Malzacher The Art of Assembly

Political Theatre Today
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-89581-607-9
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 140 Seiten

The Art of Assembly surveys theatre today to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Drawing on numerous examples from around the world in performance, visual art, and activist art, curator and author Florian ­Malz­acher examines works that draw on the particular possibilities of theatre to navigate the space between representation and participation, at once playfully and with sincerity. In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong definition of the political and for a theatre that is not content merely to reflect the world's ills, but instead acts to change them. A knowledgeable foray through the landscape of political theatre. die tageszeitung (taz) A very good overview of current postdramatic events, bringing together a great deal of empirical material. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) Rarely have the pitfalls of representation as the cornerstone of theatre been explained so elegantly. Berliner Zeitung A stimulating book that brings you up to date with the latest discursive thinking without overwhelming you with theory. An ideal side effect. profil Malzacher's analysis is clever, enjoyable and accessible even for the theory-shy. A briefing on the state of the discourse and a declaration of love for theatre. Die Wochenzeitung (WOZ)

Florian Malzacher is a curator, author, and dramaturg as well as the host of The Art of Assembly, a series of talks and conversations about the potential of gathering in art, activism, and politics. From 2006-2012 he was festival programmer of the interdisciplinary festival steirischer herbst in Graz; from 2013-2017 the artistic director of the Impulse Theater Festival. He is the editor of numerous publications on theatre, on the relationship between art, activism, and politics, and on performance curation. These include (co)edited books on the work of theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Rimini Protokoll, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as well as Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics (2014), Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today (2015) and Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy (2017). His books and essays have been translated into fifteen languages.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Malzacher, Florian

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Prologue

Representation
Crises of Representation
Regietheater and Early Postdramatic Theatre

Politics and the Political
Anthropocene, Animism, and Posthumanism
Trembling Androids, Sweating Avatars

Identity Politics
Infiltrated Terms and Special Interests
Privileges and Unproductive Silences
Offended Offenders
Stumbling and Stuttering

Participation
Care and Confrontation
Safer Spaces, Braver Spaces
Participation Behind the Scenes
Immersion: Participation as Submission

Art and Activism
Means and Ends
Fake News
Forced Positionings

Theatre as Assembly
Performative Assemblies
Parliaments, Summits, Courtrooms
Pre-enactments
Assembling Knowledge
When Realism Becomes Reality

Epilogue

Notes
List of Names
Image Credits
Acknowledgments

Leseproben

REPRESENTATION
A family sits at a table. An average family that has made something of itself. That has something to lose and not much to gain. It is a story of war, rape, loneliness, fear, but also quite mundanely one of average prosperity and the fear of loss of status, of fathers who are dominant yet cowardly, of silence and avoiding responsibility. A story that could take place anywhere. And that is, at the same time, deeply rooted in German collective consciousness; a postwar narrative hearkening back to when psychological repression became a national virtue. Harsh, yet steeped in melancholy framed by Brahms’ German Requiem, the banal nestles up to the transcendental: “For all flesh is as grass / And all the glory of man / as the flower of the grass. / The grass withers / And its flower falls away.”7 But something is off in this picture staged in a barren, somehow at once massive and claustrophobic hall. The family around the table is Black: an image average Germans recognize from American TV series, but not Bavarian family sagas. In a country in which Black people in theatre appear almost exclusively as explicitly Black people (which is why Black actors end up playing not only the same types, but also often exactly the same roles, over and over), director Anta Helena Recke has bootlegged the already existing production Mittelreich (2015)8 by Anna-Sophie Mahler on the main stage of the Münchner Kammerspiele. One to one—the same stage design, the same text, the same movements, the same sequence of events—only the actors, the choir, the musicians have been replaced by Black protagonists. It is an imitation in the tradition of US-American appropriation artists such as Elaine Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine, who since the 1970s have played a refined, often feminist or institutionally critical game with the male-dominated art world by repainting, reproducing, re-enacting, or otherwise appropriating well-known images. But this Mittelreich copy (2017) is more than just a fairly exact appropriation of another director’s staging. Through the appropriation of white figures (and their embodiment via white performers) by Black actors, it not only points out that Black bodies and stories are underrepresented on German stages if they appear at all. The work at the same time addresses a completely different, and ambivalent, appropriation: the dream, or the nightmare, of complete assimilation. A Black family that seems to have suppressed all nonwhite cultural influences, for example when the son wrestles with the fact that he does not know “what the German Wehrmacht soldier in Russia and France, who was my father, did.” (The director herself writes that in this moment, she can’t help but think of her Senegalese grandfather, “who distributed candy to German children as a French soldier after the war in Berlin.”9) Along with the very clear demand for more visibility of people of color in artworks and in society, it is the profound ambiguity of this work that challenges the audience. The staging is not limited to the stage. Like any good work of appropriation art, it continuously refers to its contexts. To the white spectators, for example, who find themselves in a situation in which there is no clear right or wrong. One’s own interpretation must be continually reinterpreted: Isn’t personal worldly openness in fact paternalistic benevolence? Do we assess family power structures differently depending on whether we are watching a white or a Black family? What shifts when we realize that the refugees spoken about on stage—displaced Germans from the East after the Second World War—were just as unwelcome as refugees from Syria almost seventy years later? (“They are simply completely different people, these refugees. They just don’t fit in here.”10) And isn’t it true that we (the white audience) can’t help associating these thoughts with the actors on stage—even though they, like the director, were all born in Germany? And if, on the other hand, we believe ourselves to be truly “color blind” (or to have become “color blind” in the wake of the performance), are we not simply and self-reassuringly ignoring a difference that we, at least structurally, are maintaining ourselves? The partly fumbling, sometimes awkward—often “overly polite”11 (Recke)—tone of the post show talkbacks says a lot about how difficult it still is for the German society to speak about discrimination at least in the public sphere. But even if the dilemma of the white spectators is an essential part of the staging, the evening is at least as much directed at the people of color in the unusually mixed audience, because it offers possibilities for identification that are otherwise almost always absent in German municipal theatres. Mittelreich is also one of surprisingly few examples of institutional critique in theatre. (This too being a genre of the visual arts, in which the criticism of an art institution becomes the actual artistic practice, usually commissioned by the very institution being criticized.) It was not only the producing theatre itself that was thrown into question by the fact that the cast had to be completely made up of guest actors because the ensemble had no Black members. Mittelreich is above all a clear critique of a concept of a repertoire as such that, as Recke says, almost always imagines a white audience—and at the same time considers this audience to be universal.12 There are not many theatres that make the public investigation of their own actions part of their program. Beyond this, the wider European theatre scene, the selection criteria for acting schools, ensembles, and repertoires, and not least the field of professional criticism with its quality categories are under scrutiny. While most of the reviews appreciated Mittelreich’s approach (and the work was invited to the Berlin The-atertreffen by a jury of critics), there were also absurd derailments. Under the headline “Black alone is not enough,” the reviewer for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the most important German daily papers, expressed her disappointment that the Black cast did not infuse the stale original production with a “reviving blood supply” as she had hoped (and explained coquettishly that—aren’t we still allowed to say that?—this was of course “politically incorrect, because it was driven by, albeit positive, prejudices”). But maybe the actors simply weren’t Black enough—because “they’re not that Black, these six new bodies and faces.” The actual discrimination would therefore not lie in the theatre system, but in this “altogether bad amateur theatre.”13 Anta Helena Recke’s copy of Mittelreich shows to what degree all those implicated in theatre—whether actors, performers, spectators, or critics—are always perceived as representatives of a larger community, distinguished by skin color, gender, physicality, social class, profession …. Thus, the questions that are currently dogging all democracies (who is represented in what way, by whom and with what right?) are reflected in the theatre. Can a bourgeois actress represent a refugee? Can the West represent the Global South? Can a man represent a woman? Is the representation of stereotypes and clichés (ethnic, gender, sexuality, etc.) an act of exposure or simply the repetition of degrading insults? Recent discussions around blackface, the use of terms perceived as defamatory, and the like, call into question far more than just the right and the ability of white actors to portray characters of color. These are politically and artistically complex challenges that—like postcolonial discourse as a whole—have arrived late to continental European theatres. The strategy of appropriation, which Recke negotiates with Mittelreich, has another complex aspect. When pop singer Miley Cyrus, who has a sharp instinct for using scandal as a marketing tool, twerked at the Video Music Awards a few years ago, a fierce and polemic discussion ensued. Was this a white woman stealing a piece of African American cultural identity for the purposes of her next hit? Was her appropriation of the move, marked by rhythmic and sexually explicit thrusting and shaking of the buttocks, an homage or a caricature? (Similar discussions accompanied Madonna’s song “Vogue” more than 20 years earlier.) This, too, is a question of power relations: appropriation from “below” of what’s “above” is self-empowerment, integration, assimilation, expansion of identity, or loss of identity. Appropriation in the opposite direction, robbery? A desire to understand? Recognition? In their performance Situation with Doppelgänger (2015), theatremakers Julian Warner and Oliver Zahn trace the appropriation and marketing of Black and other minority dance forms in pop back to the time of minstrel shows of the nineteenth century, in which non-Black performers in makeup portrayed stereotypes—sometimes romanticized, sometimes hateful—of Black people. Later, Black dancers and musicians themselves were hired to perform in these shows, a feedback loop of clichés. The questions raised by such cultural appropriations have...

Über Autor(innen)

Florian Malzacher is a curator, author, and dramaturg as well as the host of The Art of Assembly, a series of talks and conversations about the potential of gathering in art, activism, and politics. From 2006–2012 he was festival programmer of the interdisciplinary festival steirischer herbst in Graz; from 2013–2017 the artistic director of the Impulse Theater Festival. He is the editor of numerous publications on theatre, on the relationship between art, activism, and politics, and on performance curation. These include (co)edited books on the work of theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Rimini Protokoll, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as well as Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics (2014), Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today (2015) and Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy (2017). His books and essays have been translated into fifteen languages.