Tag: Roselt

Essay on political theatre – part 1

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There are two ways of thinking about political theatre, two sentence beginnings: I. ‘Theatre is political because …’ or II. ‘Theatre is political if …’.

I. ‘Theatre is political because …’

Then general conditions would have to be outlined which theatre as a whole fulfils in all possible variations and which justify the qualification as political.

II ‘Theatre is political if …’

a) descriptive

This sentence structure seems to introduce a description of a genre of theatre, a purely analytical statement that names the conditions under which a certain type of theatre can be described as political. There would then be a kind of theatre that is not political and one would have to name the difference between political and non-political theatre.

b) normative

Often, however, this ‘if …’ seems to be heading towards a value judgement. The condition is actually a wish or a demand. Theatre ought to be political. It is characteristic of the discussion in theatre criticism and theatre studies that this ought to is not explicitly formulated, but only insinuated.
How is this ought to justified?

aa) In Hegelian terms: it follows from the concept or basic structure of theatre that it is political, and only if it fulfils this concept it is theatre in the full sense. If not, is it somehow inferior? So, as with I., one would have to define the concept or basic structure of theatre more precisely. And explain how an ‘ought’ emerges from this ‘being’ of theatre.

bb) Or is the demand for a political theatre simply a moral demand like any other? Theatre should be political because it then promotes the interests of the greatest possible number of people? It would be more than just a demand that theatre meets the requirements of politics (‘politically correct’), but that it makes a morally valuable contribution to politics. The theatre would therefore not be autonomous, but subordinate to politics, which in turn would be subordinate to morality.

I.+II. Politics or the political

For both analyses, the question arises as to whether the quality ‘political’ refers to politics or to the political (in  English often polity). For in the philosophy of politics and also in the discussion of theatre theory, the distinction between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘the political’ (le politique) has become established. So does political theatre refer to the realm of politics or to the political or both? So what is the relationship between the noun ‘politics’, the attributive adjective ‘political’ and the substantivised adjective ‘the political’ in the case of theatre?

In her encyclopaedia article ‘Politisches Theater’1 Erika Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between four conceptual understandings:

1. structural politicality of theatre, 2. anthropological impact of theatre as political, 3. thematic politicality of theatre, 4. new politics of the aesthetic.

Conceptual understandings 1 and 2 are of the type ‘theatre is political because …’ (I.) and are aimed at theatre as a whole, at its structure (1) or its effect (2). 3. is a definition of a certain type of theatre, i.e. II a), but often also II b) bb). However, Fischer-Lichte’s term no. 4 is the most interesting because it has occupied the theatre studies debate in recent years.

In the following, the questions arising from I, II a) and b) as well as Fischer-Lichte’s No. 4 will be examined, in each case with reference to the philosophical or theatre studies literature and occasional references to current theatre practice.

I. ‘Theatre is political because …’

1 Alain Badiou

From Alain Badiou, the French philosopher who has always been politically active to this day and who was also present in the theatre as an author, one could expect an answer.2

For Badiou, there is a ‘formal analogy’ between theatre and politics (‘la politique’)3 He also calls this relationship of similarity ‘isomorphism theatre/politics’. It is not based on thematic congruence, but on structure. However, he also sees a distance between politics and theatre, which he calls ‘figurative’4. To show the analogous relationship between theatre and politics, he lists the elements of both areas:

‘So: place, text, director, actors, set, costumes, audience are the elements of theatre that can be deduced a priori. And organisations, textual speakers, thinkers, proper names, the state, different points of view and eventful masses are the mandatory ingredients of a political situation.’ 5

For Badiou, politics is nothing permanent, ‘politics takes place’ and so does the theatre: ‘The performance takes place.’6. For Badiou, theatre and politics (‘la politique’) have the complete precariousness of time in common. For Badiou, ‘substantial’ theatre, unlike cinema and commercial ‘theatre’, is a matter for the state and therefore requires subsidies.7.

‘Of all the arts, theatre is the one that most persistently leans towards politics (or presupposes it).’ 8

For Badiou, events produce truths, both in art (and thus in theatre) and in politics. For Badiou, truth is the process of fidelity to an event.9

This conception of politics10 can be criticised because it does not take into account the antagonistic element of politics11. But regardless of his political theory, it can also be said that even Badiou does not claim an identity between politics and theatre. For Badiou, the sentence ‘Theatre is political because …’ could not be continued in this way. It should read: ‘Theatre is similar to politics because …’.

With his definition of the relationship between theatre and politics as a relationship of proximity without identity, Badiou hits on a point that other theories of political theatre also consider.

Oliver Marchart, for example, also states

‘a certain similarity of theatrical and political action’, “a fundamental comparability of the boards that mean the world with the public space of politics.”12

Marchart examines two of the prime examples of political theatre, the occupation of the Theatre Odéon in Paris in 1968 and the re-enactment of the Russian October Revolution in 1920 in St. Petersburg by the director Nikolai Evrejnoff. However, Marchart uses these examples to show the fundamental unrepresentability of antagonism, which is the essence of politics. For him, there is therefore only a rough approximation, a ‘passage à l’acte’ to antagonism. For him, the genre of theatre that most closely corresponds to the antagonism of politics is melodrama (whereby he is referring to the French and British stage melodramas of the 18th and early 19th centuries, not the musical genre). However, because he can hardly recommend melodrama to contemporary theatre as a future-oriented model for political theatre, he leaves the conclusion for future theatre to the English theatre scholar Janelle Reinert:

“In casting my comments within the discourse of what might be called ‘democratic civics’, I am attempting to theorize a theatrical space patronized by a consensual community of citizen-spectators who come together at stagings of the social imaginary in order to consider and experience affirmation, contestation and reworking of various material and discursive practices pertinent to the constitution of a democratic society.” 13

For Marchart, political theatre seems to be possible without all theatre being political for him or theatre being part of the political or of politics. Only an approach to politics is possible.

It is therefore impossible to find a valid reason why all theatre is political per se. The sentence ‘Theatre is political because …’ remains unfinished.

2 Jens Roselt

A completely different philosophically based definition of the structure of theatre can be found in Jens Roselt’s habilitation thesis ‘Phänomenologie des Theaters’ 14. It does without any reference to politics. However, Roselt does examine the particular structure of the community that a theatre performance creates. He analyses the theatre situation between performer (actor/actress) and audience (spectators) as a we, without any reference to politics.

Unlike Badiou, he does not parallel audience (theatre) and ‘eventful masses’ (politics), but rather defines the specificity of theatre closely oriented to the manifestations of contemporary theatre. Its audience is constituted in the ‘interplay of seriality and dissidence’15. Seriality is the interdependence of a collective, but one that is purely external, without individual reciprocal influence. On the other hand, a theatre audience is not completely determined by this seriality; everyone can reclaim their individual freedom at any time (by heckling, booing, leaving the auditorium, etc.). As an audience, one acts ‘together in individual difference’16.

Following the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, Roselt distinguishes between three dimensions of we-experiences: partnership (“Partnerschaft”), community (“Gemeinschaft”) and covenant (“Bund”). All three can characterise the situation of a theatre performance:17 the encounter in a role (partnership), the experience of affiliation (community), emotional fusion (covenant). However, Roselt cites the Living Theatre’s production ‘Paradise Now’ (which was shown in January 1970 at the Berlin Akademie der Künste) as an example of this seemingly antiquated terminology from the 1930s18. Roselt can thus analyse the effect of the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s ‘as a new form of social experience’ 19 without declaring it ‘political’, although the Living Theatre explicitly saw itself as a political theatre in the radicalised succession of Erwin Piscator20. Roselt thus shows through precise analysis that new experimental theatre forms that overcome the traditional ‘viewing and listening arrangement’ of the theatre and offer an ‘exploration of the situational aspect’21 of theatre, do indeed make new forms of social experience possible for the audience, but these do not have to be equated with a political experience.

Or in the words of Oliver Marchart:

‘Not every social practice is a political practice.’22.

II ‘Theatre is political when …’

a) descriptive

1 Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator coined the term ‘political theatre’ in the 1920s. He was referring to his own  theatre, the Piscator Theatre. The term therefore originated from the perspective of the theatre makers, not as an analytical term of theatre observation. Because by ‘political theatre’ Piscator meant his theatre, which he created as a director and theatre manager, ‘political’ was not a descriptive term for him either. For him, political theatre is therefore necessarily a ‘proletarian-political theatre.’23. For him, the necessity of this theatre was based on the present, in which he developed his theatre in the 1920s and 1930s.

‘A time in which the relationships between the general public, the reorganisation of all relationships are on the agenda, can only see man in his position in society, as a political being.”24

Conditions that make every expression of life a political one also require a political theatre.

For Piscator, there is also non-political theatre, but only if a ruling class wants to keep theatre out of the power struggles of a society. For Piscator, the sentence would therefore be: ‘Theatre is political when it is necessary.’

2 Siegfried Melchinger

This view that political theatre is a special subspecies of theatre, alongside entertainment theatre, commercial theatre, children’s theatre, etc., is rarely held today. A prominent example of this view in the 1960s and 1970s, when the concept of ‘political theatre’ came back into the discussion, is Siegfried Melchinger’s comprehensive ‘Geschichte des politischen Theaters’25.

Melchinger’s account of theatre history is of little use for today’s discussion because, despite his knowledge of Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre, it only refers to theatre texts, to plays, and only to those that were still being performed in 1970. For him, theatre is always an object of politics. But politics is also a subject of theatre (plays).

‘Politics is an important and at times urgent theme of the theatre. But it has never been the only one, and it will and can be as little so as in life.”26.

For Melchinger, not all theatre is political, but his definition of the difference between political and apolitical theatre remains imprecise:

‘Political theatre sets up situations, processes that are important for many, most, perhaps all. It shows possible forms of behaviour in these situations; it shows them critically and appeals to criticism. To the criticism of the audience. Only when political theatre succeeds in involving the audience in the situations and events does it create the public sphere that is its most distinctive feature.’ 27.

The criterion of publicity applies to all types of (contemporary) theatre, as long as they are not private events. This also means that theatre tries to be important ‘for everyone’ – which it can never achieve in full. The counter-image of apolitical theatre is only pejoratively labelled with common terms such as ‘sentimental emotion’, ‘strange identification’, ‘beautiful or uplifting illusion’28.

Melchinger’s initially descriptive concept of political theatre becomes more normative in the course of his presentation. Not only should political theatre be critical, it should not serve the ‘intentions of ruling systems’ 29, but there should always be political theatre. Despite the ineffectiveness of political theatre, which Melchinger states at the end of his passage, he demands:

‘Now that nothing has been achieved, the task remains: to intervene in the arrogance of politicians through political theatre.’ 30

Melchinger’s ‘History of political theatre’ is written from the perspective of a theatre critic, and any critic cannot refrain from making judgements.

Preliminary conclusion:

There does not seem to be a truly descriptive concept of ‘political theatre’. But why?

To be continued

  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte, {Lemma} ‘Politisches Theater’ in: Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2nd ed. 2014, pp. 260-262 ↵
  2. Badiou was a leading member of the ‘Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste’ UCF-ML from 1969-1985. In 1974, he was the leader of the group ‘Foudre’ (Lightning Strike), which blew up film screenings by throwing paint bags at the screen, and which also disrupted Ariane Mnouchine’s performances because it considered her work with immigrants to be wrong. He is the author of a tetralogy of plays ‘Le Cycle Ahmed’, his dialogue ‘La Républic de Platon’ was performed at the Avignon Festival in 2015. Detailed references to Badiou’s plays and their reception can be found in note 6 of Bruno Bosteel’s foreword to the English edition of Rhapsodie pour le théâtre {Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the theatre. Edited and introduced by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso, 2013 p.X-Xi}. This volume also contains an English version of a text by Badiou on his ‘Ahmed’ tetralogy {ibid. p.139-159}. The original French version of this text, including the play text of ‘Ahmed le subtil’ on the occasion of the performance in Reims and Avignon in 1994, can be found at numilog.com. ↵
  3. Alain Badiou, Rhapsodie für das Theater.  Eine kurze philosophische Abhandlung. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2015. p.49 ↵
  4. ‘Isomorphism {of theatre} with politics (taking into account the figurative distance).’ ibid. p.36 ↵
  5. ibid. p.33 ↵
  6. ibid p.34 ↵
  7. ibid. pp. 38, 43 ↵
  8. Ibid, p. 49 ↵
  9.  Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Zum politischen Denken bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Suhrkamp, 4th ed. 2019, p. 169 ↵
  10. An English version of his essay on justice ‘Philosophy and Politics’ from 1999 is available on the Internet ↵
  11. Marchart, p. 177: ‘Badiou is led to his ethical narrow-mindedness because he does not want to understand politics as a space of immanence of intertwined forces {…}, but wants to maintain a strict separation between the state and a politics of truth in his two-world doctrine.’ trsl. G.P. ↵
  12. Oliver Machart, “On the stage of the political. The Street, the Theatre and the Political Aesthetics of the Sublime” {2004} https://transversal.at/transversal/0605/marchart/de ↵
  13. Janelle Reinelt, ‘Notes for a Radical Democratic Theatre: Productive Crises and the Challenge of Indeterminacy’, in: Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds.), Staging Resistance. Essays on Political Theatre, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1998, p. 286. cited in German translation in: Marchart 2004 ↵
  14. Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008 ↵
  15. Roselt p. 333 ↵
  16. Roselt p. 330-333 ↵
  17. Roselt p.345 ↵
  18. In my memory, it was a chaotic mess on stage that barely touched the audience, who were seated in two blocks on the two long sides of the stage in the middle. ↵
  19. Roselt p. 355 ↵
  20. Judith Melina: ‘Without question, the Living Theatre was always a political theatre. That was also always Piscator’s view.’ Erika Billetter, The Living Theatre. Paradise Now. Ein Bericht in Wort und Bild. Bern: Rütten + Loening, 1968, p.15f ↵
  21. Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater?’, In: H-Th.L., Das Politische Schreiben. Essays on theatre texts. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002 {= Recherchen 12; first in: Theater der Zeit, October 2001}, p.35 ↵
  22. Oliver Marchart, book presentation Conflictual Aesthetics.University of Applied Arts Vienna ↵
  23. Erwin Piscator, Theater der Auseinandersetzung. Ausgewählte Schriften und Reden. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 17. This formulation can be found in an article that Piscator published in the ‘Rote Fahne’, the party newspaper of the KPD, on 1 January 1928 ↵
  24. Piscator p.26 ↵
  25. Siegfried Melchinger, Geschichte des politischen Theaters. Velber: Friedrich Verlag, 1971, developed from a series of lectures at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts in 1970/71 ↵
  26. ibid. p.9. From today’s perspective, Melchinger’s addition is amusing: ’There is no doubt that the dismantling of constraints and taboos that we are experiencing in this area also has a political relevance. But nobody will be so silly as to relegate the fact itself, the division of the human race into two sexes that relate to and mate with each other, as such to the responsibility of the politician.” trsl. G.P. ↵
  27. ibid. p. 17 ↵
  28. ibid. p. 17 ↵
  29. ibid. p.18 ↵
  30. ibid. p.418 ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 4 Representation and Identity

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The concept of truth has almost disappeared from the discussion in theory of theatre during the last 30 years. In the relevant German handbook “Lexikon der Theatertheorie”, the lemma “truth” is missing1. Florian Malzacher still mentions “truth” in the list of terms used carelessly in the theatre bubble, such as “reality” or “politics” 2, but without evidence. The term seems fundamentally suspect to the prevailing relativism.

Jakob Hayner’s love of truth

Jakob Hayner makes an exception with his essay “Warum Theater. Krise und Erneuerung” 3. He is well aware of his isolated position:

“What is still considered ridiculous today, however, is above all if you expect and demand  a relationship to truth from art.” 4

But he holds fast to the emphatic concept of truth in the tradition of Hegel and Adorno. For him, as for Hegel, art has the function of making truth appear. But this truth is one about society:

“Without being able to give a definition of art that is fixed for every time, there is nevertheless a concept of it that is fed by its inner movement. In this movement, art reacts to society and articulates a truth about it from its own standards.” 5

For him, the very concept of truth is what connects politics and art:

“In the expression of truth about the untruth of society, the otherwise separate spheres of art and politics touch.” 6

“Truth” here, then, is a term for a utopian, undefined state of society to which both art and politics are supposed to be committed. Truth is for him an ethical-political postulate. That this postulate cannot be justified without speculative metaphysics is obvious. Hayner does not shy away from the outmoded reference to religion or communism.

“The questions of metaphysics are not settled, merely forgotten. Not to evade the problems once articulated in religion, but to seek to solve them oneself, is to be truly modern in a world without gods.” 7

The problems articulated in religion are, after all, theodicy, the justification of evil in the world, and the path to eschatological redemption from evil. Modern art, according to Hayner, should therefore be dedicated to these problems. On the other hand, in a grand sweep, he manages to tie together Foucault, Hegel, Rötscher and Marx for a determination of the goal of art:

“Art points the way to one’s own desire. This desire, in which truth and beauty meet, could be called political and utopian at the same time, in other words, communist.”8

The idea of communism is for Hayner (following a formulation of Walther Benjamin) “the idea of redemption as a secular event.” 9 For him, the fictionality of  theatre, the mere “appearance” of  reality, brought about by a few plywood boards as a stage set, by the actors’ doubling of themselves into real bodies and signified figures and the imagination of the spectators, by the assertion of another reality on stage, – the whole as-if is not an obstacle to the appearance of truth, but the condition for it:

“In theatre, the as-if is the condition of its capacity for truth. Through it, the subject can enter into relationship with an otherness already present in it, realise its own knowledge and desire.” 10

For Hayner, however, truth is not a question of content or material, but one of form. As supporting evidence for his view he relies on Bertolt Brecht:

“A return to Brecht would be the resumption of the attempt to articulate social criticism through  artistic form . {…} By translating political impulses into aesthetic innovations within theatrical form, he renewed the capacity for truth of appearance.” 11

Hayner  believes mimetic theatre, in which role, text and action serve to represent reality artistically, can  criticise social reality through the distance of artistic form, and he wants to defend it against  the attacks of the advocates of a “performative turn” of theatre studies.

“It is with some surprise that one can note how eagerly work is being done on the re-enchantment of theatre in the gesture of performative renewal, in order to rule out theatre as a place of truth.” 12

But in doing so, he is striving for a Hegelian, neo-metaphysical concept of the truth of art, which can only be filled speculatively, quasi-religiously. In contemporary theatre, he finds this claim only in René Pollesch and Fabian Hinrichs, in their Friedrichstraßen-Palast project: „Glauben an die Möglichkeit der völligen Erneuerung der Welt“ (“Believing in the Possibility of the Complete Renewal of the World”, Berlin 2019), but apparently also only in its title and in its conclusion, when Hinrichs floated off into the artificial starry sky13.

The crisis of representation

So why has truth disappeared from theatre-theoretical discourse? Because the Hegelian construction of the true as the whole of the unfolded world has evaporated and even for the Marxist heirs of Hegel, truth was too nebulous a concept for the goal of art.
There was no crisis of truth, it disappeared silently.

But there was a noisy crisis of representation. Actually, the concepts of truth and representation belong to different domains (at least in the Middle Ages with Thomas Aquinas): Truth to propositional logic, representation to sign theory. The statements of art are not true, but they represent something, they have a meaning. And this meaning is not something arbitrary, as in everyday language or in the forests of signs in the consumer world that surrounds us. Art should mean something essential in some way. This became questionable around 1900. The more one understands the connection between sign and signification, the more crumbling becomes the bridge between signifiant and signifié, first in literature (Mallarmé’s poetry, Hofmannsthal’s Chandos letter, Lukacs’ theory of the novel14. The terms representation, likeness, illusion, fiction and mimesis are often used indiscriminately). Theatre, initially as literary theatre, participates in this crisis of representation. Since Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud at the latest, however, theatre has freed itself from literature. But representation remains.

“Freed from the text and from the god-creator, staging would thus be given back its creative and instaurative freedom. Director and participants (who henceforth would no longer be actors or spectators) would no longer be tools and organs of representation. Does this mean that Artaud would have refused to give the theatre of cruelty the name of representation? No, provided one understood the difficult and ambiguous meaning of this term {…}. End of representation, yet original representation, end of interpretation, yet original interpretation, which no imperious language, no project of domination have occupied and flattened from the outset. Visible representation admittedly, in opposition to the language that is stolen from the gaze, {…} whose visibility, however, is not a spectacle organised by the lord’s language. Representation as self-presentation of the visible and even of the purely sensual.”15

This critique of representation mediated by Derrida was certainly very influential for the development of post-dramatic, re-theatricalised theatre. But in the verbiage of the propagandists of post-dramatic theatre, the crisis of representation became the abolition of representation, instead of asking, with Derrida-Artaud, for the “original representation” of theatre.

From the spatio-temporal identity of aesthetic act and act of reception16 it is hastily concluded that theatre should therefore “create its own, genuine situation in the copresence of the audience.” 17 “Real” here means: without representation of another reality. This is a way out of the “representation trap” 18.

If what takes place on stage is not a representation, neither that of a literary text nor any other representation of something material or ideal outside the stage, then the stage is lying when it claims to be a place other than the empty space of a theatre or when the actor claims to be perceived as someone he is not.

The concept of truth, if one starts from the classical Aristotelian version, is a two-digit relation: A (the idea) agrees with B (the thing). What this relation consists of, what distinguishes A from B, is the real epistemological question. A equals A, that would be identity. Identity is the term for equality with oneself. But the relation of actor and character is not such a relation, neither truth nor identity.

If one wants to treat acting like a propositional sentence, acting representation is something like a meaningful informative identity statement: A equals A’, actress A (Sandra Hüller) is character A’ (Hamlet), the object (actress) is identified by the spectator in two different ways, the sense is different, but the meaning is the same, as with Venus as morning and evening star in Frege 19.

But if we cannot perceive the stage in two different ways, as reality and also as appearance, if we do not adopt the spectatorial attitude that Samuel Coleridge classically characterised as the “willing suspension of disbelief”20, then all that remains is a trivial identity statement: A equals A, it makes sense but has no informative content. That Sandra Hüller is Sandra Hüller is true, but it is nothing new.21.

Either one accepts representation, then A can be equal to A’, or not, then “A is equal to A’ ” is a deception or even a fraud. And deception is evil, then we want truth.22 The complicated emotional mechanics of real and shown feelings of the actors are no longer of interest if not represented. We want the truth and that is the identity of the actor or actress with himself or herself, the identity of the shared space of auditorium and stage, the identity of the moment experienced together. You cannot escape from performance theatre that is hostile to representation and pretends to be avant-garde by imposing the goal of truth on theatre.

Thus, the liberation of theatre from the demand for truth, which has been justified many times, results in a short-circuit rejection of representation and the demand for identity instead of analysing and developing the theatre-specific mode of representation. In his discussion with Florian Malzacher, Wolfgang Engler has pointed out that there are two types of criticism of representation:

“One problematises the frame, the other breaks it, abuses people and de-theatricalises theatre.” 23

Florian Malzacher calls the use of “real” people on stage, like the experts at Rimini Protokoll, a way out of the “representation trap”. He acknowledges, however,  that the “authenticity of these people is also just a role” but calls this role “the role of their lives” 24. In contrast, Jens Roselt points out, using the example of the performance Sabenation (a project with ex-empolyees of the Belgian airline Sabena, Berlin, Hebbel Theater 2004), that real life has no privileged place,

“neither in the suburbs nor on stage. One cannot seek out reality, but it seeks us out or haunts us, everywhere, unexpectedly and uninvited. Reality cannot be prefabricated and exhibited. Rather: it happens.” 25

Putting experts or imperfect amateurs on stage instead of actors does not bring us closer to the truth.

“The conflation of the performer and his actual biography does not at all lead to a form of immediacy, {…} but to a distance.” The aesthetic framework in which these people are placed on stage always makes it clear “that it is not a question here of depicting or pretending true life in a more or less realistic sense.” 26

Only if one understands a performance as an event between player and recipient, independent of representation or non-representation, does one escape the gaze that seeks truth, identity or authenticity.

The performance: an in-between event

From the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, Jens Roselt attempts to justify the performative turn in theatre studies less as a prophecy about the future of theatre than as a necessary step from semiotic staging analysis to performance analysis. And his conclusion: theatre is an in-between event, an event between stage and audience, regardless of whether one thinks it represents something or not. From a phenomenological point of view, experience is a “dialogical in-between event”. And the situation of a performance is one of experience:

“Stage and audience thus enter into a dialogue with each other that does not have to take place linguistically. Spectators are engaged by the performance, just as they themselves question it.” 27

With the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, Roselt assumes a “responsive difference” that characterises the relationship between stage and spectator. Stage and spectator behave like question and answer. But there is

“an answer is conceivable that opens up something that the question did not anticipate. Such an answer no longer obeys the division into right and wrong.” 28

And certainly not to the division into truth and lies.

“Spectators {are} not merely asked to be vicarious agents of someone else’s intention in the performance.” 29

Roselt even criticises his teacher Fischer-Lichte for not taking this responsive difference into account with her notion of the feedback loop. 30 This also applies to a theatre of as-if, in which an actor or actress represents a character:

“The figure that occurs between actors and spectators is a third that is not exclusively owned by anyone.” [11 Roselt, p. 248.]

The spectators are a “constitutive part of the performance”. The modes of perception and experience of the spectators thus have a productive dimension, even in the representation of a character on stage by an actor or actress:

“Only in the performance [is] an appearance constituted, which can neither be reduced to the individual person of the actor nor to a role specification, since the intentions of the spectators are also meaningful here.” 31

When one acknowledges the productive activity of the spectators in a performance, all spectres of truth and identity disappear.

  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2011 ↵
  2. Florian Malzacher, Gesellschaftsspiele. Politisches Theater heute. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2020, p.40 ↵
  3. Jakob Hayner, Warum Theater. Krise und Erneuerung. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2020 ↵
  4. p. 62 ↵
  5. p. 13 ↵
  6. p. 79 ↵
  7. p. 152 ↵
  8. p. 150 ↵
  9. p.149f ↵
  10. p. 148 ↵
  11. p.77 and p. 126. ↵
  12. p. 127. Cf. also his detailed criticism of Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of the performative in the chapter “Wiederverzauberung oder Entzauberung der Welt” pp. 100-121 ↵
  13. Hayner’s comment on this: “The possibility of desiring an idea that transcends the world appears in the work of art.” cf. Christian Rakow’s critique ↵
  14. E.g. “The visionary reality of the world appropriate to us, art, has thus become independent: it is no longer a copy, for all models have sunk; it is a creating totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres is forever torn asunder.” Georg Lukacs, Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Berlin: Cassirer, 1920, p.12 ↵
  15. Jacques Derrida, “Das Theater der Grausamkeit und die Geschlossenheit der Repräsentation”, in: J.D., Die Schrift und die Differenz. transl. v. Rudolphe Gosché. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976 (first as a lecture in Parma 1966) ↵
  16. Malzacher wrongly quotes Hans-Thies Lehmann here. Lehmann names a basic condition of theatre, of dramatic as well as postdramatic or performative theatre, cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Autoren, 1999, p.12 ↵
  17. Malzacher p.36. ↵
  18. ibid ↵
  19. Gottlob Frege, Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung. Five logical studies. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969, p. 41, cf. also Tugendhat/Wolf, Logisch-semantische Propädeutik, Stuttgart: Reclam, p.176 ↵
  20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, *Biographia Literaria* (1817). Ch. XIV, ebook Project Gutenberg, 2004 p.347. cf. my review of Tom Sterns, Philosophy and theatre. An Introduction. Jakob Hayner puts it aptly in German: “One pretends to believe what one sees. Or to put it another way: one does not act as if one did not believe what is presented to one.” Hayner, p.124 ↵
  21. Tugendhat/Wolf, p. 183 ↵
  22. Hans-Thies Lehmann also works with the pair of opposites truth and deception: “If theatre is to offer truth, it must now reveal and exhibit itself as fiction and in its process of producing fictions, instead of deceiving about it.” Lehmann, p. 186. ↵
  23. Wolfgang Engler, Authentizität! Von Exzentrikern, Dealern und Spielverderbern. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2017, p. 136 ↵
  24. Malzacher, p. 32 ↵
  25. Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2008, p.280 ↵
  26. Roselt, p.281 ↵
  27. Roselt, p. 194f ↵
  28. Roselt, p.179 ↵
  29. Roselt, p.185 ↵
  30. Roselt p.195 ↵
  31. Roselt, p. 300 ↵