René Pollesch’s Cappuccetto Rosso, Salzburg, 2005. Photo: Thomas Aurin

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Bernd Stegemann

Trans lated by Matthew R . P r i c e

After Postdramatic Theater

Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theater has generated vigorous discussion and debate among academics and artists since it was first published in Germany in 1999. (An English-language version was published in 2006.) To mark the book’s tenth anniversary in October 2008, the German magazine Theater heute published two new essays reflecting on the impact and validity of Lehmann’s proposition that contemporary theater has rejected mimesis and even moved beyond drama itself. Here is Bernd Stegemann’s contribution to that original forum. — Editor

It was nearly ten years ago that Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theater was pub-lished and quickly became a standard work.1 Since then, many graduating classes of theater students have begun or in some cases ended their studies with this book. The title, which became the buzzword of an aesthetic viewpoint, is quite strong. The book promises a new aesthetic paradigm and delivers a whole variety of new descriptive vocabulary. At the same time, it promises the liberation of theater — long-awaited in certain circles — from the ruling clutches of drama.

Today, almost any theater practitioner, and for that matter almost any theater-goer, claims to know what is meant by postdramatic. For some it is an aesthetic experi-ment on being able to make theater without any conveyable narrative. For others it is the call to arms for theater’s very evolution: “If you can’t do it without a story, then just stick to your own!” For others still — for the historians of theater — it is the fulfillment of a dream, which can finally describe itself neatly with its own academic vocabulary. But what does postdramatic really mean, and what actual happenings in theater can be described with the term?

Theater 39:3 doi 10.1215/01610775-2009-002© 2008 by Bernd Stegemann, English translation © 2009 by Matthew R. Price

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To begin, we can place the term into simple language and we will find that it means something like after the plot. Heiner Müller’s famous saying — “My drama is no longer pertinent” (“mein Drama findet nicht mehr statt”) — is a statement on societal mood, ideological stance, and aesthetic position all in one and could be viewed as a starting point for this new art of the theater. But here the first difficulty in confront-ing the term postdramatic becomes apparent. For Müller’s statement refers to a crisis of drama, which consists of its apparent inability to convey the complexity of the modern world: the problems of the present exceed the representational capacity of the situational dramatic art. In the process of modernity it is evident that fewer humans are entering into conflict with one another. Instead they are sliding into complex battles with their own institutions.

In this evolution, the accused has no human or personal conflict with his judge but rather appears in a functional capacity before an institution. With The Trial, Kafka was able to represent this disconcerting relationship. But situational drama struggles to find a situation to express this: it remains reliant on human interactions, with the possible result that the judge is made out to be especially dark and inscrutable and the accused particularly perfidious. This is the tendency toward the obvious or the recog-nizable that Kafka was so expert at derailing.

Drama, with its central focus on character-driven conflicts, had clearly always been capable of responding to those limits inherent to its situational form. Natural-ism, the epic form, documentary theater, and many other dramaturgical advances rep-resented new dramatic forms. The claims of postdramatic theater, however, go beyond such developments. Its central tenet is that the very attempt to make theater with the basic ingredients of dramatic situation, character, and story, is obsolete. The relation-ship between drama and the theatrical translation of events is terminated, and the myr-iad forms of theatrical inspiration to be found within drama are refused.

Postdramatic theater, thus, has two different dimensions: it regards its function no longer as the production of a dramatic text, and it rejects the structure of dramatic situation as a basis of the actor’s representation. Postdramatic theater begins instead with an emphatic relationship with itself.

Mimesis and Postmodernity

The prior function of theater was well described in the saying that all the world is a stage. The axiom may have been understood differently depending on one’s worldview or aesthetic zeitgeist, but the representational sights were always set on a world beyond the representation itself. Since the beginning of the modern period, mimesis came to mean both the function of reference to that which was to be represented, as well as to the production itself. The mimesis of the world was a work form that itself became readily apparent. This work went into creating that secondary reality that gave to the actual reality its artistic form. Thus, mimesis functioned in two directions: it repre-

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The Oresteia, directed by Michael Thalheimer, Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 2006. Photo: Iko Freese

sented reality in a specific form, and it gave this representation its own reality. The historical continuum of mimesis could be examined through the represented world, as well as by the way in which it was represented.

In the 1990s the fragments of an exploded discourse were collected. The detona-tion had taken place at least twenty years earlier. In the wake of structuralism and post-structuralism the whole world became symbolic. The result was an unusual theoretical problem. If everything can become a symbol, and if these symbols no longer need to refer to anything beyond themselves, then the world effectively becomes indescribable and its doings unconveyable.

The driving force of life becomes simulation — one lives in quotes, borrowed iden-tities, coincidental arrangements, and random self-attributions. The master narratives — which came in the form of a superstructure, an ideology, paradigm, or worldview, and which ordered arbitrariness into describable and assessable events — are gone. Mime-sis is no longer necessary, since the world is already a hall of mirrors full of potential

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Rimini Protokoll’s Wallenstein: A Documentary Staging, Mannheim, 2005. Photo: Dieter Rüchel

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interpretations of itself. Simulation takes the place of narration. Symbols no longer tell of something beyond themselves; they only refer to other symbols or to themselves as a symbol.

“A rose is a rose is a rose” became the emblem of this epoch and the model of the dual concept of a symbol. On the one hand, the rose refers to nothing more than the word rose; on the other, the assembly of the words creates its own construct, and its own reality. Just like a childhood game, where a word is repeated again and again until it loses all meaning, this assembly of words causes the word rose to lose its reference to the flower. Instead, priority is placed on something performative, in which the words mean nothing more than that which their pronunciation itself creates. The most basic daily phrases can take on a performative symbolic usage, as in “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Not until the pronunciation of this sentence does the reality exist that it is meant to reference.

The fascination with self-reference spread like wildfire in the arts. The perform-ing arts began to perform, in the sense that the act of performance became the primary focus. Accordingly, theatrical evolution refuses to fall behind in the new discovery of the performative and the disappearance of the human. It becomes postdramatic. The voice of the actor, for example, is no longer meant to support him in his arguments or conflicts, but should now liberate itself and preserve its intrinsic value by doing so. The material value of the voice becomes important. The voice has become a symbol of itself. The intrinsic value of symbols, of physical stimulus, of the human body, of physical space — the intrinsic value of anything at all — is transformed into a leading aesthetic concept of the period. Text is spoken breathlessly, so that the breathlessness itself overtakes the meaning of the text. Audiences’ patience is put to the test, with the passing of time becoming painful. Bodies slide into mud, fall into water, or run against walls — their intrinsic value as flesh and mass is made to clash palpably with the world. Such movements are repeated until the audience reacts with “dialectic unease”: this can’t continue (boredom) leads to understanding that it’s meant to be that way (I’m sup-posed to be bored), and is followed by an evolution into voyeurism (let’s see how long they can keep this up and whether they lose their focus in the meantime).

These modest happenings have an effect, however, which is related to the percep-tion of the real world. The observer must partake in creating the artwork, in the same way that contingent events in the world can have a perspective or an interpretation only via an observer. Now the observer becomes an author of his own (artistic) story — just as in his day-to-day life — which is informed only in an illusory manner by his perception. This representation of the world has an artistic effect that aligns exactly with the post-modern worldview, with mimesis no longer portraying the world, but portraying instead a way of perceiving the world. Furthermore, the depiction is meant to be just as inscrut-able as the world itself, and the relation between the observer and the observed is shaped such that the observer is a player and co-author, or else turns away in miscomprehension.

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It should come as no surprise that in this worldview the human subject is revealed to be a particularly clever self-performance artist and comes to be considered a historical construct, the downfall of which is watched with pleasure. The self is a construction. The question “What is a human?” is answered with not a little hubris: “An invention!”

Character: Bet ween Stanislavski and Brecht

The postdramatic aesthetic despairs particularly vehemently at theater’s longing to illustrate human characters. Character is the single aspect of the performing arts that postdramatic theater most derides as obsolete, and most handily sweeps from the stage. The evolution of theater into a theoretically compatible expressive form meant that the academy had the power to recognize and ban what no longer belonged on the contemporary stage. Character — the epicenter of dramatic conflict and the courier of the plot — was persecuted academically with a passion akin to Johann Christoph Gottsched’s strict treatment of the harlequin in the eighteenth century.

Isabella’s Room, directed by Jan Lauwers, Avignon, 2004. Photo: Eveline Vanassche

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In acting schools — the sanctuary of dramatic theater — a puzzling demand was made of young performers: they should learn to “defend” their character. Two things are meant: on the one hand, they are to dive so deeply into the preparation of a charac-ter that they can understand and represent its complex, contradictory motivations, but on the other hand, they are to defend the character from their own acting. That is, vir-tuosity in one’s expressive capability must mean that one’s personal manners of speech, habits, or tendencies of appearance should not reduce the individuality of the character. Expressive capacity should be developed in order to serve a task, not in order to carry out pure self-representation.

Stanislavski’s system created a comprehensive compendium of practice for meet-ing such a task. He coupled the inner experience of the performer with the outer, physi-cal expression. Transparency in the performer’s inner experience is thus the greatest gift or talent an actor can have. The stage is an exceptional place, though, and inner experi-ence can become blocked and give way to posing or behaving instead of experiencing and being. The most important artistic device Stanislavski offered in this case is that of

situational choice. If the actor succeeds in internally recreating a situation in all its detail, he can re-experience it and relive it.

A situation is created by drama to the extent the plot is unfurled through the text. If the actor is sufficiently trained, he can tease the given situation and physical behavior from the text and breathe life into it. If he succeeds, his inner experience will be in accordance with the given situation — he acts, since the situation is fictional, yet he is real, since his experience is present and gives the character reality. In other words, he represents a character, and his repre-sentation of the character has its own reality. His acting contains a reference to reality and also a performance with its own intrinsic qualities. This is the ideal of acting training according to Stanislavski.

With Brecht, the separation between the actor and the character became a starting point for a new form

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of artistic expression. The performer began to have a perspective on his own perfor-mance, the character began to narrate his own behavior, and actions were demonstra-tive, with each happening on the stage marked by its own witnesses as something important or something worthy of reflection. This reflection was collected in a fable, which delivered a further perspective on what had happened. The audience was caught up in a dual relationship with the events: it comprehends the difference between the events and the character or actor carrying out those events, yet it also follows the chain of events that compounds into the narrative story.

In postdramatic theater all events are symbols of themselves and therefore also equal in value. The performer or subject carries these symbols and is conscious of doing so. With this consciousness, he can no longer plausibly wear the mask of a human expe-riencing something and behaving in some directly resultant way. The theatrical devices instead serve a deconstruction of the audience’s perception, which is believed to suffer from a lingering bad habit of seeking a connection between character, plot, and mime-sis in general. This habit is desensitized by the practice and repetition of the separation of symbols from their referents.

The path to this goal is the use of unclear meanings. Anything can be separated: speech from its meaning, the body from its voice, the voice from that which is said, that which is said from its meaning, the meaning from its intention, the goal from its motivation, and so on. Based on his habit, the observer continues to want to establish a synthesis of the various theatrical elements. This is considered an aspect of the power discourse, for which he may well be punished even during the performance. Extreme length of performances lets him understand the value of time; incomprehensibly spoken texts teach him to admire the beauty of symbols; repetition schools him in the study of details, which certainly would have been lost if the passage had only been spoken once; repetition also teaches humility in the face of things that are eternally the same.

In the meantime, however, people have begun to liberate themselves from this form of theatrical imposition of the will. The boundary between actor and character is increasingly seen as an inspiring and befuddling reason for acting. In the theater work of Armin Petras and Fritz Kater, the narrative perspective that each character can take on does not serve the overarching commentary but instead creates surprising and renewable interactions and situations. In the work of Jürgen Gosch, who has his actors in view of the audience before they take the stage, the magic moment of transformation is made the starting point of the situational interplay. It is also in Michael Thalheimer’s high-stakes characters, whose inhibitions give more insight into their inner lives than any expressivity in the acting. These characters and their secrets are aggressively and masterfully protected from the communicative urges of the performers. Nicolas Ste-mann’s actors take such pleasure in a successful scene that they use it as an impetus to play the character longer and deeper, and thus drive the messy conflicts further than they would ever have dreamed at the beginning of a theatrical run. It is also in the projects known as Rimini Protokoll, which transform theatrical ready-mades into self-

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narrating characters who become wrapped up in the dimensions of situational, story-oriented interactions.

All these theater-makers create a new balance each second of each night in the relationship between character, actor, and situation. Only through the work on mime-sis and the representation of the world do they and many others succeed in creating new relationships between representation and that which is represented, new rules of the game, new situations, dramaturgies, and forms. Otherwise, by throwing the baby (drama) out with the bathwater (postmodernism), the mimetic thread of connection to the existing world is liberated (lost). In that case, theatrical devices may be more easily described by theater historians. But the risk is present that the function of theater in contemporary society could become exhausted, and that would mean a true crisis.

The Dramatic Situation

Who is speaking? This question about drama is repeated in every new epoch. In Greek tragedies the song and dance of the chorus were the earliest forms of mimetic work in representing the outer world. The actors were in opposition to this, taking the posi-tion of individuals, whose stake was claimed in stubborn challenges to the gods, lead-ing to catharsis and revealing tragic hedonism. In Shakespeare’s world theater, each party, actors and audience, had its speaker or speakers. In postmodernism, speech on the stage becomes its own dramatic discourse. The authenticity and authorship of the spoken text is openly questioned. Why, for example, would one speak a text that is not created by the speaker, but merely memorized by him? And how is it that convention insists that a written text can contain a hidden character, and that the speaking of the text can create dramatic situations? From the perspective of postdramatic theater, this convention is considered an embarrassing pretense and an obvious manipulation of the audience.

But what concept of situation is operating within this perspective? Apparently it is that of the joint physical presence of the performers and their audience! In this joint presence the various interactions and stimulations occur; they “situate” themselves in this way. But this situation is the beginning and end of all necessary consideration. There can be no more dramatic situations, because “what is experienced or stylized as drama is nothing more than the blatant deceit which passes off happening as action.”2

Postdramatic theater’s entire rejection of drama lies in this one damnation. The act of observing humans for the purpose of examining and understanding their behav-ior and their actions is considered to be an illusion and a habituated lie. With this stroke, dramatic situations lose all legitimacy as a form through which the world can be described or translated into narrative structures.

If the effort has been made, however, to question one of the central and most complicated concepts of theater — the dramatic situation — then it is incumbent upon us to consider what is really meant by a dramatic situation. A situation does not only

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occur in the concrete world, which Hegel — the most complex analyst of the dramatic situation — described as the “state of the world in general” (“allgemeiner Weltzustand”). This state of the world contains at least one contradiction, which can be found on the surface of the basic ways in which we carry out our lives. Hegel’s model dramatic work for examining this contradiction is Antigone, in which family rights clash with societal rights. The opposing willpower of Antigone and Creon effectively waters down these different sets of rights, robbing each one of its unique perfection. According to this viewpoint, a tragedy is tragic only when two sides are both right and when both stake a claim on being right to exactly the same extent.

Yet indecision is an essential element of tragedy and of the emotional experi-ence recognizable within catharsis. Indeed, a situation is generated by conflict, or more appropriately, by lines of conflict that run through the very core of the world in which the situation occurs. This makes conflict the best representational form there is. Such lines of conflict are contradictory, because they reveal “something which simply is not the way it should be.”

In order for conflict to unfold into a dramatic situation, however, an oppositional mechanism is required. Conflict requires two parties as equally bound or drawn to each other as they are repelled by or destructive to each other. To wit: Creon is not coinci-dentally Antigone’s uncle. He must see through this confrontation in order to demon-strate his power within the family and within the state. Antigone must fight with her family member and with the political ruler in the same person. The insoluble bonds that exist between parties to a conflict are the precondition for a dramatic situation. The situation can be a driver of the plot only if this internal dialectic exists between simultaneous unifying and separating forces.

The contention that such a descriptive approach to the world can no longer exist has become a stereotype, and it misses completely the potency of the dramatic arts. In any successful scene, an entire closed world is created and revealed to be self- contradictory. In one of the most recent productions of Rimini Protokoll, Breaking News, the world onstage was meant to correspond exactly to the outer world and the way in which it depicts itself through news. The situation consisted of experts sort-ing the news items based on their relevance to the general public. By virtue of their backgrounds and educations, these news experts are members of the corners of the world being depicted by satellite news. They watch live as reports from their individual regions come in, and they select news items they wish to present to the public. A live news show on stage took place, with representation of important events from all around the world. The collection of news is so disparate that the audience quickly realizes how enormous the differences are in the “general state of the world” (i.e., the news from around the world), which has been created by the situation (the experts’ live editing of the news). The situation is meant to be a revelatory aspect of the drama, by enabling representation of human behavior and experience with complexity and sensory infor-mation that reveal basic contradictions.

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The postdramatic revision of drama, though, denies this concept of situation and views drama mostly through a polemic lens as “melodrama.” In doing so, the concept is viewed without regard to history and given a colloquial reference to kitschy, sentimen-tal approaches to performance that have no dimension beyond their pettiness. Drama is reduced to a cheap romance novel that finds its bombastic end in Hollywood films. Once such a shadow of true drama is established, no one sheds a tear when such a prod-uct of decay becomes evening entertainment.

Believability

To ask the question another way: what makes theater such a gripping event for audi-ence members that their attention is worthy and rewarded? A concept may help here, even though at first glance it may appear to be an outdated one: when it is believable, theater earns the devotion of its audiences.

The earliest parameters for a believable story were laid out by Aristotle in Poet-ics. The main question was how to present and narrate a story so that its effect reaches catharsis. The answer is as simple as it is complicated. The plot must be presented in the form of dramatic situations, and these situations must be understandable and surprising at the same time. They must be understandable so that interest is awakened, and they must be surprising so that the interest goes beyond a normal daily level and becomes captivating. That is to say, they have to be plausible and disquieting at the same time. The way toward this dialectic was described by Aristotle as “the architecture of plot” (freely translated). The origins of dramaturgy, therefore, are in the analysis of events for their dramatic believability. How can we draw attention toward a character in such a way that I become interested in it? What must befall that character to heighten my interest? How must its story go, so that I follow it and can leave it satisfied?

No screenwriting school and no realistic dramaturgy can survive without these criteria. Believability is not a phenomenon of daily life but a feeling — created by drama — that makes us want to give a story our attention. The most unbelievable events can be made believable by successful dramaturgy, just as the actual world at times can appear completely incomprehensible. Believability, like tragedy, is a task of dramaturgy to bring events and situations into an order that creates this effect.

In the postdramatic discourse, the believability of character and plot is replaced by the truthfulness of effect. The dramatic situation — as a medium for understanding and depicting human behavior — is rejected, as is the desire to report about humans by means of the plot form. Postmodernity promised relief from all problems associated with mimesis. Each new use of symbolism was simply doubled under this new way of theatrical thinking, leading to the fruition of its own poststructuralist theories; was this really the reason for its being in such high demand so suddenly? Since art and science used basically the same theoretical apparatus, description and invention could go hand in hand. Theater scholars rejoiced: it seemed that real theater had finally arrived at the

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theories of theater, and vice versa. Only those theatrical practices that were free from the pressure of representation were current; they were liberated, honest, and conscious of their own self-worth. Theater that had prescribed mimesis of the world, and which used dramatic structure to this end, had become outdated, since it maintained drama where only the simulation of conflict was possible. On top of that, was it not true that drama had long since been overtaken by the trivial cinematic form? The new theory described and demanded the evolution of theater into the form. In doing so, theorists made theory into an aesthetic maxim of art, which was then better and more appro-priately reflected or depicted by itself — theory. Its Bible was the little black book cur-rently under discussion.

Nearly ten years after the publication of Postdramatic Theater, its poetry of rules has been echoed in the guidelines for the support of the performing arts by Berlin’s City Art Fund and its board of advisers. The title phrase, now empty of meaning, finds its way quite naturally into politics. If you intend today to apply for project funding and are not familiar with postdramatic theater, you might as well just fold up your tents. An entire generation is confronted with a jargon that is supposed to be repeated mind-lessly. This is a fatal situation for the emerging artists who are dependent on funding, since they are expected to operate with passé postmodern tools to describe an environ-ment in which harmless simulation of conflicts is a distant dream.

If you care on the other hand to approach the evolution of theater — which always rested on the shoulders of authors, directors, and actors — in a scientific man-ner, another kind of discourse would be necessary. What does an understanding of the world look like, with all its infinite representational forms? What is it that translates an event from the world into a theater event, and what insights are performance or repre-sentation capable of delivering?

Where other art forms can be conceived and intended and created over great lengths of time, theater is different because of its one peculiarity — the necessity of reaching an audience in the present moment of performance. Its effect simply cannot be restricted to a small circle of specialists, who might purport to decide on progress and the future. The reality of performance is a fundamental element of theater as an art form.

The postdramatic discourse is enlightening and helpful, in as much as it concen-trates on theatrical phenomena, particularly theater as an event. It attempts to describe its indescribable sensual complexity, allowing for better understanding and for better potential results.

But the discourse can become irritating when it attempts to raise itself to the level of aesthetic arbiter. In this case it no longer merely describes contemporary theater but turns to prescribing the course of its artistic development. The resulting notion that the future of theater can be determined by its academic leaders is a strange twist on the typical relationship between theater and the academy. The academy’s claim to have expanded theater with the concept of the symbol is hubris. The whole world becomes

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theatrical, as a result, and each and every coincidence must be honored with theatrical thinking. Mimetic theater, on the other hand, is based on the sensuousness of acting and the many meanings that can be found therein. With their dialectical play, the the-atrical and dramatic elements unleash a complexity that belongs exclusively to theater, and which is both sensual and rational at the same time. It is not clear how taking this dialectic apart is supposed to represent a gain. Postdramatic theater’s endless expansion of possible happenings on stage alone cannot be it. Why overemphasize so much that one side of theater alone, to the point that — liberated — it only has itself as a partner?

One wants to prevent the fascinating works of art that belong to the postdra-matic canon from being monopolized by a one-dimensional aesthetic. This tight grip has been broken already by many contemporary theater-makers: the use of narration of those affected by events, the events witnessed and related by everyday, unexpected reporters, or those who tell their own personal story — these are all examples. There is a degree of self-sacrifice required under these laws; a speaker’s self-performance illus-trates his self-marketing, as in the work of René Pollesch. Similarly, while Jan Lauwer’s all-around performers act, sing, and dance, they create so many motifs, situations, and stories with their charm and their abilities that one nearly becomes dizzy. Rimini Pro-tokoll has its figures give witness to themselves live on stage, acting and speaking about the outer world within the representational context and sharing that world — and the creation of the artwork — with the live audience. Drama and mimesis — against the stipulations of the postdramatic discourse — have once again exercised their perceptive and representational strength as illustrators of the world.

Notes

1. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999).2. Lehmann, 463, trans. Matthew R. Price.

After Postdramatic Theater

Bernd Stegemann

Ten years after the original German-language publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s

Postdramatic Theater—a book that altered the critical discourse about contemporary

theater practice—Bernd Stegemann weighs the ramifications of Lehmann’s book as

European theater artists struggle for funding and support to express new visions. He

argues that Lehmann’s aesthetic analysis has taken a prescriptive turn in the theater

world and hinders artists from using the theater’s most engaging forms: characters and

narrative fictions.

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