II Politics and Theatre

Erika Fischer-Lichte. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London: Routledge, 2005.

The relationship between theatre and ritual has fascinated many writers, and, particularly in the twentieth century, inspired a wide range of provocative and influential work in anthropology and cultural studies as well as in theatre theory and practice. In this major new work by one of Europe's leading theatre scholars, significant new perspectives are opened in the study of this complex relationship. Working from a wide variety of theatrical and performative phenomena of the twentieth century, Fischer-Lichte argues for an ongoing and international concern with tapping into the transformative potential of theatre, based on its social dimensions, its ties to ritual, and the necessary bodily co-presence of performers and spectators. In large measure this concern was inspired and fueled by a deep yearning for communal experience in a world seen as increasingly fragmented by the traumas of global conflict and the continual social, cultural, and political upheavals, displacements, and violence suffered by people everywhere. In some cases, particularly at the turn of the century and in post-1968 experimental theatre, this performative search for an imagined community was also closely related to the traditional idea of such a community growing out of suffering and sacrifice. As the title of her book announces, it is this triangulation of concerns in the search for community that forms the basis of Fischer-Lichte's innovative and fascinating study.

The organization of the book is basically chronological. It begins with an engaging prologue, which demonstrates by the application of performance analysis the importance of this thematic triad—theatre, sacrifice, and ritual—in a memorable performance at the opening of the twentieth century, Gertrud Eysoldt's portrayal of Hofmannsthal's Electra in Max Reinhardt's experimental Kleines Theater in 1903. Her themes introduced and strikingly illustrated, Fischer-Lichte opens with a discussion of the intellectual status of these three terms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, drawing upon such key figures as Nietzsche, Max Herrmann, Emile Durkheim, James Frazer, Arnold van Gennep, and the Cambridge anthropologists.

The remainder of the book is devoted to in-depth analysis of a number of specific performance manifestations of the use of theatre and ritual in community (or communitas) formation. The first example is Max Reinhardt's Theatre for the Five Thousand, which in its gathering of a mass audience and its development of a mass spatial aesthetic provided a major model for the great communal spectacles between the wars which are a central concern of this book. The other chief source of inspiration for these spectacles were the Olympic Games, re-established in Athens in 1896, which Fischer-Lichte discusses as a paradigm or the new performative culture developing in Europe before the First World War, devoted to the development of a quasi-religious new international community based on shared values and bodily achievement.

The central part of the book is concerned with three distinctive manifestations of performative community building in the inter-war years. One of these has been extensively studied by theatre scholars, the Soviet mass spectacles in the years immediately following the October Revolution. The second, the German Thingspiel movement of the 1930s has received little attention outside of Germany. The third, the American Zionist pageants of the 1930s and 1940s, although generating audiences of many thousands at their peak, have been almost totally forgotten, even by American theatre historians. Fischer-Lichte has made an important contribution to theatre history by her analysis of these various movements, but has made a much greater one in contextualizing them as differing manifestations of a similar concern throughout the West in the inter-war years with the building of community through physical performance and mass manifestations.

The final section on the book centers on the Western post-1968 experimental theatre, when the issue of sacrifice returned to prominence in ritualized theatrical performances that sought to establish a new...