Theater

Traditional theater studies programs are getting more and more competition from practice-related dramaturgy programs, which teach not only theory but also promise a career-oriented education. What is the point then to studying theatre studies?

Changes in the field of knowledge

We live at a time when the manner in which knowledge is generated and institutionalized has changed more radically than it has since perhaps 200 years. A symptom of this change is the ever-present demand that theory and practice should come closer together. Under the new primacy of economics, even educational institutions such as universities must link theoretical knowledge to practice and make it usable. Conversely, practice must be shot through with theoretical reflection in order to legitimize itself. In this way, both have changed, practice as well as theory, which has radically changed both the way in which theatre is done and how it is reflected upon. To make art is today looked upon as research, equal in dignity to scientific research. By the same token, science is looked upon as a creative process, whose knowledge can by no longer lay claim to universal validity.

In this spirit, theater studies, as a relatively young academic discipline, and dramaturgy, as a practical form of theater, have been converging. The theater studies institutes in Gießen and in Hildesheim carried out the “practical turn” long ago. There students study theater in close relation to practical work in the theater. Conversely, universities (for instance, in Frankfurt am Main and Munich) and art colleges (in Ludwigsburg and soon in Berlin) have recently founded programs in dramaturgy in which dramaturgy has been established not merely as a craft but also as a specific field of knowledge that can be studied and so in a certain manner made the object of theory. So why still take theater studies if you can learn the same things in career-oriented training?

The object of theater studies

To distinguish itself from literary studies and its treatment of the dramatic text, theater studies has traditionally taken the performance as its object. The practitioners of theater studies are thus concerned with the analysis of theatrical performances, that is, with their artistic process manifested through the specific use of various means such as light, space and costumes. They ask about the production of meaning and the constitution of experience in the exchange that takes place between the stage and the audience. This inquiry is increasingly joined by questions about the relation of theatre to the new media that are shaping and changing our perception even in everyday life. In addition, there is an increased focus on the rehearsal process, since this significantly shapes the “product” of the performance. How can rehearsal processes be designed as decision-making processes with regard to what the staging means to narrate? Thus in the question about the relation of text and performance, and in that about the narration and its conversion into drama, there are many points of contact to questions of dramaturgy. Correspondingly, the practical tasks of the dramaturge in the rehearsal process, and so too his skills in mediating between the various instances of theatre, are also at issue in courses on dramaturgy.

The question about a different form of theater

Despite the mutual rapprochement of both fields of study, there remains a key difference. For all its practice-related approaches, theater studies, ideally and for the time being, continues to be exempt from the constraints of production and the market. It is precisely this freedom from practical concerns, combined with a simultaneous closeness to practice in its forms of questioning and research, that distinguishes many facets of theater studies from dramaturgy. Theater studies must not only address the supposed laws and practices of an existing theater world; it can also view these critically and question them. Theater studies therefore always poses the question about a potentially different form of theater. It asks about theater that does not yet exist and perhaps never will exist.

This key finding for the self-understanding of theater studies as a critical discipline may also be applied to research in the history of theater. Far from being a mere collection of facts, theater studies historically examines each specific theatrical constellation and asks about the implications that it has for the relationship of people to the structure of power and society. With its turn to performance and cultural studies, modern theater studies has developed into one of the fundamental disciplines of the humanities, whose subject and methods cannot be reduced to pragmatic trouble-shooting in rehearsals or questions about narrative methods. Assuming that societies form and stabilize themselves through embodied and theatrical practices, then this opens a field for theater studies that goes far beyond the analysis of texts and performances under the aspect of art.