FROM THE ‘NEW WAVE’ TO THE ‘UNNAMEABLE’: POST-DRAMATIC THEATRE & AUSTRALIA IN THE 1980s & 1990s MARGARET HAMILTON A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Media, Film & Theatre University of New South Wales October 2005 Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the input and enthusiasm of colleagues, friends and family. I am indebted to Dr Margaret Williams for her encouragement many years ago and extraordinary support, and to my supervisor Prof Dr Hans-Thies Lehmann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, for his incisive questions and suggestions, as well as his enormous generosity throughout the development of this dissertation. Special thanks are due to my Australian supervisor Clare Grant for a practitioner’s perspective and her patient appraisal of early approaches to my material. Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch are owed enormous thanks for their invaluable comments on drafts over such a long period of time, and also for their openness and direction. I’d like to extend my gratitude to Nigel Kellaway for his generous assistance and John Baylis, Chris Ryan and their collaborators for creating The Sydney Front and similarly to all the artists involved in Open City for their inspiration. It’s hard to express strongly enough my appreciation of the long evenings of theatre and discussion spent with Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann, particularly at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin. I am indebted to Uwe Mengel for his suggestion of Hans-Thies Lehmann as a supervisor and Robyn Orlin who, similarly, expanded my conception of the performance medium. Siobhan Groitl and I have shared PhD insecurities and debate and I’m indebted to her for her sympathy, assistance, reassurance and friendship. Cristyn Davies, similarly, has provided invaluable dialogue and support. Thanks to Holger Teschke, who provided much needed assistance in the initial phase of approaching the Heiner Müller material, Ann-Christin Römmen, who provided access to material covering Robert Wilson, and to the artists I interviewed for the dissertation for their time and insight. ii I would like to express my thanks to Dr Lesley Stern for her early supervision and the academic staff in the School of Media, Film & Theatre at the University of New South Wales, postgraduate supervisors Dr George Kouvaros and Dr Jodi Brooks, and in particular, Assoc Prof Jim Davis for his encouragement and support. Prof John Milfull, Assoc Prof Gerhard Fischer and Dr Anne Brewster from the University of New South Wales and Prof Dr Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich also provided much needed guidance at the outset of the dissertation. The Australia Council for the Arts and especially Karilyn Brown and the Australian Embassy in Berlin, particularly its cultural diplomacy team headed by Lucy Charlesworth and Bruce Soar, are due considerable thanks for allowing me to undertake a consultancy on the basis of flexible hours in order to accommodate my PhD, and the University of New South Wales for permitting me to suspend my PhD to commence this consultancy full-time for a year. As part of my research period in Germany Dr Ditta Bartels and Rico Janke offered access to research facilities at the Australia Centre at Potsdam University and I’d like to express my sincerest appreciation of their help. In addition I am grateful for the financial assistance provided by the University of New South Wales in the form of a University Postgraduate Research Scholarship and the Australian German Association for its Australia/Germany Educational Development Fellowship. I’d like to particularly thank Dr Ralf Eppeneder from the Goethe-Institut and Andrew Grummet from the Australian German Association for their encouragement of the academic side of my work. Finally, I’d like to thank The Performance Space and the Hebbel Theater Berlin for their generosity in facilitating access to material. Many thanks also to Dan Friedman for kindly supplying Müller in America so soon after its publication, Dr Kerrie Schaefer for forwarding her PhD to me in Berlin, and to my friends for hours of theatre debate and discussion. iii My parents Lynette and Neil Hamilton are owed the deepest gratitude for years of undaunted support and their computer and study, as well as their extraordinary patience in the final phase of completing this dissertation. iv Abstract The object of this dissertation is to re-assess Australian examples of ‘performance’ in light of discourses and directions in dramaturgy that have emerged since the 1970s internationally. The thesis applies Hans-Thies Lehmann’s comprehensive theory of post-dramatic theatre to explicate examples of departures from dramatic theatre in view of the expansive field of inquiry implied by the description ‘performance’ or ‘new media arts’ and general cultural-political theory. To examine the de-centralisation of text specific to post-dramatic theatre the dissertation analyses firstly, material devised collaboratively at all stages of creative development in its case studies of the Sydney based companies The Sydney Front (1986-1993) and Open City (1987 -); and secondly, Heiner Müller’s concept of ‘literature’ written for the theatre and in opposition to its convention. In addition, the analysis of Müller serves as an introduction to a comparative analysis of a dramatic (literary) theatre project by a group of Aboriginal artists based on a post-dramatic text by Müller. This dissertation endeavours to contribute to documentation on post-dramatic theatre in Australia and more broadly, to conceptions of contemporary forms of dramaturgy. More specifically, the thesis argues that dramaturgy no longer necessarily concerns the identification of an aesthetic locus that explicitly explicates the audience’s relation to a known macrocosm. Instead, the thesis conceives of dramaturgy as a compositional strategy that can be thought of within the bounds of Aristotle’s perfunctory visual dimension ‘opsis’ and elaborated upon in terms of Kristeva’s theory of the ‘thetic’ as regulating ‘semiotic’ incursions into the ‘symbolic’ order. In doing so, the thesis proposes the concept of a ‘televisual’ and an ‘abject’ dramaturgy, the latter on the basis of a relation to the older tradition of carnival and identifies a link between intertextuality (transposition) and dramaturgical strategies that engage the spectator in the theatre situation and the dissolution of logocentric hierarchy. vii Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... ii Abstract ........................................................................................................................ vii 1/ Introducing ‘limbo’: (trans)forming the lexicon of ‘new theatre’................ 1 Post-script: ‘new theatre’ & stage fiction ............................................................................... 1 Collaboration, Convergence & Divergence: ‘new theatre’/performance-/art ............... 6 Post-dramatic theatre: the development of a ‘new’ theatre form & discourse ............. 8 Case Studies: Open City & The Sydney Front ................................................................... 15 VALIDITY & VIABILITY Local contexts: platforms for ‘new theatre’ ................................................................... 16 Fiscal merit: determining the value of theatre forms .................................................. 20 International contexts: ‘media reality’ ............................................................................ 21 Thinking the ‘unthinkable’: Plato’s ‘chora’ & the space of post-dramatic theatre ........................................................................................................................................... 22 Resisting literature and ‘literary’ resistance: the spectator & the feasibility of post-dramatic dramaturgy .............................................................................. 26 Performing the post-dramatic text: Heiner Müller & The Aboriginal Protesters ..................................................................................................................................... 29 Approaching the ephemeral condition of performance in post-dramatic theatre .... 30 2/ Open City: a politics of the everyday ................................................................ 33 ‘Still’ life in ‘real’ time: media ‘reality’ & post-dramatic theatre .....................................33 From ‘social realism’ to ‘new naturalism’: Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter’s Open City .....................................................................................................................36 Photoplay ..................................................................................................................................... 39 Tokyo Two .................................................................................................................................. 65 Sum of the Sudden ..................................................................................................................... 78 Shop and The Necessary Orgy ................................................................................................ 93 v 3/ The Sydney Front: the grotesque body............................................................ 105 Visions of excess: the egalitarian body of carnival & post-dramatic theatre .......... 105 From pornography