Charting the Postdramatic (review)

Following in the tradition laid out by Michael Kirby and RoseLee Goldberg, Hans-Thies Lehmann in his Postdramatic Theatre (first published in Germany in 1999) attempts to define a critical vocabulary and landscape for what has variously been called performance, performance art, installation art, and so on. More simply, it's theatre, but a theatre which decenters the text as a defining element in the production and reception of theatrical experience, rendering the text or the play as an element neither more nor less central than movement, light and set design, sound or multimedia.

In journals like this one, the question of "What we talk about when we talk about theatre" has been paramount since the emergence of a significant theatrical avant-garde in America in the 1960s and 1970s. And the question does not only concern what we talk about, but how we talk about it as well: Is a critical vocabulary drawn from the reception of text-based or "play"-based theatre (what Lehmann would call "dramatic" theatre) appropriate for a form of performance that decenters or abandons traditional dramatic text entirely? Is the acquisition of terms more common in criticism of dance, music, or the visual arts a sufficient means of expanding the critical definition of "theatre," or must existing terms be imagined more broadly?

Lehmann's book is admirable in that it lays a groundwork of description before attempting to draw elements of these wildly disparate performances together, rather than beginning with a definition of "postdramatic theatre" and trying to shoehorn existing performances into his controlling paradigm (a paradigm, it must be said, more descriptive than prescriptive itself ). Unfortunately, this can lead to a seemingly slow and disorganized start as Lehmann begins to describe the foundations of modern theatre and performance in a Hegelian materialist aesthetic, then, in a section called "Prehistories," a rather plodding and unremarkable chronological tour through the histories of various avant-garde movements through surrealism and Stein.

Next, in a section titled "Panorama of postdramatic theatre," Lehmann comes into his own, collecting performance histories over a broad swathe of contemporary European and U.S. theatre to define a collection of performances for study almost Aristotelian in its breadth. Beginning with the work of Kantor, Grüber, and Wilson, Lehmann charts a path through a large body of contemporary performance, with frequent references to younger companies in both Britain and on the continent, such as Forced Entertainment and Complicite. This has the salutary effect of drawing old work and new work together as Lehmann identifies qualities in common to both: "non-hierarchy" (in which each element of a performance aesthetic is given equal weight in the definition of the experience it intends to present), "plethora" (approaches to a "sensory overload" of theatrical elements that leads a spectator to moments of both confusion and selection), "irruption of the real" (in which events and spatial elements extraneous to the rehearsed and rehearsable performance itself are allowed to affect and in some cases even direct the final public presentation of the performance).

Lehmann is careful to note that his "postdramatic" should not be confused with "antidramatic," if we are to define the word "drama" as that written artifact that, as a playtext, comes either before or after the theatrical experience itself. What Lehmann suggests is that the text take a more egalitarian place in the constellation of crafted elements and performances that coalesce to an event that can be called "theatrical." While Lehmann takes many of his examples from the theatre of images (Robert Wilson) and companies that devise their own texts in the process of rehearsal (Complicite), many of his other subjects, like Richard Maxwell, Richard Foreman, and Heiner Müller, see themselves quite as much dramatists as directors, memorializing their stage work in published books and using a written or devised text as the necessary springboard from which their theatrical and scenic imagination takes flight. Indeed, in the penultimate section of the book, "Aspects," in which Lehmann attempts to define the terminology of a postdramatic performance criticism, "Text...