Biopolitics/postdrama project – events on new theatre.

Theatre now still fights with how to adress the new society growing from globalization and the current flow of information. Naturalism is in a state of dying and performance is trying out all possible ways of dealing with the present situation. Postdramatic text has finally made it´s way through as a field where the creation of reality is displayed, giving away the idea of illusion.

Zoembient is written by Johan Jönson who was suggested for the Nordic Litterature Prize in 2008. In this play we bring the biopolitical body into the postdramatic text. It is a body flowed through by history, present and future and of ideologies, production of meaning and dreams.

Here is a presentation of the performance Zoembient - that is also the starting point of the play

The name of the performance, or the working title, is Zoembient. The word is a neologism, a new created word, at the same time a noun, an adjective and a verb (or, more metaphorically as an auxiliary verb). Or do all words need to be specified as a certain word-class?

Anyhow. Zoembient is composed of three other words: zoe, zombie and ambient. The Aristotelian zoe, that signifies diffuse panting life, like between vegetation and insect, between landscape and subject, surroundings and vector, discourse and evolution, redistribution and geology, movement and language, silence and unknown (i.e, and partly in contrast to also Aristotelian but more stratified bios, that has been more influencial and sort of mutated into history and language, from biosphere and biology to conception and intellectual tools with writers like Foucault, Agamben, Hardt and Negri). And then: zombie, meaning something (maybe seemingly) dead, killed, enslaved, not really alive, very hard to kill, or kill again, and that stubbornly and recurrently haunts them and that which have constituted the living death or the dead living. And then: ambient, English (and an active word in the Swedish vocabulary) for surrounding but also in innumerable landscape suffixes, and in a number of musical genres, particularly electronica of different kinds, and as a term for other aesthetical practices. And doesn´t it also make you think of the word ambivalence?

The play is structured in seven different, perhaps very different, scenes or meditations, as we say during the rehearsal period, dialectically combined, i.e interacting with and against each other, also with and against you and us – we don´t know exactly what and how ourselves – and with seams visible, the perception and the aesthetics open.

Premiere November 2009.