Beginning
An introduction by Sabine Pochhammer
"How time passes! Oh, my goodness,
how time passes!" (Chekov)
Where a beginning is made, an end is always inevitable. Regardless of what we do, we still find ourselves in the middle of time. Yet time is a very remarkable thing.. Although we cannot grasp it with our senses, we still have a relationship to it. And to judge by our language, it is even alive: it sometimes presses us; and if we do not keep up, it runs away from us and we have none left. When it does return, it is sometimes too long and we have to kill it.
Thus is time and - this is the paradox of time – at the same time is not. After all, what is time ultimately? An entity, a medium, a construction? If we reflect on time, we have to admit with Augustine that we only know what time is as long as we refrain from reflecting upon it. Nevertheless, we cannot escape from it, for our existence is temporal; it is, according to Heidegger, being toward death. And since the enigma of time, despite the efforts of the whole range of sciences, remains still unsolved and we remain its slave, time is an enduringly fascinating phenomenon, and reflection on time is always of interest, as it is now, for instance, at this very moment. Although our reflection and speculation on time underwent a conceptual shift at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the theory of relativity; although we now know that clocks do not tell the same time everywhere, but rather always in relation to their acceleration; and although the foundations have been pulled from underneath Newton's "absolute time", in the lifeworld we still remain locked within the inertial system of an absolutely and fatally elapsing lifetime. To a certain extent, our usual model of perceiving time as a linear progression is a product of the way in which we live, a product of the teleology of the Christian world-view, of the precision of chronometry and of the development of a modern economy upon which the standardization of time is dependent. This linear world-view seems to be confirmed by the irreversibility of the biological, psychological, and thermodynamic trajectory of time [Zeitpfeil]. Cyclical representations of time, such as are to be found in Buddhism or even in modern physics, are often cited as a way out. The physicist, Stephen Hawking, for instance, conceives of the universe as boundlessly self-enclosed and therefore having no need of a beginning or end. Yet these cyclical representations of time are even more unsettling, if they are taken radically enough, namely as the "eternal return of the same". Thus the stoics believed that every single person will live again and again with the same people, have the same experiences and perform the same activities, and not just once, but over and over again, without end - a profoundly unsettling idea which, if it were taken as seriously as it deserved, would doubtlessly entail serious moral consequences.
In spite of this hopeless situation of a temporalization which will always have preceded us and is thus inescapable, we no longer seem to suffer today from the baroque obsession with having to experience time as the destroyer, as expressed in the allegories of the grim reaper or father time. We seem rather to be suffering instead from the intoxication of an infinitely accelerating speed which has taken hold of a modernity obsessed with the idea of flying away at the speed of light like Einstein's twin, in order to retard or even stop the ageing process. In reality, however, we merely seem to fall into what Paul Virilio has called the "racing standstill" [L'inertie polaire] - we fall into a medial coma.
The figure of the cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, who in1991 had to remain in the space station MIR five months longer than planned because his country, the Soviet Union, fell apart while he was away, inspired adventurous, journalistic fantasies. According to the reports, the cosmonaut floated in space alone and forgotten, while his country sunk into chaos below; no one felt responsible for him any longer, nor were there sufficient funds left to bring him back to earth. Andrei Ujica's film 'Out of the Present', which Paul Virilio's contribution to Theaterschrift explores, and which documents the months Krikalev spent in space, shows how the event served the purposes of legend-forming. The cosmonaut was never alone in the MIR and far from forgotten. So what is expressed by this Romantic stylization of Krikalev as a galactic knight, who has fallen out of time and is cut off from all earthly relations, is primarily something about ourselves and our longing to go "beyond time." The idea of such an "outside" relieves us for a moment from the relentlessness of the passage of time and allows the utopia of a different time or temporal order to appear, one in which our earthly laws are no longer valid and which is not characterized by speed, economic effectivity and linearity.
In view of the acceleration which has become the defining trademark of the modern and the postmodern, and in view of the development of the most recent computer- communications technologies, which cause categories like time and space to vanish within the fiction of a global ubiquity, the theatre has to many poeple become increasingly anachronistic, antiquated, and dull. It no longer seems able to compete with the fast media. Yet for some this is precisely the source of the theatre's utopian potential, its "other" experiential and perceptual possibilities, and its political dimension. Having, in economic terms, fallen out of step with the times, the theatre, as in Christoph Marthaler's inimitably comic and strange productions, tells of those who have themselves fallen out of time. Of those who cannot keep pace with the new fashion of omnipresence and comprise society as the moment of inertia in an accelerated mass: the unemployed, the untimely, the harmlessly obsessive neurotics and the dull brutes who pass their lives in a half sleep. Yet, the "discovery of slowness" in the theatre does not always have to be interpreted so programmatically. In a more fundamental way, recent productions have introduced time as a constitutive medium. Time itself is presented and made aesthetically accessible as duration and repetition, but also as fragmentation and accelerated tempo. That time is influenced by our perception is a commonplace everyone knows. When things are going well it flies by, but when one is waiting it creeps by at an unbearably slow pace. At the same time, however, and the theatre demonstrates this very well in its explicit thematization of temporal sequences, our perception is substantially moulded by temporality. We perceive in different ways sequences occurring at different speeds. An increasing acceleration and simultaneity of sequences allow us to perceive more while experiencing less. Without openly declaring itself political, the theatre demonstrates how the structures of temporal flow influence our perception and our cognitive abilities and how the management of time, like all management, signifies power.
The contributions in this issue of Theaterschrift analyse our general relationship and the personal relationship of the authors to time, or else they reflect a particular aesthetic rapport with it. First, Wolfram Hogrebe provides an introduction to the philosophical concept of time and gives a diagnosis of our culture as one obsessed with the desire for the present. Hans-Thies Lehmann demonstrates in his essay how temporality itself has become both a theme and a mode of presentation in recent theatre in the last few years. The Japanese choreographer and dancer, Saburo Teshigawara, develops a very personal, bodily rapport to time from the perspective of dance in a text which structurally reflects the ephemerality of the topic. The dramaturge, Stefanie Carp, then describes the slow theatre of Christoph Marthaler as one which gives time to the voicelessness of those without power.
For Robert Wilson, stage-productions are, from the outset, constructions in time and space in which an awareness of temporality is already inscribed within the principle of their construction. Eimuntas Nekrosius reflects on the transitoriness facing every theatre performance, by contrast with the cinema, literature, and the fine arts. Hans Peter Kuhn completes the spectrum by addressing the topic from the perspective of a composer working in the most temporal of all the arts, music. And, with Manfred Weber, Jo Fabian travels in time through history, repetitions, and perceptions.
As already mentioned, Paul Virilio's article treats the documentary film 'Out of the Present', by the Rumanian director Andrei Ujica, a film which ironically disavows the myth of space-flight and its ever temporal utopias. Finally, Jean-Paul Manganaro analyses the reduction of historical time and the creation of a poetic time in Carmelo Bene's paraphrases of Shakespeare. "My time is your time / When you're in love / And time is what you / Never have enough of / You can't see or hold it / It's exactly like love", writes Lou Reed with disarming simplicity in Robert Wilson's 'Time Rocker', thereby combining two ephemera which can, as it were, be neither grasped nor held, but which nevertheless hold us captive and are capable of enslaving us. Thus we remain exposed to the volatile and violent condition of time. It has merely ceased bothering us any longer.
Of course, this issue does not answer the question of time. An answer seems to need more than the sum of its partial answers. Although this "more" is just as metaphysically dubious as the question in general, for it suggests that there is an answer to be found, if one were only wise enough to find it. Yet time seems to be one of those concepts which forever eludes its respective definitions. - And thus we are held captive in its openness and in its enigma.
Contents:
Beginning
An Introduction by Sabine Pochhammer
7
Fragment of Time: Transformations of the Experience of Time in the Present
A Text by Wolfram Hogrebe
17
Time Structures/Time Sculptures: On Some Theatrical Forms at the End of the Twentieth Century
A Text by Hans-Thies Lehmann
29
White Time
A Text by Saburo Teshigawara
49
Slow Life is Long: On the Theatre of Christoph Marthaler
A Text by Stefanie Carp
65
Time Has No Concept
An Interview with Robert Wilson
79
"The older I get the more uncertain become"
An Interview with Eimuntas Nekrosius
97
The Sound of Time
An Inteview with Hans Peter Kuhn
107
Time is Not an Hour of Day
An Interview with Jo Fabian
125
The Ruins of the Future
A Text by Paul Virilio
143
Condensations
A Text by Jean-Paul Manganaro
151
Biographies
158