Oldal 184 [184]
OCR
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, relying 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.)’* “Bioscience 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 himself 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 aesthetic 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 Ritualität 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 aestheticaland 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. «12 +
