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  • Christoph Schlingensief and Richard Wagner #CheckTheirPrivilege
  • Minou Arjomand

In honor of Christoph Schlingensief, Germany’s enfant terrible opera, film, and theater director, let me start with a bit of sacrilege: I preferred his work in a museum to experiencing it live.

For almost a decade before his early death (at forty-nine, of lung cancer), Schlingensief maintained cult status in Germany, his name metonymic for an entire style of theater and art practice. He spawned many imitators. Their work is easily recognizable: fake blood, shouting, “ironic” racial slurs and misogyny, time-lapse videos of small animals being consumed by maggots. David Hughes very aptly describes Schlingensief’s aesthetic as “constant excess within an enclosed space.”1 Schlingensief’s performances managed to combine the two dominant strands of twentieth-century theater, weaving together the Dionysian rituals of Antonin Artaud with a Brechtian self-reflexivity and attention to the historically and socially contingent gestus of performers. Deeply influenced by Joseph Beuys, Schlingensief’s events existed somewhere between theater, political activism, and performance art. He appealed to those in the art world inclined to see theatre as inevitably retrograde and he appealed to theatregoers who wanted to believe theatre was on the cutting edge of radical artistic practice. In his final years, Schlingensief became an opera director. He managed to maintain his reputation as a provocateur while getting commissions from some of the most institutional of all houses: the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Opera in Berlin, the Bayreuth Festival.

In the summer of 2014, films, performance documentation, and several large-scale installations at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1 brought Schlingensief’s work to the United States for the first time. It is unsurprising that Schlingensief’s work first appeared in the United States in a museum rather than as live performances. There are a number of explanations for this. Schlingensief’s public actions were bound to the particular situation of the German Left since reunification and spoke directly to particular debates in Germany and Austria.2 Context and language [End Page 94] are so central to his productions that they do not translate well. Schlingensief was the star of all of his own shows: he appeared on stage and among the audience, shouting into a megaphone, reeling through untranslatable clichés, political slogans, and slang. In comparison to his public actions and theater productions, his opera stagings were uniquely capable of crossing international borders, as in his 2007 Fliegende Holländer in Manaus and his plans to construct an “opera village” in Burkina Faso. Yet, even leaving aside the culture and politics of opera programming in the United States, logistics alone could have forestalled a Schlingensief production here. The lavish costs of his productions, his long-term collaborations with set ensemble members, and the length of rehearsal periods for his work all break with the apparatus of opera production in the United States.

It is tempting, especially given his untimely death, to bemoan that U.S. audiences will only experience Schlingensief’s work through a museum rather than in opera houses. The archiving and curating behind a retrospective like the one at MOMA may seem antithetical to the energies and power of live performance. Indeed, within opera scholarship, the “museum” has become a common metaphor to critique the stultification of performance. In Lydia Goehr’s elegant formation, an “imaginary museum of musical works” constrains performance through insistence on Werktreue, which only permits “a specific sort of performance” in accordance with a closed, authoritative understanding of a work.3 Assessing the decline of opera’s public resonance, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker argue that opera’s revitalization will depend on opera houses “relinquishing at least some aspects of the museum.”4 The rhetorical juxtaposition of open, live performance with the preservation and stasis of museums is powerful.5 But here I take a different approach to thinking about the relationship between opera and museum, performance and archive. In the case of Schlingensief, the framing of the retrospective and the presentation of his performances in a museum do not close off the work, but rather open it to new possibilities.

The retrospective leads visitors through Schlingensief’s remarkably wide-ranging...

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