Hans-Thies Lehmann

Hans-Thies Lehmann was professor of theatre studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt from 1988 until his retirement in 2010. He has published numerous books on contemporary theatre, on the theory of the theatre, on aesthetic theory, on Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller. The notion of postdramatic theatre was established by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre, summarizing a number of tendencies and stylistic traits occuring in avant-garde theatre since the end of the 1960s. The theatre which Lehmann calls postdramatic is not primarily focused on the drama in itself, but evolves a performative aesthetic in which the text of the performance is put in a special relation to the material situation of the performance and the stage.