Postdramatic Theater Research Articles

On Poet-Dancers and Animal-Thinkers: The Bodily Capacity to Read and Make Sense of Unjointed Time and Intensive Space in Wayn Traub's Maria Dolores (2003)

The Flemish artist and theater maker Wayn Traub uses the idea of embodied poetics to outwit logos, to introduce intensity and physicality into the cognitive viewing experience and hence to develop a postdramatic theater aesthetic. In his film-opera Maria Dolores (2003), he refers to his actors as “poet-dancers” and “animal-thinkers,” thus reflecting a particular desire for poetry to shape language, identity, community, and culture.

After Postdramatic Theater

Ten years after the original German-language publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theater—a book that altered the critical discourse about contemporary theater practice—Bernd Stegemann weighs the ramifications of Lehmann's book as European theater artists struggle for funding and support to express new visions. He argues that Lehmann's aesthetic analysis has taken a prescriptive turn in the theater world and hinders artists from using the theater's most engaging forms: characters and narrative fictions.

"The Musicality of Postdramatic Theatre: Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Theory of Independent Auditory Semiotics"

Lehmann's paradigm of postdramatic theater has mainly been criticized on two levels: its flexibility and its alleged putting to death of drama. The paper highlights to what extent flexible paradigms like the postdramatic one are necessary to study the numerous performances which are charac­terized by their in-between-ness between dramatic and postdramatic codes. The study of postdramatic jazz musicality that we observe in Jaz by Koffi Kwahule or in Isabella's Room by Jan Lauwers demonstrates the need for such flexibility. Lehmann's notion of independent auditory semiotics is developed in the paper to study the exploitation of text as music (and not only in music): the end of the convergences between arts, the performance as a musical score, voice as sound vs. voice as discourse, disintegration of the dramatic character in favor of the jazz body of the performer.

Amazing Untold Stories of Catalogues

At the 2008 TBA (Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival in Portland, Oregon, I saw two productions that put a serious crimp in my long-standing skepticism about “postdramatic theater.” One was a six-hour piece (originally from 1996) called Quizoola! by the British experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment, and the other was a new, fifty-minute work by that company’s artistic director, Tim Etchells, Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First, written for and performed by the New York actor Jim Fletcher.

Espaço inventado: o teatro pós-dramático na escola

Com a publicação da lei n. 9394/96, a arte integra-se ao currículo do ensino básico como área de conhecimento. Neste ensaio, problematiza-se essa nova condição da arte na escola, refletindo a particularidade da experiência artística em relação às outras disciplinas, de modo a não se descaracterizar o que é próprio dela. A partir do entendimento de que a presença da arte é provocadora de mudanças, busca-se observar aquilo que, na escola, é necessário "ser tocado" por ela. Esse olhar investigativo flagra uma cena de destruição, com problemáticas muito próximas daquelas expressas pelo teatro contemporâneo. Com isso, sugere-se aproximar a realidade escolar de formas do teatro pós-dramático, com o intuito de inventar espaços que possam vir a ser coletivos e que acolham o que se chamou de "trocas de intimidades". Dessa aproximação, reitera-se o conceito de conhecimento como invenção, defendido por Michel Foucault, e detecta-se a necessidade de elaborar uma atitude docente que seja provocativa e crie ações educativas de tipo estratégico.