MONSTERS MONSTERS

O FO FR R E E A A L L I T I Y T Y

A PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL ON ‘DRAMATURGIES OF THE REAL’ A performance festival on ‘Dramaturgies of the real’ 22 - 25 mars 2012 Dramatikkens Hus Siri Forberg The Danish National School of has a background in performing Performing Art - Continuing Education in different kinds of theatre and Since 2003 the Continuing Education performance. She now works as a has provided knowledge, inspiration dramaturge and producer, in addition and new skills to the professional to pedagogical theatre-work. She theatre and dance environments. The Published by initiated and curated the Monsters Continuing Education is constantly Siri Forberg (Oslo) and of Reality festival in March 2012, and looking for and introducing new The Danish National School of a follow-up to the festival, which tendencies, methods and ways Performings Arts – Continuing is currently being planned, is due of working for the benefit of the Education (Copenhagen) to take place in Oslo in 2014. Her Danish performing arts scene. The dramaturgical work includes En Department is striving to build a bridge Edited by Folkefiende in Oslo directed by Rimini between theory and practice and Siri Forberg and Miriam Frandsen Prototkoll (Haug/Wetzel) for the Ibsen create platforms for interdisciplinary Graphic Design/Layout festival at the Nationaltheatre in 2012. collaboration. Managed by a Timon Botez Her work as a performer includes Burn small team, Continuing Education baby Burn by Karen Røise Kielland develops and hosts courses in close Photos by (Blood for Roses) and Punch Drunk by collaboration with other performing Chris Erichsen (unless otherwise stated) choreographer Wendy Houstoun (DV8, arts organisations, artists and The Printed by Forced Entertainment). Siri considers National School of Performing Art– as Livonia Print, Latvia, 2013 the ‘playing’ quality of theatre as a well as developing its network with key factor in enabling reflection and collaborators nationally and abroad on All rights reserved. interaction on the question of human an ongoing basis. Material from this publication may only existence. She is keen to facilitate be reproduced with acknowledgement of events where this is the primary focus. www.scenekunstskolen- the source. efteruddannelsen.dk Miriam Frandsen Festival initiated and developed by Siri holds an M.A. in Theatre Studies Forberg in collaboration with The Danish (2003). She works as a freelance National School of Performing Arts – dramaturg, most recently on War— Continuing Education, Dramatikkens you should have been there (Lukas hus in Oslo, and the Norwegian Arts Matthaei 2013), Sidste Skrig & Council. Spejl—Hvem er køn? (Tali Razgá, This publication supported by the 2012 & 2011), and DK Ultra (Caroline Norwegian Arts Council and The Danish McSweeney, 2012). Besides being National School of Performing Arts – the dramaturgic consultant at Continuing Education CaféTeatret’s Summer Readings since 2005, she has also been coordinator Copyright © 2013 and dramaturg at the Royal Danish Siri Forberg Theatre on the project Nye Stemmer The Danish National School of concerning new writing (2008–2009). Performing Arts-Continuing Education Since 2009 Miriam has also been the Individual texts, the authors President of the Society of Danish Dramaturgs. Miriam teaches at The Typeset in Arnhem and Bulo Danish National School of Performing Arts on subjects such as ‘new ISBN 978-82-999325-0-9 playwrights’, ‘post-dramatic theatre’, ISBN 978-87-994225-1-7 ‘devising’ and ‘site specific’. Miriam has also been engaged as a Special Consultant by The Danish Arts Agency in 2011. Since 2004, Miriam Frandsen has been employed as Project Manager and Developer at The Danish National School of Performing Arts’ Department for Continuing Education. ContentS

Friday 23 March Saturday 24 March Sunday 25 March ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY False awakening Reality ’s referents: page 7 by Carol Martin by Trine Falch forms of the “real” across page 27 page 75 the arts Preface by Shannon Jackson as real as it gets Riding the Monster High on reality page 123 by Siri Forberg by Pia Maria Roll by Toril Goksøyr & Camilla Martens page 9 page 41 page 81 PrometheUs In Athens by Rimini Protokoll(Haug/Wetzel) Introduction Down with Profession! Dialectics of the document: page 137 The Monsters of Reality by Ole Johan Skjelbred Rhetoric and counter- by Siri Forberg & Miriam Frandsen page 49 rhetoric in “Almenrausch” Really fantastical page 13 a Radio Hearing by Tore Vagn Lid by Bjørn Rasmussen The rise and fall of page 89 page 143 Thursday 22 March StorKunstsolteddystaten Questions After by Julian Blaue (Dis-)Believe. in search of Program Manifest 2083 page 53 a lost reality or Playing page 150 by Christian Lollike with illusion page 19 Staging authenticity by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll by Imanuel Schipper page 99 Point Blank page 59 by Edit Kaldor Logobi 02 page 25 CMNN SNS PRJCT by Gintersdorfer/Klaßen by Kalauz/Schick page 119 page 71 Coupè Decalè Afterparty Black Box venue page 121

4 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to thank all those who participated in the festival for joining us and also to thank everyone who presented their work at the festival, and for contributing to this publication. A big thanks goes to the Norwegian Opera & Ballet for letting us present, at very short notice, one of the performances—LOGOBI 02 by Gintersdorfer/ Klaßen—at their venue. Thanks also to artistic director Jon Refsdal Moe, Hedda Abildsnes and Sara Wegge at Black Box theatre for letting us host the afterparty at their venue, and in cooperation with Black Box’ festival Oslo International Theaterfestival. We want to thank Kirstine Finneman and Nigel Ritchie for their great help with proofreading this text. We want to thank Chris Erichsen for providing us with photos from the festival. We want to thank Timon Botez for the layout. Not only has he taken great care in creating a visually stringent and focused ‘frame’ for the diverse ‘attacks on reality’ of all these texts, but he has also been patient and perceptive towards their content. A big thanks goes to the people at Dramatikkens hus for helping with all the logistics, and to Marit Grimstad Eggen in particular. A very special thanks to Kai Johnsen, former leader of Dramatikkens hus. His knowledge of, and thinking around what text and theatre can be, turned Dramatikkens hus into a dynamic and vital arena for practitioners of all kinds in the field.

6 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 7 Preface

AS REAL AS IT GETS

by Siri Forberg

Dramaturgies Of The Real This is a publication containing material produced by international scholars and artists during the “Monsters of Reality” performance festival at Dramatikkens hus in Oslo in March 2012. The festival was a four-day long combination of performances, lectures, artist talks and panel-discussions, and the festival aimed to present the participants with different notions of “Dramaturgies of the real”. This refers to an artistic strategy that has been growing in importance once again. For the last decade or so, the theatre has been bombed with the real and concrete, and challenging audiences to reflect on how they perceive everyday realities. The focus was not on whether this strategy should be branded ‘documentary theatre’, ‘reality theatre’, ‘verbatim theatre’, or even ‘new documentary theatre’. We did however want to encourage reflection around this tendency, so we asked the simple question of ‘how to stage reality and why’. Theatre will always seek a version of truth, a sense of realness. This search for ‘the real’ has taken different routes through history; Ibsen, for example, wanted to write in a “truthful reality language” and Stanislavsky strived to instill “organic principles of acting” in the student actor in order to be able to act what’s “real and true” on stage. The perception of what is real will of course differ depending on one’s position—as the ‘speaking’ artist, or the ‘listening’ spectator. In our post(post)modern contemporary world, it seems problematic to point to reality without framing it as ‘reality’. There still exists a strong tendency within our society to develop different strategies to grasp this everyday, but still complex, notion of reality. We witness different cultural phenomena that express strategies to (re)present it, evoking a kind of “reality-effect and -affect” within the spectator—and we are seduced by a surface of authenticity that somehow surrounds products and phenomena. There exists a “hunger for reality” in our contemporary world. The different ways in which the new documentary theatre has been searching for methods of drawing closer to the immediate social reality can be seen as part of this tendency. It is a positioning away from a kind of illusionistic realism and at the same time, part of an institutional criticism. In this way it connects to other historical documentary theatre-projects.

8 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 9 The discourse of reality theatre Reality is not enough With Monsters of Reality, we wanted to point to the phenomena also The dramaturgical strategies of staging ‘the real’, or of framing our by looking at the language that surrounds this theatre of the real. The social reality, thereby claiming that “all the world’s a stage”, are diverse theoretical discourse surrounding reality theatre shares this concern by and ambiguous. The one thing all these varied strategies might have in questioning the notion of whether, and how, reality—the Real— is what common is their activation of a certain kind of ‘spectator-effect’—or is really ‘present’ in this theatre. rather, that the effect of these strategies is to create an affect within the As we experienced, the concept of ‘reality’ is highly ambiguous. spectator. The use of documentary elements, whether in theatre, film, On the one hand, we have its everyday connotations—everything that literature, or arts in general, induces a certain way of connecting to our surrounds our daily existence, from the physical presence of objects social reality—it creates destabilizing images within the spectator’s mind to constant media sound bites. On the other hand, you have the that can be both seductive and challenging. All communication, such as complicated language of philosophy where reality is questioned from theatre, is built on certain kind of conventions, and a break with these different theoretical perspectives, and this same language is also used by conventions can lead to a kind of ‘noise’. For the spectator witnessing scholars discussing different art practices that try to engage directly with different kinds of artistic strategies using documentary, we might call social reality. All these different layers of ‘reality-perceptions’ guarantee this noise a ‘reality-noise’. a dynamic yet confusing ground for the spectator, something we also Reality is never enough though. Infusing the stage with elements encountered during the Monsters of Reality festival. from our immediate social reality does not make theatre more important The event was organized out of a wish to create a forum for the theory or more real. It is not the document as such that creates the ‘realness’, and the practice of theatre, thus joining the ranks of other such attempts since it always involves a certain kind of manipulation from the theatre to let the two camps meet. At times we experienced a certain resistance maker. By asking how to stage reality, we simply ask for reflections from from elements of the practical theatre field towards the theorizing of scholars and practitioners alike on how we can continue to search for theatre. There could be several reasons for this. ways of engaging with and reflecting on our reality, our existence and One might be that when the artists attending seminars and the human condition. During Monsters of Reality we experienced many symposiums encounter a “detached gaze” on their own practice, there different ways of communicating, both artistically and theoretically, is an understandable resistance against being boxed in and framed by around the relationship between theatre and social reality. One of the someone else, someone from the outside, who hasn’t actually created the important aspects of this relationship is the realization that theatre piece of work but who still claims the right to describe “what it is we see”. is part of social reality and not something outside of, or parallel to, it. Put simply, the artist will use whatever means they find best to express The inherent presence of the esthetic and the social in a theatrical their artistic ideas, and if others decide to label this as, for example, setting opens up the potential for a vibrant meeting of minds—it allows ‘documentary theatre’, the urge to push out of these boundaries might be us to reconsider, reflect, interact, and question the social and political tempting. Artists attending Monsters of Reality vocalized their resistance condition of the everyday in a way that is particular to theatre. And that’s in different ways. Despite this friction, we still believe that both academic as real as it gets. and artistic contributions to theatre can benefit from common meeting- points. This is particularly true in Oslo, where the University Theatre Oslo, May 2013 Studies department has been closed down. Siri Forberg

10 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 11 Introduction the monsters of reality by Siri Forberg & Miriam Frandsen

This publication contains contributions from all the lecturers and artists involved but not the panel discussions. While it follows the order of the festival, we have also incorporated two contributions that were not part of the original event. Danish director and playwright Christian Lollike took part in the opening panel, but his text about the performance “Manifest 2083” was written on request for this publication. Bjørn Rasmussen (professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies, NTNU, Trondheim) was also a participant, and his reflections on the Monsters of Reality festival was first published in the Norwegian journal “Norsk Shakespeare-og teatertidsskrift”. The contributors do not represent a homogenous group but are all independent artists and theorists whose views on the festivals’ overall theme are based on their own specific point of reference. The result is a wide variety of artistic and research-related perspectives on dramaturgies of the real. The first entry by playwright and director Christian Lollike questions the position of theatre as social arena by asking what the theatre should be allowed to do? He encountered a huge backlash from the media, theatre critics and the public in general after announcing that he was going to stage a performance based on Anders Behring Breivik’s manifest. The consequent ‘noise’ showed society’s limitations for theatre and what theatre should be ‘allowed’ to treat. The tragedy of 22 July might be the one incident in postwar Norway that clearly shows what is at stake when theatre and art use esthetic strategies to discuss ‘the real’. Lollike’s own point of view is that theatre is the natural place for dealing with tragedies—both real and fictional ones.

Theory In Carol Martin’s lecture “The Reality-based community”, she juxtaposes the theatre of the real with the theatre of the world, so to speak. She claims that world leaders stage and reinvent reality in a similar way to theatre makers, and that we all have the power to manipulate reality to a varying degree. The global centers of power use staging strategies that suit their own agenda, and the makers of reality theatre often use their artistic power

12 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 13 to expose and question these power mechanisms. Martin shows that this has been used to characterize very different performance forms, and works theatre can both explain and question the relationship between fact and of art can be understood differently depending on the context you place fiction, esthetic innovation, and political ideas. The artistic practices she them in. A piece of work might be considered as a break with convention refers to, treat fiction as non-fiction and non-fiction as fiction, and by in one context but might be viewed as reproducing conventions in another openly acknowledging this, they destabilize the spectators’ perceptions by context, so the reception of these reality effects will be decided by the questioning the validity of different truths that might otherwise be taken context. We also perceive and refer to reality in ways that are quite personal for granted. The ‘theatre of the real’ thus questions both global power and linked to different value-systems. One might say that everyone has their mechanisms, and the involvement and positioning of the spectator by own “ideology of reality”. It is therefore important to recognize the various esthetic inventions that challenge our conventional notions of theatre and different kinds of references, and make our position clear from the start society. when we want to discuss the staging of reality. When speaking of perceptional processes within the spectator, the The publication ends on Bjørn Rasmussen’s text, “Really Fantastical”. concept of authenticity must also be brought into discussion. The dialogue with the audience will always be an important factor for such In his lecture “Staging Authenticity”, Imanuel Schipper approaches this an event, but it is also a difficult one to establish. If we could program the slippery concept by firstly giving an overview over how different philosophers festival over again, we would have created more time and space for the and cultural thinkers have approached it, and then by putting emphasis on audience to raise questions and take part in discussions. So it is important the fact that when it comes to theatre and performance, authenticity is best to present his qualified reflections as a spectating participant. understood as something that is not inherent in the object as such, but is He starts off by stating that it was hard to grasp what kind of the result of perceptual processes within the spectator. He also points to “monsters” we are dealing with in contemporary reality theatre. He learned the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of the concept—our longing for little about monsters and more about the ambiguities that arise when authenticity brought on by the fact that it does not really exist. contemporary cultural practices are combined with the mindset of the past. With his contribution “(Dis-)Believe. In search of a lost reality or playing Rasmussen sees theatre as a linguistic device that constructs reality but with illusion”, Nikolaus Müller-Schölls raises the discourse around the is also constitutive of the reality it constructs. Rasmussen places the new ‘theatre of the real’ onto another level when he asserts that while reality documentary approach in theatre as part of an overall cultural tendency, theatre has been on a quest for the real, it has uncovered instead the suggesting that concepts of play, myth, and art are on their way of becoming “inextricable ambivalence of the belief in illusion”. Artists can only present part of normal existence again. reality as real when they mediatize and stage ‘it’. So when the spectator experience something as real, the impression does not come from the “real Lecture performances in itself” but from its artistic manipulation. Müller-Schöll underlines that The theoretical perspectives presented at the festival all pointed to examples the impression of real life does not originate in the archive but is made of performance that somehow seek to connect theatre directly with social believable by the artist’s work. The tendency of contemporary theatre reality. Some of these artistic strategies were presented here through the makers is to “deny illusion but to constantly play with its possibilities”. format of lecture performances. The coining of this reveals a theatrical And illusions are in themself a reality, even if the real is missing. We are playing around with the concepts of both ‘lecture’ and ‘performance’. We all entangled in illusions in different ways and can never eliminate them are not getting a lecture in performance theory, but rather a performance completely. But by playing with the “(dis)belief in illusion”, artists can make in lecture format. It suggests a more loose and open form that enables the visible how we are all inextricably entangled in them. artist to shift between different modalities of performance. The artists that Shannon Jackson addressed the confusion and ambiguity that presented their work as part of this format did so in many different ways— might occur when speaking about notions of reality in her lecture. She from giving a kind of overview of their work to presenting small scenarios decided to change her talk at the last minute, in order to create some vital or ‘performed commentaries’, so to speak, on the subject of staging reality. common ground for the speakers—the understanding that we all share In the lecture performance “Riding the Monster”, Pia Maria Roll attempted a basic ‘thought-structure’ when reflecting on reality and that reality is to recreate her initial meeting with someone whose expertise lies outside not something that exists prior to representation. Rather, that the actual the theatre. Matthew Landy is Vice President and Head of International Tax representational process, such as the one inherent in the performing arts, for Norwegian oil company, Statoil. He was invited to join Roll on stage for is constitutive of the very reality it is seeking to represent. The word ‘real’ a factual exchange regarding Statoil’s expanding global operations. Part of

14 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 15 this lecture performance involved his two daughters Alina (8) and Astrid is the real object. The document will always be linked to a context, and it is (1). For this publication, Pia Maria Roll has transcribed and edited some that context that in the end decides how the document should be valued. brief excerpts of what took place on stage, and it is presented here as a kind The different documentary approaches towards staging or framing reality of ‘photo story’. Here, the spectator witnesses how two different kinds of should thus be considered as open, polyphonic, and dynamic parts of a roleplay are contrasted against each other—Matthew Landy stands onstage dramaturgical arsenal for theatre artists wanting to reflect upon our social in his social role as a high-ranking oil company employee, and Pia Maria reality. Roll also stands onstage as her social role as professional performer. This is a meeting where the open exchange of dialogue becomes the focus. Guest Performances In his article “Down with profession!”, actor Ole Johan Skjelbred gives The guest performances all share a direct engagement with social reality, valid arguments for rethinking the actor’s role. Instead of continuing a although they employ different dramaturgical strategies. Each in their own tradition where one’s performance is measured by perfectly honed acting way show contemporary theatre’s turn towards the audience: either by skills, he urges the actor to focus instead on representing the idea of a engaging directly with the audience in an alternative trading situation like performance. Skjelbred advises actors to simplify relations to their own Kalauz and Schick’s “CMMN SNS PRJCT;” or as seen in Rimini Protokolls presence on stage by stating that there is nothing more ‘ready-made’ than “Prometheus in Athens”, where a contemporary Greek chorus is made up the human being. of a hundred citizens of Athens—members of the public placed on stage Julian Blaue’s “The rise and fall—Storkunstsolteddystaten” takes the instead of being seated in the audience. At the festival we were presented reader on a brief tour de force through his work from 2008–11. It describes the with a lecture-performance showing a film of this event. Five performers development of a state of his own, and the journey towards its destruction. from “Prometheus in Athens” appeared live on stage, and in dialogue with In his art, the blurry line of reality and illusion appears in the distinction the film. between the artist himself and the art he creates. In German duo GintersdorferKlaßen’s work, we meet two dancers from Trine Falch’s lecture-performance takes direct action towards the very different backgrounds who meet on an empty stage to begin a dialogue audience by guiding it through seven theatrically playful steps of ‘false in front of the audience. Here the perceptions of European and African awakenings’. She uses theatre history as the underlying basis for creating dance collide, and the meeting that apparently revolves around different a mischievous text where the whole discourse of ‘relationism’ is taken for styles of dancing is also a meeting where the audience is challenged to a spin. The performer flips the situation on its head by taking on the role question their own perceptions of ‘otherness’. of the audience and thus staging the audience as the performance. She Edit Kaldor’s performance on the opening night of the festival showed us concludes by stating that, “It might be hard to tell who’s looking at whom, contemporary theatre’s tendency to play with illusion. Mixing documentary and if you ever wonder who’s looking at you: I am too”. and fictional elements in her work, her performance is an example of Performance-project Goksøyr&Martens start their contribution reality theatre’s practice of questioning the validity of a document, whether “Relational realism” by presenting us with alternative titles, such as “Dear presented in the media or via an esthetic framing-device, such as the theatre. God, don’t ever let me do documentary theatre again” or “Fuck realism, The development of new documentary or reality theatre points to get real!”, thus showing the artist’s resistance towards being boxed in and a questioning of the function and effect of theatre in society. The artistic labeled as, for example, documentary theatre. They do not want to define strategies shown and discussed here can be seen as a form of dramaturgical their work as either fiction or reality but rather insist on playing with the playing with our social reality. Theatre will always find other ways of blurred boundaries between these two notions, seeing in it a potential for ‘framing’ reality, and the ways in which this is done reveal aspects of creating enhanced situations ultimately leading to existential tales about theatre’s possibility as a social and dynamic arena for reflection and action. the human condition. We hope this publication will be of further inspiration for the Theatre director Tore Vagn Lid gave a critique of those who see participants, and anyone else interested in the topic of “dramaturgies of the Documentary Theatre as just another trend, stating that the journalistic real” in the performing arts. stupidity of branding documentary as ‘in’, or the curatorial strategic evil of deciding that documentary is ‘out’ is actually undermining of May 2013, artistic practice. In his lecture, Tore Vagn Lid explains how he develops a Siri Forberg & Miriam Frandsen dialectical-dramaturgical form where the conflict between the documents

16 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 17 Thursday 22 March Christian Lollike

is an internationally acclaimed playwright and director. He is currently Artistic Director of the QUESTIONS established theatre CaféTeatret in Copenhagen. His artistic drive derives from wanting to understand events, social trends AFTER MANIFEST and changes in society that threaten to undermine democratic values and/or personal freedom, 2083 inflict on human rights and the role of citizenship, with focus on by Christian Lollike social dynamics, psychological and political issues from a contemporary, social point of view When Copenhagen’s independent theatre, and stimulate valuable public debate. Café-teatret, announced that we would perform a monologue based on Anders Breivik’s ‘Mani- fest’, and that it would be staged one year after his crimes, the theatre and I were subject to a massive media firestorm. The public, the politi- cians, the press—everyone—all queued up to condemn the theatre. This makes me want to ask the following questions: if we were discuss- ing a picture or a book, and not a theatre per- formance, would the same people—politicians, press, and other theatre professionals—have been as eager to comment on and condemn this work? What is the theatre allowed to do? And what is it not allowed to? What are the conventions that prevent theatre from being the natural place for tackling real tragedies?

18 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 19 “Manifest 2083” is performed as a monologue in the basement of a restaurant with an audience of 48 people. The performance begins “From my perspective, the every night at 9 pm, in consideration to the restaurant setting, and theatre is the natural place for during December there will be no performances due to Christmas events. Production costs have been minimal. dealing with tragedies, both “Manifest 2083” is about a man, an actor, who decides to play the real and the fictional”. the role of Anders Behring Breivik, and is based around the large compilation of texts, dubbed “2083”, which Anders Breivik sent out just before his actions. The actor plays ‘himself’. Through the play we follow the actor from his first readings of the manifest to realisation. In other words, I tell myself that the audience, at his thorough work on understanding the texts, the personality, moments, sees itself in the Breivik portrayed in the play. But of and characteristics of Breivik etc. The play resembles a process course I can’t be sure. of research on a man’s work, but at the same time examines the radicalization process of Anders Breivik. The actor uses several However, I do not tell myself that the performance is capable stylistic methods in order to get closer to, to understand, and of competing with the ‘idea’ of the performance. That is, the to be the man most people prefer to distance themselves from. idea that has taken place in the minds of people since the Café- Although the performance can at times be uncompromising, it teatret announced on 19th January 2012 that we would do a is not in itself unacceptably provocative. performance based on ‘Manifest 2083’. The idea, which people People do not applaud when the performance is over. created in their minds, was an individual internal experience They are not certain how to respond. Etiquette obliges them nourished by fear. This idea took place on the biggest stage of to applaud, but their emotions make them resist. Afterwards, all, namely the intense, violence-glorifying, uncensored private several write e-mails and letters, declaring that they wanted stage of the imagination, where projections of fear and anxiety to applaud to acknowledge the work and performance of the merge into grotesque and surreal ideas. actor, but that they found themselves in a ‘shocking’ situation where applause seemed inappropriate. We knew we would never be able to compete with this idea. Several times we thought about abandoning the project. I understand them. It’s not a play to applaud. Especially after the trial began, and new material was put at our disposal every day. It became the biggest live theatre show I I tell myself that the reason why people still buy tickets to the have ever seen. Incidental performances took place in the media play is that they want to learn; that they have a need to build on a daily basis. The actor Anders Breivik gave a magnificent knowledge on the observations of others; that they are touched performance. He proved to be mercilessly evil, deliberate, and and at some points frightened; that they are truly worried about changeable—all at the same time. The media took a more or the future of Europe; that they grasp the necessity of why the less sensational view on the trial—the strongest points of view actor tries to be Breivik, and tries to see the world from his point should be found, the most outrageous statements published— of view; and that they understand why the actor sometimes it was about competing for sales. Writers and researchers also feels afraid of himself in those moments where he identifies wrote about Breivik. Several were urged to do so by others, and if with xenophobia and a fear of Europe’s future. I tell myself that they declined they were deemed as “uncommitted”. Seen in this they are scared about the fact that Anders Breivik is actually light, the criticism of the play “Manifest 2083” seemed ridiculous. capable of expressing a more or less coherent understanding How could this performance, not even in production at the time, of society. I also tell myself that people recognise themselves in be found guilty? What is it about the medium of theatre that is the lack of historical knowledge, and in the longing for a cause so threatening? Is it the visual power of the medium? Is it the or a movement that goes beyond individual projects of self- fear that fictionalisation of the man means a fictionalisation of

20 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 21 reality (if this is possible), which would somehow make it easier for us to forget the severity of the situation? Did we just want to make money?

From my perspective, the theatre is the natural place for dealing with tragedies, both real and fictional. I see it partly as an expression of naivety, and partly as a lack of faith in the possibilities of theatre, to think that it was too soon for us to tackle the 22nd July tragedy on a stage. “To deny theatre It is the most difficult play I have ever created. Not just due to the external pressures, but to a greater extent because the case evolved over time. In other words, we were dealing with a kind of vivisection, that is, an attempt to describe or dissect something the possibility of living, which was always moving. People’s views on Anders Breivik continually changed and probably still do. Hence, what seemed crucial to present to the public one day changed the setting up this kind next day. Further, I think that the process of the performance became part of the performance, which is also why it is difficult to interpret the performance without taking into account the of performance circumstances, reactions, and discussions, and see them all as part of the performance, even though these reactions were never intended. expresses a The question of timing is also relevant. There is no doubt that works based on the 22nd July tragedy will take on different forms of expression according to the distance in time from the event suspicious view on when the artist creates the work. To deny theatre the possibility of staging this kind of performance expresses a suspicious view of the performing arts as a mode of expression. performing arts as a I don’t know if this performance will succeed. Will I continue working with it? Should I have found a more original approach? Should I have treated Anders Breivik as a Hollywood star, and mode of expression”. more explicitly, focused more on the performative aspects? Should I have gone further into the descriptions of the attraction and fascination of violence and evil? Should I have made a comparison with Don Quixote? Should I have made a comedy?

The work of processing this tragedy, and society’s response to it continue to intrigue me, and hence the work must go on.

22 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 23 Thursday 22 March Edit Kaldor

The director Edit Kaldor is a unique voice in the contemporary theatre landscape. She combines conceptually strong forms, rarely seen in theatre, with a personal approach to existential POINT themes. She mixes documentary and fictional elements in her work, and often integrates the use of various digital media in a sophisticated but straightforward way. Her work BLANK has been presented in theatres and by Edit Kaldor festivals worldwide. She lives and works in Amsterdam. Point Blank is a visual theatre performance Frank Theys is a Belgian philosopher, visual artist and filmmaker. His in which the narrative is constructed by using work is part of collections of the paparazzi-style photographs of everyday Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum for Contemporary situations. The 19-year-old Nada has been Art in Ghent, the Centre National secretly observing people for years, taking de la Cinématographie, Paris and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai. ‘spy-photos’ of them, capturing their private His documentary series Technocalyps moments. The core of her interest is to trace the has generated a lot of response and discussion across the scientific, various life-strategies that people follow. She cultural and political world. He wants to map out the options for herself. Driven currently lives in Brussels and Amsterdam. by this curiosity, she becomes witness to a wide

Nada Gambier is a dancer, performer, range of – at times extreme - human behaviour. choreographer, performance maker The performance is an occasion for Nada to and artistic advisor and a founding member of Action Scénique vzw. She structure her ‘archive of possibilities’. Together has worked with a.o. Charlotte Vanden with the audience she contemplates the images, Eynde, Cristian Duarte, Edit Kaldor and Kate McIntosh. In 2013 Nada is and looks for the implications and patterns working on a series of videos called that emerge. She aims to get a comprehensive ‘mechanics of emotion’ as well as performing in the new productions overview and to reach a conclusion: “the vision of Diederik Peeters (BE) and Forced of a life worth pursuing”. Entertainment (UK). Nada currently lives in Brussels.

24 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 25 Saturday 24 March Carol Martin

Professor of Drama at New York University. Recent books include Theatre of the Real and THE REALITY- Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (both published by Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays and articles have been translated BASED COMMUNITY into French, Chinese, and Japanese. Martin is the General by Carol Martin © All rights reserved Editor of “In Performance”, a book series devoted to international In an article in The New York Times, an aide to the then performance texts and plays. President of the United States told journalist Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community”, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore”, he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”.1

26 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 27 The two performances I discuss in this essay represent real events transformations between past and present, of the house, of other digital onstage by both disrupting and constructing aesthetic authenticity images, and of sounds. At the end of scene 1, for example, the bell that Ma and documentary certainty. They are examples of theatre, that, in the Joad rings for dinner morphs into the opening bell of the New York Stock words of Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, “situate historical truth as Exchange that begins scene 2. The illuminated stock ticker numbers that an embattled site of contestation” (2009:6). The Builders Association’s crawl across the traders’ desks are like an army of termites, which also “House / Divided” (2011) and Rabih Mroué’s “The Pixelated Revolution” crawl over the house to envelop and consume it. (2011) show how theatre of the real can both explain and question the According to Weems, The Builders Association began their work on relationship between fact and fiction, aesthetic innovation, and political “House / Divided” by rethinking notions of property and territory, and by ideas. looking at what happens to houses that are abandoned as the consequence “House / Divided” treats fiction as nonfiction by using the novel The of unpaid mortgages. The production includes interviews with realtors Grapes of Wrath as historical source material and combines it with images explaining their professional relationship with foreclosed homes, and of homes from the housing foreclosure crisis that followed the stock portions of the testimony given by Alan Greenspan to a congressional market crash, fictional stock market trader talk, and verbatim text from committee on 23 October 2008 in which Greenspan admitted errors in Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987–2006. regulation that may have been a catalyst for the recession. Just before The “Pixelated Revolution” assembles a fictional aesthetic manifesto the video footage of Greenspan’s testimony is projected onto the house built from nonfictional sources through an analysis of YouTube videos at the end of the production, the scene cuts to the Omniscient Narrator of the Syrian revolution. Both of these productions construct powerful who laments a sudden onslaught of rain strong enough to bring down and entertaining inquiries into the relationship between aesthetic great trees and threaten everything in its path. In response, the fictional conventions, the positioning and involvement of spectators, and Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, scramble to save themselves. The government policies. scene cuts to a looming image of Greenspan, as if he were speaking from a secreted place on high. His testimony is projected onto the central House / Divided surface of the set that also serves, at other times, a wall of the house, both The burst of the housing bubble in the US in 2007, the stock market crash, on North 4th Street and in The Grapes of Wrath: the bank and industry crisis, and the recession that followed prompted the creation of “House / Divided”. Members of The Builders Association Before I begin by discussing the role of the Federal Reserve in researched and considered the relationship among spaces, places, and our system, and the steps we’ve taken over the last ten years to material goods as physical objects, as well as virtual realities. What have respond to emerging questions in the housing and credit mar- houses come to mean as commodities in the global marketplace? How does kets, I want to make this preliminary statement: Policymakers something as abstract as stock market fluctuations affect something as real cannot predict the future. There is no way that the subprime cri- as a family’s home? How does the extreme loss of the stock value of very sis could have been predicted, and even now, there is no way of wealthy people and corporations affect ordinary people? Have events like knowing how many more homes will end up underwater. (The these happened before? The last question led company members to read John Builders Association 2011) Steinbeck’s 1939 Great Depression novel, The Grapes of Wrath. By using The Grapes of Wrath, The Builders Association suggests that the same monster that Juxtaposing The Grapes of Wrath with Greenspan’s speech established the terrorized the world during the Great Depression in the 1930s has come back relationship and relevance of the past to the present and created an eerie to life in the first decade of the 21st century. There is a sense of foreboding, a déjà vu perspective to the most recent foreclosure crisis. The Builders dread of a looming financial monster, an unseen predator consuming people, Association uses theatre as a way of producing awareness of the repetition their livelihoods, and their homes. “House / Divided” is inhabited by cultural of traumatic events. The past that “House / Divided” portrays—a past of memory and narrative recycling. ordinary people, poor people suffering from an inequitable system, as The onstage house the spectators see exists both in the present and the Joad family did—is a past that is recurring. The frame of the house, in the past, as a representation of something material and real and as a with everything “house” implies—home, shelter, security, longevity, digital construction. So too, the characters are contemporary and historical, belonging, family, childhood, love, food, permanence, continuity, loss, real and fictional. The short, episodic, and fluid scenes are connected by and trauma—becomes the sign of the troubled foundation of the nation,

28 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 29 and a representation of the spectators in the theatre and all those, who “House / Divided” avoids the many biblical allusions in The Grapes of Wrath bore the consequences of Greenspan’s miscalculations. favoring instead the alternation of literary, statistical, and architectural In performance, The Builders Association treats The Grapes of Wrath languages. Post-2007 Crash stockbroker fast-talk, the Joad family’s rural as a historical object that they recycle in the same manner that they Oklahoma drawl and Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve jargon predominate. manipulate the onstage house; the novel is animated, enacted, redacted, In performance, Steinbeck’s poetic language was set against the powerful and transformed in ways that associate it with the contemporary economic language of stock market numbers flickering on many of the set’s surfaces crisis. Steinbeck began writing The Grapes of Wrath in response to a as if they were generating the statistics that doomed countless individuals journalism assignment for Life magazine. Documentary photographer and families. The physical house onstage contrasted the virtual numeric Horace Bristol and Steinbeck traveled together to California labor camps abstractions signaling fluctuations in the value of stocks and bonds. This in the winter of 1937/38. Once on the ground in the midst of the misery juxtaposition of languages is not unlike Steinbeck’s strategy in The Grapes he had come to document, Steinbeck dumped the Life magazine project of Wrath where the scenes with the Joad family are contextualized by the in favor of writing a novel. Bristol’s work was eventually published in Life omniscient narrator’s explanation of the era to which they belong. Steinbeck magazine many years later, next to stills from the 1940 film adaptation of blamed the plight of the Joads on big bosses, unregulated capitalism, and Steinbeck’s novel for which the photographs were used as reference for God, for sending drought and dust storms, and he provided some human casting and costumes. Later in life, Bristol titled this series of photographs compassion to balance the abundance of human cruelty in his narrative of a The Grapes of Wrath to identify it with Steinbeck’s 1939 novel and even family’s suffering and loss. A classic “on the road” novel whose form is as old retitled an image of a man chopping wood Tom Joad Chopping Wood after as The Odyssey, the main characters—Ma, Jim Casy, and Tom—articulate Steinbeck’s main character in the novel.2 The historical object that “House some unorthodox humanist ideas about human relations that counter the / Divided” performs is a work of fiction but one based on actual people and world in which they find themselves. Jim Casy, a former preacher, proclaims their historical situation which was then photographed. Bristol used the that he does not believe in Jesus but instead loves people. Like Jesus, text from the fictional account of the people he photographed to label the however, Casy lives among the poor and rejected and sacrifices himself real people and situations on which the fictional account was based. The for others. Alternating scenes from the novel with scenes of stock market Grapes of Wrath is inseparable from the real time and people it represents number crunchers gives the work a larger-than-life meaning, biblical in feel. and The Builders Association positions it as the American Ur-story of The title of the work is taken from Abraham Lincoln, one of the most biblical economic and social reality of the twenty-first century. American presidents. Weems explained that the title, “House / Divided” The Builders Association made “House / Divided” by integrating refers to the repurposed, foreclosed house in Columbus, Ohio, that became technology with live performance. “No one in the company thinks a physical and metaphorical space onstage and from the oft-quoted statistics textually”, Weems explains (Schechner 2012). Co-creator, writer, and of the Occupy Wall Street movement referring to the economic disparity dramaturg James Gibbs, who trained as an architect at Cornell University, of the 1% versus the 99% in the US.3 The source of the phrase, however, in brought the technical knowhow of his D-Box company—which specializes Lincoln’s famous 16 June 1858 acceptance speech for his nomination to the in animation, web design, architectural photography, and graphic Senate, cannot be discounted. In that speech, Lincoln used a phrase from design—to the conceptualization of the work from the very beginning. By the New Testament that would have been recognized by those listening: fusing architecture, fabric such as tent cloth, objects from a foreclosed home, digitized imagery, interviews, and excerpts of pre-existing text, The A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this gov- Builders Association reconstructed the lost ethos of the nation. Who have ernment cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. ‘we’ become? This question is answered by including found domestic I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the objects in the set and recycling an old story that describes a current house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will situation in the service of creating an awareness of history repeating become all one thing or all the other. 4 itself. Close to the end of “House / Divided”, Greenspan appears again and cautions: “Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual By titling their work “House / Divided”, The Builders Association suggests framework for the way we deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to that just as the unity of the US once hinged on the question of slavery, it exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not” now hinges on the question of economic disparity. The institutionalized (The Builders Association, 2011). and legal inequity of slavery in Civil War–era America has become the

30 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 31 income and opportunity inequity of the twenty-first century. The poverty and cruelty of the Great Depression is seen again in those who have suffered foreclosure and been forcibly divided from their homes. The poverty of today, the title proposes, has antecedents in the way the nation is economically structured. Inequality reinvents itself for different but analogous reasons: chattel slavery, wage slavery, foreclosure slavery. The 99% versus the 1%, the rich few against the many poor, the number crunchers against the humanitarians, employers and administrators against laborers, banks against those whose homes have been foreclosed. “House / Divided” tries to resurrect a long-promised, idealized, and still- pending vision of America. The Leviathan, the huge untamed creature that rattles the playhouse, is finally a body of ideas. These are ideas that we may already know, that we may have heard somewhere, ideas that may make us remember something, ideas that may invoke a state of déjà vu in spectators about what they know and what they value.

The Pixelated Revolution In “The Pixelated Revolution” Rabih Mroué notes that both professional and freelance journalists are absent from the Syrian revolution, making it impossible to know what is going on, at least from the vantage point of Beirut where Mroué lives.5 At the time Mroué made “The Pixelated Revolution” in the autumn of 2011, the only available information about the demonstrations came from Syria’s official news channel and protestors’ images uploaded to the Internet—images originating outside governmental and institutional regulation. Mroué’s lecture/performance is part investigation, part explanation, part operating manual, and part homage to those who have lost their lives fighting for change in Syria. Originating from a detailed and forensic analysis of the Syrian protesters’ uploaded YouTube videos and images, “The Pixelated Revolution” is an exegesis on the aesthetics of revolution in a post-9/11 Internet world. The importance of the videos and images is not to be underestimated, Mroué told his spectators, as there is an increasing demand for them by media outlets whose journalists are denied direct access, and an increasing “The pixelated Revolution” by Rabih Mroué. Photo © Ernesto Donegana willingness to broadcast them on official programs. Walking casually onto the stage, Mroué seats himself at a downstage- about death in Syria today. I wanted to see and I wanted to know right white table with the upstage-left corner artfully angled toward more, although, we all know that this world, the Internet, is the large screen that occupied the back of the stage. A Mac laptop was constantly changing and evolving. It is a world that is loose, un- to Mroué’s right, and a reading light and glass of water were to his left. controllable. Its sites and locations are exposed to all sorts of Mroué began his lecture/performance by stating that it all began with the assaults and mutilations, from viruses and hacking procedures sentence: “The Syrian protestors are recording their own death” (2012). to incomplete, fragmented, and distorted downloads. It is an impure and sinful world full of rumors and unspoken words. So I found myself inside the Internet traveling from one site to Nevertheless, it is still a world of temptation and seduction, of another, looking for facts and evidence that could tell me more lust and deceit, and of betrayal.

32 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 33 Throughout his performance, Mroué sat at the table, sometimes looking at Then silence. The image stopped. It was not clear whether or not the the spectators, sometimes at his computer, sometimes at his manuscript, and cameraman was dead. It is as if spectators had witnessed, if not death sometimes glancing over his left shoulder at the large upstage screen where the then near death, without ever seeing the person who was hit. Spectators images and videos, that were the subject of his performance, were projected. were placed in the subjective position of the person with the mobile Mroué, an excellent actor, shaded his performance with many subtle and phone camera and saw what his eyes saw. The double shootings yielded fleeting emotions: a flicker of sadness when first mentioning the deaths of double meanings. The YouTube uploads attempted to make the details Syrian protestors; tenaciousness in his efforts to find some fragments of truth of the resistance known to the world via the Internet and to provide about the protestors’ plight; anger at the injustice. Mroué’s style of acting is to evidence of the government’s intent to kill. Through his performance present himself as an entirely trustworthy performer and researcher. Stunning as both a professional actor trained to modulate emotions, and as a ideas were casually explicated with unassuming modesty; Mroué barely social actor a member of society, Mroué looks at the politics of what is looked up as he pointed out the similarity between the camera tripod of the happening in Syria by means of aesthetic analysis. establishment and the tripod that stabilizes their automatic weapons—one of The Internet revises and sometimes obscures the possibilities of many exceedingly precise observations. He easily won over his spectators to memory, history, and memorialization that have been associated with the uniqueness of his vision, his ideas, his art. place. Besides lacking location, some Internet sites such as YouTube are Focusing on the moments of the Syrian uprising that can only be known deemed illegitimate sources of information precisely for the reasons that from what has been uploaded to the Internet, Mroué scrutinized the images Mroué states. The Internet is not fact-checked, no sources are verified, and YouTube videos as fleeting testaments to unseen protesters’ deaths and and there is no governing ethical code of reportage or information. It brief digital memorials. At the same time, he posed the question, “How should is subject to hacking, its images can be unauthored and unauthorized. we read these videos?” Mroué’s answer to this question was in the form of a The Internet is its own Greek tragedy; it is, “a world of temptation and proposal that we consider the videos as a new kind of aesthetic weapon that seduction, of lust and deceit, and of betrayal” (Mroué 2012). What Mroué articulates ideas beyond the evidence of the actual places and occurrences of performs has no connection to a specific physical place in Syria. He does the revolution. There are two kinds of shooting, Mroué informed us: shooting not mention the names of any cities such as Homs or Damascus. Nor does with a camera and shooting with a rifle. “One shoots for his life and one shoots he mention the delicate balance between Christians, Alawites, secularists, for the life of his regime” (2012). Both can have dire consequences. Protesters and Islamists. This is because Mroué’s subject is the aesthetics of the who used the recording capacity in their mobile phones to document resistance in Syria as a deliberate product of an uncensored eye that one demonstrations and conflict were targeted and killed by government soldiers cannot get from official sources: for doing so. One video that Mroué narrated was only one minute and 23 seconds I assume that what the protesters in Syria are seeing, when they long.6 He pointed out a sniper on a low floor of a building in a residential are participating in a demonstration, is the exact same thing neighborhood. Another ‘shooter’ was on a high floor of a building across the that they are filming and watching directly on the tiny screen street, in what was probably the inside of an apartment, using his mobile of their mobile phones that they are using “here and now”. I phone to film what was happening outside. The video began with the sound mean that they are not looking around and then they choose a of a gunshot, followed by a rapid succession of images of rooftops, balconies, certain scene or angle to shoot. But they are all the time look- walls, windows, and different buildings, until the eye that was the camera ing through the camera and shooting at the same time. So the spotted the sniper lurking behind a wall. The eye that was the camera creating eye and the lens of the camera are practically watching the same the vision of the man behind the camera lost the sniper. Then the sniper came thing. It is the exact same thing that we will see later, on the In- into view again with his military rifle in a ready position. The image shook as ternet or on television but at a different time and place. It is as if the eye could not believe what it was seeing. Abruptly, the sniper saw the if the camera and the eye have become united in the same body; eye, the man, the mobile phone watching him. Their eyes seemed to meet I mean the camera has become an integral part of the body. Its and then the sniper matter-of-factly raised his gun and aimed. He took a shot, lens and its memory have replaced the retina of the eye and the hitting his target. The eye, the man, the mobile phone fell to the ground as the brain. In other words, their cameras are not cameras but eyes image spun toward the ceiling. Mroué translated the voice of the cameraman implanted in their hands; an optical prosthesis. (2012) who had been hit as saying, “I am wounded, I am wounded”.

34 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 35 “The Pixelated Revolution” reveals how everyday recordings can Mroué’s belief that Syrian protesters are filming the same thing they suddenly become acts of resistance and treated as transgressions that are seeing results not only from what the cameras capture but also have to be eliminated. The surveillance Mroué refers to is not constant from the repeated aesthetics of the images. Near the beginning of his and panoptic. The surveillance, of and by both the Baathists and their performance, Mroué informs his spectators that he will compare digital opposition, is a surreptitious pop-up surveillance. There is not one eye and low-resolution images with professional footage in order to distance scanning the landscape but many eyes, all looking for and trying to them from an immediate emotional reaction. His analysis leads him to capture other eyes. The target of the security forces is no longer people create a cinematic manifesto, “a fictional list of advice and directions on with guns with the intent to kill, but people with mobile phones with how to film manifestations”, which is also a reflection on the methods of the intent to record. The target of people with mobile phones is people the Syrian protestors’ short films (2012). with guns, and their intent is to stop the killing by recording it. Instant The list includes: shoot from the back to hide the identity of posting of recordings has become lethal to both its users and its subjects. protestors; carry banners backwards so cameras shooting from the back The gun is pitted against the camera as a weapon of war and revolution, can see what they say; take long-shots from afar so as not to reveal the and this confrontation of both weapons and of aesthetics has resulted identity of the protestors; film assailants’ faces; write the date and place in ideological shifts. Mroué reads the aesthetics of the images that the of the manifestation; music should not be used; the sounds must be real; Syrian protestors create, both Muslims and secularists, as an assertion filming must be done on location in the here and now; do not use tripods; that death is not solely in the hands of God, it is also in the hands of use handheld cameras; and, do not use special lighting. He also offered people with their hand-held recording devices. The protestors’ images more general advice, including: use mobile phone cameras because consistently aim to show the faces of their killers; to show them as they are lightweight; be wary of surveillance cameras on government murderers. Mroué concludes that this aesthetic technique reveals that and institutional buildings; try to film the street address for the sake of even though the revolutionaries are sometimes referred to as Salafists, veracity; do not care about the quality of the image; and place the strap of the revolution in Syria is neither an Islamic revolution nor a resistance the camera around your neck in case you have to run. driven by religious ideology; it is a revolution driven by the desire for Mroué’s fictional manifesto—fictional because it is an aesthetic democracy as evidenced in the mobile phone recording of death as manifesto based on the practices of the filmmakers already in use— murder committed by men, not by an act of God. positions itself far from the conventional aesthetics of filmmaking in But there are two competing approaches to the aesthetics of the order to highlight the veracity of handheld, homemade, low-resolution, image, Mroué tells his audience. One approach posits that a clear image and unpremeditated images of the Syrian revolution. The manifesto’s can become official, eternal, and immortal. This was the approach assertion is that the spontaneously made and minimally produced and the aim of the timed attacks on the World Trade Center. The first YouTube videos of the Syrian demonstrations documented what was plane that slammed into the North Tower summoned recorders to the happening through a combination of aesthetic conventions, portable site in time for the second plane’s attack on the South Tower. The other devices and politically streetwise survival techniques. Conventional approach holds that a clear image is antagonistic to the revolution, that journalistic credibility is absent because authenticity in this context there should be no preparation, no possibility of a tripod standing as a exists only in opposition to official organizations and sanctioned sources. symbol of recording readiness. No staging for the media. Mroué told his The grainy, low-resolution panning shots of the two short videos that audience: Mroué shows his audience not only counter the surveillance of the state but upend assumptions about the aesthetics of credible images. Similarly, The protesters are aware that the revolution cannot and should the purpose and aesthetic implications of ‘looking’ are transformed. Mobile not be televised. Consequently, there are no rehearsals in their phone cameras are sold as devices for making positive and friendly images revolution, and no preparations for a larger and more impor- of friends and family for friends and family. In “The Pixelated Revolution” tant event. They are recording a transient event, which will however, phone cameras are a means for documenting death, even one’s never last. Their shots are not meant to immortalize a moment own death, and the reality of social and political events—what is happening or an event but rather a small portion of their daily frustration, (or has already happened). The recordings uploaded to YouTube are a new fragments of a diary that might one day be used in the writing of form of anonymous testimony that is sanctioned precisely for its anonymity an alternative history. (2012) and its refusal of silence and invisibility; what Mroué refers to as video letters

36 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 37 to the world. The digital images in combination with Mroué’s presence as an Endnotes actor, researcher, and writer, claimed the possibility of truth and authenticity 1 Suskind, Ron. 2004. “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency and their abiding absence at the same time. of George W. Bush”, New York Times, 17 October. 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH. Mroué presents terrible violence without showing it. Toward the end html (accessed 19 November 2010). of “The Pixelated Revolution”, Mroué projects a 14-second video uploaded 3 http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/bristol/ (accessed 27 to YouTube by Syrian activists.7 Spectators see a slow-moving tank enter January 2012). Email to author, 23 January 2012. an intersection at the end of a road, stop midway, and rotate its big gun 45 4 http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/abrahamlin- degrees. Behind the nozzle of the gun are the invisible eyes of the man in the colnhousedivided.html (accessed 28 February 2012). 5 The performance about which I am writing was at Barysh- tank. The invisible man in the tank faces the lens of the cameraman from nikov Arts Center, New York, as part of Performance whose position the whole scene was shot. The gun fires and the camera, the Space 122’s Coil festival. All information is from my eye, the man falls and appears to have died. A flash of color erupts. What is observation of that performance and the unpublished this? A descent into death? Then the scene is over; the video finished. The script by Rabih Mroué. 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0pFYXHy9CY&feature only sound was the sound of the tank cannon shooting the cameraman. The =related (accessed 27 January 2012). scene was real but incomplete, Mroué told us. The spectators in the theatre 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8-_wQYA-IA (accessed and the cameraman witnessed the tank and its gun, its eye, its lens, and the 27 January 2012). invisible man inside. They both experienced the power of the state through the actions of the man in the tank. The cameraman, Mroué led his spectators to believe, recorded his own death. Like The Builders Association, Mroué and the protesters, whose images he analyzed, created an aesthetic intervention in the representation of the real in order to tell a version of the truth, while openly acknowledging the simultaneous use of fiction to do so. Artists who document and challenge conventional notions of accuracy, authenticity, and fact, by analyzing, disrupting, and subverting the aesthetic conventions that underlie documentary certainty, are on the cusp of a reality- based community different from the one that Ron Suskind described in the epigraph to this article. They are a part of a reality-based community creating unique ways to understand personal, social, and political phenomena through aesthetic invention, intervention, and implementation that shows how empiricism has been compromised. Today’s world—and the world of the future—works in ways similar to theatre of the real. Theatre makers invent, reinvent, and stage reality. And so do politicians, business leaders, priests, and mullahs. Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” has never been more... real.

38 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 39 Friday 23 March Pia Roll

Performer, director, and deviser of texts for theatre. Roll has for many years been investigating documentary practice within the theatre. Her latest work, Ship Riding the O’Hoi! was an investigation of the Norwegian oil business and the consequences of Norwegian state oil company Statoil’s international operations. Monster

by Pia Maria Roll

Performance lecture with Matthew Landy (47) Vice President and Head of International Tax at Statoil. With him on stage is Alina Landy (8), Astrid Landy (1), and artist Pia Maria Roll (41). The perfomance was made as part of Roll’s preparatory work towards her theatre piece “Ship O´Hoi!”, which opened in October 2012.

40 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 41 corner of the world, which is international, and that’s what I’m in charge of, from a tax perspective. And even though it’s much smaller than the Norwegian part of Statoil’s business… it is This is a… what is it quite interesting. reality and what I do. And called?… a lecture whether we are pro or con performance, and yeah, the oil industry, I think Pia and I have had a regarding all the energy conversation over the that’s streaming through last couple of weeks, and this room, I think it’s a Pia assured me that if I reality that the oil industry come in here and talk to exists (…). you about the oil industry from my perspective Even though I said that as a.. worker in the oil international production industry… that you´ll find is a small part of our total it interesting and relevant. production, it’s still millions That’s a little hard to of kroners in revenues. And believe, but I´m just gonna from all the revenues that PROLOGUE: start talking. we produce overseas, 50 % of Statoil’s production So. If this is one oil field in When humans meet, it’s often a bizarre mixture of outside Norway is in Angola… you see that´s a ideology and chemistry that comes into play. When I first Angola. So maybe a lot of rig… met Matt, one of the top executives in the Norwegian people don’t realize that Angola is actually quite state oil company Statoil, I had been researching an important country the company’s international investments for quite for the Norwegian oil some time. It was a beautiful spring day, we went for industry. And I think it is a walk in the park, and while I was carrying his lovely My name is Matt Landy and safe to say that Norway is I’m head of international an important country for baby girl, he was telling me all about Statoil’s quest tax at Statoil. What that Angolan industry, and for for drilling licenses in every possible corner of the means is that I handle all of the Angolan economy— thank you Astrid, Astrid is world. Horror and tulips! Matt ended up participating Statoil’s tax affairs outside whether for good or evil. gonna get a job in Statoil as on video in my performance, “Ship O´Hoi!”, but the the NCS—The Norwegian And I suppose you know a rig producer. Continental Shelf. And if that the question of good lecture performance we did at Dramatikkens hus was an you think about Statoil and or evil is something that attempt to recreate this first sun-infused meeting. the Norwegian oil industry, might come up, but I am you have the NCS, which sort of here to talk about The following are brief excerpts edited from Landy’s speech. is huge, and a tremendous productive asset for us as a whole. But we also have a

42 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 43 pay what we owe, not a of course, that the oil course we should be there, penny more and not a industry is a monster. It’s we´re in business to find penny less (…). there, there’s nothing we and produce oil, and that’s can do about it, it’s real, what we’re doing. it will exist for ever, and from Statoil’s perspective, we´re gonna be in Angola. So this is one rig in Angola, From a pure corporate perspective, there is no reason for Statoil not to be in Angola. Of course there So let’s talk about tax— are ethical questions and does that sound good to legal questions. Legally I have to remember where you? She loves it when it’s absolutely good and I am now… I am standing I talk about tax. Astrid? fine for Statoil to be on the west coast of Africa. Astrid? Can you hear your in Angola. The ethical And now I´m in Brazil. And and this is another rig in dad? Oh no, she´s busy! perspective concerns the here is our platform in Angola. This is great… corrupt regimes that exist Brazil (…). And so is the Angolan By the way, 13 months old in Angola and Nigeria, or Brazil has hit a bonanza. platform! Yeaayh! and she can’t crawl yet You know, I´m on Pappa rather, that reportedly exist I think the numbers that but she scoops extremely Leave this month, and this in Angola and Nigeria and have been speculated quickly! is the biggest break I´ve other places, and that’s about the Brazilian oil (Continues describing had from childcare since another story, ah, and it industry suggest there’s 50 Statoil’s activities in it started. Now I can just affects the question of billion barrels of oil that´s Nigeria, Mozambique, carry on talking about the whether Statoil should be gonna be recovered from Tanzania, Kenya, Algeria, oil industry, I can do that in these countries? But Brazil. Brazil is the 10th Venezuela, Canada, Russia, This rig will have a tax rate, for weeks now. (Audience I´m not here to answer largest economy now, it´s a China, and Azerbaijan.) say its 75%, and this rig applaud him) that question, I´m here major player right, it´s one Ahh… I don´t know how will have another tax rate, to say that from a purely of those BRICS (…). Brazil is I´m gonna keep my chain say its 85%. The Angolan corporate point of view, of still very much in flux, and of thought on this one. government basically this is still a critical, critical keeps the oil for itself, and question for geopoliticians, it pays a contract prize to and world bodies, and the the producer. From Statoil’s oil industry, and for me as perspective, of course, we a tax person, cause the tax want to pay as little tax as system is… I can say this possible, but our objective Okay, so let’s talk about in front of Brazilians, and is not to go into a country Statoil’s tax strategy, I’ve done it a million times, and take as much oil we because the question that’s so it´s not just between can and pay as little tax as burning in the back of our us—the tax system is really we can. Our objective for heads when we talk about screwed up there. (Sound going into these countries, the “Monsters of Reality” of crash) as it is everywhere, is to and the oil industry, is,

44 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 45 “I have lived here long enough to say, with a lot of love in my heart, that Pia: Do you have some something… I guess I’ve Talking to me is one of the Norwegians think that everything is advice for us, in terms of already used the word smartest things you´ve ever dealing with reality? corrupt, but just to be a done! better if it’s associated with Norway” little more diplomatic, there is some sort of gap between all the money going in, and what’s being done with it, and we don’t know what’s in the middle.

Statoil has been sort of in Matt: I would say, keep it the forefront of “Publish real! It’s a tough question. I What You Pay”,—we think it’s a really legitimate provide full information question about the role of about what we hand over oil companies—and even to governments, but that though I am American, is only useful if every oil I have lived here long company does the same enough to say, with a lot thing. But I think the most of love in my heart, that important thing is to ask Norwegians think that honest questions and use everything is better if it’s the facts, I mean, I was a associated with Norway. little worried when I first To some extent that might spoke to you that there was be true, but if you think gonna be a lot of attacks about Angola, the amount on the oil industry, but it of money we pay to the wasn´t like that. It was a government is probably real honest exchange and a many times greater than real honest dialogue. the entire Norwegian foreign aid budget for the whole continent of Africa, it really is huge—billions and billions of dollars. And we don’t see exactly where that money is going. It’s obvious that there is

46 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 47 Friday 23 March Ole Johan Skjelbred

Trained as an actor at the Oslo National Academy of Dramatic Art. Worked for Down with various theatres and projects, mostly at the National Theatre in Oslo. He translates, edits, Profession! dramatizes, and directs plays for theatre. He writes for theatre journals, such as Norsk This article has been translated from Norwegian and was previously published in Shakespearetidsskrift, where the Norwegian theatre journal Norsk Shakespeare-og teatertidsskrift(1/2005) he is also a board member. by Ole Johan Skjelbred

There exists a concept in the Norwegian theatrical tradition—‘the Profession’. The Profession is the the ultimate seal of approval on the craft of acting. The Profession is a set of experiences and rules on how theatre should be made and performed. One talks about mastering or not mastering the Profession, and of the importance of protecting the Profession. In Norway, the theatre has always been dominated by actors. This is in contrast to the German/ Russian tradition of scenography and direction, and the British/ American tradition, which prioritizes the playwright. In Norway, it is the self-image of the actor as ruler of the eternal Profession that keeps the hegemony alive. If actors let go of this idea of the Profession, the actor-dominated theatre would cease to exist. In a paradoxical way, I think our actor-dominated theatre diminishes the work of actors and has encouraged stagnation and a uniformity in the language of theatre. There is something imprisoning and impersonal about the whole idea of the Profession. Norwegian acting-culture has become crystallized within a stereotype of ‘good’ theatre, with clear ideas about what is right and what is wrong. Every production and every concept is always viewed through the same prism —the Profession. In consequence, too much of the theatre’s energy is expended over the battle between concept (art) and tradition (profession), with actors protecting tradition. Arguing over ‘right’ theatre is anachronistic and condemnatory. Our idea of ‘right’ theatre is also a kind of marketed psychological realism. It is the work of acting. No matter how strange a foreigner or director wants you to act on stage, the Profession will always show through a good Norwegian actor’s performance. He may do as he is told, but he will work in some of the Profession into his

48 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 49 performance. He will never let go of the Profession or be lured into When actors see the criterion of success for their own performance some kind of nonsense. Whether the foreigner is called Wilson, as the criterion of success for the whole performance, one problem Hartmann, or Houvardas, the Professionals will reject him, saying will solve the other. By representing the idea of the performance, “this is not theatre”, or “this is an insult to the Profession”. Here and not some kind of tradition, you are protected by the idea of you are, on the outskirts of Europe, protecting simple and eternal the performance. As such, I think each actor will become freer, truths. The Profession is not just a prerequisite for crafting fine and each performance will find an opportunity to find its own and classic performances, it is also a tool for creating “innovative”, specific language. An actor’s balance between love and hate for “relevant”, and “ground-breaking” art. The Profession is everything yourself is embedded in the nature of this kind of work. You have and has everything. It needs nothing more. To be an actor is a great no distance to your work. You are trapped, which can feel very way to live—poetically speaking, you are a kind of wandering claustrophobic. Where other people can merge into their work metaphor for human life. You leave nothing behind but clear air and forget themselves, the work of an actor requires that you look after a working day, or a working life. Your performances only for, and hopefully find, yourself. In a role. In a performance. The exist in the moment, or in memory. This kind of carelessness commonplace idea of the actor as self-assertive and self-centred can be hard to bear, and actors need to find some way to protect is encouraged by the theatre as a profession, because it is based themselves. The most normal and most natural kind of protection around personal performance. It is also encouraged through is to dissociate the real person from their onstage presence , by theatre marketing departments, since it is easier to sell faces than pretending to be an actor. For this kind of acting, the Profession is to sell ideas. And of course other media that run a business based excellent. When there are general rules to follow, when you know on selling faces also play a role in enhancing this impression of what works and what does not, you will always feel safer. You ‘work’ actors. It is almost a century ago since Marcel Duchamp displayed like other people, and you get some kind of meaning as a person. his infamous urinal, forever changing the self-image of art. He You fit in, you master your profession. You are protected. This kind tried to destroy the subject in art by removing the idea of artistic of protection is connected with the isolation of actors through the intervention, so that the artwork itself would become more visible. tradition of the Profession. In the same way, actors should also destroy their subject to create a more simple relation to their own presence on stage—after all, there is nothing more ‘readymade’ than the human! The very definition of concept art is that the idea becomes more important “After all, there than the performance of the idea. Our current theatre-tradition ensures that we remain at a superficial level. It is a theatre without is nothing more self-knowledge. By self-knowledge, I think of the ability to discuss one’s existence, one’s tradition, one’s systems—both political and artistic. Break with the structures surrounding you. Examine your ‘readymade’ than own patterns and put yourself in the pillory. Do this in order to see yourself differently, and more clearly. And thus also to see the world more clearly, and for the world to see you more clearly. A theatre of the human!” Profession is not capable of real reflection, or of asking interesting questions. It is only capable of reproduction.

50 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 51 Friday 23 March Julian Blaue The rise and fall of Storkunstsolteddystaten

Performer and essayist writing for by Julian Blaue the Norwegian and German press. He founded a dictatorial state and several national institutions in Oslo (Black Box, Kunstnernes Hus, Kulturkirken Jakob, 2007-2010). He then closed down the state and staged a last judgment (Dramatik- kens hus, 2011). In Germany he has performed in the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Theater Bonn, and Deutsch- es National Theater Weimar. His next project on the massacres in Oslo and Utøya will be staged at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter..

Photo © Ida Muller Photo © Endre Tveitan

The ’state’ Government-in-exile

In 2008 I founded a sovereign nation in a As a consequence, I founded a square in Oslo. I was the national leader of government-in-exile at the Artist‘s House this state. It was intended as an antithesis in Oslo. I commented on the territorial to the Scandinavian welfare state. We loss. The state was reduced to a historic proceeded to our future territory. A holy film. The Iron Man was now an Iron Man procession. To establish a new society. in absentia—and made of wood. I burnt I painted the borders of our state and the papers that had reduced our state to formulated the national law—women an artistic event. The black man was now were not allowed to enter the territory, a black plastic man. I made the exiled nor were immigrants. government become reality with a seven- Suddenly a group of anti-fascists came out hour ceremony of worship for the Iron of nowhere. The punks understood the Man in absentia. fascist nature of the project and wanted to stop it. They expropriated my brush and painted on me. Made me fall in the valley of absurdity. With great satisfaction, they threw me out of the state. They eliminated the nation of the teddy, the big Iron Man.

52 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 53 State religion

In 2009, I founded the state religion at Kulturkirken Jakob, a church in Oslo. I explained the religious basis of its State university constitution. On the altar, Christ was already born. I didn´t notice. I worshipped In 2010, I founded the National University the wooden Iron Man in absentia. I of Bestiality at the Black Box Theatre kneeled by his feet. The black man was in Oslo. I didn’t follow the beautiful at the center of power. I made fish soup. I woman, I followed the Iron Man. The Zen now know that fish is a symbol of Christ. Buddhist meditated. I conversed with But at that time I was still stuck in the Old the humanistic philosopher Arne Johan Testament. I gave an angry sermon from Vetlesen. I tried to be consistent and the pulpit. God commanded Abraham to forgot my heart. The soup was not fish kill his son and Abraham was about to soup. It was poultry. A chicken doesn´t obey. I whipped myself. For I tried to prove symbolize Christ. A chicken doesn‘t the holy pain. I wanted to say yes to all the symbolize anything. They only cry and pain in the world. I was crucified by the cry and cry. They bleed and bleed and black man I had thrown out of my state. bleed. They try to fly. In vain. The flesh But I couldnt bare the pain. I left the skull is prepared for the soup. Grace for the Photo © Beate Pedersen hill behind me. I didn’t carry my cross. I poultry. The birds were sitting in a row followed the Iron Man instead. with our flags in their hands. The Zen Buddhist was now a sadomasochist. Pain and charity became one. Was love still possible? We tortured the audience. And tortured ourselves. The Chorus didn’t sing. They were just dumb birds and flew away. I was a zombie on the screen, present in absentia. They said that pain was charity. But it was not passion. Not the passion of Christ. The cruxifixion was unreal. It was only theatre, nothing more. The director told me his opinion about fiction and faction. The final victory was the final defeat. The smile was lost, the heart was cold. It stopped beating inside the old Iron Man.

Photo © Ylber Gashi

54 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 55 Photo © Julian Blaue

End of the state Abdication of the head of state

In 2011, I erased the state in Oslo. The In 2011, I abdicated as head of state in Iron Man had lost. I removed the flag. One front of Utøya island. I burnt the flag. I month earlier, the terrorist Anders Behring bowed for the victims. I took off my laurel Breivik had bombed government buildings crown. I placed it as a wreath next to the in Oslo. He disliked the power of women flowers and candles of the families. I took and the influence of immigrants. I went off my state uniform. I jumped into the with our flag to the destroyed government water. I swam to the island where the buildings near the ‘lost’ state. I was terrorist had killed 69 people. The sun ashamed. I too had stigmatized the weak made a cross. It became darker. After an and celebrated the strong. On my knees hour, I returned from the island. I was in front of the destroyed government exhausted. I put on a T-shirt, jeans, and a buildings, I wanted to erase the past. I jacket. Forgive me. I´m not an Iron Man. prayed for forgiveness. And I went to the island of the lost Iron Man.

Photo © Endre Tveitan

56 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 57 Friday 23 March Imanuel Schipper

Dramaturg, curator, producer, and a teacher, lecturer, and researcher at the Zurich University of the Staging Arts. He was Director of SNF- research-projects like “Longing for Authenticity”, “re/occupation” (examining the production of Authenticity “publics” in urban spaces through theatrical performances), and by Imanuel Schipper finally “reART: theURBAN” conference (2012). As a dramaturg, he has collaborated with, among My contribution is titled “Staging Authenticity”. others, Rimini Protokoll, William It is the result of a 15-month research Forsythe, and Luk Perceval. He is currently working on a PhD project project funded by the Swiss National Science on “staged authenticity“. Foundation. The project, a critical study of the concept and experience of authenticity in the context of contemporary theatre settings, is divided into three parts:

1) A study of the use of the concept in the last century and today within the context of performing arts 2) A study of different strategies for staging authenticity by accompanying several productions during the production process 3) A study of the reception of authenticity by the public through qualitative interviews

58 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 59 Therefore my paper will focus on three points: did not know what it meant: I could not even pronounce that word correctly, and I can still remember people’s confused 1) Strategies of staging authenticity expresssions as they tried to explain this term to me. 2) Thoughts about the concept of authenticity within the context of performing arts After some years working as a dramaturg with Rimini Protokoll, 3) The act of authentication by the public I have been confronted with this subject more and more: in the press and public discussions, with theatre directors and But before I begin, I want to say a few things about myself, journalists, and mostly, with theatre theoreticians. When they not because I think I’m particularly exciting, but because I were talking to me, I always acted as if I knew exactly what they think it is quite important to note the context from which I am meant. However, this was not the case. approaching this problem. Five years ago, I started teaching in Zürich, telling young, would-be professionals about drama and theory. That was the moment when I noticed that I had to eliminate this deficiency and I’ve been searching for a workable definition ever since, which is not so easy.

By the way, in this introductory section, I have already presented some strategies for staging authenticity.

Strategies for staging authenticity 1) When you were to hear me speak you would notice my faulty English and terrible pronunciation! This lack of perfection would confirm to you that I am not a trained English actor who only makes it sound as if he has lived through this biography. Maybe you would even have some sympathy for my Swiss accent! 2) Speaking of biography, when a biography is recounted it gives you a feeling of “I know him somehow”, or “I feel close to him”, and simplifies the identification process with that person. From left Sven Amtsberg, Imanuel Schipper, Alexander Posch From the production “La CiCi CIttà” 2004; Schauspielhaus Hamburg© Schauspielhaus Hamburg 3) The photos of the theatre, of me, and of that TV movie somehow verify that it was me who made these photos, and I was brought up in Switzerland. I am not a scientist! After my that it is me who you can see on them. This is another form of studies as an actor and some years of being on stage, and in authenticity. front of a camera, I started to work as a dramaturg in several 4) Or how about this. Do you remember that I admitted state theatres in Germany and Switzerland, for example in earlier that I had not heard the term “authenticity”? That is the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the Schauspielhaus in not strictly true—but confessions, and especially this public Zurich. In Hamburg, I got the chance to lead an independent acknowledgment of ignorance, make me a more likeable theatre that was situated in a former cinema. In that role, and person, and this feeling—sympathy again—is very favorable to from an early point, I made contact with the artist collective the process of seeing someone as authentic. Rimini Protokoll, with whom I worked on several projects. In 5) The use of documents on stage immediately makes the story one of the many after-show public conversations, I heard the more authentic. word “authenticity” for the first time of my life. Of course I

60 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 61 Rimini Protokoll provides an important example of another planning to recreate, loses its authenticity in the moment of its strategy for authentic theatre. As you may know, this performance. worldwide, working artist collective is mostly known for 2) It is very hard to be authentic when asked to be so. “Be their work with non-professional actors, with the so-called authentic—now! A little bit more!” (it is like the order—do not “Experts of the Everyday”. Of course, for those reasons their think of a white elephant!) plays are not dramatic literature but a kind of documentary 3) When you are thinking or talking about, or just observing, your theatre around a specific theme, such as Death, the Court, the authenticity, then you are not being authentic. You are being Grounding of Sabena, or the annual shareholder meeting of reflective or observant. The moment you want to be authentic is Daimler-Benz. Their performers can be elderly ladies, Vietnam the moment when you will lose it. soldiers, Bulgarian, long-distance lorry drivers, Indian call- So—what do we mean then? centre workers, and so on. Non-professional performers are in a “mode of self- Actually, in the context of theatre, the use of non-professional representation” that is based on a kind of ‘non-acting’ in the performers performing on the same stage as professional trained sense of ‘just being there’. Authenticity here is based on the actors is one of the main points of stage authenticity, especially idea of the possibility of a reference between the “I” and the in contemporary German theatre. This connection has become “world” that is 100% direct and “free of representation”. In this so established that Hajo Kurzenberger can speak of the, “theatre case, authenticity denotes a contradiction of representation. of authenticity as a theatre of amateur actors” (Laiendarsteller). We speak of an authentic presentation, assuming that the thing that is represented by the presentation is represented as So let’s stay with this for a moment. Does this mean we only have if it is not a re-presentation. to use non-professionals in order to create authenticity? Does the audience really mean this when they talk about authentic But: theatre? 1) Representations of the self (biography, body etc.) are still And anyway, what makes the non-professional performers representations. authentic performers? To find out, I would like to do an 2) A ‘representation-less’ relation between actors and the experiment with you. audience is impossible because the space of the stage is a kind of ‘intermediary body’. The stage of every performance is a Experiment: (self)- representation of itself.

1) Imagine a moment of strong authenticity: a movement, a So again - what do we mean by ‘authenticity’ in the context of a sentence etc.—everybody has one? performance? 2) I will ask you to come up and show this moment to us in a very authentic manner. Thoughts on the concept of authenticity within the context of the performing arts We will stop now. Of course I will not ask you to perform We can start with a quote by Jonathan Culler, who examined here because it is not possible! This experiment reveals three how authenticity works in the tourism industries: “The paradoxes of the concept of authenticity within the context of paradox, the dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced performing: as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic, it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence 1) If you are thinking about an authentic moment that you lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by have experienced—at that very moment you cannot express its mediating cultural codes”. authenticity anymore. Furthermore, any gesture, which you are

62 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 63 It is very difficult to talk about authenticity. Everybody And of course, there is one place that always has to be different, somehow knows what it means, but the concept itself is hard where people are always playing different characters than to understand because of the multiple uses in various areas of themselves, and that is in the theatre—or in literature. Rousseau our life: in art, media, politics, marketing, and in the context of says that all art is the exact opposite of being authentic. Anyone personal self-fulfilment. seeking authenticity should search for it in nature—not in art.

Whenever “authenticity” is used to describe a production, this Friedrich Nietzsche asks us to become who we are (!), and to concept serves as a sort of umbrella term for a whole complex of choose to be the person we know that we already are. This means meanings, including “natural”, “real”, “pure”, and “direct”. we also have to tell the truth about ourselves, and that we should be ourselves in the duties we have to perform in life. Nietzsche Authenticity belongs to the semantic field of sincerity, sees authenticity as a way of accepting the life we live, rather than directness, honesty, credibility, and originality. Its etymological lying to ourselves about the life we live. origin comes from the Greek auto-entes, which means “performed by his own hand” or “self-completion”. Even in Søren Kierkegaard is next on the list. He introduced a new antiquity, the spectrum of meanings went from originator to aspect—the personal point-of-view. If there was any kind of perpetrator to self-murderer. It also has to do with the concepts individuality before, with different authenticities for different of “authority”, “authorship”, and “autonomy”. people, then that authenticity should be clearly visible from the Some more facts: You can use authenticity to describe a person outside for everybody. I agree with Kierkegaard when he says that or a thing. The meaning of ‘personal authenticity’ has something authenticity is the truth. to do with credibility, sincerity, trust, and honesty, but also with a feeling of being close to somebody. We also describe a person as Now we make a big jump into the 1950s: authentic, if he or she is true to himself or herself. Theodor Adorno writes that he experiences the A-word as a I would now like to discuss some different ideas that strange concept and that he wants to use it systematically. Here philosophers have had at different times about the concept of is how he does it. First, he uses it as a term to describe some personal authenticity: aspects of aesthetics. This is completely new. He says that a real artwork—in opposition to a piece of work produced by the art- One of the first people to think about that concept in modern industry—has some authenticity, and by that he means that the times, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Rousseau, artwork has an objective commitment to something, which is every human being comes into the world with a kind of pure much more than just an accidental expression. ‘nucleus’, which is—and this is important for his philosophy— entirely good. During our life we meet different people, such as Niklas Luhmann postulates that authenticity can only be our parents, and more evil ones, such as our teachers (!), and shown but not described self-reflectively by oneself—something lose touch with our nucleus. Or else, it gets covered up. In other we explored earlier in this article. words, society helps to destroy our personal authenticity. Who we are and how others see us is no longer authentic. Rousseau Jürgen Habermas then says that authenticity is absolutely proposes that everything that is in contact with that nucleus necessary if you want to have real communication. becomes authentic and good. He also turns this around and I will skip the discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and others, who says that a person’s deeds can only be good if the person is good, propose to construct an authentic self by deciding who and how meaning authentic. So for Rousseau, authenticity is something you want to be. They proposed authenticity as a ‘lived’ decision. that you have to regain in order to be a good person and do some Many theories of self-fulfilment or self-realization are based on good. these ideas or on the misunderstanding of these ideas.

64 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 65 I jump again to two modern and still living persons. I don’t know how many of these thoughts are relevant to the theatre. First Charles Taylor. In his The Ethics of Authenticity, Sources of the Selves, or The Malaise of Modernity he focuses very It might be easier to examine the “authenticity of things.“ strongly on the concept of authenticity. He sees the problem Here, authenticity could mean different things: of modernity in three parts: individualism; the power of instrumental rationality; and lack of freedom. 1) Simple truth—instead of lies He proposes to use authenticity as a moral ideal for society, 2) Natural—instead of artificial (food) which transcends its fragmentation. Hence, authenticity must 3) Closer to nature than to civilization be something that is no longer individual. 4) Real—instead of fake He says that authenticity has to include: 5) Original—instead of a copy

1) Not only a finding, but also a creating and constructing So we use authenticity in the following four categories: element. 2) Originality. Normatively 3) Resistance against the actual morality of society, or even the In the sense of definition (e.g. an authentic Italian piazza) known and accepted morality. 4) At the same time, it needs to be open to its full meaning—not Morally just for the individual but for the whole of society! In the sense of honesty or sincerity (e.g. an authentic person) 5) It has to redefine itself at all times, and be in continuing dialogue with its surroundings. Empirically In the sense of original (e.g. an authentic Rembrandt) The other philosopher I want to mention is Alessandro Ferrara, who has written on Rousseau’s social and ethical Evaluative thought. He asks, how long can human beings afford to be as As a measure of credibility (e.g. how a person said that he/she different as we are, and what are the costs? He says that we are was authentic) not living a human life, but a life constructed by something or someone with a special purpose, which is obviously not that of In the current discourses on authenticity we no longer talk human beings. So he sees authenticity as, “the capacity to accept about the one, the good, the beautiful, and coming from an the undesired aspects of the self, a sensitivity to the inner needs inner ‘nucleus’. We think of authenticity more as a result linked with the essential aspects of identity, and a non-repressive of a process at a given place and time. We don’t believe that attitude toward one’s inner nature”. authenticity lingers on forever in eternity, but rather that it has to be redefined all the time. We are not sure anymore whether Let us finish this philosophical excursion with some conclusions: it is the descriptive attribute of an object, but rather we think it - The question remains whether something authentic exists has something to do with modes of perception and reflection. within our nucleus. To conclude: Authenticity is no longer the opposite of - There seems to be a conflict between individualism and society. representation, but the result of—more or less explicit— - There is a kind of a moral duty to take care of authenticity. production processes. - It is not quite clear if authenticity actually exists, or is constructed, or just perceived by others. The act of authenticity by the public But the main question remains: can authenticity be To recap: this discussion was about the authenticity of the constructed? person.

66 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 67 Well, there must be something, which somebody deliberately Conclusion constructed, which affects something that we call authentic. It is impossible to be authentic on stage. And this is true beyond theatre too. Authenticity is produced It is impossible to be authentic on purpose, or on demand. everywhere. The food industry advertises ‘authentic’ fruit However, it is possible to construct authentic feelings for the flavors of gummy bears, tourism professionals provide audience. ‘authentic’ experiences in the form of encounters with native people, and condom manufacturers promote a Authenticity is not an attribute of the performance or the story, more ‘authentic’ sensation. Even sneakers can provide an it rather describes a ‘mode of perception’ within the spectator. “authentic” experience. Authenticity has become a label for This mode of ‘authentification’ is an active, individual, the advertising industry. perceptual process within the spectator, which can be brought But, as we saw before, authenticity itself is not really on, or enhanced, by the different strategies used by directors constructible. or performers in a performance.

So what is constructed?

I would like to talk about the construction of “moments of authenticity” or “feelings of authenticity”. This means that ‘authenticity’ doesn‘t lie within the object but Endnote is constructed by the public. This text is an edited version of Imanuel Schippers manuscript presented at the Monsters of Reality. The public itself produces authenticity by ‘authentificating’ the object it ‘receives’. They become, in that moment, the Sources arbiters of authentification. Amrein, Ursula(2009): Das Authentische : Referenzen und Repräsentationen. Zürich: Chronos Berg, Jan, Hügel, Hans-Otto; Kurzenberger, Hajo (Ed.) (1997): And here I come to my last thought: Authentizität als Darstellung. Hildesheim: Universität Hildesheim cop. Our society, which has a worldwide authenticity industry, Ferrara, Alessandro(1993): Modernity and authenticity: a study in the complains of a lack of authenticity, which manifests itself in a social and ethical thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Albany: State desire, a longing for authenticity, originality, and truth. University of New York cop. Fischer-Lichte, Erika(2007): Inszenierung von Authentizität. But at the same time, the audience, which is part of this Tübingen: Francke ‘production company’, actually has a leading part in the Knaller, Susanne (Ed.) (2006): Authentizität : Diskussion eines “society of the spectacle”, ästhetischen Begriffs. München: Fink Matzke, Annemarie M (2005): Testen, spielen, tricksen, scheitern : Formen szenischer Selbstinszenierung im zeitgenössischen And here we have another paradox in the production of Theater. Hildesheim: Olms authenticity: this kind of longing for unbroken authenticity Straub, Julia (Ed.) (2012): Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Criti- reflects a knowledge that it does not exist. cal Concept. Bielefeld: Transcript Wenninger, Regina (2009): Künstlerische Authentizität : philoso- This situation seems to be a positive one for the theatre. phische Untersuchung eines umstrittenen Begriffs. Würzburg: Königshausen: Neumann The co-presence between actor and spectator, the co-presence between being and showing, demands a continual process of playful authentication, and allows the hope of catching genuine moments—moments of authenticity.

68 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 69 Friday 23 March Kalauz/Schick

This is a collaboration between independent choreographer Laura Kalauz and performance artist Martin Schick. In their artistic collaborations, Kalauz CMMN and Schick investigate models of communication and the impact of conventions (artistic, administrative, political etc.) within a theatrical setting. They create SNS PRJCT scenic plays, research performative acts and installations, and raise by Kalauz/Schick questions about the limits and possibilities of performative space. Their last piece, “title”, won the CMMN SNS PRJCT deals with social 2009 ZKB Patronage Prize at the Theaterspektakel Zürich. relationships and the gaps that can open up when operating beyond the logic of economic profit. CMNN SNS PRJCT proposes new trading opportunities and forms of exchange within a theatre context where intimacy and the unfamiliar intersect. And so the theatre becomes an arena of free trade and adventure, a space between voyeurism and participation, and an ode to incompleteness. A place to challenge all the unspoken agreements that form the basis of how we relate to each other, all the criteria by which we act and think and make decisions, all the habits and conventions that influence our behavior, all the things we take for granted and no longer question. Welcome to the world of ‘common sense’.

70 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 71 If you call it a work of theatre, you affirm.

If you don’t call it a work of theatre, you negate.

Beyond affirmation and negation, what would you call it?

72 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 73 Saturday 24 March Trine Falch

Performer, Theatre Studies drop out, and former member of the Baktruppen performance collective. Based in conceptual theatre, her work includes performance art, FALSE visual arts, music, photography, writing, and more. Trine tries to stage herself, her language, and her situations within the inherent theatricality of the setting. AWAKENING by Trine Falch

FALSE AWAKENING no1

Good morning, Theatre audiences can be I am your audience. recognized by their silence. The audience has been They just stare and never sleeping. answer when you talk to them, do they? You are free to look in all directions, to hear When my eyes had whatever you want to hear. adjusted to the light, a Haven’t you heard it yet? bunch of well-dressed The audience is the new people appeared right in protagonist. It’s all up to front of me. They had been the audience now. I’ve sitting there in the dark, taken over the production muffling their coughs and of meaning and coherence crossing their legs for more and beauty—the whole than a century. They looked package. old.

You just continue to do the things you do best— sitting—I said. You can leave the watching to me. I’m your audience. I’m very open, and I’m sure I’ll make some fiction out of you.

74 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 75 FALSE AWAKENING FALSE AWAKENING FALSE AWAKENING no.2 no.3 no.4

Good morning, I must have fallen asleep. Good morning. I am your audience, Sleeping on stage is the I just had a terrible I said. most real thing you can do. nightmare. I’m like you. You are the audience, I hear. I’ve decided I want to pay Let me read something Well, good morning. too. From now on, I’ll do from the program: theatre no one will notice. We were all looking in I can’t see you. I found myself a chair and the same direction. I can’t You paid for your tickets just sat there, looking for remember what we were and became invisible. action. looking at—it couldn’t have been a show, that’s The show was dealing with This is the action, the for sure, and that’s not the whether it was worth the audience said, clapping point. The point was to time or not, and listed all their hands—and the look in the same direction. the things you could have reaction as well. The show Eventually some began done instead of sitting still is called “The Wheel” and looking at each other in the dark. lasts forever. You can join if instead. You could feel the you like. gaze, full of expectations. I started on time and the In order to please the gaze, rest was about getting Thank you, I said, but I am we started to act strange. out of that position in a your audience. convincing and natural, yet When I looked up from graceful way. the program, I found the audience had fallen asleep. I couldn’t see the audience and overacted. As a final, pretty desperate gesture, I waved my arms, hoping for applause. Instead, the audience (it must have been them) grabbed my arms and started gnawing them. Help, I cried. Those are my arms! This is my show! It’s our show now, they said. We paid for it.

I could see my hands disappearing into thin air, and then I blacked out.

76 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 77 FALSE AWAKENING FALSE AWAKENING FALSE AWAKENING no.5 no.6 no.7

Just kidding. Moving down the aisle, Good morning, audience. 1. actor: We’re on the fringe Good morning. And then contemporary I am your actor. searching for your row of I have been sleeping on of reality. They say our I am your audience, the theatre disappeared into The actor has been seats—excuse me, thank stage, dreaming about existence is parasitic. In protagonist. the real, and everything ‘sleeping’. you, thank you, excuse contemporary theatre. order to avoid extinction, became... I hadn’t even me, thank you, thank you, we’ll have to keep a low When I sit down, it’s finished that sentence For a long time, I wanted thanks, thank you, thank After all its efforts to merge profile. showtime. Wherever I look, before contemporary you to be like me. I you, I’m sorry, you said, with reality, contemporary something really special is theatre was back in a more interviewed you, I danced before sitting down. theatre should be hard to 2. actor: No, we have to taking place right in front unreal mode than ever. with you, I did sing-along, The discrete looking spot, but it wasn’t. In order show ourselves, and act of me. I served you chocolate and around, the thumbing to be recognized, we kept recognizably. If you can’t Still, it might be hard to wine, and what have you… through the program… Let within closed circuits. spot it, then it’s not there. This time, you are taking tell who’s looking at whom. just to make you join my me read something from And there will be no more place right in front of me. And if you ever wonder show—the place to be. the program, you said. There were rumours, applause. Your special thing is sitting who’s looking at you—I though, that the really, still in the dark, all looking am too. This is your time, I said, I wanted to be real too. really contemporary 1. actor: We want applause, in the same direction. dramatic changes are on That’s why I sat down. theatre was being put on we want applause! their way. But all in vain. After a while my seat in secret places at secret Don’t worry, I will You said you’d rather keep turned into an abyss, and I times. But I couldn’t find it. 2. actor: So we’ll need to fictionalize you, I said. your position—sitting, kept falling, thinking—at Instead, I had to hang out maintain the distinction Representation was out, watching, in silence and least my darkness is darker at the same old places with between actors and they could stay as they darkness, as if pretending than yours. No exit signs. the same old drunken kids audience, no matter what. were—only a bit more not to be there. And I don’t need to pretend showing their new piece present, perhaps. You just I’m not there. called “The Wheel”. 1. actor: We’ll have to act continue your play in the Still you managed to make out of sync, monstrous, dark, I have no problem everyone believe you were forever. with that, I said. Even the real thing. And no absence has its beauty. matter how hard I tried 2. actor: My god, what are After all it’s up to me to see to act naturally, you acted we? myself in you. a hundred times more natural than me, as if you’d 1. actor: We are on the been doing the same thing fringe of reality. They say for more than a century: our existence is parasitic, and so on…

78 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 79 Saturday 24 March Toril Goksøyr/Camilla Martens

Performance project established in 1997 by Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens. Their practice represents Relational an exchange between politics and the arts, where documentary strategies and authentic Realism elements connect theatre to reality. Goksøyr & Martens have by Goksøyr & Martens presented their work at the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art, the Oslo National Theatre, the What should the title of a contribution such Johannesburg Art Gallery, the as this be? “Dear God, don’t ever let me Avignon Festival, the Berlin F.I.N.D do documentary theatre again?” Or, “Fuck Schaubühne, the Belgrade Art Saloon, the Venice Biennial, and realism, get real!” Or, “Don’t give a damn the Liverpool Biennial. about actors—send in the audience?” And if the last is the case, that people are no longer interesting, that actors playing themselves are no longer felt to be worth putting onstage—what about all the performances we have already done?

What about all the people we have interviewed, placed on stage, and who got to talk about their—and here’s that word again—documentary life-stories? What about the refugees from Kosovo who talked about how they managed to get to Norway? What about the friends of Benjamin Hermansen, who talked about what really happened behind the supermarket in Holmlia when their friend got killed? What about Marte Wexelsen Goksøyr, who played Cinderella, who played herself talking about what it was like to have Down’s syndrome? What about the fisher girl who talked about what it was like to live on a deserted island in the north of Norway? What about all the activists who talked about how another world can be made possible? And what about all the young people in Johannesburg who talked to us about what they dreamt

80 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 81 at night? Should we have dropped all this? the same time—and this is important— Of course not. Because an important aim of making a political issue visible is never our work has always been to give different the sole or final goal of our work. If it had types of people an opportunity to tell their been, we could just as well have written own stories, and the narratives we have an article or organised a seminar. And that gained insight from have taken place in is something we have never wished to do. various ways: we have collaborated with Become leaders of meetings? Or writers high-profile journalists and placed them of feature articles? No. Because even on stage; used classic interview techniques though art can’t change a political situation ourselves; organised weekly writing overnight, it can promote thought and meetings; extracted unknown people’s imagine possible new perspectives with the biographical material; and searched our help of its own innate power, which carries own autobiographies. And we are grateful beauty, poetry, and the unreality of the real. to all those who have given us their personal stories and who were happy to At the same time, however, if it is be hauled up onto a stage in front of an lamentable, wonderful, and unbearable audience. reality we are in search of, perhaps it is high time to make some adjustments. For what In addition to our journalistic and semi- if those you believed could be themselves anthropological work, which aims for and tell you their own stories, can never extreme realism, we are also interested in be anything else but actors while there is constructing real happenings. The choice a stage and a theatre? In the performance of event is of great importance for the “Palestinian Embassy”, we placed the actions that the project is centred around, audience and the actors together with and for creating the possibility of placing no clear boundary between them. We the performance in real time. It makes a did the same thing in “Church Service”. difference if what is being enacted is taking And we tried to do the same again with place right now, and in that way is both our students in The Norwegian Academy theatre and reality—simultaneously. of Theatre. The fourth wall, if it exists, only exists behind the audience, and this Apart from using documentary and fictive means that the audience become the most forms, biographical and staged techniques, important actors. And the audience cannot the extraordinary and the everyday, we be directed. You can’t agree on things in believe that our work has clear relational advance. You actually risk being surprised. qualities. The stage, on the basis of our experience, is highly suitable for creating “PALESTINIAN EMBASSY” precisely those social situations that are capable of bringing reality into play. In autumn 2009, we put on “Palestinian Embassy” at Kontraskjæret in Oslo. The Running parallel with the relational performance marked an official opening investigation is a political project. It is of a Palestinian embassy. The ‘embassy’ true that many of our productions have was a hot-air balloon that was to fly had, and have, an openly political focus. At above the city, while key politicians and Photo © Bjørn Frode Holmgren

82 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 83 academics from Norway and Palestine And why did it end up like that? Why keep it still. And then the wind got up even were invited on board to talk about the were the other politicians unwilling to more, and the conversation continued, relationship between Israel and Palestine. participate? but the embassy was unable to lift off—it Stein Tønnesson (a former director of would have been too dangerous. the Oslo Peace Research Institute) led At the same time, the Party Secretary the discussions, which were directly of The Labor Party said that he would Could this be an apt illustration of the transmitted to the ground. The balloon like to meet Barghouti. And the Minister situation in which the Palestinians find was decked out in the colors of the of the Environment and International themselves? Maybe. And maybe it was Palestinian flag, and had Palestinian Development also wanted to meet him. not all that important that the Prime Embassy written on the side in English It was just difficult to do so during our Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Arabic. event. Just great! We very much wanted had other plans and could not be there Mustafa Barghouti, who had travelled all as actors. It is uncertain whether their By means of this airborne embassy, the way from Palestine, to have a proper presence would have made for better we wanted to—while also creating programme during his short stay, so we theatre. But the fact that Rola sang, that something fantastical, dreamlike, and went with him by taxi to the Ministry of the balloon inflated and rose from the poetical—realise and promote real the Environment and International Affairs, ground, that this was actually possible— political meetings between a Palestinian and Youngstorget, where the meetings that was important. And it was a fine ambassador and a Norwegian politician. were due to take place, only to discover sight to see the balloon sail off while we that the Party Secretary did not have time heard the Palestinian ambassador cheer in Did we succeed? and had to ask his adviser to replace him, jubilation! Photo © Bjørn Frode Holmgren even though she was just as busy and Well, we invited Palestinian and also had to find a replacement. And the “CHURCH SERVICE” or personal standpoint in relation to the Norwegian politicians. We involved Hanin same thing happened with the Minister theme. In “Church Service”, we had two Shakrah, a Palestinian law student from of the Environment and International In 2010, the performance “Church Service” highly competent ministers: Tor Øystein Sweden with many years experience of Development. Mustafa Barghouti had to was presented at W17, Kunstnernes Hus Vaaland, who is also a journalist and working on Middle East solidarity, and we make do with talking to his adviser. The [The Artists’ House]. has worked on Palestinian issues for a also involved Mustafa Barghouti, a former former presidential candidate cannot have long time, and Kari Veiteberg, who is Palestinian presidential candidate, who felt he was particularly important. The performance took the form of an very interested in how a church service was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize actual church service, its dramaturgy functions as a performance. So we were in in 2010. Barghouti sits in the Palestinian The opening ceremony was held. There conforming to church liturgy, but carrying complete agreement that what we were Parliament, but neither belongs to the was dancing, singing, and speeches. The a clearly politicized message. doing was setting up a church service, Fatah or Hamas parties. In our eyes, a balloon was ready, everyone was happy, and at the same time a performance. A perfect ambassador! and the radio equipment that was to The church service included “This is performance where everyone present We invited many people from Norway. broadcast the discussions live was all in no dream”, a satellite-transmitted, would assume a role, including the public, We invited practically all the politicians working order. And then the wind got up. documentary choral work composed in which was given the role of congregation. who were members of the Standing The sail started to blow back and forth, co-operation with Lars Petter Hagen, and Committee on Foreign Affairs. Most of and suddenly it was uncertain whether written and performed by young people In her review, Line Ulekleiv wrote, “That them immediately declined (“... they saw the frail structure would manage to lift from the Palestinian Youth Committee in both the ministers and the young people no occasion for this, even though they off. Even so, Stein Tønnesson and the two Gaza City. represented themselves is clearly a would quite like to, for this was a fine politicians clambered on board. They began central feature of the performance, one event in itself… etc”.), a few accepted, and their conversation sitting down, crouching The project was set up so that all the that directly involves the spectator in an one kept his word—Morten Høglund from at the bottom of the basket while the pilot actors could play themselves and acute, conflict-ridden reality. As such, the The Progress Party. and some members of the public tried to participate according to their occupation performance was by nature documentary.

84 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 85 This meant that this time—staged or Or is it? Isn’t this the kind of theatre not—the public assumed the role of it is most fun to create? The kind of a character, performing theatrically theatre where reality and fiction slide with every vocal response and nervous away and merge with each other in a movement”. way that makes it difficult to separate one from the other? We think so. For at “TO WHISPER AND SHOUT” the very moment when nobody knows what is going to happen next, when The production “To whisper and shout” was we can no longer decide how the story, made in collaboration with Class 4 from or the dialogue, is going to continue, The Norwegian Academy of Theatre, and an enhanced situation arises. And this invitations were sent out a couple of weeks enhanced situation, which we cannot ago. The performance was divided into two be bothered to define as either fiction acts. In the first act—entitled “Sheltered or reality, but which oscillates from unit, dementia section”—the audience sat one to the other, and provokes both watching the wordless performance from enthusiasm and frustration, offers a the top of a four-metre-high scaffold. In the unique opportunity we do not want to second act—entitled “Conversation with miss out on. For us, to investigate such the audience”—the audience was invited an opportunity is reason in itself for to discuss the format and themes of the continuing to make ‘relational fiction’. first act. In this last part, a member of the audience talked about his experience of Having said all this, the strange thing doing extra shifts at a hospital. Another is that what we have done in our most member of the audience talked about how recent project is to put on a performance the actors could have done things differ- where the audience sits high above the ently. Both contributions are fine until we actors, and where ethology rather than realise that everything is perhaps not quite dialogue is the underlying principle. We how we imagined it. Some people felt they have put on a performance that does not had been cheated. They did not understand contain a single documentary passage that they were part of a performance. They of text, and we conceive the work as felt they had been exposed and slightly posing and discussing an existential ridiculed. Is that good? No, of course not! If question rather than a political issue. So playing with reality leads to people feeling maybe this contribution should actually insecure and unable to grasp what they have a title along the lines of, “Fuck are part of, or having to play a role they did the audience, send in the actors!” Drop not want to, then something is wrong. For, realism, give us some movements and in the same way as when one collaborates forget about the documentary! All we with people playing themselves, it is im- need is a wonderful tale about the life we portant to ensure that the audience knows lead on Earth. what it is a part of. It is not much fun to go to the theatre if the experience means uncertainty as to what may happen.

Photo © May B. Langhelle

86 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 87 Saturday 24 March Tore Vagn Lid

Director, auteur, and artistic leader of Transiteatret-Bergen. He has a PhD from the Institut für THE DIALECTICS Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Giessen, Germany. He studied music, aesthetics and theatre aesthetics, dramaturgy and music OF THE dramaturgy, and political science at the University of Bergen, the Humboldt and Free Universities DOCUMENT: of Berlin, and the University of Agder Music Conservatory of Kristiansand. Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric in ‘‘Almenrausch—A Radio Hearing’’

by Tore Vagn Lid

Every Quote is taken out of its context

I. Prelude: The document— and the after-party of 1996

If you strayed into an after-party during the 1990s, and were unfortunate enough to end up in a discussion, you could be sure of one thing. Everyone around the table insisted on being chairman, and no one would have anything to say. To say something yourself was binding and pretentious and could be misinterpreted as a real commitment—a statement. The same was true in art in general, and in contemporary theatre in particular. The apolitical postmodernism of the 1980s had been unchallenged for so long, that any kind of commitment or statement had become impossible, and could only be camouflaged as irony and sarcasm. Just as sure as the absence of expression and opinion at these parties and gala performances, was the almost complete absence of the words “documentary” and “documentarism”, and for the same reason. In a postmodern world where reality itself was dissolved in endless layers of fiction, the document with its desire for reality had little or no place, just like the words “political theatre”. Thus, the 1980s and 90s were in fact anomalies in the history of theatre; wonderfully idyllic anomalies in a historical period marked by tension, conflict, and ideological war. It was “End of History”,

88 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 89 “European Union” and “Clinton’s saxophone”. In real politics these III. The first critical question: Is the new were the decades, not unexpectedly, of the (political) center documentarism (in fact) a revival of naturalism? parties, “the new lefts” etc. They were—not unlike the participants at the 90s after-party—sitting at the middle of the table predicting The naturalism of the 1880s doesn’t come from the theatre. It stability and balanced agreement. comes to the theatre! As a radical strategy of reality, it began as The gradual movement of the 2000s towards new strategies of an artistic response to a change in our view of Man produced by reality can be understood as a reaction against the above. A revival scientific advances. With the publication of Charles Darwin’sOn of a dialectical approach to social reality, a re-politicization of the Origin of Species, the vigorous heroes of Schiller and Lessing the arts scene—which dominant theories of the 80s and 90s had were thrown headlong back into nature, governed by internal conceived as nearly impossible—struck, and in the end forced its and external drives. In Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, the same acting way in, even on those stages that had most vigorously resisted. and independent heroes are glued to their own class background and social context. Ibsen is no longer radical enough. The view on II. Warning Signs: When documentary theatre man changes and the theatre responds critically. And this is often undermines itself! overlooked: in the beginning naturalism was—as a program—in fact revolutionary, and even socialist. By pulling reality itself onto So what is the situation now? the stage, people were confronted with the world’s misery. Well into the first half of a new decade, critical voices have In that way, the demands of radical naturalism for authenticity— already addressed a trend by claiming that it is passing away. I hope the pure and natural—reflect more modern strategies of reality; through a couple of examples to show that the attempt to ‘trend you might call them “documentary” (a comparison that rarely set’ the “documentary” is not only professionally weak thinking, comes up!). The German naturalist writer Arno Holz (easy to but also—and more importantly—politically and artistically remember because his name means “wood” in German) came destructive. up with this formula when he defined the ‘dogma’ of political naturalism: K (art) = N (nature) - X, where X is all the ‘waste So what’s at stake? product’ that lies in between. It’s the artist’s role to reduce X to as close to 0 as possible. My claim is that a lack of differentiation and a vague use of concepts in the current discussion of “documentary” and Naturalism thus started out as a protest but ended in reaction. “documentary theatre” is about to create false opposites. Based Why? on an idea that “documentary” in itself is an expression of a naive quest for ‘authenticity’, now a set of (what can be seen as) new The problem actually became the same as much of what now goes ‘modernist’ demands for withdrawal, ‘re-theatralization’ and ’de- under the umbrella term “documentary”, and for the same reason, intellectualization’ are revitalized. In this so-called ‘anti-intellectual’ I think: tendency, there is something almost reactionary, an attack designed to shut down crucial opportunities for the theatre as a ‘critical- 1) On the one hand, it made such a strong effort to ‘document’ political’ room for experience. reality, that a basic understanding and a deeper explanation So here I want to make a case for a clean-up and for creating were not possible within the dramaturgical strategies of radical some new definitions, so that no one (postmodernists, curators naturalism. To describe a rock falling is not the same as discovering or others) is using ‘bad’ language to stigmatize, and thereby the laws of gravitation, Brecht once said. Or updated,—to describe neutralize, crucial dramaturgical and material strategies, not only a junkie’s collapse is not the same as understanding why the junkie for a contemporary, but also for a future theatre. collapsed. On the other hand, it added—as it still does—something naive and essentialist to that kind of belief in the documenting of reality; a naiveté that can quickly stigmatize and thus neutralize the very concepts of “documentary” and “documentarism”.

90 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 91 IV. The dialectic of the document in spoke differently about the same event. Stories contradicted each “Almenrausch— A Radio Hearing” other. Facts contradicted facts, etc. What became more and more interesting to me was seeing the hearing itself as a dialectical- When I started working on “Almenrausch”—first as a stage dramaturgical form, as an assembly of highly subjective voices and production, then in terms of what I called a Radio Hearing for the explanations, all of which defy all other truth apart than that which Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), the most important occurs in the conflict between the stories. So it’s not the documents thing for me was to avoid this kind of naturalistic documentarism, themselves, but the conflicting encounters between those who are where the authentic document itself stood in opposition to the play, the real objects, or documents, of the hearing. The hearing format the fiction, and the representation. Instead of such a ‘naturalistic is a place where subjectivity wrestles with subjectivity, where lies documentary’, I deliberately tried the opposite, namely what I have confront lies, and positions challenge positions, in a room which called a rhetorical contrapuntal method. only has that subjectivity as condition and possibility. I wrote “Almenrausch—A Radio Hearing” in three stages, as a As the German sociologist Max Weber made clear in his score for tape players, actors, original voices, and a small orchestra. respectful 1920 critique of Karl Marx, giving up the concept of “one The ambition was to present a kind of psychoanalysis of great story” does not mean undermining the existence of several Norwegian war history, an attempt to recall and articulate the coexisting stories and social facts. Nor does it undermine the history of the so-called war communists, that is, the part of the existence of objective relations between these stories and facts. That resistance movement that—despite their importance during the is, if two individuals—two subjects—tell contradictory versions of fighting—fell under the shadow of the official resistance movement the same “story”, the conflicting storytelling will itself present an and its celebrities, such as Max Manus and Kjakan Sønsteby. objective relation. This is a crucial point, because by overcoming the Almost randomly I had come across dozens of hours of old dichotomy of old-school relativism (or subjectivism) and the naive recordings, made privately, in secret, during the 1960s and 70s. concept of one synthetic truth (class or evolutionary) reflected in Here, dusty and unheard, were the voices of the forgotten partisan the political art both of the 1930s and of the 1960s and 70s, we can warriors, suppressed and renounced. Key words were the war about also overcome what I see as a false dichotomy of “documentarism” the war, and more importantly, the battle over history; a battle that vs. “aestheticism” now emerging on the European art-scene. ultimately determines our collective memory. The material was enormous, fragmented, and not in any way systematic. VI Relational logic & dialectic document As a dramaturgical strategy, I chose the “Hearing” as a form of “public venting” that usually takes place after a major disaster. The What is a document essentially? goal of a hearing is to allow the people involved get their versions The Norwegian psychiatrist and twin researcher Einar Kringeln of a story or event heard. My project was to freely construct the grew tired of colleagues using the phrase, “to come from/raised in hearing that had never taken place, to set it in the NRK, the official the same family”. This was his example or thought experiment: Norwegian “center of radiation”, and to attempt a dissection of the A family consists, for example, of a brother, a sister, a mother, mighty forces that “control our storytelling”. and a father. The boy and the girl do not grow up in the same family because the boy grows up with a mother, a father, and a sister, while V. The dialectical logic of the hearing: the girl grows up with a mother, a father, and a brother. They have two completely different families. The point is that the objective By itself, the hearing has no dramatic form, but, often contains very relationship is qualitatively different: the girl experiences a brother- dramatic content. When a hearing takes place after a disaster, a mother-father relationship, while the boy experiences a sister- major accident, or a crisis, there is always a lot at stake—not just for mother-father relationship. individuals but for society as a whole (think of Kings Bay, Alexander The same logic would also apply to a document in an art project, Kielland, or 22nd of July). as for example “Almenrausch”. The relation between the document What struck me with all these recordings was the divergence and its context will determine the reality of the document. That is and contradictions within the auditory documents. Different voices what I mean when I use the phrase, “the dialectic of the document”.

92 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 93 And this is the reason why I often try to confront the same fragment underlying story behind all the anniversaries, namely that the Soviet in my work, whether it is a musical, textual, or visual one, with war effort was totally blanked out, as were the Norwegian communist shifting dramaturgical contexts so that the document is repeated and fighters, at the many anniversaries for peace. returns, but always within a different setting. This is what I mean by ‘contrapuntal method’, an anti- The historical documents in “Almenrausch” are in fact documentary countermove with the intention of canceling the confronted with a similar strategy to that used by Johan Sebastian gravitational forces inherent in the documentary material, so Bach in his powerful Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, where a small that dialogic counter-voices can be raised within a hegemonic and theme—known as the ostinato—is repeated with 21 radical, shifting dominant monologue. variations over a period of about 18 minutes. The problem of “documentarism”, or rather, the problem of using Hence, and this is important: Due to this logic it is not possible the word “documentary theatre” shows up in what I have called The to talk about a document (or a theme) being outdated, or to claim dialectic of the document; when manipulation releases the document the same about “documentarism” or “documentary theatre” as such. from its false authenticity. These kinds of polemic claims, whenever and wherever they may Another concrete example is the use of Einar Gerhardsen’s appear, will in fact prove the opposite of what they are trying to say, famous Kråkerøy speech in “Almenrausch—A Radio hearing”. because as documents they can be given new life and new meanings in new documentary settings. Just briefly:

VII. VIII.

“Almenrausch – A Radio Hearing” is not, and could not be a In 1948, Norwegian Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen made his documentary project following the formula of the naturalist Arno infamous Kråkerøy speech at the Labor Party’s national meeting. Holz. There he made a frontal attack on his former party comrades in what Rather than to document, my strategy has been to insert a kind was then the Norwegian Communist Party, and started thereby a of counter-rhetoric, or rhetorical counterpoints against the field of Norwegian “Communist” process, not unlike the hearings initiated by power, which forced these partisans into a shadow existence that has Senator McCarthy in the United States about the same time. lasted to this day. On my quest through the archives I could find no record of the When the official Norway celebrates the various 30, 40, or 50 year original speech. However, I did find a radio recording from the late anniversaries, often under the auspices of the NRK, a tight audiovisual 1970s, where the then retired Gerhardsen—long hailed as a Father dramaturgy is selected, determining: who will be speaking; where; of the Nation—reminisced about his career for NRK. Here, decades what kind of music; who is invited; the host’s choice of words, etc. later, he reads the same speech, but in a low voice, and close to the When I made these anniversaries the material for the radio hearing, I microphone. Now the voice is mild, the tone gentle and friendly. was searching for ways to undermine this rhetoric, to turn it against The question was: how to use this material? How to articulate the itself, whether it be through a particular voice, text, or music. devastating power and effect that this speech had on the hundreds of An example: in the 1985 anniversary broadcast, forty years after the Norwegian communists and their families? The solution was to use a war, NRK reporter Geir Heljesen actually mentioned that the Soviet rhetorical-contrapuntal strategy, where the document—in this case, Embassy was also represented. Nevertheless, if you listen to all of it, Gerhardsen, requoting himself in his old age—was exposed to three you will hear that this small comment becomes the exception that music-dramaturgical strategies or parameters: camouflages the rule; the Soviet Union’s war contributions to Norway are not only toned down, but are also time and again underplayed, 3First, I soundtracked Gerhardsen’s speech with musical battle suppressed, and distorted. material from the early 1930s. In that way, the ‘opposing’ agitational The task was: what is here to be documented?2 My approach force was ‘re-functionalized’ to highlight the underlying brutality of was to cut away the one exception that proves the rule (the comment the speech. “that the Soviet Union is represented”) in order to demonstrate the

94 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 95 3Second, we used various audio-filter and sound-compression tools 2) Documentary (documentarism) must always be written lower- to replicate the harsh sound of the original speech when using old case – that is with a small ‘d’: microphones at the mass meeting of 1948. If not, it will camouflage the fact that the differences in strategies 3The last manipulative strategy was to introduce montages that of reality are greater than the similarities. The sad fact that some connected Gerhardsen’s quoted speech to actual speeches made by “commodity thinkers” in contemporary theatre support their own Gerhardsen’s colleagues—and directly inspired by his speech—as interests as curators by putting the same label on different ‘goods’ part of the attack on the Norwegian Communists. This meant a is quite obvious, given that diversity and tension are far more relocation of Gerhardsen to artistically constructed but no less real difficult to sell than labels and standardizations. contexts.3 Thank you! In this way, I hope, the real political truth can break through the rhetorical surface. Hidden rhetoric is openly met by counter- rhetoric, ‘natural speech’ is met by its sonic subtext, and Gerhardsen’s mild tone is revealed as a kind of covert brutality, so that postwar Norwegian democracy reveals, through the montage Endnotes of sound, certain dictatorial traits. 1 Is it not through the deliberate counter-rhetoric that the actual project can move forward, so that the actual “documentary” is to be found here in the “non-documentary”? 2 By musically and sonically undermining the ground under Gerhardsen’s own rhetorical IX. Closing (The Dialectics of the Document) attempt at self-censorship (that is. his attempts to make his own “Kråkerøy-speech” sober and careful). What I try to do is to recreate the original political charge in the Prime I would like to end with a deep-felt warning! Nothing is more dated Minister’s notorious speech. In that way—as I see it— the anti-documentary becomes than an attempt to mark “Documentarism” and “Documentarism” documentary precisely because the formal, musical manipulation reveals the attempt to as being outdated. deliberately mute the rhetorical. 3 Postmodernist deposits and appendages, which often try to “date” or “historicize” As I see it, the “Monsters of reality” seminar gets two these strategies, are not only paradoxical, but a symptom of the still ongoing crisis of important things right. postmodernism. By focusing on strategies of reality—rather than “Documentary” / “Documentarism”—both journalistic stupidity (that “Documentarism is in”) and the curator’s strategic evil (that “Documentarism is out”) are opposed. For in a situation where the “hunt for news”. “product approach”, and “aesthetic branding” have long since begun to dominate contemporary theatre, I will conclude by emphasizing the following:

1) Dramaturgy is not a ‘trend’: Dramaturgy must never be confused with a ‘trend’. So-called strategies of reality are, as the name indicates, open and polyphonic, both in time and space. Just as all other dramaturgical weapons can be used at any time, so too will various strategies of reality always be a dynamic part of a dramaturgical arsenal for progressive theatre artists. 4

96 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 97 Saturday 24 March Nikolaus Müller-Schöll

Chair of theatre studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, and Director of the Master’s (Dis-)Belief: Program in dramaturgy. Fields of interest include: the comical as paradigm of the experience of modernity, theories on theatre in In search of a lost reality or relation to philosophy, politics, and literature, and experimental playing with illusion forms of contemporary theatre and performance. Recent publications by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll include: Heiner Müller sprechen (2009, ed. with Heiner Goebbels). (1) Main argument If one is to believe the trendspotters of theatre and theatre criticism, contemporary theatre has been shaped by a “recapturing of reality on the stage” (Theaterkanal/Theatertreffen), by a “return of documentary theater” (Laudenbach: 11)1 , or even by a “Théâtre sans illusion” (Biet/ Frantz: 565) since the turn of the century. In contrast to this, it is my assertion that this supposed ‘reality theatre’, in its search for the real, has in fact—like Columbus who searched for India and found America— whether it likes it or not, rediscovered the inextricable ambivalence of the belief in illusion. It is not “reality strikes back”, as the Düsseldorf independent theatre Forum Freies Theater asserted in reference to present-day theatre during a conference in September 2006,2 but rather “illusion”. Contemporary theatre plays with ‘illusion’, one of the motifs criticized by the “post-dramatic theater of the real” (Lehmann 1999a: 67, vgl. 1999b: 183-193). Calculated or disturbed by their own calculations, theatre makers who are particularly interested in reality, or in the real, are showing us what it means to be entangled in the media of theatre and language (vgl. Chartin/Lacoue-Labarthe/Nancy/Weber: 234). To begin with, I will attempt to give a short overview of the historical problem we are dealing with. The first part of this will consist of a brief trawl through the various definitions of reality brought into play within the context of so-called “new documentary theatre” or “reality theatre”. In the second part, I will briefly elucidate a general meaning of “illusion”, as well as what its particular meaning in a theatre context. Following this, I will illustrate my hypothesis through two examples of “reality theater”: Stefan Kaegi’s “bulgarische(r) LKW-Fahrt durchs Ruhrgebiet […] Cargo Sofia Zollverein”3 [Bulgarian Truck Trip through the Ruhr Valley […] Cargo Sofia Zollverein], and Walid Raad’s works, “My neck is thinner thana hair: engines” (vgl. Nakas/Schmitz 96-103), and “I feel a great desire

98 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 99 to meet the masses once again”.4 Finally, I will offer a few suggestions Mike Vanden Heuvel phrases it. These volumes prove arrestingly that this towards a contemporary understanding of illusion. new search for the ‘real’ is a global movement feeding on local issues, if nothing else, and borne aloft on the wings of cosmopolitan opponents of (2) Fictions of Reality, Realism and the Real globalization, and those excluded due to their class, ethnicity, or sexual What do we mean when we speak of “reality”, the “real”, or, like the orientation. New Documentary Theatre, based on facts, manifests itself wonderful title of this symposium, “Monsters of Reality”, on the stage? worldwide in performances depending on all kinds of archived materials, At the moment there is hardly any other issue that one encounters in the utilization of autobiographical materials, in docudramas, in so frequently on the fringes of the theatre, on the independent stage, word-for-word documentations known as “Verbatim Theatre”, and at festivals, in projects funded by government foundations, during multimedia productions. Carol Martin differentiates between six symposia financed by third-party funds, and at theatre and media functions of the new Documentary Theatre: 1. Recent disclosures of studies, performance, and dance congresses. It is difficult to say when trials. 2. Additional accounts of historical events. 3. Reconstructions of this recent search for reality, the real, a new realism, or a new form of events. 4. Connections between autobiography and history. 5. Critiques Documentary Theatre began on the stage. At any rate, this search had of the functions of documentation and fiction. 6. Discussions of the already been on its way for about a decade, and was defining the stage, oral culture of the theatre. The aforementioned recent volumes about along with Reality TV, the Dogma 95 Manifesto, and omnipresent self- ‘the real’ on-stage illustrates this enumeration with the texts of plays exposure on the Internet, as Hans-Thies Lehmann published with his and productions, as well as accounts of the processing of individual “TheatReales” notes of 1998. Here he placed live art with its creation of and societal trauma, revisions of spectacular judicial proceedings, and situations that encourage the spectator to intervene, performance art reenactments of memorable parliamentary committees and political with its questioning of illusion, and theatre by groups like Gob Squad, speeches. and directors like Stefan Pucher and René Pollesch—which he dubbed However, reading these accounts and examples, the impression “Cool Fun”—into the context of this search, and added them to the realm quickly forms that political conflicts are often misused for the creation of of “Post-dramatic theater”, which he had just coined. This search reached entertaining evenings, or that theatre is mutating into a continuation of the Berlin Volksbühne by 2002, when Carl Hegemann published a television by other means. What Carol Martin attempts in her differential dramaturgical pamphlet with the title “Einbruch der Realität” (“Invasion essays seems all the more necessary: explaining the paradoxes of this of Reality”), and incited the fourth International Summer Academy in the new genre, naming its dangers and naiveties, and answering self-evident Frankfurt Mouson Tower with the extraordinary title, “True Truth about questions—what kinds of distinctive features does a theatre that resorts the Nearly Real”. In the following years, this translated into symposia with to archive material offer in comparison to other media? Wherein lies militant programmatic titles like the already mentioned “Reality Strikes the additional value of “documentations“ using theatrical means? What Back”, or academically timeless titles like, “Wege der Wahrnehmung. distinguishes this theatre from others? Authentizität, Reflexivität und Aufmerksamkeit im zeitgenössischen Most of the examples listed can be identified as variants of that Theater“ (“Paths of Perception. Authenticity, Reflexivity, and Attention which Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge call “Gegenöffentlichkeit”— in Contemporary Theatre”.) Kassel’s 2002 “Documenta”, as well as literally, a counter-public, an alternative political public not ruled Stuttgart’s 2005 “Theatre of the World”—accompanied by performances, by dominant economic forces. Documentary theatre is thus seen as exhibitions, and a symposium—made it clear that there were points superior to supposedly faster and more effective media, as it does not of contact with corresponding tendencies in the visual arts. Stars of purport to be more objective, but rather more subjective. Perceived the reality scene, such as Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop, Hofmann & reality, and social and political commentary, appear here as a viable form Lindholm, Christoph Schlingensief or Hans-Werner Kroesinger can now of knowledge. However, the paradoxes of stage truths quickly become be seen as part of the German theatre establishment. apparent: testimonies to reality can only appear as really real when they As the English titles, Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, are medially conveyed—when they take the stage as film, video, sound, Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, and the special issue of the or Internet documents; that reality theater is, indeed, legitimized by journal TDR on “Documentary theatre”, edited by Carol Martin, prove, way of facts, but has to choose these facts, stage them, and, in doing so, we are first of all dealing with an objection to “the paradigm ofpost- supplement them with the gestures, glances, body language, and spatial modernism and its restriction of politics to acts of ‘transgression’”, as experience of actors and directors; and that, ultimately, its believability;

100 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 101 the impression of “real life” does not originate in the archive. In other effects, at that which calls forth and steers presentations, without itself words, we are always dealing with fictions of reality. appearing within them—its grounds often traumatic, and always to be However, in this respect they confirm—if reluctantly —the very conceived as an “Ereignis”, an event. These grounds are not accessible by observation that shaped the term “post-modernism” for Jean-Francois any other means than distortion or misapprehension. Lyotard. Carol Martin’s plea is to be understood as keeping with post- modernism’s misgivings in respect to closed systems, namely that (3) Recapitulation of the Historical Problem: Illusion “our obsessive analytical attention” is required in the face of claims But, to come back to the hypothesis I alluded to at the beginning: does of “being in possession of the entirety of evidence”. It reminds me of recent so-called ‘Reality’ or ‘Documentary Theatre’ even deal with reality Lyotard’s intermittent ennoblement of the ‘small’ narrative against or the real? I would like to assert—in spite of whatever the assertions the ‘grand’ narrative, when she argues for an extension of the concept and intentions of the artists are—that in most instances, we are, in fact, of documentary, and against its universal definition, ultimately, for an dealing with much more (and less at the same time), namely the question extension of the concept of Documentary Theatre: “In actual fact, the of illusion and the belief in this illusion. Before I illustrate this with discourse surrounding the question of what is documentary theatre, tangible examples, I would like to remind you of what we are dealing with and what is not, revolves around the question of how we sanction and when we speak of illusion—in and beyond the theatre. privilege certain forms of information over others”. When we submerge a straight straw in water it appears bent. This oft- Now might be the point at which one would need to ask if this cited example quickly helps us understand what is meant by illusion— liberal and tolerant sounding relativism—a deduction drawn from the something that we believe to be true, although we know, or think we know, established and unavoidable insight that what appears on the stage is that it does not correspond to reality. A kind of spontaneous belief in the a mediated and therefore fictitious reality—does not unduly diminish unbelievable, or, as a philosopher wrote a while ago, “wissensresistentes the problem of new (and old) reality theatre. Such liberalism only seems Wirklichkeitsbewusstsein von etwas, was nicht wirklich existiert” (“a plausible as long as it is not applied to the denial of the Shoah or other consciousness of reality, resistant to knowledge, of something that does crimes. But what happens if tomorrow’s negationists, invoking their not really exist” (Wiesing: 89). right to bring under-privileged forms of information into the theatre, Fabricating uninterrupted illusion—this formula describes set about rewriting German history in the spirit of right-wing extremist in a nutshell the project and maybe also the phantasm of theatre ideology? theoreticians of the 17th and 18th centuries (cf. Strube 1976. 204-215; In contrast to the untroubled support of the numerous small Pavis: 167-168; Franz: 30-32; Ladzarzig: 140-142). In theories of the narratives, and in line with one of the fathers of post-modernism, maybe late 17th and early 18th century, this project arose out of demands for we should attempt to abide by that, which in the supposed presentation probability, naturalness, truth, and the causal necessity of plot, and also of reality refers to a different truth, even if it cannot be conceived as such, from a supposedly eternal rule derived from Aristotle—the doctrine of and ultimately to a truth as the Other of presentation. In 1968, when ‘vraisemblance’—with the goal of moral education. Above all, this project Documentary Theatre and the demand for literary realism or reality was a holistic one. Whilst viewing a work of art, a viewer should be able to was at the height of its fashion, Roland Barthes analyzed what was to be see the world (cf. Kern: 172) and—more or (in the case of Mendelssohn, observed under the auspices of realism. It was not an approximation of Schiller, and Goethe 5 ) less—completely forget about the frame through reality, but rather the attempt to create “referential illusion”, to forget which they are viewing it. From a 20th-century perspective, the project the semiotic character of presentation in favor of the impression of of the doctrinaires of French classicism and 18th-century aestheticians an unmediated representation. However, according to Barthes, to the can be described as part of a teleological process that has its origins in extent that the ‘real’—the manifold, tangible details that underpin early modern stage forms: its teloi are the 19th-century proscenium, and a ‘realistic’ narrative or production — was supposed to disappear, it its pendants the cinema and television screens (cg. Haß 2005; Heeg). inevitably resurfaced in a roundabout manner as a remnant that was not Put bluntly, between the 18th and the 20th century, theatre and other completely subsumed in the economy of presentation. Barthes described forms of visual representation aimed at realizing a 17th-century utopia of this remnant as a ”Real(ity) effect”, with which he, if nothing else, was uninterrupted illusion. Technical transformations, such as the abolition referring to the Lacanian ‘real’. Lacan’s ‘real’ is not to be confused with of illusion-inhibiting stage seating, the development of gas, and later ‘reality’ or ‘realism’. It is nothing other than a hint, manifesting itself in electric, illumination of the stage with a simultaneous darkening of the

102 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 103 auditorium, and, furthermore, the configuration of stage design to create - in the imitation of non-illustrative film plots or choreographies on the this uninterrupted illusion, all contributed to the development of theatre stage, which prevent the unmediated conduct of skilled illusionistic away from the 17th-century discursive assembly room of intersecting actors, such as found in pieces by The Wooster Group 9; gazes (cf. Biet 2002 and 2005) towards an illusion-building image-space - in the calculated conflict between the timing of music and dance, such that would later be utilized by early 20th-century avant-garde rebellions as found in Grace Ellen Barkey’s production “Chunking” (2005); in theatre practice. - in the inexplicable status of film, which transmits —sometimes live— the concealed events of the evening in the theatre auditorium, such as Brecht’s practical exercises with, and theoretical deliberations on, found in Heiner Goebbel’s work 10 ; illusion mark a turning point in the history of theatrical illusion and its - and in the meticulous transcription of oral speech and its transmission disruption. His opposition to illusion is well recorded. Theatre should through song, in the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s cycle “Live and ‘alienate’ the object of illusion by not letting the reality of its means Times”, held over ten evenings. of presentation—the body of the actor, the lighting, and so on—be I could continue, but I suspect that these examples are enough disguised. However, the position handed down in the fragmentary to demonstrate that a new concept is needed to incisively deal with didactic dialogue, or poly-logue of Der Messingkauf (Brecht 1993, p. 695- contemporary tendencies to continually deny illusion, and to persistently 869, cf. Brecht 1967: 500-657)6 is more complex than the anti-illusionism play with its general possibilities. Following Jacques Derrida, for whom that Brechtians have elevated to the status of doctrine. The formulation deconstruction is about comprehending that we are entangled in “plus “abbau der illusion und der einfühlung” (BBA 124/88, cf. Brecht 1993: d’une langue”—in more than one language, and at the same time in none 719)—the disassembly of illusion and empathy—possibly intended at all (cf. Derrida 1988:31)—one might say that a theatre that dismantles as a chapter title, which at the very least alludes to the location of the illusion always involves “plus d’une illusion”—more than one illusion, discussion—the stage. A stage whose “dekoration langsam abgebaut and none at all. To illustrate, I would like to study two particularly wird” (“decorations are slowly being disassembled”), referring back impressive examples a little more closely. to the disassembly of an ideology built up over the last 200 years, thus preparing for the “Vormarsch […] zurück zur Vernunft” (“the advance (4) “Cargo Sofia …” back to reason”) (BBA 127/48, Brecht 1993: 803). But something can (Rimini Protokoll, Stefan Kaegi) only be taken down after it has been built up, and Brecht’s assertive A very popular and well-known group of performers in search of reality “no” to illusion and empathy is qualified by a restrained “yes”, here (and on stage is the group Rimini Protokoll, made up of Helgard Haug, Stefan elsewhere)—“es kann nicht schlechtweg behauptet werden, dass diese Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel. All three are graduates of the theatre and Dramatik oder irgendeine Dramatik ganz und gar auf alle illusionären performance studies program at the University of Gießen. Their theatre Elemente verzichten kann” (“it cannot be asserted that this dramatic art is sometimes described as a “theatre that explores reality”, others call it or any other dramatic art can wholly relinquish illusionistic elements”) “new documentary theatre”, but the most appropriate description appears (Brecht 1993: 612f)—and his alter-ego philosopher in Der Messingkauf to be “documentary intervention”. The theatre journal Theater der Zeit concedes a small degree of empathy, while acknowledging that he risks has described them as the founders of a new “reality trend on the stage”. opening “dem ganzen alten unfug wieder ein türlein” (“a small door on 11 In fact, Rimini Protokoll’s productions claim to explore the theatrical all that old nonsense”) (BBA 127/55, Brecht 1993: 823). potential of reality today by either bringing various experts from real life In its ‘distance’ to Brecht’s ‘distance’, the position found in his (“Experten aus der Wirklichkeit”) onto the stage, or by turning all kinds of writings concerning the ‘disassembly of illusion’ opens up a degree of different locations that resemble theatre into playgrounds of theatrical flexibility that has been explored by theatre practices interested in the exploration. In “Zeugen! Ein Strafkammerspiel” (“Witnesses! A criminal ‘real’.7 In such theatre practice, the use of more recent media does not chamber play”), the participants on stage are a defense lawyer, one of the serve to heighten the illusion, but rather, to interrupt and play with it. In victim’s companions, a frequent visitor at trials, a court sketch artist, a lay different ways, we discover a framework that we would not notice if the judge, and a defendant. They represent their roles in the trial in different illusion were perfect. For example: but always entertaining and vivid ways. In “Sabenation. Go home & follow - in the video recordings in Castorf’s theater, which do not reveal but the news”, unemployed former employees of the insolvent Belgian airline rather disguise things differently 8; Sabena reflect on their lives before and after their dismissal. “Brunswick

104 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 105 Airport” stages Braunschweig airport and “Cameriga” stages the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Markt der Märkte” (“Market of Markets”) invites visitors to follow the dismantling of Bonn’s weekly market from a bird’s-eye-view perspective via a live broadcast, and in “Germany 2” the group invited citizens of Bonn to re-enact a debate in the Bundestag, the German parliament—the original recording being directly transmitted to the performers’ earphones.12 From among the numerous successful productions, which have received many awards and enthusiastic reviews, I would like to draw your attention to a site-specific work that was created by Stefan Kaegi in 2006, titled “Cargo Sofia …”. The third word is always the name of the city where the production takes place. It was shown all over Europe and rightly supported by many institutions across the continent. As I would like to show, it provides one of the most convincing solutions to the question of how one can say anything about the economic questions of our times, how one can ‘represent’ the nameless agents in these matters, and how one can illuminate their ‘laws’. From the outset, Kaegi intended to show “Cargo Sofia …” for several years all over Europe. One of the venues was 13 the choreographic center PACT Zollverein in Essen. Photo © Stefan Kaegi Treated as if they were commodities, 47 spectators are loaded into the cargo hold of a truck that has been turned into a tribunal. Driven transported as nighttime cargo, the spectators hear recorded statements by two Bulgarian truck drivers, they explore the surrounding area, and about what would happen if truck drivers were fairly paid: transport are at the same time confronted with the world of wage slaves—truck costs would rise, the outsourcing of huge areas of production would no drivers who have the status of German employees yet are paid Bulgarian longer be profitable, and job cuts in Western Europe would be stopped. wages. Their task is to transport freight from Eastern European low-wage “Cargo Sofia Zollverein” can be perceived as a kind of ‘sightseeing countries to the metropolises of the West. One side of the truck’s cargo tour’ that takes in amazingly strange places and areas close to the hold is made out of glass, and thus has literally been turned into a ‘fourth familiar city and roads we thought we knew. It is possible to view it wall’ behind which events take place that can be observed by the seated as a “sensory seminar evening” as one journalist put it. We learn that spectators. The truck’s route takes the spectators past ‘non-places’14 like one container can either transport 10,000 suits or accommodate two a container terminal, a dispatch center, and a parking lot popular among foreign workers. We find out that the coal on the platforms of a freight truck drivers, situated on the edge of the city. depot in the middle of the former “Kohlenpott” (literally, “coal scuttle”, The mundane highway thus turns into everyday theatre, and the nickname for the Ruhr coal-mining area) is imported from China, and ‘theatre’ into an entertaining lesson in globalization. On a screen, which that there are 7000 articulated trucks in Western Europe being driven is lowered when there is nothing special to see outside, we are told the by East European drivers paid with East European wages. Listening to story of the Swabian businessman Willi Betz, who bought the formerly the stories of two drivers, one gets an idea of their little pleasures as well state-owned Bulgarian transport enterprise SOMAT after the radical as of the loneliness of a trucker’s life. One sees the prostitutes standing upheavals in the East, and, using permitted and forbidden means (‘wage on the streets, one hears about a trucker who transports cars to Georgia dumping’, bribes, illegal authorizations), made the trucking business and passes time by drinking hard liquor, and one learns about the legal cheaper and more dangerous for all involved. A highway patrol officer and illegal drugs used by the truckers in order to stay awake. This is one talks about his daily controls of overtired truck drivers and dangerous- aspect of the evening. looking cargoes. At a dispatch center the spectators are taught about the But these interesting encounters with an alien neighborhood would complex logistics of truck driving by a suited man standing on a loading not really be enough for a full theatre evening if they were not part of ramp and talking through the truck’s open rear door. While being a clever collection of five stories, each being told synchronously and

106 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 107 artistically, and continuously interrupting each other. First, there is the establishes doubt with regard to what it is supposedly just presenting, story of a fictitious truck journey from Sofia to Essen, which leads from the group also picks up on the epistemological doubt that Brecht once Bulgaria across Serbia, Italy, and Switzerland. It is constructed out of expressed when he said that a “simple rendering of reality” says less anecdotes and original recordings that are illustrated with film extracts. than ever about reality. “A photograph of the Krupp factories or the It provides a vivid image of the fictitious journey with its long waiting AEG yields almost no information about these institutes”. Whereupon times and little adventures with corrupt customs officials at various he asserts that, following the logic alluded to above, “There is in fact checkpoints. Secondly, there is the criminal history of the expanding ‘something to be constructed’, something ‘artificial’, ‘contrived’.”16 With Swabian enterprise. It starts with the foundation of the company in the the revelation that an approximation of reality needs to elevate depiction fifties, includes the curious construction of the businessman’s private itself above being mere depiction to being the actual issue, and that this villa in the middle of the company’s premises, and culminates in the approximation should not just approvingly accept illusion but rather play story of a legendary police raid in 2003. Thirdly, the two truck drivers with it, Kaegi’s work approaches the conceptual art— the photographs, show photos of their families and tell anecdotes from their lives, which video works, and lecture performances—of the New York and Lebanon are transmitted directly from the driver’s cab into the cargo space via resident Walid Raad, in which the overriding issue is that of depiction, by microphones and cameras. The fourth story is the fictitious journey the means of which the undepictable can also be represented. spectators are participating in. And finally, there is what one might call a fifth story, the story that makes all of the other stories suspect, the story (5) Walid Raad – Reminiscence within the Medium shared by both truck driver and spectator, their common experience of Walid Raad’s subject matter is war–the war in Lebanon, between 1975 the evening structured by Kaegi’s clever mise-en-scène. Whereas most of and 1991, with which he grew up, and the current war against terror, as Rimini Protokoll’s earlier works offered a more or less traditional kind of well as the traumatic events associated with war, inasmuch as they have a ‘empathy theatre’ played by non-actors, here we find a permanent toying collective, historical dimension, and, together with all of this, and above with the creation of ‘illusion’. The truck with the spectators encounters a all, the way that film, video, photography, and theatre claim to represent young woman several times, first singing live in a park, and later, riding this psychological and physical violence. He undertakes and explores along the pavement transporting some packages on her bike. After representations of violence by constructing the illusion of writing history, leaving the highway patrol officer and dispatch center, the spectators securing evidence, identifying victims, and archiving minor stories on once again encounter the police car and a dispatch truck on the highway. the fringes of mainstream history. All of his work can be seen as historical The boundary between what is real and what produces the impression of documents produced for an imaginary archive serviced by an equally reality is very fluid, and one begins to doubt whether this documentary imaginary foundation, the “Atlas Group”, of which Raad describes himself theatre is really documenting anything at all. It becomes clear that what as a founding member—further members are, however, nowhere to be is at stake is something altogether different from the documentary plays found. As far as I know, Raad never explains that—as becomes gradually of Peter Weiss, Heinar Kipphardt, or Rolf Hochhuth—the performance evident during the course of observing his ‘historical documents’, which is not just an imitation of reality, but also a reflection upon the images of are mainly exhibited in art galleries, and abruptly so during his lecture reality and their production. Whereas former works by Rimini Protokoll performances—we are dealing with entirely fictive, manipulated, or conveyed the impression that the whole world was a stage—in line with falsified material.17 the “Theatralitäts-Forschung” (‘Theatricality’ Studies’) concept taught One brief example. In the series “My neck is thinner than a hair: in German universities—this production suggests something different engines”, we see wall-mounted photographs of motors lying in the midst to the spectators. Namely, that the ‘theatrical’ elements of reality means of what appear to be bombed-out cityscapes, surrounded by—sometimes that it is impossible to make a statement about reality that is not already small, sometimes large—groups of people. Next to the photographs contaminated by reality’s mise-en-scène.15 Theatre, or rather the theatrical are their reverse sides, on which official looking stamps, notes, and (theatricality in another sense), appears as both a way of accessing the signatures appear to confirm their authenticity. Raad ‘completes’ the world, and at the same time, of its dissimulation. In the end, both are series, which he also demonstrates in a lecture performance, with the open to question—theatre, as well as the world. It is uncertain whether note: presentations like “Cargo Sofia Zollverein” can be called theatre, or what they show can be called ‘reality’. However, where Rimini Protokoll

108 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 109 “The only part remaining when a car explodes is the mo- Motors—the remains of, as we read, 3641 car bombs activated during tor. It can be thrown for several hundred meters, and land the wars (est.)—become allegories for the unrepresented suffering and on balconies, roofs, or streets. During the wars, photogra- terror, which tends to be betrayed, falsified, kitschified, and loaded with phers staged a competition to see who would find and pho- clichéd emotionality in each representation, becoming a repetition tograph the motors first” (Zit. nach Nakas/Schmitz: 96). without prefiguration, a representation without mimetic character, a writing or trace, which, like ruins, has been left behind by the violence as a mark of that destruction which protects aniconism. What we learn about reality is not represented in these images, and is not the subject matter of Raad’s installation, which presents instead the mere materials on which these images are based.

In his lecture performance, “I feel a great desire to meet the masses once again”, which premiered in 2005 during the “Theater der Welt” festival in Stuttgart18, Raad tells of an extended police and FBI interrogation on his return to Rochester International Airport after a short domestic trip. The immigrant of Arabic origin quickly comes under suspicion and— as it becomes clear to him in retrospect—is at risk of being deported, interrogated, and tortured, as was the case for the well-known German citizen Khaled el-Masri, from Neu Ulm. The rest of the performance compiles scantily veiled traces of the impact of American intelligence agencies in their handling of predominantly Arabic terror suspects—still relatively unreported in 2005. Raad is only a suspect because of his art and his pictures, which are worthless in the eyes of his interrogators. Pictures of himself naked in front of New York skyscrapers, of dead animals, of the security warnings on various airplanes, and of Lebanese car bomb explosions identified through Arabic inscriptions. It is only when the interrogator realizes that he is dealing with an artist that Raad is released. He says that what saved him was the fact that the policeman was a hobby painter in his spare time. Raad sits with his laptop in front of a screen during this lecture performance, and to start with, there is little to differentiate him from the managers, commercial representatives, and professors, who avail themselves of easy-to-use PowerPoint presentations during their own talks. But it quickly becomes evident that, contrary to appearances, this format is part of the concept. Its minimalism allows Raad to remain as flexible and autonomous as possible19, and simultaneously reduces the fact that, “Himmelsrest des Scheins zu tragen peinlich” (“In spite of everything it remains an embarrassment for art to bear even the slightest © The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg trace of semblance”) (Aesthetic Theory, p. 104), which, following Adorno’s verdict on Dadaism, is inherent to all artistic attempts that strive to reject this semblance and yet remain “cut off from [the] real political effect” that originally inspired them (Adorno: 104). That Raad presents his narrative in the Stuttgart Art Museum, and not, for example, in front of the

110 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 111 US Armed Forces headquarters in Stuttgart-Vaihingen—i.e. as a public happened in the past, but it is this story that might be meaningful in the demonstration—can be justified by the fact that he intentionally leaves present and for the future”. (zit. nach Nakas/Schmitz: 24). art in the space dedicated to art in order to assert the possibilities of art, and to defend the exploration of illusion that he pursues in other works. (6) (Dis)belief Proceeding from the idea of his own playful beginnings—as a boy who If, in Kaegi’s case, it was important to reflect on the question of whether took photos for pleasure, and, without any benefit to himself, collected materials from reality do not simply invoke an illusionistic appearance of what he found in his war-torn, hometown of Beirut; and as a young man reality, in Raad’s case, the question is whether theatre, in the generation who studied art, moved to the USA and acquired US citizenship—he of illusion, does not at least reveal something about reality. If, as in the rapidly approaches the event that took place in the fall of 2004, the focus first case, belief in the presentation’s accurate depiction is successively of his PowerPoint performance—the interrogation, and the practices shaken during the course of the presentation, in the second case, belief of American intelligence agencies. In this way, the strange title, which in the realistic content of even the purely imaginary and fictitious— remains unexplained for the length of the performance—“I feel a great in the illusion that we have already conceived of as such—gradually desire to meet the masses once again”—can be understood as, if nothing emerges. Put together side by side, both cases reveal something about else, an ironic commentary on an action, the political consequences of the relationship between illusion and reality, which one could perhaps which amount to nothing as long as the injustice to which it testifies affect describe as a Kantian insight—illusion can paradoxically be conceived masses that are not able to appear as masses, because they are comprised of as the “necessary” or “objective appearance” (“Schein”)”, as a of innumerable, globally dispersed, marginalized, and isolated cases. The misjudgment of reality that simultaneously constitutes the only possible excited, well-to-do first-night audience, which receives his report in lieu of access to this reality.21 It resembles what a young Marx described in his the coveted “masses”, becomes a ‘living sculpture’ in this performance concept of ideology (see Marx/Engels; de Man)—psychoanalysis within whether it likes it or not, and attests modo negativo to the illusionary the concept of a phantasm. As a necessary deception, illusion retains character of the desire expressed in the performance title.20 its right to exist inasmuch as it is itself a reality, even if the object of Furthermore, what this conceptual lecture performance makes clear illusion does not correspond to any reality, even if, by its very definition, is the political dimension of Raad’s play with illusion—in this ‘play’, the the real is missing. Play with illusion in contemporary theatrical forms real emerges in the space between the familiar story, told with newspaper suggests that it is time for another concept of truth and another notion images, and Raad’s other, fictitious stories, told with the same pictures. of reality, a concept that no longer attempts to conceive of truth and The child’s, and later the artist’s, play with the futile remains of unknown reality according to the model of adequatio intellectu et rei, but rather as stories, is the start of a revocation of that “transcendental illusion” completely undefinable yet not inexistent variables. Although, or maybe (Derrida 2001a: 86), which is at work, undetected, in all medial forms because, they continually escape us, we must hold on to them, although of “realistic representation”—in documentation, newspaper reports, not so much through possession as through belief in an illusion that is and police protocols. Raad uses reality to denounce the perplexity continuously being disassembled. of certain preconceptions of the world—for example, the world of The French actor and essayist Daniel Mesguich illustrates the narrative principle: of causal, linear plot progression—and does so by paradoxes of belief in illusion, which must always be a ‘dis-belief’, with way of nothing more than an insistence upon what must appear bizarre, the following hypothesis from the psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni: “We absurd, awry, or meaningless to somebody who believes in the illusion are not frightened by a wolf mask in the same way that we are frightened of “reality”, or even suspicious, like the character introduced during the by a wolf, but rather in the way that we are frightened by the image of lecture performance. Put another way, Raad is deconstructing our belief the wolf that we carry inside ourselves”.22 Mesguich adds that in the in a single version of history, or rather a story, authorized and propagated theatre we neither believe, nor disbelieve, nor directly watch, nor directly by means of economic, political, and—as the evening of interrogation listen. On the contrary, we see and hear the child or the idiot in us who illustrates—police power. By constructing another, so to speak, believes. Jacques Derrida analyzes this remark with the comment that in homeopathic illusion he allows this single history to appear illusionary. the moment of observing the believing child or idiot within us, we are In this way, he promotes reflection on the power of images and the belief also observing identifiable memory as well as absolute separation. In the in illusion. “The story, which you tell yourself and which you endow with theatre we experience partition—partition in the sense of participation, attention and belief”, he writes, “might not have anything to do with what as well as in the sense of division. The transition from the participating

112 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 113 child to the adult responsible for division appears to him to be indefinable Endnotes 15 Cf. on the very specific notion of theatricality I use here: and irreducible. This is why he ends his commentary on Mesguich’s 1 Cf. the title of a roundtable at the “Berliner Müller-Schöll 2002: esp. 45-71 a. 183f. as well as Weber 2004. remark with an unanswered question, “What is an act of believing in Theater¬treffen” in the year of 2006 http://www.theaterkanal.de/fernsehen/ 16 Cf. Brecht 1992: 469; cf. as well and departing from here the theatre? Why does one have to believe in the theatre? One must. But monat/05/204323382 (03/25/2007). Kluge: 203. why?” (Derrida 1993: 6) 2 Cf. http://www.forum-freies-theater.de/archiv/09sept/sym- 17 See the selected bibliography of publications by and The philosopher of ‘deconstruction’—a different kind of dis- posium.html (03/25/2007). about Walid Raad in Nakas/Schmitz: 133. The following 3 CARGO SOFIA-ZOLLVEREIN, Stage director: Stefan Kaegi, depiction is based on a personal encounter with Raad assembly—seems to be referring to two things here. Firstly, his repeated within the framework of the “Performer’s Guesthouse”, reference to the fact that the phenomenon of “believing” in the theatre Rimini Protokoll. First show: 07/07/2006 at Choreogra- phisches Zentrum PACT Zollverein, Essen. Theater der Welt/Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, interests him—but also “believing” in film, as he notes at another point 4 Lecture Performance. First show at 06/23/2005 at »Theater June 23rd and 24th 2005. See also Raad’s homepage: (Derrida 2001b: 78)—might indicate that for Derrida, the division of the der Welt«, Stuttgart. www.theatlasgroup.org . spectator of illusions into, on the one hand, the believing child and, on 5 Cf. Strube 1971: 85 and 181; Koch/Voss: 7. 18 My depiction refers to the performance on the 23rd of june 2005 in the art museum Stuttgart. the other, an instance of reason that knows of the illusion, represents an 6 The MESSINGKAUF is one of Brecht’s most peculiar works of theory: Brecht was working on it between 1937 19 Raad‘s minimalism is comparable to the strategies of exception in the history of the decentered, modern subject. In theatre and 1955 and bequeathed it as a mass of fragments. quite a number of Lebanese artists who are interested studies, this assessment could be related to the curious fact that the While the editors of the 1967 edition of Brecht’s writ- in ideas of the ‘political’, as for example Rabih Mroué illusionary stage does not emerge until the development of theatre in the ings tried to reconstruct the whole work in a readable or Ali Cherri. way, the new Brecht edition gives a better idea of the 20 Cf. Freud:165 on the definition of illusion motivated by early modern era, starting in the Renaissance. As a heuristic hypothesis wish-fulfillment . Freud’s definition of “illusion”, and following on from Derrida’s remarks, one could say that theatrical fragmentary nature of the work in progress and its varying tendencies. One understands while reading it his conception of belief in it, can be compared to the illusion co-originates with the history of the subject in the modern era that the repetitions, corrections, contradictions, revi- ones that will be further developed in relation to Kant and is inseparable from its development. sions, and in the last instance, the failure of Brecht in and Marx in this text. Not unlike Kant and Marx, Freud With regards to the relationship between theatre and media, we writing a teaching manual deserves as much attention claims that illusion is not defined by its relation to real- ity but that it should rather be regarded as an inevitable would ultimately need to hold onto Derrida’s remark that the examination as the contents of the texts. However by changing the organization of the material and introducing capitals and even necessary deception. of illusion is an examination of ‘being-in-the-world’, but also with its into Brecht’s writings, it alters the typescript to the 21 Cf. on Kant: Deuber-Mankowsky 2006 and 2007. theatrical medial constitution. Precisely because we are already entangled point that it cannot be used any more. Therefore I will 22 See Derrida 1993: 6. in illusions, and more precisely, because we are all entangled in illusions quote the following texts from the typescripts found in in different ways, we will never be able to completely eliminate them. the Brecht archive. A residue of belief will sustain itself. And on the other hand, precisely 7 Cf. on the formulation »in distance to distance« Lehmann 2005: 40. However it is evident regarding the passage because we will never be able to sincerely persist in a single illusion and quoted here that this attitude is already to be found in will never be completely submerged within it, when faced with another Brecht’s writings and not only later on as for example in belief, our belief becomes (dis-)belief. What remains is a knowledge of the writings of Heiner Müller. the simultaneous inevitability and eternity of the disassembly of illusion 8 Cf. Ulrike Haß (2004) on Castorf‘s ENDSTATION AMERIKA. 9 Cf. Müller-Schöll 2007. in (dis-)believing play around it. 10 Heiner Goebbels: »Eraritjaritjaka. Das Museum der Sätze« (2004, cf. Koch 2006: 62f). 11 Cf. http://www.dramaturgische-gesellschaft.de/drama- turg/2005_02/24.pdf. 12 Cf. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/project_frontend_in- dex.php. 13 I refer myself in the following description to the show in Essen on the 7th of October 2006. 14 Cf. on the notion of the non-space Augé (97-144), who argues that this is an appearance which is specific for our time which according to him should be called »Sur¬modernité«.

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Heeg, Günther (2000): Das Phantasma der natürlichen Nakas, Kassandra/Britta Schmitz (2006): The Atlas Group Brecht, Bertolt (1993): Werke. Bd. 22, Schriften 2. Berlin und Gestalt. Frankfurt/M. and Basel: Stroemfeld. (1989-2004) A Project by Walid Raad. Köln: Verlag der Weimar, Frankfurt/M: Aufbau, Suhrkamp. Kern, Andrea (2006): »Illusion als Ideal der Kunst«. Buchhandlung Walther König. Chartin, Jean-Jacques/Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe/Jean-Luc In: Gertrud Koch/Christiane Voss (ed.): ...kraft Nakas, Kassandra (2006): »Bilder der Verfehlung, fehlende Nancy/Samuel Weber (1980): »Zum Kolloquium: ›Die der Illusion. München: Fink, p. 159-174. Bilder«. In: Kassandra Nakas/Britta Schmitz (2006): The Gattung‹«. In: Glyph, 7, Baltimore und London: The Kluge, Alexander (1975): Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Atlas Group (1989-2004) A Project by Walid Raad. Köln: Johns Hopkins Press, p. 233-237. Sklavin. Zur realistischen Methode. Frankfurt/M.: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, p. 21-24. de Man, Paul (1989): »The resistance to theory«. In: ibid.: The Suhrkamp. Pavis, Patrice (1996): »Illusion«. In: ibid.: Dictionnaire du Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Min- Koch, Gertrud/Christiane Voss (2006): ...kraft der Théâtre. Paris: Dunod, p. 167-169. nesota Press, p. 3-20. Illusion. München: Fink. Strube, W. (1976): »Illusion«. In: Joachim Ritter (ed.): Derrida, Jacques (1988): Memoires für Paul de Man. Wien: Koch, Gertrud (2006): »Müssen wir glauben, was Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wis- Passagen. wir sehen? Zur filmischen Illu¬sions¬ästhetik«. senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, p. 204-215. Derrida, Jacques (1993): »Le Sacrifice. La Métaphore«, In: Koch/Christiane Voss: ...kraft der Illusion. Strube, Werner (1971): Ästhetische Illusion. Bochum: No 1. http://www.hydra.umn.edu/Derrida/sac.html, München: Fink, p. 53-70. Inaugural-Dissertation. 10.05.2006. Ladzarzig, Jan (2005): »Illusion«. In: Erika Fischer- Weber, Samuel (2004): Theatricality as Medium. New York: Derrida, Jacques (2001a): »Above All, No Journalists!« In: Lichte/Doris Kolesch Matthias Warstatt (ed.): Fordham U.P. Hent de Vries/Samuel Weber (ed.): Religion and Media. Metzler Lexikon Theaterheorie. Stuttgart and Wiesing, Lambert (2006): »Von der defekten Illusion Stanford: Stanford U.P., p. 56-93. Weimar: Metzler, p. 140-142. zum perfekten Phantom. Über phänomenologische Derrida, Jacques (2001b): »Le cinéma et ses fantômes«. In: Laudenbach, Peter: »Hexenküche Wirklichkeit. Bildtheorien«. In: Gertrud Koch/Christiane Voss (ed.): Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 556, p. 74-85. Theatertreffen 2006: Das Dokumentarstück ist ...kraft der Illusion. München: Fink, p. 89-102. Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid (2006): »›Eine Aussicht auf die wieder da«. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22.5.2006, Zukunft, so wie in einem optischen Kasten‹. Transzen- p. 11. dente Perspektive, optische Illusion und beständiger Lehmann, Hans-Thies (1999 a): »TheatReales«. In: Schein bei Immanuel Kant und Johann Heinrich Lam- Theater der Welt 1999 in Berlin. Arbeitsbuch. bert«. In: Gertrud Koch/Christiane Voss (ed.): ...kraft der Berlin: Theater der Zeit, p. 65-59. Illusion. München: Fink, p. 103-120. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (1999 b): Postdramatisches Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid (2007): Praktiken der Illusion. Theater. Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Autoren. Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Benjamin bis Donna J. Haraway.

116 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 117 Saturday 24 March Gintersdorfer/Klaßen

Theatre director Monika Gudrun Lange works as an Gintersdorfer and visual artist Knut independent choreographer and Klaßen have been collaborating dancer, and develops projects with LOGOBI 02 for the last eight years on projects both professionals and youth. In involving performative forms of 2012–14 she received a grant to by Gintersdorfer/Klaßen film, theatre, and dance. Using a produce her own work, and to combination of movement and found her own company. Her work text, they juxtapose contemporary seeks out the connections between With speech and gesture, the performer and traditional cultures in Africa art and daily life, using her body as and Europe, creating a bridge the medium for both. attempts to impress his audience. It’s a dance for for different dance cultures to gangsters, a dance that has fallen out of the sky. encounter one another. Together with their German/Ivory Coast teams, they created the five-part A German dancer and an Ivorian dancer meet dance series “LOGOBI”. In 2012 they released a music album, on an empty stage to begin a dialogue in front of NEW BLACK Couper Decaler the audience. While the Ivorian dancer describes électronique, on the Buback label mixing Ivorian and German African Dance tradition and street dances musicians with extraordinary club like Logobi and Coupé-Decalé, the German sounds. dancer translates and demonstrates aspects of Gotta Depri founded the contemporary European dance—they compare theatre-group “Les Guirivoires” in Abidjan, and received the and contrast by presenting the varying styles of Ivory Coast Young Choreographer movement, and examining their relevance and Prize. He is currently working as a dancer and choreographer meaning in different contexts. Through these in Germany, where he has dialogues and demonstrations, perceptions of collaborated with Gintersdorfer/ Klaßen on productions like African and European dance collide. Are these “Betrügen” (Kampnagel Hamburg, only questions about dance, or is there more to it Sophiensaele Berlin, Zürcher Theaterspektakel), “Warum than first meets the eye? Gott Afrika verlassen hat“ (Theaterdiscounter Berlin), “The end of the Western” Gintersdorfer/Klaßen say about their work: (Internationale Keuze, Rotterdam) and “The International Criminal “Everything is what it is. There is nothing Court” (Theater Bremen). symbolic, parodic or illusionistic about our work, but we do not always tell the whole truth. As far as possible we want a direct transport between life in the theatre and the theatre in life”.

Photo © Knut Klaßen

118 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 119 Saturday 24 March Party at BlackBox with DJ SHAGGY SHAROOF

The afterparty was hosted at Black Box theatre, and it was a joint celebration between the Coupé-Decalé theatre’s own Oslo International Theaterfestival and the Monsters of Reality festival. Coupé-Decalé was invented in Paris by a group

DJ Shaggy Sharoof flew in from of young Ivorian men, who called themselves Paris where he is part of the “La Jet Set”. At the same time there were DJs innovative music-style ‘Coupé- Décalé’, as it has developed and musicians in Ivory Coast working on main- on the club-scene of Paris ly Congolese beats and changing them into and Berlin. He is also part of the artistic crew working what you today would call Coupé-Decalé beats. with Gintersdorfer/ Klaßen. Their leader named himself after the president ‘Douk–Saga’ and they created the style, dance moves, and important slogans, that define Coupé-Decalé. The group has an anarchistic, shameless, and competitive spirit that involves showing off in various creative ways. They play with the social order by adopting nicknames, such as ‘The Banker’, ‘The Ambassador’, ‘Sar- kozy’, and ‘Versace’.

Photo © Knut Klaßen

120 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 121 Sunday 25 March Shannon Jackson

Professor of Rhetoric, and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and Director of the Arts REALITY’S Research Center at UC Berkeley. Her work has explored the relationship between performance and social reform, between performance and REFERENTS: the disciplines of higher education, and between performance and contemporary socially engaged Forms of the real across the arts art. Her most recent book is Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting by Shannon Jackson Publics (2011). After listening to speakers and audience members at yesterday’s symposium—and thinking too about the performance we saw last night—I decided that it would be best to revise the lecture I had prepared. The title of my talk, “Reality’s Referents: Forms of the ‘Real’ across the Arts”, still reflects what I would like to discuss. However, given the varied associations and responses to this word “reality”, I decided to back up and see if we can create some common ground. For me, such a task means foregrounding the very different notions that we have for ‘real’ in our conversations. I beg your indulgence as I try to work through a different line of thought than I had originally planned.

122 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 123 I take it as axiomatic that the question of reality has been debated for art a conceptual frame in the form of potlucks, libraries, and alternate centuries. I also take it as axiomatic that, after the World Wars of the 20th churches to reform marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago, Saint Louis, century, the circulation of theories of deconstruction and simulation in and more. Located within the visual art world but still quite different from the late 20th century, and the new technologies at work in the early 21st, Gates, we can consider the techniques of the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen many of us now share a basic ‘thought-structure’ in posing and answering and Dragset who install people inside the gallery as well. In projects like questions around reality. This thought-structure assumes that reality is “The Welfare Show”, they secured ‘real people’—in this case, members of not something that exists prior to representation; rather, we conceive of it a city who are unemployed—and employed them as security guards in a as something that comes into being by virtue of representation. Whether museum; in ways that are both compelling and unnerving, the ‘assembly’ we are philosophers or gamers, we have been disabused of the notion of real people functions as both the object and subject of the artwork. that there is a ‘real’ before representation. And yet, while we might all Gates’ and Elmgreen and Dragset’s practices of working with real people share some version of that basic thought-structure, there is incredible are related to, but still different from, the forms and techniques used variation of where we take it, how we apply it, and the consequences we by our symposium visitors Rimini Protokoll, whose projects—such as draw from it. As discussed by speakers and interlocutors yesterday, when “Call Cutta in a Box”, “Cargo Sophia”, “100 Percent Berlin”, “100 Percent we debate the finer points of Zizek, or Bourriaud, or Lacan, or Derrida, we Athens”, and many others—rework a tradition of documentary theatre to find ourselves invoking different reference points and placing ourselves devise temporary, large-scale performances with the real people whom in different histories of political and philosophical debate. they call ‘experts’. If all of the above are performance forms that invoke Hence, it seems to me more helpful to back up in order to take a kind the real in some way, we need also to recall other theatrical genealogies of audit of what this variety might be and how it manifests itself in art and of the real. We might ask how contemporary “Monsters of Reality” relate performance. Let us first consider how reality and its representational to something like Ibsen or Chekhov and the host of realistic dramas processes are intertwined. To start, we might look at a variety of artistic that they spawned. While vastly different in technique and aspiration, forms that have some sort of stake in the real, or where something like the “realistic theatre” is again one of many different art forms that have a word “real” has been used to characterize its techniques and its effects. stake in something like the real. I could go on and on with examples, We could consider Karen Finley’s performance art, where the reference but as a last opening example, consider this guerrilla art project by to the real often has something to do with her hyper-‘embodiedness’— Temporary Services in Chicago. Temporary Services take real people out and to the ‘shock’ effects that embodiedness elicited. Earlier in the 20th of the gallery—or out of the theatre—and into the streets. The ‘street’ century, we could consider Allan Kaprow’s Happenings—forms that might be a signal of the ‘real’ in this work, but it also seems to me that the sought to push or undo the boundaries that separated art and life. The conditions for understanding the ‘reality effects’ of this piece will differ associations to the real we see in Finley are related to those that we find depending upon how we understand its shift in time and space. Our in Kaprow, but I would submit that they are not necessarily equivalent in sense of its ‘reality’ quotient will also differ depending upon whether one their techniques, their aspirations, or their effects. Within the visual art reads it as an urban planner or as a choreographer, whether one sees it as world, a figure like Rirkrit Tiravanija is placed within this performance art a piece of street theatre or as a piece of counterpublic art. In other words, genealogy, but also a relational art scene that descends from and deviates and to advance my interest in thinking about how reality’s referents from the early Happenings. Tiravanija is an internationally acclaimed differ “across the arts”, the reality effects of this, and any art piece, will conceptual artist who is known for re-inhabiting the art gallery space, be different depending upon whether you measure its distance from taking it over to place interactions and events, such as his famous Thai architecture or dance, from theatre or from sculpture. cooking gathering inside the museum space. For Tiravanija and other Having begun to survey, if all too briefly, a sampling of artistic relational artists, the resulting relational exchange is the central material forms, it becomes clear that the techniques and effects of ‘reality-based’ of their art practice. art vary as well. Let us continue the auditing task and think about the We might also consider a quite different cluster of artistic and number of associations invoked in our conversation yesterday. For some, performance forms that invoke the real. Consider, for instance, other reality seems to be about liveness, a reference that is based in a mode of contemporary artists who work with ‘real people’. We can consider those perception and that also invokes a particular aesthetic terminology. For who come from the domain of community art or community theater, others, reality seems to be about participation, or a mode of interaction or those, such as US-based artist Theaster Gates who gives community and exchange that creates a different kind of activity for the beholder

124 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 125 or audience member. Still others feel that action is a signifier of reality. When we uncover those material conditions, perhaps we could say that Here again, we might find formal or political variation in how action we are in the real, or, at least in a place where an investment in ‘the real’ is understood. If one understands ‘action’ from the perspective of the occurs. Once again, we could go on, and on and on with this excavation of dramatic actor, it is slightly different than it would be for artists who the many associations that we attach to the Real… introduce action in a visual arts world that conventionally exhibited I feel that it is important to conduct such audits of our ‘reality’ static objects. A turn to action feels somewhat different for an artist used conversations for a number of reasons. Even my little survey above to creating painting and sculpture than it would be for an artist in the exposes our participation in very different discourses; it is important theatre. And the associations are different still for an artist whose turn to to acknowledge a range of reference amongst terms such as “liveness”, ‘action’ is aligned politically with the action of activism. Is reality-based “participation”, “spontaneity”, “truth”, or “authenticity”. Such art more simply art that is trying not to be an illusion? In this and other acknowledgement is not a relativistic exercise but one that helps us instances, we are defining the work in relation to something that it is not. gain a modicum of control over our wide-ranging debates. For me Reality-based art is not an illusion; it is not a fiction; it is not standing in at least, a degree of discursive diligence allows us to put parameters for something that it is not. All such cases, of course, need the notion of around the conversation that we are having. One person might want fiction and the notion of illusion to exist in the first place. Is reality in to start a conversation about spontaneity, while another wants to talk art about spontaneity? Yesterday, we spoke about being the mistake, the about material conditions. Meanwhile, in another corner, someone unexpected, the unplanned, the unrehearsed. All of these associations might raise the topic of participation, and someone else responds by approach, and keep their distance from, something like improvisation, invoking the values of historical truth. A question is proffered in one a more structured way of managing the unplanned; nevertheless, the register, answered in a second register, and qualified in yet a third. In artworks all seem to be trying to create an event that allows for the eruption these confusing contexts, it seems important to gain a better sense of of the spontaneous, trying paradoxically to mediate the apparently what register is operating at any given point in a conversation. For me, unmediated intrusion of the real. Other ways of thinking about reality there are also artistic reasons for having a better understanding of the in art might have to do, not only with these perceptual dimensions, but range of reality’s referents. Earlier, I suggested that we share a general also with different value-systems. For example, some of you have been agreement that representational processes are part and parcel of the wondering whether historical truth should function as a kind of arbiter for production and experience of the ‘real’. Once we say that, however, we how we understand the effects of this reality-based practice. Many of you still have to confront the range of forms that do the work of representing. worried too about the political effects of certain art projects, projects that Even if “reality is representation”, the forms that a dancer/choreographer seek social transformation. Is actual social transformation possible inside uses to do her representing might be somewhat different to the forms these art practices? Is such transformation the only reality that matters? used by someone trained in the visual arts, which again might be Or is the model of efficacy in social transformation precisely what reality- different to those used by an architect or theatre director. I do not want based works question? Some are more focused than others on the to over-emphasize artistic differences, but it is sometimes helpful ethical position we see in these works. When real people are integrated to emphasize the different materials that artists use to engage in an into the work, interviewed as part of the work, or displayed inside the act of representation; as such, they have different histories, different work, ethical issues surface, and the question of their ‘real effects’ can conventions, and different investments in the real. Some artists regularly become quite urgent. The authenticity question often comes right on use bodies, and others regularly do not. If a body emerges in a zone the heels of the ethics question. In my own research for Social Works, I unused to that medium, by extension, that break in convention is more found myself most inspired by artists who shifted the terms in order to likely to produce a ‘reality’ effect. Some artists conventionally manipulate expose the institutions, processes, and infrastructures that produce our time, while others conventionally manipulate space. Some habitually sense of truth, politics, ethics, and authenticity in the first place. So for cultivate affect. Some organize language by default, while some always me, the ‘reality’ question in art is most interesting when it is positioned turn to image; meanwhile, others conventionally turn to sound. And we to expose the material conditions that produce it. In such projects, the could go on and on. But my point is that our perception of the innovation reality assumed turns out to be a fiction produced. The normality and of an artwork will in part depend upon the conventions of the art practice naturalness of an artwork, or of a social world, turns out to be dependent deployed. We might talk about an organization of space and image in upon material conditions, often conditions that are obscured from view. painting, or we might talk about an organization of body, space, time,

126 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 127 affect, language, and image that is a theatre practice. Or we might think beholders to become more aware of their co-production of a work, of the about the time, space, body and no-language practice that is part of the role that they, as receivers, had in co-producing this particular art object. convention of dance. Understanding these conventions turns out to As sculptor Robert Morris said, you become aware of yourself as a person have implications for how we understand the techniques and effects of in a room with things, and that kind of environmental awareness makes reality-based art. The deployment of a medium or technique in a zone us more sensible to the space around us and to the role of the beholder where such a medium or technique is new or unfamiliar instigates effects in defining the work as art in the first place. In that spectatorial effect lay that feel real. Most importantly, the break in artistic convention is a key the “really realness” of the Minimalist gesture. technique for producing the perception of reality’s intrusion. If language Those are only two different places where we encounter a break with is conventionally used, try not using it. If stasis is the norm, try turning to the conventions of visual art practice that in turn produce our perception time. If sound is the norm, try silence. A break in artistic convention can of the real. The reality effect is based in part on the artwork’s violation of an produce our perception of the Real in reality-based art. inherited set of visual art conventions. Those breaks in convention might Let me see if I can get farther with this latter point, since these kinds not be fully intelligible to a different kind of artist, say, or choreographer of inter-arts questions and histories have been so important to my work or a theatre practitioner who might not feel the significance of the reality of late. First of all, disciplinary barometers will influence our encounters effects in the same way. Indeed, what looks like Reality in one context with reality-based art forms. Think again about one of Allan Kaprow’s might look bafflingly opaque in another, or conversely, like the re-use happenings. We might have a different sense of what this form is doing of familiar artistic convention in another. Once we start to gather and depending on whether we understand it to be disrupting the art gallery analyze a range of forms—Karen Finley, Allan Kaprow, Jackson Pollock, or disrupting the theatre. Even if there is a shared sense that ‘the real’ Tony Smith—we realize that a break with convention in one context has ‘happened’, the production of that reality-effect depends upon might look like a reproduction of convention in another. Similarly, how it breaks with an inherited set of conventions. What conventions while some might experience a disruption happening in one way, others did Kaprow understand himself to be disrupting? Or, perhaps more might have different ideas of where it is occurring. Innovation to some precisely, what convention of disruption was he carrying forward? looks like tradition to others. This realization must prompt us to qualify Consider the action paintings of Jackson Pollock to begin to answer that our understanding of experiment in reality-based art. What feels like question. Pollock is a key resource for Kaprow and one of the figures intrusion of reality to one person might actually look like a staged and who prompted art critic Harold Rosenberg to invoke the term “action scripted convention to another. I think this also came up yesterday when painting” in the first place. For Rosenberg and other art critics, the most Pia Maria Roll was talking about how audiences get used to certain kind important element in Pollock’s all-over canvases—such as, say “Lavender of conventions in documentary or reality-based theatre. If I, for instance, Mist”,—was the action that produced that painting. So when a beholder speak to you now and then move forward out of the light (Jackson moves encountered that painting, at least the kind of beholder that Rosenberg forward centre stage and into the audience) we can say that some version had in mind, this receiver became completely aware of the actions of the of the Real has punctuated the space, flickered in the space for just a action painter who produced it. That action of painting was not repressed minute. That reality-effect occurs because I broke the convention of the or transcended in order to appreciate the final work; rather the action of proscenium. Or we can try silence (Jackson stops talking and stands still)… painting was part of what the beholder experienced in the presence of Let it be quiet for a while… We can say that some version of the Real has the painting. Notably, Rosenberg used the word “real” and its synonyms come about. But this perception of Reality is based on the fact that there in order to describe this kind of painterly innovation and its effects on was a threshold to cross, one architectural, the other sonic. The crossing the beholder who felt him or herself to be face to face with Reality in the of the threshold produced the “really real” feeling. This is, on some level, moment of encounter. obvious. But I am in a number of situations where artists come from Let’s try a different artistic trajectory, say a minimalist sculpture quite different kinds of backgrounds, and, as such, have different ideas such as Tony Smith’s “Die”. This is another mode of visual art practice of what is at stake in deploying a range of medium-based techniques. I where the discourse of the Real was key to its interpretation. Minimalist often try to raise these inter-art questions because it often feels to me that sculptures of the 1960s purportedly created an experience in the experimental, hybrid work still circulates in un-hybridized art networks. gallery that altered our sense of perception. The argument from several Expanded visual artists are talking to other expanded visual artists; site- minimalist sculptors was that the moment of encounter required specific choreographers are talking to other site-specific choreographers;

128 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 129 post-dramatic theatre-makers talk to other post-dramatic theatre- This brings me to a work by David Levine. Levine is someone who helps me makers. There are exceptions. Rimini Protokoll is interesting because think about what it means to join the reality-effects of Minimalist sculpture, they actually circulate in quite a different artistic network; they make the reality-effects of live art performances, and, however improbably, the work for the white cube of the visual art gallery as well as for streets and reality-effects of theatrical realism. Levine dropped out of a doctorate for theatres. But it does seem to me that there still is a sort of inertia in program in English to pursue an MFA in directing; his postgraduate life our language and in the professional networks in which we circulate. As included some credits in theatre direction. But fairly soon, he left theatre such, our artistic understanding of what it means to make a “Monster of to become a visual artist—a move that seems less about forsaking the Reality” differs enormously as well. medium than about trying to find a different art economy in which to make I would like to close with a final example that combines a variety of an artistic life. His visual artwork consistently uses the stuff of theatre, these questions into a single piece—and also shows how inter-art questions but he often places that stuff in art galleries. Along the way he has written about reality, form, and realism can challenge each other. As I continue, I about the relation between theatre and visual art, including a piece called would like you to recall those notions of liveness and participation, as well “Bad Objecthood” which reads like a Michael Fried self-exorcism. But as notions of action and spectatorship, remembering too the question there is also a kind of theatrical sense to his visual art-based work. Levine about whether reality-based art is primarily anti-illusionistic. Having cast an American actor as a character in a Heiner Müller play in a piece recalled some key works in a visual art genealogy—Pollock, Kaprow, called “Bauerntheater” in 2007, but Levine required the actor to till potato Morris—let’s also recall some key innovators in theatre practice, maybe fields for ten hours a day for a month. even an innovator in the form of realistic theatre which is now so often rejected by reality-based art. Let’s remember Stanislavski and how he might have told his actors to begin; how might he have told his actors to produce the reality effects of realistic acting?

Every action meets with a reaction which in turns intensifies the first. In every play, besides the main action we find its opposite counter-action. This is fortunate because its inevi- table result is more action. We need that clash of purposes, and all the problems to solve that grows out of them. They cause activity which is the basis of our art.

Everybody who has been in a realistic acting class remembers these directives. This is how Stanislavski asks actors to think about the management of time. Realistic acting vexes many of us in experimental theatre. Certainly in the United States, in many of our American academic departments, it is the mode that is taught most ubiquitously, and it is the mode that our undergraduate students most want. The skills are of course regularly critiqued for being ideologically loaded, especially to those who prefer their acting to be Brechtian, to those who champion the performance-art of the Karen Finley legacy. But wherever we ended up in the business of teaching theatre and analyzing performance, I think that for some of us the realistic acting class was our first exposure to the thrills and pleasures of theatre. We remember learning the beats, the objectives, the obstacles, and super-objectives. We remember the intensities of scene-study, and the character breakthroughs that made the acting space feel like the most lively thing, the most real thing, in one’s life. Photo © David Levine

130 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 131 The directive thus joined the illusionistic reality of a realistic character- Levine’s newer project brings these questions back to earlier reflections creation to the very different reality-effects of liveness at work in endurance on time and space. His project entitled “Habit” received its workshop performance. Levine has framed the vexed relationship between acting premiere at Mass MOCA and its full premiere at the Luminato festival in and laboring in other pieces as well; for example, in the piece, Levine Toronto last June. The piece consists of a house-like structure constructed paid actors to do their day-jobs, casting them with union contracts as hyper-realistically and installed in a gallery space. Lights ‘really’ turn on, administrative assistants, postal distributors, messengers, and waiters. and water ‘really’ runs through its pipe. Enclosed on all sides except for This might be more relevant in an American context where artists rarely windows and doors, three actors inhabit the room to perform a three- have a way to secure health insurance unless employed outside of the arts, person play. The play is performed continuously, in a loop, for nine so the day-job is a central part of the artist’s labor system. Levine’s concept hours—the amount of time the gallery remains open. both prompted a reflection about where the lines between acting and non-acting were drawn but, more intensely, also exposed the fragile and temporary economy—the material conditions—on which actors rely. As per union rules, David Levine’s contracts specified the size of the performance space, and its lighting and technical support. Under the category of costume, the contract specified that it would be “supplied by the actor”. Levine continued to expose the plaintiveness, the poignancy, and the perplexity of the acting profession in a piece called “Hopeful”, in which he filled Cabinet art galleries with unsolicited headshots of actors hoping for work. Whether smiling to show or to hide their teeth, looking toward or away from the camera, the display of the headshot was an exposure and a reframing of the desperation that motors this creative industry.

Photo © David Levine

The intensity of that loop is a reminder that some forms of endurance performance actually conform to the institutional conventions of the visual art museum display. The script performed inside the house is not in fact titled “Habit” but “Children of Kings”, and was written by Jason Grote on commission from Levine. Marsha Ginsburg created the drawings on the set, also on commission from Levine. The parameters thus deviate from the normal conventions of crediting and labor in traditional theatre. Levine is not the director of “Children of Kings” by Jason Grote, with set- design by Martha Ginsburg; rather, Levine has conceived a piece entitled “Habit”, in which Grote’s play and Ginsburg’s set are a kind of raw material. The actors supply material too, committing to playing out the scenes of an excruciating twenty-something love-triangle complete with Cain and Abel- like brothers and a female character who is a Madonna/Whore coke-addict and a student of semiotics, all at once. Levine’s aim was to commission “an absolutely autonomous and heartfelt piece of contemporary American realism—because realism is one of our habits”, he says. Photo © David Levine

132 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 133 of how time and space are delineated from another perspective In other words, what happens to the temporal event of theatre when moved into the conventional space of a static encounter? It isn’t just that time is activating space, but also that space is stopping time . At the very least, the gallery setting stops, interrupts, or stalls the conventional temporality with which theatre is typically received, taking the art out of the play by having it repeat, making the action of acting available for reflection, and exposing the action of acting as a form of time-based labor. In this kind of work, we find various artistic conventions challenged and other conventions re-instated, a conflation of codes that complicates the reality-effects of what we think we are encountering. This is a “really real” endurance performance that is also a kind of realistic theatre. It is an endurance performance that is also a job. It is a fairly conventional acting job—but an acting job that is also a day job. In fact, it is an acting job that is an all-day day job, exposing the material conditions that form the real basis of actors’ laboring lives. As such, “Habit” is an odd and provocative ‘monster of reality’ precisely because it conflates and juxtaposes the limits and potentials of several kinds of reality aesthetics. Photo © David Levine If it is post-dramatic theatre, it is a strange one that obsessively returns to a conventional dramatic form. If it is reality-based visual art installation, While I might want to argue about how necessary a sort of laconic this reality is produced by an aesthetic that understands stasis to be form of Gen-X sexism was to depicting the habit of realism, the other traditional and duration to be innovative. But, finally, “Habit” is an conventions of acting it out certainly were. These conventions of realistic exercise that installs the conventions of realistic theatre into a gallery acting are a central part of what Levine is installing in this gallery. The space, which brings the pleasures and ideological insidiousness of play was written to allow the creativity, and structures, and choices, of realistic theatre startlingly into view. It displays actors making illusion, actors to unfold as a central drama within the piece. The pleasures of and suddenly, the making of illusion becomes an element of reality, not Stanislavskian scene-study are brought to the gallery. Says Levine: “The a vehicle for repressing it. Finally, by stalling and installing conventions play is one that has really flexible beats. Beats that the actors can ride and of time and space, this piece and other experimental performance modify, flex and surf…: “Habit” is all about stage-business”. The sense of forms foreground the precarious formation of reality. And they do so by stage-business is both celebrated and put under scrutiny. questioning what precisely the referents for the Real might be. Given this mix of inter-art influences, it has been interesting to explore the reception of the piece. One response, written by a museum curator, talks about how this kind of piece activates the gallery: “It Endnote brings front and center how we engage and how we view, as if you were This is an edited version of a lecture delivered in March 2012 at the symposium, ”Monsters of Reality” in Oslo, Norway. to decide how much or how little you want to see. How close do you want to get, how long do you want to stare”. This kind of interpretative frame recalls conventional ways of writing about the break in convention that spawned so much post-Minimalist art. It is a kind of orientation that assumes that a viewer accustomed to the exhibition of static objects is now being asked to become the dynamic viewer of a time-based action. The heretofore static conventions of sculptural space are being disrupted by actions that are unfolding in time. But there are a few things that this visual arts trajectory misses; for one, it does not quite track the effects

134 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 135 Sunday 25 March Rimini Protokoll

Rimini Protokoll consists of Helgard Haug, Stefa Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel. They work together PROMETHEUS in various combinations and have been artists in residence at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Berlin. They have attracted international attention IN ATHENS with their dramatic works, which by Rimini Protokoll (Haug/Wetzel) take place in that colorful zone between reality and fiction. Since 2000, Rimini Protokoll has brought its “theatre of experts” to the stage and into city spaces, interpreted by non-professional actors, dubbed “experts” for that very reason.

Photo © © Ellen Bornkessel / Stiftung Zollverein

136 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 137 Performers from the 2010 Prodromos Tsinikoris – staging of “Prometheus in is a documentary theatre director Athens” appearing on stage at and actor. He was born to Greek Dramatikkens hus: parents in Wuppertal, Germany, studied in Thessaloniki, lived Theofano-Stefania (Fani) in Athens, and, because of the Karantsiouni – financial crisis, now works in is a PhD candidate in the Panteion Berlin. He identified himself with University of Athens’ Department Io, because he can’t find a place of Political Science, but she’s still to stay. working as a clerk for a courier services company. Her goal is to Pavlos Laoutaris – reach a better personal and social is a labor economist working for life through persistent effort. She the Greek Public Employment identified herself with Prometheus, Service. He is currently working because of his rebellious action on a re-engineering project in stealing something seen as for this organization that is exclusive, and transforming it into being financed by the European knowledge and power for everyone. Union. He identified himself with Hephaestus, because in his George Emmanouilidis – professional life Pavlos has to is a transportation engineer and follow strict rules that sometimes planner who has had enough contradict his own beliefs, just like of the ongoing crisis in Greece, this god. and is looking to find a proper job abroad. In his personal life, Technician in Oslo: Photo © Daniel Wetzel he is still a single man searching Tobias Klette for a girl—this being the main Prometheus Bound—what do Athenians know, reason for his participation in the Credits play. So if you are an employer, Video: and what do they think about the myth and play or a girl, or maybe both, contact Haos Film Athens – him on emmanouilidisgeorge@ www.haosfilm.com today? Prometheus in Athens puts this question hotmail.com. He identified himself with Via (violence)in the Athens Video direction: to 103 contemporary citizens of Athens who were performance, because no one Athina Tsagari wanted to hold the sign. Direction of photography: chosen according to two criteria. On the one Jonida Kapetani – Elias Adamis is a communications specialist, hand, these 103 Athenians are representatives which is why she identified herself with Oceanus. Jonida was born to of the city according to official statistics. On the live as an economic refugee! After the fall of communism in Albania, other hand, they identify or sympathize with she moved to Athens. After 20 years and the collapse of Greek economy, particular aspects of the ancient Greek tragedy, she moved again to London. Lately Jonida has become an entrepreneur, Prometheus Bound. offering Londoners a Greek culinary experience.

138 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 139 Photo © Daniel Wetzel This special lecture-performance shows a film of the performance event in Athens 2010, while five of the performers from Prometheus in Athens appear live on stage in dialogue with the film.

The Athenian citizens whom Rimini Protokoll presented onstage were people with experience of suffering; people who considered themselves part of an uncompromising insurgency; people who saw their jobs as a continuation of a Promethean effort to improve the human condition; people who uneasily exercised the powers of the state; people on the run; people prepared to break the law for the sake of others; and people who looked to God over civic society as the ultimate legislator.

140 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 141 Sunday 25 March Bjørn Rasmussen

Professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies, NTNU, Norway. His research experience Really includes: applied theatre, performativity, constructivist aesthetics and epistemology, and drama education theory. Fantastical Publications include: Art as part of everyday life: understanding applied theatre practices through Reflections on the Monsters of Reality the aesthetics of John Dewey and seminar, Dramatikkens hus, Oslo Hans-Georg Gadamer (2006, with Rikke Gürgens), and Nice, but This article has been translated from Norwegian and was previously published in the not necessary. DRAMA : Nordisk Norwegian theatre journal Norsk Shakespeare-og teatertidsskrift(2-3/2012) dramapedagogisk tidsskrift (2011). by Bjørn Rasmussen

On the initiative of curator and dramaturg, Siri Forberg, and in cooperation with the Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen (Continuing Education), Dramatikkens hus in Oslo hosted a seminar on the relationship between theatre and reality: How to stage reality and why? After a shaky start, when the subject’s complexity appeared overwhelming, the issues and concepts became gradually clearer through lectures, discussions and performances. Hence, the dramaturgical highlight of the seminar also came on the last day with Rimini Protokoll’s lecture performance of Prometheus in Athens, and the theoretical contribution by Shannon Jackson. Both made solid impressions and contributed to the discussion by pointing out which dramaturgic effects can help in experiencing and constructing this aesthetic and social reality. Seminars like this are appreciated as forums for both practice and theory and are undoubtedly important in the development of Norwegian theatre and theatre science.

142 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 143 In the introductory panel discussion, which included, among others, representation of the Syrian rebels’ own documentation through mobile the Danish playwright Christian Lollike, and the researcher Lars Gule, telephony. But is that true? we got an idea of one monster from reality: Anders Breivik. Apart from To a pre- or postmodern human mind, all reality is a representation this reference, we never really got to understand what kinds of monsters of reality. We only know the world through our own or others’ perceptions we are dealing with in a contemporary documentary theatre, or one that of reality. This is why performative statements, like theatre, are not only tries to show different degrees of ‘reality’. Is it monstrous to challenge a part of our reality, but also actively constitute our reality. Mroué’s the barriers between artistic and social reality? I learned little about performance of the Syrian rebellion is not greater or less than the actual monsters but more about the ambiguities that arise when contemporary Syrian reality, but rather, a contribution to that reality. ‘Prometheus in (postmodern) cultural practices are combined with the (modern) mindset Athens’ by Rimini Protokoll is not ‘insignificant’ poetry about the crisis of the past. The following is a reflection on the role and development in Hellas; it is an aesthetic, yet also political, statement, which genuinely of theatre in a society where the extraordinary and the virtual are both contributes to that society. One example is the mobilisation and staging reflections of our social reality. of actual Greek citizens as actors, their self-representation, and the appreciation of their lives and opinions. Another example is Rimini From hierarchical representation to performative statements Protokoll’s duplication and dissemination of their own production, The modern way of thinking strongly manifests itself in conversations which contributes to a real, political dialogue on the present situation in about art, where autonomy is understood as a closed or fictional universe: Greece. one fears that this kind of autonomy will disappear when reality is ‘placed’ Theatre is a linguistic device that constructs reality just like writing on stage. Or it is expressed in different forms of representation, which fail to and speech—and one cannot avoid representation in a linguistic clarify the difference between self-representation and external reference, framework. One cannot talk, write or stage something without using and which put emphasis on theatre as representation rather than representation. Theatre, as a linguistic statement, is always representing theatre as a critique of representation. A modern mindset is determined one thing or another. In the postmodern sense, this, above all, means to separate real facts from unreal fiction. Many share the empirical representation of a generated event or perspective; not a secondary worldview on which Western modernity is built, including scientists, reference to something more authoritative or ‘given’ ‘outside the text’. artists and art historians. Objects, events and knowledge all belong to In other words, according to a postmodern mindset the world is not a a given reality that exists beyond performances and representations ‘given’. It is not comprehensible until it is represented and staged, when of that same reality. Often, when discussing the relationship between another reality will emerge. One reality then has the opportunity to yield theatre and reality, many presume that a divide exists between actual and when meeting with another staged reality. It is in between the different represented reality in the sense that performances/representations are realities that meaning is found. considered less real and less meaningful than that which they actually represent (i.e. the given facts). It is as if the modern human being is From the enclosed space of art to a life in practice born to defend the power structure between the one who represents and A society that prioritises scientific evidence, and believes reality is what is actually represented. Hierarchical representation is the basis located in given empirical facts, is an anti-ludic (lekfiendtligt) society. A of modern communication—in the idea of entertainment, education, society opposed to play. Indeed, while poetic ideas of art are cherished traditional rhetoric, politics and so on. But it is also implemented in and nurtured as an institution, is it for the sake of the art or society? I the understanding of mimesis and the practice of art in modern society. will dare to claim that the institution of art in modern, Western society Whether it concerns direct imitation, or a more sophisticated, poetic, primarily serves to protect society and social reality from giving fictitious and and mediated representation, the relationship between subject and representational statements the same authority as political, pedagogical and object is often portrayed as a power structure—one part holding a more scientific statements. A late modern society that acknowledges (re)presented real and therefore a higher, status than the other. An example of this reality, also makes room for linguistic autonomy, since the symbolic media kind of power structure is the way that the art of theatre refers to plays. plays an increasingly larger role in our empirical reality. Art dissolves into the In line with this kind of thinking, the covering of the Syrian rebellion social since the social creates a space for a reality characterised by symbolic through mobile telephony would be a more real act than Rabih Mroué’s language. This does not mean that art loses its autonomy. It is about an performance lecture ‘The pixelated revolution’, which is a documented aestheticized and aesthetizing society where the label of ‘art’ risks becoming

144 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 145 more of an obstacle than an advantage in developing democratic, virtual and display a society where different kinds of plays, theatrical actions, and theatrical practice. Art in late modern society is «really» reality because “the staging are all important parts of the communicative and learning cultic” practice of our ideas, acts of language and constructions in symbolic society. We see before us competent, critical, and imaginative directors, form to a large extent belongs to the reality. dramaturgs, producers, and performers, who give and facilitate, In other words, the extraordinary belongs to our social everyday life. Allan ‘lecture-performances’, and other kinds of plays and performances, at Kaprow first put this argument forward in the 1950s. In the current digital educational institutions and other spaces of communication, such as and virtual revolution, this argument is more valid than ever. Linguistic and political meetings and hearings, festivals, tributes, and so on. Play and aesthetic autonomy is now democratised and digitised. art as representative practices become less real when stigmatised as Every time art closes in on itself, it does so in order to defend an autonomous practices. We still have to pay the fool. Not in order to laugh epistemology that society does not appear to value. The paradox is that we away her insights, but to let her sit in the king’s council and keep her continue to defend the existence of a society, which is hostile towards play costume. There is nothing monstrous about such a reality. and art, and which does not tolerate any intrusion of the arts into reality.

Authentic fiction Authenticity, which was also discussed at the festival/seminar, is another modernist trait that does not sit too well with theatre practices in late modernity. Some will claim that the modern human being’s yearning “We only know the world for authenticity and reality developed alongside civilized society, where social roles, games of facades, and self-presentations of position and through our own or others’ status replaced the ‘authentic’ life. Among other things, this yearning made theatre modernists experiment with ideas that sought to explore and portray other truths beneath the surface. Artists, who work with, perceptions of reality. and in close relation to, social reality, may be considered the inheritors of this modernist ambition. However, an important difference is that art as a revealing and subversive practice is no longer extraordinary This is why performative but approaches the commonplace in linguistic occurrence and communicative action. Play, myth, and art are (again) on their way to becoming parts of a normal existence. (Re)presented like this, authenticity statements, like theatre, vs. non-authenticity end up like the remains of the hierarchical system of modernism, which is futile compared with the kind of documentary are not only a part of our theatre that predominates today.

Really fantastical reality, but also actively Within the field of culture studies, the “performative turn” is a known concept, which implies, among other things, that we present and create our identity and our culture through our actions—including artistic constitute our reality”. ones. The presentation of today may become the reality of tomorrow. My self-representation in the media (or the media’s presentation of ‘me’) can easily become the new ‘me’. Through fiction, a new reality is made. From this perspective, there is no noticeable difference between Laiv’s role- play, the Youth’s Culture-parade, Rabih Mroué’s performance, the video documentation of Syrian rebels, or Rimini Protokoll’s “Prometheus in Athens”. The practices, which “Monsters of Reality” brought into focus,

146 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 147 SATURDAY 24 MARCH Panel discussion “How to stage reality and why?”

From left to right: Carol Martin, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Pia Maria Roll, Victoria Meirik, Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens.

148 Monsters Of Reality Monsters Of Reality 149 Program Monsters of Reality

Thursday 22 March Saturday 24 March 17.30-17.45 Introduction by organizer Siri Forberg 10.30-11.00 Coffee 17.45-18.45 Who owns the reality? panel with Christian Lollike 11.00-11.30 False awakening by Trine Falch (Danish playwright & artistic leader at CafeTeatret, (performer and ex-member of the performance- Copenhagen), Kjetil Røed, Lars Gule (Norwegian human group Baktruppen) rights activist and philosopher) 11.30-12.00 High on Reality by Toril Goksøyr/Camilla Martens 18.45-19.00 BREAK (performance project Goksøyr & Martens) 19.00-20.15 Performance: POINT BLANK (Edit Kaldor) 12.00-12:30 Dialectics of the Document: Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric in 20.30-21.15 Artist-talk with Edit Kaldor by Kjetil Røed “Almenrausch” - a Radio Hearing by Tore Vagn Lid (director/ auteur/artistic leader Transitteatret) 12.30-12.45 BREAK Friday 23 March 12.45-13.45 (Dis-)Believe. In search of a lost reality or playing with illusion 10.30-11.00 Coffee by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Professor at Goethe 11.00-12.00 Theatre of the Real by Carol Martin Universität, Frankfurt am Main) (Professor of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, 13.45.-14.45 LUNCH New York University) 14.45-16.30 How to stage reality and why? 12.00-12.30 Riding the Monster of Reality by Pia Roll Panel discussion with Carol Martin, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, (performer and director) Lecture Performance Victoria Meirik, Pia Maria Roll, Camilla Martens and Toril with Matthew Landy (47), Vice Precident and Head of Goksøyr. Moderated by Kjetil Røed International Tax in Statoil and Astrid Landy (1) in 19.00-20.00 Performance: LOGOBI 02 (Gintersdorfer/Klaßen) collaboration with artist Pia Maria Roll (41). Performance showing at the House of the 12.30-12.45 BREAK Norwegian Opera and Ballet 12.15-13.15 On the role of the actor by Ole Johan Skjelbred 20.15-21.00 Artist-talk with director Monika Gintersdorfer, and the (actor, director and dramaturg) performers Gotta Depri and Gudrun Lange. 13.15-13.45 Reality Art by Julian Blaue (performance artist) 22.00 Party at BlackBox with DJ SHAGGY SHAROOF 13.45-14.45 LUNCH 14.45-15.45 Staging Authenticity by Imanuel Schipper Sunday 25 of March (dramaturg, researcher, Zürcher Hochschule des Kunstes) 10.00-12.00 BRUNCH 15.45-16.00 BREAK 12.00-13.00 Reality’s Referents: Forms of the “Real” Across the Arts 16.00-17.00 Perspectives on staging authenticity. by Shannon Jackson(Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance Panel discussion with Imanuel Schipper/Edit Kaldor/ and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley) Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk. Moderated by Kjetil Røed 13.00-13.15 BREAK 19.00-20-00 Performance: CMNN SNS PRJCT (Kalauz/Schick) 13.15-15.00 Performance: PROMETHEUS IN ATHENS 20.15-21.00 Artist-talk with Laura Kalauz and Martin Schick (Rimini Protokoll-Haug/Wetzel) 15.00-15.15 BREAK 15.15-15.45 Artist-talk with the performers of PROMETHEUS IN ATHENS. Moderated by Shannon Jackson 16.00-16.15 Closure of the Festival by Kai Johnsen (Artistic leader of Dramatikkens Hus)

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