Il dramma dell’identità. Teatro, identità, politica, (ri-) appropriazione
Topic of the essay is the so called "Identity Politics", which is currently discussed with regard to theatre and the visual arts at numerous places: Who is allowed to represent whom on stage and in the arts in general? And how to deal with the alterity of the other on stage? Activists accuse white artists to appropriate black suffering and to instrumentalise it in order to sell their works. (Hannah Black vs. Dana Schutz) Theatre directors are critizised for their unreflected use of blackface on stage. (Bühnenwatch vs. Didi Hallervorden, Sebastian Baumgarten) Performance groups which bring people of colour or disabled performers on stage are accused of exploitation or paternalism. (Monster Truck, Jerome Bel) Amongst the topics of the discussion there was one of the most important ones how the traditional white European theatre deals structurally with minorities being underrepresented on stage because of their skin colour, their disability or their sexual orientation. Against the backdrop of these debates I would like to argue in my lecture that theatre’s contribution to the debate on identity and diversity lies in its questioning of the very logic of identity as such. Departing from Jan Lauwers‘ production Blind poet and perhaps some other examples I will try to show that this production shows to what extent any positing of identity is based on the construction of a phantasm. Identity is the result of the drawing of a border which establishes a binary opposition between the foreign other outside of us and our self opposed to it. Theatre questions these borders by confronting us with the foreign other within ourselves, with an originary de-position of the origins our identitys are based on.