GAIA THEATRE
No lockdown lasts forever.
Thomas Oberender
The word ‘Gaia Theatre’ first came to my mind during the coronavirus period, during those weeks of lockdown when we were only allowed to go to our workplaces or buy everyday necessities under strict safety precautions in justified cases. Looking back, this period did not last long, but it was drastic and a collective experience in many countries. Like most people at the time, I lived mainly at home, sat on the balcony and did most of my work on the computer. I mainly met people online. Road traffic had all but disappeared from the city during those weeks and there were no aeroplanes in the sky.
In previous years, we had cleaned our old balcony once a month to remove a black film of fine dust that had settled on the grey stone floor, chairs and white window sills due to the exhaust fumes from road traffic. Now it had disappeared. The news at the time showed satellite photographs of northern Italy, which suddenly became visible again from space, with all its lakes and forests, towns and villages that had long been hidden under a smog cover. The rivers became clean again and fish could be seen in the clear water.
Corona was the great disruption that no one had expected. The pandemic achieved something that no social movement, no action by environmental activists or decisions by politicians could ever have achieved. It pressed the pause button on society, brought global transport to a virtual standstill, disrupted supply chains and created a feeling of helplessness in the face of the many deaths and existential threats to working life, as there were no words or concepts for these processes to begin with. New vaccines were invented, new safety concepts and never before had there been so much talk of a ‘turnaround’: transport transition, climate transition, construction transition, health transition, energy transition, raw materials transition.
The little virus hit the modern world to the core and created a broad, critical awareness of how we humans treat the earth. The virus did not come from the wild, but humans brought it from previously untouched habitats to Wuhan, to the market for wild animals or to laboratories. The term Anthropocene, previously more familiar to climate researchers and geologists, became a familiar word in the course of the pandemic and conveyed very clearly that the impact of our species, at the latest with the above-ground detonation of the first atomic bomb, resembled a force of nature whose traces can be detected in the sediments of the entire globe. Corona has helped us to look at this in a more affected and humble way.
With SARS-Cov-2, Gaia returned, the Mother Earth of Greek mythology, a mother without romance, who gave birth to Titans, one-eyed Cyclopes and gigantic sons with a hundred arms and fifty heads. The giants emerged from the blood of her emasculated husband Uranos, and Gaia repeatedly devised ploys to ensure that the life she had given would survive. The mutations of the corona virus are a reminder of the tenacity with which life, life itself, adapts and finds new ways to pass on life itself.
There was something off-putting about the success of this virus, which has been difficult to contain and has changed our social world at almost every level. How could our man-made advances and systems prove so unstable? In the past, this question would have been directed at God, but now it is directed at us. Placing ourselves, our own reason and drive at the centre of world affairs was a revolutionary achievement in historical terms. It stood at the beginning of the modern era, was later called the ‘Renaissance’ in the 19th century and the theatre also played a part in its success.
In the 16th century, ‘Olympic academies’ were founded in northern Italian cities, which, as in Vicenza, were interested in revitalising the ancient sciences and arts and whose members conducted independent and methodical research using new methods in disciplines such as mathematics, architecture, the art of war, astronomy and music. These academics built the first free-standing theatre since antiquity, although there was no ‘contemporary literature’ for this type of stage at the time. Their ‘Teatro Olympico’ in Vicenza therefore opened in 1585 with Sophocles’ »Oedipus the King”. What was new was not the literature, but the idea of the theatre as a closed box in which the living and painted images of the world were organised according to new principles.
From the outside, the Teatro Olympico resembled a Roman theatre. However, the architect Andrea Palladio covered the building and enclosed it with walls that did not allow any daylight or noise from outside into the interior. This academy thus invented the theatre as a black box in which the image of the world was shown in the decor with linear perspectives as in a camera obscura. This ‘peep-box theatre’ still characterises the Western theatre tradition today. In it, the central perspective, which had previously been developed in garden design, painting and architecture, was now used to create a stage set that suddenly appeared astonishingly realistic and deep. The portal, which still had three arches in Vicenza, made the scene appear like a moving picture.
In this construction, the human eye became the focus of a representation of the world organised according to rational principles. To this day, theatres check the sightlines in the auditorium before a performance premieres and the closer they get to the ideal viewpoint, the more expensive the tickets become. The academics from Vicenza invented a new instrument, a magic box that could show the world as truly as never before. With this building, the ‘Olympic Academy’ created an ‘island’ in the city, a self-contained world within the world. On the ceiling of the building above the rows of seats, you could now see a painted sky, with no wind or birdsong coming in, no sunlight and no view of the sea. Over the centuries, gods, goddesses and spirits appeared on it less and less often, but more and more exclusively us.
This experimental stage of the Olympic academics of Vicenza, accompanied by similar new buildings in other cities in northern Italy, invented the stage as an anthropo-scene in the modern sense. The Teatro Olympico in Vicenza, with its central-perspective architecture, its revival of an interpersonal acting culture and its reason-led dramaturgy, helped to instil the new spirit of scientificity, rationality and progress in society and make it feel ‘natural’, so that it ultimately led to the spirit of the Anthropocene, which splits atoms and invents machines that build machines.
The vast majority of the theatre of the Western world still takes place in this magic box. For centuries, it has accustomed us to considering only that part of the ‘world’ that can be shown between people as relevant and presentable on stage. Every crisis, every problem only appears on stage when it manifests itself as the turbulence in interpersonal relationships that compels us humans to act. There is no theatre about happy people. They play the ‘world’ and at the same time misunderstand it in a very fundamental way as the social world as it appears on the modern stage.
A different lockdown has separated us from the real world with its diverse forms of life, all its actors, each with their own agenda and intelligence, since modern times. It was caused by the ‘virus’ of anthropocentrism, that exaggerated self-attention to the human ego and the social sphere that has characterised Western theatre ever since. Against this virus, Antoine Artaud developed his vision of an alchemical and cruel theatre and, in a completely different way, artists such as Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Mette Ingvartsen, Alexander Gieschen, Romeo Castellucci, Eva Meyer-Keller or Thom Luz, to name but a few, who work in the black box and yet bring things, machines, various species, elements such as fire or water and technology-based images and actors into play with us.
In the mid-1970s, scientist and inventor James Lovelock, together with biologist Lynn Margulis and her research into symbiogenesis, developed the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, according to which all life forms on Earth can be understood as a single organism that creates and stabilises the conditions of life itself. In the sentence: ‘In nature nobody lives alone’, which can be heard again and again in the science fiction film adaptation of Cixin Liu’s Trisolaris trilogy, Lovelock’s thoughts still resonate today.
At the age of one hundred, Lovelock once again turned to the future of the Earth from a completely different perspective, describing the transition of life, of life itself, from biological bodies to technical bodies under the title ‘The Novocene’. For Lovelock, this coming age of hyperintelligence began the moment machines began to build machines that humans could no longer make themselves. The constantly accelerating advances in computer technology, generative AI and biotechnologies, which make technically controlled evolution possible, indicate to him that, in addition to the evolution of life in the biological sphere, there will also be life in the technosphere.
However the evolution of theatre as an art form develops, it will be shaped by our fresh realisation that in nature no one lives alone, as well as by the technology-based developments around us, which are becoming increasingly complex and effective in our lives and those of other species. Things are increasingly developing their own agency, a power that has always attracted us humans - from magnetism and radioactivity to the wood of the marionette or puppet, with which the player on stage enters into a connection with the non-human, animates it and is equally determined by its being, its heaviness and mobility.
The ‘Gaia Theatre’ is therefore not a return of the theatre to the outside and inevitably under the open sky and into the green. Nothing about it is retro. What is essential for the ‘Gaia Theatre’ is the test for the virus of anthropocentrism within ourselves and the attempt to keep our eyes open for all that is powerful next to us, as fellow inhabitants of this planet, as a technical system or another species, which then no longer appears as an unwanted incident like a moth fluttering across the scene in the spotlight, but as a welcome companion.
There are dramaturgies that help to move us a little away from the centre of the action, that open up to the moment and give other actors, for example the audience, a real presence. For many years, Norwegian theatre artists Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller have been developing many more sets, films and pre-rehearsed scenes for their Ibsen performances than just those that can be seen on stage on a particular evening. From the pool of over 200 pre-produced hours of the respective performance, they present six or ten hours each evening, depending on the mood in the theatre and their own. In this way, each evening is structured as an original and becomes the ritual of a time that involves those present. John Cage developed dramaturgies for his pieces that are based on the I Ching or, like his ‘Music Circus’, on a porous encounter between different orchestras and their guests that is not predetermined except for the time and place.
So the challenging thing about this idea of theatre is the fact that we are the ones making it. How could we take ourselves out of the play, or at least take a step back and give our own ability, thinking and dominance a more modest space? At the moment, these attempts are taking place above all in areas that belong to the periphery of the performing arts, in auteur artistry or the new circus. This includes a new form of work with animals that is based less on training and more on humility and mutual discovery. Judith Zagury develops such new inter-species projects in her ShanjuLab and they have had an impact on the work of many theatre companies in Switzerland and France. Puppetry and the New Circus as an ‘art of succeeding’ based on the non-linguistic dialogue of humans with objects and animals have older and at the same time obviously very contemporary approaches to mitigate the virus of anthropocentrism.
But of course this will not make the ‘peep-box theatre’ disappear overnight. It is a sophisticated instrument on and with which we have learnt to play skilfully. With its figures and as-if situations, it is one of the most highly developed instruments of the human mind. In it, our human knowledge becomes behaviour in its entirety while remaining non-punitive, emotional and experimental. Within this box, nothing is created forever and reinvents the present every day, even if the box is centuries old.
A new Gaia consciousness is evident on this Olympic stage today in everything we relate to there, in the change of dramaturgies and the conception of the figure, which is already only something ‘human-like’ in Botho Strauss’ play »The Similars”, as well as in the cybernauts of the plays by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg. The age into which this instrument of the academic Olympians has led reveals the most diverse developments within it, which are slowly leading out of it again. For the growing awareness of the limitations, history and dangers of anthropocentrism is changing this theatre from within. Just like the desire of the actors to incorporate into their play whatever else proves to be vital in life.
The voice, the body, writing, dialogue, mind and knowledge have detached themselves from the human body and form digital doubles that increasingly speak and interact with us, surrounding and guiding us as assistants. As early as 2006, more machines were connected to the Internet than people. They are already playing with us, just as we do with animals or things. Robots or a curious octopus appeared in Stefan Kaegi’s plays. The things themselves approach us like animals. In a Chekhov performance, the set designer Katrin Brack had huge spotlights approach the actors from the floor like curious creatures, circling around them thanks to their expansive mechanics and observing them like large, non-human eyes.
Even the Symbolists brought the random sounds of nature to the stage, animals and the wind in the trees as well as the chime of the bell in the church tower. All of this was stage text for them. We can, as many artists do, leave the theatre, seek open places, relate to other species and non-human forces or objects, but actually leaving anthropocentrism behind is much harder. It is possible in mediation, ecstasy, spirituality or encounters with everything that is not human. Much of this can already be discovered today in the diverse landscapes of contemporary theatre. And just as the ancient Greeks or Romans played in their theatre until their age disappeared, we too will probably continue to play in this Olympic box until a new age leads us out of it of its own accord. Because no lockdown lasts forever.