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The Postdramatic Theatre
Below are my suggestions for how you might approach this activity. These are not the “right”
answers. The activity encourages you to select the facts, material and insights that you
consider relevant and to argue for your position.
While the focus of the activity is theatre, this practice is located in the wider context of the arts
and society.
Context
As Devised work has moved from the experimental margins of theatre towards being an
accepted part of mainstream practice the centrality of the text has come into question. Devised
work does not start with the intention of “faithfully” staging a particular text but rather takes a
group of performers and a number of starting points (images, objects, space) out of which a
theatrical experience is generated. A good example would be “Shockheaded Peter” (by Phelim
McDermott and Julian Crouch which was an international success playing both London’s West
End and Broadway. The piece used an MC figure who directly addressed the audience
emphasising the “liveness” of the event. Some scenes used puppets; others heightened
physicality and throughout music was an integral part of the work. While the piece took the
poems by Heinrich Hoffman as a starting point these were simply a pretext for the generation of
a complex theatrical event that instead of playing out one linear narrative staged multiple stories
and scenarios. Such work has in turn influenced the staging of text-based work leading to the
paradigm shift Lehmann calls the Postdramatic.
We often use Drama and Theatre as interchangeable terms. Are they really one and the same
thing?
A Drama consists of a sequence of dramatic events involving a set of fictional characters –
these characters are represented by the actors on stage. Theatre is a live event occurring here
and now in front of an audience. Historically, in the West the template for what occurs in the
Theatre has been the Drama but once we begin to look outside Western theatre the distinction
between Theatre and Drama becomes clearer. In Japanese Kabuki theatre the performer is an
actor/dancer who uses a range of methods beyond representational acting to shape a rich
theatrical event for an audience.
Much theatre in Britain still attempts to be “true” to the play text and uses naturalism as a default
style to achieve this. For example, in a recent play by Simon Stevens there is a scene which
deals with an incestuous relation between a brother and a sister. In the first British production of
this play the scene was staged as a conversation and the actors playing the parts were a
conventionally handsome man and woman. In the first German production of the same play the
scene was presented as a wrestling match between two men one of whom weighed more than
the norm for what is conventionally regarded as attractive. The British production tries to get out
of the way and let the text “speak,” it is an essentially literary experience. The German
production generates a complex mise-en-scene in which the text is just one element among
many; it’s emphasis is on an embodied practice. Rather than the deferred fictional frame which
makes the action something happening at a distant time and space the Postdramatic focuses on
what this real body undergoes here and now.
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What qualities define Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre according to Wessendorf?
The risk with presenting a comparative list of the qualities definitive to a Dramatic and a
Postdramatic Theatre is that the impression of a radical break with theatre’s past may be given.
Lehmann is not suggesting such a break, the Postdramatic is envisioned as an evolutionary shift
in emphasis and a response to the condition of mediatisation. Postdramatic qualities have long
been part of theatre’s genome.
Dramatic
Drama
Unities of Time, Place, Action
Dominance of Dialogue
Rootedness in dramatic text
Naturalism
Acting
Transmission of meaning
Closed representational world
The word
Theatrical
Thetic – supporting established modes
of signification
Postdramatic
Theatre
Fractured/multiple Time, Place, Action
Dominance of Mise-en-scene
Rootedness in practice of theatre making
Hypernaturalism
Performativity
Problematising of “sign systems”
Intrusion or “the real”
The body
Multidisciplinary/Multimedia
A-thetic – subverting established modes
of signification
In what way is the audience’s role altered by Postdramatic practices?
Semiotics considers how meaning is made within a particular genre/medium/culture. It does this
by analysing systems of signification – for example, the word “milk” is a sign that labels a
concept (the liquid we draw from cow’s udders). The sign used is a matter of convention;
English uses “milk,” French uses “lait.” The location of this arbitrary sign within a wider system
is what allows it to mean – it is precisely because “milk” is not “silk” or “mile” or “mink” that it
signifies in the way it does. How meaning is made is crucial because how we mean shapes our
perception of reality, of what is “natural” – I can use the word “man” to mean humanity but I
cannot use the word “woman” in the same way. Semiotic analysis is not limited to language
since sounds, gestures or proxemics also make meanings by constructing systems.
The sign systems of Drama appear to be transparent – a key example being the “fourth wall,” a
supposedly valueless, transparent window on another time and place. Drama “has” meaning
and purports to transmit that meaning to an audience. In contrast, Postdramatic theatre refuses
the transparency of this window – again and again bringing us back to the fact of a
performance’s presence here and now with this audience in this space. Instead of trying to
transmit a particular meaning it sets up a series of live experiences that the audience are invited
to decode according to a range of sign systems. Rather than promote a unitary reading,
Postdramatic theatre purposefully opens itself to multiple readings and opens it’s audience to an
awareness of the multiplicity of meaning.
Although the physical situation of the audience within a Postdramatic theatre has not changed
significantly – they still sit silently in the dark – their function has undergone a radical shift: no
longer meaning-receivers they are now meaning-makers. Postdramatic theatre access the
entire semiosphere – words, visuals, bodies, media – in a quest to question who has the right to
make meaning for others – both in the theatre and the world.
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Does the Postdramatic Theatre excite you? Is this what you want from the theatre of the future?
What theatre will we need in the future?
This question can only be answered by you, by the theatre makers of the future. Creating work
of depth involves a double encounter. First of all, with what obsesses, excites and challenges
you as a maker and then, secondly, with the social, cultural and historic moment you are living
through. Performance is never alone – it is always with and for others. Good luck.
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