Musicality as a paradigm for the theatre: a kind of manifesto

In a manifesto of ten theses the author aims to establish the notion of musicality as a paradigmatic principle in creating and perceiving theatre. He outlines how musicality can contribute to, enhance and change working processes in the theatre, be it in naturalistic productions or in a devising context. Key benefits from employing a musical frame of perception for both audiences and practitioners, he argues, are the heightened awareness of form, the productive liberation from the dominance of content and discursive meaning, the self-reflexivity and the potential for a politics of form and perception. The article draws particularly on examples of recent theatre productions from the European (and particularly German-speaking) context, for example by Heiner Goebbels, Michael Thalheimer, Ruedi Husermann or Sebastian Nbling, but the author plans to develop this necessarily restricted manifesto into a wider and historically more far-reaching project in the near future.