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Stop Just Going Along: The Dysfunctional Theatrics of René Pollesch
By Matt Cornish
Dear all,
This essay, in a slightly shorter version, will be published in the upcoming issue of
TheatreForum. My editor there, John Rouse, asked me to remove some of the theory
towards the end of the article, but otherwise it’s the same.
I am interested in continuing to work on this director/playwright, possibly as a next book
project (translations of plays plus analysis) after my dissertation. But shorter term, the
section on Cinecittà Aperta will actually appear in my dissertation, which looks at the
uses and representations of history in the German theater since 1989, analyzing how
artists imagined and reimaged the nation after unification. This is by no means a
completed section towards the larger dissertation project, but it does represent some of
my thinking. I am interested in your criticism of the whole piece, of course, as I plan to
expand upon it sometime in the future. And I am particularly interested in your reactions
to the section on Cinecittà Aperta and the theorizing that follows it, which is why I put
back the section that John cut.
Thank you!
Matt Cornish
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Stop Just Going Along: The Dysfunctional Theatrics of René Pollesch
The actors run breathlessly between trailers, shadowed by a prompter, a
videographer, a boom-mic operator, and a grip. They’re filming a movie, and also maybe
producing a theatre production, or rehearsing for both. We, the audience for this happy
mess, sit amid the trailers in white plastic lawn chairs, craning our necks to follow the
action live, or else watching it on the projection screens. Inga Busch, Christine Groß,
Martin Laberenz, Trystan Pütter, and Catrin Striebeck, their “characters” named after
them, constantly undercut their own intentions, fail to remember their lines, reveal their
weaknesses, and repeat themselves, satirizing mid-century Italian and German film and
their own production. [Photo 1] Working as an ensemble in German director and
playwright René Pollesch’s Cinecittà Aperta (2009), they refuse to represent a coherent
world.
In his astoundingly large body of work over the last decade, Pollesch tries and
tries again to create a functional political theatre in the dysfunctional world of latecapitalism, which he sees as having monetized life and collapsed the borders of the
simulated and the simulation, both in economics and entertainment. Reveling in the
simultaneous unreality and reality of the theatre situation, its aesthetic lying and its
corporeal truth, Pollesch seeks to create functional, or rather, effective politics with
dysfunctional theatre.
Born in the town Friedberg in West Germany in 1962, Pollesch attended the
Gießen Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, where he trained under Hans-Thies
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Lehmann, Heiner Müller, and Robert Wilson, among others. Gießen has produced a long
list of notable German theatre artists and performance collectives--including members of
Rimini Protokoll, Showcase Beat Le Mot, and She She Pop--who have made names for
themselves by challenging Aristotelian modes of theatrical story-telling, applying new
media, and exploring the dynamics of representation and so-called ‘authenticity’ inside
and outside of theatre buildings. To make a rough comparison with artists in the United
States, Pollesch’s work resembles the associative philosophical discourse of Richard
Foreman combined with the mad, fun play with pop-culture forms and live video by
companies like the Big Art Group.
Pollesch struggled for nearly a decade after graduating from Gießen, suffering
from writers block and making a living through a few small grants and by translating
plays (especially comedies) for the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt. In the late 1990s, he
began to get productions for his plays, and especially attracted attention with Heidi Hoh
in 1999 (Podewil Berlin). His idiosyncratic texts and productions--he always, and only,
directs his own work--distinguish him from any other playwright or director. This
attention soon became major praise: His play series world wide web-slums (2000) won
him the Mülheim Dramatists’ Prize (considered the most important German prize for
playwriting); and his so-called Prater Trilogy, City as Prey / Insourcing the Home.
People in Crap Hotels / SEX, was invited to the 2002 Theatertreffen, the festival which
annually brings the ten “most noteworthy” German-language productions of the year to
Berlin. In 2001, beginning with this trilogy, Pollesch took over the artistic direction of the
Prater theatre in Berlin, the second space of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
The Prater became his central artistic home, even as he worked throughout Germany; he
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has directed over 25 plays there (stepping down as artistic director in 2007). Working at
the impressively prolific rate of several premiers per season since Heidi Hoh, he has also
been named playwright of the year by Theater heute (2002), and won an additional
Mülheim Prize (in 2006 for Cappuccetto Rosso).
On the page, the texts look somewhat similar to plays by Sarah Kane or Martin
Crimp. Pollesch usually denotes speakers by one letter, usually an initial of the actor who
originates the role. The names of figures, which occasionally appear in the dialogue, can
shift between the actors; a reader cannot locate a character, or, as Pollesch says, a
“middle-class, autonomous subject” (“Ich bin Heidi Hoh,” 347). Pollesch builds his
discourse through improvisation in rehearsal, sampling from a mixture of social science
theory, Gender Studies, Marxist philosophy, American B-movies, and business-schoolspeak--often taken from articles and books sitting on his directing table. The process of
making texts through collaborative rehearsals is central to their final product in
performance. And though some have been published, the texts cannot be separated from
this process, or from the productions that emerge. This is one reason that Pollesch not
only always directs his own plays, but actually goes so far as to bar others from directing
them. Passages of text, complex sometimes to the point of silliness, develop
associatively, looping and accumulating over the course of the play, building slowly in
the consciousness of the audience, who cannot understand the first time around. Though
Pollesch often hangs these theoretical loops on bits of plot that feel ripped from popculture scenarios, no situation emerges; the ideas are the thing.
In practice, Pollesch asks his actors to “Haul this block of text into your brain and
don’t identify with it,” to perform with “Ceremonial speed, ceremonial hysteria,” and to
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“Let the body be taken by the loudness” of the capitalized words. (quoted in Brandl-Risi,
17). Throughout the roughly one-hour productions, the actors perform frenetically, like
hyperactive children. They play back Pollesch’s fusion of television pop-news, soapopera, and advertisements in a wild, channel-hopping style. Occasionally, the actors
exhaust themselves, and take breaks to sit for a moment and drink from plastic water
bottles. A prompter follows in their wake (or tries to), giving them lines when they lose
their place--the inevitable result of trying to deliver large chunks of Pollesch’s language
at a frenzied pace. Along with the prompter, boom-mic operators and video camerapeople often scamper behind the actors, trying to capture their words and expressions.
The technique of overtaxing actors began early in Pollesch’s career, and was in
fact even more evident. In part two of the Prater-Trilogy, Insourcing the Home. People in
Crap Hotels, three female actors run between a series of hotel or apartment-looking
rooms that surround the audience on three sides, outfitted with televisions and old
couches and wallpaper. Swiveling on desk chairs to follow the action live and on a large
projection screen, the audience watches Claudia Splitt (C), Nina Kronjäger (N) and
Christine Groß (T) go at it, speaking rapidly and without pauses, exploding where the
capital letters indicate [Photo 2]: “C: Which social practices are meant to produce the
concept of ‘being at home’ in this hotel? T: And do they discard heterosexual norms? N:
That WOULD REALLY BE SOMETHING NEW! SHIT! THAT WOULD REALLY BE
SOMETHING NEW! A GAY HOTEL! C: ISDN or LSD-Hotel. N: In this ISDN-Hotel I
can plug in my laptop. Then it lives there, and I work there too.”
The loud, fast conversation revolves around the disappearing border between
home and work, and between hotel and home (“N: This hotel HERE reminds me of being
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at home. T: And that’s service”). At home and at work and at home/work, they are
whores producing emotions and feelings for their boss--and are served by the whorish
hotel staff. “Hetero-capitalist means of production,” as T says, convert private spaces into
marketplaces, and enforce homogenous, conservative social norms. Pollesch connects
this to the central problem of Ridley Scott’s 1992 film Blade Runner: “N: The personnel
manager in this Home-As-Product-Hotel must subject his employees to some sort of
emotion-test. Like in Blade Runner. Because emotions and home are PRODUCTS here
after all.”
Periodically, the stream of text breaks off into what Pollesch calls “Clips,” and the
actors gulp water or break out physically from sitting or standing and yelling at each
other to release manic energy into the room. Using a swivel office chair as a pretend
helicopter, they reproduce the helicopter landing scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now (1979), complete with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blaring from a
tape player; later, they pop popcorn and throw the kernels at one another.
The space for Insourcing (also used for City as Prey and SEX), designed by Bert
Neumann, intensifies the claustrophobic feeling of a normalizing society engulfing the
individual: televisions flicker with various images (one plays a dog training video
throughout), and actors disappear from sight under blankets and can only be seen, thanks
to the omnipresent cameraman, on the large projector screen. Surrounded by live action
on the stage, with the video on the projection screen providing another point of view (and
short staircases giving the actors easy access to the crowd, seated close anyway),
Insourcing confronts the audience with a superfluity of visual data, not to mention
textual, cultural and theoretical information. Audience members swing around on their
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chairs (reminders of office work as well as a mode of individual freedom), crane their
necks, and craft their own story.
Many of the early Prater productions, including the other two works in the Prater
Trilogy, as well as the previous year’s “soap-opera series” world wide web-slums at the
Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, share an obsession with, as the critic Frauke MeyerGosau puts it, “a reality that has become ‘unreal’ or ‘surreal,’ that now only exists as
‘Simulation’--of work, love, health, and sensual perceptions” (10). Since 1989, when
capitalism became the only economic and political option in Europe, mimetic
entertainment like theatre and film (for Pollesch) has taken an ever increasing and
dangerous role in supporting a repressive system of representation, and in losing reality in
simulacra. Pollesch’s late-capitalist figures cannot distinguish the “replicants” (to use the
term from Blade Runner) from the people, because people have turned themselves into
replicants. Pollesch’s individuals protect themselves from becoming capitalist
heterosexual androids by burrowing deep into popular-culture, and by creating nonpsychological avatars. Groß, Splitt, and Kronjäger speak together for the first time at the
end of Insourcing, screaming at the audience: “DO NOT PRODUCE HOME.” This is
Pollesch’s project (seldom is he clearer than in this moment), driving both his texts and
his theatrical techniques: stop just going along.
Since these first productions, this continues to be Pollesch’s project, even as his
choice of techniques and themes have developed to address a changing (and increasingly
insidiously capitalist) world. Though the “Clips” remain, sometimes breathers for the
actors and sometimes wild physical exercises, many of the more extreme elements of his
productions (the constant screaming, the extraordinarily fast talking, the repeated
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SHITS!) have ebbed. The focus of the productions has shifted away from the effects on
the subject of the internet and all-consuming commercialization, though these still make
cameo appearances. Playing with modes of comedy, exploring the reality of theatre, and
exposing the unreality of historical film, Pollesch continues to search for new answers to
one central question: Lost in layers of simulacra in a hegemonically commercial world,
how can a theatre artist create political theatre that can reach audiences? How can we
stop just going along?
The form and techniques of comedy provide a mode for many Pollesch
productions, especially in the last few years. Taken together, text and performance
creates ridiculous situations that, at their best, are rollickingly funny. His work follows in
the tradition of comedies like the plays he translated early in his career (including Joe
Orton’s farce What the Butler Saw). He says that “Comedies by Feydeau or Labiche are
formats that you can play around with;” they can serve as “vehicle[s] for what we have to
say” (“Ich bin der Antiromantiker,” 357).
In JFK (2009, Deutsches Theater Berlin)--the name stands for the first initials of
the three actors, and has nothing to do with President Kennedy—Pollesch recreates a
backstage/onstage comedy in the vein of Noises Off (Michael Frayn, 1982), complete
with an actor named F, played by Felix Knopp, who doesn’t really want to go on stage or
perform his role. Knopp raps/sings his way through much of the play, in the style of R.
Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet.” Standing behind the flats of the spare but realistic box
set designed by Janina Audick, his video image projected on a large screen above the
upstage wall, he thinks out loud: “I take a drag on my cigarette and wait. For my cue. I’m
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pretty sure I passed it. No biggie, I think. She says: No, that was it! Really? She nods her
head, says: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was it, get out there, you need to get
out there. I just stand there and take a drag on my cigarette.” Onstage in the bedroomstyled set, when they’re not making fun of the director Michael Thalheimer, among other
theatre contemporaries, the actors enact a complicated love-triangle play, which naturally
gets confused with the backstage drama and with questions about the failures of
communism [Photo 3]. A line from the text, first said by K (Katrin Wichmann) and
repeated by F, gives the play it’s subtitle: “And when I think about you, I can only think
about the project of the communist party, giving up working on the communist project to
participate in building up capitalism, you ass, you!”
Pollesch’s productions work less in the vein of situational comedy, even while
sometimes using its tropes as a vehicle for his obsessions, than Aristophanic satire:
disregarding logical plot and character in order to emphasize bodily humor and sharp
laughter, often politically or socially critical. In fact, in some ways Pollesch’s plays
resemble, extended reductio ad absurdum to compose most of the text, the parabisis
sections of Aristophanes’ comedies. In the parabisis, Aristophanes would use a chorus to
directly address his audience on political and artistic matters--in a similar way, Pollesch’s
actors exist between their roles, their individual personalities, and the playwright who set
down the text, as they speak to the audience, often through the ubiquitous video camera
that has been following them.
The parabisis sections in JFK address the ontology of life versus performance,
questioning which separates you more from your authentic self, a major theme in
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Pollesch’s work over the past few years. In an interview given in March, 2007, Pollesch
tells a story about the German author Uwe Johnson: “He lived with a woman for 17
years, and she was in truth the wife of a secret agent, who had been assigned to him”
(“Ich bin Heidi Hoh,” 369). Johnson, Pollesch says, died shortly thereafter of a broken
heart (he did, in fact, pass away two years after writing Sketch of an Accident-Victim in
1982, a novel about an author confronted by this very situation). In the summer of 2010,
this story became the central anecdote of The Perfect Day, which premiered in an outdoor
space (designed by Neumann) in Mülheim an der Ruhr as the third part of Pollesch’s
Ruhr-Trilogy. (Pollesch likes to work around ideas several times, and the Johnson story
also appeared in at least one production I did not see: Solidarity is Suicide, Münchener
Kammerspiele, 2007).
The Perfect Day stars Fabian Hinrichs (who first worked with Pollesch in the
Prater Trilogy) as Fabian Hinrichs, riding onto the scene on a bicycle to the sounds of R.
Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix).” Almost ten years after the Prater Trilogy, Hinrichs no longer
relies on manic energy and rapidly spoken lines, but rather his lanky body, often shown
off with nothing but underwear as cover, along with his quirky expressions, and his
ability to stand alone in space and connect to the audience. [Photo 4] Originally set in an
empty field (I saw it performed in the Volksbühne, with a solitary tuff of grass on stage
nodding to the first setting), framed by scattered trailers, scaffolding with neon lettering
reading “La Camera de la Muerte,” and a giant balloon-moon, The Perfect Day actually
has a bit of a through line. Hinrichs begins the performance by listing, in a satire of the
BBC, the “100 most important inventions of mankind,” all the way from the pointed rock
at number one (1.5 million years ago), to the nanometer (number 100, invented 2000). Of
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course, Hinrichs cannot remember all one hundred, much less their specific years, and
must rely on the prompter to help him continue, as the audience cheers him on. After he
finally struggles through to the finish, Hinrichs announces the 101st most important
invention: “the perfect day,” which he then proceeds to create for us.
Towards the end of the production, taking a cue from the genial and corpulent
Volker Spengler (another frequent Pollesch actor), here dressed as a kind of modern
Greek god in a white wife-beater and a crown of sea-shells, Hinrichs shifts from
discussing the perfect day to perfection in life and love [Photo 5]. “I’ll tell the following
story: A man had a life plan, he wanted to have the ‘perfect marriage,’ so basically
nothing special. He wanted to have a marriage that really worked.” This is Uwe Johnson,
who perhaps could have been saved from his early death with a different world view: he
needed to understand that “as a lie the story was real.” Hinrichs continues, “This perfect
life, that was the invention! And this life that you have to believe in, that interests me.”
This conscious belief in lies is the everyday experience of the theatre audience, but
Pollesch wants to extend it into life. “This story brings aesthetic illusion into the real
world. As aesthetic illusion.” Hinrichs ends the production with a magic trick, making the
young man who follows him around with a boom-mic disappear. Even while a projection
screen shows the man below the stage, revealing the “truth” behind the magic, Hinrichs
wonders if we can “cross into the next society. In which we invent another type of
individual. A being that does not slavishly cling to the truth.” Maybe that would be the
progress only promised by the BBC’s list of inventions.
Pollesch explicitly explored this desire for appearance to match being, or at least
to be able to believe in the lies that are life, in one of his most recent productions, Throw
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Away Your Ego (2011, Volksbühne). Neumann designed a mind-bending set, which
extends the walls of the Volksbühne’s auditorium across the front of the stage, literally
building a fourth wall between the spectators and the actors [Photo 6]. In other words,
other than a thin apron on the forestage, where about half of the action takes place after
the first ten minutes, Neumann cuts off the stage from the audience, who can only see the
performance via a video projected onto the new wall: actors and audience exist in
separate rooms each surrounded by four walls. Referencing French philosopher Jean-Luc
Nancy’s examination of the Cartesian mind-body split (the program lists Nancy’s
Corpus, 1992, as recommended reading), Martin Wuttke tries to figure out why we only
perceive souls and not bodies [Photo 7]. We look at our bodies like we look at money:
seeing only the inner “worth,” and not the material: “That’s why I was so disoriented,” he
exclaims. “Because I was supposed to believe in some sort of inner being, but it didn’t
exist. I only exist on the outside. Me. The mouth and the spirit are one and the same!”
About ten minutes into Throw Away Your Ego, Wuttke (one of the most accomplished
actors in Germany, and another frequent Pollesch performer) blows open a panel in the
forth wall, allowing the actors to walk onto the apron where the audience can see them
directly, confusing the inner and the outer that this world had tried so carefully to
separate. “Inner-life doesn’t work any more,” he shouts. It’s all appearance, all aesthetics,
if we would only look.
As much as Pollesch celebrates representation, he remains deeply skeptical of
how representative entertainment, especially cinema, uses signs (costumes, scenery, etc.)
to hide its techniques, to allow the audience to forget that they’re watching fiction, telling
stories that reinforce damaging social norms. This extends to theatre as well. Pollesch
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uses an unruly chorus in A Chorus is Violently Wrong (2009, Volksbühne im Prater) in
part to satirize the work of German director Volker Lösch, who famously inserts choruses
of “real” people telling their “own” stories into his productions: Berlin sex workers in a
2010 adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu at the Schaubühne Berlin, for example. Lösch
confuses the apparent authenticity of his non-actors for truth. Pollesch finds truth not in
attempting to hide or abjure representation, but instead in embracing it.
Abstracted to the point of simulacra, representation can became dangerous for
Pollesch, as shown during the world-wide recession that began in 2008, sparked by
trading in mortgage-backed securities that created wealth from thin air and then destroyed
it. He addresses this explicitly in I’m Looking You in the Eyes, Social Context of
Deception (2010), a one-man production at the Volksbühne performed by Fabian
Hinrichs. The Verblendung of the original German title, which I’ve translated above as
“deception,” means the dazzlement that can occur when appearance is taken for reality;
the dazzlement, in other words, of bankers and home-buyers mistaking the appearance of
AAA-bonds and low-interest loans for the real thing. In this situation, which did not of
course end with the economic crash, “The reality of these goods plays absolutely no
role,” Hinrichs says, standing in his underwear in the middle of the enormous, empty
Volksbühne main-stage (designed by Neumann). As in many of his other productions,
like Throw Your Ego Away, Pollesch offers the human body--“the perpetual protest,” as
Hinrichs says--as an alterative to Verblendung. Hinrichs displays his body as a body
throughout, but most memorably by dangling at least ten feet above the stage from an
enormous multi-colored disco ball, his muscles straining [Photo 8]. The context and
history of that body, in terms of previous roles he’s played and more generally in society,
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take a central role in the performance; Hinrichs announces that this is “clearly a white,
male heterosexual who’s speaking here, from a platform that belongs only to him.” The
key here is the openness about the representative power Pollesch and Hinrichs put on
display, which stands in strong contrast to capitalism, with its reliance on blind belief.
The mutually-supportive/destructive system of representation and capitalism is
especially damaging for artists and audience when it comes to portraying history. In
Cinecittà Aperta, the second part of the Ruhr-Trilogy, which premiered in 2009, one year
before The Perfect Day, Pollesch confronts the gap between “history,” personal origins,
and the here and now of the bodies representing that history, as his figures struggle to
shoot a historical film in the style of Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948).
Set like The Perfect Day in a field in Mülheim, this time the audience sits on
white plastic lawn chairs between the trailers, instead of away and looking towards them.
(As with The Perfect Day, I saw Cinecittà Aperta at the Volksbühne; Neumann placed
trailers and audience on the main stage.) Inga Busch, Christine Groß, Martin Laberenz,
Trystan Pütter, and Catrin Striebeck smear their faces with coal to look dirty and
“historical” [Photo 9]. While a large fan (brought in cheaply from Poland) blows smoke
across the stage, Groß charges around as the great theatre director “Erna Grabowski”
ordering a rotating stage, and Striebeck declares that she’s sick of playing
Trümmerfrauen (the “rubble women” who helped clear bombed out German cities after
World War II).
With their costumes, their make-up, their wind machines, and their black and
white film (projected on a screen), the figures in Cinecittà Aperta feel completely
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dislocated historically. “Tine: What you’re calling historical is actually ahistorical. This
here is historical (pinches her). Catrin: Ow! Tine: That’s historical!” Their bodies have
pasts, have evolved genetically and led to the now. As Pollesch explains in the online
description of Cinecittà Aperta, and in various ways in the text as well, “Darwin can
elucidate where I come from, but not History. Not Germany Year Zero.” Pollesch’s
director figure in Cinecittà Aperta tries to subvert this. “Martin: Listen up, you dirty slob
you! We need your body for a historical film. It’s about historical subjects in Germany
Year Zero. Trystan: No, I don’t want to! This here [pointing at his body] is historical!”
Representative entertainment, in other words, denies or has forgotten its own
reality: the actual bodies performing and observing the performance. Artists, or perhaps
better said content producers, have embraced stories that not only make no sense today,
but cause actual harm, to the actors personally (who must embody the roles) and to the
audiences who watch them. Pollesch has emphasized repeatedly in interviews, “When an
author writes: ‘First Scene. A woman steps onto the stage,’ then he’s already writing in
jargon,” (Ich bin der Antiromantiker,” 360) which he defines elsewhere as “the white,
male, heterosexual jargon, which is the measure of all things” (“Dialektisches Theater
Now!,” 305). In other words, standard dramaturgy, and the selling and buying necessarily
involved in theatre and television, reinforces gender and sexual norms, shaping a false
reality. Laberenz addresses this in reference to his “character’s” film: “This split screen is
romantic, it only serves the social-economic illusions of the declining middle-class. Stop
it immediately!” (Once again: stop just going along!) In wanting to tell, and more
importantly sell, their stories to middleclass audiences, films obscure and distort the truth
of the past and the now.
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Where can political theatre begin in this context, as films sell false social norms
that sell films? Meyer-Gosau argues about Pollesch’s point of view, “Nothing exists for
itself, nothing can distinguish itself as real and factual outside of the larger-than-life
‘capitalist’-networks. Even the most radical protest is still a part of and an ornament for
these networks--that means that opposition is always inherent to the system and stabilizes
it.” Protest itself has become a simulacrum, an item to be bought and sold. Oppositional
political theatre can criticize this and that, but by working within the dramaturgy of “First
Scene. A woman steps onto the stage,” it ultimately just continues to sell the post-1989,
capitalist “white, male, heterosexual” world. Only when artists recognize their own
bodies and stop trying to tell stories, with their distortional beginnings, middles, and ends,
can a critique of contemporary society begin to proceed. In a moment of parabisis in
Cinecittà Aperta, Pütter exclaims that “There’s no such thing is Germany in Year Zero,
and if there is, then it’s now. We cannot just go into history, in which Germany was at
some point in year zero, and retrogressively find a line.” Linear, progressive
historiography distorts rather than reveals truth. He continues, “Only when that’s clear
can a concrete critique of capitalism take place.”
In forming an oppositional dramaturgy to capitalist-white-male-heterosexual
story-telling, Pollesch takes cues from Brecht, in whose Lehrstücke (teaching-learning
plays), as Pollesch says, “There’s no information there about who’s speaking.” In other
words, Brecht ignores character psychology. And, Pollesch continues, “When nobody’s
sitting there any more, under there, with or without the printed play, then you can hear
something” (Sie haben jetzt wieder nur ... gehört,” 62). We only listen to characters, but
we can hear ideas; the first step towards speaking with audiences is that they can hear
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you. So Pollesch takes the Lehrstück, with its focus on ideas over character, as well as
Brecht’s Verfremdungeffekt (estrangement effect), and radicalizes them: with a barrage of
ideas, superfluity of information, rejection of dramatic plotting, and outright refusal to
represent characters. Pollesch uses these methods--along with the failures and
imperfections of the actors, and the playful, inconclusive monologues on ideas and
ideologies--to open his productions to individual experience. By pushing the actors to
(and beyond) their limits as performers, and by having them followed around by an
overtaxed technical crew, Pollesch exposes the work, the physical and artistic labor, that
goes into creating his theatre.
But as David Barnett points out, in an article about Brecht and Pollesch, “while
Brecht [...] was able to rely on material contradiction, Pollesch must incorporate a world
of simulacra whose very nature militates against conventional Marxist materialist
analysis” (40). For Pollesch, the post-1989 political and economic hegemony of liberal
capitalism in Europe led to a rise of a hyper-capitalism which reached its apotheosis (at
least for now) in the simulacra of wealth and real estate that caused the 2008 recession;
the “reality [...] that now only exists as ‘Simulation’” (Meyer-Gosau 10) in Insourcing in
2001 became increasingly important, and increasingly tied to economics. Hypercapitalism has so abstracted material circumstances that those circumstances can no
longer even be identified.
In order to confront this situation, Pollesch performs a tricky series of steps in his
productions. He recreates it on stage in extreme (the video cameras, the thick layers of
pop-culture references), as is most apparent in early productions like Insourcing. He does
not hide these techniques, but rather, as in the filming sequences in Cinecittà Aperta,
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embraces them openly. We can learn from the theatre, which we’ve been trained to see
aesthetically, to perceive and accept the aestheticism of the world (Uwe Johnson’s
demise coming from his inability to accept the performances, the lies of life). This recreation and open embrace allows him to emphasize the corporeality of his actors: “I only
exist on the outside,” as Wuttke says in Throw Away Your Ego. In his monologues and
dialogues, the performance-style of his actors, and the structure of his productions,
Pollesch re-materializes the world in order to critique it. He shows the dysfunction of the
represented “real” and the “real world” itself through his plays, which do not function in
the dramatic sense, are not whole or complete.
Pollesch’s Aristophanic satire, his joy in pop-culture detritus, his questioning of
the efficacy and politics of representation within the theatre, all privilege the presence of
the actors as performers and individuals (as opposed to representational tools). He thinks
out loud, and not just in one production, but over his entire corpus, playing with ideas in
different ways in different productions. And rather than representing these ideas in
distracting stories, Pollesch’s productions manifest them in the performance spaces, the
bodies of the actors, and the words of the text. In a dysfunctional world, totalizingly
capitalistic, separated from its material reality, Pollesch creates an incomplete theatre
experience of failure--our failure in the audience to understand, their failure on stage to
perform, to tell stories, or to represent anything. In this situation, we cannot just go along.
For the hour of each performance, we work in solidarity to sort through the complex
political and social problems that loop through his plays and real life--not that they are
different!
19
SOURCES
Barnett, David. “Political Theatre in a Shrinking World. René Pollesch's Postdramatic
Practices on Paper and on Stage.” Contemporary Theatre Review 16:1 (2006): 3140.
Brandl-Risi, Bettina. The New Virtuosity: Outperforming and Imperfection on the
German Stage.” Theater 37.1 (2007): 9-37.
Meyer-Gosau, Frauke. “Ändere dich, Situation!: Rene Polleschs politisch-romantisches
Project der WWW-Slums.” world wide web-slums. Ed. Corinna Brocher. Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003. 9-26.
Pollesch, René. “Cinecittà Aperta: Ruhrtrilogie Teil 2 von René Pollesch.” Volksbühne
am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. http://www.volksbuehneberlin.de/praxis/cinecitta_aperta/. Accessed 8 September 2011.
---. “Dialektisches Theater Now! Brechts Emtfremdungs-Effekt.” Liebe ist kälter als das
Kapital: Stücke, Texte, Material. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
Verlag, 2009. 301-305.
---, interviewed by Jürgen Berger. “Ich bin Heidi Hoh.” world wide web-slums. Ed.
Corinna Brocher. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003.
341-348.
---, interviewed by Romano Pocai, Martin Saar, and Ruth Sonderegger. “Wie kann man
darstellen, was uns ausmacht?” Liebe ist kälter als das Kapital: Stücke, Texte,
Material. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009. 327-346.
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---, interviewed by Wolfgang Kralicek. “Ich bin der Antiromantiker.” Liebe ist kälter als
das Kapital: Stücke, Texte, Material. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt
Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009. 357-364.
---. “Sie haben jetzt wieder nur ... gehört!” Ruhrtrilogie Programmbuch. Berlin:
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 2010. 59-63.