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/lp/mit-press/amazing-untold-stories-of-catalogues-HbHWqFUAT0
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Copyright
- © 2009 Jonathan Kalb
- Subject
- Features
- ISSN
- 1520-281X
- eISSN
- 1537-9477
- DOI
- 10.1162/pajj.2009.31.2.1
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
AMAZING UNTOLD STORIES OF CATALOGUES Jonathan Kalb t the 2008 TBA (Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival in Portland, Oregon, I saw two productions that put a serious crimp in my long-standing skepticism about “postdramatic theater.†One was a six-hour piece (originally from 1996) called Quizoola! by the British experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment, and the other was a new, fifty-minute work by that company’s artistic director, Tim Etchells, Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First, written for and performed by the New York actor Jim Fletcher. Both these works were squarely in the vein of the German scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann’s much-discussed “postdramatic†paradigm for the cutting edge in international theatrical innovation during the past several decades. I am not a habitual user of this term, as many have become since Lehmann’s book appeared in English in 2006. “Postdramatic†becomes a Procrustean absurdity when applied indiscriminately. It seems to me just the right description, however, for the kind of artist or group whose work really is driven by a loss of patience with drama per se. Companies in the vein of Forced Entertainment have broken faith with the very idea that staged fictional stories can ever
Journal
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – MIT Press
Published: May 1, 2009