Staging Flight : The Theater as a Transitory Space ¹

Abstract

Starting from theater activities which intervene in the 2015 refugee crisis in Germany and elsewhere the article states a long lasting relationship between the stage of tragedy and asylum politics. Looking back to the dramaturgy of flight and asylum as it evolved in the Greek polis in the fifth century BCE it sketches the history of theater as a transitory space which from its beginning has been set up to negotiate asylum and grant temporary space, time and speech to those who are forced to flee und seek shelter. It outlines a dramaturgy of flight by comparing Aeschylos’ tragedy “The Suppliants” to Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Charges” in relation to the logics of asylum procedures which come into play. While Greek tragedy used structured procedural forms which defined the role of the incomers, the role of the host and the forms of dialogue und ritual they engage, in the postdramatic transcription by Jelinek the procedures and their addressees are uncertain, it blurs the line between refugees and hosts and decomposes the spatial and institutional frameworks in which they are supposed to encounter. The article thus discusses how the template of tragedy is transformed in negotiating an asylum policy which withholds the status of legal subjects to asylum seekers, forcing them into provisonary arrangements of indefinite temporality). It also discusses how the structure of theatrical space is responding to arrival and shipwreck situations (not only in the island of Lampedusa) which redefine our positions as spectators.