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The Post-dramatic Theatre's Misadventures in the Age of Contemporary Art.
In this text we examine the theater’s rejection of its own aesthetic methods and expressive idioms in the name of “direct” democracy. Has the notorious sacrifice of dramatization (i.e., the theatrical episteme per se) in postdramatic theatrical practices proven politically effective and aesthetically radical? Researchers have argued that there were two motivations for the postdramatic turn in the theater. One was post-disciplinarity’s dissolution in direct-democracy practices. The other was the attempt to borrow the performative poetics of contemporary art, which, as theater researchers imagined, was based on the artist’s living presence in the performative process.
In this connection, it is important to deal with two erroneous assumptions made by the postdramatic theater. First, what the theatrical gaze sees as the “living” presence within performance in contemporary art is not alive. Second, spontaneous behavior, liberated from the discipline of acting and theatrical staging, is not identical to emancipating citizen and society.