Reviewed by:

• Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin by Brandon Woolf
• James R. Ball III

Brandon Woolf’s Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin investigates theatre that addresses and would transform the institutions that house it and the infrastructures that support it. In sum, the book proposes “a negative art of institutional dis/avowal [through which] an institution might embrace its own determinate negation [and] reckon with the particulars of its own contradictions” (14–15). Across the book’s chapters, this initial definition (a paraphrase of Theodor Adorno) develops as a subtle tool for theorizing the ways in which performance can directly and substantially participate in the making and executing of policy.

Woolf begins to elaborate this idea in his Introduction, arguing “performance functions as a performative art of policy” (20). This novel reversal of the conventional performance studies assertion that public policy is performative offers new coordinates from which to investigate, “performance’s potential to utilize the public institutions of its support to reimagine those very institutions from within” (23). The introduction begins with recent history: the protests, debates, and occupation that followed the announcement that Chris Dercon, then curator at London’s Tate Modern museum, would take over as the new director of the Volksbühne theater in the fall of 2017. Woolf’s account of these events models the methodology employed throughout the book: rigorous and detailed archival investigations combined with strategic and illuminating instances of participant observation and original interviews with key figures.

The work is organized into two parts: “State-Stages” and “Free-Scenes.” Each part is composed of two chapters; the first chapter sets the stage for the “particular policy problematic” (21) in question, and the second offers a case study of performance as policy. Chapter 1 begins with the closure of the State-Stage Complex and follows the policy debates that ensued as they moved between parliamentary sessions, backroom negotiations, public press reports, and performances throughout the Complex. For Woolf, this history is “a springboard and strategic counterpoint—a site of dis/avowal—for the chapters that follow” (31). Though rife with moments in which key participants and their performances flirted with modes of infrastructural reimagining, the events of 1993 did not produce the same art of institutional dis/avowal apparent in subsequent cases.

Chapter 2 provides the first such counterpoint, Frank Castorf’s 2012 production Lehrstück. “Re-functioning” emerges in the chapter as a critical conceptual refinement of institutional dis/avowal. Building on Bertolt Brecht’s efforts to “refunction the theatre apparatus itself,” the book argues that Castorf in turn refunctioned Brecht, “to imagine, and subsequently enact, a new kind of public—and publicly supported—theatre in post-wall Berlin” (68–69). What emerges is “an art of dis/avowal that leans into systems of support” to undo them (86). As Castorf has put it in interviews, “Especially if you are funded through tax money […] you have the duty to be subversive. You have to be ungrateful” (86). This approach neither acquiesces to the compromises implicit in working within institutions nor refuses participation in institutionalized systems of support. It accepts the institution, warts and all, as a structural element to be played with, to be challenged even as it is embraced.

Part Two shifts focus slightly from institutions to the infrastructures of support undergirding them, and especially the infrastructures constituting Berlin’s free-scene of independent artists and ensembles. Chapter 3 introduces these infrastructures via an investigation of “the ways performance and memory animate public institutions” (107), specifically the Palast der Republik, the former seat of the East German Parliament. Drawing on Shannon [End Page 579] Jackson and debates between Jacques Derrida and the architect Daniel Libeskind, Woolf asks, “how might a performance institution dis/avow itself by embracing the temporal disjunction of the spectral?” (115). He finds his answer in a group of artists who proposed temporary artistic interventions in the space, the Zwischennutzung initiative, which refused “restorative nostalgia” in favor of a “reflective nostalgia […] that longs for a ‘future that went...

审阅者：

• 制度戏剧：柏林墙后的表演艺术政策布兰登·伍尔夫
• 詹姆斯·R·鲍尔三世

布兰登·伍尔夫（Brandon Woolf）的《制度戏剧：柏林墙后的表演艺术政策》研究了剧院，这些剧院解决并改变了容纳它的机构和支持它的基础设施。总之，该书提出了“一种机构否认/承认的消极艺术，[通过这种艺术]一个机构可以接受自己的明确否定[并]考虑其自身矛盾的细节”（14-15）。在本书的各个章节中，这个最初的定义（西奥多·阿多诺的释义）发展成为一个微妙的工具，用于理论化绩效如何直接和实质性地参与政策的制定和执行。

伍尔夫在他的引言中开始阐述这一想法，认为“表演的功能是政策的表演艺术”（20）。这种对传统绩效研究断言的新颖逆转，即公共政策是表演性的，为调查“绩效利用其支持的公共机构从内部重新构想这些机构的潜力”提供了新的坐标（23）。简介从近代历史开始：时任伦敦泰特现代博物馆馆长克里斯·德尔康 (Chris Dercon) 宣布将于 2017 年秋季接任人民剧院新任馆长后发生的抗议、辩论和占领。这些事件模拟了整本书所采用的方法：严格而详细的档案调查，结合战略性和启发性的参与观察实例以及对关键人物的原始采访。

该作品分为两部分：“状态阶段”和“自由场景”。每部分由两章组成；第一章为所讨论的“特定政策问题”（21）奠定了基础，第二章提供了绩效作为政策的案例研究。第一章从国家舞台综合体的关闭开始，随后在议会会议、幕后谈判、公共新闻报道和整个综合体的表演之间进行政策辩论。对于伍尔夫来说，这段历史是“后续章节的跳板和战略对位点——否认/承认的场所”（31）。尽管主要参与者及其表演与基础设施重新想象模式调情的时刻随处可见，但 1993 年的事件并没有产生随后案例中明显的制度否认/承认艺术。

第 2 章提供了第一个这样的对位法，弗兰克·卡斯托夫 (Frank Castorf) 2012 年制作的《Lehrstück》。本章中出现的“重新运作”是对制度否认/承认的关键概念细化。该书以贝尔托·布莱希特“重新发挥戏剧装置本身的作用”为基础，认为卡斯托夫反过来重新发挥了布莱希特的作用，“在后柏林墙中想象并随后实施一种新型的公共——并得到公众支持的——剧院”（ 68-69）。出现的是“一种依靠支持系统的否认/承认艺术”来消除它们（86）。正如卡斯托夫在采访中所说，“特别是如果你是通过税收资助的[……]，你就有责任进行颠覆。你必须忘恩负义”（86）。这种方法既不默许机构内部工作中隐含的妥协，也不拒绝参与制度化的支持系统。它接受制度，无论其缺点和全部，作为一个可以玩弄的结构元素，即使它被接受，也可以受到挑战。

第二部分将焦点从机构稍微转移到支撑机构的基础设施，特别是构成柏林独立艺术家和团体的自由场景的基础设施。第三章通过对“公共机构的表现和记忆的活力方式”（107）的调查介绍了这些基础设施，特别是前东德议会所在地共和宫。借鉴香农[第579页]杰克逊以及雅克·德里达和建筑师丹尼尔·里伯斯金之间的辩论，伍尔夫问道，“一个表演机构如何通过接受光谱的时间分离来否认/承认自己？” （115）。他在一群艺术家中找到了答案，他们提议在空间中进行临时艺术干预，即“ Zwischennutzung”倡议，该倡议拒绝“恢复性怀旧”，而是支持“反思性怀旧[……]，渴望一个‘过去的未来……’”