Postdramatic Theatre

Robert Wilson’s theatre explores ‘...the borders of art, questioned genres, pushed against limits...erasing the barrier between life and art, exploring the word as sound, replacing character with everyday people performing everyday activities, rejecting the literary in favour of other theatrical codes, non-linearity, a return to ritual...’ (Holmberg, 1996, p. 2). Wilson’s theatre is considered to be ‘...non-linear but not non-narrative’. An example of this is Wilson’s production of Einstein on the Beach where the fragmented narrative ‘...cross, crash and collide on stage. These narrative fragments, however, may be difficult to recognize. The gaps between the fragments are larger than the fragments, giving the spectator who wants a story, acres off empty space in which to construct one...By emphasizing artistic devices rather than story line, he veils narrative’ (Holmberg, 1996, p. 11). This enables the audience or spectator to construct their individual interpretation, creating a multiplicity of the signified. We deconstructed the text by firstly, not reading it as a text but as a score. This enabled us to choreograph movement which reflected upon the fragmentation and the different rhythms of each section of the text which we explored. Combined with particular words or phrases that we found interesting, we constructed movement which reflected upon Wilson’s hidden narrative within his performances. An example being in movement piece one, with the phrases ‘no place for you in my tragedy-play’ (Mueller, 2001, p. 2) and ‘her heart is a clock’ (Mueller, 2001, p. 3). We experimented with not the meaning of the words but how different actions affect the meaning of the line; also, experimenting with the rhythm of the line ‘her heart is a clock’ within the movement. This lead to playing around with the characters names, Hamlet and Ophelia, and using them for any disputes within the stick game. This reflects the fragmentation of the narrative by stripping away the traditional use of characters within a performance and using them in a different form. This combination leads to, as Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006, p. 95) observes, the body becoming ‘...the centre of attention, not as a carrier of meaning but in its physicality and gesticulation’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arthur Holmberg (1996, p. 52) states that ‘Wilson’s images speak when language fails, and they take us where words cannot go’. This exemplifies our reason for incorporating a stick into our three movement pieces. Without intention, the stick became a multitude of meaning within our choreography and we decided to play upon that more. When devising the movement, we never placed meaning to the stick and this has resulted in, unintentionally, creating a lot of signifies in relation to the stick. This includes the relationship with the stick, the language of the stick and what the stick may represent, for example power or punishment. This reflects Postdramatic theatre not simply being

 

‘...a new kind of text of staging – and even less a new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levels upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance text: it becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information’ (Lehmann, 2006, p. 85).

 

The spectator is encouraged to find meaning and ‘representation’ of the stick, through the performative ‘presence’ of this object. This reflects upon Wilson’s images, created within his devised physical movement.