Postdramatic—Hans-Thies Lehmann IToP

Hans-Thies Lehmann, a renowned theater scholar currently teaching

at the University of Kent, UK, is the author of Postdramatic Theatre
(1999), a groundbreaking study of post-1960s forms and aesthetics.

The resonance of my book Postdramatic Theatre surprised me.1

Its immediate function was not only the provision of a series of
perspectives and concepts that would allow current developments
in theater to be better theorized. The study was to engender a more
accurate discourse around current theater practices that often appear
strange, difficult to grasp conceptually from the point of view of
“traditional” theater practice. I am glad to have contributed a little to
opening new ideas in theater in such different theater cultures as those
of Brazil, Japan, or Russia. Ideas, concepts, and terms, however, often
quickly take on a life of their own. I wish today, therefore, to point to
some aspects of the term postdramatic that should not be neglected.
1. I first used the word postdramatic in 1991 in a comparison of
ancient tragedy, which I described as “predramatic” (because it is not
dramatic in the sense that has prevailed since the dominant Renaissance
paradigm of theatrical reality), and the theater of the present. I think
that this wider theoretical and historical dimension of the concept

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Postdramatic—Hans-Thies Lehmann IToP

received too little attention; instead people focused on questions of

whether there should be a post-postdramatic or a neodramatic or
whether one should not speak overall only of performance and so forth.
I believe, however, that one should have in mind the actual dramatic
theater tradition in order to better survey one’s own theater landscape.2
It becomes apparent then that indeed new theater idioms will continue
to emerge but that they will tend to remain altogether postdramatic.
2. Postdramatic Theatre could and can be (and is indeed) read
very differently depending on the culture, the tradition, and the current
“scene” of the particular theater of the region: for example, as a critique
of the dominant European theater model; or as a practice allied with
performance experiments in visual art; or as a critique of a conservative
theater practice that remains comfortably secured within the never-
questioned frame of a theater of representation.
3. The book was an attempt to theorize the political in theater
in the time of the so-called postmodern more from the perspective of
its forms of language and the self-reflection of its praxis and less as an
illustration of directly political themes. Therefore it saddens me when
I occasionally encounter a conceptual opposition of “political” and
“postdramatic,” and I hope that this false opposition will no longer be
asserted. While theater is not politics, postdramatic theater entertains
necessarily a relation to the political. To say it with an oft-quoted
formula: it is not about doing political theater but about doing theater
politically.
4. I believe that the theater and art in general are moving away
from a once highly productive value, the autonomy of art, and moving
toward a different idea: to see art and theater as a “mixing” [Legierung]
of aesthetic praxis with other social forms of praxis that cannot be
judged or even discussed in purely aesthetic terms. Therefore I welcome
collaboration between the discourse on theater today and that of
philosophical and political theory, a collaboration that can enhance the
understanding of theater abandoning a purely aesthetic silo and that is
able to perceive without prejudice art and theater in pedagogical, social,
political forms of praxis.
5. Because the book treats the new means, or treats in a partly
new way the means used by theater praxis, and discusses the text only
marginally, the postdramatic was misunderstood as a rejection of the
theater of the text overall. Its theme is, however, the analysis of the
truly “dramatic” expansion of that which can be understood under

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Postdramatic—Hans-Thies Lehmann IToP

the concept of theater. This concept includes now, for example, dance
theater, or performance; installation works, or a walk through a city;
theater presents itself as close to a rehearsal, as an exhibition, or as
a public debate. The focus of attention shifted away from the final
theater product toward the process or the “situation” of theater as a
social, live form of praxis that connects and involves every participant
in the theater event, actors and visitors alike. Within such experiments,
however, theater continues to work with language, with dramatic and
nondramatic texts, with the document and writing. And theater remains
a site of political consciousness and memory. In this regard I wish that
the poetic-literary potential of postdramatic theater, the lyrical as well
as the narrative power of the theatrical moment, would be further
researched and developed.
6. At present dramatic and postdramatic theater coexist. In
view of media and technological developments, in view of concurrent
mediatized performance, and in view of our increasing distance from
bourgeois conceptions of “the human” (concepts that are at the heart
of the form of dramatic theater), I am convinced that a return of drama
to the center of theater life—which some critics are hoping for—is not
to be expected. The future will belong only to such theater whose forms
and material provide an authentic response to its time—artistically,
politically, socially, and philosophically.

Translated from the German by Megan Hoetger and Aleksandr Rossman

1 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-

Munby (London: Routledge, 2006).
2 It is for this reason I have tried in my book Tragödie und
dramatisches Theater (Berlin: Alexander, 2013) to make just this
triad of predramatic, dramatic, and postdramatic productive for
the theory of tragedy.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

Troubleyn / Jan Fabre, Mount Olympus, 2015. Performance lasts 24 hours.
Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess, 2004.
René Pollesch, Kill Your Darlings! Streets of Berladelphia, 2012. Volksbühne
Berlin.
Einar Schleef, Verratenes Volk, 2000. Deutschen Theater, Berlin. Schleef’s
last directorial work.

© 2016 intermsofperformance.site
Postdramatic—Hans-Thies Lehmann IToP

Societas Raffaello Sanzio (founded by Claudia Castellucci, Romeo

Castellucci, and Chiara Guidi), Tragedia Endogonida, 2002–4.
Elfriede Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen, 2013.
Heiner Müller, Bildbeschreibung, 1984.
Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, 1999.
Peter Handke, Die Unschuldigen, ich und die Unbekannte am Rand der
Landstraße, 2015.

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