Hearing the Political, Sounding Death: The Human Microphone and Motus’s Alexis. Una tragedia greca (2010) Katharina Pewny (Ghent) This article examines the acoustic dimensions of forms of collective performance and action at the interface of art and the political. Following an introduction to the dramaturgic function of acoustics in contemporary theatre, Jacques Rancière’s concept of the aesthetic of the political is explored with reference to the radio ballets of the Hamburg-based performance group Ligna. The Occupy movement’s collective practice of the “human microphone” and the Antigone performance Alexis. Una tragedia greca by the Italian theatre group Motus (2010) are also discussed. The choral speaking and use of music here bridge the liminal space between the individual and the collective, between death and life, between political isolation and worldwide empathy. Acoustic Liminality in Contemporary Theatre New forms of musical theatre and of music in the performing arts came into being in the course of the twentieth century. The development of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk is one example; one might equally cite avant-garde experiments with music, sound and silence (as in the work of John Cage), or, collectively, the fraying of the arts declared by Theodor W. Adorno as early as the 1960 s 1 . One can no longer clearly distinguish from one another the various artistic genres and theatrical forms. This also applies to music-theatre and theatre of the spoken word (drama). Whereas dance has often eschewed music in the last two decades, and the breathing and the tapping of the dancers have produced the sounds, a musicalization of dramatic theatre in the German-speaking world by directors such as Christoph Marthaler and Einar Schleef was noted as early as 2003. 2 One decade later, in 2013, in the year of the two-hundred year anniversary of the births of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, opera is experiencing an aesthetic renewal through productions by choreographers and theatre directors. Music, rhythms, apparent silence and thus the specifically acoustic aspect of theatre are particularly conspicuous in the contemporary performing arts. The Flemish choreographer Jan Fabre directs the performance of Stefan Hertmann’s text The Tragedy of a Friendship (Vlaamse Opera 2013), and the Italian director Romeo Castellucci, who already staged Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at the La Monnaie opera house in Brussels in 2011, directed a production of Christoph W. Gluck’s and Hector Berlioz’s opera Orphée et Eurydice, which opened in 2014 as a co-production by La Monnaie and the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival). Live bands and live singing are to be heard from the stages of former “dramatic” theatre institutions, such as Lola Arias’s production of My Life After (2009). This features the production of “intrusive theatre noise” 3 in the sense of sounds that physically draw the audience into the production through their pace, the bass frequencies and entries set in a dramaturgically skilful manner. In Arias’s piece, the descendants of Argentina’s military dictatorship (and those of its victims) go on Forum Modernes Theater, 27 (2012 [2016]), 26-36. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen stage with live music. In Friederike Heller’s Antigone (Schaubühne Berlin 2010), the Berlin-based band Kante plays live music and embodies the chorus and the protagonists by turns, based on classical tragic theatre, alternating between spoken and musical scenes. 4 2013 has seen the guest production of Peter Sellars’s staging of Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello, at the Holland Festival (2011, text: Toni Morrison, music and singing: Rokia Traoré). The protagonist Desdemona is transformed from a victim to a racist and classist perpetrator through the lament sung by her slave Barbary. Barbary, sung by Rokia Traoré, is flanked by a chorus of two singers, and the marginalised point of view of women of colour is expressed in their singing. In Matthias Hartmann’s direction of Elfriede Jelinek’s theatre text Schatten (Eurydike sagt) (Wiener Akademietheater 2013), Lucas Gregorowicz as a singing Orpheus strides down the steps into the underworld inhabited by seven Eurydice figures who like to enjoy the silence of the underworld and do not want to return to the living (music: Karsten Riedel and Lucas Gregorowicz). Music and acoustics are realised in complex and varied ways in contemporary theatre. 5 Motus works with body sounds when the performers run over the stage together with the audience in a mini demonstration (see below), and the high-pitched shrieking of the “girls” in Schatten (Eurydike sagt) transports traditional gender-based clichés. 6 These are two explicit acoustic levels of the theatrical production of meaning. A deeper level, a “composed theatre” 7 , can also be detected. This refers not only to the increased use of music, but also to processoriented dramaturgies that compose theatre productions according to musical and rhythmical principles. 8 I draw on the term “composed theatre” because it highlights the processual nature, the rhythmics, changes and continuities of intensity, and the atmospheric aspects of theatre productions. 9 Atmospheric disturbances and enablements effected in the aforementioned performances on the street and on the stage by choral speaking and the use of music constitute the focal point of the following discussion. More specifically, I am interested in the acoustic compositions of liminality through their transformative and connective potential. In some performances of composed theatre, music and acoustics have the function of transforming vitality into death, of connecting the world of the living with the realm of the dead, or of linking unjust conditions with political utopias. Music and acoustics lead, as it were, from one side of the world to its reverse. Music is employed by Christoph Marthaler, for example, to form the transition from life to death in Schutz vor der Zukunft. 10 The dramaturgic function of live music as the bridge between the realm of the living and the underworld can be seen in Hartmann/ Jelinek. Desdemona and Barbary, both of whom are located in the realm of the dead, sing and speak their dialogue: Barbary’s singing (and that of her chorus) connects both with the world of the marginalised slaves who are/ have become silent. In Peter Sellars’s Children of Heracles (2002), shamanic singing and music production connects the earthly with the transcendental and with the hope of a better world for migrant youths. 11 In Motus’s Alexis. Una tragecia greca (2010), too, music forms the bridge between the living and the dead. It is therefore my theory that music and acoustics have the dramaturgic function of enabling transformations and connections. This applies to the transformation from life to death, the connection of the individual and the collective, and political change - in summary: the bridging of liminality. 27 Hearing the Political, Sounding Death Hearing the Political with Rancière In October 2012 the biannual congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (Society for Theatre Studies) took place at the Universität Bayreuth on the subject of “Sound and Performance”. Several of the papers given here were on the subject of revolutions and political revolts, because they are characterised by a rich repertoire of acoustic signals. This includes the singing from prison windows of Solidarnosc members in Poland in 1981, 12 and the singing of the resistance fighter, the “woman who sings” in the face of death/ of executions, which the Canadian-Lebanese dramatist Wajdi Mouawad processed in his theatre text Incendies about the civil war in Lebanon. 13 In 2001, the German director Christoph Schlingensief produced “theatre noise” as clamorous argument and loud folk music, and caused considerable confusion about whether the container action Bitte liebt Österreich. Erste österreichische Koalitionswoche (Please Love Austria. First Austrian Coalition Week; 2000) was actually art or politics. In the face of the protests of tourists, the Wiener Festwochen even found it necessary to distribute leaflets that said “This is art”. The movement instructions for the participants of the “radio ballet” of the Hamburg-based Ligna group, issued through headphones, are inaudible to bystanders: The LIGNA group has existed since 1997 and consists of the media and performance artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners and Torsten Michaelsen. They work for the Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK), a non-commercial Hamburg-based radio station, amongst others. . . . One of the models developed . . . by LIGNA . . . is the Radioballett of 2002: Through their headphones, radio listeners receive a choreography of forbidden and excluded gestures in what was previously a public and is now a privatised place, and in this way bypass its control mechanisms. The forbidden takes place everywhere and simultaneously. 14 In Ligna’s radio ballets, artistic performance merges with political demonstration. The radio ballets function primarily through individualised, simultaneous listening, and no longer through the production of a ruckus in public spaces. They are “composed dance” in the sense of “composed theatre” (see above) because their dramaturgies are based on the acoustic instructions and on the tension between hearing (the performers) and not hearing (the audience). Ligna, in contrast, does not primarily stage the disruption of the frameworks of art and politics. 15 Instead, and this is a dimension of the aesthetic of the political, the radio ballets perform a “new distribution” of “space and time” 16 . They re-organise public/ private space by “enabling [. . .] bodies” to do what is generally not done there, such as, for example, lying down on the floor of Hamburg’s main station as part of a collective choreography, or knocking simultaneously on the shop windows of the shops on Vienna’s Kärntnerstraße. This corresponds to Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the “politics of aesthetics”, which will accompany this discussion: This means that an aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms. [. . .] As a matter of fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an ‘awareness’ of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensue, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. 17 In his afterword to Rancière’s essay, Slavoj Zizek names flash mobs as an example of this 28 Katharina Pewny (Ghent) “distribution of the sensible”. Like radio ballets, they constitute a concerted and concentrated “swarming” 18 of people in urban spaces. 19 Dance as concerted movement practice has moved out of the art institutions, and the aesthetics of the avant-gardes and of diverse political movements have entered the strong holds of dramatic theatre. The fourth wall, which separates the stage from the auditorium, disappears in many of these performances. The aforementioned formal changes to the aesthetics often grow out of an uneasiness with the status quo. The acoustic dimensions of performances of “dissensus”, on the other hand, can be grasped with Jacques Rancière’s writings. Politics and aesthetics are, according to Rancière, inextricably linked because both organise sense in both senses of the word: the intelligible and perception. For the author, dissent does not consist primarily of a difference of opinion regarding content, but of differing alignments of the perceptible: Let us call it the efficacy of the dissensus, which is not a designation of conflict as such, but is a specific type thereof, a conflict between sense and sense. Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory perception and a way of making sense of it, between several sensory regimes or bodies. 20 In the case of Ligna, the dissent regarding municipal local politics, for example, consists of uneasiness about the shrinking of public spaces in favour of the increasing privatisation that affects (not only European) metropolises. Ligna’s disruption of conventional patterns of perception is characterised by the fact that the collective movements of the performers cannot be deciphered by their audiences because the bystanders cannot hear the instructions and because they are confronted with invisible theatre. For this, Ligna borrows the choreography of dancerly movements from the performative genre of dance. The radio ballets are exemplary of stage art entering urban spaces, where it gives rise to novel forms of performance that cannot be separated from political demonstrations and invisible theatre. Other examples include works by the British group Blast Theory and Ant Hampton’s staged meetings of audiences on park benches and in coffee houses. This is summed up by Charlotte Gruber as following: In addition to a tendency among theatre makers to seek out proximity to social space, and thus a stronger connection to reality, there exists in the reality of those who do not make theatre an increased tendency to inscribe (social) spaces with theatrical media and in this way to ‘re-socialise’ them. This is a tendency that can be observed in urban spaces in particular. What becomes clear here, and must not be disregarded, is that the boundaries between performance, marketing, activism, protest, politics, play, art, celebration and leisure appear to be becoming increasingly blurred. 21 The Production of Sense through Fragmentation and Multiplication in the Practice of the “Human Microphone” In 1999 a counter-demonstration to the World Economic Forum took place in Seattle with the slogan “Building on Diversity”, which is considered to mark the beginning of the anti-globalisation movement. This comprises countless humorous demonstration forms that make use of theatre techniques, including frequent use of the mask. The Clown Armies are groups of clowns whose members, made up as clowns and sometimes masked, mimetically and ironically repeat the movements of police officers and soldiers. They employ mimesis instead of resistance. The so-called Guy Fawkes 29 Hearing the Political, Sounding Death mask, too, is worn at gatherings of and demonstrations by critics of globalisation. It makes reference to the would-be assassin Guy Fawkes, who planned the assassination of a British monarch using explosives in 1605. Forbidden by the police to cover their faces, the demonstrators respond with the humorous use of the theatrical techniques of make-up and masks. The human microphone, too, resulted from a ban imposed by the state: in this case, the police ban on megaphones and amplifiers in New York. This operates not on the visual, but on the acoustic, level, however. The human microphone is the amplification of the utterances of a person through the repetition of what has been said by those who stand or sit around them. It was developed in September to November 2011 in New York during the occupation of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street. Whoever wants to speak first tests the amplification of the speech by those standing in the vicinity by performing a “mic check”: those who are within earshot respond by repeating what is said. The speech is made in short sentences or sentence parts, and on large squares the utterances are repeated between two and five times, spreading in a wave-like fashion. Although the human microphone was initially conceived as a medium for democratic dialogue, it increasingly developed into a technique for the amplification of speeches by individual/ famous speakers, 22 including, for example, the amplification of speeches by Slavoj Zizek, Michael Moore and Judith Butler. The choral repetition of the speech of an individual is reminiscent of Greek tragedy. In the latter, the protagonists’ utterances alternate with those of the chorus, which represents the conscience and/ or the citizens of the city, and thereby provides a commentary on the events that take place. 23 In the case of the human microphone, the mass, the chorus, as an acoustic prosthesis amplifies the speech of the individual. This constitutes one re-alignment of the sensual carried out by the acoustic dramaturgy of the human microphone: the dialogue between the chorus and the protagonists with which we are familiar from Greek tragedy does not take place. The tragic aesthetic convention is changed because the chorus/ the many repeat(s) the speech of the individual and do(es) not contradict it, do(es) not urge it towards the common good. According to Kretzschmar, a theatricality of the human microphone has developed over the course of the last two years, which has become more focused on Youtube users and tourists than on the people present. 24 One symptom of the theatricalization is the performance of famous individuals, such as Slavoj Zizek, Michael Moore and Judith Butler, as speakers whose sentences are amplified by the human microphone. Kretzschmar criticises the theatricalization of the human microphone because it creates a stage for famous people instead of enabling the transformation of the “clamour of the many” into the “speech of individuals” 25 . The chorus here does not give expression - as is common in tragedy - to the voices of the marginalised, 26 but acts mimetically with respect to the speech of individuals (stars). I propose that the human microphone, even in its commercialised development, is to be understood as neither the straightforward adaptation of a movement to stardom, nor as straightforward resistance. In contrast, the interest lies in the ambivalence of the slavish repetition of the speeches of stars and the alternating (acoustic) support precisely as posited by Rancière because it cannot be unambiguously interpreted. The performances of icons of critical consciousness such as Butler, Zizek and Moore can therefore be described as a fissure in the alignment of the senses, of the intelligible and the audible, and thus as politics of aesthetics as posited by Rancière. The fissure is constituted by the confusion that 30 Katharina Pewny (Ghent) results when “stardom” is performed/ when the voice of the unknown masses does not become speech, but instead in its anonymous/ choral repetition serves the amplification of the speech of the star. When the stars raise their voices to speak, it is not as democratically elected representatives of the many, and what is performed is in fact the interruption of democracy. Mutual support 27 is performed: the stars support the movement, and the members of the movement lend the stars their voices. Together, they create a forum of the political that brings forth a very specific acoustic. Regardless of whether those who are speaking are political icons or unknown activists, the human microphone is a good example of the doubling of sense as that which is both intelligible and perceptible because the spoken sentences must de facto be interrupted or radically shortened so that they can be repeated, and in this way be heard: “Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory perception and a way of making sense of it, between several sensory regimes or bodies.” 28 The sensory perception of the spoken word simultaneously becomes more tiring because fragmented, shortened sentences are repeated by many voices, while intellectual comprehension is made possible only through the fragmentation and repetition. The human microphone is thus an example of the redistribution of recognition and of the enabling of new bodily practices as the re-appropriation of spaces that were once public. “The speech of the individual” is supported by the “noise of the many” 29 , and the noise of the many gains acoustic contours through the speech of the individual. The “re-distribution of the sensible” here consists of the disruption of the dichotomy between the “speech of the individual” - in other words the appearance of the political subject - and the “noise” of the anonymous masses. Motus’s Alexis. Una tragedia greca (2010) Motus (based in Rimini, founded in 1991) performs its research into the place and circumstances of the death of Alexandros- Andreas Grigoropoulos, who was shot by the police on 6 th of December in 2008 in the Exarchia district of Athens, under the title of Motus’s Alexis. Una tragedia greca. The group Motus was founded in 1991 by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Francesconi Nicolò. The Syrma Antigónes series, which began in 2009, is one of their countless theatre productions, which are often also accompanied by workshops and theoretical reflections. An interest in violent conflicts between the generations provided the thematic framework for this. Alexis. Una tragedia greca (2010) is the third, and last, part of the Antigone trilogy. The performance is part of the Antigone series Syrma, which Motus has been carrying out since 2008, and it has been performed at the Theater der Welt Festival in Halle, amongst other places. Alexis. Una tragedia greca is a living, flexible memorial to Alexandros, who is positioned alongside Carlos Guliani, who was shot by the police on 20. 07. 2001 in Genoa at a demonstration against the G8 summit. The performance consists of the alternation of staged conversations with residents of Athens about the events that took place in the Exarchia district of Athens; of text segments from Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone; of projected film scenes of Exarchia including shots of graffiti featuring the symbol for anarchy (the circled letter A), a memorial stone to Alexis; and of shots of a southern-looking summer landscape and the repeated depiction of Alexis’s death. 30 This takes place in the manner of intermedial post-documentary theatre, which has been performed repeatedly on a variety of stages over the course of the past decade, as 31 Hearing the Political, Sounding Death with Rimini Protokoll and René Pollesch, to name two examples. Images are projected onto the walls, which simultaneously show texts and other visual elements and thus bring the reality beyond the theatre onto the stage. The perspective of the protagonist, performed by the award-winning actress Silvia Calderoni, links the different elements of the performance: The show is Motus’s journey with Silvia, through Silvia’s eyes, among the stones of ancient Hellas, which transforms into immersion in the clashes of modern Greece amid the devastating economic crisis, the anarchists in the Exarchia quarter of Athens, revolts, graffiti, murals and violent repression. ‘Antigone exists’ could be a slogan on one of those huge buildings. 31 The acoustic dramaturgy of the performance is in this case shaped mainly by the contrast between acceleration and deceleration 32 and the use of music; the pace of the performance becomes slower and slower following a fast-paced beginning. At the beginning, Calderoni carries out rapid breathing exercises and squats to punk music. The speed of the physical exercises increases along with the pace of the music, and breathlessness is suggested. The entire post-documentary performance is characterised by a cold aesthetic of video footage, silhouettes in hoodies getting ready to throw paving stones; by visual signs of anarchy; by the contrasting colours of black and red; and by punk music. “Theatre noise” is produced, entering the bodies of the audience members and making it more difficult for them to distance themselves 33 . In addition, the theatre noise communicates meaning, in this case the entire aesthetic of the 1980 s, meaning: “We are spoiling for a riot”. Calderoni does breathing exercises, in this way announcing meta-theatre in sense of the exhibition of theatre as the product of acting technique at the very beginning of the performance. The processual nature is emphasised by making the production process a significant element of the representation, so that Alexis. Una tragedia greca is part of the international body of composed theatre. The pace of the performance slows down in the middle of the performance. The light is focused on the stage, which is otherwise steeped in mostly dark/ orange lighting, and more specifically on the body of the actor who plays the part of Polynices. After a monologue in which he refers to Sophocles’s and Brecht’s Antigone, he throws himself backwards onto the ground, letting his head drop back against the nape of his neck, and stretches out his arms, performing Polynices’s corpse. Calderoni then demonstrates the theatrical production of the grief of the sister/ Antigone for her dead brother. She tells of the rehearsals for the first production of Antigone, in which she sought an emotional connection with her dead brother/ Polynices. Her body doubles over, she rests her arms on the ground and cries. Calm piano music is to be heard simultaneously, and Calderoni demonstrates how she makes her body stiff by tensing her muscles in order to be able to cry more easily later. She explains that she places the microphone between her chest and that of Polynices to create an echo cavity that amplifies her weeping. The demonstration of the production of grief using particular acting styles has an alienating effect, of course. The sobbing, her voice and the piano music create the acoustic space to which Judith Butler, too, refers, when she says that the vulnerability of the other is communicated acoustically rather than optically. The resonant cavity of the two bodies also corresponds to the emotional resonance that is to be aroused, in Aristotle’s Poetics it is éleos: pity. The perception of vulnerability and death here functions primarily through acoustics. An auditory space of pain and of grief is staged, 32 Katharina Pewny (Ghent) which Butler discusses in her critique of media reports from warzones: [. . .] since at the end of the line, it seems, it is precisely the wordless vocalization of suffering that marks the limits of linguistic translation here. The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense. 34 Emmanuel Lévinas’s concept of face is here inextricably linked with a pain that extends beyond verbal language: One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake. But what media will let us know and feel that frailty, know and feel at the limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained? 35 Performances like Motus’s Alexis. Una tragedia greca create traces of death, human vulnerability and grief through the use of various theatrical forms. The acting technique employed makes reference to bourgeois illusory theatre; its display constitutes an alienating effect in line with that of Bertolt Brecht. The performative citation of two canonical theatre styles is unusual in intermedial, post-dramatic theatre because it simultaneously presents authentic grief and demonstrates its production. It enables the doubling of the sense in the sense of the dissensus: Calderoni demonstrates how she artificially produces her grief, whose authenticity is proven by the tears. Because the story is based on Antigone, the grief is intended to appear authentic: the illusion is intended to be successful as the tragic plot is based on the love of a sister for her consanguineous brother. The grief that Calderoni demonstrates with the help of piano music can, simultaneously, never be real in the sense of the Antigone myth because the character of Silvia Calderoni/ Antigone was not personally acquainted with the dead Alexis/ Polynices. The duplication by opposing theatre techniques supports the reversal of the canonical tragic plot carried out by Motus. Motus twists the siblings’ blood ties into the political utopia of the kinship/ brotherhood and sisterhood with the stranger. At first glance it appears to be a dramaturgic misconception to compare the consanguinity of Antigone and Polynices to the political solidarity and empathy of an Italian sympathiser. Critics such as Charles Linsmayer in “Nachtkritik” accuse Motus of superficiality. 36 Upon closer examination, this transfer is a revolt in the sense of turning something around because the concept of consanguinity (in Antigone) is turned into that of political solidarity. The performance makes sense precisely because this periphrasis of the myth takes place: “Goodbye; comrade also means goodbye, brother, for comrade also means brother.” 37 Motus thus continues to write Antigone’s “claim”, as formulated by Judith Butler: What will come of the inheritance of Oedipus when the rules that Oedipus blindly defies and institutes no longer carry the stability accorded to them by Lévi-Strauss and structural psychoanalysis? [. . .] Antigone is for whom symbolic positions have become incoherent, confounding as she does brother and father [. . .]. In some ways Antigone figures the limits of intelligibility exposed at the limits of kinship. [. . .] Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement [. . .]. 38 At the end of the performance the performers bring the audience onto the stage. Like the activation of the audience by the theatre group andcompany & Co. in Der kommende Aufstand (2012), this gives the impression of a didactic reference to political correctness. 33 Hearing the Political, Sounding Death The audience became the chorus in Claudia Bosse’s production of Aeschylus’s The Persians (with Vienna’s theatercombinat, 2006) at the very latest, and Ligna, too, performed Oedipus in 2013. The act of activating and turning the audience into the chorus no longer necessarily corresponds to the politics of aesthetics that I am currently applying with Rancière because it can also be a symptom of the society of the spectacle and an affirmation of the omnipresent imperative of performance. The performance on the stage of a small demonstration, together with the audience, is therefore not the political element of Motus’s performance; it is the continuation of the Antigone myth, which re-aligns the sensory because it is a continuation of “Antigone’s claim”. If there is a re-alignment of the sensory in Alexis. Una tragedia greca, then this is because it is more loyal to brotherly and sisterly love in its Antigoneesque re-definition than the paving stones, motorbike helmets, punk music and the use of the colours red and black might suggest. The employment of the messenger’s speech - one could also read the performance as a messenger’s speech in the sense of a visual documentation of (Athenian) reality - and the evocation of éleos/ pity is part of the classical theatre repertoire. The messenger’s speech and the tragic pity, Brecht’s alienating effects, post-documentary intermediality, acting technique and theatre noise are sampled and not assembled to form a whole by Motus. The acoustic dramaturgy of the revolution in both the human microphone and in Motus’s Alexis. Una tragedia greca does not consist of “spoiling for a riot”. Instead, contemporary performances of dissensus on the street and on the stage are characterised by acoustic dramaturgies of incoherence, of non-accordance, of the non-identity of “sense” and “sense”, of intelligibility and perception, of kinship, belonging and political support. Visual elements such as colours, projections and the stage are of course also central, and yet in this context they are less interesting because they communicate unambiguous, undisrupted signs. The acoustics - the fragmented choral speaking on the one hand, and on the other hand the piano music and sobbing, which stand in contrast to the punk music of the beginning of the performance - build bridges from unjust conditions to mutual political support of individual icons and the many, from art and political movements, and to worldwide empathy/ solidarity, both in the antiglobalisation movement. Both performances, on the street and on the stage, ask explosive questions about human rights 39 , about physical inviolability despite the free expression of one’s opinion, about the right to a dignified burial ritual, and finally about spaces in which democracy can unfold. The employment of theatre aesthetics from Greek tragedy to this end is consistent because, as the director Peter Sellars succinctly put it, it was an acoustic theatre, in which political marginalisation could perhaps be counteracted for a few moments: One of the most powerful images of Greek theatre is this giant ear carved into the side of a mountain - a listening space. The power of Greek theatre is acoustic. It was about creating architecture in which a single voice reaches the top of the mountain. The Greek masks took the voice and projected it further. And the idea is that you make a structure that has a seat for every citizen. . . . So the idea that you’re actually creating this special sound space, listening space, for the voices that are not heard in the senate, for exactly the voices that have been ignored in the corridors of power, as s society you say, wait a minute, unless there is a place we are really hearing them, we don’t have a democracy. We have to take special effort to make sure that these 34 Katharina Pewny (Ghent) voices are heard and included and recognized. 40 Notes 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Art and the Arts” [1967], in: Rolf Tiedemann (Ed.), Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, Stanford 2003, p. 368. 2 David Roesner, Theater als Musik: Verfahren der Musikalisierung in chorischen Theaterformen bei Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef und Robert Wilson, Tübingen 2003. 3 Katharina Rost, “Intrusive Noises. The Performative Power of Theatre Sounds”, in: Lynne Kendrick, David Roesner (Eds.), Theatre Noise. The Sound of Performance, Cambridge 2011, pp. 44 - 57. 4 Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, “Tod/ Narration - Sprechakt und Dekonstruktion: Vom Abtreten als Verharren“, in: Franziska Bergmann, Lily Tonger-Erk (Eds.), Ein starker Abgang, Berlin 2016. 5 Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner: “Introduction”, in: Lynne Kendrick, David Roesner (Eds.), Theatre Noise. The Sound of Performance, Cambridge 2011, pp. XVIII- XXXII. 6 Doris Kolesch, “Natürlich künstlich: die Stimme im Medienzeitalter“, in: Doris Kolesch, Jenny Schrödl (Eds.), Kunst-Stimmen, Berlin 2004, pp. 19 - 38. 7 Matthias Rebstock, David Roesner (Eds.), Composed Theatre. Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, Bristol/ Chicago 2012. 8 Roesner 2012, p. 10, Rebstock 2012, p. 299. 9 Roesner 2012, p. 297. 10 Katharina Pewny, Das Theater des Prekären. Über die Wiederkehr der Ethik in Theater und Performance, Bielefeld 2011, p. 150. 11 Peter Sellars, “Performance and Ethics. Questions for the 21st century”, Peter Sellars interviewed by Bonnie Marranca, PAJ 79 (2005), p. 50. 12 Berenika Szymanski-Düll, “Die grüne Krähe und das Unvernehmen über die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen“, in: Wolf Dieter Ernst, Nora Niethammer, Berenika Szymanski-Düll and Anno Mungen, (Eds.), Sound und Performance, Würzburg 2015, pp. 229 - 240. 13 Pewny 2011, p. 138 f. 14 http: / / ligna.blogspot.be/ 2007/ 11/ diegruppe-ligna-existiert-seit-1995.html, [06. 06. 2013]. 15 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/ Main 2004, p. 308. 16 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill, with an afterword by Slavoi Zizek, London/ New York 2004, p. 13. 17 Ibid., p. 63. 18 Kai van Eikels, Die Kunst des Kollektiven. Performance zwischen Theater, Politk und Sozio-Ökonomie, Paderborn 2013, p. 201 - 208. 19 Rancière 2004, p. 79. 20 Ibid., p. 138. 21 Charlotte Gruber, “Überlegungen zu neuen Dramturgien sozialer Bewegungen”, Vortragsmanuskript, Bayreuth 2012. 22 Sylvi Kretzschmar, “Die politische Rede als public adress system“, Vortrag/ Kongreß Sound und Performance, Universität Bayreuth, 05. 10. 2012. 23 Ulrike Haß, “Chor”, in: Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, Matthias Warstat (Eds.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, Stuttgart 2005, p. 50. 24 Kretzschmar 2012. 25 Ibid., referring to Rancière. 26 Haß 2005, p. 52. 27 Shannon Jackson, Social Works. Performing Art, Supporting Publics, New York 2011. 28 Rancière 2004, p. 139. 29 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, Minnesota 1998, p. 34, p. 38. 30 Gruber, Pewny, 2014. 31 Massimo Marino in: Corriere di Bologna, 31 October 2010, http: / / www.motusonline. com/ uploads/ progetti/ syrma_antigones/ alexis_2010/ rassegna_stampa_en.pdf [23. 05. 2013]. 32 Roesner 2003, p. 165. 33 Rost 2011, p. 45. 34 Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London/ New York 2004, p. 134. 35 Ibid., p. 151. 35 Hearing the Political, Sounding Death 36 Charles Linsmeyer, „Die Explosion der Gehirne“, http: / / www.nachtkritik.de/ index. php? option=com_content&view=article&id=5990: alexis-una-tragedia-greca-dieitalienische-gruppe-motusa-praesentierteine-antigone-variation-beim-zuerchertheaterspektakel&catid=629: zuercher-theater-spektakelNachtkritik [04. 06. 2013]. 37 DVD: Motus, Alexis, Una tragedia greca, 2010, 07: 56. 38 Judith Butler, Antigones Claim. Kinship between Life and Death, Columbia 2000, p. 22, p. 24 f. 39 Christoph Menke, Francesca Raimondi (Eds.), Die Revolution der Menschenrechte. Grundlegende Texte zu einem neuen Begriff des Politischen, Frankfurt/ Main 2011. 40 Sellars 2005, p. 37. 36 Katharina Pewny (Ghent)