Interview by Matthew Raj Webb

Matthew Webb: Against the contemporary backdrop of right-wing nationalisms and populist sentiment across the world; in a country steeped in authoritarian state history (Germany); your ethnography highlights the ‘reflexive’ ethical possibilities of artistic practice in a public theatre institution. What are some of the key ideas and interventions you want to put forward?

Jonas Tinius: Alongside Alfred Gell, I consider it important not to confuse Art with “per se a Good Thing.” In fact, the Nazis created an entire ethico-aesthetic system of judgements of what is good and what is beautiful, what is bad and what is ugly. They appropriated some of the same classical and ancient Western artistic forms, genres, and content that before and after might have been used to celebrate humanity. Theatre, in the German context, was at the heart of this ‘modern problem.’ In State of the Arts,I trace some of the ways in which theatre became a matter of concern for the emerging German state and a central site and practice constitutive of what Louis Dumont has described as the “German Ideology” (1994 [1991]), that is, a particular fixation on the interrelation between autonomy and authority, and self-realization and structure. By looking at how the German state, and after WWII, in particular the Länder [provinces] and cities became patrons of public theatre institutions, I investigate how an ethics of self-formation does not necessarily contradict normative and authoritative contexts of work and play. Furthermore, I study how German theatre—both as a kind of institution and as a specific tradition—became at once a projection screen and stage for the enactment of nationalist ideals, as well as a site and practice that could subvert a focus on national and identitarian heritage.

It was for this reason that I went back to a particular theatre in a small city in the postindustrial Ruhr region to conduct my long-term ethnographic research. Through 18 months of fieldwork in a context where I could incorporate memories of my late father’s engagement as a leftist high-school teacher, as well as my own memories of growing up in this region, I developed an institutional ethnography of one of the first migrant-run theatres in Germany that propagated an anti-nationalist modern theatre aesthetic. Founded by the Italian philosopher, migrant, guest-worker, clown, actor, and director Roberto Ciulli, this theatre understood itself as a place for and of the Bastardo—those without father-land and mother-tongue—and as such exemplified both a culmination of the German logic of state patronage and its starkest rebuttal in a post-migrant logic of transnational becoming. It is precisely the practice of reflection on how one can be both within and in some ways against this German tradition of Bildung and Kultur that got me to think of this theatre as a prism, a public theorizer, itself.

Matthew: Working in a field site in which your participants (and their institutions) are such practiced public theorizers in their own right posed some important implications for the way you conducted the research and writing. Could you please say a little about this?

Jonas: The book is based on many years of what I think of as interlocutorship, sparring partnership, or as my fellow anthropologists call it: fieldwork, participant observation, or simply deep hanging out, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz. I conducted what I think of as a kind of reverse anthropology, which is to say that unlike the classic model of going far from home, I went far to go home. I inversely didn’t like the exoticizing tendencies of an anthropology that sends trained professionals into former colonies to extract knowledge about people they think have no theories about what they do—people, who, in this view, needed explanation for their practices.

In my case, the field of professional German theatre was a highly reflexive field and the Theater an der Ruhr a particular case of an institution that positioned itself already in contrast to not only a long-standing cultural tradition of the educated bourgeoisie, but also in contrast to theories of acting and theatre as mediators of literature. In other words, the field abounded in theorizing about its own practices. This has several consequences for how I conducted fieldwork: My position, first of all, was not unmarked. I was positioned. My work was re-interpreted. I was given reading lists about “anthropological” authors by the in-house dramaturg, which consisted of references to Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Adorno. Critical theory was a staple reference in the field. I needed thus to “catch up” with the theories of this field in order to be able to converse in this field.

For this reason, the ethnography I wrote wasn’t simply about a particular cultural field, but written among theories of culture. Reading in particular James Clifford’s introduction to Writing Culture (1986) reminded me that I would have to accept my writing as an arrangement of competing discourses that already problematize themselves. Many central concepts of anthropological writing—culture, aesthetics, art, practice, performance, ritual, organization—were already marked and I had to distinguish more precisely immanent theories from my etic vocabulary of explanation. Ethnographic terms came already with their own theoretical genealogies. Centrally, I had to position theory not as an analytical phenomenon outside of the field but as a practice constitutive of it.

Matthew: I really appreciated your descriptions of how practitioners ground their intellectual activities in “rehearsals,” in which cultivating and practicing Haltung [attitude] seems central to the Theater an der Ruhr’s broader political and ethical aspirations. As you note, rehearsals are less oriented toward preparing to address public audiences. How then do they enable practitioners to circulate their politics and ethics?

Jonas: Rehearsals, as I witnessed, are the principal modus and locus, that is, the main means by which and place in which the values and forms of the tradition of this theatre are negotiated. This became fairly evident in everyday forms of labor in the organization: the days are structured, morning and evening, around this social institution, important decisions regarding plays are made therein, but they are also forms of ethical reference points for the way in which the actors and agents in the Theater an der Ruhr articulate their professional and personal lives.

Consider the tensions around the different translations of the verb “to rehearse” (which, by the way, is fairly similar in French, répéter). In German, one speaks of “probieren” or “proben,” both of which have English correspondents in the verbs “probing,” that is, trying, experimenting, peeking into a different way of doing things. In the context of the Theater an der Ruhr, proben was precisely not a matter of repeating, learning by heart, as in fact many European theatre traditions since the 18th century have instituted, during which the utmost precision in repeating gestures as intended by a director, or words as written by a playwright, were to be respected. Instead, the rehearsal (die Probe) is a form of enactment—an actual practice that aims at creating a corporeal posture, but also an intellectual conduct, and an ethical stance. It is a forward-facing, prefigurative practice, which combines the work on body with the work on one’s relation towards a role, or a political theme that is being addressed. Rehearsing is a professional, extra-ordinary practice that seeks to incorporate and craft future capacities of being, and in that sense of course speaks, as a social practice, to other forms of everyday and non-quotidian behavior. 

All of this crystallizes in the most frequently used term—a term with quite some modern theatre baggage, as it was used by Brecht, albeit in other way—, the notion of Haltung. Haltung is precisely the combination of the corporeal, the emotional, the intellectual, the social, ethical, aesthetic. To cultivate one’s Haltung, the principal aim of rehearsals, means to cultivate a certain capacity for becoming otherwise. It is a term aimed for my interlocutors at the Theater at overcoming the all-too-common assumption that acting is predominantly being a different person and remaining in that role (epitomized by method acting), or being entirely yourself, without any recourse to fiction (epitomized by documentary performance). Cultivating a Haltung means being able to be and not to be, to be in a role and reflect that constant becoming towards another. This is precisely where the political rests—rehearsals are here understood as the training of a capacity fundamental to acting: the capacity to remain reflexive about one’s comportment, posture, stance in life, whilst also training to be able to be otherwise, to be open to alterity, empathic to other ways of being. 

Matthew: You conclude the book with a reflection on the stakes of art as an ethical field, highlighting the significant risks perceived by Theater practitioners in attempting to make their cultural-political expertise accessible to lay publics. How should we think about such desires among artists to produce culture in closed and restricted ways, in a moment where, for example, our own academic work is saturated with demands to make knowledge public?

Jonas: The longer I worked on and with this artistic field of cultural production, the more it struck me just how many parallels there are between the developments in an increasingly economized academic university setting and the affordances of artistic work. Of course, each national context, or each field of artistic production, just like every academic context, has their different forms of relationship between the call to “open”, “render accessible”, or “democratize” their results. In the field of theatre, which I studied, a series of very specific cultural historic elements played a particular role. Centrally, the experience of the Gleichschaltung (forceful coordination) of the arts to fit a particular Aryan ideology during the Third Reich prompted a very strong reaction against the public instrumentalization of art. This was embedded in a critical reflection expressed most clearly by the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer in his The Eclipse of Reason (1947), when he criticized the collapse of public reasoning through purely instrumental means-ends logic. The Theater an der Ruhr founders argued that theatre should catch up with the other modern arts precisely in its autonomization from an instrumental reason of providing a particular function in society. Its function, they argued, lay in a becoming conscious, or Bewusstseinswerdung, through which actors could prefigure a wider social process.

In this sense, though avant-garde art has certainly also developed forms of inward-looking elitism that contradicted a critical process of reasoning on its own goods, the Theater an der Ruhr, I argue, offered a view to think about the act of cultural production as a process of becoming ethical, becoming conscious through social interaction and inter-reflection. (Besides the archived fact that it was a pioneering institution in its street-theatre, youth projects, and engagement with severely marginalized and ostracized communities.) The questions the actors, directors, and cultural workers in the Theater an der Ruhr asked themselves were thus not about scale—how many people you reach—but about intensity, depth, and understanding—who actually understands so that the conversation can be carried onwards. This is not per se a stance against audiences or against a wide democratic participation, as it is often misunderstood, but against an instrumental logic of the functionalization of culture that I think we would do well to heed as scholars, too.