For my research I have encountered Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre, which I found very useful for the clear explanation he provides about postdramatic theatre in a historical context.

To talk about postdramatic theatre it is essential to understand that this refers to a theatre that doesn’t follow the ‘rules’ of drama anymore. These are the rules that traditionally ensured the logic and form of a play, at the same time they limited it; for example, the classical unities of action, time and place. We can find this rules in Aristoteles’ Poetics and examples of them in Western plays written before 1900. After this time something changed in drama, as Lehmann espouses ‘a crisis of the discourse form of theatre itself occurs’.

At this time theatre entered the age of its experimentation, and as other art practices it hasn’t stop experimenting and evolving. Some of this experimentation involve playing and challenging the concept of audience, text and space; and even decomposing itself. ‘From the decomposition of the whole of a genre into its individual element develop new languages of form’ (Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre). Through decomposition different layers of the whole theatre production came separate: characters and audience, body and language. An through these changes a new range of possibilities opens.