The Viet Nam Diskurs

was a play* written by the Swedish-German artist, writer and filmmaker Peter Weiss that had its premier at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt
 on 20.03.1968, directed by Harry Buckwitz. Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss created the stage and costume designs that had outstanding audience responses. The same year the play was performed in Rostock as Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss exchanged actively with the intellectual scene in the GDR. The play itself was a mark stone for the documentary theater – a notion established by Weiss and created several scandals in the BRD as it consciuosly took a stance to use the theater stage as a political mobilization and education device. The most known theater scandal was the fundraising campaign of the director Peter Stein after the performance of Viet Nam Diskurs at the Kammerspiele Munich the same year. The sit and go-ins that went along with the play from 1968 in Frankfurt and Munich were part of a series new theater protests. The protest events around the play also asked for a change in the work relations inside the institution like the Mitbestimmungstheater (participation theater) by Stein. The famous play has so far not been performed in a Swedish theater.

The project Viet-Nam Discourse, Stockholm 2016 takes the play and its multiple receptions as a starting point to reflect the relation of Third World Solidarity and the emergence of radical aesthetics. It looks back on the plays background and production history in the Swedish context of Anti-Vietnam War campaigning. The project thus creates research on North-Vietnam travels of Swedish activists, artists and filmmakers as well as unraveling the constitution of the 1st Russel Tribunal (Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal) in Stockholms Folkets Hus in 1967 of which Peter Weiss and many other outstanding international intellectuals had been functioning as jury members. The many documents, facts and protocols created for the Tribunal by Swedish activists and artist like John Takman, Sara Lidman, Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss seem to have not only informed the internationalists campaigning but as well the creation of new forms of cultural production.

* Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and the Events Leading up to it as Illustration of the Necessity for Armed Resistance against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution [Viet Nam Discourse]. In: Peter Weiss. Two Plays. New York: Atheneum, 1970. 65-249. (Diskurs über die Vorgeschichte und den Verlauf des lang andauernden Befreiungskrieges in Viet Nam als Beispiel für die Notwendigkeit des bewaffneten Kampfes der Unterdrückten gegen ihre Unterdrücker- 2 Damen, 13 Herren Surhkamp Verlag, FFM 1967)

The Viet-Nam Discourse, Stockholm  is a collaboration between Tentsa Konsthall, Stockholm Sweden and the Center for Post-Colonial Knowledge and Culture Berlin (Marion von Osten, Peter Spillmann) and will be presented in the frame of the Eros Effect series in 2016.