Abstract
Zwischen Readymade und „Einbruch des Realen“. Das postdramatische Musiktheater von Christoph Schlingensief ist Teil des Werkes Christoph Schlingensief und die Avantgarde, hrg. v. Lore Knapp, Sven Lindholm und Sarah Pogoda, Paderborn: Fink 2019, 2019.
Christoph Schlingensief’s work in musical theatre can be considered as postdramatic theatre, as the term was defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999. Thus, too, Schlingensief’s theatre productions may be understood as avant garde: like historical avant gardes of the 20th century, Schlingensief’s understanding of theatre is strongly opposed to a traditional, drama-centred notion of theatre. His antagonism is also directed against the aesthetics of so-called ‚director’s theatre‘, which has dominated the performance practice of opera and musical theatre in general in the German-speaking countries since the early 1970s. The paper understands Schlingensief’s music-theatre productions as a postdramatic musical theatre which expresses opposition, inter alia, to director’s theatre. The paper tries to show how this performance practice can be not just different, but also avant garde.
