I]ITRODUCTIOiI

The time seems out ofjoint. Economical disasters, outrageous social

imbalance, growing right wing populism, millons of people forced
into migration, various religious fundamentalisms, and unprecedent-
ed eõólogicat catastrophes to come. But theatre - in the past often
óonsidéred to be the political art per se - is struggling to find its place
in the current events and debates. Unsure ofhow to relate to society
adequately, it often seems to doubt its own political relevance. While
some theatre makers seek answers still in narration-driven mimesis,
others overestimate the reception-changing powers of aesthetics.
The crisis ofrepresentation in democracy has hit the representa-
tion machine of theatre at its core. But at the same time, amidst all
the uncertainty and prevailing old strategies, a social and political
turn in theatre has become veryvigible. Artists who have been engag-
ing in their work for many years rvith the political struggle suddenly
become the focus of attention, whereas others have just recently
shifted their own work towa¡ds social, ecological, and economic is-
sues. So how can theatre today again become a powerful medium of
not only mirroring society but being a part of changing it?

For better or worse theatre has, in its forms and contents, always
been an expression of its time. The Greek polis gathered in the The-
atre ofDionysus to debate its values in an architectural setting that
anticipated many of today's parliaments. During the Baroque pe-
riod the monarch was the focal point of the performance whilst the
choreography on stage was in line with the social choreography of
the absolutist society. And it was not by chance that the awakening
of the European bourgeoisie was accompanied by the emergence of
the bourgeois theatre as an aesthetic but also cultural-political and
institutional phenomenon.
The avant-gardes of the twentieth cenhrry went more than one
step further when they considered theatre as a tool to challenge or even
change society. The quotation borrowed as the title of this book -
'Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to
rþpg itl - is attributed .iit ãi to ¡tt*i, lvtuiut o"rLi, or riieðiìf ttre
 latter wishing for theatre to be a moral institution of class struggle
where the distinction between spectator and actor would dissolve. In
contrast, Antonin Artaud imagined the dissolution of this border as
subversive intoxication; and the Futurists forced the audiences of their
serate futuriste with d¡astic means into what we today would call par-
ticipation. Even if such desires often remained more radical on paper
than in practice, the most consequential theatre makers always under-
stood theatre as a medium in which social and political practices could
be tried out; in which societies in all thei¡
- actual or imagined - va-
rieties a¡e performed, expanded, verified, or even re-invented.
_ _Joday - after a strong period of mostly narrative-theatre in_t[g llZos
and r98os, followed by post-dramatic formsëiñphásising the me-
itylf
bf.focusing on its form since the 199os thêià is a s'iionq
- sual arts. This section plays with the idea of an inventory of artistic
{ium
I
I
desire
.-.
-.-..
for a theatre that not only gets a grip on pressing
f political
o r _______
l-=Ssyes but also becomes a political space, a public sphere, in itself.,
There is no common glgqlqr4 to folJo¡'. Wg are grqÆIre{ e&ry¡4g'
;"ì, -
out artists as well as the audiences. Bqt there are
"f-fi"ã;g
enough bits andpigçes (andsometimes even big chunk$ of imples-
sive artistic work-an-d political engagement that allow us to imagine
or even feel the powerful potential of engaged theatre again. Nor
Just a Mirror takes a look at how theatre today can unfold its fun-
damental agonistic vigour in very different geographical, political,
and artistic contexts. A potential that cannot be immediately inte-
grated into the system nor bound to merely conceal social dysfunc-
tions and sore spots, but that is opening spheres ofnegotiation and
debate in which contradictions are not only kept alive but above all
can be shaped and articulated.
The book opens with an introductory text outlining the situation of
possible and existing political theatre today as a public sphere of
social experimentation, followed by essays mapping the terrain from
different topical angles. While Carol Martin takes a look at how 'the
real'is presented and represented in a wide spectrum ofverbatim
and documentary theatre, Jeroen Peeters traces the symptoms of a
new ecological thinking in current performances. Julian Boal revis-
its the Theatre of the Opressed that his father created and practised
in Latin America in the r96os and beyond, and shows where and
how his approaches are still valuable today. A conversation between
Monika Gintersdorfer and Hervé Kimenyi, Lloyd Nyikadzino, Michael
Sengazi, and Franck Edmond Yao offers an insight into the often
difficult situation of performance in Ivory Coast, Congo, and Rwan-
da. In her very last interview, Judith Malina - legendary head and
soul of the Living Theatre -together with Annie Dorsen runs the
gamut over decades of a¡tistic and political engagement, fiercely and
ever-optimistically connecting the past with the present. Two essays
then directly link political activism with theatre: Margarita Tsomou
and Vassilis S. Tsianos analyse the theatrical and performative forms
that can be found in the recent anti-austerity movements in Athens,
while JohnJordon gives a very personal account ofhis beliefand
disappointment in theatre as a political tool.
/
The second part ofthe book consists ofr5 shorter essays by authors
) coming from theatre as well as political studies, philosophy, or vi-
!
strategies in progress and looks in depth and one by one at current
practices, covering a wide geographical as well as aesthetic range
of sometimes even contradictory approaches. Many of them are
inseparable from the concrete political and social contexts the artists
are involved in: Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula not
only creates pieces with mÍmy references to the politics in his coun-
try but also to the infrastructure around them. The Freedom Theatre
in the Palestinian refugee camp ofJenin highlights strong gestures
of self-empowerment being practised over many years, while the
straightforward verbatim performances of Teater.doc aim to spread
information that is supressed by Russian mainstream media. Árpád
Schilling's Kretakör company took the political crisis in Hungary
as a call to use thei¡ own artistic know-how for direct social engage-
ment, though in a very different way to Akira Takayama, who deals
almost anthropologically with the neglected traumas of post-Fuku-
shima Japan. The Columbian Mapa Teatro have, for more than 3o
years, been poetically mixing facts with fiction in their laboratory
for social imagination in the middle of Bogotá.
Who is representing whom in which way and with what right?
These questions - addressed to the political systems as well as at
theake itself - are at the centre of the work made by many of the art-
ists introduced in this book. For example, Swiss Theater Hora's actors
with cognitive disabilties answer them in a very different way to Milo
Rau's re-staging of three recent Russian trials against art and artists.
The game of representation is pushed even further when three Slove-
nia¡r artists rename themselves after the powerfi¡l nationalist politician
JanezJanð4 plaimg a complex game with identity and authorship.
 ESSAYS &
Closer to straightforward activism is the Argentinian group CONVERSATIONS
Etcétera... , subverting real politics by confronting terrorism with their
own concept of errorism. St. Petersburg collective Chto Delat? con-
-
sisting of theatre a¡d film makers, visual artists, and philosophers
-
brings new life to the old Brechtian Learning Pla¡ and the Israeli
Public Movement uses choreography as a means to cut deep into the
tissue ofpolitical representation, often directly intervening in the
public sphere.
Expanding the stage far into the realm of news and social me-
dia by provoking vehement discussions can still be a powerful
technique - as shown by Croatian theatre director Oliver Frljió, who
likes to put not just his finger but his whole hand into the wounds
of society. Or by the Teater NO99, who by (almost) founding their
own party in the wake of Estonian general elections fuelled debates
not only in the cultural sections of the newspapers, but echoed an
earlier artistic project that also took the form of a political party:
the legendary Chance zooo of the late German artist Christoph
Schlingensief.

Not Just a Mi¡'roris the first part of the publication series Performing
Urgency, commissioned by European theatre network House on Fire
which will continue half-yearly. Performing Urgency focuses on the
relationship between theatre and politics, and asks: How can theatre
engage in contemporary social and political issues without compro-
mising art or politics? What kind of knowledge or impact can art
generâte that activism and theory alone cannot? What are the pro-
cesses and methodologies of political theatre today? It aims at a
broader discussion ofthe conditions, aesthetics, concepts, and top-
ics of contemporary performing arts.

This book is dedicated to Judith Malina and Christoph Schlingensief,

the two late protagonists of Nof Jast a Miror. Their presence as art-
ists and as human beings can be felt still so strongly, as they remain
core figures ofthe political theatre scene oftoday.

Florian Malzacher

af
FLORIAN IIIALZACHER

NfI ÍIRGANUM
Some people are yelling at each other with red faces, others try to

TfI FflLLfIW stay calm whilst convincing bystanders of the threat of foreigners
taking over their country. How Austria stands alone against the rest
of the world. An old man almost cries while shaking a newspaper
that repeats in large letters the same discussion on its front page.
Some Korean tourists watch the spectqgle withgut a clug,
r5 years ago, when German theatre maker Christoph Schlin-
gensief set up his now legendary container-installation Bitte liebt
Osterreich.l(Please Love Austria!, zooo) right in the centre of Vienna,
Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel had just made his devil's pact with
the right wing demagogue Jörg Haider, and the other EU-countries
were discussing sanctions against the fellow member state. Austria
debated passionately about immigration policy, as well as about the
limits of art. And Europe watched qith some bewilderment.
Under the dominating banner 'Ausländer raus' ('Foreigners
out!') Schlingensief staged a Big Brother-type game show with asy-
lum seekers. The containers housed a group of immigrants who
could be watched via CCTV on the internet, and the Austrian
population was invited to vote them out of the country one by one.

PflSSIBILITIES The scandal was enormous: conservatives felt insulted by the seem-
ing parody of their argumentation, and the left was disgruntled by
the supposedly cynical display.

flF PÍILITICAL If political theatre can only exist in a context in which the world is
believed to be changeable, in which theatre itself wants to be part of
that change, and where there is an audience that is willing to ac-
THEATRE tively engage in the exploration of what that change should be - then
it becomes clear why it is so difficult to thlnk of such a theatre today

TflDAY in a society paralysed by the symptoms of post-political ideologies

that tend to disgui¡9 ttrgg-rsgly_e9 as þõiita;t¡ðpiagmatism, þ:Fy
mose- resignation, or cheerfrrl complacency. Where the credo of 'There
''ny¡ì
is no alternative' (TINA) is considered common sense and the belief
in the possibility or even desirability of political imagination is fading,
theatre is hit at its core. All its political potential seems disabled.
It was a different time in the r97os and r98os when political
theatre in Europe actually was (in different ways on either side of
 the WaIl) a relevant factor in many public debates. With ideologies
still going strong and the division between east and west clear cut,
theatre engaged in everyday politics by representing all the world's
miseries - from the Vietnam War or Apartheid in South Africa to
the small daily adversities of a local working class family. Either in
new drama or modernised classics, radical interpretations of the text
were a key feahire of a Regietheater (director's theatre) which, despite
its many ner,¡/ approaches, stayed mostly in the realm of the mi-
metic. In the east it was a game with hidden messages, in the west
open provocations were an important part of the repertoire, and
audiences slamming doors while leaving was a rule rather than an
exception.
No wonder that large parts of the.public still consider '.his
-þeriod
almost synonymous with 'political the.atre' itself. Ðut-even
though the theatre during this period was often able to propose an
understanding ofthe structural reasons behind the presented evils,
it couldn't avoid the'dilémma that in the end its representations rvere
just another repetition of the very miseries it \Manted to fight. Brecht
called this phenomenon'Menschenfresserdramatik' ('cannibal's
dramatic art'), which he described in the early r93os in his notes on
Die dialektische Dramatik: 'The physical exploitation of the poor is
followed by a psychological one' when the pitied character is sup-
posed to produce feelings ofsadness, guilt or even anger in a spec-
tator, who most likely - at least structurally - is part of keeping
the very system of exploitation alive. In the end they continued what
Brecht had already analysed in his S/¿orf Organum for the Theatre
(1949): 'The theatre we know shows the structure of society (repre-
sented on the stage) as incapable ofbeing influenced by society (in
the auditorium).'Not only the play onstage but the whole theatrical
set up (not to speak of the hierarchies within the institution itself)
- -fì;.)
t"' merely reproduced the system they wanted to criticise.
In the r98os and particularly into the t99os new forms of theatre
emerged with the aim not just to reform the predominant models
but to revolutionise them from outside the established theatre insti-
\ì tutions and traditions. Post-dramatic theatre, devised theatre, per-
-+.
formance theatre - there are many labels for this genre which is still
difficult to clearly define due to its variety of forms and its overlaps
with other artistic disciplines. At the centre of the critique of dra-
matic theatre stood its use of however estranged mimetic rçpresen-
tation, which was seen as discredited and was subsequently con-
fronted with the notion of presence. In close exchange with their
counterparts in the emerging conceptual dance movement, theatre
makers brought to the stage highly self-aware works, continually
questioning themselves as products of ideologies, politics, times,
fashions, and circumstances. Strongly inspired by de-constructivist
and poststructuralist theory they offered a new complexþ of theatre
îignifiers revolting against the hegemony of the text, undermining
the linearity and causality of drama, and experimenting with all
possibilities of spectatorship and participation. Instead of represent-
ing a (fake) situation in order to critique it*þ alm was to create a
(real) situation in the co-presence ofthe audience, focusing on the
here and now of the experience, as German theatre scholar Hans-
Thies Lehmann describes in Post-dramatic Theatre $g99):
In contrast to other arts, which produce an object and/or are
communicated through media, here the aesthetic act itself (the
performing) as well as the act of reception (the theatre going)
take place as a real doing in the here and now. [...] Th. emission
and reception of signs and signals take place simultaneously.
This focus on the medium and the form of theatre itseH, the distrust
in narrative content and psychological causality and the interest in
creating individual experiences in which each audience member had
to find her/his own path of interpretation, also had an impact on the
concept ofthe political potential oftheatre. The political effect of
theatre was now primarily looked for in 'the how' of its representa-
tion, not in its concrete political contents. Philosophers like Jacques
Rancière offered a broader theoretical base for rethinking the medium
of theatre and the notion of performativity by analysing The Politics $
of Aesthetics (zooo) and higtrlighting The Emancipated Spectator (zoo7).
It was an important moment of empowering spectators as co-
authors of their own but it had side effect: the
audience was seen less as a collective but rather as a
ofindividuals. Post-dramatic theatre and conceptual dance once
-
agãiñ-T-sonãfing the changes in society - formed a spectator who,
whilst emancipated from the forced-upon imagination of the director,
has become akin to the ideal neoliberal subject that seeks its individu-
alism in active consumption.
The consequent reaction ofpost-dramatic theatre and concep-
tual dance to the often simplistic or moralistic use of notions like
truth, reality, or even politics with a complex game of layers, ambi-
guities and re-questioning enabled new perspectives and possibilities
that also reached far into the field of dramatic theatre. But building
on the thoughts of philosophers who derived their theoretical con-
cepts from their own political experiences and engagements (Michel
Foucault fighting for human rights in prisons with the Groupe
d'information sur les prisons, Alain Badiou being engaged in migra-
tion and asylum policies in the Organization politique, Jacques
Rancière as a short term member in a Maoist group, to name but a
few), the new generations ofthinkers, artists, and curators too often
forgot to bind their even further abstracted thinking back to their
own contemporâry, concrete realities. As a result we got too used to
calling philosophical theories and performances 'political', even if
they are only very distantly based on thoughts that themselves were
already abstracted from the concrete political impulses that sparked
them. A homeopathic, second-hand idea of political philosophy and
art has become a main line of contemporary cultural discourse.
It is a thin division between the necessary awareness that eve-
rything is contingent and simple laziness. Complexity can become an
excuse for intellectual and political relativism. The writings of Rancière
in particular have been used as key arguments from very different
sides - his scepticism towards any clear political statement in a¡t and
his valorising of the power of ambiguity and rupture as the true virfues
of art, helped pave the way for wide definitions of the political. In the
end, if everything is political, nothing is political anymore.
So where are we today? How can theatre still create spheres where
alternatives can be collectively imagined, tried out, discussed, con-
fronted? How can theatre create alternative models of how we might
Iive togethe¡ or what kind of society or world we want? A look at
the contemporary performing arts scene shows a strong desire for
a thêàtre that not only focuses on pressirrg pglitical iisues, but also
becomes a political space - a public sphere - in itself. There is no
common organum to follow. We are in a period of trying out, of
finding out - artists as well as the audiences. But there are enough
bits and pieces (and sometimes even big chunks) of artistic work
and political engagement that allow us to imagine the potential of
engaged theatre again. A theatre that keeps the necessary self-re-
flexivity ofthe last decades but avoids the traps ofpure self-refer-
entiality. That understands contingency not as merely arbitrary and
an excuse for relativism but as a call for active engagement to
counter its consequences.
When your trousers are literally glued to your theatre seat in a Se-
rata Futurista (evenings organised by the Italian Futurists from rgro
on, mixing performance, painting, music, and often practical jokes),
this kind of participation might not seem particularly desirable. But
even though participation
- in art and in politics - is not always
pleasant, the beliefthat one can take part in shaping society is a
necessity for democracy. On the other hand the putative participa-
tion that we are permanently confronted with in an all-inclusive
capitalist system (that - unlike Marx's prediction
- has so far always
been able to absorb its internal contradictions by affirmation) has
rendered the term almost useless: a pacifier which perversely del-
egates the responsibility for what is happening to citizens that can-
-nòt influence it, and thus enables the system to continue more or
less undisturbed in its task to maintain itself. Rare elections, basic
social care, some small measures against climate change and human
rights violations here and there, and our conscience is satisfied.
lPhilosopher
Slavoj ZiZek calls this procedure icultural capitalism.
So-called participatory theatre all too often merely mimics such
placebo-involvement; offering not only fake, stipulated choices but
also forcing the audience to engage in this transparent set-up. This
is the real 'nightmare of participation' (to use a term by Markus
Mießen): not being forced into participation but being forced into a
fake participation. A permanent involvement (which basically means
we are active only in the sense that we are consumers) that we can't
escape and which merely prevents us from participating in the pow-
ers that be. Passivity disguised as activity. The audiences ofthe Se-
rata Futurista understood that: for them the provocation that came
from the stage - a participation forced upon them was an invita-
-
tion for a real fight. And many went for it.
A contemporary political theatre has to put itself right in the
middie of this dilemma: not only avoiding false participation but at
the same time reclaiming the idea of participation as such. Ap-a¡_-
ligrnation that thrives - in politics and art - on its iadical potential.
A participation that doesn't merely replace one mode of tutelage
with another. Such an involvement does not necessarily have to
happen with the consensus of the people involved. It can also aim
at direct confrontation, and can experiment with miscommunication
or even abuse.
 Since, in short, participatory art is - taking the definition from
Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells (zotz) - an art 'in which people con-
stitute the central artistic medium and material, in the manner of
theatre and performance', it can constitute a whole range of possible
human relationships. Artist Pablo Helguera differentiates in Educa-
tion for Socially Engaged Art (zou) between nonvoluntary (with no
negotiation or agreement involved), toluntary (with a clear agree-
ment or even contract) and intoluntary participation - the nego-
tiations in the latter being rather subtle, not direct, a play ofhidden
agendas in which 'deceit and seduction play a central role.' These
categories of participation can shift and mix, of course. Maintaining
a lack of clarity around them can be a useful artistic tool, as many
of the early works of Christoph Schlingensief show. It was not only
in Bine liebtÕsterreichlthat the status of the participants remained
dubious, since it was never officially resolved whether they were
real asylum seekers or actors and if they fully understood the game
being played. A comparable ambivalence can be found in his work
with handicapped actors, for which Schlingensief was regularly
accused of abuse.
In a different way such ambiguities are also a key strategy of the
Israeli company Public Movement. Interested in the rituals and cho-
reographies of politics, they play a complex game with participation
and representation, for example when trying to cast leftist activists
as well as neo-Nazis and the German police for a re-enactment of the
Berhn Fírst of MqyRiots (zoro). In the end all three groups withdrew
and the project had to be realised in a different way. Similarly, their
attempt in zorr failed to convince a right-wing fraternity in the Aus-
trian city ofGraz to publicly perform one oftheir secrete celebrations.
The line Public Movement walk might often be too thin, but the real
political and artistic project is in many cases already happening dur-
ing the preparation of such works, for example when extreme po-
litical adversaries meet and attempt in awkward conversations to find
some coÍrmon ground for direct confrontation.
Real participation implies giving up responsibility and power. Brecht's
'Lehrstücke' ('Teaching Plays') were to be performed by the audience
itsell the working class. Brazilian theatre maker Augusto Boal not
only followed this idea inhis Theatre of the Oppressed but even
handed over the responsibility for how the performance developed
to the 'spect-actors' (spectators that during the performance turned
into actors).
Dutch theatre director Lotte van den Berg's ongoing project
(since zor4) Building Conyersation aims at even further reducing
theatre to its core. For her, theatre is first and foremost a place of
communication, of meeting each other, a sphere where conflicts can
be shown and experienced. An agreement to communicate by obey-
ing often very different rules. And Building Conyersation is indeed
just this: talking with each other. Inspired by communication tech-
niques from all over the world, models and frames for dialogues are
developed. There are no actors, no audience. Just the invitation to
participate in a conversation without words, inspired by Inuit as-
semblies, or alternating between reflection, retreat, and dialogue,
following a method invented byJesuits. Another conversation hap-
pens completely without a moderator, topic, or goal - a principle
developed by quantum physicist David Bohm, exploring the patterns
of our collective thinking. ts directly influenced
by Belgium political Chantal Mouffe her concept of z-l ú¡iwr(ír'(
'agonistic pluralism ', and one of the to her theory. tt.,.t'i..1ÅbfI
A sphere of agonistic pluralism is also created by one of the most
politically radical participatory art projects in the recent years. The
New World Summit(zon onwards), invented and organised by Dutch
artistJonas Staal, opens up alternative political spaces in the form
of quasi-parliamentarian conventions of representatives of organisa-
tions that are excluded from the democratic discourse by being
categorised as terrorists. These summits offer intense and touching
moments where voices can be hea¡d that are elsewhere silenced, and
where a radical idea of democracy appears at the horizon. However
they also produce moments of a strong sense of unease, disagree-
ment, or even anger since these organisations are obviously not
chosen by criteria of political correctness. Some might appear eas-
ier for the audience to identify with - for example the Kurdish
women's movement - whereas others' causes might be seem unac-
ceptable, for example when it comes to nationalism, violence, patri-
archy, and hierarchies in many struggles for independence. The New
World Summif welcomes very different organisations; there is no
advice given on how to judge or relate to them. The only clarity
comes in the critique of Western democracies which base their ex-
istence on undemocratic, secretive, and often - even by their own
standards - illegal ways of excluding what doesn't fit in their own
scheme. As Claire Bishop pointed out in her essay 'Antagonism and
Relational Aesthetics' (zoo4): participation should create a sense of
'unease and discomfort rather than belonginCl Trgtllflg all involved
as'subject[s] of independent though!' the-'gssãn.tiat t *.-q@é
]s
It is not by chance that Staal often chooses to hold the Ner¿
World Summill in theatres spaces in which all that happens is real
-
and not real, is simultaneously concrete and abstract, and in which
the difference between presence and representation is always at
stake. Here things can be shown and said that don't find a form
elsewhere, and where radical imagination is, in rare moments, still
is possible.
The question ofparticipation is necessarily linked to the question
ofrepresentation. Everyone participating in theatre - as an actor,
is also automatically understood
performe¡ spect-actor or audience -
as representing a larger community distinguished by colour, sex,
class, profession, and so on. Therefore, the questions that currently
who is being represented in which way by
haunt all democracies -
whom and with what right? - are mirrored in theatre: Can a bour-
geois actor represent a refugee? Can the west represent the global
south? Can a man represent a woman? Is the representation of co-
lonial clichés de-masking or just a repetition of a degrading insult?
The problem addressed by recent discussions around 'black-face'
and similar issues go much deeper than questioning the right and
ability of a white actor to play a character of colour. These chal-
lenges are politically and artistically complex. They will certainly
outlast short term debates about political correctness and occupy
theatre for a long time as they resonate with fundamental arguments
about the necessity, effectiveness, and rightfulness of representation
within democracy in general.
Post-dramatic theatre in the r99os and early zooos sought solu-
tions to this problem in different ways. Directors like René Pollesch
and collectives like Gob Squad or She She?op rejected the
"ttog"tt..
of talking about others by subjectively focusing orr th,e*i¡-.o-w5t- spe
õific, smallbut influential social environment of a glob-aljsed'grbqn'
white, creative, and semi-precarious new middle c-14!s. Others turned
towards more documentary-oriented forms and opened the stage
for the self-representation of 'experts of the everyday' as the direc-
tor-trio of Rimini Protokoll famously calls their performers. Working
almost exclusively with 'real people' - meaning non-actors - agination, it has also always been a medium for showing conflicts and
Rimini Protokoll have over the years developed a very specific
dramaturgy of care, suiting the demands of their performers as well
as the artistic aims of the performance.
However, the rapid changes around the globe have also high-
lighted the limits of these approaches where the respect for 'the
other' has often turned into either its fetishisation or into the self-
centredness of believing one's own living room to be the world.
Theatre makers like Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klaßen as a
consequence search for new ways ofhanding over the stage to their
African collaborators by permanently redefining the own role as
directors. The concept of'chefferie' not only gave the title to one of
their works, but also serves as a metaphor of how to work together
as it describes a political and administrative model of the meeting
of many chiefs of equal status that was practised before the coloni-
zation ofsub-Saha¡an Africa and continues to exist today in parallel
with official government institutions.
By contrast, the Swiss Theater Hora - one of the best known
companies of actors with cognitive disabilities - seems at first glance
to still offer their directors rather classical authorial positions. How-
ever on second view it becomes clear that the resistance of the
performers, their own strong and often unpredictable personalities,
permanently undermine this working model. As guest director, the
French choreographerJérôme Bel made the ambivalence in Disabled
Theater (zon) very clear. On one hand the strict orders he gave were
announced during the performance on stage and highlighted the
hierarchy of the production. On the other, the performers fulfrlled
their tasks in whichever way they wanted (and sometimes not at
all). As Bel has pointed out, it is not the performers who are disabled
but the audience who feel uneasy looking at them.
In the end it is in theatre as it is in society: only attempts at
pluralism will work. Groups of people that have been largely unrep-
resented (or represented only by others) have to enter the stages of
our theatres. And not only the stages but also the positions of thea-
tre makers and audiences. If theatre really is a sphere in which social
practices can be tried out or invented on a small scale, then this is
one of the most urgent tasks at hand.
As much as theatre can be a space of collective or collaborative im-
¡ñF
oppositions between ideas, powers, nations, generations, couples, or
even within the psyche of a single character. Different forms of real-
ism have sharpened this aspect oftheatre by focusing on the internal
contradictions of society. Brecht's dialectical theatre looked at the
different aspects ofconcrete struggles to enable the audience to un-
derstand how it was created by the system they lived in instead of
simply identifuing with one position. Following Ma¡x, Brecht's thea-
tre was driven by the belief that when the class struggle would fi-
nally be won, a harmonious communist society would be created.
Later philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and Rowles -tn
very different ways - to save of a con_se4pgr ggciety, believ-
ing that would encourage humankind to overcome its
individual interests. But we are not only rational beings; emotion will
always play a role, as Chantal Mouffe stresses in The Democratic
Paradox(zooo): 'While we desire an end to conflict, if we want people
to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may
appeff and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted.'
Mouffe's concept of 'agonistic pluralism' therefore aims for
democracy to be an arena in which we can act out our differences
as adversaries without having to reconcile them. At a time in which
the once frowned upon dictum 'Who is not with us, is against us' is
having a renaissance at all sides of the political spectrum, we need
plaful (but serious) agonism where contradictions are not only kept
alive, but above all can be freely articulated. Only through this can
we prevent an antagonism that ends all negotiation. It is not by
chance that Mouffe's concept draws its name from theatre, from
'agon', the game, the competition of arguments in Greek tragedy.
While some of the works of Swiss theatre director Milo Rau rely on
very well crafted shock and awe realism, his staging of political tri-
als appear to be textbook examples of an agonistic theatre. Tlre
Moscow Trials(zo4) presented a theatre setup in which three trau-
matic legal cases against Russian artists and curators were brought
again in front of a judge, but this time in the realm of art. Protagonists
of the actual trials as well as people with close links to them were
confronted with each other in an artificial but simultaneously
highly realistic situation. Curators, artists, and critics were fighting
for artistic freedom on one side, conservative TV moderators, or-
thodox activists, and priests on the other. For three days the Sakharov
Centre in Moscow became an agonistic space, in which radically
different opinions were exchanged in a way that was not possible
outside. In front of an audience that emotionally was just as involved
in the piece as the performers, the independent jury in the end de-
cided - by the smallest possible margin - that art was innoòeni
-
As Mouffe suggests, public space is 'the battleground' for the
agonistic struggle between opposing hegemonic projects. On a small
scale theatre can create such spheres of open exchange, even in
societies where free speech is scarce or in western democracies
where the space between consensus and antagonism is becoming
increasingly narrow. Art - using a differentiation by art theorist
Miwon Kwon - not in but aspublic space might be one of the most
important things theatre can offer. This public space is not limited
to the physical and material space of the performance. As much as
the trials initiated by Milo Rau were one-time events with a quite
limited audience, they extended their stage far into the realm of
news and other media, where discussions about politics as well as
art continued.
While the once popular critical tooì of mediated scandals - an
essential feature of political art, especially in the second half of the
twentieth century - seems to have become toothless due to its
predictability, at moments it still manages to break the routine.
Croatian director Oliver Frljió is one such protagonist of a neo-
scandalist approach, and regularly creates heated debates in Croatia,
Serbia, or Slovenia where he routinely pokes his finger in the wounds
of post-Yugoslavian identity crises. This method does not work
everywhere; in Germany for example Frljió's work is considered
controversial but not overtly emotionally upsetting. Scandals de-
velop their potential where the lines of demarcation within a soci-
ety need to be made visible and/or where there is a necessity to flnd
allies by concentrating one's own troops.
Manipulating mass media with the aim of disseminating a mes-
sage as widely as possible is the domain of the US-American group
Yes Men. Their strategy is first to make it into the news headlines
with a false but disarming announcement, and then make the news
again by uncovering the prank. Most famously, ín zoo4 they man-
aged to appear on the BBC news by impersonating a Dow Chemical
spokesman on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe.
The false representative (performed by Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum)
announced that his company would finally take full responsibility
foi the disaster and compensate their thousands of victims. The
läier disclosut. olüìi real identity fuelled public debate about the
scandal worldwide.
¡ñrt
 Also for the Berlin-based Zentrum für politische Schönheit
(Centre for Political Beauty) the real battlefield is the newspaper
headlines, as well as the TV news, Facebook and Twitter. In zotz
they offered a rewa¡d of z5,ooo Euro for any information that would
lead to a conviction of one of the owners of the weapon producer
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann. Since the arms business itself was not
amerceable the group searched for any other possible offence. The
real denouncement however was a series of posters and a website
with the narnes of the company or,¡/ners in the manner of a wild west
warrant. This artistically productive but ethically challenging am-
bivalence was pushed even further when Zentrum für politische
Schönheit stole the memorial crosses for those who had died at the
Berlin V/aIl in order to bring them - allegedly - to the outer borders
of the EU, and thus creating a link to the victims of the borders of
today. In their most recent and so far most controversial action, Die
Toten Kommen (The Dead Arrive),Zentrum für politische Schönheit
salvaged the corpse ofa drowned 34-year-old Syrian refugee from
a cold store at the EU border in Sicily and buried her in a Berlin
graveyard.
The social turn in the arts brings to the fore the very questions
that accompany all socially motivated initiatives: To what degree
are the people involved self-determined? How long does a commit-
ment have to last? Who is profiting most? Is it sustainable? It soon
becomes clear that such questions don't always have the same an-
swers when considered from the perspective of a¡t, or from activism,
or even from that of social work.
It is not just theatre makers who are inspired by the numerous po-
litical movements in recent years and try to bring some of this
momentum into their art but vice versa: performance, performative
actions, and theatre have long been part ofthe creative repertoire
of activism. Boal's forum and invisible theatre remained an inspira-
tion for those bringing performances to the streets, and distantly
inspired initiatives like the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army
in London as a strategy to de-escalate confrontation with the police.
As one of their founders, John Jordan, writes in Truth is Concrete
(zor4): 'Armed with mockery and love and using tactics of confusion
rather than confrontation, some notable Clown Army actions were
when a 7o strong gaggle of clowns walked straight through a line
of UK riot cops who, unusuall¡ could not hold their line. When the
video footage of the event was examined, it turned out that beneath
their visors the cops were laughing too much to concentrate.' From
agit prop to therapeutic theatre, performance as a 'useful art' has
been playing an important role in political or social struggles.
Less explicit are the many theatrical moments of movements
like Occupy, such as the famous 'human mike', which demands from
everybody present the repetition ofthoughts and arguments that
one might not agree with before being able to react. Everybody is
present in this act of individual and at the same time collective
speaking. The assemblies themselves - the heart of the Occupy
movement - are also performative in nature. Their political imagi-
nation is always also physical, and always performed, as philosopher
Judith Butler described in her speech at Occupy Wall Street (zorr):
It matters that as bodies we arrive together in public, that we
a¡e assembling in public; we are coming together as bodies in
alliance in the street and in the square. As bodies we suffer, we
require shelter and food, and as bodies we require one another
and desire one another. So this is a politics of the public body,
the requirements of the body, its movement and voice. [...] We
sit and stand and move and speak, as we can, as the popular
will, the one that electoral democracy has forgotten and aban-
doned. But we are here, and remain here, enacting the phrase,
'we the people.'
But despite all overlaps, the relation between art and activism remains
a complex one. Just as artists reject the notion of giving up complex-
ity and ambiguity, activists are likewise alienated by the traditional
role ofartists as especially gifted creators or even lone authors - and
even more by the market or the institutions they are usually part of.
At the core ofactivism stands the concept ofdirect action: an
action with the very concrete goal of pointing out a problem, show-
ing an alternative or even a possible solution. The 'direct' points at
the idea of a non-mediated action - in short, the time for talking
and negotiating is over, or at least suspended. Direct action is the
opposite of hesitation and ambivalence. Reflection - to a degree
- is posþoned. In this regard, direct action might feel like the mo-
ment in which activism is farthest apart from art.
On the other hand there is also a moment when a performance
gains momentum and there is a point of no return. Where it is all
 Tþ; ¿ .l
about the here and now. In this regard, direct action might feel like /'1,t,^ I c.?, )
the moment when art is closest to activism. Many radical moments
d- d f,t
of live art might very well be considered direct actions.
In any case, direct actions are usually not spontaneous; they
are often meticulously prepared, mapped out and staged. They are
planned like a military action, or like a piece of performance art.
The Russian activists of Pussy Riot, to take a famous example, did
not just march into the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and sponta-
neously decide what to do. They chose the setting carefrrlly, rehearsed
text and movements.
The inflatables invented by the collective Tools for Action serve
\
as a means to resolve tense and potentially violent moments or, in
l
j case this fails, as shields against water cannons. At the same time,
I they are eye-catching for the media covering the demonstration. But
')
most of all, they tend to create performative, often theatrical situa-
tions: at a demonstration in Spain a giant inflatable cube was tossed
towards the police, and at first the highly armed squad of zo riot
cops backed awa¡ then tossed it back. The cube moved back and
forth a couple of times before the police frnally managed to get rid
of the thing.

Eliminating the difference between presentation and representation

might have been, as art theorist Boris Groys claims, the goal of much
radical art of the twentieth century and still be a dream of some
activist and artists. But politically-engaged theatre offers the more
complex and necessary possibility that whilst eradicating difference rJ
¡-rJ"ì ¡
it also analyses it at the same time. It does not create an artificial
outside of pure criticality and neither does it have to lure in apo-
litical identification. Theatre is the space where things are real and
not real at the same time. Where we can observe ourselves from the
outside whilst also being part of the performance. It is a paradox
that creates situations and practices that are symbolic and actual at
the same time.
After all, as ZiZek pointed out in his speech at Occupy Wall Street:
today it is actually easier to imagine the end of the world (as done
in so many Hollywood blockbusters) than the end of capitalism. At
a time and in a system where we have even lost, as ZiZek suggests,
'the language to articulate our nonfreedom', radical imagination
reminds us that there is still the possibility to act at all.
CAROL iIARTIN

HISTÍIRY AND PÍILITICS '...What happens is of lixle significance compared with the stories
we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only
flN STAGE stories of events afect us.'
Rabfü Alameddine, The Hakawati

The question - what is political theatre today? - assumes that

political theatre extends beyond staging the stories of underrep-
resented communities, performing a social good such as work
with the ageing, the incarcerated, the disabled, or arguing for
social justice. Political theatre today is deeply engaged with the
representation and analysis of real events in ways we have
never quite seen before. Constructed from interview-based verba-
tim and archive-derived documentary sources (letters, diaries, in-
terviews, records, photographs, films, YouTube, and Facebook) the
real is often presented in the context ofuncertainty about actually
knowing anything in a highly manipulated digital world. Toda¡
theatre's political contribution is to both represent events for further
examination and explore the shifts in paradigm, perspective, and
subject matter that digital reality has wrought. The overlap and
interplay between 'theatre' and 'reality', the blurred boundary be-
tween the simulated and the 'real'world, is one of the most compel-
ling and productive areas of theatrical activity to emerge in the
twentieth century and continue in the twenty-first.
Theatre of the real has many names: documentary theatre,
verbatim theatre, îeâlify-based theairel theaäèläi:l""t, theatrè öf
witné'$; rribunal investigative theatre, nonfiction theatre,
THE THEATRE restored village performances, war and battle re-enactments, and
autobiographical and of terms indi-
cates a range of methods and outcomes that may overlap and cross-
flF THE fertilise. Any combination of theatre created from the verbatim use
oftranscripts, trials, and interviews, re-enacting the experiences of
witnesses, historic events, and places, biographical and autobio-
REAL graphical accounts might be employed. In all of these methods, there
is the desire to produce what Roland Ba¡thes calls the 'reality effect',
ßr\n"i t/V /

an effe ct th at c onfer s the--s tals,s o l lç gi!-i+"1gl il-t}g_ gJygfL fr6Âe."-t¡

.
_lp
because what is represented is thought to have really happened or e{ (s^
AA
has a relationship with what is understood to be real. Theatre about
real events beckons its spectators to wrestle, like Jacob wrestled with
the angel, with their own moment.
The influence of theatre of the real on the entire political thea-
tre landscape cannot be underestimated. E,arly in the twentieth
century, the German director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) created
Trotz alledem!(In Spite of Ererythingl r9z5) using new media on stage
in the form of film footage of World War I. Focusing on German
history from 1914 to the r9r9 assassination of German communist
Ieader Karl Liebknecht, the visual and verbal form oftheatrical re-
portage of ln Spite ofEverythinglwas designed to directly represent
experience and provoke political action. Documentary film footage
of the War functioned like a tragic chorus both reporting and por-
traying the offstage world. Comprised of actual speeches, articles,
newspaper clippings, slogans, leaflets, photographs, and films, Pisca-
tor thought his production was an historically truthful montage.
Judging from his experience in the War, Piscator thought this was
the first time that theatrical representation was in accord with 'ab-
solute truth.' His goal was to make theatre a generative place that
functioned like a meeting hall. Learning from Piscator and then
striking out on his own, Bertolt Brecht also reconsidered the con-
nection between life (the real) and theatre (the professed fictional)
proposing that theatre be in the service of'socially practical sig-
nifrcance,' more than in the creation of pure emotion, as he wrote
in The Street Scene þ938).
Brecht described Piscator's work as 'documentary' in what was
probably the first use of that term in relation to theatre. By 'docu-
mentary'Brecht did not mean a balanced account of both sides of
the story but an account that redressed mainstream capitalist news-
paper accoiñts. Early on the notion of documentary wâi as-s"mãd
to be both a corrective and its own form of propaganda. Writing on
Piscator's theatre in Voicings (1995), historian Attilio Favorini con-
cludes; 'In Spite of EverythingJwas thus in line with Piscator's sub-
sequent, if irregular, attempts to bring to theater the directness of
political speech, that is, to transform representation into political
action.' Gone for the moment were the psychological preoccupations
and assumptions of the bourgeois theatre in favour of what Piscator
referred to as 'the great forces of history.' Life as lived by communi-
ties of people, rather than individuals, began storming stages and
probably owed something to the Soviet history spectacles such as
the Storming of the Winter Palace.
More recently there have been many productions that portray
individuals as representatives of entire systems of thought. The
British play My Name Is Rachel Corrie (zoo5) co-edited by Alan Rick-
man and Katharine Viner, for example, challenges the way theatre
constructs history and memory. The deceased protagonist of the
play, Rachel Corrie, wrote about her experience in Gaza apart from
the historical narratives that created that particular place. Rickman
and Viner created a structure for the play by making omissions,
additions, subtle changes of rhetoric, and juxtapositions in Rachel
Corrie's diary entries, letters, and emails. The play's problems of
authorship, the opacity of the work of its editors, and the often hate-
filled internet discourse that surrounded it obscured the play,s
meaning. The story of Rachel and her sea¡ch for social justice became,
in the hands of Rickman and Viner, testimony for the prosecution
of Israel.
Even as the notion that truth is stable and knowable has come
under scrutiny, some artists and theorists continue to make claims
for testimony. Typically concerned with social injustice and civil
Iiberties and informed by civil rights, antiwar protests, feminism,
and gay rights, documentary and verbatim trial plays address the
shortcomings of the law in relation to gende¡ race, and social justice.
Trial plays stage legal proceedings in order to portray the problems
of the law in relation to history (the archive) and the implications
of re-imagining, re-writing, re-staging and, by implication, recon-
figuring that history. Some prominent examples of trial plays in
which the events, the resulting trials, and theatrical innovation are
all present, include: The Investigationby Peter Weiss (1966), which
documents the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial; The Trial of the Catonsville
Nineby Daniel Berrigan exposes the government death machine of
the Vietnam War; The Chicago Conspiracy Triatby Ron Sossi and
Frank Condon OSZù portrays racial injustice; Inquest (197o) by
Donald Freed reveals legal corruption; Are you Now or Have you Ever
Pyyfl(tgZù by Eric Bentleyìtages the inlamous McCarthy hearings;
Execution of Justice (1984) gives an account of the homophobic mur-
der of Harvey Milk, and Greensboro (A Requiem) (1996), exposes how
the Ku Klux Klan literally got away with murder, both plays by
Emily Mann; Unquestioned Integrity: The H\II Thomas Hearings (1993)
by Maime Hunt discloses the gender ignorance of Congress during
congressional hearings; Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar
Wilde þgg) and The Laramie Project (zooo), both by Moises Kauf-
man, reveal gay hatred; The Colour of Justice (rSSS) by Richard
Norton-Taylor, is an account of the unconscious racism of the Brit-
ish police in relation to the murder of Stephen Lawrence; One Hour
Eighteen Minutes (zoro) by Moscow's Teatr.doc shows the failure to
protect a Russian anti-corruption lawyer; and The Moscow Trials
(zorz) conceived by the Swiss director Milo Rau, stages real-life
protagonists in a trial of Russian democracy and freedom.
Court documents can and often are intercut with other informa-
tion and scenes. The original production of Inquest used recon-
structed scenes from Ethel andJulius Rosenbergs's private l.fe. Inquest
attempts to exonerate the Rosenbergs by using court documents to
tell a story about the corrupt and unethical practices of the persons
who controlled the construction of the couple's legal narrative. The
production reopened their espionage trial by constituting the audi-
ence as an assembly of citizens with the rights and responsibilities
of delivering a verdict. The once strange but now familiar ability of
unproven master narratives to dominate public thinking, especially
in moments of cultural and political crises, is integral to the play.
A great number of international works address the interface
between performance and the archive both in terms of interrogating
the archive and adapting the portrayal of memory to a theatrical
space. O Jardim (zon) by Companhia Hiato of Brazil tells the stories
of three generations of the same family. Although the overarching
narrative of the work is fictional its infrastructure is real, using as
it does the performers' family photographs and portions of their life
stories as the basis of the production. Brickman Brando Bubble Boom
(zon) by Agrupación Señor Serrano of Spain tells the story ofJohn
Brickman, who invented the mortgage system in Victorian England
and fought for the right of everyone to have a home. Brickman's
story is intercut with footage of Marlon Brando in The Godfather at
the same time as a nârrator describes Brando playing the role of
Brickman in a film. Soon enough we learn that the very plausible
story of Brickman is fictional while the fantastic story of Brando's
succession of homes culminating in the purchase of an island is true.
Live-feed projection shows the performers manipulating tiny human
figures and Monopoly houses to illustrate Brickman's housing pro-
jects and map the locations of Brando's many homes.
Complex stage reality is also a part of The Builders Association's
House / Divided(zon) which makes extensive use of multiple projec-
tion screens, live actors, real and fabricated artifacts in a general
technological extravaganza with an episodic narrative structure
about the real US housing foreclosures that resulted from the most
recent recession. House / Divided also conjoined the real with the
simulated and the fictional. The burst of the housing bubble in zoo7,
the stock market crash, the bank and industry crisis, and the reces-
sion that followed prompted the members of The Builders Associa-
tion to ask questions about the collapse of the American and global
economic infrastructure, especially the loss of homes. The company
researched and considered the relationship among spaces, places,
and material goods as well as virtual realities. What have houses
come to mean as commodities in the global marketplace? How does
something as abstract as prices on the stock market affect something
as real as a family's home? How did the extreme loss of wealth affect
ordinary people? Have events like these happened before?
Daily life is an important realm of inquiry in theatre of the real.
Most famous for their work in this area is Rimini protokoll, a com-
pany that resides in Berlin but works all over the world. Known as
experts of everyday life, Rimini Protokoll has created many works
that integrate assumptions about quotidian reality. In Remote Berlin
(zor3) created by company member Stefan Kaegi, a group of about
5o people wearing headsets trekked through the city, guided by
Rachel, a digital voice. Accompanied by a soundtrack of music and
street sounds, Rachel guided participants through streets and parks,
into banks, churches, onto the metro, and eventually to the roof of
a hospital. Remote Berlín's Rachel is both seemingly naive and very
facetious as she guides participants through'scripted realities' on
the streets of Berlin. 'Automatically you pass the small posts like on
autopilot,' she says. 'Your body knows how to do it and how it works:
Walking. I like working with humans. Evolution has taught you so
much.' Leading participants into a bank, Rachel advises them to act
normal by feigning interest in a banking product, sitting down, or
casually leaning against the wall. Situations like this occurred sev-
eral times in Remote Berlin, giving participants a reflexive perspec-
tive on how we predictably perform urban life according to digital
instructions. Remote Berlin appears to disrupt urban conformity by
staging the movement of 5o people through the cit¡ even âs it con-
forms to the rules and regulations of the city by securing the
proper permissions necessary for some of its 'stages.'
A growing number of reflexive performance techniques focus
the spectator's attention on how performance is made and reality is
constructed. Acknowledging the complexity of aperformance's real-
ity redirects single-perspective notions of truth toward the ambigu-
ity of multiple viewpoints. Works like those of Lebanese-born Rabih
Mroué and Linah Sineh stage a radical uncertainty both about un-
derstanding and the actual occurrence of events. In their workLook-
ing for a Missing Employee (zoq) halflies, invented truth, newspa-
per clips, diary entries, found objects, and propaganda are swirled
together to tell the story of how and why the civil servant Raafat
Suleiman went missing. Mroué and Saneh examine the way docu-
mentary can evade truth in a flurry of reportage that attempts to
piece together apuzzle but never creates a definitive picture. Mroué
sits perched behind his spectators with his image projected on a
screen until he too disappears from both the screen and the perch.
The real is lost in the very act of trying to summon it. Information
fails as it is revealed. A¡chives are created and 'disappear' in the same
act of performance. Even the story teller disappears. Knowledge
escapes us even as information invades us. Truth exists but may not
be able to be found. What is real are the devices of reportage, not
what they purport to report. The medium is the subject.
Recent revoìutions and protest movements and performances
about them have used mobile phone images in ways that tell us
something about the contingencies ofeveryday acts and aesthetics.
Mroué's The Pixelated Revolution (zorr) is a provocative commentary
on the everyday aesthetics of twenty-first-century warfare and
revolution. Mroué analyses the mobile phone film recordings up-
loaded to the internet by Syrian protestors in order to talk about
several things: images that originate outside of institutional regula-
tion; the risk of making images during a revolution; variables of
truth and authenticity; and, how the protestors' images document
the circumstances of the demonstrators not shown on camera. Ac-
cording to Mroué, the images of the Syrian protestors not only
counter the surveillance of the state but upend assumptions about
the aesthetics of credible images and sources of information. An
aesthetic born from the contingencies of everyday necessity can
disclose truth and authenticity to create unauthorised political his-
tory by examining the ways in which instruments of 'looking'
transform historical knowledge as they change hands and purpose.
The disappearance of truth is also the subject of another work
by Mroué and Sineh, 33 rpm and a few seconds (zorz, sometimes also
referred to as 33 rounds per minute and then some).'Ihe performance
installation documents Beirut resident Diyaa Yamout's unexpected
disappearance. The stage installation shows only his workspace with
a table and two chairs, an open computer with a screen showing his
Facebook page, a television, a cell phone, and an answering machine.
Yamout is absent yet omnipresent as he inhabits a technological
afterlife. There is a lot of speculation about what happened to him,
especially in the context ofhis artistic life, his religion, his personal
relationships, and the Arab Spring. ln the media-driven world brought
into Yamout's room through the electronic devices on stage, all the
information is potentially significant and relevant while none of it
seems to definitively reveal anything about Yamout. The postings
on his Facebook page, messages on his answering machine, and,
eventuall¡ the announcement of his death on television infer a post-
secular world where enormously powerful forces are in control. The
entire work amounts to the staging of a simulated biography.
The technological afterlife that is 'Yamout' is staged for a real
audience in real time. The invented responses of his Facebook 'friends'
are in concert with the real as we know it through our digital de-
vices and serve to reveal how we invent what we think we know
What live audiences see in this actorless installation is, finally, just
the flickering texts, images, and sounds of technology; texts, im-
ages, and sounds that are, nevertheless, overburdened with meaning
and presented as real. The archive that informs fi rpm and a few
seconds is the daily performance of self on digital media. It is an
imagined and invented experiential archive that documents a past
that never happened. The digital version of Yamout's life is fic-
tional even as it is figuratively happening in all our lives all the time.
Mroué and Saneh show the technical means of archiving as part of
the archive; reality is eating its own tail.
ß rpm and a few seconds stages today's technology as a social
practice that portends the real even as it pretends its own actuality.
It is a postmodern version of Henrik Ibsen's dramaturgy where the
fiction onstage problematises the very idea ofa stable reality offstage.
Twenty-first-century dramaturgy employs the technical means at
hand - the internet, computers, live streaming, smartphones, etc
just as the nineteenth-century activist play'wright used what was new
-
to his age, highly realistic stage sets dressed with meticulous visual
detail a¡imated by actors who appeared not to be acting. In theatre
of the real, the use of media is not secondary
- not merely a record-
ing of live events - but primary; today media is an arbiter of truth
and the benefactor of its invention. Media is still 'evidence' that what
is purported to have happened actually did happen. It functions as a
record of events, as a form of testimony, and as source information
open to extensive manipulation.
 YouTube, Facebook, and social media in general are challenging
the social and political role oftheatre. In response, theatre about real
events has generated new methodologies and styles for political
provocation by using the ubiquitous technologies that are part of
our daily lives. Remediation such as sampling, remix, collage, and
mash-up trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction. Embrac-
ing complex, multivalent, and contradictory ways of seeing informs
both the way we experience theatre and reality. Visual images such
as photographs, animations, digital re-enactments, and videos includ-
ing documentaries, surveillance cameras, and amateur videos shot
from conventional and mobile phone cameras can both prove and
contradict legal and casual testimony and written reports. Using
redacted texts and digital media has both deconstructed drama and
reconfigured the authority of a written text. Comparing the possi-
bilities of technology with our own experiences creates its own form
of disinformation.
Troubled epistemology is not new to theatre. One of the most
important documentary works to critically intervene in the reliabil-
ity of documents is Weiss's Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, frrst
staged reading October 1965). Written as a dramatic portrayal of the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that lasted from the end of t963 through
the summer of 1965, The Inttestigafion is comprised of extracted and
edited portions of the trial's testimony. Working from the published
testimony of the trial and from recollections of having attended part
of the trial, W'eiss never intended a literal verbatim recreation. Cau-
tioning against reconstruction Weiss wrote in his preface to the
published play: 'In the presentation of this play, no attempt should
be made to reconstruct the courtroom before which the proceedings
of the camp trial took place.' The Investigationhas its own narrative
style, sequence, and poetics that includes witness testimony about
the Nazis'painstaking alteration of documents. Alongside the sur-
vivors' testimonies, accounts of the corrupted documents convey
how the language of the camps \Mas part of an alternate universe
with its own context-specific language. The accuracy of Weiss,s
portrayal was not questioned, even though his aesthetics were at-
tacked.
In the twenty-first centur¡ both performance theorists and
artists are turning their attention to how documents, whether reaÌ
or fictional, material or digital, are framed; to the status of documents
as artifacts; and to their implications for dramaturgy, scenography,
and mis-en-scène. Analysing the way documents are used in live
tfl
performance provides insight into not only how documents work
as stage objects, but also how audiences perceive meaning in relation
to document ation. EI año en que nací (The Year I Was Born, zorc) by
. 'ãnd
Lola Arias differentiates between the visual images of the documents
the testimony the performers use to tell their own stories. The
stories they tell about r7 years of dictatorship þ9z3-t99o) in Chile
attempt to set the record straight about what happened during those
years and the legacy of trauma that still accompanies national nar-
ratives.
The Year I Was Born initially shows family photographs as the
self-evident sources of information that the performers used to make
assertions and to tell stable stories about the individuals depicted in
them. One important exception is the story of Viviana Hernández
looking for the identity of her father. As Hernández shows us a suc-
cession ofphotos, she talks about her search for her father. The
projected photos change as new narratives about who her father
might be emerge. Each photograph is successively presented as the
one, as her real father, and then followed by a kind of digital execution
as they are dashed off the screen. Not him, not him, not him. Before
the photos are swept off the screen, however, the performer manag-
ing them from the table at the side of the stage draws on them -
glasses, a moustache, etc - as if to elide their documentary status
with a deft strike of the pen in a manner that made a caricature of
the men in the images. Sweeping the images from one to the next
was not unlike the definitive iPhone and iPad gesture that moves
images across the screen from one to the next. Finally, when Hernán-
dez reads a portion of her father's trial we learn that execution is
precisely the subject. Hernández's real father, or so she says, is in
prison for the murder of two militants.
Hernández gives us a series of full stops in the pursuit of truth.
At any moment in the world of the performance, Hernández could
have ended her search. Arias conceived the fault li.ne between fact
and fiction in this production as following the difference between
visual evidence and testimony. 'You can call it documentary theatre
because the play is based in documents, facts from the past,' Arias
said in an interview. 'But I call it theatre. The performers reconstruct
the life of their parents through their own family photo albums,
letters, tapes... But there is also a lot offiction in it. They do re-en-
actments of scenes from the past, based on what someone told them
or blurry memories... The past is also a fiction that changes every
time we transform it into a story to tell to others.' The overlap be-
 tween fact and fiction reflects not only the recurring overlap and It is not history or fact but it can allude to both history and facts.
interplay between 'theatre' and 'reality', and the blurred boundary Strange connotes not only odd, peculiar, and weird but also unex-
between the stage and the 'real'world, but also the difference between pected and inexplicable in ways that attract new interest and atten-
visual and oral testimony. The notion that documents provide in- tion. The phrase may be understood to describe theatre about real
controvertible evidence has long been in question. yet documents, events; narratives that are in accord with reality that articulate fidel-
in both their material and digital forms, are still well respected and ity to an ideal in ways that invite consideration of what was here-
are used as sources of information with consequences for the crea- tofore thought ofas usual but are, in fact, strange. Theatre about real
tion ofmeaning in historical accounts, in legal procedures, and on events has generated new structures and styles ofperformance,
theatre stages. unique approaches to drama, and diverse forms of dramaturgy. By
All the productions and plays discussed here assume that the interweaving fiction and nonfiction and simulating documentary
stage is a serious social space where audiences can learn about the style to upend assumptions about how we understand the world,
real world. Theatre's potential for making the world comprehensible artists of the real challenge us to make sense of how the meta-
is integral to its ability to occupy and constitute a public space. The phoric lifts from its physical presence onstage to a realm of ideas
Polish playwright Pawel Demirski calls documentary theatre a way both on and offstage.
of thinking and method for acquiring knowledge about the world.
I prefer the phrase 'theatre ofthe real', as it both includes and exceeds
documentary theatre. The former depends upon verbatim quotation
whereas 'theatre of the real' is a larger category that encompasses
both theatre about real events andthe way real events are concep-
tualised using diverse means, including fiction clearly identified as
such, in the service of nonfiction. Theatre of the real is where the
procedures of society are tested, *ñ"r" th¿äã."te4iif iit-o_c.eatã
-ãlãesthetic
laboratory for ideas and actio¡l^:,-wlrer.ì1" o,r*i¿. world--
-_*1
t/' is inside the theatre, and where the role of the spectator is one of a
critical analyst assessing the potential of new and accepted wisdom -
for the greatest good. We have here a shift in paradigm, perspective,
subject, performance, and methodology.
Even Brecht's proposal for theatre being like an event on a
street corner can produce not the acceptance of a diversity of opin-
ion but continuing conflict. Even in the face of concrete evidence,
people can remain convinced of their own views. What ensues may
be more a hot argument about convictions than insight. Tolerating
differing narratives with equanimity is not the same as considering
the merit of multiple views in order to arrive at the truth about
social reality. Reality may be multifaceted, but people may very well
believe only in one version of events. When an author writes many
views into his play or performance, she still controls the selection
and portrayal ofall the views represented but not their reception.
Truth is stranger than fiction, so the saying goes. Truth, of
course, means being given the facts about something, to be in accord
with reality, and to have some sort of fidelity to some kind of ideal.

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