{"id":190,"date":"2016-11-01T17:26:37","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T17:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/?p=190"},"modified":"2023-06-03T08:09:49","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T08:09:49","slug":"fugitive-performance-nicolas-stemanns-die-schutzbefohlenen-and-the-medial-matrix-of-refugee-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/fugitive-performance-nicolas-stemanns-die-schutzbefohlenen-and-the-medial-matrix-of-refugee-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Fugitive Performance: Nicolas Stemann\u2019s Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em> and the Medial Matrix of Refugee Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ralf Remshardt<\/strong>*<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Nicolas Stemann\u2019s production of Elfriede Jelinek\u2019s text Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em>, at the 2015 Berlin Theatertreffen, began with, perhaps, the most overworked gesture of intermedial theatre: as the audience entered, a live feed flickered on monitors around the auditorium, while an interviewer asked several people onstage\u2014refugees, apparently\u2014about their experiences of flight and resettlement. What interested me, from the beginning, was not the tired trope of documentary authenticity evoked by staging an\u2014if simulated\u2014journalistic exchange; it was, for one, the fact that the production had felt the urgent necessity to put actual refugee bodies and stories onto the stage and into the shared space, only to subvert that statement, without apparent irony, with the most conventional framing device of digital mediation, thus implicitly conceding that, in the experience of most theatre-goers at least, refugees exist in an irreducibly mediated and mediatized space, even if they are actually present<\/em>. The second thought that struck me was that hardly anyone was paying attention. Theatertreffen is an elite social occasion studded with high-culture celebrity, and the refugees, now chanting \u201cWe are Lampedusa!\u201d would have to wait until all the kiss-kissing and backslapping had subsided.<\/p>\n

Thus, the production, originating at Hamburg\u2019s respected Thalia Theater, subsequently endowed with the imprimatur of several international theatre festivals (Theater der Welt and Holland Festival), and now given pride of place as the lead offering at Theatertreffen, was effectively performing its own inefficacy, and, with it, putting the inadequacy of art to give due to the most pressing humanitarian crisis of our time on overt display. In fact, festival juror Barbara Burckhardt argued the virtue of this deficiency when she wrote: \u201cNicolas Stemann [asks] the question of how to represent the suffering: Who can speak for whom here? The production revolves around the failure of civil society–and of art.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Purportedly, Stemann\u2019s production was a realization\u2014in fact, the premiere\u2014of Nobel Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek\u2019s new dramatic text, Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em>. The title is an archaism that literally translates to \u201cthose commended to protection,\u201d that is, those who are entitled to safety, and is an echo of Die Schutzflehenden<\/em>, the German title of Aeschylus\u2019 The Suppliants<\/em>. In the first part of the mostly lost Aeschylean Danaides<\/em> tetralogy, the safety-seeking maidens are given sanctuary in Argos after King Pelasgos, at first, rejects them, but, finally, acquiesces to the will of the enlightened Argive population. Like their twenty-first-century successors, the distressed daughters of Danaus are fleeing a threat from the Middle East; in this case, a forced marriage to Egyptian suitors. In The Suppliants<\/em>, the Greek\u2014and, by implication, European\u2014ethos of the hiketeia<\/em>, or right of sacred sanctuary, becomes manifest. The telling irony that much of the current refugee trail geographically duplicates the ancient model while straining the ethical principle enshrined in it is of course inescapable.<\/p>\n

\"Image
Sebastian Rudolph, Felix Knopp, Sebastian Lommatzsch in Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em>. Photo: Thalia Theater\/Krafft Angerer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jelinek\u2019s text, though infused with the appellative tone of ancient choral speech, is also entirely contemporary. Technically, it is less a drama (dran<\/em> means to act, little of which happens here), than an extended stasimon<\/em>, a choral ode in the collective voice of the refugees, alternately demanding and reflective, hectoring and rebarbative. Aeschylus and Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em> provide the mythological undercurrent, Martin Heidegger\u2019s philosophy the ontological superstructure, but the text\u2019s primary linguistic target is an Austrian government brochure on resettlement and integration filled with platitudes that lapse from the poetic into the bureaucratic (\u201cfreedom is a feeling\u201d), which it skewers with the author\u2019s customary acerbic irony.<\/p>\n

The immediate trigger event for the play was the action by sixty mostly Pakistani migrants who, in November 2012, left their internment camp and took refuge in a Viennese church, seeking permanent asylum and work permits (the church, as if the discontents of civilization were not marked with sufficiently clear irony, was close to Sigmund-Freud-Platz). A hunger strike, arrests, extraditions, and protests and counter-protests followed. While the text is shot through with direct references to these events, it is open enough to allow it to stand for a larger political situation.<\/p>\n

In many ways, Jelinek\u2019s text is signally unsuitable for its intended purpose, the exposure of a political and ethical crisis of historic proportions, because it dwells with obsessive insistence on the kinds of petty hypocrisies Austria specializes in; in this case the fact that Boris Yeltsin\u2019s daughter and opera soprano Anna Netrebko (a notorious Putinista) were able to buy their way into citizenship while others languished. In appropriating the refugees\u2019 voice, moreover, the text can hardly escape the patronizing gestures it superficially condemns\u2014an ineluctable, systemic failure of Western theatre that Stemann, in his production, attempted to address.<\/p>\n

Jelinek, of course, is aware of this aporia<\/em>. The text, though forbiddingly block-like and impenetrable in appearance, actually exists in intermedial form as a an open-ended, malleable theatrical hypertext on her web site where, in response to the unfolding of the European refugee situation, she has continued to expand, tweak, gloss, re- and overwrite it like a postdramatic palimpsest. In that sense, the failure of the text to come to terms with the crisis has become its structuring principle. Such a gesture of simultaneously glutting and withholding; such Medien<\/em>zertr\u00fcmmerung<\/em> (media destruction) has its deeper roots in Jelinek\u2019s long-avowed skepticism of the representational theatre\u2014in a 1983 Theater Heute<\/em> essay, long before ubiquitous postdramatic sloganeering, she declared: \u201cI don\u2019t want to play and I don\u2019t want to see others play, either,\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> and embraced an aesthetics of \u201cshallowness.\u201d Subsequently, she has cultivated a permissive, if sometimes slightly hostile, relationship with the directors of her texts who, as she has minimized and finally eliminated stage directions, have become co-authors in what is probably the most consequent realization of the Regietheater<\/em>. In reference to Jelinek\u2019s Maria Ulrike Stuart<\/em>, in 2006, which he also directed, Stemann noted that \u201ca certain irresponsibility towards the text is precisely what the text demands of the director.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

To me, Stemann\u2019s production and others like it raise a different kind of question about intermediality; one that is slightly distinct from the aesthetic or formal integration of medial discourses in live performance, though it responds to Chiel Kattenbelt\u2019s observation that intermedial practice strives for a \u201cresensibilisation of perception.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a> Here, straining to contribute to an increasingly contentious discussion about European refugee policy in an increasingly fractured and fractious public sphere, Stemann pursued a series of intermedial interventions designed both to evoke theatre\u2019s power to suspend or sublate (in the Hegelian sense) representation in presence and<\/em> to declare, finally, an impasse to that self-same Enlightenment project.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the production was mightily enamored of its own contradictions and the insistent, recursive irony with which it exhibited them. Could the theatre speak for the refugees? Could they even speak for themselves? In one exchange\u2014interpolated into the text by Stemann\u2014the three main white actors (Felix Knopp, Daniel Lommatzsch, Sebastian Rudolph) mistook a black actor (Ernest Allen Hausmann) for an immigrant. Even as he answered their awkward English in perfect stage German, they refused to understand him, since a person of color conversing in their native tongue seemed unthinkable. Superficially droll, the scene skewered the easy target of the clueless Gutmensch<\/em>, a naive, politically correct meddler, but it drew on stereotypes decades out of date in an increasingly multicultural Germany.<\/p>\n

The actors, in mock plaintive voice, offered the quintessential defense of artistic insufficiency when later in the play the refugees impatiently importuned them to take action: \u201cWe can\u2019t help you,\u201d they cried, \u201cwe\u2019re too busy playing you.\u201d In a certain type of theatre, the production seemed to say, the Marxian praxis<\/em> of political action will always already be subsumed by the Aristotelian praxis<\/em> of aesthetic action.<\/p>\n

However, Stemann\u2019s production could offer scant assurances that it was not itself that type of theatre; indeed, in its overtly arch gestures of parody, mocking the excesses of the avant-garde and of Regietheater<\/em> (actors in high heels and evening attire speaking chorally; a huge Christ figure flown in from above; projections of the pyramid of divine providence found on the dollar bill; the quasi-Pirandellian and extempore comments on the supertitles that translated Jelinek\u2019s text into English) it seemed self-laceratingly conscious of its limitations. Stemann appeared to be courting the collision between his own sense of privilege and high artistic affectations and the irreducible presence of the refugees to the point of embarrassment, as if in acknowledgment that in the hypermedium of the theatre, resensibilization was now only possible through a modicum of mortification.<\/p>\n

Matthias Dell of Theater der Zeit <\/em>wrote scathingly that Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em> was \u201cmarked by awkwardness\u201d and \u201cbehaves like a high-school theatre from 20 years ago that wants to rehearse something about discrimination.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a> A large digital counter on stage progressed inexorably, from 24168, at the start of the show (or when I first became aware of it), to 24299, at its close. But what did this discrepancy of 131 signify? The number of refugees who had died, elsewhere, in the two hours traffic on the stage?<\/p>\n

Though Stemann utilized a number of intermedial strategies (live feed, projections, etc.), the key factor for me here is that the attempt to come to terms with the refugee crisis through performance is already irrevocably imbricated with the medial matrix in which it exists. For better or worse, refugees and migrants are creatures of the mass medial imagination, in which narratives of individual suffering which feed emotional concerns (for instance the pictures of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on the beach of Bodrum in September 2015) compete with the images of columns of bedraggled migrants tussling with border guards and marching on dusty roads into the heart of European civilization, provoking political backlash.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the medial image of refugees is marked by agendas and omissions. The independent watchdog organization Ethical Journalism Network (EJN) released a report in December 2015 indicting Western media coverage of the refugee crisis. Among the findings of the report, Moving Stories<\/em>, was that journalists failed to \u201cget ahead\u201d of the story and address the developments when they first happened; that media have let coverage become sensationalized and hijacked by hate speech and inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric; and that the systematic gutting of news operations and editorial resources has led to superficial, inaccurate and repetitive reporting.[6]<\/sup><\/a> Research by scholars from the University of Cardiff in Wales found that there are notable differences in terminology that have the power to set the agenda. British newspaper coverage of the crisis is the most consistently polarized between liberal- and right-leaning publications: While Germany (91.0%) and Sweden (75.3%) overwhelmingly used the terms \u201crefugee\u201d or \u201casylum seeker\u201d, in Spain the most widely (67.1%) used term was \u201cimmigrant\u201d and in Britain (54.2%) and Italy (35.8%) \u201cmigrant.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cMigrant,\u201d you will note, is linguistically subtly different from \u201cimmigrant,\u201d a legal term of purposeful resettlement; phonetically close to \u201cvagrant,\u201d it carries overtones of transgression and disruption.<\/p>\n

As I was writing this paper (June 2016), the reports of another shipwreck catastrophe in the Mediterranean, with an assumed 1,000 victims, was added to a tally that grows with numbing regularity. Given the centrality of the refugee crisis to the debate about the larger humanitarian responsibilities of the European powers and to the political future of the EU, a theatrical response is to be expected. The topic of migrants and refugees, their stories in documentary and fictionalized form, and, increasingly, their actual bodies, have found their way onto the European stage. Refugee theatre is, if not a bona fide <\/em>new genre, then, at least a compelling contemporary performance trope that is almost inevitably realized in the idiom(s) of intermediality. This is not the place to give a full accounting of refugee-themed theatre, even if that were possible, but I will mention some instances.<\/p>\n

\"Refugees
Refugees on stage in Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em>. Photo: dpa\/Stephanie Pilik<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the years since David Edgar offered eloquent neo-Brechtian disquisitions about culture and displacement, in his 1994 Balkans play Pentecost,<\/em> and Ariane Mnouchkine an epic set of vignettes on crossings and sufferings, Le Dernier Caravanserail<\/em> (2003)\u2014in fact, a decade later, the political pressures of the moment have demanded a less poetically contemplative and more activist, even interventionist strategy. In a recent article, Simon Hagemann discussed three paradigmatic German representational approaches to the border and migration situation, including Jelinek\u2019s Die Schutzbefohlenen<\/em>. The two others are Hans-Werner Kroesinger\u2019s documentary drama FRONTex SECURITY<\/em>, co-produced with Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Berlin, in December 2013, and Po.W.E.R.<\/em> by BBM, a group specialized in machine performance, first staged in Hanover, in 2014.<\/p>\n

While Kroesinger\u2019s documentary piece is a fact-rich juxtaposition, often in \u201cdry and complicated . . . \u00a0bureaucratic jargon\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a> of legal and political texts, BBM create a kind of retrospective science fiction narrative in which speaking robots, from a posthuman future 10,000 years hence, discuss the climate and refugee crises of the twenty-first century. But \u201cmigrant participation\u201d has become a watchword of more recent performances which attempt, not merely to thematize the crisis, but to make it physically present, even unavoidable.<\/p>\n

Dries Verhoeven\u2019s ground-breaking, ambulatory performance piece, No Man\u2019s Land<\/em>, from 2008 (and most recently in its 2014 iterations in Athens and Munich), was likely the first to give mediated voice to individual migrants and put them into one-on-one contact with audiences. But, while based on a conceit of mediation (an audio track with a refugee narrative), Verhoeven\u2019s piece succeeded by dislodging the experiencers from the safety of the theatre and sustaining a brittle physical intimacy between them and their guides as they made their way through unfamiliar cityscapes.<\/p>\n

In a so-called EcoFavela set up at the Hamburg venue Kampnagel, the art collective Baltic Raw created performance pieces with migrants from the Lampedusa community and provided a temporary habitat for five refugees until legal action by the right-wing AfD party, in 2015, shut it down.[9]<\/sup><\/a> And, in what may be the most radical realization of the staging of refugee bodies, performance group Zentrum f\u00fcr Politische Sch\u00f6nheit<\/em> (Center for Political Beauty), in June 2015, exhumed and reburied in Berlin several bodies of drowned refugees salvaged from the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

The action Die Toten Kommen<\/em> (The Dead Are Coming<\/em>), its title a sardonic nod to popular culture\u2019s obsession with zombies, was aimed at bringing the victims from the margins of Europe\u2019s watery borders to the center of political power and to restore posthumously an individuality they had lost in the flood of statistics and the haze of medial images. Andr\u00e9 Leipold, co-founder of ZPS, emphasizes that \u201cpolitically beautiful acts\u201d are those that put up resistance against human rights violations and disturb the \u201cbloodless and poetry-free political sphere\u201d by using the means of the theatre to drive them \u201cinto the here and now.\u201d He calls their method, citing Jean Baudrillard, \u201chyperreal.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/a> Like so-called B\u00fcrgerb\u00fchnen<\/em> (citizens stages) where ordinary people create theatre with professional guidance, or the \u201cExperts of the Everyday\u201d of Rimini Protokoll, the hyperreal recourse to an actual Other that presents an ontological challenge to the cosseted mediality of the stage follows a \u201crealistic turn\u201d in the German theatre.<\/p>\n