Postdramatic Stress Syndrome: Dood Paard's medEia at P.S. 122

Abstract

Art—or at least the kind we most like to write about—is almost always political, whether it is inter/national or personal; and though TDR has already taken this up in its “War and Other Bad Shit” issue, the topic remains center stage. In his review of Dutch theatre troupe Dood Paard's medEia, Jacob Gallagher-Ross notes the emergence of “a new age of the chorus” in which spectatorship becomes inseparable from paralyzed witnessing and Medea's tragedy is reconceived as a metaphor for the West's tragic relations with the East. Laurietz Seda explores Guillermo Gómez-Peña's recent performance/installation Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium, a fluid piece that, like much of the artist's recent work, addresses the xenophobia and “war on difference” that underlies the US's ongoing War on Terror. The Burmese stand-up trio the Moustache Brothers is the subject of Xan Colman and Tamara Searle's personal account of how performance can be both art and resistance in a contradictory and charged political regime.

Postdramatic Greek Tragedy

“…According to Jacob Gallagher-Ross, "Dood Paard's postdramatic aesthetic banishes dramatic action from the stage so we can begin to see it clearly again" not in our art, but in the contemporary world in which we live. 60 This is a clear rejection of drama's need for "wholeness, illusion and world representation" as the "model of the real," 61 instead turning the focus of the theatrical experience clearly onto the spectators and their subjective perceptions of story, of character, and of the act of representation.…”