Glenn D'Cruz - Teaching Postdramatic Theatre-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018) PDF

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Teaching Postdramatic Theatre
Glenn D’Cruz
Teaching Postdramatic
Theatre
Anxieties, Aporias and Disclosures
Glenn D’Cruz
School of Communication & Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-71684-8 ISBN 978-3-319-71685-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5
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Preface
After teaching theatre, drama and performance studies for almost 30 years,
I am now, more than ever, acutely aware of the gap between the academic
vocabularies I use to teach theatre practice and those my students employ
to make sense of the same phenomenon. Perhaps this is a consequence of
growing older and realising we no longer share common cultural refer-
ents. Then again, this generational anxiety about terminology may have
more to do with a personal disposition than any general, quantifiable cul-
tural condition. No doubt, readers of this book will form their own opin-
ions about the extent to which my observations and arguments apply to
their contexts.
I first studied theatre in the 1980s. Although my desire to become an
actor inspired my interest in the field, the critical theories popular in this
era seduced me. Theatre scholars commonly cited philosophers such as
Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and frequently drew
on the discourse of postmodernism in the context of explicating experi-
mental theatre. And, like many people of my generation, I believed that
thinking about performance through adjacent disciplines enriched creative
practice and generated new settings and techniques for teaching theatre. I
still hold this view. However, I am sceptical about the truth claims made
by all critical vocabularies, including my own. Consequently, this book
often adopts the ironic tone of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy,
aspects of which inform its central argument. Scepticism is not the same
thing as outright dismissal, so while I often express frustration with the
protocols and practices that govern academic approaches to theatre, I
v
vi PREFACE
c ontinue to invoke and use theoretical vocabularies and concepts in my

teaching.
That said, the disparity between this work’s anecdotal and scholarly
registers is intentional and, to some extent, unavoidable. The book’s style
performs its argument by exposing the tensions between its different stylis-
tic registers: the work combines anecdotal reflections with critical analyses.
It is important to declare at the outset that I have lightly fictionalised the
short, reflective narratives to preserve the anonymity of my students and
academic peers.
The book’s primary thesis is that different vocabularies perform differ-
ent functions, and we need to be mindful of the limitations of academic
discourse when we teach creative practice. This is not to say that serious
scholarship is pointless, or that it cannot productively inform artistic prac-
tice. On the contrary, most of this book enthusiastically invokes a wide
range of theoretical discourses. Moreover, I engage with Hans-Thies
Lehmann’s critical vocabulary, derived from his concept of postdramatic
theatre, to underscore its pedagogical value as well as its limitations within
the context of creating theatre with students.
Finally, this book intends to generate a series of provocative questions
about the status of creative practice in academic institutions by approach-
ing postdramatic theatre from the perspective of a pedagogue/practitio-
ner as opposed to a scholar engaged in performance analysis. It does not
suggest that analysis is anathema to creativity, or that theory necessarily
impedes artistic practice. Indeed, this book frequently uses academic
vocabularies to critique dramatic writing and performances. I hope my
scepticism towards critical and institutional orthodoxy will resonate with
teachers, students and perhaps even professional practitioners.
Burwood, VIC, Australia Glenn D’Cruz

Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to this book, but I am especially indebted

to the students I have taught at Murdoch University, the University of
Melbourne, Newcastle University, New South Wales and Deakin
University. Thanks to my artistic collaborators at Deakin University, Tom
Salisbury and Doug Donaldson, who have made an inestimable contribu-
tion to my theatre productions over many years. Thanks to Palgrave’s
anonymous readers who made a number of important criticisms and sug-
gestions that helped me sharpen the focus of this book. Thanks to Clare
Grant of The Sydney Front, Back to Back Theatre, Gob Squad and the
Schaubühne, Berlin for kindly giving me permission to reproduce images
from their work. Thanks to Carolyn D’Cruz and Leonard D’Cruz for
their sage advice and editorial assistance. Thanks also to Sonia Sankovich
for putting up with my cloistered lifestyle while I worked on this project.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 1
2 John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic? 17
3 From Drama to Theatre to Performance Studies 49
4 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable 73
5 Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play? 95
6 Teaching History and (Gender) Politics: The

Hamletmachine and the Princess Plays 119
7 Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 151
8 An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or, What I Think

About When I Think About Teaching Postdramatic
Theatre 181
Index 201
ix
List of Figures
Image 2.1 “The Cream Bun,” John Laws/Sade, 1987. Courtesy of The
Sydney Front Archive, the University of Sydney.
Photographer: Regis Lansac 20
Image 2.2 “The Crotch Grab”: John Laws/Sade, 1987. Courtesy of The
Sydney Front Archive, the University of Sydney.
Photographer: Regis Lansac 31
Image 4.1 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, courtesy Back to Back Theatre.
Photograph by Jeff Busby 78
Image 5.1 Attempts on Her Life, Deakin University. Photograph by
Glenn D’Cruz 100
Image 6.1 The Hamletmachine, Deakin University, 2006. Photograph by
Glenn D’Cruz 133
Image 6.2 The Princess Plays, Deakin University, 2016. Photograph by
Glenn D’Cruz 138
Image 7.1 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David
Baltzer/Bildbuehne.de153
Image 7.2 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David
Baltzer/Bildbuehne.de155
Image 7.3 From Noir, Group Devised Project, Deakin University, 2014.
Photograph by Glenn D’Cruz 168
Image 8.1 Stefan Stern as Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People,
2012, Schaubühne Berlin. Photograph by Arno Declair 184
xi
Chapter 1
Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics

and the Personal
Prologue
It’s 8.30 a.m., and the rehearsal hasn’t been going well. The student per-
formers are lethargic. Some can’t stop yawning through the warm-up
exercises. Others, though bleary-eyed and weary, gamely go through the
motions. The lecturer is in a similar mood, but makes a valiant stab at
appearing enthused and energised. These early-morning starts are a killer,
but there’s no contesting the utilitarian logic that claims the new timetable
regime makes the most efficient use of university resources. Having dis-
pensed with preliminaries, the students prepare to run through the first
scene of the play. One older woman looks a little more agitated, and the
lecturer can see that something more than the early-morning blues is trou-
bling her. She fidgets a little before raising her hand to call time-out:
“Can we talk about this, please?”

“Of course, what’s the problem?”
“This is just so sexist and offensive! Why does he have to use those
words? And what is this play about anyway?”
It’s a good question, but before the lecturer can open his mouth,
another student, an unruly young man with some kind of attention deficit
disorder, pipes up and declares with more than a hint of sarcasm: “The
scene is about an absence of character. It’s a line from the fucking play.”
© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. D’Cruz, Teaching Postdramatic Theatre,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_1
2 G. D’Cruz
The lecturer intervenes, and concedes that it is important to address the

play’s sexual politics: “My bad. We do need to talk about this. I actually posted
an article about the play’s gender politics online. Did anybody read it?”
Two students raise their hands. The debate begins. The class talks about
irony and the death of character, and the lecturer is pleased the students
have come to life:
Irony is just a cop-out. It allows the playwright, if we can call him that, to
say, yes, we all know these ideas about women are sexist, but we’re going to
keep them in circulation, anyway. And it’s all supposed to be OK because he
obviously being ironic. I call bullshit!
Collectively, the class formulates a strategy for signalling their discomfort

with the play’s sexism by stopping the performance in media res and asking
the audience for their opinions on what they are viewing. The group agrees it
might be effective to incorporate the audience responses into the play by
using live projections. Basically, they intend to screen live vox pop interviews
using a video camera that is fed into a data projector. A young man raises his
hand and announces, “That’s too complicated, and it’s going to detract from
our time on stage. Remember, we’re being assessed on our performances.
Let’s not get carried away.” The discussion continues, and the group resolves
the problem by putting a limit on the proposed vox pop strategy.
This vignette summarises many of this book’s themes and tensions: the
competing demands of institutional imperatives and creative work, the com-
munication of postdramatic aesthetics, the obsession with educational mea-
surement and learning outcomes, the political and pragmatic consequences
of attempting to teach under the sign of equality. But most importantly, this
book is about assessing the vocabulary of postdramatic theatre within a ped-
agogical context. As Gregory Ulmer (1985, ix) noted long ago, there exists
a disparity between “the contemporary understanding of reading, writing
and epistemology and the institutional framework in which this understand-
ing is communicated (pedagogy, curriculum, evaluation).” But let’s back up
a little, and say something about my particular context.
Pedagogy
The process is more or less the same every year. The students gather in the
rehearsal room, waiting for me to enter. Their chatter and laughter do not
subside as I walk into the space and survey their faces: a few look familiar
Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 3
from previous classes, but most are strangers. I have no idea who the
majority of these people are, and what skills they possess as performers, yet
I will mount a production with them in ten weeks. I have undertaken this
task for the last 15 years within the framework of two production classes:
the first, a second-year unit, is concerned with producing a full-scale the-
atre production from an existing dramatic script. The second proceeds
without the security of a pre-existing text, and culminates in a public
showing of a group-devised performance. This book engages with the
conceptual and pedagogical productivities and challenges generated by my
experience of teaching these classes and directing the performances associ-
ated with them. With very few exceptions, I have deliberately chosen to
work with so-called postdramatic texts in the Page to Stage unit. Moreover,
I have adopted an explicitly postdramatic aesthetic in the class devoted to
creating devised work, hence the title of this book: Teaching Postdramatic
Theatre.
The concept of postdramatic theatre is, as Marvin Carlson (2015)
notes, difficult to define in a consistently coherent manner. I use the term
“postdramatic” after Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe contemporary
works that reject the primacy of the written text in theatre performance,
but do not reject the principles of modernity (formal innovation, experi-
mentation, political engagement). This is why Lehmann (2006, 85)
argues, as we shall see in the next chapter, that the term “postdramatic,”
rather than postmodern, best describes those contemporary performance
works that employ “new” forms of sign usage that privilege presence over
representation and process over product and unsettle the status of her-
metically sealed fictional worlds situated in a particular time and place.
Many of these so-called postdramatic works eschew conventional concep-
tions of dramatic character—that is, fictional entities driven by psychologi-
cal motivations and endowed with deep subjectivity. Postdramatic works
also unsettle traditional notions of dramatic conflict and teleology, which
makes it difficult to employ, say, a Stanislavskian approach to perfor-
mance—how is it possible to establish character motivation and a logical
line of action based on objectives when postdramatic theatre unsettles and
contests the necessity of concepts of dramatic character and causality?
Since Lehmann’s formulation of the postdramatic is not epochal, we can
find manifestations of postdramatic aesthetics in works from a range of his-
torical periods and a variety of performance genres. For Lehmann, the ten-
dency of much contemporary work to unsettle verities about representation,
signification and theatricality is best understood with reference to tensions
4 G. D’Cruz
and developments within the tradition of modern drama, as opposed to the

general cultural logic of postmodernism, which some scholars argue mani-
fests in various contemporary performance practices. We are better off
looking for postdramatic theatre’s antecedents in the various modernist
experiments concerned with unsettling dramatic form than in the discourse
of postmodernism. And, as we shall see in my more detailed explication of
Lehmann’s work in the following chapter, the Brechtian (1964, 91) objec-
tive to maintain a distance between performers and spectators for political
purposes, or Antonin Artaud’s (1958, 74) call to abolish literary theatre,
arguably provide a better point of departure for apprehending the political
valence of postdramatic theatre than postmodern discourses about the cul-
tural logic of late capitalism, or the death of metanarratives, for example.
However, it is important to declare at the outset that I adopt a critical
approach to the concept of postdramatic theatre throughout this book. I
remain sceptical as to whether Lehmann proffers what Rorty (1989, 174)
might call a redescription of an existing set of performance practices, or
whether he merely establishes a critical vocabulary that lacks the explana-
tory force of the postmodern lexicon it contests. In the chapters that fol-
low, I interrogate the utility of Lehmann’s vocabulary as I explore its
potentialities for unpacking the complexities and aporias of the texts, per-
formances and pedagogical practices I analyse in this book.
I am not alone in choosing to stage postdramatic theatre with under-
graduate students. Regarding the United Kingdom (UK) scene, Julia
Wilson (2012, 6) notes that “over the last thirty years post-dramatic
devised performance practices have increasingly been taught within Higher
Education Institutions.” Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling (2006, 218)
also note that postdramatic work is “formally embedded in the syllabi of
teaching institutions in the UK as both process and product.” There is a
similar commitment to teaching postdramatic theatre in Australian univer-
sities. Gaye Poole (2010, 6) suggests that this is partially a consequence of
institutional limitations: “the constraints of casting, variable commitment
levels and diminishing budgets.” Postdramatic theatre, either written by
playwrights or devised by students, is flexible regarding casting
requirements and suitable for large groups of students. With respect to
postdramatic texts written by playwrights, such as Martin Crimp’s Attempts
on Her Life or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, to name two texts regularly
performed by student ensembles, the absence of “lead” roles and fluidity
of line distribution among actors makes them extremely malleable, and
capable of accommodating groups with different levels of skill, experience
and enthusiasm (Poole 2010, 6). Yet scholars interested in Lehmann’s

work have produced a relative paucity of critical commentary on the prac-
tice of staging postdramatic theatre productions within academic con-
texts—academics working in the areas of applied theatre, devised theatre
or theatre in education produce most of the scholarly work concerned
with teaching theatre, and few of these works address postdramatic theatre
directly. Further, Duška Radosavljević (2013, 22) observes that we need
to understand “the link between the educational contexts from which
theatre-makers emerge and the actual theatre landscapes they enter.” With
reference to the British context, she points out that, while actor-training
institutions feed the theatre and film industries:
university drama graduates arguably have a broader range of opportunities:

some end up working as actors, directors, playwrights, designers while many
others pursue teaching or arts management careers. Interestingly, however,
by the end of the twentieth century, university drama departments have
frequently produced groups of people who continued working together
professionally—such as Forced Entertainment (University of Exeter),
Suspect Culture (University of Bristol), Unlimited Theatre (University of
Leeds). (Radosavljević 2013, 22)
This book identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes gener-
ated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice within my imme-
diate pedagogical context. It does this by underscoring the institutional
pressures that shape my teaching practices. The book focuses on the nuts
and bolts of teaching within an institution that expresses concerns about
such things as the assessment of collectively generated work, risk factors
associated with physical performance and industry-focused learning
objectives.
There are many possible reasons for not paying close critical attention
to production work within academic institutions (as opposed to conser-
vatories concerned with professional actor training). First, the produc-
tions created for pedagogical purposes are not very prestigious or visible:
they are made, for the most part, by untrained students, and performed
for small audiences primarily comprising friends and family of the ama-
teur performers. Professional critics rarely attend such productions and,
if they do, seldom write about them. Of course, there are notable excep-
tions. The New York Times covered Robert Wilson’s production of
Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine with students from New York
University in 1986, but this was mostly a consequence of Wilson’s status
6 G. D’Cruz
and reputation within the New York theatre scene (Rockwell 1986).
Second, the economics of scholarly publishing shape disciplinary prac-
tices; there is a symbiotic relationship between research projects, the
publishing business and the international arts industry. There are bound
to be more people interested in the work of celebrated theatre auteurs
such as, say, Robert Wilson, Ariane Mnouchkine or Romeo Castellucci
than in the work of less renowned artists, or student theatre groups. This
is entirely understandable; I am not suggesting that academics should
spend more time writing about amateur, provincial or student manifesta-
tions of postdramatic theatre, although Lehmann (2006, 121) himself
acknowledges that, occasionally, a “lack of professionalism” has its vir-
tues. It is sometimes possible to foster a greater sense of play and experi-
mentation in non-professional contexts.
That said, this book consistently draws attention to the institutional con-
text that both sustains the discourse of postdramatic theatre and generates
pedagogical problems for those concerned with teaching it. It also pays
attention to the relationships between professional practice, aesthetic theory
and pedagogy, since the concept of postdramatic theatre has been formu-
lated within academic institutions. And while the divide between the acad-
emy and the theatre industry diminishes as artists regularly enter universities
as graduate students and practitioner–scholars, we need to be mindful that
postdramatic discourse is primarily a scholarly term that provides conceptual
tools for understanding contemporary theatre practice (Lehmann 2006,
19). In one sense, then, Lehmann’s (2006, 19) project is inherently peda-
gogical: his book attempts to contextualise new postdramatic performance
practices with reference to the development of twentieth-century European
theatre, and to “serve the conceptual analysis and verbalization of the experi-
ence of this often ‘difficult’ contemporary theatre as a way to promote its
‘visibility’ and discussion.” Lehmann apparently believes that his explication
of this body of work serves a useful pedagogical and political purpose. He
assumes his critical vocabulary can promote a better understanding of the
cultural and political significance of postdramatic theatre. This book
attempts to achieve something similar through identifying the anxieties and
aporias generated by staging postdramatic works within the context of uni-
versity production courses. Put simply, it seeks to generate discussion about
a series of pedagogical issues that often fly under the radar because so much
scholarly discourse about postdramatic theatre focuses on explicating exem-
plary productions—for example, the contributions to the book Postdramatic
Theatre and the Political (Jürs-Munby et al. 2013). Of course, this is not
surprising. Explication is often a scholar’s stock in trade. However, most
scholars also teach and need to communicate the value and utility of their
research activities to students who may not accept the inherent value of “dif-
ficult” contemporary theatre, especially when we compel them to partici-
pate in producing such work on stage.
On one level, this book describes and analyses how I approach pro-
duction work with my students. On another, it provides an account of
what Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer (2002, 3) call “conscious
teaching”: “that is, teaching with self-reflectivity and a heightened
awareness of methods, attitudes, hidden curricula, postures, and inflec-
tions.” Teaching and directing are activities seldom observed by one’s
colleagues and peers. I have always been curious about how other peda-
gogues approach their work, and, in writing this volume, I’ve made the
assumption that other academics engaged in the messy and labour-inten-
sive task of directing student productions are also interested in how their
peers undertake artistic work in the academy. Directing student theatre
is a time-consuming, challenging practice that is rarely perceived as legit-
imate scholarly work, but which requires rigorous research, thought and
creativity—at least, that is the impression I get from many of my col-
leagues who work in adjacent disciplines. Paul Carter’s (2004, xi) con-
cept of “material thinking” goes some way towards correcting this
misconception and contesting the assumption that creative practice can
be a rigorous form of research:
Material thinking occurs in the making of works of art. It happens when the
artist dares to ask the simple but far-reaching questions. What matters? What
is the material of thought? To ask these questions is to embark on an intel-
lectual adventure peculiar to the making process. Critics and theorists inter-
ested in communicating ideas about things cannot emulate it. They remain
outsiders, interpreters on the sidelines, usually trying to make sense of a
creative process afterwards, purely by its outcome. They lack access to the
process and, more fundamentally, they lack the vocabulary to explicate its
intellectual character. For their part, film-makers, choreographers, installa-
tion artists and designers feel equally tongue-tied: knowing that what they
make is an invention that cannot easily be put into words, they find their
creative research dumbed-down … their social and cultural function danger-
ously dematerialises.
So, the following chapters account for the practical, intellectual and
artistic aspects of the performance-making process from the inside. They
present case studies that draw on my experience of teaching and directing
scripted and devised student productions of postdramatic theatre.
8 G. D’Cruz
Politics
This book deals with three broad political themes: the relationship between
aesthetics and politics, the politics of the academic institution and the poli-
tics of teaching. The vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics is a
persistent theme in the critical literature on postdramatic theatre. From
Elinor Fuchs’s (2008) notorious review of Lehmann’s book to the essays
collected in the volume co-edited by Lehmann’s translator, Karen Jürs-
Munby (2013), critics consistently interrogate the political value and
function of the concept of postdramatic theatre. These discussions, such as
those found in Jürs-Munby’s book, remind me of the deliberations of
Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and
Georg Lukács during the rise and fall of European fascism from the 1930s
to the 1950s; these debates, collected in the volume Aesthetics and Politics
(1977), deal primarily with the political efficacy of realism and modern-
ism, respectively. In the afterword that concludes the book, Fredric
Jameson notes that:
Much of the fascination of these jousts, indeed, comes from the internal
dynamism by which all the logical possibilities are rapidly generated in turn,
so that it quickly extends beyond the local phenomenon of Expressionism,
and even beyond the ideal type of realism itself, to draw within its scope the
problems of popular art, naturalism, socialist realism, avant-gardism, media,
and finally modernism—political and non-political—in general. (Bloch et al.
1977, 197)
Lehmann formulated the term “postdramatic theatre” within the con-

text of the German academy, so it comes as no surprise that his work
echoes and resonates with earlier debates about the relationship between
aesthetics and politics, and there is certainly value in providing a historical
context for the development of new aesthetic practices. Indeed, Lehmann
(2006, 27) explicitly states that postdramatic theatre “includes the pres-
ence or resumption or continued working of older aesthetics, including
those that took leave of the dramatic idea of earlier times, be it on the level
of text or theatre. Art, in general, cannot develop without reference to
earlier forms.” However, the danger in focusing too narrowly on ques-
tions of artistic innovation with reference to earlier historical innovations
is that it becomes easy to ignore mutations in, say, the form and function
of capital, or the more mundane aspects of political economy, both of
which may underpin new performance works. So, while this book engages
with a range of political questions concerning postdramatic theatre prac-

tices, it also examines the institutional context that provides a crucial con-
dition of possibility for the consolidation and propagation of the concept
of postdramatic theatre. To this end, it consistently evokes certain
Foucauldian themes about discourses, bureaucratic structures, administra-
tive techniques, policy initiatives and systems of knowledge that enable
and constrain teaching practices. This book examines how the logic of the
corporate university manifests in what Jon McKenzie (2001) has called the
imperative to “perform or else.” This phrase refers, in part, to the pressure
academic institutions exert on their employees to achieve tangible objec-
tives that can be captured in empirical metrics about research outputs, or
in student evaluations of academic teaching.
This book is also concerned with the politics of teaching, and the power
dynamics that regulate relationships between teachers and students. It
engages with Jacques Rancière’s (1991) provocative thesis, articulated in
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, that all intelligences are equal to better appre-
hend the practical consequences that flow from institutional power/
knowledge relations that position teachers as experts and students as unin-
formed and enlightened dupes. Indeed, this book draws heavily on
Rancière’s critique of entrenched preconceptions about pedagogy and
performance. Most notably, it takes up his challenge to rethink what con-
stitutes engaged activity, as opposed to docile passivity, in the classroom,
the workshop and the theatre. The case studies presented in this book
identify a series of pedagogical fault lines that expose the power relations
inherent in teaching postdramatic theatre within the academy.
Methodologically, it uses autoethnography, performance analysis and criti-
cal theory to assist university teachers involved in directing theatre
productions to deepen their understanding of the concept of postdramatic
theatre, and reflect on the institutional and discursive forces that shape the
ways we teach.
Is the Personal Political?
The personal is political, right? Well, this feminist slogan rings true on
some levels. It resonates with me insofar as it makes an explicit connection
between individual identities and larger political systems. This book takes
it as axiomatic that our experience of the world is always filtered through
affective energies and impulses that often remain beyond the threshold of
conscious cognition. Moreover, these forces are always socially codified,
10 G. D’Cruz
and place us within political hierarchies. So, the personal is political

because the sensory apparatus through which we apprehend the world,
and orient ourselves within the world, is political. Our ways of seeing,
modes of doing, means of hearing, smelling and touching locate us in the
political order of things. This political order is what Rancière (2004) calls
the distribution of the sensible, and it determines what can be seen, heard
and voiced within a society. It also determines who is included and
excluded from participating in a wide range of social, economic and politi-
cal activities. In very general terms, Rancière is interested in the relation-
ship between aesthetics and politics, which is why I refer to his ideas about
pedagogy, equality, aesthetics and politics throughout this work. On one
level, he is interested in how communities are established by commonality.
For Rancière, this commonality is sensible, the way certain ways of speak-
ing, seeing, hearing and so forth are separated from other sensible modali-
ties to demarcate a community. The distribution of the sensible is about
how this partitioning creates groups that are part of the dominant police
order and those that are not. It is about the creation of common sense, if
you will, and Rancière’s politics are, like Lehmann’s, a politics of
perception:
I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense
perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in com-
mon and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions
within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at the same time
something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment
of parts and positions is based on a division of spaces, times, and forms of
activity that determine the very manner in which something in common
lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part
in this distribution. (Rancière 2004, 12)
Obviously, universities promote particular ways of knowing, seeing,

hearing and doing, all of which apportion to people various parts and posi-
tions to play, and there have been many times during my career when I
have felt uncomfortable participating in the social rituals of academe
because of my Anglo-Indian ethnicity and working-class background. I do
not want to overstate the degree to which my relationship with teaching
postdramatic theatre is shaped by my background, but it is impossible to
read the critical literature on the topic without being aware of the con-
cept’s Eurocentric assumptions about the nature, function and value of
art. Moreover, teaching postdramatic theatre to students excluded from
the dominant police order of things on the basis of race, class and gender
reveals how a lot of postdramatic theatre fails to connect with students
(and audiences) because they literally do not possess the sensory apparatus
to see, hear and comprehend postdramatic work according to Lehmann’s
theoretical schema. This does not mean they are stupid; rather, they for-
mulate ways of seeing and knowing that cannot be specified in advance, or
unequivocally manipulated through formal mechanisms that supposedly
subvert the police order. More often than not, I use the personal anec-
dotes about my experience of teaching postdramatic theatre in this book
to underscore how the personal is political.
Chapter 2 introduces the concept of postdramatic theatre by offering
two readings of The Sydney Front’s 1987 production John Laws/Sade: A
Confession. Originally described as a work of postmodern performance,
the work displays many of the features Lehmann associates with postdra-
matic theatre. Drawing on Rorty’s distinction between arguments and
descriptions, the chapter examines the similarities and differences between
the vocabularies of postmodern theatre and postdramatic theatre as they
are used to respectively describe and redescribe John Laws/Sade. The chap-
ter pays particular attention to the relationship between postdramatic the-
atre and the tradition of twentieth-century avant-garde drama in Europe
by identifying the ways Péter Szondi’s seminal book Theory of Modern
Drama informs Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic. Finally, the chap-
ter concludes with an account of the ethical perils spawned by teaching
ideas about avant-garde performance through practice, with a focus on
the Artaudian ideas that provide an important condition of possibility for
The Sydney Front and postdramatic theatre.
Chapter 3 deals with the institutional and discursive relationships between
postdramatic theatre and performance studies with respect to scholars such as
Richard Schechner, Shannon Jackson and Jon McKenzie. While Lehmann’s
book includes a few scant references to Richard Schechner, it says relatively
little about performance studies. I argue that performance studies not only
establishes an important condition of possibility for the acceptance of
Lehmann’s work in the academy, but also provides an eclectic set of method-
ological tools and theoretical perspectives that enable a richer understanding
of the political efficacy of postdramatic theatre. After providing a brief account
of the genealogy of performance studies by engaging with the work of
Jackson, among others, I use McKenzie’s (2001) seminal work Perform or
Else to help me identify the institutional performance imperatives and pres-
sures that enable and constrain teaching practices within universities.
12 G. D’Cruz
Chapter 4 is about the similarities between teaching and directing with

respect to power relationships and ethics. However, its main focus is on
the celebrated play Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (2011) by Back to Back
Theatre, which I read as a parable for understanding the power dynamics
that suffuse all pedagogical activities. Unlike the majority of case studies in
this book, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich was produced by a professional
theatre company, Australia’s acclaimed Back to Back Theatre, and has no
connection with a university. It does, however, provide an uncommonly
astute analysis of the power relations at play within the theatre production
environment, thereby introducing one of this book’s major themes: equal-
ity, or the (im)possibility of equality in the pedagogical situation. Using
Rancière’s (1991) book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation as a point of departure, this chapter reads
Ganesh and the critical commentary generated by the work with reference
to the ethical challenges posed by teaching, which I unpack in subsequent
chapters.
Chapter 5 reads Martin Crimp’s (1997) play Attempts on Her Life as
an exemplary instance of postdramatic writing. Drawing on the concep-
tual schema articulated in the first three chapters of this book, I ask how
Lehmann’s critical schema might enrich our understanding of Attempts
on Her Life, a play that was written and performed a few years before
Lehmann published his book on postdramatic theatre. The chapter con-
textualises Crimp’s work by looking at its early critical reception and its
relationship to the era of “Cool Britannia” and the so-called “In-Yer-
Face” movement. This chapter also returns to the question of the politi-
cal dimension of postdramatic theatre by interrogating the work’s gender
politics, since the play uses irony to deal with the (mis)representations of
women within the so-called society of the spectacle. The final section of
the chapter describes and analyses a range of pedagogical and political
issues generated by a student production of the play I directed in 2003,
with a focus on the way Rancière’s argument about educational equality
can help us explore the ethical dilemmas generated by teaching postdra-
matic theatre through practice.
Chapter 6 extends the discussion about the politics of pedagogy artic-
ulated in the previous chapter by analysing student productions of Heiner
Müller’s The Hamletmachine and Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Plays. Despite
being only five pages long, The Hamletmachine is full of densely packed
allusions, quotations and misquotations about European history and pol-
itics. As I read it, the play attacks utopian political theories and exposes
the inability of intellectuals to “set things right” politically, socially and

economically. As much of a critique of totalitarianism as it is of capitalism,
The Hamletmachine demands its actors and audience engage with Cold
War history and politics. However, the overwhelming majority of the
students in my production had an alarming lack of knowledge about
these issues and a very vague understanding of the play’s historical con-
text. On the one hand, this is not surprising, considering this group of
students were born in the 1980s. On the other, I found their gap in
knowledge disturbing, since it also indicates a lack of knowledge about
the contemporary geopolitical situation. In response to a question about
how to stage the play, Müller (2001, 225) remarked, “You can only dis-
cover the answers when you are grounding the work strictly in the text
and insist on the text; then certain constraints will appear which may lead
to new forms of theatre or a new way to manipulate a theatre space. But
without this step into an absolute darkness, the absolutely unfamiliar, the
theatre cannot continue.” Drawing on archival videos that document the
production’s rehearsal process, I provide a self-reflexive autoethnographi-
cal account of what I have always considered my most successful attempt
to teach postdramatic theatre.
The chapter juxtaposes The Hamletmachine with a case study of a more
recent, and perhaps less successful, student production of Jelinek’s Princess
Plays, with a particular emphasis on the students’ experience of creating a
dramatic context for a postdramatic text. The chapter identifies and analy-
ses the reading strategies students adopt for, first, making sense of the
text’s major themes and ideas, and then for transforming the postdramatic
script into a performance text through a set of theoretical and dramaturgi-
cal provocations developed through debates and discussions about the
play. The chapter also identifies the dramaturgical, pedagogical and politi-
cal problems generated by staging the Princess Plays within a contempo-
rary institutional context that intensifies the imperative to perform or else
through a more bureaucratic approach to educational measurement and
assessment.
Chapter 7 focuses on devised postdramatic theatre. As its point of
departure, it uses the work of Gob Squad, an acclaimed theatre group
whose reputation rests on its devising practices, which are perhaps best
described as postdramatic. The chapter provides a close reading of one
of the company’s more recent works, War and Peace, before going on
to provide a “performative” manifesto for devising postdramatic the-
atre with students. The first part of this chapter examines how the con-
14 G. D’Cruz
cept of postdramatic theatre provides a useful way of understanding

the conceptual basis of such devised work, with specific reference to
the political and philosophical dimensions of Gob Squad’s War and
Peace. The chapter also examines how this group manipulates the
performer/audience relationship to unsettle the apparently “passive”
role of the spectator in dramatic theatre.
Chapter 8, the final chapter of this book, reiterates its major themes
as a set of anxieties generated, in part, by my reading of Thomas
Ostermeier’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which
I saw at the Playhouse Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, in 2012. The
chapter offers a final assessment of the utility and strengths of Lehmann’s
concept of postdramatic theatre, with particular reference to questions
of pedagogy, politics and aesthetics. In the epilogue to his seminal book
Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann (2006, 186) points out that postdra-
matic theatre is always engaged in a certain kind of pedagogy, and one
that deliberately formulates non-rational approaches to contesting the
hegemony of consumer society: “We have to realize the growing impor-
tance of a certain cultivation of affects, the ‘training’ of an emotionality
that is not under the tutelage of rational preconsiderations.
‘Enlightenment’ and education by themselves are not enough.” I con-
clude this study by articulating the extent to which Lehmann’s critical
vocabulary (that is, its redescription of contemporary theatre) manages
to break free from the tyranny of rational considerations.
References
Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline
Richards. New York: Grove Press.
Bloch, Ernst, et al. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics. Translation editor Ronald Taylor.
London: Verso.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting. In Brecht on Theatre,
ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang.
Carlson, Marvin. 2015. Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance.
Brazilian Journal of Presence Studies 5 (3): 577–595. https://doi.
org/10.1590/2237-266053731.
Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking. Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Press.
Crimp, Martin. 1997. Attempts on Her Life. London: Faber and Faber.
Fuchs, Elinor. 2008. Postdramatic Theatre (Review). TDR: The Drama Review 52
(2 (T198)): 178–183.
Heddon, Deirdre, and Jane Milling. 2006. Devising Performance: A Critical

History. London: Palgrave.
Jürs-Munby, Karen, Jerome Carroll, and Steve Giles, eds. 2013. Postdramatic
Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary
Performance. London: Bloomsbury Methuen.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated and with an intro-
duction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge.
McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London
and New York: Routledge.
Müller, Heiner. 2001. Conversation in Brecht’s Tower. Dialogue. In A Heiner
Müller Reader. Plays, Poetry, Prose, ed. and trans. Carl Weber. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Poole, Gaye. 2010. Introduction: Teaching Theatre, Performance and Drama
Studies. Australasian Drama Studies 57: 4–9.
Radosavljević, Duška. 2013. Theatre-making: Interplay Between Text and
Performance in the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated
by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum.
Rockwell, John. 1986. Wilson and Müller at NYU. New York Times, May 12. http://
www.nytimes.com/1986/05/12/theater/wilson-and-muller-at-nyu.html
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stucky, Nathan, and Cynthia Wimmer, eds. 2002. Teaching Performance Studies.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Ulmer, Gregory L. 1985. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques
Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wilson, Julia, and Helen Manchester. 2012. Teaching Post-Dramatic Devised
Theatre in Higher Education. London: Higher Education Academy.
Chapter 2
John Laws/Sade: Postmodern

or Postdramatic?
Let’s begin with a rhetorical strategy or, more properly, a teaching strat-
egy, since this book is primarily concerned with pedagogical vocabularies
and practices. When I present my introductory lecture on experimental
theatre to first-year undergraduates, I play them excerpts from a radio
show, The Ladies Lounge, hosted by Judith Lucy and Helen Razer, and
broadcast on Australia’s Triple J youth network in the late 1990s. Lucy
and Razer (1997) invited their listeners to share their experiences of bad
theatre on the air. The goal of this invitation was to test the proposition
that theatre, which our hosts used as a synonym for experimental perfor-
mance, was a dead art form. People dutifully phoned in with often-
hilarious descriptions of bizarre performance practices. One story involved
a performance artist with a penchant for producing a string of cocktail
frankfurter sausages from her vagina. Another told of a performance that
culminated in the audience being pelted with dead fish, while yet another
described a performer who wrapped herself in cellophane, and then took
40 minutes to break out of the encumbrance while grunting and groan-
ing. Each successive anecdote confirmed that experimental performance
was practised by the pretentious and talentless. Interestingly, nobody told
tales about bad acting, stilted, wooden performances or histrionic displays
of angst in the service of poor dramatic writing. Apparently, the radio
audience on that particular day preferred to mock the performance artists.
These excerpts taken from a long-defunct radio programme never fail to

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_2
18 G. D’Cruz
entertain. Many students laugh out loud, and I do not doubt that most of
the ridiculed performances probably deserved their scorn. However,
having mocked this genre of performance, for strategic reasons, I point
out that dismissive hostility towards experimental performance might pre-
vent people from experiencing a vital and exciting art form that requires a
bit of effort to understand and appreciate.
I follow the recorded tales of performance-art horror with an account
of a performance that inspired my interest in avant-garde theatre. My spiel
goes something like this: the year is 1987. The place is the Performance
Space located at 199 Cleveland Street in Redfern, an inner-city suburb of
Sydney. I’m here to witness a performance by The Sydney Front. I’ve
never heard of the group before, but I decide to see its show on the
strength of an intriguing press release:
In John Laws/Sade the world is colder, the genitals sit tight. We are in
densely occupied territory. The telephone rings, the radio is always on.
• a drowned hero emerges from the bathwater of history to strut and

splash his hour upon the stage
• the orifices of the body turned upside-down in a series of intricate
surrenders
• a City-to-Surf of Sadean excesses
The performers find themselves unsure of the boundaries of their own

bodies. The world traverses them without obstacle. This is no longer the
traditional obscenity of what is forbidden or repressed. Rather, it is the
obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-the-
visible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret.
Please note that no member of the audience will be spat upon. (Grant 2012)
John Laws/Sade: A Confession begins in the foyer of the theatre (which

looks like a gallery space). As the audience enters this area, they hear cock-
tail music on the PA system. The music is mixed with sound bites taken
from the John Laws talkback radio show (Laws was a notorious “shock
jock” on Sydney radio known for his right-wing politics, and his penchant
for giving voice to the city’s most rabid racists). Several large black tubes
featuring strategically placed holes are scattered around the space, and
voice-over instructions invite the audience to insert their hands into the
orifices. I accept the invitation and put my right hand into one of the
holes. I recoil at the touch of bare human flesh (some of the less inhibited
John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic… 19
members of the audience keep returning to the same hole—they’ve

apparently found something they like). Each cylinder contains a naked
body, so the performance commences with physical interaction between
the spectators and at least one performer. It is not often audiences get to
touch the bodies of performers, let alone the naked bodies of performers,
but this is not the only thing that makes the performance memorable.
On entering the main performing area, the audience must walk past a
sour and vaguely threatening actor dressed as a policeman. He is patrolling
a roped-off region of the space, which contains a naked man who is, we
discover later, playing Jean-Paul Marat (one of the significant figures in
the French Revolution and a character in Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade).
This character is partially submerged in a bathtub, and his face is hidden
by what appears to be a cross between an especially grotesque S&M mask,
and the top half of a harlequin suit. He slowly emerges from the bath: his
movements are jerky; his body convulses as he moves to the sound of elec-
tronically treated harpsichord music. A group of performers enters the
space after the audience members take their seats on a raked rostrum. The
performers rhythmically stamp their feet in unison, while staring intently
at the audience. One or two of the actors single out particular spectators,
eyeballing them before literally laughing in their faces. The prospect of
being singled out by the actors, and perhaps being lured on stage, terrifies
me; I can feel my pulse racing. Before I can compose myself, a man enters
the space wearing what looks like a mélange of rags, possibly sourced from
a Shakespearean play; he is naked from the waist down. After a few
moments, he begins screaming the lyrics of “You Make Me Feel Like a
Natural Woman.” Later, another man enters the space with a can of dog
food. He delivers a monologue while opening the can and then helping
himself to its contents without flinching, or conveying the least bit of
revulsion. The performance culminates with one of the performers drag-
ging Marat out of the bathtub by his genitals. I wince; my genitals sit
tight. Having extracted Marat violently from his bath, a few of the other
performers proceed to hose him down with a water cannon. This ritual
humiliation concludes when one of the actors stuffs a cream bun up
Marat’s arse, and one of the female actors self-consciously announces that
the performance is over, and there will be no curtain call (see Image 2.1).
What did it all mean? And what might we call this kind of performance?
Does it belong to an existing genre, or is it doing something radically new?
Do we even need to categorise it, and assign it a place in the proper order
of things? At the time, I was clueless and did not possess the vocabulary to
20 G. D’Cruz
Image 2.1 “The Cream Bun,” John Laws/Sade, 1987. Courtesy of The Sydney
Front Archive, the University of Sydney. Photographer: Regis Lansac
respond to these questions. I was clueless about the work’s meaning, but
stunned by the impression it made on me. The play, if one could call it
that, did not rely on any narrative or character study to establish an empa-
thetic relationship with its audience. I left the theatre awestruck, and wan-
dered around Sydney in a kind of reverie, attempting to process and
comprehend what I had just witnessed. Did that guy eat “real” dog food?
How can a man be dragged across the stage by the genitals without expe-
riencing excruciating pain? And what about all that stomping? I swear it
had a visceral effect on my body. Why did I feel so intimidated, yet thrilled,
by the show? The primordial and voyeuristic pleasures offered up by this
performance demanded further reflection. While it represented a few rec-
ognisable dramatic characters, it was more concerned with the presenta-
tion of bodies in various states of excitation. On leaving the performance
space that night, I knew one thing for sure: I could never look at conven-
tional theatre the same way again. In fact, The Sydney Front made me see
the world differently. Who knew theatre could generate such affects?
I describe my experience of witnessing this play as an integral part of my

lecture on experimental performance to convey my enthusiasm for work that
unsettles our expectations of what constitutes a theatrical performance. Most
students I teach have never seen anything remotely like the work performed
by The Sydney Front. Theatre studies in Australian high schools focus on
canonical plays such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a perennial favourite.
Most of my first-year students are unfamiliar with the work of Robert Wilson,
or the Wooster Group. They might prick up their ears when they discover that
Willem Dafoe was a member of the latter group, if only because he played the
Green Goblin in the first Spiderman film (2002). Almost all the students I
teach find non-narrative theatre perplexing when they first encounter it. For
most of them, drama is a form of storytelling, and compelling drama is about
conflict between strong characters that embody recognisable human traits and
idiosyncrasies—characters that evoke raw emotion and passion. People appear
to crave identification with characters that are analogues of the sinners and
saints, rogues and rascals who populate the “real” world. The prospect of
engaging with theatre that lacks conventional characters and traditional stories
is daunting for many students, as well as those aficionados of traditional the-
atre who tend to dismiss experimental work as confusing, incomprehensible
and even unremittingly tedious, which is why I avoid using academic jargon
to describe the play in the first instance. Of course, there are other ways of
engaging with the play in scholarly contexts.
A Postmodern Redescription of John Laws/Sade

We can, if we are so inclined, look at John Laws/Sade as an example of what
scholars in the 1980s called postmodern theatre: work that resonated with the
then in-vogue discourse of postmodernism, which redescribes a practice once
labelled experimental or avant-garde theatre. I use the term “redescription”
after Richard Rorty (1989) to describe a scholarly practice that seeks to dis-
place or transform an entrenched critical vocabulary by proffering a new lan-
guage that provides a better description of the phenomenon under
investigation. Writing in 1996, Marvin Carlson (123) noted that “critics and
reviewers have found ‘postmodern’ a useful tag to apply to much contempo-
rary performance work” before going on to identify the various connections
between postmodernism and performance, and pointing out that:
The general popularity of “postmodernism” as a critical term has guaran-

teed its wide appearance in recent writings in the fields of theatre and per-
22 G. D’Cruz
formance art. But for good or ill, neither of those fields had produced a
specific theorist, like Jencks in architecture or Banes in dance, who has pro-
vided a kind of focal point, however disputed, for usage of the term. (132)
Indeed, the relationship between postmodern theory and theatre prac-

tice has always been problematic. Steven Connor (1989, 133) asserts that
“theories of postmodern drama have had to draw upon postmodern the-
ory in other cultural fields,” and Johannes Birringer (1991, 44) argues
that experimental theatre did not have “any impact on the cultural forma-
tions of postmodernism.” The fact that postmodernism’s key theorists (for
example, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard)
explore diverse themes and often contradict each other, especially when
assessing the political status of postmodern culture, intensifies the prob-
lem. Jameson (1998) describes postmodernism as an epoch defined by
“the logic of late capitalism.” Lyotard’s (1979) take on the postmodern
begins with a focus on the way new computer technologies transform the
status of knowledge in the contemporary world and rejects the idea that
the word describes a specific historical era. Baudrillard (1983) explores the
way ubiquitous media images unsettle the relationship between reality and
hyperreality, original artefact and copy. Thus, talking about postmodern
theatre is always complicated by the need to first refer to a broad spectrum
of theories and discourses that mostly ignore performance, and concen-
trate on more general cultural and political themes.
Nonetheless, postmodernism provided a significant scholarly frame of
reference for the work of artists such as Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars,
Richard Foreman, Pina Bausch, Robert Lepage and Laurie Anderson, and
companies such as the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, DV8 Physical
Theatre, Goat Island and Forced Entertainment, among many others.
The Sydney Front’s earliest critics and commentators also used the vocab-
ulary of postmodernism. For example, Kerrie Schaefer’s (1999) account of
The Sydney Front’s later work Don Juan devotes over 70 pages to expli-
cating a broad range of postmodern theories before analysing the compa-
ny’s rehearsal process. She does this because she contends that
postmodernism is “a discursive field concerned predominantly with the
politics of representation and signification” (Schaefer 1999, 47). And
while her thesis provides an insightful account of The Sydney Front’s cre-
ative process, its detailed explication of postmodern theory feels laboured.
Schaefer’s (1999, 44–79) use of Jacques Derrida’s critique of the meta-
physics of presence is the most illuminating aspect of her analysis of The
Sydney Front’s work, which is postmodern insofar as the prevalence of

“theory” in the academy is a symptom of postmodernism.
Ultimately, it is perhaps most productive to think of postmodernism,
with John Frow, as a discourse with a set of recognisable tropes, and with
regulative rules that determine how one participates in debates about it
(Frow 1991). The term “postmodernism,” for Frow (1991, 3), “can be
taken as designating nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theo-
retical writing. To speak or to write the word is to be caught up in a pre-
scriptive network that loosely specifies a limited number of possible
moves.” One could say the same thing about the vocabulary of postmod-
ern theatre. It is possible to identify a set of recurrent tropes if you read
accounts of particular postmodern performances by the likes of Connor
(1989), Birringer (1991), Kaye (1994) and Fuchs (1996), among many
others. Some of the most important aesthetic figures of postmodern the-
atre, according to this body of work, involve self-reflexivity, irony, pas-
tiche, ambiguity, repetition, a critique of presence and so on. Lehmann
(2006, 25) provides an exhaustive list of the tropes of postmodern theatre
before he articulates his panorama of postdramatic theatre:
Some of the key words that have come up in the international postmodernism
discussion are: ambiguity; celebrating art as fiction; celebrating theatre as pro-
cess; discontinuity; heterogeneity; non-textuality; pluralism; multiple codes;
subversion; all sites; perversion; performer as theme and protagonist; defor-
mation; text as basic material only; deconstruction; considering text to be
authoritarian and archaic; performance as a third term between drama and
theatre; anti-mimetic; resisting interpretation. Postmodern theatre, we hear, is
without discourse but instead dominated by mediation, gestuality, rhythm,
tone. Moreover: nihilistic and grotesque forms, empty space, silence.
It is possible to grab one or more of these key words and wax lyrical
about the extent to which they illuminate some aspect of John Laws/Sade,
and perhaps enable us to situate it within a genre or tradition. For exam-
ple, the work presents us with a series of ambiguous scenarios drawn from
a wide range of sources. The play quotes from a mélange of modern and
classical dramatic texts (such as Müller’s The Hamletmachine, Weiss’s
Marat/Sade, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon)
and scraps of popular culture (the John Laws radio broadcasts and pop
song lyrics, for example). The juxtaposition of these sources bridges the
divide between high culture and popular culture and employs an extensive
24 G. D’Cruz
range of performance vocabularies (dance, music, ritual, comedy, drama

and so on). Further, we might invoke Jameson’s (1998) postmodern
vocabulary to condemn the work for merely producing a pastiche that sev-
ers its quotations from history. Patrice Pavis (1992, 47) does this when he
argues that “postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about
textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in
the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable
memory bank.” Alternatively, we could use Linda Hutcheon’s (1989, 93)
vocabulary to argue the contrary position—namely that in blurring the
distinction between fact and fiction, high culture and popular culture,
postmodern parody serves to undermine monolithic, authoritative narra-
tives by “contesting our humanist assumptions about artistic originality
and uniqueness and our capitalist notions of ownership and property.”
To fully appreciate the difficulties involved in redescribing the work of
The Sydney Front with the vocabulary of the postmodern, we need to
pause and consider the cumbersome consequences of glossing the key
ideas of seminal postmodern thinkers such as Jameson and Lyotard. Put
differently, before we can approach John Laws/Sade as an exemplary
instance of postmodern performance, we must familiarise ourselves with
postmodern discourse as articulated by its major proponents. Let us first
consider some of Jameson’s key ideas. In his seminal essay “Postmodernism
and Consumer Culture,” he points out that postmodernism:
is not just another word for the description of a particular style. It is also, at
least in my use, a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the
emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new
type of social life and a new economic order—what is often euphemistically
called modernization, post-industrial or consumer society, the society of the
media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism. This new moment of
capitalism can be dated from the post-war boom in the United States in the
late 1940s and early 1950s or, in France, from the establishment of the Fifth
Republic in 1958. (Jameson 1998, 3)
Postmodernism, for Jameson (1998), marks a radical break with the

past and signals a new social, cultural and political order. Postmodernists
of Jameson’s ilk also express scepticism towards the ability of experimental
modernist works to continue challenging and subverting the status quo.
In other words, they see the formerly radical practices of modernist artists
as being blunted and co-opted by consumer society. Postmodernism is
thus a manifestation of the logic of late capitalism, which hungrily
transforms cultural artefacts into commodities. Nothing is exempt from

market forces, and this rampant and aggressive form of capitalist logic has
consequences for the production of art, which cannibalises the styles and
compositional techniques of the past. Pastiche becomes the dominant aes-
thetic strategy for postmodern artists, and history becomes a vast reposi-
tory of styles, genres and codes ripe for capitalist exploitation. Consequently,
this logic of the market elides any absolute distinction between popular
culture and high culture, and equalises the value of cultural artefacts—so
European opera, for example, is not inherently superior to hip-hop, and
both are commodities that can be exploited and even combined to form a
hybrid art form.
Jameson does not celebrate the advent of postmodernism. In fact, it is
important to stress his pessimism, for his writings on postmodernism diag-
nose the symptoms of a cultural and political malaise that threatens the
very possibility of an oppositional politics. In a society so dominated by
the logic of the capitalist market, it becomes impossible to adopt a posi-
tion of critical distance, since every radical practice is contaminated by
capitalism. In short, Jameson, writing from within the tradition of Marxist
critique, draws attention to a crisis or rupture in contemporary culture,
which leaves the critics of capitalism with very little to celebrate. I return
to the aesthetic and political implications of this position, with specific
reference to postmodern theatre, later in this chapter.
From Jameson’s perspective, then, we could describe John Laws/Sade
as an exemplary postmodern work that vacuously uses pastiche with no
regard for historical context. The performance also resonates with Pavis’s
(1992, 47) observation that “Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to lis-
ten to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more
than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately avail-
able and reusable memory bank.” More generously, we might also desig-
nate it an avant-garde work that employs parody to undermine normative
values about bodies and identities—indeed, Schaefer (1999, 72) describes
The Sydney Front as a (post)modern avant-garde group whose work
focuses on “the construction of individual bodies in the theatre as per-
forming and spectating subjects.” This more sympathetic assessment of
John Laws/Sade resonates with Lyotard’s belief in the political efficacy of
experimental art.
Postmodernism for Lyotard is also a temporal phenomenon, but he
proffers a theory of postmodern knowledge that promotes the critical
potential of experimental art. Like Jameson, Lyotard (1979, 3) contends
26 G. D’Cruz
that postmodernism emerged in advanced Western societies at the end of

the 1950s. However, his conception of the term accounts for the way capi-
talism and the advent of computer technologies transform the status of
knowledge. Lyotard identifies two forms of knowledge: narrative knowl-
edge (expressed in the form of myths, stories, literature and so on) and
scientific knowledge (generated by strict experimental protocols).
Narrative knowledge can take many forms and need not necessarily mani-
fest as oral or written stories. For example, the frescoes painted on the
ceilings of medieval churches are forms of narrative knowledge, since they
tell stories about the cosmological order of things from a Christian per-
spective. They are narratives that convey authoritative knowledge to a
largely illiterate population by depicting and dramatising biblical scenes.
Myths, stories and images are ways of knowing the world and our place in
it. This form of narrative knowledge does not require external validation,
since it is generated by a system of religious belief.
Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, requires substantiation, which
is why it contests and displaces the authority of narrative knowledge. For
Lyotard, science, before the postmodern era, produced authoritative knowl-
edge by strictly adhering to protocols that required the results of experi-
ments to be reproducible and falsifiable. But this is not to say that science
dispensed with narrative. On the contrary, the very raison d’être of modern
science relied on Enlightenment narratives about human progress and rea-
son. In short, modern science provided a rational account of the material
world to produce a better world. This noble project, Lyotard (1979, 5)
argues, is challenged by the advent of computer technologies that generate
a transformation in the status of knowledge. Computers enable vast quanti-
ties of data to be stored and recalled on demand. Thus, knowledge becomes
a commoditised resource subject to the logic of the marketplace, and the
status of scientific knowledge in the postmodern era is subject to what
Lyotard calls the performativity principle, which I consider in more detail in
the next chapter. For now, the salient point is that the validity of scientific
knowledge in the era of postmodernism is assessed on utilitarian grounds—
that is, on the basis of its ability to efficiently produce useful, profitable
outputs. Scientific knowledge needs to perform efficiently rather than con-
tribute to any vague narrative about human progress, or pursue the “specu-
lative unity of all knowledge,” as Jameson puts it in his introduction to
Lyotard’s book (1984, ix). As Lyotard (1984, 51) remarks, “the question
(overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or in
the rooms of higher education is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What use is it?’”
For Lyotard, the postmodern condition refers to an increasing scepti-

cism towards metanarratives: any grand, totalising philosophy or belief
system that purports to provide an authoritative foundation for guarantee-
ing human freedom and identity. Science, he argues, is both a practice and
a language game that erodes the authority of older narrative modes of
knowledge, but is itself transformed and undermined by the postmodern
condition, which is:
based fundamentally upon the perception of the existence of a modern era

that dates from the time of the Enlightenment and that has now run its
course. And that this modern era was predicated on a notion of progress in
knowledge and the arts, and technology, human freedom as well. All of
which was thought of as leading to a truly emancipated society—a society
emancipated from poverty, despotism, and ignorance. But all of us can see
that development continues to take place without leading to the realization
of any of these dreams of emancipation. So today one no longer feels guilty
about being ignorant. (Lyotard 1984, 37)
This is not to say that Lyotard nostalgically laments this transformation

in the status of knowledge. Rather, he explores the consequences and pos-
sibilities generated by this new condition. For example, “the transmission
of knowledge should not be limited to the transmission of information,
but should include training in all of the procedures that can increase one’s
ability to connect the fields jealously guarded from one another by the
traditional organization of knowledge” (Lyotard 1984, 52). In other
words, computer technology harbours the potential to generate new
knowledge by combining different data sets in new and hitherto unimagi-
nable ways. Lyotard’s observations about the way technology transforms
knowledge are especially prescient given the ubiquity of digital technolo-
gies, portable databases and new media in contemporary culture.
Moreover, recent debates about “fake news” and “alternative facts” point
to the continuing relevance of questions concerning the processes involved
in legitimating knowledge.
Today, Lyotard’s (1979) book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge is best remembered for its author’s succinct definition of post-
modernism as “an incredulity towards metanarrative” (1979, xxiv).
However, it is in the appendix to this seminal book that his work resonates
most strongly with the concerns of the present discussion. Lyotard cele-
brates the unsettling qualities of avant-garde art within the context of
contesting Jürgen Habermas’s (1983, 9) call to complete the emancipa-
28 G. D’Cruz
tory project of modernity, which was concerned with using specialised

knowledge to enrich everyday life. It is in Lyotard’s writing on aesthetics
that we can most fully apprehend how his articulation of postmodernism
might illuminate our understanding of John Laws/Sade. He invokes a con-
ception of the sublime that suggests experimental art is concerned with
representing the unrepresentable by eschewing the conventions of realism
and normative aesthetic values. He writes:
A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he

writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established
rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by
applying familiar categories to the text or work. Those rules and categories
are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and writer, then, are
working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what would have
been done. (Lyotard 1984, 81)
Did The Sydney Front work without rules? Well, not really. Clare Grant’s
(2012, 9–10) documentation of the company’s work indicates that the
group not only situated itself within the tradition of the European avant-
garde, but also developed its own tongue-in-cheek list of rules for generat-
ing performances. Grant’s archive also reveals that the company had
powerful ideas about the value and political efficacy of avant-garde perfor-
mance. On the back of one of its programmes is the following statement:
In one of its manifestations, the avant-garde is simply a compliant genre

within a broad range of cultural offerings available in late capitalist society.
In another, it attempts to occupy an outsider position, refusing to acknowl-
edge any contamination, and so dreaming of a pure resistive art.
The Sydney Front places itself between these two positions, accepting
that we work within a liberal pluralist culture that co-opts experimental
work to further its own ends while maintaining a skirmishing position that
continually tries to lever open the cracks, to expose the contradictions and
omissions within the dominant value system. And doing so with no alterna-
tive master plan in mind, but out of a belief in the liberating value of the
superfluous gesture itself. (quoted in Grant 2012, 26)
Writing in the 1960s, Renato Poggioli (1968, 56) observed that “the
conventions of avant-garde art are often as easily deduced as those of the
academy: their deviation from the norm is so regular and normal a fact
that it is transformed into a canon no less exceptional than predictable.”
Obviously, I found nothing normal or predictable about John Laws/Sade,

but I saw the production as a young and naïve spectator unfamiliar with
theatre history or aesthetic theory. Did John Laws/Sade confirm Lyotard’s
faith in avant-garde art? Schaefer (1999) draws our attention to the
debates about the end of the avant-garde that were gaining momentum as
early as the 1960s. She points out that The Sydney Front consciously situ-
ated its work within the tradition of the European avant-garde, which had,
more or less, become a heavily codified practice by the late 1980s. The
company also explicitly acknowledged its debt to postmodern theory
(Schaefer 1999, 5). Perhaps this combination of inspirations gave its work
an edge and political valence in accord with Lyotard’s position on experi-
mental art. Conversely, Rorty (1984, 43) suggests, in his most curmud-
geonly mode, that the “attempt of leftist intellectuals to pretend that the
avant-garde is serving the wretched of the earth by fighting free of the
merely beautiful is a hopeless attempt to make the special needs of the
intellectual and the social needs of his community coincide.” In the pres-
ent context, I think it is more important to establish the fact that the dis-
course of postmodernism, for the most part, provides a cogent vocabulary
for describing the work of The Sydney Front. The possibilities for explicat-
ing John Laws/Sade using the postmodern vocabularies that circulated in
academia in the 1980s and 1990s are as endless as they are tedious, given
that scholars have generated a plethora of commentary about postmod-
ernism for over 40 years. Take a cursory look through the archival copies
of the theatre and performance studies journals of this period if you are in
any doubt about the ubiquity of postmodern vocabularies during this era.
When a once radical and unsettling vocabulary becomes doxa, it is time to
consider alternatives.
A Postdramatic Redescription of John Laws/Sade

Alternatively, we could view John Laws/Sade as an exemplary instance of
what Lehmann calls postdramatic theatre. In fact, Karen Jürs-Munby
does just this in her translator’s introduction to Lehmann’s book
Postdramatic Theatre, where she describes a later incarnation of this
Sydney Front performance, which toured Europe, as postdramatic
(2006, 4). Lehmann (2006) developed the term “postdramatic” in this
book, which he initially published in German in 1999. However, schol-
ars and teachers in the English-speaking world did not engage with the
work until Jürs-Munby translated it in 2006. The phrase “postdramatic”
30 G. D’Cruz
was taken up with remarkable speed, and is now a firm part of the estab-
lished critical vocabulary in theatre, drama and performance studies.
Lehmann’s book describes a variety of innovative works that challenge
many commonly held assumptions about the relationship between dra-
matic writing and performance from the 1960s up until the cusp of the
twenty-first century. He consistently uses the word “new” in his descrip-
tions of the performances he classifies as postdramatic, but the “new”
theatre Lehmann discusses is not especially new. His book focuses on
mostly European and American experimental performance from the
1970s to the 1990s, which many critics and scholars once described as
“postmodern” (Pavis 1992; Auslander 2002). So, let’s explore how the
vocabulary of postdramatic theatre might help us engage with the expe-
rience of witnessing John Laws/Sade. As I stated in the introduction to
this book, Lehmann’s (2006, 85) most cogent formulation of the con-
cept of the postdramatic theatre occurs when he claims that:
postdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging—and even

less a new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre
that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structur-
ally changed quality of the performance text: it becomes more presence than
representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process
than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse
than information.
This account of postdramatic theatre certainly resonates with John

Laws/Sade in many ways. For me, the stomping and staring sequence,
which involved the performers glaring at the audience while aggressively
stamping their feet, unleashed a palpable force of energy that I found
unnerving and enthralling. Lehmann (2006, 38) describes postdramatic
theatre as “energetic theatre,” and cites Lyotard (the postmodernist) as
the source of this term, which refers to a theatre of “forces, intensities,
present affects” (Lyotard quoted in Lehmann 2006, 36). Similarly, I
found the “crotch grab” and the “cream bun” (those sequences that made
my “genitals sit tight”) memorable because of how they made me feel. I
had no idea what either of these scenes represented within the context of
this disjointed performance, but I felt their effect on my body. This is not
to say John Laws/Sade was devoid of meaning, or that it did not represent
characters and scenes. Rather, it played with various qualities of presence,
especially in the way it made the relationship between performers and the
audience the focus of the work. The opening “grope tube” experience, for
example, created a strange intimacy between performers and spectators
that is best described as a “shared” experience as opposed to a communi-
cated one. Of course, these binary oppositions (presence/representation
and process/product) unravel under close inspection, but they do provide
a useful set of coordinates for explaining the logic (or illogic) of the per-
formance (see Image 2.2).
Lehmann (2006) enumerates other features of postdramatic theatre
that also resonate with John Laws/Sade—for example, he describes how
postdramatic works employ signs in a non-hierarchical manner (86).
Postdramatic performances often mix elements such as music, movement,
language, lighting effects and dance without giving precedence to any
single aspect of the performance. Lehmann (2006, 86–87) calls this
parataxis, which promotes simultaneity as a structural principle of postdra-
matic theatre, which means the audience is often bombarded with a pleth-
ora of signs (87) without a strong sense of focalisation. As I recall, John
Laws/Sade contained moments of mayhem, where it was difficult to dis-
cern where I should direct my attention, but for the most part, the perfor-
Image 2.2 “The

Crotch Grab”: John
Laws/Sade, 1987.
Courtesy of The Sydney
Front Archive, the
University of Sydney.
Photographer: Regis
Lansac
32 G. D’Cruz
mance focused the audience’s gaze very carefully. Nonetheless, the salient
point is that Lehmann’s vocabulary, which enumerates several other fea-
tures of postdramatic theatre, such as plethora—the proliferation of signs
without concern for intelligibility or conventional sequencing (90)—
musicalisation, visual dramaturgy, physicality and so on provides a rela-
tively simple means of unpacking the mysteries and perceptual confusions
generated by John Laws/Sade.
We can retrospectively read the performance as an exemplary postdramatic
work insofar as it was primarily theatrical—the script or dramatic text was
unmistakably cobbled together from a wide range of other sources. Moreover,
this textual pastiche was only one element of a performance event that
appeared to be as concerned with the physicality of the performers, their ener-
getic exchange with the audience, as much as with language. Indeed, John
Laws/Sade was apparently not a work of dramatic literature, although it used
extracts from Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade and Heiner Müller’s The
Hamletmachine. Years later, one member of the ensemble remarked that the
group “takes as its basic subject the moment of performance, not the script
that precedes it” (Waites 1991, 7). Another member of The Sydney Front
recalls that the group’s work focused on the relationship between performers
and spectators, a relationship “so often lost in naturalistic theatre” (Grant
2012). The piece was composed collectively in workshops and confounded
any simple correspondence between script and performance. It decoupled
“drama” (story, plot, character, suspense, reversal) from “theatre” (perfor-
mance, physical presence, energy, material space, real time), but we could have
made the same observation without recourse to the vocabulary of postdra-
matic theatre. In fact, my account of John Laws/Sade within a postmodern
frame of reference made the same basic points about its salient features.
Indeed, we could have approached the work from other perspectives. For
example, we could use the vocabulary of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty,
with its references to energy and presence, to unpack the work’s relationship
to a primordial concept of theatrical presence. But why should we bother?
Heritage and Novelty
Why favour one redescription over the other? On one level, I appreciate the
practitioner’s scepticism towards theoretical debates about terminology.
Surely it does not matter whether we call a piece of work modern, experimen-
tal, avant-garde, postmodern or postdramatic? And who, outside of a rela-
tively small band of scholars, cares about the answer to this question? Theatre
practitioners? Students? As I see it, there are three primary reasons for favour-
ing Lehmann’s postdramatic vocabulary. First, it brings order to the house of
contemporary theatre discourse by focusing on theatre practices as opposed
to general cultural theories, or an expanded account of performance. Second,
it has pedagogical ambitions. Jürs-Munby (2006, 14) makes this clear in her
translator’s introduction to Lehmann’s book, where she writes, “for practitio-
ners, students, scholars and fans of contemporary theatre, the analyses pro-
vided in this book should contribute an invaluable theoretical vocabulary for
reflecting on this work and for articulating its aesthetics and politics.” Finally,
it fulfils the academic industry’s desire to replenish and reinvigorate disciplines
by generating new approaches to research. For many contemporary critics,
postmodernism is over—dead, buried and mostly irrelevant as a concept to a
new generation of scholars who believe digital technologies and mutations in
capitalism render postmodernism obsolete (Kirby 2006, 2009; Nealon 2012).
Alan Kirby (2006) argues that “digimodernism” or “pseudo-modernism”
describes the contemporary world, which is saturated with digital communi-
cations technologies, more accurately than postmodernism. “In postmodern-
ism,” Kirby (2006, 36) points out, “one read, watched, listened, as before. In
pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, down-
loads.” Jeffrey Nealon (2012) proffers the awkward neologism “post-post-
modernism” to provide an account of the mutations and transformations in
economic and cultural production since the doyens of postmodernism—
Jameson, Lyotard and Baudrillard—published their major works over 30
years ago. There is a sense in which Lehmann’s book participates in this rejec-
tion of postmodernism, and shares in the fatigue postmodernism generates
after its long reign as a fundamental concept in so many scholarly disciplines.
But academic fashions and institutional imperatives cannot wholly account for
the success of Lehmann’s vocabulary. As I have already stated, one of the
advantages of using the language of postdramatic theatre lies in what we
might call its theatre-specific heritage.
Postdramatic Theatre and Péter Szondi’s Theory

of Modern Drama
As previously stated, the postmodern vocabularies discussed above consti-

tute a kind of totalising force that permeates every aspect of contemporary
culture. If postmodernism is a condition of knowledge, an epoch or a
“cultural dominant,” then its reach is immense. However, the major theo-
34 G. D’Cruz
rists of postmodernism pay relatively little attention to theatre, as Connor

(1989) and Birringer (1991), among others, point out. As I’ve already
stated, I think Lehmann’s coinage of the postdramatic is partially an
attempt to provide the field of theatre studies with a critical vocabulary
that accounts for the development of new dramatic, theatrical and perfor-
mative practices that emerge from the contradictions, aporias and ruptures
within the field of theatre practice itself, as opposed to a more generalised
social, economic or cultural context. Margaret Hamilton (2008, 4) made
this point shortly after the appearance of the English translation of
Lehmann’s book, claiming that Lehmann “theorises the aesthetic experi-
ence of theatre and, in doing so, offers a methodology that contrasts
markedly to the application of a general cultural theory to theatre.”
In formulating his redescription of contemporary experimental theatre,
Lehmann adopts the neo-Hegelian methodology used by Péter Szondi
(1987) in his seminal book Theory of the Modern Drama, while acknowl-
edging the severe limitations of Szondi’s work in accounting for the “new”
theatre. Jürs-Munby’s translator’s introduction to Lehmann’s book
underscores this debt to Szondi’s work, and it is worth clarifying what
Lehmann takes from Szondi’s neo-Hegelian methodology (2006, 2–3).
In crude terms, Hegelian philosophy addresses the problem of how one
epoch is transformed into something significantly different through inter-
nal contradictions that rupture, and are consequently synthesised into new
social and political formations. The Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis,
synthesis—proposes that history moves towards some ultimate resolution
of conflict and contradiction: the end of history, if you will. This dialectic
is apparently at work within the field of modern drama. Szondi (1987)
accounts for new forms of innovative modern drama by identifying what
he calls the “crisis of drama” that stems from the inability of conventional
dramatic forms to convey the problems of the modern zeitgeist. Lehmann’s
work is situated within this Hegelian tradition and implicitly draws on the
insights of various German language critics, such as Georg Lukács and
Theodor Adorno, who, like Szondi, assert the primacy of the formal prop-
erties of an artistic work in determining its ability to “deconstruct the
space of political discourse,” which, according to Lehmann (2006, 177),
is the way postdramatic theatre makes political interventions.
Like Szondi, Lehmann is committed to the form–content dialectic, and
accepts that dramatic and theatrical forms are connected to specific histori-
cal and ideological contexts in complex ways that cannot be reduced to
simple and reductive forms of sociological explanation. This enables him
to demonstrate how the “new” theatre emerges from the contradictions

inherent in the forms of modernism that preceded it. Postdramatic theatre
is, therefore, not a rejection of modern drama; rather, it is “the unfolding
and blossoming of a potential of disintegration, dismantling and decon-
struction within drama itself. This virtuality was present, though barely
decipherable, in the aesthetics of dramatic theatre” (Lehmann 2006, 44).
This is also why he underscores his belief that the politics of postdramatic
theatre is a politics of perception. Works that merely address various con-
temporary political themes—the plight of asylum seekers, terrorism, glo-
balisation, rampant capitalism, for example—are not necessarily innovative,
or especially political, in his view. The contradictions of an epoch, for the
neo-Hegelian critic, are enmeshed within the fabric of the work’s formal
properties. As Lehmann (2006, 178) remarks in the epilogue of his book:
That politically oppressed people are shown on stage does not make theatre
political. And if the political in its sensationalist aspects merely procures
entertainment value, then theatre may well be political—but only in the bad
sense of an (at least unconscious) affirmation of existing political conditions.
It is not through the direct thematization of the political that theatre
becomes political but through the implicit substance and critical value of its
mode of representation.
The fact that Lehmann chooses to italicise the phrase “mode of repre-
sentation” indicates not just how crucial theatrical form is to the politics
of postdramatic theatre, but how closely aligned Lehmann is to the
historical avant-garde, which also stressed the importance of dramatic and
theatrical form. It also demonstrates why it is appropriate to see his work
as a kind of sequel to Szondi’s Theory of Modern Drama. As Michael Hays
(1983, 72) notes, form was a crucial aspect of Szondi’s work:
formal structure is as important to the process of signification in a play as is

content. There is, for Szondi, no such thing as a form, which exists beyond
the moment of its use. There are only particular sets of form–content rela-
tionships and form, like content must be “read” as a statement about the
nature and significance of the aesthetic enterprise as a whole, dramatic form
codifies assertions about human existence.
It is crucial for Lehmann, like Szondi before him, to engage with the
aesthetic work rather than analyse some general postmodern condition or
“cultural dominant”; not because he believes the individual play is somehow
36 G. D’Cruz
disconnected from its various epochal contexts, but because the conflicts
inherent in those settings are subsumed within particular texts. Thus, an
analysis of these texts will reveal their relationship to the ideological and
political contradictions present in any given period.
Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic lends itself to modes of
immanent critique, in which analyses and descriptions of performances
focus on their formal properties before seeking any transcendent
account of their conditions of possibility. This position has a political
dimension. Lehmann (2006, 186) believes that postdramatic theatre
can contribute to politics not by representing political content, but by
unsettling everyday perceptions through aesthetic strategies that shock
and disturb spectators, and “make visible the broken thread between
personal experience and perception.” Most contributors to the volume
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political (Jürs-Munby et al. 2013) rein-
force this view. Lehmann also implicitly rejects the anti-foundational
scepticism of postmodernism (his chapter on the “prehistory” of post-
dramatic theatre, which presents a genealogy of postdramatic perfor-
mances, reinforces the argument that the “new” postdramatic theatre
emerges from contradictions and problems contained within the “old”
dramatic theatre). Like Brecht before him, Lehmann (2006, 181)
believes theatre can unsettle authoritarian political structures and
formations:
Postdramatic theatre has come closer to the trivial and banal, the simplicity
of an encounter, a look or a shared situation. With this, however, theatre
also articulates a possible answer to the tedium of the daily flood of artificial
formulas of intensification. The inflationary dramatizations of daily sensa-
tions that anaesthetize the sensorium have become unbearable. What is at
stake is not a heightening but a deepening of a condition, a situation. In
political terms: what is at stake is also the fate of the errors of dramatic
imagination.
In this somewhat cryptic passage, Lehmann appears to be making an

argument for the political efficacy of postdramatic theatre, which he locates
in its ability to resist mainstream media representations. By embracing the
quotidian and privileging performance, postdramatic theatre challenges the
narcotic power of media society. The closer theatre gets to banal mass
entertainment—presumably social media, film, television and video
games—the more it attempts to duplicate its narrative strategies uncritically,
and the less likely it is to unsettle and expose the machinations of political
power. Lehmann consistently denigrates the mass media and takes up a
political position informed by Frankfurt School critics of the culture indus-
try, such as Theodor Adorno.
Lehmann (2006, 85) is also committed to the view that postdramatic
theatre describes a set of tendencies in contemporary performance that
radically alters our understanding of the status and function of dramatic
writing:
postdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging—and even

less a new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre
that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structur-
ally changed quality of the performance text: it becomes more presence than
representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process
than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse
than information.
This passage provides us with yet another point of distinction between

postmodern and postdramatic theatre. If one follows Kaye’s (1994)
account of postmodern performance, it is possible for dramatic theatre
(that is, theatre that uses traditional storytelling techniques and concepts
of character) to be postmodern if it unsettles the verities of modernism
(since postmodern performance is not attached to a set of formal conven-
tions). Thus, it is possible, if one ignores Lyotard’s argument concerning
postmodern art, to give credence to Michael Vanden Heuvel’s (2001,
213) view that Tom Stoppard is a postmodern playwright because he
“investigates such postmodern issues as the death of the author, the loss of
sustaining cultural narratives, the waywardness of language, and the frag-
mented nature of identity,” even though Stoppard expresses disdain for
postmodern theory. Leaving aside the issue of whether such an “investiga-
tion” actually deconstructs modernist assumptions about authorship,
metanarratives and language, there is no reason why dramatic writing can-
not accomplish such a task. And there is a welter of critical writing on
playwrights such as Stoppard to suggest that postmodern drama is not a
contradiction in terms. However, Stoppard’s use of conventional dramatic
categories—character, narrative, a recognisable fictional world—disqualify
him as a postdramatic playwright, since Lehmann identifies postdramatic
theatre as a form that significantly diminishes the role and primary status
of conventional dramatic writing in the theatrical event. The salient point
38 G. D’Cruz
here is that while we can describe the work of a playwright such as Stoppard
as postmodern, it is not postdramatic theatre in Lehmann’s sense of the
term, since Stoppard’s work relies on traditional codes of representation,
and presents itself more as “manifestation than signification” (2006, 85).

Hopefully, we now have a more expansive account of the concept of
postdramatic theatre within the realm of teaching theatre practice. As I
mentioned in the introduction to this book, there are compelling prag-
matic reasons for teaching postdramatic theatre, particularly in the
context of production-based classes. Moreover, Lehmann’s formula-
tion of this concept generates important questions about the relation-
ships between aesthetics, politics and ethics that should be of interest
even to those performance-makers and teachers who profess a hostility
towards “avant-garde” texts that eschew conventional dramatic cate-
gories such as character, plot, catharsis and so on. However, I am not
sure that the concept and its concomitant critical vocabulary offer a
distinctive redescription of the performance practices they explicate.
The question that functions as the guiding thread of this book’s argu-
ment is this: does Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre provide
a better account of what was once called avant-garde, experimental or
even postmodern performance? Or does it describe something entirely
novel and contemporary? Put simply, does the concept of the postdra-
matic disclose anything radically new about works such as The Sydney
Front’s John Laws/Sade? And, more crucially, does it merely offer
another way to read performances as opposed to new strategies for
creating them? My book is less about embracing Lehmann’s “new”
vocabulary and more about identifying the “family resemblances” that
sometimes beg for new vocabularies for teaching performance through
practice. In the following chapters of this book, I explore postdramatic
theatre within a pedagogical context. I primarily examine the concept’s
value within various scenes of teaching (the workshop, the lecture, the
rehearsal room and so on) from the perspective of someone who
remains ambivalent about its critical utility and pedagogical value. This
book confronts this ambivalence with regard to the postdramatic
through a series of case studies concerned with the anxieties and apo-
rias generated by student productions of postdramatic texts (both
devised by students and authored by playwrights). The postdramatic
has become one of the most widely used (and abused) terms in the
fields of theatre, drama and performance studies in recent times, so it
is timely to account for how this has come to be the case.
While I have attempted to provide a clear and concise account of the
commonalities and differences between postmodern theatre and postdra-
matic theatre, there is little doubt that this chapter’s theories and concepts
are esoteric and restricted to the confines of what Habermas (1983) would
call “expert” knowledge—a form of specialised discourse that is not easily
communicated to a lay audience (incidentally, I find the Habermas/Lyotard
debate about postmodernism, with its focus on the status and transmission
of knowledge, especially prescient, and germane to the pedagogical themes
of this book). The value of avant-garde or experimental performance is not
self-evident to neophytes, especially those who appreciate more popular
performance genres, such as musical theatre (a significant number of my
students are enthusiastic fans of this much-maligned form).
In the final section of this introductory chapter, I want to sketch a few
of the practical problems generated by teaching experimental perfor-
mance. More specifically, I want to focus on the disparity between what I
think I am communicating and what students take from my lectures and
workshops. In the epilogue to his book, Lehmann (2006) points out that
postdramatic theatre is always engaged in a certain kind of pedagogy, and
one that deliberately formulates non-rational approaches to contesting the
hegemony of consumer society. He writes that we must “realize the grow-
ing importance of a certain cultivation of affects, the ‘training’ of an emo-
tionality that is not under the tutelage of rational preconsiderations.
‘Enlightenment’ and education by themselves are not enough” (Lehman
2006, 186). On one level, then, this book is concerned with this cultiva-
tion or training of affects. It identifies a set of anxieties and aporias that are
generated by teaching postdramatic theatre in production contexts by
underscoring the vocabulary’s political character through addressing ques-
tions of form, affect and what Lehmann (2006, 187) calls the aesthetics of
risk—that which explicitly challenges the academy’s preference for instru-
mental logic, rational calculation and quantifiable, utilitarian outputs:
We can see here that theatre does not attain its political, ethical reality by way of
information, theses and messages; in short: by way of its content in the tradi-
tional sense. On the contrary: it is part of its constitution to hurt feelings, to
produce shock and disorientation, which point spectators to their own presence
precisely through “amoral,” “asocial,” and seemingly “cynical” events.
40 G. D’Cruz
It is not easy to teach postdramatic theatre—especially if you want to

engage with “shock and disorientation,” which is all well and good within
the context of professional theatre, but, as we shall see in a moment, quite
another in educational settings. The subtitle of this book refers to aporias
and anxieties. I have already implicitly addressed the anxiety generated by
trying to find an effective way to communicate the value of postdramatic
theatre in a lecture. This anxiety is intensified when we move to the teach-
ing scene of the workshop, where it is vital to balance scholarly integrity
with a duty of care towards students. University administrators have legiti-
mate concerns about teaching material that explicitly attempts to chal-
lenge and offend normative sensibilities, yet the most compelling forms of
theatre do just that. How does one approach this contradiction? This
book does not attempt to resolve the ethical problems associated with
teaching transgressive texts. The scene of teaching is always fraught with
ethical problems, but the most valuable form of education, I argue,
demands what we might call the pedagogy of risk. The final section of this
chapter describes the first of many pedagogical fault lines this book identi-
fies; in particular, it underscores the unforeseen energies and affects that
may manifest while teaching postdramatic theatre.
Pedagogy of the Flesh: Artaud and Pedagogical

Anxiety
I teach a first-year subject called Modern and Postmodern Drama (ACP177),
which surveys a range of canonical plays, directors and theorists from the late
nineteenth century to the beginning of the present century. I don’t claim to
be an expert on all of the topics I teach. There are so many conflicting read-
ings of Artaud that it is hard to summarise his work, let alone teach it to stu-
dents. Artaud, as we know, is a seminal theorist of the theatre, and a prominent
figure in both postmodern and postdramatic vocabularies. Lehmann (2006)
identifies Artaud as a major influence on his formulation of postdramatic the-
atre (32). In preparation for my first lecture on this icon of modern drama, I
consulted a variety of primary and secondary texts: Artaud’s writings in The
Theatre and Its Double (1958), Jane Goodall’s book The Gnostic Drama
(1994), Michel Foucault’s writing on Artaud in Madness and Civilization
(1988) and two especially prescient essays on Artaud in Derrida’s Writing
and Difference (1978). This body of work informed me that there are several
different readings of Artaud’s eclectic writings.
My lecture identifies three approaches to Artaud: the theatrical, the

poststructuralist and the Gnostic. However, it focuses on the “theatrical
Artaud” and his twentieth-century acolytes: Brook, Grotowski, The
Living Theatre and so on. The Deakin University drama programme is
about theatre practice. It aims to provide students with a range of skills
that will enable them to make performances with minimal resources in a
variety of spaces, locations and circumstances. Given this orientation, I
choose to concentrate on Artaud’s effect on performance-makers. What
follows is not primarily about Artaud; it is about teaching, and the prac-
tical and ethical problems I encountered as a result of teaching Artaud a
few years ago. Despite “doing my homework” and trying to describe
“the theatre of cruelty” as carefully and accessibly as I could, I was
shocked by how some of my students interpreted Artaud’s work and my
commentary on him. Of course, we need to be suspicious of those who
insist on a single, “faithful” reading of Artaud and, perhaps, cautious of
those who (like me) situate the theatre of cruelty “within the succession
of models of theatrical representation” (Derrida 1978, 234). In his essay
“The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Derrida
(1978, 243) writes:
Perhaps we can now ask, not about the conditions under which a modern
theater could be faithful to Artaud, but in what cases it is surely unfaithful
to him. What might the themes of infidelity be, even among those who
invoke Artaud in the militant and noisy fashion we all know?
Derrida answers this question by enumerating all that is “foreign” to

the theatre of cruelty (non-sacred theatre, all theatre that privileges speech,
all abstract theatre, all theatre of alienation, all political theatre, all ideo-
logical theatre). Having catalogued these “themes of infidelity,” Derrida
(1978, 247) “comes to understand very quickly that fidelity [to Artaud] is
impossible.” Moreover, he claims, there is no theatre, including Artaud’s,
that is “faithful” to the theatre of cruelty. This is because the “grammar”
of the theatre of cruelty:
will always remain the inaccessible limit of representation which is not

representation, of a re-presentation which is full presence, which does
not carry its double within itself as its death, of a present that does not
repeat itself, that is, of a present outside time, a nonpresent. (Derrida
1978, 248)
42 G. D’Cruz
Artaud’s (1974, 64) call for an affirmative, non-voyeuristic theatre that

refuses to probe “the intimacy of a few puppets” and re-present selected
scenes from their “lives” is a call to restore the immediacy and vitality of
theatre to full “presence.” As we know, Derrida’s writings destabilise
metaphysical thinking—that is, logocentric thought that relies on “pres-
ence” as the guarantor of “truth.” For Derrida, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty
attacks Western metaphysics, but is nonetheless contaminated by its logo-
centrism. If we follow Derrida (1978, 249), Artaud’s call for a theatre of
full presence, a theatre that elides the difference between representation
and its double (life), situates his work at the “limit of theatrical
possibility.”
As a teacher, I want to be “faithful” to the spirit of Derrida’s Artaud, if
only to avoid the almost inevitable assault on the senses inspired by the
following passage, which I unpack, with assistance from Derrida, in my
lecture:
The theater is a passionate overflowing

a frightful transfer of forces
from body
to body
This transfer cannot be reproduced twice.
Nothing more impious than the system of the Balinese which consists,
after having produced this transfer one time,
instead of seeking another,
in resorting to a system of particular enchantments
in order to deprive astral photography of the gestures thus obtained. (quoted
in Derrida 1978, 250)
How do students interpret this material? After having sat through my

lecture and heard about “the frightful transfer of forces from body to
body,” having read extracts from Artaud’s writing and read Weiss’s
Marat/Sade and having seen Peter Brook’s rather dated production of
the play on video, what do they make of all this? As one of the assess-
ment requirements in Modern and Postmodern Drama, students
research a chosen topic and present their findings to their peers. This
exercise takes many different forms. Some students opt to present con-
ventional tutorials—they summarise academic articles, identify the major
enabling conventions of the relevant performance genre, formulate essay
questions and sometimes run workshop activities that illuminate some
aspect of their chosen topic.
Others choose a more performative and creative approach to the task.

Artaud inevitably inspires presentations in the performative mode. These
performances vary in quality and pedagogical value, as you would expect.
Over the years, students have burnt human hair in the workshop space,
assaulted their peers with a barrage of raw sausage meat, scrubbed the
studio floor with foul-smelling hospital-grade disinfectant, raised the roof
with ear-shattering sound effects and even stripped naked in front of their
peers, all in the name of Artaud. Generally, for all their sound and fury,
these presentations are usually tame affairs, and I’ve never asked students
to run their presentation scenarios by me before they unleash them on
their peers. More often than not, the discussions that follow these perfor-
mances are animated and, I think, valuable in explicating Artaud. But one
year, things took a more menacing and unsettling turn.
This particular class began with a general discussion about Brook’s ver-
sion of Marat/Sade. As it happened, only a few students had finished read-
ing Weiss’s play, but most had seen Brook’s film of the Royal Shakespeare
Company’s landmark 1965 production of it. Many complained that the
play was exceptionally tedious and difficult to read. Moreover, they could
not find any connection between the play and the extracts from Artaud I
asked them to read in preparation for the class. Some students felt the play
was tame, and probably lost something in its transfer to film (perhaps they
were referring to the bodily presence of Brook’s actors, which is lost on
film).
Next, the group of students who had prepared a presentation on the
theatre of cruelty asked the class to exit the space so they could rearrange
it for their performance. The class moved outside and began chatting and
socialising. The mood was light and buoyant. After a few minutes, the
Artaud group invited the rest of the group to re-enter the workshop. On
entering the space and taking their seats, the students encountered the
following scenario. In the middle of the performing area was a couch, lit
by a single spotlight. Two performers (one male and one female) were
entangled on the sofa, caressing and kissing each other passionately. The
scene was overtly sexual. A television monitor was placed on either side of
the couch. One played a looped scene from a soft-porn movie. The other
played scenes from an unusually violent war film. After a few minutes,
another two student actors entered the space and started haranguing the
audience with a speech that exhorted the spectators to close their eyes and
place their hands on the neck of the person seated directly in front of
them. They then asked the spectators to undress the person they were
44 G. D’Cruz
touching in their minds. As the speech progressed, its sexual overtones

became more violent and misogynist. The speaker also let rip with a set of
common expletives—fuck, cunt, bitch and so on. This rant increased in
volume and intensity, culminating with a string of racist epithets, directed
at Blacks and Asians, and a chant of “Rape Them, Fuck Them.” The
speech continued, as did the cacophony produced by the film soundtracks
and the student actors. When instructed to open their eyes, the audience
found that the scene on the couch had changed: now, one of the “speak-
ers” was attempting to “rape” the female actor on the sofa. The “rape”
was obviously simulated and highly “theatrical.” At this point, several stu-
dents burst into tears, and some left the room in obvious distress. The
performance ended. There was a smattering of applause, then silence. All
eyes turned to me. I immediately suggested a short break and went in
search of the students who had left the class in a state of anguish.
For me, teaching drama has always involved a far greater degree of
energetic and emotional investment than other classes (I have taught lit-
erature and cultural studies alongside drama throughout my academic
career). While I have had the occasional heated moment with students
over the years (usually in a production context), I have never seen students
as distressed over a workshop or classroom incident as those who found
the “Artaud” performance offensive. The discussion after the event proved
instructive on many levels. It raised questions about the duty of care aca-
demics have towards their students, as well as questions about the ethics
of drama workshops and the nature and function of theatre pedagogy in
general. The group responsible for the presentation claimed, in their
defence, that they wanted to provide their peers with an “experiential”
understanding of their interpretation of the theatre of cruelty. For them,
this form of theatre demanded an assault on the senses—hence their use of
a complex (and extremely loud) soundscape, and a physical interaction
with the audience. They certainly took Artaud’s call for the theatre to
involve “a frightful transfer of forces from body to body” seriously, and
challenged the class to think about the nature, value and function of
performance.
While almost everyone agreed that the performance was “effective”
and even compelling, some students objected to the fact that they were
not warned about the sexually explicit content of the work, nor were they
prepared for the “sensual assault” on the audience. Interestingly, nobody
commented on the presentation’s overt racism and misogyny. Some stu-
dents suggested that, in future, I should warn people about the possible
content of workshops (one young woman suggested I should preface

classes with a disclaimer similar to those used in the film and television
industry: “this class may contain frequent coarse language, sexual refer-
ences and adult concepts”). One of the students involved in the perfor-
mance immediately countered that such a disclaimer would compromise
the performance, which succeeded, he believed, because it undermined
the audience’s expectations. This comment initiated a heated debate about
the function of theatre. Some members of the class felt theatre was primar-
ily a form of entertainment; others, particularly those inspired by Artaud’s
writings, countered that it should not pander to a passive, voyeuristic audi-
ence. The student read the following quotation from the subject reader
(which contained extracts from Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double) to
support his argument:
We can perfectly well continue to conceive of a theater based on the author-

ity of the text, and on a text more wordy, diffuse, and boring, to which the
esthetics of the stage would be subject. But his conception of theater, which
consists of having people sit on a certain number of straight-backed or over-
stuffed chairs placed in a row and tell each other stories, however marvelous,
is not the absolute negation of theatre—which does not absolutely require
movement in order to be what it should—certainly its perversion. (Artaud
1958, 106)
The group also submitted a written account of their understanding of

Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, which attempted to justify their fidelity to
Artaud’s writings. The students responsible for the performance sincerely
believed they had produced a performance that was “true” to Artaud’s
vision. I believe the group was sincere in trying to provide the class with a
challenging learning experience. They could not have anticipated that the
two students most upset by the performance would reveal they had been
victims of sexual abuse, and that the performance had revived extremely
traumatic memories they did not expect to have to relive in the context of
a drama class. My drama class, like most classes, comprised individuals
with different life experiences, and they also had different reasons for
studying drama. These differences do not usually provide me with any dif-
ficulties. However, the Artaud presentation exposed the heterogeneity of
the class and the “fault lines” of my teaching practice.
What did I learn from this event? Well, first, I no longer have as much
faith in the unit objectives I’m obliged to list in the study guide of every
class I teach at Deakin University. Is it possible to specify in advance
46 G. D’Cruz
exactly what a student will learn from any given class? Is it possible or
even desirable that students produce “faithful” readings of the texts they
are asked to analyse? This is not to say that we should not list unit objec-
tives or follow assessment criteria. However, I think it necessary to
acknowledge that learning and teaching are complex, emotional, bodily
activities that administrative techniques cannot regulate in absolute terms.
Most students agreed that the Artaud class was the most memorable and
valuable they had experienced during the semester. Apart from creating
the context for the performance/presentation, I had no input into what
eventuated. Moreover, the learning that took place had very little to do
with the specified objectives in the unit guide. The class was productive
because it exposed pedagogic “fault lines.” The discussion that took place
in the wake of the Artaud performance was a “life lesson” for us all, and
perhaps closer to the spirit of Artaud’s impossible theatre of cruelty than
I could have imagined.
The real learning was made possible by the cracks and fissures opened
up by this event, which was both exhilarating and traumatic, dangerously
so for some students; but what about my duty of care as a teacher? Should
I have stopped the performance? Since I was concentrating on the
presentation before me, I was unaware that some students felt distressed
by what they were witnessing. Good teaching, like good acting, involves
a degree of risk, but how much risk is acceptable in a pedagogical con-
text? Do I issue a disclaimer and a warning about the content of the unit
next time I teach ACP177? I’m not sure how to answer these questions,
but I am confident that teaching theatre practice within a pedagogical
institution generates a series of important political issues that scholars
who write about exemplary professional performances rarely address.
Most academics are also teachers, or were teachers at some point. Yet
there is, as I noted in the introduction to this book, a relative paucity of
critical commentary on the anxieties and ethical aporias generated by
teaching specific forms of experimental theatre in universities. As we shall
see in the following chapters, this is because of the institutional regula-
tions that shape and determine the status of knowledge and set strict
conditions on the relationship between theory and practice. However,
before engaging with these disquieting apprehensions, it is important to
contrast the concept of postdramatic theatre with the discipline of perfor-
mance studies, which provides another compelling account of the drift
between drama and performance and anticipates the idea of the postdra-
matic in an engagingly comprehensive manner.
References
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Richards. New York: Grove Press.
———. 1974. The Theatre and Its Double. In Collected Works, translated by
Victor Corti, vol. 4. London: Calder & Boyars.
Auslander, Philip. 2002. From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and
Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and
Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).
Birringer, Johannes. 1991. Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge.
Connor, Steven. 1989. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.
In Writing and Difference, 292–316. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.
Frow, John. 1991. What Was Postmodernism? Sydney: Local Consumption
Publications.
Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after
Modernism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Goodall, Jane. 1994. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Grant, Clare. 2012. Staging the Audience: The Sydney Front 1986–1993. Melbourne:
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. Modernity—An Incomplete Project. In The Anti-
aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 3–15. Seattle: Bay Press.
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Hays, Michael. 1983. Drama and Dramatic Theory: Péter Szondi and the Modern
Theater. Boundary 2 (11): 69–81.
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Turn. Essays on the Postmodern 1983–1998, 111–125, 1–20. London and
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Jürs-Munby, Karen. 2006. Translator’s Introduction to Postdramatic Theatre,

1–15. London and New York: Routledge.
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———. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern
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CHAPTER 3
From Drama to Theatre to Performance

Studies
If I close my eyes, I can still revisit the scene of one of my formative experi-
ences as a teacher in 1989. The Des Conner Room is a small rehearsal
space perched above one of the student union theatres at the University of
Melbourne. I’m sure I felt my pulse racing as I ascended the staircase to
what would become the site of my first truly challenging teaching experi-
ence. As I entered the room, I observed most of the students casually
chatting with each other while milling about on the parquetry floor. They
were an animated bunch, energetic and eager to start the new academic
year. As it turned out, many of them were uncommonly talented and
would forge successful careers in the performing and visual arts one day. I
remember hearing snatches of conversation about holiday activities in
exotic locations: one young woman was waxing lyrical about her adven-
tures in the Swiss Alps; another was recounting the details of a trip to
Rome. A young man whose head was crowned with an unruly mop of
curls was engaged in flirtatious banter with a striking young blonde woman
who spoke with an outrageous French accent. The young man had recently
returned to Melbourne from Paris, where he had participated in a work-
shop at the École Philippe Gaulier. He had obviously picked up some of
the language and was displaying his linguistic prowess by regaling la jeune
femme in her native tongue. Although I tried my best to appear confident
and authoritative, I probably looked like the novice I was. What was I
doing here at the University of Melbourne, arguably Australia’s most pres-

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_3
50 G. D’CRUZ
tigious educational institution? I was barely older than the majority of my

students, and a good deal less worldly than a lot of them, the sons and
daughters of inherited privilege. What could I possibly teach them about
anything? As it happened, not very much.
I recall the first semester being an unadulterated disaster. At first, the
students gave me the benefit of the doubt and approached each class with
enthusiasm. But as the weeks progressed, their patience diminished and
their attendance became erratic; I failed to engage them. Each workshop
began with a series of warm-up exercises and theatre games as a prelude
to introducing the students to the then-nascent world of performance
studies. They were up for the games, but more or less perplexed by my
clumsy attempts to explicate and critique the ideas of figures such as
Erving Goffman, Victor Turner and, of course, Richard Schechner. I
thought I was teaching my class through practical exercises that engaged
the body and mind in a way that would illustrate the ideas about energy
and presence I had gleaned from these eminent scholars. My students
wanted to act and create work for the theatre that was primarily con-
cerned with embodying fictional characters, and they became impatient
with my enthusiasm for the avant-garde. For them, performance was syn-
onymous with what Lehmann (2006, 21) calls the “European theatre
tradition”—that is, theatre concerned with “the representation, the
‘making present’ of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dra-
matic play.” My excursions into the worlds of performance art, theatre
anthropology, sociology and semiotics did not satisfy their perfectly
understandable craving for theatre practice that aimed to realise a dra-
matic text on stage. They had every reason to feel disgruntled: my work-
shops were unfocused. I was flying blind with only a vague idea of what
I was trying to achieve as a teacher.
My early teaching experiences at Murdoch University in Perth gave me
a misplaced confidence in my abilities. Under the supervision of Susan
Melrose, my classes ran smoothly—Susan provided her tutors with weekly
lesson plans, so I was able to engage my students by following her instruc-
tions closely. I enjoyed teaching those early classes, my ego bolstered by
positive student feedback. I also felt confident about my ability to translate
Susan’s lectures—which she peppered with references to a wide range of
philosophical discourses—into terms my students could understand.
Murdoch University was, in many ways, the antithesis of Melbourne.
Founded in the 1970s, Murdoch was young and eager to explore new
pedagogical models that explicitly embraced intercultural and interdisci-
FROM DRAMA TO THEATRE TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES 51
plinary knowledge as well as critical theory (which partially explains why

performance studies resonated so strongly with my teachers). Indeed, the
theatre studies curriculum at Murdoch University drew much of its mate-
rial from beyond the Western canon; hence my undergraduate encounters
with Asian theatre, theatre anthropology and performance studies (under
the expert tutelage of David E.R. George and Serge Tampalini).
The University of Melbourne employed me to bring this “new” knowl-
edge to their students. I functioned as a conduit for the “theory explo-
sion” (Reinelt and Roach 1992, 4). In the 1980s, continental philosophy
transformed theatre and performance scholarship around the world
(McKenzie 2001, 40–41). Melrose and Pavis made a strong impression on
the academics teaching the Interdepartmental Drama Course (ID Drama)
at Melbourne University when they ran guest workshops and lectures in
the late 1980s. Pavis’s (1982) book Languages of the Stage: Essays in the
Semiology of the Theatre had found a receptive audience in the Australian
academy, especially among academics dedicated to liberating the study of
theatre and performance from the domain of literary studies. My employ-
ers at Melbourne felt I could transform their course into something “theo-
retically correct.” In other words, they were hoping I could take a
contemporary, “theoretical” postmodern approach to teaching drama as
performance. Today, many academics routinely invoke theory, often from
adjacent disciplines, in the context of making creative work. Of course,
theory is not something that is “simply” applied to performance and its
associated practices. I agree with Stephen Farrier’s (2005, 131) observa-
tion that theory should be “dynamically sutured to the creative process
which enables a different grade of perception of the possibilities of making
performance.” Unfortunately, it took me a little while to figure out how
to sew.
Before my arrival, the ID Drama course was taught by a series of very
experienced and talented academics who were also theatre practitioners
(some, such as James McCaughey and Rush Rehm, were classics scholars,
while others specialised in Brecht and Stanislavski). While taught through
a combination of practical workshops and lectures, the course primarily
focused on canonical texts: The Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Three Sisters by
Anton Chekhov, The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen and The Caucasian
Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht. Some of my predecessors also engaged
with the Theatre of the Absurd and perhaps even a few contemporary
Australian plays by the likes of David Williamson. Despite employing a
workshop format, the course mainly concentrated on the dramatic text as
52 G. D’CRUZ
the source of theatrical activity, although I suspect students might have

been given the occasional opportunity to devise their work. Nonetheless,
the written play was “the thing,” and, while there was a lot of talk about
breaking free from the strictures of literary studies, the ID Drama course
only vaguely engaged with what we now call performance studies. This
chapter argues that this discipline provides another vital context for under-
standing the conditions of possibility for the emergence of postdramatic
theatre, or, perhaps more accurately, the appearance of what we might call
the “postdramatic turn” in academic theatre studies.
In the previous chapter, I engaged with Lehmann’s (2006, 21) argu-
ment that postdramatic theatre emerges from the modern drama para-
digm, and is a consequence of “a concrete problem of theatre aesthetics.”
Lehmann (2006, 77, 101, 182) makes a few scant references to Schechner’s
work and the discipline of performance studies. Since performance studies
scholars were among the first critics to pay serious attention to many of the
artists Lehmann claims as postdramatic—see the “namedropping” section
of his book’s prologue (2006, 21–22)—it is odd that he does not pay
closer attention to the discipline. Postdramatic theatre and performance
studies—especially in their New York University incarnations—share an
interest in the following phenomena: the transformation of consciousness,
the affective intensity of performance and the spectator–performer inter-
action (environmental theatre). Schechner (2013) also focuses on percep-
tual changes, often in theatre and dance performances, but also in
paratheatrical contexts. Before making a detailed case for why it might be
useful to think about teaching postdramatic theatre in relation to perfor-
mance studies, I want to unpack my autobiographical reflection further,
since it underscores three crucial points about the stance I adopt in this
chapter and the rest of this book.
First, contingency, in the word’s everyday sense, is a major factor in
shaping scholarship, pedagogy and life. I never consciously pursued an
academic career—I found myself teaching drama at university because of
an unlikely alignment of the stars. Put more prosaically, a complex set of
events gave me my first regular academic job. However, contingency, in
the context of this book, means more than chance or unforeseeable pos-
sibilities. For Rorty (1989), the contingency of selfhood refers to the
vocabulary we use to legitimate our beliefs, dispositions and aesthetic
preferences, among other things. He argues that, whether we admit it or
not, we all subscribe to “a final vocabulary”—that is, a set of words that
people use to justify “their actions, their beliefs and their lives” that can’t
be justified in any non-circular way (Rorty 1989, 73). In many ways, this
book, as I hope the previous chapter has already demonstrated, is about
sifting through competing vocabularies about avant-garde theatre prac-
tice (and, consequently, assessing the value and utility of competing
vocabularies from a pedagogical perspective). My personal history and
education have conditioned my approach to the topic of this book, and
are worth revealing so as to identify my often-ambivalent disposition
towards teaching postdramatic theatre. I remain sceptical about the value
of Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic, which I believe reinforces the
hegemony of a narrow, Eurocentric account of modern drama. This
becomes evident when we contrast Lehmann’s vocabulary with the lexi-
con of performance studies, which, for all its flaws, actively embraces non-
Western performance, and rails against the tyranny of accepting
fundamental axioms that privilege specific methodologies, histories and
aesthetic hierarchies. In short, performance studies takes an eminently
pragmatic approach to performance.
Second, the anxiety I describe in meeting my class for the first time is a
form of performance anxiety that has a personal and professional dimen-
sion. The tension I described at the start of this chapter was partially due to
“imposter syndrome”: an anxiety disorder that manifests as series of affects
that reinforces the often-erroneous perception that a person is not good
enough or competent enough for their occupation (Simmons 2016). On
one level, my experience of “imposter syndrome” came from my lack of
teaching experience, but it also stemmed from anxiety about my class back-
ground and Anglo-Indian ethnicity. The University of Melbourne is—in
the context of higher education in Australia—an elite institution. Most of
its students come from wealthy backgrounds and possess significant stores
of cultural capital. I felt intimidated by my students’ wealth and social con-
fidence, despite finding myself in a position of authority underwritten by
institutional power. This is not a trivial observation about a subjective state
of being, for it points to complex and contradictory forces that frame peda-
gogical practices. How might “imposter syndrome” shape my attitude
towards students whom I perceive, rightly or wrongly, as privileged? How
might I compensate for this perceived inequality? Similarly, how might stu-
dents view my ethnicity and class identity in this educational context? And
how do such perceptions manifest in the relationship between teacher and
student? How might they also unsettle or consolidate the machinations of
the “teaching machine”? How do questions of affect and identity play out
within the energies that circulate between the participants of any given
54 G. D’CRUZ
educational transaction? As Ann Cooper Albright (2013, 219) notes,

“while issues of diversity are never confined to the physical body—they are
always implicated in social contexts and representational structures—they
are made present through our bodies.”
My anecdote shows how private and public identities manifest within
the context of teaching. It is worth noting that most chapters of this book
identify and critically examine the way personal dispositions (regimes of
value, emotions, moods, philosophical and political inclinations, among
other things) flow and/or overflow into the sites of education (the work-
shop space, the lecture theatre, the performing space, the cafeteria and so
on). Stucky and Wimmer (2002, 2) point out that “the classroom is a
charged space, a site of performance as well as a place invested in studying
performances. Teachers have increasingly come to understand the unique
characteristics of classrooms as environments where performance holds
particular power.” And as a “charged space,” the classroom generates and
circulates a broad range of unruly emotions. As Anna Gibbs (2001)
observes, “bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from
one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage,
exciting fear – in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and mus-
cles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion.” Bodies, feel-
ings, energies, affects: these terms are difficult to define, and their effects
hard to quantify, yet they release profound and palpable forces that shape
our behaviours in teaching situations. These forces are also theatrical, and
should be of interest to scholars interested in postdramatic theatre and
performance studies.
Finally, the corporate university provides the immediate context for my
engagement with postdramatic theatre, producing yet another form of
performance anxiety in the shape of institutional imperatives to generate
financial income, and articulating pedagogical objectives by following
strict utilitarian principles. This development in higher education around
the world has inspired a welter of critical commentary in recent years (for
example, see Newfield 2011; Roth 2014; Zakaria 2015). However, this is
not the only way specific institutional locations shape scholarly practice.
The rise of performance studies—especially in the United States (US) and
Australia—has also provided an important context for approaching theatre
as performance rather than as an ephemeral adjunct to dramatic literature.
Indeed, I approach postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective
shaped by my encounter with performance studies. This point of view not
only helps me formulate pragmatic questions about what to teach and
how to teach, but frames my readings of postdramatic theatre on the page,

stage and a plethora of other performance sites. That is why the bulk of
this chapter deals with the relationship between performance studies and
postdramatic theatre. As I demonstrate shortly, academic institutions have
been suspicious of the unstable, ineffable forces unleashed by performers,
and this may account for why the scholarly interest in theatre has histori-
cally valorised the dramatic text. Performance studies, as we shall see, has
played a crucial part in displacing what some critics, notably Jonas Barish
(1985), call the anti-theatrical prejudice. Therefore, understanding the
institutional history of performance studies as a discipline is important if
we are to understand how it provides a significant condition of possibility
for the success of Lehmann’s articulation of postdramatic theatre.
Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies

I owe my career to a hangover and an accident of birth. In the pre-digital
world, universities required undergraduate students to show up in person
to enrol in classes. It was a case of first in, best dressed. The most popular
units filled up quickly, and latecomers had to contend with scraps and
leftovers. Because of consuming copious amounts of intoxicating sub-
stances, I overslept, dragged a brush across my shaggy head of hair and
made a futile dash to the university, hoping I could still enrol in the sub-
jects of my choice. No such luck. I was keen on studying the contempo-
rary American novel, but by the time I made it to the enrolment hall, that
particular bundle of goodness was full, and I was forced to make do with
modern drama—one of the less popular options for literature majors
(most of my peers were into poetry and narrative prose).
As it turned out, the course was a blast. It was taught expertly by a
passionate and well-informed teacher who introduced her students to
the drama of the “century of innovation”—Oscar Brockett and Robert
Findley’s (1991) tome was one of the assigned readings. Each week
threw up a new and apparently more experimental dramatist. We
started with Henrik Ibsen and made our way through August
Strindberg, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom
Stoppard, David Storey and, finally, Peter Handke. Handke’s play
Offending the Audience (1996) made a particularly strong impression
on me, since it dispensed with most of the dramatic codes and conven-
tions I took to be essential components of dramatic literature. Handke’s
play was essentially a long string of observations and provocations
56 G. D’CRUZ
about the social ritual of attending a theatre performance, delivered by

four speakers. He provided a bizarre, esoteric set of stage directions—
“watch Ringo smile in A Hard Day’s Night,” “Listen to the Rolling
Stones sing ‘Tell Me’”—and did not attempt to create dramatic char-
acters or represent any closed fictional world (Handke 1971, 3).
Lehmann lists Handke’s work among other precursors to postdramatic
theatre. However, I encountered the play in a course about dramatic
literature. The play, not the performance, was the thing we were most
interested in, although class discussions sometimes strayed into the
world of performance.
My encounter with the theatre world was a consequence of being
the only Indian-looking person in the orbit of a group involved with
staging David Hare’s play A Map of the World (1983)—a work whose
main character is loosely based on the Indian novelist V.S. Naipaul. I
shared a flat with one of the cast members of this production, who
talked me into auditioning for the role of Victor Mehta. This was
despite my lack of experience and the obvious age difference between
Hare’s 40-something protagonist and me (I was 22). I got the part
(there wasn’t a great deal of competition—I was thrown into the world
with brown skin and black hair, which was the main qualification for
the role). This experience opened up new vistas and put a very differ-
ent spin on the work of playwrights I had read as a student of litera-
ture. Stage-struck, I decided to enrol in a theatre and drama studies
degree at the height of the theory revolution in the Australian acad-
emy. It was here that I encountered semiotics, continental philosophy
and performance studies—a heady brew of mind-altering discourses
that rivalled any of the hallucinogenic drugs readily available on cam-
pus. Those were exciting times, and I found Schechner’s writings on
performance especially seductive. From the outset, Schechner courted
contingency and refused to close his mind to any methodology that
might illuminate his objects of study or indicate new paths of critical
and creative enquiry.
This short biographical sketch is important, I think, not only because it
provides a frame for discussing the shifting focus from dramatic literature
to theatre performance—and an expanded conception of performance—
but because it also conveys something about my educational background.
There is little doubt that my particular journey through the labyrinthine
scholarship devoted to drama, theatre and performance has shaped the
way I teach postdramatic theatre today.
So much for my encounter with performance studies; let’s get down to

probing the relationship between postdramatic theatre and performance
studies. In her notorious review of the English-language version of
Lehmann’s book, Fuchs (2008, 180) states:
The reader may rightly wonder whether performance might have been a
rival rubric under which to organize the entire orientation of the postdra-
matic. The 10 pages titled, if not exactly devoted to, “Performance” near
the end of the book can hardly make a stab at such a discussion. Performance
here is shrunk to performance art, and seems caught in a time warp in which
the performer is “noticeably often a female artist [who] exhibits actions that
affect and even seize her own body.”
Fuchs is correct in pointing out that the concept of postdramatic the-

atre resonates with many of the critical interventions made within the field
of performance studies. Where Lehmann’s work has a distinctly European
focus, American performance studies, at least in theory, embraces a much
larger geographical domain. There is something eminently attractive in its
deliberate attempt to avoid theoretical and methodological dogma, and its
desire to swallow the big, wide world of performance. “Whatever works”
might be its mantra, and I would be remiss if I did not explore its reso-
nances with, and points of departure from, Lehmann’s vocabulary.
However, the key question, as Lehmann (2008, 15) points out in his
response to Fuchs’s review, is “what insights do you gain from choosing
performance or (postdramatic) theatre as a focus”?
Writing in 1982, Schechner (24) contended that “what happened
during the 60s and into the 70s was that performances originated from
many centers other than dramatic texts. Theories about what perfor-
mance was, or could be, gave rise to events rarely if ever seen before.”
Schechner (1988, 20) even uses the term “post-dramatic” with refer-
ence to happenings in his book Performance Theory, originally published
in 1977. However, whereas Schechner’s (2013, 2) “broad spectrum”
approach to performance encompasses a wide range of events—“ritual,
play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre,
dance, music), and everyday life performances”—Lehmann’s concept of
the postdramatic engages with a narrower range of aesthetic perfor-
mance events. This does not mean his theory is necessarily impoverished
by a tighter focus. For Hamilton (2008, 5), the idea of postdramatic
theatre “circumvents the performance/theatre dichotomy to specifically
58 G. D’CRUZ
encapsulate the development of the new theatre ‘text’—that is, forms of

composition ‘no longer dramatic’ insofar as text operates as one of a
number of elements and is deprived of its ‘codified royalty,’ to use the
words of Italian director Romeo Castellucci.”
Although it is a relatively young academic discipline, various scholars
have documented the genealogy of performance studies or written intro-
ductions to the field (Schechner 2013; Harding and Rosenthal 2011;
Jackson 2004; McKenzie 2001; Phelan 1998; Carlson 1996; D’Cruz
1995). There is little need to provide yet another detailed account of the
discipline’s formation considering the breadth of scholarship that already
exists. Instead, I sketch some of the discipline’s major themes and preoc-
cupations, and explain how they relate to postdramatic theatre. The fol-
lowing outline of the discipline’s major features also helps clarify its
centrality to the concerns of this book. In general terms, performance
studies addresses a wide range of performance practices. Schechner (2002)
describes the discipline in terms of “fundamentals.” The first is that “there
is no fixed canon of works, ideas, practices, or anything else that defines or
limits the field” (Schechner 2002, x). The second is that performance
studies enthusiastically borrows from other disciplines. In other words,
“there is nothing that inherently ‘really belongs to’ or ‘really does not
belong to’ performance studies” (Schechner 2002, x). Peggy Phelan
(1998, 4) provides a more concrete view of the field’s early incarnation
when she points out that it “was able to combine new work in critical
theory, literary studies, folklore, anthropology, postcolonial theory, the-
atre studies, dance theory, and feminist and queer studies while forging a
new intercultural epistemology.” But perhaps Shannon Jackson (2004,
15) provides the most cogent account of the field when she writes that
performance:
is about doing, and it is about seeing; it is about image, embodiment, space,

collectivity, and/or orality; it makes community and it breaks community; it
repeats endlessly and it never repeats; it is intentional and unintentional, inno-
vative and derivative, more fake and more real. Performance’s many connota-
tions and its varied intellectual kinships ensure that an interdisciplinary
conversation around this interdisciplinary site rarely will be neat and
straightforward.
Of course, these expansive and somewhat elusive conceptions of the

field invite dissension, debate and dispute, and some of these areas of con-
testation become apparent as we turn our attention to the connections
between this “non-discipline” and Lehmann’s account of postdramatic

theatre. The first and most obvious area of convergence lies in how the
formulations of performance studies and postdramatic theatre move in
and between the worlds of practice and the academy. Both areas engage in
the scholarly interrogation of performance practices. As James Harding
and Cindy Rosenthal (2011, 4) note, “Schechner has repeatedly drawn
significant connections between his performance practice and his scholarly
endeavors.” And in a long and distinguished career as one of the major
figures at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of
Gießen, Lehmann, along with Andrzej Wirth, is one of the first European
scholars to promote and institutionalise the mutually constitutive study of
artistic performance and critical theory. It is worth recalling that Schechner
worked at Gießen several times, so Schechner is no stranger to Lehmann.
The striking point for my argument in the present context is that perfor-
mance studies and postdramatic theatre have close, if complex, relation-
ships with the academy.
As I’ve already suggested, the location of artistic practice, in its myriad
forms, poses serious challenges for the gatekeepers and custodians of
knowledge. The messy materiality of performance practices, with their
propensity to unleash untamed energies and affects, even today unsettles
the institutional protocols that govern academic disciplines. In her book
Professing Performance, Jackson (2004, 5) points out—with reference to
the US scene—that the “modern university is itself a formidably complex
and self-contradicting array of institutional practices. Its modes of knowl-
edge production are propelled by the vagaries of institutional power, ped-
agogical process, and occupational structure as much as by felt desire and
intellectual curiosity.”
New disciplinary formations do not appear out of the ether because of
somebody’s intellectual passion. In “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault
(1981, 59) argues that “a discipline is defined by a domain of objects, a set
of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, a play of rules
and definitions, of techniques and instruments.” A “discipline” must be
capable of generating an infinite number of propositions, but these propo-
sitions must be intelligible within their frame of reference, or, as Foucault
would put it, within the discourse of the “true.” The academy is a strict
taskmaster, and its acceptance of a “new” discipline is conditional. For
example, theatre studies in a university environment cannot be solely con-
cerned with the production of performance texts. If the discipline is to
survive in an academic milieu, it needs to generate at least three other
60 G. D’CRUZ
features, which we might think of, after McKenzie (2001, 143), as “per-
formance pressures.” First, it must establish a research paradigm—it needs
to continually generate books, articles and thesis topics. Second, it must
formulate and develop a curriculum with clearly stated learning outcomes
and appropriate assessment tasks. Finally, a discipline must perform in eco-
nomic terms if it is to survive (its scholars must win research grants, and its
students must be employable). As McKenzie might put it, a discipline
must perform, in various ways, or else it risks annihilation. This is particu-
larly the case in today’s corporatised university.
The second and perhaps most important resonance between perfor-
mance studies and postdramatic theatre concerns the mutual interest in
ritual ceremony, liminal states of being and performance processes as
opposed to reified texts. Referring to the conditions of possibility that
enabled performance studies to coalesce as an academic discipline,
McKenzie (2001, 38) observes that “between 1955 and 1975 and across
a wide range of cultural practice and research, there was an attempt to
pass from product to process. From mediated expression to direct con-
tact, from representation to presentation, from discourse to body, from
absence to presence.”
Lehmann (2006) also identifies similar forces working within the mod-
ern drama paradigm that generate the conditions of possibility for post-
dramatic theatre. He consistently invokes terms such as energy and
presence to describe the processual and often “auto-sufficient physicality”
of postdramatic theatre, where the actor’s body no longer serves significa-
tion but functions as an unsettling “auratic” presence (Lehmann 2006,
95, 163). However, it is crucial to note that, for McKenzie, the “theory
explosion” unsettles and displaces verities about energy, presence and the
primacy of the body. Technological developments, too, make it impossible
to reify “auratic” performance uncritically. Lehmann (2006, 114–115)
also acknowledges the effect of technology as a mediating force that
undermines any simple valorisation of presence, especially in those post-
dramatic performances that use recorded and/or screen technologies.
The third area of resonance is best described as the privileging of effi-
cacy over entertainment (McKenzie 2001, 37). In simple terms, both the
discipline of performance studies and those theatrical works Lehmann
identifies as postdramatic tend to proffer various forms of political critique
while remaining indifferent to normative entertainment values, which are
mostly propagated by what Guy Debord (1967) calls “the society of the
spectacle”—that is, mediatised culture that uses the proliferation of images
(in film, TV, advertising and the internet) to mediate human relations by
substituting representations for reality. This is not to say that the perfor-
mance practices valorised by performance studies scholars and Lehmann
necessarily lack a sense of play and humour, since entertainment and effi-
cacy are not mutually exclusive categories (as we shall see in subsequent
chapters of this book). Rather, it is to see certain kinds of performance
events as having the potential to unsettle normative regimes of value and
representation. Political efficacy is a persistent theme both in Lehmann’s
work and performance studies scholarship, which traditionally adopts sub-
versive political positions informed by those adjacent disciplines—such as
feminism, multiculturalism, critical theory and cultural studies—that
emerged at approximately the same time as performance studies consoli-
dated its disciplinary identity (Jackson 2004, 23). Lehmann (2006,
184–185), too, espouses a critical politics, but locates political efficacy in
the manner that postdramatic theatre unsettles the spectator’s perception
of signs. As I pointed out in Chap. 2, Lehmann (2006, 85) argues that
postdramatic theatre contests and disturbs the false sense of unity pro-
moted by media society through challenging the normative power of its
representations by expanding presence, bodily intensity and reconfiguring
the relationship between performers and spectators.
Despite these resonances between performance studies and Lehmann’s
account of postdramatic theatre, it is important to reiterate that there are
significant differences between the “broad spectrum” reach of perfor-
mance studies—which, from its inception, has engaged with international
performance traditions and embraced intercultural exchange—and
Lehmann’s tight focus on the tensions and contradictions inherent in the
European modern drama paradigm. Despite Rustom Bharucha’s (1993)
trenchant criticism of interculturalism, and Schechner’s brand of intercul-
turalism in particular, performance studies continues to pursue engage-
ments with non-Western performances, and serves to remind us that
postdramatic theatre’s political efficacy, as theorised by Lehmann, has a
relatively narrow aesthetic focus that not only neglects questions con-
cerned with non-European performance practices, but, more importantly
for this book, questions of institutional power and disciplinary politics.
Finally, while performance studies opens up to embrace the performative
dimension of a wide range of social, cultural and political practices, the
concept of the postdramatic, as I have already stated, closes in on the nar-
row slice of the performance pie known as theatre practice. In the next
section of this chapter, I employ aspects of McKenzie’s general theory of
62 G. D’CRUZ
performance to redress this oversight and identify the ways performance

theory might provide valuable insights into the institutional and political
forces that shape pedagogical practices. I use McKenzie’s account of the
imperative to “perform or else” to establish a context for teaching post-
dramatic theatre.
Perform—Or Else?
Despite being written more than a decade and a half ago, McKenzie’s (2001)
book Perform or Else has never been so relevant to those interested in under-
standing the performative forces that drive the corporate university, which
provides the institutional context for most people who teach postdramatic
theatre (which is, as I have already claimed, very much an academic phenom-
enon). McKenzie’s book is a tour de force and was enthusiastically received by
performance studies scholars for its impressive scholarship, wit and ambition.
At the risk of reducing such an original contribution to the discipline to a few
key themes, I here provide a brief précis of McKenzie’s argument before
applying some of his insights to my current institutional context.
McKenzie develops a general theory of performance by first identifying
certain resonances between the way the term “performance” operates in three
distinct settings: the world of scholarly performance studies, the world of
business and the domain of technological performance. We can find the
imperative to perform or else operating within the realms of culture, manage-
ment and technology. McKenzie argues that, in each case, people are pres-
sured to perform or else suffer severe consequences that include expulsion,
demotion, public ridicule and even death. Of course, performance means
slightly different things in each context, although there are, now more than
ever, considerable resonances between these apparently distinct domains.
We have already seen how cultural performances operate with reference
to questions of political efficacy, although McKenzie is careful to point out
that the subversive, liminal cultural performances that garner so much
attention from performance studies scholars can often possess a normative
force—that is, cultural performances may serve or subvert the status quo.
There is certainly a cultural dimension to the practice of teaching, and we
need to be mindful of the ways our pedagogical practices may, overtly or
unconsciously, affirm and reinforce normative social relationships and per-
sonal identities. Performance management is, as McKenzie convincingly
demonstrates, a well-developed discipline with its own set of standards
and assumptions. Its foundational verities serve the imperative to perform
or else. Corporations attempt to manage their human and non-human

resources in a way that maximises profits for a minimal outlay of expendi-
ture and effort—as McKenzie puts it, they strive for minimal inputs and
maximal outputs. Failure to perform in this context usually results in
redundancy, but it is crucial to understand that performance management
is not a contemporary manifestation of Taylorism, a rational, utilitarian
calculation that resulted in the time and motion studies of the early indus-
trial age. The discourse of performance management today invokes terms
such as “flexibility” and “creativity” to describe the qualities of “high
achievers”—those who can implement operational and managerial changes
that inflate profit margins. Technological performance is perhaps the most
ubiquitous manifestation of the performance imperative. Today, digital
technologies—from computers to smartphones, from military missile sys-
tems to rocket science, from clean energy technologies to greenhouse gas-
emitting energy plant—need to perform to maximal standards of
engineering and scientific excellence. In a society in which, as Lev
Manovich (2013) notes, “software takes command,” the imperative for
technology to “perform or else” has never been greater.
Indeed, computers and new-media technologies permeate almost every
facet of educational practice today. For example, companies such as Oracle
sell cloud-computing software that enables universities to manage student
support, student engagement and recruitment, among other things.
Oracle (2017) also claims that their “software solutions” allow the busi-
ness of education to be “data driven” and “efficient”:
The rise of mobile, social, and analytic technologies has forced colleges and
universities to rethink their business models. All higher education institu-
tions must improve student outcomes and increase engagement—but,
unfortunately, traditional information systems can no longer keep up. Oracle
provides a modern technology platform that spans all layers of the cloud,
enabling a data-driven environment that delivers maximum value to faculty,
students, and staff.
Software has already taken command of most university functions. It

now shapes research, teaching and administration tasks in direct and covert
ways to maximise efficiency. Thus, the institutional context for teaching
postdramatic theatre is increasingly shaped by complex interactions
between cultural, corporate and technological performance imperatives,
which both constrain and enable pedagogical practices.
64 G. D’CRUZ
Let us imagine a hypothetical situation. After a careful and thorough

assessment, a university performance studies department rewrites its
curriculum to provide its students with units that reflect the best
insights offered by contemporary theory and practice in the perform-
ing arts. Moreover, this new programme is sequenced to ensure the
maximum degree of resonance between individual units, and to pro-
vide students with skills and knowledge that progressively build over
the course of a three-year degree. The academics responsible for this
revised iteration of their programme have invested lots of time and
effort in making sure their work meets stringent standards of perfor-
mance. The programme is designed to equip students with a broad
range of discipline-specific proficiencies and more general skills that
they can transfer to a wide range of work contexts. Their university
employs a new head of department a year after the new programme is
introduced. After careful consultation, the new head—an academic
with a scant publication record, but with apparently impeccable mana-
gerial credentials—determines that this department requires a whole-
sale restructuring if it is going to thrive in a precarious and challenging
education market.
The new manager might have based his decision to implement a
restructuring on the basis of having read EY’s analysis of the higher
education sector in Australia—this hypothetical scenario is set in
Australia, but EY (a rebranded firm formerly known as Ernst and
Young) is a multinational accounting firm with an interest in the per-
formance of a dizzying array of businesses all over the world. EY (2012,
4) asserts that “at a minimum, incumbent universities will need to sig-
nificantly streamline their operations and asset base, at the same time as
incorporating new teaching and learning delivery mechanisms, a diffu-
sion of channels to market, and stakeholder expectations for increased
impact.” The internet, they argue, has breached the barriers that once
gave the guardians of knowledge, ensconced in strategically located
ivory towers, a monopoly over the knowledge economy. Seekers of wis-
dom can now search the online world for information, most of which
is free. Moreover, some prestigious universities offer massive open
online courses (MOOCs) that threaten the existence of smaller, less
prestigious universities, and the entire sector is engaged in a global
battle for students. What is to be done? In the mind of the new head of
school, the way forward is clear. He sends a memo to staff quoting the
EY (2012, 4) report, which declares that the department will “need to

build significantly deeper relationships with industry in the decade
ahead—to differentiate teaching and learning programs, support the
funding and application of research,” while communicating to those
positioned at a higher level in the corporate bureaucracy that the
department can function as a driver of innovation and growth. Before
fully implementing their new curriculum, the one devised before the
appointment of their new manager, the performance studies academics
are dispatched back to their interactive, electronic whiteboards to
brainstorm ways to innovate and grow their programme—again. One
member of the despondent team speculates that every new manager is
compelled to implement change. Not, of course, for the sake of change
itself, but for the advancement of their career within what Marginson
and Considine (2000) call the “enterprise university.” After all, promo-
tion is dependent on good metrics and healthy key performance indica-
tors (KPIs). Perform—or else!
This hypothetical scenario will, I think, resonate with academics all over
the world. Universities appear to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of restruc-
turing to meet the challenges of efficiency (McKenzie 2001, 50). Over the
last three years, there have been major restructurings at the University of
Western Australia (Burrell 2016), the University of Sydney (Lavoipierre
2016), the University of Newcastle (McGowan 2017) and James Cook
University (2014)—to name only those institutions that have attracted
significant media coverage because of their often-outrageous attempts to
execute mass redundancies. The final vocabulary of education today is
managerialism, and it is important not to lose sight of this fact as we turn
our attention to questions regarding the value and ethics of teaching post-
dramatic theatre.
As I have already suggested, the imperative to perform manifests in a
variety of ways, and generates performance anxieties in teachers and stu-
dents that are always present in the pedagogical encounter. Earlier in this
chapter, I alluded to the affects and energies such encounters unleash. I
want to conclude the chapter by returning to the visceral forces we
ignore because of the difficulties involved in finding an appropriate
vocabulary to discuss unhappy or, to revert to managerial discourse,
“inadequate” encounters. The following stories are fictional, but based
on real incidents that have occurred within the context of teaching post-
dramatic theatre.
66 G. D’CRUZ
Nevaeh
I receive an email from a student during the first week of the new semester.
The student’s name is unfamiliar, and the content of her terse message
confirms she is not one of mine. She did, however, take one of the first-year
(freshman) units I chair. The missive does not address me personally, and
I can’t help feeling mildly offended by the tone of her communication:
Hey, I did your course last year. I failed because I just found out that my
tutor didn’t get my essay. I should just do it again, right?
I immediately tap out an equally terse, but formal, response:
Dear Nevaeh,
Can you please send me the name of your tutor and your student number?
I’ll investigate the matter and get back to you ASAP.
Regards,
Glenn
Nevaeh responds the next day.
She was that foreign-looking chick with the weird hair. My number is
7896662016.
Once again, the student dispenses with polite preliminaries and doesn’t
even address me by name. I never thought I cared much for social conven-
tions, but now I am pissed off. I immediately form an image of the student
in my head. She’s obviously a bogan (“white trash”). No doubt she’s uninter-
ested in study, and probably just going through the motions of attending uni-
versity to please her parents or claim some financial benefit. I can’t believe
standards have fallen so low. Fuck, I have better things to do than deal with
idiots.
I’m momentarily surprised by my bigotry and take a deep breath while
considering my next move. I call the “foreign-looking chick with the
weird hair,” one of my most accomplished and competent graduate stu-
dents. She consults her records and informs me that Nevaeh attended five
classes out of eleven. She missed the last four weeks of the class entirely,
and the online portal shows she never submitted her final essay. (The com-
puter system logs every piece of assessment students post. It also records
the amount of time they are logged into the system and provides a record
of the resources they access and the files they download. Academics can
monitor the online activities of students with a high degree of accuracy.)
Armed with this information, I write back to Nevaeh. Adopting the
formal, professional tone of the bureaucracy, I ask her if she has a copy of
her essay (which I am willing to grade, despite the four-month lag between
the student receiving and disputing her result).
Another few days pass. Here’s Nevaeh’s response:
Nah, don’t have it. My computer blew up. I’ll just do it again and send
it to you soon.
This variation on “the dog ate my homework” makes me laugh. They’ll

try anything on, I think to myself. I forward the email correspondence to
the head of my department. Her response contains all the conventional
pleasantries, but she is adamant that I allow the student to submit the
outstanding assignment. “We can’t afford to lose anybody. Our numbers
are very low this year.”
I concede defeat, and immediately tap out another email to Nevaeh,
informing her that I will grade her paper. In all probability, her work will
be dismal. Her interest in the essay topic (what is postdramatic theatre?) is
probably less than zero. She will produce a perfunctory, perhaps plagia-
rised, essay that I will grade with the enthusiasm of a man forced to visit a
proctologist. Perform—or else?
Neutral Scene
As the director and co-devisor of a student performance, I decide to insert
a neutral scene into the play at three different points. A “neutral scene”
most commonly refers to a short piece of dialogue between two or three
nameless characters. In fact, the characters in such works possess no mark-
ers of identity (such as race, gender or age). The text refers to characters
by letters or numbers. The dialogue does not refer to space and time,
either. The challenge for the performers of the neutral text lies in their
ability to evoke a dramatic world and build characters using the material in
hand—they need to fill in the blanks.
I can see that one group of students working on this task, three young
men, are having great difficulty with the exercise. They approach me for
68 G. D’CRUZ
help, and I make a few suggestions about how they might use pauses,
voice modulation, proxemic relationships and variations in bodily intensity
to make the scene more “theatrical.” They take up my suggestions, and
the scene comes to life. The specifics of what occurs are not important for
my purpose here—suffice it to say that I have a sense of pride and accom-
plishment in being able to use my experience and professional training to
act as a troubleshooter. Even though all I’ve done is what most competent
theatre directors or drama teachers would have done in a similar situation,
I can’t help feeling I’m at the top of my game. After many years of toil in
the theatre workshop, I no longer feel like an imposter. I go home that
night thinking that, on balance, I have actually learnt a lot about the
dynamics and variables that are always in play during rehearsals and classes.
The anxiety I experienced when observing my first class of talented stu-
dents at the University of Melbourne has dissipated—or so I think.
The next day, I walk into the theatre space feeling enthused and ready
to work. My class has had three weeks to polish their work before the
play’s first public performance. One of the groups, led by a very head-
strong and enthusiastic woman, is busy preparing an elaborate scene that
involves the use of multiple data projectors, screens and a very compli-
cated lighting set-up. This student had approached me earlier in the
semester and requested that I allow her to develop an extra scene, since
she felt her skills weren’t being wholly used by her collaborators. I had
consented with the proviso that I could not guarantee I would include the
scene if it did not fit the work’s overall aesthetic; I had also underscored
the fact that the work had to be of a high standard. Now, as she moves
around the space issuing directions to her performers, I can see that the
theatre technicians are not happy. The technical director pulls me aside
and tells me that the student’s technical requirements are very complex,
and most probably unviable without a lot of investment in terms of time
and money. “Let’s see what she’s got before making a call,” I say.
Finally, after about 45 minutes—that is, 45 precious minutes of rehearsal
time—the scene unfolds. In my view, it is a debacle: woefully underre-
hearsed, painfully earnest and technically intricate. Moreover, its use of
screens, which I had endorsed for the entire production, now seems
clumsy to me, and I decide to scrap the use of these items altogether. The
scene I’ve just witnessed depends on the use of screens, so it no longer
suits the aesthetic of the show. I take a deep breath and ask the other stu-
dents what they think. After an awkward pause, a few offer words of
encouragement while noting that the scene needs work. I choose to give
the student honest and frank feedback. I tell her that I had expected to see
something more polished, and could not justify the use of sophisticated
technology for a single scene. As I speak, I can see the student’s face go
cherry-red, and then huge crocodile tears start to run down her cheeks.
Before I can finish giving her my feedback, she runs out of the theatre,
sobbing uncontrollably. What have I just done? I feel a palpable chill in the
room. I ask one of the students near me if I have stepped out of line. She
just stares at me awkwardly. Have I been an asshole? Have I made a mis-
take in the manner of delivering feedback? As Stephen Wangh (2013, 43)
notes, “feedback is power-filled.” It is a fair point, but at this particular
moment I feel powerless. In a concise space of time, I have lost the confi-
dence of at least half the cast. The sense of accomplishment I had felt the
day before vanishes instantly.
I try to get on with business and brush off the incident. After asking the
students to set up for a run of the play, I excuse myself from the group and
go after the distressed student. I apologise for embarrassing her and try to
suggest ways we might be able to revise her scene so it could be better
integrated into the play. It is too late. The show goes on and the disgrun-
tled student continues with her work, but there is no question that many
of the students now harbour a thinly veiled hostility towards me that lasts
for the rest of the semester. What did Gibbs say about affects leaping from
one body to another? I now have a visceral sense of anxiety as I get on with
the job of directing the show, and immersed in forces that are difficult to
name, but which are clearly in play as the work progresses. I am reminded
of Teresa Brennan’s (2004, 1) observation about “feeling a room.” The
students, for the most part, behave professionally, and the season proceeds
more or less the way these things usually go, but I breathe a huge sigh of
relief at the end of the semester. Perform—or else?
* * *
These anecdotes are about two mildly traumatic incidents that generated
two different forms of anxiety about the principle of equality and mani-
fested as a set of visceral bodily sensations. The first story can be read as
the articulation of a trauma that unsettles my imaginary sense of authority
and demands a reconfiguration of the teaching persona. The errant stu-
dent’s disregard for my authority—which is then intensified by my supe-
rior’s demand that I accede to the student’s request—shatters the order of
things by requiring that I ask another question of myself: who am I for the
70 G. D’CRUZ
student? What is my proper place in her symbolic world? The second story
is a cautionary tale about the precarity of teaching. It does not matter how
experienced you may be, the messy business of having to assess perfor-
mances—aesthetic, academic or professional—makes the pedagogue,
among other things, a manager of knowledge and people. More impor-
tantly, this managerial function reveals that teaching always involves the
exercise of power. How do we negotiate these power relationships? Is it
possible to avoid, or at least minimise, the teacher’s managerial function
within the context of the corporate university? How might we address
questions of equality and power imbalances?
The next chapter explicitly addresses these issues of authority between
the educated and the ignorant, the masters and the slaves, the teachers
and the students. It does so by reading a celebrated devised perfor-
mance—Back to Back Theatre’s production of Ganesh Versus the Third
Reich—as a pedagogical parable that contains valuable lessons for anyone
involved in addressing the question of power relations in the various
scenes of teaching.
References
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University of California Press.
Bharucha, Rustom. 1993. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of
Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Brockett, Oscar G., and Robert Findlay. 1991. Century of Innovation: A History of
European and American Theatre and Drama Since the Late Nineteenth Century.
2nd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Burrell, Andrew. 2016. UWA Head Paul Johnson Quits After Rows with Staff,
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higher-education/uwa-head-paul-johnson-quits-after-rows-with-staff-stu-
dents/news-story/865d7e454678b528f0353985d2398158
Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and
Cooper Albright, Ann. 2013. Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of
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D’Cruz, Glenn. 1995. From Theatre to Performance: Constituting the Discipline
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Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
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Assets/University_of_the_future/$FILE/University_of_the_future_2012.pdf
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(2 (T198)): 178–183.
Gibbs, Anna. 2001. Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology
of Affect. Australian Humanities Review, December. http://australianhuman-
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Hamilton, Margaret. 2008. Postdramatic Theatre and Australia: A ‘New’ Theatre
Discourse. Australasian Drama Studies 52: 3–23.
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au/jcu-the-future/organisational-restructure
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Chapter 4
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical

Parable
A few weeks before the start of my second semester at the University of

Melbourne in 1989, my then-girlfriend took me to see Dead Poets Society
(1989). In the film, Robin Williams plays an eccentric and very charis-
matic teacher, John Keating, who implores his students to defy conven-
tion and “seize the day.” Williams employs his considerable skills as an
improviser and comedian to create a compelling and memorable charac-
ter who, on the surface, appears to function as a life-affirming master
pedagogue. Keating doesn’t merely teach literature; he “changes lives,”
or so the film’s trailer would have us believe. Keating, who is teaching at
a stuffy, elite school for boys, subverts the institution’s motto (“tradition,
honour, discipline”) through a series of compelling performances that
restore literature to the realm of life, as opposed to the stultifying domain
of scholarship (“dead poets,” Keating explains, “suck the marrow out of
life”). Williams pulls out all the stops to make his character charming and
irresistible—he performs Shakespeare with a thick slice of ham and races
through an impressive series of comic (and stentorian) voices while “act-
ing out” the literary canon. In many ways, the film creates the impression
that Keating is an exemplary pedagogue because of his ability to inspire
creativity and a non-conformist ethos in his students. The film also draws
attention to the fact that teaching is a performative act and that a teach-
er’s persona is crucial in the successful transmission of knowledge.
Novelists, dramatists and filmmakers regularly represent this performative

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_4
74 G. D’Cruz
dimension of teaching—Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), To Sir With Love

(1967), Oleanna (1992), Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) … the list goes on.
Arthur J. Sabatini (2002, 191) notes that pedagogy “is the type of perfor-
mance that is so common, so universally and historically threaded through
the human experience that its every feature has been parodied, not least
of all by people who have been students.”
Far from being inspired by the film, I was overcome with a desultory
feeling of mild irritation, which was exacerbated by my girlfriend’s incre-
dulity at my negative response:
“What’s the matter with you? You’re a fucking teacher!”
She rolled her eyes and said nary a word to me on the tram home. Her
silence spoke volumes. Although she didn’t say it, I was sure she thought
I must be a lousy teacher. After all, I was thinking the same thing. I
couldn’t quite put my finger on why I didn’t like the film. Perhaps it was
a consequence of my dismal debut as a university tutor. While I was cer-
tainly no John Keating, I have always been aware that to teach is to per-
form—or else! As I pointed out in the second chapter of this book, there
is an erotic dimension to teaching insofar as the activity requires seducing
an audience. If you fail to capture your students’ attention, especially
when teaching a “difficult” subject such as postdramatic theatre or “the-
ory,” all is lost. At this early stage in my career, I had not yet developed my
shtick or formulated a dynamic teaching persona. So, on one level, I am
sure I found Williams’s portrayal of Keating intimidating. On further
reflection, I came to realise that there was something else disturbing about
the film’s representation of the exemplary teacher: it was quasi-fascistic. As
Noah Berlatsky (2014) puts it, “rather than teaching the students to think
for themselves, Keating teaches them to think like him.” The film’s repre-
sentation of pedagogy assumes it is the teacher’s performance that plays
the most crucial role in facilitating learning.
This is not to say that teachers should adopt a dour, sober demeanour
to be effective. Rather, my invocation of Dead Poets Society identifies a key
theme of this book: power relations. All teachers find themselves enmeshed
in power relations that shape their actions, emotional dispositions and
ability to teach and learn. How might a charismatic teacher like Keating
facilitate learning? How might such a character impede students’ ability to
think critically? How central is the pedagogue to quality education? This
chapter is about providing a frame of reference for the case studies that
follow by addressing questions of power relations in pedagogy.
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable… 75
The previous chapter provided the institutional context for this book’s
investigation into the practice of teaching postdramatic theatre. This chap-
ter, in keeping with my deliberately pragmatic approach to theory, uses
Jacques Rancière’s provocative ideas about equality to interrogate some of
the normative verities concerning education and the relationship between
teachers and students. Rancière (1991, 7) argues that most educational
practices embrace a pedagogical myth that “there is an inferior intelligence
and a superior one.” This division is sustained by what Rancière (1991, 7)
calls “the principle of explication”:
The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method,

from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intel-
ligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to
the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the
student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle
of explication.
The pedagogical myth sustains the principle of explication, which func-

tions to make the teacher the master of knowledge and indispensable to
student learning. While the theme of equality permeates most of Rancière’s
work, he articulates it most explicitly in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991).
The book begins by telling a story—or a fable, as the work’s translator
would have it—about Joseph Jacotot, another teacher of literature, who
inadvertently stumbled upon a startling discovery about the processes of
learning. It is highly unlikely that Jacotot was a star teacher in the same
sense as the fictional John Keating, but Rancière claims that many people
praised his pedagogical skills. When Jacotot was forced to flee France in
the wake of the Bourbon Restoration of 1815 for his role in the revolution
of 1789, he took up a position in Holland and found himself having to
teach a group of students who didn’t speak French; and since the master
pedagogue spoke no Flemish, there was “no language in which he could
teach them what they sought from him” (Rancière 1991, 2). He sur-
mounted this seemingly impossible problem by asking his students to
study a bilingual edition of the novel Les aventures de Télémaque by
François Fénelon, which was originally published in 1699. This book
enabled the students to perform a word-by-word comparison of the
French and Flemish texts.
Jacotot instructed these students, through a translator, “to learn the
French text with the help of the translation. When they had made it
through the first half of the book, he had them repeat what they had
76 G. D’Cruz
learned over and over, and then told them to read through the rest of the
book until they could recite it” (Rancière 1991, 2). To his astonishment,
Jacotot found that his students learnt to write French through this pro-
cess. The key revelation for Jacotot concerns the pedagogical myth that
places the teacher, and his or her powers of explication, at the centre of the
learning process. Jacotot had conveyed nothing to his students in the way
of substantive knowledge about the French language; he had more or less
left them to their own devices after providing them with the bilingual ver-
sion of Fénelon’s novel. It was their engagement with the translation and
their desire to learn that enabled them to learn French (Rancière 1991, 9).
So what has Jacotot contributed to this apparent pedagogical miracle?
Rancière (1991, 9) puts it eloquently when he claims that Jacotot gave the
students “the order to pass through a forest whose openings and clearings
he himself had not discovered. Necessity had constrained him to leave his
intelligence entirely out of the picture—that mediating intelligence of the
master that relays the printed intelligence of written words to the appren-
tice’s. And, in one fell swoop, he had suppressed the imaginary distance
that is the principle of pedagogical stultification.”
Rancière (1991, 5) also identifies the master’s speech as an integral part
of the pedagogical myth and questions whether there is any substantive
reason for assuming that such speech is indispensable to student learning.
He writes that the principle of explication:
presupposes that reasonings are clearer, are better imprinted on the mind of
the student, when they are conveyed by the speech of the master, which dis-
sipates in an instant, than when conveyed by the book, where they are
inscribed forever in indelible characters. How can we understand this para-
doxical privilege of speech over writing, of hearing over sight? What relation-
ship thus exists between the power of speech and the power of the master?
He goes on to make the now-commonplace observation that children

learn most effectively when they are, more or less, allowed to mimic and
play (Wangh 2013, 10). After all, he says, the thing we all learn most effi-
ciently is our mother tongue, which requires no formal instruction at all.
Rather, parents speak to their children and talk to each other around them.
Thus, through processes of trial and error and acts of imitation and repeti-
tion, children “at too young an age for explicators to begin instructing
them, […] are almost all—regardless of gender, social condition, and skin
color—able to understand and speak the language of their parents”
(Rancière 1991, 5). Writing in a different register and pedagogical con-

text, Stephen Wangh (2013, 6) claims that young children, especially
babies, are remarkable learners because they are experimenters whose
explorations are unfettered by what I have been calling, after Rancière, the
principle of explication.
This précis of Rancière’s ideas about equality and pedagogy provides a
useful framework for engaging with the first theatre production in this
book, but it is not my intention in this chapter to dwell on the way Ganesh
Versus the Third Reich may or may not function as an example of postdra-
matic theatre. At the time of writing, I have not lectured or taught a class
about this play, yet it has, in many ways, inspired many of the ideas I
articulate in the following chapters. Of course, it is certainly possible to
approach this exemplary work as a form of devised postdramatic theatre. I
could identify how it may offer spectators “an unmediated sense of the
real” (Lehmann 2006, 134), or point out how it prioritises theatricality
over drama or any of the other features of postdramatic theatre I identified
in Chap. 2. However, in this section of the book, I want to use the play as
a point of departure for thinking about teaching and what we might call
Rancière’s principle of equality—that is, the idea that all intelligence is
equal. On the face of it, this is a bold and faintly absurd proposition, but
let us leave this issue to one side for the moment and focus on the play
itself, with particular reference to the growing body of criticism that
responds to the complex ethical challenges it generates. This brief synopsis
of the play’s scholarly reception will enable a richer understanding of how
it connects with Rancière’s principle of equality and, consequently, why it
functions as a compelling parable about teaching.
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich

Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is a play about powe (see Image 4.1)r. It is
also, as one cast member puts it, “a very powerful play.” Most critics con-
cur, and most scholarly commentary on the work addresses the way it
generates awkward, perhaps irresolvable, questions about the ethics of
spectatorship as well as the ethical conundrums caused by Back to Back
Theatre’s creative practices. These aporias, which I recount in detail
shortly, make the play one of the most ambitious and harrowing pieces of
theatre I have ever seen. However, Ganesh is also about other things: the
overcoming of apparently insurmountable obstacles, the relationship
between reality and performance, the representation of intellectual dis-
78 G. D’Cruz
Image 4.1 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, courtesy Back to Back Theatre.
Photograph by Jeff Busby
ability, the status of the disabled body and, most importantly for this chap-
ter, the (im)possibility of equality. Further, since there is a considerable
overlap between teaching students and directing plays, a close analysis of
the play enables us to identify several of the major ethical and pedagogical
contradictions that are engendered by teaching postdramatic theatre.
Formed in the late 1980s in the city of Geelong, Back to Back Theatre is a
unique company. First, it is “the only full-time professional acting ensemble in
Australia” (Grehan and Eckersall 2013, 15). Second, some of its members
have intellectual disabilities. Significantly, these people work alongside neuro-
typical people under the artistic direction of Bruce Gladwin. So, on one level,
Ganesh is about the politics of making a play with intellectually disabled indi-
viduals who may or may not be wholly aware of what they are doing. Put
simply, Ganesh is a metatheatrical work that skilfully weaves its two narrative
threads together in a mutually enriching manner. One story concerns the
Hindu deity Ganesh, the elephant god of obstacles, who is on a mission to
reclaim his sacred symbol, the swastika, from the Nazis. This is a story suf-
fused with myth, an apparently simple tale of good versus evil, right against
wrong. Ganesh is a hero who must overcome a variety of obstacles before
realising his goal and defeating the villainous Nazis.
The other story is about the process of devising this first tale, and it
explicitly exposes the power relations at play in the creative process. This
part of the performance appears to be a fictionalised and exaggerated ver-
sion of what transpired during the development of the work, which took
around five years (Gladwin and Gough 2013). David Woods, a neurotypi-
cal guest member of the company, plays a director who is attempting to
shape and rehearse the Ganesh story. The choice of pitting Ganesh against
the Nazis is an inspired one. The Nazis, as we all know, were obsessed with
racial purity, and attempted to exterminate those members of the German
population deemed degenerate or abnormal. The notorious Dr. Joseph
Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” conducted experiments on so-
called “mongoloids” in the interests of “science.” Thus, the play pits the
Nazis against Ganesh, whose righteous quest to recover the Nazi swas-
tika—which bears a striking resemblance to the elephant god’s sacred sym-
bol—resonates with the structure of many mythological narratives.
In another inspired aesthetic choice, “the director” functions as an
exemplar of charismatic fascism (he is a cross between John Keating from
Dead Poets Society and Adolf Hitler). Put in more sober terms, “the direc-
tor” is a mostly benevolent dictator who is prone to fits of inchoate rage
when things don’t go his way. He possesses what we might call an “artistic
temperament,” which appears to fuel the frustration he expresses towards
his collaborators throughout the play. His dictatorial behaviour turns him
into a little Hitler (another person with a volatile artistic temperament—
let’s not forget that Hitler was a failed artist).
The Ganesh story is told through some ingeniously simple techniques—
masks, projections and conventional stage lighting—but it is the rehearsal
story that has the greatest effect on the audience. The director treats his
charges—the intellectually disabled actors—with tenderness and compas-
sion at times, but he is also capable of losing his religion, and humiliating his
cast when he runs out of patience with their limitations as performers. The
play also enacts a very sophisticated and complex game with the audience by
consistently undermining its “reality status.” It is impossible to ignore the
fact that the performers on stage—except “the director”—are intellectually
disabled. It is also impossible to suspend disbelief and see them as represent-
ing fictional characters. This is despite the fact that they are, of course, play-
ing fictionalised versions of themselves in the metatheatrical rehearsal. What
is perhaps most unsettling is that, at times, the dialogue draws attention to
the fact that audiences are watching actors who may have difficulty compre-
hending the distinction between fact and fiction, play and world, represen-
tation and reality (consistent features of postdramatic theatre, incidentally).
80 G. D’Cruz
Helena Grehan (2013, 197) argues that the play “unsettles its audience
on ethical grounds—so that the ability to feel, think and respond to the
issues being addressed in a way that allows spectators to make sense of
them becomes almost impossible.” Leaving aside the spectator’s ethical
dilemma for a moment, it is also important to ask how it might be possible
for the neurotypical members of the company to find an ethical way to
collaborate with people who may not fully comprehend instructions and
directions. Grehan (2013, 198) observes that the staged debates “about
comprehension, inclusion and group dynamics seem so real and deal with
questions ‘we’ (as non-disabled spectators) think ‘they’ (as a company of
artists with disabilities) must negotiate, they leave spectators unmoored
and uncertain.” Uncertainty and contradiction are leitmotifs in much of
the critical commentary devoted to the work produced by Back to Back
Theatre (Grehan 2013; Schmidt 2013; Scheer 2013; Calvert 2016). This
is largely a consequence of the fact that the majority of the company’s
performers are disabled, and that disability—at least in most Western cul-
tures—makes people uncomfortable. As “the director” notes in the
rehearsal strand of Ganesh: “The thing is people have problems with us
blurring reality and fiction because you are a group of people with intel-
lectual disabilities” (quoted in Grehan and Eckersall 2013, 184). So let us
pause here, and unpack Grehan’s observation concerning the play’s unset-
tling effect on its audiences. What are we seeing? And what can the work
teach us about teaching?
Disability and the Distribution of the Sensible

With regard to the first question, we are witnessing, in Ganesh, a particular
“distribution of the sensible.” That is, an essentially aesthetic, as opposed
to rational, way of organising what we can see and understand. In this
chapter, I want to underscore Rancière’s view that people who occupy dif-
ferent positions in the social and political order of things possess different
senses—different ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, acting and so on. The
concept of the distribution of the sensible reveals that politics “revolves
around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the
ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and
the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2004, 6). Our identities and capacities
to perform certain activities are demarcated by distributions of the sensi-
ble—rich folk process sensory information differently from the poor, just
as disabled people are marked by their distinctive ways of seeing, hearing

and being. The Back to Back performers unsettle the order of things by
confounding audiences’ expectations of what disabled people can or can-
not do. In a post-show discussion of Ganesh:
A man in the audience stood up and threw a metaphorical grenade into the
room. “I don’t believe these people made this work,” he said. “I have
worked with people like this and I don’t think they are capable of it.” One
of the actors, Scott Price, livid at the presumption, stood up, grabbed the
microphone and said: “Well mate, you can just get out of here because what
you said is so wrong and so offensive.” (Coslovich 2011, 20)
Calvert (2016) argues that Price’s statement contests the spectator’s

declaration by illustrating that the work’s contradictions—those unset-
tling statements in the script concerning the cast’s ability to comprehend
what they are doing—undermine the belief that being “intellectually dis-
abled” delimits the potentialities of those people whose lives are defined
by this category of identity. To put it differently, identity categories such
as “disabled” never wholly define people, regardless of their relationship
to normative distributions of the sensible. This observation brings us back
to questions of teaching, learning and the politics of pedagogy.
“How do you learn all those lines?” Actors are frequently asked this
question, as Antony Sher (2015) and others attest. Not only do actors
have to learn large slabs of text, but they also have to absorb a broad
range of spatial cues. If you have ever performed in a play (or a closely
related mode of performance, such as live art), you might have asked
yourself some of the following questions: when do I move from one
position on the stage to another? How far away do I stand from my
interlocutors? How do I articulate my lines? Do I whisper, scream or
shout? Who do I look at? Where do I look? Do I stand and deliver or
walk and talk? What about my facial expressions? Do I smile, wink, blink
or keep my eyes tightly closed? Of course, we may not make all these
decisions consciously, but, regardless of your particular brand of training
or experience, acting is a formidably difficult activity. Devising an origi-
nal work from i mprovisations, as Back to Back does, adds another signifi-
cant layer of complexity to its artistic practice. Bruce Gladwin, the
company’s artistic director, states that improvisation is its “fundamental
writing tool” (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 1). So how does one impro-
82 G. D’Cruz
vise? The voluminous literature on this topic identifies several other

complex skills: do I always “take up the offer” proffered by my partners?
How do I define the dramatic situation after I receive directions from a
facilitator? How much of myself do I reveal? The trials and anxieties of
the improvising actor or devisor are legion. How do people with intel-
lectual disabilities negotiate these complex problems? What does it mean
to be an actor with an intellectual disability? Gladwin points out that
Ganesh was, in a sense, conceived to counter accusations that the Back to
Back actors were incapable of producing complex work. In a revealing
interview with Richard Gough, he states:
Alright, if you think the actors aren’t capable of making work like this, we’re
going to make something even more complex. And it’s going to be really
detailed and layered and, not only that, we’re going to get the actors to
speak in three languages, and you’re not going to doubt their competency
and command over what they’re doing. (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 252)
The critical commentary generated by Back to Back deals with intel-

lectual disability as a theoretical problem of signification. Both Schmidt
(2013) and Calvert (2016), in their different ways, grapple with this issue.
Calvert (2016, 140) identifies the tension between the identity categories
of “actor” and “disabled” in the following manner:
The actor, concerned with the dramatic representation of character, is

expected to possess mimetic flexibility, while learning disability is under-
stood as a fixture of identity that constrains mimetic prowess. This, in turn,
complicates the relationship between learning disability and individuality, as
intellectual impairment becomes perceived as the substance of identity, con-
fusing it with the actor’s own character. In that reading, it determines, rather
than obscures, the individual.
As Gladwin (quoted in Calvert 2016, 140) puts it: “‘There’s a guy with
Down’s syndrome. I wonder if he’s playing a person with Down’s syn-
drome?’ I think that’s a tension that the audience is never released from.”
This pressure perhaps best explains the unsettling effect the company has
on its audience.
This still leaves us with the problem of how the work is made. Yoni Prior
(2013) gives us some insight into the company’s artistic process through
her account of observing some of the rehearsals for Ganesh, and it is this
account that has enabled me to identify how this play resonates with the
problems generated by teaching postdramatic theatre. But before engag-

ing with Prior’s work, I want to return to the question of audience recep-
tion in general terms, for it is within Rancière’s account of the paradox of
the spectator that we find the most compelling reason for thinking about
the connections between the theatre and pedagogy.
The Paradox of the Spectator

I saw Ganesh Versus the Third Reich at the Geelong Performing Arts Centre
on 3 March 2013, long after it had received critical acclaim all over the
world. It should be evident that I think the play is a momentous achieve-
ment, partly for the reasons articulated by the scholars I have already cited
in this chapter (Grehan, Scheer and Calvert). However, while questions
concerning ethical ambiguity and the politics of spectatorship were among
the things I thought about after witnessing the play, I was especially fasci-
nated and repulsed by David Woods’ performance as “David, the direc-
tor.” Grehan (2013, 203) notes that:
As the “director” David plays a key role in the rehearsal story, he seems ini-
tially concerned to open up the performance space to all of the actors. His
negotiations with the cast move from facilitation to aggravation and finally
to his decision to quit and his departure. His parody of a theatre “director”
as someone we could encounter in a community theatre context where
“empowerment through the arts” may be the catch cry is both funny and
disturbing.
I wholeheartedly endorse Grehan’s observation that Woods plays a

key role in the rehearsal story, but I think the character is more than a
parody of a kind of theatre director commonly found in community
theatre. Woods draws on his vast experience in the theatre to create his
monstrous character, and there is little doubt that his portrayal is some
exaggerated version of himself or the artists he has worked with during
his career. Gladwin points out that Woods “drew a lot on his experi-
ences in training institutions and (from) University lecturers, directors
running workshops” (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 253). On one level,
it is almost facile to say that Woods’ character resembles a teacher.
Naturally, his role as director gives him power and authority, which is
intensified by the fact that he is not intellectually disabled. David the
director calls the shots, he directs the actors, he goads and cajoles them
84 G. D’Cruz
into performing tasks he believes will produce exciting, incisive the-

atre. In this respect, he is a teacher (as are many professional theatre
directors, I might add). He is in charge, he sets goals and he knows
what he wants. He embodies knowledge and intelligence and consis-
tently questions his actors’ ability to comprehend and execute his com-
mands. It is this division between different qualities of intelligence that
makes the play function as a parable about the politics of teaching.
Before identifying the ways that Ganesh illuminates the complexities of
pedagogical power relations, it is worth noting that Rancière also iden-
tifies structural parallels between theatre practice and teaching, which
we can apprehend by paying attention to the opposition between pas-
sivity and activity. Let us begin with passivity in the theatre.
In his book The Emancipation of the Spectator, Rancière (2009)
argues that theatrical discourse—especially discourse concerned with
political efficacy—reinforces the mostly passive role of the audience,
which is accorded a negative value. Actors do stuff; spectators merely
watch. For Rancière, the Brechtian imperative to turn the performer
into a politically engaged activist through formal aesthetic devices
(such as the famous A-Effect) assumes that the spectator needs to be
shaken from their passive narcotic slumber. Elizabeth Wright (1989,
13) discovered that Brecht wrote about his theatre practice with refer-
ence to something he called major pedagogy and minor pedagogy. He
believed epic theatre, as practised in conventional theatre spaces, rep-
resented a form of minor pedagogy, since its primary goal was to inspire
spectators to take political action in the real world by presenting con-
tradictions and injustices on stage. Major pedagogy, by contrast, mani-
fested in the learning plays (the Lehrstücke), which abolished the
separation between spectator and audience altogether. The partici-
pants, no longer spectators but actors themselves, learnt political les-
sons through performance. They transformed themselves by becoming
active participants in the Lehrstücke. Rancière (2009, 7) provides a neat
summation of this tendency:
Theatre is an assembly in which ordinary people become aware of their situ-

ation and discuss their interests, says Brecht following Piscator. It is, claims
Artaud, the purifying ritual in which a community is put in possession of its
own energies … the theatrical stage and performance thus become a
vanishing mediation between the evil of spectacle and the virtue of true
theatre. They intend to teach their spectators ways of ceasing to be specta-
tors and becoming agents of a collective practice.
This opposition between negative passivity and positive activity has an

analogue in the world of education. Indeed, as Rancière himself points
out, his views concerning the theatre’s political efficacy in The Emancipated
Spectator owe a debt to the argument about intelligence and inequality he
articulates in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This is most evident when he
contends that the “self-vanishing mediation is not something unknown to
us. Rather, it is the very logic of the pedagogical relationship: the role
assigned to the schoolmaster in that relationship is to abolish the distance
between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus” (Rancière
2009, 8). Consequently, teachers are judged on their ability to close this
gap or, perhaps more accurately, on their ability to create the appearance
of turning the “ignorant” into the “educated.”
The Paradox of the Pedagogue

As we saw in the previous chapter, the imperative to perform in the corpo-
rate university manifests in several different ways. Student evaluations of
teaching are ubiquitous and provide one method of assessing pedagogical
efficiency and efficacy. In my experience as a teacher at several different
Australian universities, this mechanism of surveillance usually takes the
form of multiple-choice questionnaires, which include an option for stu-
dents to provide qualitative feedback in the shape of general commentary.
These surveys ask students to assess whether a unit has been taught well.
More specifically, they seek information about whether teachers provide
clear instructions, and set assessment tasks at an appropriate level. They
are also concerned with discovering whether teachers provide prompt and
constructive feedback and so on. Paul Ramsden (1991, 129) provides a
brief rationale for performance-indicator surveys when he writes:
The development and application of performance indicators (PIs) in higher

education systems that are supported by large quantities of public money is
a direct result of efforts by national governments to increase universities’
and colleges’ accountability to their paymasters. The idea of public account-
ability is, in its turn, the result of highly political pressures in many OECD
countries towards linking higher education more closely to the goal of eco-
nomic growth.
Ramsden (1991, 144), an advocate for evaluation surveys, believes they

“possess good statistical qualities; they have a sound conceptual basis;
there is compelling evidence of their validity in terms of associations with
86 G. D’Cruz
the quality of student learning, student satisfaction, and lecturers’ reports

of their own attitudes to teaching.” However, there is a growing body of
critical literature that contests this view and identifies the intellectual and
ideological presuppositions that underpin the drive towards quantifying
performance efficacy (Eisner 2002; Axelrod 2002; Edwards and Roy
2017). The practice of teaching within a context obsessed with metrics
and measurements, inputs and outputs, necessarily equates good peda-
gogy with clearly identifiable aims and objects. As Eisner (2002, 10)
explains:
In Western models of rational decision making, the formulation of aims,

goals, objectives, or standards is a critical act; virtually all else that follows
depends upon the belief that one must have clearly defined ends. Once ends
are conceptualized, means are formulated, then implemented, and then out-
comes are evaluated. If there is a discrepancy between aspiration and accom-
plishment, new means are formulated. The cycle continues until ends and
outcomes are isomorphic.
I would add that not only does such an approach manifest as yet another
form of performance pressure, but also produces narrow conceptions of
educational value by assuming that it is possible to accurately measure
pedagogical outcomes in the first place. I have sometimes been puzzled by
qualitative student feedback about my teaching, especially when students
make statements about what they have learnt from my lectures or work-
shops. There is no guarantee that there is always a strong correlation
between what I think I am teaching and what a student takes from my
classes. This is not to say that as teachers we should throw our game plans
out the window and wing it. Rather, it is imperative to acknowledge that
students are never passive spectators. They come to the class, lecture,
workshop or rehearsal with a plethora of knowledge and experience about
a wide range of phenomena. And what personal baggage they bring to
class—things such as mood, political disposition and sense of self-will
shape what they might take away from any given pedagogical encounter.
Moreover, their very presence alters the status of knowledge or skill we
might teach. The emancipation of the spectator, for Rancière (2009, 14),
may “begin with the realisation that viewing actively transforms and inter-
prets its objects; what she sees, feels and understands from the perfor-
mance is not necessarily what the artist thinks she must.” Similarly, the
emancipation of the student—who occupies a structurally similar position
to the spectator regarding their relation to knowledge—might begin with

the pedagogue’s realisation that what she learns from any given “lesson”
may have little to do with specified learning objectives. According to
Rancière (2009, 10), the spectator, like the student, “observes, selects,
compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that
she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her
own poem with the elements of the poem before her.” The much-maligned
spectator need not be judged according to some quantifiable measure of
political efficacy. The measure of activity, then, is no longer measured by a
narrow conception of action. A spectator does not have to raise a people’s
army and mount a violent assault on the edifice of capitalism, or copulate
with the cast of an experimental theatre production, to demonstrate their
activity and, hence, the efficacy of the performance they have witnessed.
So, what does all this talk of the spectator’s emancipation have to do with
the politics of teaching? The emancipation of the spectator and student is
something that can only occur when performers and pedagogues let go of
the desire to measure or determine the meaning of any given activity.
These masters need to stand aside and acknowledge that they often func-
tion as impediments to the very goals they hope to achieve. In the final
section of this chapter, I argue that Back to Back Theatre’s approach to
“making shows” can teach us something about emancipation and peda-
gogy by identifying the obstacles that work against dynamic learning, both
on the stage and in the context of teaching postdramatic theatre.
Ganesh as Pedagogical Parable

In her evocative and insightful account of Back to Back Theatre’s rehearsal
process, Prior (2013, 209) points out that the company’s work “prob-
lematizes conventional notions of ability, technique and talent that are
already complex and contested in the field of contemporary performance.”
Back to Back unsettles common conceptions about performance virtuos-
ity. The fact that this remarkable ensemble produces work of such a con-
sistently high quality, I contend, is a consequence of it working from a
position that recognises “the equality of intelligence,” as articulated by
Rancière. The company contests and intervenes in the dominant or nor-
mative distribution of the sensible. It actively claims an equality of intelli-
gence by showing us that marginalised, uncounted members of the social
distribution are capable of far more than those who are counted in the
normative distribution sometimes acknowledge. Expressed another way,
88 G. D’Cruz
Back to Back Theatre presents an ethical challenge for those of us who

believe identity designations (such as “intellectually disabled”) wholly
determine one’s capabilities and place in the order of things. The scholarly
response to the company’s work engages with this ethical challenge, but
should not restrict the lessons we can learn from Ganesh in terms of ques-
tions of disability or theatre practice. As I hope I have demonstrated, the
play addresses issues of emancipation for all of us who, at one point or
another, have found ourselves oppressed and limited by the distribution of
the sensible. What follows contests the normative allocation of the sensible
in the world of pedagogy by identifying—with the aid of Prior’s essay—
the key ethical fault lines that emerge in the rehearsal space as part of the
devising process that produced Ganesh.
As an “emancipated” spectator sitting in the Geelong Performing Arts
Centre, watching a performance of Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, I kept
thinking about teaching. More specifically, I was thinking about my teach-
ing practice and the extent to which the power relations dramatised in the
play are present in all collaborative situations. The fact that I regularly
direct student plays made me especially attentive to Woods’ portrayal of
“the director.” My students do not usually have intellectual disabilities,
and I would like to think that my teaching persona is utterly unlike David’s
authoritarian figure. As I watched the rehearsal story play out, I was struck
by how the play generated questions about the function of authority, trust,
dissent, consent and risk. These issues are as pertinent to pedagogy as they
are to all other forms of collaborative activity.
Prior’s description and analysis of Back to Back’s rehearsal process
reveals that the act of collaboration can be fraught with dissension, dis-
agreement and confusion. Moreover, her examination of an exemplary
scene also confirms what all directors, devisors and teachers know: the
pursuit of artistic excellence is a risky enterprise, especially when working
with vulnerable actors. Prior’s work focuses on a particularly contentious
improvisation, which took place on 29 March 2011 (the improvisation-
generated Scene 15, “Scott’s Aired a Couple of Things”). From what I
gather from her account, the real-life director of the show, Bruce Gladwin,
initiates the improvisation by issuing a provocation. He asks one of the
actors, Scott, if he has any concerns about the show they are rehearsing—
Gladwin states that his role in improvisations is to set up a framework for
the performers (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 251). Scott consistently plays
devil’s advocate to David’s dictatorial “director” in the improvisation, and
Prior (2013) observes that he aggressively questions David. He tells him

that the show is “shit” and goes on to state that he does not believe the
company should be making a play about psychopaths like Hitler and
Mengele (Mengele was the notorious Nazi doctor responsible for imple-
menting the Aktion T4 policy that enabled certain medical practitioners to
recommend involuntary euthanasia for patients deemed physically or
mentally deficient). Another member of the company, X, agrees with
Scott, but when Scott impatiently asks this actor—whom Prior does not
name, to preserve his or her privacy—what they mean, the improvisation
becomes tense. The actors exchange insults and X leaves the space in tears.
X then returns, and the situation becomes even more fraught. As in the
corresponding scene in the final play, David then issues a series of vacuous
platitudes about each actor’s strengths. He thanks them for “sharing their
truth” and the “essence” of their beings (Prior 2013, 180). All of this
cringeworthy material is present in the final script, and while Prior’s
description of the rehearsal that yielded this material provides an illumi-
nating insight into the company’s creative process, it also reveals the ethi-
cal challenges involved in devising such work. Part of the tension
responsible for making X burst into tears was related to what Prior (2013,
212) calls “the reality line.” That is the line that separates the world and
activity of the rehearsal from the real world. Prior (2013, 212) confesses
her anxiety after witnessing the rehearsal, which she attempts to confront
by asking the following questions:
Why did X lose “the reality line”? Could the loss be attributed to intellectual
disability? Had s/he not understood or attended to the instructions? Was it
because Scott in the improvisation is not distinctly different from Scott in
the real world? Had the intensity of Scott’s performance energy and com-
mitment to the improvisation blurred the line between acting and
behaving?
As I established in Chap. 1 of this book, you do not have to be a partici-

pant in an improvisation to cross “the reality line.” The “Artaud incident” I
described in Chap. 2 shows that spectators can feel traumatised by merely
witnessing a performance that triggers a distressing personal memory. The
Back to Back improvisation highlights the fact that precarious exercises may
produce compelling material, but also open up the possibility that partici-
pants in such activities might become anxious and distraught. Risk, how-
90 G. D’Cruz
ever, is a fundamental component of Back to Back’s creative practice. So

what constitutes an appropriate duty of care in such a context? How does
the director wield authority? How do they deal with dissent? What consti-
tutes appropriate feedback? Is it possible to establish trust? What happens
when you lose the trust of your charges? What role do personality and emo-
tional disposition play in creating a productive rehearsal (or teaching) envi-
ronment? All these questions are equally relevant to pedagogical situations,
which is one of the primary reasons I found Ganesh so enthralling. Indeed,
these issues frame the anxieties and aporias I explore in the rest of this book.
Finally, as this chapter has demonstrated, Back to Back Theatre is not
afraid of taking artistic risks that have personal consequences for company
members. It deliberately embraces controversial material and confronts
uncomfortable taboos concerning the place and representation of intellec-
tually disabled people in the distribution of the sensible. The company prac-
tises what Lehmann (2006, 186–187) calls “an aesthetics of risk”—that is,
a creative practice that knowingly assaults spectators’ sensibilities by con-
fronting them with challenging, ambiguous material that makes it difficult
to understand what is involved in ethical spectatorship (Grehan 2013). And
what of a “pedagogy of risk”? How might such a practice develop within the
corporate university, an institution concerned with “risk management” and
the maximisation of income-generating outputs? To teach postdramatic the-
atre by engaging with an “aesthetics of risk” involves finding a way to sub-
vert the rationalist vocabulary of the corporate university by creating
“playful” situations that enable students to disrupt the order of things. This
is a formidable task, as the following chapters demonstrate.
I opened this chapter with an anecdote about my antipathy towards the
film Dead Poets Society, a work that offers a model of how one might per-
form the role of an inspiring pedagogue. Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
presents an alternative approach to pedagogy in the form of “the direc-
tor,” a sinister character who both overtly and covertly manipulates his
actors to achieve his artistic ambition: to produce “edgy, exciting mate-
rial” (Ganesh Script 2013, 184). Scene 19 (2013, 189–192) provides one
example of David’s sadistic, authoritarian approach to directing. He is
trying to teach Scott how to convey the experience of being shot

realistically:
SCOTT: How am I meant to do it? Can’t we fake it?

DAVID: We are faking it, but we’re faking it well. We’re not faking it
stupid.
SCOTT: I’ll try it once more.

DAVID: No.
SCOTT: Why not?
DAVID: Because you’re moving from your hips and thighs.
SCOTT: Can we stop this please? I can only do what I can do. (2013,
191)
The scene becomes increasingly tense until Scott, who is trying his best
to follow David’s directions, loses his patience and angrily vents his frus-
tration: “Go and get fucked cunt” (2013, 191). At this point, David “loses
it,” becomes angry and aggressive and barks a serious of commands: “No.
You get back to your chairs so he can get back on his fucking mat. Get on
the floor. Get on the fucking floor. Get on the fucking floor. Get on the
fucking floor” (2013, 192).
Carpe diem, indeed! David is certainly no John Keating in terms of
charisma. However, the actor is an incredibly talented performer and, in
my view, a match for Robin Williams as an improviser. The salient point
here is that both David and John Keating are master manipulators. They
use different strategies and techniques, but their goals are similar—they
both want to close the gap between what they know and what their charges
do not know. They both accept the pedagogical myth that the teacher/
director is central to educational efficacy.
Gladwin confesses that he toyed with the idea of playing the role of
the director himself: “Initially I contemplated trying to play the role
myself, because I thought that would give it a great authenticity if I
could do it myself” (Gladwin and Gough 2013, 252). Stung by criticism
that he functions as a manipulative ringmaster, Gladwin wanted to con-
front these criticisms directly; indeed, much of the play’s power comes
from its unflinching desire to examine questions of power between the
able and disabled members of the company. While the character of
David may or may not be an exaggerated version of the actor David
Woods, he certainly does not appear to have much in common with
Gladwin in terms of temperament or creative methodology. I have not
seen Gladwin direct his actors, and have no way of assessing whether he
manipulates them emotionally. In the interviews he gives for Grehan
and Eckersall’s book, and in Prior’s account of the rehearsal process,
Gladwin comes across as someone who is in no hurry to attain results or
impose a preconceived vision of the improvisations. He tells Gough:
92 G. D’Cruz
To be receptive, open and responsive requires skill, complex technique and

good management—to impose is, in a way, a lot easier. I’ve seen people
and interviewed directors who make claims for the power and the integrity
of devising, the need for collaboration and co-authorship and yet, actually,
are authoring, are controlling and imposing their idea. (Gladwin and
Gough 2013, 251)
Discussing Scene 15 (“Scott’s Aired a Couple of Things”), Prior (2013,

212) notes that while Woods’ fictional “director” constantly berates and
manipulates his actors into doing his bidding, Gladwin takes a very differ-
ent approach to directing improvisations. Gladwin functions as more of a
facilitator, but he nonetheless still aims to produce work of a very high
standard, and his practice is not necessarily immune from the ethical
conundrums dramatised in the play, which, as Gladwin concedes, contains
autobiographical elements. What Gladwin represents within the context of
this chapter is a figure more closely aligned with the ethos embodied by
Jacotot, Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmaster” who proceeds from the sup-
position that all intelligence is equal, and that all students (or actors) can
teach themselves and exceed the limits that categories of identity impose
on what they can do. Ganesh is a play about many things, but, for this
book, it functions as an inspiring parable about the pitfalls and possibilities
of pedagogy.
References
Axelrod, Paul. 2002. Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials
of Liberal Education. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Berlatsky, Noah. 2014. The ‘Dead Poets Society’ Takeover of America: How Memes
Ate Our Politics. Salon, February 22. http://www.salon.com/2014/02/26/
the_dead_poets_society_takeover_of_america_how_memes_ate_our_politics
Calvert, Dave. 2016. ‘Everything Has a Fucking Value’: Negative Dialectics in the
Work of Back to Back Theatre. Contemporary Theatre Review 26 (2): 134–152.
Coslovich, Gabriella. 2011. The Elephant in the Room. The Saturday Age, 20–21,
September 24.
Edwards, Marc A., and Siddhartha Roy. 2017. Academic Research in the 21st
Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives
and Hypercompetition. Environmental Engineering Science 34 (1): 51–61.
Eisner, Elliot W. 2002. What Can Education Learn from the Arts about the
Practice of Education? Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 18 (1): 4–16.
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich Script. 2013. In “We’re People Who Do Shows”: Back
to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility, ed. Helena Grehan and Peter
Eckersall, 159–194. Aberystwyth: Performance Research Books.
Gladwin, Bruce, and Richard Gough. 2013. Making Room for Elephants: Bruce
Gladwin in Conversation with Richard Gough. In “We’re People Who Do Shows”:
Back to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility, ed. Helena Grehan and
Peter Eckersall, 231–257. Aberystwyth: Performance Research Books.
Grehan, Helena. 2013. Irony, Parody and Satire in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich.
In “We’re People Who Do Shows”: Back to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics,
Visibility, ed. Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall, 197–207. Aberystwyth:
Performance Research Books.
Grehan, Helena, and Peter Eckersall, eds. 2013. “We’re People Who Do Shows”:
Back to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility. Aberystwyth:
Performance Research Books.
Prior, Yoni. 2013. Scott’s Aired a Couple of Things: Back to Back Theatre Rehearse
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich. In “We’re People Who Do Shows”: Back to Back
Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility, ed. Helena Grehan and Peter
Eckersall, 208–217. Aberystwyth: Performance Research Books.
Ramsden, Paul. 1991. A Performance Indicator of Teaching Quality in Higher
Education: The Course Experience Questionnaire. Studies in Higher Education
16 (2): 129–150.
Emancipation. Translated and with an introduction by Kristin Ross. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum.
———. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London:
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Sabatini, Arthur J. 2002. The Dialogics of Performance and Pedagogy. In Teaching
Performance Studies, ed. Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, 191–204.
Scheer, Anna. 2013. The Impossible Fairytale, or Resistance to the Real. In “We’re
People Who Do Shows”: Back to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility,
ed. Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall, 218–226. Aberystwyth: Performance
Research Books.
Schmidt, Theron. 2013. Outsider Theatre: A Journey Through Back to Back’s
Hell House. Performance Research 18 (1): 139–148.
Sher, Antony. 2015. Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries. London: Nick
Hern.
Wright, Elizabeth. 1989. Post-Modern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. London:
Routledge.
Chapter 5
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic

Learning Play?
If you search for Martin Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life on YouTube
you will find a plethora of video clips from a wide range of productions.
Most of these are extracts from relatively recent student performances,
and they testify to the work’s popularity within university drama courses
and actor-training institutions. These videos also confirm that scholarly
commentary and criticism can never wholly exhaust the staging potential
of this or any other play text. This is because no single critical vocabulary
can delimit the excess of meanings generated within theatrical, scholarly or
pedagogical contexts. That said, we can observe uniformity in the way
these student groups approach the play and attempt to follow Crimp’s
imperative to highlight its irony. I return to this point at the end of this
chapter but, for now, want to reinforce my thesis that the popularity of
postdramatic plays in the academy has more to do with pragmatic staging
considerations than with Lehmann’s vocabulary and its concomitant
interpretative strategies. As I pointed out in the introduction to this
book, postdramatic plays such as Attempts on Her Life have flexible cast-
ing requirements. Crimp’s play does not contain any lead roles, which
means it can accommodate large numbers of student actors and provide
every performer with an approximately equal amount of stage time. The
play also offers teachers the opportunity to explore a broad range of theo-
retical and political issues with students. This stylistic mutability is largely

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_5
96 G. D’Cruz
a consequence of the play’s experimental form, which invites, among

other things, an interrogation of the status of theatre in contemporary
society, an examination of gender politics and a critique of the function of
media images.
This chapter is divided into two sections. The first is concerned with
accounting for the disparity between the play’s initial critical reception,
which was tepid, and its subsequent reputation as an exemplar of post-
dramatic writing. The second is concerned with some of the pedagogi-
cal problems generated by my experience of staging the play with
students. More specifically, this final section of the chapter exposes the
gap between Rancière’s ideal of equality and the world of pragmatic
pedagogical practice.
Attempts on Her Life, 1997

As I write, it is almost 20 years to the day that I saw the original production
of Martin Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life at the Ambassadors Theatre in
London (a temporary location for the Royal Court Theatre, which was
refurbishing its iconic Sloane Square building). Time Out’s description of
the play sounded intriguing: “Why does a well-known international terrorist
have her face on the cover of Vogue? How does it feel to survive genocide?
And—more importantly—who owns the Movie rights?” (1997, 145). Alas,
this sketch of the play is quite misleading. If the play was a thriller, Crimp
located its thrills in the experimental form of the text. That the work was
experimental should come as no surprise, since the Royal Court’s raison
d’être is to discover and promote new, innovative writing that speaks to
contemporary issues. Today, the company’s website proudly declares:
The Royal Court Theatre is the writers’ theatre. It is the leading force in
world theatre for energetically cultivating writers—undiscovered, emerging
and established.
Through the writers, the Royal Court is at the forefront of creating rest-
less, alert, provocative theatre about now. We open our doors to the unheard
voices and free thinkers that, through their writing, change our way of see-
ing. (2017)
Crimp’s play certainly qualifies as typical Royal Court fare, yet it also
unsettles conventional ideas about authorship and writing, and demon-
strates how the drift between drama and theatre can become the focus of a
dramatic text. The play comprises “17 scenarios for the theatre” of varying
Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play… 97
length and, in the words of Clara Escoda Agustí (2005, 103), they “lay bare
the different discursive possibilities contained in the telling of a story. They
make visible the various ideological twists and turns that discourse and rep-
resentation can take, and depict how speakers activate and choose among a
set of ideological positions as they construct meaning.” The stage directions
do not specify a location or time, or provide detailed instructions about how
to allocate lines. In fact, Crimp does not determine how many actors are
needed to perform the play. He only states that dashes in the text indicate a
change of speaker and that the cast “should reflect the composition of the
world beyond the theatre” (Crimp 1997, 3); this impossible direction reso-
nates with the playwright’s imperative to highlight the irony of each sce-
nario. Irony, of course, is a major postmodern trope, and Crimp’s invocation
of the term signals his intent to unsettle verities about the production and
reception of artistic works. Linda Hutcheon (1989, 176) famously argued
that postmodern irony possessed a critical edge through exposing excess
and artifice in various social and cultural practices. Put simply, irony conveys
the disparity between a work’s apparent meaning and its significance as a
mechanism of ideological control.
The play opens with a series of recorded messages on an answerphone.
They range from the mundane (a reminder of a car purchase, glad tidings
from the mother of the machine’s owner) to the sinister (a sexually explicit
threat from a possible stalker and ominous-sounding threats made in for-
eign languages). Crimp connects some of these statements to the follow-
ing scenarios, and provides clues to the mysterious entity known as Anne
(AKA Annie, Anya and so on). As the play progresses, we learn that the
absent character known by variations on the moniker “Anne” may be a
pornographic movie star, a terrorist, a suicidal artist, a tour guide, a physi-
cist refugee, an American survivalist or a brand of car. Scenario 15, titled
“The Girl Next Door,” is a set of pop-song lyrics that allude to these pos-
sible identities. Anne’s age and marital status are also hard to specify, since
Crimp describes her as being 18, 19 or 40, single and married. Anne is an
enigma, and the play is about, as the refrain of the pop-song scenario puts
it, “all the things that Anne can be.” The work’s title is a pun: the play
attempts to render the life of a fictional character; in fact, it makes several
attempts to tell the audience something about “her,” and there are also
some scenarios concerning attempts to kill “her.” So the title can be read
as a reference to what Elinor Fuchs (1996) has called “the death of char-
acter.” As one of the speakers in the play says: “she is not a real character,
not a real character like you get in a book or on TV, but a lack of character,
an absence … of character” (Crimp 1997, 25).
98 G. D’Cruz
Today, I remember very little about the details of the production, apart
from the fact that the multi-ethnic cast was very skilled. They spoke in a
variety of different languages and regional accents; they could also sing
and dance (the play contained a few song-and-dance sequences, including
a rap). Aleks Sierz’s (2013, 51) account of the production confirms the
veracity of these fragmentary memories:
Images of Albery’s production that stick in the mind are red lights that con-
verged at the back of the stage, suggesting an airport runway; a black frame
reminiscent of airplane windows, conference venues or a television screen;
the passing images of X-rayed luggage on an airport carousel in “Mum and
Dad”; bleak cityscapes and a violent TV movie. In Scenario 5, Hakeem Kae-
Kazim performed a rap song while a film projection showed a girl’s legs
dangling—which suddenly twitch as blood starts running down them, soak-
ing her white socks—and Scenario 14 was a showbiz song-and-dance
routine.
I also recall that the play used slides and video projections but, no mat-
ter how hard I try, I cannot conjure up a clear mental image from this
event. I have no idea how it was staged and, if not for a few notes jotted
down in my diary, I suspect I would have an even dimmer impression
about what has turned out to be an enduring play. My brief diary entry
suggests I was mildly engaged, but felt the production was a little long and
far too wordy. I attended the play with an aunt who admitted that she
didn’t “get it,” thus demonstrating one of the work’s ironic maxims: “the
point is that there really is no point.” As an academic with a vested interest
in experimental performance, I felt I “got it.” I may not have been overly
impressed, but I most certainly felt I understood what Crimp was attempt-
ing to do. I “made sense” of the play by categorising it as a postmodern
work concerned with media culture and the instability of personal identity.
I bought a copy of the script, which was on sale in the theatre foyer, as is
often the custom with Royal Court productions. The play sat on my book-
shelf, half-forgotten and unread, until 2003, when I directed the play with
Deakin University students. I return to the problems generated by direct-
ing the play with students in the second part of this chapter; for the
moment, let us examine the work’s critical reception.
The first production of Attempts on Her Life did not inspire many superla-
tives. The London critics who wrote about its first staging in 1997 gave it
mixed reviews. Nicholas de Jongh (quoted in Sierz 2013, 52) praised Attempts
on Her Life “for the wit and agility with which it disappears up its own self-
reflexive futility,” and Alastair Macaulay’s (quoted in Sierz 2013, 52) antipa-
thetic review recognised the play as postmodern, “post-civilisation, post-truth,
post-feeling, post-everything.” Sierz (2000, 33) also reaches for the ubiqui-
tous “P” word in his brief account of the play: “Attempts on Her Life,” he
writes, “was a postmodern extravaganza that could be read as a series of pro-
vocative suggestions for creating a new kind of theatre.”
These early commentaries use the word “postmodern” without any expli-
cation. The term appears to function in these discourses as shorthand for an
amorphous form of contemporary experimentation (the authors cited above
did not feel compelled to specify what they meant by the word “postmod-
ern,” such was its omnipresence by the late 1990s). Crimp himself explicitly
invited a postmodern reading of his play by including an epigraph from Jean
Baudrillard in a later published version: “No one will have directly experi-
enced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an
image of them” (quoted in Crimp 2005, 198). This quotation directly relates
to the play’s concern with the status of reality in the “society of the spectacle”
(Debord 1967). The play’s references to media society and the plethora of
images that saturate everyday life follow: Scenario 2 (“Tragedy of Love and
Ideology”), for example, reads as though the speakers are scriptwriters trying
to pitch a series of dramatic ideas about a character called Anne. Scenario 5
(“The Camera Loves You”) explicitly addresses the ubiquity of televisual tech-
nologies and the production of “hyperreal” simulacra with respect to the
status of theatre: “we need to feel what we’re seeing is real; it’s not about act-
ing, it’s far more exacting than acting” (Crimp 1997, 19). We assess the status
of the real through our emotions. If it feels real, then it is real, or perhaps even
“hyperreal.” In another scenario, Crimp slyly anticipates the critical response
to the play by writing a wicked parody of (postmodern) critical discourse. In
this part of the play, the lines belong to art critics who are pontificating about
the relative merits of Anne’s performance-art installation: “it’s theatre for a
world in which theatre itself has died” (Crimp 1997, 50). Agustí (2005, 109)
identifies the play’s postmodern themes, but argues that we should view
Crimp’s use of irony as a modernist strategy.
Crimp employs postmodern techniques, like the recourse to collapse, together

with other forms of short-circuiting the integrity of the text. However, he
maintains a distance from some forms of postmodernism, which, as many
postmodern authors have been accused, align themselves with neo-liberal
thought and laissez-faire politics. Crimp’s use of irony is related to scepticism,
and thus, it can then be considered to be more modern than postmodern, in
that it attempts to discriminate right from wrong and to maintain a basic set
of values grounded in honesty and commitment.
100 G. D’Cruz
Nonetheless, the earliest critics of the play used a postmodern vocabu-

lary. This is not surprising since Crimp’s play resonated with a popular
understanding of postmodernism because of its blatant use of parody and
pastiche, its self-reflexive interrogation of the status of reality, and its
ruminations on the death of character, the demise of theatre and the pro-
cesses of artistic production and reception. While postmodernism pro-
vided an important frame of reference for the play on its debut, we also
need to locate it within its original cultural context if we are to appreciate
its originality (Image 5.1).
Crimp and “Cool Britannia”

Attempts on Her Life appeared at an auspicious period in British history.
After 18 consecutive years of conservative governments, the country was
on the cusp of electing Tony Blair as its prime minister. This was the era of
Cool Britannia, Brit-Pop and “In-Yer-Face” theatre. The anticipation of a
Labour Party victory coincided with what appeared to be a cultural renais-
Image 5.1 Attempts on Her Life, Deakin University. Photograph by Glenn

D’Cruz
sance. It was as though the UK was awakening from a collective slumber,

and attempting to revive the energy and vibrancy that had characterised
the “swinging London” ethos of the 1960s. It’s difficult to assess the
degree to which Cool Britannica was more hype than genuine zeitgeist;
either way, the period did involve a renewed interest in theatre. Sierz
(2013, 49) suggests that “while Cool Britannia was principally about cul-
tural industries such as Brit pop and frock flicks, traditional art forms such
as theatre were soon swept up in the excitement. Whether on the superfi-
cial level of marketing or because of a genuine creative upsurge, theatre
was suddenly newsworthy again.” Indeed, the British scene during this
time was awash with exciting ensembles such as DV8 and Forced
Entertainment, to name two of the most prominent experimental groups
of the “nasty nineties.” The scene also promoted a group of young play-
wrights (most notably Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson and
Jez Butterworth) who produced confrontational work that often courted
controversy for its representation of explicit sexuality and extreme vio-
lence. Crimp belongs to an earlier generation, yet his work in the 1990s
certainly resonates with some of the themes found in the work of the so-
called “In-Yer-Face” writers. Sierz coined the label “In-Yer-Face” to
describe theatre that uses “filthy” language to talk about taboo subjects
such as sexual violence, prostitution, illegal drug consumption and
“unpleasant emotions.” At their most effective, the plays Sierz (2000, 5)
categorises as “In-Yer-Face” are “so powerful, so visceral, that it forces
audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they want all
their friends to see it too. It is the kind of theatre that inspires us to use
superlatives, whether in praise or condemnation.” While Crimp’s play
does contain “filthy” language, its heavy use of irony ensures that it has a
tangential relationship to the “In-Yer-Face” movement. European scholars
were quick to note its resonance with Lehmann’s postdramatic
vocabulary.
Attempts on Her Life as Postdramatic Theatre

Heiner Zimmerman (2003, 77) was one of the earliest critics to explicitly
address the play’s postdramatic qualities when he underscored the extent
to which it drifts from engaging with dramatic conventions: “Its models
are not drama,” he points out, “but film, performance and installation
art.” More pointedly, he argues that the scenarios “do not depict what the
narrator imagines, but what the camera sees” (Zimmerman 2003, 77).
102 G. D’Cruz
Describing Crimp’s text as postdramatic may appear to be a contradiction

in terms, given the concept’s antipathy towards drama. However, Lehmann
(2006, 6) makes it clear that “the notion of postdramatic theatre and its
valorization of the performance dimension does not imply that texts writ-
ten for the theatre are no longer relevant or cannot be considered in this
context.” He supports this statement by citing Malgorzata Sugiera’s
(2004) observation that many contemporary playwrights take theatricality
as their subject. More specifically, she points out that this interest in the
intrinsic theatricality of texts written for the stage functions “as a means of
inducing the audience to watch themselves as subjects which perceive,
acquire knowledge and partly create the objects of their cognition”
(Sugiera 2004, 26).
The play’s 17 scenarios also resonate with Lehmann’s account of the
postdramatic by not constituting an enclosed fictional world—rather,
they suggest a plurality of worlds. Most scenarios, at best, suggest vari-
ous fictional settings (a luxurious hotel room, a domestic living room,
a survivalist camp, a film set and so on). Others, such as Scenario 14,
“The Girl Next Door,” suggest media genres as opposed to specific
physical locations. David Barnett (2008, 18) uses the term “text
bearer” as a postdramatic replacement for dramatic character. Thus,
while Crimp’s “text bearers” hint at specific dramatic contexts, the play
requires the creative team responsible for realising the scenarios to
present rather than represent the multiplicity of possible worlds that the
absent Anne may inhabit. Moreover, the play’s temporal schema is
incoherent: we cannot deduce any consistent form of causal logic that
connects the scenarios. In an interview he gave for the play’s 2007
revival at the National Theatre in London, Crimp (2007, 12) con-
firmed that the work’s attempts to unsettle verities about dramatic
writing were entirely intentional:
The normal way of writing a play, of representing the world, is to give the
illusion that you have people on stage who are real people, who are expe-
riencing real problems or whatever. That’s normally the art of a dramatist
or the art of a novelist, to give this illusion of people enacting life. The
thing about that is that you can’t necessarily get very far or you can’t nec-
essarily reflect a world that’s full of multiple stories. So really it’s a very
simple technique; it’s the thing you’re not supposed to do, that rather
than show the story, you tell the story. This is simply a play in which the
story is being told and the drama in the play is about conflicts within the
teller about telling the story.
The vocabulary of the postdramatic resonates most strongly with

Crimp’s play if we restrict our reading to questions of form. The work
eschews the conventional “beginning, middle, end” structure that has
dominated dramatic writing since Aristotle. This is not to say that Attempts
on Her Life lacks a structure; rather, the absence of traditional character
development and dramatic conflict do not play a significant role in the
play’s construction.
Lehmann (2006, 11) argues that, in postdramatic theatre, “simultane-
ous and multi-perspectival modes of perception replace linear and succes-
sive ones. A more superficial and, at the same time, more encompassing
sensibility takes the place of the more centralized and deeper one.”
Lehmann’s vocabulary becomes less convincing when he merely repeats
postmodern truisms. Following Debord (1967), Lehmann (2006, 183)
believes that the spectacle is a “fundamental fact of today’s Western
Societies” and, most importantly for the present context, that the citizen
is defined as a spectator in the society of the spectacle. From this perspec-
tive, Attempts on Her Life is an exemplary piece of postdramatic writing
because its experimental form parodies key aspects of the society of the
spectacle—that is, a form of social organisation where the totality of
human experience is, in Lehmann’s (2006, 183) view, “tied to commodi-
ties or more precisely their consumption and possession.” Scenario 7,
“The New Anny,” makes a similar point by appropriating, and perhaps
subverting, the language of advertising. This obviously ironic scenario
presents Anny as a sleek new car: “We now understand that the Anny
comes with electric windows as standard” (Crimp 1997, 30). This parody
of capitalist consumption is an ironic gesture that doesn’t tell us anything
new: we all know that female sexuality is itself a commodity that sells other
commodities, so it would be dangerous to make any grand claims about
the play’s political efficacy.
Lehmann (2006, 185) is careful to concede that it would be unrealistic
to make definitive claims about the political value of postdramatic theatre:
“It would be absurd to expect theatre to oppose an effective alternative to
the massive superiority of these [media] structures.” Nonetheless, he is
committed to the idea that postdramatic theatre can produce political
effects. He claims that the politics of postdramatic theatre are “the poli-
tics of perception” (Lehmann 2006, 186); and, as I read it, this formula-
tion rests on theatre’s ability to “move the mutual implication of actors
and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and
thus make visible the broken thread between personal experience and
104 G. D’Cruz
perception” (Lehmann 2006, 186). Apparently, postdramatic theatre can

unsettle the inherent passivity of the alienated, atomistic spectator of the
spectacle. This sounds very similar to the political objective of the histori-
cal avant-garde, and the tendency for theorists and advocates of theatre’s
political efficacy to set up an opposition between what Rancière (2009, 7)
calls the “evil spectacle and the virtuous theatre,” where the spectacle
separates spectators from events and each other, while postdramatic the-
atre performance combats these forms of alienation.
I could argue that one of the advantages of redescribing Attempts on
Her Life as a postdramatic play lies in enabling us to apprehend what is
most striking in the play’s critique of the spectacle. Rather than thinking
of Attempts as postmodern because it reflects the logic of late capitalism
through its use of irony and pastiche, or because it is conceived within a
historical period some call postmodern, it might be more useful to con-
sider how its postdramatic qualities unsettle verities about audience passiv-
ity. Rather than reading the play as a purely ironic gesture, which merely
reflects the currents of postmodern culture, it is possible to read it as a
radical gesture that unsettles audience perceptions about the media tech-
nologies that sustain and cultivate passive spectatorship. The problem with
Lehmann’s vocabulary is that it often recycles familiar ideas and tropes
without a sufficiently new spin. An obsession with the “politics of percep-
tion” can often occlude more significant political considerations, as the
feminist critique of Crimp’s play demonstrates. Vicky Angelaki (2012,
181) argues that while it is tempting to categorise Crimp’s play as postdra-
matic, this label “does not suffice to account for the ethics, or the sensory
and intellectual complexity of such affective theatre.” Angelaki proffers a
phenomenological approach to Crimp’s theatre, which is worth noting if
only to dispel the impression that the vocabularies of the postmodern and
the postdramatic have an exclusive purchase on Crimp scholarship.
The Politics of Attempts on Her Life

Mary Luckhurst (2003) offers another alternative by reading the play from
a feminist perspective. She points out that Crimp’s work attempts to repre-
sent a woman, or a series of feminine stereotypes propagated by the media.
As I have already stated, the play makes a myriad of statements about “all
the things that Anne can be,” yet there is a sense that Anne, as the absence
that structures and connects the various theatrical scenarios, functions as a
cipher for various male fantasies about women: she is a pornographic
movie star, a highly sexualised brand of car, a doomed suicidal artist and so
forth. Not only does Crimp (1997, 49) invoke these clichés of female
sexuality and sexual identity, but he also parodies feminist critical discourse:
“Anne’s only way to avoid being a victim of the patriarchal structures of
late twentieth-century capitalism is to become her own victim.” While
acknowledging the novelty of the play’s form, Luckhurst (2003, 59) draws
attention to the problems associated with the work’s thematic content
when she points out that “its dual critique of global capitalism and patriar-
chy is evident but all the voices connected with that critique are deluded,
fascistic, and morally corroded. The effect of this is to reduce maleness to
a monolithically sadistic and psychopathic construct—in every scenario.”
She further observes that:
Anne’s a fantasy-repository for extreme kinds of wish-fulfilment. The fact of

“Anne’s” non-existence accounts for her fabricators’ obsessive engagement
with attempting to narrate her: only in narration can “Anne” be imagined
to be real and only through repeated attempts to resolve the irresolvable,
that is—to summon her presence—can the idea of “Anne” be sustained.
(Luckhurst 2003, 55)
Luckhurst’s criticism of Crimp’s play exposes its ambivalent sexual politics

and forces us to question whether it merely reinforces the normative way of
reading women as cultural signs within the society of the spectacle. The point
is not that there is no point, but rather that political efficacy is always radically
unknowable insofar as it is impossible to specify how any given text might
function in the world. Luckhurst (2003, 60) concludes her analysis by sum-
marising its politics in the following manner: “men are wicked and brutal,
women are less wicked and brutal but may be partially to blame for their own
victimhood.” This raises the question of whether the play’s postmodern irony
fails to acknowledge its complicity in sustaining the political status quo.
Karen Jürs-Munby (2013, 33) argues that the concept of the postdra-
matic “is deeply engaged with the political,” and the volume she co-edits
with Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles, Postdramatic Theatre and the Political
(2013), provides an eclectic set of essays that more or less support this
view. Her editor’s introduction, though, suggests a rather conventional
conception of how postdramatic theatre might unsettle normative ideolo-
gies. She reiterates the argument I glossed earlier in this chapter: that
postdramatic theatre, in its various incarnations, overcomes the alienation
of Debord’s society of the spectacle—that is, the separation of the specta-
tor from the direct experience of perceiving things in the world.
106 G. D’Cruz
The problem with this account of political efficacy is that it is almost

impossible to substantiate without significant empirical studies of audience
responses to those works deemed politically efficacious. And even if
Lehmann and his acolytes were to undertake such a study, it is impossible
to track the relationship between having one’s perception of the world
altered by a performance, and being inspired to change one’s life or moti-
vated to engage in political activism. The real problem, as I perceive it, is
that a “politics of perception” maintains, and even depends on, a very
conventional understanding of the relationship between the performer
and spectator. Jürs-Munby refers to Rancière’s Emancipation of the
Spectator throughout her introduction to Postdramatic Theatre and the
Political, and while there are certainly resonances between this work and
Lehmann’s book, she seems to have missed the more radical and provoca-
tive aspects of his argument. As I read him, Rancière believes there is no
privileged aesthetic medium more capable of political efficacy than any
other; he also rejects the view that an artist or teacher can directly and
unproblematically transmit knowledge, or affect, to a spectator or student.
I return to this point in the final section of this chapter when I relate my
experience of teaching and directing Crimp’s play. For now, it is worth
underscoring Rancière’s (2007, 277–278) view that:
The dramaturge and the performer do not want to “teach” anything.

Indeed, they are more than a little wary these days about using the stage as
a way of teaching. They want only to bring about a form of awareness or a
force of feeling or action. But still, they make the supposition that what will
be felt or understood will be what they have put in their script or perfor-
mance. They presuppose the equality—meaning the homogeneity of cause
and effect.
Rancière reminds us that performance-makers cannot ensure that spec-

tators receive their work in the manner intended—just because you think
you have written or performed work that discloses a specific injustice or
changes the way spectators might perceive the world doesn’t make it so.
And Sierz (2013, 156) makes the glib observation, in his book about
Crimp, that “Easy texts, including playtexts, tend to support the status
quo. The difficult text, because it forces audiences to re-examine their
beliefs, whether political or aesthetic, always embodies a critical point of
view.” Always? This statement reminds us why we need to be suspicious of
those theoretical positions that make claims about a work’s political effects
on the basis of its aesthetic properties alone. What constitutes an easy text?
Sierz is certainly referring to Crimp’s formal innovations, but this mod-
ernist truism is difficult to substantiate. Shirin M. Rai and Janelle Reinelt
(2015, 10) observe that today, “it is only too possible to recognise a realm
of aesthetic analysis that considers itself political but does not engage in
the collective concrete struggles of pragmatic politics.” While Rai and
Reinelt (2015, 12) are critical of Rancière’s focus on dissensus and rup-
ture, they share his interest in the politics of equality when they reveal that
they “harbour a suspicion of too much emphasis on aesthetics because of
the historical collusion between aesthetics and hierarchies of taste and
judgement.” They make a good point. However, my examination of the
scholarship on Crimp’s play reveals the extent to which academics are pri-
marily engaged in critical reading practices that are sustained by language
games that can only be played by those schooled in the critical discourses
I have described and contributed to in this book. In the second half of this
chapter, I identify some of the ways that teaching Crimp’s work within the
context of a production course negates the possibility of approaching the
play from a purely aesthetic and academic standpoint.
Directing/Teaching Attempts on Her Life

It should now be evident that the concept of postdramatic theatre gener-
ates a vocabulary that scholars have used to describe a variety of contem-
porary (and not so contemporary) performances. Indeed, Jürs-Munby
(2006, 14) points out that Lehmann’s theoretical vocabulary enables us
to reflect on experimental theatre and “articulate its aesthetics and poli-
tics.” This is all very well for those scholars and students whose primary
interest in theatre and performance lies in analysing the work of profes-
sionals. Indeed, I have used Lehmann’s vocabulary to describe or rede-
scribe several landmark performances in earlier chapters of this book.
However, theatre practice or performance-making has been an integral
part of many university courses all over the world for a long time. James
Arnott (1981) provided a comprehensive account of theatrical theory,
history and research in Britain, the US and Europe, which demonstrates
that practice in the academy is not a new phenomenon. What is relatively
novel is the way the vocabularies of adjacent academic disciplines have
infiltrated and shaped the way we think about performance. Lehmann
was part of a pioneering team that explored the relationship between
theory and practice in a university context. In an article titled “Theatre
108 G. D’Cruz
and University: the Gießen Model,” Christel Weiler (1988) speaks with
Andrzej Wirth, Hans-Thies Lehmann and Susanne Winnacker about the
applied theatre studies programme at the University of Gießen. He poses
the following question: “why shouldn’t critics direct plays and directors
teach and write?” Here is an extract from the exchange between Weiler
and Wirth:
Weiler: Work on performance projects is … an essential part of the [Gießen

course]. But it does not only mean that a member of staff together with
students puts a text on stage in a conventional way, but rather it is an attempt
to link compatible theoretical and practical forms (Annäherungsformen]
with the theatre.
Wirth: Yes, I think that is what Thies and I understood and sought to
achieve by using projects for the stage, but also the guest professors I chose.
But as far as my own motivation is concerned—I’m not a purely theatre
person, I always saw myself as an intellectual in the theatre, as someone who
uses theatre for thinking. (Weiler 1988, 42–43)
Today, the relationship between theatre and academic thought does not
seem especially radical, and Lehmann’s vocabulary provides a useful set of
tools for reflecting on practice. My university accepts the concept of the prac-
titioner/researcher, and most of our research students in the creative arts have
extensive experience as artists. There is also now a wide body of critical litera-
ture on practice as research methodologies, confirming that a significant num-
ber of academic institutions have no problem accepting artists as higher-degree
candidates (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Allegue et al. 2009; Freeman 2010).
However, these aspiring practitioner/scholars still need to articulate their
research projects in some exegetical form—so writing about performance,
from the position of a practitioner or “expert spectator,” remains a non-nego-
tiable institutional requirement for artists seeking to locate and conduct their
practice within the academy. It is impossible to avoid the institutional impera-
tive to explicate the scope and value of research. Lehmann’s vocabulary can
certainly assist people engaged in this enterprise, but using this lexicon in the
context of teaching and directing postdramatic theatre with students exposes
the gap between scholarly contemplation and the often-messy business of
dealing with an unruly encounter between conflicting approaches to creating
theatre. How do we speak about the experiential encounter between students
and teachers in these contexts? Do we need to develop a different register of
writing to unpack the politics of teaching postdramatic theatre through prac-
tice? And what might Lehmann’s vocabulary contribute to teaching students
about how to make performances? The problems I describe in the last part of
this chapter should be familiar to those who direct student performances
within university contexts. At the start of this book, I claimed that postdra-
matic plays, such as Crimp’s, overcome some of the major obstacles involved
in staging plays with large casts for pedagogical purposes. They can facilitate
equity of participation insofar as it makes it easier to give students approxi-
mately the same amount of stage time (conventional plays with principal roles
and supporting parts make it difficult to avoid casting hierarchies). This is not
to say that it is necessarily easier to stage postdramatic work, as I reveal in a
moment. And what of trying to work under the sign of equality within the
context of the corporate university? Well, that’s much easier said than done.
We have just finished reading Attempts on Her Life as a class. We had fol-
lowed Crimp’s direction to change speaker every time we encountered a
dash on the page, and I had scanned the faces of my students for clues to
their responses to the text as they read. I had detected the occasional gri-
mace and a few smiles; nothing to indicate the students had been bored or
disengaged during the reading. A few people had guffawed and laughed out
loud at various points. Nonetheless, I can’t shake the feeling that nobody in
the rehearsal room is overly enthused by the prospect of staging this play:
“So what do you think? What are your immediate impressions of the play?”
“I think it’s a shame we can’t invite our families to see this. Is it really
necessary to use filthy language? Also, there’s too much sexual innuendo.”
This is not the response I was hoping to elicit, but the student has a
good point. I realise that I am not staging the play for the usual sus-
pects—hipsters, bourgeois theatre darlings and the general public. The
audience for this student production will comprise friends and family
members of the cast, other students and perhaps a few academics, but
does this mean I’m necessarily compelled to produce crowd-pleasing
vanilla fluff? This thought alone reveals the extent to which questions of
taste and hierarchies of aesthetic judgement are always in play. Any text I
select would disclose my aesthetic preferences and prejudices—Andrew
Lloyd Webber shows are off the table for me, but there is no reason why
producing one of his works would not fulfil the institution’s pedagogical
imperative. The primary objective of this particular production course is
to teach students how to analyse a dramatic text for performance. Here
are the course objectives in the unit guide given to all students before the
start of the semester:
110 G. D’Cruz
Using a selected dramatic text, through classes/rehearsals/workshops, stu-

dents will research and analyse the process of rehearsal and performance;
students will explore questions of dramatic structure, language and theatri-
cal style and the ways these work together to create dramatic meaning
through theatrical production. Each student will document the process in a
journal. Emphasis will be given to further development of individual per-
forming skills and also further students’ knowledge of design and produc-
tion matters. In short: you will perform as well as help to produce a play.
You will also keep a journal and do a written exercise set by your teacher,
both due at the end of the semester. (Deakin University 2003, 4)
Those of us who find ourselves responsible for staging or devising the-

atre productions within the context of a university course have to strike a
balance between aesthetic concerns and pedagogical imperatives. On the
one hand, I want to make sure the production works as a piece of theatre.
On the other, I’m mindful of having to develop the students’ performance
skills and also teach them something about how theatre communicates
with audiences. I thought Crimp’s play could address these twin objectives
because it explicitly addresses questions of dramatic structure, language
and style by privileging formal experimentation over story. This is not to
say the play is wholly about theatricality and aesthetics; this is not the case,
as indicated in the scholarly commentary generated by the work. Attempts
is about many things, including the relationship between media represen-
tations and gender identity. But let’s return to the student’s question. I
concede she has a point, but explain my rationale for choosing the play by
talking about the course objectives and my conviction that students need
to be challenged by difficult work. She doesn’t look convinced, and a
moment of awkward silence ensues before a few of the other students offer
their opinions and perspectives, which are thankfully more enthusiastic: “I
think the play gives us the opportunity to be really creative. It’s so open.”
Several students nod their heads and join the conversation, which
quickly drifts into a brainstorming session about how we might stage the
play. I suggest we go back to the text and look at it more closely. We begin
with Scenario 2, “Tragedy of Love and Ideology,” which provides the
“basic ingredients” of a dramatic scene. Someone suggests the scenario
could be about a group of scriptwriters trying to concoct a thriller or film
noir. We identify the “basic ingredients”: a woman is making love to a man
in a luxury apartment in a glamorous European city (the scenario contains
references to Florence, Paris, Berlin and London). The speakers describe
the woman, Anne. She has “golden hair” that cascades over the edge of
the bed. They describe her emotions (she’s angry when she wakes at 3
a.m. and hears voices; she interrogates her lover, who may be some sort of
spy). Crimp gives his speakers lines that evoke the contours of a fictional
world and reference certain genre conventions (the scenario makes a num-
ber of references to the quality of the light that streams through the apart-
ment’s window, perhaps inviting the play’s director or designer to employ
chiaroscuro lighting techniques to create the ambience of film noir or a
John le Carré thriller).
Having identified the “basic ingredients” for a possible dramatic scene,
the students go to work and produce several variations on the thriller
theme. Some play it as a farcical Cohen Brothers parody of Hollywood;
others take a darker, more menacing approach. We’re off and running.
What could go wrong?
Before unpacking some of the ethical issues generated by this experience
of staging Crimp’s play with students, I want to underscore the fact that,
in my experience, students accept the challenge of working with postdra-
matic texts with little fuss. Most of the students I teach at Deakin University
are theatre enthusiasts with particular preferences. Each year, I ask first-
year students to tell me about their favourite forms of theatre. Almost
invariably, they talk about commercial musical theatre (Cats, Phantom of
the Opera and so on). Some express a love of Shakespeare, and a few nomi-
nate plays such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, or whatever works
they enjoyed reading or performing at school. They rarely choose postdra-
matic theatre produced by the likes of Forced Entertainment or Martin
Crimp as favourites. They also often tell me they can’t afford to see theatre
or attend the annual arts festival that often showcases the work of artists
whose work we might describe as postdramatic. The point here is that the
works I consider interesting may be widely discussed and debated by aca-
demics, but they remain inaccessible, for a variety of political and economic
reasons, to the bulk of my students. To some extent, the raison d’être of
the university, at least in its non-corporate form, is to take students out of
their comfort zones by providing them with a set of intellectual challenges
that expand their intellectual horizons. This imperative to teach students
something they do not know is not necessarily incompatible with Rancière’s
(1991) principle of equality if one abandons the principle of explication for
the principle of exploration (7). We need to carefully consider the role of
the type of scholarly exegesis I mentioned in the first part of this chapter in
pedagogical situations if we are to avoid the pitfalls involved in sustaining
the pedagogical myth described in the previous chapter.
112 G. D’Cruz
Creating an environment conducive to explorative play is one thing.

Avoiding imposing one’s own cultural, political and aesthetic preju-
dices on students is an impossible task, since the very choice of play,
together with various institutional imperatives to formulate activities,
assess students and perform duties of care, require teachers to make
value judgements that frequently confound students. It is important to
recognise, as does Frow (2013, 87), that judgement “is the inescapable
horizon both of work in the humanities and social sciences, and of
everyday life; it is built deep into the processes and institutions of tex-
tual culture.” Regimes of value always shape our approach to teaching,
so to teach postdramatic theatre is to at least tacitly impose systems of
cultural and aesthetic value. This raises the question of whether it is
possible, or even desirable, to perform the role of the “ignorant school-
master” in the contexts I describe in this book. Finally, what am I
teaching in regard to the implicit curriculum? What am I implicitly
teaching students through assessment tasks that require me to make
judgements about their conduct and abilities as performers? And what
happens when these values clash with those of the students? Let’s
return to the rehearsal room.
After they have read the play as a group, I divide the class into
smaller groups and ask them to devise a preliminary performance based
on one of Crimp’s scenarios. As I walk around the space and observe
the students at work, I observe that most of them are confident per-
formers and, if they have reservations about the play, hide them very
well. This does not mean the exercise proceeds smoothly. One young
man seems especially engaged by the task; I’ll call him Travis. He’s in
his early twenties, lean, wiry and in possession of a slightly menacing
stare. He’s working on Scenario 1, “All Messages Deleted.” Scenario 1
consists of a series of answerphone messages, which create the impres-
sion that the owner of the device leads an extraordinarily disjointed
and mysterious life. The messages convey the fact that Anne inhabits
many apparently incongruous worlds. Travis performs two of these
messages (which are the primary source of concern for the student
worried about how her family are going to respond to the play). The
first reads:
—Anne. Good Evening. Let me tell you what I’m going to do to you. First
you’re going to suck my cock. Then I’m going to fuck you up the arse. With
a broken bottle. And that’s just for starters. Little miss Cunt. (Crimp 1997, 3)
The second, the last message in the scenario, is most likely from one of
Anne’s lovers. The speaker suggests that Anne has told him (or her) that
she wants to kill herself. The speaker, who has apparently not heard from
Anne for a while, imagines she is now a rotting corpse. Travis delivers both
messages with a savage intensity. His performance suggests that he’s either
a very good actor or dangerously unhinged. The class enthusiastically
applaud his group’s efforts (his collaborators perform the other messages).
Travis seems oblivious to this positive response—he shuffles back to his
seat as the next group take up their positions for the following scene.
Travis remains aloof from the rest of the students for most of the semes-
ter. He requests to perform Scenario 8, “Particle Physics,” as a mono-
logue. I give him my consent. The speakers in this scenario describe an
ashtray owned by Anne, noting that it looks like something you would
find in a cheap hotel that hosts illicit sexual liaisons. Travis believes the
scenario’s sexual connotations gives him licence to play out a sadistic fan-
tasy that involves him ranting his lines to the accompaniment of a chain-
saw. He shoots me a sinister glare when I veto the idea (on health and
safety grounds). Some of the students like the performance, and I concede
it has an effect, but doesn’t seem to connect with the scenario’s theme,
which suggests that Anne is a physics genius who has discovered a new
elementary particle that may change our entire conception of the universe
(Crimp 1997, 36). One student points out that she doesn’t believe the
play makes any sense, anyway. “Why do we have to read the basic ingredi-
ents, so literally,” another asks. She has a point. “Yeah, why can’t a genius
physicist have a psychotic lover?” Again, the student has a point. I tell the
class I will investigate the possibility of using a chainsaw on stage.
Thankfully, the theatre’s production manager immediately stymies the
idea. Travis devises a way to mime the violence, and everybody seems
happy—except me. What am I worried about? The play is full of references
to sexual abuse, after all. Do the students understand irony? Do I know
why the class is so impressed by Travis’s scenario? Do any of us fully com-
prehend the play? Should I get them to read the scholarly criticism gener-
ated by the work? Perhaps it is time to engage in a bit of explication?
Travis is not the only student who challenges my conception of the
play. I have a vague recollection of the rap in the original production, so I
suggest the group working on Scenario 5, “The Camera Loves You,”
devises a rap (each member of this group has musical ability, although rap
is not a genre they have much time for). I can see they find my suggestion
ludicrous, and passé. This group has spent a lot of time debating how they
114 G. D’Cruz
should approach the scenario without actually achieving much. When

they, quite correctly, decline to explore the rap option because it doesn’t
dramatise the scenario’s concern with the camera, I leave them alone, but
insist they need to have something to show me by the end of the class.
They come up with a cheesy cabaret routine, which they perform with the
requisite degree of irony. The class goes wild with applause and effusive
praise when the piece is finally performed. I cannot see how the number
engages with the scenario’s interrogation of the relationship between real-
ity and acting; the group also seems to have given up on dealing with the
question of the camera. Eventually, I help the group tweak the scenario so
it becomes more like a Brecht/Weil number that resonates, I think, with
a hastily improvised mime involving cameras. It’s not the most inspired or
elegant solution, but I am rapidly running out of ideas and patience.
A significant number of students in the class appear obsessed with
sketch comedy. I explain that I want the production to convey a variety of
moods, and I am wary of having every scenario played as comedy. Most of
the students take my point, and a few groups reconceptualise their sce-
narios. One group, though, remains intransigent—or rather, one very
strong personality in the group is determined to play Scenario 3, “Faith in
Ourselves,” as a parody of a then-popular Australian TV talk show, The
Panel. They cannot find a way of making the text work with their very
static blocking. The scene, in my view, is appalling, but no matter what I
suggest, the dominant figure in the group insists on keeping the original
idea. I insist the scene needs to be more dynamic, and offer a few sugges-
tions that the group reluctantly incorporates into their performance.
From the very first class of this unit, I made a few sly references to some
of the postmodern criticism I cited in the first part of the chapter to give
the students a frame of reference for what I thought the play was trying to
say about contemporary culture, gender politics and the society of the
spectacle. They seemed engaged by the analyses I offered, but it soon
became apparent that we were all more concerned about the practicalities
of staging the play as opposed to attempting to wrestle with the play’s
arguments and understanding the nuances of its formal experimentation.
The work came together in a shambolic kind of way, but I felt that not
only had I lost control of the aesthetic shape of the production, but had
been so overwhelmed by my desire to “put on a good show” that I had
neglected to fully acquit my duties as a teacher. How do you balance the
impulse to be liked by the class with the desire to produce good art? And
how much emphasis do you place on getting the students to demonstrate
that they understand the nuances of what they are doing? To what extent
do you attempt to “serve” the intentions of the postdramatic playwright?
Does it even make sense to think about authorial intentions when produc-
ing a play that demands the creative team fill in the blanks and shape
something new from the basic ingredients of the text? I made a plethora
of rookie mistakes, but felt I had learnt a great deal about how I might
take a different, more pedagogically efficacious approach to the task of
teaching postdramatic theatre.
The three anecdotes drawn from my production notes illustrate the
disconnect between analysing and debating the status of Crimp’s play as
postmodern or postdramatic, and attempting to stage the play while nego-
tiating the “volatile energies” and “power inequities inherent in the [ped-
agogical] situation” (Wangh 2013, 95). The anecdotes also suggest that
the students’ “active” engagement with a text did not necessarily give
them a greater understanding of the play, or facilitate a political epiphany
about the state of the world. This is not to imply they approached the
tasks associated with staging the play passively or uncritically. On the con-
trary, they made their sense of the play; sometimes this involved working
with referents that had little connection to my postmodern reading of it,
and at other times I could see they had engaged with the theoretical ideas
I used to interpret the play. Earlier in this book, I invoked Elizabeth
Wright’s (1989, 13) articulation of the distinction Brecht made between
minor and major pedagogy. You may recall that Brecht considered his
works for the stage examples of minor pedagogy because they could
merely represent the ideological contradictions and conflicts that sus-
tained class society to audiences. Major pedagogy, conversely, dispensed
with the separation between actors and audience, since the so-called
“learning plays” were written to be performed by non-actors—that is,
workers and students. Brecht, according to Wright, believed people were
more likely to become aware of the material conditions that oppressed
them if they enacted rather than merely observed drama. Advocates of
drama in education-applied theatre, and adjacent fields of scholarship,
often talk about the life-changing, transformative value of theatre practice
in pedagogical contexts and argue that the kinaesthetic knowledge gener-
ated by such practice is a distinguishing mark of performance pedagogy.
As Chris Hay (2016) argues, there may be good reasons for making such
a case, but there is no reason why this stance is incompatible with articu-
lating more precise pedagogical principles. My major claim in this chapter
is that the rehearsal space as a pedagogical site is not necessarily a better
116 G. D’Cruz
place to teach postdramatic theatre—not least because it is very difficult to

document what students take away from the experience of working on
postdramatic productions, but also because there is an imprecision and
essential mystery at the heart of teaching. The more we try to quantify and
direct learning, the more we may function as impediments to education. I
had not read The Ignorant Schoolmaster or The Emancipated Spectator
when I directed Crimp’s play back in 2003, but many of Rancière’s works
have given me good reason to reassess how I might better approach the
task of teaching postdramatic theatre. Maybe it is more effective to shut
up and forsake the role of master director for that of a tour guide who
points the way through the forested thickets of theory and politics.
References
Agustí, Clara Escoda. 2005. ‘Short Circuits of Desire’: Language and Power in
Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life. Ariel 36 (3–4): 103–126.
Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini. 2009. Practice-
as-Research in Performance and Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Angelaki, Vicky. 2012. The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Arnott, James. 1981. An Introduction to Theatrical Scholarship. Theatre Quarterly
10 (39): 29–42.
Barnett, David. 2008. When Is a Play Not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic
Theatre Texts. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14–23.
Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt, eds. 2007. Practice as Research: Approaches to
Creative Arts Enquiry. London and New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.
Crimp, Martin. 1997. Attempts on Her Life. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 2005. Martin Crimp Plays 2. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 2007. Interview with Martin Crimp. In National Theatre Education
Background Pack. London: The Royal National Theatre Board. http://d1wf-
8hd6ovssje.cloudfront.net/documents/Attempts_bkpk.pdf.
Debord, Guy. 1995 (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Freeman, John. 2010. Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research Through Practice in
Performance. Faringdon: Libri.
Frow, John. 2013. Practice of Value: Essays on Literature in Cultural Studies.
Crawley: UWAP Scholarly.
Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After
Modernism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Hay, Chris. 2016. Knowledge, Creativity and Failure: A New Pedagogical
Framework for Creative Arts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York:

Routledge.
Performance. London: Bloomsbury.
Luckhurst, Mary. 2003. Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her
Life. Contemporary Theatre Review 13 (1): 47–60.
Rai, Shirin M., and Janelle Reinelt. 2015. The Grammar of Politics and Performance.
London: Routledge.
Emancipation. Translated, with an Introduction, by Kristin Ross. Stanford:
———. 2007. The Emancipated Spectator. Artforum 45 (March): 271–280.
Verso.
Sierz, Aleks. 2000. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and
Faber.
———. 2013. The Theatre of Martin Crimp: Second Edition. Critical Companions.
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Theatre Research International 29 (1): 6–28.
Theatre West End. 1997. Time Out, March 5–12, no. 1385.
The Royal Court Theatre. 2017. About Us. https://royalcourttheatre.com/
about/
Wangh, Stephen. 2013. The Heart of Teaching. London and. New York: Routledge.
Weiler, Christel. 1988. Theatre and University: The Gießen Model. Translated by
Hector Maclean (1992). Theater Heute 12 (88): 42–43.
Wright, Elizabeth. 1989. Post-Modern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. London:
Routledge.
Zimmerman, Heiner. 2003. Images of Woman in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her
Life. European Journal of English Studies 7 (1): 69–85.
Chapter 6
Teaching History and (Gender) Politics: The

Hamletmachine and the Princess Plays
How do you know when you’ve taught a successful class? Can you see
enthusiasm in the eyes of your students? Can you feel their energetic
engagement in your body? Or do you rely on verbal feedback or formal
teaching-evaluation metrics to gauge whether you have met your peda-
gogical aims and objectives? Perhaps you and your managers draw on all
of these feedback mechanisms when you reflect on and assess your perfor-
mance as a teacher at the end of the year. This chapter analyses two post-
dramatic productions: The Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller and Princess
Plays by Elfriede Jelinek. The first, which I directed in 2006, was a success
according to the feedback mechanisms I have just articulated. The second,
well, not so much. If, after Foucault, we think of the university as a disposi-
tif—that is, a complex mix of institutional rules, forces and imperatives
that sustain particular systems of power/knowledge relations—then we
apprehend our pedagogic role as a cog in an unstable, constantly changing
teaching machine. As Foucault (1978, 72–73) puts it, a dispositif is a
“large surface network where the stimulation of bodies, the intensification
of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of specialized
knowledge, and the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked
together according to a few grand strategies of knowledge and power.” As
I have argued in earlier chapters, the institutional imperative to perform
according to specified criteria that use corporate metrics to measure the
value of teaching both constrains and enables teaching strategies. However,
it would be dangerous to conclude that the forces circulating within peda-
gogical situations are wholly determined and controlled by the corporate

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_6
120 G. D’Cruz
university’s formal imperative to perform or else. The very institutional

structures and rules that govern official pedagogic conduct also provide a
point of departure for subverting those structures and rules, since various
acts, energies and affects coalesce around the power/knowledge relations
that mark the dispositif of pedagogy. This chapter provides an autoethno-
graphic account of how this dispositif of pedagogy shapes the productions
I have chosen to analyse to provide a different perspective on the politics
and ethics of teaching postdramatic drama. I draw on video documenta-
tion of the rehearsals and final performances of both productions in my
analysis.
The Hamletmachine (2006)

The Deakin drama course, like many similar programmes housed in uni-
versities around Australia and other parts of the world, does not attempt
to provide students with comprehensive actor training. We don’t have the
resources to compete with actor-training institutions, so we focus on
performance-making skills. We hope to provide our students with the
practical tools to develop their creative work with minimal financial and
technical resources. Almost every unit we offer culminates in a season of
public performances for a paying audience. The work, for staff and stu-
dents, is demanding, and the performance and pedagogical outcomes vary
in quality from year to year. We meet for two three-hour classes per week,
and occasionally arrange rehearsals outside scheduled class time (this is a
relatively rare occurrence, since most students have heavy work commit-
ments and struggle to make these extra sessions). We have 60 hours of
rehearsal time with the cast, and most classes comprise 20 to 30 students.
Most students are also studying a cognate creative arts discipline, such as
film, dance, graphic design or photography, which means it is possible to
incorporate multi-arts and multimedia into our drama productions.
The students to whom I refer in this chapter auditioned to enter the
course; most of them had practical performance experience (we no longer
audition students at Deakin University, but select them by their high-
school matriculation scores). A large proportion of this particular cohort
also had backgrounds in musical theatre, amateur theatre and community
theatre. Very few had worked on anything other than musicals, light com-
edy and naturalistic theatre, so I expected they might find The
Hamletmachine challenging.
Teaching History and (Gender) Politics... 121
Müller’s play looks odd on the page. In the Dennis Redmond transla-
tion, which I distributed to the class, the words are printed in blocks of
black text. Each of the work’s five sections is numbered and printed in
bold type. The first paragraph of the play appears in capitals and is divided
by diagonal breaks. The next paragraph also uses capital letters, but appears
in two blocks that look like poetic stanzas. The third paragraph on the first
page looks very much like the one you are reading now: like a block of text
from a book. The translator prefaces the play by noting that its author has
deliberately composed his work to include these graphic idiosyncrasies.
The work does not provide a list of characters, nor any indication of the
size of the cast, the distribution of lines or any other conventional pieces
of dramatic information (a characteristic postdramatic text, then?). At first
glance, the play is not reader-friendly, especially for students with limited
exposure to experimental theatre. Further, unlike Crimp’s play, which, for
the most part, uses contemporary linguistic idioms, Müller’s use of lan-
guage in The Hamletmachine is dense and alienating. It is a mélange of
Elizabethan English, translated into German and then back into English.
It reads like a stream-of-consciousness rambling loosely related to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and punctuated by misogynistic references to
women—“open your legs, mama”; “sew the witches up” (Müller 2001b,
1). Müller’s images are evocative and violent: the description of the corpse
train that appears as an ominous bell tolls, together with the implied
speaker’s distribution of human flesh to onlookers via his sword, is cer-
tainly dramatic, if challenging to stage. Müller (2001b) does assign some
lines to the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia, and also issues stage direc-
tions in a manner of speaking; but his instructions are quite bizarre, and
some appear impossible to realise: a refrigerator bleeds (4) and the Hamlet-
Actor splits the heads of Marx Lenin Mao with an axe (5). Müller (2001a)
claims that when he wrote the play he had:
no idea whatsoever how it could be realized on stage, not the slightest idea.
There was a text, and there was no space in my imagination for the text, no
stage, no actors, nothing. It was written in a kind of soundproof zone, and
that has been happening with me increasingly. It was the same with
Hamletmachine; there are those desperate stage directions that are impos-
sible to realize, a symptom of my inability to imagine ways to realize them
and see the space where these events could happen. That means these are at
bottom plays or texts whose only place of action is my brain or head. They
122 G. D’Cruz
are performed here, within this skull. How do you do that on a theatre
stage? (218–219)
This was the question we had to answer within a short time frame.
David Barnett (2016, 49) argues that the “play openly resists attempts to
limit its meaning by interpreting its lines, as even a cursory reading of the
speeches reveals.” If this is the case, how might one approach the task of
realising the play on stage?
The Rehearsal Process

I always feel a sense of excitement and trepidation as I clear my throat and
announce it’s time to make a start, even though I know I will experience
myriad unanticipated problems and frustrations before opening night. Of
course, my process begins with a close reading of the play. Like most teach-
ers and directors, I have a game plan; I never walk into a rehearsal without
having done a significant amount of preparation. This doesn’t mean I
research the life of the playwright in exhaustive detail, or immerse myself in
theoretical debates about what constitutes a postdramatic play. First and
foremost, I focus on the words on the page—I read the play from beginning
to end and make notes about those aspects of the text that interest me: fig-
ures of speech, images, metaphors, intertextual references. I’m looking for a
point of departure, something that will allow me to bring something new
and distinctive to the realisation of the play in performance. More often than
not, I’m looking for something that will, first, make the play connect with
my students and, second, hold the attention of an audience, which mostly
comprises other drama students and friends and family of the cast. I might
find a phrase or thematic motif that initiates a chain of associations that sug-
gest a way to begin the performance. I want to make the postdramatic text
intelligible and entertaining without compromising its formal characteris-
tics. Looking at my preparatory notes for The Hamletmachine, it is evident I
had no intention of proceeding without some conceptual framework. I for-
mulated the following questions: what does the play’s title mean? What kind
of machine produces Hamlets? Perhaps this word refers to the way a particu-
lar social formation creates Hamlet-like subjects? Indeed, what kind of dis-
positif generates figures akin to Shakespeare’s Danish prince? What are
Hamlet’s essential characteristics? In response to this last question, I noted
that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the iconic Hamlet whose name continues to
circulate in myriad contemporary contexts, is an indecisive intellectual; he’s
vengeful, suspicious, erratic, paranoid and perhaps even insane. At the end
of this list is one final question. This is an edited verbatim transcript of stu-
dent responses to the question, what do you know about the Cold War?
Umm … Not much.

Some economic crisis featuring countries?
I know absolutely nothing about the Cold War.
Very, very little.
They were fighting over nuclear something … I don’t remember.
It was between America and Iraq, I think.
1945 … 1935 … it was before then. No, I can’t tell you.
I’m not too sure.
The Cold War, eh? I have no idea.
I know it had something to do with, like, death.
Not a huge amount.
(Grunt of incredulity) Nah, not much.
The Cold War: even though it’s called the Cold War. There were pockets
of hot war such as the Vietnam War and the Korean War. However, the
Cold War was really about a clash of ideologies. That being the commu-
nist ideals of the eastern bloc of Europe, which then spread to China as
of 1949, and then through South East Asia, and the capitalist ideals of
what was called the West: the United States, Great Britain, France and all
of the non-Russian victors in the Second World War.
* * *
Out of a group of 20 enrolled students, 14 turned up to the first class
of the semester on time. I made them wait outside the theatre space, called
them in one by one and asked each of them the question posed at the start
of this chapter (I arranged things so the students could not see or hear the
responses of their peers). Most of these students were about 20 years old,
which means they were born a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall
(most of the class were born in 1986 or 1987). This explains, to some
extent, their paucity of knowledge about the Cold War, a defining element
of my cultural and political milieu. I saw the fall of the wall on TV, and I
distinctly remember the triumphalist tone of President George H.W. Bush’s
speech marking this momentous event that, for some, signalled the end of
history: the end of the ideological struggle between communism and capi-
talism. Most of my students had not studied history at high school. I do
not want to suggest that their lack of knowledge is representative of their
entire generation (Australian schools teach recent history, but it is easy to
124 G. D’Cruz
avoid a close encounter with the subject if you so choose). Nonetheless, I

was a little surprised by the group’s lack of knowledge about historical
events that have shaped the contemporary world they inhabit. It is impos-
sible to grasp contemporary political conflicts and debates without a basic
understanding of history, yet this very diverse group of students, who
came from a variety of religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, demon-
strated a very similar disposition towards the study of their immediate
past. So, most of the class were ignorant about some of the most momen-
tous events in twentieth-century history; conversely, I lived through the
period and possessed more than a cursory knowledge of the Cold War.
Here we have a very familiar pedagogical scenario. The teacher, who is
significantly older than his students, possesses the institutional authority
to transmit his knowledge, about history, theatre practice and the play
titled The Hamletmachine, to his “ignorant students” (most of whom
know next to nothing about the Cold War, and even less about the play).
Looking back at the unedited tape of my one-on-one interviews with the
students, I am made aware of just how embarrassed some of them were
about their lack of knowledge. One woman explicitly refuses to answer
because she does not want to appear stupid on camera. I gently insist that
she make some response. In this instance, I play the master to her hysteric.
I find the video recording of this encounter mildly shocking, not because
I am unaware of the power relations that always inform such interactions,
but because of just how much my off-screen voice modulates and cajoles
in a manner very reminiscent of the director character in Ganesh Versus the
Third Reich (see Chap. 3). How to proceed?
The pedagogical dispositif reinforces power/knowledge relations that
assign the various actors in the teaching machine a proper place in the
institutional order of things: I, the teacher, play the role of the master, the
one who knows, and the teaching machine requires the “ignorant” stu-
dents to please the master by performing a series of formal assessment
tasks, but also a series of implicit or implied acts that elicit the master’s
favour. Students need to complete their assignments according to the
assessment criteria specified in the unit guide. In the case of the produc-
tions under review in this chapter, this means keeping a journal of rehearsal
activities, performing an acting role and a production task and, finally, writ-
ing a short research essay on some aspect of the production. The master
sets the essay topics and is supposed to observe such things as a student’s
commitment to the production (which he supposedly measures through
keeping an attendance record and making observational notes throughout
the semester about each student’s performance). The master implements

the assessment regime to justify the place of creative activity within the
teaching machine. In 2006, it was possible to pay scant regard to these
formal imperatives as long as the paperwork was in order at the end of the
process. Thus, despite being somewhat limited by the bureaucratic frame-
work that creates an essential condition of possibility for producing theatre
within a university setting, it is still possible to take a few cues from Joseph
Jacotot, Rancière’s (1991) “ignorant schoolmaster.”
In his book The Heart of Teaching, Wangh (2013, 5–7) argues that
formal education, together with the process of growth and maturation,
kills the human impulse for spontaneity and play. Wangh (2013, 5) sug-
gests that people learn most effectively when they possess a sense of won-
der: “For a young child every day is Awe-some. Learning happens at a
terrific pace and every moment of learning is an experience of Wonder.”
For students and teachers, maintaining this sense of wonder is not easy,
particularly in the context of the corporate university, which is obsessed
with performance indicators and metrics. Like Rancière, Wangh (2013, 8)
acknowledges that “instruction itself can be inimical to learning.” But
instruct we must if we are to remain part of the teaching machine. In my
view, teachers must continually negotiate the tension between what
Foucault (1981, 51–52) calls desire and the institution—that is, the
impulse to adopt an open, playful disposition towards knowledge and
learning and the imperative to conform to institutional regulations and
standards. I suggest we need to acknowledge the complex dialectic that
structures the relationship between the pedagogical desire to cultivate play
and the institutional imperative to meet KPIs and attain specific educa-
tional aims and objectives. It is worth noting the role “play” performs in
the emancipatory discourses of several twentieth-century avant-garde
movements, most notably Letterism and Situationism. Concepts such as
the dérive, a deliberate but playful drift through city streets (Wark 2011,
17), and the détournement, the appropriation of some element of capital-
ism to turn the system against itself (Wark 2011, 17), underscore the sub-
versive potential of play. More recently, L.M. Bogad (2016) develops a
theory of “serious play” about the performance work of political activists.
We need to be mindful of how these ideas also romanticise play. One of the
great ironies about teaching performance within an institutional context,
under the rubric of postdramatic theatre or some other nomenclature, is
that play itself becomes subject to institutional structures and imperatives.
126 G. D’Cruz
And it is with this caveat in mind that we can now move to the first of this
chapter’s case studies.
Looking at the video recording of the rehearsals for The Hamletmachine
after more than ten years is a strange experience. I realise I have most cer-
tainly forgotten many details about the specific exercises I set the class
during the rehearsal period. Instead of auditioning students for specific
roles, which is more or less impossible within the structure of Deakin
University’s production courses, I always devote one of the first classes to
having students perform for each other: I ask them to present any “hidden
talent” they might possess to their peers. The tape of this session reminds
me that the class brought a welter of sophisticated performance skills to
the production. Several students possessed solid musical-theatre chops;
another played a Beethoven sonata on piano from memory. Six students
had strong movement backgrounds; one young Latina woman could rap,
and delivered a stunning rendition of a piece she had written about the
politics of Australian national identity (she prefaced this with the famous
political chant “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” [the people united will
never be defeated]). Another young woman, having spent some time as an
exchange student in the US, performed cheerleader rhymes. Most of them
may not have known much about the Cold War, but they were an excep-
tionally talented group, and directly incorporated many of these little
“acts” into their final performance. The archival videos show a very lively,
good-humoured class. The students applauded each other enthusiastically
and did not appear inhibited by the imperative to perform. They looked
like they were having fun, and I hear myself frequently laughing behind
the camera. If cultivating a sense of play and spontaneity is a crucial aspect
of successful pedagogy, then the archival rehearsal tapes indicate that The
Hamletmachine class was successful on this level. As an aside, it also shows
I am doing my job in terms the institution values. Creativity, as Helen
Nicholson (2011), among others, notes, is also a valuable form of cultural
capital within what is most commonly called the creative economy. She
observes that there is “an instrumental justification for creativity,” since
the state values the ability to create various forms of intellectual property
in the form of marketable performances (Nicholson 2011, 95). I return to
this issue in the final chapter of this book.
The next few archival tapes I examine feature students discussing
Shakespeare’s play, and it is evident that I have asked them to analyse the
relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia and to make connections
between the themes of the play and contemporary politics. I divide the
class into small groups, and two students move from group to group
armed with a video camera and microphone to record the discussion. I
have also asked the students to translate the Elizabethan English of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet into contemporary language. This tape reminds me
that I intended to make the video record a part of the final performance
(while the production used lots of video projections, including an anima-
tion sequence, I ultimately dropped the idea of projecting rehearsal foot-
age in the final performance). From the recording, I deduce that I asked
the students to try to figure out why Müller might have chosen the char-
acter of Hamlet as an emblematic figure for his play. I do not appear on
the tapes until the end of the exercise, when the class assembles as a group.
I feel convinced that they are engaged and enthusiastic. While on camera,
they look relaxed, and some crack a jokes about the difficulty of the text,
but I am impressed by their commitment to this cerebral exercise. Perhaps
the presence of the camera helps them stay focused (they are, of course,
under surveillance).
Another tape documents what must have been a relatively early discus-
sion about the play. I stand in front of a whiteboard, marker in hand,
poised to jot down the students’ responses to the exercise and my ques-
tions; they engage one another in debate about what the play might be
trying to achieve. It soon became apparent that the majority of the class
also shared a left-leaning political ethos: they expressed, during class dis-
cussions and rehearsals, concern for the environment, refugees and the
poor. The one exception was the history buff who rattled off a very coher-
ent response to my question about the Cold War—I’ll call him Paul. Paul
possessed a detailed knowledge of history, and was the pianist I mentioned
earlier; he possessed perfect pitch, and I ended up using his musical skills
on the keyboard as an integral part of our Hamletmachine production.
The play explicitly addresses history and the politics of the Cold War
period. Paul’s political views were extremely conservative, to say the least.
He was obsessed with Nazi history, and even took great pride in demon-
strating his German-language skills. None of the extant tapes documents
some of his more provocative contributions to the class debate, but I have
a vivid memory of one of the Jewish women in the class taking him to task
over his political affiliations. As previously mentioned, this group of
students came from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds and held a variety
of different religious beliefs. Nonetheless, they bonded as a team and
became exemplars of what I have found to be a relatively unusual desire to
genuinely collaborate. (I have only taught one other group that displayed
128 G. D’Cruz
a greater sense of investment in a student production. This class staged

Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies, a play that shares many features with
Attempts on Her Life; this particular assembly of students often started
work before I entered the rehearsal space, and I frequently felt superfluous
to the production.)
The tapes confirm my impression that, whatever shortcomings the pro-
duction may have had as a play, the process of making the work was thor-
oughly enjoyable. This is not to say there was no conflict or dissension,
and I focus on the experience of one student who was less than impressed
by my role as the master teacher/director a little later in this chapter. For
the moment, I want to dwell on how postdramatic texts might facilitate a
distinctive pedagogy because they explicitly invite the creative team to col-
laborate in realising the text theatrically. To some extent, traditional dra-
matic writing also invites collaborators, to greater and lesser degrees; any
text that claims to be written for the theatre implicitly solicits the creative
input of other artists—performers, directors and designers. So what is dis-
tinctive about postdramatic writing? Perhaps the term’s “payoff,” as
Lehmann (2006, 185–186) suggests, lies in unsettling the relationship
between drama and theatre by drawing attention to the co-implication of
performers and spectators in the production of a theatrical event. As has
already been established, the opposition between activity and passivity
structures most discourse on the theatre’s political efficacy. You may
remember that Rancière notes formulations of the spectator’s activity tak-
ing two paradigmatic forms. The first involves separating the spectator
from the spectacle, as in the classic Brechtian theory of estrangement,
whereby the performance destroys the spectator’s apparent narcotic pas-
sivity through formal mechanisms that expose the theatrical means of pro-
duction and underscore contradictions in the social formation. We might
call this the “fission” model of political efficacy in the theatre, since it
attempts to prevent the audience from identifying with the illusion. The
second paradigm, which Rancière (2009, 4–7) associates with Artaud,
might be best described as the “fusion” model, since it insists on breaking
down the barriers between spectators and performers, so there is no dis-
tinction between passive viewers and active performers.
As is the case in any production, the actors (or student actors) must
wrestle with a plethora of questions about the meaning and structure of
the dramatic text before going on to actively embody characters or, in the
case of many postdramatic works, some form of physical theatrical entity—
that is, a present body that may or may not represent a dramatic character.
Actors will always bring aspects of their own life, in the form of political
and religious beliefs, emotional and affective dispositions, and corporeal
and intellectual eccentricities, to their work. Rancière’s point in The
Emancipated Spectator is that the opposition between passivity and activity
is untenable, since spectators also bring these distinctive characteristics to
the theatre. Moreover, as Alain Badiou (2015, 32) notes, the injunction
for the viewer to become active is actually “the height of passivity” insofar
as the spectator does what he is told. The connection between political
efficacy and activity (in either its manifestation as fission or fusion) is, for
Rancière, unsustainable. It is impossible to specify in advance, with any
degree of certainty, how any work of art or teaching strategy might suc-
ceed or fail to facilitate a radical intrusion of unsettling forces that cannot
be formulated in any symbolic form, but that unsettle our way of seeing
the world and, perhaps, function as a catalyst for reorienting the way we
live. There are many ways to attempt to describe this phenomenon; the
fact that such events are rare and remote does not mean that artists and
pedagogues stop trying to engineer them.
For example, the scholarly commentary generated by Ganesh Versus the
Third Reich is testament to a production’s ability to challenge verities
about disability, theatre and politics. Perhaps the Back to Back play is an
example of what Badiou (2015, 32) calls “real” theatre: theatre that “con-
tinues to illuminate our existence and our historical situation, beyond or
outside of dominant opinion.” In what ways might teaching The
Hamletmachine through performance accomplish something similar? And
how is it possible to quantify such a phenomenon? Sanja Bahun-Radunović
(2008, 446) believes that “history becomes ‘humanised’ and ‘workable’
by/in the very act of performance. The latter is always a ‘state of emer-
gency,’ the chronotopic point at which our personal and social being is
excited, ex-centered, and sometimes, Bertolt Brecht hoped at least,
brought to awareness of its historical condition.” On one of the archival
rehearsal tapes, I ask the students to introduce themselves and tell me
what they would like to learn from the unit. Without exception, they
respond with answers that suggest they hope to learn something about the
processes involved in staging a play and improve their skills as performers.
This is not unexpected—they are drama students, after all, and the teach-
ing machine specifies that I satisfy their desire to learn about theatre prac-
tice. However, to teach The Hamletmachine is to teach history. The major
question for me in the context of this chapter is to ascertain whether
teaching through practice makes the students more aware of the historical
130 G. D’Cruz
conditions that shape their lives than, say, teaching the play through giving
a lecture or unpacking its dense prose within the context of a seminar. But
how are we to address critically the historical conditions that not only
shape our lives, but also develop the pedagogical practices and forms of
knowledge authorised by the academy? And, more importantly, what is
the status of the knowledge generated by staging a play like The
Hamletmachine? The final part of this chapter attempts to address these
issues.
The Production
Towards the end of the class concerned with looking at the relationship
between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Hamletmachine, I tell the stu-
dents about how I intend to approach staging the play. I throw around a
few ideas about incorporating video recordings of the rehearsal process
before talking about how we might be looking for clues regarding staging
the play in Müller’s intertextual references. Bahun-Radunović (2008,
447) notes that:
Postmodern theater texts compulsively, and frequently traumatically, invoke

axial historical events and attendant historical gaps, probing the ways in
which these re-inscribe identities; this summoning is performed through the
re-enactments of the event or examinations of the event’s effects on the lives
of the participants or their heirs. The experimental strategies most often
deployed to this end include the intertextual inclusion of archival and quasi-
archival material; the introduction of long-term, supra-historical patterns
which subtend and subvert the storyline; the presentation of historical
events as fragmented, compressed, and disjunctive units; and the compulsive
repetition of events and quasi-events in the performative present.
This account of postmodern theatre provides an uncannily accurate

account of the way our production of The Hamletmachine used archival
and semi-archival material to illuminate Müller’s work, which opens with
what amounts to a short film that contextualises and frames the
performance. The video is projected on a large screen that hangs from the
rafters and almost covers the entire upstage wall. The video image is huge,
and begins with a short interview with Dr. Ron Goodrich, then an aca-
demic in literary studies at Deakin University who taught a course on
Shakespeare. He talks about Hamlet and provides a synopsis of Müller’s
career as a playwright. Remembering that the audience for this perfor-

mance consists primarily of cast members’ friends and family, the Goodrich
interview functions to “spoon-feed” the audience with information I hope
will make the play a little more accessible than it might otherwise have
been. It is followed by a montage of images culled from the archival tapes
of the rehearsals mentioned above. It shows the students taking notes and
talking about the text and the difficulties involved in staging the play. I
wanted to include an edited version of the students responding to my
question concerning their understanding of the Cold War; they correctly
rejected this idea, and instead suggested we conduct vox pop interviews
with the wider university community to discover what other people knew
about the “axial historical events” that comprise the Cold War narrative.
An edited version of this exercise appears as the next segment of the video
and depicts a broad range of people struggling to answer the question.
Unsurprisingly, most students have little idea about the topic, while some
of the older interviewees are very knowledgeable and articulate. This seg-
ment is followed by a title sequence. The play’s title is stretched along the
lower third portion of the frame, with three “picture-in-picture” boxes
placed at even spaces around the text. Each box contains a set of moving
images. The first box on the right of the frame contains a montage of
images from different film versions of Hamlet; the second shows archival
footage of Cold War-era politicians and missiles; and the final box contains
footage of the vox pop interviews. The sounds from the various montages
bleed into each other until the video cuts into a set of images of the ghost
of Hamlet’s father taken from a variety of films. I briefly superimpose the
image of Karl Marx over the most hirsute representation of the ghost—
this is probably an indulgent academic reference to Derrida’s Spectres of
Marx (2006). I do this knowing most of the audience will not get the
reference.
The final segment of the video comprises the “something is rotten in the
state of Denmark” speech taken from the Laurence Olivier version of
Hamlet. As the camera pans away from Shakespeare’s characters, we cut to
images of people joyfully celebrating on the top of the Berlin Wall as they
dismantle the edifice. We play George H.W. Bush’s famous speech about
the death of communism on the soundtrack along with the sounds of the
cheering crowd in Berlin. As we project this final portion of the video, the
cast slowly moves onto the stage in the dark. They wait for their cue to start
cheering along with the crowd on the screen. At this point, the screen goes
black and the play commences with a young man reciting the “something
132 G. D’Cruz
is rotten” speech while waving a giant Soviet flag. The cast cheers until
someone steps up with a US flag and displaces the young prince. The cast
becomes subdued, and then enthusiastically cheers while listening to
another “political” speech. They cheer and become forlorn again and again
until Leonard Cohen’s song “The Future” signals the beginning of the
play’s next segment. This song provides an uncommonly prescient and
articulate view of the new world order following the death of communism:
“Give me back the Berlin Wall/Give me Stalin and St Paul/I’ve seen the
future, baby, and it’s murder.” Some members of the cast perform a cheer-
leader routine; others chant “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” fore-
shadowing later sequences in the performance. We thus presented a dense
set of intertextual references drawn from a variety of archives before any of
the cast uttered a word from The Hamletmachine.
Reflections on Teaching/Directing The

Hamletmachine
So, what to make of this obviously expository sequence from more than a
decade ago? Indeed, what to make of the production as a whole? I am
struck, as already indicated, by my desire to explicate the history of the Cold
War. Inspired in part by accounts of Wilson’s productions of the play, espe-
cially the 1987 London production analysed by Nicholas Zurbrugg (1988),
I encourage the students to adopt various vocal registers and performance
strategies in their approach to realising the play on stage. Formally, the pro-
duction attempted to mimic aspects of Wilson’s aesthetic:
Mixing almost every theatrical and extra-theatrical trick in the Post-Modem

book, it combined classical declamation, parodic classical declamation,
autistic anti-declamation, colloquial declamation, cry, whisper, laugh, whim-
per, tape-recorded screech and mutter, tape-recorded noise, mime, acrobat-
ics, sculptural immobility, videoesque choreography, virtuoso lighting,
projected slide-imagery, black and white and coloured film-imagery, digi-
tally deconstructed video-image, and an array of musical sound-tracks
ranging from the nostalgic tango accompanying the cast’s final bow, to the
echoing tones of a piano piece by Lieber and Stoller (composers of Elvis
Presley’s Hound Dog). (Zurbrugg 1988, 439)
In our production, the right-wing pianist provides a live musical

soundtrack in addition to donning full Nazi regalia in those scenes that
require him to perform. One group sings sections of the text, another
recreates the famous “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial on
the pretext of finding a reference to Coca-Cola in the script. I get another
group, those involved in the Europe of the Woman section of the play, a
video from the DVD that accompanies the book Anarchic Dance by Liz
Aggiss and Billy Cowie (2006), and they choreograph the text to move-
ments and sounds inspired by Aggiss and Cowie’s video. Aggiss and Cowie
are members of the Divas Dance Theatre, a company celebrated for its
eclecticism and interdisciplinary approach to making performance.
We make several references to contemporary politics in other parts of
the play. For example, when we move Ophelia onto the stage towards the
end of the performance in a wheelchair, the young man in the Nazi uni-
form covers her head with a white hood when he reaches downstage cen-
tre. We create a tableau of Hamlet, Claudius and the “Nazi” posing for
“selfies” with the hooded and restrained Ophelia. This is an obvious and
none-too-subtle reference to the notorious Abu Ghraib abuse photo-
graphs that depict US soldiers posing with their humiliated, and some-
times hooded, captives (Image 6.1).
Image 6.1 The Hamletmachine, Deakin University, 2006. Photograph by Glenn

D’Cruz
134 G. D’Cruz
Watching the tapes of the production makes me wince in places, and

not just because of the inevitable distortions of the archival video. The
show’s political content appears heavy-handed, clichéd in many places and
clumsy. As much as we may have sought inspiration from Wilson’s aes-
thetic strategies, the modest budget of the Deakin production ensured
that the final result was always going to look a little ragged when com-
pared with the high-profile professional productions that attract scholarly
attention. The experience of watching the tapes generated other troubling
questions about my role as a pedagogue, and my performance, in this
instance as a teacher: could I have produced a less didactic play? How
might I have taken a less prominent role is establishing the overall aes-
thetic of the production? Does such practical production work teach stu-
dents anything valuable about the ethics of performing? Did I encourage
an uncritical approach to the use of archival material? Did I do enough to
raise the issue of using the pain and suffering of others for aesthetic pur-
poses? To what extent does a production like the one described in this
chapter merely trivialise history? And, finally, are we kidding ourselves
when we think that aesthetic activity of any kind, at any level, makes one
iota of difference to the way people see the world and formulate political
views?
I do not recall asking such questions back in 2006. The play proved to
be, on the surface at least, a great success (with respect to audience response
and student feedback), and perhaps I just assumed I had accomplished
something of lasting pedagogical value. The teaching evaluations from the
students are overwhelmingly positive. Of the 14 respondents, 13 say they
strongly agree that the unit was well taught. One student remains neutral,
and I feel I know the identity of the dissenter. Moreover, I suspect she
strongly disagreed with the proposition that the unit was well taught. Of
course, I have no way to verify my suspicion. The statistical anomaly can
only attest to my low-level paranoia. I’ll call the dissenter Jane, a neutral
name for a neutral rating. During rehearsals, Jane offered several sugges-
tions about how the group might approach a scene or solve one of the
many practical staging problems generated by the media projections.
Apparently, I rejected every single suggestion she made. At first, I was not
aware I had ignored or rejected her contributions. One day, during an espe-
cially difficult technical rehearsal, Jane expressed her dissent when I failed
to incorporate one of her ideas: “He always ignores me,” she said in a voice
loud enough for everyone to hear. Later, Jane apologised for her outburst
and told me she was sick of being ignored by her teachers, especially her
male teachers. She felt we were either overtly or unconsciously ignoring her
because, in her view, she was not “pretty” enough to garner our attention.
One of the great strengths of Wangh’s (2013) book The Heart of Teaching
lies in his deliberate engagement with “what teachers don’t talk about”
(xii)—that is, their response to antagonistic students, their sexual attraction
to others, the way they formulate and pose questions, the way they listen
and the way their class or gender identity imposes specific political disposi-
tions on the way they approach teaching. My practice as a teacher is over-
determined by a plethora of factors, conscious and unconscious, and it is a
sobering experience to be reminded about pedagogical power dynamics.
Jane’s experience suggests that she found the production frustrating in aes-
thetic and pedagogic terms.
The truth of the matter is that it’s hard to quantify pedagogical success
with any degree of certainty. Assessment rubrics and teaching-evaluation
surveys are crude mechanisms that fail to capture the structure of feeling
that makes each teaching experience distinctive. As already noted in previ-
ous chapters, Lehmann (2006, 178) argues that it “is not through the
direct thematisation of the political that theatre becomes political but
through the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representa-
tion.” So, did the production’s “mode of representation” make it political?
If so, for whom was it political: the audience of peers, friends and family, or
the group involved in the pedagogical activity? These questions are diffi-
cult to answer with any precision, since I did not directly ask the students
whether their involvement in The Hamletmachine had changed their per-
ception of the order of things. Suffice it to say that I was very pleased by
the students’ engagement with the project, their investment of time and
energy and their overall enthusiasm for the show, which they expressed
formally and informally at the end of it. My overwhelming feeling, all cave-
ats aside, was that The Hamletmachine production facilitated a rich peda-
gogical experience for the majority of students involved in the project.
When I think about this work, I recall a spirit of conviviality and coopera-
tion that I use as a yardstick, rightly or wrongly, to measure my perfor-
mance as a teacher. If I have learnt anything from my career as an academic
involved in directing student productions, it is that there is no formula or
failsafe set of principles that can ensure every production is an aesthetic and
pedagogical success. To teach within the educational dispositif is to teach
within a constantly shifting network of relations at the level of local insti-
tutional politics and at the level of governmental public policy. The condi-
tions of possibility for teaching The Hamletmachine in the way I have
136 G. D’Cruz
sketched in this chapter no longer exist because of the increasing corporati-

sation of the university.
In the final section of this chapter, I provide an account of a more
recent production that will serve to underscore the current pedagogical
dispositif, which imposes a different set of constraints on teaching postdra-
matic theatre. It would be disingenuous to claim that there is not some
degree of nostalgic yearning in this book for the time when tertiary educa-
tion was relatively free from the corporate logic that frames contemporary
teaching practices in the academy. The fact is that it is no longer possible
to return to some romanticised academic version of Arcadia. Indeed, the
academy has never been overly concerned with equality, and has always
functioned to maintain class privilege. Conservative critics such as
T.S. Eliot and George Steiner, for example, expressed their horror at the
prospect of working-class barbarians assaulting the ivory towers of aca-
deme in the 1940s and 1950s, and their arguments are regularly recycled
in the “culture wars” of more recent times. Nonetheless, teaching post-
dramatic theatre in 2017 is a distinctly different proposition then it was
even ten years ago.
The Princess Plays (2017)

I am sitting in a café in Amsterdam sipping green tea and contemplating
whether I should return to the academic conference I’m attending, or find
something more engaging to do with my afternoon. This is my third visit
to the city, so I’ve already seen the tourist sights. As my mind flits from
one recreational possibility to another, a mild feeling of anxiety possesses
me as I suddenly realise I’m scheduled to fly back to Australia in a few days
and commence teaching soon after that. I need to make a decision. I am
expected to teach another production class in the forthcoming trimester
(the academic year at Deakin University consists of trimesters to maximise
the institution’s material and human resources). I haven’t taught a pro-
duction for a couple of years, thanks to the university’s current workload
allocation model, which rewards publications and successful grant applica-
tions by providing teaching relief. Nonetheless, teaching is still a part of
my job description, and it’s time to consider my options. I have my theory
courses covered; I will present the same curriculum I have taught, with
minor modifications, for the last few years. The readings for these units are
still current, and I have already written my lectures. I always find produc-
tion classes harder to organise. It feels like I am teaching (and directing)
for the first time whenever I step into the theatre or one of the rehearsal
studios. So this year, do I choose Woyzeck, a play I’ve directed many times,
or do I attempt, once again, to teach postdramatic theatre? I have wanted
to direct Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Plays ever since I saw the first Australian
production of these pieces, under the title Princess Dramas, by Melbourne’s
Red Stitch Theatre in 2011. A few years earlier, I thought I’d make life
easier for myself by staging Attempts on Her Life for the second time. I
naively reasoned that having already directed the play once, and seen two
relatively recent student productions, would make the process a doddle.
As it turned out, the play proved just as difficult to direct as any other. The
cast of the 2012 production, unsurprisingly, possessed entirely different
skills, temperaments and dispositions from their antecedents. Thus, recall-
ing my failed attempt to take a shortcut by choosing a familiar text, I
decided to take on Jelinek’s Princess Plays and begin to jot down ideas on
my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone (a model that comes with a sty-
lus, but without an exploding battery).
Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, and having a
relatively successful art-house movie based on one of her books (Michael
Haneke’s The Piano Teacher), Jelinek is not well known in Australia. The
so-called Princess Plays comprise three distinct pieces: the first is based on
the fairy tale Snow White, the second rewrites Sleeping Beauty and the final
piece, Jackie, is a long monologue that draws on various biographical facts
about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In her review of the Red Stitch pro-
duction, directed by André Bastian, Alison Croggon (2011) writes that
these plays use “a commonplace of feminist writing: the reworking of
myth or folklore to subvert conventional ideas of the feminine in popular
culture. Jelinek, however, is not so much rewriting the myths as empower-
ment, as demonstrating how profoundly their clichés infect every aspect of
self.” These plays, then, are about identity politics, and the cultural and
ideological work performed by feminine stereotypes. I explicate these
political themes within the context of describing the rehearsal process, but
before I articulate the details of this production, it is important to
underscore developments in the 2017 incarnation of Deakin University’s
teaching machine (Image 6.2).
After spending more than a decade producing various kinds of postdra-
matic theatre with students, I become aware that I’m a creature of habit,
and have developed an almost formulaic approach to directing student
work. The process goes a bit like this. First, I make notes on the dramatic
text or the theme for a devised work. In the case of works such as Attempts
138 G. D’Cruz
Image 6.2 The Princess Plays, Deakin University, 2016. Photograph by Glenn
D’Cruz
on Her Life, The Hamletmachine or the Princess Plays, I try to find or

impose a structure on the writing. I take notes on how I might segment
the text; that is, I look for ways to create scenes and distribute lines (if
these features are absent from the published play, and they usually are
absent in postdramatic writing). Next, I look at the language and hunt for
images and metaphors that may generate staging ideas. Sometimes, as in
the case of Jelinek’s play, this is relatively straightforward—for example,
the Jackie monologue is filled with references to clothes and historical

events that suggest an overall sixties aesthetic. Sometimes these initial
explorations merely function as a point of departure for getting the stu-
dents to engage in their readings; on other occasions, a line or image may
provide the conceptual basis of the entire production. For example, here
are the first lines of Sarah Kane’s (2001, 205) 4.48 Psychosis:
(A very long silence.)

But you have friends.
(A long silence.)
You have a lot of friends.
What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive?
I directed a student production of this play in 2007, when social media

was rapidly establishing a presence in everyday life. Most of my students
had MySpace accounts (this was before Facebook became the dominant
social media platform). I locked on to the phenomenon of computers and
new-media networks mediating social relationships between friends, vir-
tual and real, and decided to open the play by having two performers
exchange real-time messages on social media. I have published an exten-
sive account of this production elsewhere (D’Cruz 2011), so suffice it to
say that the practice of close reading is an integral part of my creative pro-
cess (as it probably is for most directors). As I have already noted, I work
within an institutional context that renders auditions obsolete. My first
two classes always involve my asking students, as individuals separated
from the larger group, questions about a key theme of the play I have cho-
sen to stage: what do you know about the Cold War? Can you tell me the
story of Snow White? This one-on-one meeting with students helps me get
a sense of their personalities and gives them a chance to size me up, too. I
then usually set up a series of exploratory practical exercises that generally
involve some text. This occurs before we read the play as a group, or start
the devising process. This allows me to see the students work on the floor,
and get a sense of their capabilities as performers in a small-stakes setting.
The next class involves a show-and-tell exercise of sorts, which I described
in the first part of this chapter in the context of the Hamletmachine pro-
duction. The students primarily perform for each other and show what
might otherwise be a “hidden talent”: they sing, dance, tell jokes, perform
feats of gymnastic virtuosity or card tricks and so on. After a short period
of observation, I split the class into groups (corresponding to the way I
140 G. D’Cruz
have segmented the text for performance). I set a series of improvisatory

exercises designed to help them gain a detailed knowledge of the text (I
discuss the process of directing devised work in the next chapter, and note
the way such work demands a slightly different approach to getting the
show on the road). As we shall see, this division of the large assembly of
students into smaller groups usually works best when there are opportuni-
ties to reassemble the group.
So, this is my process, and the videotapes I use to document my rehears-
als attest to the fact that I rarely depart from it. The experience of direct-
ing the Princess Plays in 2017 taught me many things, but perhaps the
most important lesson I took from what turned out to be a rather fractious
and arduous process was that it is important to maintain a self-reflexive
perspective on pedagogy. On reflection, I think my approach to teaching
postdramatic theatre has become stale; or, perhaps more worryingly, I
have burnt out as a teacher. At times, it certainly felt like I was merely
going through the motions. What happened to the enthused, energised
version of myself on The Hamletmachine rehearsal tapes? What has
changed in the ten years between these productions?
No doubt I’m a little older and slower, and maybe more than a tad
disenchanted with the corporate logic that seems to permeate almost every
aspect of academic life today. In their incisive critique of the corporate
university, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber (2016, 2) point out that
academic culture “has been reticent in acknowledging its stress; to talk
about the body and emotion goes against the grain of an institution that
privileges the mind and reason.” But perhaps my ambivalent attitudes
towards my teaching activities have more to do with changes in the man-
agement of academic institutions than they do with matters of personal
fatigue. The imperative to perform—or else, identified by Jon McKenzie
almost 20 years ago, has intensified in recent times, and nowhere more so
than in the academy. As I have consistently argued in this book, the desire
to minimise inputs and maximise outputs characterises the contemporary
academic institution. Indeed, the “values of productivity, efficiency, and
competition have time as a common factor. Productivity is about getting
some tasks done in a set unit of time; efficiency is about tasks getting done
quickly; and competition, in part, is about marketing your achievements
before someone else beats you to it” (Berg and Seeber 2016, 8). Perhaps
we need to reformulate McKenzie’s imperative: today, academics need to
perform quickly, or else! The trimester structure at Deakin University aims
for efficiencies by providing students with the option to finish their degrees
quickly, and enter the workforce with the minimum of fuss. Each trimester
is two weeks shorter than the 13-week norm that was the most common
time frame for a semester for most of my academic career. This means each
unit we offer is two weeks shorter than it used to be, and thus, since
degree requirements have not changed in terms of the number of units
students need to complete a degree, students are now getting less face-to-
face teaching. Whereas they may have once had the luxury of viewing an
undergraduate education as an opportunity to pursue knowledge for a
wide variety of reasons, employment now appears to be the principal pur-
pose of that education. Consequently, students, in my recent experience,
have become obsessed with speed, and there is a sense in which teaching
postdramatic theatre in my immediate context is now more about teach-
ing project-management efficiency. After all, if you can learn how to
mount a full-scale production for public performance in ten weeks, than
you can handle almost any logistical task you encounter in the workforce.
But perhaps the changes I have just described are best apprehended within
a more detailed account of the Princess Plays.
There are seven students, five women and two men, working on
Jelinek’s Jackie; with one exception, the students self-selected to work on
this play. My show-and-tell class reveals that they possess a broad range of
talents. Some are musicians, others have had extensive acting experience
and so on. I ask them to edit Jelinek’s text because I think the monologue
is too long (I want each of the three plays to run for approximately the
same length of time). Remember, I regularly choose to work with postdra-
matic theatre because it enables me to ensure that all participants in my
class are given equal stage time, and have an equal opportunity to demon-
strate their creativity by dealing with a difficult and challenging text. For
me, the politics of postdramatic theatre in a pedagogical context are about
facilitating the principle of equality. This, of course, is a guiding ideal, and
various inequities invariably become evident during a production. I ask the
group to make collective decisions about how they will stage the text;
however, I make it clear that I reserve the right to veto their artistic choices
if I feel they do not work, or run the risk of contravening university regula-
tions regarding health and safety. The institution now compels us to per-
form risk assessments for most classes, and one of my new responsibilities
involves organising these evaluations with technical staff and lodging an
online form that confirms I have acquitted this duty properly—so I give
students licence to make artistic decisions within a framework circum-
scribed by an ever-increasing number of institutional dictates. After three
142 G. D’Cruz
classes (we meet twice a week for three hours), the students decide they
will represent Jackie as a collective, and distribute the lines of the mono-
logue evenly. They inform me that they have read the text and identified
some of its major themes and motifs. They observe, for example, that
Jelinek consistently refers to fashion, and identifies some of the former first
lady’s iconic dresses, such as her pink Chanel suit. This provides the group
with ideas about costuming, too. They pay heed to Jelinek’s stage direc-
tions, but I underscore the importance of taking in the full weight of the
playwright’s final remark regarding staging: “But I am sure you’ll come up
with something completely different” (Jelinek 2006, 53).
The students decide the women will all wear clothes connected with
Jackie, and the two men will wear suits; the men will embody aspects of
Jackie’s personality, but will, at appropriate times, portray President
Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. They identify the following themes in the
text: public life and celebrity, death, fashion, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, wom-
en’s bodies, most notably “the female waist,” and something they call
“light and dark” (which I read as the references to colour, such as Jackie
talking about her white face and black hair). The group transforms each
theme into a “character,” so they allocate most of the lines that refer to the
female body to a character called “Waist.” To wit:
Well, I suggest myself like my waist, which I don’t stress. I wear understated
clothes. My waist would be wasted if stressed and instantly cast off, I mean
cast in. Oh, no, well, I am about to make a crucial decision, and I decide
differently: my waist shall not be cast in anything, it should just be sug-
gested. It’s not something I would stress about myself. (Jelinek 2006, 53)
The group assigns the references in the text to celebrity to a “character”

they call “Public”:
I politely take off my self when I am talking to somebody, and yet I also stay,
though far above. I prefer to be suspended in all those pictures of myself and
dragged along, that way I don’t have to do anything. (Jelinek 2006, 54)
This turns out to be an eminently workable and efficient strategy for

segmenting the text, and it had absolutely nothing to do with me; I sug-
gested the students read the script slowly and carefully before making any
specific edits, and they discovered or imposed a logical schema on the text
as a consequence of group discussion and debate. I keep track of their
progress by talking directly to the group, but also by monitoring work

that occurs outside class time by checking the students’ Facebook posts.
Like most of my colleagues involved in production work at Deakin, I
establish a private Facebook group to facilitate efficient communication
between class members. I also regularly post rehearsal videos if I want
students to rehearse pieces of choreography or music in their own time. I
ask students to use the ubiquitous social media platform to inform me of
absences, and all group members post internet links to clips and articles
relevant to the production. As part of the formal assessment for this pro-
duction unit, we require that students post weekly journal entries that
record their workshop activities on Cloud Deakin, the online hub that is
supposed to function as a “one-stop shop” for the bulk of the administra-
tive and assessment tasks associated with each unit taught at the university.
Some students diligently post weekly journal entries; others hastily com-
plete them retrospectively (some post all their entries at the end of the
trimester). The journals give me some insight into how each student views
the rehearsal process and enables me to identify potential problems. The
group working on Jackie, for example, hit an impasse after editing Jelinek’s
text: they attempt to construct a series of scenes that represent the the-
matic content of the lines and become frustrated by the fact that the play
jumps from topic to topic very quickly in places. They also attempt a psy-
chological reading of the monologue, and toy with the idea of trying to
find psychological motivations for blocking (they are, after all, attempting
to portray fragments of Jackie’s mind). This strategy also meets with lim-
ited success. I consistently suggest that they focus on larger scenic units
without regard for what the text says. For example, if a few lines refer to
JFK’s funeral, then stage a funeral scene for a duration that exceeds the
particular reference. This does not mean I want the students to recite the
lines in a perfunctory manner—it is important that they understand what
they are saying, and attempt to deliver the lines theatrically.
During the intra-trimester break, I attend a conference at the University
of Sydney and visit Julian Rosefeldt’s film installation, Manifesto, at the
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Manifesto consists of 12 distinct film
installations featuring Cate Blanchett, who plays 13 characters (she appears
as her doppelganger in one scenario). Rosefeldt sets each section of art-
work in a distinct fictional world, and Blanchett’s lines, which she delivers
in a dizzying array of theatrical registers and accents, come from a variety
of manifestos, mostly the modernist tracts produced by Futurism,
Surrealism, Dadaism and so on. Rosefeldt also uses extracts from The
144 G. D’Cruz
Communist Manifesto and more recent works, such as Debord’s The Society
of the Spectacle and Jim Jarmusch’s “Golden Rules of Filmmaking.” In his
catalogue essay, Reinhard Spieler (2016, 88) points out that the installa-
tion’s “manifesto collages trace a path through the arts and their history.
The work is a tour de force through architecture, film, theatre, perfor-
mance and the visual arts, through the -isms of the avant-garde to the
present day, ingeniously accompanied by images, which themselves, in
turn, guide us through the history of these media and their protagonists.”
The first part of the exhibition catalogue is set out like a script. Rosefeldt
describes a fictional scenario at the top of each segment’s first page; he
assembles the various extracts from the manifestos underneath this descrip-
tion and provides performance annotations in the page margins. These
scant notes describe actions and sometimes indicate such things as vocal
dynamics and rhythms. For example, Rosefeldt (2016, 32) represents the
“world” of the segment that uses parts of the Dadaist manifesto in the
following terms:
A mourning close friend of the deceased delivering an oration at a funeral

ceremony beside an open grave surrounded by people in black. Earlier we’ve
observed the typical ceremonial activities: the coffin being carried out of the
church, accompanied by a small brass band, the mourning crowd walking
towards the grave, etc.
Next, in the first paragraph of the script, he writes: “voice over while we
see the quiet crowd on the way from the church to the grave” (Rosefeldt
2016, 32). The disjunction between the literal meaning and context of the
manifesto quotations and film scenarios reminds me of how I hope the
students will approach Jelinek’s script, for it is the play between the juxta-
position of words, images and spatial configurations that will make the
work come alive on stage. The installation segments underscore Blanchett’s
theatrical virtuosity while establishing resonances between the film scenar-
ios and the manifestos. Therefore, the juxtaposition of the words extracted
from the manifestos with the film scenarios and Blanchett’s theatrical per-
formances creates a mélange of rich significations that remind me of the
artistic strategies used by those playwrights and devisors Lehmann gathers
under the rubric of postdramatic theatre. Rosefeldt (2016, 97) claims his
main idea for the work was “not to illustrate the particular manifesto texts,
but rather to allow Cate to embody the manifestos.”
This is exactly what I hope the students will do with the Princess Plays.
I record extracts from the installation’s films and present them to the stu-
dents at our next rehearsal. I hope my account of Rosefeldt’s work will
inspire the class and provide them with practical strategies for staging
Jelinek’s text. Afterwards, when I read the students’ journals, I am disap-
pointed to find that almost nobody refers to Manifesto, and I remain
unsure whether my explication of this work helped the class with the prag-
matic task of staging the play.
As the rehearsals move forward, I am heartened by how well the group
working on Jackie is progressing. With very little input from me, they
develop what I think is a genuinely engaging performance, which is
focused and highly polished. I give the other groups a similar degree of
autonomy, but it becomes apparent that personality clashes have impeded
their ability to collaborate as successfully. This is not to say that the other
two Princess Plays do not have their moments, but I can sense the unease
and hostility that some students feel towards each other, and towards me.
A student in one of these other plays is especially hostile to any form of
direction. When I make what I think is a fairly straightforward suggestion
about reblocking a scene, she stares at me with incredulity. You might
think I’d asked her to perform a triple somersault while singing an operatic
aria. Some students directly express their grievances about their peers and,
at times, I feel as though the entire production is teetering on the edge of
calamity. I feel remote and removed from the class members as we come
closer to the performance season, and I cannot determine whether I am
merely paranoid, or sensing a general feeling of dissatisfaction with my
performance as a teacher.
As usual, I attend every performance and make notes on the show.
Except for the matinee, which is played in front of an enthusiastic audi-
ence of peers, the audience response to the performance is stoic, maybe
even tepid. As a pedagogical exercise, though, I think the unit provided a
challenging set of objectives for the students, and about half the group’s
journals suggest they did learn about collaboration strategies, text analysis
and postdramatic aesthetics. In addition to the assessment tasks directly
related to the production, the students must also write a research essay. I
set the following topics:
1. “[My plays] can be read as literary texts, just like novels. Except that they
are texts for speaking. Then I hand them over to a team of theater people,
and only then the ‘play’ gets made.” Elfriede Jelinek
146 G. D’Cruz
Describe and critically analyse the strategies your group used to “make”
the play to overcome the difficulties associated with the ‘postdramatic’ form
of Jelinek’s Princess Plays.
2. “My ‘characters’ are not real human beings, but figures made of
speech, stencils punched out of the nonstop talking all around,” Jelinek
wrote. Identify and analyse the problems associated with performing a role
that lacks the psychological depth of conventional dramatic characters.
3. Denise Varney writes that in postdramatic theatre there “is no longer
embodiment of character but selves present in real time. Rather than the
individual’s story, performers enact a more collective history, functioning as
sites of memory in collaboration with the spectator. Movement takes place
without underlying motivation and performers appear as accretions of ener-
gies and affects.”
To what extent can Jelinek’s Princess Plays be described as postdramatic
in Varney’s understanding of the term?
For the students, it is obvious that the play’s the thing, and most turn
in perfunctory assignments. Nonetheless, every assignment shows at least
some engagement with the critical literature on postdramatic theatre, but
it is very difficult to determine whether Lehmann’s term and the growing
body of critical literature on the topic of postdramatic theatre resonate
with the students. Only five out of 20 complete the formal evaluation
questionnaire and, of those five, only two provide written feedback; one
praises the unit because it gave students the freedom to devise their own
creative strategies; the other states there wasn’t enough direction. These
contradictory sentiments appear in the journal entries, too. Finally, a few
days after the university releases the grades, I get a few emails from dis-
gruntled students asking me to revise their marks in the light of discover-
ing that some students attained higher marks for what they perceived to be
lesser efforts.
Grading production units is always difficult. We know this, which is
why we provide detailed assessment rubrics for each assessment task. We
are also required to correlate what the university calls “unit learning objec-
tives” with each assessment task. This is in addition to providing evidence,
in tabular form, of how the assessment tasks relate to the “course learning
objectives.” All this material is published in a unit guide with the aim of
providing students with transparent assessment information. For example,
the overall graduate learning outcomes refer to such elements as discipline
knowledge, communication, critical thinking and digital literacy, among
others. The university compels academics to formulate unit learning
bjectives so they can complete the phrase “at the successful completion
o
of this unit students can”:
Apply appropriate research and reflective skills to create material for

performance
Collaborate effectively as part of a creative team
Develop and apply appropriate rehearsal skills to interpret and perform
material for performance
Develop an extended performance vocabulary, and an understanding of
how to read a dramatic text for content, style and aesthetic to produce
meaning in performance
Demonstrate personal, project and time management skills. (D’Cruz
2016)
In addition to the unit guide, we give students guides to each assess-

ment task; these documents offer practical tips on how to write a critically
reflexive journal and how to research an essay. We also provide verbal feed-
back during class time. Of course, academics in other disciplines also pro-
duce similar material. My point is that the institution’s obsession with
particular pedagogical aims and objectives necessarily leads to a plethora of
documents concerning assessment, which, in turn, make students hyper-
vigilant about assessment. And while there is nothing wrong with account-
ability, transparency and clarity per se, I feel we compromise our ability to
teach effectively when assessment and learning objectives displace play and
discovery as educational values. The corporate university’s obsession with
metrics requires constant proof of an academic’s ability to perform effi-
ciently. Despite this, at my institution, a large number of students seem
reticent about responding to teaching evaluations, and I feel that the insti-
tutional bureaucracy does more to impede learning than it does to facili-
tate good pedagogy.
But such anecdotal speculation remains in the realm of unsupported
assertion without careful study. The purpose of this chapter has been to
describe the pedagogical strategies I use to teach postdramatic theatre and
identify the ways that time, technology and institutional policy have cre-
ated a new context for teaching this topic. So there you have it: a tale of
two productions. I have very fond memories of The Hamletmachine, and
while I am sure I will recall the Princess Plays less enthusiastically, I hope I
have demonstrated some of the practical differences between the two pro-
ductions. Social media, educational and theatre technologies have altered
148 G. D’Cruz
the way I approach teaching. I am not suggesting that things were better
in the old days; there are too many variables to make such an assertion. I
taught fractious groups in the early 1990s, long before the advent of social
media, online assessment and the intensification of corporate manage-
ment. Rather, I think it important to describe the present conditions that
shape how we teach postdramatic theatre and adjacent topics. Teaching
postdramatic theatre through staging of texts written by the likes of Crimp,
Müller and Jelinek is not the only way to engage with the postdramatic. In
the next chapter, I approach the postdramatic from the perspective of
group-devised theatre, and examine the problems and potentialities that
emerge through a more conventional and cerebral approach to the field.
References
Aggiss, Liz, and Billy Cowie. 2006. Anarchic Dance. London and New York:
Routledge.
Badiou, Alain. 2015. In Praise of Theatre. Translated by Andrew Bielski.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bahun-Radunović, Sanja. 2008. History in Postmodern Theater: Heiner Müller,
Caryl Churchill, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Comparative Literature Studies 45 (4):
446–470.
Barnett, David. 2016. Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine. London and
Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the
Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bogad, L.M. 2016. Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play.
London and New York: Routledge.
Croggon, Alison. 2011. Review of The Princess Dramas by Elfriede Jelinek,
directed by André Bastian. Theatre Notes. http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com.
au/2011/06/review-princess-dramas.html
D’Cruz, Glenn. 2011. Teaching/Directing 4.48 Psychosis. Australasian Drama
Studies 57: 99–114.
———. 2016. ACP280 Unit Guide. Melbourne: Deakin University.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.
———. 1981. The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
Reader, ed. Robert Young and trans. Ian McLeod, 48–78. Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Jelinek, Elfriede. 2006. Princess Plays. Translated by Gitta Honegger. Theatre 36
(2): 39–65.
Kane, Sarah. 2001. 4.48 Psychosis. In Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London:
Methuen.
Müller, Heiner. 2001a. Conversation in Brecht’s Tower. Dialogue. In A Heiner
Müller Reader. Plays, Poetry, Prose, ed. and trans. Carl Weber, 217–232.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2001b. The Hamletmachine. Translated by Dennis Redmond. http://
members.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine.PDF
Nicholson, Helen. 2011. Theatre, Education and Performance. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Verso.
Rosefeldt, Julian. 2016. Manifesto (Exhibition Catalogue). London: Koenig
Books.
Spieler, Richard. 2016. Manifesto Catalogue. London: Koenig Books.
Wark, McKenzie. 2011. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and
Glorious Times of the Situationist International. London and New York: Verso.
Zurbrugg, Nicholas. 1988. Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility:
Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson. Modern Drama
31 (3, Fall): 439–453.
Chapter 7
Devising Postdramatic Theatre

in the Academy
Take a printed text. Take any printed text—a phone book from 1983, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5), The
Communist Manifesto, a restaurant menu, the wrapper from a can of soup.
In fact, take whatever happens to float your boat, wet your whistle or gets
the neurons firing in your hippocampus: a theme, a topic, a mood, an
object, or a person, place or thing. With a lot of work and a little inspira-
tion, you too can turn any random text or thing into a work of postdra-
matic theatre. No, I kid you not. This is not some remote aspiration, but
an eminently achievable possibility. Okay, well, perhaps I might be over-
stating things slightly, but while all theatre practice involves various forms
of individual and collective creativity, devised theatre, as the MC5 might
have put it, allows you to “kick out the jams, motherfuckers.” Devised
theatre gives you licence to make things up as you go; if you find the codes
and conventions of dramatic theatre restricting, you can blow them off.
And, up to a point, you can invent your own rules and develop your own
aesthetic practices and theories—unless, of course, you devise work within
an academic context. The university imposes stricter limitations on what
you can and cannot do in the name of art. Whereas critics and scholars
celebrate the work of artists and companies that regularly take artistic
risks, teachers need to be more circumspect about the creative work they
devise with students. This chapter is about the resonances between devis-
ing practices and postdramatic aesthetics, and is primarily about my expe-
rience of teaching devised performance by actually doing creative work.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_7
152 G. D’Cruz
Before examining the pedagogical problems generated by this branch

of postdramatic theatre, I sketch a historical context for such work and
interrogate some of the myths about group devised performance. I also
examine the apparent differences between texts written by playwrights and
those devised by collective “discussion, improvisation and writing” (Oddey
1994, 45). Let’s start with one of my most recent encounters with devised
theatre before making a quick excursion into the history of devised
performance.
Gob Squad’s War and Peace (2016)

I’m standing in the busy foyer of the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne,
Australia, eagerly anticipating Gob Squad’s latest performance: War and
Peace. Yes, the performance I am about to see is based on Tolstoy’s canon-
ical tome, and no, I haven’t read it. Gob Squad is an internationally
acclaimed company of performers based in Berlin, although some of its
members are British. The group formed in Nottingham in 1994, but relo-
cated to Germany some years later; the German members of the group
attended the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies at Gießen, where Hans-
Thies Lehmann has taught for many years (Techlenburg 2012, 10). Gob
Squad is renowned for producing irreverent performances that blur the
distinction between fiction and reality by using a welter of screen tech-
nologies to explore the paradoxes generated by the society of the specta-
cle. Well, this is the impression I get from reading the group’s publicity
material, anyway. I also learn that Gob Squad regularly performs in odd,
non-traditional performing spaces (abandoned parks, hotels, streets and
so on—it practises site-specific performance). War and Peace will be my
first Gob Squad show, and I’m a little disappointed to find myself in a
conventional theatre space. But the atmosphere is convivial—one might
even say “festive”; the performance I’m about to see is, after all, part of the
2016 Melbourne Festival, and Gob Squad is one of the event’s major draw
cards (Image 7.1).
The few hundred people gathered in the theatre with me on this par-
ticular night are laughing, joking, talking, drinking, eating and generally
making a racket. For the most part, this assembly looks wealthy, judging
from their clothes: smart-casual—I spot a few women in elegant evening
dresses, and there is the usual smattering of men in suits, but most of this
middle-class throng are younger people, many dressed in black. Tickets
for this festival event are relatively cheap, $30 if you are under 30. As
Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 153
Image 7.1 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David Baltzer/
Bildbuehne.de
someone past the age of 30, I pay more than double the cost of a student
ticket. Oh, well; I can afford it, and I do, of course, have a professional
interest in Gob Squad’s style of theatre. Theatre? Does Gob Squad do
theatre? I’m pondering this question while casually chatting with an
acquaintance when a man taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and look
up at a blond-headed individual perched on a pair of large platform boots.
He’s wearing make-up, a strange-looking, figure-hugging beige silk dress
and a long cape. He looks a bit like a glam rocker from the 1970s:
“And who are you?” he says.

I stare at him vacantly.
“What’s your name?”
“Glenn D’Cruz.”
“How exotic!”
He then asks me a series of questions about what I do and where I’m

from. I answer evasively; I’m happy to go along with this game, but I’m a
little suspicious of his motives (he’s jotting down notes as I respond to his
questions). He’s obviously a member of Gob Squad, and I fear that I’m
154 G. D’Cruz
about to be roped into some sort of audience-participation bollocks. I

look around the space and see other costumed members of the group
chatting with other people: more audience-participation bollocks. As my
conversation with the glittering giant continues, my worst fears are
realised: the man, whom I later learn is Gob Squad member Simon Will,
invites me into the theatre to become part of the performance.
As it turns out, he doesn’t want me to do much. He asks me to stand
in front of a screen when he calls my name. I’m happy to comply. As the
audience moves into the performance space and everyone takes their seats,
the performers start announcing the names and occupations of the chosen
few. Simon introduces me as “a man of mystery” based on my evasive
attempts to take the piss out of his questions. Tolstoy’s novel begins with
a scene set in a Salon (the venue of high-society gatherings in nineteenth-
century Russia). In Tolstoy’s time, it was customary to announce Salon
guests as they arrived, and my small role in the evening’s performance
recalls the novel’s opening scene. After I’m introduced and dismissed, I
notice that some audience members remain on stage; they are seated at
tables. I see glasses, strawberries, bottles of alcohol and microphones on
each of the tables in my immediate field of vision. As I walk to my desig-
nated $65 seat, I breathe a sigh of relief that I am not one of those hapless
spectators trapped on stage under the glare of the theatre lights, although
I could use a drink at this point.
The set looks a little shabby. A tent with gauze draperies occupies the
upstage centre position, and a variety of different-sized screens are placed
around the rest of the space. The tables I mentioned earlier are not far
from the front row. As it happens, Gob Squad uses Tolstoy’s novel as a
point of departure for generating a series of loosely structured scenes and
discussions about some weighty issues: the nature of war (and peace),
theories of history, political conflict and so on. One of the performers
introduces the work by asking one of the audience participants to hold the
novel. He then says: “Heavy, isn’t it? That’s only half of it. It’s one of the
longest in the world. It has 1256 pages (depending on the edition and
language you are reading in), originally written in four volumes, there are
more than 135 characters. Have you read it? I’m only half way through”
(Gob Squad 2016).
The Gob Squad performers go on to ask the audience members seated
at the tables a series of questions about the book’s themes while offering
them alcoholic beverages and an assortment of snacks. These discussions
are interspersed with a series of set pieces that sometimes dramatise parts
of the novel or stage scenes inspired by the book’s themes. The perfor-
mance, then, consists of the following elements: live video of actors ques-
tioning the co-opted audience, projected images that evoke Tolstoy’s
Russia (the interiors of aristocratic mansions, battlefields, period portraits
and so on), and rehearsed scenes and songs (a profoundly ironic version of
John Lennon’s peace anthem, “Imagine,” is especially memorable). On
the whole, I find the event never less than engaging, and I find myself
anticipating each sequence eagerly. What are these clever bastards going to
do next? The actors are charismatic and witty; the conversations they con-
duct with the audience provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate
their skills as improvisers; they are particularly adept at asking Socratic
questions that trip people up, but they manage to keep everyone on side
by being utterly charming and polite. They also ask people to read pas-
sages from Tolstoy’s novel to generate discussion. Most of the rehearsed
scenes are comic—they stage an ironic fashion parade using a range of
ridiculous nineteenth-century costumes, for example, and stage mock bat-
tles between historical figures drawn from War and Peace (including a
hilarious argument between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander) (Image 7.2).
Image 7.2 War and Peace, Gob Squad (2016). Photograph by David Baltzer/
Bildbuehne.de
156 G. D’Cruz
For me, though, it is the live video feed of the conversations that is
most compelling. The company is walking a tightrope; I suspect the entire
performance might collapse if they choose uncooperative, or overly intro-
spective, audience members as their interlocutors. On the night I attend,
the audience participants are a beguiling bunch, and include a professional
historian and a postgraduate student of avant-garde theatre. My fascina-
tion lies in hearing what these “everyday” people have to say about politics
and history under the pressure of the literal and metaphorical spotlight.
The casual tone of the conversations belies their genuinely intriguing rev-
elations. I wonder how I might perform under the glare of a thousand
eyes? What do I think about the prospect of war? There is no doubt that I
find the performance entertaining, and even insightful, but I can’t help
wondering whether the comic, almost frothy aesthetic trivialises the
weighty issues the work addresses. Does the spoonful of sugar simply mask
the profound terrors unleashed by War? Or can this type of devised perfor-
mance have a substantial degree of political efficacy? I have consistently
asked these sorts of questions in this book, and I find myself, once again,
struggling to find a way to quantify such efficacy in meaningful terms.
The reviews of the play are mixed. Cameron Woodhead (2016) of The
Age newspaper writes the most overtly hostile and dismissive assessment:
Gob Squad’s War and Peace is an insult to Tolstoy’s novel and ranks among
the worst pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Even fans of previous shows these
theatrical renegades have brought to Melbourne (I count myself among
them) will be annoyed by the lack of anarchic inspiration the British–German
company usually brings to the table.
Surely, as someone familiar with previous Gob Squad productions,

Woodhead could not have seriously expected to see a faithful theatrical
adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel. Even the Royal Shakespeare Company, an
institution with a history of adapting canonical novels for the stage, would
probably baulk at the prospect of putting War and Peace on stage. But
Woodhead does raise an interesting point about the pitfalls of Gob Squad’s
postdramatic approach to Tolstoy: the company’s irreverent treatment of
the book underscores the status of canonical literary works in contempo-
rary culture. I mean, who’s got the time to read a nineteenth-century
tome these days? And, more to the point, who has the patience to read
Tolstoy when there are so many other entertainment and information
media that compete for our attention? Why should anyone avert his or her
gaze from a television screen, smartphone, computer or tablet to read a

long and complicated novel? Woodhead’s (2016) rather cranky review
argues that “the bulk of this show sees the performers saunter around,
casually sabotaging every fine quality of the book: the author’s mastery of
dialogue is inverted; his command of time and incident traduced by lon-
gueurs; his philosophical excursions reduced to vacuous generalities.”
Perhaps he caught the show on a bad night, or maybe he fails to grasp the
philosophical import of everyday banalities.
Questions of politics and taste aside, this performance resonates with a
variety of postdramatic themes. It consistently unsettles the conventions of
theatrical representation by blurring the boundaries between different
orders of reality. Gob Squad adopts a presentational approach to its
work—not only do the performers directly address the spectators, but
make selected members of the audience an integral part of the show.
Tolstoy’s text is, in the end, a minor element of War and Peace; it is the
contingent elements of the performance, the variability of the audience
participants’ levels of intelligence, confidence and charisma, which make
the performance compelling. Theatrical qualities of energy and presence
are more important than fidelity to the source text, which functions, as I
have already observed, as a point of departure for what amounts to an
absorbing theatrical experiment (at least when I saw it). Techlenburg
(2012, 9) notes that:
the most important topic in Gob Squad’s work has always been the inclu-
sion of people, places, things, and behaviors from everyday life—which
places the performance collective within a long tradition of avant-garde the-
atre, dance, performance art, and Happenings—they take an additional step:
if the artistic enterprise of the discovery of the real that began with Dada and
Artaud and moved on to Brecht, Cage, the Living Theatre, Boal, and envi-
ronmental theatre culminates in Kaprow’s demand for art as “doing life.”
Gob Squad is thus not doing anything especially new; people have been
playing with new technologies on stage, screwing up canonical works of
literature and blurring the lines between various levels of fiction and reality
for a long time. Moreover, critics have been expressing their hostility
towards works such as Gob Squad’s War and Peace from the moment they
appear. Richard Hornby (2016, 115) begins one of the most recent, and
aggressive, examples of this type of criticism thus:
158 G. D’Cruz
Any theatregoer who hates the Wooster Group can’t be all bad. The
Woosters are experts at hiding a play behind a screen of gadgetry: Film!
Video! Audio! Dance! Plasma screens, multiple microphones onstage, mul-
tiple television monitors! But if all that is too technological for you, throw
in traditional theatrical techniques at random from minstrel shows, vaude-
ville, burlesque, and Kabuki. Somewhere under the media explosion there is
a play—if not a classic (Hamlet) then at least something of historical impor-
tance (The Hairy Ape)—but without a program you could not even tell what
play you are supposed to be watching. A solo role muttered mindlessly for
over an hour by a white woman in blackface? Why, it’s O ’Neill’s The
Emperor Jones, of course.
So much for the politics of perception—Hornby apparently finds the

Wooster Group’s approach to messing with the theatre’s traditional sys-
tems of signification to be tedious. However, I am reluctant to dismiss
Hornby’s antipathy to postdramatic aesthetics. He obviously values dra-
matic literature and those more traditional modes of acting that depend
on representing fictional characters that inhabit some sort of fictional
world. In fact, his antipathy towards postdramatic work is at its most vocif-
erous when he writes about acting: “My basic complaint with avant-garde
troupes like the Woosters has always been not that they do not revere
texts, but that they do not revere actors” (Hornby 2016, 119). As I have
argued in previous chapters, it’s hard to sustain any argument about the
superiority of one aesthetic form over others by appealing to a work’s for-
mal characteristics, which is not to say that formal experimentation does
not produce a range of complex effects. Rather, I contend that the politi-
cal efficacy of a performance is contingent on a complex melange of fac-
tors and circumstances connected with audience reception, cultural
context and history, which is why theoretical speculations about political
efficacy are mostly articulated in the subjunctive mood. This is not to say
that theatre cannot inspire people to engage in concrete activism, or that
it is incapable of changing people’s minds about how they perceive the
world and their place in the order of things. Rather, we need to base any
claims we make about political efficacy on something more than the aca-
demic analysis of “sign usage.” The same can be said about pedagogical
effectiveness. Our tools of educational measurement are crude, but we can
create situations and generate provocations that unleash political energies
and forces. Indeed, the history of devised theatre reveals a close connec-
tion between pedagogy and politics, and the Gob Squad production
I have just described (and impoverished through my necessarily reductive

account of its key features) points to a form of pedagogical practice appro-
priate to the present moment.
Devised Theatre and Postdramatic Pedagogy

Writing in 1985, Gregory L. Ulmer (1985, ix) observed “the disparity
between the contemporary understanding of reading, writing, and episte-
mology and the institutional framework in which this understanding is
communicated (pedagogy, curriculum, evaluation).” In many ways, this
book makes a similar observation about the relationship between the
scholarly understanding of contemporary performance practice and the
institutional imperatives that make it difficult to avoid conventional assess-
ment regimes, even in those pedagogical sites that value practice as
research. To teach postdramatic theatre through practice, as many of us
do, is to teach an expansive mode of writing—for writing, in the Derridean
sense, is about compositional practice (Ulmer 1985, x). This is why Ulmer
(1985, 225) identifies performance as one of the exemplary scenes of his
applied grammatology:
Examples of what an applied grammatology might be like—of a pict-ideo-

phonographic Writing put to work in the service of pedagogy—are already
available in the intermedia practices of certain avant-garde artists.
Contemporary movements such as conceptual art, performance art, and
video art may be considered from our perspective as laboratories for a new
pedagogy, since in these and other movements research and experience have
placed form as the guiding force.
More recently, McKenzie has followed Ulmer’s (1985, 225) lead in

collapsing the distinction between “critical-theoretical reflection and cre-
ative practice” through developing StudioLab, which is:
a critical design pedagogy that seeks to democratize emerging forms and

processes of digitality by supplementing seminar-based critical thinking with
studio-based design thinking and lab-based tactical media-making. In
StudioLab, students roleplay as critical design teams to research and create
conceptually-rich projects that address contemporary social challenges
through a variety of media forms and events. (McKenzie 2017, 279)
160 G. D’Cruz
In their own ways, Ulmer and McKenzie unsettle scholarly and peda-
gogical verities by forging connections between critical thinking, technol-
ogy and creative practice. The extent to which this approach is possible
depends on specific institutional contexts. However, I fully endorse the
basic principle of bringing apparently opposed vocabularies, technologies
and stylistic registers into the scenes of pedagogy. This chapter’s focus on
contemporary devised performance undertakes a similar gesture by exam-
ining the role of postdramatic theatre’s vocabulary in the context of teach-
ing devised performance.
Institutional and economic constraints aside, devised performance
appears to be the most flexible of forms, and is especially well suited to
pedagogical contexts, since the only given circumstances, or artistic objec-
tives, that frame a devised work are the ones constructed by the devisers
themselves, or by the director or teacher leading the devising process.
Today, groups such as Back to Back, Goat Island, The Builders Association,
Ex Machina, Gob Squad, Frantic Assembly and Forced Entertainment,
among many other experimental companies, use a plethora of devising
techniques and strategies to generate their work. Moreover, many of these
groups write about their creative processes, and conduct workshops on
their artistic strategies. In fact, there exists an overwhelming set of
resources, videos, books and critical commentaries to guide the novice
deviser. For example, Gob Squad, which gave a series of workshops in
Melbourne during the run of War and Peace, maintains a website that
functions as a resource for those interested in the company’s working
methods. Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment has written some books
that document his group’s work, and the scholarly commentary generated
by the output of devised companies is voluminous (Oddey 1994; Etchells
1999; Graham and Hoggett 2014; Gob Squad 2016). Since this chapter
is primarily concerned with how teaching postdramatic theatre through
devised performance produces variants of the anxieties and aporias I have
identified in previous chapters of the book, I do not intend to add to this
growing body of criticism beyond noting the most salient tensions in the
critical literature on the topic—Heddon and Milling (2006) provide a use-
ful starting point for those interested in the history of devised
performance.
In her seminal book on devised theatre, Alison Oddey (1994, 4) argues
that such work “is a response and a reaction to the playwright–director
relations, to text-based theatre, and to naturalism, and challenges the pre-
vailing ideology of one person’s text under another person’s direction.”
She also notes that work in the 1970s contested the hierarchical means of
theatrical production by embracing democratic working methods; thus,
discussion, debate and collective responsibility for the entire gamut of pro-
duction tasks displaced traditional methods of organising performance
labour. However, she goes on to say that, in the 1990s, “the term ‘devis-
ing’ [had] less radical implications, placing greater emphasis on skill shar-
ing, specific roles, increasing division of responsibilities … and more
hierarchical group structures” (Oddey 1994, 9). Of course, there are myr-
iad ways to generate devised work, and the democratic principles Oddey
identifies in the 1970s are present in the work of established companies
such as Forced Entertainment. Etchells (1999, 17) describes his group’s
democratic dimension differently when he notes that “no single aspect of
the theatrical vocabulary is allowed to lead—so that set design, found cos-
tume, soundtrack, text fragment or idea for action might each just as well
take the lead as a source or starting-point in a project.” Thus, it’s impor-
tant to acknowledge that the term “devised theatre,” like the term “post-
dramatic theatre,” refers to a wide range of practices—and it would “be
misleading to suggest that this umbrella term signifies any particular dra-
matic genre or a specific style of performance” (Govan et al. 2007, 4).
Moreover, the distinction between pre-existing writing and devising as
different points of departure for generating performances collapses under
scrutiny. In general terms, one might deconstruct this opposition by
invoking Derrida’s (1976) famous declaration that there is no outside-text
(Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte)—that is, all forms of communication rely
on a system of differences, which makes it impossible to argue for the
superiority of one form of signification over another. With specific refer-
ence to dramaturgy, Barba (1985, 75) points out that “the word ‘text’
before referring to a written or spoken, printed or manuscript text, meant
a ‘weaving together’.” In this sense, there is no performance without
“text,” and the distinction between a conventional dramatic text and a
performance text is one of degree rather than kind. I return to Barba’s
account of dramaturgy at the end of this chapter. For the moment, I want
to draw attention to Duška Radosavljević’s (2013) more prosaic point
about the importance of acknowledging the ways conventional dramatic
structures shape devised performances. This is evident in her description
of a work entitled Internal by the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed,
which consists of five performers speed-dating five audience members
while the other spectators look on. Radosavljević (2013, 3) notes that:
162 G. D’Cruz
despite its performance art-like appearance (the fact that it was set in a
gallery-like space and that the actors/performers made no obvious attempt
at assuming dramatic characters), Internal had also upheld certain theatrical
conventions that might be seen as Aristotelian. The piece was scripted,
although this also anticipated the actors’ licence to extemporize in the inter-
est of personalizing it to each audience member. There was evidence of a
clear three-act structure, the conventions of a curtain rising and falling to
signify beginning and end, as well as a foregrounding of the usually hidden
elements of the theatrical machinery—such as the make-up mirrors and
desks being exhibited in the “foyer” area. However, the way in which the
piece transcended both theatrical and performance art conventions was,
once again, by drawing the audience into the inner dramaturgy of the piece
in such a way as to turn them into co-protagonists.
Radosavljević’s book provides a series of other examples that unsettle

the opposition between scripted and devised performances, and she
reminds us that we should be mindful of hasty judgements when it comes
to making absolute distinctions between devised and written works.
Perhaps Andy Field (2009) puts it best when he bluntly states that “all
theatre is devised and all theatre is text-based.” It’s certainly difficult to
argue with his observation that:
A text is simply a blueprint for performance and a basis for making some-
thing happen. As such, it is the product of a devising process. A text might
well be a thing written on lots of pages with a person’s name at the top. It
might equally be something inscribed in or on the bodies of the perform-
ers—a series of movements or gestures or acts. It might similarly be a set of
rules for play. It might be a combination of all these things. All of these are
types of texts that could be used to make a performance. (Field 2009)
It is important to stress again that Lehmann’s formulation of postdra-

matic theatre does not demonise playwriting. Nor does it uncritically cel-
ebrate devised performances, since the act of developing a performance
collectively does not necessarily make it postdramatic or, for that matter,
aesthetically valuable—obviously, no single approach to creating a perfor-
mance guarantees its aesthetic value or political or pedagogic efficacy.
Lehmann’s account of postdramatic theatre is not concerned with making
distinctions between collectively devised and written work, since he is
more interested in articulating a critical vocabulary that describes the for-
mal features of a wide range of experimental performances. The discourse
of postdramatic theatre is agnostic about a given work’s genesis. But if, as

I claimed in the introduction to this book, the discourse of postdramatic
theatre is an act of redescription in Rorty’s (1989) sense of the term, what
are the advantages of adopting Lehmann’s critical vocabulary—that is, his
redescription of experimental performance, in the context of teaching
devised performance through practice?
As the first part of this chapter demonstrates, it is relatively easy to
describe a performance, such as, say, Gob Squad’s War and Peace, by
invoking the concept of postdramatic theatre. Indeed, explicating or ana-
lysing this performance using Lehmann’s postdramatic discourse can cer-
tainly help students understand how it might, among other things, unsettle
verities about representation, the status of the real, the distinctions
between self, performer and character and so on. It can also assist with
providing a context for explicating the work of playwrights such as Jelinek,
Kane and Crimp. But how might we mobilise this discourse in the context
of teaching group devised theatre? And what are the advantages and dan-
gers of teaching students to devise postdramatic work? The next section of
this chapter addresses these questions through a series of reflections on my
approach to teaching devised theatre over the last 15 years.
Metaphysicians and Ironists
In their own ways, many of the scholars and artists I have cited in this
book rail against the dangers of formulaic approaches to art and pedagogy.
Wangh (2013, 148), for example, argues that creative work “demands
openness, risk-taking, and incompleteness—values entirely opposite to
those of fundamentalism.” Rorty (1989, 73–74), writing in a different
register, makes a distinction between metaphysicians and ironists: simply
put, a metaphysician believes in the common-sense view that a fixed,
enduring reality exists behind surface appearance; this enables the meta-
physician to assert, among other things, fundamental distinctions between
genres, modes of writing or performances. An ironist, on the other hand,
“thinks that nothing has an intrinsic nature, or real essence” (Rorty 1989,
74); consequently, the ironist is suspicious of his place in the order of
things, and consistently questions the veracity and status of the language
games he plays. As I have argued in the introduction to this book, I am
not sure whether Lehmann is a metaphysician or an ironist, since it is dif-
ficult to know whether his redescription of contemporary performance
displaces an atrophied critical vocabulary or stealthily reinstates modernist
164 G. D’Cruz
clichés concerning the relationship between theatrical innovation and

political efficacy. I return to this point in the concluding chapter.
For now, I want to examine another disjunction generated by Lehmann’s
concept of postdramatic theatre. Bernd Stegemann (2009, 22) accepts
that “postdramatic discourse is enlightening and helpful, in as much as it
concentrates on theatrical phenomena, particularly theater as an event. It
attempts to describe its indescribable sensual complexity, allowing for bet-
ter understanding and for better potential results.” However, he also
points out that the discourse of postdramatic theatre has a prescriptive
force that entrenches an orthodoxy that effectively stifles artistic risk by
functioning as a kind of “aesthetic arbiter” (Stegemann 2009, 22). It is
possible to use the concept of postdramatic theatre to evaluate the artistic
worth of performances; this has dangerous consequences when funding
bodies take up the postdramatic mantle. Regarding his immediate cultural
context in Berlin, Stegemann (2009, 22) claims that “If you intend today
to apply for project funding and are not familiar with postdramatic theater,
you might as well just fold up your tents.” He is also concerned that what
begins as a scholarly description of performance events ends up shaping the
development of creative practice. I think Stegemann is maybe overstating
the prescriptive force of Lehmann’s concept, but I believe there is a sense
when the desire for an open, rootless approach to pedagogy can be com-
promised by one’s immersion in the dominant vocabularies and debates
generated by narrow disciplinary concerns. To put it bluntly, the discourse
of postdramatic theatre can quickly become what Rorty (1989, 73) calls a
“final vocabulary”: that is, a set of words people “employ to justify their
actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we for-
mulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term
projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes.” In the present
context, these words might be such things as presence, process, energy,
theatricality, multimedia, postdramatic.
I have discovered two things as a consequence of surveying and reflect-
ing on the devised work I have made with students over the last 15 years
for the purposes of writing this chapter. First, I’m struck by how many
ideas and concepts associated with postdramatic theatre are present in
these works, despite a conscious attempt on my part to avoid unnecessary
theoretical jargon. Second, the body of devised work I’ve created with
students is formulaic. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense. I agree with
Carl Lavery (2005, 230) when he writes that teaching creative practice “is
like being in a garage or punk rock band—you throw off the stifling
straitjacket of craft, take your three chords and use them differently. It’s
about standing on the shoulders of giants, and not feeling bad about it.”
So what if each production appears to be compiled from the same “basic
ingredients” and follows a structural shape that resonates with
Radosavljević’s account of the dramatic conventions present in Internal?
In any case, we never actually begin from ground zero; as teachers and
artists, our aesthetic prejudices, artistic training and political dispositions
are always at play, even when we think we are deliberately trying to subvert
them. What’s more, the desire to be open and take risks is always compro-
mised by institutional imperatives, rules and regulations. While it makes
pedagogical sense to use Lehmann’s vocabulary to contextualise postdra-
matic plays such as Attempts on Her Life, it is possible to teach group
devised theatre by simply creating it.
Let me clarify what I mean. When presented with a play such as
Attempts, students invariably want to know why the playwright has not
assigned lines to specific characters, or bothered to create a coherent story.
The discourse of postdramatic theatre provides consistent, if not immedi-
ately clear, responses to such questions. For example, the concept of a
“text-bearer” as opposed to a dramatic character provides a useful way for
students to get a grip on Crimp’s use of language in Attempts. While often
mystified by experimental writing for the theatre, most students are unper-
turbed when told they are going to make a performance work about time,
or love, or money or similar familiar themes. Further, even when I use an
academic text as a prompt, students rarely ask me to explain myself; they
just get on with the work. I occasionally use the vocabulary of postdra-
matic theatre in the context of creating devised work when working with
students, but the pressure to hit the ground running and generate a per-
formance within a very short time frame leaves little room for explicating
theory in too much detail.
As part of the Deakin University course concerned with group devised
theatre, we show students videotapes of landmark performances by groups
such as Forced Entertainment and Gob Squad. These companies are very
articulate about their creative processes, and have produced a range of
books and videos that describe their methods and techniques for generat-
ing work; for the most part, these texts function as “how-to” manuals, and
require little commentary. It is certainly possible to explicate the work of
these companies using the language of postdramatic theatre, but it is not
absolutely necessary, since these practitioners have developed their own
ways of speaking about their work. As I’ve already stated, many of the
166 G. D’Cruz
most celebrated devising companies are graduates of university drama

courses, and their work resonates with the concept of postdramatic theatre
in many ways. However, as Melrose (2011, 12) reminds us, there is a dif-
ference between the intuitions and practices of artists and those of the
academy. We need to be mindful of the differences between analysing a
performance (breaking it down into a set of formal components) and mak-
ing a performance, which requires an expansive orientation to the world
around us (Melrose 2011, 12). This is not to say analyses play no part in
the creative process; rather, making performance work activates a different
mode of thinking and analysing. The tension between these various forms
of “intuition” is always present, particularly in the context of production
classes that are supposed to teach students how to devise performances. In
the next section of this chapter, I explore these tensions with reference to
particular devised works.
Out of the Ether: Teaching Group Devised

Performance
Welcome to Out of the Ether: Group Devised Performance for 2014. We
are excited at the prospect of dealing with the creative, theoretical and prac-
tical challenges associated with the difficult but rewarding process of making
performance as a group, working with Drama students in the final year of
their undergraduate studies. In this unit you will work under the direction
and guidance of your lecturer to develop a piece of theatre “from scratch.”
The unit is designed to provide you with skills and strategies to develop and
produce your own independent performance projects in Drama in T2 units
and in the future. Concurrently, you will be researching the methodologies
which other performance-makers have developed to assist with aspects of
the process such as dramaturgical research, script writing, improvisation,
adaption of non-theatrical texts for performance, developing a style or aes-
thetic, group decision-making processes and, ultimately, performance.
(Prior 2014, 2)
When the glass is half-empty, and these days it often is, I am more anx-
ious than excited by the prospect of teaching group devised theatre. By
any measure, the task of generating a performance “from scratch” year
after year is intimidating, considering the circumstances: a ten-week devel-
opment and rehearsal period, a group of students with disparate skills and
levels of commitment, a meagre production budget and the ever-present
pressure to perform, or else. But when I redescribe that metaphorical
drinking container as half-full, I am energised by the prospect of, yes, pull-

ing a performance out of the ether—except performances never really
come out of the ether. It takes a lot of hard work and preparation to pro-
duce a half-decent play at the best of times. The work produced by profes-
sional ensembles such as Gob Squad, Goat Island and Back to Back
Theatre don’t come out of the ether. These groups often spend years
developing devised projects, so it does not pay to expect miracles; but
sometimes, when the stars align, and the capricious wheel of fortune clicks
into place, students amaze me with their capacity for invention and their
willingness to learn. Regardless of how I perceive the glass on any given
day, I put on a brave face, gather my thoughts and my notebook full of
ideas and exercises and enter the rehearsal space. In theory, there is an
unlimited number of ways to teach devised performance. Some colleagues
enter the fray without a game plan and let the students come up with a
concept or theme that will function as their point of departure. This is a
noble approach, and consistent with the principles of pedagogical democ-
racy and equality I have been explicating, if not espousing, throughout
this book. Devised theatre provides teachers with an opportunity to take a
back seat, and perhaps direct traffic when necessary. Other people might
go in with a series of options, or a set of games or improvisations that they
use to generate ideas. No matter how you approach the task of teaching
devised theatre, it works best, in my experience, if the students feel a sense
of ownership over the final production. What follows is a broad summary
of my approach to teaching devised performance—and while I rarely
invoke the term “postdramatic theatre” while teaching these classes, the
concept, and the formal aesthetic elements associated with it, haunt my
creative practice (Image 7.3).
Ideas can come from anywhere, and anyone. I could begin a class
about devising theatre by showing students videos of celebrated devisors
talking about their creative processes, or assigning readings from some
of the books about group devised theatre I have cited in this chapter.
This would certainly provide them with strategies and techniques for
making their own work, and many academics teaching devised perfor-
mance within universities recommend the work of these expert devisors
to their students, or directly invoke this body of work as an integral part
of the curriculum (Rogers 2010, 166). For example, asking students to
respond to Etchells’ (1999) evocative lists provides a useful starting
point for devised work:
168 G. D’Cruz
1. A broken text.
2. A discredited text.
3. A text to be utterly disowned by all those that perform it.
4. A series of texts in a language that doesn’t work. (102)
1. A text of obvious lies.

2. A text of promises.
3. A text of accusations.
4. A text no one will ever hear. (106)
1. The kind of silence you sometimes get in phone calls to a person that
you love.
2. The kind of silence that people only dream of.
3. The kind of silence that follows a car crash.
4. The kind of silence that only happens at night. (108)
Image 7.3 From Noir,

Group Devised Project,
Deakin University, 2014.
Photograph by Glenn
D’Cruz
I choose not to work in this way, since students can access this sort of
material in their own time if they have the interest and inclination (we
provide them with a rich set of devising resources). I am always mindful of
the ticking clock: I have ten weeks to help my students produce work for
public consumption, so I commence the devising process immediately. I
also choose a specific theme or topic for the group. Some may find this
approach too prescriptive and even undemocratic, and they may be cor-
rect. The following account of the process I currently use to teach devised
performance is fragmentary, and is meant to convey the pedagogical
imperatives that drive the creative process. Ideally, I want to help students
create a devised work that will engage an audience. My primary objective
is to create an environment for learning; this is not to say I don’t strive for
high aesthetic standards, rather that my purpose is to convey a set of prag-
matic techniques for making a performance “from scratch.” In previous
chapters, I have used plays and performances I have already taught or
directed as case studies that unpack some of the anxieties and tensions
generated as a consequence of teaching postdramatic theatre. Rather than
retrospectively reflecting on past work, the final section of this chapter
describes and reflects on my approach to creating a new work. Hopefully,
this strategy will impart the way postdramatic aesthetics might inform the
way I prepare to teach, and generate a set of questions and problems that
invite student input into the creative process. My approach involves engag-
ing with their immediate social context. Today, social media is an integral
part of everyday life, especially for young people, the so-called digital
natives—their regular use of social media and other digital technologies
often provides a useful point of departure for the devising process. The
following set of exercises offers an example of how I might approach
developing creative work with students.
Software Takes Command

Step 1: Provide a rationale for your theme or idea, and generate a set of
discussion questions.
While casually flipping through my Facebook feed on my smartphone,

I find a friend’s post proselytising for Lev Manovich’s (2013) book
Software Takes Command. I’m intrigued by the synopsis I read on my
phone, so I open my Kindle app and buy the book, which I start reading
as soon as it’s downloaded. Manovich’s (2013, 2) thesis is simple and
170 G. D’Cruz
compelling: “Software has become our interface to the world, to others,

to our memory and our imagination—a universal language on which the
world runs. What electricity and the combustion engine were to the early
twentieth century, software is to the early twenty-first century.” It’s hard
to argue with this proposition: I’m using software to write this book, and
software drives almost everything I own in the sense that if it isn’t directly
run by software, it’s almost certainly designed with the aid of software.
Manovich goes on to pose a series of provocative questions about the
ubiquity of software. For example, “how are the tools of media authoring
software shaping contemporary aesthetics and visual languages of different
media forms?” and “What happens to the idea of a ‘medium’ after previ-
ously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software?
Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all?” (Manovich
2013, 4).
When I was a child, I used to walk past a toy shop that sold something
called a 7-in-1 scope. This device contained a mirror, a compass and four
plastic lenses that the user could configure as a microscope, telescope or
magnifying glass. I recall being impressed by the fact that a single device
could perform a variety of functions. Today, computers, tablets and smart-
phones not only perform myriad different functions, they are making
older, single-function technologies obsolete. For example, the smartphone
is a portable telephone, a music and video player, a camera, a diary, a cal-
culator, an egg timer, a stopwatch and an almost endless array of other
things. This multifunction device also provides access to the internet and
social networks, so information has never been more accessible, and
human interaction is no longer constrained by geography. Looking for a
lover? Well, there are a multitude of apps for that. Looking for a ride? Call
an Uber or a taxi with a few taps on the ubiquitous black mirror you have
in your pocket. Need I go on? Most people, in the Western world at any
rate, take smartphone technology for granted, but fewer, outside aca-
demia, consider the way this software-run technology transforms human
relations. Let’s return to Manovich’s thesis and ask the following
questions:
How does software mediate our relationships with other people?

What effect do digital storage devices have on our memories?
How might software limit or expand our imaginations?
How might our access to an almost limitless amount of data shape our
understanding of the world and our political allegiances?
If computer games, films, music and even theatre performances are
driven by software, does it make sense to talk about these artistic medi-
ums as distinct aesthetic forms?
Of course, it may be a good idea to start the class with these questions,
but it may also be permissible to dive straight into the exercises I have
listed below and allow the students to formulate their own questions after
performing the improvisation activities. Assume the group comprises 20
students. Split the group into four, and give each of them one of the fol-
lowing exercises.
Step 2: Devise a series of improvisations connected with your chosen

theme.
• Exercise 1: If you don’t know what Reddit is, look it up: <https://
www.reddit.com/>.
If you are still confused, the site’s slogan, “the front page of the
internet,” provides a clue. Basically, Reddit is a news aggregation
website that enables its subscribers to post and rank news items from
other internet sites and create and curate discussion groups on a wide
variety of topics. The site’s members vote to determine the popular-
ity of a news item.
Go to Reddit’s home page and look at the top five news items; use
these items as the basis for constructing a conventional TV news
bulletin.
Look at the list titled “controversial” and find a way of turning
the post into a scene with the following limitations: (a) you must
perform an activity or event unrelated to the substantive content of
the chosen text, while speaking lines from the Reddit post; (b) you
must distribute the lines equally among the group. For example, you
might create a party scenario, and assign specific actions to each
member of the group (one member of the group is smoking, another
dancing and so on).
• Exercise 2: Today I Fucked Up (TIFU): <https://www.reddit.
com/r/tifu/>.
This is what’s known as a subreddit; that is, a forum devoted to a
particular topic or theme. Read the TIFU rules, and then each mem-
ber of the group must scroll through the TIFU forum and choose a
post. Convert these posts into monologues; the posts may require
172 G. D’Cruz
editing. Be sure to write a “too long; didn’t read” (TL:DR) sum-

mary for each post. Create a sense of variety in each group member’s
mode of delivery. Choose two members of the group to present their
edited TIFU monologues after engaging in some form of intensive
exercise (you should exercise until you struggle for breath). One
member of the group not involved in physical exertion should read
their TIFU monologue in a monotone, and the remaining member
of the group should read the text as though they are telling a joke.
Make up your own instructions until you feel you have created some-
thing compelling.
• Exercise 3: Explain Like I’m 5 (ELI5) <https://www.reddit.com/
r/explainlikeimfive/>.
Read the ELI5 rules, and then each member of the group must
formulate their own ELI5 post about some involuntary reflex behav-
iour (such as a gag reaction to shit). You will need to conduct some
research to find an elaborate explanation about the reflex action you
choose, which you must then simplify and present as a speech. Find
ways of performing each reflex action as part of this presentation.
• Exercise 4: Mechanical GIFs <https://www.reddit.com/r/
mechanical_gifs/>.
Browse the site and choose a series of GIFs you can edit into a
two-minute sequence. Create an organic soundtrack for your compi-
lation of images; you can sing, clap, snap your fingers, tap your feet,
scratch your head or make any other sound with your body. Project
your edited GIFs, and perform your soundtrack with choreography.
The exercises I have just described use Reddit as an example of a con-

vergence technology that unsettles the status of news in contemporary
culture; I could have generated a set of similar exercises using another
social media platform, or a dating application such as Tinder. Indeed, we
can learn a lot about the current state of how software mediates human
relationships by using Snapchat or Facebook as a prompt for generating
work. The point is that I am trying to raise questions about the way soft-
ware in the form of what I am calling a “convergence technology”
transforms verities about representation and human interaction in an age
that may or may not be defined by Manovich’s provocative thesis about
the ubiquity of software. The mock project I have described creates a
pedagogical situation in which the students can not only engage with
Manovich’s ideas through performance, but also learn pragmatic lessons

about the importance of form and structure for devised works.
Formulating exercises constitutes an important first step, but the most
difficult part of the devising process involves selecting and combining the
work generated by the improvisations; this is where things begin to get
tricky. Students invest a considerable amount of intellectual and emotional
energy in their creative work and have difficulty assessing its aesthetic
quality, or the way it may not resonate with the other pieces of the devis-
ing puzzle. In my institutional context, I do not have the luxury of long
rehearsals; the rhythm of teaching devised work in an academic context
differs from the sorts of processes Etchells or Gladwin, the director of
Back to Back Theatre, describe in their accounts of devising techniques.
It’s important to acknowledge that time constraints, coupled with the
pedagogical imperative to assess students, play significant roles in shaping
the final artistic outcome of the course. So what happens next? Well,
directing a devised performance is not categorically different from direct-
ing any other kind of theatrical event, once the group has settled on what
will constitute the raw material of the performance. I aim to have made
decisions about the “basic ingredients” of the performance (scenes, mono-
logues, songs, video projections, games, stage/audience relationships) by
the end of the seventh week of the course. I am constantly formulating
possible ways of organising the material the group generates for perfor-
mance. I believe any artistic work must inevitably negotiate the tension
between establishing a formal structure that can accommodate the play
and facilitating affects that bind the audience into the performance event.
I invite student input into the dramaturgical process, but make it clear that
I reserve the right to act as the final arbiter on all dramaturgical matters.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Barba (1985, 75–76) uses the
term “dramaturgy” to describe the “weave” of a performance event, which
entwines what the performers say and do with light, sound, space, soft-
ware and a variety of other technologies of production, which Barba places
under the rubric of actions:
Actions are what work directly on the audience’s attention, on their under-
standing, their emotiveness, their synaesthesia. The list could become so
long as to become useless. It is not so important to define what an action is,
or to determine how many actions there may be in a performance. What is
important is to observe that the actions come into play only when they
weave together, when they become texture: “text.”
174 G. D’Cruz
I attempt to convey these dramaturgical principles to students through

practice, and I often use musical metaphors to explain the importance of
dynamics in structuring material, so that the various components of the
performance text intertwine and play off each other to create Barba’s tex-
tual weave. For example, let’s return to our hypothetical devised work—
for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it Reddit. Let’s also assume that we
have assembled a series of scenes, sketches and choreographed movement
pieces based on the improvisation prompts I outlined earlier in this chap-
ter. How might we assemble this material into some structure that consti-
tutes a dramaturgical weave? A basic, non-technical understanding of
music can help students think about how to achieve this. Musical compo-
sitions play with a set of melodic, harmonic and dynamic variables. For
example, a melodic sequence of notes often works as a motif that moves
through a composition; sometimes it may be transposed from a major to a
minor key, or be articulated with variations in rhythm and tone. The com-
poser may choose to repeat, alter or sequence a motif according to what
we might call an affective logic. In classical music, we can discern this sort
of motivic development in the sonata form (perhaps Beethoven’s ubiqui-
tous “Moonlight Sonata” best illustrates this compositional strategy).
Moreover, the contrast between soft and loud passages in music (dynam-
ics) also contributes to the formulation of the weave.
One approach to establishing such a weave for our hypothetical devised
production, Reddit, might involve finding or composing a musical motif
that is repeated, altered and sequenced in accordance with the logic of the
weave. We might return to the Reddit site and look for posts concerning
music and technology. Perhaps we want to underscore a theme concerning
the way computer geeks, the authors of the software that dominates con-
temporary culture, relate to music. We might type in the phrase “geek
music” in Reddit’s search function and find something like the song “The
Robots Will Kill Us All” by a band called Boy Meets Robot (<https://
boymeetsrobot.bandcamp.com/>). We might seek permission to use this
song and sequence it throughout the performance, perhaps as an accompa-
niment to transitions between scenes or whatever other performance ele-
ments we decide to include. We might follow a different strategy and use
classical music to create a disparity between the work’s high-tech focus and
the past. We could compose our own music, or dispense with the musical
idea altogether, since a motif does not have to take a musical form. A move-
ment score, or a repeated video projection, or a particular configuration of
bodies in space, can perform the same function with respect to the weave
of the performance text.
Anybody tasked with teaching performance through practice will be
familiar with the compositional strategies I have just described. Creating
the dramaturgical weave is common to all forms of creative work. It is pos-
sible to approach teaching students about the “basic ingredients” of a
performance text’s weave in a variety of ways. For example, Patrice Pavis’s
(1985, 209) semiotic questionnaire, written for students learning how to
analyse performances as “expert spectators,” exhaustively identifies what
we are calling, after Barba, dramaturgical actions: scenography, the pace of
the production, the function of music and so on. This questionnaire could
work as a checklist for practitioners since, to use the document’s own
vocabulary, it identifies the signifying systems practitioners manipulate to
generate meanings and affects. Of course, following any formulaic guide
will not guarantee effective performance outcomes, yet teaching through
practice requires articulating pragmatic compositional principles together
with having an awareness of the institutional forces that enable and con-
strain the production of art in a pedagogical context.
Finally, what have we learned about the discourse of postdramatic the-
atre from this chapter’s exploration of devised theatre? First, in my experi-
ence, there is no necessary or overwhelmingly compelling reason to invoke
the concept of postdramatic theatre in the context of teaching devising
principles. As I have argued, expert practitioners, such as those members
of Gob Squad and Forced Entertainment, have a very pragmatic way of
speaking about their compositional strategies and functioning as effective
pedagogues. More often than not, the members of such groups are gradu-
ates of university courses that teach performance history and theory, and
it is possible to argue that these artists produce work that has been shaped
by their encounters with the scholarly study of performance. It is the dis-
course of practice and the articulation of specific compositional strategies
that I find most compelling. This is not to say that those involved in teach-
ing performance through practice cannot learn anything from Lehmann’s
critical vocabulary and his concept of postdramatic theatre. Nor should we
dismiss the way theoretical concepts from adjacent disciplines might invig-
orate our creative practices within academic contexts. Farrier (2005, 142)
has made a compelling case for the ways academic discourse from adjacent
disciplines can not only function as a useful point of departure for creating
creative work with students, but can operate as an integral component of
pedagogical practice in the academy by demonstrating the “possibilities
176 G. D’Cruz
for connecting physical work with the high priestesses and priests of the-
ory.” The key problem, for me, is finding a pragmatic way to use theory in
a production context.
In 2003, I used Roland Barthes’s (1978) A Lover’s Discourse as the
starting point for creating a performance about love, a topic I thought
might resonate with a group of young adults. I first read Barthes’s book in
the early 1990s and was immediately struck by its theatrical possibilities. It
is subtitled “fragments,” and consists of a set of figures that constitute an
“image-repertoire” of love. For Barthes (1978, 4), these figures that com-
prise a lover’s discourse are best understood as gymnastic or choreographic
fragments of action: “the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the
straining body can be immobilised. So it is with the lover at grips with his
figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself, like an
athlete; he ‘phrases,’ like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a
statue. The figure is the lover at work.” Thus, the book contains a series of
amorous episodes and affective states that Barthes annotates with refer-
ences to literature (drawn mainly from Greek antiquity and nineteenth-
century French and German novels), music, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
For example, the fragment entitled “The Dedication” analyses the “amo-
rous gift”: “By this object, I give you my All, I touch you with my phallus;
it is for this reason that I am mad with excitement, that I rush from shop
to shop, stubbornly tracking down the ‘right’ fetish, the brilliant, success-
ful fetish which will perfectly suit your desire” (Barthes 1978, 75). Barthes
places proper names (Pasolini, Baudelaire) and the titles of various art-
works (The Marriage of Figaro, The Symposium) in the margins of the para-
graphs that resonate with these referents.
I found these Barthesian fragments eminently dramatic so, in class, I
decide to select a few of them to use as prompts for improvisations, hoping
to generate a blueprint for a performance. After a few warm-up games, I
introduce the topic. The students appear engaged and up for the chal-
lenge. I then distribute Barthes’s fragments and ask the students to read
them and see if they can figure out what they might mean, and whether
the pieces resonate with their own amorous experiences. I split the class
into groups of four, and give each group an extract from Barthes’s book.
I move from group to group and listen to their conversations. Most
students find the fragments difficult to comprehend at first—for them,
Barthes’s referents are obscure and his prose opaque, but they persist with
the exercise, and by the end of the first class we have collectively compiled
a set of themes and motifs from A Lover’s Discourse: obsession, immersion,
asceticism, infatuation, absence and so on. For the next class, I ask the
students to bring in objects, songs, film extracts or stories that connect
with the fragments from Barthes’s book. One student brings in a mix-tape
cassette of songs compiled by an ex-girlfriend and tells a story about how
the songs on the tape unsettle his perception of the nature of the relation-
ship. Another brings in an original song that resonates with the fragment
titled “I am engulfed; I succumb” (Barthes 1978, 10). And so it goes. By
the end of the class, we have compiled a set of poems, songs, film extracts
and anecdotes that resonate with the fragments. These fragments gener-
ated by fragments become the “basic ingredients” for the devised
performance.
However, the more I attempt to explicate the theoretical originality of
Barthes’s book, as opposed to its compilation of amorous affects, the less
engaged the students become with the project. It becomes apparent that
the process of making creative work is a form of thinking in itself (Carter
2004). There is no reason why “high theory” cannot function as an inte-
gral part of a creative process, but there is also no need to make it a manda-
tory component of artistic practice or fetishise its explanatory force. Carter
(2004, 9) points out that the “disciplinary separation that undermines an
understanding of creative processes also inhibits the emergence, even
locally, of a discourse coeval with those processes rather than parasitic on
it, often offering nothing more than a rather pretentious post hoc ratio-
nalisation.” Indeed, my greatest anxiety about teaching postdramatic the-
atre is that the discourse is merely a “post hoc rationalisation” of practices
that exceed exegetical strategies. I unpack this particular anxiety about
teaching postdramatic theatre as I summarise the arguments of this book.
References
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New Theatre Quarterly 1 (1): 75–78.
Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking. Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Etchells, Tim. 1999. Certain Fragments: Texts and Writings on Performance.
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Farrier, Stephen. 2005. Approaching Performance Through Praxis. Studies in

Theatre and Performance 25 (2): 129–144.
Field, Andy. 2009. All Theatre Is Devised and Text-Based. Guardian Theatre
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apr/21/theatre-devised-text-based
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war-and-peace
Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson, and Katie Normington. 2007. Making a
Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices. London and
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in Cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance 25 (2): 229–238.
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Imanuel Schipper, 279–296. New York: Columbia University Press.
Melrose, Susan. 2011. Bodies Without Bodies. In Performance and Technology, ed.
Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, 1–17. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Oddey, Alison. 1994. Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook.
Pavis, Patrice. 1985. Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire. New
Theatre Quarterly 1 (2): 208–212.
Prior, Yoni. 2014. ACP378—Out of the Ether: Devised Performance Unit Guide.
Melbourne: Deakin University.
Radosavljević, Duška. 2013. Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and
Performance in the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rogers, Meredith. 2010. An Adaptable Aesthetic: Performing the Happy Accident
and the Everyday in Tertiary Performance-Making. Australasian Drama
Studies 57: 163–172.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stegemann, Bernd. 2009. “After Postdramatic Theater.” Translated by Matthew
R. Price. Theater 39 (3): 11–23.
Techlenburg, Nina. 2012. Reality Enchanted, Contact Mediate a Story of Gob

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Ulmer, Gregory L. 1985. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques
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Woodhead, Cameron. 2016. Melbourne Festival Review: Gob Squad’s War and
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entertainment/stage/melbourne-stage/melbourne-festival-review-gob-
squads-war-and-peace-an-insult-to-tolstoy-20161021-gs7hjq.html
Chapter 8
An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or,

What I Think About When I Think About
This book describes a set of pragmatic strategies for teaching postdramatic

theatre while being mindful of the anxieties, tensions and contradictions
generated by using its vocabulary. Such an enterprise necessarily calls for
assessing the viability and coherence of the postdramatic as a concept.
Each chapter, to a greater or lesser extent, poses the following questions:
what do we gain from Lehmann’s redescription of experimental perfor-
mance as postdramatic? How might the vocabulary of the postdramatic
disclose something distinctive about the aesthetics of contemporary per-
formance works? In other words, how might Lehmann’s concept of the
postdramatic provide a better redescription of contemporary experimental
works and those older performances that scholars and critics once described
as postmodern? And, finally, how does the concept of postdramatic theatre
function in the context of making creative work with students? This book’s
responses to these questions make a distinctive contribution to the rela-
tively small body of scholarship devoted to teaching theatre, drama and
performance studies in universities (Stucky and Wimmer 2002; Bacon and
Chamberlain 2005; Poole 2010; Wangh 2013). This concluding chapter
revisits these questions by using Thomas Ostermeier’s 2012 adaptation of
Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) as its point of departure.
The Schaubühne Berlin originally staged this work at the 2012 Avignon
Festival, and it was a staple of the international festival circuit until 2016.
I approach Ostermeier’s adaptation of Ibsen from two perspectives: first,
as an “expert” spectator armed with Lehmann’s postdramatic vocabulary,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5_8
182 G. D’Cruz
and second, from the standpoint of a pedagogue interested in using the

play to think about the anxieties generated by teaching postdramatic
theatre.
Thomas Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People (2012)

As I walk into the auditorium, I immediately notice a large, semi-
transparent cloth, imprinted with legible text, hanging from the rafters,
instead of the curtains that usually conceal the stage before a performance.
After taking my seat, I read the writing on the curtain:
“I AM WHAT I AM.” Never has domination found a more above-suspicion

slogan. The maintenance of an “I” that’s in a permanent state of semi-
disrepair, in a chronic state of semi-failure, is the best-kept secret of the
present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual “I” is
essentially the indefinitely adaptable subject that requires a production based
on innovation, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant
upheaval of social norms, and generalised flexibility. At the same time the
most voracious consumer, and, paradoxically, the most productive “I,” it
will throw itself with the most energy and avidity into the slightest project,
only to come back later to the embryonic state it started from. (The Invisible
Committee 2008)
I recognise the first phrase, “I am what I am,” from Reebok’s advertis-

ing campaign that used various athletes and music celebrities to sell the
company’s footwear and associated athletic products. The advertising
strategy was straightforward and direct: you need to be a unique individ-
ual to succeed in the world. The Reebok brand apparently embodies the
spirit of excellence and personal achievement associated with sporting
heroes such as Allen Iverson, Donovan McNabb, Curt Schilling and Kelly
Holmes, and rap celebrities such as Jay-Z and 50 Cent. In the advertise-
ments, these stars speak about overcoming adversity and staying true to
their vision of success.
I am unfamiliar with the rest of the text, so I perform a Google search
on my smartphone and discover that Ostermeier had decided to frame his
performance with a quotation from a political manifesto entitled The
Coming Insurrection (2008) by a French anarchist group known as The
Invisible City. This provocative declaration about an impending revolu-
tion recycles concepts familiar to those interested in contemporary politics
and philosophy. The manifesto critiques consumer capitalism, drawing on
An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or, What I Think… 183
classic Marxist concepts such as commodity fetishism and reification, and

on critical theory. The book resonates with ideas expounded by Debord
and the Situationists, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, among others. The
title of the document also recalls Giorgio Agamben’s (1993) The Coming
Community, a text that attempts to rethink conventional political catego-
ries by interrogating the relationship between the individual and the com-
munity. Its diagnosis of contemporary culture is bleak, and it repeatedly
draws attention to the vacuity of the sovereign individual in consumer
society: “I am me, you are you, and it’s not going too well. Mass person-
alization. Individualization of all conditions—of life, work, misery … The
more I express myself the more I dry up” (The Invisible Committee
2008). So what does all this have to do with a nineteenth-century play?
More to the point, what does my invocation of this production have to do
with the anxieties and aporias generated by teaching postdramatic
theatre?
Ibsen set his play in a small coastal town whose economy is dependent
on its mineral baths, which attract infirm visitors. The protagonist,
Stockmann, is a medical officer who learns that the baths use contami-
nated water that is poisoning its patrons. He attempts to rectify the situa-
tion, but meets resistance from the vast majority of the townsfolk, who
fear that Stockmann’s exposé will ruin their livelihoods and the town’s
economy.
Importantly, Ostermeier sets his version of Ibsen’s canonical text in
contemporary Germany among the so-called Berlin Mitte. This demo-
graphic is akin to what we in Australia call “hipsters”: the highly educated,
and mostly left-leaning, middle class that often appears more interested in
fashion and popular culture than political activism. The production is both
a cautionary tale about the tyranny of majority opinion and the dangers of
demagoguery. The obvious parallels between Ibsen’s scenario and the
contemporary state of climate-change politics are evident, but this is not
an issue I want to pursue in the context of this chapter. In any case, I have
written about this production in more detail elsewhere (D’Cruz 2017).
For my present purposes, I want to underscore a few points about the
play’s climactic scene, which Ibsen locates at a town hall meeting, where
Stockmann expresses his inconvenient truth in front of his detractors.
Ostermeier’s actors break the fourth-wall convention at this point in the
play: Stockmann initially directs his speech towards the characters within
the fictional world of the performance, but goes on to address the audi-
ence directly. More significantly, Ostermeier replaces Ibsen’s text with
184 G. D’Cruz
Image 8.1 Stefan

Stern as Dr. Stockmann
in An Enemy of the
People, 2012, Schaubühne
Berlin. Photograph by
Arno Declair
long excerpts from The Coming Insurrection; as the speech concludes, the
house lights come up on the audience and the actors step out of character
and initiate a political debate with the spectators. It is as though a crack
opens in the self-enclosed world of the play (Image 8.1).
This is a risky dramaturgical strategy. The carefully controlled fictional
stage world, inhabited by actors embodying fictional characters that
attempt to repeat a rehearsed set of speeches and choreographed move-
ment, embraces the “real” space of the auditorium. Within the fictional
frame of the play, the actor playing Stockmann has just delivered a passion-
ate plea to his recalcitrant peers, who refuse to accept the veracity of his
scientific research. However, the substantive content of his speech is, at
least to some extent, masked by his fervent mode of delivery. Some of the
actors move into the aisles, and one asks the audience to put up their
hands if they agree with Stockmann’s argument. When I see the play, most
spectators raise their hands. After this informal straw poll, another actor
asks if we heard the lines about the need to silence opposition and a host
of other anti-democratic utterances made by the Stockmann character. I
feel sheepish and slightly pissed off—what is Ostermeier playing at? This
incursion into the “real” space of the auditorium may facilitate, among
other things, a dialogue about how the rhetoric of emancipatory truth

might facilitate totalitarianism. It may also fail spectacularly if the audience
remains mute and unwilling to play the game. When I see this production,
the audience is lively: some of my fellow spectators respond with humour,
feigning impatience with the length of this interruption to the story.
Others react angrily, especially when one of the actors asks how the specta-
tors are going to vote in an upcoming council election (“How dare you
presume to know anything about Australian politics,” someone declares).
On stage, the actors speak German (and the audience read subtitles), but
the performers conduct their extra-theatrical conversations with the audi-
ence in English. One of the players utters a statement that resonates with
me: he points out that criticising the actions of politicians is easy, but it’s
much harder to become politically involved as an activist or politician and
attempt to formulate policy and assess the relative merits of competing
interests and communities while upholding individual liberties.
The Mutual Emancipation and Division

Between Drama and Theatre
So how might this brief moment in an otherwise orthodox stage play dis-
close something important about the relationship between aesthetics and
politics, and how might the discourse of the postdramatic assist us in
unpacking its complexities? The increasingly fraught relationship between
drama and theatre provides the fundamental starting point for under-
standing the concept of the postdramatic (Lehmann 2006, 46). The idea
of the postdramatic begins from the premise that contemporary experi-
mental works are more concerned with theatricality—bodily presence,
movement, mise en scène and so on—than with dramatic writing. The
town hall scene is perhaps the most obvious way that Ostermeier’s pro-
duction dramatises this drift between drama and theatre. Ibsen’s text
anchors the scene insofar as Ostermeier amplifies certain rhetorical quali-
ties and dispositions in Stockmann’s speech. However, the director does
not feel compelled to remain faithful to the substantive content of the
speech. In fact, the power of the participatory town hall scene depends on
Ostermeier replacing Ibsen’s text, which is altered by being translated
from Norwegian into German, with extracts from The Coming Insurrection.
Moreover, the staged text functions as a mechanism that facilitates the
debate between the actors and the audience. We could describe this
186 G. D’Cruz
articipatory interruption of Ibsen’s fable as a postdramatic interlude: the

p
players positioned in the aisles step out of their dramatic roles; they speak
English and function as interlocutors for the audience.
We might also claim that this scene discloses hitherto unperceived
details about Ibsen’s play. Lehmann (2006, 23) argues that the concept of
the postdramatic “can retroactively allow the ‘non-dramatic’ aspects of the
theatre of the past … to stand out more clearly. The newly developed aes-
thetic forms allow both the older forms of theatre and the theoretical
concepts used to analyse them to appear in a changed light.” If we employ
Lehmann’s vocabulary, it is perhaps possible to discover the way naturalist
conventions rely on theatrical innovations to realise their objective: to
make theatre resonate with the realities of the late nineteenth century. It is
important to remember that many critics and spectators found Ibsen’s
plays confrontational and unsettling. Indeed, scholars often read An
Enemy of the People (1882) as Ibsen’s response to those critics who pillo-
ried him for writing Ghosts (1881). One critic described the play as “an
open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly”
(quoted in Shaw 1994, 45). It is also worth recalling that the “reality
effect” produced by naturalistic theatre depended on more than its repre-
sentation of taboo themes such as sexual desire and class politics. Further,
Raymond Williams (1991, 15–16) identifies the importance of under-
standing the dynamic relationship between the dramatic text and theatri-
cal performance in his book Drama in Performance by arguing that
theatrical naturalism was largely a consequence of new lighting technolo-
gies, the director’s invention of “stage business” and so on. So, maybe a
postdramatic approach to reading Ostermeier’s production might entice
the critical spectator to consider how Ibsen’s source text may contain
essential “non-dramatic” elements—that is, moments that have little to do
with Ibsen’s written play script.
A postdramatic perspective also draws attention to the way the produc-
tion unsettles theatrical representation. Ostermeier manipulates a wide
range of often-antagonistic signs in his mise en scène. He juxtaposes real-
istic stage properties with cryptic messages—assorted chalk drawings, slo-
gans, philosophers’ names and religious figures are scrawled on the
blackboard-like surface of the stage walls; Rousseau, Hegel and Søren
Kierkegaard are grouped together, and the slogan “If you see Buddha, kill
him” is scribbled on another part of the wall among many other phrases.
The set contains a surfeit of often-baffling visual information for the audi-
ence to scan. The production also includes a long musical sequence in
which the actors perform two English pop songs in their entirety: David
Bowie’s “Changes” and Jackson Browne’s “These Days.” This particular
theatrical performance, which obviously has no analogue in Ibsen’s dra-
matic text, conveys something about the characters’ cultural milieu,
thereby adding another layer of theatrical signification to the production.
However, it is the town hall scene that best represents the way sign
usage in the theatre unsettles the logic of naturalistic representation. The
actors in this part of the play are performing a rehearsed routine, yet they
have stepped out of character and broken the representational conven-
tions that have hitherto organised the fictive world of the performance. As
previously stated, the town hall scene opens the fault line between two
levels of representation and unsettles the division between the spectators’
“real” time and space, and the self-enclosed fictional world of the play.
The production also resonates with Lehmann’s concept of the postdra-
matic by drawing attention to the manner in which the rise of the director
in the late nineteenth century is an important precondition for the drift
between drama and theatre. Lehmann (2006, 52) points out that “a direc-
tors’ theatre (Regietheater) is arguably a prerequisite for the postdramatic
disposition (even if whole collectives take on the direction), but dramatic
theatre, too, is largely a directors’ theatre.” Ostermeier is one of the major
figures in contemporary Regietheater, so it is fitting that this book con-
cludes with a focus on one of his recent works. We can see that the vocabu-
lary of postdramatic theatre discloses aspects of Ostermeier’s production
that may or may not be apparent if we were to approach analysing the
work through a different theoretical lens. My concern, though, is that,
despite Lehmann’s (2006, 19) hope that the concept will “encourage
ways of working in the theatre that expand our preconceptions of what
theatre is or is meant to be,” it consolidates an overly rational and schol-
arly approach to analysing performance.
To put this in slightly different terms, Lehmann’s articulation of the
concept strengthens the sovereignty of what Melrose (2011) calls the
“expert spectator” paradigm in theatre, drama and performance studies
programmes. Most scholarship produced under these rubrics is exegetical.
After liberating the dramatic text from the clutches of literary scholars,
successfully identifying the performance text as a legitimate object of
scholarly enquiry and then expanding the field of performance to include
a broader spectrum of performance events, most academics (myself
included) still engage in exegetical research practices. The nascent “prac-
tice as research” paradigm threatens the status quo, however. And despite
188 G. D’Cruz
having recourse to an increasingly complex and sophisticated repertoire of

critical concepts, the description and analysis of performance remain
incredibly frustrating enterprises. As Croggon (2010, 3) notes, with a nod
to T.S. Eliot, each instance of writing about a theatrical event results in “a
different kind of failure.” My account of An Enemy of the People, for exam-
ple, cannot possibly convey the complex experience of witnessing the play.
I can identify certain aspects of the production I might find compelling for
any number of reasons, but my account of the event will inevitably fail to
do justice to the complexity and singularity of the performance event. Of
course, this applies to all forms of exegetical writing and does not make
scholarly criticism redundant. As Croggon (2010, 4) eloquently puts it:
One of the great attractions of writing about the performing arts is its
impossibility; the greater the impact of a work, the more difficult it is to
convey accurately what that experience was. The experience is translated
from the immediate present, where it lives and exists, into a past tense,
which makes it what it never was—a complete and finite object, now pre-
served in the distorting aspic of memory. The act of viewing a theatre per-
formance is not a recordable experience. Its repetition is, even in its crudest
forms, not a reproduction so much as an imitation of its earlier
performances.
Writing about the experience of witnessing any event is impossible if

your goal is to provide an exhaustive or accurate account of the incident.
We focus, then, on those disclosures that illuminate a particular problem
or state of affairs. I have just argued that the concept of postdramatic the-
atre facilitates a reading of Ostermeier’s production because it reveals
something about the politics of representation, the drift between drama
and theatre, the performance of demagoguery and the way a breach of the
fourth-wall convention unsettles the relationship between performers and
spectators. Such a reading is, of course, incomplete, and I could have
explicated these aspects of the production through a different theoretical
lens, or from an entirely different analytical perspective. For example, I
could have explored the relationship between Ibsen’s original dramatic
text and Ostermeier’s production in the light of the critical literature on
adaptations: might it be useful to compare the Schaubühne Berlin with,
say, Arthur Miller’s famous adaptation of the same play? Or might it be
helpful to tease out how framing the play with a long quotation from The
Coming Insurrection invites us to consider the resonances between
c ontemporary accounts of community? I could also, if I felt so inclined,

play a different language game and argue that Ostermeier’s production is
nothing more than a self-indulgent sham that gently chastises the middle
classes for their political complacency in a form that flatters their intelli-
gence and good taste (“we know we are smug, but we enjoy being
reminded of the fact if it’s served up in a clever aesthetic package”). The
crucial point here is that I am expressing what is perhaps best described as
an ironist’s anxiety. Rorty (1989, 73–74) argues that an ironist believes
that:
anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their
renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final
vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called “meta-stable”:
never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the
terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, and always
aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies and thus
their selves.
This book has expressed anxieties about the extent to which Lehmann’s
vocabulary functions as a useful pedagogical tool, and has engaged with
the following questions: to what degree does it disclose something impor-
tant about those works that display the stylistic features of postdramatic
theatre? To what extent does Lehmann’s redescription of contemporary
experimental performance prescribe an orthodoxy that impedes new cre-
ative practices?
The Anxiety of Paradox

The concept of postdramatic theatre, as articulated by Lehmann, is inher-
ently pedagogical. In the second chapter of his book, he writes:
The description of all those forms of theatre that are here considered as
postdramatic is intended to be useful. What is at issue is, on the one hand,
the attempt to place the theatrical development of the twentieth century
into a perspective inspired by the developments of the new and newest the-
atre—developments which are obviously still hard to categorize—and, on
the other hand, to serve the conceptual analysis and verbalization of the
experience of this often “difficult” contemporary theatre and thus to pro-
mote its “visibility” and discussion. (Lehmann 2006, 19)
190 G. D’Cruz
The welter of articles and books that use Lehmann’s vocabulary to

describe and analyse contemporary theatre confirms the success of post-
dramatic theatre as a useful concept. So, on one level, his redescription is
a resounding success. However, one of the dangers of proselytising on
behalf of any form of aesthetic practice is that you risk turning what you
perceive to be exciting new practices into stifling orthodoxy. This is
essentially Stegemann’s (2009, 22) major reservation about the concept
of postdramatic theatre, which I cited in the previous chapter. After
almost two decades of providing a crucial point of focus for those inter-
ested in understanding and making experimental performance, it may be
time to consider whether the concept of postdramatic theatre occludes
more than it discloses. My anxiety about the obfuscatory and prescrip-
tive force of the idea, as I have argued in earlier chapters of this book,
becomes apparent in certain pedagogical contexts. For example, as
pointed out in Chap. 7, I do not find the vocabulary of postdramatic
theatre especially useful when I teach students devising strategies for
performance, because its vocabulary encourages students to adopt an
overly cerebral and analytical disposition, which stifles their impulse to
play and explore creative potentialities and possibilities. Perhaps my
inability to mobilise Lehmann’s vocabulary in this particular context says
more about my limitations as a teacher than it does about the limitations
of the concept of the postdramatic. Yet there is a troubling paradox in
using rational discourse to describe, after the fact, works that defy easy
categorisation. Before bringing this work to an end, there are a few more
ironist’s anxieties I want to underscore, with a little assistance from
Ostermeier’s production.
The Anxiety of (In)Equality

The play invokes an opposition between political quietism and political
action—the townsfolk want to maintain the status quo, while Stockmann
makes a case for change. This tension between action and passivity intensi-
fies when the town hall scene morphs from a conventional fourth-wall
scenario into a form of participatory forum theatre: the actors pose ques-
tions about political complacency and apathy; they remind the audience
that it’s easy to criticise, but not so easy to become involved in, politics.
Some spectators take the bait and engage with the actors; others remain
mute. I have made several references to Jacques Rancière’s (1991, 2009)
work in this book, and argued that it is dangerous to assume that students
and spectators who prefer not to engage in debate are passive. I did not
participate in the forum discussion, but felt absorbed by the spectacle. My
mind was racing; I was formulating myriad responses to the provocation
in my head—the activity of writing this chapter is a tangible consequence
of engaging with the play, for instance. This is not to claim that everyone
in the audience was similarly engaged and stimulated; rather, it is to under-
score the view that one can never equate silence with passivity in the the-
atre or in the classroom. The town hall scene reminds me of the importance
of never underestimating students’ skills and knowledge in a pedagogical
situation, and to be mindful of how easy it is to forget to be self-reflexive
about educational practices.
Among the many aspects or stylistic features of postdramatic theatre
Lehmann (2006) identifies in his book, there is something he refers to as
the “physical, motoric act of speaking” (147). Lehmann (2006, 147)
claims that speech acts are unnatural processes insofar as “the word does
not belong to the speaker.” In other words, speech is something that
does not reside in the body of the utterer, but remains foreign. Moreover,
the conflict between body and word manifests in the inarticulate stutter-
ing and phonic tics that punctuate speech. This physical aspect of verbal
utterances is disclosed in the way the actor playing Stockmann delivers
his town hall speech in An Enemy of the People. Stockmann’s veneer of
rationality and reasonableness is displaced by a form of corporeal inten-
sity, replete with stops and stutters, which turns him into a deranged
demagogue. The physicality of the actor’s performance pulls focus. The
substantive content of his speech is lost as the sensual aspects of his vocal
delivery become more arresting. As someone who regularly stands before
an audience of students, I am conscious of the need to perform and
make my ideas accessible by adopting performative strategies that will
hopefully connect with them. To teach is to perform, and to be con-
scious of the distribution of the sensible that enables or impedes com-
munication (Rancière 2004).
Stockmann’s speech provokes me to think about another of the themes
addressed by this book: the problem of (in)equality in the pedagogical
situation, which was most obviously dealt with in Chap. 5 with reference
to Back to Back Theatre’s devised work, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich.
Throughout this work, I have attempted to unsettle some of the peda-
gogical myths and assumptions that underpin those teaching practices that
foreground the inherent “superiority” of the teacher’s knowledge.
However, this book has also attempted to reveal the tensions, anxieties
192 G. D’Cruz
and contradictions generated by operating under the sign of equality

within an institutional context obsessed with competitive assessment
protocols and performance objectives. I have consistently identified ten-
sions produced by the corporate university’s imperative to perform or else,
which has become more oppressive since the publication of McKenzie’s
(2001) work almost 20 years ago (see Newfield 2011; Roth 2014; Zakaria
2015; Bartlett and Clemens 2017).
The Anxiety of Ignorance

The Schaubühne Berlin production of An Enemy of the People gathers a
bewildering and disorienting array of intertextual signs at the level of
mise en scène, dramatic text and performance. First, there is the fact that
German actors perform a Norwegian play, originally drafted in Danish,
for an Australian audience in German with English subtitles. This is
enough to get me thinking about whether it matters that Australian
spectators may not comprehend the work’s intellectual and cultural
nuances. The work, whose very presence in Melbourne is facilitated by a
global cultural economy, the international arts festival circuit, consis-
tently reminds spectators about the reach of global capital and its conse-
quences for the way we perceive ourselves in the order of things: “I am
what I am.” The homogenising force of consumer capitalism aside, I
wonder whether the play’s local German and European milieu resonates
with Australian spectators, or is there something crucial we are missing
about the play’s cultural context? These are not easy questions to answer,
and I suspect that Lehmann (2006, 67) is correct when he points out
that “that real communication does not take place via understanding at
all but through impulses for the recipient’s creativity, impulses whose
communicability is founded in the universal predispositions of the
unconscious.” Nonetheless, thinking about questions concerned with
the cultural contexts within which artists produce work, and scholars
interpret work, is pertinent to this chapter insofar as it is important to
acknowledge that there are things I have inevitably missed about the
cultural and institutional context within which Lehmann formulated his
concept of the postdramatic. My geographical location and inability to
read German make it difficult to assess the extent to which I may have
overlooked something crucial about the relationship of Lehmann’s con-
cept to creative practice in the academy.
The Anxiety of Politics

Perhaps the greatest fear we face as university teachers today takes a politi-
cal form. I conclude this book by examining two particular political anxi-
eties: the politics of postdramatic theatre and the politics of teaching
postdramatic theatre. Lehmann (2006, 185–187) believes his vocabulary
makes it easier to identify the ways postdramatic theatre challenges the
current political order through “a politics of perception,” to which he
accords a distinctly pedagogical character. He argues that we have to
acknowledge “the growing importance of a particular cultivation of
affects, the ‘training’ of an emotionality that is not under the tutelage of
rational preconsiderations” (Lehmann 2006, 186). He goes on to say that
“theatrical practices” are capable of undertaking such a task by creating
“playful situations in which affects are released and played out” (Lehmann
2006, 186). Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the vagueness of this declara-
tion, and note that there is not a lot of “play” in Lehmann’s book. The
irony is that he proselytises for a “playful” postdramatic theatre in very
sober, logical terms. He notes the pedagogical character of postdramatic
performance, but neglects the formal qualities of his writing, which mirror
the rationalistic approaches to politics he claims postdramatic theatre con-
tests. There is not a lot of play in the vocabulary of postdramatic theatre—
and despite my intention to provide a personal and idiosyncratic perspective
on teaching postdramatic theatre, this book also follows academic proto-
cols for the most part.
This is not necessarily a bad thing in the era of “fake news” and “alter-
native facts.” It has never been more important to cite sources and sub-
stantiate arguments by providing evidence for one’s theories. Indeed, the
most valuable feature of Lehmann’s vocabulary lies in its focus on the heri-
tage of contemporary performance. He joins the dots between the work of
the historical avant-garde and contemporary artists. This tight concentra-
tion on the legacy of modern drama enables us to sustain a historical
understanding of the ideas and practices that inform postdramatic theatre.
The scholar’s sobriety can also disclose the way some performances unset-
tle aspects of the political order that spectators might have missed.
However, the scholarly vocabulary is rarely playful, and sometimes the
desire to argue for the political utility of art occludes its most subversive
feature: its lack of utility. As Terry Eagleton (2013, 833) remarks, “The
idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the
grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a
194 G. D’Cruz
deeply subversive affair.” Identifying the political and pedagogical efficacy

of any given text often functions as the raison d’être for scholarship in the
humanities. Indeed, Fuchs (2008) famously criticised the English edition
of Lehmann’s book for its paucity of political analyses, and Lehmann
(2008) responded by pointing out that his concern with theatrical form is
an inherently political matter. For the moment, let’s give Lehmann the
benefit of the doubt, and focus on his claim that a particular set of aes-
thetic preferences (or what we might call “postdramatic strategies”) is bet-
ter suited to analysing, and perhaps contesting, political issues (the unequal
distribution of wealth, terrorism, global warming, social dysfunction, rac-
ism, sexism and so on).
If we concede that postdramatic theatre is capable of political effects,
how do we substantiate this claim? For example, in what sense might we
prove that the postdramatic town hall scene in Ostermeier’s An Enemy of
the People is political? Does the encounter between performers who step
out of character and engage the audience in a debate about political issues
constitute the sort of “playful” intervention Lehmann promotes? I don’t
discount the possibility that Ostermeier’s play might facilitate moments of
political revelation; indeed, his use of The Coming Insurrection certainly
gives the audience pause for thought by showing the way bourgeois life-
styles are both in thrall to the society of the spectacle and unsettled by the
forces of global capitalism. But it’s difficult to see how the play avoids the
pitfalls of the echo-chamber effect. If we look beyond the formal qualities
of the performance and forget about whether we can classify the play as
postdramatic, we find a group of sophisticated bourgeois artists from
Germany admonishing a group of mainly middle-class theatre spectators
from Australia about their complicity in sustaining the political order of
things. This is all fine, but I’m not sure this highly engaging performance
contributes to changing the world, and I’m even less certain about whether
spectators need Lehmann’s postdramatic vocabulary to unpack the play’s
political themes and strategies.
Jodie Dean (2012, 13–14) generated much controversy among those
with a stake in making claims about the political efficacy of art practices
when she wrote:
Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences,

thereby buttress capital as they circulate political affects while displacing
political struggles from the streets to the galleries. Spectators can pay (or
donate) to feel radical without having to get their hands dirty. The d
ominant
class retains its position, and the contradiction between this class and the
rest of us doesn’t make itself felt as such.
The journal Performance Paradigm (2014) devoted an entire issue to

Dean’s provocation. Helena Grehan (2014, 4), in her editor’s introduc-
tion to the special issue of the journal, makes the eminently reasonable
point that the question of any given artwork’s political efficacy is “contin-
gent—it depends on what kind of art we are talking about, where we are
situated (geographically, politically and culturally) and how we as specta-
tors, viewers, participants or consumers choose to respond in each situa-
tion.” I would add that the practice of textual analysis (whether such
studies focus on a dramatic text or a performance text) cannot determine
the political effects of any given work of art. And even if we accept that art
does produce political effects, the problem with Lehmann’s position on
the political efficacy of postdramatic theatre stems from his belief that
postdramatic strategies are more effective in challenging the status quo
than more traditional theatrical forms. Lehmann is not alone in this regard.
We are, I claim, whether we admit it or not, still in thrall to modernist
obsessions about the value of the “new.”
In Chap. 3, I pointed out that Richard Schechner’s “broad spectrum”
incarnation of performance studies proceeded from the view that conven-
tional theatre is an archaic cultural form. In Schechner’s (1992, 8) oft-
cited words, “theatre as we have known and practiced it—the staging of
written dramas—will be the string quartet of the twenty-first century: a
beloved but extremely limited genre, a subdivision of performance.”
Stephen Bottoms (2011) points out that this statement refers primarily to
written dramatic texts. In his defence of “the string quartet of the twenty-
first century” (dramatic theatre), Bottoms (2011, 24–25) supports the
work of the traditional playwright by pointing out that when Schechner
made his provocative declaration about the waning cultural influence and
relevance of traditional theatre in 1992, plays such as David Mamet’s
Oleanna (1992) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) were
attracting significant media attention and driving debates about political
correctness, gender relations and the AIDS crisis. The success of the
British “In-Yer-Face” playwrights of the period, especially Sarah Kane and
Mark Ravenhill, bolster Bottoms’s (2011) claim that conventional theatre
is far from a spent force, and continues to attract audiences and contribute
to contemporary cultural and political debates. In other words, even if
theatre is a small slice of the performance pie, we underestimate its cultural
196 G. D’Cruz
reach at our own risk. Conventional dramatic theatre, along with its post-
dramatic variants, continues to exist and even thrive within certain cultural
sectors.
For the most part, academics write for each other, and, despite their
best intentions, theoretical vocabularies tend to alienate non-specialists
and promote hierarchies of knowledge. This is not to say that postdra-
matic theatre cannot be political, or that academics should cease writing
about performances they find engaging. Rather, I think we, as a profes-
sional class, need to be more mindful about the claims we make regarding
the relationship between our activities as critics, scholars and practitioners.
We might start by acknowledging our privileged place in the order of
things by paying closer attention to the politics of teaching, which brings
me to perhaps the most unsettling anxiety that haunts this book. Over the
course of my career, I have believed that the most valuable thing students
take away from production classes has more to do with what they learn
about collaboration, team-building, flexibility and creativity than what
they might take from a close encounter with a specific dramatic text or
theatrical event. The business of performance-making facilitates these
other, more important, life lessons. However, I feel increasingly apprehen-
sive about the resonance between the discourses of pedagogical value and
neo-liberalism that circulate in the corporate university. I feel especially
anxious when I am compelled to use a neo-liberal vocabulary to articulate
the teaching and learning outcomes of my courses. The words that make
up my pedagogical vocabulary (terms such as “team-building,” “flexibil-
ity,” “creativity” and so on) are the very words universities use to substan-
tiate claims about making students “job-ready” and “life-long learners.” I
am not suggesting students should not graduate with a broad range of
skills. Rather, I am pointing out, as do A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
(2017, 33–34), that, at the present moment, “education is reduced to
being the training ground for good state subjects, as so many policy and
curriculum documents, no less than course descriptions, now excitedly
attest.”
This is why we need to pay as much attention to how we teach as to
what we teach. This is not to say we should ignore the kinds of texts we
choose to stage within the context of teaching postdramatic theatre
through performance. Theatre practice is a messy business, and fraught
with ethical and emotional perils. As a pedagogical form, it is more likely
to unleash a frightful rush of energies and affects because, as Williams
(1990, 172) observes, it “gets us passionately involved in disorderly
human encounters.” This book has focused on how the vocabulary of

postdramatic theatre operates within this unruly context and raised ques-
tions about its political and pedagogical efficacy, which brings me back to
Ostermeier’s play and final anxiety about teaching postdramatic theatre.
As I watched Stockmann’s town hall speech descend into an exercise in
incoherent demagoguery, I couldn’t help but think about how circum-
stance and contingency can corrupt good intentions and transform enthu-
siasm for a particular vocabulary into a stultifying orthodoxy that remains
blind to alternative positions and ideas. Stockmann wants to save his town,
but he becomes so convinced of his own “truth” and the veracity of his
own final vocabulary that he loses his ability to be self-reflexive and scepti-
cal. Almost 20 years after Lehmann wrote his book, I think it is timely to
ask whether the vocabulary of postdramatic theatre is up to the task of
functioning as a useful pedagogical tool today. Do we need to formulate
new, more invigorating concepts to engage with contemporary perfor-
mance? If so, what kind of vocabulary might displace Lehmann’s? This
book hopes to generate further discussion about what forms of writing,
thinking, speaking and doing are best suited to teaching postdramatic the-
atre in a university context. In keeping with the anxious disposition I have
adopted in this chapter and other parts of this book, I wonder whether the
value of the forms of thinking through theatre that we foster, in whatever
theoretical guise, can ever be articulated in terms that can be expressed as
learning objectives. And what might it mean to create a space where the
performative practice of pedagogy blooms beneath the sign of play?
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Index1
A 110, 115, 120, 122, 128, 131,

Affect, 14, 20, 30, 39, 40, 53, 54, 57, 134, 135, 139, 145, 154–158,
59, 65, 69, 106, 120, 146, 173, 161, 162, 169, 173, 183–186,
175, 177, 193, 194, 196 190–192, 194, 195
Agamben, Giorgio, 183 Auslander, Philip, 30
Aggiss, Liz, 133 Avant-garde, the
Agustí, Clara Escoda, 97, 99 art, 18, 27–29, 144, 157
Angelaki, Vicky, 104 theatre, 11, 18, 21, 38, 39, 50, 53,
Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, The, 55 104, 156, 157
Anxiety, v, 5, 6, 14, 38–46, 53, 54, theory, 104
65, 68, 69, 82, 89, 90, 136, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 35
160, 169, 177, 181–183, Axelrod, Paul, 86
189–197
Arnott, James, 107
Artaud, Antonin, 4, 32, 40–46, 84, B
89, 128, 157 Back to Back Theatre
The Theatre and its Double, 40, 45 ethics, 12, 77, 88
the theatre of cruelty, 32, 41–46 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, 12,
Attempts on Her Life, 4, 12, 95–116, 70, 77, 78, 129, 191
128, 137–138, 165 Bacon, Jane, 181
Audience, 2, 5, 11, 13, 14, 17–20, Badiou, Alain, 129
30–32, 39, 43–45, 51, 74, 79–84, Bahun-Radunović, Sanja, 129, 130
97, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109, Banes, Sally, 22
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71685-5
202 INDEX
Barba, Eugenio, 161, 173–175 Crimp, Martin, 4, 12, 95–107,

Barish, Jonas, 55 109–113, 115, 116, 121, 128,
Barnett, David, 102, 122 148, 163, 165
Barrett, Estelle, 108 Croggon, Alison, 137, 188
Barthes, Roland, 176, 177
Bartlett, A.J., 192, 196
Baudrillard, Jean, 22, 33, 99 D
Berg, Maggie, 140 Dean, Jodie, 194, 195
Bharucha, Rustom, 61 Debord, Guy, 60, 99, 103, 105, 144,
Birringer, Johannes, 22, 23, 34 183
Blanchett, Cate, 143, 144 Deleuze, Gilles, v
Bloch, Ernst, 8 Derrida, Jacques, v, 22, 40–42, 131, 161
Bogad, L.M., 125 Devised theatre, 5, 148, 151, 152,
Bolt, Barbara, 5, 108 158–163, 165–167, 175
Bottoms, Stephen, 195 Digimodernism, 33
Brecht, Bertolt, 8, 36, 51, 55, 84, Distribution of the sensible, 10,
114, 115, 129, 157 80–83, 87, 88, 90, 191
Brennan, Teresa, 69
Brook, Peter, 41–43
E
Eagleton, Terry, 193
C Education
Calvert, Dave, 80–83 drama and, v, 4, 32, 54–56, 158
Capitalism, 4, 13, 22, 24–26, 28, 33, teaching theatre, v, 5, 38, 46, 181
35, 87, 103–105, 123, 125, 182, theatre and, 5, 54, 147
192, 194 what is Education?, 196
Carlson, Marvin, 3, 21, 58 Eisner, Elliot W., 86
postdramatic theatre, 58 Etchells, Tim, 160, 161, 167, 173
postmodernism, 3, 21 Ex Machina, 160
Carter, Paul, 7, 177
Century of Innovation, 55
Chamberlain, Franc, 181 F
Clemens, Justin, 192, 196 Farrier, Stephen, 51, 175
Connor, Steven, 22, 23, 34 Field, Andy, 162
Cooper Albright, Ann, 54 Forced Entertainment, 5, 22, 101,
Corporate University, 9, 54, 62, 70, 111, 160, 161, 165, 175
85, 90, 109, 119, 125, 140, 147, Foucault, Michel, v, 40, 59, 119, 125,
192, 196 183
critiques of the corporate university, Freeman, John, 108
85, 147 Frow, John, 23, 112
Cowie, Billy, 133 Fuchs, Elinor, 8, 23, 57, 97, 194
INDEX
203
G J
Gender politics, 2, 12, 96, 114, Jackson, Shannon, 11, 58, 59, 61
119–148 Jameson Fredric, 8, 22, 24, 25
Gibbs, Anna, 54, 69 postmodernism, 22, 24, 25
Gießen Model, 108 Jelinek, Elfriede, 12, 13, 119, 137,
Gladwin, Bruce, 78, 79, 81–83, 88, 138, 141–146, 148
91, 92, 173 Jürs-Munby, Karen, 6, 8, 29, 33, 34,
Goat Island, 22, 160, 167 36, 105–107
Gob Squad, 13, 14, 152–160, 163, Postdramatic Theatre and the
165, 167, 175 Political, 6, 36, 106
War and Peace, 13, 14, 152–160,
163
Goodall, Jane, 40 K
Govan, Emma, 161 Kane, Sarah, 4, 101, 139, 163, 195
Graham, Scott, 160 Kaye, Nick, 23, 37
Grant, Clare, 18, 28, 32 Kirby, Alan, 33
Grehan, Helena, 78, 80, 83, 90, 91,
195
Guattari, Félix, 183 L
Lavery, Carl, 164
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, vi, 3–6, 8,
H 10–12, 14, 23, 29–40, 50, 52,
Habermas, Jürgen, 27, 39 53, 55–57, 59–61, 77, 90, 95,
Hamilton, Margaret, 34, 57 101–104, 106–108, 128, 135,
Handke, Peter, 55, 56 144, 146, 152, 162–165, 175,
Hay, Chris, 115 181, 185–187, 189–195, 197
Heddon, Deidre, 4, 160 Postdramatic Theatre, vi, 4–6,
Heuvel, Michael Vanden, 37 8–12, 14, 23, 29–32, 34–40,
Hoggett, Steven, 160 52, 53, 55–57, 59–61, 77,
Hornby, Richard, 157, 158 102–104, 107, 108, 146, 162,
Hutcheon, Linda, 24, 97 164, 175, 189–191, 193, 195,
197
Luckhurst, Mary, 104, 105
I Lyotard, Jean-François, 26–28
Ibsen, Hendrik, 14, 51, 55, 181, 183, The Postmodern Condition, 27
185–188
An Enemy of the People, 14, 181,
186 M
Imposter syndrome, 53 Macaulay, Alastair, 99
Interculturalism, 50, 58, 61 Manifesto, 143–145, 151
Invisible Committee, The, 182, 183 Manovich, Lev, 63, 169, 170, 172,
In-Yer-Face theatre, 100 173
204 INDEX
McKenzie, Jon, 9, 11, 51, 58, 60–65, concept of, vi, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11,
140, 159, 160, 192 13–14, 30, 36, 38, 46, 53, 57,
Perform or Else: From Discipline to 61, 105, 107, 163–166, 175,
Performance, 9, 11, 62–65, 181, 185–190, 192
140, 192 panorama, 23
Melrose, Susan, 50, 51, 166, 187 parody, 103
Milling, Jane, 4, 49, 160 pastiche, 24, 32
Modern drama, 4, 34, 35, 40, 52, 53, pedagogy, 6, 14, 39, 159
55, 60, 61, 193 politics, 9, 11, 12, 14, 24, 34–36,
Modernism, 3, 4, 8, 24, 28, 33, 35, 61, 103, 108, 141, 193, 195,
37, 99, 107, 143, 163, 195 197
Müller, Heiner, 5, 12, 13, 23, 32, vocabulary, vi, 2, 11, 30, 32, 107,
119, 121, 127, 130, 148 165, 175, 187, 190, 193, 197
The Hamletmachine, 5, 12, 23, 32, Postmodernism
119–121, 130 cultural dominant, 33, 35
and performance, 21
and politics, 25
N Postmodern theatre
Narrative, vi, 20, 24, 26, 27, 36, 37, politics, 11, 25
55, 78, 79, 131 vocabulary, 11, 23
Newfield, Christopher, 54, 192 Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural
Nicholson, Helen, 126 Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism,
33
Presence, 3, 8, 22, 23, 30–32, 37, 39,
O 41–43, 50, 60, 61, 86, 105, 127,
Oddey, Alison, 152, 160, 161 139, 157, 164, 185, 192
Ostermeier, Thomas, 181–190, 194, The Princess Plays, 13, 119–148
197 Prior, Yoni, 82, 83, 87–89, 91, 92, 166
P R
Pavis, Patrice, 24, 25, 30, 51, 175 Radosavljević, Duška, 5, 161, 162,
Performance Studies 165
as an academic discipline, 58–60, Rai, Shirin M, 107
107 Rancière, Jacques, 9, 10, 12, 75–77, 80,
broad spectrum, 22, 57, 61, 195 83–87, 92, 96, 104, 106, 107,
history, 53, 55, 175 111, 116, 125, 128, 129, 190, 191
pedagogy, 4, 5, 14, 43, 54, 63 distribution of the sensible, 10, 80,
Phelan, Peggy, 58 87, 191
Pinter, Harold, 55 The Emancipated Spectator, 85, 129
Poggioli, Renato, 28 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 9, 12, 75
Poole, Gaye, 4, 5, 181 pedagogical myth, 75, 76
Postdramatic theatre, 40 principle of explication, 75–77, 111
INDEX
205
Ravenhill, Mark, 101, 195 Sydney Front, The, 11, 18, 20–25, 28,
Reinelt, Janelle, 51, 107 29, 31, 32, 38
Roach, Joseph R, 51 John Laws/Sade: A Confession, 11
Rockwell, John, 6 Szondi, Péter, 11, 33–38
Rogers, Meredith, 167
Rorty, Richard, 4, 11, 21, 29, 52, 53,
163, 164, 189 T
ironist, 163, 189 Techlenburg, Nina, 152, 157
redescription, 4, 21, 163 Technology, 27, 60, 62, 63, 69, 147,
Rosefeldt, Julian, 143–145 160, 170, 172, 174
Roth, Michael S., 54, 192 Theatricality, 3, 77, 102, 110, 164,
185
Theory of Modern Drama, 11, 33–38
S
Sabatini, Arthur J., 74
Schaefer, Kerrie, 22, 25, 29 U
Schaubühne Berlin, 181, 184, 188, Ulmer, Gregory L, 2, 159
192
Schechner, Richard, 11, 50, 52,
56–59, 61, 195 W
broad spectrum, 57, 195 Waites, James, 32
performance studies, 11, 52, 58, 59, Wark, McKenzie, 125
195 Weiler, Christel, 108
Scheer, Anna, 80, 83 Williams, Raymond, 186
Schmidt, Theron, 80, 82 Wilson, Robert, 5, 6, 21, 22
Seeber, Barbara K, 140 Wimmer, Cynthia, 7, 54, 181
Shaw, George Bernard, 186 Wirth, Andrzej, 59, 108
Sher, Antony, 81 Woodhead, Cameron, 156
Sierz, Aleks, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107 Wooster Group, The, 21, 22
Society of the spectacle, 12, 60, 99, Wright, Elizabeth, 84, 115
103, 105, 114, 152, 194
Spectatorship, 77, 83, 90, 104
Stegemann, Bernd, 164, 190 Z
Stoppard, Tom, 37, 38, 55 Zakaria, Fareed, 54, 192
Stucky, Nathan, 7, 54, 181 Zimmerman, Heiner, 101
Sugiera, Malgorzata, 102 Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 132

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ISBN 978-3-319-71684-8 ISBN 978-3-319-71685-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936367

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: roman makhmutov / Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

c­ ontinue to invoke and use theoretical vocabularies and concepts in my

Burwood, VIC, Australia Glenn D’Cruz

Many people have contributed to this book, but I am especially indebted

1 Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 1

2 John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic? 17

3 From Drama to Theatre to Performance Studies 49

4 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable 73

5 Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play? 95

6 Teaching History and (Gender) Politics: The

7 Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 151

8 An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or, What I Think

Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics

“Can we talk about this, please?”

© The Author(s) 2018 1

The lecturer intervenes, and concedes that it is important to address the

Collectively, the class formulates a strategy for signalling their discomfort

and developments within the tradition of modern drama, as opposed to the

and enthusiasm (Poole 2010, 6). Yet scholars interested in Lehmann’s

university drama graduates arguably have a broader range of opportunities:

Lehmann formulated the term “postdramatic theatre” within the con-

with a range of political questions concerning postdramatic theatre prac-

and place us within political hierarchies. So, the personal is political

Obviously, universities promote particular ways of knowing, seeing,

Chapter 4 is about the similarities between teaching and directing with

the inability of intellectuals to “set things right” politically, socially and

cept of postdramatic theatre provides a useful way of understanding

Heddon, Deirdre, and Jane Milling. 2006. Devising Performance: A Critical

John Laws/Sade: Postmodern

© The Author(s) 2018 17

• a drowned hero emerges from the bathwater of history to strut and

The performers find themselves unsure of the boundaries of their own

John Laws/Sade: A Confession begins in the foyer of the theatre (which

members of the audience keep returning to the same hole—they’ve

I describe my experience of witnessing this play as an integral part of my

A Postmodern Redescription of John Laws/Sade

The general popularity of “postmodernism” as a critical term has guaran-

Indeed, the relationship between postmodern theory and theatre prac-

Sydney Front’s work, which is postmodern insofar as the prevalence of

range of performance vocabularies (dance, music, ritual, comedy, drama

Postmodernism, for Jameson (1998), marks a radical break with the

t­ransforms cultural artefacts into commodities. Nothing is exempt from

that postmodernism emerged in advanced Western societies at the end of

For Lyotard, the postmodern condition refers to an increasing scepti-

based fundamentally upon the perception of the existence of a modern era

This is not to say that Lyotard nostalgically laments this transformation

tory project of modernity, which was concerned with using specialised

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he

In one of its manifestations, the avant-garde is simply a compliant genre

Obviously, I found nothing normal or predictable about John Laws/Sade,

A Postdramatic Redescription of John Laws/Sade

postdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging—and even

This account of postdramatic theatre certainly resonates with John

Image 2.2 “The

Postdramatic Theatre and Péter Szondi’s Theory

As previously stated, the postmodern vocabularies discussed above consti-

rists of postmodernism pay relatively little attention to theatre, as Connor

to demonstrate how the “new” theatre emerges from the contradictions

c ontinue to invoke and use theoretical vocabularies and concepts in my

Burwood, VIC, Australia Glenn D’Cruz

1 Introduction: Pedagogy, Politics and the Personal 1

2 John Laws/Sade: Postmodern or Postdramatic? 17

3 From Drama to Theatre to Performance Studies 49

4 Ganesh Versus the Third Reich as Pedagogical Parable 73

5 Attempts on Her Life: A Postdramatic Learning Play? 95

6 Teaching History and (Gender) Politics: The

7 Devising Postdramatic Theatre in the Academy 151

8 An Enemy of Postdramatic Theatre? Or, What I Think

transforms cultural artefacts into commodities. Nothing is exempt from