FISCHER-LICHTE, Erika - Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre

theatre research international · vol. 33 | no.
1 | pp84–96
Federation for Theatre Research 2008 · Printed in the United Kingdom doi:10.1017/S0307883307003410
C International
Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre

erika fischer-lichte
This article examines a particular aesthetic experience that is brought about by a destabilization, even
a collapsing, of the dichotomous pair of concepts the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’. While a tension between
the two, even in differing degrees, proves characteristic of all kinds of theatre, recent developments on
European stages emphasize this tension. In the paper it is examined with respect to 1) the actors’ bodies
and 2) the theatrical spaces. In each case, the point of departure is two examples which are analysed
with regard to the particular function that the tension between the real and the fictional might serve. It
is argued that what in everyday life is neatly separated into two different worlds to be fully grasped by
the dichotomous pair of concepts becomes blurred in the performances discussed here. The particular
aesthetic experience coming into being in such performances is an experience of ‘betwixt and between’
(Turner) – a liminal experience. This way, they stimulate a new discussion of the concept of aesthetic
experience, so central to all forms of art in the Western world since 1800.
Whenever and wherever theatre happens, it is characterized by a tension between reality

and fiction, between the real and the fictional. For it is always real spaces where perform-
ances take place, it is always real time that the performance consumes, and there are always
real bodies which move in and through the real spaces. At the same time, the real space, the
stage, may signify various fictional spaces; the real time, the duration of the performance,
is not identical with the time represented; and the real body of each actor usually signifies
the body of another, a stage figure, a character. These circumstances quite often gave and
still do give rise to a variety of transgressions between the fictional and the real.
Johann Jakob Engel, a philosopher of the Enlightenment, later to become the
director of Berlin’s Royal Theatre, and author of two volumes on the art of acting,
blames actors and, in particular, actresses for preventing their real, phenomenal body
from disappearing in and behind the body of the fictional stage character by performing
actions that direct the attention of the spectators to their own phenomenal body. The
new theory of an illusionistic theatre (a theatre of the ‘fourth wall’, as Diderot put it)
demanded that the spectator only perceive the dramatic character in the performance. If
the spectator’s attention is attracted to the real, phenomenal body of the actor or actress,
in a way that is no longer a sign of the dramatic character, the spectator starts to feel
empathy for the actor or actress. And this, no doubt, ‘inevitably, will drag him out of the
illusion’.1 The spectator is forced to leave the fictional world of the play and pass over
into the world of real corporeality.
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Instituição Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro PUC-Rio, on 03 Aug 2020 at 17:43:20, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883307003410
fischer-lichte Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre 85
In order to avoid this dilemma, the actor, according to Engel, must completely
transform his or her real, phenomenal body into a semiotic body, which only signifies
the fictional body of a fictional stage character. Although this is the idea underlying all
realistic-psychological theatre – an idea, which, in its strictest sense, demands a somewhat
totalitarian gestus, by which the real, sensuous body is to be disciplined – it was never fully
realized. In every single performance a particular tension arises between the phenomenal
and the semiotic body, between the real and the fictional. This is one of the reasons why
theatre avant-gardists in the first decades of the twentieth century so fiercely attacked
the realistic-psychological theatre for pretending to create a complete illusion of reality
and for feigning the ability to overcome the tension between the real and the fictional so
characteristic of traditional theatre performances.
In the 1960s the focus shifted from the fictional to the real without diminishing the
tension between them. It was not only performance artists, but also theatre artists like
Jerzy Grotowski who emphasized the real within a performance. Whereas performance
artists did so by doing away with the dramatic figure, the stage character itself, proclaiming
that they were performing real actions in real time and real spaces, Grotowski reversed
the relationship between actor and character/role, between the real and the fictional. He
defined the fictional role as an instrument for achieving a particular goal, not as the end
of the actors’ efforts. As the surgeon uses his scalpel, the actor is required to use the role
as a tool for dissecting her/himself. The desired result of this process was, according to
Grotowski, the transfiguration of the actor’s real body, his transformation into a ‘holy
actor’ who summons the spectators to follow his example.
A theatre performance always embraces the real and the fictional, and frequently
the boundaries between them are not clearly drawn, but blurred. We have to keep this in
mind in order to do justice to some recent developments on European stages where the
relationship between the real and the fictional is emphasized. This article will examine
this relationship with respect to 1) actors’ bodies and 2) theatrical spaces. In each case,
my point of departure will be two examples, which I shall analyse with regard to the
particular function that the tension between the real and the fictional might serve.
One of the devices to produce and to reflect the relationship between the real and
the fictional is an obvious falling apart of the real body of the actor/performer and
the fictional character. The Italian company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, led by Romeo
Castellucci, achieved this in its production of Giulio Cesare (1998) by placing bodies
on the stage that blatantly deviated from ‘normal’ bodies, demonstrating frailty and
decay, as well as physical excess, in such a way that spectators started to tremble, to
sweat, to hold their breath; they became terrified, disgusted, frightened or ashamed.
Caesar was played by a very frail, infirm, senile man, who was almost unable to keep
himself upright and thereby simultaneously both moved and shocked the spectators.
Antonius was represented by a man who had just undergone an operation on his larynx.
A microphone was implanted in its place and it helped to make his tortured, voiceless
attempts to articulate himself ‘heard’, incessantly reminding the spectators of his wound.
As Cicero, a half-naked, obese giant, resembling a Sumo wrestler, appeared onstage,
wearing a woollen mask, thereby affirming and even strengthening the impression of
him as a faceless monster without identity. The two female parts were played by two
86 fischer-lichte Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre
performers who were suffering from bulimia and looked as if they already had one foot
in the grave (in fact, one of them did die soon after and was replaced by a very slim
dancer).
The individual physis (physicality) of the actors had such an immediate and
disturbing impact on the spectators that many felt quite unable to establish a relationship
between this physicality and the dramatic figure that the actor/actress supposedly
represented. They did not perceive them as signs of a particular figure but solely as
their particular bodily being-in-the-world.
But even if it seemed difficult, even inappropriate, to perceive and interpret the
bodies of the actors as signs of a particular dramatic figure, this does not mean that
the spectators perceived them without generating meaning. Once the spectators had got
used to these very peculiar bodies, they were in fact able to perceive them as Caesar or
Cicero from time to time. Generally, it can be said that the perception of the actor’s
body and of that of the dramatic figure he or she represented diverged. Focusing on
the actor’s body meant forgetting the dramatic character completely; focusing on the
character required a desperate attempt to overlook the very particular qualities of the
actors’ or actresses’ bodies.
Frank Castorf, the director of the Berlin Volksbühne, has used some other, quite
different devices to create similar effects. His actors quite often seem to step out of
their roles, to forget the dramatic figures they are representing, by addressing some
spectators directly. Perhaps the spectator concerned was leaving the auditorium, perhaps
his reactions for whatever reason challenged the actor, provoking him to go straight up
to this spectator and start a discussion with him. Sometimes the spectator could not be
sure whether it was the actor in propria persona who was addressing him, or the actor
taking on another role, or even the actor continuing to play the role in his own way.
Another, even more disturbing, device is cross-casting. In his production of Carl
Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General (Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, 1996)
Castorf cast two actors for the part of General Harras. For the first half of the performance
he was played by the actress Corinna Harfouch, for the second half by the rather virile
actor Bernhard Schütz. At her first appearance, Corinna Harfouch was dressed in the
uniform of a German Air Force general in the Second World War. Under the uniform
cap her head was bald. She delivered Harras’s speeches, which are generally considered
pithy and manly, in her own voice, although using a harsh tone. Her movements and
gestures were ‘manly’ in a very pronounced way. All the while, the spectators were well
aware that General Harras’s part was played by a woman, even if she displayed ‘typically’
masculine behaviour. Therefore, right from the beginning, the audience would have
found it somewhat difficult to perceive the actress Corinna Harfouch as the dramatic
figure of General Harras.
The difficulties and irritations increased in the course of the performance,
particularly when Corinna Harfouch began to unbutton and take off the uniform. Under
the uniform she wore a transparent shirt, which displayed her body as unmistakably
female. She sat down on the lap of her colleague Kurt Naumann, playing Hartmann,
who had just confessed that he had fallen in love with Pützchen, who, however, had
rejected him because of his ‘racially’ questionable family tree. Harfouch’s hands touched
Naumann’s waist and hips, slowly making their way to his thighs. At the same time,
she delivered Harras’s speech about roots in the Rhineland as the best possible racial
heritage, to which Hartmann answered time and again, ‘Yes, Herr General’. The scene
was most disturbing. The outward appearance of the actress bore little resemblance
to a male figure. Unmistakably, this was a woman sitting on a man’s lap. However,
she did not behave like a woman trying to seduce a man – more like someone who
wants to commit rape. The words which Harfouch spoke contradicted both ideas.
Was she acting as the dramatic figure of General Harras or as the actress Corinna
Harfouch or as an actress who is playing quite another part? Was a fictional male figure
making an attempt to rape another fictional male figure? Or was Corinna Harfouch
trying to seduce a fictional male character or her colleague Kurt Naumann? Or was
the actress playing a completely different role in order to seduce or rape someone else?
The spectators were not in a position to give an unequivocal answer. The undeniably
female body and the undeniably male behaviour that referred to the fictional character
of General Harras diverged irrevocably.
The devices used by Romeo Castelucci and Frank Castorf, as different as they might
be, are similar in that they emphatically direct the spectator’s attention to the specific
peculiarity and individuality of the actor’s phenomenal body – to his or her ‘real’ body.
This may result in a temporary disappearance of the dramatic figure; however, it is not to
be regarded as a device to let the dramatic figure disappear completely, rather as a device
to deeply disturb our perception. It shifts and oscillates between perceiving the actor’s
or acress’ real body as his or her phenomenal body and focusing on the dramatic figure.
While the staging devices – like the use of ‘abnormal’ bodies or cross-casting – can direct
or even fixate the spectator’s attention on the phenomenal body, the dramaturgy opens
up the possibility that every now and then the attention shifts to the dramatic figure. The
frequency of this effect depends on the situation and the performance. In other words,
what is brought about is a perceptional multistability, as occurs in cases where perception
shifts between figure and ground – for example between faces and a vase or between
two figures, such as a duck’s bill and a rabbit’s head. What in one moment is perceived
as the actor’s phenomenal body is perceived as a dramatic figure in the next and vice
versa.
This paper will not attempt to give a psychological explanation for this
phenomenon.2 Suffice it to say that we are obviously confronted with a case of emergence
because we cannot pin down a particular reason for such a shift. It is not the result of a
particular staging device or a particular dramaturgy. The question is what perceptional
multistability in a performance achieves. Obviously, productions by Romeo Castelucci
and Frank Castorf (and also by Robert Wilson, Jan Fabre and others) open up many more
possibilities for such a shift than those following the principle of psychological realism.
Whenever such a shift takes place, there is a rupture, a discontinuity. The order of
perception, which the spectators have initially followed, is upset and even destroyed and
another one has to be established. Perceiving the ‘real’, phenomenal body of the actor, his
bodily being-in-the-world, lays the foundation for a particular order of perception, to
perceive the actor’s body as sign for a fictional character, for a very different order of
perception.
Each of the two orders generates meaning according to its own principles, which
become dominant the moment one order is stabilized. In the second order, which I
will call the order of representation, everything that is perceived is done with reference
to a particular fictional character. The meanings generated in their totality constitute
the dramatic character. The process of perception is guided in order to let a dramatic
figure come into existence. Perceived elements, which cannot be regarded as signs of the
figure, will not be considered in the ongoing process of generating meaning, where the
perceptional process selects only those elements that can be perceived and interpreted
with regard to the dramatic figure itself. It is performed as a result-oriented process, and
is, in this respect, predictable to a certain extent.
This is the order of perception that the theoreticians of the eighteenth century,
among them Engel, were striving for. However, as has become evident, it is impossible
to totally stabilize it. Inevitably, at some point a shift will occur where the order of
representation is disturbed and another order emerges, even if only temporarily.
This other order, which I will call the order of presence, follows completely different
principles. The actor’s body is perceived in its phenomenality, as his particular being-
in-the-world. This meaning induces a number of associations, memories, imaginations,
which, in most cases, are not directly connected to the perceived element. When this
order of perception stabilizes, the process of perception and the generation of meaning
becomes absolutely unpredictable and even chaotic. It is impossible to foresee what
meanings will be brought forth by association and to predict what meaning will direct
perception to which theatrical element. Stability of order, in this case, means the highest
degree of unpredictability. The process of perception turns out to be an entirely emergent
process, over which the perceiving subject has no control.
Perceptive multistability, which takes effect in the shift from one order to another,
is responsible for the fact that none of the two orders becomes permanently stabilized.
The dynamics of the perceptive process take another turn with each shift. They lose
their randomness and become goal-oriented, or stop being goal-oriented and instead
become unbridled, chaotic. Each shift results in the perception of something else –
namely of those elements that can be incorporated into the newly stabilizing order and
that contribute to its stabilization.
So what happens at the moment of the shift; that is to say, when the existing order of
perception is disturbed, but the other is not yet established, the moment of passage from
the order of presence to the order of representation or vice versa? A state of instability
comes into being. It transfers the perceiving subject between two orders, into a state
of in-betweenness. The perceiving subject thus finds him- or herself at a threshold –
the threshold which forms and marks the passage from one order to the other. The
anthropologist Victor Turner has called this being-at-the-threshold liminality.3 Hence
we can conclude that the shift transfers the perceiving subject into a liminal state.
When, in the course of a performance, perception repeatedly shifts and the spectator
is situated between the two orders, the difference between the two orders increasingly loses
its relevance, and instead the attention of the perceiving subject focuses on the rupture of
stability, the state of instability, the passage. The more often such a shift occurs, the more
the spectator becomes a wanderer between two worlds, between two orders of perception,
becoming increasingly aware that he cannot control this passage. He may try repeatedly
to adjust his perception anew – to the order of presence or representation. However, very
soon, he will notice that the shift happens to him regardless of his intentions and that he
is thrust into a state between the two orders without wanting it or being able to prevent
it. At that moment, he experiences his own perception as emergent, out of reach of his
will and control, evading his charge, but still consciously performed.
Before drawing any far-reaching conclusions from this scenario, I will discuss two
examples that are related to the tension between real spaces and fictional spaces. While
in Giulio Cesare and The Devil’s General the actors were moving before the spectators
seated in an auditorium, in both performances individual spectators abandoned their
seats, moved through the auditorium and left it. In the two following examples that I
have chosen it is the spectators who move through the theatrical space. In both cases, the
result is a disturbing blurring of real and fictional spaces.
In the spring of 1979 a strange performance titled Rudi took place in Berlin. Its
site was a former grand hotel, the Esplanade, which was built in 1907 adjacent to the
Tiergarten, the Reichstag and the Prussian Parliament and close to the Potsdamer Platz,
right in the centre of the city. This hotel had very quickly become an attraction for
upper-class tourists, including film stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo. It
was the centre of high-society life in Berlin – in the Palm Courtyard of the Esplanade
the Charleston was introduced to the city. After the Nazis seized power, Albert Speer
requisitioned the hotel as a guest house of the government. During the war it was
severely damaged. Only the front foyers, the Palm Courtyard, the Breakfast Hall, the
Imperial Hall, a barroom and the basement remained intact. However, after the war,
these spaces were regularly used for opera-, press- or film-balls and other gala events,
for fashion shows and beauty contests. When the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961,
the square in front of the hotel, opening to the Tiergarten, was blocked off by barbed
wire. Following this, only a few events took place in the hotel and in the 1970s the ruins
gradually became dilapidated.4 This, then, was the site of the performance Rudi to which
the stage director Klaus Michael Grüber and his stage designer Antonio Recalcati invited
the audience.
By that time Grüber was already famous for using sites for his productions that were
not built as theatre spaces. So, for instance, in 1975 he had staged Goethe’s Faust in the
Chapelle Saint Louis of the hospital of Salpêtrière in Paris, and in the ice-cold December
of 1977 he realized a project titled Winterreise (Winter Journey) in the Berlin Olympic
Stadium, the former Reichssportfeld, where the Olympic Games were held in 1936.
Recalcati added a few objects to the rooms of the Esplanade hotel, which by
themselves were already loaded with history. When approaching the ruins, the visitor
was first confronted with the Berlin Wall. Leaning against it were some masks recalling
the theatre masks of antiquity; behind it the silhouette of East Berlin’s illuminated
representative buildings stood out against the dark sky, among them the television tower
at Alexanderplatz. Two enlarged wood engravings by Frans Masereel hung above the
entrance, and beside them in huge letters were the words ‘Mein ist dein Herz’ (‘mine is
your heart’) – an allusion to an old movie title or to the popular song “Dein is mein
ganges Hertz” (Yours is all my heart) from Franz Lehar’s operetta Das Land des Lachelns.
In the Breakfast Hall the Schaubühne-actor Paul Burian sat in front of a fireside and
read out Bernard von Brentano’s 1934 novel Rudi in a monotonous voice and with many
breaks. Parts of his reading were transmitted into the other rooms of the hotel through
loudspeakers. The chandeliers in the breakfast hall were covered with tulle. Spiderwebs
stretched out between the chandeliers and the mantlepiece of the fireplace and seemed
to cover the reading man. Beside him there was an old iron stove with a pile of books,
from which, it seemed, he had chosen the one he held in his hands. When he had finished
reading he stood up and left.
The dreary-looking foyer was decorated with a huge silver basket full of palm
branches – the only palm branches in the hotel, for there were no longer any growing
in the Palm Courtyard. A dressing table stood on its gallery. Nearby, on a clothes tree, a
black dress was hanging. The three doors in the rear were boarded up. In one corner of
the Imperial Hall two huge objects had been placed – a gigantic chair and a wooden bed,
both two-dimensional enlarged copies of elements to be found on the famous Van Gogh
painting, which hung in his bedroom. In one of the rooms, dominated by a grand piano,
a boy was playing; he wore jeans, a pullover and a shirt with a huge collar. In the same
room an old grey-haired woman, dressed in black, sat in an old-fashioned wheelchair.
In the novel that Burian was reading aloud Brentano tells the story of an illegitimate
proletarian boy who, siding with his communist stepfather, was caught in the armed
conflict between Communists and National Socialists in 1933 and died by accidentally
detonating a bomb. While some of the objects added to the rooms by Recalcati might be
connected to the story of the novel, if only vaguely, most of them were not related to it
at all.
The performance was special in many respects. What makes it so interesting in our
context is the fact that the spectators were not restricted to a particular auditorium but
were able to move through the rooms. They could take a chair in the Breakfast Hall
and listen to Paul Burian’s reading of the novel; they could stroll through the foyer, the
Palm Courtyard, the Imperial Hall and some of the upper rooms, pausing whenever they
wanted to; they could take a closer look at the objects, even contemplate some, and leave
the room whenever they felt like it. When Burian left, they were not forced to make their
exit but could either remain seated for a while or get up and move through the room
or pass over to another. Compared to other performances – even to other productions
by Grüber – the relationship between real spaces and fictional spaces was fundamentally
different.
No doubt the spaces of the grand Esplanade hotel in and through which the
spectators moved were real. And the few objects, added to them by Recalcati, were
also real, even the two-dimensional objects – as objects, if not as a ‘bed’ or a ‘chair’.
There was a fictional story, the novel rendered by Paul Burian, resounding through the
spaces. But, as mentioned before, the spaces as well as the objects added to them could
only be vaguely connected to the fictional story of the novel, if at all. It might well have
been the case that by moving through the spaces, the spectators set their imagination in
motion and imagined other fictional stories – be it at will or through emergent processes.
However, moving through the real spaces while listening to a fictional story established
an altogether new relationship between the real and the fictional. And, as it seems, at least
at first glance, this relationship has less to do with the concept of theatre than with that
of the museum. For moving in and through rooms in order to look at them and at the
exhibited objects has less in common with the audience’s behaviour even in happenings
and cases of audience participation than with the behaviour of visitors in a museum.
There, one has to move through different rooms where all kinds of ‘real’ objects – from
natural history or human history, including art history – are exhibited.
Why this merging of theatre and museum? For visitors in a museum, it is common
practice to make one’s route through the rooms according to a particular plan, guiding
one from room to room in order to look at the objects exhibited there, be that objects
from natural history or human history, or works of art. It is usually up to the visitor to
decide how long to remain in a room or in front of a particular object, whether to throw
just a quick glance at it or to become totally absorbed in it, even to contemplate or to
meditate on it. This was also the case in Rudi, but whereas in Rudi a novel was read, i.e.
a particular fictional story told, this is usually not the case in a museum.
At least, it seems so. For as Tony Bennett has shown in his illuminating study
on The Birth of the Museum, this is not quite the case. He compares the museum to
Conan Doyle’s detective stories, where Sherlock Holmes is a ‘backteller’ who, just like the
palaeontologist, must reconstruct a past event – the crime – on the basis of its remnants.
Bennett argues that the museum as it was invented in the nineteenth century is another
backteller, a narrative machinery. The objects exhibited are usually displayed in a certain
chronological order, starting with the remnants that allow for a reconstruction of a
distant, often ‘primitive’, past – the origin – and gradually proceeding to objects of the
spectator’s present:
Like the reader in a detective novel, it is towards this end point that the visitor’s activity
is directed. This is not simply a matter of representation. To the contrary, for the visitor,
reaching the point at which the museum’s narrative culminates is a matter of doing
as much as of seeing. The narrative machinery of the museum’s ‘backtelling’ took the
form of an itinerary whose completion was experienced as a task requiring urgency
and expedition.5
The museum embodies or instantiates ideologies of progress. It is an environment for

exhibiting objects and simultaneously a performative one, which makes the principles
governing it clear by and through the itinerary that it organizes.
While the visitors move through the rooms of the museum, their imagination is
inspired if not guided and controlled by the underlying narrative structure. The spaces
and scenes, which they imagine while looking at a particular object, are not simply
conjured up by associations, nor are they solely dependent on the historical knowledge
of the visitor, but are primarily suggested by the fictional story of permanent progress,
which the visitor retells and understands while moving through the space according
to the given itinerary. This was still, in fact, the predominant structure of museums,
including art museums, by the end of the 1970s – and can quite often be found even
today.
Although in Rudi it was the spectators who moved through the spaces – much
as in a museum – they did not follow a linear narrative structure. Most of the objects
in the different rooms through which the spectators moved did not serve as ‘props’
in a performance that would re-enact the fictional story told in the novel. Its linear
structure did not guide the movements of the spectators through the rooms of the hotel;
it rather ran counter to them. Since the rooms by themselves were laden with history
and the added objects were related unequivocally neither to the fictional story told nor
to the real history of the hotel, but rather were only vaguely connected, the associations,
memories and imaginations which the rooms and the objects might have evoked in the
spectators would in all likelihood have differed enormously from spectator to spectator.
Thus, by moving through the rooms, the visitors transformed them into spaces open to
their own imaginations and memories. What kinds of spaces, images and scenes they
imagined or recalled was neither determined by the rooms and their objects nor guided
or controlled by the story of the novel. The performative spaces brought forth by the
visitors allowed for the most diverse imaginations and memories to emerge in the minds
of the spectators. However, despite this potential for diversity, a relationship with the
German history of the twentieth century was suggested, i.e. with a history that was shaped
and determined not by a permanent progress leading to perfection but by catastrophes,
madness and atrocities. It is hardly conceivable that this relationship escaped the notice
of any spectator. Therefore some of the emerging imaginations and memories connected,
however vaguely, to this history might have followed, at least partly, the narrative pattern
of ‘backtelling’. Still, a coherent story, which all spectators would have followed and
understood, was not told.
The merging of theatre and museum in Rudi transferred the visitors/spectators into
a situation of in-betweenness. Neither the frame ‘theatre’ nor the frame ‘museum’ was
exclusively valid, but rather both were at the same time. As in the theatre, there were some
‘actors’ present, like Paul Burian, the boy and the old woman. However, the spectators
were invited to act as visitors in a museum, moving through the rooms, looking at them as
well as at the objects exhibited there. On the other hand, there was no itinerary guiding
them from some distant ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ beginning towards a state of growing
perfection culminating in the end of the route. Quite the contrary, by moving through
the rooms, they were unable to (re)construct a coherent story or history or any kind
of linear progression, stabilizing their own selves. They were, in fact, confronted with
elements of recent German history, but no single object that they looked at triggered
particular imaginations and experiences, nor did the route through the whole setting
allow for the construction of a linear narrative. Instead, they were presented as fragments
and ruins which challenge the imagination without offering any guideline for a coherent
(re)construction. The movements through the different rooms of the hotel, from time to
time accompanied by the reading voice or even the reading actor, and by the segments and
partly the even longer pieces of the fictional story he was telling, transferred the moving
person into a situation of betwixt and between, into a state of liminality. There was a
story, there had been a history, but there was no coherence any more. What was left, the
remnants of history, lay broken in pieces, opening up no possibility of making sense of
such fragments. Not only was there no stable frame within which to perceive and to
act – theatre or museum – there was also no coherence offered, neither in the relationship
between the real rooms, the added objects and the fictional story of the novel, nor in the
relationship the visitor might establish by her/his real movements through the rooms.
Instead of stabilizing the self as the itinerary in the museum did, the route through
the rooms rather tended to destabilize the visitors/spectators. This experience may be
characterized as a liminal experience – an experience of irritation, of destabilization of
the self, of the inability to make sense of what is perceived and to place it in a coherent
order. Such experiences arise from the sense of perceiving enigmatic images that might be
interconnected by a secret, mysterious underlying order, which is not accessible, even not
to be imagined. So it was not felt as a desperate crisis, but as a kind of deep melancholy,
spreading out like the spiderwebs in the Breakfast Hall.
My second example is more recent – from the beginning of the new century
when the situation had changed dramatically. Germany was reunited. In the theatre,
a widespread merging of theatre and performance art, theatre and other kinds of
cultural performances, had taken place; postdramatic theatre had advanced and become
mainstream. In museums, new forms of exhibition were tried out, doing away with
the old fictional story of permanent progress towards greater perfection. This was the
situation when the group Hygiene heute (Hygiene Today), led by Stefan Kaegi, was
founded. Since the year 2000 it has developed the genre of audio-tours in and through
different towns and cities, in cities like Giessen (Verweis Kirchner, 2000), Frankfurt-
am-Main (System Kirchner, 2000), Munich (Kanal Kirchner, 2001) and Graz (Kirchners
Schwester, 2002). As with audio-tours in museums, castles and other historic sites, each
spectator was equipped with a walkman that should guide her/him on a one-hour tour
through the town. Each spectator/visitor was sent away by him- or herself at fifteen- to
twenty-minute intervals. The tape which they heard during their tour was said to be a
rare sign of life from the librarian Kirchner, from 1998, when he had disappeared under
mysterious circumstances. In Munich the tape was allegedly found in a public toilet,
which is why the route started there. The voice on the tape began by telling the story
of the librarian’s disappearance and, gradually, dragged the listener into the story – as
one chasing and, at the same time, being chased, as pursuer and pursued. Indubitably
it was a detective story, in which the spectator became involved not only in his or her
imagination but, as it seemed, also literally and physically. The tour thus unfolded as a
kind of backtelling narrative machinery. According to the voice on the tape, the spectator
was in great danger of being trapped and caught by the ‘snail’.
The spectator thus became the protagonist of the fictional story, the leading actor
of the performance. In a huge underground car park the voice on the tape admonished
urgently and with a hurried breath, ‘Run! Open the door. The Snail is close, do you smell
it? Run faster! Open the door at the end of the floor.’ And at a tram station the voice
gave the instruction, ‘Observe the people at the tram station. Do you see anyone carrying
luggage?’ At any tram station in the centre of Munich you will always find people carrying
luggage; in any town men wearing blue shirts are on their way – against whom the voice
warned in Frankfurt; and in all public buildings the watching eye of a camera is installed –
to which the voice constantly referred in order to supply evidence of the chase. Therefore
it was hard, if not impossible, for the spectator/visitor to get a clear indication of whether
actors were playing the parts of the pursuers all over the city or whether he or she was
just imagining that the people to whom the voice referred were hunters. To find such an
indication was all the more difficult since the spectators, following the instructions of the
voice, sometimes behaved so strangely themselves that passers-by stopped and looked
back at them. This raised the question of whether these were just passers-by or actors
playing the part of pursuers. The spectator who moved through the real space of the
city, guided by the instructions of the voice that were part of a fictional detective story,
became the only actor, unable to discern between actors and spectators and accidental
passers-by.
By moving through the city’s space the spectator turned it into ever-changing
performative spaces that evoked particular imagined spaces. Spectators who believed
that they knew their city very well soon began to perceive it differently. They entered the
familiar streets, squares, parks and buildings as sites where the incredible mysterious
detective story, which the voice on the tape told by giving instructions, warnings,
explanations, was taking place – a story in which, obviously, the spectator her-/himself
played a major role. By moving through the spaces of the city according to the
instructions, and in this way transforming them into ever-changing performative spaces
by her/his very perception of these spaces, which became tinted as by coloured glass,
influenced, even guided, by the voice, each and every spectator brought forth the city’s
spaces as imagined spaces, as strange blends of real and fictional spaces, persons, actions.
This way, too, the spectator was transferred into a liminal state, into a situation of
in-betweenness – not only between theatre and museum but between the real and the
fictional, the performative and the imaginary.
This merging of theatre and museum in the audio-tours of Hygiene heute quite
obviously differed enormously from that realized in Rudi. The site of Rudi was a ‘real’
hotel no longer used as such, damaged in the war more than thirty years previously
and, at the time of the performance, located directly at the Wall; its façade and rooms
were rearranged in a particular way. In all the audio-tours, the respective town or city
served as the site of the performance without any additional arrangements. In Rudi a
novel was read, but it seemed impossible to relate the fictional story of the novel to the
rooms and the added objects in such a way that a coherent narration – be it fictional, be
it historical – could come into being. The audio-tours, on the contrary, proceeded from
a coherent, though never-ending, fictional detective story – where the end that serves as
the culmination of any detective story, as well as of the fictional stories of permanent
progress in museums, was constantly suspended. By moving through the space of the
city, the spectators were encouraged, even seduced, by the voice to relate the fictional
spaces, persons and actions of the story to the real spaces, persons and actions in the city
in a way that made sense to them, even if it was an alarming sense – while the end, which
is supposed to reveal all mysteries, to complete the story in its coherence, and thus to
eliminate all concerns, all suspense, was withheld.
Despite such differences, both Rudi and the audio-tours of Hygiene heute challenged
the spectators by requiring them to move through real spaces in order to set their
imagination in motion, to transform performative spaces into imagined, fictional spaces.
And by doing so, a situation of betwixt and between was created for the spectators,
transferring them into a liminal state.
In all four examples, the blurring of the real and the fictional, as unique as it is to
each case, resulted in transferring the spectator/visitor into a state of in-betweenness,
into a state of liminality. This state not only destabilizes the order of perception but, more
importantly, the self. Aesthetic experience, in all these cases, is to be regarded as a liminal
experience, as an experience of being ‘betwixt and between’, as Victor Turner put it,6 an
experience of crisis. It is, above all, the collapse of the ‘real’ versus ‘fictional’ opposition
which induces the crisis. What in everyday life is neatly separated into two different
worlds that can be fully grasped by a dichotomous pair of concepts becomes blurred in
the performances discussed here, as well as in many others in the last twenty-five years,
so that all certainty about whether to place oneself in a real or a fictional world is lost.
By such an experience the dichotomy itself is undermined.
Since such dichotomous pairs like the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’ serve not only as
tools to describe the world, but also as regulators for our behaviour and actions, their
destabilization, their collapse, results, on the one hand, in a destabilization of our
perception of the world, ourselves and others, and, on the other, in a shattering of
the norms and rules that guide our behaviour. From such oppositional pairs different
frames can be deduced, such as ‘this is theatre’ or ‘this is reality’. Such frames imply
that there are norms for appropriate behaviour in the situation they refer to. By letting
such frames collide, by collapsing the dichotomy, these performances transferred the
spectator between all fixed rules, norms and orders. They established and affirmed a new
understanding of aesthetic experience.
At the end of the eighteenth century a ‘detached pleasure’, meant to allow the
subject to experience him- or herself with a sense of free subjectivity, might have been
the appropriate understanding of an aesthetic experience. Now, after the turn from the
twentieth to the twenty-first century, the circumstances have completely changed. In our
times of an ongoing aestheticization of everyday life based on an event-culture, ‘detached
and free pleasure’ quite certainly can no longer be regarded as the required sensation
to let the subject re-create him- or herself anew. To this end, irritation, the collision of
frames and the destabilization of perception and self – in a nutshell, inducing a state of
crisis – seems to be much more appropriate. So, by blending the real and the fictional
and thereby transferring the spectator into a state of liminality, these performances
allowed for a particular aesthetic experience which ran counter to our traditional
understanding of what aesthetic experience is about, and in this way stimulated a new
discussion of its very concept, so central for all forms of art in the Western world
since 1800.
notes
1 Johann Jakob Engel, Mimik (Berlin: Mylius, 1804), Schaubühne (1801–1806) 11 Vol., VII, p. 60.
2 With regard to such an explanations see Michael Stadler/Peter Kruse, ‘Zur Emergenz psychischer
Qualitäten. Das psychophysische Problem im Lichte der Selbstorganisationstheorie’, in Wolfgang
Krohn and Günter Küppers, eds., Emergenz. Die Entstehung von Ordnung, Organisation und Bedeutung
(Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp 1992), pp. 134–60. See also Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative
Power of Performance A New Aesthetics Performance (London and New York: Routledge 2009).
3 Cp. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1969).
4 Today, the foyer, the Palm Courtyard, the Breakfast Hall and the Imperial Hall can be visited in the
Sony-Center at the Potsdamer Platz, where in 1996 they were transferred by applying rather
complicated technical devices.
5 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 181.
6 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.
erika fischer-lichte holds the chair in the Department of Theater Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Her most recent books include Aesthetik des Performativen (2004), which will come out in an English translation
at Routledge in spring 2008; Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (Routledge 2005);
and the Lexikon Theatertheorie (Metzler 2005). She is director of the Research Center on ‘Performing Culture’, as
well as of the International Graduate School on ‘Interart Studies’.

FISCHER-LICHTE, Erika - Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

FISCHER-LICHTE, Erika - Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

FISCHER-LICHTE, Erika - Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

theatre research international · vol. 33 | no.

Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre

Whenever and wherever theatre happens, it is characterized by a tension between reality

The museum embodies or instantiates ideologies of progress. It is an environment for

You might also like