Mainstage theatre and immigration: The long history of exclusion and recent attempts at diversification in Berlin and Vienna

Abstract

Abstract Recent studies have shown that mainstage theatre has largely remained closed to immigrants and their descendants who want to enter the cultural institution as actors, directors and playwrights. This was explained with persistent homogeneous national narratives, gatekeepers denying immigrants and their descendants access and cultural policies pushing them into niches. This article adds to this the dimension of theatre history to understand first, why mainstage theatre in the German-speaking countries has remained closed to the new diversity brought by migration and second, why diversification, when it finally arrived, was more successful in Berlin than in Vienna. I regard the intricate link between theatre and nation-building as underlying the long exclusion of immigrants and their descendants in the German-speaking context. Subsequently, I argue that the more flexible theatre structures and the recent turn towards including immigrants and their descendants in cultural policy-making in Berlin have facilitated the career of an artist whose main aim was to address the exclusionary structures of theatre. Due to the limited research on this topic, I cannot claim my observations to be representative, but they provide a matrix for an in-depth analysis in other contexts.