Post-Drama and «Text for theater» as genres: between literature, theater and performance

Abstract

Modern Ukrainian drama in the 21st century went through such stages of separation as rejection of past relationships (since 2013); liminality as a stage of conditional uncertainty, search for identity and incorporation (according to the concept of liminality by A. van Gennep and V. Turner): The stage of liminality is characterized by active experiments with genres and reveals new
genre formations of post-drama and «text for the theater».

The purpose of the article is to characterize postdrama and «text for the theater» as new genre formations between literature, theater and performance in the context of the concept of liminality.

«Performative turn» and the aesthetics of post-dramatic theater determined the specificity of modern dramatic texts and led to the emergence of new genre formations. Post-drama is a dramatic genre that embodies the playwright's focus on the text as a performative action, through a difficult form, provokes the recipient to create extensive metaphors and associations, forms images of sacred corporeality.

Post-dramatic texts are characterized by the following features: the presence of a character-performer, a narrator who comments on events; involving the technique of estrangement, which forms a distance between the character and the reader, and motivates a state of receptive liminality; the presence of performative notes that indicate the possible actions of the character, the interaction with the audience during the performance, formalizes the performative corporeality; creation of a conditional
space-time of the inner world of a person; the presence of images of sacred physicality; implementation of post-documentary aesthetics of human research through the document (autobiographical material, testimony, fixation of iconic ideological images of the time, images of the classical text in the process of perception and influences); complicated metaphoricality and images-associations; it is possible to place the text in «steps», use photos and images, vocations, poems, etc.

A «text for the theater» is a text intended for a theatrical production, with an actively embodied «draft aesthetic», which manifests itself in ignoring the dramaturgical laws of the artistic representation of events realized in the dialogue «here and now», and reveals a potential focus on restoring these laws in the process theatrical performance.