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Glenn D'Cruz - Teaching Postdramatic Theatre-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018) PDF
Glenn D'Cruz - Teaching Postdramatic Theatre-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018) PDF
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Teaching Postdramatic Theatre
Glenn D’Cruz
Teaching Postdramatic
Theatre
Anxieties, Aporias and Disclosures
Glenn D’Cruz
School of Communication & Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood, VIC, Australia
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International
Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
After teaching theatre, drama and performance studies for almost 30 years,
I am now, more than ever, acutely aware of the gap between the academic
vocabularies I use to teach theatre practice and those my students employ
to make sense of the same phenomenon. Perhaps this is a consequence of
growing older and realising we no longer share common cultural refer-
ents. Then again, this generational anxiety about terminology may have
more to do with a personal disposition than any general, quantifiable cul-
tural condition. No doubt, readers of this book will form their own opin-
ions about the extent to which my observations and arguments apply to
their contexts.
I first studied theatre in the 1980s. Although my desire to become an
actor inspired my interest in the field, the critical theories popular in this
era seduced me. Theatre scholars commonly cited philosophers such as
Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and frequently drew
on the discourse of postmodernism in the context of explicating experi-
mental theatre. And, like many people of my generation, I believed that
thinking about performance through adjacent disciplines enriched creative
practice and generated new settings and techniques for teaching theatre. I
still hold this view. However, I am sceptical about the truth claims made
by all critical vocabularies, including my own. Consequently, this book
often adopts the ironic tone of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy,
aspects of which inform its central argument. Scepticism is not the same
thing as outright dismissal, so while I often express frustration with the
protocols and practices that govern academic approaches to theatre, I
v
vi PREFACE
vii
Contents
Index 201
ix
List of Figures
Image 2.1 “The Cream Bun,” John Laws/Sade, 1987. Courtesy of The
Sydney Front Archive, the University of Sydney.
Photographer: Regis Lansac 20
Image 2.2 “The Crotch Grab”: John Laws/Sade, 1987. Courtesy of The
Sydney Front Archive, the University of Sydney.
Photographer: Regis Lansac 31
Image 4.1 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, courtesy Back to Back Theatre.
Photograph by Jeff Busby 78
Image 5.1 Attempts on Her Life, Deakin University. Photograph by
Glenn D’Cruz 100
Image 6.1 The Hamletmachine, Deakin University, 2006. Photograph by
Glenn D’Cruz 133
Image 6.2 The Princess Plays, Deakin University, 2016. Photograph by
Glenn D’Cruz 138
Image 7.1 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David
Baltzer/Bildbuehne.de153
Image 7.2 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David
Baltzer/Bildbuehne.de155
Image 7.3 From Noir, Group Devised Project, Deakin University, 2014.
Photograph by Glenn D’Cruz 168
Image 8.1 Stefan Stern as Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People,
2012, Schaubühne Berlin. Photograph by Arno Declair 184
xi
Chapter 1
Prologue
It’s 8.30 a.m., and the rehearsal hasn’t been going well. The student per-
formers are lethargic. Some can’t stop yawning through the warm-up
exercises. Others, though bleary-eyed and weary, gamely go through the
motions. The lecturer is in a similar mood, but makes a valiant stab at
appearing enthused and energised. These early-morning starts are a killer,
but there’s no contesting the utilitarian logic that claims the new timetable
regime makes the most efficient use of university resources. Having dis-
pensed with preliminaries, the students prepare to run through the first
scene of the play. One older woman looks a little more agitated, and the
lecturer can see that something more than the early-morning blues is trou-
bling her. She fidgets a little before raising her hand to call time-out:
It’s a good question, but before the lecturer can open his mouth,
another student, an unruly young man with some kind of attention deficit
disorder, pipes up and declares with more than a hint of sarcasm: “The
scene is about an absence of character. It’s a line from the fucking play.”
Irony is just a cop-out. It allows the playwright, if we can call him that, to
say, yes, we all know these ideas about women are sexist, but we’re going to
keep them in circulation, anyway. And it’s all supposed to be OK because he
obviously being ironic. I call bullshit!
Pedagogy
The process is more or less the same every year. The students gather in the
rehearsal room, waiting for me to enter. Their chatter and laughter do not
subside as I walk into the space and survey their faces: a few look familiar
Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 3
from previous classes, but most are strangers. I have no idea who the
majority of these people are, and what skills they possess as performers, yet
I will mount a production with them in ten weeks. I have undertaken this
task for the last 15 years within the framework of two production classes:
the first, a second-year unit, is concerned with producing a full-scale the-
atre production from an existing dramatic script. The second proceeds
without the security of a pre-existing text, and culminates in a public
showing of a group-devised performance. This book engages with the
conceptual and pedagogical productivities and challenges generated by my
experience of teaching these classes and directing the performances associ-
ated with them. With very few exceptions, I have deliberately chosen to
work with so-called postdramatic texts in the Page to Stage unit. Moreover,
I have adopted an explicitly postdramatic aesthetic in the class devoted to
creating devised work, hence the title of this book: Teaching Postdramatic
Theatre.
The concept of postdramatic theatre is, as Marvin Carlson (2015)
notes, difficult to define in a consistently coherent manner. I use the term
“postdramatic” after Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe contemporary
works that reject the primacy of the written text in theatre performance,
but do not reject the principles of modernity (formal innovation, experi-
mentation, political engagement). This is why Lehmann (2006, 85)
argues, as we shall see in the next chapter, that the term “postdramatic,”
rather than postmodern, best describes those contemporary performance
works that employ “new” forms of sign usage that privilege presence over
representation and process over product and unsettle the status of her-
metically sealed fictional worlds situated in a particular time and place.
Many of these so-called postdramatic works eschew conventional concep-
tions of dramatic character—that is, fictional entities driven by psychologi-
cal motivations and endowed with deep subjectivity. Postdramatic works
also unsettle traditional notions of dramatic conflict and teleology, which
makes it difficult to employ, say, a Stanislavskian approach to perfor-
mance—how is it possible to establish character motivation and a logical
line of action based on objectives when postdramatic theatre unsettles and
contests the necessity of concepts of dramatic character and causality?
Since Lehmann’s formulation of the postdramatic is not epochal, we can
find manifestations of postdramatic aesthetics in works from a range of his-
torical periods and a variety of performance genres. For Lehmann, the ten-
dency of much contemporary work to unsettle verities about representation,
signification and theatricality is best understood with reference to tensions
4 G. D’Cruz
This book identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes gener-
ated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice within my imme-
diate pedagogical context. It does this by underscoring the institutional
pressures that shape my teaching practices. The book focuses on the nuts
and bolts of teaching within an institution that expresses concerns about
such things as the assessment of collectively generated work, risk factors
associated with physical performance and industry-focused learning
objectives.
There are many possible reasons for not paying close critical attention
to production work within academic institutions (as opposed to conser-
vatories concerned with professional actor training). First, the produc-
tions created for pedagogical purposes are not very prestigious or visible:
they are made, for the most part, by untrained students, and performed
for small audiences primarily comprising friends and family of the ama-
teur performers. Professional critics rarely attend such productions and,
if they do, seldom write about them. Of course, there are notable excep-
tions. The New York Times covered Robert Wilson’s production of
Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine with students from New York
University in 1986, but this was mostly a consequence of Wilson’s status
6 G. D’Cruz
and reputation within the New York theatre scene (Rockwell 1986).
Second, the economics of scholarly publishing shape disciplinary prac-
tices; there is a symbiotic relationship between research projects, the
publishing business and the international arts industry. There are bound
to be more people interested in the work of celebrated theatre auteurs
such as, say, Robert Wilson, Ariane Mnouchkine or Romeo Castellucci
than in the work of less renowned artists, or student theatre groups. This
is entirely understandable; I am not suggesting that academics should
spend more time writing about amateur, provincial or student manifesta-
tions of postdramatic theatre, although Lehmann (2006, 121) himself
acknowledges that, occasionally, a “lack of professionalism” has its vir-
tues. It is sometimes possible to foster a greater sense of play and experi-
mentation in non-professional contexts.
That said, this book consistently draws attention to the institutional con-
text that both sustains the discourse of postdramatic theatre and generates
pedagogical problems for those concerned with teaching it. It also pays
attention to the relationships between professional practice, aesthetic theory
and pedagogy, since the concept of postdramatic theatre has been formu-
lated within academic institutions. And while the divide between the acad-
emy and the theatre industry diminishes as artists regularly enter universities
as graduate students and practitioner–scholars, we need to be mindful that
postdramatic discourse is primarily a scholarly term that provides conceptual
tools for understanding contemporary theatre practice (Lehmann 2006,
19). In one sense, then, Lehmann’s (2006, 19) project is inherently peda-
gogical: his book attempts to contextualise new postdramatic performance
practices with reference to the development of twentieth-century European
theatre, and to “serve the conceptual analysis and verbalization of the experi-
ence of this often ‘difficult’ contemporary theatre as a way to promote its
‘visibility’ and discussion.” Lehmann apparently believes that his explication
of this body of work serves a useful pedagogical and political purpose. He
assumes his critical vocabulary can promote a better understanding of the
cultural and political significance of postdramatic theatre. This book
attempts to achieve something similar through identifying the anxieties and
aporias generated by staging postdramatic works within the context of uni-
versity production courses. Put simply, it seeks to generate discussion about
a series of pedagogical issues that often fly under the radar because so much
scholarly discourse about postdramatic theatre focuses on explicating exem-
plary productions—for example, the contributions to the book Postdramatic
Theatre and the Political (Jürs-Munby et al. 2013). Of course, this is not
surprising. Explication is often a scholar’s stock in trade. However, most
Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 7
scholars also teach and need to communicate the value and utility of their
research activities to students who may not accept the inherent value of “dif-
ficult” contemporary theatre, especially when we compel them to partici-
pate in producing such work on stage.
On one level, this book describes and analyses how I approach pro-
duction work with my students. On another, it provides an account of
what Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer (2002, 3) call “conscious
teaching”: “that is, teaching with self-reflectivity and a heightened
awareness of methods, attitudes, hidden curricula, postures, and inflec-
tions.” Teaching and directing are activities seldom observed by one’s
colleagues and peers. I have always been curious about how other peda-
gogues approach their work, and, in writing this volume, I’ve made the
assumption that other academics engaged in the messy and labour-inten-
sive task of directing student productions are also interested in how their
peers undertake artistic work in the academy. Directing student theatre
is a time-consuming, challenging practice that is rarely perceived as legit-
imate scholarly work, but which requires rigorous research, thought and
creativity—at least, that is the impression I get from many of my col-
leagues who work in adjacent disciplines. Paul Carter’s (2004, xi) con-
cept of “material thinking” goes some way towards correcting this
misconception and contesting the assumption that creative practice can
be a rigorous form of research:
Material thinking occurs in the making of works of art. It happens when the
artist dares to ask the simple but far-reaching questions. What matters? What
is the material of thought? To ask these questions is to embark on an intel-
lectual adventure peculiar to the making process. Critics and theorists inter-
ested in communicating ideas about things cannot emulate it. They remain
outsiders, interpreters on the sidelines, usually trying to make sense of a
creative process afterwards, purely by its outcome. They lack access to the
process and, more fundamentally, they lack the vocabulary to explicate its
intellectual character. For their part, film-makers, choreographers, installa-
tion artists and designers feel equally tongue-tied: knowing that what they
make is an invention that cannot easily be put into words, they find their
creative research dumbed-down … their social and cultural function danger-
ously dematerialises.
So, the following chapters account for the practical, intellectual and
artistic aspects of the performance-making process from the inside. They
present case studies that draw on my experience of teaching and directing
scripted and devised student productions of postdramatic theatre.
8 G. D’Cruz
Politics
This book deals with three broad political themes: the relationship between
aesthetics and politics, the politics of the academic institution and the poli-
tics of teaching. The vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics is a
persistent theme in the critical literature on postdramatic theatre. From
Elinor Fuchs’s (2008) notorious review of Lehmann’s book to the essays
collected in the volume co-edited by Lehmann’s translator, Karen Jürs-
Munby (2013), critics consistently interrogate the political value and
function of the concept of postdramatic theatre. These discussions, such as
those found in Jürs-Munby’s book, remind me of the deliberations of
Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and
Georg Lukács during the rise and fall of European fascism from the 1930s
to the 1950s; these debates, collected in the volume Aesthetics and Politics
(1977), deal primarily with the political efficacy of realism and modern-
ism, respectively. In the afterword that concludes the book, Fredric
Jameson notes that:
Much of the fascination of these jousts, indeed, comes from the internal
dynamism by which all the logical possibilities are rapidly generated in turn,
so that it quickly extends beyond the local phenomenon of Expressionism,
and even beyond the ideal type of realism itself, to draw within its scope the
problems of popular art, naturalism, socialist realism, avant-gardism, media,
and finally modernism—political and non-political—in general. (Bloch et al.
1977, 197)
Is the Personal Political?
The personal is political, right? Well, this feminist slogan rings true on
some levels. It resonates with me insofar as it makes an explicit connection
between individual identities and larger political systems. This book takes
it as axiomatic that our experience of the world is always filtered through
affective energies and impulses that often remain beyond the threshold of
conscious cognition. Moreover, these forces are always socially codified,
10 G. D’Cruz
I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense
perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in com-
mon and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions
within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at the same time
something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment
of parts and positions is based on a division of spaces, times, and forms of
activity that determine the very manner in which something in common
lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part
in this distribution. (Rancière 2004, 12)
the dominant police order of things on the basis of race, class and gender
reveals how a lot of postdramatic theatre fails to connect with students
(and audiences) because they literally do not possess the sensory apparatus
to see, hear and comprehend postdramatic work according to Lehmann’s
theoretical schema. This does not mean they are stupid; rather, they for-
mulate ways of seeing and knowing that cannot be specified in advance, or
unequivocally manipulated through formal mechanisms that supposedly
subvert the police order. More often than not, I use the personal anec-
dotes about my experience of teaching postdramatic theatre in this book
to underscore how the personal is political.
Chapter 2 introduces the concept of postdramatic theatre by offering
two readings of The Sydney Front’s 1987 production John Laws/Sade: A
Confession. Originally described as a work of postmodern performance,
the work displays many of the features Lehmann associates with postdra-
matic theatre. Drawing on Rorty’s distinction between arguments and
descriptions, the chapter examines the similarities and differences between
the vocabularies of postmodern theatre and postdramatic theatre as they
are used to respectively describe and redescribe John Laws/Sade. The chap-
ter pays particular attention to the relationship between postdramatic the-
atre and the tradition of twentieth-century avant-garde drama in Europe
by identifying the ways Péter Szondi’s seminal book Theory of Modern
Drama informs Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic. Finally, the chap-
ter concludes with an account of the ethical perils spawned by teaching
ideas about avant-garde performance through practice, with a focus on
the Artaudian ideas that provide an important condition of possibility for
The Sydney Front and postdramatic theatre.
Chapter 3 deals with the institutional and discursive relationships between
postdramatic theatre and performance studies with respect to scholars such as
Richard Schechner, Shannon Jackson and Jon McKenzie. While Lehmann’s
book includes a few scant references to Richard Schechner, it says relatively
little about performance studies. I argue that performance studies not only
establishes an important condition of possibility for the acceptance of
Lehmann’s work in the academy, but also provides an eclectic set of method-
ological tools and theoretical perspectives that enable a richer understanding
of the political efficacy of postdramatic theatre. After providing a brief account
of the genealogy of performance studies by engaging with the work of
Jackson, among others, I use McKenzie’s (2001) seminal work Perform or
Else to help me identify the institutional performance imperatives and pres-
sures that enable and constrain teaching practices within universities.
12 G. D’Cruz
References
Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline
Richards. New York: Grove Press.
Bloch, Ernst, et al. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics. Translation editor Ronald Taylor.
London: Verso.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting. In Brecht on Theatre,
ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang.
Carlson, Marvin. 2015. Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance.
Brazilian Journal of Presence Studies 5 (3): 577–595. https://doi.
org/10.1590/2237-266053731.
Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking. Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Press.
Crimp, Martin. 1997. Attempts on Her Life. London: Faber and Faber.
Fuchs, Elinor. 2008. Postdramatic Theatre (Review). TDR: The Drama Review 52
(2 (T198)): 178–183.
Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 15
Let’s begin with a rhetorical strategy or, more properly, a teaching strat-
egy, since this book is primarily concerned with pedagogical vocabularies
and practices. When I present my introductory lecture on experimental
theatre to first-year undergraduates, I play them excerpts from a radio
show, The Ladies Lounge, hosted by Judith Lucy and Helen Razer, and
broadcast on Australia’s Triple J youth network in the late 1990s. Lucy
and Razer (1997) invited their listeners to share their experiences of bad
theatre on the air. The goal of this invitation was to test the proposition
that theatre, which our hosts used as a synonym for experimental perfor-
mance, was a dead art form. People dutifully phoned in with often-
hilarious descriptions of bizarre performance practices. One story involved
a performance artist with a penchant for producing a string of cocktail
frankfurter sausages from her vagina. Another told of a performance that
culminated in the audience being pelted with dead fish, while yet another
described a performer who wrapped herself in cellophane, and then took
40 minutes to break out of the encumbrance while grunting and groan-
ing. Each successive anecdote confirmed that experimental performance
was practised by the pretentious and talentless. Interestingly, nobody told
tales about bad acting, stilted, wooden performances or histrionic displays
of angst in the service of poor dramatic writing. Apparently, the radio
audience on that particular day preferred to mock the performance artists.
These excerpts taken from a long-defunct radio programme never fail to
entertain. Many students laugh out loud, and I do not doubt that most of
the ridiculed performances probably deserved their scorn. However,
having mocked this genre of performance, for strategic reasons, I point
out that dismissive hostility towards experimental performance might pre-
vent people from experiencing a vital and exciting art form that requires a
bit of effort to understand and appreciate.
I follow the recorded tales of performance-art horror with an account
of a performance that inspired my interest in avant-garde theatre. My spiel
goes something like this: the year is 1987. The place is the Performance
Space located at 199 Cleveland Street in Redfern, an inner-city suburb of
Sydney. I’m here to witness a performance by The Sydney Front. I’ve
never heard of the group before, but I decide to see its show on the
strength of an intriguing press release:
In John Laws/Sade the world is colder, the genitals sit tight. We are in
densely occupied territory. The telephone rings, the radio is always on.
Image 2.1 “The Cream Bun,” John Laws/Sade, 1987. Courtesy of The Sydney
Front Archive, the University of Sydney. Photographer: Regis Lansac
respond to these questions. I was clueless about the work’s meaning, but
stunned by the impression it made on me. The play, if one could call it
that, did not rely on any narrative or character study to establish an empa-
thetic relationship with its audience. I left the theatre awestruck, and wan-
dered around Sydney in a kind of reverie, attempting to process and
comprehend what I had just witnessed. Did that guy eat “real” dog food?
How can a man be dragged across the stage by the genitals without expe-
riencing excruciating pain? And what about all that stomping? I swear it
had a visceral effect on my body. Why did I feel so intimidated, yet thrilled,
by the show? The primordial and voyeuristic pleasures offered up by this
performance demanded further reflection. While it represented a few rec-
ognisable dramatic characters, it was more concerned with the presenta-
tion of bodies in various states of excitation. On leaving the performance
space that night, I knew one thing for sure: I could never look at conven-
tional theatre the same way again. In fact, The Sydney Front made me see
the world differently. Who knew theatre could generate such affects?
John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic… 21
formance art. But for good or ill, neither of those fields had produced a
specific theorist, like Jencks in architecture or Banes in dance, who has pro-
vided a kind of focal point, however disputed, for usage of the term. (132)
Some of the key words that have come up in the international postmodernism
discussion are: ambiguity; celebrating art as fiction; celebrating theatre as pro-
cess; discontinuity; heterogeneity; non-textuality; pluralism; multiple codes;
subversion; all sites; perversion; performer as theme and protagonist; defor-
mation; text as basic material only; deconstruction; considering text to be
authoritarian and archaic; performance as a third term between drama and
theatre; anti-mimetic; resisting interpretation. Postmodern theatre, we hear, is
without discourse but instead dominated by mediation, gestuality, rhythm,
tone. Moreover: nihilistic and grotesque forms, empty space, silence.
It is possible to grab one or more of these key words and wax lyrical
about the extent to which they illuminate some aspect of John Laws/Sade,
and perhaps enable us to situate it within a genre or tradition. For exam-
ple, the work presents us with a series of ambiguous scenarios drawn from
a wide range of sources. The play quotes from a mélange of modern and
classical dramatic texts (such as Müller’s The Hamletmachine, Weiss’s
Marat/Sade, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon)
and scraps of popular culture (the John Laws radio broadcasts and pop
song lyrics, for example). The juxtaposition of these sources bridges the
divide between high culture and popular culture and employs an extensive
24 G. D’Cruz
is not just another word for the description of a particular style. It is also, at
least in my use, a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the
emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new
type of social life and a new economic order—what is often euphemistically
called modernization, post-industrial or consumer society, the society of the
media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism. This new moment of
capitalism can be dated from the post-war boom in the United States in the
late 1940s and early 1950s or, in France, from the establishment of the Fifth
Republic in 1958. (Jameson 1998, 3)
Did The Sydney Front work without rules? Well, not really. Clare Grant’s
(2012, 9–10) documentation of the company’s work indicates that the
group not only situated itself within the tradition of the European avant-
garde, but also developed its own tongue-in-cheek list of rules for generat-
ing performances. Grant’s archive also reveals that the company had
powerful ideas about the value and political efficacy of avant-garde perfor-
mance. On the back of one of its programmes is the following statement:
Writing in the 1960s, Renato Poggioli (1968, 56) observed that “the
conventions of avant-garde art are often as easily deduced as those of the
academy: their deviation from the norm is so regular and normal a fact
that it is transformed into a canon no less exceptional than predictable.”
John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic… 29
was taken up with remarkable speed, and is now a firm part of the estab-
lished critical vocabulary in theatre, drama and performance studies.
Lehmann’s book describes a variety of innovative works that challenge
many commonly held assumptions about the relationship between dra-
matic writing and performance from the 1960s up until the cusp of the
twenty-first century. He consistently uses the word “new” in his descrip-
tions of the performances he classifies as postdramatic, but the “new”
theatre Lehmann discusses is not especially new. His book focuses on
mostly European and American experimental performance from the
1970s to the 1990s, which many critics and scholars once described as
“postmodern” (Pavis 1992; Auslander 2002). So, let’s explore how the
vocabulary of postdramatic theatre might help us engage with the expe-
rience of witnessing John Laws/Sade. As I stated in the introduction to
this book, Lehmann’s (2006, 85) most cogent formulation of the con-
cept of the postdramatic theatre occurs when he claims that:
audience the focus of the work. The opening “grope tube” experience, for
example, created a strange intimacy between performers and spectators
that is best described as a “shared” experience as opposed to a communi-
cated one. Of course, these binary oppositions (presence/representation
and process/product) unravel under close inspection, but they do provide
a useful set of coordinates for explaining the logic (or illogic) of the per-
formance (see Image 2.2).
Lehmann (2006) enumerates other features of postdramatic theatre
that also resonate with John Laws/Sade—for example, he describes how
postdramatic works employ signs in a non-hierarchical manner (86).
Postdramatic performances often mix elements such as music, movement,
language, lighting effects and dance without giving precedence to any
single aspect of the performance. Lehmann (2006, 86–87) calls this
parataxis, which promotes simultaneity as a structural principle of postdra-
matic theatre, which means the audience is often bombarded with a pleth-
ora of signs (87) without a strong sense of focalisation. As I recall, John
Laws/Sade contained moments of mayhem, where it was difficult to dis-
cern where I should direct my attention, but for the most part, the perfor-
mance focused the audience’s gaze very carefully. Nonetheless, the salient
point is that Lehmann’s vocabulary, which enumerates several other fea-
tures of postdramatic theatre, such as plethora—the proliferation of signs
without concern for intelligibility or conventional sequencing (90)—
musicalisation, visual dramaturgy, physicality and so on provides a rela-
tively simple means of unpacking the mysteries and perceptual confusions
generated by John Laws/Sade.
We can retrospectively read the performance as an exemplary postdramatic
work insofar as it was primarily theatrical—the script or dramatic text was
unmistakably cobbled together from a wide range of other sources. Moreover,
this textual pastiche was only one element of a performance event that
appeared to be as concerned with the physicality of the performers, their ener-
getic exchange with the audience, as much as with language. Indeed, John
Laws/Sade was apparently not a work of dramatic literature, although it used
extracts from Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade and Heiner Müller’s The
Hamletmachine. Years later, one member of the ensemble remarked that the
group “takes as its basic subject the moment of performance, not the script
that precedes it” (Waites 1991, 7). Another member of The Sydney Front
recalls that the group’s work focused on the relationship between performers
and spectators, a relationship “so often lost in naturalistic theatre” (Grant
2012). The piece was composed collectively in workshops and confounded
any simple correspondence between script and performance. It decoupled
“drama” (story, plot, character, suspense, reversal) from “theatre” (perfor-
mance, physical presence, energy, material space, real time), but we could have
made the same observation without recourse to the vocabulary of postdra-
matic theatre. In fact, my account of John Laws/Sade within a postmodern
frame of reference made the same basic points about its salient features.
Indeed, we could have approached the work from other perspectives. For
example, we could use the vocabulary of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty,
with its references to energy and presence, to unpack the work’s relationship
to a primordial concept of theatrical presence. But why should we bother?
Heritage and Novelty
Why favour one redescription over the other? On one level, I appreciate the
practitioner’s scepticism towards theoretical debates about terminology.
Surely it does not matter whether we call a piece of work modern, experimen-
tal, avant-garde, postmodern or postdramatic? And who, outside of a rela-
tively small band of scholars, cares about the answer to this question? Theatre
John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic… 33
practitioners? Students? As I see it, there are three primary reasons for favour-
ing Lehmann’s postdramatic vocabulary. First, it brings order to the house of
contemporary theatre discourse by focusing on theatre practices as opposed
to general cultural theories, or an expanded account of performance. Second,
it has pedagogical ambitions. Jürs-Munby (2006, 14) makes this clear in her
translator’s introduction to Lehmann’s book, where she writes, “for practitio-
ners, students, scholars and fans of contemporary theatre, the analyses pro-
vided in this book should contribute an invaluable theoretical vocabulary for
reflecting on this work and for articulating its aesthetics and politics.” Finally,
it fulfils the academic industry’s desire to replenish and reinvigorate disciplines
by generating new approaches to research. For many contemporary critics,
postmodernism is over—dead, buried and mostly irrelevant as a concept to a
new generation of scholars who believe digital technologies and mutations in
capitalism render postmodernism obsolete (Kirby 2006, 2009; Nealon 2012).
Alan Kirby (2006) argues that “digimodernism” or “pseudo-modernism”
describes the contemporary world, which is saturated with digital communi-
cations technologies, more accurately than postmodernism. “In postmodern-
ism,” Kirby (2006, 36) points out, “one read, watched, listened, as before. In
pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, down-
loads.” Jeffrey Nealon (2012) proffers the awkward neologism “post-post-
modernism” to provide an account of the mutations and transformations in
economic and cultural production since the doyens of postmodernism—
Jameson, Lyotard and Baudrillard—published their major works over 30
years ago. There is a sense in which Lehmann’s book participates in this rejec-
tion of postmodernism, and shares in the fatigue postmodernism generates
after its long reign as a fundamental concept in so many scholarly disciplines.
But academic fashions and institutional imperatives cannot wholly account for
the success of Lehmann’s vocabulary. As I have already stated, one of the
advantages of using the language of postdramatic theatre lies in what we
might call its theatre-specific heritage.
That politically oppressed people are shown on stage does not make theatre
political. And if the political in its sensationalist aspects merely procures
entertainment value, then theatre may well be political—but only in the bad
sense of an (at least unconscious) affirmation of existing political conditions.
It is not through the direct thematization of the political that theatre
becomes political but through the implicit substance and critical value of its
mode of representation.
The fact that Lehmann chooses to italicise the phrase “mode of repre-
sentation” indicates not just how crucial theatrical form is to the politics
of postdramatic theatre, but how closely aligned Lehmann is to the
historical avant-garde, which also stressed the importance of dramatic and
theatrical form. It also demonstrates why it is appropriate to see his work
as a kind of sequel to Szondi’s Theory of Modern Drama. As Michael Hays
(1983, 72) notes, form was a crucial aspect of Szondi’s work:
It is crucial for Lehmann, like Szondi before him, to engage with the
aesthetic work rather than analyse some general postmodern condition or
“cultural dominant”; not because he believes the individual play is somehow
36 G. D’Cruz
disconnected from its various epochal contexts, but because the conflicts
inherent in those settings are subsumed within particular texts. Thus, an
analysis of these texts will reveal their relationship to the ideological and
political contradictions present in any given period.
Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic lends itself to modes of
immanent critique, in which analyses and descriptions of performances
focus on their formal properties before seeking any transcendent
account of their conditions of possibility. This position has a political
dimension. Lehmann (2006, 186) believes that postdramatic theatre
can contribute to politics not by representing political content, but by
unsettling everyday perceptions through aesthetic strategies that shock
and disturb spectators, and “make visible the broken thread between
personal experience and perception.” Most contributors to the volume
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political (Jürs-Munby et al. 2013) rein-
force this view. Lehmann also implicitly rejects the anti-foundational
scepticism of postmodernism (his chapter on the “prehistory” of post-
dramatic theatre, which presents a genealogy of postdramatic perfor-
mances, reinforces the argument that the “new” postdramatic theatre
emerges from contradictions and problems contained within the “old”
dramatic theatre). Like Brecht before him, Lehmann (2006, 181)
believes theatre can unsettle authoritarian political structures and
formations:
Postdramatic theatre has come closer to the trivial and banal, the simplicity
of an encounter, a look or a shared situation. With this, however, theatre
also articulates a possible answer to the tedium of the daily flood of artificial
formulas of intensification. The inflationary dramatizations of daily sensa-
tions that anaesthetize the sensorium have become unbearable. What is at
stake is not a heightening but a deepening of a condition, a situation. In
political terms: what is at stake is also the fate of the errors of dramatic
imagination.
and the less likely it is to unsettle and expose the machinations of political
power. Lehmann consistently denigrates the mass media and takes up a
political position informed by Frankfurt School critics of the culture indus-
try, such as Theodor Adorno.
Lehmann (2006, 85) is also committed to the view that postdramatic
theatre describes a set of tendencies in contemporary performance that
radically alters our understanding of the status and function of dramatic
writing:
here is that while we can describe the work of a playwright such as Stoppard
as postmodern, it is not postdramatic theatre in Lehmann’s sense of the
term, since Stoppard’s work relies on traditional codes of representation,
and presents itself more as “manifestation than signification” (2006, 85).
has become one of the most widely used (and abused) terms in the
fields of theatre, drama and performance studies in recent times, so it
is timely to account for how this has come to be the case.
While I have attempted to provide a clear and concise account of the
commonalities and differences between postmodern theatre and postdra-
matic theatre, there is little doubt that this chapter’s theories and concepts
are esoteric and restricted to the confines of what Habermas (1983) would
call “expert” knowledge—a form of specialised discourse that is not easily
communicated to a lay audience (incidentally, I find the Habermas/Lyotard
debate about postmodernism, with its focus on the status and transmission
of knowledge, especially prescient, and germane to the pedagogical themes
of this book). The value of avant-garde or experimental performance is not
self-evident to neophytes, especially those who appreciate more popular
performance genres, such as musical theatre (a significant number of my
students are enthusiastic fans of this much-maligned form).
In the final section of this introductory chapter, I want to sketch a few
of the practical problems generated by teaching experimental perfor-
mance. More specifically, I want to focus on the disparity between what I
think I am communicating and what students take from my lectures and
workshops. In the epilogue to his book, Lehmann (2006) points out that
postdramatic theatre is always engaged in a certain kind of pedagogy, and
one that deliberately formulates non-rational approaches to contesting the
hegemony of consumer society. He writes that we must “realize the grow-
ing importance of a certain cultivation of affects, the ‘training’ of an emo-
tionality that is not under the tutelage of rational preconsiderations.
‘Enlightenment’ and education by themselves are not enough” (Lehman
2006, 186). On one level, then, this book is concerned with this cultiva-
tion or training of affects. It identifies a set of anxieties and aporias that are
generated by teaching postdramatic theatre in production contexts by
underscoring the vocabulary’s political character through addressing ques-
tions of form, affect and what Lehmann (2006, 187) calls the aesthetics of
risk—that which explicitly challenges the academy’s preference for instru-
mental logic, rational calculation and quantifiable, utilitarian outputs:
We can see here that theatre does not attain its political, ethical reality by way of
information, theses and messages; in short: by way of its content in the tradi-
tional sense. On the contrary: it is part of its constitution to hurt feelings, to
produce shock and disorientation, which point spectators to their own presence
precisely through “amoral,” “asocial,” and seemingly “cynical” events.
40 G. D’Cruz
Perhaps we can now ask, not about the conditions under which a modern
theater could be faithful to Artaud, but in what cases it is surely unfaithful
to him. What might the themes of infidelity be, even among those who
invoke Artaud in the militant and noisy fashion we all know?
exactly what a student will learn from any given class? Is it possible or
even desirable that students produce “faithful” readings of the texts they
are asked to analyse? This is not to say that we should not list unit objec-
tives or follow assessment criteria. However, I think it necessary to
acknowledge that learning and teaching are complex, emotional, bodily
activities that administrative techniques cannot regulate in absolute terms.
Most students agreed that the Artaud class was the most memorable and
valuable they had experienced during the semester. Apart from creating
the context for the performance/presentation, I had no input into what
eventuated. Moreover, the learning that took place had very little to do
with the specified objectives in the unit guide. The class was productive
because it exposed pedagogic “fault lines.” The discussion that took place
in the wake of the Artaud performance was a “life lesson” for us all, and
perhaps closer to the spirit of Artaud’s impossible theatre of cruelty than
I could have imagined.
The real learning was made possible by the cracks and fissures opened
up by this event, which was both exhilarating and traumatic, dangerously
so for some students; but what about my duty of care as a teacher? Should
I have stopped the performance? Since I was concentrating on the
presentation before me, I was unaware that some students felt distressed
by what they were witnessing. Good teaching, like good acting, involves
a degree of risk, but how much risk is acceptable in a pedagogical con-
text? Do I issue a disclaimer and a warning about the content of the unit
next time I teach ACP177? I’m not sure how to answer these questions,
but I am confident that teaching theatre practice within a pedagogical
institution generates a series of important political issues that scholars
who write about exemplary professional performances rarely address.
Most academics are also teachers, or were teachers at some point. Yet
there is, as I noted in the introduction to this book, a relative paucity of
critical commentary on the anxieties and ethical aporias generated by
teaching specific forms of experimental theatre in universities. As we shall
see in the following chapters, this is because of the institutional regula-
tions that shape and determine the status of knowledge and set strict
conditions on the relationship between theory and practice. However,
before engaging with these disquieting apprehensions, it is important to
contrast the concept of postdramatic theatre with the discipline of perfor-
mance studies, which provides another compelling account of the drift
between drama and performance and anticipates the idea of the postdra-
matic in an engagingly comprehensive manner.
John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic… 47
References
Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline
Richards. New York: Grove Press.
———. 1974. The Theatre and Its Double. In Collected Works, translated by
Victor Corti, vol. 4. London: Calder & Boyars.
Auslander, Philip. 2002. From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and
Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and
Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).
Birringer, Johannes. 1991. Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge.
Connor, Steven. 1989. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.
In Writing and Difference, 292–316. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.
Frow, John. 1991. What Was Postmodernism? Sydney: Local Consumption
Publications.
Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after
Modernism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Goodall, Jane. 1994. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Grant, Clare. 2012. Staging the Audience: The Sydney Front 1986–1993. Melbourne:
Contemporary Arts Media.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. Modernity—An Incomplete Project. In The Anti-
aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 3–15. Seattle: Bay Press.
Hamilton, Margaret. 2008. Postdramatic Theatre and Australia: A ‘New’ Theatre
Discourse. Australasian Drama Studies 52: 3–23.
Hays, Michael. 1983. Drama and Dramatic Theory: Péter Szondi and the Modern
Theater. Boundary 2 (11): 69–81.
Heuvel, Michael Vanden. 2001. “Is Postmodernism?” Stoppard Amongst/Against
the Postmoderns. In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine
E. Kelly, 213–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York:
Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1998. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In The Cultural
Turn. Essays on the Postmodern 1983–1998, 111–125, 1–20. London and
New York: Verso.
48 G. D’Cruz
If I close my eyes, I can still revisit the scene of one of my formative experi-
ences as a teacher in 1989. The Des Conner Room is a small rehearsal
space perched above one of the student union theatres at the University of
Melbourne. I’m sure I felt my pulse racing as I ascended the staircase to
what would become the site of my first truly challenging teaching experi-
ence. As I entered the room, I observed most of the students casually
chatting with each other while milling about on the parquetry floor. They
were an animated bunch, energetic and eager to start the new academic
year. As it turned out, many of them were uncommonly talented and
would forge successful careers in the performing and visual arts one day. I
remember hearing snatches of conversation about holiday activities in
exotic locations: one young woman was waxing lyrical about her adven-
tures in the Swiss Alps; another was recounting the details of a trip to
Rome. A young man whose head was crowned with an unruly mop of
curls was engaged in flirtatious banter with a striking young blonde woman
who spoke with an outrageous French accent. The young man had recently
returned to Melbourne from Paris, where he had participated in a work-
shop at the École Philippe Gaulier. He had obviously picked up some of
the language and was displaying his linguistic prowess by regaling la jeune
femme in her native tongue. Although I tried my best to appear confident
and authoritative, I probably looked like the novice I was. What was I
doing here at the University of Melbourne, arguably Australia’s most pres-
be justified in any non-circular way (Rorty 1989, 73). In many ways, this
book, as I hope the previous chapter has already demonstrated, is about
sifting through competing vocabularies about avant-garde theatre prac-
tice (and, consequently, assessing the value and utility of competing
vocabularies from a pedagogical perspective). My personal history and
education have conditioned my approach to the topic of this book, and
are worth revealing so as to identify my often-ambivalent disposition
towards teaching postdramatic theatre. I remain sceptical about the value
of Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic, which I believe reinforces the
hegemony of a narrow, Eurocentric account of modern drama. This
becomes evident when we contrast Lehmann’s vocabulary with the lexi-
con of performance studies, which, for all its flaws, actively embraces non-
Western performance, and rails against the tyranny of accepting
fundamental axioms that privilege specific methodologies, histories and
aesthetic hierarchies. In short, performance studies takes an eminently
pragmatic approach to performance.
Second, the anxiety I describe in meeting my class for the first time is a
form of performance anxiety that has a personal and professional dimen-
sion. The tension I described at the start of this chapter was partially due to
“imposter syndrome”: an anxiety disorder that manifests as series of affects
that reinforces the often-erroneous perception that a person is not good
enough or competent enough for their occupation (Simmons 2016). On
one level, my experience of “imposter syndrome” came from my lack of
teaching experience, but it also stemmed from anxiety about my class back-
ground and Anglo-Indian ethnicity. The University of Melbourne is—in
the context of higher education in Australia—an elite institution. Most of
its students come from wealthy backgrounds and possess significant stores
of cultural capital. I felt intimidated by my students’ wealth and social con-
fidence, despite finding myself in a position of authority underwritten by
institutional power. This is not a trivial observation about a subjective state
of being, for it points to complex and contradictory forces that frame peda-
gogical practices. How might “imposter syndrome” shape my attitude
towards students whom I perceive, rightly or wrongly, as privileged? How
might I compensate for this perceived inequality? Similarly, how might stu-
dents view my ethnicity and class identity in this educational context? And
how do such perceptions manifest in the relationship between teacher and
student? How might they also unsettle or consolidate the machinations of
the “teaching machine”? How do questions of affect and identity play out
within the energies that circulate between the participants of any given
54 G. D’CRUZ
The reader may rightly wonder whether performance might have been a
rival rubric under which to organize the entire orientation of the postdra-
matic. The 10 pages titled, if not exactly devoted to, “Performance” near
the end of the book can hardly make a stab at such a discussion. Performance
here is shrunk to performance art, and seems caught in a time warp in which
the performer is “noticeably often a female artist [who] exhibits actions that
affect and even seize her own body.”
features, which we might think of, after McKenzie (2001, 143), as “per-
formance pressures.” First, it must establish a research paradigm—it needs
to continually generate books, articles and thesis topics. Second, it must
formulate and develop a curriculum with clearly stated learning outcomes
and appropriate assessment tasks. Finally, a discipline must perform in eco-
nomic terms if it is to survive (its scholars must win research grants, and its
students must be employable). As McKenzie might put it, a discipline
must perform, in various ways, or else it risks annihilation. This is particu-
larly the case in today’s corporatised university.
The second and perhaps most important resonance between perfor-
mance studies and postdramatic theatre concerns the mutual interest in
ritual ceremony, liminal states of being and performance processes as
opposed to reified texts. Referring to the conditions of possibility that
enabled performance studies to coalesce as an academic discipline,
McKenzie (2001, 38) observes that “between 1955 and 1975 and across
a wide range of cultural practice and research, there was an attempt to
pass from product to process. From mediated expression to direct con-
tact, from representation to presentation, from discourse to body, from
absence to presence.”
Lehmann (2006) also identifies similar forces working within the mod-
ern drama paradigm that generate the conditions of possibility for post-
dramatic theatre. He consistently invokes terms such as energy and
presence to describe the processual and often “auto-sufficient physicality”
of postdramatic theatre, where the actor’s body no longer serves significa-
tion but functions as an unsettling “auratic” presence (Lehmann 2006,
95, 163). However, it is crucial to note that, for McKenzie, the “theory
explosion” unsettles and displaces verities about energy, presence and the
primacy of the body. Technological developments, too, make it impossible
to reify “auratic” performance uncritically. Lehmann (2006, 114–115)
also acknowledges the effect of technology as a mediating force that
undermines any simple valorisation of presence, especially in those post-
dramatic performances that use recorded and/or screen technologies.
The third area of resonance is best described as the privileging of effi-
cacy over entertainment (McKenzie 2001, 37). In simple terms, both the
discipline of performance studies and those theatrical works Lehmann
identifies as postdramatic tend to proffer various forms of political critique
while remaining indifferent to normative entertainment values, which are
mostly propagated by what Guy Debord (1967) calls “the society of the
spectacle”—that is, mediatised culture that uses the proliferation of images
FROM DRAMA TO THEATRE TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES 61
(in film, TV, advertising and the internet) to mediate human relations by
substituting representations for reality. This is not to say that the perfor-
mance practices valorised by performance studies scholars and Lehmann
necessarily lack a sense of play and humour, since entertainment and effi-
cacy are not mutually exclusive categories (as we shall see in subsequent
chapters of this book). Rather, it is to see certain kinds of performance
events as having the potential to unsettle normative regimes of value and
representation. Political efficacy is a persistent theme both in Lehmann’s
work and performance studies scholarship, which traditionally adopts sub-
versive political positions informed by those adjacent disciplines—such as
feminism, multiculturalism, critical theory and cultural studies—that
emerged at approximately the same time as performance studies consoli-
dated its disciplinary identity (Jackson 2004, 23). Lehmann (2006,
184–185), too, espouses a critical politics, but locates political efficacy in
the manner that postdramatic theatre unsettles the spectator’s perception
of signs. As I pointed out in Chap. 2, Lehmann (2006, 85) argues that
postdramatic theatre contests and disturbs the false sense of unity pro-
moted by media society through challenging the normative power of its
representations by expanding presence, bodily intensity and reconfiguring
the relationship between performers and spectators.
Despite these resonances between performance studies and Lehmann’s
account of postdramatic theatre, it is important to reiterate that there are
significant differences between the “broad spectrum” reach of perfor-
mance studies—which, from its inception, has engaged with international
performance traditions and embraced intercultural exchange—and
Lehmann’s tight focus on the tensions and contradictions inherent in the
European modern drama paradigm. Despite Rustom Bharucha’s (1993)
trenchant criticism of interculturalism, and Schechner’s brand of intercul-
turalism in particular, performance studies continues to pursue engage-
ments with non-Western performances, and serves to remind us that
postdramatic theatre’s political efficacy, as theorised by Lehmann, has a
relatively narrow aesthetic focus that not only neglects questions con-
cerned with non-European performance practices, but, more importantly
for this book, questions of institutional power and disciplinary politics.
Finally, while performance studies opens up to embrace the performative
dimension of a wide range of social, cultural and political practices, the
concept of the postdramatic, as I have already stated, closes in on the nar-
row slice of the performance pie known as theatre practice. In the next
section of this chapter, I employ aspects of McKenzie’s general theory of
62 G. D’CRUZ
Perform—Or Else?
Despite being written more than a decade and a half ago, McKenzie’s (2001)
book Perform or Else has never been so relevant to those interested in under-
standing the performative forces that drive the corporate university, which
provides the institutional context for most people who teach postdramatic
theatre (which is, as I have already claimed, very much an academic phenom-
enon). McKenzie’s book is a tour de force and was enthusiastically received by
performance studies scholars for its impressive scholarship, wit and ambition.
At the risk of reducing such an original contribution to the discipline to a few
key themes, I here provide a brief précis of McKenzie’s argument before
applying some of his insights to my current institutional context.
McKenzie develops a general theory of performance by first identifying
certain resonances between the way the term “performance” operates in three
distinct settings: the world of scholarly performance studies, the world of
business and the domain of technological performance. We can find the
imperative to perform or else operating within the realms of culture, manage-
ment and technology. McKenzie argues that, in each case, people are pres-
sured to perform or else suffer severe consequences that include expulsion,
demotion, public ridicule and even death. Of course, performance means
slightly different things in each context, although there are, now more than
ever, considerable resonances between these apparently distinct domains.
We have already seen how cultural performances operate with reference
to questions of political efficacy, although McKenzie is careful to point out
that the subversive, liminal cultural performances that garner so much
attention from performance studies scholars can often possess a normative
force—that is, cultural performances may serve or subvert the status quo.
There is certainly a cultural dimension to the practice of teaching, and we
need to be mindful of the ways our pedagogical practices may, overtly or
unconsciously, affirm and reinforce normative social relationships and per-
sonal identities. Performance management is, as McKenzie convincingly
demonstrates, a well-developed discipline with its own set of standards
and assumptions. Its foundational verities serve the imperative to perform
FROM DRAMA TO THEATRE TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES 63
The rise of mobile, social, and analytic technologies has forced colleges and
universities to rethink their business models. All higher education institu-
tions must improve student outcomes and increase engagement—but,
unfortunately, traditional information systems can no longer keep up. Oracle
provides a modern technology platform that spans all layers of the cloud,
enabling a data-driven environment that delivers maximum value to faculty,
students, and staff.
Nevaeh
I receive an email from a student during the first week of the new semester.
The student’s name is unfamiliar, and the content of her terse message
confirms she is not one of mine. She did, however, take one of the first-year
(freshman) units I chair. The missive does not address me personally, and
I can’t help feeling mildly offended by the tone of her communication:
Hey, I did your course last year. I failed because I just found out that my
tutor didn’t get my essay. I should just do it again, right?
Dear Nevaeh,
Can you please send me the name of your tutor and your student number?
I’ll investigate the matter and get back to you ASAP.
Regards,
Glenn
She was that foreign-looking chick with the weird hair. My number is
7896662016.
Once again, the student dispenses with polite preliminaries and doesn’t
even address me by name. I never thought I cared much for social conven-
tions, but now I am pissed off. I immediately form an image of the student
in my head. She’s obviously a bogan (“white trash”). No doubt she’s uninter-
ested in study, and probably just going through the motions of attending uni-
versity to please her parents or claim some financial benefit. I can’t believe
standards have fallen so low. Fuck, I have better things to do than deal with
idiots.
I’m momentarily surprised by my bigotry and take a deep breath while
considering my next move. I call the “foreign-looking chick with the
weird hair,” one of my most accomplished and competent graduate stu-
dents. She consults her records and informs me that Nevaeh attended five
classes out of eleven. She missed the last four weeks of the class entirely,
and the online portal shows she never submitted her final essay. (The com-
FROM DRAMA TO THEATRE TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES 67
puter system logs every piece of assessment students post. It also records
the amount of time they are logged into the system and provides a record
of the resources they access and the files they download. Academics can
monitor the online activities of students with a high degree of accuracy.)
Armed with this information, I write back to Nevaeh. Adopting the
formal, professional tone of the bureaucracy, I ask her if she has a copy of
her essay (which I am willing to grade, despite the four-month lag between
the student receiving and disputing her result).
Another few days pass. Here’s Nevaeh’s response:
Nah, don’t have it. My computer blew up. I’ll just do it again and send
it to you soon.
Neutral Scene
As the director and co-devisor of a student performance, I decide to insert
a neutral scene into the play at three different points. A “neutral scene”
most commonly refers to a short piece of dialogue between two or three
nameless characters. In fact, the characters in such works possess no mark-
ers of identity (such as race, gender or age). The text refers to characters
by letters or numbers. The dialogue does not refer to space and time,
either. The challenge for the performers of the neutral text lies in their
ability to evoke a dramatic world and build characters using the material in
hand—they need to fill in the blanks.
I can see that one group of students working on this task, three young
men, are having great difficulty with the exercise. They approach me for
68 G. D’CRUZ
help, and I make a few suggestions about how they might use pauses,
voice modulation, proxemic relationships and variations in bodily intensity
to make the scene more “theatrical.” They take up my suggestions, and
the scene comes to life. The specifics of what occurs are not important for
my purpose here—suffice it to say that I have a sense of pride and accom-
plishment in being able to use my experience and professional training to
act as a troubleshooter. Even though all I’ve done is what most competent
theatre directors or drama teachers would have done in a similar situation,
I can’t help feeling I’m at the top of my game. After many years of toil in
the theatre workshop, I no longer feel like an imposter. I go home that
night thinking that, on balance, I have actually learnt a lot about the
dynamics and variables that are always in play during rehearsals and classes.
The anxiety I experienced when observing my first class of talented stu-
dents at the University of Melbourne has dissipated—or so I think.
The next day, I walk into the theatre space feeling enthused and ready
to work. My class has had three weeks to polish their work before the
play’s first public performance. One of the groups, led by a very head-
strong and enthusiastic woman, is busy preparing an elaborate scene that
involves the use of multiple data projectors, screens and a very compli-
cated lighting set-up. This student had approached me earlier in the
semester and requested that I allow her to develop an extra scene, since
she felt her skills weren’t being wholly used by her collaborators. I had
consented with the proviso that I could not guarantee I would include the
scene if it did not fit the work’s overall aesthetic; I had also underscored
the fact that the work had to be of a high standard. Now, as she moves
around the space issuing directions to her performers, I can see that the
theatre technicians are not happy. The technical director pulls me aside
and tells me that the student’s technical requirements are very complex,
and most probably unviable without a lot of investment in terms of time
and money. “Let’s see what she’s got before making a call,” I say.
Finally, after about 45 minutes—that is, 45 precious minutes of rehearsal
time—the scene unfolds. In my view, it is a debacle: woefully underre-
hearsed, painfully earnest and technically intricate. Moreover, its use of
screens, which I had endorsed for the entire production, now seems
clumsy to me, and I decide to scrap the use of these items altogether. The
scene I’ve just witnessed depends on the use of screens, so it no longer
suits the aesthetic of the show. I take a deep breath and ask the other stu-
dents what they think. After an awkward pause, a few offer words of
encouragement while noting that the scene needs work. I choose to give
FROM DRAMA TO THEATRE TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES 69
the student honest and frank feedback. I tell her that I had expected to see
something more polished, and could not justify the use of sophisticated
technology for a single scene. As I speak, I can see the student’s face go
cherry-red, and then huge crocodile tears start to run down her cheeks.
Before I can finish giving her my feedback, she runs out of the theatre,
sobbing uncontrollably. What have I just done? I feel a palpable chill in the
room. I ask one of the students near me if I have stepped out of line. She
just stares at me awkwardly. Have I been an asshole? Have I made a mis-
take in the manner of delivering feedback? As Stephen Wangh (2013, 43)
notes, “feedback is power-filled.” It is a fair point, but at this particular
moment I feel powerless. In a concise space of time, I have lost the confi-
dence of at least half the cast. The sense of accomplishment I had felt the
day before vanishes instantly.
I try to get on with business and brush off the incident. After asking the
students to set up for a run of the play, I excuse myself from the group and
go after the distressed student. I apologise for embarrassing her and try to
suggest ways we might be able to revise her scene so it could be better
integrated into the play. It is too late. The show goes on and the disgrun-
tled student continues with her work, but there is no question that many
of the students now harbour a thinly veiled hostility towards me that lasts
for the rest of the semester. What did Gibbs say about affects leaping from
one body to another? I now have a visceral sense of anxiety as I get on with
the job of directing the show, and immersed in forces that are difficult to
name, but which are clearly in play as the work progresses. I am reminded
of Teresa Brennan’s (2004, 1) observation about “feeling a room.” The
students, for the most part, behave professionally, and the season proceeds
more or less the way these things usually go, but I breathe a huge sigh of
relief at the end of the semester. Perform—or else?
* * *
These anecdotes are about two mildly traumatic incidents that generated
two different forms of anxiety about the principle of equality and mani-
fested as a set of visceral bodily sensations. The first story can be read as
the articulation of a trauma that unsettles my imaginary sense of authority
and demands a reconfiguration of the teaching persona. The errant stu-
dent’s disregard for my authority—which is then intensified by my supe-
rior’s demand that I accede to the student’s request—shatters the order of
things by requiring that I ask another question of myself: who am I for the
70 G. D’CRUZ
student? What is my proper place in her symbolic world? The second story
is a cautionary tale about the precarity of teaching. It does not matter how
experienced you may be, the messy business of having to assess perfor-
mances—aesthetic, academic or professional—makes the pedagogue,
among other things, a manager of knowledge and people. More impor-
tantly, this managerial function reveals that teaching always involves the
exercise of power. How do we negotiate these power relationships? Is it
possible to avoid, or at least minimise, the teacher’s managerial function
within the context of the corporate university? How might we address
questions of equality and power imbalances?
The next chapter explicitly addresses these issues of authority between
the educated and the ignorant, the masters and the slaves, the teachers
and the students. It does so by reading a celebrated devised perfor-
mance—Back to Back Theatre’s production of Ganesh Versus the Third
Reich—as a pedagogical parable that contains valuable lessons for anyone
involved in addressing the question of power relations in the various
scenes of teaching.
References
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University of California Press.
Bharucha, Rustom. 1993. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of
Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Brockett, Oscar G., and Robert Findlay. 1991. Century of Innovation: A History of
European and American Theatre and Drama Since the Late Nineteenth Century.
2nd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Burrell, Andrew. 2016. UWA Head Paul Johnson Quits After Rows with Staff,
Students. The Australian, September 6. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
higher-education/uwa-head-paul-johnson-quits-after-rows-with-staff-stu-
dents/news-story/865d7e454678b528f0353985d2398158
Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge.
Cooper Albright, Ann. 2013. Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of
Corporeality. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
D’Cruz, Glenn. 1995. From Theatre to Performance: Constituting the Discipline
of Performance Studies in the Australian Academy. Australasian Drama Studies
26: 36–52.
FROM DRAMA TO THEATRE TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES 71
Debord, Guy. 1995 (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald
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Assets/University_of_the_future/$FILE/University_of_the_future_2012.pdf
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Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young and trans. Ian McLeod, 51–76. Boston:
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Fuchs, Elinor. 2008. Postdramatic Theatre (Review). TDR: The Drama Review 52
(2 (T198)): 178–183.
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of Affect. Australian Humanities Review, December. http://australianhuman-
itiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2001/gibbs.html#footnote1
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72 G. D’CRUZ
She rolled her eyes and said nary a word to me on the tram home. Her
silence spoke volumes. Although she didn’t say it, I was sure she thought
I must be a lousy teacher. After all, I was thinking the same thing. I
couldn’t quite put my finger on why I didn’t like the film. Perhaps it was
a consequence of my dismal debut as a university tutor. While I was cer-
tainly no John Keating, I have always been aware that to teach is to per-
form—or else! As I pointed out in the second chapter of this book, there
is an erotic dimension to teaching insofar as the activity requires seducing
an audience. If you fail to capture your students’ attention, especially
when teaching a “difficult” subject such as postdramatic theatre or “the-
ory,” all is lost. At this early stage in my career, I had not yet developed my
shtick or formulated a dynamic teaching persona. So, on one level, I am
sure I found Williams’s portrayal of Keating intimidating. On further
reflection, I came to realise that there was something else disturbing about
the film’s representation of the exemplary teacher: it was quasi-fascistic. As
Noah Berlatsky (2014) puts it, “rather than teaching the students to think
for themselves, Keating teaches them to think like him.” The film’s repre-
sentation of pedagogy assumes it is the teacher’s performance that plays
the most crucial role in facilitating learning.
This is not to say that teachers should adopt a dour, sober demeanour
to be effective. Rather, my invocation of Dead Poets Society identifies a key
theme of this book: power relations. All teachers find themselves enmeshed
in power relations that shape their actions, emotional dispositions and
ability to teach and learn. How might a charismatic teacher like Keating
facilitate learning? How might such a character impede students’ ability to
think critically? How central is the pedagogue to quality education? This
chapter is about providing a frame of reference for the case studies that
follow by addressing questions of power relations in pedagogy.
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable… 75
The previous chapter provided the institutional context for this book’s
investigation into the practice of teaching postdramatic theatre. This chap-
ter, in keeping with my deliberately pragmatic approach to theory, uses
Jacques Rancière’s provocative ideas about equality to interrogate some of
the normative verities concerning education and the relationship between
teachers and students. Rancière (1991, 7) argues that most educational
practices embrace a pedagogical myth that “there is an inferior intelligence
and a superior one.” This division is sustained by what Rancière (1991, 7)
calls “the principle of explication”:
learned over and over, and then told them to read through the rest of the
book until they could recite it” (Rancière 1991, 2). To his astonishment,
Jacotot found that his students learnt to write French through this pro-
cess. The key revelation for Jacotot concerns the pedagogical myth that
places the teacher, and his or her powers of explication, at the centre of the
learning process. Jacotot had conveyed nothing to his students in the way
of substantive knowledge about the French language; he had more or less
left them to their own devices after providing them with the bilingual ver-
sion of Fénelon’s novel. It was their engagement with the translation and
their desire to learn that enabled them to learn French (Rancière 1991, 9).
So what has Jacotot contributed to this apparent pedagogical miracle?
Rancière (1991, 9) puts it eloquently when he claims that Jacotot gave the
students “the order to pass through a forest whose openings and clearings
he himself had not discovered. Necessity had constrained him to leave his
intelligence entirely out of the picture—that mediating intelligence of the
master that relays the printed intelligence of written words to the appren-
tice’s. And, in one fell swoop, he had suppressed the imaginary distance
that is the principle of pedagogical stultification.”
Rancière (1991, 5) also identifies the master’s speech as an integral part
of the pedagogical myth and questions whether there is any substantive
reason for assuming that such speech is indispensable to student learning.
He writes that the principle of explication:
presupposes that reasonings are clearer, are better imprinted on the mind of
the student, when they are conveyed by the speech of the master, which dis-
sipates in an instant, than when conveyed by the book, where they are
inscribed forever in indelible characters. How can we understand this para-
doxical privilege of speech over writing, of hearing over sight? What relation-
ship thus exists between the power of speech and the power of the master?
Image 4.1 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, courtesy Back to Back Theatre.
Photograph by Jeff Busby
ability, the status of the disabled body and, most importantly for this chap-
ter, the (im)possibility of equality. Further, since there is a considerable
overlap between teaching students and directing plays, a close analysis of
the play enables us to identify several of the major ethical and pedagogical
contradictions that are engendered by teaching postdramatic theatre.
Formed in the late 1980s in the city of Geelong, Back to Back Theatre is a
unique company. First, it is “the only full-time professional acting ensemble in
Australia” (Grehan and Eckersall 2013, 15). Second, some of its members
have intellectual disabilities. Significantly, these people work alongside neuro-
typical people under the artistic direction of Bruce Gladwin. So, on one level,
Ganesh is about the politics of making a play with intellectually disabled indi-
viduals who may or may not be wholly aware of what they are doing. Put
simply, Ganesh is a metatheatrical work that skilfully weaves its two narrative
threads together in a mutually enriching manner. One story concerns the
Hindu deity Ganesh, the elephant god of obstacles, who is on a mission to
reclaim his sacred symbol, the swastika, from the Nazis. This is a story suf-
fused with myth, an apparently simple tale of good versus evil, right against
wrong. Ganesh is a hero who must overcome a variety of obstacles before
realising his goal and defeating the villainous Nazis.
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable… 79
The other story is about the process of devising this first tale, and it
explicitly exposes the power relations at play in the creative process. This
part of the performance appears to be a fictionalised and exaggerated ver-
sion of what transpired during the development of the work, which took
around five years (Gladwin and Gough 2013). David Woods, a neurotypi-
cal guest member of the company, plays a director who is attempting to
shape and rehearse the Ganesh story. The choice of pitting Ganesh against
the Nazis is an inspired one. The Nazis, as we all know, were obsessed with
racial purity, and attempted to exterminate those members of the German
population deemed degenerate or abnormal. The notorious Dr. Joseph
Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” conducted experiments on so-
called “mongoloids” in the interests of “science.” Thus, the play pits the
Nazis against Ganesh, whose righteous quest to recover the Nazi swas-
tika—which bears a striking resemblance to the elephant god’s sacred sym-
bol—resonates with the structure of many mythological narratives.
In another inspired aesthetic choice, “the director” functions as an
exemplar of charismatic fascism (he is a cross between John Keating from
Dead Poets Society and Adolf Hitler). Put in more sober terms, “the direc-
tor” is a mostly benevolent dictator who is prone to fits of inchoate rage
when things don’t go his way. He possesses what we might call an “artistic
temperament,” which appears to fuel the frustration he expresses towards
his collaborators throughout the play. His dictatorial behaviour turns him
into a little Hitler (another person with a volatile artistic temperament—
let’s not forget that Hitler was a failed artist).
The Ganesh story is told through some ingeniously simple techniques—
masks, projections and conventional stage lighting—but it is the rehearsal
story that has the greatest effect on the audience. The director treats his
charges—the intellectually disabled actors—with tenderness and compas-
sion at times, but he is also capable of losing his religion, and humiliating his
cast when he runs out of patience with their limitations as performers. The
play also enacts a very sophisticated and complex game with the audience by
consistently undermining its “reality status.” It is impossible to ignore the
fact that the performers on stage—except “the director”—are intellectually
disabled. It is also impossible to suspend disbelief and see them as represent-
ing fictional characters. This is despite the fact that they are, of course, play-
ing fictionalised versions of themselves in the metatheatrical rehearsal. What
is perhaps most unsettling is that, at times, the dialogue draws attention to
the fact that audiences are watching actors who may have difficulty compre-
hending the distinction between fact and fiction, play and world, represen-
tation and reality (consistent features of postdramatic theatre, incidentally).
80 G. D’Cruz
Helena Grehan (2013, 197) argues that the play “unsettles its audience
on ethical grounds—so that the ability to feel, think and respond to the
issues being addressed in a way that allows spectators to make sense of
them becomes almost impossible.” Leaving aside the spectator’s ethical
dilemma for a moment, it is also important to ask how it might be possible
for the neurotypical members of the company to find an ethical way to
collaborate with people who may not fully comprehend instructions and
directions. Grehan (2013, 198) observes that the staged debates “about
comprehension, inclusion and group dynamics seem so real and deal with
questions ‘we’ (as non-disabled spectators) think ‘they’ (as a company of
artists with disabilities) must negotiate, they leave spectators unmoored
and uncertain.” Uncertainty and contradiction are leitmotifs in much of
the critical commentary devoted to the work produced by Back to Back
Theatre (Grehan 2013; Schmidt 2013; Scheer 2013; Calvert 2016). This
is largely a consequence of the fact that the majority of the company’s
performers are disabled, and that disability—at least in most Western cul-
tures—makes people uncomfortable. As “the director” notes in the
rehearsal strand of Ganesh: “The thing is people have problems with us
blurring reality and fiction because you are a group of people with intel-
lectual disabilities” (quoted in Grehan and Eckersall 2013, 184). So let us
pause here, and unpack Grehan’s observation concerning the play’s unset-
tling effect on its audiences. What are we seeing? And what can the work
teach us about teaching?
A man in the audience stood up and threw a metaphorical grenade into the
room. “I don’t believe these people made this work,” he said. “I have
worked with people like this and I don’t think they are capable of it.” One
of the actors, Scott Price, livid at the presumption, stood up, grabbed the
microphone and said: “Well mate, you can just get out of here because what
you said is so wrong and so offensive.” (Coslovich 2011, 20)
Alright, if you think the actors aren’t capable of making work like this, we’re
going to make something even more complex. And it’s going to be really
detailed and layered and, not only that, we’re going to get the actors to
speak in three languages, and you’re not going to doubt their competency
and command over what they’re doing. (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 252)
As Gladwin (quoted in Calvert 2016, 140) puts it: “‘There’s a guy with
Down’s syndrome. I wonder if he’s playing a person with Down’s syn-
drome?’ I think that’s a tension that the audience is never released from.”
This pressure perhaps best explains the unsettling effect the company has
on its audience.
This still leaves us with the problem of how the work is made. Yoni Prior
(2013) gives us some insight into the company’s artistic process through
her account of observing some of the rehearsals for Ganesh, and it is this
account that has enabled me to identify how this play resonates with the
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable… 83
As the “director” David plays a key role in the rehearsal story, he seems ini-
tially concerned to open up the performance space to all of the actors. His
negotiations with the cast move from facilitation to aggravation and finally
to his decision to quit and his departure. His parody of a theatre “director”
as someone we could encounter in a community theatre context where
“empowerment through the arts” may be the catch cry is both funny and
disturbing.
I would add that not only does such an approach manifest as yet another
form of performance pressure, but also produces narrow conceptions of
educational value by assuming that it is possible to accurately measure
pedagogical outcomes in the first place. I have sometimes been puzzled by
qualitative student feedback about my teaching, especially when students
make statements about what they have learnt from my lectures or work-
shops. There is no guarantee that there is always a strong correlation
between what I think I am teaching and what a student takes from my
classes. This is not to say that as teachers we should throw our game plans
out the window and wing it. Rather, it is imperative to acknowledge that
students are never passive spectators. They come to the class, lecture,
workshop or rehearsal with a plethora of knowledge and experience about
a wide range of phenomena. And what personal baggage they bring to
class—things such as mood, political disposition and sense of self-will
shape what they might take away from any given pedagogical encounter.
Moreover, their very presence alters the status of knowledge or skill we
might teach. The emancipation of the spectator, for Rancière (2009, 14),
may “begin with the realisation that viewing actively transforms and inter-
prets its objects; what she sees, feels and understands from the perfor-
mance is not necessarily what the artist thinks she must.” Similarly, the
emancipation of the student—who occupies a structurally similar position
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable… 87
Why did X lose “the reality line”? Could the loss be attributed to intellectual
disability? Had s/he not understood or attended to the instructions? Was it
because Scott in the improvisation is not distinctly different from Scott in
the real world? Had the intensity of Scott’s performance energy and com-
mitment to the improvisation blurred the line between acting and
behaving?
The scene becomes increasingly tense until Scott, who is trying his best
to follow David’s directions, loses his patience and angrily vents his frus-
tration: “Go and get fucked cunt” (2013, 191). At this point, David “loses
it,” becomes angry and aggressive and barks a serious of commands: “No.
You get back to your chairs so he can get back on his fucking mat. Get on
the floor. Get on the fucking floor. Get on the fucking floor. Get on the
fucking floor” (2013, 192).
Carpe diem, indeed! David is certainly no John Keating in terms of
charisma. However, the actor is an incredibly talented performer and, in
my view, a match for Robin Williams as an improviser. The salient point
here is that both David and John Keating are master manipulators. They
use different strategies and techniques, but their goals are similar—they
both want to close the gap between what they know and what their charges
do not know. They both accept the pedagogical myth that the teacher/
director is central to educational efficacy.
Gladwin confesses that he toyed with the idea of playing the role of
the director himself: “Initially I contemplated trying to play the role
myself, because I thought that would give it a great authenticity if I
could do it myself” (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 252). Stung by criticism
that he functions as a manipulative ringmaster, Gladwin wanted to con-
front these criticisms directly; indeed, much of the play’s power comes
from its unflinching desire to examine questions of power between the
able and disabled members of the company. While the character of
David may or may not be an exaggerated version of the actor David
Woods, he certainly does not appear to have much in common with
Gladwin in terms of temperament or creative methodology. I have not
seen Gladwin direct his actors, and have no way of assessing whether he
manipulates them emotionally. In the interviews he gives for Grehan
and Eckersall’s book, and in Prior’s account of the rehearsal process,
Gladwin comes across as someone who is in no hurry to attain results or
impose a preconceived vision of the improvisations. He tells Gough:
92 G. D’Cruz
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Chapter 5
If you search for Martin Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life on YouTube
you will find a plethora of video clips from a wide range of productions.
Most of these are extracts from relatively recent student performances,
and they testify to the work’s popularity within university drama courses
and actor-training institutions. These videos also confirm that scholarly
commentary and criticism can never wholly exhaust the staging potential
of this or any other play text. This is because no single critical vocabulary
can delimit the excess of meanings generated within theatrical, scholarly or
pedagogical contexts. That said, we can observe uniformity in the way
these student groups approach the play and attempt to follow Crimp’s
imperative to highlight its irony. I return to this point at the end of this
chapter but, for now, want to reinforce my thesis that the popularity of
postdramatic plays in the academy has more to do with pragmatic staging
considerations than with Lehmann’s vocabulary and its concomitant
interpretative strategies. As I pointed out in the introduction to this
book, postdramatic plays such as Attempts on Her Life have flexible cast-
ing requirements. Crimp’s play does not contain any lead roles, which
means it can accommodate large numbers of student actors and provide
every performer with an approximately equal amount of stage time. The
play also offers teachers the opportunity to explore a broad range of theo-
retical and political issues with students. This stylistic mutability is largely
The Royal Court Theatre is the writers’ theatre. It is the leading force in
world theatre for energetically cultivating writers—undiscovered, emerging
and established.
Through the writers, the Royal Court is at the forefront of creating rest-
less, alert, provocative theatre about now. We open our doors to the unheard
voices and free thinkers that, through their writing, change our way of see-
ing. (2017)
Crimp’s play certainly qualifies as typical Royal Court fare, yet it also
unsettles conventional ideas about authorship and writing, and demon-
strates how the drift between drama and theatre can become the focus of a
dramatic text. The play comprises “17 scenarios for the theatre” of varying
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 97
length and, in the words of Clara Escoda Agustí (2005, 103), they “lay bare
the different discursive possibilities contained in the telling of a story. They
make visible the various ideological twists and turns that discourse and rep-
resentation can take, and depict how speakers activate and choose among a
set of ideological positions as they construct meaning.” The stage directions
do not specify a location or time, or provide detailed instructions about how
to allocate lines. In fact, Crimp does not determine how many actors are
needed to perform the play. He only states that dashes in the text indicate a
change of speaker and that the cast “should reflect the composition of the
world beyond the theatre” (Crimp 1997, 3); this impossible direction reso-
nates with the playwright’s imperative to highlight the irony of each sce-
nario. Irony, of course, is a major postmodern trope, and Crimp’s invocation
of the term signals his intent to unsettle verities about the production and
reception of artistic works. Linda Hutcheon (1989, 176) famously argued
that postmodern irony possessed a critical edge through exposing excess
and artifice in various social and cultural practices. Put simply, irony conveys
the disparity between a work’s apparent meaning and its significance as a
mechanism of ideological control.
The play opens with a series of recorded messages on an answerphone.
They range from the mundane (a reminder of a car purchase, glad tidings
from the mother of the machine’s owner) to the sinister (a sexually explicit
threat from a possible stalker and ominous-sounding threats made in for-
eign languages). Crimp connects some of these statements to the follow-
ing scenarios, and provides clues to the mysterious entity known as Anne
(AKA Annie, Anya and so on). As the play progresses, we learn that the
absent character known by variations on the moniker “Anne” may be a
pornographic movie star, a terrorist, a suicidal artist, a tour guide, a physi-
cist refugee, an American survivalist or a brand of car. Scenario 15, titled
“The Girl Next Door,” is a set of pop-song lyrics that allude to these pos-
sible identities. Anne’s age and marital status are also hard to specify, since
Crimp describes her as being 18, 19 or 40, single and married. Anne is an
enigma, and the play is about, as the refrain of the pop-song scenario puts
it, “all the things that Anne can be.” The work’s title is a pun: the play
attempts to render the life of a fictional character; in fact, it makes several
attempts to tell the audience something about “her,” and there are also
some scenarios concerning attempts to kill “her.” So the title can be read
as a reference to what Elinor Fuchs (1996) has called “the death of char-
acter.” As one of the speakers in the play says: “she is not a real character,
not a real character like you get in a book or on TV, but a lack of character,
an absence … of character” (Crimp 1997, 25).
98 G. D’Cruz
Today, I remember very little about the details of the production, apart
from the fact that the multi-ethnic cast was very skilled. They spoke in a
variety of different languages and regional accents; they could also sing
and dance (the play contained a few song-and-dance sequences, including
a rap). Aleks Sierz’s (2013, 51) account of the production confirms the
veracity of these fragmentary memories:
Images of Albery’s production that stick in the mind are red lights that con-
verged at the back of the stage, suggesting an airport runway; a black frame
reminiscent of airplane windows, conference venues or a television screen;
the passing images of X-rayed luggage on an airport carousel in “Mum and
Dad”; bleak cityscapes and a violent TV movie. In Scenario 5, Hakeem Kae-
Kazim performed a rap song while a film projection showed a girl’s legs
dangling—which suddenly twitch as blood starts running down them, soak-
ing her white socks—and Scenario 14 was a showbiz song-and-dance
routine.
I also recall that the play used slides and video projections but, no mat-
ter how hard I try, I cannot conjure up a clear mental image from this
event. I have no idea how it was staged and, if not for a few notes jotted
down in my diary, I suspect I would have an even dimmer impression
about what has turned out to be an enduring play. My brief diary entry
suggests I was mildly engaged, but felt the production was a little long and
far too wordy. I attended the play with an aunt who admitted that she
didn’t “get it,” thus demonstrating one of the work’s ironic maxims: “the
point is that there really is no point.” As an academic with a vested interest
in experimental performance, I felt I “got it.” I may not have been overly
impressed, but I most certainly felt I understood what Crimp was attempt-
ing to do. I “made sense” of the play by categorising it as a postmodern
work concerned with media culture and the instability of personal identity.
I bought a copy of the script, which was on sale in the theatre foyer, as is
often the custom with Royal Court productions. The play sat on my book-
shelf, half-forgotten and unread, until 2003, when I directed the play with
Deakin University students. I return to the problems generated by direct-
ing the play with students in the second part of this chapter; for the
moment, let us examine the work’s critical reception.
The first production of Attempts on Her Life did not inspire many superla-
tives. The London critics who wrote about its first staging in 1997 gave it
mixed reviews. Nicholas de Jongh (quoted in Sierz 2013, 52) praised Attempts
on Her Life “for the wit and agility with which it disappears up its own self-
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 99
reflexive futility,” and Alastair Macaulay’s (quoted in Sierz 2013, 52) antipa-
thetic review recognised the play as postmodern, “post-civilisation, post-truth,
post-feeling, post-everything.” Sierz (2000, 33) also reaches for the ubiqui-
tous “P” word in his brief account of the play: “Attempts on Her Life,” he
writes, “was a postmodern extravaganza that could be read as a series of pro-
vocative suggestions for creating a new kind of theatre.”
These early commentaries use the word “postmodern” without any expli-
cation. The term appears to function in these discourses as shorthand for an
amorphous form of contemporary experimentation (the authors cited above
did not feel compelled to specify what they meant by the word “postmod-
ern,” such was its omnipresence by the late 1990s). Crimp himself explicitly
invited a postmodern reading of his play by including an epigraph from Jean
Baudrillard in a later published version: “No one will have directly experi-
enced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an
image of them” (quoted in Crimp 2005, 198). This quotation directly relates
to the play’s concern with the status of reality in the “society of the spectacle”
(Debord 1967). The play’s references to media society and the plethora of
images that saturate everyday life follow: Scenario 2 (“Tragedy of Love and
Ideology”), for example, reads as though the speakers are scriptwriters trying
to pitch a series of dramatic ideas about a character called Anne. Scenario 5
(“The Camera Loves You”) explicitly addresses the ubiquity of televisual tech-
nologies and the production of “hyperreal” simulacra with respect to the
status of theatre: “we need to feel what we’re seeing is real; it’s not about act-
ing, it’s far more exacting than acting” (Crimp 1997, 19). We assess the status
of the real through our emotions. If it feels real, then it is real, or perhaps even
“hyperreal.” In another scenario, Crimp slyly anticipates the critical response
to the play by writing a wicked parody of (postmodern) critical discourse. In
this part of the play, the lines belong to art critics who are pontificating about
the relative merits of Anne’s performance-art installation: “it’s theatre for a
world in which theatre itself has died” (Crimp 1997, 50). Agustí (2005, 109)
identifies the play’s postmodern themes, but argues that we should view
Crimp’s use of irony as a modernist strategy.
The normal way of writing a play, of representing the world, is to give the
illusion that you have people on stage who are real people, who are expe-
riencing real problems or whatever. That’s normally the art of a dramatist
or the art of a novelist, to give this illusion of people enacting life. The
thing about that is that you can’t necessarily get very far or you can’t nec-
essarily reflect a world that’s full of multiple stories. So really it’s a very
simple technique; it’s the thing you’re not supposed to do, that rather
than show the story, you tell the story. This is simply a play in which the
story is being told and the drama in the play is about conflicts within the
teller about telling the story.
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 103
movie star, a highly sexualised brand of car, a doomed suicidal artist and so
forth. Not only does Crimp (1997, 49) invoke these clichés of female
sexuality and sexual identity, but he also parodies feminist critical discourse:
“Anne’s only way to avoid being a victim of the patriarchal structures of
late twentieth-century capitalism is to become her own victim.” While
acknowledging the novelty of the play’s form, Luckhurst (2003, 59) draws
attention to the problems associated with the work’s thematic content
when she points out that “its dual critique of global capitalism and patriar-
chy is evident but all the voices connected with that critique are deluded,
fascistic, and morally corroded. The effect of this is to reduce maleness to
a monolithically sadistic and psychopathic construct—in every scenario.”
She further observes that:
on the basis of its aesthetic properties alone. What constitutes an easy text?
Sierz is certainly referring to Crimp’s formal innovations, but this mod-
ernist truism is difficult to substantiate. Shirin M. Rai and Janelle Reinelt
(2015, 10) observe that today, “it is only too possible to recognise a realm
of aesthetic analysis that considers itself political but does not engage in
the collective concrete struggles of pragmatic politics.” While Rai and
Reinelt (2015, 12) are critical of Rancière’s focus on dissensus and rup-
ture, they share his interest in the politics of equality when they reveal that
they “harbour a suspicion of too much emphasis on aesthetics because of
the historical collusion between aesthetics and hierarchies of taste and
judgement.” They make a good point. However, my examination of the
scholarship on Crimp’s play reveals the extent to which academics are pri-
marily engaged in critical reading practices that are sustained by language
games that can only be played by those schooled in the critical discourses
I have described and contributed to in this book. In the second half of this
chapter, I identify some of the ways that teaching Crimp’s work within the
context of a production course negates the possibility of approaching the
play from a purely aesthetic and academic standpoint.
and University: the Gießen Model,” Christel Weiler (1988) speaks with
Andrzej Wirth, Hans-Thies Lehmann and Susanne Winnacker about the
applied theatre studies programme at the University of Gießen. He poses
the following question: “why shouldn’t critics direct plays and directors
teach and write?” Here is an extract from the exchange between Weiler
and Wirth:
Today, the relationship between theatre and academic thought does not
seem especially radical, and Lehmann’s vocabulary provides a useful set of
tools for reflecting on practice. My university accepts the concept of the prac-
titioner/researcher, and most of our research students in the creative arts have
extensive experience as artists. There is also now a wide body of critical litera-
ture on practice as research methodologies, confirming that a significant num-
ber of academic institutions have no problem accepting artists as higher-degree
candidates (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Allegue et al. 2009; Freeman 2010).
However, these aspiring practitioner/scholars still need to articulate their
research projects in some exegetical form—so writing about performance,
from the position of a practitioner or “expert spectator,” remains a non-nego-
tiable institutional requirement for artists seeking to locate and conduct their
practice within the academy. It is impossible to avoid the institutional impera-
tive to explicate the scope and value of research. Lehmann’s vocabulary can
certainly assist people engaged in this enterprise, but using this lexicon in the
context of teaching and directing postdramatic theatre with students exposes
the gap between scholarly contemplation and the often-messy business of
dealing with an unruly encounter between conflicting approaches to creating
theatre. How do we speak about the experiential encounter between students
and teachers in these contexts? Do we need to develop a different register of
writing to unpack the politics of teaching postdramatic theatre through prac-
tice? And what might Lehmann’s vocabulary contribute to teaching students
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 109
about how to make performances? The problems I describe in the last part of
this chapter should be familiar to those who direct student performances
within university contexts. At the start of this book, I claimed that postdra-
matic plays, such as Crimp’s, overcome some of the major obstacles involved
in staging plays with large casts for pedagogical purposes. They can facilitate
equity of participation insofar as it makes it easier to give students approxi-
mately the same amount of stage time (conventional plays with principal roles
and supporting parts make it difficult to avoid casting hierarchies). This is not
to say that it is necessarily easier to stage postdramatic work, as I reveal in a
moment. And what of trying to work under the sign of equality within the
context of the corporate university? Well, that’s much easier said than done.
We have just finished reading Attempts on Her Life as a class. We had fol-
lowed Crimp’s direction to change speaker every time we encountered a
dash on the page, and I had scanned the faces of my students for clues to
their responses to the text as they read. I had detected the occasional gri-
mace and a few smiles; nothing to indicate the students had been bored or
disengaged during the reading. A few people had guffawed and laughed out
loud at various points. Nonetheless, I can’t shake the feeling that nobody in
the rehearsal room is overly enthused by the prospect of staging this play:
“So what do you think? What are your immediate impressions of the play?”
“I think it’s a shame we can’t invite our families to see this. Is it really
necessary to use filthy language? Also, there’s too much sexual innuendo.”
This is not the response I was hoping to elicit, but the student has a
good point. I realise that I am not staging the play for the usual sus-
pects—hipsters, bourgeois theatre darlings and the general public. The
audience for this student production will comprise friends and family
members of the cast, other students and perhaps a few academics, but
does this mean I’m necessarily compelled to produce crowd-pleasing
vanilla fluff? This thought alone reveals the extent to which questions of
taste and hierarchies of aesthetic judgement are always in play. Any text I
select would disclose my aesthetic preferences and prejudices—Andrew
Lloyd Webber shows are off the table for me, but there is no reason why
producing one of his works would not fulfil the institution’s pedagogical
imperative. The primary objective of this particular production course is
to teach students how to analyse a dramatic text for performance. Here
are the course objectives in the unit guide given to all students before the
start of the semester:
110 G. D’Cruz
the bed. They describe her emotions (she’s angry when she wakes at 3
a.m. and hears voices; she interrogates her lover, who may be some sort of
spy). Crimp gives his speakers lines that evoke the contours of a fictional
world and reference certain genre conventions (the scenario makes a num-
ber of references to the quality of the light that streams through the apart-
ment’s window, perhaps inviting the play’s director or designer to employ
chiaroscuro lighting techniques to create the ambience of film noir or a
John le Carré thriller).
Having identified the “basic ingredients” for a possible dramatic scene,
the students go to work and produce several variations on the thriller
theme. Some play it as a farcical Cohen Brothers parody of Hollywood;
others take a darker, more menacing approach. We’re off and running.
What could go wrong?
Before unpacking some of the ethical issues generated by this experience
of staging Crimp’s play with students, I want to underscore the fact that,
in my experience, students accept the challenge of working with postdra-
matic texts with little fuss. Most of the students I teach at Deakin University
are theatre enthusiasts with particular preferences. Each year, I ask first-
year students to tell me about their favourite forms of theatre. Almost
invariably, they talk about commercial musical theatre (Cats, Phantom of
the Opera and so on). Some express a love of Shakespeare, and a few nomi-
nate plays such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, or whatever works
they enjoyed reading or performing at school. They rarely choose postdra-
matic theatre produced by the likes of Forced Entertainment or Martin
Crimp as favourites. They also often tell me they can’t afford to see theatre
or attend the annual arts festival that often showcases the work of artists
whose work we might describe as postdramatic. The point here is that the
works I consider interesting may be widely discussed and debated by aca-
demics, but they remain inaccessible, for a variety of political and economic
reasons, to the bulk of my students. To some extent, the raison d’être of
the university, at least in its non-corporate form, is to take students out of
their comfort zones by providing them with a set of intellectual challenges
that expand their intellectual horizons. This imperative to teach students
something they do not know is not necessarily incompatible with Rancière’s
(1991) principle of equality if one abandons the principle of explication for
the principle of exploration (7). We need to carefully consider the role of
the type of scholarly exegesis I mentioned in the first part of this chapter in
pedagogical situations if we are to avoid the pitfalls involved in sustaining
the pedagogical myth described in the previous chapter.
112 G. D’Cruz
—Anne. Good Evening. Let me tell you what I’m going to do to you. First
you’re going to suck my cock. Then I’m going to fuck you up the arse. With
a broken bottle. And that’s just for starters. Little miss Cunt. (Crimp 1997, 3)
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 113
The second, the last message in the scenario, is most likely from one of
Anne’s lovers. The speaker suggests that Anne has told him (or her) that
she wants to kill herself. The speaker, who has apparently not heard from
Anne for a while, imagines she is now a rotting corpse. Travis delivers both
messages with a savage intensity. His performance suggests that he’s either
a very good actor or dangerously unhinged. The class enthusiastically
applaud his group’s efforts (his collaborators perform the other messages).
Travis seems oblivious to this positive response—he shuffles back to his
seat as the next group take up their positions for the following scene.
Travis remains aloof from the rest of the students for most of the semes-
ter. He requests to perform Scenario 8, “Particle Physics,” as a mono-
logue. I give him my consent. The speakers in this scenario describe an
ashtray owned by Anne, noting that it looks like something you would
find in a cheap hotel that hosts illicit sexual liaisons. Travis believes the
scenario’s sexual connotations gives him licence to play out a sadistic fan-
tasy that involves him ranting his lines to the accompaniment of a chain-
saw. He shoots me a sinister glare when I veto the idea (on health and
safety grounds). Some of the students like the performance, and I concede
it has an effect, but doesn’t seem to connect with the scenario’s theme,
which suggests that Anne is a physics genius who has discovered a new
elementary particle that may change our entire conception of the universe
(Crimp 1997, 36). One student points out that she doesn’t believe the
play makes any sense, anyway. “Why do we have to read the basic ingredi-
ents, so literally,” another asks. She has a point. “Yeah, why can’t a genius
physicist have a psychotic lover?” Again, the student has a point. I tell the
class I will investigate the possibility of using a chainsaw on stage.
Thankfully, the theatre’s production manager immediately stymies the
idea. Travis devises a way to mime the violence, and everybody seems
happy—except me. What am I worried about? The play is full of references
to sexual abuse, after all. Do the students understand irony? Do I know
why the class is so impressed by Travis’s scenario? Do any of us fully com-
prehend the play? Should I get them to read the scholarly criticism gener-
ated by the work? Perhaps it is time to engage in a bit of explication?
Travis is not the only student who challenges my conception of the
play. I have a vague recollection of the rap in the original production, so I
suggest the group working on Scenario 5, “The Camera Loves You,”
devises a rap (each member of this group has musical ability, although rap
is not a genre they have much time for). I can see they find my suggestion
ludicrous, and passé. This group has spent a lot of time debating how they
114 G. D’Cruz
that they understand the nuances of what they are doing? To what extent
do you attempt to “serve” the intentions of the postdramatic playwright?
Does it even make sense to think about authorial intentions when produc-
ing a play that demands the creative team fill in the blanks and shape
something new from the basic ingredients of the text? I made a plethora
of rookie mistakes, but felt I had learnt a great deal about how I might
take a different, more pedagogically efficacious approach to the task of
teaching postdramatic theatre.
The three anecdotes drawn from my production notes illustrate the
disconnect between analysing and debating the status of Crimp’s play as
postmodern or postdramatic, and attempting to stage the play while nego-
tiating the “volatile energies” and “power inequities inherent in the [ped-
agogical] situation” (Wangh 2013, 95). The anecdotes also suggest that
the students’ “active” engagement with a text did not necessarily give
them a greater understanding of the play, or facilitate a political epiphany
about the state of the world. This is not to imply they approached the
tasks associated with staging the play passively or uncritically. On the con-
trary, they made their sense of the play; sometimes this involved working
with referents that had little connection to my postmodern reading of it,
and at other times I could see they had engaged with the theoretical ideas
I used to interpret the play. Earlier in this book, I invoked Elizabeth
Wright’s (1989, 13) articulation of the distinction Brecht made between
minor and major pedagogy. You may recall that Brecht considered his
works for the stage examples of minor pedagogy because they could
merely represent the ideological contradictions and conflicts that sus-
tained class society to audiences. Major pedagogy, conversely, dispensed
with the separation between actors and audience, since the so-called
“learning plays” were written to be performed by non-actors—that is,
workers and students. Brecht, according to Wright, believed people were
more likely to become aware of the material conditions that oppressed
them if they enacted rather than merely observed drama. Advocates of
drama in education-applied theatre, and adjacent fields of scholarship,
often talk about the life-changing, transformative value of theatre practice
in pedagogical contexts and argue that the kinaesthetic knowledge gener-
ated by such practice is a distinguishing mark of performance pedagogy.
As Chris Hay (2016) argues, there may be good reasons for making such
a case, but there is no reason why this stance is incompatible with articu-
lating more precise pedagogical principles. My major claim in this chapter
is that the rehearsal space as a pedagogical site is not necessarily a better
116 G. D’Cruz
References
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Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life. Ariel 36 (3–4): 103–126.
Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini. 2009. Practice-
as-Research in Performance and Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Angelaki, Vicky. 2012. The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Arnott, James. 1981. An Introduction to Theatrical Scholarship. Theatre Quarterly
10 (39): 29–42.
Barnett, David. 2008. When Is a Play Not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic
Theatre Texts. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14–23.
Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt, eds. 2007. Practice as Research: Approaches to
Creative Arts Enquiry. London and New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.
Crimp, Martin. 1997. Attempts on Her Life. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 2005. Martin Crimp Plays 2. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 2007. Interview with Martin Crimp. In National Theatre Education
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8hd6ovssje.cloudfront.net/documents/Attempts_bkpk.pdf.
Debord, Guy. 1995 (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Freeman, John. 2010. Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research Through Practice in
Performance. Faringdon: Libri.
Frow, John. 2013. Practice of Value: Essays on Literature in Cultural Studies.
Crawley: UWAP Scholarly.
Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After
Modernism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Hay, Chris. 2016. Knowledge, Creativity and Failure: A New Pedagogical
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Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 117
How do you know when you’ve taught a successful class? Can you see
enthusiasm in the eyes of your students? Can you feel their energetic
engagement in your body? Or do you rely on verbal feedback or formal
teaching-evaluation metrics to gauge whether you have met your peda-
gogical aims and objectives? Perhaps you and your managers draw on all
of these feedback mechanisms when you reflect on and assess your perfor-
mance as a teacher at the end of the year. This chapter analyses two post-
dramatic productions: The Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller and Princess
Plays by Elfriede Jelinek. The first, which I directed in 2006, was a success
according to the feedback mechanisms I have just articulated. The second,
well, not so much. If, after Foucault, we think of the university as a disposi-
tif—that is, a complex mix of institutional rules, forces and imperatives
that sustain particular systems of power/knowledge relations—then we
apprehend our pedagogic role as a cog in an unstable, constantly changing
teaching machine. As Foucault (1978, 72–73) puts it, a dispositif is a
“large surface network where the stimulation of bodies, the intensification
of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of specialized
knowledge, and the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked
together according to a few grand strategies of knowledge and power.” As
I have argued in earlier chapters, the institutional imperative to perform
according to specified criteria that use corporate metrics to measure the
value of teaching both constrains and enables teaching strategies. However,
it would be dangerous to conclude that the forces circulating within peda-
gogical situations are wholly determined and controlled by the corporate
Müller’s play looks odd on the page. In the Dennis Redmond transla-
tion, which I distributed to the class, the words are printed in blocks of
black text. Each of the work’s five sections is numbered and printed in
bold type. The first paragraph of the play appears in capitals and is divided
by diagonal breaks. The next paragraph also uses capital letters, but appears
in two blocks that look like poetic stanzas. The third paragraph on the first
page looks very much like the one you are reading now: like a block of text
from a book. The translator prefaces the play by noting that its author has
deliberately composed his work to include these graphic idiosyncrasies.
The work does not provide a list of characters, nor any indication of the
size of the cast, the distribution of lines or any other conventional pieces
of dramatic information (a characteristic postdramatic text, then?). At first
glance, the play is not reader-friendly, especially for students with limited
exposure to experimental theatre. Further, unlike Crimp’s play, which, for
the most part, uses contemporary linguistic idioms, Müller’s use of lan-
guage in The Hamletmachine is dense and alienating. It is a mélange of
Elizabethan English, translated into German and then back into English.
It reads like a stream-of-consciousness rambling loosely related to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and punctuated by misogynistic references to
women—“open your legs, mama”; “sew the witches up” (Müller 2001b,
1). Müller’s images are evocative and violent: the description of the corpse
train that appears as an ominous bell tolls, together with the implied
speaker’s distribution of human flesh to onlookers via his sword, is cer-
tainly dramatic, if challenging to stage. Müller (2001b) does assign some
lines to the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia, and also issues stage direc-
tions in a manner of speaking; but his instructions are quite bizarre, and
some appear impossible to realise: a refrigerator bleeds (4) and the Hamlet-
Actor splits the heads of Marx Lenin Mao with an axe (5). Müller (2001a)
claims that when he wrote the play he had:
no idea whatsoever how it could be realized on stage, not the slightest idea.
There was a text, and there was no space in my imagination for the text, no
stage, no actors, nothing. It was written in a kind of soundproof zone, and
that has been happening with me increasingly. It was the same with
Hamletmachine; there are those desperate stage directions that are impos-
sible to realize, a symptom of my inability to imagine ways to realize them
and see the space where these events could happen. That means these are at
bottom plays or texts whose only place of action is my brain or head. They
122 G. D’Cruz
are performed here, within this skull. How do you do that on a theatre
stage? (218–219)
This was the question we had to answer within a short time frame.
David Barnett (2016, 49) argues that the “play openly resists attempts to
limit its meaning by interpreting its lines, as even a cursory reading of the
speeches reveals.” If this is the case, how might one approach the task of
realising the play on stage?
vengeful, suspicious, erratic, paranoid and perhaps even insane. At the end
of this list is one final question. This is an edited verbatim transcript of stu-
dent responses to the question, what do you know about the Cold War?
* * *
Out of a group of 20 enrolled students, 14 turned up to the first class
of the semester on time. I made them wait outside the theatre space, called
them in one by one and asked each of them the question posed at the start
of this chapter (I arranged things so the students could not see or hear the
responses of their peers). Most of these students were about 20 years old,
which means they were born a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall
(most of the class were born in 1986 or 1987). This explains, to some
extent, their paucity of knowledge about the Cold War, a defining element
of my cultural and political milieu. I saw the fall of the wall on TV, and I
distinctly remember the triumphalist tone of President George H.W. Bush’s
speech marking this momentous event that, for some, signalled the end of
history: the end of the ideological struggle between communism and capi-
talism. Most of my students had not studied history at high school. I do
not want to suggest that their lack of knowledge is representative of their
entire generation (Australian schools teach recent history, but it is easy to
124 G. D’Cruz
And it is with this caveat in mind that we can now move to the first of this
chapter’s case studies.
Looking at the video recording of the rehearsals for The Hamletmachine
after more than ten years is a strange experience. I realise I have most cer-
tainly forgotten many details about the specific exercises I set the class
during the rehearsal period. Instead of auditioning students for specific
roles, which is more or less impossible within the structure of Deakin
University’s production courses, I always devote one of the first classes to
having students perform for each other: I ask them to present any “hidden
talent” they might possess to their peers. The tape of this session reminds
me that the class brought a welter of sophisticated performance skills to
the production. Several students possessed solid musical-theatre chops;
another played a Beethoven sonata on piano from memory. Six students
had strong movement backgrounds; one young Latina woman could rap,
and delivered a stunning rendition of a piece she had written about the
politics of Australian national identity (she prefaced this with the famous
political chant “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” [the people united will
never be defeated]). Another young woman, having spent some time as an
exchange student in the US, performed cheerleader rhymes. Most of them
may not have known much about the Cold War, but they were an excep-
tionally talented group, and directly incorporated many of these little
“acts” into their final performance. The archival videos show a very lively,
good-humoured class. The students applauded each other enthusiastically
and did not appear inhibited by the imperative to perform. They looked
like they were having fun, and I hear myself frequently laughing behind
the camera. If cultivating a sense of play and spontaneity is a crucial aspect
of successful pedagogy, then the archival rehearsal tapes indicate that The
Hamletmachine class was successful on this level. As an aside, it also shows
I am doing my job in terms the institution values. Creativity, as Helen
Nicholson (2011), among others, notes, is also a valuable form of cultural
capital within what is most commonly called the creative economy. She
observes that there is “an instrumental justification for creativity,” since
the state values the ability to create various forms of intellectual property
in the form of marketable performances (Nicholson 2011, 95). I return to
this issue in the final chapter of this book.
The next few archival tapes I examine feature students discussing
Shakespeare’s play, and it is evident that I have asked them to analyse the
relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia and to make connections
between the themes of the play and contemporary politics. I divide the
Teaching History and (Gender) Politics... 127
class into small groups, and two students move from group to group
armed with a video camera and microphone to record the discussion. I
have also asked the students to translate the Elizabethan English of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet into contemporary language. This tape reminds me
that I intended to make the video record a part of the final performance
(while the production used lots of video projections, including an anima-
tion sequence, I ultimately dropped the idea of projecting rehearsal foot-
age in the final performance). From the recording, I deduce that I asked
the students to try to figure out why Müller might have chosen the char-
acter of Hamlet as an emblematic figure for his play. I do not appear on
the tapes until the end of the exercise, when the class assembles as a group.
I feel convinced that they are engaged and enthusiastic. While on camera,
they look relaxed, and some crack a jokes about the difficulty of the text,
but I am impressed by their commitment to this cerebral exercise. Perhaps
the presence of the camera helps them stay focused (they are, of course,
under surveillance).
Another tape documents what must have been a relatively early discus-
sion about the play. I stand in front of a whiteboard, marker in hand,
poised to jot down the students’ responses to the exercise and my ques-
tions; they engage one another in debate about what the play might be
trying to achieve. It soon became apparent that the majority of the class
also shared a left-leaning political ethos: they expressed, during class dis-
cussions and rehearsals, concern for the environment, refugees and the
poor. The one exception was the history buff who rattled off a very coher-
ent response to my question about the Cold War—I’ll call him Paul. Paul
possessed a detailed knowledge of history, and was the pianist I mentioned
earlier; he possessed perfect pitch, and I ended up using his musical skills
on the keyboard as an integral part of our Hamletmachine production.
The play explicitly addresses history and the politics of the Cold War
period. Paul’s political views were extremely conservative, to say the least.
He was obsessed with Nazi history, and even took great pride in demon-
strating his German-language skills. None of the extant tapes documents
some of his more provocative contributions to the class debate, but I have
a vivid memory of one of the Jewish women in the class taking him to task
over his political affiliations. As previously mentioned, this group of
students came from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds and held a variety
of different religious beliefs. Nonetheless, they bonded as a team and
became exemplars of what I have found to be a relatively unusual desire to
genuinely collaborate. (I have only taught one other group that displayed
128 G. D’Cruz
Actors will always bring aspects of their own life, in the form of political
and religious beliefs, emotional and affective dispositions, and corporeal
and intellectual eccentricities, to their work. Rancière’s point in The
Emancipated Spectator is that the opposition between passivity and activity
is untenable, since spectators also bring these distinctive characteristics to
the theatre. Moreover, as Alain Badiou (2015, 32) notes, the injunction
for the viewer to become active is actually “the height of passivity” insofar
as the spectator does what he is told. The connection between political
efficacy and activity (in either its manifestation as fission or fusion) is, for
Rancière, unsustainable. It is impossible to specify in advance, with any
degree of certainty, how any work of art or teaching strategy might suc-
ceed or fail to facilitate a radical intrusion of unsettling forces that cannot
be formulated in any symbolic form, but that unsettle our way of seeing
the world and, perhaps, function as a catalyst for reorienting the way we
live. There are many ways to attempt to describe this phenomenon; the
fact that such events are rare and remote does not mean that artists and
pedagogues stop trying to engineer them.
For example, the scholarly commentary generated by Ganesh Versus the
Third Reich is testament to a production’s ability to challenge verities
about disability, theatre and politics. Perhaps the Back to Back play is an
example of what Badiou (2015, 32) calls “real” theatre: theatre that “con-
tinues to illuminate our existence and our historical situation, beyond or
outside of dominant opinion.” In what ways might teaching The
Hamletmachine through performance accomplish something similar? And
how is it possible to quantify such a phenomenon? Sanja Bahun-Radunović
(2008, 446) believes that “history becomes ‘humanised’ and ‘workable’
by/in the very act of performance. The latter is always a ‘state of emer-
gency,’ the chronotopic point at which our personal and social being is
excited, ex-centered, and sometimes, Bertolt Brecht hoped at least,
brought to awareness of its historical condition.” On one of the archival
rehearsal tapes, I ask the students to introduce themselves and tell me
what they would like to learn from the unit. Without exception, they
respond with answers that suggest they hope to learn something about the
processes involved in staging a play and improve their skills as performers.
This is not unexpected—they are drama students, after all, and the teach-
ing machine specifies that I satisfy their desire to learn about theatre prac-
tice. However, to teach The Hamletmachine is to teach history. The major
question for me in the context of this chapter is to ascertain whether
teaching through practice makes the students more aware of the historical
130 G. D’Cruz
conditions that shape their lives than, say, teaching the play through giving
a lecture or unpacking its dense prose within the context of a seminar. But
how are we to address critically the historical conditions that not only
shape our lives, but also develop the pedagogical practices and forms of
knowledge authorised by the academy? And, more importantly, what is
the status of the knowledge generated by staging a play like The
Hamletmachine? The final part of this chapter attempts to address these
issues.
The Production
Towards the end of the class concerned with looking at the relationship
between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Hamletmachine, I tell the stu-
dents about how I intend to approach staging the play. I throw around a
few ideas about incorporating video recordings of the rehearsal process
before talking about how we might be looking for clues regarding staging
the play in Müller’s intertextual references. Bahun-Radunović (2008,
447) notes that:
is rotten” speech while waving a giant Soviet flag. The cast cheers until
someone steps up with a US flag and displaces the young prince. The cast
becomes subdued, and then enthusiastically cheers while listening to
another “political” speech. They cheer and become forlorn again and again
until Leonard Cohen’s song “The Future” signals the beginning of the
play’s next segment. This song provides an uncommonly prescient and
articulate view of the new world order following the death of communism:
“Give me back the Berlin Wall/Give me Stalin and St Paul/I’ve seen the
future, baby, and it’s murder.” Some members of the cast perform a cheer-
leader routine; others chant “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” fore-
shadowing later sequences in the performance. We thus presented a dense
set of intertextual references drawn from a variety of archives before any of
the cast uttered a word from The Hamletmachine.
recreates the famous “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial on
the pretext of finding a reference to Coca-Cola in the script. I get another
group, those involved in the Europe of the Woman section of the play, a
video from the DVD that accompanies the book Anarchic Dance by Liz
Aggiss and Billy Cowie (2006), and they choreograph the text to move-
ments and sounds inspired by Aggiss and Cowie’s video. Aggiss and Cowie
are members of the Divas Dance Theatre, a company celebrated for its
eclecticism and interdisciplinary approach to making performance.
We make several references to contemporary politics in other parts of
the play. For example, when we move Ophelia onto the stage towards the
end of the performance in a wheelchair, the young man in the Nazi uni-
form covers her head with a white hood when he reaches downstage cen-
tre. We create a tableau of Hamlet, Claudius and the “Nazi” posing for
“selfies” with the hooded and restrained Ophelia. This is an obvious and
none-too-subtle reference to the notorious Abu Ghraib abuse photo-
graphs that depict US soldiers posing with their humiliated, and some-
times hooded, captives (Image 6.1).
male teachers. She felt we were either overtly or unconsciously ignoring her
because, in her view, she was not “pretty” enough to garner our attention.
One of the great strengths of Wangh’s (2013) book The Heart of Teaching
lies in his deliberate engagement with “what teachers don’t talk about”
(xii)—that is, their response to antagonistic students, their sexual attraction
to others, the way they formulate and pose questions, the way they listen
and the way their class or gender identity imposes specific political disposi-
tions on the way they approach teaching. My practice as a teacher is over-
determined by a plethora of factors, conscious and unconscious, and it is a
sobering experience to be reminded about pedagogical power dynamics.
Jane’s experience suggests that she found the production frustrating in aes-
thetic and pedagogic terms.
The truth of the matter is that it’s hard to quantify pedagogical success
with any degree of certainty. Assessment rubrics and teaching-evaluation
surveys are crude mechanisms that fail to capture the structure of feeling
that makes each teaching experience distinctive. As already noted in previ-
ous chapters, Lehmann (2006, 178) argues that it “is not through the
direct thematisation of the political that theatre becomes political but
through the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representa-
tion.” So, did the production’s “mode of representation” make it political?
If so, for whom was it political: the audience of peers, friends and family, or
the group involved in the pedagogical activity? These questions are diffi-
cult to answer with any precision, since I did not directly ask the students
whether their involvement in The Hamletmachine had changed their per-
ception of the order of things. Suffice it to say that I was very pleased by
the students’ engagement with the project, their investment of time and
energy and their overall enthusiasm for the show, which they expressed
formally and informally at the end of it. My overwhelming feeling, all cave-
ats aside, was that The Hamletmachine production facilitated a rich peda-
gogical experience for the majority of students involved in the project.
When I think about this work, I recall a spirit of conviviality and coopera-
tion that I use as a yardstick, rightly or wrongly, to measure my perfor-
mance as a teacher. If I have learnt anything from my career as an academic
involved in directing student productions, it is that there is no formula or
failsafe set of principles that can ensure every production is an aesthetic and
pedagogical success. To teach within the educational dispositif is to teach
within a constantly shifting network of relations at the level of local insti-
tutional politics and at the level of governmental public policy. The condi-
tions of possibility for teaching The Hamletmachine in the way I have
136 G. D’Cruz
for the first time whenever I step into the theatre or one of the rehearsal
studios. So this year, do I choose Woyzeck, a play I’ve directed many times,
or do I attempt, once again, to teach postdramatic theatre? I have wanted
to direct Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Plays ever since I saw the first Australian
production of these pieces, under the title Princess Dramas, by Melbourne’s
Red Stitch Theatre in 2011. A few years earlier, I thought I’d make life
easier for myself by staging Attempts on Her Life for the second time. I
naively reasoned that having already directed the play once, and seen two
relatively recent student productions, would make the process a doddle.
As it turned out, the play proved just as difficult to direct as any other. The
cast of the 2012 production, unsurprisingly, possessed entirely different
skills, temperaments and dispositions from their antecedents. Thus, recall-
ing my failed attempt to take a shortcut by choosing a familiar text, I
decided to take on Jelinek’s Princess Plays and begin to jot down ideas on
my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone (a model that comes with a sty-
lus, but without an exploding battery).
Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, and having a
relatively successful art-house movie based on one of her books (Michael
Haneke’s The Piano Teacher), Jelinek is not well known in Australia. The
so-called Princess Plays comprise three distinct pieces: the first is based on
the fairy tale Snow White, the second rewrites Sleeping Beauty and the final
piece, Jackie, is a long monologue that draws on various biographical facts
about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In her review of the Red Stitch pro-
duction, directed by André Bastian, Alison Croggon (2011) writes that
these plays use “a commonplace of feminist writing: the reworking of
myth or folklore to subvert conventional ideas of the feminine in popular
culture. Jelinek, however, is not so much rewriting the myths as empower-
ment, as demonstrating how profoundly their clichés infect every aspect of
self.” These plays, then, are about identity politics, and the cultural and
ideological work performed by feminine stereotypes. I explicate these
political themes within the context of describing the rehearsal process, but
before I articulate the details of this production, it is important to
underscore developments in the 2017 incarnation of Deakin University’s
teaching machine (Image 6.2).
After spending more than a decade producing various kinds of postdra-
matic theatre with students, I become aware that I’m a creature of habit,
and have developed an almost formulaic approach to directing student
work. The process goes a bit like this. First, I make notes on the dramatic
text or the theme for a devised work. In the case of works such as Attempts
138 G. D’Cruz
Image 6.2 The Princess Plays, Deakin University, 2016. Photograph by Glenn
D’Cruz
quickly, and enter the workforce with the minimum of fuss. Each trimester
is two weeks shorter than the 13-week norm that was the most common
time frame for a semester for most of my academic career. This means each
unit we offer is two weeks shorter than it used to be, and thus, since
degree requirements have not changed in terms of the number of units
students need to complete a degree, students are now getting less face-to-
face teaching. Whereas they may have once had the luxury of viewing an
undergraduate education as an opportunity to pursue knowledge for a
wide variety of reasons, employment now appears to be the principal pur-
pose of that education. Consequently, students, in my recent experience,
have become obsessed with speed, and there is a sense in which teaching
postdramatic theatre in my immediate context is now more about teach-
ing project-management efficiency. After all, if you can learn how to
mount a full-scale production for public performance in ten weeks, than
you can handle almost any logistical task you encounter in the workforce.
But perhaps the changes I have just described are best apprehended within
a more detailed account of the Princess Plays.
There are seven students, five women and two men, working on
Jelinek’s Jackie; with one exception, the students self-selected to work on
this play. My show-and-tell class reveals that they possess a broad range of
talents. Some are musicians, others have had extensive acting experience
and so on. I ask them to edit Jelinek’s text because I think the monologue
is too long (I want each of the three plays to run for approximately the
same length of time). Remember, I regularly choose to work with postdra-
matic theatre because it enables me to ensure that all participants in my
class are given equal stage time, and have an equal opportunity to demon-
strate their creativity by dealing with a difficult and challenging text. For
me, the politics of postdramatic theatre in a pedagogical context are about
facilitating the principle of equality. This, of course, is a guiding ideal, and
various inequities invariably become evident during a production. I ask the
group to make collective decisions about how they will stage the text;
however, I make it clear that I reserve the right to veto their artistic choices
if I feel they do not work, or run the risk of contravening university regula-
tions regarding health and safety. The institution now compels us to per-
form risk assessments for most classes, and one of my new responsibilities
involves organising these evaluations with technical staff and lodging an
online form that confirms I have acquitted this duty properly—so I give
students licence to make artistic decisions within a framework circum-
scribed by an ever-increasing number of institutional dictates. After three
142 G. D’Cruz
classes (we meet twice a week for three hours), the students decide they
will represent Jackie as a collective, and distribute the lines of the mono-
logue evenly. They inform me that they have read the text and identified
some of its major themes and motifs. They observe, for example, that
Jelinek consistently refers to fashion, and identifies some of the former first
lady’s iconic dresses, such as her pink Chanel suit. This provides the group
with ideas about costuming, too. They pay heed to Jelinek’s stage direc-
tions, but I underscore the importance of taking in the full weight of the
playwright’s final remark regarding staging: “But I am sure you’ll come up
with something completely different” (Jelinek 2006, 53).
The students decide the women will all wear clothes connected with
Jackie, and the two men will wear suits; the men will embody aspects of
Jackie’s personality, but will, at appropriate times, portray President
Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. They identify the following themes in the
text: public life and celebrity, death, fashion, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, wom-
en’s bodies, most notably “the female waist,” and something they call
“light and dark” (which I read as the references to colour, such as Jackie
talking about her white face and black hair). The group transforms each
theme into a “character,” so they allocate most of the lines that refer to the
female body to a character called “Waist.” To wit:
Well, I suggest myself like my waist, which I don’t stress. I wear understated
clothes. My waist would be wasted if stressed and instantly cast off, I mean
cast in. Oh, no, well, I am about to make a crucial decision, and I decide
differently: my waist shall not be cast in anything, it should just be sug-
gested. It’s not something I would stress about myself. (Jelinek 2006, 53)
I politely take off my self when I am talking to somebody, and yet I also stay,
though far above. I prefer to be suspended in all those pictures of myself and
dragged along, that way I don’t have to do anything. (Jelinek 2006, 54)
Communist Manifesto and more recent works, such as Debord’s The Society
of the Spectacle and Jim Jarmusch’s “Golden Rules of Filmmaking.” In his
catalogue essay, Reinhard Spieler (2016, 88) points out that the installa-
tion’s “manifesto collages trace a path through the arts and their history.
The work is a tour de force through architecture, film, theatre, perfor-
mance and the visual arts, through the -isms of the avant-garde to the
present day, ingeniously accompanied by images, which themselves, in
turn, guide us through the history of these media and their protagonists.”
The first part of the exhibition catalogue is set out like a script. Rosefeldt
describes a fictional scenario at the top of each segment’s first page; he
assembles the various extracts from the manifestos underneath this descrip-
tion and provides performance annotations in the page margins. These
scant notes describe actions and sometimes indicate such things as vocal
dynamics and rhythms. For example, Rosefeldt (2016, 32) represents the
“world” of the segment that uses parts of the Dadaist manifesto in the
following terms:
Next, in the first paragraph of the script, he writes: “voice over while we
see the quiet crowd on the way from the church to the grave” (Rosefeldt
2016, 32). The disjunction between the literal meaning and context of the
manifesto quotations and film scenarios reminds me of how I hope the
students will approach Jelinek’s script, for it is the play between the juxta-
position of words, images and spatial configurations that will make the
work come alive on stage. The installation segments underscore Blanchett’s
theatrical virtuosity while establishing resonances between the film scenar-
ios and the manifestos. Therefore, the juxtaposition of the words extracted
from the manifestos with the film scenarios and Blanchett’s theatrical per-
formances creates a mélange of rich significations that remind me of the
artistic strategies used by those playwrights and devisors Lehmann gathers
under the rubric of postdramatic theatre. Rosefeldt (2016, 97) claims his
main idea for the work was “not to illustrate the particular manifesto texts,
but rather to allow Cate to embody the manifestos.”
Teaching History and (Gender) Politics... 145
This is exactly what I hope the students will do with the Princess Plays.
I record extracts from the installation’s films and present them to the stu-
dents at our next rehearsal. I hope my account of Rosefeldt’s work will
inspire the class and provide them with practical strategies for staging
Jelinek’s text. Afterwards, when I read the students’ journals, I am disap-
pointed to find that almost nobody refers to Manifesto, and I remain
unsure whether my explication of this work helped the class with the prag-
matic task of staging the play.
As the rehearsals move forward, I am heartened by how well the group
working on Jackie is progressing. With very little input from me, they
develop what I think is a genuinely engaging performance, which is
focused and highly polished. I give the other groups a similar degree of
autonomy, but it becomes apparent that personality clashes have impeded
their ability to collaborate as successfully. This is not to say that the other
two Princess Plays do not have their moments, but I can sense the unease
and hostility that some students feel towards each other, and towards me.
A student in one of these other plays is especially hostile to any form of
direction. When I make what I think is a fairly straightforward suggestion
about reblocking a scene, she stares at me with incredulity. You might
think I’d asked her to perform a triple somersault while singing an operatic
aria. Some students directly express their grievances about their peers and,
at times, I feel as though the entire production is teetering on the edge of
calamity. I feel remote and removed from the class members as we come
closer to the performance season, and I cannot determine whether I am
merely paranoid, or sensing a general feeling of dissatisfaction with my
performance as a teacher.
As usual, I attend every performance and make notes on the show.
Except for the matinee, which is played in front of an enthusiastic audi-
ence of peers, the audience response to the performance is stoic, maybe
even tepid. As a pedagogical exercise, though, I think the unit provided a
challenging set of objectives for the students, and about half the group’s
journals suggest they did learn about collaboration strategies, text analysis
and postdramatic aesthetics. In addition to the assessment tasks directly
related to the production, the students must also write a research essay. I
set the following topics:
1. “[My plays] can be read as literary texts, just like novels. Except that they
are texts for speaking. Then I hand them over to a team of theater people,
and only then the ‘play’ gets made.” Elfriede Jelinek
146 G. D’Cruz
Describe and critically analyse the strategies your group used to “make”
the play to overcome the difficulties associated with the ‘postdramatic’ form
of Jelinek’s Princess Plays.
2. “My ‘characters’ are not real human beings, but figures made of
speech, stencils punched out of the nonstop talking all around,” Jelinek
wrote. Identify and analyse the problems associated with performing a role
that lacks the psychological depth of conventional dramatic characters.
3. Denise Varney writes that in postdramatic theatre there “is no longer
embodiment of character but selves present in real time. Rather than the
individual’s story, performers enact a more collective history, functioning as
sites of memory in collaboration with the spectator. Movement takes place
without underlying motivation and performers appear as accretions of ener-
gies and affects.”
To what extent can Jelinek’s Princess Plays be described as postdramatic
in Varney’s understanding of the term?
For the students, it is obvious that the play’s the thing, and most turn
in perfunctory assignments. Nonetheless, every assignment shows at least
some engagement with the critical literature on postdramatic theatre, but
it is very difficult to determine whether Lehmann’s term and the growing
body of critical literature on the topic of postdramatic theatre resonate
with the students. Only five out of 20 complete the formal evaluation
questionnaire and, of those five, only two provide written feedback; one
praises the unit because it gave students the freedom to devise their own
creative strategies; the other states there wasn’t enough direction. These
contradictory sentiments appear in the journal entries, too. Finally, a few
days after the university releases the grades, I get a few emails from dis-
gruntled students asking me to revise their marks in the light of discover-
ing that some students attained higher marks for what they perceived to be
lesser efforts.
Grading production units is always difficult. We know this, which is
why we provide detailed assessment rubrics for each assessment task. We
are also required to correlate what the university calls “unit learning objec-
tives” with each assessment task. This is in addition to providing evidence,
in tabular form, of how the assessment tasks relate to the “course learning
objectives.” All this material is published in a unit guide with the aim of
providing students with transparent assessment information. For example,
the overall graduate learning outcomes refer to such elements as discipline
knowledge, communication, critical thinking and digital literacy, among
others. The university compels academics to formulate unit learning
Teaching History and (Gender) Politics... 147
bjectives so they can complete the phrase “at the successful completion
o
of this unit students can”:
the way I approach teaching. I am not suggesting that things were better
in the old days; there are too many variables to make such an assertion. I
taught fractious groups in the early 1990s, long before the advent of social
media, online assessment and the intensification of corporate manage-
ment. Rather, I think it important to describe the present conditions that
shape how we teach postdramatic theatre and adjacent topics. Teaching
postdramatic theatre through staging of texts written by the likes of Crimp,
Müller and Jelinek is not the only way to engage with the postdramatic. In
the next chapter, I approach the postdramatic from the perspective of
group-devised theatre, and examine the problems and potentialities that
emerge through a more conventional and cerebral approach to the field.
References
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Badiou, Alain. 2015. In Praise of Theatre. Translated by Andrew Bielski.
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Bahun-Radunović, Sanja. 2008. History in Postmodern Theater: Heiner Müller,
Caryl Churchill, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Comparative Literature Studies 45 (4):
446–470.
Barnett, David. 2016. Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine. London and
New York: Routledge.
Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the
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Croggon, Alison. 2011. Review of The Princess Dramas by Elfriede Jelinek,
directed by André Bastian. Theatre Notes. http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com.
au/2011/06/review-princess-dramas.html
D’Cruz, Glenn. 2011. Teaching/Directing 4.48 Psychosis. Australasian Drama
Studies 57: 99–114.
———. 2016. ACP280 Unit Guide. Melbourne: Deakin University.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.
———. 1981. The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
Reader, ed. Robert Young and trans. Ian McLeod, 48–78. Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Jelinek, Elfriede. 2006. Princess Plays. Translated by Gitta Honegger. Theatre 36
(2): 39–65.
Teaching History and (Gender) Politics... 149
Kane, Sarah. 2001. 4.48 Psychosis. In Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London:
Methuen.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated and with an intro-
duction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge.
Müller, Heiner. 2001a. Conversation in Brecht’s Tower. Dialogue. In A Heiner
Müller Reader. Plays, Poetry, Prose, ed. and trans. Carl Weber, 217–232.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2001b. The Hamletmachine. Translated by Dennis Redmond. http://
members.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine.PDF
Nicholson, Helen. 2011. Theatre, Education and Performance. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation. Translated and with an introduction by Kristin Ross. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
———. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London:
Verso.
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Books.
Spieler, Richard. 2016. Manifesto Catalogue. London: Koenig Books.
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Wark, McKenzie. 2011. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and
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Zurbrugg, Nicholas. 1988. Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility:
Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson. Modern Drama
31 (3, Fall): 439–453.
Chapter 7
Take a printed text. Take any printed text—a phone book from 1983, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5), The
Communist Manifesto, a restaurant menu, the wrapper from a can of soup.
In fact, take whatever happens to float your boat, wet your whistle or gets
the neurons firing in your hippocampus: a theme, a topic, a mood, an
object, or a person, place or thing. With a lot of work and a little inspira-
tion, you too can turn any random text or thing into a work of postdra-
matic theatre. No, I kid you not. This is not some remote aspiration, but
an eminently achievable possibility. Okay, well, perhaps I might be over-
stating things slightly, but while all theatre practice involves various forms
of individual and collective creativity, devised theatre, as the MC5 might
have put it, allows you to “kick out the jams, motherfuckers.” Devised
theatre gives you licence to make things up as you go; if you find the codes
and conventions of dramatic theatre restricting, you can blow them off.
And, up to a point, you can invent your own rules and develop your own
aesthetic practices and theories—unless, of course, you devise work within
an academic context. The university imposes stricter limitations on what
you can and cannot do in the name of art. Whereas critics and scholars
celebrate the work of artists and companies that regularly take artistic
risks, teachers need to be more circumspect about the creative work they
devise with students. This chapter is about the resonances between devis-
ing practices and postdramatic aesthetics, and is primarily about my expe-
rience of teaching devised performance by actually doing creative work.
Image 7.1 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David Baltzer/
Bildbuehne.de
someone past the age of 30, I pay more than double the cost of a student
ticket. Oh, well; I can afford it, and I do, of course, have a professional
interest in Gob Squad’s style of theatre. Theatre? Does Gob Squad do
theatre? I’m pondering this question while casually chatting with an
acquaintance when a man taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and look
up at a blond-headed individual perched on a pair of large platform boots.
He’s wearing make-up, a strange-looking, figure-hugging beige silk dress
and a long cape. He looks a bit like a glam rocker from the 1970s:
of the novel or stage scenes inspired by the book’s themes. The perfor-
mance, then, consists of the following elements: live video of actors ques-
tioning the co-opted audience, projected images that evoke Tolstoy’s
Russia (the interiors of aristocratic mansions, battlefields, period portraits
and so on), and rehearsed scenes and songs (a profoundly ironic version of
John Lennon’s peace anthem, “Imagine,” is especially memorable). On
the whole, I find the event never less than engaging, and I find myself
anticipating each sequence eagerly. What are these clever bastards going to
do next? The actors are charismatic and witty; the conversations they con-
duct with the audience provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate
their skills as improvisers; they are particularly adept at asking Socratic
questions that trip people up, but they manage to keep everyone on side
by being utterly charming and polite. They also ask people to read pas-
sages from Tolstoy’s novel to generate discussion. Most of the rehearsed
scenes are comic—they stage an ironic fashion parade using a range of
ridiculous nineteenth-century costumes, for example, and stage mock bat-
tles between historical figures drawn from War and Peace (including a
hilarious argument between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander) (Image 7.2).
Image 7.2 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David Baltzer/
Bildbuehne.de
156 G. D’Cruz
For me, though, it is the live video feed of the conversations that is
most compelling. The company is walking a tightrope; I suspect the entire
performance might collapse if they choose uncooperative, or overly intro-
spective, audience members as their interlocutors. On the night I attend,
the audience participants are a beguiling bunch, and include a professional
historian and a postgraduate student of avant-garde theatre. My fascina-
tion lies in hearing what these “everyday” people have to say about politics
and history under the pressure of the literal and metaphorical spotlight.
The casual tone of the conversations belies their genuinely intriguing rev-
elations. I wonder how I might perform under the glare of a thousand
eyes? What do I think about the prospect of war? There is no doubt that I
find the performance entertaining, and even insightful, but I can’t help
wondering whether the comic, almost frothy aesthetic trivialises the
weighty issues the work addresses. Does the spoonful of sugar simply mask
the profound terrors unleashed by War? Or can this type of devised perfor-
mance have a substantial degree of political efficacy? I have consistently
asked these sorts of questions in this book, and I find myself, once again,
struggling to find a way to quantify such efficacy in meaningful terms.
The reviews of the play are mixed. Cameron Woodhead (2016) of The
Age newspaper writes the most overtly hostile and dismissive assessment:
Gob Squad’s War and Peace is an insult to Tolstoy’s novel and ranks among
the worst pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Even fans of previous shows these
theatrical renegades have brought to Melbourne (I count myself among
them) will be annoyed by the lack of anarchic inspiration the British–German
company usually brings to the table.
the most important topic in Gob Squad’s work has always been the inclu-
sion of people, places, things, and behaviors from everyday life—which
places the performance collective within a long tradition of avant-garde the-
atre, dance, performance art, and Happenings—they take an additional step:
if the artistic enterprise of the discovery of the real that began with Dada and
Artaud and moved on to Brecht, Cage, the Living Theatre, Boal, and envi-
ronmental theatre culminates in Kaprow’s demand for art as “doing life.”
Gob Squad is thus not doing anything especially new; people have been
playing with new technologies on stage, screwing up canonical works of
literature and blurring the lines between various levels of fiction and reality
for a long time. Moreover, critics have been expressing their hostility
towards works such as Gob Squad’s War and Peace from the moment they
appear. Richard Hornby (2016, 115) begins one of the most recent, and
aggressive, examples of this type of criticism thus:
158 G. D’Cruz
Any theatregoer who hates the Wooster Group can’t be all bad. The
Woosters are experts at hiding a play behind a screen of gadgetry: Film!
Video! Audio! Dance! Plasma screens, multiple microphones onstage, mul-
tiple television monitors! But if all that is too technological for you, throw
in traditional theatrical techniques at random from minstrel shows, vaude-
ville, burlesque, and Kabuki. Somewhere under the media explosion there is
a play—if not a classic (Hamlet) then at least something of historical impor-
tance (The Hairy Ape)—but without a program you could not even tell what
play you are supposed to be watching. A solo role muttered mindlessly for
over an hour by a white woman in blackface? Why, it’s O ’Neill’s The
Emperor Jones, of course.
In their own ways, Ulmer and McKenzie unsettle scholarly and peda-
gogical verities by forging connections between critical thinking, technol-
ogy and creative practice. The extent to which this approach is possible
depends on specific institutional contexts. However, I fully endorse the
basic principle of bringing apparently opposed vocabularies, technologies
and stylistic registers into the scenes of pedagogy. This chapter’s focus on
contemporary devised performance undertakes a similar gesture by exam-
ining the role of postdramatic theatre’s vocabulary in the context of teach-
ing devised performance.
Institutional and economic constraints aside, devised performance
appears to be the most flexible of forms, and is especially well suited to
pedagogical contexts, since the only given circumstances, or artistic objec-
tives, that frame a devised work are the ones constructed by the devisers
themselves, or by the director or teacher leading the devising process.
Today, groups such as Back to Back, Goat Island, The Builders Association,
Ex Machina, Gob Squad, Frantic Assembly and Forced Entertainment,
among many other experimental companies, use a plethora of devising
techniques and strategies to generate their work. Moreover, many of these
groups write about their creative processes, and conduct workshops on
their artistic strategies. In fact, there exists an overwhelming set of
resources, videos, books and critical commentaries to guide the novice
deviser. For example, Gob Squad, which gave a series of workshops in
Melbourne during the run of War and Peace, maintains a website that
functions as a resource for those interested in the company’s working
methods. Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment has written some books
that document his group’s work, and the scholarly commentary generated
by the output of devised companies is voluminous (Oddey 1994; Etchells
1999; Graham and Hoggett 2014; Gob Squad 2016). Since this chapter
is primarily concerned with how teaching postdramatic theatre through
devised performance produces variants of the anxieties and aporias I have
identified in previous chapters of the book, I do not intend to add to this
growing body of criticism beyond noting the most salient tensions in the
critical literature on the topic—Heddon and Milling (2006) provide a use-
ful starting point for those interested in the history of devised
performance.
In her seminal book on devised theatre, Alison Oddey (1994, 4) argues
that such work “is a response and a reaction to the playwright–director
relations, to text-based theatre, and to naturalism, and challenges the pre-
vailing ideology of one person’s text under another person’s direction.”
Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 161
She also notes that work in the 1970s contested the hierarchical means of
theatrical production by embracing democratic working methods; thus,
discussion, debate and collective responsibility for the entire gamut of pro-
duction tasks displaced traditional methods of organising performance
labour. However, she goes on to say that, in the 1990s, “the term ‘devis-
ing’ [had] less radical implications, placing greater emphasis on skill shar-
ing, specific roles, increasing division of responsibilities … and more
hierarchical group structures” (Oddey 1994, 9). Of course, there are myr-
iad ways to generate devised work, and the democratic principles Oddey
identifies in the 1970s are present in the work of established companies
such as Forced Entertainment. Etchells (1999, 17) describes his group’s
democratic dimension differently when he notes that “no single aspect of
the theatrical vocabulary is allowed to lead—so that set design, found cos-
tume, soundtrack, text fragment or idea for action might each just as well
take the lead as a source or starting-point in a project.” Thus, it’s impor-
tant to acknowledge that the term “devised theatre,” like the term “post-
dramatic theatre,” refers to a wide range of practices—and it would “be
misleading to suggest that this umbrella term signifies any particular dra-
matic genre or a specific style of performance” (Govan et al. 2007, 4).
Moreover, the distinction between pre-existing writing and devising as
different points of departure for generating performances collapses under
scrutiny. In general terms, one might deconstruct this opposition by
invoking Derrida’s (1976) famous declaration that there is no outside-text
(Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte)—that is, all forms of communication rely
on a system of differences, which makes it impossible to argue for the
superiority of one form of signification over another. With specific refer-
ence to dramaturgy, Barba (1985, 75) points out that “the word ‘text’
before referring to a written or spoken, printed or manuscript text, meant
a ‘weaving together’.” In this sense, there is no performance without
“text,” and the distinction between a conventional dramatic text and a
performance text is one of degree rather than kind. I return to Barba’s
account of dramaturgy at the end of this chapter. For the moment, I want
to draw attention to Duška Radosavljević’s (2013) more prosaic point
about the importance of acknowledging the ways conventional dramatic
structures shape devised performances. This is evident in her description
of a work entitled Internal by the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed,
which consists of five performers speed-dating five audience members
while the other spectators look on. Radosavljević (2013, 3) notes that:
162 G. D’Cruz
despite its performance art-like appearance (the fact that it was set in a
gallery-like space and that the actors/performers made no obvious attempt
at assuming dramatic characters), Internal had also upheld certain theatrical
conventions that might be seen as Aristotelian. The piece was scripted,
although this also anticipated the actors’ licence to extemporize in the inter-
est of personalizing it to each audience member. There was evidence of a
clear three-act structure, the conventions of a curtain rising and falling to
signify beginning and end, as well as a foregrounding of the usually hidden
elements of the theatrical machinery—such as the make-up mirrors and
desks being exhibited in the “foyer” area. However, the way in which the
piece transcended both theatrical and performance art conventions was,
once again, by drawing the audience into the inner dramaturgy of the piece
in such a way as to turn them into co-protagonists.
A text is simply a blueprint for performance and a basis for making some-
thing happen. As such, it is the product of a devising process. A text might
well be a thing written on lots of pages with a person’s name at the top. It
might equally be something inscribed in or on the bodies of the perform-
ers—a series of movements or gestures or acts. It might similarly be a set of
rules for play. It might be a combination of all these things. All of these are
types of texts that could be used to make a performance. (Field 2009)
Metaphysicians and Ironists
In their own ways, many of the scholars and artists I have cited in this
book rail against the dangers of formulaic approaches to art and pedagogy.
Wangh (2013, 148), for example, argues that creative work “demands
openness, risk-taking, and incompleteness—values entirely opposite to
those of fundamentalism.” Rorty (1989, 73–74), writing in a different
register, makes a distinction between metaphysicians and ironists: simply
put, a metaphysician believes in the common-sense view that a fixed,
enduring reality exists behind surface appearance; this enables the meta-
physician to assert, among other things, fundamental distinctions between
genres, modes of writing or performances. An ironist, on the other hand,
“thinks that nothing has an intrinsic nature, or real essence” (Rorty 1989,
74); consequently, the ironist is suspicious of his place in the order of
things, and consistently questions the veracity and status of the language
games he plays. As I have argued in the introduction to this book, I am
not sure whether Lehmann is a metaphysician or an ironist, since it is dif-
ficult to know whether his redescription of contemporary performance
displaces an atrophied critical vocabulary or stealthily reinstates modernist
164 G. D’Cruz
straitjacket of craft, take your three chords and use them differently. It’s
about standing on the shoulders of giants, and not feeling bad about it.”
So what if each production appears to be compiled from the same “basic
ingredients” and follows a structural shape that resonates with
Radosavljević’s account of the dramatic conventions present in Internal?
In any case, we never actually begin from ground zero; as teachers and
artists, our aesthetic prejudices, artistic training and political dispositions
are always at play, even when we think we are deliberately trying to subvert
them. What’s more, the desire to be open and take risks is always compro-
mised by institutional imperatives, rules and regulations. While it makes
pedagogical sense to use Lehmann’s vocabulary to contextualise postdra-
matic plays such as Attempts on Her Life, it is possible to teach group
devised theatre by simply creating it.
Let me clarify what I mean. When presented with a play such as
Attempts, students invariably want to know why the playwright has not
assigned lines to specific characters, or bothered to create a coherent story.
The discourse of postdramatic theatre provides consistent, if not immedi-
ately clear, responses to such questions. For example, the concept of a
“text-bearer” as opposed to a dramatic character provides a useful way for
students to get a grip on Crimp’s use of language in Attempts. While often
mystified by experimental writing for the theatre, most students are unper-
turbed when told they are going to make a performance work about time,
or love, or money or similar familiar themes. Further, even when I use an
academic text as a prompt, students rarely ask me to explain myself; they
just get on with the work. I occasionally use the vocabulary of postdra-
matic theatre in the context of creating devised work when working with
students, but the pressure to hit the ground running and generate a per-
formance within a very short time frame leaves little room for explicating
theory in too much detail.
As part of the Deakin University course concerned with group devised
theatre, we show students videotapes of landmark performances by groups
such as Forced Entertainment and Gob Squad. These companies are very
articulate about their creative processes, and have produced a range of
books and videos that describe their methods and techniques for generat-
ing work; for the most part, these texts function as “how-to” manuals, and
require little commentary. It is certainly possible to explicate the work of
these companies using the language of postdramatic theatre, but it is not
absolutely necessary, since these practitioners have developed their own
ways of speaking about their work. As I’ve already stated, many of the
166 G. D’Cruz
When the glass is half-empty, and these days it often is, I am more anx-
ious than excited by the prospect of teaching group devised theatre. By
any measure, the task of generating a performance “from scratch” year
after year is intimidating, considering the circumstances: a ten-week devel-
opment and rehearsal period, a group of students with disparate skills and
levels of commitment, a meagre production budget and the ever-present
pressure to perform, or else. But when I redescribe that metaphorical
Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 167
1. A broken text.
2. A discredited text.
3. A text to be utterly disowned by all those that perform it.
4. A series of texts in a language that doesn’t work. (102)
1. The kind of silence you sometimes get in phone calls to a person that
you love.
2. The kind of silence that people only dream of.
3. The kind of silence that follows a car crash.
4. The kind of silence that only happens at night. (108)
I choose not to work in this way, since students can access this sort of
material in their own time if they have the interest and inclination (we
provide them with a rich set of devising resources). I am always mindful of
the ticking clock: I have ten weeks to help my students produce work for
public consumption, so I commence the devising process immediately. I
also choose a specific theme or topic for the group. Some may find this
approach too prescriptive and even undemocratic, and they may be cor-
rect. The following account of the process I currently use to teach devised
performance is fragmentary, and is meant to convey the pedagogical
imperatives that drive the creative process. Ideally, I want to help students
create a devised work that will engage an audience. My primary objective
is to create an environment for learning; this is not to say I don’t strive for
high aesthetic standards, rather that my purpose is to convey a set of prag-
matic techniques for making a performance “from scratch.” In previous
chapters, I have used plays and performances I have already taught or
directed as case studies that unpack some of the anxieties and tensions
generated as a consequence of teaching postdramatic theatre. Rather than
retrospectively reflecting on past work, the final section of this chapter
describes and reflects on my approach to creating a new work. Hopefully,
this strategy will impart the way postdramatic aesthetics might inform the
way I prepare to teach, and generate a set of questions and problems that
invite student input into the creative process. My approach involves engag-
ing with their immediate social context. Today, social media is an integral
part of everyday life, especially for young people, the so-called digital
natives—their regular use of social media and other digital technologies
often provides a useful point of departure for the devising process. The
following set of exercises offers an example of how I might approach
developing creative work with students.
If computer games, films, music and even theatre performances are
driven by software, does it make sense to talk about these artistic medi-
ums as distinct aesthetic forms?
Of course, it may be a good idea to start the class with these questions,
but it may also be permissible to dive straight into the exercises I have
listed below and allow the students to formulate their own questions after
performing the improvisation activities. Assume the group comprises 20
students. Split the group into four, and give each of them one of the fol-
lowing exercises.
• Exercise 1: If you don’t know what Reddit is, look it up: <https://
www.reddit.com/>.
If you are still confused, the site’s slogan, “the front page of the
internet,” provides a clue. Basically, Reddit is a news aggregation
website that enables its subscribers to post and rank news items from
other internet sites and create and curate discussion groups on a wide
variety of topics. The site’s members vote to determine the popular-
ity of a news item.
Go to Reddit’s home page and look at the top five news items; use
these items as the basis for constructing a conventional TV news
bulletin.
Look at the list titled “controversial” and find a way of turning
the post into a scene with the following limitations: (a) you must
perform an activity or event unrelated to the substantive content of
the chosen text, while speaking lines from the Reddit post; (b) you
must distribute the lines equally among the group. For example, you
might create a party scenario, and assign specific actions to each
member of the group (one member of the group is smoking, another
dancing and so on).
• Exercise 2: Today I Fucked Up (TIFU): <https://www.reddit.
com/r/tifu/>.
This is what’s known as a subreddit; that is, a forum devoted to a
particular topic or theme. Read the TIFU rules, and then each mem-
ber of the group must scroll through the TIFU forum and choose a
post. Convert these posts into monologues; the posts may require
172 G. D’Cruz
Actions are what work directly on the audience’s attention, on their under-
standing, their emotiveness, their synaesthesia. The list could become so
long as to become useless. It is not so important to define what an action is,
or to determine how many actions there may be in a performance. What is
important is to observe that the actions come into play only when they
weave together, when they become texture: “text.”
174 G. D’Cruz
bodies in space, can perform the same function with respect to the weave
of the performance text.
Anybody tasked with teaching performance through practice will be
familiar with the compositional strategies I have just described. Creating
the dramaturgical weave is common to all forms of creative work. It is pos-
sible to approach teaching students about the “basic ingredients” of a
performance text’s weave in a variety of ways. For example, Patrice Pavis’s
(1985, 209) semiotic questionnaire, written for students learning how to
analyse performances as “expert spectators,” exhaustively identifies what
we are calling, after Barba, dramaturgical actions: scenography, the pace of
the production, the function of music and so on. This questionnaire could
work as a checklist for practitioners since, to use the document’s own
vocabulary, it identifies the signifying systems practitioners manipulate to
generate meanings and affects. Of course, following any formulaic guide
will not guarantee effective performance outcomes, yet teaching through
practice requires articulating pragmatic compositional principles together
with having an awareness of the institutional forces that enable and con-
strain the production of art in a pedagogical context.
Finally, what have we learned about the discourse of postdramatic the-
atre from this chapter’s exploration of devised theatre? First, in my experi-
ence, there is no necessary or overwhelmingly compelling reason to invoke
the concept of postdramatic theatre in the context of teaching devising
principles. As I have argued, expert practitioners, such as those members
of Gob Squad and Forced Entertainment, have a very pragmatic way of
speaking about their compositional strategies and functioning as effective
pedagogues. More often than not, the members of such groups are gradu-
ates of university courses that teach performance history and theory, and
it is possible to argue that these artists produce work that has been shaped
by their encounters with the scholarly study of performance. It is the dis-
course of practice and the articulation of specific compositional strategies
that I find most compelling. This is not to say that those involved in teach-
ing performance through practice cannot learn anything from Lehmann’s
critical vocabulary and his concept of postdramatic theatre. Nor should we
dismiss the way theoretical concepts from adjacent disciplines might invig-
orate our creative practices within academic contexts. Farrier (2005, 142)
has made a compelling case for the ways academic discourse from adjacent
disciplines can not only function as a useful point of departure for creating
creative work with students, but can operate as an integral component of
pedagogical practice in the academy by demonstrating the “possibilities
176 G. D’Cruz
for connecting physical work with the high priestesses and priests of the-
ory.” The key problem, for me, is finding a pragmatic way to use theory in
a production context.
In 2003, I used Roland Barthes’s (1978) A Lover’s Discourse as the
starting point for creating a performance about love, a topic I thought
might resonate with a group of young adults. I first read Barthes’s book in
the early 1990s and was immediately struck by its theatrical possibilities. It
is subtitled “fragments,” and consists of a set of figures that constitute an
“image-repertoire” of love. For Barthes (1978, 4), these figures that com-
prise a lover’s discourse are best understood as gymnastic or choreographic
fragments of action: “the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the
straining body can be immobilised. So it is with the lover at grips with his
figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself, like an
athlete; he ‘phrases,’ like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a
statue. The figure is the lover at work.” Thus, the book contains a series of
amorous episodes and affective states that Barthes annotates with refer-
ences to literature (drawn mainly from Greek antiquity and nineteenth-
century French and German novels), music, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
For example, the fragment entitled “The Dedication” analyses the “amo-
rous gift”: “By this object, I give you my All, I touch you with my phallus;
it is for this reason that I am mad with excitement, that I rush from shop
to shop, stubbornly tracking down the ‘right’ fetish, the brilliant, success-
ful fetish which will perfectly suit your desire” (Barthes 1978, 75). Barthes
places proper names (Pasolini, Baudelaire) and the titles of various art-
works (The Marriage of Figaro, The Symposium) in the margins of the para-
graphs that resonate with these referents.
I found these Barthesian fragments eminently dramatic so, in class, I
decide to select a few of them to use as prompts for improvisations, hoping
to generate a blueprint for a performance. After a few warm-up games, I
introduce the topic. The students appear engaged and up for the chal-
lenge. I then distribute Barthes’s fragments and ask the students to read
them and see if they can figure out what they might mean, and whether
the pieces resonate with their own amorous experiences. I split the class
into groups of four, and give each group an extract from Barthes’s book.
I move from group to group and listen to their conversations. Most
students find the fragments difficult to comprehend at first—for them,
Barthes’s referents are obscure and his prose opaque, but they persist with
the exercise, and by the end of the first class we have collectively compiled
a set of themes and motifs from A Lover’s Discourse: obsession, immersion,
Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 177
asceticism, infatuation, absence and so on. For the next class, I ask the
students to bring in objects, songs, film extracts or stories that connect
with the fragments from Barthes’s book. One student brings in a mix-tape
cassette of songs compiled by an ex-girlfriend and tells a story about how
the songs on the tape unsettle his perception of the nature of the relation-
ship. Another brings in an original song that resonates with the fragment
titled “I am engulfed; I succumb” (Barthes 1978, 10). And so it goes. By
the end of the class, we have compiled a set of poems, songs, film extracts
and anecdotes that resonate with the fragments. These fragments gener-
ated by fragments become the “basic ingredients” for the devised
performance.
However, the more I attempt to explicate the theoretical originality of
Barthes’s book, as opposed to its compilation of amorous affects, the less
engaged the students become with the project. It becomes apparent that
the process of making creative work is a form of thinking in itself (Carter
2004). There is no reason why “high theory” cannot function as an inte-
gral part of a creative process, but there is also no need to make it a manda-
tory component of artistic practice or fetishise its explanatory force. Carter
(2004, 9) points out that the “disciplinary separation that undermines an
understanding of creative processes also inhibits the emergence, even
locally, of a discourse coeval with those processes rather than parasitic on
it, often offering nothing more than a rather pretentious post hoc ratio-
nalisation.” Indeed, my greatest anxiety about teaching postdramatic the-
atre is that the discourse is merely a “post hoc rationalisation” of practices
that exceed exegetical strategies. I unpack this particular anxiety about
teaching postdramatic theatre as I summarise the arguments of this book.
References
Barba, Eugenio. 1985. The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work.
New Theatre Quarterly 1 (1): 75–78.
Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking. Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Etchells, Tim. 1999. Certain Fragments: Texts and Writings on Performance.
London and New York: Routledge.
178 G. D’Cruz
long excerpts from The Coming Insurrection; as the speech concludes, the
house lights come up on the audience and the actors step out of character
and initiate a political debate with the spectators. It is as though a crack
opens in the self-enclosed world of the play (Image 8.1).
This is a risky dramaturgical strategy. The carefully controlled fictional
stage world, inhabited by actors embodying fictional characters that
attempt to repeat a rehearsed set of speeches and choreographed move-
ment, embraces the “real” space of the auditorium. Within the fictional
frame of the play, the actor playing Stockmann has just delivered a passion-
ate plea to his recalcitrant peers, who refuse to accept the veracity of his
scientific research. However, the substantive content of his speech is, at
least to some extent, masked by his fervent mode of delivery. Some of the
actors move into the aisles, and one asks the audience to put up their
hands if they agree with Stockmann’s argument. When I see the play, most
spectators raise their hands. After this informal straw poll, another actor
asks if we heard the lines about the need to silence opposition and a host
of other anti-democratic utterances made by the Stockmann character. I
feel sheepish and slightly pissed off—what is Ostermeier playing at? This
incursion into the “real” space of the auditorium may facilitate, among
An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or, What I Think… 185
which the actors perform two English pop songs in their entirety: David
Bowie’s “Changes” and Jackson Browne’s “These Days.” This particular
theatrical performance, which obviously has no analogue in Ibsen’s dra-
matic text, conveys something about the characters’ cultural milieu,
thereby adding another layer of theatrical signification to the production.
However, it is the town hall scene that best represents the way sign
usage in the theatre unsettles the logic of naturalistic representation. The
actors in this part of the play are performing a rehearsed routine, yet they
have stepped out of character and broken the representational conven-
tions that have hitherto organised the fictive world of the performance. As
previously stated, the town hall scene opens the fault line between two
levels of representation and unsettles the division between the spectators’
“real” time and space, and the self-enclosed fictional world of the play.
The production also resonates with Lehmann’s concept of the postdra-
matic by drawing attention to the manner in which the rise of the director
in the late nineteenth century is an important precondition for the drift
between drama and theatre. Lehmann (2006, 52) points out that “a direc-
tors’ theatre (Regietheater) is arguably a prerequisite for the postdramatic
disposition (even if whole collectives take on the direction), but dramatic
theatre, too, is largely a directors’ theatre.” Ostermeier is one of the major
figures in contemporary Regietheater, so it is fitting that this book con-
cludes with a focus on one of his recent works. We can see that the vocabu-
lary of postdramatic theatre discloses aspects of Ostermeier’s production
that may or may not be apparent if we were to approach analysing the
work through a different theoretical lens. My concern, though, is that,
despite Lehmann’s (2006, 19) hope that the concept will “encourage
ways of working in the theatre that expand our preconceptions of what
theatre is or is meant to be,” it consolidates an overly rational and schol-
arly approach to analysing performance.
To put this in slightly different terms, Lehmann’s articulation of the
concept strengthens the sovereignty of what Melrose (2011) calls the
“expert spectator” paradigm in theatre, drama and performance studies
programmes. Most scholarship produced under these rubrics is exegetical.
After liberating the dramatic text from the clutches of literary scholars,
successfully identifying the performance text as a legitimate object of
scholarly enquiry and then expanding the field of performance to include
a broader spectrum of performance events, most academics (myself
included) still engage in exegetical research practices. The nascent “prac-
tice as research” paradigm threatens the status quo, however. And despite
188 G. D’Cruz
One of the great attractions of writing about the performing arts is its
impossibility; the greater the impact of a work, the more difficult it is to
convey accurately what that experience was. The experience is translated
from the immediate present, where it lives and exists, into a past tense,
which makes it what it never was—a complete and finite object, now pre-
served in the distorting aspic of memory. The act of viewing a theatre per-
formance is not a recordable experience. Its repetition is, even in its crudest
forms, not a reproduction so much as an imitation of its earlier
performances.
anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their
renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final
vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called “meta-stable”:
never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the
terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, and always
aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies and thus
their selves.
This book has expressed anxieties about the extent to which Lehmann’s
vocabulary functions as a useful pedagogical tool, and has engaged with
the following questions: to what degree does it disclose something impor-
tant about those works that display the stylistic features of postdramatic
theatre? To what extent does Lehmann’s redescription of contemporary
experimental performance prescribe an orthodoxy that impedes new cre-
ative practices?
The description of all those forms of theatre that are here considered as
postdramatic is intended to be useful. What is at issue is, on the one hand,
the attempt to place the theatrical development of the twentieth century
into a perspective inspired by the developments of the new and newest the-
atre—developments which are obviously still hard to categorize—and, on
the other hand, to serve the conceptual analysis and verbalization of the
experience of this often “difficult” contemporary theatre and thus to pro-
mote its “visibility” and discussion. (Lehmann 2006, 19)
190 G. D’Cruz
and spectators who prefer not to engage in debate are passive. I did not
participate in the forum discussion, but felt absorbed by the spectacle. My
mind was racing; I was formulating myriad responses to the provocation
in my head—the activity of writing this chapter is a tangible consequence
of engaging with the play, for instance. This is not to claim that everyone
in the audience was similarly engaged and stimulated; rather, it is to under-
score the view that one can never equate silence with passivity in the the-
atre or in the classroom. The town hall scene reminds me of the importance
of never underestimating students’ skills and knowledge in a pedagogical
situation, and to be mindful of how easy it is to forget to be self-reflexive
about educational practices.
Among the many aspects or stylistic features of postdramatic theatre
Lehmann (2006) identifies in his book, there is something he refers to as
the “physical, motoric act of speaking” (147). Lehmann (2006, 147)
claims that speech acts are unnatural processes insofar as “the word does
not belong to the speaker.” In other words, speech is something that
does not reside in the body of the utterer, but remains foreign. Moreover,
the conflict between body and word manifests in the inarticulate stutter-
ing and phonic tics that punctuate speech. This physical aspect of verbal
utterances is disclosed in the way the actor playing Stockmann delivers
his town hall speech in An Enemy of the People. Stockmann’s veneer of
rationality and reasonableness is displaced by a form of corporeal inten-
sity, replete with stops and stutters, which turns him into a deranged
demagogue. The physicality of the actor’s performance pulls focus. The
substantive content of his speech is lost as the sensual aspects of his vocal
delivery become more arresting. As someone who regularly stands before
an audience of students, I am conscious of the need to perform and
make my ideas accessible by adopting performative strategies that will
hopefully connect with them. To teach is to perform, and to be con-
scious of the distribution of the sensible that enables or impedes com-
munication (Rancière 2004).
Stockmann’s speech provokes me to think about another of the themes
addressed by this book: the problem of (in)equality in the pedagogical
situation, which was most obviously dealt with in Chap. 5 with reference
to Back to Back Theatre’s devised work, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich.
Throughout this work, I have attempted to unsettle some of the peda-
gogical myths and assumptions that underpin those teaching practices that
foreground the inherent “superiority” of the teacher’s knowledge.
However, this book has also attempted to reveal the tensions, anxieties
192 G. D’Cruz
class retains its position, and the contradiction between this class and the
rest of us doesn’t make itself felt as such.
reach at our own risk. Conventional dramatic theatre, along with its post-
dramatic variants, continues to exist and even thrive within certain cultural
sectors.
For the most part, academics write for each other, and, despite their
best intentions, theoretical vocabularies tend to alienate non-specialists
and promote hierarchies of knowledge. This is not to say that postdra-
matic theatre cannot be political, or that academics should cease writing
about performances they find engaging. Rather, I think we, as a profes-
sional class, need to be more mindful about the claims we make regarding
the relationship between our activities as critics, scholars and practitioners.
We might start by acknowledging our privileged place in the order of
things by paying closer attention to the politics of teaching, which brings
me to perhaps the most unsettling anxiety that haunts this book. Over the
course of my career, I have believed that the most valuable thing students
take away from production classes has more to do with what they learn
about collaboration, team-building, flexibility and creativity than what
they might take from a close encounter with a specific dramatic text or
theatrical event. The business of performance-making facilitates these
other, more important, life lessons. However, I feel increasingly apprehen-
sive about the resonance between the discourses of pedagogical value and
neo-liberalism that circulate in the corporate university. I feel especially
anxious when I am compelled to use a neo-liberal vocabulary to articulate
the teaching and learning outcomes of my courses. The words that make
up my pedagogical vocabulary (terms such as “team-building,” “flexibil-
ity,” “creativity” and so on) are the very words universities use to substan-
tiate claims about making students “job-ready” and “life-long learners.” I
am not suggesting students should not graduate with a broad range of
skills. Rather, I am pointing out, as do A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
(2017, 33–34), that, at the present moment, “education is reduced to
being the training ground for good state subjects, as so many policy and
curriculum documents, no less than course descriptions, now excitedly
attest.”
This is why we need to pay as much attention to how we teach as to
what we teach. This is not to say we should ignore the kinds of texts we
choose to stage within the context of teaching postdramatic theatre
through performance. Theatre practice is a messy business, and fraught
with ethical and emotional perils. As a pedagogical form, it is more likely
to unleash a frightful rush of energies and affects because, as Williams
(1990, 172) observes, it “gets us passionately involved in disorderly
An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or, What I Think… 197
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Bacon, Jane, and Franc Chamberlain. 2005. Editorial: The Practice of Performance
Studies in the United Kingdom. Studies in Theatre and Performance 25 (3):
179–188.
Bartlett, A.J., and Justin Clemens. 2017. What is Education? Edinburgh: University
of Edinburgh Press.
Bottoms, Stephen. 2011. An Open Letter to Richard Schechner. In The Rise of
Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum, ed.
James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, 23–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Croggon, Alison. 2010. Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky: Two Innovative
Australian Directors. TheatreForum 37: 3–12.
198 G. D’Cruz
G J
Gender politics, 2, 12, 96, 114, Jackson, Shannon, 11, 58, 59, 61
119–148 Jameson Fredric, 8, 22, 24, 25
Gibbs, Anna, 54, 69 postmodernism, 22, 24, 25
Gießen Model, 108 Jelinek, Elfriede, 12, 13, 119, 137,
Gladwin, Bruce, 78, 79, 81–83, 88, 138, 141–146, 148
91, 92, 173 Jürs-Munby, Karen, 6, 8, 29, 33, 34,
Goat Island, 22, 160, 167 36, 105–107
Gob Squad, 13, 14, 152–160, 163, Postdramatic Theatre and the
165, 167, 175 Political, 6, 36, 106
War and Peace, 13, 14, 152–160,
163
Goodall, Jane, 40 K
Govan, Emma, 161 Kane, Sarah, 4, 101, 139, 163, 195
Graham, Scott, 160 Kaye, Nick, 23, 37
Grant, Clare, 18, 28, 32 Kirby, Alan, 33
Grehan, Helena, 78, 80, 83, 90, 91,
195
Guattari, Félix, 183 L
Lavery, Carl, 164
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, vi, 3–6, 8,
H 10–12, 14, 23, 29–40, 50, 52,
Habermas, Jürgen, 27, 39 53, 55–57, 59–61, 77, 90, 95,
Hamilton, Margaret, 34, 57 101–104, 106–108, 128, 135,
Handke, Peter, 55, 56 144, 146, 152, 162–165, 175,
Hay, Chris, 115 181, 185–187, 189–195, 197
Heddon, Deidre, 4, 160 Postdramatic Theatre, vi, 4–6,
Heuvel, Michael Vanden, 37 8–12, 14, 23, 29–32, 34–40,
Hoggett, Steven, 160 52, 53, 55–57, 59–61, 77,
Hornby, Richard, 157, 158 102–104, 107, 108, 146, 162,
Hutcheon, Linda, 24, 97 164, 175, 189–191, 193, 195,
197
Luckhurst, Mary, 104, 105
I Lyotard, Jean-François, 26–28
Ibsen, Hendrik, 14, 51, 55, 181, 183, The Postmodern Condition, 27
185–188
An Enemy of the People, 14, 181,
186 M
Imposter syndrome, 53 Macaulay, Alastair, 99
Interculturalism, 50, 58, 61 Manifesto, 143–145, 151
Invisible Committee, The, 182, 183 Manovich, Lev, 63, 169, 170, 172,
In-Yer-Face theatre, 100 173
204 INDEX
McKenzie, Jon, 9, 11, 51, 58, 60–65, concept of, vi, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11,
140, 159, 160, 192 13–14, 30, 36, 38, 46, 53, 57,
Perform or Else: From Discipline to 61, 105, 107, 163–166, 175,
Performance, 9, 11, 62–65, 181, 185–190, 192
140, 192 panorama, 23
Melrose, Susan, 50, 51, 166, 187 parody, 103
Milling, Jane, 4, 49, 160 pastiche, 24, 32
Modern drama, 4, 34, 35, 40, 52, 53, pedagogy, 6, 14, 39, 159
55, 60, 61, 193 politics, 9, 11, 12, 14, 24, 34–36,
Modernism, 3, 4, 8, 24, 28, 33, 35, 61, 103, 108, 141, 193, 195,
37, 99, 107, 143, 163, 195 197
Müller, Heiner, 5, 12, 13, 23, 32, vocabulary, vi, 2, 11, 30, 32, 107,
119, 121, 127, 130, 148 165, 175, 187, 190, 193, 197
The Hamletmachine, 5, 12, 23, 32, Postmodernism
119–121, 130 cultural dominant, 33, 35
and performance, 21
and politics, 25
N Postmodern theatre
Narrative, vi, 20, 24, 26, 27, 36, 37, politics, 11, 25
55, 78, 79, 131 vocabulary, 11, 23
Newfield, Christopher, 54, 192 Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural
Nicholson, Helen, 126 Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism,
33
Presence, 3, 8, 22, 23, 30–32, 37, 39,
O 41–43, 50, 60, 61, 86, 105, 127,
Oddey, Alison, 152, 160, 161 139, 157, 164, 185, 192
Ostermeier, Thomas, 181–190, 194, The Princess Plays, 13, 119–148
197 Prior, Yoni, 82, 83, 87–89, 91, 92, 166
P R
Pavis, Patrice, 24, 25, 30, 51, 175 Radosavljević, Duška, 5, 161, 162,
Performance Studies 165
as an academic discipline, 58–60, Rai, Shirin M, 107
107 Rancière, Jacques, 9, 10, 12, 75–77, 80,
broad spectrum, 22, 57, 61, 195 83–87, 92, 96, 104, 106, 107,
history, 53, 55, 175 111, 116, 125, 128, 129, 190, 191
pedagogy, 4, 5, 14, 43, 54, 63 distribution of the sensible, 10, 80,
Phelan, Peggy, 58 87, 191
Pinter, Harold, 55 The Emancipated Spectator, 85, 129
Poggioli, Renato, 28 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 9, 12, 75
Poole, Gaye, 4, 5, 181 pedagogical myth, 75, 76
Postdramatic theatre, 40 principle of explication, 75–77, 111
INDEX
205
Ravenhill, Mark, 101, 195 Sydney Front, The, 11, 18, 20–25, 28,
Reinelt, Janelle, 51, 107 29, 31, 32, 38
Roach, Joseph R, 51 John Laws/Sade: A Confession, 11
Rockwell, John, 6 Szondi, Péter, 11, 33–38
Rogers, Meredith, 167
Rorty, Richard, 4, 11, 21, 29, 52, 53,
163, 164, 189 T
ironist, 163, 189 Techlenburg, Nina, 152, 157
redescription, 4, 21, 163 Technology, 27, 60, 62, 63, 69, 147,
Rosefeldt, Julian, 143–145 160, 170, 172, 174
Roth, Michael S., 54, 192 Theatricality, 3, 77, 102, 110, 164,
185
Theory of Modern Drama, 11, 33–38
S
Sabatini, Arthur J., 74
Schaefer, Kerrie, 22, 25, 29 U
Schaubühne Berlin, 181, 184, 188, Ulmer, Gregory L, 2, 159
192
Schechner, Richard, 11, 50, 52,
56–59, 61, 195 W
broad spectrum, 57, 195 Waites, James, 32
performance studies, 11, 52, 58, 59, Wark, McKenzie, 125
195 Weiler, Christel, 108
Scheer, Anna, 80, 83 Williams, Raymond, 186
Schmidt, Theron, 80, 82 Wilson, Robert, 5, 6, 21, 22
Seeber, Barbara K, 140 Wimmer, Cynthia, 7, 54, 181
Shaw, George Bernard, 186 Wirth, Andrzej, 59, 108
Sher, Antony, 81 Woodhead, Cameron, 156
Sierz, Aleks, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107 Wooster Group, The, 21, 22
Society of the spectacle, 12, 60, 99, Wright, Elizabeth, 84, 115
103, 105, 114, 152, 194
Spectatorship, 77, 83, 90, 104
Stegemann, Bernd, 164, 190 Z
Stoppard, Tom, 37, 38, 55 Zakaria, Fareed, 54, 192
Stucky, Nathan, 7, 54, 181 Zimmerman, Heiner, 101
Sugiera, Malgorzata, 102 Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 132