Scenographies of the everyday in Contemporary German theatre – Anna Langhoff and Sasha Waltz restage the family drama

Abstract

This article investigates what it means to move beyond the text in two works – Anna Langhoff's Frieden Frieden (Peace Peace) (1997) and Sasha Waltz and Guests' Allee der Kosmonauten (Avenue of the Cosmonauts) (1996, 1997, 2000) – chosen for the way they show how contemporary dramatic theatre and non-text based Tanztheater alike exemplify new directions in scenography. Through a focus on mise en scène, particularly scenography, movement and sound, the article will look ‘beyond the text’ to the performative, visual and aural image-making in these two productions as they shed light on tensions and debates in post-reunification Germany. The works are analysed as examples of a noticeable trend in 1990s' theatre that revisits the domestic spaces of everyday life within a post-communist frame of reference. The essay concludes by suggesting that this renewed interest is a critical response to the increasing pressures on the family of a deregulated, privatized, post-industrial economy. These politicized scenographies present the everyday as both violent and bizarre but they also open up possibilities for imaginative reconstruction and play.

Notes

Anna Langhoff, Frieden Frieden, Theater der Zeit, July/August, 1997, pp. 83–95. First performed at the Baracke, Deutsches Theater, Berlin, on 10 December, 1997. The production was directed by Anna Langhoff.

Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 116.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 117.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 115.

Ibid.

Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 124.

Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 4.

Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 4 and 5.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 117.

Langhoff, Frieden, Frieden, p. 83.

Robert Schumann, Frauenliebe und Leben, Opus 42, text by Adelbert von Chamisso (Composed 1840).

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 117.

Detlef Friedlich refers to the hat in this way in his review, ‘Es bleibt das schwarze Loch’, Berliner Zeitung, 15 December 1997, p. 18.

Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 6.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 116.

Ibid., p. 118.

Langhoff, Frieden, Frieden, p. 93.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 118.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 53.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 117.

Clare Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 86.

Ibid., p. 96.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 117.

See Jens Richard Giersdorf, ‘Border Crossings and Intra-National Trespasses: East German Bodies in Sasha Waltz's and Jo Fabian's Choreographies’, Theatre Journal, 55.3 (2003), 413–32 (p. 420).

Loren Kruger, ‘Performance Review’, Theatre Journal, 53.3 (2001), 485–88 (p. 485).

Giersdorf, ‘Border Crossings and Intra-National Trespasses’, p. 423.

Ibid.

See Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crow's Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002), p. 57.

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 30–31.

Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 148.