Bleeker, M. (2012) Media Dramaturgies of the Mind: Ivana Müller’s cinematic choreographies. Performance Research, 17(5) 61-70.

• “Theoretical debates on the specificity of theatre, on liveness and on presence reflect how the confrontation with other media inspired a reconsideration of what the specificity of the theatre is, and how theatre differs from other media.” (61)
• “theatre that distances itself from drama as organizational principle and develops new modes of organizing the means of theatrical presentation” (61-62)
• “re-theatricalization of the theatre – theatre highlighting its own being theatre and testifying its awareness of the implications of its being theatre”(62)
• “‘shift in axis of theatrical communication’” (Lehmann, 1997, 58) – Lehmann, H. (1997) From logos to landscape: Text in contemporary dramaturgy. Performance Research, 2(1) 55–60.
• “The performance lacks dramatic structure and instead of communicating amongst themselves, the characters on stage directly address the audience. The performance is highly self-reflexive and draws attention to its being theatre. The characters present themselves as the actors behind the characters of an (imaginary) performance that has just ended.” (64)
• “introducing new modes of constructing plots that shift attention away from the unfolding of action on stage towards what has happened before the beginning of the action shown on stage, and what may happen in the future (or not) […] Instead of being absorbed in the unfolding of a tightly structured dramatic action taking place on stage, the audience is taken along in contemplation about other moments before or after, while time unfolding becomes the duration of the contemplation. Simultaneously the strict separation between the world on stage and the world of the audience becomes porous as idealized other worlds on stage make place for theatrical representations closer to the world of the spectator, sometimes even directly responding to contemporary issues and concerns.” (64)

My notes:

• “shift in axis of theatrical communication”: This ‘shift in axis’ also necessitates a shift in axis with regard to dramaturgy: “The implication that follows from Lehmann’s observation (but which is not elaborated by him) is a ‘shift in axis’ with regard to dramaturgy as well, from a focus on constructing worlds on stage towards the relationship between the ‘mind set’ of the beholder and what is presented on stage.” (Bleeker, 2012, 62)
• “The performance lacks dramatic structure and instead of communicating amongst themselves, the characters on stage directly address the audience. The performance is highly self-reflexive and draws attention to its being theatre. The characters present themselves as the actors behind the characters of an (imaginary) performance that has just ended.” (64) – Some of this can be used to justify counting AIDY and AOT as postdramatic
• Both productions throw off the linear progression and cohesive mimetic time structures of the dramatic and place focus on non-linear temporal structures. In AIDY this is done by exploring imagined futures and pasts, breaking from the temporality of the stories being told. Also: where the little girl falls through the ice there is the suggestion that the mother “doesn’t realise because for her it hasn’t happened yet” – challenges the universality of time as an overarching temporality and highlight subjective experience of time as a construct. In AOT the story progresses non-linearly, audience are an imagined one in a year in a different place – temporality and spaciality are skewed.
• NO HOMOGENAIETY OR UNITARY SHARED HERE AND NOW as Bleeker puts it
• In AIDY there are co-existent separate here-and-nows – temporality is not shared between narratives and those narratives’ temporality are at odds with the unitary temporality and spaciality of the performance space and performer-spectator relationship