Silvija Jestrovic
University of Toronto
Presented August 2, 2000 at the ATHE Conference in Washington D.C. on the panel, "The Politics of Performance: Intercultural Intertexts in 'European' Performance from the Renaissance to the Postmodern."
Robert Wilson’s triptych The Oceanflight, which premiered in 1998 in Berliner Ensemble, is a new reading of Brecht’s didactic play, in the light of succeeding texts, performance styles and experience of history that filled the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Even though the performance consists of three parts or texts — Brecht’s radio play Oceanflight, Heiner Müller’s Landscape with Argonautes, and Wilson/ Kuhn’s adaptation of Dostoyewski’s Notes from the Dead House - the show is named and advertised under the title of Brecht’s play. The Oceanflight is indeed a point of departure of this performance and almost a backdrop against which the other two parts of the triptych are perceived. In other words, Brecht’s play is the intertextual link that ties the different parts of the show together. Furthermore, Wilson’s staging strategy of putting The Oceanflight into a postmodern framework alters both Brechtian dramaturgy and its ideological consequences. Brecht’s play within the world of Robert Wilson’s and Heiner Müller’s theatre becomes a reference and a quotation, but also a material for an intertextual polemic.
Brecht wrote The Oceanflight in 1929 for, at that time, the new medium of modern technology-radio, in search for new performative possibilities that the traditional theatre was no longer able to offer. The play is an almost Biblical parabola for "scientific age" mounted around the legendary first solo flight over the Atlantic Ocean from 1927 by Charles Lindbergh. There are three elements that make the context within which the play is conceived — the actual historical event, Marxist ideas, and new technology.
Charles Lindbergh was a star greeted and prized equally in London, Paris and Berlin. The reason he became the fascination of Europe was perhaps because his success was reinforcing so many different ideas and dreams of the time. Lindbergh was the embodiment of the Futurist notion of man and the machine. He also fit into Nazis ideas of power and supremacy. In addition, he became an acquaintance of Hitler and Göring, and the first foreigner to visit the Luftwaffe factory where the bombardiers were constructed and soon after lunched to conquer Europe. This made Brecht change the original title of the play The Lindbergh’s Flight into The Oceanflight. And last but not the least Lindbergh was an epitome of Marxist belief in progress through man conquering the nature. This last point seems the most likely to attract Brecht. During 1929-1930 Brecht started reading Marx, Engels, Lenin and to some extent Hegel. Brecht centers the play on the character of Lindbergh who refers to himself in plural We, explaining in a direct address to the audience, that he stands for the collective body that constructed the plane and enabled the flight. It is also the "We" of one figure that the pilot and his machine make. This symbiosis between the man and the machine brings forth Marxist utopian visions through the theme of collective victory over the forces of nature.
Brecht attempts to rejuvenate the notion of representation through the medium of radio. In the 1929 production of the play, with the music of Kurt Weill and Paul Hidemith, at Baden Baden Music Festival Brecht was making a scenic demonstration of the radio as medium for new social communication. However, he created a hybrid form that brings together two mediums of representation, resembling the structure of oratorio, enhanced through new technical possibilities. On the left side of the stage was the radio orchestra with its apparatus and singers, on the right side with the score in front of him was the actor/ listener who performed Lindbergh’s part. Lindbergh’s only scenic interlocutor in the play is a radio voice — a machine - who performs several functions. It personifies the voices of allegorical figures - Clouds, Storm, Sleep - who tempt Lindbergh. Through the radio apparatus comes the sound of plane’s engine, as well, to which the pilot talks. Finally, it also establishes an actual quasi-documentary radio voice that reports and comments on the flight. The character of Lindbergh was presented as a model for Brechtian ideal listener or recipient — the one who participates and even co-fabulates.
A sense of optimism marks both the play and its first production as a belief in better humanity through embracing the Marxist world view and better theatre through epic devices and modern technology. Brecht’s Oceanflight is a representation of utopia suggesting a society without the border between individual and collective, and a theatre that the audience co-creates. In this project Brecht’s strategies of distancing the familiar and breaking the conventions of illusionist theatre create a new kind of illusion - that of history as progress, and observers as participants.
This play has not been much performed either on radio or in theatre. Before Wilson staged the play for the Berliner Ensemble, Jan Francois Jung made it into an educational children film about radio technology in 1992 for European cultural channel ARTE. Both of these remounts of Brech’s piece take the play outside the medium for which it was initially conceived. Furthermore, in both cases the play’s ideological and aesthetic connotations are altered in comparison to the first presentation on Baden Baden Festival.
Even though, Wilson’s The Oceanflight project opens with Brecht’s play as an embodiment of optimism, this optimism is quite different from the one that was possible to find in the production of the late 20’s. Wilson’s representation of optimism in
The Oceanflight has an ironic edge. And not only the content of the play, but also Brecht’s staging methodology of Verfremdung has in this production an aura of comic-naivety.
Wilson places Brechtian stage world of epic dramaturgy and Marxist ideological connotations into a surrealist framework. The Oceanflight is represented through a combination of staging strategies typical for Wilson with elements of Brecht’s Verfremdung dramaturgy. On one side Wilson separates words and gestures, uses repetitions and abstract geometrical movements and other devices somewhat antithetical to Brechtian methodology. On the other side, Wilson incorporates means of epic theatre such as direct addresses to the audience, acting beside the role, and epic commentary. The actor playing Lindbergh introduces himself directly to the audience; two actors are placed in the auditorium to comment on the stage event in the manner of the radio broadcasters. In the scene that depicts Lindbergh’s flight over the ocean, the actor’s interlocutor is a puppet. The actor switches from animating the puppet, to the role of the pilot, and eventually to addressing the audience directly outside the roles. This gap between the actor and the role (roles) does not have a distancing effect of a Brechtian kind. There is no commentary on the content or change of perspectives that it genuinely provides. Brecht conceptualised his staging conventions in order to make the audience see the familiar in a new light, Wilson re-stages Brechtian conventions showing that they might not be sufficient any longer for the contemporary audience.
Brechtian Verfremdung in Wilson’s staging becomes almost decorum, since it is no longer able to carry its ideological content with conviction. This renders Brechtian theatrical strategies comic and naïve. The combination of Wilson’s and Brechtian theatre is represented as a clash of modern and post-modern aesthetics. Nevertheless, Brecht’s methodology and ideological content of the play still result in an estrangement effect (Verfremdungs effekt) in Wilson’s staging. This effect is not achieved through devices of Brechtian Verfremdung, but by means of estranging Brechtian concept of estrangement. In the framework of Wilson’s surrealist stage, Brecthian epic theatre, is seen in a new light, and acquires different connotations. It is not merely an act of showing Brectian theatre as no longer sufficient, but opening a process for its re-negotiation. In other words, Wilson, through devices of parody and comedy in the first triptych, makes the canonical Brechtian devices strange, offering a possibility for their rejuvenation through new readings and unpredictable interpretations.
The entire content of the play becomes defamiliarised in the style of comic naivety. The character of Lindbergh looks like a movie star from the 20’s and 30’s. In Brecht’s version the inner voice that encourages the pilot to succeed is coming from the powerful symbiotic fusion between the man and the machine and a collective We they represent. In Wilson’s version this inner voice is a tiny pink puppet, a mockery of an angle, or even nothing more than a little boy’s favourite toy. The powerful machine that took Lindbergh across the ocean is in Wilson’s interpretation a desk hanging in the air while the actor playing the pilot sits on the bicycle and pedals the "engine". The technological wonder from the 20’s at the end of the century looks like a poorly constructed toy. The figure of Lindbergh, as icon of progress and of the belief in better future that the advance of technology was to bring, becomes here a self-ironic and naïve dream from the childhood of the 20th century.
When Brecht wrote and presented his Oceanflight he could not know what the future had in store. Theatre of Wilson and also Heiner Müller survived the future Lindebrgh’s flight announced. Wilson’s Lindbergh has an alter ego in the image of a naked male body painted in gold that highlights the metaphor of Icarus. Brecht’s Lindbergh/ Icarus reverses the myth and succeeds. Wilson puts a big question mark to this success especially juxtaposing it to Heiner Müller’s play Landscape with Argonauts. Wilson’s Oceanflight, thus, deliberately confronts a pre-holocaust theatre with a post-holocaust one.
Heiner Müller is considered the official successor of Brecht in Germany, and his early plays are strongly influenced by Brecht. Later in his work Müller recreates the Brechtian theatre, by infect, diverging from Brecht’s methods. He incorporates Brecht’s defamiliarisation techniques into his own theatre of synthetic fragments were the illusion can not be broken, since it never really gets established. Müller’s lyrical and cryptic plays, often relaying on dramaturgy of quotations, rejuvenate the Brechtian spirit by deconstructing it. The play Landscape with Argonauts moves the epic theatre to the world of T.S. Eliot’s "Waste Land" filled with metaphoric language and imagery that logic of associations ties together.
This play is a part of Müller’s trilogy Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts structured around the Medea myth. The mythological material is treated as a political metaphor that depicts the catastrophe of history ( in Benjamin’s sense). The story of Argonaut Jason is for Müller "the first colonisation myth" that marks the beginning of European history, and threatens to bring it to an end as well.
The plays of Brecht and Müller, brought together in Wilson’s project, make for an optimistic and a pessimistic perspective on the same issues — history, progress, Marxism, technology. However, the context in which the two plays are written is very different. Müller’s play is written in 1982 in what used to be East Germany. This schizophrenic division of the country, as a microcosm of the world’s split through the cold war politics, had a strong impact on Müller’s writing and reality. Müller shares the Marxist ideological views with Brecht. Yet, Müller’s Marxism is wrapped in an aura of skepticism. In the Landscape with Argonauts Müller deals with the contemporary world that Marxist liner concept of history is no longer capable to encompass. It is a world where the historical alternatives in finding a way around the cold war politics have already been worn out. Such as the examples Müller alludes to in the play, namely, the alliance of the Third World countries and the Yugoslav model — that used to be a country of "real socialism", but outside the blocks. Marxist ideology becomes too much of a simplification and hardly a rescue for the world that Müller, paraphrasing Hölederlin, describes as: "Yet what remains is created by bombs".
Wilson’s stage depicts Müller’s world in a surrealist fashion — the backdrop is an ominous deserted landscape, the stage is a salon in the style of the 50’s, yet with a sofa and three coffins. In one of them a woman is laying with a scarf over her face. One woman is pregnant and walks mechanically like a doll. Another woman sits on the sofa, while the third one vacuums the stage. The fourth woman is dressed in black. The women occasionally fight over the vacuum cleaner. Technology is not any more represented as a sign or dream of progress, but as a commodity that has no power to counteract the numbness of the characters. This is the only part of the show dominated by women who take turns in the coffins. In addition there is an almost desolated male figure that occasionally roars from the proscenium. Wilson stages the typical Müller’s women, (who speak from "the bottom of the ocean" as Ophelia in the Hamletmachine). They are objects in the history of which man is the subject — a distorted one though. The women alternately repeat lines from Müller’s play such as: "The theatre of my death has started" and "What has stronger, teeth blood or stone?" Wilson depicts Müller’s political landscapes, within which the lines are uttered either from the past or from the future — in other words, from the place where the dramatic action is already over. It is a world that survived a catastrophe and is on the verge of a new one. However, the comic element is still present, not through irony and naivete, but through a grotesque absurdity of the stage figures and the landscape they create.
In the context of Wilson’s production, Müller’s Landscape with Argonatus could be understood as an answer to Brecht. This answer comes after the experience of the II World War, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after planes dropping bombs on Europe at first to conquer it then to liberate it. (Out of this experience Brecht too wrote his later plays where, as in The Life of Galileo, the notion of optimism as progress through technology would inevitably fade away.) The image of the plane is also present in Müller’s Argonatuts and the following lines, repeated a number of times by Wilson’s stage figures, make a virtual polemic with Brcht’s Oceanflight:
The theatre of my death/ had opened/as I stood between the mountains/in the circle of dead comrades on the stone/ and the expected airplane appeared above me/ Without thinking I knew/ this engine was/ what my grandmother used to call God.
This is the point in the performance where Brecht’s God of Promise and Müller’s God of Death meet. The notion of the pilot Lindberh/Icarus who heroically flies across the ocean is replaced by another myth here — that of the Argonaut Jason who appears as an ominous male subject of a conqueror and coloniser. Like in Brecht’s Oceanflight, in Wislon’s and Müller’s landscape the, subject - the I - is a collective too. Yet, it makes a very different collective body then the one animated through Marxism. The collective I on Wilson’s stage is on the verge of disappearing. And while in Brecht’s Oceanflight the ocean, stands for a challenge, through which the collective I becomes fully unified, in Müller/ Wilson’s version the water is a space between the presence and absence, I and not I. And this horror of disappearance is depicted in the mute screams of the women, at the end of the section about Argonauts.
Wilson/Kuhn’s free adaptation of Dostoyevski’s Notes from the Dead House places Müller’s post apocalyptic world into an Orvelseque distopia from the end of the century. Müller’s notion of desolated subject and victimised individual of modern industrial society, becomes a dehumanised subject of the high tech, corporate society. The last part of the triptych opens with a boy playing video games. Brecht’s Lindbergh reapers thorough the distorted repetitions of the scenes from Brecht’s Oceanflight. Lindbergh repeats the line " I am ill". His alter-ego, the golden boy Icarus, mirrors Lindbergh’s movements, and when laying on his back with his hands and feet in the air he resembles a fetus. Almost through out this section a number of young men emerge from a door, placed on stage, carrying briefcases, while an older actor utters lines from Dostoyewski’s novel in a mechanical, but fast paced fashion. The men are identical, perpetually walking, following the rhythm of the speech. In this context of postmodern technological society the figure of Lindebrgh appears somewhat disoriented, and reduced to a mere reference point. The other elements of the performance, images, stage figures, language, also appear as quotations that lost their connotation.
Staged in the manner of minimalist anti-utopia this last part of the triptych makes a summary of both Brecht’s and Müller’s worlds within a contemporary framework. This triptych traces the 20th century history through three stages —utopia, catastrophe and anti-utopia. It ends with a loud, painful scream of a woman that is both a summary of horror and a possibility for the return of the lost meaning.
Brecht advocated a theatre that is capable of critically corresponding to the contemporary world. It is a theatrical model that presupposes changes and deviations from its own norms in order to maintain the capacity of communicating a view that counteracts the habitualisation of perception. Heiner Müller is Brecht’s most fateful successor in exactly this aspect. His work is a constant search for the place of theatre and the role of artists and intellectuals in the modern society. In a note to the Landscape with Argonautes Müller wrote: "Landscape with Argonautes presumes the catastrophes which mankind is working towards. The theatre’s contribution to their prevention can only be their representation." In order to achieve this task, however, theatre needs to reinterpret and transcend its aesthetics and its politics. In other words, to constantly test its relevance and place in the society. Wilson’s theater is the one of transition and transgression as based on the strategy of taking materials, images, sounds, movements, dramatic texts out of their habitual context in order to rejuvenate their presence.
It is not accidental that Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, as a theatre who cherishes Brechtian tradition, puts on its repertoire a production of Brecht’s play that, even though makes use of his devices, diverges so much from the notion of Brechtian understood as a formulaic model. Wilson’s staging of both Brecht’s aesthetics and ideology opens a space for a dialectic interaction and tension among three different texts and contexts. This staging shows that Brecht as a political author is nowadays only possible through intervention, and new readings, thus, through and within a process of concretisation. Patrice Pavis describes the phenomenon of concretization in a following way:
Different mises en scene of a common text, particularly those produced at very different moments in history, do not provide readings of the same text. The letter of the text remains of course unchanged, but the spirit varies considerably (27)
Concretisation is always an act of reception and re-interpretation by means of which the topicality and relevance of a work becomes reestablished even through distortion. It is a process of bridging the gap between history and the current context and between I and the Other. Hence, the title Oceanflight in this staging gains a broader significance, marking the transitions from the beginning of the century to its end, from utopia to distopia, from text to context, from Brecht to Wilson.