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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. 1 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. 2 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. 3