The mushrooms of the Nibelung: how Twitter-paratexts about Friedrich Hebbel’s staging at Rheinisches Landestheater Neuss deal with ephemera

This paper proposes a reflection on ephemerality by discussing whether the digitalisation that affects our lives is more precarious than life itself. It focuses on the problem of the ephemeral nature of the work of art (i.e., a theatrical play) in the moment of its interaction with the social network Twitter. Starting from the TweetUp initiative of the RLT Neuss near Düsseldorf in 2013, in which F. Hebbel’s play The Nibelungen (1861) was performed, the paper investigates the TweetUp as a specific form of art communication, ephemeral as it is, an evanescent trace of something (the performance) destined to disappear very soon, but of which it is still a fragmentary testimony. The TweetUp initiative raised the issue of memory, culminating in the obsession with commentary via tweet, which is constantly threatened with oblivion. Methodologically, the tweets found on the web today are examined on the basis of Sara Pesce’s relections on short-lived multimedia digital paratexts, preceded by Nicolini’s ones on the ephemeral value of Italian theatre performances in the 1980s. Like symbiotic mushrooms, tweets establish a relationship both with the performance and with the everyday life of actors and spectators. Meanwhile, the activity in which the audience takes part leads them to relect on the potential of the individual memory of the new millennium, which has replaced the collective historical memory in the twentieth century, preparing individuals to acquire awareness of their own social role, according to new forms of citizenship. The Brechtian approach of the TweetUp initiative contributes to replacing the emotional detachment of the spectator, which the author’s written text produced, with the texts now produced by the audience. Finally, this paper closes with some reflections on the waste-nature of the Tweets, which is ultimately no more ephemeral than material reality is perishable and temporary.