THEATRE OF THE REAL
Carol Martin
STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE
Series Editors: Janelle Reinalt and Brian Singleton
© 2013 Carol Martin, published by Palgrave Macmillan
Series Editors’ Preface (excerpt)
The ‘Studies in International Performance’ series was initiated in 2004 on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research, by Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, successive Presidentts of the Federation. Their aim was, and still is, to call on performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social, and political borders. […] In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship this series aims to make a significant contribution to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation.
Chapter 1 Theatre of the Real: An Overview (excerpt)
(p 17, 18)
In Chapter 3, I discuss how theatre of the real stages memory and history to create new aesthetic versions of human experience. This staging constructs and reconstructs personal and social memory from the raw data of experience and history with the use of specific theatrical methodologies. The resulting creation of meaning often exposes the fault line between documentary evidence as fact and social memory as invention. Framing is a way of negotiating the difference between individual knowledge based on memories that are always in the process of being formed and reformed, and historical knowledge that is always in the process of being revisited and revised.
To illustrate how memory is transformed from individual memory to historical accounts I begin by relating my memory of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers as I saw it from the window and the terrace of my Greenwich Village apartment and on television. Following this personal memory, I analyze History of the World – Part Eleven, a live-animation simulation of the two planes crashing into the Towers on that day. This artwork was created by Herman Helle of Hotel Modern who saw the attack on the World Trade Towers only on television. The ‘primary reality’ of Helle’s memory was formed from a single-focus, already edited version of that event. This is different from the ‘primary reality’ of my viewing experience formed from the contradiction between my direct experience of the attack and the versions of the attack presented on television.
Finally, I discuss Kamp (2006) also by Hotel Modern. Kamp depicts in miniature and in silence events what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The representations of beatings, work routines, hangings, and other events were created more than 50 years after the end of World War II. Kamp is not based on personal lived experience or even on a shared experience of a contemporary event, but on research of the experience of those who lived through it and on the actual physical place of Auschwitz-Birkenau. […] No one in Hotel Modern claims Jewish lineage or familial experience of the Holocaust. Kamp both distances itself from the Holocaust and brings it closer by combining miniaturization, live performance, and live film of the live performance – film made in the mode of a documentary of what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau but performed with puppets. Kamp exemplifies the confounding of lived experience, constructed memories, and virtual reality that informs today’s theatre of the real.
Chapter 3 After the Fact: Memory, Experience, Technology (excerpt)
(p 59, 64-66)
“I thought I could do that in miniature. But then I thought, this is real, this is real. But I can visualize what I saw with miniature props and models. I needed to cope with it.”
Herman Helle of Hotel Modern
History of the World – Part Eleven
I thought that what I saw in my mind’s eye that day when I looked at the burning towers could not be comprehended or even known by anyone else. The silent horror of my imagination, I thought, was mine alone. But then I encountered on You Tube Hotel Modern’s 4 minute and 20 second puppet film, History of the World – Part Eleven (2004), made by company member Herman Helle and accompanied by David Bowie’s music. It was as if Helle had uploaded what I saw in my imagination on that fateful day.
The film begins with an aerial shot over an urban skyline made of juice boxes, soft-drink cans, and then the camera focuses on a tight shot of the nose of a papier-mâché airplane flying over the buildings. Inside the plane, clay puppet people – props, really, as they have no moving parts – are screaming. As the plane hits, the scene shifts to the vantage point of those inside the World Trade Center tower. There are desks, chairs, water coolers, and paperwork. The handmade people with their contorted clay faces are posed frozen, screaming, running, and clasping one another. Still others have sunk down against the wall. Fire breaks out everywhere. A legion of clay office people marches downstairs. A man puppet jumps from a window. All the images are close-ups of what must have been – or, more accurately – of Helle’s imagination and reconstruction of what must have been. They are real and not-real at the same time.
Helle wrote to me that he decided to keep his images very simple. ‘Not too many details, just hints of office furniture, a model plane that’s very obviously made of paper. I figured we had all seen the perfect Hollywood-style images on television. I needn’t do them again (as if I could). You use your own imagination to fill in the details, to project what you’ve seen, or think you’ve seen, or want to see, onto the crude images. Suggestion is stronger than many details. The fewer the details, the more real it becomes. The shots are very short. Mostly ten frames per shot. I moved the lens of the camera over the model to simulate movement.’
Perfect Hollywood-style images? There is more truth in this than meets the eye. Helle is referring to the limitations of a well-known style of visual language in which images of the real are enhanced, colorized, cleaned up, and generally manipulated for presentation without imperfections. The visual experience of 9/11 rapidly produced and reproduced in the media was focused on the spectacle of the exploding towers, especially the moment right after the second plane hit. The 17 minutes that elapsed between when the first and second tower were hit allowed for professional photographers to arrive on the scene. Almost all the photographs of the exploding tower that circulated in newspapers and on television were of the second impact. The well-framed color images told little about the suffering, the odor, the sound. What was not, could not have been shown on that first day was the tragic experience of most of the individuals in the towers at the time of the attacks.
The ways in which changes in technology create and inform representation, which in turn creates new knowledge, requires ethical consideration. Aerial photography offers a case in point: it provided a new kind of military intelligence, ‘turning the battlefield into an object of vision of a (seemingly) all seeing eye, while it also introduced a kind of abstraction from the direct experience of this landscape by someone present within it.’ (Bleeker 2011:280). In ‘Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination’, Maaike Bleeker observes that new technologies helped create a new type of heroic imagery portraying the glory and grandeur of modern warfare, making it appear clean, civilized, and efficient (281). To help make her point, Bleeker quotes Bernd Hüppauf’s essay ‘Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation’:
It [aerial photography] not only eliminated smells, noises and stimuli directed at the senses, but also projected an order onto an amorphous space by reducing the abundance of detail to restricted patterns of a surface texture. In photographs taken from a certain altitude objects of certain minimum sixe will be represented; smaller objects, in particular human bodies, will not be there and cannot be made visible, even with magnifying glasses or through extreme enlargement. The morphology of the landscape of destruction, photographed from a plane, is the visual order of an abstract pattern. (281)
Helle’s view of the World Trade Center towers in History of the World – Part Eleven rejects an exclusive depiction of the abstract spectacle of the towers exploding and burning, in favor of representing the excruciating human drama that took place aboard the planes and inside the towers. Helle’s heroes are not glorious and grand, but inglorious and vulnerable as death smashes into them.
On September 11, 2001, Helle and his colleagues in Hotel Modern had gone to a theatre in Rotterdam to prepare for the evening’s performance of The Great War, their work about World War I inspired by letters about life in the trenches, written by a soldier to his mother. An administrator called the company members upstairs, saying that something had happened and asked them to look at the television. While watching the television, they saw the second plane crash. Helle remembers thinking, ‘I could do this in miniature but then I thought this is real, this is real.’ Faced with what then looked like the beginning of World War III, the company debated whether or not to perform The Great War that night. The show, which is full of miniature special effects, both sound and visual, including explosions and fire, was sold out for that evening. They decided to go on. Only half the ticket-holders showed up; evidently they understood the show as being about what had happened that day – a good example of how contexts outside the theatre can shape spectators’ relationships to a particular theatrical event. The spectators viewed The Great War on the evening of September 11, 2001, as the first installment of what was now being played out on the world stage. What the company saw on television was ‘what we were already doing. We were invoking the atmosphere of a battlefield. What we saw on television was what we were about to do that evening in the theatre. But what was on television was real.’
Helle made History of the World – Part Eleven over a three-year period from 2001 to 2004 accumulating the equivalence of about two months of work during that time. ‘I made the work as a way of coping with what I saw,’ he says. But Helle did not see what he creates in his work. No one, save those who perished, saw what went on inside the plane or inside the doomed offices of the towers as they were hit. What Helle captured was a scenic imaginary that refers to the real in what appears to be a model of it. In making the work, Helle asked three questions: what would it be like to be in a building and see a plane coming at you? What would it be like to be in the plane? What would it be like for the hijacker who is accomplishing what he sought to do? The last question eventually led Helle to the music Heroes (1977) by David Bowie with its adrenaline-pumped hysteria, its musical excitement, and ethical ambiguity about the very idea of heroes who are often only designated as such when dead. ‘At that time there was a lot of talk about heroes. The firefighters, of course. But I even heard other people that died in the buildings, the office people, being called heroes once or twice. And then it struck me that the hijackers, from the vantage point of their supporters and families, also were heroes.
Helle ended up making a simple model that focused more on visualizing an imaginary of what happened than one presenting literal verisimilitude. He used several planes, each about half a meter long. One plane was made of plastic, the others were made of papier-mâché so that Helle could set them on fire and crash them several times in order to film a variety of shots. The images Helle created refer to the contours of the city, the shape and form of New York, though made with very different materials. In ‘The Return of the Real Hal’ Foster writes about two opposing models of representation emerging since the 1960s. one asserts that images refer to real things in the world, the other that images only represent other images. As Foster points out, and as Helle demonstrates, this binary constrains our understanding of art – and, I want to add, of reality. Poststructuralists have wanted to separate depth of meaning from art, which is understood as endless simulacra. But many successful artists, such as Helle, still create work in order to mine depth of meaning. The models that Hotel Modern creates both refer to things in the real world and represent the images we already have of those things.
Helle’s recurring use of the word real in his description of how he created his simulation indicates his own relational status as being between the real and the referent. With its clay people and juice-box city, History of the World – Part Eleven is self-consciously not a realistic representation even as it is a chronicle, an illustration, and a history of the event it takes as its subject – History of the World – Part Eleven is a documentary of sorts. Helle was not looking to make Hollywood images, but he did exploit a Hollywood-type optical illusion in relation to pictorial space; the conventions of framing Helle used are ones with which we are familiar. Helle observes, ‘We communicate with the visual language we have learned and know.’ This simple statement says a lot about how we come to know ourselves today. But there is also a contradiction in what Helle says, because it is not exactly what he did in History of the World – Part Eleven. Instead of an abstract and omniscient aerial view-point, Helle used an eye-level, eyewitness point of view to show the first victims of 9/11 on the planes and in the towers, as a way to focus on the catastrophe’s unfolding human, not architectural devastation. Bleeker describes Hotel Modern as confronting war and destruction from a split perspective. ‘The audience,’ she writes, ‘is put in the position of having to negotiate its relation to the atrocities represented on stage [as well as on film] and, by extension, its position with respect to the question of what might be at stake in particular ways of representing these atrocities, or claiming them to be unrepresentable’ (2011:279). In creating a relationship to the referent that includes both the real and its simulations, Hotel Modern asserts that atrocities can be meaningfully and aesthetically represented precisely by repositioning the spectator’s assumptions about the duality of the real and the simulated or reenacted.
As I sat on my bed that September 11 morning, looking at the World Trade Center towers through the frame of the picture window, I could not have been seeing something uniquely created by my own mind. Any empathetic person could have imagined what was going on inside those buildings. But the way I saw what I saw – in scenes with settings, movement, narratives, triumph, and tragedy – was in the visual and theatrical language I have learned and know. As Helle’s History of the World – Part Eleven demonstrates, this language and learning is shared across at least some national boundaries. As a historical witness, I found the tragic narrative unbearable. A view framed by my bedroom window and by the television was the view I needed in order to tolerate my own imagination.
Most theatre of the real uses framing, whether verbal of visual. This framing is apart from the reality of the experience itself, is it has to do with aesthetics and modes of perception. As early as the late 1920s Ernst Jünger asserted that human perception was adapting to the vantage point of the camera lens (281). This was before film had fully entered popular consciousness. Today, framing is often all we can do. The 9/11 attacks were a tragedy that presented itself first as a spectacle. The plot, if it can be called that, was revealed through repetition of the visual: the towers burning, collapsing, smoking, and the crowds gathering every day at the corner of Houston and West Broadway, looking south at what was no longer there. The frame was all that was left of a vanished, very familiar picture.
Dramaturgical structures also help us to ‘know what we know.’ Janelle Reinelt writes that for a public occurrence in everyday life to become theatricalized, several things must happen (2006:74). The event must be grave and significant, attracting a great deal of public attention; it must take a recognizably Aristotelian form in terms of protagonist-antagonist conflict and plot development. The event must also be a symbolic staging of some already known feature of national or local life in order to ‘embody a kind of analogical critique of ways of living’ (74). Reinelt’s observations describe a number of documentary plays, but not the field of ‘theatre of the real’ as a whole. The form of drama that Aristotle wrote about is not universal, and a significant proportion of the theatre that engages the real in performance today is devised in ways that stand apart from Aristotelian dramatic structure. […]
Much theatre of the real constructs vantage points for spectators that are fundamentally other than Aristotelian. Like The Great War, History of the World – Part Eleven has no plot, no characters, no single protagonist, no catharsis. It is not a eulogy, nor does it construct the national sentiment that characterized so much post-9/11 writing and theatre. Planes crashed, people suffered, people died, the buildings collapsed. History of the World – Part Eleven, like much theatre of the real, is built on a narrative logic that is visual, not literary. History of the World – Part Eleven is like a documentary but without documents, a virtual doppelgänger. It is a mirror of both known and invented reality that gives form and image to sights seen and unseen.
Today we construct reality as a circuit between the real and the virtual, leading to the imaginary. As he was in Rotterdam on September 11, Helle could only have seen the attack on the World Trade Center towers on television or on the Internet. Both media work within the confines of specific visual logic. Visual logic is key here. Hotel Modern describes their performances and the dramaturgical process of making them as focused simultaneously on the live and on what company member Pauline Kalker calls live-animation.
‘We don’t work with a script written beforehand, we usually start by building the basic scale model. When it’s finished we start working with cameras and decide on the scenes that are included in the performance. Then we work out the models, puppets, and props in detail. With the content in our heads, the cameras in our hands and our eyes on the monitor we develop the screenplay. As we perform, the piece starts to breathe, we cut things, add things and sometimes change the order of scenes. The piece usually reaches its final form after we’ve performed it for about three weeks.’ (website Hotel Modern)
Content, cameras, scenes, monitor, screenplay, and performance: this is the methodological mix that Hotel Modern uses to ‘breathe’ life into their work. ‘We move between sham and reality around us which we then transform, and the subjects from the fictional world which we interweave with elements of reality,’ says Helle. Mixing reality, documentary and fiction, the live and the virtual is the methodological statement that describes the vanguard of theatre that lays claim to reality in the process of creating representation. History of the World – Part Eleven adapts mass media’s reality-shaping use of fiction and nonfiction to its own ends: to portray history as no one witnessed it. Critiques of ways of living take different forms that correspond to innovations in art practices and changing cultural and political conflicts. […]
In History of the World – Part Eleven, Helle prominently constructs eye-level views of the terrorists inside the planes that hit the twin towers. By including the terrorists perpetrators in his video, Helle visually acknowledges that there are those who might consider the terrorists heroes, even as the film mostly focuses on passengers and on those in the towers. History of the World – Part Eleven includes the traumatic suffering of those outside American discourse. Even as Helle avoids mobilizing a vision of suffering that demands tribal retribution, the events he shows inside the planes and the towers are harrowing and violent, replete with undeserved suffering and death.
Works like those of Hotel Modern function as critical representations, as progenitors of analysis of information and meaning in a world that understands and invents itself with images, sound, action, narrative, and performance in a variety of media and environments, including the stage, the Internet, film, museums, the street, homes, schools, and conference rooms. The arts are where this invention of new knowledge takes place; it is where narratives and myths are given performative reality. […]
Much of Hotel Modern’s works, and work like theirs, disrupts flattened versions of mediatized experience through an inquiry of spectatorship by staging the live and the mediatized at the same time. Inquiry into our mediatized experience, the way we know and write history, and our legal and theatrical epistemologies is part of the portfolio of theatre of the real as it locates itself both in the discourses of the real world and in those of theatre, technology, and new media.
The metonymic logic of the juice-box and soft-drink-can city of History of the World – Part Eleven is a Warholian urban landscape that gains unambiguous identity not only from the unmistakable shape of the World Trade Center towers but from what happens to the cardboard an aluminum city. Using the logic of jump-cut interpolations, Helle parodied mass-culture representation even as he used its debris to create it. The bond that Helle creates between the real and its representation is forged from the understanding that no matter the difference in materials, the ontology of the real and the reenacted, like the writing of history, proceeds from acts of the imagination in the forms of reiteration, representation, and narration. […]
Kamp
In terms of theatre, perhaps it is only at this moment in history that we can have a documentary without documents because theatre that presents reality by means of specific citations has become an operative idea, a mindset, a familiar way of framing the world that tells us this happened, this is real, this is the truth, or at least a part of the truth because ‘we are dealing with reality here’. Kamp (2006) is another work of Hotel Modern that exists between live experience and virtual reality but in very different ways from History of the World – Part Eleven. Kamp depicts a day and a night in Auschwitz-Birkenau using 3000 puppets, each the size of a finger (approximately eight centimeters), dressed in black-and-white concentration camp uniforms. Kamp simultaneously stages the Holocaust in the theatre and on live-animation film during the performance. Both the live performance and the film take place in real time. The live-animation film consists of sequences shot with four small cameras, whose images are projected on a large screen behind the playing area. Diminutive puppet faces are enlarged on the screen and give a more personal identity, and by extension, survival, through this technical magnification. Spectators see the puppets’ faces and the events that happen in Auschwitz-Birkenau in close-ups captured by the camera and at a small distance in the theatre from the vantage point of looking down on many tiny puppets manipulated by the three puppeteers. The two domains of Kamp’s simultaneous live and virtual staging of the actions of emaciated, exhausted, and dehumanized puppet people inform one another. What is collectivized and perhaps dehumanized live is powerfully individuated on film. The film is a close-up of the live, and both the live and the film take place in front of the spectators.
The environment of Kamp consists of what appears to be a painstaking scale model of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is, in fact, not a scale model but an extraordinary combination and conflations of the two camps; the model is an approximation based on visual and experiential assessments, not mathematical measurements. ‘We started with scaling the puppets which had to be big enough to be seen by the audience. Then we adjusted the scale of the buildings. The problem was that the stage was not going to be big enough to show the whole camp using this scale. So the ‘real’ thing [the real stage set] had to be much bigger than what we are able to show on stage. There are more gas chambers and crematoria-buildings, and more barracks than are included in our model, for instance,’ explains company member Pauline Kalker. An accurate scale model would result in an environment too small for spectators to see the action, as the model has to fit in the ten-by-ten-meter-theatres where Hotel Modern typically performs.
Helle designed the model for Kamp using decisively homemade aesthetics, with materials such as cardboard boxes, rescaled in miniature so that the puppeteers and the spectators loom large over the action and its environment. The camp gallows is a tiny, simple wooden post-and-lintel structure with wire hangman nooses. The train that pulls into the camp to unload its doomed puppet passengers is not unlike a child’s model train. The sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on top of the gate to Auschwitz is splayed in a mockingly lyrical arch that lights up during the foreboding night at the camp. There is the infamous guard tower that stands over the train tracks in Birkenau. From the moment spectators enter Hotel Modern’s performance space, the camp onstage is in plain view.
But whose memory does Kamp enact? Keeping traumatized memory alive beyond the authoritative witnesses of the Holocaust has led to attempts not only to record words and images but also to make re-creations of the experience of the camps in order to build a new generation of witnesses. Despite its use of live-animation, Kamp is anti-technological, because the labor of creating the work is painstakingly exposed. Its positioning of spectators as a new generation of witnesses to the Holocaust happens because the miniaturization and the ‘thingness’ of the puppets and the environment are communicated as felt experience in relation to the perception of difference of one’s own size in relation to that of the puppets: large and powerful versus tiny and frail.
Kamp’s simultaneous liveness and live-animation film forms its particular way of producing meaning about the Holocaust. The use of both live theatre and live-animation film intervenes in the division of the way theatre and film position spectators. In his discussion of bodily practices in relation to memory, Connerton points out theatre and film’s different relationships to objects:
In theatre, actors and spectators are present at the same time and in the same location; everything the audience see and hear is actively produced in their presence by human beings or props which are themselves present. In cinema, the actors were present when the spectators were absent (at the shooting [of the film]) and the actors are absent when the spectators are present (at the projection). […] What defines the rules of looking specific to cinema is the absence of the object seen.
The difference Connerton describes is the difference between preserving versions of the past by using the incorporation bodily practices of oral culture as theatre does or by using the inscribing practices of what he calls ‘literate culture’ by means of both text and film (75).
In addition to Connerton’s distinction between physical and literate culture we might consider that while actors and spectators are present in the theatre at the same time, not everything the spectators see and hear is produced in their presence. Alice Rayner writes about how the stage crew is responsible for managing the illusion of what passes for reality. The visible spaces in theatre, Rayner writes, are produced by the unseen presence of the backstage. Backstage – offstage, or ‘ob-scene’, is the place where the secrets of staging the real thing operate (2001:538).
The real world is typically understood as outside the theatre (536). But Rayner proposes that there is a real that is housed only in the theatre itself (537). The willing suspension of disbelief that enables spectators to receive what happens on stage as real comes with an ideological contract that ‘prohibits an acknowledgement of the backstage life that includes the stage manager, light and sound operators, dressers, property managers, curtain pullers or make-up crews: the technicians and stage hands of theatrical production’ (537).
Kamp uses both incorporation and inscription with its dual use of the live physical presence of the puppeteers and the simultaneous live-animation film. The performance demands that spectators see the objects, the puppets, as physically present both in the theatre and in the live-animation film as, contrary to Connerton’s assertion, both the actors and the spectators are present at ‘the shooting’ of the film as it is projected in the theatre. Kamp is post-illusionist theatre. ‘We want the audience to see us. We deliberately do not dress in black. We do not think of our presence as an interruption but as part of how we are going to stage the work. We want to show the illusion and how it was reached,’ explains Kalker. This approach is in accord with Bertolt Brecht’s desire to show the lighting instruments and the stage machinery, the ‘work’ of the theatre. The three members of Hotel Modern, Kalker, Helle, and Arlène Hoornweg, are at once the live puppeteer performers and the makers and witnesses of the live-animation film as well as the stage crew. The openly manipulate the puppets, the concentration camp environment, and the four miniature cameras used throughout the performance. ‘Structurally, Kamp alternates sequences in which the puppeteers move within the set, preparing the figures for the next scene, with the scenes themselves’ (Cherry 2011:110). Once the performance starts, the puppeteers manage everything that enters and leaves the stage until the performance is over. The members of Hotel Modern intentionally did away with the stage crew’s conventional invisibility as they expose the labor of what they perform. Kamp is about approaching full disclosure and transparency of the process of making the live performance and the live-animation-film. They use bodily practice and digital inscription, the techniques of oral and postmodern culture, to banish theatrical magic in ways that are meant to expose what the Nazis tried to hide – the labor of creating the alternative reality of the camp.
The production tension of Kamp is one of visibility and absence, a theatrical tension crucial to theatre of the real in which the world outside the theatre is explicitly cited, quoted, simulated, and summoned in a variety of ways in addition to verbatim text: these include archival photos, film, and audio recordings. […] In addition to incorporation through bodily practice and inscription through literary, photographic and cinematic texts, theatre of the real can be made from memory contained in material objects.
Kamp reiterates and creates a cultural memory with its model of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the same way the real Auschwitz and Birkenau function today as tourists sites of evidentiary status: the Holocaust happened and it happened here, on this ground, in these crematoria, and the other parts of the camps on display in their original geographical locations. More than a million people, mostly Jewish people, were outright killed, starved, and worked to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a monument of the Holocaust and to those who perished in it, the camps draw over a million visitors each year. What does the performance of Kamp add to our relationship to the history, to a narrative of history that is already known? What can a theatre model of Auschwitz-Birkenau add to a world in which the actual camps still stand outside Krakow? What is the purpose of Kamp’s ritualized representation of history? What meanings does Kamp produce? Is it a work of memory, remembrance, mourning, moral education, national identity? Does miniaturization matter?
Kamp’s careful miniature representation of the real is in the form of a foreboding physical environment, an environment both familiar and exotic.