ABSTRACT
The new theatre confirms the not so new insight that there is never a harmonious relationship but rather a perpetual conflict between text and scene. Bernhard Dort talked about the unification of text and stage never really taking place, saying that it always remained a relationship of oppression and of compromise.1 Being a latent structural conflict of any theatrical practice anyway, this inevitability can now become a consciously intended principle of staging. What is decisive here is not – as is often implied by the popular and unquestioned opposition between ‘avant-gardist’ theatre and ‘text theatre’ – the opposition verbal/non-verbal. The wordless dance may be boring and overly didactic while the signifying word may be a dance of language gestures. In postdramatic theatre, breath, rhythm and the present actuality of the body’s visceral presence take precedence over the logos. An opening and dispersal of the logos develop in such a way that it is no longer necessarily the case that a meaning is communicated from A (stage) to B (spectator) but instead a specifically theatrical, ‘magical’ transmission and connection happen by means of language. Artaud was the first to theorize this. Julia Kristeva pointed out that Plato in his Timaeus develops the idea of a ‘space’ that is meant to render a logically unsolvable paradox thinkable in an ‘anticipating manner’, namely the paradox of having to think of being also as becoming. According to Plato, there was at the origin a conceiving, receptive (maternally connoted) ‘space’, not logically comprehensible and in whose womb the logos with its oppositions of signifiers and signifieds, hearing and seeing, space and time was differentiating itself in the first place. This ‘space’ is called ‘chora’. The chora is something like an antechamber and at the same time the secret cellar and foundation of the logos of language. It remains antagonistic to logos. Yet as rhythm and enjoyment of sonority it subsists in all language as its ‘poetry’. Kristeva refers to this dimension of the ‘chora’ in all processes of signification as the ‘Semiotic’ (as distinguished from the ‘Symbolic’). What is emerging in the new theatre, as much as in the radical attempts of the modernist ‘langage poétique’, can therefore be understood as attempts towards a restitution of chora: of a space and speech/discourse without
telos, hierarchy and causality, without fixable meaning and unity. In this process the word will resurge in its whole amplitude and volume as sonority and as address, as a beckoning and appeal (Heidegger’s ‘Zu-sprache’). In such a signifying process across all positings (Setzungen) of the logos, it is not the destruction of the latter that is happening but its poetic – and here theatrical – deconstruction. In this sense, we can say theatre is turned into chora-graphy: the deconstruction of a discourse oriented towards meaning and the invention of a space that eludes the laws of telos and unity.
