‘Did you mean post-traumatic theatre?’: The vicissitudes of traumatic memory in contemporary postdramatic performances
Abstract
While working on the English translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater a few years ago, I had a strange experience: When conducting a Google search for ‘postdramatic theatre’, Google asked: ‘Did you mean “post-traumatic theatre”?’
Nowadays, Google no longer asks this question. For by now the concept of ‘postdramatic theatre’ – describing forms of contemporary theatre without the mimesis of a dramatic plot, fictional universe and conflict between psychological characters – has arrived in its dictionary. And yet, might there not be some truth to Google’s erstwhile ‘Freudian slip’? Does there not seem to be a relation between the postdramatic and the post-traumatic at least in a considerable portion of twentieth and twenty-first century contemporary theatre? [1] And could it not be that there is an affinity between trauma’s incommensurability, inaccessibility and ultimate resistance to narrative representation and postdramatic theatre’s anti-representational impetus, combined with its preference for fragmentation and its emphasis on the live copresence of audience members and performers?
What I am proposing to explore in this article by analysing a few recent examples is how postdramatic forms of theatre might relate to forms of traumatic memory in the twenty-first century.
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