System Normal, All In Flux - Some Provisional Notes On The Risky Business Of Staging Transitions
Antje Dietze
Transitional theatre practices can be reactions to the experience of social, cultural and political transitions in the society the artists and the audience live in, and attempts at articulating and reflecting this experience. They can also imply strategic attempts at opening up potentials of transition both for theatre practice and society, and to organise ways and means to think and perform the changeability of the given context.
In both situations, many theatre practitioners decide not to stage plays, in the sense of the interpretation paradigm, that is, the reconstruction of a text-based meaning provided by an author. Vojislav Klacar's project of the fictional state of Koreta can be considered in this context. Comparable to other projects that operate at the intersection of different art forms, political procedures and the arena of civil society (like NSK's State in Time, or Christoph Schlingensief's Chance 2000, a political party he founded for the German parliamentary elections in 1998 (1)), his "work of art" is rather a "work in progress". This includes the crossing of the traditional imagined boundaries of the aesthetic sphere – towards political spaces, towards audience participation, and in establishing a transitional status of the work itself, as its outcome is, for the time being, undecided.
My theoretical interest in theatre practices like that of Vojislav Klacar, NSK or Christoph Schlingensief are essentially the linkages between aesthetic practice and cultural context (of transition). What does it mean to develop theatrical strategies that step aside of dramatic text and continuity of narration, that sometimes also work outside of a coherent meaning or in a way suspend or exceed it? What are the theoretical and social-political implications when one tries to re-think culture, transition and theatrical practice in this respect?
Transition and Narration
The classical dramatic text and the vision of historical dynamics it brings forth often takes on the form of a self-contained entity setting up a stable frame of understanding and judging the represented conflict. There are strong arguments for understanding this teleological concept of the "drama of history", with its implications of unity, continuity and conclusion (and the violence and death as prerequisite for the successful transition to the new order), as the model par excellence for historical transformations. But times of transition include the experience of a moment of the openness of the present, and of unknown future, like in the early 1990s – the fact that historical development is not a determinism, that it is not linear and whole. It can comprise different pasts, and the ambivalence of the present situation. What is at stake in those decisive moments, is the question of what path will be taken – that of democratisation, of radicalisation, that of the collapse of a state, or the founding of a new one, that of war, change of elites and so on, and the question of what this will cost each individual.
Another way of dealing with times of transition would be to think of them as processes without a given frame that secures a prefigured destination legitimating violent means of achieving it. The goal would not be to tell a different story or give a different interpretation of what is going on or should be going on, but rather to critically reflect on the structure of assured, seemingly naturalised and consistent narratives and the mostly invisible position of their authors. Those attempts can be based on the experience of contingency that people may have made in transitional times, and of indistinct and insecure criteria for evaluating the ongoing process of the transformation of their cultural and social context. These artistic strategies often also come from those who are excluded from the symbolical space of the transformed society, and they can comprise elements of critique, resistance, but also of attempts at participation in creating the new society.
Blind Spots and Drifters
There have been numerous attempts to think of theatrical processes in a different way. One important theatre model in this respect are Bertolt Brecht's learning plays, which make a link between text, audience and social transition. They are meant as social experiments, a kind of learning-by-doing on the basis of the presentation of controversial possibilities of action. They have been criticised for their didactic (and, for some, ideological) impetus, as the action is for the most part related to a pre-given text and to the frame for possible decisions that text is offering. But nevertheless they aim at the active involvement of the audience in a controversial decision making process, in which participants are expected to bring in their own social and political experience, thus becoming a politicised public.
Instead of setting up a self-contained aesthetic totality being presented to an audience, Brecht wanted to initiate an open process. The provocative aspect of the learning plays is the idea that there would be no audience, only participants negotiating their own issues (2) – it is the vision of a democratic rather than a hierarchical or doctrine-guided process. This is still mostly a "dream", as the German playwright Heiner Müller calls it, and, I might add, an ambivalent one. Opening up the artwork towards a process of action that is not or not totally prescribed by an author (of the text, of the staging, of the rules of the game or other cultural patterns) is not in itself already an emancipative practice. It can cause irritation and fear on the side of both creators and audience. Will the author and the actors be ready to lose a big part of their sovereignty, exposing themselves to the unforeseeable intervention of the audience-participants? Will the participants be willing to step out of their secure distance? The question is, what concepts and patterns of behaviour they will activate to fill the "gap". It comes with no surprise that there are several examples in the history of theatre avant-garde and performance art where, for example, the authority of the author of the text has been replaced by that of a group guru. There is always a blind spot in such theatre practices of enlightenment heritage – that is the question of the position from which someone is educating others. According to Hans-Thies Lehmann – who with his concept of the postdramatic theatre is thinking on in the way Brecht has shown – articulating political issues on a stage is not in itself already a political act. What would be essential for the postdramatic theatre is not to destroy the drama, but to draw attention to the specific social situation between the participants of a theatre event, and the form it takes. (3) Instead of turning the audience into judges of the represented conflict, thus falling into the above mentioned moralistic trap, theatre should make them experience the shaky grounds and conditions for their own judgement, thus pointing towards their own latent responsibility for the theatrical process and the cultural and institutional conditions it is not only representing, but also producing. (4)
Another blind spot can be found in the assumption that everything in the theatrical process is part of the representation, and its wholeness and rationality. Here it might be helpful to come back to Roland Barthes' notion of the third meaning. In his article "The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein Stills," (5) he differentiates several levels of meaning in an image (in this case: a filmstill). Besides the level of communication, there is the symbolic level – an understanding made possible by a commonly shared culture. This second meaning is intentional and directed towards the beholder. It is part of a closed system between sender and receiver. Here one can easily locate the possibility of didactics, ideology, but also identification and orientation. This meaning often appears as naturalised and self-evident.
The third meaning, then, the obtuse meaning, is based in the concrete materiality of the image and does not depict or express something else. Instead of telling a story, it opens up a discontinuous field of meaning, that is erratic and fetishist – as examples, Barthes names the obviously artificial beard of the Tsar, or the beauty of an actor's face. The third sense is part of the mediality of an artwork, of that concrete remainder that cannot be translated into another medium – it is, in the Eisenstein example, the "filmic" that cannot be articulated in spoken or written language, for example. It is emotional and excessive, and cannot be reduced to the rational, purposeful, useful, as it exceeds the cultural order. The third meaning does not destroy or alter the other meanings and narrations of the image, but it pulls the rug out from under their practice and the assumption of aesthetic totality. Human action, then, cannot be reduced to the function of a plot, or an element in a cultural or national narrative.
Transition and Contingency
Instead of assuming a totality of meaning I prefer to think of theatrical practice as the exposure of contingency. Michael Makropoulos defines contingency not as an ontological fact, but as a reflexive product of modern societies. It is the friction between the real and the possible, being produced and negotiated in the social sphere. (6) By using this concept for describing aesthetic strategies, I want to point at a potentiality that is basic for any theatrical performance. It is part of the specific character of representations – Koreta is the ghost of a state, suspended between the real and the possible. (7)
Contingency means that things can be different. This is the basis for differentiation, for decision-making, and for change, outlining an arena for action (in a way that is not entirely pre-given or determined). This also means that although we are capable of influencing the process we take part in, we cannot fully control it. When theatre is conceived of as a performative act, that is, it produces its own reality that cannot be reduced to the represented ideas, this also means that there is the possibility for change, unintentional outcomes, errors and finiteness. (8) By that, one can rethink the problem of orientation, of criteria of decisions and their legitimating. When we do not claim to be acting according to higher and all-compassing principles, when the criteria for our work is not the reproduction of a given frame of meaning or of the unquestioned position of an author, we ourselves take the responsibility for our actions, and are subject to their unpredictability and possible deviation from our intentions.
Depending on what concepts, sets of rules and cultural framings are concerned, strategies of organising an experience of their contingency can become quite severely provocative acts. They take on political meaning depending on their context, especially when concerning concepts like that of the nation, of ethnicity, of religion or of democracy. This does not mean that the addressed concepts are to be neglected, but it can get in conflict with them by – on the one hand – putting their claim for authority and exclusive validity under question, and – on the second hand – questioning the way they are performed and represented.
This sphere of contingency is deeply ambivalent. It is a sphere of both freedom and insecurity. The political aspect of the corresponding theatrical practices is the fact that those involved are confronted with the question where, for each of them, the sphere of contingency ends, where they set the limits of what are acceptable possibilities of action and thought – not only in terms of possible models for society, but also in terms of the reality of the theatrical process. Consequently, a decisive element of those strategies is to establish an interrogative space within the art work, by practically and theoretically exploring the processes of friction and convergence between its elements:
- between the present and the represented (that is, stressing on the Koreta example, between the presented material and the participants' corporeality, and the fictional state and the process of constituting its government);
- between the real and the possible (that is, between the real Serbian state and the possible state of Koreta, or between the actual performance and the different paths it might take, that are being considered in the decision making process that constitutes it);
- between intention and deviation (that is, between the intended performance and whatever may be its outcome, which the authors and the participants of the project cannot – and possibly do not want to – fully control).
Consequently, the theatrical practice itself can be put into question, as was the case with Christoph Schlingensief. In 1999, when in the course of the Kosovo War, NATO bombings started, he cancelled his theatre production in Berlin and went to visit refugee camps in Macedonia. He then tried to use the theatre institution to bring in refugees into Germany, which in the end did not work out. It would be cynical to consider this to be an (unfinished) work of art, and this is why I mention it: By constantly reconsidering one's own field of action, one takes the risk of coming to the conclusion that it might not be appropriate for dealing with the issues under question. Artistic practices like those of Klacar, Schlingensief or NSK are more than just free-floating games of imagination, as they always refer to cultural narratives, to existing conflicts, values and meanings. They are experimentations of concrete possibilities and options of organising the world, and how they can be performed and experienced. The interesting question, to be answered differently with each performance, is how participants deal with the given frames of thought and action, what boundaries, deadlocks and impossibilities they will bring up in the process, but also what impulses they can create by strategically or playfully shifting those frames on different tracks and basements.
(1) See http://nskstate.com/ and www.schlingensief.com/index_eng.html
(2) Günther Heeg: Klopfzeichen aus dem Mausoleum. Brechtschulung am Berliner Ensemble. Herausgegeben von Stefan Schnabel. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2000, p. 104.
(3) Hans-Thies Lehmann: Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater? In: Hans-Thies Lehmann: Das politische Schreiben. Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2002, 11-21.
(4) For a corresponding model for the field of the visual arts, see Alexander Koch: Kunstfeld 5. Hinweise zur Ausdifferenzierung des kulturellen Feldes. Vortrag auf der 5. Kulturwerkstatt des Gesprächskreises KULTUR UND POLITK des Forum Ostdeutschland der Sozialdemokratie, Berlin 2006. www.kunst-verlassen.de/texte.html
(5) Roland Barthes: Der dritte Sinn. Forschungsnotizen über einige Fotogramme S.M. Eisensteins. In: Roland Barthes: Der entgegenkommende und der stumpfe Sinn. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1990, 47-66.
(6) Michael Makropoulos: Historische Kontingenz und soziale Optimierung. Stuttgart 2000. www.michael-makropoulos.de/Texte.html, p. 1.
(7) For a more detailed analysis of representations in a status of contingency, suspension and undecidability, see Urs Stäheli: The Outside of the Global. New Centennial Review 3 (2), Autumn 2003, 1 – 22.
(8) See Jacques Derrida: Signature, Event, Context. In: Jacques Derrida: Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985, 307-330.
Antje Dietze
Transitional theatre practices can be reactions to the experience of social, cultural and political transitions in the society the artists and the audience live in, and attempts at articulating and reflecting this experience. They can also imply strategic attempts at opening up potentials of transition both for theatre practice and society, and to organise ways and means to think and perform the changeability of the given context.
In both situations, many theatre practitioners decide not to stage plays, in the sense of the interpretation paradigm, that is, the reconstruction of a text-based meaning provided by an author. Vojislav Klacar's project of the fictional state of Koreta can be considered in this context. Comparable to other projects that operate at the intersection of different art forms, political procedures and the arena of civil society (like NSK's State in Time, or Christoph Schlingensief's Chance 2000, a political party he founded for the German parliamentary elections in 1998 (1)), his "work of art" is rather a "work in progress". This includes the crossing of the traditional imagined boundaries of the aesthetic sphere – towards political spaces, towards audience participation, and in establishing a transitional status of the work itself, as its outcome is, for the time being, undecided.
My theoretical interest in theatre practices like that of Vojislav Klacar, NSK or Christoph Schlingensief are essentially the linkages between aesthetic practice and cultural context (of transition). What does it mean to develop theatrical strategies that step aside of dramatic text and continuity of narration, that sometimes also work outside of a coherent meaning or in a way suspend or exceed it? What are the theoretical and social-political implications when one tries to re-think culture, transition and theatrical practice in this respect?
Transition and Narration
The classical dramatic text and the vision of historical dynamics it brings forth often takes on the form of a self-contained entity setting up a stable frame of understanding and judging the represented conflict. There are strong arguments for understanding this teleological concept of the "drama of history", with its implications of unity, continuity and conclusion (and the violence and death as prerequisite for the successful transition to the new order), as the model par excellence for historical transformations. But times of transition include the experience of a moment of the openness of the present, and of unknown future, like in the early 1990s – the fact that historical development is not a determinism, that it is not linear and whole. It can comprise different pasts, and the ambivalence of the present situation. What is at stake in those decisive moments, is the question of what path will be taken – that of democratisation, of radicalisation, that of the collapse of a state, or the founding of a new one, that of war, change of elites and so on, and the question of what this will cost each individual.
Another way of dealing with times of transition would be to think of them as processes without a given frame that secures a prefigured destination legitimating violent means of achieving it. The goal would not be to tell a different story or give a different interpretation of what is going on or should be going on, but rather to critically reflect on the structure of assured, seemingly naturalised and consistent narratives and the mostly invisible position of their authors. Those attempts can be based on the experience of contingency that people may have made in transitional times, and of indistinct and insecure criteria for evaluating the ongoing process of the transformation of their cultural and social context. These artistic strategies often also come from those who are excluded from the symbolical space of the transformed society, and they can comprise elements of critique, resistance, but also of attempts at participation in creating the new society.
Blind Spots and Drifters
There have been numerous attempts to think of theatrical processes in a different way. One important theatre model in this respect are Bertolt Brecht's learning plays, which make a link between text, audience and social transition. They are meant as social experiments, a kind of learning-by-doing on the basis of the presentation of controversial possibilities of action. They have been criticised for their didactic (and, for some, ideological) impetus, as the action is for the most part related to a pre-given text and to the frame for possible decisions that text is offering. But nevertheless they aim at the active involvement of the audience in a controversial decision making process, in which participants are expected to bring in their own social and political experience, thus becoming a politicised public.
Instead of setting up a self-contained aesthetic totality being presented to an audience, Brecht wanted to initiate an open process. The provocative aspect of the learning plays is the idea that there would be no audience, only participants negotiating their own issues (2) – it is the vision of a democratic rather than a hierarchical or doctrine-guided process. This is still mostly a "dream", as the German playwright Heiner Müller calls it, and, I might add, an ambivalent one. Opening up the artwork towards a process of action that is not or not totally prescribed by an author (of the text, of the staging, of the rules of the game or other cultural patterns) is not in itself already an emancipative practice. It can cause irritation and fear on the side of both creators and audience. Will the author and the actors be ready to lose a big part of their sovereignty, exposing themselves to the unforeseeable intervention of the audience-participants? Will the participants be willing to step out of their secure distance? The question is, what concepts and patterns of behaviour they will activate to fill the "gap". It comes with no surprise that there are several examples in the history of theatre avant-garde and performance art where, for example, the authority of the author of the text has been replaced by that of a group guru. There is always a blind spot in such theatre practices of enlightenment heritage – that is the question of the position from which someone is educating others. According to Hans-Thies Lehmann – who with his concept of the postdramatic theatre is thinking on in the way Brecht has shown – articulating political issues on a stage is not in itself already a political act. What would be essential for the postdramatic theatre is not to destroy the drama, but to draw attention to the specific social situation between the participants of a theatre event, and the form it takes. (3) Instead of turning the audience into judges of the represented conflict, thus falling into the above mentioned moralistic trap, theatre should make them experience the shaky grounds and conditions for their own judgement, thus pointing towards their own latent responsibility for the theatrical process and the cultural and institutional conditions it is not only representing, but also producing. (4)
Another blind spot can be found in the assumption that everything in the theatrical process is part of the representation, and its wholeness and rationality. Here it might be helpful to come back to Roland Barthes' notion of the third meaning. In his article "The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein Stills," (5) he differentiates several levels of meaning in an image (in this case: a filmstill). Besides the level of communication, there is the symbolic level – an understanding made possible by a commonly shared culture. This second meaning is intentional and directed towards the beholder. It is part of a closed system between sender and receiver. Here one can easily locate the possibility of didactics, ideology, but also identification and orientation. This meaning often appears as naturalised and self-evident.
The third meaning, then, the obtuse meaning, is based in the concrete materiality of the image and does not depict or express something else. Instead of telling a story, it opens up a discontinuous field of meaning, that is erratic and fetishist – as examples, Barthes names the obviously artificial beard of the Tsar, or the beauty of an actor's face. The third sense is part of the mediality of an artwork, of that concrete remainder that cannot be translated into another medium – it is, in the Eisenstein example, the "filmic" that cannot be articulated in spoken or written language, for example. It is emotional and excessive, and cannot be reduced to the rational, purposeful, useful, as it exceeds the cultural order. The third meaning does not destroy or alter the other meanings and narrations of the image, but it pulls the rug out from under their practice and the assumption of aesthetic totality. Human action, then, cannot be reduced to the function of a plot, or an element in a cultural or national narrative.
Transition and Contingency
Instead of assuming a totality of meaning I prefer to think of theatrical practice as the exposure of contingency. Michael Makropoulos defines contingency not as an ontological fact, but as a reflexive product of modern societies. It is the friction between the real and the possible, being produced and negotiated in the social sphere. (6) By using this concept for describing aesthetic strategies, I want to point at a potentiality that is basic for any theatrical performance. It is part of the specific character of representations – Koreta is the ghost of a state, suspended between the real and the possible. (7)
Contingency means that things can be different. This is the basis for differentiation, for decision-making, and for change, outlining an arena for action (in a way that is not entirely pre-given or determined). This also means that although we are capable of influencing the process we take part in, we cannot fully control it. When theatre is conceived of as a performative act, that is, it produces its own reality that cannot be reduced to the represented ideas, this also means that there is the possibility for change, unintentional outcomes, errors and finiteness. (8) By that, one can rethink the problem of orientation, of criteria of decisions and their legitimating. When we do not claim to be acting according to higher and all-compassing principles, when the criteria for our work is not the reproduction of a given frame of meaning or of the unquestioned position of an author, we ourselves take the responsibility for our actions, and are subject to their unpredictability and possible deviation from our intentions.
Depending on what concepts, sets of rules and cultural framings are concerned, strategies of organising an experience of their contingency can become quite severely provocative acts. They take on political meaning depending on their context, especially when concerning concepts like that of the nation, of ethnicity, of religion or of democracy. This does not mean that the addressed concepts are to be neglected, but it can get in conflict with them by – on the one hand – putting their claim for authority and exclusive validity under question, and – on the second hand – questioning the way they are performed and represented.
This sphere of contingency is deeply ambivalent. It is a sphere of both freedom and insecurity. The political aspect of the corresponding theatrical practices is the fact that those involved are confronted with the question where, for each of them, the sphere of contingency ends, where they set the limits of what are acceptable possibilities of action and thought – not only in terms of possible models for society, but also in terms of the reality of the theatrical process. Consequently, a decisive element of those strategies is to establish an interrogative space within the art work, by practically and theoretically exploring the processes of friction and convergence between its elements:
- between the present and the represented (that is, stressing on the Koreta example, between the presented material and the participants' corporeality, and the fictional state and the process of constituting its government);
- between the real and the possible (that is, between the real Serbian state and the possible state of Koreta, or between the actual performance and the different paths it might take, that are being considered in the decision making process that constitutes it);
- between intention and deviation (that is, between the intended performance and whatever may be its outcome, which the authors and the participants of the project cannot – and possibly do not want to – fully control).
Consequently, the theatrical practice itself can be put into question, as was the case with Christoph Schlingensief. In 1999, when in the course of the Kosovo War, NATO bombings started, he cancelled his theatre production in Berlin and went to visit refugee camps in Macedonia. He then tried to use the theatre institution to bring in refugees into Germany, which in the end did not work out. It would be cynical to consider this to be an (unfinished) work of art, and this is why I mention it: By constantly reconsidering one's own field of action, one takes the risk of coming to the conclusion that it might not be appropriate for dealing with the issues under question. Artistic practices like those of Klacar, Schlingensief or NSK are more than just free-floating games of imagination, as they always refer to cultural narratives, to existing conflicts, values and meanings. They are experimentations of concrete possibilities and options of organising the world, and how they can be performed and experienced. The interesting question, to be answered differently with each performance, is how participants deal with the given frames of thought and action, what boundaries, deadlocks and impossibilities they will bring up in the process, but also what impulses they can create by strategically or playfully shifting those frames on different tracks and basements.
(1) See http://nskstate.com/ and www.schlingensief.com/index_eng.html
(2) Günther Heeg: Klopfzeichen aus dem Mausoleum. Brechtschulung am Berliner Ensemble. Herausgegeben von Stefan Schnabel. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2000, p. 104.
(3) Hans-Thies Lehmann: Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater? In: Hans-Thies Lehmann: Das politische Schreiben. Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2002, 11-21.
(4) For a corresponding model for the field of the visual arts, see Alexander Koch: Kunstfeld 5. Hinweise zur Ausdifferenzierung des kulturellen Feldes. Vortrag auf der 5. Kulturwerkstatt des Gesprächskreises KULTUR UND POLITK des Forum Ostdeutschland der Sozialdemokratie, Berlin 2006. www.kunst-verlassen.de/texte.html
(5) Roland Barthes: Der dritte Sinn. Forschungsnotizen über einige Fotogramme S.M. Eisensteins. In: Roland Barthes: Der entgegenkommende und der stumpfe Sinn. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1990, 47-66.
(6) Michael Makropoulos: Historische Kontingenz und soziale Optimierung. Stuttgart 2000. www.michael-makropoulos.de/Texte.html, p. 1.
(7) For a more detailed analysis of representations in a status of contingency, suspension and undecidability, see Urs Stäheli: The Outside of the Global. New Centennial Review 3 (2), Autumn 2003, 1 – 22.
(8) See Jacques Derrida: Signature, Event, Context. In: Jacques Derrida: Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985, 307-330.
