Hello and welcome to a new series here on my channel where I aim to give a
brief and hopefully accessible introduction to some key academic
concepts and theories. I've become acutely aware recently that at the beginning of
the next academic year I have to start doing a little bit of teaching. And, as
part of that, I've been really keen to make sure I'm going back and revisiting
some really core academic texts. In reconnecting with some of those core
ideas, I thought a way to make it a little bit
more fun to myself, as well as to provide some wonderful content for my youtube
channel, I would create some short videos in which I sum up some particular
ideas. As always, I'm going to start from theatre, but I'm likely to slowly spiral
out and start to bring in some concepts which will be applicable to many other
fields of study as well. So, without further ado, here is the first episode of
What the Theory in which I look at postdramatic theatre.
So, I directed a piece as part of a short play festival recently and, gradually,
throughout the process I realised that none of the pieces were what I would
describe as plays. And this got me thinking a lot about postdramatic
theatre which I feel is something we talk about an awful lot in an academic
context but is a term which hasn't particularly traveled an awful lot into
mainstream theatremaking. So, here's a brief introduction the term.
Postdramatic theatre was coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his 1999 book of
the same name. It was published in Germany in 1999 but wasn't translated
into English until 2006. Now, just as with the broader artistic and philosophical
movement of post-modernism, which postdramaticism is part of, we can't really
understand postdramatic theatre without understanding what dramatic
theatre is. Plays, basically. Dramatic theatre is, broadly speaking, mimetic in
that it aims to mimic real life. It is also totalising, it creates a complete
world, a fictional world and populates it with characters and asks an audience to
believe wholly and completely in those characters. It may or may not
invoke the idea of a fourth wall in which the characters are not aware that
an audience is there; the use of monologue or soliloquy does not mean a
piece of theatre is not dramatic as long as the characters are still addressing
the audience as their fictional character. Dramatic theatre also has a
closed logic. So time may move forwards backwards or hop around and we may hop
between many different locations but we will always do so for a reason.
Characters will also always be very specific and have particular backgrounds
and particular desires for the future. Increasingly, however, over the latter
half of the 20th century, dramatists and theatre makers sought to experiment with
the flaws in this mimetic type of theatre. Dramatists started to carry out
playful explorations of the failure of this totalizing representative act.
Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life is a particularly good example. Consisting
of 17 scenes, the play is a number attempts to describe or define or
characterise the central character. Anne, who never appears on the stage, is at
once an actress, a terrorist, a victim, a hero, even a car at one point. Some of the
scenes, when we view them alongside each other, we can begin to draw links from,
but just as many seem to be describing a completely different individual. The play
is a barrage of information which in many ways doesn't add up to a simple,
single, logical conclusion. And this is very typical of postdramatic theatre,
it explores the idea that our experience of the world is very rarely as causal
and logical as our experience of traditional fiction is. In being so
logical, then, dramatic theatre actually fails to mimic our experience of the
real world. We can see similar ideas in some of Sarah Kane's later work and in
Caryl Churchill's plays where, quite often, there is the use of blank verse
which, instead of being attributed to particular characters in the playtext,
is left up to the creative team to distribute it within the rehearsal room.
In some of their plays, too, it is not the journey of a character which is explored
but the dramaturgy of an idea. Increasingly, a dramatist or playwright
might not be involved in this process at all. An awful lot of postdramatic
theatre is devised. Characters may actually introduce themselves as the
performer that is playing them, they may introduce themselves with their actual
real-world name. In these cases, fiction is done away with all together. For
examples of this kind of work we can look at the work of Ontroerend Goed,
Forced Entertainment and GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN. As I mentioned at the
beginning, postdramatic theatre is largely defined in opposition to
dramatic theatre. In many ways, it is what it is not. It can vary hugely in form and
content but central to it is the idea of a rejection of simple, logical, causal
sense being made from a piece of theatre. As a movement, it contests that the world
is best represented through things which make simple, logical, causal sense
but in the conflicting the contested and the unreconcilable multiple
logics. Thank you very much for watching this very first episode of What the
Theory. It would be really interesting to find out if there's any
particular concepts or anything you'd like me to focus on. It's been quite fun
to do something slightly new. As usual, please do consider subscribing or
giving the video a thumbs up. Thanks very much and have a great week!