Quorum: Martin Harries
When: Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 5:30 PM -
Where: Pinter Studio
"Only Disconnect: Theater and Assemblage"
This event is in-person, all are welcome, and it’s free to attend.
Abstract: Heiner Goebbels, whose theatre pieces combine surprising musical and visual elements, rejects “collage” as a description of his work. This rejection illuminates a problem in his theatre pieces, but also in other strands of postdramatic practice and contemporary art: if not according to the logic of collage, how do the parts relate? What ideas of relation drive this practice, and what sorts of aesthetic and political questions does a drive toward non-relation and disconnection raise? The main object of this paper will be Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge, a piece with no actors which includes (in his words) “acoustic documents of voices from Papua New Guinea, voices of Indians from Colombia, historical recordings of Greek voices, an interview with Claude Lévi-Strauss and a political speech by Malcolm X.”
Martin Harries is Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine and works on twentieth-century theatre, modernism, and theory. His most recent book is Theater after Film (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and he recently introduced a performance text by Asher Hartman in The Georgia Review (Summer 2025). His previous books are Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (Fordham, 2007) and Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford, 2000).