Has Video Killed the theatre star? some German responses

Abstract

A number of leading German theatre artists have in recent years pursued extensive experimentation with the interaction of the live body and various technologies. This has profoundly affected both traditional conceptions of theatrical space and of the body of the performer. This essay focuses upon the effects of phenomenological interplay between physical and virtual bodies in recent productions by Frank Castorf, René Pollesch at the Volksbühne and the associated Prater in Berlin.

The incorporation of live video into performance began in a relatively modest manner in Castorf productions of the late 1980s, but by the end of the century had become one of the leading characteristics of Castorf's work, especially in his major adaptations of Dostoevsky and Bulgakov. In the opening years of the new century Pollesch brought such work to similar prominence at the Volksbühne's experimental annex, the Prater, with his highly acclaimed Prater Trilogy of 2001.

More recent productions, such as Pollesch's 2003 Das Revoloutionäre Unternehmen have taken this experimentation further still, bringing live actors and audience members, their virtual reproduction, stock video footage, and live and recorded sound into a phenomenological nexus which established an ongoing feedback mechanism and a co-dependence of live and mediatized that requires a new way of experiencing the performative act.

Notes

Theatre Journal, 51.4 (1999), 383 – 94.

Theatre Journal, 51.4, 361 – 81 (p. 378).

Johannes Birringer, Media and Performance: Along the Border (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1998); Performance on the Edge: Transformation of Culture (London: Athlone, 2000).

Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); The Body in Performance, ed. by Patrick Campbell, Contemporary Theatre Review, 10.3 (2000).

Philip Auslander, Liveness (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 24.

See Marvin Carlson, ‘Video and Stage Space: Some European Perspectives’, Modern Drama, 46.4 (Winter 2003), 614 – 28.

Thomas Oberender, ‘Mehr Jetzt auf der Bühne’, Theater Heute 45.4 (May 2004), 20 – 26 (p. 20).

Ibid., p. 20.

Ibid., p. 22.

See ibid., p. 20.

Jan, Speckenbach, ‘Der Einbruch der Fernsehntechnologie’, in Einbruch der Realität: Politik und Verbrechen, ed. by. Carl Hegemann (Berlin: Alexander, 2002), pp. 80 – 81 (p. 86).

Ralf Remshardt, ‘Touring The Insulted and the Injured’, Western European Stages, 14.3 (Winter 2002), 25 – 32 (p. 27).

For a further discussion of these effects, see my ‘Video and Stage Space’, pp. 621 – 22.

Very little has been written so far on Pollesch in English, but an excellent article on his ‘postdramatic’ use of language is David Barnett, ‘Political Theatre in a Shrinking world: René Pollesch's Postdramatic Practices on Paper and on Stage’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 16.1 (2006), 31 – 40.

Andrzej Wirth, ‘René Pollesch’, in Werk-Stück: Regisseure im Porträt, ed. by Anja Dürrschmidt and Barbara Engelhardt (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003), pp. 26 – 31 (p. 28).

Oberender, ‘Mehr Jetzt’, p. 20.

Birgit Lengers, ‘Ein PS im Medienzeitalter’, in Theater fürs 21. Jahrhundert, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Christian Dawidowski (Munich: Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2004), pp. 143 – 55 (p. 150).

See Helga Finter, ‘Das Kameraauge im postmodernen Theater’, Studien zu Ästhetik des Gegenwartstheaters, ed. by Christian W. Thomsen (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 1985), pp. 46 – 66.

Philip Auslander, Liveness (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 24.

Ibid., pp. 91 – 92.

Ibid., p. 158.

Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1985), p. 40.