Documentary theater

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The documentary theater treats historical or current political or social events. Legal or historical reports, reports, documents and interviews act as sources. Although authentic material is adopted and usually reproduced unchanged, it is a fictional art form.

The essence of documentary theater

The investigation of Peter Weiss at the State Theater in Nuremberg , June 2009

The creative achievement of the authors of the documentary theater consists in the composition of the raw material and in the concentration on the essentials. Unimportant things are left out in order to achieve clarification, confrontation and agitation. The aim is realism , not naturalism . The purpose or aim of a documentary play is political education and agitation (but often also the condemnation of one of the parties concerned). In addition, intimidating authenticity such as exact replicas of courtrooms etc. is dispensed with in order not to unnecessarily distract the viewer from the facts.

This form of theater, which is linked, among other things, to the “ political theater ” of the twenties, emerged in the sixties . Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy , Heinar Kipphardt's In the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Peter Weiss ' The Investigation are mentioned as contemporary text examples, as well as Kipphardt's brother Eichmann .

A renaissance of documentary theater in German-speaking countries has been on the horizon since the late 1990s. Hans-Werner Kroesinger and Andres Veiel are more in the classic tradition of documentary theater . Veiels Der Kick , whose text is based on interviews with those involved, relatives and witnesses of a murder case, was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2006 . At the same festival, the directing collective Rimini Protokoll was represented for the second time with its documentary production based on Schiller's Wallenstein . The three members of Rimini Protokoll are considered to be the founders of a renaissance and redefinition of documentary theater.

Since the end of the 1990s, the researched material has not been in the foreground in Rimini Protokoll's projects, but the protagonists of the respective events take the stage themselves. In contrast to the documentary film , the so-called "everyday experts" produce their appearances anew with each performance. And in contrast to amateur and amateur theater , they do not try to play theater: the performers maintain their own authenticity and that of their stories within the artistic framework of a theater.

The young form of documentary theater, also known as “expert theater”, is now practiced by a number of groups and author-directors. A more recent example of the potential for conflict that can arise from the new entry of the documentary into the theater was the ban on Volker Lösch's staging of Gerhart Hauptmann's Die Weber in 2004 at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden : a choir of 33 real unemployed people should be staged with one Text collage based on their own fears and worries occur. The reason for a performance ban was the legal protection of the original text.

In 2013 Matthias Hartmann dared a completely new form of documentary theater together with Doron Rabinovici with the project The Last Witnesses at the Burgtheater in Vienna by having six contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust perform and their texts read by actors from the castle. This hybrid form of documentary theater, reading staging and honoring enthusiastic audiences and critics, won an invitation to the Berlin Theatertreffen and also made a guest appearance at the Dresden State Theater .

criticism

The approaches to the theoretical foundation of a category “documentary theater”, which Hilzinger, Blumer and Barton have increasingly pursued since the 1970s, are increasingly critically assessed in the context of more recent literary approaches. With reference to the far-reaching aestheticization of documents from a non-literary reference system (i.e. real historical materials) by theater authors, the term documentary theater has sometimes been interpreted as a controversial “ theorem ” or is fundamentally rejected. Similar methodological objections are met by comparable literary terms such as “documentary literature”, “ documentary novel ” or “documentary drama”.

The findings for other art genres with “documentary” formats are different. Only in the cinematic area is the category of the documentary with the " documentary film " equally firmly established in secondary literature as in general linguistic usage. New concepts such as the “ docu-drama ” or the “ docu-soap ” have been added since the 1990s . The category of documentary photography does not have nearly the same importance .

literature

Secondary literature

  • Brian Barton: The Documentary Theater. (= Metzler Collection. No. 232). Metzler, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-476-10232-7 .
  • Arnold Blumer: The documentary theater of the sixties in the Federal Republic of Germany. Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1977, ISBN 3-445-01513-9 .
  • Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and Memory. German-language historical drama since Brecht. (= Cologne German Studies. New Series, Vol. 5). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2004.
  • Sven Hanuschek: I call that finding the truth. Heinar Kipphardt's Dramas and a Concept of Documentary Theater as Historiography. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 1993, ISBN 3-925670-88-2 .
  • Klaus H. Hilzinger: The dramaturgy of the documentary theater. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1976, ISBN 3-484-10256-X .
  • Nikolaus Miller: Prolegomena to a Poetics of Documentary Literature . (= Munich German Studies. Volume 30). Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7705-2013-0 .
  • Boris Nikitin, Carena Schlewitt , Tobias Brenk: Document, forgery, reality. Material volume on contemporary documentary theater . Theater der Zeit, 2014, ISBN 978-3-943881-84-4 .

Journalistic response

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See among other things Heiner Teroerde: Political dramaturgies in divided Berlin. Social imaginations with Erwin Piscator and Heiner Müller around 1960 . V&R unipress, Göttingen 2009, p. 29.
  2. ↑ Breuer described the documentary drama as a new expression of the historical drama. See Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and Memory. German-language historical drama since Brecht . Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2004.