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Symposium: Where Culture and Politics Intersect German Theatre and Reunification 15-16 September 2006

PUBLICATIONS

Presentations and submissions in 2006:

FIRT Helsinki, 7-12 August, 2006

Presentation abstract: The multicultural kitchen and other transnational issues in German theatre

Denise Varney, University of Melbourne

As Habermas wrote in 1997, globalization 'threatens to dissolve the social glue that holds together already fragmented national societies.' In Germany, questions of nation, national identity and culture, along with the search for a binding 'social glue', have arisen just as globalisation challenges the possibility of the national unification process. Anti-globalisation there, as elsewhere, seeks to protect local identity, economies and culture from both the European Union and the more powerful American 'empire'. In many communities, however, sentimental and commercialised local culture merely makes more capital and reinforces traditional patriarchal values. Many feminists maintain, therefore, an ambivalent stance on globalisation. If nation is historically patriarchal and national culture, masculinist, then globalisation, in its post-national or transnational form, represents an opportunity to escape restrictive national borders.

In German theatre since reunification, both post-nationalist-global and historicist-Germanicist tendencies are evident. This paper proposes that the former kind of theatre is well-placed to critique 'the social glue' that bound old nations together while investigating new relations between the global and the local. Anna Langhoff's The Table Laid is discussed as a paradigmatic text that brings middle and eastern European refugees together in the kitchen of a hostel in present-day Germany. The paper argues that in dealing with transnational issues of relationships, migration, food and desire, for example, women's theatre has less capital invested in national drama and theatre cultures and is making significant and timely excursions into the social politics of the new global order.

FIRT Feminist Working Group, Helsinki 7-12 August 2006

Working group abstract: 'Shedding the national and historical: its benefits and dangers'

Denise Varney, University of Melbourne

In my current research into trends in German theatre since reunification, vergangenheitsbewþltigung, that can mean coming to terms with the past, or more assertively, overcoming (as in forgetting) or mastering the past, is a frequent theme. It is most often used in relation to debates about the appropriate way to deal with Nazism and the Holocaust and theatre that works through this subject matter. Heiner Muller's work, for example, can be understood as a continual critical engagement with twentieth century German history. In a recent interview with Berlin-based playwright and director, Anna Langhoff, vergangenheitsbewþltigung was linked with a number of very interesting tendencies that I would like to explore further. Firstly, understanding the concept as 'overcoming the past', Langhoff linked it to a desire for eternity, of lasting and outlasting the past, which brings us to immortality and to the masculine. Secondly, she linked vergangenheitsbewþltigung with a chauvinistic obsession with Germany in German theatre, which she said was 'incredibly unglobal'.

My presentation will expand on the interview and reflect on Langhoff's work. Her thoughts offer a provocation to the anti-globalisation position but also resonate with feminist interest in transnational issues of ethnicity, sexuality, ethics and time and critiques of national theatres as masculinist in orientation. My presentation would like to open up a discussion about feminist responses to globalisation and consider the potential of the transnational for women theatre-makers.

ADSA 2006 Being There: Before, During and After 4-7 July 2006

Panel Presentation: Being Political

This panel will take up the question of 'being' as a contingent political state, or a state under constant interrogation in works of theatre and drama concerned with questions of politics. The panel will examine how Western theatre, in spite of its critics, still provokes immediacy, and afterthoughts, in relation to conflicting and contradictory regimes and conditions of power and knowledge. The panel invites responses from other contributors but is comprised at the moment of three speakers who will each give papers as follows. If there is sufficient interest in this topic, it could be convened so that the papers were followed by a more open session or panel discussion with debate from the floor.

The speakers will discuss selected theatre works as well as present distinctive theoretical frameworks for considering how 'being political' functions in nation-states of the contemporary era.

Professor Helen Gilbert (Royal Holloway) on Canadian and Australian responses to the 'war on terror'. The aim is to analyse the techniques and strategies currently animating political theatre about U.S. foreign policy and to suggest some of theeffects of such policy in specific locales. The discussion will be informed by Hardt and Negri's recent work on globalisation, terrorism and 'the multitude.'

Dr Denise Varney (University of Melbourne) on German theatre since reunification. Anna Langhoff and Christoph Schlingensief are two contemporary theatre makers who sit at opposite ends of the dramatic/postdramatic theatre divide. In that both artists see themselves as critics of western neoliberalism, their different approaches to theatre and performance invite a comparative study of ‘being political’. Langhoff’s neorealist plays and Schlingensief’s performance events both demonstrate the limits of liberal society’s capacity to deal with complex social problems. But how effective is each after the event?

Professor Rachel Fensham (Surrey) on the US alliance, tentatively titled 'The BlueDress, Mr President and Being Miss Julie.' This paper will read the Bogart production of Miss Julie against the paradox of Clinton's impeachment, as a commentary on class, race and justice in contemporary America.

Contact:
Helen Gilbert helen.gilbert@rhul.ac.uk
Denise Varney dvarney@unimelb.edu.au
Rachel Fensham Rachel.Fensham@arts.monash.edu.au

International Conference of the Arts in Society 2006: Arts of Engagement

Theory Focus - Theme 8: Meaning and Representation: Sense-making Connecting the arts to everyday life

Abstract for Virtual Presentation: Gestus, Affect and the Post-Semiotic in Contemporary Political Theatre

Dr Denise Varney, University of Melbourne

With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the movement of its former member states towards democratic elections and capitalist economies, the Cold War was hastily and abruptly over. Triumphalist liberal and neo-conservative discourses proclaimed the end of communism and exhausted socialist populations welcomed the end of real existing socialism. Both politically and philosophically, the great modernist dualisms of communism and capitalism, East and West, Left and Right, had come to an end. This final act of deconstruction not only had profound effects on politics and the everyday, but it also changed the terms and reference points for the processes of meaning-making, representation, interpretation and reception in the arts. Is there still a place for the arts of engagement in contemporary Europe?
This paper proposes that these historic shifts in politics and the everyday find their artistic outlet in the shift from a gestic to an affective model of meaning and representation, or, from the semiotic to the post-semiotic. Whereas the Brechtian gestic model of social signification is based in the class war and the correlation of sign and referent, the affective domain, as theorised by Massumi drawing on Deleuze, is adaptable to a more fluid global realm. There is an associated movement from an emphasis on gesture to image. Gesture is indexic, it points to a relatively fixed social realm, whereas the image is everywhere in ‘the image- and information- based economies of late capitalism.’
Drawing on theatrical examples from Germany, the paper teases out the strengths and weaknesses of affect as a critical framework for new understandings of the arts of engagement.

FIELD TRIPS

July 2006

Dr. Denise Varney travelled to Berlin in late July to complete further interviews with artists and research further archival performance material.

2005

After travelling to the FIRT conference in Washington, Dr. Denise Varney travelled to Berlin in July 2005 to research archival performance material.

In 2005 Melinda Hetzel also continued research assistance on the project, completing interviews with key artists and scholars during a six month stay in Berlin.

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