five years ago, I started teaching in Zürich, telling young,
would-be professionals about drama and theory. That was the
moment when I noticed that I had to eliminate this deficiency
and I’ve been searching for a workable definition ever since,
which is not so easy.
By the way, in this introductory section, I have already
presented some strategies for staging authenticity.
From left Sven Amtsberg, Imanuel Schipper, Alexander Posch
From the production “La CiCi CIttà” 2004; Schauspielhaus Hamburg© Schauspielhaus Hamburg
I was brought up in Switzerland. I am not a scientist! After my
studies as an actor and some years of being on stage, and in
front of a camera, I started to work as a dramaturg in several
state theatres in Germany and Switzerland, for example in
the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the Schauspielhaus in
Zurich. In Hamburg, I got the chance to lead an independent
theatre that was situated in a former cinema. In that role, and
from an early point, I made contact with the artist collective
Rimini Protokoll, with whom I worked on several projects. In
one of the many after-show public conversations, I heard the
word “authenticity” for the first time of my life. Of course I
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Strategies for staging authenticity
1) When you were to hear me speak you would notice my faulty
English and terrible pronunciation! This lack of perfection
would confirm to you that I am not a trained English actor who
only makes it sound as if he has lived through this biography.
Maybe you would even have some sympathy for my Swiss
accent!
2) Speaking of biography, when a biography is recounted it gives
you a feeling of “I know him somehow”, or “I feel close to him”,
and simplifies the identification process with that person.
3) The photos of the theatre, of me, and of that TV movie
somehow verify that it was me who made these photos, and
that it is me who you can see on them. This is another form of
authenticity.
4) Or how about this. Do you remember that I admitted
earlier that I had not heard the term “authenticity”? That is
not strictly true—but confessions, and especially this public
acknowledgment of ignorance, make me a more likeable
person, and this feeling—sympathy again—is very favorable to
the process of seeing someone as authentic.
5) The use of documents on stage immediately makes the story
more authentic.
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61
Rimini Protokoll provides an important example of another
strategy for authentic theatre. As you may know, this
worldwide, working artist collective is mostly known for
their work with non-professional actors, with the so-called
“Experts of the Everyday”. Of course, for those reasons their
plays are not dramatic literature but a kind of documentary
theatre around a specific theme, such as Death, the Court, the
Grounding of Sabena, or the annual shareholder meeting of
Daimler-Benz. Their performers can be elderly ladies, Vietnam
soldiers, Bulgarian, long-distance lorry drivers, Indian callcentre workers, and so on.
Actually, in the context of theatre, the use of non-professional
performers performing on the same stage as professional trained
actors is one of the main points of stage authenticity, especially
in contemporary German theatre. This connection has become
so established that Hajo Kurzenberger can speak of the, “theatre
of authenticity as a theatre of amateur actors” (Laiendarsteller).
So let’s stay with this for a moment. Does this mean we only have
to use non-professionals in order to create authenticity? Does
the audience really mean this when they talk about authentic
theatre?
And anyway, what makes the non-professional performers
authentic performers? To find out, I would like to do an
experiment with you.
Experiment:
1) Imagine a moment of strong authenticity: a movement, a
sentence etc.—everybody has one?
2) I will ask you to come up and show this moment to us in a very
authentic manner.
We will stop now. Of course I will not ask you to perform
here because it is not possible! This experiment reveals three
paradoxes of the concept of authenticity within the context of
performing:
1) If you are thinking about an authentic moment that you
have experienced—at that very moment you cannot express its
authenticity anymore. Furthermore, any gesture, which you are
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planning to recreate, loses its authenticity in the moment of its
performance.
2) It is very hard to be authentic when asked to be so. “Be
authentic—now! A little bit more!” (it is like the order—do not
think of a white elephant!)
3) When you are thinking or talking about, or just observing, your
authenticity, then you are not being authentic. You are being
reflective or observant. The moment you want to be authentic is
the moment when you will lose it.
So—what do we mean then?
Non-professional performers are in a “mode of selfrepresentation” that is based on a kind of ‘non-acting’ in the
sense of ‘just being there’. Authenticity here is based on the
idea of the possibility of a reference between the “I” and the
“world” that is 100% direct and “free of representation”. In this
case, authenticity denotes a contradiction of representation.
We speak of an authentic presentation, assuming that the
thing that is represented by the presentation is represented as
if it is not a re-presentation.
But:
1) Representations of the self (biography, body etc.) are still
representations.
2) A ‘representation-less’ relation between actors and the
audience is impossible because the space of the stage is a kind
of ‘intermediary body’. The stage of every performance is a
(self)- representation of itself.
So again - what do we mean by ‘authenticity’ in the context of a
performance?
Thoughts on the concept of authenticity within the context of
the performing arts
We can start with a quote by Jonathan Culler, who examined
how authenticity works in the tourism industries: “The
paradox, the dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced
as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is
marked as authentic, it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence
lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by
mediating cultural codes”.
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It is very difficult to talk about authenticity. Everybody
somehow knows what it means, but the concept itself is hard
to understand because of the multiple uses in various areas of
our life: in art, media, politics, marketing, and in the context of
personal self-fulfilment.
And of course, there is one place that always has to be different,
where people are always playing different characters than
themselves, and that is in the theatre—or in literature. Rousseau
says that all art is the exact opposite of being authentic. Anyone
seeking authenticity should search for it in nature—not in art.
Whenever “authenticity” is used to describe a production, this
concept serves as a sort of umbrella term for a whole complex of
meanings, including “natural”, “real”, “pure”, and “direct”.
Friedrich Nietzsche asks us to become who we are (!), and to
choose to be the person we know that we already are. This means
we also have to tell the truth about ourselves, and that we should
be ourselves in the duties we have to perform in life. Nietzsche
sees authenticity as a way of accepting the life we live, rather than
lying to ourselves about the life we live.
Authenticity belongs to the semantic field of sincerity,
directness, honesty, credibility, and originality. Its etymological
origin comes from the Greek auto-entes, which means
“performed by his own hand” or “self-completion”. Even in
antiquity, the spectrum of meanings went from originator to
perpetrator to self-murderer. It also has to do with the concepts
of “authority”, “authorship”, and “autonomy”.
Some more facts: You can use authenticity to describe a person
or a thing. The meaning of ‘personal authenticity’ has something
to do with credibility, sincerity, trust, and honesty, but also with a
feeling of being close to somebody. We also describe a person as
authentic, if he or she is true to himself or herself.
I would now like to discuss some different ideas that
philosophers have had at different times about the concept of
personal authenticity:
One of the first people to think about that concept in modern
times, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Rousseau,
every human being comes into the world with a kind of pure
‘nucleus’, which is—and this is important for his philosophy—
entirely good. During our life we meet different people, such as
our parents, and more evil ones, such as our teachers (!), and
lose touch with our nucleus. Or else, it gets covered up. In other
words, society helps to destroy our personal authenticity. Who
we are and how others see us is no longer authentic. Rousseau
proposes that everything that is in contact with that nucleus
becomes authentic and good. He also turns this around and
says that a person’s deeds can only be good if the person is good,
meaning authentic. So for Rousseau, authenticity is something
that you have to regain in order to be a good person and do some
good.
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Søren Kierkegaard is next on the list. He introduced a new
aspect—the personal point-of-view. If there was any kind of
individuality before, with different authenticities for different
people, then that authenticity should be clearly visible from the
outside for everybody. I agree with Kierkegaard when he says that
authenticity is the truth.
Now we make a big jump into the 1950s:
Theodor Adorno writes that he experiences the A-word as a
strange concept and that he wants to use it systematically. Here
is how he does it. First, he uses it as a term to describe some
aspects of aesthetics. This is completely new. He says that a real
artwork—in opposition to a piece of work produced by the artindustry—has some authenticity, and by that he means that the
artwork has an objective commitment to something, which is
much more than just an accidental expression.
Niklas Luhmann postulates that authenticity can only be
shown but not described self-reflectively by oneself—something
we explored earlier in this article.
Jürgen Habermas then says that authenticity is absolutely
necessary if you want to have real communication.
I will skip the discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and others, who
propose to construct an authentic self by deciding who and how
you want to be. They proposed authenticity as a ‘lived’ decision.
Many theories of self-fulfilment or self-realization are based on
these ideas or on the misunderstanding of these ideas.
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I jump again to two modern and still living persons.
First Charles Taylor. In his The Ethics of Authenticity, Sources
of the Selves, or The Malaise of Modernity he focuses very
strongly on the concept of authenticity. He sees the problem
of modernity in three parts: individualism; the power of
instrumental rationality; and lack of freedom.
He proposes to use authenticity as a moral ideal for society,
which transcends its fragmentation. Hence, authenticity must
be something that is no longer individual.
He says that authenticity has to include:
1) Not only a finding, but also a creating and constructing
element.
2) Originality.
3) Resistance against the actual morality of society, or even the
known and accepted morality.
4) At the same time, it needs to be open to its full meaning—not
just for the individual but for the whole of society!
5) It has to redefine itself at all times, and be in continuing
dialogue with its surroundings.
The other philosopher I want to mention is Alessandro
Ferrara, who has written on Rousseau’s social and ethical
thought. He asks, how long can human beings afford to be as
different as we are, and what are the costs? He says that we are
not living a human life, but a life constructed by something or
someone with a special purpose, which is obviously not that of
human beings. So he sees authenticity as, “the capacity to accept
the undesired aspects of the self, a sensitivity to the inner needs
linked with the essential aspects of identity, and a non-repressive
attitude toward one’s inner nature”.
Let us finish this philosophical excursion with some conclusions:
- The question remains whether something authentic exists
within our nucleus.
- There seems to be a conflict between individualism and society.
- There is a kind of a moral duty to take care of authenticity.
- It is not quite clear if authenticity actually exists, or is
constructed, or just perceived by others.
To recap: this discussion was about the authenticity of the
person.
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I don’t know how many of these thoughts are relevant to the
theatre.
It might be easier to examine the “authenticity of things.“
Here, authenticity could mean different things:
1) Simple truth—instead of lies
2) Natural—instead of artificial (food)
3) Closer to nature than to civilization
4) Real—instead of fake
5) Original—instead of a copy
So we use authenticity in the following four categories:
Normatively
In the sense of definition (e.g. an authentic Italian piazza)
Morally
In the sense of honesty or sincerity (e.g. an authentic person)
Empirically
In the sense of original (e.g. an authentic Rembrandt)
Evaluative
As a measure of credibility (e.g. how a person said that he/she
was authentic)
In the current discourses on authenticity we no longer talk
about the one, the good, the beautiful, and coming from an
inner ‘nucleus’. We think of authenticity more as a result
of a process at a given place and time. We don’t believe that
authenticity lingers on forever in eternity, but rather that it has
to be redefined all the time. We are not sure anymore whether
it is the descriptive attribute of an object, but rather we think it
has something to do with modes of perception and reflection.
To conclude: Authenticity is no longer the opposite of
representation, but the result of—more or less explicit—
production processes.
The act of authenticity by the public
But the main question remains: can authenticity be
constructed?
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Well, there must be something, which somebody deliberately
constructed, which affects something that we call authentic.
And this is true beyond theatre too. Authenticity is produced
everywhere. The food industry advertises ‘authentic’ fruit
flavors of gummy bears, tourism professionals provide
‘authentic’ experiences in the form of encounters with
native people, and condom manufacturers promote a
more ‘authentic’ sensation. Even sneakers can provide an
“authentic” experience. Authenticity has become a label for
the advertising industry.
But, as we saw before, authenticity itself is not really
constructible.
Conclusion
It is impossible to be authentic on stage.
It is impossible to be authentic on purpose, or on demand.
However, it is possible to construct authentic feelings for the
audience.
Authenticity is not an attribute of the performance or the story,
it rather describes a ‘mode of perception’ within the spectator.
This mode of ‘authentification’ is an active, individual,
perceptual process within the spectator, which can be brought
on, or enhanced, by the different strategies used by directors
or performers in a performance.
So what is constructed?
I would like to talk about the construction of “moments of
authenticity” or “feelings of authenticity”.
This means that ‘authenticity’ doesn‘t lie within the object but
is constructed by the public.
The public itself produces authenticity by ‘authentificating’
the object it ‘receives’. They become, in that moment, the
arbiters of authentification.
And here I come to my last thought:
Our society, which has a worldwide authenticity industry,
complains of a lack of authenticity, which manifests itself in a
desire, a longing for authenticity, originality, and truth.
But at the same time, the audience, which is part of this
‘production company’, actually has a leading part in the
“society of the spectacle”,
And here we have another paradox in the production of
authenticity: this kind of longing for unbroken authenticity
reflects a knowledge that it does not exist.
This situation seems to be a positive one for the theatre.
Endnote
This text is an edited version of Imanuel Schippers manuscript
presented at the Monsters of Reality.
Sources
Amrein, Ursula(2009): Das Authentische : Referenzen und
Repräsentationen. Zürich: Chronos
Berg, Jan, Hügel, Hans-Otto; Kurzenberger, Hajo (Ed.) (1997):
Authentizität als Darstellung. Hildesheim: Universität Hildesheim
cop.
Ferrara, Alessandro(1993): Modernity and authenticity: a study in the
social and ethical thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Albany: State
University of New York cop.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika(2007): Inszenierung von Authentizität.
Tübingen: Francke
Knaller, Susanne (Ed.) (2006): Authentizität : Diskussion eines
ästhetischen Begriffs. München: Fink
Matzke, Annemarie M (2005): Testen, spielen, tricksen, scheitern
: Formen szenischer Selbstinszenierung im zeitgenössischen
Theater. Hildesheim: Olms
Straub, Julia (Ed.) (2012): Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept. Bielefeld: Transcript
Wenninger, Regina (2009): Künstlerische Authentizität : philosophische Untersuchung eines umstrittenen Begriffs. Würzburg:
Königshausen: Neumann
The co-presence between actor and spectator, the co-presence
between being and showing, demands a continual process
of playful authentication, and allows the hope of catching
genuine moments—moments of authenticity.
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Friday 23 March
Kalauz/Schick
This is a collaboration between
independent choreographer
Laura Kalauz and performance
artist Martin Schick. In their
artistic collaborations, Kalauz
and Schick investigate models
of communication and the
impact of conventions (artistic,
administrative, political etc.) within
a theatrical setting. They create
scenic plays, research performative
acts and installations, and raise
questions about the limits and
possibilities of performative space.
Their last piece, “title”, won the
2009 ZKB Patronage Prize at the
Theaterspektakel Zürich.
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CMMN
SNS PRJCT
by Kalauz/Schick
CMMN SNS PRJCT deals with social
relationships and the gaps that can open up
when operating beyond the logic of economic
profit. CMNN SNS PRJCT proposes new
trading opportunities and forms of exchange
within a theatre context where intimacy and
the unfamiliar intersect. And so the theatre
becomes an arena of free trade and adventure,
a space between voyeurism and participation,
and an ode to incompleteness. A place to
challenge all the unspoken agreements that
form the basis of how we relate to each other, all
the criteria by which we act and think and make
decisions, all the habits and conventions that
influence our behavior, all the things we take
for granted and no longer question. Welcome to
the world of ‘common sense’.
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If you call it a
work of theatre,
you affirm.
If you don’t
call it a work
of theatre, you
negate.
Beyond
affirmation and
negation, what
would you call
it?
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Saturday 24 March
Trine Falch
Performer, Theatre Studies drop
out, and former member of the
Baktruppen performance collective.
Based in conceptual theatre, her
work includes performance art,
visual arts, music, photography,
writing, and more. Trine tries to
stage herself, her language, and
her situations within the inherent
theatricality of the setting.
FALSE
AWAKENING
by Trine Falch
FALSE AWAKENING
no1
Good morning,
I am your audience.
The audience has been
sleeping.
You are free to look in
all directions, to hear
whatever you want to hear.
Haven’t you heard it yet?
The audience is the new
protagonist. It’s all up to
the audience now. I’ve
taken over the production
of meaning and coherence
and beauty—the whole
package.
Theatre audiences can be
recognized by their silence.
They just stare and never
answer when you talk to
them, do they?
When my eyes had
adjusted to the light, a
bunch of well-dressed
people appeared right in
front of me. They had been
sitting there in the dark,
muffling their coughs and
crossing their legs for more
than a century. They looked
old.
You just continue to do
the things you do best—
sitting—I said. You can
leave the watching to me.
I’m your audience. I’m very
open, and I’m sure I’ll make
some fiction out of you.
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FALSE AWAKENING
no.2
FALSE AWAKENING
no.3
FALSE AWAKENING
no.4
Good morning,
I am your audience,
I said.
I’m like you.
I must have fallen asleep.
Sleeping on stage is the
most real thing you can do.
You are the audience,
I hear.
Well, good morning.
Good morning.
I just had a terrible
nightmare.
Let me read something
from the program:
We were all looking in
the same direction. I can’t
remember what we were
looking at—it couldn’t
have been a show, that’s
for sure, and that’s not the
point. The point was to
look in the same direction.
Eventually some began
looking at each other
instead. You could feel the
gaze, full of expectations.
In order to please the gaze,
we started to act strange.
When I looked up from
the program, I found the
audience had fallen asleep.
I can’t see you.
You paid for your tickets
and became invisible.
The show was dealing with
whether it was worth the
time or not, and listed all
the things you could have
done instead of sitting still
in the dark.
I started on time and the
rest was about getting
out of that position in a
convincing and natural, yet
graceful way.
I’ve decided I want to pay
too. From now on, I’ll do
theatre no one will notice.
I found myself a chair and
just sat there, looking for
action.
This is the action, the
audience said, clapping
their hands—and the
reaction as well. The show
is called “The Wheel” and
lasts forever. You can join if
you like.
Thank you, I said, but I am
your audience.
I couldn’t see the audience
and overacted. As a final,
pretty desperate gesture,
I waved my arms, hoping
for applause. Instead, the
audience (it must have been
them) grabbed my arms and
started gnawing them.
Help, I cried. Those are my
arms! This is my show!
It’s our show now, they
said. We paid for it.
I could see my hands
disappearing into thin air,
and then I blacked out.
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FALSE AWAKENING
no.5
Just kidding.
I am your actor.
The actor has been
‘sleeping’.
For a long time, I wanted
you to be like me. I
interviewed you, I danced
with you, I did sing-along,
I served you chocolate and
wine, and what have you…
just to make you join my
show—the place to be.
This is your time, I said,
dramatic changes are on
their way. But all in vain.
You said you’d rather keep
your position—sitting,
watching, in silence and
darkness, as if pretending
not to be there.
Still you managed to make
everyone believe you were
the real thing. And no
matter how hard I tried
to act naturally, you acted
a hundred times more
natural than me, as if you’d
been doing the same thing
for more than a century:
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FALSE AWAKENING
no.6
Moving down the aisle,
searching for your row of
seats—excuse me, thank
you, thank you, excuse
me, thank you, thank you,
thanks, thank you, thank
you, I’m sorry, you said,
before sitting down.
The discrete looking
around, the thumbing
through the program… Let
me read something from
the program, you said.
I wanted to be real too.
That’s why I sat down.
After a while my seat
turned into an abyss, and I
kept falling, thinking—at
least my darkness is darker
than yours. No exit signs.
And I don’t need to pretend
I’m not there.
Good morning, audience.
I have been sleeping on
stage, dreaming about
contemporary theatre.
After all its efforts to merge
with reality, contemporary
theatre should be hard to
spot, but it wasn’t. In order
to be recognized, we kept
within closed circuits.
There were rumours,
though, that the really,
really contemporary
theatre was being put on
in secret places at secret
times. But I couldn’t find it.
Instead, I had to hang out
at the same old places with
the same old drunken kids
showing their new piece
called “The Wheel”.
FALSE AWAKENING
no.7
1. actor: We’re on the fringe
of reality. They say our
existence is parasitic. In
order to avoid extinction,
we’ll have to keep a low
profile.
2. actor: No, we have to
show ourselves, and act
recognizably. If you can’t
spot it, then it’s not there.
And there will be no more
applause.
1. actor: We want applause,
we want applause!
2. actor: So we’ll need to
maintain the distinction
between actors and
audience, no matter what.
1. actor: We’ll have to act
out of sync, monstrous,
forever.
2. actor: My god, what are
we?
Good morning.
I am your audience, the
protagonist.
When I sit down, it’s
showtime. Wherever I look,
something really special is
taking place right in front
of me.
This time, you are taking
place right in front of me.
Your special thing is sitting
still in the dark, all looking
in the same direction.
And then contemporary
theatre disappeared into
the real, and everything
became... I hadn’t even
finished that sentence
before contemporary
theatre was back in a more
unreal mode than ever.
Still, it might be hard to
tell who’s looking at whom.
And if you ever wonder
who’s looking at you—I
am too.
Don’t worry, I will
fictionalize you, I said.
Representation was out,
they could stay as they
were—only a bit more
present, perhaps. You just
continue your play in the
dark, I have no problem
with that, I said. Even
absence has its beauty.
After all it’s up to me to see
myself in you.
1. actor: We are on the
fringe of reality. They say
our existence is parasitic,
and so on…
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Saturday 24 March
Toril Goksøyr/Camilla Martens
Performance project established in
1997 by Toril Goksøyr and Camilla
Martens. Their practice represents
an exchange between politics
and the arts, where documentary
strategies and authentic
elements connect theatre to
reality. Goksøyr & Martens have
presented their work at the Oslo
Museum of Contemporary Art,
the Oslo National Theatre, the
Johannesburg Art Gallery, the
Avignon Festival, the Berlin F.I.N.D
Schaubühne, the Belgrade Art
Saloon, the Venice Biennial, and
the Liverpool Biennial.
Relational
Realism
by Goksøyr & Martens
What should the title of a contribution such
as this be? “Dear God, don’t ever let me
do documentary theatre again?” Or, “Fuck
realism, get real!” Or, “Don’t give a damn
about actors—send in the audience?”
And if the last is the case, that people are
no longer interesting, that actors playing
themselves are no longer felt to be worth
putting onstage—what about all the
performances we have already done?
What about all the people we have
interviewed, placed on stage, and who got
to talk about their—and here’s that word
again—documentary life-stories? What
about the refugees from Kosovo who talked
about how they managed to get to Norway?
What about the friends of Benjamin
Hermansen, who talked about what really
happened behind the supermarket in
Holmlia when their friend got killed? What
about Marte Wexelsen Goksøyr, who played
Cinderella, who played herself talking about
what it was like to have Down’s syndrome?
What about the fisher girl who talked about
what it was like to live on a deserted island
in the north of Norway? What about all the
activists who talked about how another
world can be made possible? And what
about all the young people in Johannesburg
who talked to us about what they dreamt
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81
at night? Should we have dropped all this?
Of course not. Because an important aim of
our work has always been to give different
types of people an opportunity to tell their
own stories, and the narratives we have
gained insight from have taken place in
various ways: we have collaborated with
high-profile journalists and placed them
on stage; used classic interview techniques
ourselves; organised weekly writing
meetings; extracted unknown people’s
biographical material; and searched our
own autobiographies. And we are grateful
to all those who have given us their
personal stories and who were happy to
be hauled up onto a stage in front of an
audience.
In addition to our journalistic and semianthropological work, which aims for
extreme realism, we are also interested in
constructing real happenings. The choice
of event is of great importance for the
actions that the project is centred around,
and for creating the possibility of placing
the performance in real time. It makes a
difference if what is being enacted is taking
place right now, and in that way is both
theatre and reality—simultaneously.
Apart from using documentary and fictive
forms, biographical and staged techniques,
the extraordinary and the everyday, we
believe that our work has clear relational
qualities. The stage, on the basis of our
experience, is highly suitable for creating
precisely those social situations that are
capable of bringing reality into play.
Running parallel with the relational
investigation is a political project. It is
true that many of our productions have
had, and have, an openly political focus. At
the same time—and this is important—
making a political issue visible is never
the sole or final goal of our work. If it had
been, we could just as well have written
an article or organised a seminar. And that
is something we have never wished to do.
Become leaders of meetings? Or writers
of feature articles? No. Because even
though art can’t change a political situation
overnight, it can promote thought and
imagine possible new perspectives with the
help of its own innate power, which carries
beauty, poetry, and the unreality of the real.
At the same time, however, if it is
lamentable, wonderful, and unbearable
reality we are in search of, perhaps it is high
time to make some adjustments. For what
if those you believed could be themselves
and tell you their own stories, can never
be anything else but actors while there is
a stage and a theatre? In the performance
“Palestinian Embassy”, we placed the
audience and the actors together with
no clear boundary between them. We
did the same thing in “Church Service”.
And we tried to do the same again with
our students in The Norwegian Academy
of Theatre. The fourth wall, if it exists,
only exists behind the audience, and this
means that the audience become the most
important actors. And the audience cannot
be directed. You can’t agree on things in
advance. You actually risk being surprised.
“PALESTINIAN EMBASSY ”
In autumn 2009, we put on “Palestinian
Embassy” at Kontraskjæret in Oslo. The
performance marked an official opening
of a Palestinian embassy. The ‘embassy’
was a hot-air balloon that was to fly
above the city, while key politicians and
Photo © Bjørn Frode Holmgren
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83
academics from Norway and Palestine
were invited on board to talk about the
relationship between Israel and Palestine.
Stein Tønnesson (a former director of
the Oslo Peace Research Institute) led
the discussions, which were directly
transmitted to the ground. The balloon
was decked out in the colors of the
Palestinian flag, and had Palestinian
Embassy written on the side in English
and Arabic.
By means of this airborne embassy,
we wanted to—while also creating
something fantastical, dreamlike, and
poetical—realise and promote real
political meetings between a Palestinian
ambassador and a Norwegian politician.
Did we succeed?
Well, we invited Palestinian and
Norwegian politicians. We involved Hanin
Shakrah, a Palestinian law student from
Sweden with many years experience of
working on Middle East solidarity, and we
also involved Mustafa Barghouti, a former
Palestinian presidential candidate, who
was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2010. Barghouti sits in the Palestinian
Parliament, but neither belongs to the
Fatah or Hamas parties. In our eyes, a
perfect ambassador!
We invited many people from Norway.
We invited practically all the politicians
who were members of the Standing
Committee on Foreign Affairs. Most of
them immediately declined (“... they saw
no occasion for this, even though they
would quite like to, for this was a fine
event in itself… etc”.), a few accepted, and
one kept his word—Morten Høglund from
The Progress Party.
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And why did it end up like that? Why
were the other politicians unwilling to
participate?
At the same time, the Party Secretary
of The Labor Party said that he would
like to meet Barghouti. And the Minister
of the Environment and International
Development also wanted to meet him.
It was just difficult to do so during our
event. Just great! We very much wanted
Mustafa Barghouti, who had travelled all
the way from Palestine, to have a proper
programme during his short stay, so we
went with him by taxi to the Ministry of
the Environment and International Affairs,
and Youngstorget, where the meetings
were due to take place, only to discover
that the Party Secretary did not have time
and had to ask his adviser to replace him,
even though she was just as busy and
also had to find a replacement. And the
same thing happened with the Minister
of the Environment and International
Development. Mustafa Barghouti had to
make do with talking to his adviser. The
former presidential candidate cannot have
felt he was particularly important.
The opening ceremony was held. There
was dancing, singing, and speeches. The
balloon was ready, everyone was happy,
and the radio equipment that was to
broadcast the discussions live was all in
working order. And then the wind got up.
The sail started to blow back and forth,
and suddenly it was uncertain whether
the frail structure would manage to lift
off. Even so, Stein Tønnesson and the two
politicians clambered on board. They began
their conversation sitting down, crouching
at the bottom of the basket while the pilot
and some members of the public tried to
keep it still. And then the wind got up even
more, and the conversation continued,
but the embassy was unable to lift off—it
would have been too dangerous.
Could this be an apt illustration of the
situation in which the Palestinians find
themselves? Maybe. And maybe it was
not all that important that the Prime
Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs
had other plans and could not be there
as actors. It is uncertain whether their
presence would have made for better
theatre. But the fact that Rola sang, that
the balloon inflated and rose from the
ground, that this was actually possible—
that was important. And it was a fine
sight to see the balloon sail off while we
heard the Palestinian ambassador cheer in
jubilation!
“CHURCH SERVICE”
In 2010, the performance “Church Service”
was presented at W17, Kunstnernes Hus
[The Artists’ House].
The performance took the form of an
actual church service, its dramaturgy
conforming to church liturgy, but carrying
a clearly politicized message.
The church service included “This is
no dream”, a satellite-transmitted,
documentary choral work composed in
co-operation with Lars Petter Hagen, and
written and performed by young people
from the Palestinian Youth Committee in
Gaza City.
The project was set up so that all the
actors could play themselves and
participate according to their occupation
Photo © Bjørn Frode Holmgren
or personal standpoint in relation to the
theme. In “Church Service”, we had two
highly competent ministers: Tor Øystein
Vaaland, who is also a journalist and
has worked on Palestinian issues for a
long time, and Kari Veiteberg, who is
very interested in how a church service
functions as a performance. So we were in
complete agreement that what we were
doing was setting up a church service,
and at the same time a performance. A
performance where everyone present
would assume a role, including the public,
which was given the role of congregation.
In her review, Line Ulekleiv wrote, “That
both the ministers and the young people
represented themselves is clearly a
central feature of the performance, one
that directly involves the spectator in an
acute, conflict-ridden reality. As such, the
performance was by nature documentary.
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85
This meant that this time—staged or
not—the public assumed the role of
a character, performing theatrically
with every vocal response and nervous
movement”.
“ TO WHISPER AND SHOUT ”
The production “To whisper and shout” was
made in collaboration with Class 4 from
The Norwegian Academy of Theatre, and
invitations were sent out a couple of weeks
ago. The performance was divided into two
acts. In the first act—entitled “Sheltered
unit, dementia section”—the audience sat
watching the wordless performance from
the top of a four-metre-high scaffold. In the
second act—entitled “Conversation with
the audience”—the audience was invited
to discuss the format and themes of the
first act. In this last part, a member of the
audience talked about his experience of
doing extra shifts at a hospital. Another
member of the audience talked about how
the actors could have done things differently. Both contributions are fine until we
realise that everything is perhaps not quite
how we imagined it. Some people felt they
had been cheated. They did not understand
that they were part of a performance. They
felt they had been exposed and slightly
ridiculed. Is that good? No, of course not! If
playing with reality leads to people feeling
insecure and unable to grasp what they
are part of, or having to play a role they did
not want to, then something is wrong. For,
in the same way as when one collaborates
with people playing themselves, it is important to ensure that the audience knows
what it is a part of. It is not much fun to
go to the theatre if the experience means
uncertainty as to what may happen.
Or is it? Isn’t this the kind of theatre
it is most fun to create? The kind of
theatre where reality and fiction slide
away and merge with each other in a
way that makes it difficult to separate
one from the other? We think so. For at
the very moment when nobody knows
what is going to happen next, when
we can no longer decide how the story,
or the dialogue, is going to continue,
an enhanced situation arises. And this
enhanced situation, which we cannot
be bothered to define as either fiction
or reality, but which oscillates from
one to the other, and provokes both
enthusiasm and frustration, offers a
unique opportunity we do not want to
miss out on. For us, to investigate such
an opportunity is reason in itself for
continuing to make ‘relational fiction’.
Having said all this, the strange thing
is that what we have done in our most
recent project is to put on a performance
where the audience sits high above the
actors, and where ethology rather than
dialogue is the underlying principle. We
have put on a performance that does not
contain a single documentary passage
of text, and we conceive the work as
posing and discussing an existential
question rather than a political issue. So
maybe this contribution should actually
have a title along the lines of, “Fuck
the audience, send in the actors!” Drop
realism, give us some movements and
forget about the documentary! All we
need is a wonderful tale about the life we
lead on Earth.
Photo © May B. Langhelle
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Saturday 24 March
Tore Vagn Lid
Director, auteur, and artistic
leader of Transiteatret-Bergen. He
has a PhD from the Institut für
Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft
in Giessen, Germany. He studied
music, aesthetics and theatre
aesthetics, dramaturgy and music
dramaturgy, and political science
at the University of Bergen, the
Humboldt and Free Universities
of Berlin, and the University of
Agder Music Conservatory of
Kristiansand.
THE DIALECTICS
OF THE
DOCUMENT:
Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric in
‘‘Almenrausch—A Radio Hearing’’
by Tore Vagn Lid
Every Quote is taken out of its context
I. Prelude: The document—
and the after-party of 1996
If you strayed into an after-party during the 1990s, and were
unfortunate enough to end up in a discussion, you could be sure of
one thing. Everyone around the table insisted on being chairman,
and no one would have anything to say. To say something yourself
was binding and pretentious and could be misinterpreted as a
real commitment—a statement. The same was true in art in
general, and in contemporary theatre in particular. The apolitical
postmodernism of the 1980s had been unchallenged for so long,
that any kind of commitment or statement had become impossible,
and could only be camouflaged as irony and sarcasm.
Just as sure as the absence of expression and opinion at these
parties and gala performances, was the almost complete absence of
the words “documentary” and “documentarism”, and for the same
reason. In a postmodern world where reality itself was dissolved
in endless layers of fiction, the document with its desire for reality
had little or no place, just like the words “political theatre”. Thus,
the 1980s and 90s were in fact anomalies in the history of theatre;
wonderfully idyllic anomalies in a historical period marked by
tension, conflict, and ideological war. It was “End of History”,
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“European Union” and “Clinton’s saxophone”. In real politics these
were the decades, not unexpectedly, of the (political) center
parties, “the new lefts” etc. They were—not unlike the participants
at the 90s after-party—sitting at the middle of the table predicting
stability and balanced agreement.
The gradual movement of the 2000s towards new strategies of
reality can be understood as a reaction against the above. A revival
of a dialectical approach to social reality, a re-politicization of
the arts scene—which dominant theories of the 80s and 90s had
conceived as nearly impossible—struck, and in the end forced its
way in, even on those stages that had most vigorously resisted.
II. Warning Signs: When documentary theatre
undermines itself!
So what is the situation now?
Well into the first half of a new decade, critical voices have
already addressed a trend by claiming that it is passing away. I hope
through a couple of examples to show that the attempt to ‘trend
set’ the “documentary” is not only professionally weak thinking,
but also—and more importantly—politically and artistically
destructive.
So what ’s at stake?
My claim is that a lack of differentiation and a vague use of
concepts in the current discussion of “documentary” and
“documentary theatre” is about to create false opposites. Based
on an idea that “documentary” in itself is an expression of a naive
quest for ‘authenticity’, now a set of (what can be seen as) new
‘modernist’ demands for withdrawal, ‘re-theatralization’ and ’deintellectualization’ are revitalized. In this so-called ‘anti-intellectual’
tendency, there is something almost reactionary, an attack designed
to shut down crucial opportunities for the theatre as a ‘criticalpolitical’ room for experience.
So here I want to make a case for a clean-up and for creating
some new definitions, so that no one (postmodernists, curators
or others) is using ‘bad’ language to stigmatize, and thereby
neutralize, crucial dramaturgical and material strategies, not only
for a contemporary, but also for a future theatre.
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III. The first critical question: Is the new
documentarism (in fact) a revival of naturalism?
The naturalism of the 1880s doesn’t come from the theatre. It
comes to the theatre! As a radical strategy of reality, it began as
an artistic response to a change in our view of Man produced by
scientific advances. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species, the vigorous heroes of Schiller and Lessing
were thrown headlong back into nature, governed by internal
and external drives. In Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, the same acting
and independent heroes are glued to their own class background
and social context. Ibsen is no longer radical enough. The view on
man changes and the theatre responds critically. And this is often
overlooked: in the beginning naturalism was—as a program—in
fact revolutionary, and even socialist. By pulling reality itself onto
the stage, people were confronted with the world’s misery.
In that way, the demands of radical naturalism for authenticity—
the pure and natural—reflect more modern strategies of reality;
you might call them “documentary” (a comparison that rarely
comes up!). The German naturalist writer Arno Holz (easy to
remember because his name means “wood” in German) came
up with this formula when he defined the ‘dogma’ of political
naturalism: K (art) = N (nature) - X, where X is all the ‘waste
product’ that lies in between. It’s the artist’s role to reduce X to as
close to 0 as possible.
Naturalism thus started out as a protest but ended in reaction.
Why?
The problem actually became the same as much of what now goes
under the umbrella term “documentary”, and for the same reason,
I think:
1) On the one hand, it made such a strong effort to ‘document’
reality, that a basic understanding and a deeper explanation
were not possible within the dramaturgical strategies of radical
naturalism. To describe a rock falling is not the same as discovering
the laws of gravitation, Brecht once said. Or updated,—to describe
a junkie’s collapse is not the same as understanding why the junkie
collapsed. On the other hand, it added—as it still does—something
naive and essentialist to that kind of belief in the documenting of
reality; a naiveté that can quickly stigmatize and thus neutralize
the very concepts of “documentary” and “documentarism”.
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IV. The dialectic of the document in
“Almenrausch— A Radio Hearing”
When I started working on “Almenrausch”—first as a stage
production, then in terms of what I called a Radio Hearing for the
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), the most important
thing for me was to avoid this kind of naturalistic documentarism,
where the authentic document itself stood in opposition to the play,
the fiction, and the representation. Instead of such a ‘naturalistic
documentary’, I deliberately tried the opposite, namely what I have
called a rhetorical contrapuntal method.
I wrote “Almenrausch—A Radio Hearing” in three stages, as a
score for tape players, actors, original voices, and a small orchestra.
The ambition was to present a kind of psychoanalysis of
Norwegian war history, an attempt to recall and articulate the
history of the so-called war communists, that is, the part of the
resistance movement that—despite their importance during the
fighting—fell under the shadow of the official resistance movement
and its celebrities, such as Max Manus and Kjakan Sønsteby.
Almost randomly I had come across dozens of hours of old
recordings, made privately, in secret, during the 1960s and 70s.
Here, dusty and unheard, were the voices of the forgotten partisan
warriors, suppressed and renounced. Key words were the war about
the war, and more importantly, the battle over history; a battle that
ultimately determines our collective memory. The material was
enormous, fragmented, and not in any way systematic.
As a dramaturgical strategy, I chose the “Hearing” as a form of
“public venting” that usually takes place after a major disaster. The
goal of a hearing is to allow the people involved get their versions
of a story or event heard. My project was to freely construct the
hearing that had never taken place, to set it in the NRK, the official
Norwegian “center of radiation”, and to attempt a dissection of the
mighty forces that “control our storytelling”.
V. The dialectical logic of the hearing:
By itself, the hearing has no dramatic form, but, often contains very
dramatic content. When a hearing takes place after a disaster, a
major accident, or a crisis, there is always a lot at stake—not just for
individuals but for society as a whole (think of Kings Bay, Alexander
Kielland, or 22nd of July).
What struck me with all these recordings was the divergence
and contradictions within the auditory documents. Different voices
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spoke differently about the same event. Stories contradicted each
other. Facts contradicted facts, etc. What became more and more
interesting to me was seeing the hearing itself as a dialecticaldramaturgical form, as an assembly of highly subjective voices and
explanations, all of which defy all other truth apart than that which
occurs in the conflict between the stories. So it’s not the documents
themselves, but the conflicting encounters between those who are
the real objects, or documents, of the hearing. The hearing format
is a place where subjectivity wrestles with subjectivity, where lies
confront lies, and positions challenge positions, in a room which
only has that subjectivity as condition and possibility.
As the German sociologist Max Weber made clear in his
respectful 1920 critique of Karl Marx, giving up the concept of “one
great story” does not mean undermining the existence of several
coexisting stories and social facts. Nor does it undermine the
existence of objective relations between these stories and facts. That
is, if two individuals—two subjects—tell contradictory versions of
the same “story”, the conflicting storytelling will itself present an
objective relation. This is a crucial point, because by overcoming the
dichotomy of old-school relativism (or subjectivism) and the naive
concept of one synthetic truth (class or evolutionary) reflected in
the political art both of the 1930s and of the 1960s and 70s, we can
also overcome what I see as a false dichotomy of “documentarism”
vs. “aestheticism” now emerging on the European art-scene.
VI Relational logic & dialectic document
What is a document essentially?
The Norwegian psychiatrist and twin researcher Einar Kringeln
grew tired of colleagues using the phrase, “to come from/raised in
the same family”. This was his example or thought experiment:
A family consists, for example, of a brother, a sister, a mother,
and a father. The boy and the girl do not grow up in the same family
because the boy grows up with a mother, a father, and a sister, while
the girl grows up with a mother, a father, and a brother. They have
two completely different families. The point is that the objective
relationship is qualitatively different: the girl experiences a brothermother-father relationship, while the boy experiences a sistermother-father relationship.
The same logic would also apply to a document in an art project,
as for example “Almenrausch”. The relation between the document
and its context will determine the reality of the document. That is
what I mean when I use the phrase, “the dialectic of the document”.
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94
And this is the reason why I often try to confront the same fragment
in my work, whether it is a musical, textual, or visual one, with
shifting dramaturgical contexts so that the document is repeated and
returns, but always within a different setting.
The historical documents in “Almenrausch” are in fact
confronted with a similar strategy to that used by Johan Sebastian
Bach in his powerful Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, where a small
theme—known as the ostinato—is repeated with 21 radical, shifting
variations over a period of about 18 minutes.
Hence, and this is important: Due to this logic it is not possible
to talk about a document (or a theme) being outdated, or to claim
the same about “documentarism” or “documentary theatre” as such.
These kinds of polemic claims, whenever and wherever they may
appear, will in fact prove the opposite of what they are trying to say,
because as documents they can be given new life and new meanings
in new documentary settings.
underlying story behind all the anniversaries, namely that the Soviet
war effort was totally blanked out, as were the Norwegian communist
fighters, at the many anniversaries for peace.
This is what I mean by ‘contrapuntal method’, an antidocumentary countermove with the intention of canceling the
gravitational forces inherent in the documentary material, so
that dialogic counter-voices can be raised within a hegemonic and
dominant monologue.
The problem of “documentarism”, or rather, the problem of using
the word “documentary theatre” shows up in what I have called The
dialectic of the document; when manipulation releases the document
from its false authenticity.
Another concrete example is the use of Einar Gerhardsen’s
famous Kråkerøy speech in “Almenrausch—A Radio hearing”.
VII.
VIII.
“Almenrausch – A Radio Hearing” is not, and could not be a
documentary project following the formula of the naturalist Arno
Holz.
Rather than to document, my strategy has been to insert a kind
of counter-rhetoric, or rhetorical counterpoints against the field of
power, which forced these partisans into a shadow existence that has
lasted to this day.
When the official Norway celebrates the various 30, 40, or 50 year
anniversaries, often under the auspices of the NRK, a tight audiovisual
dramaturgy is selected, determining: who will be speaking; where;
what kind of music; who is invited; the host’s choice of words, etc.
When I made these anniversaries the material for the radio hearing, I
was searching for ways to undermine this rhetoric, to turn it against
itself, whether it be through a particular voice, text, or music.
An example: in the 1985 anniversary broadcast, forty years after the
war, NRK reporter Geir Heljesen actually mentioned that the Soviet
Embassy was also represented. Nevertheless, if you listen to all of it,
you will hear that this small comment becomes the exception that
camouflages the rule; the Soviet Union’s war contributions to Norway
are not only toned down, but are also time and again underplayed,
suppressed, and distorted.
The task was: what is here to be documented?2 My approach
was to cut away the one exception that proves the rule (the comment
“that the Soviet Union is represented”) in order to demonstrate the
In 1948, Norwegian Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen made his
infamous Kråkerøy speech at the Labor Party’s national meeting.
There he made a frontal attack on his former party comrades in what
was then the Norwegian Communist Party, and started thereby a
Norwegian “Communist” process, not unlike the hearings initiated by
Senator McCarthy in the United States about the same time.
On my quest through the archives I could find no record of the
original speech. However, I did find a radio recording from the late
1970s, where the then retired Gerhardsen—long hailed as a Father
of the Nation—reminisced about his career for NRK. Here, decades
later, he reads the same speech, but in a low voice, and close to the
microphone. Now the voice is mild, the tone gentle and friendly.
The question was: how to use this material? How to articulate the
devastating power and effect that this speech had on the hundreds of
Norwegian communists and their families?
The solution was to use a
rhetorical-contrapuntal strategy, where the document—in this case,
Gerhardsen, requoting himself in his old age—was exposed to three
music-dramaturgical strategies or parameters:
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Just briefly:
3First, I soundtracked Gerhardsen’s speech with musical battle
material from the early 1930s. In that way, the ‘opposing’ agitational
force was ‘re-functionalized’ to highlight the underlying brutality of
the speech.
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3Second, we used various audio-filter and sound-compression tools
to replicate the harsh sound of the original speech when using old
microphones at the mass meeting of 1948.
3The last manipulative strategy was to introduce montages that
connected Gerhardsen’s quoted speech to actual speeches made by
Gerhardsen’s colleagues—and directly inspired by his speech—as
part of the attack on the Norwegian Communists. This meant a
relocation of Gerhardsen to artistically constructed but no less real
contexts.3
In this way, I hope, the real political truth can break through the
rhetorical surface. Hidden rhetoric is openly met by counterrhetoric, ‘natural speech’ is met by its sonic subtext, and
Gerhardsen’s mild tone is revealed as a kind of covert brutality, so
that postwar Norwegian democracy reveals, through the montage
of sound, certain dictatorial traits.
IX . Closing (The Dialectics of the Document)
I would like to end with a deep-felt warning! Nothing is more dated
than an attempt to mark “Documentarism” and “Documentarism”
as being outdated.
As I see it, the “Monsters of reality” seminar gets two
important things right.
By focusing on strategies of reality—rather than
“Documentary” / “Documentarism”—both journalistic stupidity
(that “Documentarism is in”) and the curator’s strategic evil (that
“Documentarism is out”) are opposed. For in a situation where
the “hunt for news”. “product approach”, and “aesthetic branding”
have long since begun to dominate contemporary theatre, I will
conclude by emphasizing the following:
2) Documentary (documentarism) must always be written lowercase – that is with a small ‘d’:
If not, it will camouflage the fact that the differences in strategies
of reality are greater than the similarities. The sad fact that some
“commodity thinkers” in contemporary theatre support their own
interests as curators by putting the same label on different ‘goods’
is quite obvious, given that diversity and tension are far more
difficult to sell than labels and standardizations.
Thank you!
Endnotes
1 Is it not through the deliberate counter-rhetoric that the actual project can move forward, so
that the actual “documentary” is to be found here in the “non-documentary”?
2 By musically and sonically undermining the ground under Gerhardsen’s own rhetorical
attempt at self-censorship (that is. his attempts to make his own “Kråkerøy-speech”
sober and careful). What I try to do is to recreate the original political charge in the Prime
Minister’s notorious speech. In that way—as I see it— the anti-documentary becomes
documentary precisely because the formal, musical manipulation reveals the attempt to
deliberately mute the rhetorical.
3 Postmodernist deposits and appendages, which often try to “date” or “historicize”
these strategies, are not only paradoxical, but a symptom of the still ongoing crisis of
postmodernism.
1) Dramaturgy is not a ‘trend’:
Dramaturgy must never be confused with a ‘trend’. So-called
strategies of reality are, as the name indicates, open and
polyphonic, both in time and space. Just as all other dramaturgical
weapons can be used at any time, so too will various strategies
of reality always be a dynamic part of a dramaturgical arsenal for
progressive theatre artists. 4
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Saturday 24 March
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll
Chair of theatre studies at the
Goethe University in Frankfurt am
Main, and Director of the Master’s
Program in dramaturgy. Fields
of interest include: the comical
as paradigm of the experience of
modernity, theories on theatre in
relation to philosophy, politics,
and literature, and experimental
forms of contemporary theatre and
performance. Recent publications
include: Heiner Müller sprechen
(2009, ed. with Heiner Goebbels).
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(Dis-)Belief:
In search of a lost reality or
playing with illusion
by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll
(1) Main argument
If one is to believe the trendspotters of theatre and theatre criticism,
contemporary theatre has been shaped by a “recapturing of reality on
the stage” (Theaterkanal/Theatertreffen), by a “return of documentary
theater” (Laudenbach: 11)1 , or even by a “Théâtre sans illusion” (Biet/
Frantz: 565) since the turn of the century. In contrast to this, it is my
assertion that this supposed ‘reality theatre’, in its search for the real,
has in fact—like Columbus who searched for India and found America—
whether it likes it or not, rediscovered the inextricable ambivalence of
the belief in illusion. It is not “reality strikes back”, as the Düsseldorf
independent theatre Forum Freies Theater asserted in reference to
present-day theatre during a conference in September 2006,2 but rather
“illusion”. Contemporary theatre plays with ‘illusion’, one of the motifs
criticized by the “post-dramatic theater of the real” (Lehmann 1999a: 67,
vgl. 1999b: 183-193). Calculated or disturbed by their own calculations,
theatre makers who are particularly interested in reality, or in the real,
are showing us what it means to be entangled in the media of theatre and
language (vgl. Chartin/Lacoue-Labarthe/Nancy/Weber: 234). To begin
with, I will attempt to give a short overview of the historical problem we
are dealing with. The first part of this will consist of a brief trawl through
the various definitions of reality brought into play within the context of
so-called “new documentary theatre” or “reality theatre”. In the second
part, I will briefly elucidate a general meaning of “illusion”, as well as
what its particular meaning in a theatre context. Following this, I will
illustrate my hypothesis through two examples of “reality theater”: Stefan
Kaegi’s “bulgarische(r) LKW-Fahrt durchs Ruhrgebiet […] Cargo Sofia
Zollverein”3 [Bulgarian Truck Trip through the Ruhr Valley […] Cargo
Sofia Zollverein], and Walid Raad’s works, “My neck is thinner than a
hair: engines” (vgl. Nakas/Schmitz 96-103), and “I feel a great desire
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to meet the masses once again”.4 Finally, I will offer a few suggestions
towards a contemporary understanding of illusion.
(2) Fictions of Reality, Realism and the Real
What do we mean when we speak of “reality”, the “real”, or, like the
wonderful title of this symposium, “Monsters of Reality”, on the stage?
At the moment there is hardly any other issue that one encounters
so frequently on the fringes of the theatre, on the independent stage,
at festivals, in projects funded by government foundations, during
symposia financed by third-party funds, and at theatre and media
studies, performance, and dance congresses. It is difficult to say when
this recent search for reality, the real, a new realism, or a new form of
Documentary Theatre began on the stage. At any rate, this search had
already been on its way for about a decade, and was defining the stage,
along with Reality TV, the Dogma 95 Manifesto, and omnipresent selfexposure on the Internet, as Hans-Thies Lehmann published with his
“TheatReales” notes of 1998. Here he placed live art with its creation of
situations that encourage the spectator to intervene, performance art
with its questioning of illusion, and theatre by groups like Gob Squad,
and directors like Stefan Pucher and René Pollesch—which he dubbed
“Cool Fun”—into the context of this search, and added them to the realm
of “Post-dramatic theater”, which he had just coined. This search reached
the Berlin Volksbühne by 2002, when Carl Hegemann published a
dramaturgical pamphlet with the title “Einbruch der Realität” (“Invasion
of Reality”), and incited the fourth International Summer Academy in the
Frankfurt Mouson Tower with the extraordinary title, “True Truth about
the Nearly Real”. In the following years, this translated into symposia with
militant programmatic titles like the already mentioned “Reality Strikes
Back”, or academically timeless titles like, “Wege der Wahrnehmung.
Authentizität, Reflexivität und Aufmerksamkeit im zeitgenössischen
Theater“ (“Paths of Perception. Authenticity, Reflexivity, and Attention
in Contemporary Theatre”.) Kassel’s 2002 “Documenta”, as well as
Stuttgart’s 2005 “Theatre of the World”—accompanied by performances,
exhibitions, and a symposium—made it clear that there were points
of contact with corresponding tendencies in the visual arts. Stars of
the reality scene, such as Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop, Hofmann &
Lindholm, Christoph Schlingensief or Hans-Werner Kroesinger can now
be seen as part of the German theatre establishment.
As the English titles, Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present,
Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, and the special issue of the
journal TDR on “Documentary theatre”, edited by Carol Martin, prove,
we are first of all dealing with an objection to “the paradigm of postmodernism and its restriction of politics to acts of ‘transgression’”, as
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Mike Vanden Heuvel phrases it. These volumes prove arrestingly that this
new search for the ‘real’ is a global movement feeding on local issues, if
nothing else, and borne aloft on the wings of cosmopolitan opponents of
globalization, and those excluded due to their class, ethnicity, or sexual
orientation. New Documentary Theatre, based on facts, manifests itself
worldwide in performances depending on all kinds of archived materials,
in the utilization of autobiographical materials, in docudramas, in
word-for-word documentations known as “Verbatim Theatre”, and
multimedia productions. Carol Martin differentiates between six
functions of the new Documentary Theatre: 1. Recent disclosures of
trials. 2. Additional accounts of historical events. 3. Reconstructions of
events. 4. Connections between autobiography and history. 5. Critiques
of the functions of documentation and fiction. 6. Discussions of the
oral culture of the theatre. The aforementioned recent volumes about
‘the real’ on-stage illustrates this enumeration with the texts of plays
and productions, as well as accounts of the processing of individual
and societal trauma, revisions of spectacular judicial proceedings, and
reenactments of memorable parliamentary committees and political
speeches.
However, reading these accounts and examples, the impression
quickly forms that political conflicts are often misused for the creation of
entertaining evenings, or that theatre is mutating into a continuation of
television by other means. What Carol Martin attempts in her differential
essays seems all the more necessary: explaining the paradoxes of this
new genre, naming its dangers and naiveties, and answering self-evident
questions—what kinds of distinctive features does a theatre that resorts
to archive material offer in comparison to other media? Wherein lies
the additional value of “documentations“ using theatrical means? What
distinguishes this theatre from others?
Most of the examples listed can be identified as variants of that
which Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge call “Gegenöffentlichkeit”—
literally, a counter-public, an alternative political public not ruled
by dominant economic forces. Documentary theatre is thus seen as
superior to supposedly faster and more effective media, as it does not
purport to be more objective, but rather more subjective. Perceived
reality, and social and political commentary, appear here as a viable form
of knowledge. However, the paradoxes of stage truths quickly become
apparent: testimonies to reality can only appear as really real when they
are medially conveyed—when they take the stage as film, video, sound,
or Internet documents; that reality theater is, indeed, legitimized by
way of facts, but has to choose these facts, stage them, and, in doing so,
supplement them with the gestures, glances, body language, and spatial
experience of actors and directors; and that, ultimately, its believability;
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the impression of “real life” does not originate in the archive. In other
words, we are always dealing with fictions of reality.
However, in this respect they confirm—if reluctantly —the very
observation that shaped the term “post-modernism” for Jean-Francois
Lyotard. Carol Martin’s plea is to be understood as keeping with postmodernism’s misgivings in respect to closed systems, namely that
“our obsessive analytical attention” is required in the face of claims
of “being in possession of the entirety of evidence”. It reminds me of
Lyotard’s intermittent ennoblement of the ‘small’ narrative against
the ‘grand’ narrative, when she argues for an extension of the concept
of documentary, and against its universal definition, ultimately, for an
extension of the concept of Documentary Theatre: “In actual fact, the
discourse surrounding the question of what is documentary theatre,
and what is not, revolves around the question of how we sanction and
privilege certain forms of information over others”.
Now might be the point at which one would need to ask if this
liberal and tolerant sounding relativism—a deduction drawn from the
established and unavoidable insight that what appears on the stage is
a mediated and therefore fictitious reality—does not unduly diminish
the problem of new (and old) reality theatre. Such liberalism only seems
plausible as long as it is not applied to the denial of the Shoah or other
crimes. But what happens if tomorrow’s negationists, invoking their
right to bring under-privileged forms of information into the theatre,
set about rewriting German history in the spirit of right-wing extremist
ideology?
In contrast to the untroubled support of the numerous small
narratives, and in line with one of the fathers of post-modernism, maybe
we should attempt to abide by that, which in the supposed presentation
of reality refers to a different truth, even if it cannot be conceived as such,
and ultimately to a truth as the Other of presentation. In 1968, when
Documentary Theatre and the demand for literary realism or reality
was at the height of its fashion, Roland Barthes analyzed what was to be
observed under the auspices of realism. It was not an approximation of
reality, but rather the attempt to create “referential illusion”, to forget
the semiotic character of presentation in favor of the impression of
an unmediated representation. However, according to Barthes, to the
extent that the ‘real’—the manifold, tangible details that underpin
a ‘realistic’ narrative or production — was supposed to disappear, it
inevitably resurfaced in a roundabout manner as a remnant that was not
completely subsumed in the economy of presentation. Barthes described
this remnant as a ”Real(ity) effect”, with which he, if nothing else, was
referring to the Lacanian ‘real’. Lacan’s ‘real’ is not to be confused with
‘reality’ or ‘realism’. It is nothing other than a hint, manifesting itself in
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effects, at that which calls forth and steers presentations, without itself
appearing within them—its grounds often traumatic, and always to be
conceived as an “Ereignis”, an event. These grounds are not accessible by
any other means than distortion or misapprehension.
(3) Recapitulation of the Historical Problem: Illusion
But, to come back to the hypothesis I alluded to at the beginning: does
recent so-called ‘Reality’ or ‘Documentary Theatre’ even deal with reality
or the real? I would like to assert—in spite of whatever the assertions
and intentions of the artists are—that in most instances, we are, in fact,
dealing with much more (and less at the same time), namely the question
of illusion and the belief in this illusion. Before I illustrate this with
tangible examples, I would like to remind you of what we are dealing with
when we speak of illusion—in and beyond the theatre.
When we submerge a straight straw in water it appears bent. This oftcited example quickly helps us understand what is meant by illusion—
something that we believe to be true, although we know, or think we know,
that it does not correspond to reality. A kind of spontaneous belief in the
unbelievable, or, as a philosopher wrote a while ago, “wissensresistentes
Wirklichkeitsbewusstsein von etwas, was nicht wirklich existiert” (“a
consciousness of reality, resistant to knowledge, of something that does
not really exist” (Wiesing: 89).
Fabricating uninterrupted illusion—this formula describes
in a nutshell the project and maybe also the phantasm of theatre
theoreticians of the 17th and 18th centuries (cf. Strube 1976. 204-215;
Pavis: 167-168; Franz: 30-32; Ladzarzig: 140-142). In theories of the
late 17th and early 18th century, this project arose out of demands for
probability, naturalness, truth, and the causal necessity of plot, and also
from a supposedly eternal rule derived from Aristotle—the doctrine of
‘vraisemblance’—with the goal of moral education. Above all, this project
was a holistic one. Whilst viewing a work of art, a viewer should be able to
see the world (cf. Kern: 172) and—more or (in the case of Mendelssohn,
Schiller, and Goethe 5 ) less—completely forget about the frame through
which they are viewing it. From a 20th-century perspective, the project
of the doctrinaires of French classicism and 18th-century aestheticians
can be described as part of a teleological process that has its origins in
early modern stage forms: its teloi are the 19th-century proscenium, and
its pendants the cinema and television screens (cg. Haß 2005; Heeg).
Put bluntly, between the 18th and the 20th century, theatre and other
forms of visual representation aimed at realizing a 17th-century utopia of
uninterrupted illusion. Technical transformations, such as the abolition
of illusion-inhibiting stage seating, the development of gas, and later
electric, illumination of the stage with a simultaneous darkening of the
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auditorium, and, furthermore, the configuration of stage design to create
this uninterrupted illusion, all contributed to the development of theatre
away from the 17th-century discursive assembly room of intersecting
gazes (cf. Biet 2002 and 2005) towards an illusion-building image-space
that would later be utilized by early 20th-century avant-garde rebellions
in theatre practice.
Brecht’s practical exercises with, and theoretical deliberations on,
illusion mark a turning point in the history of theatrical illusion and its
disruption. His opposition to illusion is well recorded. Theatre should
‘alienate’ the object of illusion by not letting the reality of its means
of presentation—the body of the actor, the lighting, and so on—be
disguised. However, the position handed down in the fragmentary
didactic dialogue, or poly-logue of Der Messingkauf (Brecht 1993, p. 695869, cf. Brecht 1967: 500-657)6 is more complex than the anti-illusionism
that Brechtians have elevated to the status of doctrine. The formulation
“abbau der illusion und der einfühlung” (BBA 124/88, cf. Brecht 1993:
719)—the disassembly of illusion and empathy—possibly intended
as a chapter title, which at the very least alludes to the location of the
discussion—the stage. A stage whose “dekoration langsam abgebaut
wird” (“decorations are slowly being disassembled”), referring back
to the disassembly of an ideology built up over the last 200 years, thus
preparing for the “Vormarsch […] zurück zur Vernunft” (“the advance
back to reason”) (BBA 127/48, Brecht 1993: 803). But something can
only be taken down after it has been built up, and Brecht’s assertive
“no” to illusion and empathy is qualified by a restrained “yes”, here (and
elsewhere)—“es kann nicht schlechtweg behauptet werden, dass diese
Dramatik oder irgendeine Dramatik ganz und gar auf alle illusionären
Elemente verzichten kann” (“it cannot be asserted that this dramatic art
or any other dramatic art can wholly relinquish illusionistic elements”)
(Brecht 1993: 612f)—and his alter-ego philosopher in Der Messingkauf
concedes a small degree of empathy, while acknowledging that he risks
opening “dem ganzen alten unfug wieder ein türlein” (“a small door on
all that old nonsense”) (BBA 127/55, Brecht 1993: 823).
In its ‘distance’ to Brecht’s ‘distance’, the position found in his
writings concerning the ‘disassembly of illusion’ opens up a degree of
flexibility that has been explored by theatre practices interested in the
‘real’.7 In such theatre practice, the use of more recent media does not
serve to heighten the illusion, but rather, to interrupt and play with it. In
different ways, we discover a framework that we would not notice if the
illusion were perfect. For example:
- in the video recordings in Castorf’s theater, which do not reveal but
rather disguise things differently 8;
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- in the imitation of non-illustrative film plots or choreographies on the
stage, which prevent the unmediated conduct of skilled illusionistic
actors, such as found in pieces by The Wooster Group 9;
- in the calculated conflict between the timing of music and dance, such
as found in Grace Ellen Barkey’s production “Chunking” (2005);
- in the inexplicable status of film, which transmits —sometimes live—
the concealed events of the evening in the theatre auditorium, such as
found in Heiner Goebbel’s work 10 ;
- and in the meticulous transcription of oral speech and its transmission
through song, in the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s cycle “Live and
Times”, held over ten evenings.
I could continue, but I suspect that these examples are enough
to demonstrate that a new concept is needed to incisively deal with
contemporary tendencies to continually deny illusion, and to persistently
play with its general possibilities. Following Jacques Derrida, for whom
deconstruction is about comprehending that we are entangled in “plus
d’une langue”—in more than one language, and at the same time in none
at all (cf. Derrida 1988:31)—one might say that a theatre that dismantles
illusion always involves “plus d’une illusion”—more than one illusion,
and none at all. To illustrate, I would like to study two particularly
impressive examples a little more closely.
(4) “Cargo Sofia …”
(Rimini Protokoll, Stefan Kaegi)
A very popular and well-known group of performers in search of reality
on stage is the group Rimini Protokoll, made up of Helgard Haug, Stefan
Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel. All three are graduates of the theatre and
performance studies program at the University of Gießen. Their theatre
is sometimes described as a “theatre that explores reality”, others call it
“new documentary theatre”, but the most appropriate description appears
to be “documentary intervention”. The theatre journal Theater der Zeit
has described them as the founders of a new “reality trend on the stage”.
11
In fact, Rimini Protokoll’s productions claim to explore the theatrical
potential of reality today by either bringing various experts from real life
(“Experten aus der Wirklichkeit”) onto the stage, or by turning all kinds of
different locations that resemble theatre into playgrounds of theatrical
exploration. In “Zeugen! Ein Strafkammerspiel” (“Witnesses! A criminal
chamber play”), the participants on stage are a defense lawyer, one of the
victim’s companions, a frequent visitor at trials, a court sketch artist, a lay
judge, and a defendant. They represent their roles in the trial in different
but always entertaining and vivid ways. In “Sabenation. Go home & follow
the news”, unemployed former employees of the insolvent Belgian airline
Sabena reflect on their lives before and after their dismissal. “Brunswick
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Airport” stages Braunschweig airport and “Cameriga” stages the Latvian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Markt der Märkte” (“Market of Markets”)
invites visitors to follow the dismantling of Bonn’s weekly market from
a bird’s-eye-view perspective via a live broadcast, and in “Germany 2” the
group invited citizens of Bonn to re-enact a debate in the Bundestag, the
German parliament—the original recording being directly transmitted
to the performers’ earphones.12
From among the numerous successful productions, which have
received many awards and enthusiastic reviews, I would like to draw your
attention to a site-specific work that was created by Stefan Kaegi in 2006,
titled “Cargo Sofia …”. The third word is always the name of the city where
the production takes place. It was shown all over Europe and rightly
supported by many institutions across the continent. As I would like to
show, it provides one of the most convincing solutions to the question
of how one can say anything about the economic questions of our times,
how one can ‘represent’ the nameless agents in these matters, and how
one can illuminate their ‘laws’. From the outset, Kaegi intended to show
“Cargo Sofia …” for several years all over Europe. One of the venues was
the choreographic center PACT Zollverein in Essen.13
Treated as if they were commodities, 47 spectators are loaded into
the cargo hold of a truck that has been turned into a tribunal. Driven
by two Bulgarian truck drivers, they explore the surrounding area, and
are at the same time confronted with the world of wage slaves—truck
drivers who have the status of German employees yet are paid Bulgarian
wages. Their task is to transport freight from Eastern European low-wage
countries to the metropolises of the West. One side of the truck’s cargo
hold is made out of glass, and thus has literally been turned into a ‘fourth
wall’ behind which events take place that can be observed by the seated
spectators. The truck’s route takes the spectators past ‘non-places’14 like
a container terminal, a dispatch center, and a parking lot popular among
truck drivers, situated on the edge of the city.
The mundane highway thus turns into everyday theatre, and the
‘theatre’ into an entertaining lesson in globalization. On a screen, which
is lowered when there is nothing special to see outside, we are told the
story of the Swabian businessman Willi Betz, who bought the formerly
state-owned Bulgarian transport enterprise SOMAT after the radical
upheavals in the East, and, using permitted and forbidden means (‘wage
dumping’, bribes, illegal authorizations), made the trucking business
cheaper and more dangerous for all involved. A highway patrol officer
talks about his daily controls of overtired truck drivers and dangerouslooking cargoes. At a dispatch center the spectators are taught about the
complex logistics of truck driving by a suited man standing on a loading
ramp and talking through the truck’s open rear door. While being
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Photo © Stefan Kaegi
transported as nighttime cargo, the spectators hear recorded statements
about what would happen if truck drivers were fairly paid: transport
costs would rise, the outsourcing of huge areas of production would no
longer be profitable, and job cuts in Western Europe would be stopped.
“Cargo Sofia Zollverein” can be perceived as a kind of ‘sightseeing
tour’ that takes in amazingly strange places and areas close to the
familiar city and roads we thought we knew. It is possible to view it
as a “sensory seminar evening” as one journalist put it. We learn that
one container can either transport 10,000 suits or accommodate two
foreign workers. We find out that the coal on the platforms of a freight
depot in the middle of the former “Kohlenpott” (literally, “coal scuttle”,
nickname for the Ruhr coal-mining area) is imported from China, and
that there are 7000 articulated trucks in Western Europe being driven
by East European drivers paid with East European wages. Listening to
the stories of two drivers, one gets an idea of their little pleasures as well
as of the loneliness of a trucker’s life. One sees the prostitutes standing
on the streets, one hears about a trucker who transports cars to Georgia
and passes time by drinking hard liquor, and one learns about the legal
and illegal drugs used by the truckers in order to stay awake. This is one
aspect of the evening.
But these interesting encounters with an alien neighborhood would
not really be enough for a full theatre evening if they were not part of
a clever collection of five stories, each being told synchronously and
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artistically, and continuously interrupting each other. First, there is the
story of a fictitious truck journey from Sofia to Essen, which leads from
Bulgaria across Serbia, Italy, and Switzerland. It is constructed out of
anecdotes and original recordings that are illustrated with film extracts.
It provides a vivid image of the fictitious journey with its long waiting
times and little adventures with corrupt customs officials at various
checkpoints. Secondly, there is the criminal history of the expanding
Swabian enterprise. It starts with the foundation of the company in the
fifties, includes the curious construction of the businessman’s private
villa in the middle of the company’s premises, and culminates in the
story of a legendary police raid in 2003. Thirdly, the two truck drivers
show photos of their families and tell anecdotes from their lives, which
are transmitted directly from the driver’s cab into the cargo space via
microphones and cameras. The fourth story is the fictitious journey the
spectators are participating in. And finally, there is what one might call a
fifth story, the story that makes all of the other stories suspect, the story
shared by both truck driver and spectator, their common experience of
the evening structured by Kaegi’s clever mise-en-scène. Whereas most of
Rimini Protokoll’s earlier works offered a more or less traditional kind of
‘empathy theatre’ played by non-actors, here we find a permanent toying
with the creation of ‘illusion’. The truck with the spectators encounters a
young woman several times, first singing live in a park, and later, riding
along the pavement transporting some packages on her bike. After
leaving the highway patrol officer and dispatch center, the spectators
once again encounter the police car and a dispatch truck on the highway.
The boundary between what is real and what produces the impression of
reality is very fluid, and one begins to doubt whether this documentary
theatre is really documenting anything at all. It becomes clear that what
is at stake is something altogether different from the documentary plays
of Peter Weiss, Heinar Kipphardt, or Rolf Hochhuth—the performance
is not just an imitation of reality, but also a reflection upon the images of
reality and their production. Whereas former works by Rimini Protokoll
conveyed the impression that the whole world was a stage—in line with
the “Theatralitäts-Forschung” (‘Theatricality’ Studies’) concept taught
in German universities—this production suggests something different
to the spectators. Namely, that the ‘theatrical’ elements of reality means
that it is impossible to make a statement about reality that is not already
contaminated by reality’s mise-en-scène.15 Theatre, or rather the theatrical
(theatricality in another sense), appears as both a way of accessing the
world, and at the same time, of its dissimulation. In the end, both are
open to question—theatre, as well as the world. It is uncertain whether
presentations like “Cargo Sofia Zollverein” can be called theatre, or
what they show can be called ‘reality’. However, where Rimini Protokoll
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establishes doubt with regard to what it is supposedly just presenting,
the group also picks up on the epistemological doubt that Brecht once
expressed when he said that a “simple rendering of reality” says less
than ever about reality. “A photograph of the Krupp factories or the
AEG yields almost no information about these institutes”. Whereupon
he asserts that, following the logic alluded to above, “There is in fact
‘something to be constructed’, something ‘artificial’, ‘contrived’.”16 With
the revelation that an approximation of reality needs to elevate depiction
itself above being mere depiction to being the actual issue, and that this
approximation should not just approvingly accept illusion but rather play
with it, Kaegi’s work approaches the conceptual art— the photographs,
video works, and lecture performances—of the New York and Lebanon
resident Walid Raad, in which the overriding issue is that of depiction, by
means of which the undepictable can also be represented.
(5) Walid Raad – Reminiscence within the Medium
Walid Raad’s subject matter is war–the war in Lebanon, between 1975
and 1991, with which he grew up, and the current war against terror, as
well as the traumatic events associated with war, inasmuch as they have a
collective, historical dimension, and, together with all of this, and above
all, the way that film, video, photography, and theatre claim to represent
this psychological and physical violence. He undertakes and explores
representations of violence by constructing the illusion of writing history,
securing evidence, identifying victims, and archiving minor stories on
the fringes of mainstream history. All of his work can be seen as historical
documents produced for an imaginary archive serviced by an equally
imaginary foundation, the “Atlas Group”, of which Raad describes himself
as a founding member—further members are, however, nowhere to be
found. As far as I know, Raad never explains that—as becomes gradually
evident during the course of observing his ‘historical documents’, which
are mainly exhibited in art galleries, and abruptly so during his lecture
performances—we are dealing with entirely fictive, manipulated, or
falsified material.17
One brief example. In the series “My neck is thinner than a hair:
engines”, we see wall-mounted photographs of motors lying in the midst
of what appear to be bombed-out cityscapes, surrounded by—sometimes
small, sometimes large—groups of people. Next to the photographs
are their reverse sides, on which official looking stamps, notes, and
signatures appear to confirm their authenticity. Raad ‘completes’ the
series, which he also demonstrates in a lecture performance, with the
note:
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“The only part remaining when a car explodes is the motor. It can be thrown for several hundred meters, and land
on balconies, roofs, or streets. During the wars, photographers staged a competition to see who would find and photograph the motors first” (Zit. nach Nakas/Schmitz: 96).
© The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Motors—the remains of, as we read, 3641 car bombs activated during
the wars (est.)—become allegories for the unrepresented suffering and
terror, which tends to be betrayed, falsified, kitschified, and loaded with
clichéd emotionality in each representation, becoming a repetition
without prefiguration, a representation without mimetic character, a
writing or trace, which, like ruins, has been left behind by the violence
as a mark of that destruction which protects aniconism. What we learn
about reality is not represented in these images, and is not the subject
matter of Raad’s installation, which presents instead the mere materials
on which these images are based.
In his lecture performance, “I feel a great desire to meet the masses once
again”, which premiered in 2005 during the “Theater der Welt” festival
in Stuttgart18, Raad tells of an extended police and FBI interrogation on
his return to Rochester International Airport after a short domestic trip.
The immigrant of Arabic origin quickly comes under suspicion and—
as it becomes clear to him in retrospect—is at risk of being deported,
interrogated, and tortured, as was the case for the well-known German
citizen Khaled el-Masri, from Neu Ulm. The rest of the performance
compiles scantily veiled traces of the impact of American intelligence
agencies in their handling of predominantly Arabic terror suspects—still
relatively unreported in 2005. Raad is only a suspect because of his art
and his pictures, which are worthless in the eyes of his interrogators.
Pictures of himself naked in front of New York skyscrapers, of dead
animals, of the security warnings on various airplanes, and of Lebanese
car bomb explosions identified through Arabic inscriptions. It is only
when the interrogator realizes that he is dealing with an artist that Raad
is released. He says that what saved him was the fact that the policeman
was a hobby painter in his spare time.
Raad sits with his laptop in front of a screen during this lecture
performance, and to start with, there is little to differentiate him from
the managers, commercial representatives, and professors, who avail
themselves of easy-to-use PowerPoint presentations during their own
talks. But it quickly becomes evident that, contrary to appearances, this
format is part of the concept. Its minimalism allows Raad to remain as
flexible and autonomous as possible19, and simultaneously reduces the
fact that, “Himmelsrest des Scheins zu tragen peinlich” (“In spite of
everything it remains an embarrassment for art to bear even the slightest
trace of semblance”) (Aesthetic Theory, p. 104), which, following Adorno’s
verdict on Dadaism, is inherent to all artistic attempts that strive to reject
this semblance and yet remain “cut off from [the] real political effect”
that originally inspired them (Adorno: 104). That Raad presents his
narrative in the Stuttgart Art Museum, and not, for example, in front of the
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US Armed Forces headquarters in Stuttgart-Vaihingen—i.e. as a public
demonstration—can be justified by the fact that he intentionally leaves
art in the space dedicated to art in order to assert the possibilities of art,
and to defend the exploration of illusion that he pursues in other works.
Proceeding from the idea of his own playful beginnings—as a boy who
took photos for pleasure, and, without any benefit to himself, collected
what he found in his war-torn, hometown of Beirut; and as a young man
who studied art, moved to the USA and acquired US citizenship—he
rapidly approaches the event that took place in the fall of 2004, the focus
of his PowerPoint performance—the interrogation, and the practices
of American intelligence agencies. In this way, the strange title, which
remains unexplained for the length of the performance—“I feel a great
desire to meet the masses once again”—can be understood as, if nothing
else, an ironic commentary on an action, the political consequences of
which amount to nothing as long as the injustice to which it testifies affect
masses that are not able to appear as masses, because they are comprised
of innumerable, globally dispersed, marginalized, and isolated cases. The
excited, well-to-do first-night audience, which receives his report in lieu of
the coveted “masses”, becomes a ‘living sculpture’ in this performance
whether it likes it or not, and attests modo negativo to the illusionary
character of the desire expressed in the performance title.20
Furthermore, what this conceptual lecture performance makes clear
is the political dimension of Raad’s play with illusion—in this ‘play’, the
real emerges in the space between the familiar story, told with newspaper
images, and Raad’s other, fictitious stories, told with the same pictures.
The child’s, and later the artist’s, play with the futile remains of unknown
stories, is the start of a revocation of that “transcendental illusion”
(Derrida 2001a: 86), which is at work, undetected, in all medial forms
of “realistic representation”—in documentation, newspaper reports,
and police protocols. Raad uses reality to denounce the perplexity
of certain preconceptions of the world—for example, the world of
narrative principle: of causal, linear plot progression—and does so by
way of nothing more than an insistence upon what must appear bizarre,
absurd, awry, or meaningless to somebody who believes in the illusion
of “reality”, or even suspicious, like the character introduced during the
lecture performance. Put another way, Raad is deconstructing our belief
in a single version of history, or rather a story, authorized and propagated
by means of economic, political, and—as the evening of interrogation
illustrates—police power. By constructing another, so to speak,
homeopathic illusion he allows this single history to appear illusionary.
In this way, he promotes reflection on the power of images and the belief
in illusion. “The story, which you tell yourself and which you endow with
attention and belief”, he writes, “might not have anything to do with what
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happened in the past, but it is this story that might be meaningful in the
present and for the future”. (zit. nach Nakas/Schmitz: 24).
(6) (Dis)belief
If, in Kaegi’s case, it was important to reflect on the question of whether
materials from reality do not simply invoke an illusionistic appearance of
reality, in Raad’s case, the question is whether theatre, in the generation
of illusion, does not at least reveal something about reality. If, as in the
first case, belief in the presentation’s accurate depiction is successively
shaken during the course of the presentation, in the second case, belief
in the realistic content of even the purely imaginary and fictitious—
in the illusion that we have already conceived of as such—gradually
emerges. Put together side by side, both cases reveal something about
the relationship between illusion and reality, which one could perhaps
describe as a Kantian insight—illusion can paradoxically be conceived
of as the “necessary” or “objective appearance” (“Schein”)”, as a
misjudgment of reality that simultaneously constitutes the only possible
access to this reality.21 It resembles what a young Marx described in his
concept of ideology (see Marx/Engels; de Man)—psychoanalysis within
the concept of a phantasm. As a necessary deception, illusion retains
its right to exist inasmuch as it is itself a reality, even if the object of
illusion does not correspond to any reality, even if, by its very definition,
the real is missing. Play with illusion in contemporary theatrical forms
suggests that it is time for another concept of truth and another notion
of reality, a concept that no longer attempts to conceive of truth and
reality according to the model of adequatio intellectu et rei, but rather as
completely undefinable yet not inexistent variables. Although, or maybe
because, they continually escape us, we must hold on to them, although
not so much through possession as through belief in an illusion that is
continuously being disassembled.
The French actor and essayist Daniel Mesguich illustrates the
paradoxes of belief in illusion, which must always be a ‘dis-belief’, with
the following hypothesis from the psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni: “We
are not frightened by a wolf mask in the same way that we are frightened
by a wolf, but rather in the way that we are frightened by the image of
the wolf that we carry inside ourselves”.22 Mesguich adds that in the
theatre we neither believe, nor disbelieve, nor directly watch, nor directly
listen. On the contrary, we see and hear the child or the idiot in us who
believes. Jacques Derrida analyzes this remark with the comment that in
the moment of observing the believing child or idiot within us, we are
also observing identifiable memory as well as absolute separation. In the
theatre we experience partition—partition in the sense of participation,
as well as in the sense of division. The transition from the participating
Monsters Of Reality
113
child to the adult responsible for division appears to him to be indefinable
and irreducible. This is why he ends his commentary on Mesguich’s
remark with an unanswered question, “What is an act of believing in
the theatre? Why does one have to believe in the theatre? One must. But
why?” (Derrida 1993: 6)
The philosopher of ‘deconstruction’—a different kind of disassembly—seems to be referring to two things here. Firstly, his repeated
reference to the fact that the phenomenon of “believing” in the theatre
interests him—but also “believing” in film, as he notes at another point
(Derrida 2001b: 78)—might indicate that for Derrida, the division of the
spectator of illusions into, on the one hand, the believing child and, on
the other, an instance of reason that knows of the illusion, represents an
exception in the history of the decentered, modern subject. In theatre
studies, this assessment could be related to the curious fact that the
illusionary stage does not emerge until the development of theatre in the
early modern era, starting in the Renaissance. As a heuristic hypothesis
following on from Derrida’s remarks, one could say that theatrical
illusion co-originates with the history of the subject in the modern era
and is inseparable from its development.
With regards to the relationship between theatre and media, we
would ultimately need to hold onto Derrida’s remark that the examination
of illusion is an examination of ‘being-in-the-world’, but also with its
theatrical medial constitution. Precisely because we are already entangled
in illusions, and more precisely, because we are all entangled in illusions
in different ways, we will never be able to completely eliminate them.
A residue of belief will sustain itself. And on the other hand, precisely
because we will never be able to sincerely persist in a single illusion and
will never be completely submerged within it, when faced with another
belief, our belief becomes (dis-)belief. What remains is a knowledge of
the simultaneous inevitability and eternity of the disassembly of illusion
in (dis-)believing play around it.
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Endnotes
1 Cf. the title of a roundtable at the “Berliner
Theater¬treffen” in the year of 2006
http://www.theaterkanal.de/fernsehen/
monat/05/204323382 (03/25/2007).
2 Cf. http://www.forum-freies-theater.de/archiv/09sept/symposium.html (03/25/2007).
3 CARGO SOFIA-ZOLLVEREIN, Stage director: Stefan Kaegi,
Rimini Protokoll. First show: 07/07/2006 at Choreographisches Zentrum PACT Zollverein, Essen.
4 Lecture Performance. First show at 06/23/2005 at »Theater
der Welt«, Stuttgart.
5 Cf. Strube 1971: 85 and 181; Koch/Voss: 7.
6 The MESSINGKAUF is one of Brecht’s most peculiar
works of theory: Brecht was working on it between 1937
and 1955 and bequeathed it as a mass of fragments.
While the editors of the 1967 edition of Brecht’s writings tried to reconstruct the whole work in a readable
way, the new Brecht edition gives a better idea of the
fragmentary nature of the work in progress and its
varying tendencies. One understands while reading it
that the repetitions, corrections, contradictions, revisions, and in the last instance, the failure of Brecht in
writing a teaching manual deserves as much attention
as the contents of the texts. However by changing the
organization of the material and introducing capitals
into Brecht’s writings, it alters the typescript to the
point that it cannot be used any more. Therefore I will
quote the following texts from the typescripts found in
the Brecht archive.
7 Cf. on the formulation »in distance to distance« Lehmann
2005: 40. However it is evident regarding the passage
quoted here that this attitude is already to be found in
Brecht’s writings and not only later on as for example in
the writings of Heiner Müller.
8 Cf. Ulrike Haß (2004) on Castorf‘s ENDSTATION AMERIKA.
9 Cf. Müller-Schöll 2007.
10 Heiner Goebbels: »Eraritjaritjaka. Das Museum der Sätze«
(2004, cf. Koch 2006: 62f).
11 Cf. http://www.dramaturgische-gesellschaft.de/dramaturg/2005_02/24.pdf.
12 Cf. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/project_frontend_index.php.
13 I refer myself in the following description to the show in
Essen on the 7th of October 2006.
14 Cf. on the notion of the non-space Augé (97-144), who
argues that this is an appearance which is specific
for our time which according to him should be called
»Sur¬modernité«.
15 Cf. on the very specific notion of theatricality I use here:
Müller-Schöll 2002: esp. 45-71 a. 183f. as well as Weber
2004.
16 Cf. Brecht 1992: 469; cf. as well and departing from here
Kluge: 203.
17 See the selected bibliography of publications by and
about Walid Raad in Nakas/Schmitz: 133. The following
depiction is based on a personal encounter with Raad
within the framework of the “Performer’s Guesthouse”,
Theater der Welt/Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart,
June 23rd and 24th 2005. See also Raad’s homepage:
www.theatlasgroup.org .
18 My depiction refers to the performance on the 23rd of
june 2005 in the art museum Stuttgart.
19 Raad‘s minimalism is comparable to the strategies of
quite a number of Lebanese artists who are interested
in ideas of the ‘political’, as for example Rabih Mroué
or Ali Cherri.
20 Cf. Freud:165 on the definition of illusion motivated by
wish-fulfillment . Freud’s definition of “illusion”, and
his conception of belief in it, can be compared to the
ones that will be further developed in relation to Kant
and Marx in this text. Not unlike Kant and Marx, Freud
claims that illusion is not defined by its relation to reality but that it should rather be regarded as an inevitable
and even necessary deception.
21 Cf. on Kant: Deuber-Mankowsky 2006 and 2007.
22 See Derrida 1993: 6.
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115
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Frankfurt/M. : Suhr¬kamp.
Augé, Marc (1991): »Des lieux au non-lieux«. In: Ibid: NonLieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, p. 97-144.
Biet, Christian (2002): »L’avenir des illusions ou Le théâtre
et l’illusion perdue«. In: Litteratures classiques, Nr. 44,
p. 175-214.
Biet, Christian (2005): »Rechteck, Punkt, Linie, Kreis und
Unendliches. Der Raum des Theaters in der Frühen
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Biet, Christian/Pierre Frantz (Ed.) (2005): Le théâtre sans
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Brecht, Bertolt (1967): »Der Messingkauf«. In: ibid.: Gesammelte Werke 16. Schriften zum Theater 2. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, p. 497-657, here p. 578-585.
Brecht, Bertolt (1992): Werke. Bd. 21, Schriften 1. Berlin und
Weimar, Frankfurt/M: Aufbau, Suhrkamp.
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Derrida, Jacques (1988): Memoires für Paul de Man. Wien:
Passagen.
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10.05.2006.
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Hent de Vries/Samuel Weber (ed.): Religion and Media.
Stanford: Stanford U.P., p. 56-93.
Derrida, Jacques (2001b): »Le cinéma et ses fantômes«. In:
Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 556, p. 74-85.
Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid (2006): »›Eine Aussicht auf die
Zukunft, so wie in einem optischen Kasten‹. Transzendente Perspektive, optische Illusion und beständiger
Schein bei Immanuel Kant und Johann Heinrich Lambert«. In: Gertrud Koch/Christiane Voss (ed.): ...kraft der
Illusion. München: Fink, p. 103-120.
Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid (2007): Praktiken der Illusion.
Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Benjamin bis Donna J. Haraway.
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Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8.
Diderot, Denis (1968): »Von der dramatischen
Dichtkunst«. In: Friedrich Bassenge (ed.): Denis
Diderot. Ästhetische Schriften. Out of the french
by F. Bas¬senge a. T. Lücke. Frankfurt/M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, p. 239-347.
Frantz, Pierre (1998): L’esthétique du tableau dans le
théâtre du XVIIIe siècle. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund (1982): »Die Zukunft einer Illusion«.
In: ibid.: Studienausgabe Band IX. Fragen der
Gesellschaft. Ursprünge der Religion. Frankfurt/M.:
Fischer, p. 135-190.
Haß, Ulrike (2004): »Wo glaubten die Szenographen,
daß sich ihr Publikum befände. Eine genauso
alte wie neue Frage«. [Unpublished lecture at the
conference »Theater sucht Publikum«. Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, march 2004.]
Haß, Ulrike (2005): Das Drama des Sehens. Auge, Blick
und Bühnenform. München: Fink.
Heeg, Günther (2000): Das Phantasma der natürlichen
Gestalt. Frankfurt/M. and Basel: Stroemfeld.
Kern, Andrea (2006): »Illusion als Ideal der Kunst«.
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der Illusion. München: Fink, p. 159-174.
Kluge, Alexander (1975): Gelegenheitsarbeit einer
Sklavin. Zur realistischen Methode. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp.
Koch, Gertrud/Christiane Voss (2006): ...kraft der
Illusion. München: Fink.
Koch, Gertrud (2006): »Müssen wir glauben, was
wir sehen? Zur filmischen Illu¬sions¬ästhetik«.
In: Koch/Christiane Voss: ...kraft der Illusion.
München: Fink, p. 53-70.
Ladzarzig, Jan (2005): »Illusion«. In: Erika FischerLichte/Doris Kolesch Matthias Warstatt (ed.):
Metzler Lexikon Theaterheorie. Stuttgart and
Weimar: Metzler, p. 140-142.
Laudenbach, Peter: »Hexenküche Wirklichkeit.
Theatertreffen 2006: Das Dokumentarstück ist
wieder da«. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22.5.2006,
p. 11.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (1999 a): »TheatReales«. In:
Theater der Welt 1999 in Berlin. Arbeitsbuch.
Berlin: Theater der Zeit, p. 65-59.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (1999 b): Postdramatisches
Theater. Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Autoren.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006): »(Sich) Darstellen. Sechs
Hinweise auf das Obszöne«. In: Krassimira Kruschkova
(ed.): Ob?Scene. Zur Präsenz der Ab¬senz im zeitgenössischen Tanz, Theater und Film. Wien a.o.: Böhlau, p.
33-48.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1981): Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Marx, Karl/Friedrich Engels (1978): »Die deutsche Ideologie«. In: Marx/Engels: Werke. Volume 3, Berlin: Dietz,
p. 9-580.
Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus (2002): Das Theater des »konstruktiven Defaitismus«. Lektüren zur Theorie eines Theaters der
A-Identität bei Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht und Heiner
Müller. Frankfurt and Basel: Stroemfeld.
Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus (2007): »Lügen Tränen nicht? Ausdruck, Konvention und Körper in der Wooster GroupProduktion ›To you the birdie (Phèdre)‹«. In: Bierl, Anton
a.o. (ed.): Theater des Fragments. Performative Strategien im Theater zwischen Antike und Postmoderne.
Bielefeld, p. 183-206.
Nakas, Kassandra/Britta Schmitz (2006): The Atlas Group
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Nakas, Kassandra (2006): »Bilder der Verfehlung, fehlende
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Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, p. 21-24.
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Théâtre. Paris: Dunod, p. 167-169.
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Strube, Werner (1971): Ästhetische Illusion. Bochum:
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Wiesing, Lambert (2006): »Von der defekten Illusion
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Bildtheorien«. In: Gertrud Koch/Christiane Voss (ed.):
...kraft der Illusion. München: Fink, p. 89-102.
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Saturday 24 March
Gintersdorfer/Klaßen
Theatre director Monika
Gintersdorfer and visual artist Knut
Klaßen have been collaborating
for the last eight years on projects
involving performative forms of
film, theatre, and dance. Using a
combination of movement and
text, they juxtapose contemporary
and traditional cultures in Africa
and Europe, creating a bridge
for different dance cultures to
encounter one another. Together
with their German/Ivory Coast
teams, they created the five-part
dance series “LOGOBI”. In 2012
they released a music album,
NEW BLACK Couper Decaler
électronique, on the Buback
label mixing Ivorian and German
musicians with extraordinary club
sounds.
LOGOBI 02
Gudrun Lange works as an
independent choreographer and
dancer, and develops projects with
both professionals and youth. In
2012–14 she received a grant to
produce her own work, and to
found her own company. Her work
seeks out the connections between
art and daily life, using her body as
the medium for both.
by Gintersdorfer/Klaßen
With speech and gesture, the performer
attempts to impress his audience. It’s a dance for
gangsters, a dance that has fallen out of the sky.
A German dancer and an Ivorian dancer meet
on an empty stage to begin a dialogue in front of
the audience. While the Ivorian dancer describes
African Dance tradition and street dances
like Logobi and Coupé-Decalé, the German
dancer translates and demonstrates aspects of
contemporary European dance—they compare
and contrast by presenting the varying styles of
movement, and examining their relevance and
meaning in different contexts. Through these
dialogues and demonstrations, perceptions of
African and European dance collide. Are these
only questions about dance, or is there more to it
than first meets the eye?
Gotta Depri founded the
theatre-group “Les Guirivoires”
in Abidjan, and received the
Ivory Coast Young Choreographer
Prize. He is currently working
as a dancer and choreographer
in Germany, where he has
collaborated with Gintersdorfer/
Klaßen on productions like
“Betrügen” (Kampnagel Hamburg,
Sophiensaele Berlin, Zürcher
Theaterspektakel), “Warum
Gott Afrika verlassen hat“
(Theaterdiscounter Berlin),
“The end of the Western”
(Internationale Keuze, Rotterdam)
and “The International Criminal
Court” (Theater Bremen).
Gintersdorfer/Klaßen say about their work:
“Everything is what it is. There is nothing
symbolic, parodic or illusionistic about our work,
but we do not always tell the whole truth. As far
as possible we want a direct transport between
life in the theatre and the theatre in life”.
Photo © Knut Klaßen
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119
Saturday 24 March
Party at BlackBox with
DJ SHAGGY SHAROOF
Coupé-Decalé
The afterparty was hosted at
Black Box theatre, and it was a
joint celebration between the
theatre’s own Oslo International
Theaterfestival and the Monsters
of Reality festival.
Coupé-Decalé was invented in Paris by a group
of young Ivorian men, who called themselves
“La Jet Set”. At the same time there were DJs
and musicians in Ivory Coast working on mainly Congolese beats and changing them into
what you today would call Coupé-Decalé beats.
Their leader named himself after the president
‘Douk–Saga’ and they created the style, dance
moves, and important slogans, that define
Coupé-Decalé. The group has an anarchistic,
shameless, and competitive spirit that involves
showing off in various creative ways. They play
with the social order by adopting nicknames,
such as ‘The Banker’, ‘The Ambassador’, ‘Sarkozy’, and ‘Versace’.
DJ Shaggy Sharoof flew in from
Paris where he is part of the
innovative music-style ‘CoupéDécalé’, as it has developed
on the club-scene of Paris
and Berlin. He is also part
of the artistic crew working
with Gintersdorfer/ Klaßen.
Photo © Knut Klaßen
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121
Sunday 25 March
Shannon Jackson
Professor of Rhetoric, and of
Theater, Dance, and Performance
Studies, and Director of the Arts
Research Center at UC Berkeley. Her
work has explored the relationship
between performance and social
reform, between performance and
the disciplines of higher education,
and between performance and
contemporary socially engaged
art. Her most recent book is Social
Works: Performing Art, Supporting
Publics (2011).
REALITY’S
REFERENTS:
Forms of the real across the arts
by Shannon Jackson
After listening to speakers and audience
members at yesterday’s symposium—and
thinking too about the performance we saw last
night—I decided that it would be best to revise
the lecture I had prepared. The title of my talk,
“Reality’s Referents: Forms of the ‘Real’ across
the Arts”, still reflects what I would like to
discuss. However, given the varied associations
and responses to this word “reality”, I decided
to back up and see if we can create some
common ground. For me, such a task means
foregrounding the very different notions that
we have for ‘real’ in our conversations. I beg
your indulgence as I try to work through a
different line of thought than I had originally
planned.
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123
I take it as axiomatic that the question of reality has been debated for
centuries. I also take it as axiomatic that, after the World Wars of the 20th
century, the circulation of theories of deconstruction and simulation in
the late 20th century, and the new technologies at work in the early 21st,
many of us now share a basic ‘thought-structure’ in posing and answering
questions around reality. This thought-structure assumes that reality is
not something that exists prior to representation; rather, we conceive of it
as something that comes into being by virtue of representation. Whether
we are philosophers or gamers, we have been disabused of the notion
that there is a ‘real’ before representation. And yet, while we might all
share some version of that basic thought-structure, there is incredible
variation of where we take it, how we apply it, and the consequences we
draw from it. As discussed by speakers and interlocutors yesterday, when
we debate the finer points of Zizek, or Bourriaud, or Lacan, or Derrida, we
find ourselves invoking different reference points and placing ourselves
in different histories of political and philosophical debate.
Hence, it seems to me more helpful to back up in order to take a kind
of audit of what this variety might be and how it manifests itself in art and
performance. Let us first consider how reality and its representational
processes are intertwined. To start, we might look at a variety of artistic
forms that have some sort of stake in the real, or where something like the
word “real” has been used to characterize its techniques and its effects.
We could consider Karen Finley’s performance art, where the reference
to the real often has something to do with her hyper-‘embodiedness’—
and to the ‘shock’ effects that embodiedness elicited. Earlier in the 20th
century, we could consider Allan Kaprow’s Happenings—forms that
sought to push or undo the boundaries that separated art and life. The
associations to the real we see in Finley are related to those that we find
in Kaprow, but I would submit that they are not necessarily equivalent in
their techniques, their aspirations, or their effects. Within the visual art
world, a figure like Rirkrit Tiravanija is placed within this performance art
genealogy, but also a relational art scene that descends from and deviates
from the early Happenings. Tiravanija is an internationally acclaimed
conceptual artist who is known for re-inhabiting the art gallery space,
taking it over to place interactions and events, such as his famous Thai
cooking gathering inside the museum space. For Tiravanija and other
relational artists, the resulting relational exchange is the central material
of their art practice.
We might also consider a quite different cluster of artistic and
performance forms that invoke the real. Consider, for instance, other
contemporary artists who work with ‘real people’. We can consider those
who come from the domain of community art or community theater,
or those, such as US-based artist Theaster Gates who gives community
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Monsters Of Reality
art a conceptual frame in the form of potlucks, libraries, and alternate
churches to reform marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago, Saint Louis,
and more. Located within the visual art world but still quite different from
Gates, we can consider the techniques of the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen
and Dragset who install people inside the gallery as well. In projects like
“The Welfare Show”, they secured ‘real people’—in this case, members of
a city who are unemployed—and employed them as security guards in a
museum; in ways that are both compelling and unnerving, the ‘assembly’
of real people functions as both the object and subject of the artwork.
Gates’ and Elmgreen and Dragset’s practices of working with real people
are related to, but still different from, the forms and techniques used
by our symposium visitors Rimini Protokoll, whose projects—such as
“Call Cutta in a Box”, “Cargo Sophia”, “100 Percent Berlin”, “100 Percent
Athens”, and many others—rework a tradition of documentary theatre to
devise temporary, large-scale performances with the real people whom
they call ‘experts’. If all of the above are performance forms that invoke
the real in some way, we need also to recall other theatrical genealogies
of the real. We might ask how contemporary “Monsters of Reality” relate
to something like Ibsen or Chekhov and the host of realistic dramas
that they spawned. While vastly different in technique and aspiration,
“realistic theatre” is again one of many different art forms that have a
stake in something like the real. I could go on and on with examples,
but as a last opening example, consider this guerrilla art project by
Temporary Services in Chicago. Temporary Services take real people out
of the gallery—or out of the theatre—and into the streets. The ‘street’
might be a signal of the ‘real’ in this work, but it also seems to me that the
conditions for understanding the ‘reality effects’ of this piece will differ
depending upon how we understand its shift in time and space. Our
sense of its ‘reality’ quotient will also differ depending upon whether one
reads it as an urban planner or as a choreographer, whether one sees it as
a piece of street theatre or as a piece of counterpublic art. In other words,
and to advance my interest in thinking about how reality’s referents
differ “across the arts”, the reality effects of this, and any art piece, will
be different depending upon whether you measure its distance from
architecture or dance, from theatre or from sculpture.
Having begun to survey, if all too briefly, a sampling of artistic
forms, it becomes clear that the techniques and effects of ‘reality-based’
art vary as well. Let us continue the auditing task and think about the
number of associations invoked in our conversation yesterday. For some,
reality seems to be about liveness, a reference that is based in a mode of
perception and that also invokes a particular aesthetic terminology. For
others, reality seems to be about participation, or a mode of interaction
and exchange that creates a different kind of activity for the beholder
Monsters Of Reality
125
or audience member. Still others feel that action is a signifier of reality.
Here again, we might find formal or political variation in how action
is understood. If one understands ‘action’ from the perspective of the
dramatic actor, it is slightly different than it would be for artists who
introduce action in a visual arts world that conventionally exhibited
static objects. A turn to action feels somewhat different for an artist used
to creating painting and sculpture than it would be for an artist in the
theatre. And the associations are different still for an artist whose turn to
‘action’ is aligned politically with the action of activism. Is reality-based
art more simply art that is trying not to be an illusion? In this and other
instances, we are defining the work in relation to something that it is not.
Reality-based art is not an illusion; it is not a fiction; it is not standing in
for something that it is not. All such cases, of course, need the notion of
fiction and the notion of illusion to exist in the first place. Is reality in
art about spontaneity? Yesterday, we spoke about being the mistake, the
unexpected, the unplanned, the unrehearsed. All of these associations
approach, and keep their distance from, something like improvisation,
a more structured way of managing the unplanned; nevertheless, the
artworks all seem to be trying to create an event that allows for the eruption
of the spontaneous, trying paradoxically to mediate the apparently
unmediated intrusion of the real. Other ways of thinking about reality
in art might have to do, not only with these perceptual dimensions, but
also with different value-systems. For example, some of you have been
wondering whether historical truth should function as a kind of arbiter for
how we understand the effects of this reality-based practice. Many of you
worried too about the political effects of certain art projects, projects that
seek social transformation. Is actual social transformation possible inside
these art practices? Is such transformation the only reality that matters?
Or is the model of efficacy in social transformation precisely what realitybased works question? Some are more focused than others on the
ethical position we see in these works. When real people are integrated
into the work, interviewed as part of the work, or displayed inside the
work, ethical issues surface, and the question of their ‘real effects’ can
become quite urgent. The authenticity question often comes right on
the heels of the ethics question. In my own research for Social Works, I
found myself most inspired by artists who shifted the terms in order to
expose the institutions, processes, and infrastructures that produce our
sense of truth, politics, ethics, and authenticity in the first place. So for
me, the ‘reality’ question in art is most interesting when it is positioned
to expose the material conditions that produce it. In such projects, the
reality assumed turns out to be a fiction produced. The normality and
naturalness of an artwork, or of a social world, turns out to be dependent
upon material conditions, often conditions that are obscured from view.
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When we uncover those material conditions, perhaps we could say that
we are in the real, or, at least in a place where an investment in ‘the real’
occurs. Once again, we could go on, and on and on with this excavation of
the many associations that we attach to the Real…
I feel that it is important to conduct such audits of our ‘reality’
conversations for a number of reasons. Even my little survey above
exposes our participation in very different discourses; it is important
to acknowledge a range of reference amongst terms such as “liveness”,
“participation”, “spontaneity”, “truth”, or “authenticity”. Such
acknowledgement is not a relativistic exercise but one that helps us
gain a modicum of control over our wide-ranging debates. For me
at least, a degree of discursive diligence allows us to put parameters
around the conversation that we are having. One person might want
to start a conversation about spontaneity, while another wants to talk
about material conditions. Meanwhile, in another corner, someone
might raise the topic of participation, and someone else responds by
invoking the values of historical truth. A question is proffered in one
register, answered in a second register, and qualified in yet a third. In
these confusing contexts, it seems important to gain a better sense of
what register is operating at any given point in a conversation. For me,
there are also artistic reasons for having a better understanding of the
range of reality’s referents. Earlier, I suggested that we share a general
agreement that representational processes are part and parcel of the
production and experience of the ‘real’. Once we say that, however, we
still have to confront the range of forms that do the work of representing.
Even if “reality is representation”, the forms that a dancer/choreographer
uses to do her representing might be somewhat different to the forms
used by someone trained in the visual arts, which again might be
different to those used by an architect or theatre director. I do not want
to over-emphasize artistic differences, but it is sometimes helpful
to emphasize the different materials that artists use to engage in an
act of representation; as such, they have different histories, different
conventions, and different investments in the real. Some artists regularly
use bodies, and others regularly do not. If a body emerges in a zone
unused to that medium, by extension, that break in convention is more
likely to produce a ‘reality’ effect. Some artists conventionally manipulate
time, while others conventionally manipulate space. Some habitually
cultivate affect. Some organize language by default, while some always
turn to image; meanwhile, others conventionally turn to sound. And we
could go on and on. But my point is that our perception of the innovation
of an artwork will in part depend upon the conventions of the art practice
deployed. We might talk about an organization of space and image in
painting, or we might talk about an organization of body, space, time,
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affect, language, and image that is a theatre practice. Or we might think
about the time, space, body and no-language practice that is part of the
convention of dance. Understanding these conventions turns out to
have implications for how we understand the techniques and effects of
reality-based art. The deployment of a medium or technique in a zone
where such a medium or technique is new or unfamiliar instigates effects
that feel real. Most importantly, the break in artistic convention is a key
technique for producing the perception of reality’s intrusion. If language
is conventionally used, try not using it. If stasis is the norm, try turning to
time. If sound is the norm, try silence. A break in artistic convention can
produce our perception of the Real in reality-based art.
Let me see if I can get farther with this latter point, since these kinds
of inter-arts questions and histories have been so important to my work
of late. First of all, disciplinary barometers will influence our encounters
with reality-based art forms. Think again about one of Allan Kaprow’s
happenings. We might have a different sense of what this form is doing
depending on whether we understand it to be disrupting the art gallery
or disrupting the theatre. Even if there is a shared sense that ‘the real’
has ‘happened’, the production of that reality-effect depends upon
how it breaks with an inherited set of conventions. What conventions
did Kaprow understand himself to be disrupting? Or, perhaps more
precisely, what convention of disruption was he carrying forward?
Consider the action paintings of Jackson Pollock to begin to answer that
question. Pollock is a key resource for Kaprow and one of the figures
who prompted art critic Harold Rosenberg to invoke the term “action
painting” in the first place. For Rosenberg and other art critics, the most
important element in Pollock’s all-over canvases—such as, say “Lavender
Mist”,—was the action that produced that painting. So when a beholder
encountered that painting, at least the kind of beholder that Rosenberg
had in mind, this receiver became completely aware of the actions of the
action painter who produced it. That action of painting was not repressed
or transcended in order to appreciate the final work; rather the action of
painting was part of what the beholder experienced in the presence of
the painting. Notably, Rosenberg used the word “real” and its synonyms
in order to describe this kind of painterly innovation and its effects on
the beholder who felt him or herself to be face to face with Reality in the
moment of encounter.
Let’s try a different artistic trajectory, say a minimalist sculpture
such as Tony Smith’s “Die”. This is another mode of visual art practice
where the discourse of the Real was key to its interpretation. Minimalist
sculptures of the 1960s purportedly created an experience in the
gallery that altered our sense of perception. The argument from several
minimalist sculptors was that the moment of encounter required
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beholders to become more aware of their co-production of a work, of the
role that they, as receivers, had in co-producing this particular art object.
As sculptor Robert Morris said, you become aware of yourself as a person
in a room with things, and that kind of environmental awareness makes
us more sensible to the space around us and to the role of the beholder
in defining the work as art in the first place. In that spectatorial effect lay
the “really realness” of the Minimalist gesture.
Those are only two different places where we encounter a break with
the conventions of visual art practice that in turn produce our perception
of the real. The reality effect is based in part on the artwork’s violation of an
inherited set of visual art conventions. Those breaks in convention might
not be fully intelligible to a different kind of artist, say, or choreographer
or a theatre practitioner who might not feel the significance of the reality
effects in the same way. Indeed, what looks like Reality in one context
might look bafflingly opaque in another, or conversely, like the re-use
of familiar artistic convention in another. Once we start to gather and
analyze a range of forms—Karen Finley, Allan Kaprow, Jackson Pollock,
Tony Smith—we realize that a break with convention in one context
might look like a reproduction of convention in another. Similarly,
while some might experience a disruption happening in one way, others
might have different ideas of where it is occurring. Innovation to some
looks like tradition to others. This realization must prompt us to qualify
our understanding of experiment in reality-based art. What feels like
intrusion of reality to one person might actually look like a staged and
scripted convention to another. I think this also came up yesterday when
Pia Maria Roll was talking about how audiences get used to certain kind
of conventions in documentary or reality-based theatre. If I, for instance,
speak to you now and then move forward out of the light (Jackson moves
forward centre stage and into the audience) we can say that some version
of the Real has punctuated the space, flickered in the space for just a
minute. That reality-effect occurs because I broke the convention of the
proscenium. Or we can try silence (Jackson stops talking and stands still)…
Let it be quiet for a while… We can say that some version of the Real has
come about. But this perception of Reality is based on the fact that there
was a threshold to cross, one architectural, the other sonic. The crossing
of the threshold produced the “really real” feeling. This is, on some level,
obvious. But I am in a number of situations where artists come from
quite different kinds of backgrounds, and, as such, have different ideas
of what is at stake in deploying a range of medium-based techniques. I
often try to raise these inter-art questions because it often feels to me that
experimental, hybrid work still circulates in un-hybridized art networks.
Expanded visual artists are talking to other expanded visual artists; sitespecific choreographers are talking to other site-specific choreographers;
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post-dramatic theatre-makers talk to other post-dramatic theatremakers. There are exceptions. Rimini Protokoll is interesting because
they actually circulate in quite a different artistic network; they make
work for the white cube of the visual art gallery as well as for streets and
for theatres. But it does seem to me that there still is a sort of inertia in
our language and in the professional networks in which we circulate. As
such, our artistic understanding of what it means to make a “Monster of
Reality” differs enormously as well.
I would like to close with a final example that combines a variety of
these questions into a single piece—and also shows how inter-art questions
about reality, form, and realism can challenge each other. As I continue, I
would like you to recall those notions of liveness and participation, as well
as notions of action and spectatorship, remembering too the question
about whether reality-based art is primarily anti-illusionistic. Having
recalled some key works in a visual art genealogy—Pollock, Kaprow,
Morris—let’s also recall some key innovators in theatre practice, maybe
even an innovator in the form of realistic theatre which is now so often
rejected by reality-based art. Let’s remember Stanislavski and how he
might have told his actors to begin; how might he have told his actors to
produce the reality effects of realistic acting?
This brings me to a work by David Levine. Levine is someone who helps me
think about what it means to join the reality-effects of Minimalist sculpture,
the reality-effects of live art performances, and, however improbably, the
reality-effects of theatrical realism. Levine dropped out of a doctorate
program in English to pursue an MFA in directing; his postgraduate life
included some credits in theatre direction. But fairly soon, he left theatre
to become a visual artist—a move that seems less about forsaking the
medium than about trying to find a different art economy in which to make
an artistic life. His visual artwork consistently uses the stuff of theatre,
but he often places that stuff in art galleries. Along the way he has written
about the relation between theatre and visual art, including a piece called
“Bad Objecthood” which reads like a Michael Fried self-exorcism. But
there is also a kind of theatrical sense to his visual art-based work. Levine
cast an American actor as a character in a Heiner Müller play in a piece
called “Bauerntheater” in 2007, but Levine required the actor to till potato
fields for ten hours a day for a month.
Every action meets with a reaction which in turns intensifies
the first. In every play, besides the main action we find its
opposite counter-action. This is fortunate because its inevitable result is more action. We need that clash of purposes,
and all the problems to solve that grows out of them. They
cause activity which is the basis of our art.
Everybody who has been in a realistic acting class remembers these
directives. This is how Stanislavski asks actors to think about the
management of time. Realistic acting vexes many of us in experimental
theatre. Certainly in the United States, in many of our American academic
departments, it is the mode that is taught most ubiquitously, and it is
the mode that our undergraduate students most want. The skills are of
course regularly critiqued for being ideologically loaded, especially to
those who prefer their acting to be Brechtian, to those who champion the
performance-art of the Karen Finley legacy. But wherever we ended up in
the business of teaching theatre and analyzing performance, I think that
for some of us the realistic acting class was our first exposure to the thrills
and pleasures of theatre. We remember learning the beats, the objectives,
the obstacles, and super-objectives. We remember the intensities of
scene-study, and the character breakthroughs that made the acting space
feel like the most lively thing, the most real thing, in one’s life.
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Photo © David Levine
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The directive thus joined the illusionistic reality of a realistic charactercreation to the very different reality-effects of liveness at work in endurance
performance. Levine has framed the vexed relationship between acting
and laboring in other pieces as well; for example, in the piece, Levine
paid actors to do their day-jobs, casting them with union contracts as
administrative assistants, postal distributors, messengers, and waiters.
This might be more relevant in an American context where artists rarely
have a way to secure health insurance unless employed outside of the arts,
so the day-job is a central part of the artist’s labor system. Levine’s concept
both prompted a reflection about where the lines between acting and
non-acting were drawn but, more intensely, also exposed the fragile and
temporary economy—the material conditions—on which actors rely. As per
union rules, David Levine’s contracts specified the size of the performance
space, and its lighting and technical support. Under the category of
costume, the contract specified that it would be “supplied by the actor”.
Levine continued to expose the plaintiveness, the poignancy, and the
perplexity of the acting profession in a piece called “Hopeful”, in which he
filled Cabinet art galleries with unsolicited headshots of actors hoping for
work. Whether smiling to show or to hide their teeth, looking toward or
away from the camera, the display of the headshot was an exposure and a
reframing of the desperation that motors this creative industry.
Levine’s newer project brings these questions back to earlier reflections
on time and space. His project entitled “Habit” received its workshop
premiere at Mass MOCA and its full premiere at the Luminato festival in
Toronto last June. The piece consists of a house-like structure constructed
hyper-realistically and installed in a gallery space. Lights ‘really’ turn on,
and water ‘really’ runs through its pipe. Enclosed on all sides except for
windows and doors, three actors inhabit the room to perform a threeperson play. The play is performed continuously, in a loop, for nine
hours—the amount of time the gallery remains open.
Photo © David Levine
The intensity of that loop is a reminder that some forms of endurance
performance actually conform to the institutional conventions of the
visual art museum display. The script performed inside the house is not in
fact titled “Habit” but “Children of Kings”, and was written by Jason Grote
on commission from Levine. Marsha Ginsburg created the drawings on
the set, also on commission from Levine. The parameters thus deviate
from the normal conventions of crediting and labor in traditional theatre.
Levine is not the director of “Children of Kings” by Jason Grote, with setdesign by Martha Ginsburg; rather, Levine has conceived a piece entitled
“Habit”, in which Grote’s play and Ginsburg’s set are a kind of raw material.
The actors supply material too, committing to playing out the scenes of an
excruciating twenty-something love-triangle complete with Cain and Abellike brothers and a female character who is a Madonna/Whore coke-addict
and a student of semiotics, all at once. Levine’s aim was to commission
“an absolutely autonomous and heartfelt piece of contemporary American
realism—because realism is one of our habits”, he says.
Photo © David Levine
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Photo © David Levine
While I might want to argue about how necessary a sort of laconic
form of Gen-X sexism was to depicting the habit of realism, the other
conventions of acting it out certainly were. These conventions of realistic
acting are a central part of what Levine is installing in this gallery. The
play was written to allow the creativity, and structures, and choices, of
actors to unfold as a central drama within the piece. The pleasures of
Stanislavskian scene-study are brought to the gallery. Says Levine: “The
play is one that has really flexible beats. Beats that the actors can ride and
modify, flex and surf…: “Habit” is all about stage-business”. The sense of
stage-business is both celebrated and put under scrutiny.
Given this mix of inter-art influences, it has been interesting to
explore the reception of the piece. One response, written by a museum
curator, talks about how this kind of piece activates the gallery: “It
brings front and center how we engage and how we view, as if you were
to decide how much or how little you want to see. How close do you want
to get, how long do you want to stare”. This kind of interpretative frame
recalls conventional ways of writing about the break in convention that
spawned so much post-Minimalist art. It is a kind of orientation that
assumes that a viewer accustomed to the exhibition of static objects is
now being asked to become the dynamic viewer of a time-based action.
The heretofore static conventions of sculptural space are being disrupted
by actions that are unfolding in time. But there are a few things that this
visual arts trajectory misses; for one, it does not quite track the effects
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of how time and space are delineated from another perspective In other
words, what happens to the temporal event of theatre when moved into
the conventional space of a static encounter? It isn’t just that time is
activating space, but also that space is stopping time . At the very least,
the gallery setting stops, interrupts, or stalls the conventional temporality
with which theatre is typically received, taking the art out of the play by
having it repeat, making the action of acting available for reflection, and
exposing the action of acting as a form of time-based labor.
In this kind of work, we find various artistic conventions challenged
and other conventions re-instated, a conflation of codes that complicates
the reality-effects of what we think we are encountering. This is a “really
real” endurance performance that is also a kind of realistic theatre. It is
an endurance performance that is also a job. It is a fairly conventional
acting job—but an acting job that is also a day job. In fact, it is an acting
job that is an all-day day job, exposing the material conditions that
form the real basis of actors’ laboring lives. As such, “Habit” is an odd
and provocative ‘monster of reality’ precisely because it conflates and
juxtaposes the limits and potentials of several kinds of reality aesthetics.
If it is post-dramatic theatre, it is a strange one that obsessively returns to
a conventional dramatic form. If it is reality-based visual art installation,
this reality is produced by an aesthetic that understands stasis to be
traditional and duration to be innovative. But, finally, “Habit” is an
exercise that installs the conventions of realistic theatre into a gallery
space, which brings the pleasures and ideological insidiousness of
realistic theatre startlingly into view. It displays actors making illusion,
and suddenly, the making of illusion becomes an element of reality, not
a vehicle for repressing it. Finally, by stalling and installing conventions
of time and space, this piece and other experimental performance
forms foreground the precarious formation of reality. And they do so by
questioning what precisely the referents for the Real might be.
Endnote
This is an edited version of a lecture delivered in March 2012
at the symposium, ”Monsters of Reality” in Oslo, Norway.
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Sunday 25 March
Rimini Protokoll
PROMETHEUS
IN ATHENS
Rimini Protokoll consists of
Helgard Haug, Stefa Kaegi, and
Daniel Wetzel. They work together
in various combinations and have
been artists in residence at Hebbel
am Ufer (HAU) Berlin. They have
attracted international attention
with their dramatic works, which
take place in that colorful zone
between reality and fiction. Since
2000, Rimini Protokoll has brought
its “theatre of experts” to the stage
and into city spaces, interpreted by
non-professional actors, dubbed
“experts” for that very reason.
by Rimini Protokoll (Haug/Wetzel)
Photo © © Ellen Bornkessel / Stiftung Zollverein
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Performers from the 2010
staging of “Prometheus in
Athens” appearing on stage at
Dramatikkens hus:
Theofano-Stefania (Fani)
Karantsiouni –
is a PhD candidate in the Panteion
University of Athens’ Department
of Political Science, but she’s still
working as a clerk for a courier
services company. Her goal is to
reach a better personal and social
life through persistent effort. She
identified herself with Prometheus,
because of his rebellious action
in stealing something seen as
exclusive, and transforming it into
knowledge and power for everyone.
George Emmanouilidis –
is a transportation engineer and
planner who has had enough
of the ongoing crisis in Greece,
and is looking to find a proper
job abroad. In his personal life,
he is still a single man searching
for a girl—this being the main
reason for his participation in the
play. So if you are an employer,
or a girl, or maybe both, contact
him on emmanouilidisgeorge@
hotmail.com. He identified himself
with Via (violence)in the Athens
performance, because no one
wanted to hold the sign.
Jonida Kapetani –
is a communications specialist,
which is why she identified herself
with Oceanus. Jonida was born to
live as an economic refugee! After
the fall of communism in Albania,
she moved to Athens. After 20 years
and the collapse of Greek economy,
she moved again to London. Lately
Jonida has become an entrepreneur,
offering Londoners a Greek culinary
experience.
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Prodromos Tsinikoris –
is a documentary theatre director
and actor. He was born to Greek
parents in Wuppertal, Germany,
studied in Thessaloniki, lived
in Athens, and, because of the
financial crisis, now works in
Berlin. He identified himself with
Io, because he can’t find a place
to stay.
Pavlos Laoutaris –
is a labor economist working for
the Greek Public Employment
Service. He is currently working
on a re-engineering project
for this organization that is
being financed by the European
Union. He identified himself
with Hephaestus, because in his
professional life Pavlos has to
follow strict rules that sometimes
contradict his own beliefs, just like
this god.
Technician in Oslo:
Tobias Klette
Credits
Video:
Haos Film Athens –
www.haosfilm.com
Video direction:
Athina Tsagari
Direction of photography:
Elias Adamis
Photo © Daniel Wetzel
Prometheus Bound—what do Athenians know,
and what do they think about the myth and play
today? Prometheus in Athens puts this question
to 103 contemporary citizens of Athens who were
chosen according to two criteria. On the one
hand, these 103 Athenians are representatives
of the city according to official statistics. On the
other hand, they identify or sympathize with
particular aspects of the ancient Greek tragedy,
Prometheus Bound.
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Photo © Daniel Wetzel
This special lecture-performance shows a film of
the performance event in Athens 2010, while five
of the performers from Prometheus in Athens
appear live on stage in dialogue with the film.
The Athenian citizens whom Rimini Protokoll
presented onstage were people with experience
of suffering; people who considered themselves
part of an uncompromising insurgency;
people who saw their jobs as a continuation
of a Promethean effort to improve the human
condition; people who uneasily exercised the
powers of the state; people on the run; people
prepared to break the law for the sake of others;
and people who looked to God over civic society
as the ultimate legislator.
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Sunday 25 March
Bjørn Rasmussen
Professor at the Department of
Art and Media Studies, NTNU,
Norway. His research experience
includes: applied theatre,
performativity, constructivist
aesthetics and epistemology,
and drama education theory.
Publications include: Art as part
of everyday life: understanding
applied theatre practices through
the aesthetics of John Dewey and
Hans-Georg Gadamer (2006, with
Rikke Gürgens), and Nice, but
not necessary. DRAMA : Nordisk
dramapedagogisk tidsskrift (2011).
Really
Fantastical
Reflections on the Monsters of Reality
seminar, Dramatikkens hus, Oslo
This article has been translated from Norwegian and was previously published in the
Norwegian theatre journal Norsk Shakespeare-og teatertidsskrift(2-3/2012)
by Bjørn Rasmussen
On the initiative of curator and dramaturg, Siri
Forberg, and in cooperation with the Danish
National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen
(Continuing Education), Dramatikkens hus in Oslo
hosted a seminar on the relationship between theatre
and reality: How to stage reality and why? After a
shaky start, when the subject’s complexity appeared
overwhelming, the issues and concepts became
gradually clearer through lectures, discussions and
performances. Hence, the dramaturgical highlight
of the seminar also came on the last day with Rimini
Protokoll’s lecture performance of Prometheus in
Athens, and the theoretical contribution by Shannon
Jackson. Both made solid impressions and contributed
to the discussion by pointing out which dramaturgic
effects can help in experiencing and constructing
this aesthetic and social reality. Seminars like this are
appreciated as forums for both practice and theory
and are undoubtedly important in the development of
Norwegian theatre and theatre science.
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In the introductory panel discussion, which included, among others,
the Danish playwright Christian Lollike, and the researcher Lars Gule,
we got an idea of one monster from reality: Anders Breivik. Apart from
this reference, we never really got to understand what kinds of monsters
we are dealing with in a contemporary documentary theatre, or one that
tries to show different degrees of ‘reality’. Is it monstrous to challenge
the barriers between artistic and social reality? I learned little about
monsters but more about the ambiguities that arise when contemporary
(postmodern) cultural practices are combined with the (modern) mindset
of the past. The following is a reflection on the role and development
of theatre in a society where the extraordinary and the virtual are both
reflections of our social reality.
From hierarchical representation to performative statements
The modern way of thinking strongly manifests itself in conversations
about art, where autonomy is understood as a closed or fictional universe:
one fears that this kind of autonomy will disappear when reality is ‘placed’
on stage. Or it is expressed in different forms of representation, which fail to
clarify the difference between self-representation and external reference,
and which put emphasis on theatre as representation rather than
theatre as a critique of representation. A modern mindset is determined
to separate real facts from unreal fiction. Many share the empirical
worldview on which Western modernity is built, including scientists,
artists and art historians. Objects, events and knowledge all belong to
a given reality that exists beyond performances and representations
of that same reality. Often, when discussing the relationship between
theatre and reality, many presume that a divide exists between actual and
represented reality in the sense that performances/representations are
considered less real and less meaningful than that which they actually
represent (i.e. the given facts). It is as if the modern human being is
born to defend the power structure between the one who represents and
what is actually represented. Hierarchical representation is the basis
of modern communication—in the idea of entertainment, education,
traditional rhetoric, politics and so on. But it is also implemented in
the understanding of mimesis and the practice of art in modern society.
Whether it concerns direct imitation, or a more sophisticated, poetic,
and mediated representation, the relationship between subject and
object is often portrayed as a power structure—one part holding a more
real and therefore a higher, status than the other. An example of this
kind of power structure is the way that the art of theatre refers to plays.
In line with this kind of thinking, the covering of the Syrian rebellion
through mobile telephony would be a more real act than Rabih Mroué’s
performance lecture ‘The pixelated revolution’, which is a documented
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representation of the Syrian rebels’ own documentation through mobile
telephony. But is that true?
To a pre- or postmodern human mind, all reality is a representation
of reality. We only know the world through our own or others’ perceptions
of reality. This is why performative statements, like theatre, are not only
a part of our reality, but also actively constitute our reality. Mroué’s
performance of the Syrian rebellion is not greater or less than the actual
Syrian reality, but rather, a contribution to that reality. ‘Prometheus in
Athens’ by Rimini Protokoll is not ‘insignificant’ poetry about the crisis
in Hellas; it is an aesthetic, yet also political, statement, which genuinely
contributes to that society. One example is the mobilisation and staging
of actual Greek citizens as actors, their self-representation, and the
appreciation of their lives and opinions. Another example is Rimini
Protokoll’s duplication and dissemination of their own production,
which contributes to a real, political dialogue on the present situation in
Greece.
Theatre is a linguistic device that constructs reality just like writing
and speech—and one cannot avoid representation in a linguistic
framework. One cannot talk, write or stage something without using
representation. Theatre, as a linguistic statement, is always representing
one thing or another. In the postmodern sense, this, above all, means
representation of a generated event or perspective; not a secondary
reference to something more authoritative or ‘given’ ‘outside the text’.
In other words, according to a postmodern mindset the world is not a
‘given’. It is not comprehensible until it is represented and staged, when
another reality will emerge. One reality then has the opportunity to yield
when meeting with another staged reality. It is in between the different
realities that meaning is found.
From the enclosed space of art to a life in practice
A society that prioritises scientific evidence, and believes reality is
located in given empirical facts, is an anti-ludic (lekfiendtligt) society. A
society opposed to play. Indeed, while poetic ideas of art are cherished
and nurtured as an institution, is it for the sake of the art or society? I
will dare to claim that the institution of art in modern, Western society
primarily serves to protect society and social reality from giving fictitious and
representational statements the same authority as political, pedagogical and
scientific statements. A late modern society that acknowledges (re)presented
reality, also makes room for linguistic autonomy, since the symbolic media
plays an increasingly larger role in our empirical reality. Art dissolves into the
social since the social creates a space for a reality characterised by symbolic
language. This does not mean that art loses its autonomy. It is about an
aestheticized and aesthetizing society where the label of ‘art’ risks becoming
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more of an obstacle than an advantage in developing democratic, virtual and
theatrical practice. Art in late modern society is «really» reality because “the
cultic” practice of our ideas, acts of language and constructions in symbolic
form to a large extent belongs to the reality.
In other words, the extraordinary belongs to our social everyday life. Allan
Kaprow first put this argument forward in the 1950s. In the current digital
and virtual revolution, this argument is more valid than ever. Linguistic and
aesthetic autonomy is now democratised and digitised.
Every time art closes in on itself, it does so in order to defend an
epistemology that society does not appear to value. The paradox is that we
continue to defend the existence of a society, which is hostile towards play
and art, and which does not tolerate any intrusion of the arts into reality.
Authentic fiction
Authenticity, which was also discussed at the festival/seminar, is another
modernist trait that does not sit too well with theatre practices in late
modernity. Some will claim that the modern human being’s yearning
for authenticity and reality developed alongside civilized society, where
social roles, games of facades, and self-presentations of position and
status replaced the ‘authentic’ life. Among other things, this yearning
made theatre modernists experiment with ideas that sought to explore
and portray other truths beneath the surface. Artists, who work with,
and in close relation to, social reality, may be considered the inheritors
of this modernist ambition. However, an important difference is that
art as a revealing and subversive practice is no longer extraordinary
but approaches the commonplace in linguistic occurrence and
communicative action. Play, myth, and art are (again) on their way to
becoming parts of a normal existence. (Re)presented like this, authenticity
vs. non-authenticity end up like the remains of the hierarchical system
of modernism, which is futile compared with the kind of documentary
theatre that predominates today.
Really fantastical
Within the field of culture studies, the “performative turn” is a known
concept, which implies, among other things, that we present and create
our identity and our culture through our actions—including artistic
ones. The presentation of today may become the reality of tomorrow. My
self-representation in the media (or the media’s presentation of ‘me’) can
easily become the new ‘me’. Through fiction, a new reality is made. From
this perspective, there is no noticeable difference between Laiv’s roleplay, the Youth’s Culture-parade, Rabih Mroué’s performance, the video
documentation of Syrian rebels, or Rimini Protokoll’s “Prometheus in
Athens”. The practices, which “Monsters of Reality” brought into focus,
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display a society where different kinds of plays, theatrical actions, and
staging are all important parts of the communicative and learning
society. We see before us competent, critical, and imaginative directors,
dramaturgs, producers, and performers, who give and facilitate,
‘lecture-performances’, and other kinds of plays and performances, at
educational institutions and other spaces of communication, such as
political meetings and hearings, festivals, tributes, and so on. Play and
art as representative practices become less real when stigmatised as
autonomous practices. We still have to pay the fool. Not in order to laugh
away her insights, but to let her sit in the king’s council and keep her
costume. There is nothing monstrous about such a reality.
“We only know the world
through our own or others’
perceptions of reality.
This is why performative
statements, like theatre,
are not only a part of our
reality, but also actively
constitute our reality”.
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SATURDAY 24 MARCH
Panel discussion
“How to stage reality and why?”
From left to right: Carol Martin,
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Pia Maria
Roll, Victoria Meirik, Toril Goksøyr
and Camilla Martens.
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Program
Monsters of Reality
17.30-17.45
Thursday 22 March
Introduction by organizer Siri Forberg
Saturday 24 March
10.30-11.00
Coffee
17.45-18.45
Who owns the reality? panel with Christian Lollike (Danish playwright & artistic leader at CafeTeatret, Copenhagen), Kjetil Røed, Lars Gule (Norwegian human rights activist and philosopher)
11.00-11.30
False awakening by Trine Falch
(performer and ex-member of the performancegroup Baktruppen)
18.45-19.00
BREAK
11.30-12.00
High on Reality by Toril Goksøyr/Camilla Martens
(performance project Goksøyr & Martens)
19.00-20.15
Performance: POINT BLANK (Edit Kaldor)
20.30-21.15
Artist-talk with Edit Kaldor by Kjetil Røed
12.00-12:30
Dialectics of the Document: Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric in “Almenrausch” - a Radio Hearing by Tore Vagn Lid (director/
auteur/artistic leader Transitteatret)
Friday 23 March
12.30-12.45
BREAK
10.30-11.00
Coffee
11.00-12.00
Theatre of the Real by Carol Martin
(Professor of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts,
New York University)
12.45-13.45
(Dis-)Believe. In search of a lost reality or playing with illusion
by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Professor at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main)
13.45.-14.45
LUNCH
12.00-12.30
Riding the Monster of Reality by Pia Roll
(performer and director) Lecture Performance
with Matthew Landy (47), Vice Precident and Head of
International Tax in Statoil and Astrid Landy (1) in collaboration with artist Pia Maria Roll (41).
14.45-16.30
How to stage reality and why?
Panel discussion with Carol Martin, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll,
Victoria Meirik, Pia Maria Roll, Camilla Martens and Toril Goksøyr. Moderated by Kjetil Røed
12.30-12.45
BREAK
19.00-20.00
Performance: LOGOBI 02 (Gintersdorfer/Klaßen)
Performance showing at the House of the
Norwegian Opera and Ballet
20.15-21.00
Artist-talk with director Monika Gintersdorfer, and the performers Gotta Depri and Gudrun Lange.
22.00
Party at BlackBox with DJ SHAGGY SHAROOF
Sunday 25 of March
10.00-12.00
BRUNCH
12.00-13.00
Reality’s Referents: Forms of the “Real” Across the Arts
by Shannon Jackson(Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance
and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley)
13.00-13.15
BREAK
13.15-15.00
Performance: PROMETHEUS IN ATHENS
(Rimini Protokoll-Haug/Wetzel)
15.00-15.15
BREAK
15.15-15.45
Artist-talk with the performers of PROMETHEUS IN ATHENS. Moderated by Shannon Jackson
16.00-16.15
Closure of the Festival by Kai Johnsen
(Artistic leader of Dramatikkens Hus)
12.15-13.15
On the role of the actor by Ole Johan Skjelbred
(actor, director and dramaturg)
13.15-13.45
Reality Art by Julian Blaue (performance artist)
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13.45-14.45
LUNCH
14.45-15.45
Staging Authenticity by Imanuel Schipper
(dramaturg, researcher, Zürcher Hochschule des Kunstes)
15.45-16.00
BREAK
16.00-17.00
Perspectives on staging authenticity.
Panel discussion with Imanuel Schipper/Edit Kaldor/
Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk. Moderated by Kjetil Røed
19.00-20-00
Performance: CMNN SNS PRJCT (Kalauz/Schick)
20.15-21.00
Artist-talk with Laura Kalauz and Martin Schick
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