ABSTRACT
On the occasion of the Berliner Schaubühne’s production of Gorki’s Summer Guests, the adapter Botho Strauss made a note on Peter Stein’s directorial decision to reorganize Gorki’s dialogue material in the first and second act showing all figures on stage at the same time. Gorki himself, he wrote, had not called his piece a ‘drama’, ‘play’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ but ‘scenes’. The theatre here showed ‘less a succession, a development of a story, more an involvement of inner and outer states’. This way of putting it is helpful. As is well known, it is generally painters who speak of states, the states of images in the process of creation, states in which the dynamics of image creation are crystallizing and in which the process of the painting that has become invisible to the viewer is being stored. Effectively, the category appropriate to the new theatre is not action but states. Theatre here deliberately negates, or at least relegates to the background, the possibility of developing a narrative – a possibility that is after all peculiar to it as a time-based art. This does not preclude a particular dynamic within the ‘frame’ of the state – one could call it a scenic dynamic, as opposed to the dramatic dynamic. The seemingly ‘static’ painting, too, is in reality merely the now definitive ‘state’ of the congealed pictorial work, in which the eye of the viewer wanting to access the picture has to become aware of and reconstruct its dynamics and process. Equally, textual theory teaches us to read the dynamic movement of becoming, the geno-text, in the congealed, now ‘inert’ (pheno-)text. The state is an aesthetic figuration of the theatre, showing a formation rather than a story, even though living actors play in it. It is no coincidence that many practitioners of postdramatic theatre started out in the visual arts. Postdramatic theatre is a theatre of states and of scenically dynamic formations.
