Alienating Choruses in German-speaking Performing Arts

Abstract

The chorus has become a signature of German-language theater productions since the late 1980s. As a reflexive figure it exposes its linkage to the setting of the scene and the process of figuration. This article discusses the chorus against the backdrop of global societal changes, the specific situatedness of choral theater aesthetics in German history, the environmental epistemic turn in cultural studies and media discourses, and the institutional shift towards internationalized festival productions. It expands on the prefiguration of chorality in German literature (Elfriede Jelinek, Heiner Müller), the development of stage productions creating choral, i.e., non-dramatic aesthetics beyond group representations from Einar Schleef to Florentina Holzinger and thus the emergence of a new and manifold performative language at the threshold of performance and dance art. As this article suggests, these transformations of the chorus from rhetorical experiments to predominantly kinesthetic forms may indicate future unforeseeable turns of a figure that has been crucial for German-language theater in the last decades.