Politics of the independent performing arts.

"The art of staying many" – With this inviting formulation, art can also stay being many things: It can be an everyday art of living, an undisciplined aesthetic practice or the art of practicing art on large and small stages. An intimate, reciprocal exchange takes place between the sensory forms of everyday life and the institutionalized arts – I would like to develop this below as a political potential of the arts. "To stay many" suggests that we have always been many – as members of families, groups and alliances, but also many as individuals – traits, roles, desires. Although we begin as many, we must ensure that we stay many and perhaps even become more, because in everyday life, isolation and struggle, we are in danger of becoming less, uniform communities and entrenched selves. After a brief look at the relationship between diversity, sensuality and democracy with the philosophers John Dewey and Jacques Rancière, I will then discuss five artistic processes that stand for such an art of staying many and that are implicitly portrayed in the film “Blickwechsel” in the constellation of individual artistic works.

Aesthetics and democracy

In 1916, the philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey emphasized plurality as a genuinely democratic force in Democracy and Education. One criterion for democracy is the recognition of "more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest"¹. The more numerous and more varied interests a society shares, the stronger it is as a democracy. A second criterion for democracy is "continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse."² A society requires encounters with foreignness and the will to allow itself to be changed by it in order to be able to develop broader commonalities. The common cannot be separated from the foreign and the new and one's own transformation; identity and difference go hand in hand. That is why democracy begins in the sensory composition of our lives, in the ability to encounter others and other things. As Dewey puts it: "A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."³ Democracy begins long before professional politics, before governments, offices and elections – it lies less in the politics of institutions than in the politics of practices that make new experiences possible, that make experiences communicable, that encourage us to endure and desire our own becoming foreign.

With the philosopher Jacques Rancière, the democratic-political can be thought of even more fundamentally as a way of life. Rancière speaks of a primary aesthetic. This primary aesthetic takes precedence over the genres of the arts – dance, film, theater – over articulated interests and opinions and institutionalized politics. It is the organization of the sensual forms in which something becomes perceptible, attracts attention, makes a difference. The primary aesthetic is the sensual texture of our lives: "The delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise[.]" The political nature of primary aesthetics "revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time"⁴ This political aspect is thus to be found in the arrangement of our sensory world and our modes of perception. It precedes convictions. This is why it is so difficult to change ideologies using the better arguments, because they are intertwined with ways of life, emotional abodes and body images. Because the arts do not argue, but rather traverse the sensual, they have an inherent weakness that allows them to touch people beneath their articulated worldviews.

Blickwechsel

The film “Blickwechsel” was conceived, shot, edited and finalized over the last 12 months. This rapid pace was an attempt to bend the present back on itself, so to speak, and make it visible to itself. A mirror with which one can look oneself in the face or from behind. Like a festival, “Blickwechsel” brings together artists, institutions, audiences and experts in order to outline the present of the performing arts in a condensed form and to reveal views of its future. This goes hand in hand with the appeal that now is the time to look. The art of this looking lies in allowing the slowing down, self-questioning and self-criticism that goes hand in hand with self-reflection, as well as gaining the ability to act, orientation and solidarity through this kind of sharpening of the gaze.

“Blickwechsel” is a stock-taking of the political interventions of theater in our present – in the country and in the city; of the unknown and the known, the freelance and the employed, the young and the old; of those affected, allies and observers; documentary, performative, fictional; dramatic, epic, post-dramatic; euphoric and angry. What unites this wild diversity of positions is their desire for the free proliferation of differences and idiosyncrasies in all directions and their sharp rejection of everything and everyone who opposes this freedom to be diverse: be it neoliberal precarization or violence from the far right. Even if Adorno says that every "[art]work is the mortal enemy of every other,"⁵ the works portrayed are connected across differences – not through the identity of their artistic responses, but through their insistence on the right to question and research, through their aesthetic work on the sensual. – But how does one actually work on the sensual? How do you allow diversity and obstinacy and the untimely to proliferate? How do you create a shared experience – and how do you share experiences with people who have not had them? What are the current paradigmatic processes in the independent performing arts?

Testimony

A first method is that of artistic witnessing. A person becomes a witness in the emphatic sense when what they say is substantiated by their word alone. When no one can speak for them, in their place – for example, because only they have survived a particular experience of discrimination or violence. In contrast to the suspension of disbelief, the willful renunciation of reality testing in the face of fiction, aesthetics of testimony is about the audience being able to actively believe. There is more at stake here than the investigative and forensic question of what really happened. It is about using invention and imagination, translation and mediation to accurately imagine what another person has experienced and what this experience means for their life. In this sense, Carolin Emcke says that the "greatest opponent of emancipation and recognition is not repressive laws alone, but a lack of imagination."⁶ What does it even mean to imagine what has happened to someone? – Artistic witnessing can take on different degrees of mediation. Artists can be victims themselves and take their experiences as a starting point. They can share the stage with those affected and create texts, scores and choreographies together with them. For example, in “Chinchilla Arschloch, waswas” by Rimini Protokoll, musicians, geriatric nurses and politicians with Tourette's syndrome not only report on the reality of their lives, but also confront the theater, which is designed for control and repeatability, with a lack of intention and loss of control. Plays can reenact, edit or fictionalize statements and protocols, such as Tuğsal Moğul’s “And Now Hanau” about the racist attacks of February 19, 2020. The play reconstructs the events and restages relatives’ statements – thus creating its own framework, one that differs from the mass media, whereby the acts are re-examined from the perspective of those affected.

The Public

The movement of theater away from the stage and into public places is a second method. While independent productions have always been allowed and required to travel throughout Germany, the performance at other venues, as in the case of “And Now Hanau,” which was shown in town halls and museums, becomes a political and insightful gesture. Instead of being transported into an autonomous sphere, these kinds of plays seek to intervene in the spaces of everyday life, representation and power. – Conversely, site specificity means that these spaces in turn make demands on the theater. Performers cannot simply colonize supposedly empty spaces with their large-scale art. Instead, they are called upon to engage with problem areas, landscape physiognomies and local people, and to allow them to challenge preconceived ideas and aesthetic micro-conventions. It’s a theater that has sworn off the stage, curtain and fourth wall with its autonomy, and instead starts in situ with what already exists, trusting that it can participate in the world precisely in the heteronomy of existing conditions, in the heteronomy of conflicts, infrastructures and audience habits. Compromises, impurities and external influences provide opportunities for it to strip away the staleness of autonomy and enter into contact. It is often festivals such as the Phoenix Festival in Erfurt or the Osten Festival in Bitterfeld-Wolfen that develop aesthetic forms based on local issues. Or it’s a performance such as “Angst Verdirbt den Charakter” by Omnivolant, in which an angry monologue during an aerial art solo on a market square becomes a cipher for the power that can be drawn from one's own vulnerability in public spaces.

Counterarchive

Just as theater is bound to landscapes, squares and places, it is also drawn toward the gravitational field of the past. Understanding the performing arts as a living archive is a third strategy. It becomes both a resonance field for the real history of injustice, the last chapter of which we are currently writing, as well as for its own canon of exclusion. The treatment of both real and theatrical history from the perspective and with the sensitivity of the beaten, oppressed and exploited, in short: in the sense of a minoritarian aesthetic, on the one hand accepts the impact of history on the present and, on the other, denies its claim to a fateful lack of alternatives. The readjustment of history and the canon from a minoritarian perspective insists that both have always been more diverse, more complex and also more dazzling than the simplifications of the dominant society would have us believe. As historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman says: "Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive."⁷ This could be, for example, an adaptation of the Nibelungen Ring at Theater Dortmund, in which the marginal characters come to the fore and search for a ring without exclusion. Or a re-examination of the so-called “baseball bat years,” the right-wing violence of the post-reunification period, from the perspective of former activists. Because violence and counter-violence are not aesthetically abstinent, because they are based on the creation of a body image, a self-image, a heroic narrative, theater is more than a medium of memory and, as an aesthetic medium, is particularly well suited to critically examining the staging, repetition and performance aspects of violence itself.

Subjectivization

When figures step from the sidelines to the center stage, this is not just a spatial change. It is the appropriation of a position, a role, a status – and the fourth process I wish to outline here. The theatrical play with roles, whether it is the miming of a fictional character or the interplay between the performer and private person, is a double of our everyday role behavior, especially under the neoliberal auspices of affective work and entrepreneurial selves. It is no coincide that the German version of Erving Goffman's sociology classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is called: Wir alle spielen Theater – We all are playing theater. On stage or on the street, when we appear somewhere, we appear as someone, behave accordingly and are read accordingly, of course always with deviations and misunderstandings: as a white man, as someone brought up working class, as an academic ... When we speak as someone, we are both enabled and empowered as well as subject to expectations and rules: Cultural studies call this subjectivation in the active and subjectivation in the passive. What is at stake with these terms is not the polarity between the individual and society, but the question of how individuals are inextricably socially constituted. In the words of sociologist Andreas Reckwitz: "It is the cultural form that upholds the 'individual' itself as natural (...) within a certain historical context (...) It is not about the confrontation of the individual with social expectations, but about how this 'individual' is composed of highly specific cultural schemata in their seemingly given pre-cultural, physical and psychological characteristics, which supposedly ensure their autonomy."⁸ Theater is a subjectification machine; this becomes particularly clear in the work for and with children and young people. In “Unterscheidet Euch!” by Turbo Pascal, schoolchildren from different parts of the city meet and play out their social identities in a comparative way: for example, between socialization as a boy or girl or as rich or poor. In choreographed encounters, the children learn both to realize that roles are written into their bodies from birth and that they can transcend these roles through practice, creativity and communication. The interactive and integrative formats with young people, elderly people and amateurs portrayed in “Blickwechsel” show that playing, participating and especially watching are social forms of action that need to be practiced and that influence how we participate in shaping a democratic public sphere. This becomes tangible in the guest performance jury of the Theaternatur Festival in the Harz Mountains, where amateurs curate guest performances and are challenged to take positions on topics such as representation, queerness and sexuality.

Pleasure

Experimenting with the body, especially the pleasurable one, is the final strategy I would like to discuss. While forms of artistic witnessing and counter-memory often inevitably revolve around experiences of violence, queer and BIPOC artists in particular are working on a politics of pleasure. As early as 1978, the poet Audre Lorde described this as a source of agency and knowledge in her lecture “The Uses of the Erotic”. Feelings of pleasure are archives of our desires, visions of a better life together, interfaces of sensuality and meaning. Lorde describes the experience of the erotic as the gold standard of intensity and fulfillment, which can serve to critically compare other activities with it: "We begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence [...] And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe."⁹ The erotic orients us to how much we are allowed to demand from life. The arts achieve something similar, as a measure of our capacity for happiness, when they demonstrate the intensity of the feeling, the micro-perceptions and the mental leaps that we are capable of. The performance collective Chicks*, for example, describes their work “Lecken” as a “Aufklärungsunterricht unserer Träume,” playing with the double meaning of “Aufklärung” in German, meaning the philosophical tradition of rationality as well as sex education. So, the lesson could be understood as a utopian form of sex education, an education about our dreams or an ideal introduction to rational philosophy at the same time. – While an aesthetic of pleasure can represent an empowering affirmation of our identity and values, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has pointed out that love and desire can remove our armor and our security, and even strip us of our core: In her words, desire is on the one hand "a primary relay to individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history," but on the other hand "the impulse that most destabilizes people, putting them into plots beyond their control as it joins diverse lives and makes situations."¹⁰

Finding yourself and losing yourself again

Contemporary theater is simultaneously capable of self-empowerment and the loss of the self. It creates identities, enables people to play with roles, creates public spheres, testifies to and preserves memories and experiences. At the same time, it is prepared to give all of this away again and again: for a de-individualizing experience of desire and lust, for a critical self-questioning that puts knowledge, self and communities to the test, for a sensual fabric that forces us to perceive, feel and reflect in a way that is open to process. In the sense of Dewey, it is an art of encountering the other and of a society pluralizing itself. Because theater, in its desire for exploration and research, is per se particularly interested in unheard and buried voices, and because it simultaneously has a categorical openness to the sensual density beneath our lines of identity, it is a thorn in the side of all those who think they know in advance whose identity counts and whose does not, and that beyond identity there is only chaos.

Sources:

(1) John Dewey: Democracy and Education. State College, PE, 2001 [1916], S. 91.

(2) John Dewey: Democracy and Education. State College, PE, 2001 [1916], S. 91.

(3) John Dewey: Democracy and Education. State College, PE, 2001 [1916], S. 92.

(4) Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien, London/New York 2004 [2000], S. 12.

(5) Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt/Main 1973 [1970], S. 59.

(6) Carolin Emcke: Weil es sagbar ist. Über Gerechtigkeit und Zeugenschaft, Frankfurt/Main 2015, S. 176.

(7) Saidiya Hartman: “Venus in Two Acts,” in: small axe, nr. 26 (June 2008), p. 1–14, p. 4.

(8) Andreas Reckwitz: Subjekt, Bielefeld 2012 [2008], S. 15.

(9) Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider. Essays and Speeches, New York 2007 [1984], S. 57.

(10) Lauren Berlant: Desire/Love, New York 2012, S. 13.