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9 STEFAN PUCHER ver since Lessing, the German stage has had a particularly close relationship with England, most notably in its adoption of Shakespeare as central to its own classic tradition. In the period covered by this book, the English stage has been central to the formation and careers of a number of Germany’s most significant directors. In the older generation, Peter Zadek actually began his career in England, directed many English plays, and always claimed an ongoing English influence in his work. In the following generation, Thomas Ostermeier established his reputation with the “in-yer-face” dramatists of London’s Royal Court theatre, and their dramas and aesthetic have been central to his career. The subject of this chapter, Stefan Pucher, one of the most honored of the now emerging generation of directors, began his career working with the British experimental group Gob Squad, and the ambient technoculture of their productions can been seen operating in much of his subsequent work. Born in Gießen in 1965, Pucher attended the University of Frankfurt from 1988 to 1994, where he specialized in theatre and American studies. He then began to create performances at Frankfurt’s leading venue for experimental production , the Theater am Turm (TAT). The first work in what has been called Pucher’s “Sturm und Drang” period was Zombie—A Horror Trip Through Three Decades, presented in 1995. Zombie was strongly influenced by the pop and discjockey culture of the decade, which reveled in the mixture of apparently incompatible categories. Pucher’s production combined club concert style with performance and video art, featuring himself as the controlling DJ. For his next two productions, Right Close Up (1996) and 15 Minutes to Comply (1997), he worked together with the Gob Squad, formed in Nottingham but now often working in Frankfurt as well. 15 Minutes, the climax of Pucher’s “Sturm und Drang,” was a late-night action rather reminiscent of the American happenings of the 1960s. In an underground tram stop, a dog barked across the wall in a video loop while members of the Gob Squad performed a grotesque dance until they were picked up by the tram. The disorienting combination of technology, performance, and everyday life attracted wide attention and gained Pucher invitations to create performances at two of Germany’s leading public theatres, the Volksbühne in Berlin and the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Flashback was presented at the Volksbühne in October 1998, and Comeback and Snapshots in Hamburg in 1999. All utilized variations of the mixture of disparate media, chance, and live action which Pucher had developed during his collaborations with the Gob Squad. Flashback consciously mixed visual and aural material from the present and the past. Pop-art poet Dieter Brinkmann provided scraps of text, while live action and video played in counterpoint. The old and E 182 new met in the juxtaposition of song hits of the 1960s and 1970s rendered by the leading actor Matthias Matschke with contemporary riffs by Claudia Splitt from the Berlin band Madonna Hiphop Massaker. A similar eclecticism marked both the Hamburg productions, for which the leading experimental choreographer, Meg Stuart, provided the movement. Nontraditional and nontheatrical elements were stressed, along with extensive use of video. The major performer in Comeback , for example, was a tennis-ball-throwing machine, whose random actions dictated much of the six actors’ coming and going in and out of constantly moving tents. None of them spoke, the fragmentary text coming from speakers suspended in the middle net of the tennis-court–like stage. Had these productions gained a major success, it is possible that Pucher would have continued to develop this sort of work, combinations of conceptual art, performance, and disco created by himself. His subsequent career might then have been more like that of René Pollesch or Christoph Schlingensief , who have achieved notable success on the contemporary German stage but remained in an important way outside it, presenting their own creations instead of the standard classics. Schlingensief in particular has often left the stage entirely to create conceptual art, generally with strong political content, in the public sphere. Pucher, finding neither the audiences nor the actors at major theatres sympathetic to his Gob Squad–style creations, went a different route and began a new phase of his career, closer to that of most of the other leading directors of the modern German stage, by bringing his aesthetic style to the standard classics, beginning with Chekhov. His unconventional, highly contemporary...

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