{"id":534,"date":"2018-11-12T19:25:26","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T19:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/?p=534"},"modified":"2022-02-06T20:35:38","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T20:35:38","slug":"protest-choirs-a-new-aesthetics-of-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/protest-choirs-a-new-aesthetics-of-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Protest Choirs: A New Aesthetics of Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Protestch\u00f6re \u2013 Zu einer neuen \u00c4sthetik des Widerstands
\n<\/strong>Stuttgart 21, Arabischer Fr\u00fchling und Occupy in theaterwissenschaftlicher Perspektive
\n<\/strong>(Stuttgart 21, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement from a Theatre Studies Perspective)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

By Stefan Donath
\n<\/strong>478 pp., Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Publishing House<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Natascha Siouzouli<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

This book is a publication of a recent German Ph.D. dissertation, meaning that it is still bound to have some issues (for example, its extravagant length, which brings with it redundancies and a somewhat opaque structure), but it also has many original qualities, which are far more important and which make this volume of unusual note.<\/p>\n

Written by Stefan Donath, a research assistant at the International Research Centre of the Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin under the supervision of the well-known critic and scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, Protestch\u00f6re <\/em>gives a full background on the historical formations of the choir within and outside theatrical practice, as well as on various practices of protest and resistance, including theoretical approaches from politics, sociology and a wider aesthetics. But, ultimately, this volume takes a performative approach which brings a special kind of focus to the idea of radical agency.<\/p>\n

What Donath specifically does here is to look into protest practices as performative process<\/em>\u00a0without focusing extensively on questions of success or failure. By taking this approach, he emphasizes a different kind of reception\u2014 \u201cwhat happened?\u201d rather than \u201cwhy?\u201d and \u201cto what purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donath argues that contemporary group<\/em> protest negates a single<\/em> homogenous entity, replacing it with polyphonic figurations of opinions, attitudes and voices. The study concludes that the interaction of group agents intentionally makes their focus difficult to grasp. This, he argues, means that they might actually have more potential to undermine or subvert their objects.<\/p>\n

His first example is the \u201cB\u00fcrgerch\u00f6re\u201d (Citizen\u2019s Choirs) and the so-called \u201cSchwabenstreich\u201d (Swabian prank), created and deployed by the famous German theatre director Volker L\u00f6sch, as part of demonstrations and actions against the building of a new rail station in Stuttgart. Donath approaches this specific form of choral protest as a \u201cKlangraum\u201d (soundspace), consisting of voices, language and noise. By undermining the goal to make sense, the collective challenges the (self-)conception of group protest as we know it, allowing a strategy of more abstract political agency to emerge.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s second example is the so-called \u201cSilent Stands,\u201d which took place in various cities in Egypt and which, to a certain extent, paved the way for the massive demonstrations in Cairo, in January 2011. These choreographed gatherings of people in public spaces\u2014part of the Arab Spring\u2014focused on collective silence and stillness, a new theatrical agent of resistance, intentionally refusing action and expression, and thus, again, challenging traditional and intellectually clear forms of protest.<\/p>\n

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is Donath\u2019s third example. He focuses here on the staging of the space\u2014the \u201cgeneral assembly\u201d or the \u201chuman microphone\u201d\u2014exploring the perceptions and transformations of that space through group action. Not being a homogenous space, it too becomes a point of constant change and negotiation.<\/p>\n

As well, the study problematizes the (re)production of all these theatricalized events by the media, arguing that the media itself becomes an important factor not only in the transmission of the events, but also in the shaping and intellectual transformation of them.<\/p>\n

The main argument of the book is that these contemporary forms of group protests <\/em>challenge traditional concepts of protest, an idea kept in the foreground throughout this well-argued study.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

*<\/a>Natascha Siouzouli <\/strong>is a theatre and performance theorist. She is currently working on a book about what she calls \u201cethical militancy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2018 Natascha Siouzouli
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
\nCreative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Protestch\u00f6re \u2013 Zu einer neuen \u00c4sthetik des Widerstands Stuttgart 21, Arabischer Fr\u00fchling und Occupy in theaterwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Stuttgart 21, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement from a Theatre Studies Perspective) By Stefan Donath 478 pp., Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Publishing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":535,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-by-natascha-siouzouli","","tg-column-two"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2018\/11\/CS18-Books-Protest.png?fit=258%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pam472-8C","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1598,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/1598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}