Malzacher Not just a mirror. Looking for the political theatre today
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-3-89581-395-5
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Performing Urgency 1
E-Book, Englisch, 196 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-89581-395-5
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Der englischsprachige Band Not Just a Mirror setzt sich mit grundlegenden Fragen des
politischen Theaters in der Gegenwart auseinander und stellt künstlerisch-politische Strategien
und Praktiken von Theatermachern aus aller Welt vor - u. a. Chto Delat, Milo Rau,
Kretakör, Faustin Linyekula, Public Movement, Christoph Schlingensief, Akira Takayama.
Mit Beiträgen von Julian Boal, Boris Buden, Matan Cohen, Annie Dorsen, Galit Eilat, Monika
Ginterdorfer, John Jordan, Alexander Karschnia, Hervé Kimenyi, Beatrix Kricsfalusi,
Bojana Kunst, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Judith Malina, Florian Malzacher, Tala Jamal Manassah,
Oliver Marchart, Carol Martin, Giulia Palladini, Roman Pawlowski, Jeroen Peeters,
Goran Sergej Pristaš, Christian Römer, Sylvia Sasse, Francesco Scasciamacchia, Michael
Sengazi, Vassilis Tsianos, Margarita Tsomou, Franck Edmond Yao u. a.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
?...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.’ — Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati The question — what is political theatre today? — assumes that political theatre extends beyond staging the stories of underrepresented communities, performing a social good such as work with the ageing, the incarcerated, the disabled, or arguing for social justice. Political theatre today is deeply engaged with the representation and analysis of real events in ways we have never quite seen before. Constructed from interview-based verbatim and archive-derived documentary sources (letters, diaries, interviews, records, photographs, films, YouTube, and Facebook) the real is often presented in the context of uncertainty about actually knowing anything in a highly manipulated digital world. Today, theatre’s political contribution is to both represent events for further examination and explore the shifts in paradigm, perspective, and subject matter that digital reality has wrought. The overlap and interplay between ?theatre’ and ?reality’, the blurred boundary between the simulated and the ?real’ world, is one of the most compelling and productive areas of theatrical activity to emerge in the twentieth century and continue in the twenty-first. Theatre of the real has many names: documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatre-of-fact, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, investigative theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village performances, war and battle re-enactments, and autobiographical and biographical theatre. The array of terms indicates a range of methods and outcomes that may overlap and cross-fertilise. Any combination of theatre created from the verbatim use of transcripts, trials, and interviews, re-enacting the experiences of witnesses, historic events, and places, biographical and autobiographical accounts might be employed. In all of these methods, there is the desire to produce what Roland Barthes calls the ?reality effect’, an effect that confers the status of legitimacy upon the artwork because what is represented is thought to have really happened or has a relationship with what is understood to be real. Theatre about real events beckons its spectators to wrestle, like Jacob wrestled with the angel, with their own moment. The influence of theatre of the real on the entire political theatre landscape cannot be underestimated. Early in the twentieth century, the German director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) created Trotz alledem! (In Spite of Everything!, 1925) using new media on stage in the form of film footage of World War I. Focusing on German history from 1914 to the 1919 assassination of German communist leader Karl Liebknecht, the visual and verbal form of theatrical reportage of In Spite of Everything! was designed to directly represent experience and provoke political action. Documentary film footage of the War functioned like a tragic chorus both reporting and portraying the offstage world. Comprised of actual speeches, articles, newspaper clippings, slogans, leaflets, photographs, and films, Piscator thought his production was an historically truthful montage. Judging from his experience in the War, Piscator thought this was the first time that theatrical representation was in accord with ?absolute truth.’ His goal was to make theatre a generative place that functioned like a meeting hall. Learning from Piscator and then striking out on his own, Bertolt Brecht also reconsidered the connection between life (the real) and theatre (the professed fictional) proposing that theatre be in the service of ?socially practical significance,’ more than in the creation of pure emotion, as he wrote in The Street Scene (1938). Brecht described Piscator’s work as ?documentary’ in what was probably the first use of that term in relation to theatre. By ?documentary’ Brecht did not mean a balanced account of both sides of the story but an account that redressed mainstream capitalist newspaper accounts. Early on the notion of documentary was assumed to be both a corrective and its own form of propaganda. Writing on Piscator’s theatre in Voicings (1995), historian Attilio Favorini concludes; ?In Spite of Everything! was thus in line with Piscator’s subsequent, if irregular, attempts to bring to theater the directness of political speech, that is, to transform representation into political action.’ Gone for the moment were the psychological preoccupations and assumptions of the bourgeois theatre in favour of what Piscator referred to as ?the great forces of history.’ Life as lived by communities of people, rather than individuals, began storming stages and probably owed something to the Soviet history spectacles such as the Storming of the Winter Palace. More recently there have been many productions that portray individuals as representatives of entire systems of thought. The British play My Name Is Rachel Corrie (2005) co-edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, for example, challenges the way theatre constructs history and memory. The deceased protagonist of the play, Rachel Corrie, wrote about her experience in Gaza apart from the historical narratives that created that particular place. Rickman and Viner created a structure for the play by making omissions, additions, subtle changes of rhetoric, and juxtapositions in Rachel Corrie’s diary entries, letters, and emails. The play’s problems of authorship, the opacity of the work of its editors, and the often hate-filled internet discourse that surrounded it obscured the play’s meaning. The story of Rachel and her search for social justice became, in the hands of Rickman and Viner, testimony for the prosecution of Israel. Even as the notion that truth is stable and knowable has come under scrutiny, some artists and theorists continue to make claims for testimony. Typically concerned with social injustice and civil liberties and informed by civil rights, antiwar protests, feminism, and gay rights, documentary and verbatim trial plays address the shortcomings of the law in relation to gender, race, and social justice. Trial plays stage legal proceedings in order to portray the problems of the law in relation to history (the archive) and the implications of re-imagining, re-writing, re-staging and, by implication, reconfiguring that history. Some prominent examples of trial plays in which the events, the resulting trials, and theatrical innovation are all present, include: The Investigation by Peter Weiss (1966), which documents the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial; The Trial of the Catonsville Nine by Daniel Berrigan exposes the government death machine of the Vietnam War; The Chicago Conspiracy Trial by Ron Sossi and Frank Condon (1979) portrays racial injustice; Inquest (1970) by Donald Freed reveals legal corruption; Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (1972) by Eric Bentley stages the infamous McCarthy hearings; Execution of Justice (1984) gives an account of the homophobic murder of Harvey Milk, and Greensboro (A Requiem) (1996), exposes how the Ku Klux Klan literally got away with murder, both plays by Emily Mann; Unquestioned Integrity: The Hill Thomas Hearings (1993) by Maime Hunt discloses the gender ignorance of Congress during congressional hearings; Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997) and The Laramie Project (2000), both by Moises Kaufman, reveal gay hatred; The Colour of Justice (1999) by Richard Norton-Taylor, is an account of the unconscious racism of the British police in relation to the murder of Stephen Lawrence; One Hour Eighteen Minutes (2010) by Moscow’s Teatr.doc shows the failure to protect a Russian anti-corruption lawyer; and The Moscow Trials (2012) conceived by the Swiss director Milo Rau, stages real-life protagonists in a trial of Russian democracy and freedom. Court documents can and often are intercut with other information and scenes. The original production of Inquest used reconstructed scenes from Ethel and Julius Rosenbergs’s private life. Inquest attempts to exonerate the Rosenbergs by using court documents to tell a story about the corrupt and unethical practices of the persons who controlled the construction of the couple’s legal narrative. The production reopened their espionage trial by constituting the audience as an assembly of citizens with the rights and responsibilities of delivering a verdict. The once strange but now familiar ability of unproven master narratives to dominate public thinking, especially in moments of cultural and political crises, is integral to the play. A great number of international works address the interface between performance and the archive both in terms of interrogating the archive and adapting the portrayal of memory to a theatrical space. O Jardim (2011) by Companhia Hiato of Brazil tells the stories of three generations of the same family. Although the overarching narrative of the work is fictional its infrastructure is real, using as it does the performers’ family photographs and portions of their life stories as the basis of the production. Brickman Brando Bubble Boom (2012) by Agrupación Señor Serrano of Spain tells the story of John Brickman, who invented the mortgage system in Victorian England and fought for the right of everyone to have a home. Brickman’s story is intercut with footage of Marlon Brando in The Godfather...
