Oldal 184 [184]
BIRTE GIESLER
bioscience drama on human cloning and ritualised identities. Juli Zeh’s Corpus
Delicti premiered in 2007 and approaches biomedicine from a slightly different
angle as it portrays German society in the year 2057 in the form of a “health
dictatorship” where sexual partnerships and family systems have turned out
to be highly ritualised cultural practices dictated by German authorities, rely¬
ing purely on DNA criteria.’ Felicia Zeller’s Wunsch und Wunder [Desire and
Miracle] is a grotesque play about the actual reproductive medicine business,
poetically mirroring the topic of reproduction and the sarcastic criticism of
some current tendencies in reprogenetics. Part of the play’s “poetic rituality”
relies on linguistically repetitive patterns and extremely self-reflecting and
self-referring intertextuality and intermediality, such as quoting the hard rock
band “Black Sabbath” (named — famously — after a satanic ritual.)’* “Biosci¬
ence drama” lends itself to the researching of the inner connection between
ritual, drama, and gender. Drama per se is an artistic genre where the physical
body is particularly relevant as drama carries the intention to be performed
inherently: the characters emerge physically in front of the “reader” who him¬
self is a “co-reader” as part of the audience that is physically present. The
physical human body, however, has long been recognized as an intersection
between “nature” and “culture” whereat current biomedical developments lead
to an increased blurring at this intersection.” Literary drama deals with and
reflects on language and the body as the two major tools of human cognition
whilst also being the tools of ritual. Bioscience drama reflects on up-to-date
praxeologist cultural theories conceiving of personal and collective identities
as embodied products of ritualized repetition of social enactment. On an aes¬
thetic level, “bioscience drama” features various aspects of “poetic rituality.”
WHAT IS ‘POETIC RITUALITY ’?
As Saskia Fischer points out in her comprehensive study on Ritual und Ritual¬
ität im Drama nach 1945 [Ritual and Rituality in post-1945 Drama], the main
attributes of rituals are repetition, a formally structured and standardized
process, performativity, significance, self-referentiality, an elaborated aestheti¬
caland symbolic presentation, and a deliberated staging, as well as the social
” Juli Zeh: CORPUS DELICTI, Hamburg, 2007. Playbook courtesy of Rowohlt Theater Verlag.
Klaus Miehling: Gewaltmusik Musikgewalt. Populäre Musik und die Folgen, Würzburg,
Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, 39; Felicia Zeller: Wunsch und Wunder, Theater heute 3
(2015). Particularly on Zeller’s criticism of technology see Birte Giesler: “Eine Komödie liegt
auf der Hand.” Friedrich Diirrenmatts Theatertheorie und Technikkritik in Felicia Zellers
Wunsch und Wunder, in K. Dreckmann — M. Butte — E. Vomberg (eds.): Technologien des
Performativen. Technologien des Performativen, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2020, 317-327.
Erika Fischer-Lichte - Anne Fleig (eds.): Körper-Inszenierungen. Präsenz und kultureller
Wandel, Tübingen, Attempto, 2000, 9-10.
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