Erfaringsfattigdom

Abstract

The lecture ”Poverty of Experience – Performance Practices after the Fall” by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll was presented at the international seminar ”After the Fall”, held at The Danish Royal Theatre in 2009 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The author has kindly permitted Peripeti to print a translated version of his lecture. Deploying Walter Benjamin’s concept of Poverty of Experience Müller-Schöll conducts an analysis of the crisis in not only experience but also the world of ideas as such in the time following the era of the cold war, the disastrous development of the (Western) financial markets and thereby the last great ideology remaining after the fall of the Berlin Wall, namely capitalism. Following this, he analyses a number of European performance practices, namely those of the performance group White Horse, the director duo Hofmann & Lindholm and Phillip Quesne’s group Vivarium Studio, exploring how these practices address the circumstances “after the fall” in an manner where they expose their own “poverty of experience” whilst very consciously dedicating themselves to an unspectacular scenic poverty.