This is almost like a Lehrstück (learning play).

Almost. Perhaps it could be called a ‘situation play.’

The idea here was that you are spectator and player at the same time, and that you learn to better understand different positions. That is quite similar to the learning plays.

What is really interesting emerges at the didactic level when you are not in just one position but rotate through all the roles. And of course the question remains: Is there a message? In Situation Rooms, the point is primarily the incompatibility of perspectives; the impossibility of synthesis. In World Climate Change Conference there was a synthesis, because the global community had set itself goals, and the subject was this performance aimed at achieving potential unanimity for the sake of reaching those goals.

World Climate Change Conference
© Benno Tobler

CREATING SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS

But theater is also a space for rehearsing and experiencing social processes, negotiations and the like. Although they emerged from similar ways of thinking, the outcomes of Situation Rooms and World Climate Change Conference are in fact quite different. In the first, I have to accept the theatrical contract and be willing to believe that I am standing inside a hospital tent in the desert. In the second, although this fictional level is present, the primary aim is to understand the rules of the game and to learn how nations negotiate with one another.

True, even if only at a basic level. In World Climate Change Conference, the point is to occupy one of the various positions within the United Nations, even if not in the way it actually works. When you leave the piece, you leave having shared the space with 195 different perspectives.

I’m very curious how differently you can experience other perspectives when you test or live them yourself. In Situation Rooms, the aim is rather to ultimately identify with one person; what is at stake here is not only perspectives but very specific biographies that amount to more than simple avatars. Whether or not I find someone sympathetic, for example, is a major factor. Even if you can look at it in the abstract and see only their socio-political role beforehand, you can also gain structural insights into them from the piece.

Yes. Theater is above all a good tool for perceiving strangeness, for taking a closer look at the unfamiliar. This also applies to developing an understanding of something you do not actually know or understand. But it is also a space where I can have an emotional and an intellectual experience at the same time with things I only know. Among all strategies of re-presentation, however, theater is a place subject to parameters entirely different from those of the original place in question. Situation Rooms is also a space that makes it possible to connect with the observable situation.

So what you essentially want is to show situations as they are and, in this way, allow them to be better understood. But if we are talking about political theater, isn’t the next step to see theater as a space where new procedures, possibilities and systems can also be developed?

Absolutely. And it goes even further. In Home Visit Europa⁸, one of our European projects, fifteen visitors find themselves seated at a table, each time in a different apartment. So there are no longer any spectators, nor any outside experts. The point is for fifteen people to discover ‘competitive cooperation’ and thereby unravel the political mechanisms of an institution such as the EU.

For me, political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe 2013) is at least a useful metaphor, despite the problem of applying political theory directly to theater. If we do not want to fall into the trap of outright hostility, which essentially means civil war, we need spaces of agonistic pluralism in which conflicts can be expressed. I believe theater can be an arena in which we can express our differences as adversaries, without needing to suppress them. It is no coincidence that Chantal Mouffe borrowed the word ‘agonism’ from theater, from the ‘agon’ of ancient Greek tragedy, that is, the contest of discourses.

While preparing Home Visit, we had already held meetings with game developers and with the creators of game models of political conflict. An unexpected preliminary result of this marathon of fictional negotiations was how many people were astonished at how much harder it was to escape that mechanism of group formation under certain conditions than they had skeptically predicted. The need for something to be approved, the lack of an alternative and the obligation to produce a final text are examples of such conditions. Afterward, it would turn out that the text produced was very similar to those that already existed. The attempt to develop an alternative way of thinking within a political process, by developing it in a different environment, became almost a political rather than an artistic exercise. Such work can lead to the emergence of concrete models of political action.

The artistic side at this point might be that you are not immediately drawn into pragmatism, and that instead something like a ‘radical imagination’ asserts itself, which is an artistic rather than a political value.

Absolutely. In the end, in World Climate Change Conference, the ‘USA’ fundamentally changed its stance, said ‘okay, listen, let’s step on the gas and pay up,’ and replenished the Green Climate Fund. That is a rather utopian situation.

I have always found it astonishing how far questions of representation in society are mirrored by questions of representation in theater: Who represents whom? With what authority? In what way? Who is not represented? How could other models of representation be designed? – this, for example, was at least partly the concern of the Greek left movement and the Syriza party. But politics immediately becomes subject to pragmatism; there is very little room for maneuver. Perhaps you can imagine things a little more radically, but then, to use an analogy by political theorist Gerald Raunig, you may have to repair your ship while it is sailing full speed ahead. And that, of course, would be quite a challenge.

And even a ship is too simple to serve as an analogy.

For me, the theatrical space becomes politically interesting when you stop a ship sailing full speed ahead for a moment in order to look at it from the outside while still remaining part of it. You are both inside and outside the ship at once; a situation emerges that is at the same time real and artificial, actual and symbolic. What other forms of representation can we imagine here?

I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Whenever I hear the word ‘representation,’ I feel a strange buzzing in my head.

Who is represented, and how? That is the issue underlying political struggles in Greece, in Spain, in different ways in Germany, in the US and, in fact, all over the world. How is it possible to look at this issue within the artistic processes of theater, and even to develop new ways of dealing with it? For me, theater is still the best tool for achieving this.

Transferring this into artistic processes is important. Recently, Greek Prime Minister Tsipras went to see a very good work by Anestis Azas and his company. The play dealt with the case of a refugee boat that sank near Farmakonisi, drowning most of the people on board⁹. A young boy, who clearly belonged to the group of refugees, was sentenced to an incredibly long prison term for human smuggling. Everything about the incident was dubious, and much of the way the case was handled was very ugly. Even though for months he had done nothing meaningful to improve the situation of asylum seekers, either at sea or in the migrant camps, Tsipras arrived at the play smiling and left it smiling. He probably left that evening at the theater having gained nothing except the experience of being among cultured people, of how peaceful the place was, and of how these cultured people ‘conveyed’ the problems of our time. Much as we often do, too. On the other hand, though, you speak of theater as a kind of laboratory in which perception and common knowledge, a different kind of action, are tested. There are even plays in which people vote on alternative draft constitutions.

Absolutely. This is the classic Mayakovsky/Brecht question: Is art a mirror held up to society, or a sledgehammer with which to change it? Is it enough simply to observe and analyze conditions? World Climate Change Conference explores the possibility of changing reality and actually influencing politics – but of course it only does so as if. It adopts a critical Enlightenment stance, in the hope that if you understand, things can get better.

But what if there were a real opportunity for artists and audiences to contribute to concrete change? What would theater’s specific possibilities be in that case? As theater makers, we have a great deal of experience in how people are brought together, how people are organized, how representation works, and so on. Why not try to make use of this knowledge? After all, aren’t parliamentary spaces theaters, and theaters parliamentary spaces?

This subject, this theatrical turn in relation to parliament, once interested me too. At the same time, I am aware of the difference between the possibilities of theater and the rather shabby show in parliament, owing to the differences in representation. Of course, from the perspective of political activists, the notion of an Enlightenment bourgeois theater, in which I sit below the stage as analyst and empathizer and am presented again and again with the same mechanisms that I can nicely imitate when I go home, is rather shabby…

But how is that not exactly the same as what you do?

Ah! I don’t see it that way. But I’ll think about it. That isn’t our starting point. But if you use bourgeois theater buildings, what you are describing will always sneak back in through the back door. Can I change something by changing the parameters there? We claim that we can. Psychologists probably have lots of nice maxims along the lines of ‘you can only start to act once something has happened to you.’ So at the level of theater, the distinction at stake is the one between the sledgehammer and the mirror: do my observation and empathy come from a distance, or will I act differently? The sledgehammer is a tool in the logic of agitprop and of revolution that can also set off alarm bells in a person, and art projects that embed themselves in political practice, especially in theater, are often chained to their own transience.

Look at Christoph Schlingensief’s party¹⁰, or at the so-called actions of the Zentrum für politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty), which prepared an unusable, camera-equipped island to rescue asylum seekers¹¹. I truly believe that thinking develops together with theater, nourished not only by knowledge but also by the formal means employed. Do I think differently when I am inside a position rather than being represented in it? I think so. But in that case I am clearly operating in a space different from the one in which politics is made.