F1311 Drama and Dramaturgy in the Age of Globalization: The German and British Paradigms, Gad Kaynar
Kaynar Gad
This course will analyze major developments in the field of dramatic writing and dramaturgy over the last decades in German as well as British drama, as inextricably connected with globalization dynamics and critique.
Since the fall of the Wall which, in a way, marked the inception of the age of globalization, drama in Europe vacillates between two poles: on the one hand, the closed, text-based and neo-classical, "objective" mimetic matrix with its linear or circular plot, characterized three-dimensional or typological fictive personae and definite loci, as well as the dichotomy between acting space and spectators; and, on the other hand, the post-dramatic text that serves as a mere score for a deconstructed, plot-less, character-less, imagistic, inter- or multimedial performative "event", often revolving around an ideological or philosophical concept rather than narrative. This score for a subjective self-manifestation deprives the dramatic verbal layer of its hegemonic position, discards the notion of acted "character" in favour of the "performer" who appears in his/her own personality, shatters the liminal barriers between audience and performance space and turns the spectator into an engaged spect-actor. Thus post-dramatic theatre serves as a correlative of and performative substantiation for globalization processes, since it enhances inter-cultural communication by liberating itself from the limitations and coercions of language and culturally-conditioned plot and conventions, and instead highlights universally accessible theatricality, synaesthetic imagery and hybrid, inter-medial dialogue, audience participation, and so on.
However, in close proximity to the increasing disillusionment with regard to the utopian ideal of global unification at the beginning of the third millennium, and the relative withdrawal of different cultures back to their national confines and interests, one can observe the gradual return to the traditional "dramatic drama" form, re-legitimized through its concern with the social, economic, gender and racial problems faced by multi-cultural societies. Whereas renowned scholars such as Hans-Thies Lehmann and Malgorzata Sugiera refused in 2006 to acknowledge this "regression" from post-dramatic radicalism back to the old forms, the critic Franz Wille bewails this "neo-bourgeois" development, and Birgit Haas classifies the entire German drama since the mid 1990s as "dramatic drama".
These developments are reflected in the work of the professional dramaturg, who moves between the locally-affiliated concept of the Produktionsdramaturg engaged with the dramaturgy of the culturally, lingually and normatively bound verbal text, and the trans-cultural model of the involved dramaturg as spect-actor and co-director in devising-oriented works. In this unique performative process, "classical" dramaturgy of the dramatic text is challenged by the open-ended and autogenic dramaturgy of the self, or of the dramaturg as text.
In the course, and in view of these basic contentions, we shall explore – through texts and media recordings – the post-dramatic texts (or "Textflächen") of Elfriede Jelinek, Rene Pollesch, Schorsch Kamerun and others, as well as the generically ambivalent texts of Dea Loher and Roland Schimmelpfennig. The latter constitute socially committed, programmatic plays from the thematic viewpoint, and a synergy of post-dramatic elements and dramatic drama structure, rhetoric and aesthetic from the formal perspective. These texts will be examined both in situ, i.e. as negotiating with the intra- and extra-aesthetic contexts (political, social and personal) in which and for which they originated, and as corresponding with the foreign cultural contexts in which they have been produced and perceived. They will also be explored through comparison with the plays of the British "brutalists" (Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp). On the dramaturgical level, this exploration will be complemented through two typically globalization-conscious productions: Feridun Zaimoglu's "translation" (in fact, rewriting) of Shakespeare's Othello into a blatant German-Turkish argot for Luk Perceval's production (Munich Kammerspiele 2003), manifesting the otherness of migrating populations as experienced by the translator; and Frank Castorf and Carl Hegemann's imagistic, hybrid, and theatrical-event-conscious adaptation of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire at the East-Berlin Volksbühne (2000), turning the piece into the nostalgic satire Endstation Amerika on the creators, actors and implied spectators – all of them non adjusted 'exiled' East-German ex-communists – rather than on the characters.
Evaluation
Readings