Theatre

I close my eyes. I even let someone blindfold me. A hand gently takes mine and helps me find my way while I grope along in the dark. A whispered warning: “Mind the step!” I lift my foot, feel my way until I find the step and trust that it will bear my weight. I am swaying slightly. I have been deprived of my sense of sight and therefore have only my body for perceiving my surroundings. Its movements seem extremely clumsy and slow. My intelligence is reduced to the envelope of my body and a couple of nerve cells.

I concentrate on a cold draft of air as it caresses my bare skin. Music sounds. It reminds me that the world is usually full of all sorts of sense impressions. Suddenly, I feel a sharp pain on my breast. Shortly thereafter a burning sensation on my back. “If you would like to stop, just say so,” says a gentle voice. I don’t want to stop yet. I continue surrendering to this experience of guessing, sensing and feeling that makes up the performance “Secret Service”, by the Berlin choreographer Felix Ruckert. I enjoy the journey through the landscape of my body. I am in the midst of the theater of the future – in an interactive theater arrangement that no longer limits me to the passive role of viewer, but instead gets right under my skin – literally.

Marx experts, air traffic controllers and news junkies on stage

Actor A plays a role in Play B – and Viewer C looks at the commotion. Up until the 90’s, this minimal definition of theater would have met up with practically no opposition. But this hackneyed formula is now obsolete. Traditional acting has been transformed into post-dramatic theater. Due to influences coming from performance art, the relationship between actor and role has been massively changed in recent years. Actors depart from their characters more and more often. They comment on them, adopt a pose of ironic distance to them. The trend towards creating characters from the actors’ biographical or supposedly biographical material is also gaining in strength. The group Rimini Protokoll currently plays this game with the greatest skill when they assemble Karl Marx experts, air traffic controllers or news junkies on stage and have them go about their occupations in seemingly improvised arrangements. In any case, it is clear that the traditional separation between dramatic person and actor – that made the development of the acting profession possible in the first place – is being blurred.

The viewer as actor

And the viewer, too, is no longer bound to his seat in the parquet or tier. He may move about freely in many of the more recent theater productions. His freedom to choose his own perspectives on the production has been increasing. The final result is that he himself is drawn into the action as an actor, even going so far as to become the main character.

The origins of interactive theater are to be found in the work of the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal. In the 1970’s, together with the inhabitants of the favelas (slums) on the edges of Latin American metropolises, Boal developed a theater form in which current local conflicts were presented. The viewers could influence the action in this “forum theater”. They entered upon the stage, told the actors how they were to act or simply acted a scene themselves. Boal’s goal was to bring social conflicts into public awareness and present possible courses of action. In today’s interactive theater, Boal’s political intentions have largely disappeared. But its conflict-solving potential is being utilized by numerous theater groups that work with businesses. These groups offer their clients typical scenes from the company’s every-day life – meetings with customers, mobbing situations, etc. – and work out strategies for solutions in the employees’ presence. And interactive theater forms are increasingly finding applications in therapeutic practice as well (among other things in treating depression and Alzheimer’s).

Theater beyond the known and calculable

Interactivity has also made inroads in performance art. At present, primarily avant-garde artists such as the Berlin choreographers Felix Ruckert and Helena Waldmann, or the performance collective She She Pop (Berlin/Hamburg) and Signa who are going about dissolving traditional production contexts. Ruckert’s approach is the most radical, because he isolates the viewer and throws him back on himself. Waldmann and She She Pop create festivals whose course directly depends on all participants, meaning the viewers as well. The Danish performance group Signa is developing entire acting frameworks that can extend over several days and simulate a specific reality. In “Die Erscheinungsformen der Martha Rubin” (i.e. the forms in which Martha Rubin appears), it is above all the expanded temporal course of events that leads the viewer to new ways of perceiving.

What characterizes these artists is their emancipation of interactive theater from simple participatory theater. With attentiveness and sensitivity, they take care that the experience remains intact for the individual, and prevent a casting-show atmosphere from arising. But this cautiousness is also a weakness. To protect the integrity of the participating amateurs, conflicts are deliberately defused. Any culmination in tragedy is taboo, and therefore the public now judges according to the criteria of wellness and positive thinking instead of undergoing a cathartic experience. But the public is nonetheless confronted with a ritual structure. In its current form, the artistic interactive theater articulates a yearning for an experience beyond the known and calculable.