Book Contributions by Ilinca Tamara Todorut
Opheliamachine, 2024
This is the introduction to the published text of Magda Romanska's play Opheliamachine.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater
Schlingensief’s gargantuan last project, the Opera Village in Burkina Faso, remained uncompleted ... more Schlingensief’s gargantuan last project, the Opera Village in Burkina Faso, remained uncompleted at the time of his premature death from lung cancer in 2010. The most ambitious project, artistically and politically, that he ever undertook, the Opera Village cracked under the weight of its contradictions. A decolonial venture reaching towards a state of non-hierarchical cultural hybridity, the Opera Village simultaneously rehashed colonial practices. The epilogue summarizes Christoph Schlingensief’s body of work as one marked by magnificent highs and embarrassing lows emergent out of the incompatibility between western art and globally equitable politics.
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Christoph Schlingensief's Realist Theater , 2022
The chapter discusses Schlingensief’s Animatographs, which were large structures built on big rev... more The chapter discusses Schlingensief’s Animatographs, which were large structures built on big revolving platforms and stuffed with objects and audio-video materials. In concept and execution, the Animatographs harkened back to early cinematic devices (such as panoramas) and to old practices in realist scenography as employed by the likes of Ibsen and Brecht. The three major Animatograph projects taking place in 2005—the Icelandic “House of Obsessions,” the German “Odin’s Parsipark” in Neuhardenberg, and the “Area 7” outside Lüderitz, Namibia—placed the carousel constructions in the center of experiential ecosystems involving performances, street actions, and film shooting. An Animatograph construction absorbed influences and materials from its surroundings, evoked art histories and local histories, and invited spectators to walk freely within its bowels. With the help of Walter Benjamin’s ideas of imagistic critique, the chapter argues that the Animatographs articulated a political message with dogged insistence, despite the absence of narratives communicated in conceptual terms.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater
Schlingensief lost himself in a growing obsession with Richard Wagner over the course of staging ... more Schlingensief lost himself in a growing obsession with Richard Wagner over the course of staging the opera Parsifal at Bayreuth in 2004. Schlingensief used Wagner as a metonymic key for understanding current political realities and for analyzing what happens to theater posing as politics. With Parsifal, Schlingensief worked through his own anxieties related to being a white, male, German politicized artist. The chapter compares The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ scathing review of Parsifal as vomit-inducing with Nietzsche’s accusations leveled against Wagner, and sees in the aversion to Schlingensief’s Parsifal a legitimate concern over the staging’s nauseating overabundance of meaning. Schlingensief’s Parsifal unfolded like a moving revue of cluttered props and set pieces doused in projections and spinning on a giant turntable. It was unwilling to take one particular, discernible stand as it touched on many issues briefly and in passing, albeit repetitively and incessantly: war, religion, colonialism, terror, racism, xenophobia, misogyny.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater
The 2001 Please Love Austria project that asked Austrians to vote daily for the eviction of an as... more The 2001 Please Love Austria project that asked Austrians to vote daily for the eviction of an asylum seeker temporarily housed in a shipping container in the center of Vienna invites evaluations of the political efficiency of artmaking. The grotesquely detourned Big Brother project grated against an Austria that had just voted the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) into a ruling governmental coalition. FPÖ campaigned with the slogan “Foreigners Out!” The chapter analyzes the project’s dramaturgy, which despite Schlingensief’s avowals of relinquishing all directorial control, entrapped its audience turned Brechtian co-producers into situations that undercut the capacity to act. Please Love Austria betrayed misanthropy and disillusionment, and evidenced the unsteady positioning of Schlingensief’s art between social work and theater work. His efforts to weave a positive mythology around ideas of failure succeeded in defending artistic autonomy, but also provided quick retreats from social criticism and ways of shirking responsibility. Schlingensief himself sensed the parallelism between such aesthetic fundamentalism and political terrorism.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater, 2022
Schlingensief’s 2001 Hamlet production at Schauspielhaus Zürich copied Gustaf Gründgens’ 1963 Ham... more Schlingensief’s 2001 Hamlet production at Schauspielhaus Zürich copied Gustaf Gründgens’ 1963 Hamlet staging, as well as Gründgens’ own acting mannerisms when playing Hamlet in a 1936 Third Reich production. Schlingensief punctured the detournement by letting a contingent of six recanted neo-nazis infiltrate the staging. The transmedially-conceived Hamlet Nazi-Line project included a wide range of events, from street actions and press talks to founding a support organization for neo-nazis who wanted to exit the movement. The chapter explains the project’s investment in a critique of the relationship between fascism and post-nazism Europe, and the responsibilities and liabilities of artistic institutions vis-à-vis political regimes. Hamlet Nazi-Line interrogated the collusions between high-art and base politics, and dispraised post-reunification politics of memory. Schlingensief saw how the nazi-hype can be a lucrative business, commercially, artistically, and politically. According to Schlingensief, neo-nazism is not an extremist appendage to a tolerant mainstream society, but a tackier expression of piled-up violence that continues to accumulate, as evidenced by the wide support given to ultra-nationalist parties.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater, 2022
Contrasting and comparing with acting theories from Stanislavski’s to Michael Kirby’s, the chapte... more Contrasting and comparing with acting theories from Stanislavski’s to Michael Kirby’s, the chapter shows why Schlingensief’s ideal of seemingly unprofessional and unpredictable acting style can still be called realist. Behind Schlingensief’s work with actors lie both a critique of institutionalized practices, as well as a resistance to trade in essentialisms about human nature. The chapter then analyzes Schlingensief’s project with a large cast of people with disabilities, Freakstars 3000, a detournement of reality-TV singing competitions in the vein of American Idol. The project encompassed under the same name the stage performance at the Volksbühne, the mini TV series airing on VIVA music channel in 2002, and eventually the documentary released in 2003 under Schlingensief’s direction. By acknowledging the Freakstars 3000’s collaborators as actors, the project unfolds not just as a show lobbying for disability rights, but as a project about actor training and professionalized work standards, about acting itself, on stage and off.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater, 2022
In Rosebud, a stage play that premiered in 2001 at the Berlin Volksbühne, Schlingensief criticize... more In Rosebud, a stage play that premiered in 2001 at the Berlin Volksbühne, Schlingensief criticized liberal politics and the theater institution. The production freely copied from Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, Peter Zadek’s 2000 Rosmersholm staging at the Akademietheater Vienna, and from a plethora of other artistic references. The chapter first reads Rosmersholm with Jürgen Habermas’ help to articulate Ibsen’s concern with the theatricalization of the public sphere, a theme picked up by Schlingensief. It then articulates Rosebud’s portrayal of the intersection between media and theater industries. Rosebud evidenced Schlingensief’s passion for bad theater, on and off stage, in its staging of 9/11 debates, emulation of terrorism such as live bomb threats, or its use of reality-derived, contemporary characters like the German Chancellor and Deutsches Theater Berlin’s dramaturg, Roland Koberg. The stage of Rosebud patched together quotations of Ibsen, of Zadek, of the dramatic form, of German theatrical practice, constructing an indicting play on theater itself.
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Christoph Schlingensief 's Realist Theater, 2022
The introductory chapter argues for the relevance of seeing Christoph Schlingensief’s variegated ... more The introductory chapter argues for the relevance of seeing Christoph Schlingensief’s variegated body of work through the lens of theatrical realism. It places Schlingensief within a stylistically heterogeneous tradition of realism primarily defined by its extra-aesthetic social outreach that obsesses about what lies occluded by the visual clutter, rather than being defined by surface mimesis. Schlingensief’s oft-conjured metaphors of darkness and exposures signaled his allegiance to the socially invisible, from the unemployed to refugees, who invalidate by their marginal existence the fronts of equanimity, democracy, and community. His realist theater understood that the surface obscures reality more than reveals it. His work aimed to de-naturalize held images of reality, not naturalize the stage, using techniques such as detournements, the copying and undoing of already existing elements. Schlingensief imitated characters, situations, and narratives thriving in the social realm, hinting at the interbreeding between fiction and reality in the age of the mass spectacle. He practiced a theatrical realism that combined interrelated dimensions of critique: political (critique of reality), aesthetic (critique of formal artistic means), and institutional (critique of theater as a cultural apparatus). Schlingensief’s work begs for a widening of our conceptualization of theatrical realism.
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The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, 2015
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Papers by Ilinca Tamara Todorut
The Theatre Times, 2024
The European Theatre Convention (ETC) in collaboration with Renew Culture officially launched in ... more The European Theatre Convention (ETC) in collaboration with Renew Culture officially launched in July 2024 the ETC Theatre Green Book (ETC TGB). The sixty-nine-page, freely available document brimming with images, graphs, and tables aims to offer a clear, step-by-step, and undaunting roadmap to live arts institutions in their journey towards achieving carbon emission neutrality. For the sixty-three publicly-funded European member theatres of the ETC, this goal is currently set for 2030.
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Performance Research, 2024
In ‘Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral’, Ilinca Todoruț anal... more In ‘Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral’, Ilinca Todoruț analyses Western theatre’s fraught relationships with acting habits by reading between the lines of Konstantin Stanislavski’s short account of a daring casting experiment gone awry. In a slippery two-page text, Stanislavski narrates how he attempted to cast an unnamed peasant woman in the 1902 production of Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Prying open what went wrong at the Moscow Art Theater, despite the best of intentions, helps guide a critique of contemporary performance training methods geared towards eliminating habit.
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Performance Research, 2024
I look at digital theatre made under the COVID-19 lockdown in Romania – specifically Exeunt, a co... more I look at digital theatre made under the COVID-19 lockdown in Romania – specifically Exeunt, a collective creation directed by Bobi Pricop, POOL (no water), where Radu Nica, Andu Dumitrescu and Vlaicu Golcea repurpose Mark Ravenhill's text, and finally Ștefan Peca's one-man show mynewplay? – from the perspective of precarity and work-induced sadness. Through their alluring video art or funny rants against the theatre, the three projects stage anxieties about the future, labour grievances and commentaries on the art market. Theatre artists' resilience during the time of lockdowns reflects both artistic ingenuity and the practiced survivalism of the cultural worker under neoliberalism.
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TDR: The Drama Review, 2024
Under lockdown in a boarding school in China, students staged a performance based on poetry writt... more Under lockdown in a boarding school in China, students staged a performance based on poetry written by Chinese migrant workers. The poems guided an exploration of biotechnical interdependencies in and between local and global environments and the composition of the resistance script and movement score of laboring bodies embedded in the poems. [Draft version]
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Observator Cultural , 2024
Recentul protest al activistei trans Antonella Lerca Duda, în timpul unei reprezentații cu un spe... more Recentul protest al activistei trans Antonella Lerca Duda, în timpul unei reprezentații cu un spectacol jucat la Teatrul Mic din București, a născut în spațiul public o avalanșă de reacții despre modul de reprezentare a unor grupuri minoritare pe scenă. Pentru că această discuție – despre cine și cum reprezintă categorii precum romii, persoanele trans sau non-heterosexuale, persoanele cu dizabilități etc. – e una care se poartă rar și tinde să fie dusă în derizoriu ori așa-numitul whataboutism, publicăm în acest număr perspectivele unei teoreticiene și ale unui practician, ambele argumentînd de ce e, pînă la urmă, vital să luăm această temă foarte în serios. (I.P.)
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The Theatre Times, 2022
On November 20, 2021, TheTheatreTimes.com published futureStage Manifesto, developed by futureSta... more On November 20, 2021, TheTheatreTimes.com published futureStage Manifesto, developed by futureStage Research Group at metaLAB at Harvard, a group of 40 leading thinkers in performing arts. The Manifesto was “animated by the ambition of transforming the post-Covid ‘return to normal’ not into a return, but instead into an opportunity to reimagine the future of the performing arts.” This is Ilinca Todorut’s response to the Manifesto.
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Theatre History Studies, 2018
In 2010, contemporary arts museum BAK in Utrecht, the Netherlands, curated Rabih Mroué's first so... more In 2010, contemporary arts museum BAK in Utrecht, the Netherlands, curated Rabih Mroué's first solo exhibition, referencing the achievement of a theatre artist breaking into the fine art circuit with the exhibit's playful title wavering between self-celebratory and self-effacing: I, the Undersigned. A few months into the exhibit, Mroué crossed out with a bold red line the big lettered title displayed on the pristine white gallery wall and graffitied in cursive Arab lettering underneath: "The People Are Demanding." The slogan had just begun circulating among demonstrating crowds first in Tunisia and then in Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt, in a wave of protests that soon came to be named in the media as the Arab Spring. With a single gesture, Mroué drew a line underneath his previous work and hinted at beginning a new chapter. The move from the "I" to the "we" underscored an intent to recalibrate forms and temporalities in a shifted focus from past memories to future aspirations—from an obsession with parsing and (de)ciphering a long history of civil war in Lebanon and marking the present with the signs of trauma to a collective effort to move beyond ghosts and traces to imagine what can happen in an approaching future.
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European Stages, 2014
One of the nine performers belonging to the Mladinsko Theater company from Slovenia stands on the... more One of the nine performers belonging to the Mladinsko Theater company from Slovenia stands on the empty stage directly facing the Romanian audience huddled in a small black box venue and tells us how the director of this piece we're seeing-Oliver Frljić, who was wryly described by critic Nataša Govedić as "post-Bosnian, ex-Yugoslav, and currently Croatian" i-came to their theater with the intention "to do a show about the conflict between Slovenians and Croats, a conflict that never was, and never will be." Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland addresses the violence that has ripped apart the people and territories of former Yugoslavia in its inter-ethnic wars and genocides of the 1990s, challenging the claim that Slovenians were not involved in the conflict, thus revealing the intensely problematic incapacity to assume responsibility for the past, to recognize its legacies, and to distinguish just how deep violence has remained nested in our midst and is still shaping our reality. Oliver Frljić uses the theatre to encourage a public forum for open debate, a recurrent impulse in Eastern-European contemporary performance towards shaping theater as a truth and reconciliation committee.
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Journal of Poverty, 2014
This paper centers on "Letter to Heiner Müller" by Croatian playwright Goran Ferčec in order to d... more This paper centers on "Letter to Heiner Müller" by Croatian playwright Goran Ferčec in order to discuss methods of artistic intervention into the social sphere. Various forms of movement—as mass mobilizations, as ideology in flux, as national and international migration chasing work opportunities, and as the movement of the singular body in performance—form the layered textures of Ferčec’s piece trying to spell out possible directions of political action. The role of the artist and intellectual in oppositional movement appears to be the burning question of the day.
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Theater Magazine, 2012
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Book Contributions by Ilinca Tamara Todorut
Papers by Ilinca Tamara Todorut