From Stage to Page: New Forms of Performance Text

If in the contemporary theatre, the performance text became “more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than a product, more manifestation that signification, more energetic impulse than information” (H. T. Lehmann, 2006, 85), then we are in front of a still new phenomena that requires new instruments for its analysis. The performance text could be also defined as a piecing together of different elements, material and conceptual alike that exist only during performance, in the very act of performing, during an event, performance, or, in representation that produce different performance texts, which Alain Badiou calls theatre-ideas (A. Badiou, 2005, 72). This also means that theatre-ideas could not be produced by any other instruments or at any other place, as well as that none of the elements by itself could produce theatre-ideas, or even the text of the performance itself. Precisely, the theatre-ideas come forth only in the (brief) time of its performance, of its representation. Therefore, all these texts could be called ‘open’ texts of the performance, in the sense that they require the spectators to become active co-writers. Can we therefore define the performance text as scenic écriture, collective writing, or hypertext, or stretch text, or even écriture corporelle? And how it can be translated from stage to page, in order to be preserved for future studies? Performance text is impossible without its author(s), so my paper will be an attempt to analyze the concept of the performance text through the works of Croatian director, Oliver Frljic, who is always using the theatre as a performative tool to reach out to audience’s darkest taboos. When he is not deconstructing classical texts, Frljic is presenting his own performance texts that are sometimes based on true facts and sometimes on invented narratives. Frljic prefers “the original politics of performance art: no repetition, no rehearsing and no recording. So the only trace of each performance is an experience shared between you as a performer and the audience” (Frljic, 2016). But what are these traces and how they can be acknowledged? The central goal of such a reflection should be to analyze with precision the creation and meaning of the performance text as a new and unavoidable theatre tool that enlarges the definition of contemporary theatre.