Erika Fischer-Lichte and the Importance of Sacrifice
Savas Patsalidis*
Before coming to BRNO I saw Erika Fischer Lichte on April 3, 2024, when the Department of Theatre of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki awarded her an honorary doctorate. The ceremony took place at the main Hall of the Faculty of Philosophy where some 27 years ago we had organized an international conference with the suggestive title Dis-placing the Classics. Erika was invited as keynote speaker. It was the first time we met and also her first visit to our university, along with a group of important scholars in the field such as Marianne MacDonald, James Diggle, Freddy Decreus, Jeannette Malkin, Michael Walton, among others.
Although back then her writing and research interests were not directly related to the study of the Greek classics and the problematics of their adaptation, we thought that Erika’s cutting-edge views on theatre/performance would have been a very important contribution to the wider debate on the future of classical texts. Her writings were part of the vanguard of the changes that were taking place in the European theatre culture at that time, a culture shifting its perspective from being a culture of texts to more performative cultural modes. An emerging and dynamic body of scholars was calling for new ways of approaching the classics in general, new ways to counter the sterile, text-oriented and unimaginative readings of classical theatre and push theatre practice and theory towards another direction more fresh, liminal, less predictable and more inter-national, inter-cultural and cosmopolitan.
In this atmosphere of search, liminality and revision Erika’s keynote address “Invocation of the Dead, Festival of Peoples’ Theatre or Sacrifice? Some Remarks on Staging Greek Classics,” raised the basic question of the conference: Why stage the Greek classics? Who needs the classics?
Starting with the hypothesis that the European theatre is text-centric, Erika argued that every staging of classical works can only be treated as a kind of sacrifice. It is this sacrifice that creates space for something new to come to light. Sacrifice as a necessary act that allows space for the birth of performance; it allows space for the re-historicization and re-territorialization of the original text so that it can communicate with the new reality, its needs and its audiences. In Erika’s argument, every new production of an old text, especially a classical one, even when it does not aim to do so, creates (or ought to create) a new historicity, and a new space to accommodate this historicity. It discovers new aspects of the contemporary real; it unleashes the possibility of a new interpretation of the world and of ourselves. Yet, Erika warns, no matter how one approaches the original text, in a sacrificial or other way, it will never admit us into the paradise of “an unmediated understanding.” Our distance from the past, be it Greek, Elizabethan or Spanish or Japanese or German, cannot be bridged. Thus the purpose of staging a classical play is to remind us or make us aware of this distance and also enable us to find ways of coping with this distance, and perhaps include some fragments of it into our present theatre, into our contemporary culture.
What Erika generally advocates concerning the staging of the classics is, on the one hand, the promotion of new performative ways of dealing with them and, on the other, a new attitude towards the past. The staging of a tragic play will not necessarily be a renewal of our acquaintance with people’s “defeat,” but a renewal of people’s ability to (re)visit their world; and this re-visiting requires a re-view-ing of the theatre itself.
A text, ancient or modern, will continue to exist as a living liminal body, “betwixt and between,” as Victor Turner coins the term, always in transit, always in a state of constant transformation, determined each time by different ideological, aesthetic and sacrificial givens and pursuits. Which means that it will be constantly unpredictable, hence disobedient to “pre-determinations,” Erika argues.
I could go on for hours discussing Erika’s impressive and multifarious contribution to theatre, however I must conclude my brief commentary here by saying that I am very happy the International Association of Theatre Critics has chosen to award this year’s Thalia Prize to Erika Fischer-Lichte, a theatre scholar whose work has had a decisive influence on the development of contemporary theatre theory/criticism as well as on the way in which theatre works (classical and modern) are approached and used.
I would like to wish Erika health and prosperity and to continue with the same zeal, passion and concern to offer what she has been doing all these years.
Erika, the theatre community owes you a very big THANK YOU!!
*Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques.
