Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012
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Schulte, Philipp. Identität als Experiment: Ich-Performanz auf der Gegenwartsbühne. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011. 444 pp. ISBN: 978-3-631-60350-5 (Hardback) £61.20.
Reviewed by
Indiana University Southeast
The title of Philipp Schulte’s Identität als Experiment: Ich-Performanz auf der Gegenwartsbühne—which roughly translates into “Identity as Experiment: Self-Performance on the Contemporary Stage”—describes accurately the scope of his intricate investigation which puts avant garde performance and identity studies in a fascinating dialogue.
Before embarking on a comprehensive analysis of more than a dozen self performances of the last forty years, Schulte painstakingly develops a theoretical framework based on recent identity theories from Judith Butler to Wolfgang Iser, carefully examining their suitability for his project. Between Iser who sees identity as evidence of an entirely subjective experience and Butler’s idea of identity as a retroactive fictional effect, Schulte discusses identity concepts that have gained currency on the “postdramatic” stage. While some readers may find this part a bit too detailed, one must emphasize that Schulte’s systematic analysis of a broad spectrum of identity representations on stage pays off in the third part, when he can readily draw on this catalogue in an exemplary discussions of six performance artists. Without the intricate theoretical layout, one might easily have overlooked the nuanced differences between these experimental performances. In fact, it is this fine-tuned comparative approach which makes Schulte’s book so valuable for any scholar or critic trying to understand and appreciate the fascinating correlation between performance and identity on the postmodern stage.
The spectrum of Schulte’s prudently selected examples ranges from Spalding Gray’s auto-performances between traditional and postdramatic identity enactments to Xavier Le Roy’s more direct subversions of symbolic identities to Marina Abramović’s extreme body performances, which repeatedly break away from any kind of symbolic representation. Similar to Abramović’s distancing non-verbal methods of identity (de)construction, Michael Laub’s solo-performances decenter self-narrative through dance and gesture, while Rimini Protokoll’s Wallenstein, for instance, achieves the defamiliarizing effect through a combination of different identity performances in the same space. While all these selections focus on individual identity performances, Schulte also shows—in the example of Walid Raad’s Atlas Group—that postdramatic subversions of identity work in a similar way for collectively constructed identities.
All the performances discussed here share a (postmodern) way of thinking about identity as a never finished dialectical process. Self-definition is construed as an illusion which cannot be maintained consistently, even though in some cases consolidation of identity seems possible, but only temporarily, as the momentary appearance of substance is immediately followed by its questioning. Such questioning, as Schulte can show for all these pieces, depends on and requires a high level of audience cooperation: spectator perception continuously “oscillates” (a key term in Schulte) between two or several possibilities of identification, i.e. between truth and fiction, aesthetic and non-aesthetic modes of representation. What is interesting is that contemporary performances of identity no longer juxtapose appearance and reality or performance and essence as opposites. Since essence is no longer a given, these performances rather compare and contrast fiction with fiction or construction with construction. Although we can still glimpse individually discernable identities now and then, their coherence is revealed to be an illusion which is subsequently replaced by new, equally short-lived constructions. The challenge for the viewers then is that they not only have to vacillate constantly between alternating modes of representation, but that they also have to take in simultaneous performances of two or more models of identity construction which can even contradict each other.
From beginning to end, Schulte uses a well-rehearsed concept from linguistics—performative act—which helps him to avoid moral criteria so he can shift the evaluation of identity representation from “right” and “wrong” (or “true” and “fictitious”) to successful or failed. The achievement of avant garde performance, as he stresses repeatedly, hinges on the audience’s acceptance of their own uncertainty or hesitation in thinking about identity. In other words, the artists have to anticipate to what extent their viewers are ready to oscillate between construction and deconstruction of identity, and this anticipation becomes an integral part of their performance art.
One may say that postdramatice staging of self performances serve two functions. On the one hand, they create the experimental space for testing the audience’s horizons of expectation when confronted with multiple and often extreme forms of representation. On the other hand, and that is perhaps a surprise, the avant garde stage is likely to become a protected area for the actors’ self narratives, which is an effect of the predominantly aesthetic function of the stage. As Schulte demonstrates in the case of the unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Rimini Protokoll’s Wallenstein, identities that have not had a chance to succeed in real life, can retroactively be reinstated, albeit on the aesthetic level. In Wallenstein, Sven Otto, exposes his ineffective self-construction as a political candidate in the past by addressing his audience in a seemingly self-reflective pose in the present. Otto plays himself, this time, not on the political, but on the aesthetic stage and thus arrives at a new, successful form of identity performance. The gap that occurs between role and performance, leaves the audience uncertain, but it creates a space for new modes of thinking about identity and subjectivity. Schulte’s conclusion implies that the postmodern experimental stage successfully projects attractive new models of identity, not in spite of but because of their incoherence and fragmentation. And, echoing an old Chinese proverb, we may add: postdramatic self-performance stages failure, only to transforms it into chance.