Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion

Contemporary theatres in Europe: a critical companion / edited by. Joe Kelleher and Nick Ridout. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.
Table of contents

Ridout, however — who does, it would appear, believe in magic — leaves those sorts of questions for the moment to the fairies. His analysis of the status of theatrical mimesis in the moments he examines in his chapter is more mordant. That is a concern for the relation between the theatrical experience and the writing of that experience, which, as was suggested at the start of this introduction, we might assume involves a certain kind of knowledge being produced in the wake of the encounter, in the aftermath of the experience. Writing after the event has a double meaning.

The second and less immediately obvious is that of pursuit. The event is what we are after. If theatre and performance criticism works from a pursuit vehicle, this is because it so passionately wants to know what the theatre event is after is all about. We love the act of writing about it, and that love may be destructive as well as productive. For Bayly, philosophy is always struggling against writing. The theatre event that Bayly is after, it seems, is something that appears almost outside the attention of the spectator, or something to which the spectator whether scholarly or not would normally try not to pay any attention.

The moment the spectator whether Bayly or not starts to see that thing appearing within an existing understanding of what theatre is supposed to be, that thing ceases to be that thing. It stops being an event and becomes part of the state of things. Badiou does this by presenting a series of names from recent theatrical history, as if to underline their interchangeability, and the way in which this naming simply contributes to the stabilisation of the state of things as they are.

Bayly does this by refusing to write about any particular theatre at all. We started out claiming that this is a book about experiences of theatre. Perhaps this should go without saying. Reality, it will be pointed out, as it is conceived in the theatre, tends to be on a human scale.

Theatre tends to privilege the representation of human life. It tends to be enjoyed — when it is enjoyed — by human beings, so much so that a general account of theatre as a mechanism of human interaction, or more elaborately a means of representing reality from — and to — a human point of view, hardly seems worth elaborating. Indeed it may well be objected that one major problem of 22 Joe Kelleher theatre lies in these same anthropocentric tendencies, which have deployed that generality to mask the sorts of privileges that cause things to go harder in the world for some humans than for others.

I shall come to the Norwegians later, but we begin in Latvia with a testimonial. Above the slogan are screens showing recorded footage from rehearsals, alongside live action largely facial close-ups, individual features cut out from the group relayed by a hand-held video camera. The action itself takes place below the slogan in a glass room with a built-in ceiling, divided by further glass walls deeper into the stage.

The space is part living quarters, part workspace, part exercise room — there is movable bedding, light plastic furniture, a massage table and exercise equipment, a cooker and water cooler, entertainment gear such as a video karaoke machine and so on. There are occasional set pieces: There is a peculiar ambivalence to all this. At the level of the narrative the play is unremittingly grim, depicting a complex of poverty, addiction, exhaustion, despair, terminal illness, violence, meanness, betrayal and self-delusion.

In this are all the beginnings and all the ends. Everything in man, everything for man. Only man exists, the rest is the work of his hands and his brain. It has a proud ring! Nor is the basic humanism of this and other passages undermined by their being woven together in a tapestry of sharp but weary epigrams on humankind that deliver a dry running 24 Joe Kelleher commentary on the species. Even dogs have names. So that in the shadow of the most pressing reality or at least its most exact imitation the human essence is given as an outline traced in the air by a cynical fantasist, an ephemeral gesture, a sound effect.

And what is this exactly? How, for instance, might what I see chime with what I am supposed to hear? And is this humanity on each occasion the same thing? Was the centrality of the human category as such the problem? A place and time when human beings become fully human. However, we fail to arrive at that redeemed humanity as long as humans are consigned to subhumanity by the conditions of the market.

Life, so to speak, for sale or rent. They can both make as much noise as they like, without mattering too much. Baktruppen appear unconcerned with what their spectators believe, saving all their seriousness for the Neanderthals. They also — at least in this particular work — appear unconcerned with that most basic theatrical pay-off, human presence, to the extent that they barely appear on stage at all.

Where presence and appearance fail, however, something much more touching and troubling may step in: That stuff involves actors, but there is something more than human to be included in that term: And, of course, the Neanderthals. Filling the far wall of a deep and otherwise empty black box studio there are video projections, images of half a dozen middle-aged Norwegians i. Neither mundanity nor beauty, however, are what is at stake so much as an open-ended process of investigation, pitched somewhere between amateur enthusiasm and academic analysis, into whatever might matter — a process that is free to go anywhere except, it appears, on to the stage.

As it is, though, these same performers are — and remain, throughout the show — camped under the risers where the spectators are sat. That, or the verses of a found poem cut up out of its operating manual.

Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion

The effect is a theatre that is not so much hyper-real as hyper-familiar. Hello, who are you? Is there a difference between them up there and us down here? They are looking at us. We are like the Neanderthals. You never know how prehistoric you are, and why. And also something altogether theatrical. Baktruppen are playing a game with us. Or, they are just playing a game. They make an echo chamber in which to sound out futures from a hole under the stairs and an ancient cousin from Human stuff 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 31 a pile of old bones.

I have written of returns in contemporary European performance: At the conclusion of By Gorky, as in the original play, an actor hangs himself. After the reality shows, as it were, the desert of the real. Except with this proviso: They are that close. We need to know them better. Bey, Immediatism, Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, , p.

Alexander Bakshy with Paul S. Nathan, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, , p. Gorky, The Lower Depths, pp. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, trans. Midgley, Beast and Man, p. Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Rose, London and New York: University of Minnesota Press, For an account of later returns to the avant-garde project in art see H. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. Indiana University Press, , p. For an extended commentary on the Heidegger text, see G. Man and Animal, trans. Stanford University Press, Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Agamben, The Open, p.

Exhibiting Cultures, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, , pp. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Agamben, The Open, pp. A Brief History of Humankind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, , p. Homo Egg Egg text, Baktruppen website. Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Harvard University Press, , pp. Latour, Politics of Nature, p.

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English translation of By Gorky performance text distributed at the theatre. But for me at least, despite my professional and academic engagement with the form, opera is the encounter that never happens; can never happen, probably, despite its sociocultural visibility and its scandalous consumption of resources. But I want to suggest that, whereas new American music theatre is essentially innocent, European artists are always profoundly aware of the burden of history, and it is for this reason that the operatic continues to haunt the imagination of so many European musicians and theatre artists.

Moreover, it is clear that the works that claim this terrain with the greatest urgency have emerged primarily from within German and Italian theatre. My guess is that this should be understood as a need by artists from these countries to re-engage history. And for these artists, to engage history demands an engagement with the forms of its representation. In Italy and Germany that has meant dealing with the operatic. The recurrent themes of nineteenth-century Italian romantic opera — loyalty, conspiracy, revenge — colour Italian politics to this day, the result of what the historian Paul Ginsborg describes as a social structure based on familial allegiance and networks of patronage.

And in Germany, as in Italy, opera developed during the nineteenth century as a key contributor to this process. Until the later eighteenth century opera meant in Germany, as everywhere else in Europe other than France, Italian opera. It is in those European countries where history has been thus mythologised through opera that artists have found themselves forced to confront 36 Nicholas Till the operatic: Fascism and Nazism swept these narratives to their inevitable outcome in the Second World War, and in each instance the postwar political and cultural life of these countries has been over-determined by a coming-to-terms with those events.

A common part of that process in both countries was the experience of a violently polarised repoliticisation in the early s, culminating in state crises in both Italy and Germany in —8. The problematic of opera during the postwar period has to be understood in this context, and it may best be considered in relation to other cultural forms. More immediately pressing was the need to reject those aspects of culture that had been compromised and degraded by fascism and Nazism.

In Germany the literary Gruppe 47 promoted writing based on plain language, refusing the windy abstractions of literary German that were believed to have contributed to the rhetoric of Nazism. German theatre underwent a comparable purging of the expressionist acting styles that had been appropriated by Goebbels to such malign effect. Some sort of related periodisation may be found in the trajectory of the postwar operatic in Germany and Italy, in which I think there may be discerned four distinct tendencies: This is the immediate response of postwar modernist composers, whose ambition is to effect a radical purging of Western art music.

An effort to reclaim opera for liberal humanism without questioning its basic theatrical or musical forms. In operatic production this response is represented by the neo-realism of Visconti in Italy or the socialist humanism of Felsenstein in East Germany. By the s leftist modernists such as the Italian Luigi Nono, or in Germany Berndt Aloys Zimmermann, are attempting a more radical reclamation of opera for both the Left and modernism. The development in the s of forms of non-operatic music theatre that explore the rituals of musical performance, or new relationships between music and space or image.

Where these works differ from my more recent examples of post-operatic music theatre is in their modernist abstraction: You took away our sunsets, sunsets by Caspar David Friedrich. And we are snuffed out. Nothing more will grow here. For artists this entails a rejection of the deliberate amnesia and abstraction of high modernism.

For Syberberg, music in German history can only mean Wagner, to whom he has returned obsessively. But from the late s there is a more general critical re-engagement with the historical genealogies of music in Germany and Italy; expanded musical and theatrical practices that renegotiate the repressed forms and energies of the operatic. Composer and theatre artist Heiner Goebbels offers a useful starting point for an analysis of such approaches.

Born in , Goebbels studied sociology and music in Frankfurt from , where he encountered the Investigating the entrails 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 39 critical theory of the Frankfurt School and became associated with the leftist grouping called the Frankfurter Spontis, one of a number of post movements who combined a critique of West German consumerist capitalism with a determination to make Germany face its Nazi past.

This is not, for Goebbels, a mark of weakness. Alongside his work with the art-rock band Cassiber throughout the s, Goebbels made radio dramas in which he wove found sound, documentary material, literary texts and vernacular musics into complex montages. Goebbels dislikes the Gesamtkunstwerk principles of opera or modernist music theatre: But he is also alert to the immediate physicality and playfulness of musical performance, especially in the possibilities afforded by improvisation from his free-jazz background as a metonym for non-hierarchical forms of social organisation.

Paradoxically, some of the more direct investigations of post-operatic lyricism — with singing as a primary medium of theatrical communication — have come from theatre artists rather than composers. Admittedly the Swiss theatre director Christoph Marthaler trained originally as a musician. But, in contrast to Goebbels, Marthaler prefers to rework existing musical texts. The piece ends with a sequence in which proscribed verses from the national anthems of both the FGR and former GDR surface as troubling spectral presences. The city is a palimpsest where layers of history rub their dreams and failures against each other.

Its empty spaces often speak louder than its monuments, although many of these are empty too, abandoned shells that contain uncomfortable memories that no one can quite bring themselves to erase. Drained of history and memory after the Second World War in the name of a future that never came, it is now a place where the wipe-easy dynamic of commercial redevelopment snags against inadmissible nostalgias for a past that never was. Into the routines of the present erupt the repressed of history — forbidden memories of nation dimly recalled. How can a people live without history or memory? But how can they live with those histories and those memories?

When these people sing it is without volition or solidarity, as if they are being sung through by songs that colonise their minds. This is followed by the Nazi Horst Wessel song, escaping from a tinkly musical watch that is peremptorily silenced by being snapped shut if only history could be so easily silenced, the gesture says. For what imagined Germany could the eyes of many in the audience be seen brimful with tears when the houselights go up?

On two screens are projected images that similarly bound the fragile space of bourgeois autonomy: Post-operatic theatre artists and musicians in Italy seem to be especially sensitive to the dangerously regressive illusion of omnipotent self-presence and emotional persuasion that the traditional operatic voice promises. But it is an elegy for the imminent passing of music itself as a mode of bodily and social production as well.

Sciarrino is a self-taught composer who positions himself in conscious opposition to the structural complexity and a historical abstraction of most postwar modernist music. Luci miei traditrici appears more like opera as we know it than any of the works hitherto discussed. But Sciarrino here inverts every assumption of the operatic. The opera is constructed as series of duets, in which the narcissistic sublation of difference of the conventional operatic duet is constantly punctured by the voice of the interloper.

The operatic expires for shortness of breath. They have galvanised the entrails of opera, employing theatre to expose the suppressed social and discursive of music and deploying the materiality of musical production to challenge the smooth representational economies of theatre. Their works are clearly anti-operatic; and yet they also confront the operatic, reactivating its once troubling energies while sifting out its ideological metaphysics so that these can be laid to rest.

Editorial Reviews

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, , p. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, —, London: Cornell University Press, , p. History, Identity, Subject, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, , p. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: Essays and Conversations, London: Conversations with Celestine Deliege, London: Eulenberg Books, , p.

Elsaesser, New German Cinema: Castellucci, Epopea della polvere: Fearn, Italian Opera Since , London: We are herded together, lined up on wooden benches, heads bent beneath rows of hanging shoes. A face appears in the dim light before us. Through broken glass and barbed wire, a voice begins to ask questions: What did your father do in World War II?

Project MUSE - Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion (review)

Its importance derived from the bold and self-critical manner in which the performance portrayed the memory of the Holocaust as one of the formative forces in Israeli consciousness, whilst challenging its use in justifying the denial of the right to freedom and self-determination to the Palestinians. It is important to stress that Arbeit was not a piece about the historical Holocaust — rather it explored how the memory of this event continues to impact on life in the present. It proposed that this memory is not exclusively owned by those who experienced the Holocaust directly, or their families, but by all whose current lives are affected by its legacy, including Mizrahi3 Jews and Palestinians.

Between and , the Acco Theatre Center also brought the work to the toitland of German-speaking Europe under the title Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa , where it initiated a related debate about the role that the commemoration of the Holocaust has played in the constitution of postwar collective German identity. I have revisited this scene many times, actually and imaginatively: Arbeit underwent substantial alterations at each of its locations, taking into account local historical and political differences. At a pivotal moment in the performance the survivor handed over to the Palestinian to explain the workings of the Treblinka extermination camp, thus challenging the Jewish sense of ownership over this memory.

Yet the trip is also invested with a different meaning, which is to gain prominence during the course of the performance. The meeting point where we were asked to wait for the coach was chosen carefully: We retraced their journeys — often unwittingly. As the video ends, a sign comes into view. We have arrived at KZ Neuengamme, a former concentration camp in the outskirts of Hamburg, now a museum. At a memorial stone outside, a ceremony is held in commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust in the presence of two visitors from Israel, who are introduced to us as a survivor of the camps, Zelma Greenwald Yaaron and her son Menashe Moni Yosef.

Speeches, songs, the placing of wreaths, a minute of silence — the whole performance of atonement at the heart of German memorial culture is played out. Both are shown to have developed into empty rituals. But, whereas the latter will clearly be characterised as satirical — with adult actors impersonating children, exaggerating their mishaps — the mocking overtones of the former are subtler, thus inviting us to consider it as real.

A similar blurring between the realities of an act of memory and its re-enactment is at work in the scene that follows. We are invited to accompany the two Israeli visitors on a guided tour round the exhibition that is attached to the former work camp. Zelma introduces herself as the director of a Holocaust museum in Israel. She wears her hair in the style of the s and is dressed in an old-fashioned suit and thickly soled orthopaedic shoes. She speaks a mixture of Yiddish, German, English and Hebrew in the typical accent of the central European, locating her both in the past and the present, Europe and Israel.

With the authority of the survivor, Zelma interrupts our young German guide and her carefully chosen didactic phrases with provocative comments. But in Israel we do not have this variety of evidence. We are very far from the centre of the black hole. Should we be moved by the exhibition or feel provoked by her presentation; follow quietly, or intervene and protest? Every statement in this scene is cited from authentic documents, collected by the company during three years of research.

The museum scene contains the central elements of the performance like a nucleus from which the next four hours of Arbeit will be developed: These include a torture table, on which, so the guide explains, naked Jewish inmates were whipped before being rushed Encountering memory 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 51 to the gas chambers, while camp guards were looking on smoking and drinking beer. Yet it risks what James E. In postwar Germany, this problematic of the memorial that threatens to replace the need for personal memory-work is of particular urgency: Roaring Nazi songs and speeches can be heard.

An image appears out of the darkness: She unwraps a bandage and reveals a number across her forearm, the sign of the camp survivor. In the scene that follows we are to be presented with a video which shows how the actor Smadar Yaaron Maayan had the number tattooed on her arm.


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In its centre stands a miniature concentration camp of cardboard barracks encircled by a steaming toy train. Four of the adult actors, dressed as children, perform a parody of a school memorial for the annual Yom Hashoah, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. Led by Zelma, the children sing out of tune into microphones that hang far too high over their heads. The words of nationalist poems are spoken with the wrong emphasis or lost in electronic feedback.

Now we are allowed to recognise the satirical overtones of this re-enactment and take up a position of ironic distance that was not available before. This momentary distance is deceptive, however: The questions are simple: Do we have a family connection with it? The theatrical situation — with its clear distinction between those of us who watch and those who act on our behalf — is momentarily suspended, and we are asked to contribute something of our own personal memory to the work.

This forces us to articulate the point where our personal stories connect with the traumatic narrative of our collective past. Yet, in a moment of the greatest intimacy between spectators and performers, the interview scene also made painfully obvious their separateness — Jews were facing Germans on different sides of a broken window, and their conversations revolved around their historical roles of victims and perpetrators.

The interview scene presents a point of transition between the institutionalised forms of public commemoration which the performance has so far portrayed and the often suppressed pain of personal memory that is to be explored in its remainder — a rite of passage into the inner world of the set and the deeper levels of individual recollection. We are invited into a small and cramped chamber under a low ceiling, furnished with a grand piano and family photographs on the one hand, and old suitcases and scattered pieces of clothing on the other: We are seated surrounding the piano on which Zelma gives a virtuoso musical lecture on the similarities between the nationalist sentiments expressed in fascist and Zionist music.

In place of a cloth, the table is covered in photographs and documents referring to the Holocaust. Yosef uses the information given to him during the interview scene and addresses some of us directly by name, inviting us to join in. Haled is interrupted by a group of demonstrators, who force their way into the room, shouting interchangeable political phrases: With blood we liberate Palestine!

The world is against us. The table rattles down once more. She lies on her back Encountering memory 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 55 with her head tilted backwards and slowly takes out a piece of bread that has been hidden inside her vagina.

Earlier, during the tour of the museum, Zelma had called attention to a photo of a Muselmann and remarked: The creativity of these people. I would give a fortune for only once for a moment to hear this creature.


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    4. The Muselmann is offered to us spectators for consumption on the metaphorical dinner table right in our midst, in a manner that makes it impossible to divert our gazes from it. It is striking that only one commentator Rokem , to whose interpretation I am hugely indebted, has acknowledged the importance of the scene for an understanding of Arbeit. Although most articles describe the performance in detail, the Muselmann image is either only mentioned in passing,28 or missing altogether from the analysis. The table is pulled up again, and from beneath appears Haled, singing a song of mourning.

    A deafening cacophony of national songs and watchtowers emitting spinning lights envelops the performers, who are engaged in painful forms of selfpunishment: The cacophony slowly merges into one recognisable melody that of a nationalist Zionist song , during which the Muselmann descends from her suspension, climbs over the gate, walks to a microphone, and joins in the singing. This is one of the most painful lessons that Arbeit proposes: Now, at the far end of the room, Haled Abu Ali is dancing naked on a table which is an exact replica of the torture device explained in the museum scene.

    Meanwhile he is hitting himself with a truncheon, inviting us to do the same — and indeed one man accepts the invitation, climbs on to the table, takes over the truncheon and beats Abu Ali with it. He thus transforms himself into a portrayal of the beer-drinking, smoking, torturing camp guard. Arbeit demonstrates that no such innocence exists: By offering us the bodies of the performers as physical materialisations of an Israeli collective consciousness that can thus be touched, metaphorically and literally, the performance involves us too in its attempt to reclaim Encountering memory 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 57 the subjectivity of Holocaust trauma, including us in its process of transferring witnessing.

    But it is an uneasy process — one that subjects us spectators to aggression, anxiety and somatic distress, rather than transcendence, and one that was resisted repeatedly by members of the audience. As we are leaving the space, the deafening noise comes to an end. The list also invites us to consider the making of the piece, the long period of research, followed by the creation of set and characters, and the staging for an audience. Historical time and theatrical time become superimposed: We opened it wide. I have chosen the spelling the company itself uses in its publicity, but I will retain other spellings in quoted materials.

    The Shoah in Drama and Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , pp. University of Iowa Press, My translation from the German. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , p. Nazi term for the process by which members of a transport were chosen: Edelheit, History of the Holocaust: Westview Press, , pp.

    Max Niemeyer Verlag, , pp. Concentration camp slang term referring to an inmate on the verge of death from starvation, exhaustion, and despair. For an account of the history of the term, see Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. The implications of the term for Arbeit 60 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 Heike Roms and its investigation of the communality of Jewish and Muslim victimhood are complex. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. LaCapra, History and Memory, p. Rokem, Performing History, p. My memories of that trip are of an unprecedented sense of huge expanses of land — we could have gone all the way to China without having to cross water again.

    We also encountered the novelty of the land border — waiting in a dusty Spanish town to cross into France, being woken in the middle of the night by an irate East German guard halfway to the strange island that was West Berlin, and then coming back on a night train that had started its journey in Moscow.

    This encounter with borders and trains, with the idea and the reality of Europe and its edges, with that sense of vast amounts of land being used and shaped and invented by the people we met moving around it — travellers, students, migrants, workers — is, I suppose, the one which begins this journey. My work has been about the construction of theatrical spaces by events in public, rather than more conventionally understood theatre events and spaces. The essay will use key concepts from these important European thinkers: It will concern itself with space, appearance and dis-location.

    Europe, like anywhere, is a place that is determined by histories of particular movements. The borders of modern Europe are constructed out of the experience of pogroms, enforced evacuations, and continuing displacements arising from post-colonial inequality and poverty, twentieth-century fascism and war. Between and , for example, some thirty million people left the continent for North and South America, with millions more moving between various European states.

    The word pogrom entered into common currency following the outbreak of violence against Russian Jewry that followed the assassination of the Tsar in , and which triggered a westward migration lasting well into the twentieth century. Despite the apparent ease with which the war-torn economies of Europe absorbed the displaced of the Second World War, Cohen observes that On the border as theatrical space 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 63 there was an undercurrent of racism in the selection of immigrants which has only gathered pace and force with more recent Turkish, African, Caribbean and post-colonial migration.

    The work of novelists such as W. But, while all of these instances are deeply connected to the ways we move, or fail to move, across the continent, and to the experiences of the displaced and those seeking refuge, I argue that the space of Europe itself is also being forged as a theatrical imaginary through the ways in which people try to cross it.

    This essay is not about conventional theatre events. You will not read about theatres, plays or actors. What this essay represents is one of the ways in which our discipline is undergoing a strategic broadening, and is beginning to address and encompass many different kinds of event. In a way, it starts from another perspective. Instead of asking what events in the public arena have in common with the theatre, it asks: What are we talking about, really talking about, when we talk about the theatre?

    The question is, how can we use a particular frame of reference — in this case, a theatrical frame of reference — through which to look at the world around us in new and useful ways?

    We have seen over the past two decades the expansion of performance as a viable concept in social and political analysis. I mean, rather, that some of the ways in which identity, space and appearance work together in the encounter at the border are similar to the ways they work together in the theatre. The theatre is the place where these people appear — it is the only place where they can appear.

    On the border as theatrical space 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 65 The border, like the theatre, is a place where you have to appear. This encounter, too, requires the production of a space in which identity can be doubled; in which it is possible, indeed necessary, to be present in more than one way; in which one must simultaneously be present and be represented. The issue is not whether a person is there. A person is clearly there. This, he says, is particularly so at a border. These appearances, too, are witnessed, by observers, inspectors, judges — audiences.

    Border crossing I will expand on some of these thoughts in the following section, as I look more closely at the space of Europe and the philosophical, and practical, question of the border. I am going to look particularly at the work of Etienne Balibar and Giorgio Agamben — who are writing not as theatre scholars, but as philosophers and political economists — to show how the ideas of presence, appearance and representation, which I am claiming as theatrical ideas, seem to permeate discussion of borders and migration.

    This is not merely a mapping of a conveniently titled economic entity on to an almost congruent set of national parameters. Not only do the economic variegations of Europe and its constituents derive from very particular moments in the imperial, colonial and other pasts of the continent, but contemporary movements, which impact upon national boundaries, derive their momentum from economic causes.

    Migrants from Estonia to Britain, for example, are not just crossing a geographically coherent clump of land — they are positioned within the economic inequity deriving from post-colonial, postwar and post-cold war realities. In the context of this movement, borders serve several functions. In part, these anxieties are played out as part of a national ist politics internal to the continent and the economic community.

    The point of a border is as much to determine who is outside as who is inside. Cesarani and Fulbrook continue though writing before the inclusion of some of the eastern states into the EU: These anxieties lead, of course, to increases in the mechanisms of regulation governing migration. Yet these mechanisms are not neutral instruments; they contribute to the construction of both identity and space — to the production of theatrical space and the theatricalised encounter.

    For Balibar, this becomes an issue of the ability of the refugee to appear, to make themselves present in the way that the encounter with the border 68 Sophie Nield demands. Failure to negotiate this mode of appearing, or to inhabit the space of the border properly, causes a sort of spatial disjuncture, a stasis. The refugee becomes a non-person, a border-dweller. The consequences of these breakdowns in presence and encounter apply also to the borders themselves.

    Various sources, in fact, point to the physical migration of the borders of the nationstates of Europe themselves. They report the literal shifting of borders, understood as instruments of regulation and restriction, away from the locations of borders understood as the limit of national territory.

    European proposals increasingly mention the possibility of detaining asylum seekers in camps located outside the European Union. These practices and proposals are not without critics. It is the site at which identity or its lack is staged, enacted and performed. And this dis-location, this permanent temporariness, is what the migrant ends up inhabiting.

    We are, ultimately, held in tension between here and there as the theatre holds us in tension between here and there. We are able to move only in so far as we are able to appear at the margins, at the borders, only in so far as we are able to accurately represent ourselves to the audiences we encounter there. In the months before the closure in of the last mainland refugee camp before the English Channel, at Sangatte in northern France, I watched several news reports which featured Kurdish, Eastern European and other prospective immigrants to Britain play a deadly serious game of cat and mouse with immigration controls and the border guards.

    As darkness fell, many people, some with children, shivering in coats and woollen hats, would walk the three kilometres to congregate on the roads and waste ground near to the Eurostar freight terminal. There they would attempt to scale the razor wire and stow away on one of the slow trains moving through the night towards the Channel Tunnel.

    Passengers on the kph train heard a frantic banging during the three-hour journey, and alerted train staff. A three-year-old girl was crammed into the tiny space with the adults. The nine, who claimed asylum and had come from Romania, were arrested at Waterloo. In August of the same year, forty-four people were stopped after walking eleven kilometres along the Channel Tunnel from the Coquelles terminal on an unlit metre-wide walkway next to the tracks.

    The tunnel is sixty kilometres long. I was struck initially by the dramatic and performative qualities of what was taking place — groups of people, waiting by day and hiding by night, trying to do the impossible, and hang underneath a train as it made its journey under the sea and into the south of England — possibly even to London, which sounded in their descriptions like some latterday Dick Whittington fable — streets paved with employment, houses for all, safety from persecution, the chance of a new life.

    But as I considered it, it occurred to me that these encounters were about theatrical space and appearance, too. These people running through the dark, hiding in ditches, crossing Europe in the boots of cars, under trains, are all trying to be invisible, to avoid appearing in the way that the encounter of the border and the nation-state tries to insist that they appear. They use all the means of theatrical appearance at their disposal to enjoin us to admit them, to release them from the theatrical space and into the world. They want to board the train.

    We, the witnesses, the audience, the judges, cannot help them; we cannot validate their appearance and grant them the refuge which they are pleading for us to provide. So, as the train pulls up, and just before we are disgorged back into Banglatown, we look back into the mechanism of the ghost train. The tracks, structures and machines of appearance are mysteriously gone, the space is open, waiting. All the migrant, refugee, border-crossing women we have seen during the course of the ride are there.

    They look back at us, they dance, they signal to us across the space. And then, as if by magic, they all instantly, and completely, disappear. Notes 1 For a full treatment of these issues, see R. Theater at the Vanishing Point, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, , p. If the practices of everyday life and media textuality appear multiple, contradictory and open, theatre performances are positioned by other scholars [as] simple, closed. Butler, Bodies that Matter: Michigan University Press, , pp. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, London: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, , p.

    Hipkins, Observer, 15 June Chapter 5 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 Foreign bodies Performing physical and psychological harm at the Mladi Levi festival, August Sarah Gorman Mladi Levi, an annual international festival organised by Ljubljana-based promoter Bunker, works to bring together artists, audience members and promoters in order to facilitate an annual celebration of experimental theatre and dance. The promoters attempt to forge a culture of dialogue and exchange by housing artists in budget accommodation and funding an extended stay in the city.

    Yet in the blessed moment when all the performances come together in some sort of logical rhythm, all of a sudden we feel that we want to be driven by a hope. An invisible thread, a thought, a curiosity and a desire for new experience. Inevitably, my presuppositions about Europe are reinforced by Western European ideology. The project of this chapter, then, must be to scrutinise the meanings I forged from the three theatre pieces I witnessed in Ljubljana within the context of the Mladi Levi festival.

    Before going on to relay my experience of each of the shows, I will set out to explore the contexts of viewing lent by the festival: On 1 May , Slovenia gained accession to the European Union, as one of ten new members. Its status as the only former Yugoslav country to enter was thought to be partially attributable to the healthy export trade set into motion under Tito.

    It is as though the performers have arranged to meet online and have only encountered each other before now in virtual contexts. My interest in watching this piece was framed by the fact that I was already familiar with the piece, having seen it in the United Kingdom in 76 Sarah Gorman two different modes of performance. The temperatures were around 30 degrees Celsius, and the Mladi Levi audience were appropriately attired in summer dresses, shorts and T-shirts. Richard and Jessica H. In Bristol and London the carpet appeared incidental, barely contributing to the meaning of the show.

    I suddenly got an unexpected glimpse of my home country as a cold, potentially inhospitable place. The piece was presented at Mladinsko Theatre, situated in the grounds of a university building. Over the course of the two-hour performance, the audience are presented with a number of different scenes. They appeared to invoke images from Western popular culture, performers variously mimicking hapless gameshow participants and roles of TV pollsters garnering votes for erotic dancers and politicians. Other slightly incongruous sections of the show were more akin to examples of performance or body art.

    They became increasingly troubled as the female member of the party began to dribble effervescent white saliva. A further section, towards the end of the show, saw graphic pornography projected on to the screen. Somehow, negotiating responses to scenes of amusement, modesty and impudence, we realise that the funniest scenes captivate. However, I was not sure how this might contribute to its overall effect. I had also found myself feeling uncomfortable, as if ethically compromised, by being invited to watch explicit pornographic footage of heterosexual intercourse and the performance of the violent exchange between the male and female performer.

    On the one hand it gave me a starting point from which to recall key images of the show. On the other, it seemed wholly reductive, as the presence of soft and explicit sexual violence had remained with me as the most potent and threatening image on stage. What surprised me the most, however, was a sense of the images somehow extending beyond the boundaries of my own cultural experience.

    I was also aware that, until , the Spanish government exercised rigorous censorship, and that adultery, homosexuality Foreign bodies 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 79 and the sale of contraception were not decriminalised until In my bid to be open to different cultural signs and images, I became confused and uneasy about my seemingly conservative response to the pornography, and the use of irony in relation to violence against women and people with disabilities. They represent another Catalan company working in both Castilian and Catalan dialects in order to promote an anti-intellectual and multi-disciplinary vision of contemporary Spain.

    Their use of sexual imagery is more akin to that of La Fura dels Baus, although their intention in including explicit images of sexual activity appears to blur the boundaries between body art and popular culture. To the right of the screen sat the DJ at his turntable. Behind the screen a collection of Turkish carpets had been rolled out, providing an alternative performance area behind the screen.

    The projection screen featured a series of alternating captions juxtaposed against contemporary newspaper photographs. Towards the end of a prolonged introductory section, the DJ mixed a deep masculine voice repeating the word echt into the more ambient music he had been playing previously. A male performer with a shaved head entered from behind the screen, and appeared to stumble as he climbed on to the makeshift stage of beer crates. I was entered on the birth register. The performer speaks in a muted, faltering tone, apparently relaying these ideas with great solemnity.

    The piece takes the form of a list of regulations and codes of behaviour apparently internalized by the speaker. As the list continues, it appears to take the form of a protracted confession, the speaker s account for their conception, their birth, their entry into language and the social system into which they have been born. Two male performers and one female performer share the confessions, occasionally completing lines for each other, or completing sentences together.

    In common with Seven Dust Show, 40, Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts was organised according to a non-linear structure, and punctuated by sections apparently improvised and pre-rehearsed. Handke was born to a Slovenian mother and German father. I might crudely distinguish between the work of Uninvited Guests, Dood Paard and Conservas, by naming the former two companies as indicative of a Northern European experimental theatre culture and Conservas as representative of a Southern European sensibility.

    Second, Seven Dust had been a much more active or vital show in that performers executed a range of different gestures, activities and rituals, whereas the Northern European work had largely comprised the conspicuous performance of restraint and self-control. This could be seen to be representative of a sexualised genre of Southern European experimental theatre, sharing features with other established Spanish companies such as La Fura dels Baus and La Cubana.

    In contrast to the subtle verbal repetition of societal interpellation, Conservas appear to be showing newly liberated, sexualised bodies on stage. It works with an awareness of how societal constraint might be self-policing. By contrast the Southern European work appears to concomitantly celebrate sexual freedom and critique the sexualised language of late capitalist culture. Although Slovenian independence was won with comparative ease, Slovenia still came under direct attack by the Yugoslav army, with a resultant loss of lives. Anyone who has followed his writings over recent years can see this clearly.

    It works to foreground the role the Western media play in representing Eastern and Central Europe, and hints at enduring misconceptions about the atrocities committed by the distinct ethnic groups involved. Be the first to review this item Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Customer reviews There are no customer reviews yet. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

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