Theron Schmidt
I work internationally as a writer, teacher, and performer. My academic research and my approaches to teaching are rooted in several decades of ongoing practice as a multidisciplinary artist in Europe, the USA, and Australia, as well as prior work supporting activist movements and art for social change. I am committed to modes of research, learning, and making that are collaborative and experiential, alive in the thick of things and responsive to the complex and contested entanglements of diverse bodies, politics, histories, and alliances.
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Papers by Theron Schmidt
In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multiuser , and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities.
In delineating these concepts in relation to particular artworks presented in the 2016 BoS, my intention is to use them as critical lenses with which to view those works, but also to consider how those works might speak back to these concepts. That is, what is proposed here is not a hierarchy of “materialisms,” nor a privileging of concept over work (or vice versa), but instead an attempt to articulate how the works themselves might be material practices of thinking, “working through” the conditions of their own possibility, and implicating me (as spectator) within the questions of value, ethics, and agency that they raise.
In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multiuser , and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities.
In delineating these concepts in relation to particular artworks presented in the 2016 BoS, my intention is to use them as critical lenses with which to view those works, but also to consider how those works might speak back to these concepts. That is, what is proposed here is not a hierarchy of “materialisms,” nor a privileging of concept over work (or vice versa), but instead an attempt to articulate how the works themselves might be material practices of thinking, “working through” the conditions of their own possibility, and implicating me (as spectator) within the questions of value, ethics, and agency that they raise.
Panelists: CJ Mitchell, Live Art Development Agency, UK, Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency, UK, Adrian Heathfield, University of Roehampton, UK, Theron Schmidt, Kings College London, UK, Marin Blazevic, University of Zagreb, Croatia, Brian Lobel, Artist, UK, Sara Jane Bailes, University of Sussex, UK, Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London, UK, Aoife Monks Birkbeck College University of London, UK, Lara Shalson, Kings College London UK, Richard Gough, Aberystwyth University, UK, Mary Paterson, Writer, UK, Yelena Gluzman, University of Tokyo, Japan, Nika Arhar, freelance publicist, Slovenia, Katja Čičigoj, freelance theoretician and researcher, Slovenia
For example, in the piece ‘by’ John Baldessari included in the 11 Rooms exhibition at the 2011 Manchester International Festival, the organisers attempted to stage a previously unrealised concept by Baldessari that centred around the display of a real human corpse. For various reasons, they were unable to do so and instead displayed printouts selected from a year of correspondence in which the bulk of activity was undertaken by relatively anonymous members of curatorial and technical staff. In this form, the work is partly about the normally hidden labour that underlies the production of artistic value, and the way in which celebrated artists and curators derive surplus value from the (waged) labour of those working for them. But it also reproduces the extraction of surplus value from that same labour. Indeed, the ‘work’ of art here is no longer that object or event that is produced by anonymous labour, but is in its entirety that labour itself, being put to work twice.
The Baldessari piece, and similar theatrical pieces that foreground ‘non-artistic’ labour (such as Quarantine’s Entitled), tend also to present this labour in the service of the idea of the ‘real’ that might interrupt the fakery of art: the real corpse, the real stagehands, etc. The professionals are enlisted in overcoming theatre’s artifice. Perhaps one solution to this problem of double-exploitation might be offered by an approach that instead highlights the unreality of the labour involved, and which offers an invitation to join in the construction of an artificial ‘commons’ – an altogether unreal work to which the theatre might be especially suited.
And yet, Back to Back’s most recent work, Food Court, seems to engage with questions and dynamics of theatrical spectacle and dramatic representation – not in order to overcome them, but rather as a way of engaging with the politics of appearance itself. Rather than getting to the ‘real’ politics behind these representational surfaces, the work stages the idea that disability is precisely a matter of appearance, and that, as Jacques Rancière has argued, the distribution of appearance is the domain of politics.
• What is the nature of the difference between the representation and the real? This seems particularly relevant with regard to the presentation of damaged, tenderised, or suffering bodies. In Regarding by Isabelle Dumont, an actress applies layers of professional stage makeup to reproduce the image of a brutalised victim of violence; what makes this kind of illusion different from the presentation of bodies which are ‘really’ bleeding or otherwise vulnerable?
• What political effects might be at stake in these distinctions? In cultural critics BAVO’s collection on the idea of ‘over-identification’, they describe works by the likes of Christoph Schlingensief as being characterised by radical undecidability, what they call a ‘structural ambiguity’. I would suggest that destabilising the distinction between reality and representation might be one source of performance’s political efficacy – and perhaps the only source which is not based on the transcendence or suppression of theatricality.
In addressing this question, I want to propose a politics of theatricality which is at odds with the idea of theatre as public, democratic space. Instead, I will draw on theatre scholar Tracy Davis’s analysis of the ‘doubling’ mechanism of theatricality and its production of ‘a sympathetic breach’, and on Jacques Rancière’s critical account of theatre history in which theatre revolutionaries (such as Brecht and Artaud) continuously theorise a ‘good theatre’ which will overcome its status as spectacle in order that allegedly passive spectators can enter into a collective state of being.
Considering works such as Rita McBride’s Arena (the centrepiece of Tate Modern’s 2008 exhibition The World as a Stage) alongside parallel works by Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, and the Freee Art Collective, I will argue that the theatrical's interventionist potential resides exactly in its separation from the public sphere, and in its attention to and play with the conditions of that separation – a condition that, in an update to Debord, we might call ‘the situation of the spectacle’.
One perspective is offered by the tactic of over-identification, which utilises an exaggerated sincerity as part of a refusal of the idealism that is typically expected to be art’s social role. In these cases, sincerity itself is under attack. But even in official situations, a kind of over-identification is required, as in Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s three-hour apology to his country’s aboriginal peoples. Somewhere in between are actions such as Rabih Mroué’s I, the Undersigned, an apology for the Lebanese civil wars taken in the absence of any other apology, but also a work for sale at the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London. To what extent is a work like this an intervention in specific politics, or might it be understood as an intervention in the very idea of polity? What authority is asserted in the absence of sincerity? And how might (mis-)performance rework the relation between context and authority?
These questions will be addressed through consideration of the production of theatrical space: what is a theatrical space, and how is it produced? At one extreme, theatrical space is theorised as a model of the public sphere, and at the other, as a place of inauthenticity and spectacle. Taking Tracy Davis's analysis of the 'doubling' mechanism of theatricality and its production of 'a sympathetic breach', I will discuss both the restrictions on and possibilities for a characteristically theatrical mode of intervention. Looking at Rita McBride’s ‘Arena’ (recently recreated as the centrepiece of Tate Modern’s ‘The World as a Stage’), alongside performance-based works in un-curated public spaces, I will argue that the interventionist potential of the theatrical is enabled precisely by its separation from the public sphere - and its attention to and play with the conditions of that separation.
The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance.
Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others.
CONTENTS
Introduction (Jerome Carroll (University of Nottingham, UK; Steve Giles, Emeritus, University of Nottingham, UK; Karen Jürs-Munby, Lancaster University, UK)
1. Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty, or: Why Post-Brechtian Does Not Mean Postdramatic (David Barnett, University of Sussex, UK)
2. Spectres of Subjectivity: On the Fetish of Identity in (Post-)Postdramatic Choreography (Peter M Boenisch, University of Surrey, UK)
3. Political Fictions and Fictionalisations: History as Material for Postdramatic Theatre (Mateusz Borowski, Jagiellonian University, Poland, and Malgorzata Sugiera, Jagiellonian University, Poland)
4. Phenomenology and the Postdramatic: A Case Study of three plays by Ewald Palmetshofer (Jerome Carroll, University of Nottingham, UK)
5. Christoph Schlingensief's 'Rocky Dutschke, '68': A reassessment of activism in theatre (Antje Dietze, University of Leipzig, Germany)
6. Postdramatic Reality Theatre and Productive Insecurity: Destabilizing Encounters with the Unfamiliar in Theatre from Sydney and Berlin (Ulrike Garde, Macquarie University, Australia, and Meg Mumford, University of New South Wales, Australia)
7. Parasitic Politics: Elfriede Jelinek's 'Secondary Dramas' and their staging (Karen Jürs-Munby, Lancaster University, UK)
8. A future for Tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic (Hans-Thies Lehmann, Visiting Professor at University of Kent, UK)
9. Acting, disabled: Back to Back Theatre and the politics of appearance (Theron Schmidt, King's College London, UK)
10. Performing the Collective: Heiner Müller's 'Alone with these Bodies' ('Allein mit diesen Leibern) as a piece of Postdramatic Theatre (Michael Wood, University of Edinburgh, UK)
11. Crises of Representation: Towards a Postdramatic Politics? (Brandon Woolf, University of California, USA)
EDITORS
Dr Jerome Carroll is lecturer in German Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Steven Giles is Professor Emeritus of German Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has contributed to Brecht on Art and Politics (Methuen Drama, 2003) as well as authoring books on Modern European Drama and Critical Theory.
Dr Karen Jürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK. She translated and wrote a critical introduction for Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre (2006).