Kritik. Rivista di letteratura e critica culturale

Prefazione

2024-08-05T10:21:48+00:00

Heiner Müller regista

2024-08-05T10:29:24+00:00

Heiner Müller’s work stands out in the landscape of German literature in a singular way, like an erratic boulder. But his activity as a director has also taken on a special, even symbolic significance precisely for that German history to which his interest as a writer is directed. While his value as a writer is rarely questioned even by his opponents, the plays he has produced as a director have not met with unanimous critical or public approval. This essay aims to offer an examination of the positive and negative criticism of the plays of this important heir to the theater of Bertolt Brecht.Even as a director, Müller holds fast to the task he set himself as a writer, which can be described with the formula: theater as historical-political commentary. Like his texts, his directing should be understood as a ceaseless “commentary”: an interpreting, unearthing and bringing to light (“archaeology”), a revealing of hidden contradictions. Commentary historically situates models and predecessors, brings out the political “content” of texts through rewriting and reworking.

Madri di Einar Schleef

2024-08-05T10:29:51+00:00

Mütter is a very controversial play; spectators leave the theater in droves, aggressively worded critiques pour in from the newspapers. The reason for the violence of the reactions is primarily the chorus, which is in fact the undisputed star of the play, not only because of its constant presence on stage and the quantity of choruses, but also because of the specific way in which it is understood and used. Schleef always stages the chorus as an autonomous formal element, as an enclosed unit in itself, which is clearly detached as much from the actors and actresses as from the audience, asserting itself in its own distinct independence.

Heiner Goebbels. Un regista compositore

2024-08-05T10:30:16+00:00

This contribution focuses on the musical theater of composer and director Heiner Goebbels, who has emerged as the protagonist of a stage practice that critiques the traditional function of the director by revolutionizing the role of actor and spectator. Underlying his theater is his Ästhetik der Abwesenheit, the aesthetics of absence that involves the disappearance of the actor/performer from the center of attention and consequently a shattering of the spectator’s attention, the avoidance of the spectator’s expectations, a desynchronization of listening and viewing, the separation of voices from performers’ bodies and sounds from instruments, the abandonment of expressiveness and the absence of a central visual focus. Added to this is the “absence” of a story.

Ora zero ovvero l’arte del servire di Christoph Marthaler

2024-08-05T10:28:47+00:00

This essay focuses on the drama Christoph Marthalers Stunde Null oder die Kunst des Servierens. It is undoubtedly one of the most important and commercially successful German-language plays of the late 1990s. Numerous performances in other German theaters and abroad, as well as filming and television broadcasts, contributed to its widespread popularity. I will try to outline the particular aesthetic of the staging. After some brief background on the director and his famous “Marthaler-like” style, I will focus on the genesis and structure of this play. Starting with a detailed analysis of a key scene, I will discuss its crucial aesthetic traits, touching on issues concerning body language, musicality of language and the satirical nature of the Swiss director’s works.

Against Representation: il teatro di Einar Schleef

2024-08-05T10:31:45+00:00

Thies essay focuses on Einar Schleef’s theatre. Schleef provokes and fascinates so much mainly because he uses an original and highly personal theatrical language that stands in strong friction with the hegemonic theatrical aesthetic. To this Schleef opposes an aesthetic of overwhelm that operates with large choral masses, with excessive vocalizations produced by choirs that not only speak and sing, but also frequently shout. The tight rhythms of these performances rehearse a very intense, sometimes violent stimulation and solicitation of the body and senses, both as far as the actor and the spectator are concerned.

Eidos: Telos, Kammer/Kammer e altri balletti di William Forsythe

2024-08-05T10:33:03+00:00

This essay aims to illustrate the particularity of Forsythe’s projects and ballets. Among the relevant features of his ballets is the use of all the means of theater to create an autonomous scenic universe. Lights, space, music, text, costumes as well as bodies and their movements are understood as autonomous systems that on stage can enter into multiple connections to generate an openness that suspends and transforms the usual modes of perception and signification.

Irruzione del cinema, evasione del teatro. Franz Castorf mette in scena Umiliati e offesi di Dostoevskij

2024-08-05T10:39:50+00:00

This essay discusses Castorf’s theater. His plays are taken from Dostoevsky’s novels and are based precisely on the moment of the turning point in mediality. Between 1999 and 2003, Castorf is not at all interested in trying to address a present full of catastrophes with a paraphrase of Dostoevsky. Rather he, in a precise and congenial movement, welcomes Dostoyevsky’s writing into the center of his work and repeats in the sphere of theater “the effort of the form that counteracts itself” that is made in the Russian writer’s novels.

Città come preda di René Pollesch, liberamente ispirato alle ricerche dello spaceLab

2024-08-05T10:41:21+00:00

The contribution investigates through the work Stadt als Beute the theatre of René Pollesch. Such theater is a dramatic discourse, just as the discourse of philosophy is a theater, the theatrum philosophicum, that is, as Deleuze puts it, a “series” that takes place in a “multiple, polyscenic, simultaneous theater, fragmented into scenes that ignore each other and make signs, and where without representing (copying, imitating) anything, masks dance, bodies shout, hands and fingers gesticulate”.

La bella mugnaia a Zurigo: sul piacere del falso ascolto in Christoph Marthaler

2024-08-05T10:42:53+00:00

The subject of this essay is the theatrical art of Marthaler. The works of the director and his team seduce through careful, perhaps deconstructive (and capable of equivocation) reading, through the unobtrusive and loving way of reflecting, critiquing and deconstructing theatrical and musical traditions that retain great popularity to our present day. The theatricalization of misunderstanding (in listening and reading) is in Marthaler an offering of enjoyment.

Thomas Ostermeier e l’assalto al realismo capitalista

2024-08-05T10:44:18+00:00

The essay delves into the artistic-political genealogy of Ostermeier’s realism, drawing connections to Brechtian approaches. At the 1935 International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, Brecht emphasized the strained relationship between the artistic avant-garde and class struggle. He criticized the belief that art alone could incite revolutionary change, a stance mirrored in Ostermeier’s critique of contemporary performance forms as insufficient for challenging capitalist realism.
Both Brecht and Ostermeier contest the assimilation of artistic work into the bourgeoisie, emphasizing that while art can critique the system, it cannot fully subvert it without Revolutionary conditions. Ostermeier’s theater, then, aims to reveal concealed aspects within dramatic texts. I examine how his approach disrupts the familiar by situating classical plays in contemporary environments. His productions unearth buried aspects of traditional culture, emphasizing the unspoken, unseen, and unsettling elements of these works.
Ostermeier’s Nora, his adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, epitomizes this approach. He transforms the play, revealing the contemporary façade of gender roles, consumerism, and patriarchal control. Nora’s evolution, from a compliant wife to a character breaking free through unsettling actions, serves as a critique of societal norms.
In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the interplay between the audience’s engagement and bourgeois curiosity, dissecting their pivotal role in crafting the scenic impact. In Nora, this impact exposes to the spectator the enduring role they persist in assuming.

Teatro fuori di sé. Sul lavoro di Wanda Golonka

2024-08-05T10:45:50+00:00

Since Klaus Michael Grüber’s work on Euripides’ Bacchae at Berlin’s Schaubühne in the 1970s, there has perhaps not been a more radical attempt than that of director Wanda Golonka’s An Antigone to investigate the foreignness and at the same time the closeness of the material of a Greek myth or tragedy in the setting of a public theater by making it jump. The choice of Antigone should come as no surprise. Nowhere else are the political issues raised by Golonka’s behavior within the institutional theater discussed so radically as in this tragedy: the act of freedom in relation to the law; the transgression that does not represent a questioning of the individual law, but rather exhibits the fragile foundation of law, provokes a crisis of the existing order and its legitimacy, taking upon itself the responsibility for the violation, with all the consequences that follow. It is no coincidence that this moment of stepping “outside oneself” has been repeatedly discussed in connection with this work

La rivoluzione teatrale di Laurent Chétouane

2024-08-05T10:47:00+00:00

Laurent Chétouane is the quietest revolutionary playwright in German theater. Since the beginning of this millennium, Chètouane has been staging highlights of the German public theater canon in the German public theater system and in other European theatres. This essay aims to illustrate how in his representations, the focus is equally on the bodily reality of text and spoken word and the textuality of bodies in motion. Chètouane describes the turning point in his work that came about through collaboration with dancers and the relationship with the body not dancing, but moving. At the beginning lies the question of how “what is said [...] exerts an influence on space. And how it exerts an influence on bodies”.

Michael Thalheimer, coreografo di gesti. Un’Orestea al Deutsches Theater

2024-08-05T10:48:48+00:00

George Steiner, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and numerous other modern and contemporary authors have, albeit for different reasons, come to the diagnosis that tragedy belongs to the past. Yet on the stage we are witnessing an exceedingly vital return of the tragic, which can also be explained by the fact that in a world marked by increasingly uncontrollable conflicts, the disorientations of globalisation and catastrophes that we witness with a growing sense of helplessness, the anti-tragic faith in the power of reason to understand our condition (not to mention the power to solve problems) has been severely weakened. Moreover, the possibility of idealising – or even personalising as theatrically interesting figures – certain forces, characters, powers or agents of historical power has disappeared. Thus, tragedy once again becomes a model of representation and reflection beyond Enlightenment dreams, beyond romantic internalisations, beyond political idealism: a theatrical form in which radical scepticism and the disillusioned representation of pain and failure prevail, a theatrical form that does not touch us because of its utopias or heroic stylisations, but because of its recognition of human inadequacies and the empathy it shows towards the vulnerabilities of human beings. In this sense, it has an anti-ideological effect and this quality appears as an increasingly necessary antidote to the daily flat ideologisation of reality, with which consciousness is used to mask its own bewilderment to itself.

Il recycling nel teatro mediale. Gob Squad’s Kitchen dei Gob Squad

2024-08-05T10:50:11+00:00

For decades the Gob Squad have been contributing to the development of experimental forms of theater in Germany by bringing back, as Warhol had also done in his own way with Kitchen, the omnipresent devices of medial perception to the elementary situation of theater in when scene of simulation and observation of everyday behavior in a slightly modified frame. This contribution aims to show the construction of their performances through their representations.

Realismo postdrammatico: 100% Karlsruhe dei Rimini Protokoll

2024-08-05T10:51:33+00:00

The text proposes an analysis of the theatre of Rimini Protokoll by analysing certain performances, in particular 100% Karsruhe, which refer to political issues concerning participation and citizenship, representation and representativeness. Rimini Protokoll practise a postdramatic realism that has left behind the paradigm of representation and is marked by a particular dialectic of spectacularisation. It is a theatre that is realist because it exhibits the theatricality of existence, its ‘spectacularity’, but does not conceive the spectacle as a separation from real life, but rather as something that allows individuals to establish relationships with themselves and others. We are invited to conceive theatre not just as a medium through which life is articulated and interacts with itself, but also as a medium that allows us to establish contact with a real that resists theatricalisation, the articulation of life in terms of spectacle and staging.

Comunità di fan – Partecipazione e cultura pop negli She She Pop

2024-08-05T10:52:55+00:00

This essay is a critical presentation of the work of the She She Pop theater group, which originated in the context of university courses in theater studies, which turns its attention to themes, texts and formats of popular and everyday culture. The goal is an approximation of theater to what is perceived as contemporary social reality. The artists stage themselves and themselves as co-authors of texts that are found in reality. They reject the idea of the playwright as a single author of dialogic texts to be staged and, in general, the idea of staging a drama understood as a presentation of a reading of the text by the director. The starting point of theatrical practice is no longer the dramatic, canonized text, but the set of fragments of popular culture texts – whether pop songs, advertising texts, television formats or popular myths – found in everyday culture. The word “pop” thus comes to define a perspective in which everything everything appears as material for theater, without any hierarchy.

Il teatro come esercizio di morte: Orfeo. Eine Sterbeübung di Susanne Kennedy

2024-08-05T10:54:19+00:00

With this essay, reference will be made to a very complex, relatively early installation that Susanne Kennedy conceived in the summer of 2015 for the Ruhrtriennale, thus, two years after his breakthrough in German drama theater. In collaboration with Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, she then staged Orfeo. Eine Sterbeübung (death exercise) in the upper floors of the mixing plant of the Zeche Zollverein in Hesse. Aware that the role of the mythological character of Eurydice in Ovid’s narrative has been little or not at all represented, the three artists choose a varied interpretation of the myth with an emphasis on the figure of Eurydice. In the program booklet they also refer to the play Schatten (Eurydike sagt) by Elfriede Jelinek, which offers an alternative viewpoint on the character of Eurydice. In the labyrinth of the walkable installation Orfeo. Eine Sterbeübung one comes across a multitude of Eurydice figures, occupying the space with their bodies. Displayed as artificial figurative constructions, the performers are united not only by flashy costumes complete with masks, but also by the fact that they are silent. Only the interpretation of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, performed by the solo ensemble Kaleidoskop, resonates in the labyrinth. The performers occupy the spaces with their bodies, do not speak and seem to repeat seemingly endless movements and positions based on the spatial arrangement.

Teatro maldestro. Sul lavoro del regista Boris Nikitin

2024-08-05T10:55:50+00:00

This Essay focuses on Boris Nikitin’s clumsy theatre, a theatre of revolt that brings into play nothing less than the play itself: the beginning and end of theatre, its conventions and even its rejection. The matrix and program of all Nikitin’s plays is fiction, plagiarism, fakery or fraud: on the stage reality and fiction merge and blur, disorienting the viewer. His performers are “expert of every day life” who on the stage inevitably become “expert of the stage”, triggering in the play with stage illusion a game of faith in representation in which the subject experiences together with the performer his own decentralization in a fictional process of discovery of his own hidden potentialities, of knowledge of self and reality.

Un teatro per tutta la città. Il fidanzamento a Santo Domingo – un’opposizione. Di Necati Öziri contro Heinrich von Kleist al Maxim Gorki Theater di Berlino

2024-08-05T10:57:13+00:00

In the German theatrical debate of recent years, the call for a decolonization of white institutions has become louder. Central to these debates around diverse ensembles, oppressive and offensive language, and blackface has been the thematization of ignorance in the face of population groups constructed as “other.” Both at renowned theater festivals and on social media, protests and discussions took place that also showed a growing sensitivity to German colonial history and its consequences to the present day. Through activist movements, but also artistic works that have sprung up in recent years, it has become evident how homogeneous German municipal and state theaters are in their casts. The present contribution attempts to show what conception of theater and identity lies behind the ambition of the directors of the Maxim Gorki Theater, Schermin Langhoff and Jens Hillje, to free German actors around the world from encasings and classifications and (gender) univocity through an analysis of Sebastian Nübling’s staging of the play Die Verlobung in St. Domingo - Ein Widerspruch. Von Necati Öziri gegen Heinrich von Kleist by Necati Öziri, which makes its debut at the Gorki-Theater on August 30, 2019.

Il mostruoso femminino in Tanz e A Divine Comedy di Florentina Holzinger

2024-08-05T10:59:04+00:00

This paper is concerned with Florentina Holtzinger’s dramatization of Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste’s 1922 dances of vice, horror, and ecstasy [Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase]. In her performances, the structural convention of the three-act ballet and the historical legacy of images and movements is alienated, contemporary equivalents are sought for productions historically received as scandalous, and the monstrous montage of their work is explicitly revealed. This method plays with the breaking of taboos and draws attention to the norms and mechanisms of censorship.

Servirebbe davvero un buon teatro stabile?

2024-08-05T11:56:01+00:00

This text is an unpublished translation of a speech given in Mannheim at the public session of the German Palatinate Society on June 26, 1784 by F. Schiller, a member of this society and adviser to the Duke of Weimar.

Messaggio secondario e vocalità nello Jakob von Gunten di Fabio Condemi

2024-08-05T11:57:28+00:00

This essay proposes to reconstruct, in the footsteps of phonostylist Iván Fónagy, the secondary message in the Walserian Jakob von Gunten and investigate the ways in which it is represented in the theatrical “remediation”, taking on the vocal gesture as a metaphor for a drive reality. Signed by Fabio Condemi and presented at the Venice Theatre Biennale in 2018, the adaptation declines, in the pluricodic composition of the stage event, the harrowing drama of a deliberately emptied existence told by Walser’s irreverent style, founded on labyrinthine chatter and uninterrupted irony.

I suoni del calligrafo. Per un’analisi della drammaturgia sonora dello Jakob von Gunten di Fabio Condemi

2024-08-05T11:58:49+00:00

This essay aims to illustrate the complexity of the phono-theatrical device put in place by Fabio Condemi for the construction of the sound dramaturgy of his play and the importance that the latter assumes for the construction of meanings within the entire performance. Beneath its surface, the spectator, digging in, can find the dialogue between Walser’s novel-which, as the remarks in the previous paragraph suggest, also carries with it the author’s entire universe, including his biography-and the mind of the director who read that novel in order to draw from it his performance. The viewer thus has access to the mechanisms that led to the genesis of the work and can treat what it manifests on its surface – here the sound dramaturgy created by Condemi – as a true signifying productivity, constantly evolving during the performance. A true engine of the play, in short, the sound body of Fabio Condemi’s Jakob von Gunten could not leave the stage without bringing with it a relevant part of the dramaturgy of the entire performance.