Amsterdam School of the Arts
February 17 - 19, 2006
International conference on postdramatic theatre

An international conference on postdramatic theatre with Hans-Thies Lehmann, Professor of Theatre Studies at the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt. Supported by the Theatre School, the University Theatre in Amsterdam, DasArts, Theater Gasthuis and Maatschappij Discordia.

Where has the post-dramatic perspective taken us? What comes after drama, where are theatre-makers heading towards? Where and how do we ‘re-enter’? If in the course of this conference artists, dramaturges, scientists and producers are willing to exchange, and a set of concepts can be collected of words that help to formulate what it is that keeps us returning to the theatres, Na(ar) het theater – After Theatre? will have served its purpose – to move beyond, back and ahead towards theatre.

“It’s not a question of site-specific-performance vs. rehearsed acting, state-theatre vs. ‘free scene’; not the destruction of the boundary between performer and visitor, stage and auditorium, but the undermining of these distinctions is the effect on the theatre after the end of drama, history, humanism, the Western canon, the Gutenberg-galaxy, the colonial occidental phallogocentric civilization – progression as transgression, making the petrified circumstances dance: Trans-Theatre Express.”

Alexander Karschnia, ‘The Drama of Drama, Na(ar) het theater – After Theatre?’, Amsterdam 2007