Postmigratory or Postdramatic? The Political and Aesthetic Stakes of Classification

Speaker(s): Matthew Cornish, Ohio University

German “postmigratory” theater defines itself primarily by the artists who create it: immigrants and the children of immigrants, making lives and telling stories in a nation that often views them as outsiders. The name postmigratory tells us about labor conditions and content, but critics and scholars have still struggled to classify it. Some see autobiographical documentary theater, artists telling stories that haven’t been heard; others find experimental, even postdramatic, performances that reject and rupture dramatic worlds. Responding sometimes to the same works of art, critics find in the former a mimesis that reproduces hierarchies of exclusion and repression, or attack the latter as apolitical, the pliable plaything of individual subjectivities.
Arguing that taxonomies, in shaping how we experience and understand performances, also do political work, “Postmigratory or Postdramatic” examines form to understand how postmigratory theater creates meaning. Drawing on the formalism of Caroline Levine and the theater theory of Hans-Thies Lehmann, and responding to recent articles on postmigratory theater within German Studies, this talk poses three overlapping questions: What are the stakes—aesthetic, political, historic—of formal classification? What happens when experimental structures meet postmigratory stories? And what are the limits of dramatic and postdramatic forms?
 
Matt Cornish is Assistant Professor of Theater History at Ohio University. He has also taught at Yale College, Yale School of Drama, and Mount Holyoke College, and he has held a Fulbright Research Fellowship and a DAAD Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, both at the Freie Universität Berlin. His essays have appeared in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, PAJ, TheatreForum, TDR, and Theater, and he contributes to German theater magazine Theater der Zeit. Matt’s first book examines performances of history and nation in Germany following reunification (University of Michigan Press, 2017), and he is completing a collection of contemporary German performance texts by groups including Gob Squad and Rimini Protokoll (forthcoming, Seagull Books--In Performance). Matt received his Doctor of Fine Arts from Yale School of Drama, where he also completed an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.
 
Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies and the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies