Christian Janecke: The entirely democratized stage

The entirely democratized stage

In democracies, the people are free to move about, but do they also have their own debut? Perhaps only where an otherwise unmarked urban space is partitioned and designated as a focal point. Recent art has repeatedly made offers in exactly this way: temporarily at the Documenta, sculpturally solidified in parks, installed in museums, set up in an unexpected place on the urban periphery. Those who visit such places as participants and enter corresponding platforms or stages, must reckon with the attention of others or, quite the contrary, with being disregarded – up to the extreme case that they do not even notice how they have become an unwitting participant themselves!

The price for such participation is the disarmament, indeed the levelling of the stage form. Modern theatre had already paid this price: in the mass spectacles of the Schaubühne, in the elaborate productions of Max Reinhardt, in Hellerau, where actors and audience were at the same head height, or in the ostentatiously austere performance venues of late modern theatre in the 1960s and '70s.

However, it was only contemporary art that became so radical as to conceive stages that became almost indistinguishable from their surroundings, from their exterior. Bypassers are allowed to perform their sheer arrival there, semper et ubique. The fact that democratic representation in such works has not merely achieved a hollow victory, is due to those more insightful works that invite reflection on the aporias of a stage situation delegated to the subjects themselves.