THE THEATRE OF DISSATISFACTION
Offending the Audience instead of As You Like It – a change that took place in the theatre between the Elizabethan times and the emergence of postdramatic theatre (a term coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann1). And this does not simply mean replacing Shakespeare’s play by Handke’s. It is not even about the dramatic texts themselves, but about the notion of theatre they contain: the notion to which authors returned after many years in order to make use of it, modify it and turn it upside down. The spectator was an axis of that turn. The two titles mentioned indicate that the spectator and his condition would be an important point of reference for the artists. Both posit interaction, an intentional relationship or an ordinary Koltès's deal between the stage and the audience. It is easy to imagine how such a deal looked like in case of the Globe theatre.
If a play won approval, the chances were that it will appear on stage once more, if it did not – only shouts, thumping and thrown vegetables awaited it. The accounts of mobs forcing Shakespeare’s actors to change the plot of a play during the actual performance belong to the most colourful in the history of theatre. What then was an inherent part of theatre today has become a method in the new theatre. And specifically? Lehmann explaines that mechanism by a reference to an anachronic but clarifying notion of a ‘theatron’.
“In my book I made a certain distinction between what we call a dramatic axis, that is a tension between the characters of a play, who are engaged in a dialogue, and theatron axis, that is the relationship between the actors and the audience. […] The dominance of the theatron axis over the dramatic one is an important aspect of postdramatic theatre. […] The clash between the text and the audience becomes crucial. […] The theatre becomes a transition to a social event.”2
All this may seem nothing new. Such tricks are known even by the regular audience of boulevard theatres. In Sheer Madness, a play by Paul Partner staged all over the world, the audience actually takes part in the performance and choses its ending. But there that moment of choice is only a humorous device incorporated to an unusually traditional structure. The real power of co-creating a theatrical event (is it still theatrical?) is given to the audience in e.g. Alicja 0-700-188-188 by Usta-Usta Theatre (2005).
The founder members of this group might have been surprised to learn that what they do is a postdramatic theatre. However, it is difficult to classify the techniques they used differently. The play Alicja… is based wholly on one principle: “press the button of your mobile and decide about heroine’s fate”. Similarly, in Hautnah by the German choreographer Felix Ruckert, the director is not the one who imposes the sequence of events but only creates certain possibilities, for example, invites the audience and the artists to a certain space. In Hautnah a client in a club first chooses a dance partner for himself and then spends the rest of the evening with this person in a separated room. The performance becomes a compromise between the activity of the spectator and the artist’s skill.
“Every spectator gets the kind of theatre he deserves”3. The crowd rowing by the stage of the Globe (oftentimes so effectively that they were able to change the play to be performed that day) used this strategy to the full, didn’t it? Analogies between the Elizabethan and postdramatic theatre can be so evocative that they may lead to misunderstandings. In both cases we deal with an active audience, who is responsible for the direction in which the evening proceeds. The temptation to equate this models is the greater the more fashionable it becomes (Sarah Kane was named the new Shakespeare long time ago; Mark Ravenhill is the modern Kyd and so on). So where are the differences? In the intentions of the two theatres and in the simple opposition between “not yet” and “no longer”. In Renaissance England the principle of actor’s dominance was “not yet” valid. The Globe’s stage was the place where not only Hamlet’s and Othello’s fate were decided about but also the fates of actors desiring above all to win the audience’s favor. It was obvious then that the text of the play comes under negotiation. Today, the modern audience also chooses, influences, takes part in a performance. However, it is only because there is no other choice. The author able to propose a consistent, comfortable and exciting world no longer exists. The spectator has to construct the text of the play on his own. He will get exactly what he is able to work out.
Whereas the goal of the 17thC English actors was to live up to the audience expectations, the founders of postdramatic theatre try with all their might to let those expectations down. Everything that up to this time attracted the clientele during some hundreds years of bourgeois theatre’s dominance – from the existential pleasure of epiphany, through illusion, a plot full of tension up to a physical pleasure of relaxation in a plush armchair – is rejected. The authority irreversibly moved out from the pockets of an audience to the hands of a director or a troupe. Guests coming to see a performance are no longer principals in the name of whom theatrical rituals are conducted. Entering the space of the game they give a mute assent to have everything they do used against themselves. They may stamp, yawn, leave ostentatiously or abuse actors. Very well. Eitherway, they will not escape the entrapment. Rejection to enter the game is a part of it.
Komuna Otwock in its first action Bez Tytułu [Untitled] (1996) attracted the audience not only with aggressive light and a rumble difficult to bear but also with telling questions like “What are you here for?”
“Being” in the theatre ceased to be something obvious as the theatre ceased to be a three-dimensional cinema and started to pay attention to its own elements like dramatic time, location (highlighted, referring one to other locations), actors’ bodies or the very presence of observers. This presence is both discovered and questioned. It becomes the subject of activity for an actor and the main object of interest for the audience itself. Eyes that were once turned to the stage, now wander through the faces of others. What do they think about the monotonous, cold scenes created by Robert Wilson? Will they accept snacks from the actress murdered violently onstage a moment earlier? Will they react when the situation becomes threatening for themselves or the performers? Which room will they choose if actors disperse in the building? The groups like British Gob Squad or Tim Etchells’s Forced Entertainment strive to make people aware of the peculiar situation they are in.
In The First Night (2001), one of the works originally meant for the theatre, the artists of Forced Entertainment welcomed their guests saying “Ladies and Gentlemen. We would like to try to forget about the world outside as you are saying here with us. Do not think about anything beyond this room”. Nevertheless, it was not an introduction to a theatrical illusion of a ‘long long time ago’ kind, which would mark the transition to the safe world of drama, fiction and plot. The thing the audience was to concentrate on was not the performance but the difficulty of performing one. Actors’ countless mistakes, unexpected pauses, a wild dance instead of the expected continuation of a dialogue, these were all to confuse and unnerve. In their earlier production Showtime (1996), Forced Entertainment attacked the common notion of a performance as something ready-made and discussed the reasons why people come to theatres. “You may be here in order to see something which will make you sick. Something you would do only in the cozy privacy of your own homes […]. The audience likes seating in the darkness and observing how other people do it. Well, once you have paid – I wish you’d be lucky”. But instead of a piece of somebody else’s life, they were lectured about creating a good performance, saw a pantomime of cardboard trees, some aesthetics of plays for children mixed with texts about suicide, sexuality and violence. Instead of a good time – failure, disappointment, fraud. In the same time, Forced Entertainment consequently performs in small halls, for small audiences. This makes it possible to preserve the feeling of intimacy and enforce some real communication, which not necessarily must be approved of. It happens that fighting is the best way to get in contact with the other. Thus irritation and complete rejection of the artists by the audience belong to the set of desired responses.
Such spontaneous responses of the spectators, who become outraged and start distancing themselves, very often contribute to the matter of a performance. But that is what the postdramatic theatre is about: breaking up with the hegemony of the author of a play and equal rights for the means used. Audience reaction then becomes an element of a performance (or rather an event) as important as the text, light, actors’ bodies or music. It turns out that the spectator is not necessarily watching but being watched. Thrown out from the centre of Foucault’s panoptikon, the spectator found himself in a room with Venetian mirrors or rather by a screen showing Big Brother and he is one of the participants. Appropriating looks come from equally lost neighbors and also from artists provoking him to take action.
The discovery that a spectator has, beside eyes and ears, also a body – an important communication channel – is a legacy of the 70’s, the environment and performance movements. Adopting it on the stage posses an additional advantage of surprise, a perverse game with what the audience is accustomed to. Those who that were sitting indifferently and motionlessly will wander through a messy storehouse or a suspiciously looking side street. Who came for some entertainment will get bored, disgraced, and dirty, will confess about all their sins or become the stars of the evening. Who wanted security will be attacked. The artists of the Spanish formation La Fura Dels Baus repeatedly made their guests panic. Irritating with blinding lights, roar, din (well known by Komuna Otwock), they draw one into the game, create situations of a real danger and change “a cultural evening” into a struggle for survival.
It would be a revealing pastime to check what words are used most often by the specialists describing the situation of the audience in postdramatic theatre. Although such a survey was never conducted, one can assume that it would not be “satisfaction”, “ease”, indifference” but rather “confusion”, “uncertainty”, “shock”, “Compulsion” and “pressure” instead of “comfort”, “contact” instead of “distance”. According to traditional criteria, postdramatic performances are too slow (like Wilson’s), too fast (like Polesh’s and his breakneck technique of firing words at audience), too hermetic (like Nekrošius’), too boring and intimate, too intensive and brutal. Postdramatic is the theatre of deliberate discomfort, the aspect of which is not only aesthetic but also ethic. When the dancers of Two Fish4 group crash on the floor just few centimeters from us we too become responsible for the successive cuts and bruises. The awareness of that causes discomfort, chafing, disturbance. One desires that someone (preferably, not me) should stop them. After all, we are only the audience. This magic “only” is the most frequent target of radical artists. Moral oppression into which they drag us makes us desire to escape or react but once and effectively eliminates the belief in the innocence of observing. Here it stands trial, its power and hypocrisy is revealed.
To the list of postdramatic determiners one should add the word “competence”. Demanding competence or using it perversely by deriding the audience’s incompetence forms a basis of activity of some groups and directors. Preparing a performance, artists have clear and specific demands of the recipients. It is a rarity in the time when consumers’ “incompetence” seems to be their most valuable characteristic, which is discreetly strengthened by media, companies and advertising agencies. The one who knows nothing can easily be manipulated, deceived, thrust a piece of trash on or lured with some nice-looking picture. Swimming against the tide, postdramatic artists, like Gombrowicz’s Szambelans, make it difficult to follow their own creation. A barrier emerges: you don’t understand, you haven’t read certain books, you haven’t been to that town, you’ve missed yesterday’s news. However, sometimes a common generational experience is enough. The artistic director of Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells claims that his 200% & Bloody Thirsty (1989) can be understood by everyone who was brought up in a home where TV was always on. Sometimes it is good to go to a library or get a diploma in some specialized studies prior to going to a theatre. In the performance Trzeba zabić pierwszego boga [First God Must Be Killed] (2000) Komuna Otwock referred directly to the writings of Mircea Eliade, a culture and religion specialist from Romania. In Perechodnik/Bauman (2003) they clashed two visions of the holocaust: Jewish policeman dairy and the sophisticated sociological analysis by Zygmunt Bauman from his Modernity and The Holocaust. Complete understanding of the plays is possible only after recognizing the texts referred to (or rather lines of thinking).
Not less demanding is René Pollesch who staged a multipartite Saga in Prater (Berlin). In Sex nach Mae West [Sex according to Mae West] (2002) he makes a prostitute use terminology from marketing, feminist criticism and economics. In his Staadt als Beute [Berlin Stories] (2002) characters/personas quarrel and offend one another, mixing the language of the gutter with sophisticated philosophical reflection. The director and author of stage verbal scores know perfectly well that he can allow himself a reference to poststructuralists’ theories, Gilles Deleuze’s articles on the sociology of a city, juggle with terms like the production of space by Henri Deleuze or Edward Soja’s “postmetropolis”. His audience will not be there by chance. Those who had the courage to come would be able follow the performance and appreciate it. Those who did not intend to come at all may also become a part of the theatre production.
This was the case when Pollesch collaborated with Gob Squad group (Prater Saga, 2004). In the accompanying artistic event In This Neighborhood, The Devil Is a Goldmine accidental passers-by were subject to casting (the casting being not that accidental itself as it was conducted on a small stage Volksbühne by the heart of the artistic Berlin – the avenue Kastanienallee, called “Castingallee”). Artists tested passers-by’s acting skills, tried them and negotiated the price. “Ladies and Gentlemen, you ask whether we have a show for you. That’s a good question, because the stars of today’s evening are walking on Berlin streets and they don’t know yet that we wait for them to perform. What we are doing today is working with the real people!” – one of the performers shouted as he strolled along the red carpet in front of the theatre. The whole performance is created then by a spectator – “incompetent”, accidental, forced to react spontaneously. Reality is mixed with fiction, symbolic space with the real one blurring the boundaries between the audience and the artists. Pollesch’s actors do not pretend, they do not present any fictional beings with complicated but often paper psychologies. All the time they deconstruct the impression of mimesis, showing that they are real men, flesh and blood, who sweat, forget their lines, get pissed off at the author and one another. The performance ends when exhaustion and thirst makes them unwilling to make any effort more.
While in Pollesch’s performance, demonstrative autopresentation of actors takes place, in Christoph Marthaler’s Protection from the Future5 (performed during the third edition of Dialog Festival) the presentation of location plays an important role.
The introduction was a trip along the rooms of the psychiatric hospital in Lubiąż (in the original version, the audience were driven around the Viena clinic Am Steinhof, where Nazis realized the program of mass killing of patients during WWII). Real devices, postcards, toys, posters with Nazis propaganda – the spectator was to feel in his own body the claustrophobic atmosphere, stuffiness, hear his own steps echoing in the empty halls. The historical truth was appropriated by the director and forced into the recipient’s perceptual apparatus. The spectator has to “experience”, “feel” and “identify”, he becomes a character. However, nothing like identification with a fictional character or recognizing oneself in that character takes place. The spectator recognizes himself in the condition of a spectator that is a voyeur, parasite, member of a community. That is why the postdramatic theatre is often described as a metacomment on the traditional one. Purposefully not well fitted, ideologically “not for people”, this theatre is in the same time the only in which the audience is a theme, object and subject simultaneously. It wages a war against the automatised perception. It gets too close, accuses, fraternizes with the spectator or gives him a slap across the face. It works with non-dramatic texts, meddles with politics and private lives of the audience as well. Contrary to its centuries-old “dramatic” predecessor, instead of requiring memory and grasping whole intrigue or plot, it demands reacting to real events. The spectator learns to take responsibility for his own actions and often has to pay for the mistakes he makes. If the postmodern reality main occupation is the production of new needs, postdramatic theatre excels in not satisfying them.
Joanna Derkaczew
Translated by Anna Skrajna
The article comes from the monthly