Aesthetics of Absence

Texts on Theatre

Heiner Goebbels, Jane Collins, Nicole Gronemeyer, David Roesner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317911838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Aesthetics of Absence presents a significant challenge to the many embedded assumptions and hierarchical structures that have become 'naturalised' in western theatre production. This is the first English translation of a new collection of writings and lectures by Heiner Goebbels, the renowned German theatre director, composer and teacher. These writings map Goebbels' engagement with 'Aesthetics of Absence' through his own experience at the forefront of innovative music-theatre and performance making.

In this volume, Goebbels reflects on works created over a period of more than 20 years staged throughout the world; introduces some of his key artistic influences, including Robert Wilson and Jean-Luc Godard; discusses the work of his students and ex-students, the collective Rimini Protokoll; and sets out the case for a radical rethinking of theatre and performance education. He gives us a rare insight into the rehearsal process of critically acclaimed works such as Eraritjaritjaka and Stifters Dinge, explaining in meticulous detail the way he weaves an eclectic range of references from fine art, theatre, literature, politics, anthropology, contemporary and classical music, jazz and folk, into his multi-textured music-theatre compositions.

As an artist who is prepared to share his research and demystify the processes through which his own works come into being, as a teacher with a coherent pedagogical strategy for educating the next generation of theatre-makers, in this volume, Goebbels brings together practice, research and scholarship.

1

Aesthetics of Absence

How it all began

It might be best to demonstrate what I understand to be aesthetics of absence by relating to the experience of Stifters Dinge, a performative installation without performers, which has been touring since 2007. But maybe we should reflect instead on how this topic has developed in my work over the years in order to better understand what happens there and what I mean by ‘absence’.

How did it all begin? Maybe with an accident in 1993 during rehearsals for Ou bien le débarquement désastreux [Or the Hapless Landing], one of my earliest music-theatre plays, with five African and French musicians and one wonderful actor, André Wilms.

Magdalena Jetelová, a renowned visual artist from Prague, created the stage design: in the centre a gigantic aluminium pyramid suspended upside down with sand trickling out of it, and which could be turned completely upside down during the show; stage right a giant wall of silk hair, rippled smoothly by 50 fans behind it driving the actor crazy with their noisy motors. During one scene the actor disappears behind the wall of hair, in another he is sucked in completely by the hanging pyramid and then comes back, minutes later, head first. After rehearsing these scenes Magdalena Jetelová went directly to the actor, André Wilms, and enthusiastically told him: ‘It is absolutely fantastic when you disappear.’ Definitely something you should never say to an actor. André Wilms instantly became so furious that I had to ask the set designer kindly not to visit any further rehearsals.

Far more interesting, however, is the intuitive approach from her perspective as a visual artist, with which she was able to question one of the most fundamental principles in performing arts. For despite some radical (and subsequently often ignored) experiments by the theatrical avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century (including Gertrude Stein’s plays and the approaches of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Adolphe Appia, and many other artists), and despite the intriguing experiments by American artists such as Bob Wilson, Richard Schechner, Richard Foreman and others in the 1960s and 1970s who proposed a performative theatre against the intimidating authority and gravity of texts – despite all that theatre and opera are still widely based on the classical concept of an artistic experience guided by notions of presence and intensity. The focus of perception is on expressive performers (actors, singers, dancers and instrumentalists): self-confident soloists – assured of their roles, characters and bodies.

Among all the performing arts, only contemporary dance has been raising questions of subject and identity since the 1980s, and has attempted to translate them into the choreography of fragmented, de-located, unfinished, deformed or disappearing bodies.¹ Theatre and opera stubbornly refuse to interrogate their traditional assumptions. Occasionally they will change the text of a play, sometimes they change the sound of an opera – but not much more than that. And speaking as someone who knows the inertia of educational institutions for actors and directors, I can reassure you this will go on for a while.

What was merely an anecdote and a brief moment in Ou bien le débarquement désastreux became a crucial aspect for my work.

Already in this piece the moment of presence is divided. The actor has to share it and accept sharing it with all the elements involved and produced by the reality of the set (which is not illustrative decor but itself a work of art): the confrontation between text and music, the separation between the voice and the body of the actor, the sudden clash between one music and another (music by two griots from Senegal and my own music performed by trombone, keyboards and electric guitar), the clash between one scene and another. Between these ‘separate elements’,² as Brecht put it, distances occur, gaps for the spectator’s imagination.

Ou bien le débarquement désastreux offers neither a complete picture, nor a musical chronology, nor a linear narration for that matter. It is based on three texts which allude to possible topics which may arise – personally and individually – for the spectator in response to the performance: Joseph Conrad’s The Congo Notebooks,³ a prose text called Herakles 2 oder die Hydra⁴ by Heiner Müller, and a poem on pine wood by Francis Ponge.⁵ The texts touch on topics such as the fear of the stranger, violence and colonization, an insistence on the acknowledgement and respect for ethnic differences rather than trying to find common traits. Or to put it with Maurice Blanchot: ‘The other is not your brother.’

Moreover, all the voices in this piece were in French or Mandingo – languages that only a few spectators are likely to understand. I actually do not mind that at all. One can ‘rest in it untroubled’ as Gertrude Stein says when she describes her first theatre experiences:

I must have been about sixteen years old and [Sarah] Bernhardt came to San Francisco and stayed two months. I knew a little french [sic] of course but really it did not matter, it was all so foreign and her voice being so varied and it all being so french I could rest in it untroubled. And I did. … The manners and customs of the french theatre created a thing in itself and it existed in and for itself. … It was for me a very simple direct and moving pleasure.⁶

Theatre as a ‘thing in itself’, not as a representation or a medium to make statements about reality, is exactly what I try to offer. In such theatre the spectator is involved in a drama of experience rather than looking at a drama event in which psychologically motivated relationships are represented by characters on stage. This is a drama of perception, a drama of one’s senses, as in those quite powerful confrontations of all the elements – stage, light, music, words – in which the actor has to survive, rather than act. So the drama of the ‘media’ is actually a twofold drama here: a drama for the actor as well as for the perception of the audience.

This experience of a presence divided onto several elements probably explains why two years later – in the performance Schwarz auf Weiß / Black on White – I put my money not on the virtuosity of a brilliant actor but let the responsibility rest on the shoulders of 18 musicians of the Ensemble Modern,⁷ a collective protagonist, so to speak. This was therefore also a statement against an art form that is often entirely hierarchical: in its organization and working process, in the use of theatrical elements, in its artistic result, and not least with regard to the totalitarian character of its aesthetic and its relationship towards the audience.

In Black on White the musicians of the Ensemble Modern do not vanish in the orchestra pit for the benefit of soloists. They perform on stage themselves and discover their own theatrical abilities beyond their musical virtuosity: writing, singing, sorting things, playing badminton and other games, hitting drums and metal sheets with tennis balls or failing to do so, and reading: ‘Ye who read are still among the living: but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows.’⁸

This early anticipation of the ‘death of the author’⁹ in Edgar Allan Poe’s parable Shadow should not only be taken literally (Heiner Müller, friend and German author recommended this text to me before he died during the rehearsal period for Black on White). Absence can be found here on other levels, too: as a refusal of any dramatic action, for example. ‘Little seems to happen,’ said Ryan Platt in his introduction to a screening of the film version of Black on White at Cornell University some time ago.¹⁰

And Black on White is also a piece about writing. ‘Writing, which has traditionally retired behind the apparent presence of performance, is openly declaring itself the environment in which dramatic structure is situated,’¹¹ as the theatre scholar Elinor Fuchs wrote in 1985. ‘The price of this emergence, or perhaps its aim, is the undermining of theatrical Presence,’¹² which also undermines the ‘self-presence’¹³ of the actor. Presence is twice reduced in Black on White by the rather amateurish ‘non-presence’ of the musicians, who had never done anything like that before. You can observe the un-expressive, un-dramatic, but highly concentrated faces of the musician-performers, who do not pretend to be anyone other than themselves as musicians in that very space and time we watch them in. Frequently they turn their backs to the audience thus dividing the attention of the audience across the ‘landscape’ of 18 simultaneously active people. To cite Elinor Fuchs again: ‘A theatre of Absence … disperses the center, displaces the Subject, destabilizes meaning.’¹⁴

In this performance we as spectators have to focus our gaze ourselves. This is not dissimilar to aspects of a later piece with the same musicians (Eislermaterial), in which the centre of the stage remains empty throughout. During the performance the musicians sit on the three sides of the stage. ‘Presence’ occurs on a purely acoustic level by close microphony and amplification. Structural hindrances / resistances / difficulties for the musicians (the distance between them, the separation of the instrumental families, and so on) help to visualize the communicative process of an ensemble for the audience; a self-dependent ensemble without a conductor. The conductor’s place is held only by a little statue of the composer Hanns Eisler, a close friend and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht. Strangely enough the audience’s attention does not dwindle due to the absence of any distracting spectacle during the performance, although I had been warned this would happen by seasoned theatre makers. ‘The experience of represented presence in the act of perception grows to the degree that the presented presence disappears’¹⁵ – as my colleague Gerald Siegmund put it in his recently published study on ‘absence’.

Speaking of concerts, I would say that it is often the conductor who gets in the way of a self-responsibility of the musicians on the one hand, and a self-responsible perception of the audience on the other. Elias Canetti tells us why:

There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. [ … ]

The immobility of the audience is as much part of the conductor’s design as the obedience of the orchestra. They are under a compulsion to keep still. Until he appears they move about and talk freely among themselves. [ … ]

During a concert, and for the people gathered together in the hall, the conductor is a leader. [ … ]

He is the living embodiment of law, both positive and negative. His hands decree and prohibit. His ears search out profanation.

Thus for the orchestra the conductor literally embodies the work they are playing, the simultaneity of the sounds as well as their sequence; and since, during the performance, nothing is supposed to exist except this work, for so long is the conductor the ruler of the world.¹⁶

This text is presented as an impressive virtuoso monologue by the actor André Wilms downstage (the classic position of presence) in the music-theatre piece Eraritjaritjaka before he leaves the stage, followed by a cameraman, while his live video-image continues to be projected onto the backdrop of the stage, the white façade of a house. The audience sees how he leaves the foyer of the theatre, enters a car, drives through the city in which the piece is being performed, leaves the car after a few minutes of driving, and enters his apartment. The words we hear during all this are taken from Canetti’s notebooks: ‘A country where anyone who says “I” is immedately swallowed up by the earth.’¹⁷

It is obvious: the actor’s absence is going to be a long one. The audience, released from the strong presence of the actor’s earlier monologue, is irritated, confused, but at the same time relaxed. Audience members do not even know if the actor, whom th...