Hans-Theis Lehmann speaking in Mexico at the Department of UNAM, October 2014
- ‘postdramatic’ a more widely accepted and widespread term in Germany
- Postdramatism: a ‘theatrical vocabulary’ and ‘aesthetic logic’ to articulate politics and aetshetics of theatre as uncoupled from drama
- ‘post’ should not be considered as a chronological ‘after’ drama or as forgetting a dramatic ‘past’ – but rather as a rupture and a beyond that continues to entertain relationships with drama (Lehmann, 2006, 2)
- To call theatre postdramatic includes subjecting the traditional relationship of theatre to drama to deconstruction
- Entertains relationships to drama as it has emerged from traditions of drama (Lehmann, 2006, 2)
- Postdramatic aesthetics have operated alongside drama for a long time, but has only recently reached critical mass where it can be conceieved of as distinct
- Emergence of neo-avant-garde art forms (eg. happenings, fluxus events, performance art) gave rise to renewed attention to the materiality of the text – text is just one element of scenography and general ‘performance writing’ (Lehmann, 2006, 4)
- Theatre’s relationship to changing media constellation in the 20th century – historical shift out of textual culture and into mediatised image and sound culture (Lehmann, 2006, 4)
- Lehmann “systematically considers the new theatre aesthetics of space, time and the body, as well as the use of text” (Lehmann, 2006, 4) – phenomenological elemtns of scenography considered equivalent in value to the text
- Postmodernism is a general concept which can be widely applied: postdramatism derives and unfoldes from within a long-established discourse of theatre aesthetics, as a deconstruction of one of its major premises (Lehmann, 2006, 14)
Works cited
Lehmann, H. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge.