As I said, I don’t watch much theatre, because I don’t want to see the routine work of directors and actors who already know how it should be done. What I look for instead are challenges and surprises in the way things are presented—or not presented—on stage. And of course, since I teach at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, most of the performances I’ve seen over the past 15–20 years have been there, created by my students.

Recently, I saw a piece by one of them called Cascade. It was very difficult to describe what I saw. It was extremely dark, and I first had to adjust to the space before I could make anything out. Then I noticed a strange, woolly—or perhaps natural—object or subject, something like an animal or a human; it was impossible to determine, even by the end. The performance lasted an hour and a half. What I saw was a moving body, let’s say, constantly changing its form.

After some time, I thought: “Alright, there must be some kind of performer inside this strange costume—something like a forest, or camouflage, or a monkey, or something else.” But even with that assumption, I was never certain where the head was, where the legs were, because the performer—a dancer—could move in completely different directions.

This raises many questions about the anthropocentric perspective from which we usually view theatre. Perhaps this is the key point: I am interested in performances that search for a post-human world, or a world that is not controlled by us, whose fate is not decided by us. A theatre in which we cannot recognize ourselves. A theatre that does not exist for identification, but instead offers an encounter with something we have not seen before—something difficult to describe, just as it is difficult for me to describe this performance now.

I think this is a key definition of art—of any art: it should not show us what we already know. It should not mirror our lives; instead, it should articulate material, text, images, or sound that we have neither seen nor heard before. This is what makes artistic experience possible. And this is what I am looking for when I go to the theatre.