Doris Uhlich's Extraordinary Sun: Notes towards a not-quite-yet-planetary theatre

She pointed the light directly at us, causing an uncontrollable reflex to ‘look away’. On a cold and dark December evening I visited the Volkstheater in Vienna, Austria to see the premiere of SONNE (Sun, 2023) by Austrian choreographer Doris Uhlich. Uhlich’s performance is dedicated to this extraordinary celestial body, which illuminates almost all matter and has the capacity to both sustain and destroy existences. “The theatre”, Uhlich tells me, “is inestimably designed to keep the sun out.” She insists “This is what this show is about. What does it mean to bring the sun into the theatre?” My presentation explores this curious question with reference to Uhlich’s work and its premise as a show that (I want to suggest) has nothing whatsoever to do with the climate emergency – yet might help us think differently about how we relate to that which is so ordinary it is with us every day; part of (making) us even, yet remains a total stranger. I am interested in thinking through Uhlich’s performance in terms of what Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak calls ‘Planetarity’ – rejecting the global – that which is good for imperialism and capitalism – in favour of its ‘subalternizing tendency’. For Spivak ‘the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’. The same could be said for the sun, ‘one we cannot make sense of but inhabit “on loan”’. Despite its revered and beloved status, the sun is a blazing paradox: both a life-giving force and an existential threat. It contains us as much as it flings us away. I want to grapple with this sensation, through my experience of watching, writing and thinking with Uhlich’s Sonne from the “cheap seats”. A vantage point that I suggest brought me closer to the sun, while also positioning me to engage in a cultural and material history of the sun and the theatre. By moving towards the planetary but never mastering it, I make a case for theatre’s capacity to draw attention to that which is both ordinary but ‘out of this world’ (i.e extraordinary); to re-think our relationship to alterity; to engage in awe of an ineffable presence, to be blinded by its light, and to feel its burn – as energy – as solar friction: solar fiction.