Einar Schleef Research Articles

Excerpts from Einar Schleef’s "Droge Faust Parsifal" (Drugs Faust Parsifal)

Arguably the most important books by Einar Schleef (1944-2001) are his novel Gertrud, a monologue narrated by his fictionalized mother, his diaries, and the work excerpted here, Droge Faust Parsifal (Drugs Faust Parsifal, 1997). Schleef also wrote plays and short stories, and was a theater director, set and costume designer, actor, illustrator, painter, and photographer. His work deserves a wide readership, yet only a story and a play have been translated into English (Buchner 1982, 130-138; Vivis 1987). Drugs Faust Parsifal’s 500 pages are autobiography, theater history, dramaturgy and cultural essay in one. It won the City of Bremen Literature Prize in 1998 and was adapted for the stage in 2011 by Armin Petras. The selected passages from Drugs, which are somewhat anomalous in a book mainly about dramaturgy, concern Schleef’s personal struggles; they have historical relevance and show his linguistic dexterity, articulated in his “suffering language, a language for suffering” (Windrich 2009, 481). Both as child and adult, he is an observer of a postwar society divided against itself.

Alienating Choruses in German-speaking Performing Arts

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.

Dramatising Solidarity and Unification in Divided Palestine: The Chorus and the Ghost in Kamel EL-Basha’s Following the Footsteps of Hamlet (2013)

This essay explores how Kamel EL-Basha’s theatre production Following the Footsteps of Hamlet (2013) preaches unity and resistance in a post-2006 divided Palestine. After giving a brief historical account of the causes of the internal Palestinian political divisions that distract Palestinians from achieving liberation, the article traces how El-Basha uses theatrical devices such as the chorus and the ghost to materialise a sense of unification in the theatrical space. The analysis draws on other international theatrical practices like Einar Schleef’s (1980) ‘Choric Theatre’ and cites critical works such as Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to locate El-Basha’s theatrical practice in a broader context regarding the significance of the chorus in dramatising unity. The essay also traces how the performance of traditional Palestinian songs, ululation, dances like dabke and other rituals in the play, help foster Palestinian identity and shape their sumud (steadfastness) in facing the occupation. Finally, the essay focuses on the role of the ghost in evoking nostalgia in the audience for the days of unity and collective resistance promoted by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat before his death.

The History of Dance as Hypertext

Abstract This review presents Transforming Acts, a theatrical installation conceived by Penelope Wehrli and Detlev Schneider in 2014, which brings more than a hundred hours of documentary footage of performances and interviews with their authors, Pina Bausch, Laurent Chétouan, Joe Fabian, Jan Fabre, Johann Kresnik, Thomas Lehmen, Heiner Müller, Einar Schleef, Meg Stuart, Robert Wilson and others. The arrangement enabling their simultaneous screenings on five screens establishes numerous new connections between their works and thoughts.

Il coro come soggetto negato e l’eterno conflitto con l’individuo nel teatro di Einar Schleef

The paper aims to outline one of the fundamental figures in the theatrical aesthetic of Einar Schleef: the choir as removed protagonist of the tragic conflict. Starting from a description of choir as “pestiferous mass”, feared and therefore emarginated (as Schleef defines it in his controversial essay Droge Faust Parsifal), the article depicts the ambiguous and insolvable struggle between illusionary individual and failed community. A topic strongly pointed out in three significant productions: Goetz von Berlichingen by Johann W. Goethe, Vor Sonnenaufgang by Gerhart Hauptmann e Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti by Bertolt Brecht.

Mimo di voci, mimo di corpi: intervocalità in scena

As one of the keynote conferences at the Lyon Firth Congress of 2000 on Theater: Sound Space, virtual Space, this text proposes the concept of intervocality to seize the phenomena of plural vocal quotations (colour, timber and melos of voice conduction) in one single voice. Intervocality is first discussed in its general aspects as result of psychogenesis and socialization as well as gender, and second as an esthetic vocal feature in theatre praxis. Considering voice as a heterotopic phenomenon between body and language (Guy Rosolato) its force to project utopian and imaginary bodies in daily life is shown as giving place to vocal rhetoric of scene personae in theatre. In this context, Artaud’s voice experiments reveal intervocality as being part as well of the vocal psychogenesis as of the social vocal norms of language and voice delivery. Artaud’s extreme personal and theatrical voice is than confronted to the extreme public voice of Hitler, both defying the rhetoric code of decency of their time. The quotation of these extreme voices by performers of different contemporary productions (I magazzini, Jan Fabre, Einar Schleef, Bert Brecht/Heiner Müller, Christoph Marthaler, Robert Wilson etc.) is analyzed in its psycho-semiotic and historical functions implicating a History of theatrical voice and their dialectics with public historical voices as for instance the voice battle of Fritz Kortner against Hitler’s voice , The conclusion enounces eight theses on intervocality modellized on the conceptualization of intertextuality as proposed for the text by Julia Kristeva and Michael Riffaterre: they focuse for the voice the impact of intervocality on the projection of body and/mind of the staged persona as well as its affirmative or analyzed status.

Caesura of History: Performing Greek Tragedy after Brecht

Taking into account the intertwining of the theory of tragedy on the one hand and theatrical work on ancient tragic texts on the other, the paper explores the way in which tragedy poses the question of history. This is especially the case in conceptions of tragedy as an interruption in a continuum. Hölderlin’s idea of caesura, its reflection in Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy as a revision of myth are in the center of a critical dramaturgy of this kind. By analysing Brecht’s work on Antigone as well as the stagings of critical theatre makers that came after Brecht (Einar Schleef, Dimiter Gotscheff), the paper shows the consequences of the concept ‘tragedy as caesura‘ on the level of the aesthetics of the theatre, unclosing in a radical way the temporality of the tragic process. From this point of view, tragedy is understood as a site of encounter with the persisting powers of the past; as reflexive rupture in the transition between times, that undermines the established order, but without, however, arriving at a new one. Although in the history of theatre and thought tragedy has been too often associated with the universal and timeless, how is it possible to think of historicity in a way negating submission under the universal without losing the genre of tragedy itself?

Agon, Conflict and Dissent: Elfriede Jelinek's Ein Sportstück and its Stagings by Einar Schleef and Just a Must Theatre

Agon, Conflict and Dissent: Elfriede Jelinek's Ein Sportstück and its Stagings by Einar Schleef and Just a Must Theatre

Agon, Conflict and Dissent: Elfriede Jelinek's <em>Ein Sportstück</em> and its Stagings by Einar Schleef and Just a Must Theatre

This article explores the directorial approaches of Einar Schleef’s radically choric staging of Elfriede Jelinek’s play Ein Sportstuck at the Burgtheater (1998) and Vanda Butkovic’s English language premiere of Sports Play (Just a Must, 2012) in the context of the ancient Greek concept of the agon and the conflict between group and individual. A reworking of agon and conflict is not only central to Jelinek’s text but even more so to Schleef’s dramaturgy. This latter is read in terms of Schleef’s theory about the disappearance of the chorus from German theatre and woman from the centre of the conflict. While in terms of its content Jelinek’s play critiques society’s valorization of sportive agon and its relationship to collective violence and warfare, on the level of theatrical communication both Schleef’s and Butkovic’s stagings show that the play revives an agonistic tradition creating a public space for political dissent.

Crowd or chorus? Howard Barker's mise-en-scène and the tradition of the chorus in the European theatre of the twentieth century

ABSTRACTThis article analyses Howard Barker's most recent play BLOK/EKO from a European perspective. It identifies his use of language and of bodies as common elements in his exploration of plethora, and links them to European experimentation with new choric forms, for example on German-speaking stages. These forms offer a wide range of choric elements that do not always presuppose the presence of a fully formed chorus. Instead, they investigate a more fluid interaction between the individual and the mass. The article will use Detlev Baur's classification of the chorus in his seminal book Der Chor im Theater des 20. Jahrhunderts (1999) to compare and contrast Barker's staging of BLOK/EKO with Einar Schleef's staging of Elfriede Jelinek's Ein Sportstück (1998). Both directors use musicalization of language and a formal spatial arrangement of bodies onstage to create a stylized, heightened performance that consciously moves away from realism. In this comparison, I will point out how Barker's use of the chorus is still more closely linked to a realistic notion of the mass onstage, whereas Schleef employs his chorus more freely. Barker's concept of the ‘exordium’ will help to illustrate what both performances have in common in their use of choric elements.

Toward a Definition of Post-Brechtian Performance: The Example of In the Jungle of the Cities at the Berliner Ensemble, 1971

'Post-Brechtian' is a term whose meaning is suggestive but whose terms have never been carefully defined. This article considers the implications of the post-Brechtian in performance by proposing five theses that might apprehend the term's multifarious manifestations onstage. The theses proceed from conditions of epistemological uncertainty and articulate points of confluence with and divergence from Brecht's own performance practices, which he developed at the Berliner Ensemble. Ruth Berghaus's production of Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities at the same theatre in 1971 provides an early example of the epiphenomena associated with the post-Brechtian. The article seeks to locate the impulses that lay behind the production's performance decisions in order to generalize a series of principles that can be applied to the work of other directors, such as Robert Wilson, Christoph Marthaler, and Einar Schleef.

Toward a Definition of Post-Brechtian Performance: The Example ofIn the Jungle of the Citiesat the Berliner Ensemble, 19711

‘Post-Brechtian’ is a term whose meaning is suggestive but whose terms have never been carefully defined. This article considers the implications of the post-Brechtian in performance by proposing five theses that might apprehend the term's multifarious manifestations onstage. The theses proceed from conditions of epistemological uncertainty and articulate points of confluence with and divergence from Brecht's own performance practices, which he developed at the Berliner Ensemble. Ruth Berghaus's production of Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities at the same theatre in 1971 provides an early example of the epiphenomena associated with the post-Brechtian. The article seeks to locate the impulses that lay behind the production's performance decisions in order to generalize a series of principles that can be applied to the work of other directors, such as Robert Wilson, Christoph Marthaler, and Einar Schleef.

Prospective Genealogies: Einar Schleef's Choric Theatre

Since the 1980s, a growing number of performances in Europe have created new forms of choric theatre in search of altered concepts of the political. In Germany, one of its pioneers was the GDR-born director Einar Schleef (1944–2001). The article explores his oeuvre, from his first choric production Mothers (1986), a classical drama project, to his last production, Betrayed People (2000), which focused on the problem of revolution in Germany. Schleef's genealogical project reintroduced the chorus as a repressed figure that develops a spectral potentiality. Through a detailed analysis of Schleef's approach to performing history, the article examines how choric theatre initiates theatrical processes of cultural remembrance and creates a relation to the past that becomes generative of the future.

»… muß nach drei Seiten Jelinek-Lektüre schreiend aus dem Fenster springen…«

In her writing for the theatre, Elfriede Jelinek has reinvented not only writing but also theatre. Yet her aesthetic concept of »das andere Theater« (the »other theatre«), which she outlined in various texts on drama theory, seems realizable only in theory and in her plays Jelinek herself has realized only partially the radicalness she proposes in her texts. In their most consistent realizations, her plays resist any easy specification as they can no longer be identified strictly as plays but more as prose. Also on stage, Jelinek’s concept of the »other theatre« has been realized only partially. While some productions (Einar Schleef ) and production proposals (Nicolas Stemann) have tried to comply with Jelinek’s call for »other« staging methods of her plays, other stagings have returned to portray her »Sprachflachen« (montage texts) again as stage characters in concrete scenes and places (Jossi Wieler). In contrast, reviews of stagings of Jelinek’s plays seldom respond to the »other theatre« presented on stage. The reviews are text centered, analyzing the play at work with regard to how well it succeeds in conveying the »message« of the play to the audience. Elfriede Jelinke herself, on the other hand, at times »complicates« a radical interpretation of her plays and their theatrical realizations, because her aesthetic concept appears at times contradictory. Thus, Jelinek’s aesthetic concept seems only realizable on stage when it resists any specific definition of acting.

The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek's Sprachflächen

This article places stagings of theatre texts by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek in the wider theoretical context of the relationship between text and performance in postdramatic theatre. Countering a widespread misperception that postdramatic theatre is by definition theatre beyond the use of text, the article argues that in Jelinek productions, postdramatic forms of communication arise in response to a challenging new type of theatre text provided by the writer that actively demands new directorial and performative approaches. After first looking at Jelinek’s longstanding resistance to conventional theatre practice as articulated in her theoretical essays, I explore productions by Thirza Brunken, Einar Schleef and Nicolas Stemann. I argue that Jelinek’s texts act as a resistant force and that productions of her work increasingly acknowledge and openly exhibit the conflict between written text and performance in their dramaturgical approaches.

Viewed from Behind: The Projected Image and its Doppelgänger

The spectre is also […] what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects – on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always...

The politics of the polyphony of performance: Musicalization in contemporary German theatre1

The article describes and analyses the ‘musical turn’ German theatre has undergone in the past fifteen to twenty years, consisting in a re-discovery of the musicality of the theatrical process and event, not a mere inclusion of more music into the theatrical performance. The author focuses on three aspects of this phenomenon: firstly, musicalization in the devising or rehearsal process; secondly, musicalization as an organizational principle of performance; and thirdly, musicalization and the perception process. By looking at productions of Ruedi Häusermann, Sebastian Nübling, Heiner Goebbels, Christoph Marthaler and Einar Schleef, the author finds that musicality helps to introduce new dramaturgies and structures to theatrical performance and to challenge the expectations and meaning-making processes of the audience. For the director and performer musicality provides an alternative (not necessarily mutually exclusive) performative task to work with that shifts the attention from working on character, situation and narrative towards aspects of timing, sound and the polyphony of the theatrical media. For the audience, the inclination of a theatrical event towards the self-referentiality of music is a liberation of the obligation to ‘get’ the meaning of everything that happens on stage. And potentially, by worrying less about ‘what it means’, the audience can focus their attention on ‘what it is’ and thus challenge, widen and reflect on their own modes of perception and observation. At the same time, musicalization in the theatre will always deal with concrete spaces, bodies, texts and para-texts; meaning and coherence can thus be reintroduced through the back door by making use of the connotative referential potential of music.

Bertolt Brecht, de 1947 à 1995, une chronique allemande

This text is like a chronicle. Its aim is the history of Brecht’s theatre since his return from the USA (1947) to Heiner Muller’s death (1995). Brecht’s work and posterity are analysed in the historical contexts of the following dates : 1953 (Stalin’s death and the uprising in East-Berlin), 1956 (Brecht’s death and the uprising in Budapest), 1961 (construction of the Berlin wall), 1976 (Biermann’s polemic), 1989-90 (fall of the Berlin wall, reunification of Germany). Two key-moments will be dealt with : Ruth Berghaus’ attempt after Helene Weigel’s death to revive the Berliner Ensemble under the supervision of a Directory (Langhoff, Marquardt, Muller, Palitzch, Zadek), and after the fall of the wall and German reunification to revive it under the supervision of Heiner Muller alone. The literary posterity of Brecht and the development of a scenic aesthetic inspired by him were subject to a kind of reversal initiated by stage director Einar Schleef and author and stage director Heiner Muller.

Bruderkrieg in Deutschland – zu Rolf Hochhuths Stück Wessis in Weimar

Rolf Hochhuth's Wessis in Weimar is one of the surprisingly few accounts of German reunification on stage. First performed in 1993, the play depicts how life in the former GDR changed under the influence of newly established capitalist rule. The article discusses the value of Hochhuth's political agenda as well as the aesthetic shortcomings and historical misappropriations of the play. In addition, it introduces the first production of Wessis in Weimar, staged at the Berlin Ensemble, which was heatedly debated by critics and theatre-goers alike. Casting aside the scenic realism desired by Hochhuth, the producer Einar Schleef deconstructed the narrative structure of the play, thereby radically altering its political potential. His version of Hochhuth's text has since become a classic example of so-called postdramatic theatre.