 This was a little thing, a lot of things we had to do completely before coming to theatre for everybody. Yes, everybody. But it was a good day. And indeed, I understand your life, the way it was done. I've already seen it all. Survival of theatre as a platform depends on that. Thank you, everybody, to come out tonight to the Martinis Segal Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschka and I'm the director of the Segal Center. And it is a great honour and pleasure to have with us tonight Hans-Ties Lehmann. And he's been a teacher of mine. I went to the Giesen School. Actually, I think he arrived the same semester I did after the first year. And as you all know, he is a heavyweight champion in the history of theatre and thinking about the history of theatre and combining it into a theory that actually can be applied. And this is what that Giesen School was all about. The success of it would not have been thinkable without Anjaye Wirt and Hans-Ties Lehmann and Hans-Ties' book went around the world. It came as a little bit of a time difference, I think, here to the U.S. but still in all the mannered languages it has been translated. It is obviously clear how large and how huge the impact was. And I think Peter, someone also pointed out that normally theatre reacts to philosophy or to art history or to other fields. But this is the idea of the post-traumaticcy that came out within the field of theatre. And it's a very important thing to know. And so we're looking for two days. We already had ten screenings today. We have screenings all day tomorrow, so have a look at the list. It was probably the first time that also these significant theatre artists have been shown together. There was a little map, the star map of the universe that they all connected to each other and not only because Hans-Ties selected them and we also helped with it but also because they represent what we think is truly a contemporary theatre, a theatre that is closer to the future that anticipates the future instead of reworking the expected. What we already know is not just adaptations but radical inventions. The Siegel Center bridges academia and professional theatre, international and American theatre. So of course an evening like this is right in the bullseye of what we are doing and it's very happy to see that you're coming doing two evenings but the same theme is very dangerous in New York. You divide your audience, sometimes they don't come at all. So it's a great compliment I think to us that you come and also for Hans-Ties that you are with us and I welcome all the students and all the professors and everybody who came out. And our fuchs even came out, even so you officially see it tomorrow as you already came and also many of our visiting scholars from around the world who are here. We have a little reception here after the evenings, a glass of wine if you couldn't get an answer to the questions you were asked you can do that then. It shouldn't be longer than 90 minutes. The former Hans-Ties will talk about 20-25 minutes about post-traumatic theatre and where it stands at the moment because of course it's still very, very new and still it's not, it is for some people also, they say we knew about it for 10, 15, 20 years ago. So where is it now? I mean I met Columbia students who said Hans-Ties Lehmann, who's that? I've never heard of it, was shocked. And others say oh my god, this is already, you know, centuries ago and so this is quite a good time to talk about it, why this is significant, why it is important and why we really should also use it as a model to go forward as Brecht said or Heidner model said about Brecht using things without criticizing his treason. He said that about Brecht and I think the same is here. So it's a great honour and pleasure to have Hans-Ties with us. If you have a cell phone please take it out at the moment and turn it off. After the 20-25 minute talk from Hans-Ties there will be three sessions, 20 minutes each with the couples which are in your programs and then we have a Q&A here. Again, really thank you all for coming. It's a great evening here at the program. We are truly honoured also to welcome Peter Ekersl, the EO of the program here and of course all the artists in the audience. So Hans-Ties please come and join us. It's a great honour to be here with Frank and you all here because when you talk about post-traumatics here to today we must actually go back to 30 years or 20 years ago when in Giesen we were together and there was also Frank Henschka there and John Gesserland was there and Molly Davis was there and this was a great moment and I want to start by telling you something that you can't know that when Frank Henschka was turning with us in Giesen he came to New York and he found out about the Sir John Gesserland and John Gesserland came to Frankfurt and then Rene Poles saw what John Gesserland did and this was a key element in developing the theatre of Rene Poles which has now become one of the most important voices in German theatre so there's something that's great to see how this history is here in the room now when I started to write about post-traumatic theatre it was practically in the end of the Giesen period and I wrote it as you say, Ford and Gewehrleuch in Direct D without sabbatical or so I was writing parallel to teaching in the university and first of all I would say that I did not plan in the beginning to call it just post-traumatic theatre I thought of a title like this that studies in the development of theatrical languages something I don't dare to think what had taken this decision to take this title so that was one thing that I didn't coin the idea of post-traumatic theatre and then I was looking for examples that is happening too often in theatre studies today people find out the idea and then they look for proofs of it no, I was seeing a lot of different theatre works which I didn't think weren't really appreciated right by the audience or by the critics I wanted to give their names and concepts to understand it better and then there was a second influence on the book which I think is now very important it was the director of the Verlach de Autor in my editor he suggested that I don't write the long chapters I had but the short sections that many of you may know from the book I don't think that the book would have had this influence without this structure so the word post-traumatic theatre and also the dramaturgical setup in small units was quite important now when I wrote this what is the difference to today much of what I had written about at the time was for example Jan Faber or Jan Lowers who was absolutely marginal at the time had somebody told me at that point Jan Faber would one day be the director of Avignon so I would have said she was crazy really and now this is kind of mainstream so this is an interesting situation for a theoretician because on one hand I intended the concept to be polemical against a theatre that felt all too comfortably secured in the dramatic framework what they were doing representation on stage meaning it was easily readable for an audience that was united by this meaning and so on at the same time however I chose the title because I think that in fact there's a wider historical dimension to this phenomenon that was why I started to write the second book and it's not that without a certain responsibility of Elinor Fuchs there because one day she used this wonderful phrase she said notice what actually is post-dramatic theatre, post-2 and then I thought I should write it out dramatic theatre, what is it for most people this is a many people still today it's a kind of what you call a pleonasm dramatic theatre isn't all theatre dramatic no it isn't at all so I thought I had written before that in 1991 I'd written about a book on a book about ancient quick tragedy I called it pre-dramatic and said there's there are strange analogies between this pre-dramatic ancient theatre and the post-dramatic theatre of today used the term post-dramatic there in 1991 but nobody cared about it and like always you see you can't have any idea if you don't decide to write a book about it you can't make it visible so that was the beginning I thought that except the title post-dramatic was not just a polemic term for describing a whole set of different ways of doing theatre different from the traditional way but also that's a European theatre in general is largely defined as dramatic theatre or should be defined as dramatic theatre since the Renaissance neither before nor after the 19th, end of the 19th century this of course gives as Frank already mentioned a different perspective also on theatre history dramatic theatre was a very specific development of European theatre from the Renaissance on theatre where people were telling the stories in the form of dialogues making decisions in dialogues and so on and this doesn't happen in other theatre cultures for example in Japan or other theatre culture you don't have this dramatic structure there not at all but of course the European culture was very strong because of a certain imperialism and so we projected this dramatic theatre model to all the world practically so if you come to China Korea, if you come to Argentina or Brazil you always find the same theatre buildings operas and so on with the same names as in European tradition and this is of course today an important aspect of the impact if you want to call it that way that the book has in many regions I noticed that it is taken as a kind of liberation signal from certain traditions and a kind of call to weapons to find your own way of expressing yourself so the theatre beyond drama may also be theatre beyond representation although this may be a good point to throw in theoretical reflection there representation and critic of representation there will always be representation there's no way out of it but you can make differences how this dealt with and theatre as the end of representation as the end of drama also these are our concepts that I don't believe in it's like the idea of Derrida who never said that there's a beyond representation so there's a theoretical point for theatre to be thought in post-traumatic theatre there's a tension between drama and theatre what many people think has a natural unity it's not at all as such because drama is a limiting factor for theatre and theatre always has again a possibility to liberate itself from this frame there's a theoretical aspect of that critic of representation and the way I qualified it now just for a little bit and then also there's a theoretical it's a historical dimension at the beginning of 21st century the radicalizing of all these questions I think because up to this point what I just said can always think it within the aesthetic realm in general all of these are questions inside the aesthetic dimension but we have no situation where many artists feel they have to interrupt this aesthetic dimension go into the real, go into document into game-playing to something that is not aestheticized this makes it of course complicated and more difficult for us to judge the task of the critic has become much more complex now because there are no longer any standards whereby to measure I just think now of some examples that may as an end to this introduction makes this a bit visual for you for example we have here an artist over Mengele Mengele started in the 80s with the practice of theatre people didn't impersonate the figures they didn't play a gery story or anything but the audience came into a shop and there were people gathered the people were the cast and there was a criminal story supposedly had happened and you went in and came in we didn't have conversations with these people so they would be the father of the victim for example a friend of the victim and they had studied this story in terms of things that were going on in a certain quarter of the city so you started with them talking about it so everybody got to theatre earning for himself you might say this is something that is no longer art but I think this is an interesting borderline or when you take Rimini protocol today with people who are cast as young they are there and they tell about their lives their profession about their ideas also where is the art then of directing but the art of directing is there just the attempt to keep these people from making a fool of themselves because when you are not a professional you are asked to be on stage in front of audience it is in danger of making a fool of yourself so they help them I think that the political dimension of theatre has changed its face a lot in the 70s and 80s many people still believed we could teach something about politics by the theatre stage today nobody will believe people on stage are not smart about politics and the people in the audience they had a solution for political problems they would have gone into politics and realized the solutions there but of course theatre remains a political art form I think by the way it is done it is a communal work the utopia of theatre is answered with somebody of a group a conference is that we do something together that is it I think that the political dimension of theatre is there today this is the dimension of practice which is possible to do together this if you want to say it put it like this dramatic, very democratic aspect of theatre it is much more important than the messages you may try to serve to give by your theatre the social dimension of theatre is happening in the performance by the contact between audience and performer nothing else nowhere else it is not in the thinking about the things he said to you something of the sort it is just the moment of communication that is happening theatre is not in the first place something to be understood but something to be shared it is like telling a joke I tell you a joke you look back at me like this and you say I have understood the joke something went wrong I think that is the model of aesthetic communication it is not about understanding the understanding is there too that something else is happening this is also interesting to see if you look a bit closer to the classic tragedies there is a moment of anagnosis some of you may have heard there is a moment of recognition that is totally identified as one of the great moments of effective reality in theatre that is what anagnosis is you know it is a moment when early Paul says oh wow, wow, wow the whole comes out now it is me I was searching for now this is not a knowledge this is anagnosis it is a moment of insight personally he notices what is going on especially what he notices is that he did not notice it so theatre is not a place for bringing knowledge from one place to another not at all it is a moment of such insights which may be comic or tragic but which are like the telling of a joke or the sharing of a sad moment of somebody you love I think that many of these aspects of theatre practice have been lost in the business and also in the academia in the business because people are used to be sold something they want to buy something when they go to the theatre something like a meaning knowledge identification but not this moment of a passing insight which is lost again the academia of course is even worse than that respect theatre studies in Germany we have the word theatrewissenschaft you know it is a bit heavy woff woff theatrewissenschaft theatre science it is already better to talk about theatre studies because it does not apply this systematic aspect but if you want to have masses of students write papers for you of course you give them a system where they can then say ok this is the insight this is the knowledge this is the definitive point I think that in Gießen we at least made an effort to do things differently I remember that René Polish for example once or twice in his interview he said he liked about the teachings of Wirt and Lehmann there at the time in Gießen it was essentially that we didn't try to tell them what they should do to have success in theatre to find out what they have to say this of course takes time in today's study programs are on the contrary directed toward effectiveness and speedy finishing of studies which I find is wholly improductive because a young person who is going to a theatre should first of all have a chance to find out what is in him and then only try to share it with others I like to think of theatre as an offer that you give to people to share an experience with you you don't have to share it but there's an offer to do it this may be a kind of closing statement and I think in the good old Gießen school tradition instead what would have been needed and also fascinating German but the idea now is to also to share some of the artists and the re-collective researchers and colleagues that are together and I think we could go to the first a panel of about 20 minutes 15 to 20 minutes Uwe Mangel, John Jess from MOLI Davis and on new forms of theatre you already mentioned Uwe's contribution but I would like to invite all three of you to come out over here so please do come here and Uwe and John and let's talk for a moment about what are your thoughts that was beautiful I even took notes I never take notes that was beautiful snacks snacks it looks more professional with water do we need the mic yes it's recorded also and also to hear better okay so new forms of theatre and maybe you all talk about your work and how it relates to Hans Tees' Lehmann where you see your connection I think MOLI should start absolutely well I do because you do the mic a bit closer MOLI John is a big technical expert here I don't know what this is is this the microphone? thank you it's not a camera but I think MOLI was really one of the first people at Giesen really weren't you? it's just such a pleasure to see you and be here it changed my life I was a filmmaker and I was living in Stuttgart and did a show in Frankfurt a place called Teater am Tour and Andres Schwerth saw the piece and he came afterwards and he said we'd love you to I said what's that? he said it's a theater and I couldn't imagine what that would be I said look thank you so much I was very honored but I know nothing about theatre he said that'll be perfect so I said no you don't understand I didn't finish college I never was even in a school play and I know nothing about theatre and he said well we're interested about Beckett and I was so nervous I said I know nothing about Brecht he said not Brecht Beckett the great thing for you all I assume a lot of you are graduate students with Frank and this idea of openness that's what that was about Andres was completely convinced that the idea of opening things up and as you said in one of the chapters I like the smaller chapters but one was cool fun I think and about opening that up outside of the whatever is traditional whether it's dramatic or post-traumatic and this whole idea that what it is that you want to do and I had I don't know if there were 12 or 15 or however many students there were because to my enormous surprise in Germany you don't actually have to go to class who knew I was so pissed off once because nobody was there and then everybody was really apologetic they said we had to go to a lighting thing at some of the theatre in Giesen and I was like well I came on the train all the way from Stuttgart God damn well better be here for something and that was Andres and Tis never there was there were absolutely no restrictions and since and it was terrific we had a terrific time in Giesen I mean it was fabulous Rene Polish was I was particularly fond of Rene because he was just so weird and his English was very odd so I asked him to do the malady de la mort in English and he said I don't act I said oh come on Rene just get up and do it in English which of course made it interesting and he was he and Frank I mean about six or seven of these people that happened to be there who taught me a lot let me tell you this was you guys are really helping whomever your instructors teachers professors whomever comes here you're really helping them a lot because they're lost in time and space I can tell you that right now isn't that right Frank very much so yes and there was I actually wrote notes down because Tis I thought it was so terrific but there was something that reminded me of this separation of learning space in language was it reminded me of John Cage and Merce who were separating the dance the dance from the music and giving each artistic dimension some place to breathe around it and actually John quotes Kant saying that there are two things in life that you don't for which you don't need to understand and that's music and laughter and when you talked about that I thought or about laughter I thought about that because they just give you pleasure and you don't need to understand them you know and that idea of it being a the political as a communal gift is um could not be more important now no preaching no knowing more than somebody else no battering somebody with your political ideas but just being open that's exactly the point was already in the way we choose the students at the time it was not the point that they did something in theater before whatever they did one was doing music another one was doing a video clip so I was doing something completely different yeah and we chose them on the on the spaces always I don't know that I've ever been with a more fun, more interesting group of people and you brought that on to Frankfurt too that was that continued to be open Uwe, just for you Hans-Ties talked a bit about us how do you see your theater connected to Hans-Ties's book and was it there before I don't know I don't know if it was there before maybe at the same time I don't know I think there's a lot of luck in life when there's certain situations which basically challenge you if you feel the challenge and I think that was the situation in Giesen in the early 80's when did you start in the 80's kind of and also when I started doing this kind of what I still call interactive performance but now the official title participative changed but it's still the same and that was the early 80's in New York you got the age and it was the most amazing time in the arts scene in New York because you're really kind of people really push themselves to the limits in my opinion in much more open-minded in a certain way and you went to unusual places to create your performance I think that's the most important thing I grew up as a child basically with theater big German theater where you have opera, everything what I most enjoyed was the restaurant within the theater where all the performers were because that's the most amazing thing to see Hamlet sitting there playing cards and what he is called on stage so this really intrigued me in a certain way and I was always searching for ways to leave the stage behind and and Steve mentioned that the worst part for me is audience participation thank you for bringing that up it's really the worst part you sit there and you of course you mention it you make a fool of yourself and when I say people I do this but in my performance everyone is completely free to come to go anytime you want you can come back whatever you can talk with a murderer you can talk with a wife you can talk as long as you want you can ask any question you want it's a special way of creating this and that's how we basically connected I remember I was taught I was invited to Giesen but since I'm an artist I was also prone to depression and when I did this this participative performance for the first time that was in the South Bronx and you might heard about the South Bronx in the 80s that was hell but there was a very famous gallery fashion model there and everyone was up there Keith Herring, Baski everyone showed up there in this hellhole so to speak and that's why I created this performance and it got them basically and then Anjie will call me and say oh you should teach at Giesen that's when I started but somehow I spent a few months in the hospital with the depression so it never worked out anyhow but I'm I'm very grateful for Hans-Ties Lehmann's understanding of my work because that basically helped me it's I mean you all when you say to people I'm doing this type of work still at my age a lot of times I have to explain it it's not self-explanatory it's very interesting so when I was in Mexico City or whatever why don't you read post-traumatic I'm in there thank you very much for that it's a big help it was helped with sponsors and so on and so on it's really wonderful if you travel over the world and invited to festivals oh you're in post-traumatic theater so that really helps it's translated into many languages so that's really kind of it's kind of in my situation it's a big it's a big help and what you just said I would like to say that basically my problem is we just discussed it in Berlin I'm using now some politics behind what I'm doing to go to my performance obviously you talk about the murder or something else but behind other politics the problem is I cannot help it but I'm interested in politics but the problem is if you do it in theater it's kind of you're preaching to the choir that's the problem I mean I can be as much as I want against no names but say whatever the people sitting in front of me they are the same that's a huge problem and I try to avoid this also by confronting people with people they would usually not talk to I just did this performance a while ago in Germany and you might have heard about that there's this huge right-wing party in Germany alternative for Germany and they're getting more powerful by the day and all the people who go to performance in theater in this town they don't know anyone from the IFT so I created a character for one of the performers who was a member of the IFT so basically you were sitting in front with this person and if you don't ask questions nothing happens in my performance you have to talk and so all of a sudden they were confronted by someone who was a member of the IFT in his character so as an audience all of a sudden I'm challenged and of course there's a certain way of training the actors you can also say reversing but that's it I don't want to make it too long yeah maybe if I would go to a question to John Hans T said earlier he looked what's out there and then tried to put it together so in a way your work was out there I know you also asked me frankly we have a PDF of the book and I said yes I'll send it to you so how would a post-traumatic theater be for you and the book or to your work I mean I just also have to sort of bring up this period of time that we could say that post-traumatic theater was starting to form itself because at the time really Giesen started I think it was a reflection of what was you know it was feeling of what was happening in the world already so you know there was the east west Germany was the site of the wall that was starting to people could feel it whether they really knew it or not that was starting to split you could also say the internet was actually just beginning a few short years this strange thing called the internet was going to come about all this other political things you know sexuality was opening up all these things were just right in that small period of time and so I think in a way this post-traumatic theater was kind of you know sensing all of that and that was all feeding into what post-traumatic theater could become also the media all this that was really the center point when the media was just starting to show its real power really before that in the 70s nobody really had too much of an idea except maybe a few social scientists somewhere who were really paranoid but still so I think it was all a place like Giesen was kind of a focal point and interesting again that it happened in Germany of all places I think it's very it didn't happen let's say it was happening it could be happening in different parts of the western world or whatever these kinds of ideas but actually it really was kind of focusing there and it was that Hans Sties was the one who really started to notice what is actually going on around here it's not just sort of another trend or another thing flying by and to notice these questions so I do remember being in Giesen and it was either the first or second time I was there but I do remember that you asked me that you wanted to meet with me and talk to me about my work in a very serious way and of course you know Andre was around but Andre was had a different way of talking about your work and I thought oh my god now I'm gonna have to so I better get together this guy has real questions and he wants real answers in a way so that was great so that was kind of an education for me I thought I have and then of course I was actually you know pleasantly surprised actually that I had some answers but I was induced to give them in a way so that I mean that is what was a great part of that school is that it was able to pull these questions and answers out of people and get their minds working so that being there was a great education for me I mean I was supposed to be there as a teacher and I only started making theater two years before and suddenly I was there as a guest professor or something so it was a real education for me and I do think that he was already contextualizing all of these things in the things that you would say, the questions you would ask and it was kind of an interesting type of communication with you because you were so curious about everything all these things you know what are you doing? You weren't dismissing things or pretending that you knew things about it, it was curiosity and so I think there was a great curiosity that actually got transferred to a lot of those students very curious students were very curious, yes we would bring up Renee Polish very curious mind very impertinent kind of mind you know but so curiosity to stretch out all different creative directions so I don't know for me that was a really kind of a focal point which as time went on I thought oh my god this is kind of a pivot here there's actually something happening and we seem to be part of it in this little town that you brought me to and I mean that was the other thing I have to say that these students were somehow had this idea that in Frank's thing you know he tried to sneak into one of my performances in New York in the East Village and pass himself off as a journalist yeah somebody said there's some German kid here who says he's a journalist from Germany and the place was completely full there was no seats left and I looked over and there's a very young thin kid and I just said I'll just let him in let's see what happens and so I was quite lucky to just let him in but that the students were encouraged to act upon what they were thinking that was the other thing so in this case you know Frank saw something and he acted upon it and he invited me Andre invited people you invited people you asked questions so it was this idea of really acting upon what you were doing not just thinking about it thinking about it was actually daydreaming in a way so to act on this so anyway that was so I think something is a pivot you think something did change but we we have a reaction to what your colleagues we can go on much longer because they have the next panel but Hansi what comes to your mind listening to these comments comes to my mind that also our work on theory was not distant to interact directly with the art but we studied let's say one seminar we did Deluz or something on its own right I think that it's a mistake that is often made now in theater studies people try to mediate to quickly between theory and practice but this is the way so being curious about what is happening in the theater being curious about thinking should be they should both have their own way and then you can have if you are lucky then it works something between them thank you for joining Hansi I think we are out of time but thank you for the practitioners to come and join us and we thought it was important to open with them so thank you really for all of it and Andre and Berti maybe you come and join us thank you and now we come to what we say the performance of performance so maybe we move in a way a step ahead none of you have been there but still your work is connected in some way to Hansi's work so maybe give us some of your reflections first so my work because it was interesting to hear how you first encountered post-traumatic I have to say first I studied with Rebecca Schneider as an undergrad and discovered a little bit of theater out of theater kind of performance then I went to performance studies and studied with Richard Schegner then I came here to the PhD and it was only when I graduated that Frank was like because I was friends with Frank there is a book that was just translated so it was only after I graduated with the performance studies Rebecca Schneider and Pagie that I finally read your book and I always wonder why had I never been taught that book when I was either in performance studies or as a PhD and I think this is kind of where my work is and kind of the intersections of disciplines because we were talking about everything you were saying I felt like oh I wonder about live art from the UK I was thinking of a live art development agency in lowest K down I was thinking about an essay I read that Andy Horowitz wrote on contemporary performance versus visual art performance I was thinking about how you include so much dance and how now there's you were saying mainstream there's like this market of kind of post-traumatic theater slash live art so this is where I'm interested in what's the post to the post what's new because there's definitely you go to all the festivals and it's the same kind of artist that you're seeing so now with the internet I mean post internet digital YouTube I'm curious to see what the next generation is gonna do and I think one more thought before you speak maybe is that so with current performance art how now theater is really infiltrating the museum the gallery spaces this is not something new obviously but it's now at least theater history is being taught in graduate visual art programs and I think this is a little bit different than perhaps Black Mountain College always kind of that history of experimental so maybe just as an example my nephew went to Cooper Union and one day he comes and he's like oh I'm gonna do this really great contemporary art piece it's on puppets have you ever heard of the of the Peter Schumann I was like yeah I heard of Peter Schumann yeah and so what's new you know and one discipline is like this re-invention but I think these things perhaps are emerging in the more conversations we have across disciplines so this is kind of where I'm interested in when do we talk about live art versus performance studies versus post-traumatic theater just to open it up in that way so well first of all thank you Frank and thank you Hans-Tis for inviting me to be here it's a great honor to be in this beautiful theater and so in terms of dance this is what I'll be talking about because it's my field of study but also I guess between more or less 86 and 98 I was working in Europe and working as a dance dramaturg which was something that actually was completely unheard of except in one of the examples that actually appear in the book which is to think about how Pina Bausch would be one of the artists that would be included within the post-traumatic theater so from that position both as a dramaturg and as a dance scholar what I have to say is and also someone who teaches in performance studies at NYU it seems to me that it's very clear from not only the intervention early today but also from your talk in performance studies last week that we had the pleasure to have you talking a little bit longer and what's very clear is that how the notion of post-traumatic theater as you said is not an invention that you come up with but it's actually the expression of a concept that emerges imminently from the practice of the artists that are surrounding you and it's as if like all of a sudden you give the name or you express the name of a condition that is already being there and it needed to be named from the point of view of dance that becomes really really important because throughout the 80s and 90s the choreographers in Europe that we are working with are facing this ongoing accusation that they are killing dance and what they are doing is not dance and something that your book proposes and you mentioned this today is that it's not post-theater it's post-traumatic theater so the equivalent for all of a sudden for a whole generation of choreographers and dramaturgs it's not that we are not doing dance we are doing post-choreographic dance there was dance before the invention of choreography there will be dance after choreography but this moment when you say that the dramatic theater is invented in a renaissance coincides with the invention of choreography also the first time that the word appears is in 1589 in a French book Orchezographie and 100 years later in 1700 finally we have choreography printed on a book so it's a formation of a new discipline and in the 80s and 90s all of a sudden we have a group of choreographers more or less in different generations with different concerns, different ideas that are interested precisely in questioning the choreographic within dance just as perhaps some dramaturgs and theater directors are interested in questioning the dramatic within or drama within theater so I don't read German but I remember distinctly when the book came out maybe simultaneously or a few months later there was a short essay by you published in Ballet International 10th act well called post-traumatic theater which is maybe 10 pages or something like that which is a summary of your arguments and when that fell within the realm of those who don't speak German it was really like a moment of insight that somehow validated what we are doing and allowed to give us a little bit of energy I was working very closely with Meg Stewart at the time and with Vera Manteiro in Portugal and with other choreographers and I remember distinctly the audience yelling at this choreographer saying dance why don't you dance and the reason that they wouldn't dance is because precisely they were questioning the imperative that is always attached to the choreographic machine is precisely this imperative to move and they were questioning that so that was these two aspects like to create a concept out of the practice of the authors that surround you I think it's exemplary for scholars and for theorists and we should all do it and on the other hand this proposition that there is something that is pre-dramatic and post-traumatic and then like this alignment between let's say it was very curious for me to see that many examples of the post-traumatic corresponded to what perhaps in dance we are calling dance theater and that made me rethink the condition of theater somehow because I believe Meg Stewart is there in the book and that there is a kid's marker and many others so that was very very important and let's see if I have I think I had one last point but now I can't remember let's see I guess that's it for now yeah yeah yeah that's very moving even to hear this because of course dance was always in the theater important and there was this artificial separation between speaking theater dance theater and opera music theater and the German tradition and the European tradition and I think to find back theater must first of all also mean find back dance of course also the idea that language and music is not separated like in the ancient Greek word musici which included language, poetry and music and rhythm and everything and I had a chance to collaborate during the last years a little bit with Jan Fabre and it was a great experience because I hadn't expected his work to start to be as it was I thought he's a dictator who says to that and that and that nothing of the sort it was a group that developed the ideas then he would select of course and dance theater like Jan Fabre is of course completely different from dance theater let's say of Max Duart but I love both and I don't think that there's any reason to be dogmatic about this or this question I have a feeling like it says in the bible my father's house has many rooms or something of the sort I think this is very true for the theater today so I feel that mostly the people who are attacking avant-garde theater as dogmatic they are really dogmatists who say theater has to be like this everything else has to be justified particularly it's quite interesting also in relationship to what you said of theater in the museum just as a brief, it was the last thing I wanted to say but I didn't write it down but in relationship also to that I just was in Miami this weekend and they were showing Tino Segal's this situation and what was really really interesting was to think about how in the room you walk into a room and then in the gallery and in that gallery there are six people who are two of them are actors or dancers but we don't know and then the other people are professors right, especially Simfuku and like really high theory people and within that space they create a little a little possibility of an encounter and I was just thinking about it's a theater without character but it's a situation and they say one of the things that Tino says is like maybe theater is just another name for a situation in which we have to be engaged in what happens to you at that moment somehow it's really interesting, I didn't know that because I had this concept it was very important for me in post-traumatic theater to say a situation in the sociological sense situation starts in the birthday party when the second person arrives and it ends when the second last person goes in between there's a situation and I think this is I was just going to, it's funny that we're talking about situation because I was going to talk about well the comment I had was on when you were speaking about dramaturgy and that in your book you mentioned yeah dramaturgy of a situation alive in the situation that's kind of orchestrated in time and space as a durational component and this kind of merging of disciplines, again one essay I wrote I remember reading Claire Doherty's book called situation and I thought I can't believe it, she's talking about situation coming I guess from visual art and more dance and she never read post-traumatic theater that's just what kept coming so maybe it's a time and a place where yeah where these kinds of dramaturgies from different disciplines are re-becoming together a little bit not sure, institutionally maybe I would like to include there also visual arts and cinema because we always had the theater film and media studies together in Frankfurt I think it's extremely important that people who study theater today they know a little bit what's going on in the cinema and in the visual arts so they should be a lot in the museums and also we did for example in Frankfurt they happened the first great exhibition about Stanley Kubrick they were very angry in Berlin that we did it in Frankfurt was a really great exhibition and we were collaborated with it so students were doing little performances on subjects of the films within the exhibition it was quite interesting and I think we should this collaboration should be intensified today between museums and performance and theater studies because sometimes you just don't need anything else but a room in the museum and a painting or something or an object and a performer there and then you find out new things good, I mean if not you know where we'll be on schedule, we also want to have really time with the audience so really thank you for coming and contributing the microphone on the chair really Andre and Berti thank you for coming and we all know these conversations could go on could have spoken longer and all three are this Molly and John and Uwe but I think it gives a little insight or inspiration and you can go as deep as you want, we now have Peter who is the executive officer here at the program Australian professor of theater specialist in Asian theater studies here and to see what did this book mean in Asia in Asian theater and in dramaturgy in general but also for the Asian theater what what does it mean after me, okay sure hi so when I was asked to speak at this panel by Frank and Peter I was thinking oh what am I going to talk about because when I think about my own practice and my own research in theater and performance I never framed it in terms of the post dramatic so the question to myself was I'm wondering why do I not frame it you know through this term and I realize it's because it's so naturalized in the way that I think about theater I was a theater practitioner in the 1990s in Singapore and I became a scholar of theater in the mid-2000s until now and I realize that the work that I've been doing and the work that I've been writing about are all post dramatic in nature so I've read about the book but then I don't think about it as a term to think about the work because I guess it's the way I think about theater in general and then I started thinking for the purpose of this panel why is there such a prevalence of post dramatic theater practices in the spaces of my study right so I write about theater practices, performance practices interdisciplinary performance practices in post colonial spaces Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong and so my hypothesis is perhaps it's because these new city have a lack of a how would I say this a canon of traditional narrative performance text so how do you think about new histories how do you perform a new nation state into being if you do not have these canonical a text to look back on so how do you perform self and being how do you perform new histories so thinking about new dramatic forms for example might be a good way to think about it so if we think about the post dramatic as a form of presence as a situation, as a moment are these theater practitioners rethinking or relooking at traditional theater practices so that would be I guess my main hypothesis and another thing and to kind of carry on from this I'm also thinking in terms of scholarship could we actually look at if we look at a performance practices with a post dramatic lens then perhaps we can move the conversation think about comparative practices of western theater forms and Asian theater forms moving the conversation away from intercultural framework to thinking about these practices to be in conversation with each other and thinking about them in terms of with a transnational framework rather than an intercultural framework thanks Melissa I think I remember but I think I've only ever met you twice in Europe but I've met you about five times in Japan and you know I'm going to speak a little bit about my understanding at least of the reception of your work in Japan before I do though I'd just like to briefly mention the two times that were in Europe because I think they were well they were certainly very important for me the first one was that I was very fortunate to attend a symposium that was made in Holland in Amsterdam organized by Marika Hulgemann to celebrate the translation of post-traumatic theater into English and there was a two or three day symposium and there was this wonderful presentation by one of your graduate students who was really sweating I remember who had to give an explanation of the theory in English for this international audience it was very insightful and the whole conference was really exciting the second time was some years later when you organized what was probably the best conference around dramaturgy that I think has ever been held in Frankfurt and it was in the early 2000s and it produced the publication and with several very notable essays by people like Mary Van Cook oven and your own essay and that was a remarkable event for bringing together some of the key dramaturgs and academics working in the field quite extraordinary and you know I consider myself very fortunate to have been there and I guess the segue to Japan is that at least as far as I can think there's a connection between the reception of the post-traumatic theater and dramaturgy in Japan and I think one of the interests that they've always that Japanese scholars have had in your work is very much exploring that connection and so I think it was Hirata Ichiro who wrote the first book in Japanese on dramaturgy called dramaturgy which was very much a kind of German history of dramaturgy and a German specialist who works at Kaio University and I think at one stage he invited you there as a visiting scholar and then later on I met you in association with Takayama Akira and Hirata Hayashi Tatsuki who are two theater makers and again I think a strong connection to Gisen there through Takayama's work and Takayama is working a lot in Germany now as well and they work in Takayama mainly I was just told that Hayashi's actually moved to the south of Japan and is just bringing up a family and has given up performance and that was quite news to me but Takayama of course is very, very, very busy in these days and I think his work relates to the theater concept in so many ways because it's relating to concepts of the theater of the real but also his training in Brecht and his training in dramaturgy is very much a part of his and I think the German school of dramaturgy if we call it that and then you were also part of a very extensive project organized by Fuji Shintaro at Wasari University so he came from Keio which is one of the big prestigious universities but very much associated with the very kind of conservative education to Wasedo which was one of the main sites of the 60s activism and the biggest theater program in Japan and Fuji-san organized a year-long symposium on questions of contemporary performance post-traumatic theater and dramaturgy of which I remember I met you there because we were both speaking at that seminar. The Japanese they have for many, I mean for centuries they've translated everything. They have avarice translators and very often translating books from non-English language into Japanese before they translated into English. They translated Antoinette before he was translated into English and they may well have translated post-traumatic theater before it was translated into English, half of it. It was really the first translation that was ready for the Japanese. That's right. It was four years or so earlier then the English translation even the French. But you know there is that kind of tendency to translate and that thirst for knowledge but I think there's also not only intellectual in Japan but also the artistic contemporary artistic community find a lot of resonances in the kind of work they're doing particularly after the 1980s and into the present day with people like Okada Toshiki who are doing work that is in some respects post-traumatic but in other respects of course there's always been a post-traumatic theater in Japan so many of the characteristics that append to Japan to the concept of post-drama have existed in Japan for a very long time indeed, you know centuries in fact but in different contexts so yeah. Yeah there's of course very special relation between Japan and Germany in this respect because on the other hand Japanese theater was very influential in the beginning of 20th century in Europe and Germany because all the avant-gardeists they loved the Asian theater they loved Charlie Chaplin it was about the only thing they could agree upon they were all for Chaplin and for Asian theater I was very happy in Japan when I was there because the first time I went there was with a theater project of Hamlet Hamlet machine 1992 I think or 1991 it was it was a friend an Austrian director named Joseph Seiler and he had a rotation to work there parallel to a Japanese who was putting on stage Hamlet to do the Hamlet machine and we sat together in Vienna one day and as Joseph Seiler so is he said you know I'm going there I said oh great I would like to be there he said well why don't you come I said yes of course why don't I come but few days later a few weeks later I received suddenly effects the times was to effects communication from Tokyo good institute I wanted to come there on a conference on this project I wrote it once back that I won't take a long flight to Japan just to attend the conference but if they would host me for a few weeks so that I could see some no theater I would come they did this and so I I became a fan of no theater which I think is really great invention theater historic there's also just one other thing that I was thinking about the the use of post John was speaking about the kind of age of post-modernism post-traumatic theater but in Japan there's also the concept of the post-Shingeki which was a theory developed by one of my professors David Goodman who Shingeki is the Japanese word for the modern drama and so he proposed the concept of the post-Shingeki referring to the 60s theater very radical avant-garde of the 1960s and so that post-Shingeki is an interesting sort of parallel to the idea of the post-traumatic and I know when they translate post-traumatic theater into Japanese they use the Karakana so it's it's post-dramatic sieta it's not post-traumatic engeki but there's an interesting I think mirror or some kind of parallel kind of discussion around the very active 60s theater and this idea of the post-Shingeki also there's a kind of deep divide how many intellectuals think that politically left sieta must be realistic sieta in this engeki tradition so they were very skeptical about no forms of post-traumatic sieta post-traumatic sieta but I think that meanwhile this has changed see there's no connection I think the word mirror as you moved I think it is is one of the perhaps great function of the book that it did hold up a mirror in a way father, theater father has died and you know you look in yourself what do we do now and that it really mirrored in so many forms and reflected also more light perhaps came out then even you put in it so it was just brilliance in the sense of the word I would say since we are at 8 o'clock and we don't want to go over time too much maybe we open up to a few questions maybe since we have so many participants maybe just to Hans Thies so maybe put up some light to the audience and I would like to thank Melissa and Peter to give a little idea for an idea of an idea how profound the influence really was and again thank you all for participating and hope you will be able to join us tomorrow we need a good audience we need good theater but we also need good audience and it's fantastic to have such a great audience who is here so some comments or a question for Hans Thies we have the microphone again not only that we hear you but it is also being recorded hi hello thanks for coming I'm a student here at the PhD program and I liked the offer of thinking about theater as a joke I connected that very much and I wanted to ask as a theater scholar is our job to explain the joke in other words how do you relate to the joke to that aesthetic communication I believe you called it aspect as a scholar that's of course a question that you cannot answer generally I think you can write about theater by taking a step away from it or going very close to it mostly academic discourse remains the middle distance you don't find out anything so you can go into the details or you can go to the theoretical dimension of it and I think the second for the joke aesthetic communication it's the same thing you can relate to it in terms of theory for example if you take the Freudian theory of the joke you find there exactly this model it says when you take you tell a joke and then you laugh with the laughter when you have told your point it's exactly it's a kind of tsundong how did you say that initiation between the subconscious of one and the other that's the aspect of the element there and I think that with Lacan you have a possibility to theorize this my mechanism a bit wide how it would be too difficult to explain I'm afraid now thank you another comment this is really a pleasure to meet you I've been knowing your work for some time now and I wanted to ask about the place of the text in post-americ theater as we talked a lot about dance and performance installation and how much and of course the importance of art too this what we may call maybe a tradition now what would a post-traumatic theatrical writing look like as a practice I'm thinking there are some writers I believe that could somewhat fit that category like I am I know well the work of Valère Novalina for instance the French somebody who writes beyond representation or is it writing as a form of performance I wanted to know if you would just comment more on this I would love to especially since I constantly have to fight the misunderstanding post-traumatic theater would be theater against the text which is of course nonsensical where to start there are texts by Frida Jelinek by Rony Polish by Sarah Kane by a number of other authors which are great in which correspond in my opinion exactly to the to the post-traumatic style or mentality or whatever you want to call it so there is obviously a number of great writers in our days I don't mention Dynamo La of course because it's so evident so on one hand you have this dimension of authors who write in the post-traumatic way on the other hand you have a lot of text work for example in fast entertainment in no fast entertainment certainly wonderful theater one of my absolute favorites however it's really textual theater text theater so I think the function of text post-traumatic theater is just as essential as it was in dramatic theater only in other ways and I feel that happy about much dramatic theater because it's liberating the text has literary phenomenon from the reduction to role text another one or two more some comments or thoughts then yeah no I think we will go on we will also have tomorrow maybe you will stick around we have a small reception also here and we are also already a bit in minutes so really thank you all for coming and thank you Hans Tees of course for doing all the way here and thank you