introduction: europe, crises, performance
TRANSCRIPT
v
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction: Europe, Crises, Performance Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager 1
Part I Returns
1 The Weimar Republic and its Return: Unemployment, Revolution, or Europe in a State of Schuld 17Giulia Palladini
2 Towards a Nomadology of Class Struggle: Rhythms, Spaces and Occupy London Stock Exchange 37Philip Hager
3 Topographies of Illicit Markets: Trolleys, Rickshaws and Yiusurum 56Myrto Tsilimpounidi
Part II Paradoxes
4 Performing Politics of Care: Theatrical Practices of Radical Learning as a Weapon Against the Spectre of Fatalism 77Florian Thamer and Tina Turnheim Translated from the German by Martin Thomas Pesl
5 Making Time: The Prefigurative Politics of Quarantine’s Entitled 94Cristina Delgado- García
6 Theatrical Nationhood: Crisis on the National Stage 113Louise Owen
7 Staging the Others: Appearance, Visibility and Radical Border Crossing in Athens 134Aylwyn Walsh
Part III Interpreters
8 The Riots: Expanding Sensible Evidence 153Rachel Clements
vi Contents
9 ‘We are Athens’: Precarious Citizenship in Rimini Protokoll’s Prometheus in Athens 171Marissia Fragkou
10 At the Gates of Europe: Sacred Objects, Other Spaces and Performances of Dispossession 193Marilena Zaroulia
11 Economies of Atonement in the European Museum: Repatriation and the Post- rational 211Emma Cox
Bibliography 232
Index 258
1
‘ London- Athens- and- Berlin- we- will- fight- we- will- win’: imagine the slo-gan reverberating as protesters walk down London’s Fleet Street in May 2012.1 The chant of struggle and victory connects the streets of a financial centre of the developed world, the ‘new capital of Europe’ (Rachman 2012), and the locus of a potential Eurozone contamina-tion. An invisible thread connects London, Berlin and Athens!– three cities with loaded past and complex relations to the formation of the European idea!– and their people; this diagonal line, we argue, is instrumental for understanding current articulations of the European idea(l) and its Others, the tension between centre and periphery, Old and New Europe, Europhiles and Eurosceptics.2 This book sets out to understand the role of performance in the making of contemporary, in- crisis, European identities by presenting perspectives from the London– Berlin– Athens axis while also engaging with questions of crisis as it ripples beyond the borders of Europe. We propose that the ‘inside/outside Europe’ conundrum, which marked the tone of the post- 2008 Eurozone crisis, reframes Europe, both the idea and the geopolitical formation, as at once exclusive and privileged. The recent uses of this dichotomy point to the discursive value and in- crisis permutations of notions of inside and outside; the May 2012 slogan attests to such shifts insofar as the ‘we’ who will ultimately rise victorious is juxtaposed with an imagined ‘them’. But who is ‘we’?
‘One protagonist with 103 heads’: this is the German theatre collec-tive Rimini Protokoll’s description of the chorus of 103 amateurs in their 2010 meditation on democracy in its mythical cradle, Prometheus in Athens. In her chapter, Marissia Fragkou discusses this work as an inter-vention on European myth- making processes, as the performance invites the inclusion of repressed and invisible Others in the fabric of a plural,
Introduction: Europe, Crises, PerformanceMarilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager
2 Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance
future Europe. The amateur stage actors were ‘experts’ in their lives as Athens’ citizens. There, in the summer of 2010, ‘we’ stand onstage as a city; in spring 2012, ‘we’ walk London’s streets, but this imagined ‘we’ seems to extend beyond the city’s limits. As bodies occupy and voices overpower habitual cityscapes, this ‘we’ comes into being as collectivity, performing indignation and solidarity with other Europeans. It embod-ies a diverse, direct- democratic, popular and urban subject. Yesterday in London, tomorrow elsewhere; ‘we’ shapes temporary communities but ‘we’ stands firmly against the neoliberal European ‘we’, that is rational, singular and best mirrored in the European Union’s (EU’s) material sign of integration, the single European currency. By expressing an irrational, passionate vision of the world, by producing a performative multipli-city, ‘being a part without exactly being a part’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 155), this collective ‘we’ performs a monstrous (yet ridiculous) threat to the EU’s orthodoxy. Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance maps the performative re- turn of such multiplicities, while considering the methodological challenges that performances of crises and crisis as performance pose for our discipline.
Performance, writes Guillermo Gómez- Peña, ‘as an artistic “genre” is in a constant state of crisis, and is therefore an ideal medium for articulat-ing a time of permanent crisis such as ours’ (2000: 9). Crisis has been a recurrent trope marking the European and global zeitgeist since the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008. This book is concerned with the intersections of crisis and performance in quotidian and artis-tic terms. On the one hand, the crisis brought about a ‘state of emer-gency’, where debt- ridden populations were inflicted with collective guilt, while sacrifices were deemed necessary for a return to ‘normality’. A!glossary of ‘sticky’ (Ahmed 2004) terms, metaphors of natural disaster, plague and illness and geographies of productivity or laziness spread across Europe. This is no novelty: Walter Benjamin, writing in 1940, in the midst of another capitalist crisis when similar metaphors and dis-courses were thriving, invites us to look at crises from a quite different perspective: ‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (1999: 248). On the other hand, performance, both as creative and economic process and product, as labour in the theatrical frame and beyond, in its ephemerality and its relational, intimate and affective registers, is bound to be precarious!– in crisis. Responding to Benjamin’s formulation of the ‘state of emergency’ and understanding performance as that ‘which uses the condition of crisis as its essential trope […], that contains its struggle within the making and its articulation’ (Delgado and Svich 2002: 6– 7),
Introduction: Europe, Crises, Performance 3
Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance does not seek to fetishise or lament Europe, nor to construct another European myth; rather, we ask whether and how performance can unsettle normative narratives on crises and inside/outside binaries.
Metaphysics of Europe
In the midst of a crisis that led philosopher Étienne Balibar (2010) to argue that ‘unless it finds its capacity to start again on radically new bases, Europe is a dead political project’, the Nobel Committee’s unex-pected and controversial decision to award the EU with the Prize for Peace attempted to restore faith in the European project. In October 2012, the Committee saluted the EU for transforming Europe from ‘a continent of war to a continent of peace’ (Europa 2012), fulfilling its mission as laid out in the 1951 Treaty of Paris that founded the European Coal and Steel Community, a first post- Second World War step to a united Europe:
[T]o create by establishing an economic community, the basis of a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts and to lay the foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared. ( EUR- Lex 2014)
Cloaked in a narrative of peace and reconciliation and a pledge to pro-duce a community of ‘shared destiny’, this Treaty and the subsequent 1957 European Economic Community’s (EEC’s) foundational Treaty of Rome reveal how an economic basis consolidates such a political union. Further, the transition from the EEC to the EU in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the rise of neoliberalism; this was a synergy that defined the shape of many European institutions, including theatres, as Louise Owen shows in her reading of the historical intersections of crisis, capitalism and ideology in the foundation and repertoire of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain.
Caught between crisis and celebrations, post- award commentary high-lighted the EU’s role in safeguarding ‘the common interest of our citizens’ (Barroso 2012). An exclusive and excluding logic emerges in these words, assuming economic and cultural commonalities among Europeans that only Brussels’ officials can protect. This logic marks and is marked by what we consider a dominant factor of the current crises: integration, both as a centralised transnational mode of governance (see Delanty 2014; Delanty and Rumford 2005) and a performance of one European consciousness.