Theater

Ren Polleschs
Cappuccetto Rosso,
Salzburg, 2005.
Photo:
Thomas Aurin

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Theater

Bernd Stegemann
Tra n s l a te d by M a t t h e w R . P r i c e

A f t e r Po st dra m at i c Th e at e r

Hans-Thies Lehmanns book Postdramatic Theater has generated vigorous discussion and
debate among academics and artists since it was first published in Germany in 1999. (An
English-language version was published in 2006.) To mark the books tenth anniversary in
October 2008, the German magazine Theater heute published two new essays reflecting
on the impact and validity of Lehmanns proposition that contemporary theater has rejected
mimesis and even moved beyond drama itself. Here is Bernd Stegemanns contribution to that
original forum.
Editor
It was nearly ten years ago that Hans-Thies Lehmanns Postdramatic Theater was published and quickly became a standard work.1 Since then, many graduating classes of
theater students have begun or in some cases ended their studies with this book. The
title, which became the buzzword of an aesthetic viewpoint, is quite strong. The book
promises a new aesthetic paradigm and delivers a whole variety of new descriptive
vocabulary. At the same time, it promises the liberation of theaterlong-awaited in
certain circlesfrom the ruling clutches of drama.
Today, almost any theater practitioner, and for that matter almost any theatergoer, claims to know what is meant by postdramatic. For some it is an aesthetic experiment on being able to make theater without any conveyable narrative. For others it is
the call to arms for theaters very evolution: If you cant do it without a story, then just
stick to your own! For others stillfor the historians of theaterit is the fulfillment
of a dream, which can finally describe itself neatly with its own academic vocabulary.
But what does postdramatic really mean, and what actual happenings in theater can be
described with the term?

Theater 39:3 doi 10.1215/01610775-2009-002

2008 by Bernd Stegemann, English translation 2009 by Matthew R. Price

Published by Duke University Press

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To begin, we can place the term into simple language and we will find that it
means something like after the plot. Heiner Mllers famous sayingMy drama is no
longer pertinent (mein Drama findet nicht mehr statt)is a statement on societal
mood, ideological stance, and aesthetic position all in one and could be viewed as a
starting point for this new art of the theater. But here the first difficulty in confronting the term postdramatic becomes apparent. For Mllers statement refers to a crisis of
drama, which consists of its apparent inability to convey the complexity of the modern
world: the problems of the present exceed the representational capacity of the situational
dramatic art. In the process of modernity it is evident that fewer humans are entering
into conflict with one another. Instead they are sliding into complex battles with their
own institutions.
In this evolution, the accused has no human or personal conflict with his judge
but rather appears in a functional capacity before an institution. With The Trial, Kafka
was able to represent this disconcerting relationship. But situational drama struggles
to find a situation to express this: it remains reliant on human interactions, with the
possible result that the judge is made out to be especially dark and inscrutable and the
accused particularly perfidious. This is the tendency toward the obvious or the recognizable that Kafka was so expert at derailing.
Drama, with its central focus on character-driven conflicts, had clearly always
been capable of responding to those limits inherent to its situational form. Naturalism, the epic form, documentary theater, and many other dramaturgical advances represented new dramatic forms. The claims of postdramatic theater, however, go beyond
such developments. Its central tenet is that the very attempt to make theater with the
basic ingredients of dramatic situation, character, and story, is obsolete. The relationship between drama and the theatrical translation of events is terminated, and the myriad forms of theatrical inspiration to be found within drama are refused.
Postdramatic theater, thus, has two different dimensions: it regards its function
no longer as the production of a dramatic text, and it rejects the structure of dramatic
situation as a basis of the actors representation. Postdramatic theater begins instead
with an emphatic relationship with itself.
M i m e s i s a n d Po st mode r n i t y
The prior function of theater was well described in the saying that all the world is a
stage. The axiom may have been understood differently depending on ones worldview
or aesthetic zeitgeist, but the representational sights were always set on a world beyond
the representation itself. Since the beginning of the modern period, mimesis came to
mean both the function of reference to that which was to be represented, as well as
to the production itself. The mimesis of the world was a work form that itself became
readily apparent. This work went into creating that secondary reality that gave to the
actual reality its artistic form. Thus, mimesis functioned in two directions: it repre-

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sented reality in a specific form, and it gave this representation its own reality. The
historical continuum of mimesis could be examined through the represented world, as
well as by the way in which it was represented.
In the 1990s the fragments of an exploded discourse were collected. The detonation had taken place at least twenty years earlier. In the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism the whole world became symbolic. The result was an unusual theoretical
problem. If everything can become a symbol, and if these symbols no longer need to
refer to anything beyond themselves, then the world effectively becomes indescribable
and its doings unconveyable.
The driving force of life becomes simulationone lives in quotes, borrowed identities, coincidental arrangements, and random self-attributions. The master narratives
which came in the form of a superstructure, an ideology, paradigm, or worldview, and
which ordered arbitrariness into describable and assessable eventsare gone. Mimesis is no longer necessary, since the world is already a hall of mirrors full of potential

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The Oresteia,
directed by Michael
Thalheimer,
Deutsches Theater,
Berlin, 2006.
Photo: Iko Freese

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Rimini Protokolls
Wallenstein: A
Documentary Staging,
Mannheim, 2005.
Photo: Dieter Rchel

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interpretations of itself. Simulation takes the place of narration. Symbols no longer tell
of something beyond themselves; they only refer to other symbols or to themselves as a
symbol.
A rose is a rose is a rose became the emblem of this epoch and the model of the
dual concept of a symbol. On the one hand, the rose refers to nothing more than the
word rose; on the other, the assembly of the words creates its own construct, and its own
reality. Just like a childhood game, where a word is repeated again and again until it
loses all meaning, this assembly of words causes the word rose to lose its reference to the
flower. Instead, priority is placed on something performative, in which the words mean
nothing more than that which their pronunciation itself creates. The most basic daily
phrases can take on a performative symbolic usage, as in I now pronounce you husband
and wife. Not until the pronunciation of this sentence does the reality exist that it is
meant to reference.
The fascination with self-reference spread like wildfire in the arts. The performing arts began to perform, in the sense that the act of performance became the primary
focus. Accordingly, theatrical evolution refuses to fall behind in the new discovery of
the performative and the disappearance of the human. It becomes postdramatic. The
voice of the actor, for example, is no longer meant to support him in his arguments
or conflicts, but should now liberate itself and preserve its intrinsic value by doing so.
The material value of the voice becomes important. The voice has become a symbol
of itself. The intrinsic value of symbols, of physical stimulus, of the human body, of
physical spacethe intrinsic value of anything at allis transformed into a leading
aesthetic concept of the period. Text is spoken breathlessly, so that the breathlessness
itself overtakes the meaning of the text. Audiences patience is put to the test, with the
passing of time becoming painful. Bodies slide into mud, fall into water, or run against
wallstheir intrinsic value as flesh and mass is made to clash palpably with the world.
Such movements are repeated until the audience reacts with dialectic unease: this
cant continue (boredom) leads to understanding that its meant to be that way (Im supposed to be bored), and is followed by an evolution into voyeurism (lets see how long
they can keep this up and whether they lose their focus in the meantime).
These modest happenings have an effect, however, which is related to the perception of the real world. The observer must partake in creating the artwork, in the same
way that contingent events in the world can have a perspective or an interpretation only
via an observer. Now the observer becomes an author of his own (artistic) storyjust as
in his day-to-day lifewhich is informed only in an illusory manner by his perception.
This representation of the world has an artistic effect that aligns exactly with the postmodern worldview, with mimesis no longer portraying the world, but portraying instead
a way of perceiving the world. Furthermore, the depiction is meant to be just as inscrut
able as the world itself, and the relation between the observer and the observed is shaped
such that the observer is a player and co-author, or else turns away in miscomprehension.

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It should come as no surprise that in this worldview the human subject is revealed
to be a particularly clever self-performance artist and comes to be considered a historical
construct, the downfall of which is watched with pleasure. The self is a construction.
The question What is a human? is answered with not a little hubris: An invention!
C h a rac t e r : B e t w e e n S ta n i s l av s k i a n d B re c h t

Isabellas Room,
directed by Jan
Lauwers, Avignon,
2004. Photo:
Eveline Vanassche

The postdramatic aesthetic despairs particularly vehemently at theaters longing

to illustrate human characters. Character is the single aspect of the performing arts
that postdramatic theater most derides as obsolete, and most handily sweeps from the
stage. The evolution of theater into a theoretically compatible expressive form meant
that the academy had the power to recognize and ban what no longer belonged on
the contemporary stage. Characterthe epicenter of dramatic conflict and the courier
of the plotwas persecuted academically with a passion akin to Johann Christoph
Gottscheds strict treatment of the harlequin in the eighteenth century.

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In acting schoolsthe sanctuary of dramatic theatera puzzling demand was
made of young performers: they should learn to defend their character. Two things
are meant: on the one hand, they are to dive so deeply into the preparation of a character that they can understand and represent its complex, contradictory motivations, but
on the other hand, they are to defend the character from their own acting. That is, virtuosity in ones expressive capability must mean that ones personal manners of speech,
habits, or tendencies of appearance should not reduce the individuality of the character.
Expressive capacity should be developed in order to serve a task, not in order to carry
out pure self-representation.
Stanislavskis system created a comprehensive compendium of practice for meeting such a task. He coupled the inner experience of the performer with the outer, physical expression. Transparency in the performers inner experience is thus the greatest gift
or talent an actor can have. The stage is an exceptional place, though, and inner experience can become blocked and give way to posing or behaving instead of experiencing
and being. The most important artistic device Stanislavski offered in this case is that of
situational choice. If the actor succeeds
in internally recreating a situation in
all its detail, he can re-experience it
and relive it.
A situation is created by drama to
the extent the plot is unfurled through
the text. If the actor is sufficiently
trained, he can tease the given situation
and physical behavior from the text and
breathe life into it. If he succeeds, his
inner experience will be in accordance
with the given situationhe acts, since
the situation is fictional, yet he is real,
since his experience is present and gives
the character reality. In other words, he
represents a character, and his representation of the character has its own
reality. His acting contains a reference
to reality and also a performance with
its own intrinsic qualities. This is the
ideal of acting training according to
Stanislavski.
With Brecht, the separation
between the actor and the character
became a starting point for a new form

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of artistic expression. The performer began to have a perspective on his own performance, the character began to narrate his own behavior, and actions were demonstrative, with each happening on the stage marked by its own witnesses as something
important or something worthy of reflection. This reflection was collected in a fable,
which delivered a further perspective on what had happened. The audience was caught
up in a dual relationship with the events: it comprehends the difference between the
events and the character or actor carrying out those events, yet it also follows the chain
of events that compounds into the narrative story.
In postdramatic theater all events are symbols of themselves and therefore also
equal in value. The performer or subject carries these symbols and is conscious of doing
so. With this consciousness, he can no longer plausibly wear the mask of a human experiencing something and behaving in some directly resultant way. The theatrical devices
instead serve a deconstruction of the audiences perception, which is believed to suffer
from a lingering bad habit of seeking a connection between character, plot, and mimesis in general. This habit is desensitized by the practice and repetition of the separation
of symbols from their referents.
The path to this goal is the use of unclear meanings. Anything can be separated:
speech from its meaning, the body from its voice, the voice from that which is said,
that which is said from its meaning, the meaning from its intention, the goal from its
motivation, and so on. Based on his habit, the observer continues to want to establish a
synthesis of the various theatrical elements. This is considered an aspect of the power
discourse, for which he may well be punished even during the performance. Extreme
length of performances lets him understand the value of time; incomprehensibly spoken
texts teach him to admire the beauty of symbols; repetition schools him in the study of
details, which certainly would have been lost if the passage had only been spoken once;
repetition also teaches humility in the face of things that are eternally the same.
In the meantime, however, people have begun to liberate themselves from this
form of theatrical imposition of the will. The boundary between actor and character
is increasingly seen as an inspiring and befuddling reason for acting. In the theater
work of Armin Petras and Fritz Kater, the narrative perspective that each character can
take on does not serve the overarching commentary but instead creates surprising and
renewable interactions and situations. In the work of Jrgen Gosch, who has his actors
in view of the audience before they take the stage, the magic moment of transformation
is made the starting point of the situational interplay. It is also in Michael Thalheimers
high-stakes characters, whose inhibitions give more insight into their inner lives than
any expressivity in the acting. These characters and their secrets are aggressively and
masterfully protected from the communicative urges of the performers. Nicolas Stemanns actors take such pleasure in a successful scene that they use it as an impetus to
play the character longer and deeper, and thus drive the messy conflicts further than
they would ever have dreamed at the beginning of a theatrical run. It is also in the
projects known as Rimini Protokoll, which transform theatrical ready-mades into self-

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narrating characters who become wrapped up in the dimensions of situational, storyoriented interactions.
All these theater-makers create a new balance each second of each night in the
relationship between character, actor, and situation. Only through the work on mimesis and the representation of the world do they and many others succeed in creating
new relationships between representation and that which is represented, new rules of
the game, new situations, dramaturgies, and forms. Otherwise, by throwing the baby
(drama) out with the bathwater (postmodernism), the mimetic thread of connection to
the existing world is liberated (lost). In that case, theatrical devices may be more easily
described by theater historians. But the risk is present that the function of theater in
contemporary society could become exhausted, and that would mean a true crisis.
Th e D ra m at i c S i t uat i on
Who is speaking? This question about drama is repeated in every new epoch. In Greek
tragedies the song and dance of the chorus were the earliest forms of mimetic work in
representing the outer world. The actors were in opposition to this, taking the position of individuals, whose stake was claimed in stubborn challenges to the gods, leading to catharsis and revealing tragic hedonism. In Shakespeares world theater, each
party, actors and audience, had its speaker or speakers. In postmodernism, speech on
the stage becomes its own dramatic discourse. The authenticity and authorship of the
spoken text is openly questioned. Why, for example, would one speak a text that is not
created by the speaker, but merely memorized by him? And how is it that convention
insists that a written text can contain a hidden character, and that the speaking of the
text can create dramatic situations? From the perspective of postdramatic theater, this
convention is considered an embarrassing pretense and an obvious manipulation of the
audience.
But what concept of situation is operating within this perspective? Apparently it
is that of the joint physical presence of the performers and their audience! In this joint
presence the various interactions and stimulations occur; they situate themselves in
this way. But this situation is the beginning and end of all necessary consideration.
There can be no more dramatic situations, because what is experienced or stylized as
drama is nothing more than the blatant deceit which passes off happening as action.2
Postdramatic theaters entire rejection of drama lies in this one damnation. The
act of observing humans for the purpose of examining and understanding their behavior and their actions is considered to be an illusion and a habituated lie. With this
stroke, dramatic situations lose all legitimacy as a form through which the world can be
described or translated into narrative structures.
If the effort has been made, however, to question one of the central and most
complicated concepts of theaterthe dramatic situationthen it is incumbent upon
us to consider what is really meant by a dramatic situation. A situation does not only

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occur in the concrete world, which Hegelthe most complex analyst of the dramatic
situationdescribed as the state of the world in general (allgemeiner Weltzustand ).
This state of the world contains at least one contradiction, which can be found on the
surface of the basic ways in which we carry out our lives. Hegels model dramatic work
for examining this contradiction is Antigone, in which family rights clash with societal
rights. The opposing willpower of Antigone and Creon effectively waters down these
different sets of rights, robbing each one of its unique perfection. According to this
viewpoint, a tragedy is tragic only when two sides are both right and when both stake a
claim on being right to exactly the same extent.
Yet indecision is an essential element of tragedy and of the emotional experience recognizable within catharsis. Indeed, a situation is generated by conflict, or more
appropriately, by lines of conflict that run through the very core of the world in which
the situation occurs. This makes conflict the best representational form there is. Such
lines of conflict are contradictory, because they reveal something which simply is not
the way it should be.
In order for conflict to unfold into a dramatic situation, however, an oppositional
mechanism is required. Conflict requires two parties as equally bound or drawn to each
other as they are repelled by or destructive to each other. To wit: Creon is not coincidentally Antigones uncle. He must see through this confrontation in order to demonstrate his power within the family and within the state. Antigone must fight with her
family member and with the political ruler in the same person. The insoluble bonds
that exist between parties to a conflict are the precondition for a dramatic situation.
The situation can be a driver of the plot only if this internal dialectic exists between
simultaneous unifying and separating forces.
The contention that such a descriptive approach to the world can no longer
exist has become a stereotype, and it misses completely the potency of the dramatic
arts. In any successful scene, an entire closed world is created and revealed to be selfcontradictory. In one of the most recent productions of Rimini Protokoll, Breaking
News, the world onstage was meant to correspond exactly to the outer world and the
way in which it depicts itself through news. The situation consisted of experts sorting the news items based on their relevance to the general public. By virtue of their
backgrounds and educations, these news experts are members of the corners of the
world being depicted by satellite news. They watch live as reports from their individual
regions come in, and they select news items they wish to present to the public. A live
news show on stage took place, with representation of important events from all around
the world. The collection of news is so disparate that the audience quickly realizes how
enormous the differences are in the general state of the world (i.e., the news from
around the world), which has been created by the situation (the experts live editing of
the news). The situation is meant to be a revelatory aspect of the drama, by enabling
representation of human behavior and experience with complexity and sensory information that reveal basic contradictions.

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The postdramatic revision of drama, though, denies this concept of situation and
views drama mostly through a polemic lens as melodrama. In doing so, the concept is
viewed without regard to history and given a colloquial reference to kitschy, sentimental approaches to performance that have no dimension beyond their pettiness. Drama
is reduced to a cheap romance novel that finds its bombastic end in Hollywood films.
Once such a shadow of true drama is established, no one sheds a tear when such a product of decay becomes evening entertainment.
B e l i e va b i l i t y
To ask the question another way: what makes theater such a gripping event for audience members that their attention is worthy and rewarded? A concept may help here,
even though at first glance it may appear to be an outdated one: when it is believable,
theater earns the devotion of its audiences.
The earliest parameters for a believable story were laid out by Aristotle in Poetics. The main question was how to present and narrate a story so that its effect reaches
catharsis. The answer is as simple as it is complicated. The plot must be presented in the
form of dramatic situations, and these situations must be understandable and surprising
at the same time. They must be understandable so that interest is awakened, and they
must be surprising so that the interest goes beyond a normal daily level and becomes
captivating. That is to say, they have to be plausible and disquieting at the same time.
The way toward this dialectic was described by Aristotle as the architecture of plot
(freely translated). The origins of dramaturgy, therefore, are in the analysis of events
for their dramatic believability. How can we draw attention toward a character in such
a way that I become interested in it? What must befall that character to heighten my
interest? How must its story go, so that I follow it and can leave it satisfied?
No screenwriting school and no realistic dramaturgy can survive without these
criteria. Believability is not a phenomenon of daily life but a feelingcreated by
dramathat makes us want to give a story our attention. The most unbelievable events
can be made believable by successful dramaturgy, just as the actual world at times can
appear completely incomprehensible. Believability, like tragedy, is a task of dramaturgy
to bring events and situations into an order that creates this effect.
In the postdramatic discourse, the believability of character and plot is replaced
by the truthfulness of effect. The dramatic situationas a medium for understanding
and depicting human behavioris rejected, as is the desire to report about humans by
means of the plot form. Postmodernity promised relief from all problems associated
with mimesis. Each new use of symbolism was simply doubled under this new way of
theatrical thinking, leading to the fruition of its own poststructuralist theories; was this
really the reason for its being in such high demand so suddenly? Since art and science
used basically the same theoretical apparatus, description and invention could go hand
in hand. Theater scholars rejoiced: it seemed that real theater had finally arrived at the

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theories of theater, and vice versa. Only those theatrical practices that were free from
the pressure of representation were current; they were liberated, honest, and conscious
of their own self-worth. Theater that had prescribed mimesis of the world, and which
used dramatic structure to this end, had become outdated, since it maintained drama
where only the simulation of conflict was possible. On top of that, was it not true that
drama had long since been overtaken by the trivial cinematic form? The new theory
described and demanded the evolution of theater into the form. In doing so, theorists
made theory into an aesthetic maxim of art, which was then better and more appropriately reflected or depicted by itselftheory. Its Bible was the little black book currently under discussion.
Nearly ten years after the publication of Postdramatic Theater, its poetry of rules
has been echoed in the guidelines for the support of the performing arts by Berlins
City Art Fund and its board of advisers. The title phrase, now empty of meaning, finds
its way quite naturally into politics. If you intend today to apply for project funding and
are not familiar with postdramatic theater, you might as well just fold up your tents.
An entire generation is confronted with a jargon that is supposed to be repeated mindlessly. This is a fatal situation for the emerging artists who are dependent on funding,
since they are expected to operate with pass postmodern tools to describe an environment in which harmless simulation of conflicts is a distant dream.
If you care on the other hand to approach the evolution of theaterwhich
always rested on the shoulders of authors, directors, and actorsin a scientific manner, another kind of discourse would be necessary. What does an understanding of the
world look like, with all its infinite representational forms? What is it that translates an
event from the world into a theater event, and what insights are performance or representation capable of delivering?
Where other art forms can be conceived and intended and created over great
lengths of time, theater is different because of its one peculiaritythe necessity of
reaching an audience in the present moment of performance. Its effect simply cannot
be restricted to a small circle of specialists, who might purport to decide on progress
and the future. The reality of performance is a fundamental element of theater as an
art form.
The postdramatic discourse is enlightening and helpful, in as much as it concentrates on theatrical phenomena, particularly theater as an event. It attempts to describe
its indescribable sensual complexity, allowing for better understanding and for better
potential results.
But the discourse can become irritating when it attempts to raise itself to the level
of aesthetic arbiter. In this case it no longer merely describes contemporary theater but
turns to prescribing the course of its artistic development. The resulting notion that
the future of theater can be determined by its academic leaders is a strange twist on
the typical relationship between theater and the academy. The academys claim to have
expanded theater with the concept of the symbol is hubris. The whole world becomes

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theatrical, as a result, and each and every coincidence must be honored with theatrical
thinking. Mimetic theater, on the other hand, is based on the sensuousness of acting
and the many meanings that can be found therein. With their dialectical play, the theatrical and dramatic elements unleash a complexity that belongs exclusively to theater,
and which is both sensual and rational at the same time. It is not clear how taking this
dialectic apart is supposed to represent a gain. Postdramatic theaters endless expansion
of possible happenings on stage alone cannot be it. Why overemphasize so much that
one side of theater alone, to the point thatliberatedit only has itself as a partner?
One wants to prevent the fascinating works of art that belong to the postdramatic canon from being monopolized by a one-dimensional aesthetic. This tight grip
has been broken already by many contemporary theater-makers: the use of narration
of those affected by events, the events witnessed and related by everyday, unexpected
reporters, or those who tell their own personal storythese are all examples. There is
a degree of self-sacrifice required under these laws; a speakers self-performance illustrates his self-marketing, as in the work of Ren Pollesch. Similarly, while Jan Lauwers
all-around performers act, sing, and dance, they create so many motifs, situations, and
stories with their charm and their abilities that one nearly becomes dizzy. Rimini Protokoll has its figures give witness to themselves live on stage, acting and speaking about
the outer world within the representational context and sharing that worldand the
creation of the artworkwith the live audience. Drama and mimesisagainst the
stipulations of the postdramatic discoursehave once again exercised their perceptive
and representational strength as illustrators of the world.
Notes
1. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der
Autoren, 1999).
2. Lehmann, 463, trans. Matthew R. Price.

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