Ambiguous Factuality and Fictionality in Contemporary Swiss Performance Theatre

In Swiss independent theater one can experience many pieces devised from autobiographical and/or researched material—deemed documentary theater or maybe theater of the real—and just as often can be led down a puzzling path of ambiguous factuality and fictionality. A truthful account can be spun around and turn out to be made up, a fictional tale can emerge as painfully true after all, and in some cases the entanglement is so intricate that one never really knows what to mistrust and what to believe. My research is concerned with theater that dances or stumbles over the threshold between factuality and fictionality. I ask what its creators do, how they go about it and what they try to clarify by obfuscating fact and fiction. In 2013 the Basler Dokumentartage, titled “It’s the Real Thing”, took a look at the performing arts trend towards playing with fact and fiction—especially in autobiographically grounded performances. Since then an increased interest in dramaturgical and performative strategies that challenge the boundaries of fictionality and factuality can be observed in the Swiss independent theater scene. The discourse back then saw such strategies primarily in the service of constructivist questioning of the concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’.1 More recent artworks, however, show an increasing differentiation of methods and motives in creating ambiguous modes of fictionality. Many aspects of the dramaturgical and staging strategies for the establishment, strengthening and subsequent deconstruction of factual modes of representation that artist Boris Nikitin developed and recorded in various auto-theorizing essays in the early 2010s are still valid.2 However, the topics, discourses and identities approached with these strategies have shifted considerably. In particular, artists who create theater from feminist, BIPoC, queer and/or crip perspectives today use autobiographical and autofictional methods, ambiguous identities and narratives in order to position themselves in theatrical and social discourses.3 The versatility of these methods, which are used productively in a wide range of thematic discussions, is impressive. My PhD research at the University of Bern thus examines ambiguous modes of fictionality and factuality in various examples of contemporary independent Swiss performance theater. On the one hand, I analyze the dramaturgical and performative strategies employed. On the other hand, I investigate the discursive framings and emanations within the examined performances and the links to overarching discourses in theater and society.

Keywords: Factuality and Fictionality, Documentary Theatre, Autofictionality, Dramaturgical Strategies, Contemporary Performance, Switzerland