Oldal 185 [185]
GENDER AS RITUAL AND ‘POETIC RITUALITY’ IN CONTEMPORARY ‘BIOSCIENCE DRAMA’
impact of rituals as symbolic and communicative actions, all of which are also
constitutive for drama and theater.*° Fischer’s categories show the fundamen¬
tal relation between theater, drama, and ritual practice in general.*' However,
“poetic rituality,” as she conceptualizes it, means that the artwork itself show¬
cases ritual practice by (either) describing a specific literary and dramatic
adaptation of ritual patterns, types, genres, and ways of language usage, and/
or it features a particularly ritualised structure. Hence, “poetic rituality” in
the “Fischerian” sense also arises when a particular ritual or ritual practice
fundamentally shapes the aesthetic construction and the concept of a drama
or a piece of literature.
RITUALISTIC THEATER AS GENDERED LIMINAL PROCESS
IN IGOR BAUERSIMA'S FUTUR DE LUXE
Written in 2002 by German-language Swiss playwright Igor Bauersima, futur
de luxe extensively uses ritual and self-reflecting theatricality by addressing
biomedical issues and religious rituality at the same time. However, while
ritualized cultural practices and all the more sacral rituals anthropologically
serve as coping strategies for the existential challenges of illness and death,
futur de luxe addresses the age of biotechnology as a liminal phase for hu¬
mankind. While Victor Turner considered the adaptation of ritual in drama
and theater as an artistic and innovative liminal process in itself, Bauersima’s
futur de luxe is, on various levels, explicitly playing with aesthetical liminal¬
ity in order to explore the ethical liminality of current biomedical sciences.
Futur de luxe achieves dramatic and theatrical irony by unmasking the inher¬
ent self-destructiveness of a binary gender concept, setting the disembodied
male subject position as a rationalistic and fundamentally atheistic result of
abjection of the “Other”?
The play recounts the story of a shared dinner of the Jewish Klein family
on a Friday night in the year 2020. The father, Theo, mother Ulla, the 25-year¬
old daughter Uschi, and the 24-year-old twin sons Felix and Rudi, meet at the
parents’ house to celebrate Shabbat. While the family argues that they have
never been particularly religious, the daughter insists on the sacral background
of the meal, so that at the beginning of the play the religious ritual of lighting
30 Saskia Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945, Paderborn, Fink, 2019, 28-30,
79-80.
31 See connections between literature and ritual / theater, drama, and ritual in Wolfgang Braun¬
gart: Ritual und Literatur, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1996; Erika Fischer-Lichte: Das Theater der
Rituale, in A. Michaelis (ed.): Die neue Kraft der Rituale, Heidelberg, Winter, 2007, 117-139.
% On the concept of ‘Othering’ in the context of human cloning see Solveig Lena Hansen:
Alterität als kulturelle Herausforderung des Klonens. Eine Rekonstruktion bioethischer und
literarischer Verhandlungen, Münster, Mentis, 2016.
* 183 ¢