A Few Words About the Laureate’s Oeuvre
Ivan Medenica*
As I was conceptualizing this panel to honor Erika Fischer-Lichte, knowing Erika as I do, I thought that she would prefer to hear reflections on her work by colleagues of different generations and especailly cultures, rather than listen to a classical laudation. This occurred to me because in the last few decades Erika Fischer-Lichte has been deeply committed to the study of what she calls the interweaving performance cultures.
According to Erika Fischer-Lichte, the concept of interweaving performance cultures can be clearly differentiated from the better known concept of intercultural theatre. In Fischer Lichte’s own words, “ The concept of ‘intercultural’ theatre makes the false assumption that cultures are sealed entities: once Japanese, always Japanese; once European, always European. Instead, cultures are immersed in a continuous process of change and exchange. It is often difficult to disentangle or distinguish what is ‘one’s own’ and what is ‘foreign’” (2014).
In other words, Fischer-Lichte claims that “Above all, an integrated history of theatre makes apparent that in most cultures theatre did not develop in isolation but rather through cultural exchange. In fact, developments within specific theatre traditions were often prompted by confrontations with other cultures. Any given culture would appropriate individual elements of the other tradition and weave them into its own theatrical fabric in order to expand its possibilities and means of expression. The interaction of theatrical cultures has been a perpetual instrument and vehicle of change and renewal” (2014). After publishing a number of books on various aspects of interweaving performance cultures, including the above cited Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies (2014), The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008) and Dionysus Resurrected. Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World (2014), Fischer-Lichte continued her research in this field. She has been mapping, together with her collaborators, numerous performance-related notions and concepts in non-European or better said non-Western cultures such as rasa (Sanskrit), furga (Arabic) jiadingxing (Chinese) and gei (Japanese). These concepts reflect culturally specific ways of thinking and talking about the performing arts and are very difficult to translate into English or any other international language of Europe. The result of this momentous work is The Routledge Companion to Performance-Related Concepts in Non-European Languages that she has just edited (2024), in collaboration with Torsten Jost and Astrid Schenka.
My focus at the beginning of this panel, a profoundly intercultural gathering dedicated to the work of Thalia Prize laureate Erika Fischer-Lichte, was her concept of interweaving performance cultures. But clearly this has not been the only focus of her research in her very fruitful and diverse career. I cannot begin to describe the totality of her work, so I will instead briefly describe some additional areas of research that she has explored in depth.
Fischer-Lichte is, first and foremost, an extraordinary theatre historian; one of her major works is History of European Drama and Theatre (2002). She approaches this topic from a critical and thoughtfully elaborated perspective – through representations of collective identities in theatre and drama and processes of their construction and deconstruction. It is also noteworthy that during her long career Fischer-Lichte has changed theoretical and methodological frames, but not from a desire to follow fashionable trends. On the contrary, Fischer-Lichte has consistently pursued an immanently German dialectic approach in her research. Thus, she convincingly argues that her work in the field of theatre semiotics in the 80s and 90s, as exemplified in her book, The Semiotics of Theatre (1992), has not been cancelled by her later research on the aesthetic of performativity. As she once told me in a private conversation, these are two sides of the same coin.
The aesthetic of performativity is a more suitable theoretical frame for researching performance itself, as a temporary and intense artistic and/or social event, a mutually conditioning exchange between actions of performers and reactions of spectators. Fischer-Lichte refers to this flow, one of her well-known theoretical concepts, as the autopoetic feedback loop; such interaction between performers and spectators is immanent to any performance, from rituals and political relies to drama theatre and art of performance. Fischer-Lichte elaborates on this theoretical concept and explains related notions and methodologies in her seminal book already mentioned above, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Whenever we critics refer to audience reactions, when we stress their importance for the development of a performance, we are addressing, consciously or unconsciously, the theoretical concept of autopoetic feedback loop. The semiotic approach, on the other hand, is still theoretically and methodologically appropriate to analyze the text of the show, its artistic plan that Fischer-Lichte terms “staging,” “inszenierung” or “mise-en-scène.” Finally, not only is Erika Fischer-Lichte an extraordinary academic, but she is also a master of scientific politics. In my estimation, she is one of the rare scholars outside of the Anglo-American world who has developed an impressive, internationally acclaimed infrastructure for theatre and performance research. I refer to the International Research Centre, Interweaving Performance Cultures, that Fischer-Lichte inaugurated at the Free University Berlin, where she taught from 1996 until her retirement in 2011. I am very pleased that Doctor Christel Weiler, as a guiding spirit and powerhouse of the Center, is with us today.
Let me finish this brief introduction to the work of this year’s Thalia Prize laureate, Erika Fischer-Lichte, with a fun fact. Some of the previous laureates of the Prize, like Femi Osofisan from Nigeria, were fellows in this Center or in some way connected to its activities. This also applies to those of us who are members of the IATC, including one of the world’s leading theatre scholars, Professor Emerita Maria Shevtsova. Drawing from the list of the fellows or board members of the International Research Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures, including figures such as Marvin Carlson, Rustom Bharucha, Phillip Zarrilli, Nicola Savarese and many others, the list of candidates for the Thalia Prize could easily be strengthened.
*Ivan Medenica, Vice President of AITC/IATC and Chair of the Thalia Prize Committee.
