Bitef

TRAGICOMEDY - TRAGEDY OF OUR TIME

SUZANNE OSTEN My first immediate response is: LIFE. And our performance Babydrama is our way of saying welcome to life. Where the babies will meet their tragicomical adults.... My next response is the tragicomical blindness for the facts of how early the human being, the infant, responds to all complex human doings, and our civilizations blindness of this perspective of the child. My idol, the British analyst Winnicot, has given those thoughts another twist, theatrical humour and cabarets, my favorite form of theatre, how does that relate to life and serious business. "For instance, one is at a music-hall and on to the stages come the dancers. Trained to liveliness. One can say that here is the primal scene. Here is exhibitionism. Here is anal control. Here is masochistic submission to discipline. Here is a defiance of the super-ego. Sooner or later one adds: Here is LIFE." Winnicot The Manic Defence, 1935 ALVIS HERMANIS As years go by, my views about art are becoming more and more old-fashioned; therefore, I believe that the theatre must be a place where the audience would laugh and cry. And the ultimate level that the actors can achieve is to make the audience do it simultaneously. If a viewer's lips are smiling, while, at the same time, there are tears in his eyes, it means that the theatre has touched the most fragile matter in this world - the human soul itself. DIMITER GOTCHEFF "Die Dunkelheit erhellt den Absatand zwischen Aischylos und uns. In der Distanz scheint das Kontinuum menschlicher Existenz auf und im Kontinuum die Differenz." Dieses Zitat von Heiner Müller war Grundlage meiner Arbeit. MEG STUART & PHILIP GEHMACHER "I try to exercise loss, but that does not necessarily mean that I am able to accept it," Rivane Neuenschwander ANDRÄS URBÂN tragicomedy is an illusion and the interpretation of this subtitle can in fact tell that the tragedy of our time is indeed the tragicomedy, that is the presence of the tragicomedy is the tragedy. We could also represent it as the only possible theatre action, at least in the sense of the drama theatre. No matter how much it seems to resemble life, the relation to things mitigates, waters down the power of a serious and completed action, dilutes the urge for revenge, commercialises, makes edible even that what should not be eaten Nevertheless, a production which is always serious and represents a tragic act, at least in my case, always contains an element of laughter, the element of maybe the tiniest smile which continues to be a means of alienation from the event represented. So as not to take it, and ourselves, too seriously. This, however, is still not that tragicomic reality - that pleasant evening spent in following the degradation of human destiny. And we'd better not lie. To relate to life and the theatre as a genre is dangerous both for the actor and for the director but not in the sense in which danger ap-

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