Berlin Theatre Research Articles

Big Bang Theory

By presenting the supposedly “nostalgic” and “traditional” genre operetta as a genderfuck spectacle, without opera singers and with queer icons and dancers instead, “gay Jewish kangaroo” Barrie Kosky has revolutionized popular musical theatre in Berlin and brought operetta back to its pre-1933 roots.

Postmigrant perspectives: Radical diversity as artistic-political intervention

In the last decade, the concept of radical diversity has gained traction, not least in the circles around the postmigrant theatre at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin. This essay explores this concept and interprets it as part of the overall tendency in postmigratory art and culture to move beyond clear-cut identity groups and to build alliances and coalitions beyond stable identity markers. Radical diversity thus not only denounces doctrines of cultural homogeneity and monoculturalism but also rejects the logic of integration and traditional ideas of multiculturalism. Against this background, radical diversity focuses on the multiplicity of subject positions in society, as well as on the complexity of structures of discrimination and marginalization. As a artistic-political intervention, this essay argues, radical diversity expresses some of the major characteristics of postmigrant societies and urges us to reconsider traditional research perspectives on migratory art and on the relation between culture and migration.

In Interview: On the Development of Video in the Theatre

German film artist Jan Speckenbach ingeniously contributed to the development of live video on the stage, and this discussion focuses on his education, as well his as experimental collaborations with director Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne Berlin, starting in 2000. Speckenbach’s background in film and media studies facilitated his explorations of uncharted territory in the theatre, going from a set of fixed cameras on the stage to the use of a camera crew with live-editing for augmented images as part of the whole directing concept and process. His first-hand insights into how actors have interacted with this new technology and how filmmaking can be an integral part of the theatre indicate clearly that filmmaking has played an invaluable role in recent theatre history. Speckenbach here also speaks of his collaborations with other directors, notably Sebastian Hartmann and René Pollesch, and about the future perspectives of this technology, which has changed the theatre altogether.Jan Speckenbach studied art history, philosophy, and media in Karlsruhe, Munich, and Paris during the 1990s. At the beginning of the new millennium he participated in the development of video theatre with Frank Castorf and, now a successful filmmaker, he also continues to work in the theatre. His short film Gestern in Eden [Yesterday in Eden] premiered at Cannes in 2008, while the full-length feature film Die Vermissten [The Missing] was shown at the 2012 Berlinale and Freiheit [Freedom] at the 2017 film competition at Locarno. In 2020 he directed the live-stream of Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain, after Thomas Mann’s novel] at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (premiered online in November 2019), which was subsequently invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Thomas Irmer is the editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based monthly Theater der Zeit. He has co-edited two books on the work of Frank Castorf – Zehn Jahre Volksbühne Intendanz Frank Castorf (2003) and Castorf (2016). During the last forty years he has authored, among other significant writings, numerous analytical articles and interviews on Castorf’s creative output.

A Contemporary Clown

Richard III is the perfect Shakespearean figure to look into the clowning tradition at play in the early modern theatrical world. Richard is a wise fool, who delivers the truth under comic appearances, as well as a buffoon, “deformed, unfinish'd, sent before [his] time” (Richard III, 1.3.21), who amuses the audience. Thomas Ostermeier, world renowned director of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin (since 1999), presented his Richard III at the Avignon Festival (France) in July 2015. His favorite actor, Lars Eidinger, largely contributed to his success. The latter chose to play a particularly dynamic Richard, in connection with the figure of the medieval Vice. Richard's role marks the pinnacle of Eidinger's acting, with a strong emphasis on improvisation. The spectators are constantly solicited. Improvisation is the perfect form of communication for the clown who mocks his audience and adapts to the conditions of live performance. Thomas Ostermeier, a keen reader of Shakespearean criticism, revisits the figure of the medieval Vice: he deploys twenty-first-century playing techniques in order to explore a complex Shakespearean heritage. Eidinger’s play mode is a perfect illustration of how the clown figure can be revisited to offer a new experience to twenty-first-century audiences.

LOST (1.5 m) by Cordula Däuper and Johannes Müller

Reviewed by: LOST (1.5 m) by Cordula Däuper and Johannes Müller Olivia Maria Schaaf LOST (1.5 m). By Cordula Däuper and Johannes Müller. Directed by Cordula Däuper. Neuköllner Oper, Berlin. October 22, 2020. In times of a crisis, a bourgeoise struggle with radical change and its necessity exposes inequalities in distribution of finite resources and the social construction of the Establishment. With the very concept of finality in musical form, German composer Franz Schubert’s final song cycle Schwanengesang (1828) provided the musical foundation of LOST (1.5 m) at the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin. The small theatre in Berlin’s Neukölln district stages original music theatre performance and has become home to some of Germany’s most original and exciting productions of opera, operetta, musical theatre, and everything in-between since opening its doors on Karl-Marx-Straße in 1988. As for all Berlin performance venues, 2020 was a year of uncertainty, restrictions, and compromise for the Neuköllner Oper, with its season shortened to just three months due to COVID-19. As one of two productions realized during this short period of live performances from August through October of 2020, LOST (1.5 m) directly [End Page 573] responded to the feelings of stagnation and anxiety weighing on a collective performing arts community and tackled the ultimate fear: never performing again. Click for larger view View full resolution Fernanda Farah with gas mask in LOST (1.5 m). At its premiere on October 22, 2020, the dark and dystopian stage (design by Sylvia Rieger) awakened with Schubert’s interpretation of Ludwig Rellstab’s poem Ständchen from Schwanengesang. In a distorted arrangement by Tobias Schwenke for the band of five instrumentalists, the song’s eerie intro and first phrase promised an evening rich with feelings of desperation: “Leise flehen meine Lieder / Durch die Nacht zu dir” [My songs plead softly / through the night to you]. The singer and piano accompaniment initiated the play in sotto voce, mirrored by a creeping and slow transition from pitch-black darkness to dim, sickly light. The elevated stage showed a wasteland of black foam mulch. Three elegant women sat on small cubes, listening to Schubert’s song. The singer, in an extravagant black-tie concert event ballgown, continuously interrupted herself and started over. The other women—her audience— half-heartedly skimmed their programs, looking around, attempting applause. They acted with palpable discomfort; relief restricted by peer pressure: no one could leave, and no one wanted to be the person who wants to leave. The loop of attempted singing emptied into the exasperated screech of one woman in the “audience”: the seal of pretense and etiquette was broken. More and more frantically the women started looking around, standing up, sitting back down, trying to connect by getting each other’s attention, but awkwardly failing. Inside the world of the play, the 1.5-meter social distancing required of performers functioned as a tool for complete emotional isolation. The women onstage could not touch. Whenever they tried and failed, their lack of physical contact transformed into a complete inability to communicate. Two women began taking turns in chasing each other across stage, tumbling over in the uneven mulch. They did not speak to each other, and they ignored each other’s pain. LOST (1.5 m) commented on the Coronavirus pandemic most directly through its title, and not so much in its content. Instead, the crisis more directly addressed by Cordula Däuper and Johannes Müller’s concept and adapted libretto was the sluggish response to climate change in a world where the ruling class is superbly distracted by their own comfort. The increasing disarray and chaos onstage clashed recalcitrantly with the characters’ need to maintain their version of normalcy, and their own decay into insanity creeped onto their unaware attempts. As the women tried enjoying a beach vacation in the mulch after being sprayed down by an ominous figure in a hazmat suit, buckets of trash fell down onto them from above. Except for mild discontent, the heaps of plastic bags, bottles, and crumpled soda cans did not greatly seem to...

The Dancer from the Dance

Valda Setterfield is 86. She comes on stage at the HAU theatre in Berlin—hobbles, really—and begins to speak. She stutters. She repeats herself, phrases loop in on each other, long silences sit heavy in the air. Only re-watching the video do I see how carefully the slow, snowballing monologue is structured. And then Gus Solomons Jr. enters and begins his daily exercise routine: touche. Hungarian choreographer Ezster Salamon has titled the piece Monument 0.1: Gus and Valda, pointing with a wink and a nod to how fragile a monument might be. At the end of the performance, the two dancers list their accomplishments, and they are many: professional roles and life experiences running together in a kind of performative slurry. But dance itself as a medium complicates Gus and Valda’s status as a kind of living archive of 20th century American dance—the choreographies live inside their bodies, but when the bodies are gone? ‘I will always remember, I will always remember, I will always remember how I learned to do that step’ chants Satterfield as Solomons marks the movement, working restrained versions of old scores. They walk offstage arm in arm to the rhythm of Setterfield’s hopeful refrain. This essay is a meditation on Salamon and Wavelet's Monument 0.1 & 0.2 and the questions that they raise about aging, ephemerality, and the archive in the context of contemporary European performance.

Ancient Drama and Reception of Antiquity in the Theatre and Drama of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)

Theatre in the German Democratic Republic was an essential part of the state propaganda machine and was strictly controlled by the cultural bureaucracy and by the party. Until the early sixties, ancient plays were rarely staged. In the sixties, classical Greek drama became officially recognised as part of cultural heritage. Directors free to stage the great classical playwrights selected ancient plays, on one hand, to escape the grim socialist reality, on the other to criticise it using various forms of Aesopian language. Two important dramatists and three examples of plays are presented and discussed: an adaptation of an Aristophanic comedy (Peter Hack’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin in 1962), a play based on a Sophoclean tragedy (Heiner Müller’s Philoktet, published in 1965, staged only in 1977), and a short didactic play (Lehrstück) based on Roman history (Heiner Müller’s Der Horatier, written in 1968, staged in 1973 in Hamburg in West Germany, and in the GDR only in 1988). At the end there is a brief look at a production of Aeschylus Seven against Thebes at the BE in 1969.

Karl von Holteis Kościuszko-Verehrung

The article deals with the subject within studies on motives and problems of Poland in German literature. It describes the origin of the drama about Tadeusz Kościuszko “Der alte Feldherr” [The Old Leader] by the German playwright and novalist Karl von Holtei. At the same time it reflects repercussions which were caused by the staging of the "Old Leader" in 1825 in Königstädter Theater in Berlin. Karl von Holtei who was himself an actor, practised mostly a rare profession of a declaimer, played many times the role of Tadeusz Kościuszko, contributing for its popularity. In his autobiography “Vierzig Jahre” [Forty Years] Holtei says, when describing his life full of travels, that it was the spirit of Kościuszko which made him a constant wonderer. The article traces the truthfulness of his words.

Frank Castorf's Art of Institutional Dis/avowal : A Volksbühne Elegy

There is so much to say about the persistent critiques of and mobilizations against Chris Dercon's vision (or lack thereof) of the newly named Volksbühne Berlin. My task here, however, is a different one: to begin to understand why there has also been such persistent mobilization on behalf of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In what follows, I provide some critical context for reflection upon the unique role the Volksbühne played in post-Wall Berlin. I suggest that in his twenty-five-year tenure at the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf worked to refunction the theatre apparatus itself, to transform the theatre as state institution, as interrelated set of supporting structures that extend beyond and behind the proscenium arch. Further, Castorf's work as both director and artistic director helps us to understand the complex relations between a theatre aesthetic, which exposes and critiques the structures of its (state) support, and a theatrical institution with similarly ambitious goals. As an aesthetic and as an infrastructural project, Castorf's Volksbühne enacted a new kind of public theatre in Berlin—and it is this project of institutional dis/avowal that we must remember (and dare to reenact) as so much more than reactionary or provincial nostalgia.

Syrian Theatre in Berlin

Syrian Theatre in Berlin Margaret Litvin Against a background of civil war, anger, and loss back home, how are Syrian theatre-makers in today’s Berlin navigating their new artistic and political landscape in order to make theatre, make a living, and perhaps eventually make a difference? My 2018 ATHE paper asked this question against its own background of raw and vivid loss. Our “Arab Theatre after the 2011 Uprisings” panel—comprising Ted Ziter and me, with Charlotte Canning as respondent—was inspired and instigated by our dear friend Hazem Azmy. Hazem was a beloved professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo and one of the most prominent and intellectually honest Egyptian theatre critics of his generation. He loved Boston, having first visited for an ASTR conference ten years earlier, when he arrived on the very night in 2008 that Barack Obama was elected president. Now, in 2018, we were both amazed at all the heartache and the thousand shocks that both our countries had suffered in just ten years. By temperament and training Hazem, was a dialectical optimist—he liked to resist despair, quoting Orson Welles’s saying that “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” His paper was to analyze a recent Egyptian adaptation of Inherit the Wind that won Best Performance at the National Theatre Festival in 2014, and its subsequent revivals: Did the play dramatize the battle between righteous reason and dull conformity, or between an arrogant intelligentsia and a threatened society? This was his way: to turn a text and performance over and over through different historical moments, watching it change meanings as different facets caught the light. But it was not to be. Three weeks before he was to come to Boston, Hazem died suddenly of an apparent heart attack in Belgrade, at the International Federation for Theatre Research conference, on July 10. He was just 49 years old. In the Egyptian theatre community, Hazem’s death is not a singular grief, but a tragedy upon tragedies. In September 2005, a theatre fire in Bani Suef killed forty-six theatre-festival participants, including the entire jury, wiping out an entire cohort of critics and directors with one blow. In 2017, prominent and beautiful-souled critic Nehad Selaiha, godmother to Egypt’s avant-garde theatre movement, died at age 72. My own mentor, Egyptian theatre critic and award-winning translator Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa, died five years ago at 70. Egyptian theatre practitioners live with censorship and untimely death as a constant companion. ________ The divergent strategies of two recent plays in Berlin—the first by Mohammad al-Attar and Omar Abusaada at the Volksbühne, the second by Ayham Majid Agha at the Gorki Theatre—challenge us to theorize what the work of Syrian theatre artists in Europe can say at this moment, and to whom. Unlike some more typical cases of post-9/11 “Arab/ic theatre for Western audiences,”1 Berlin audiences are diverse, comprising [End Page 447] viewers with different language skills and expectations, including some who are Arab immigrants themselves or know Syria or other Arabic-speaking societies intimately, along with others who do not but want their play-going to be timely. Yet, the Syrian-German arts community is relatively new, compared for instance to the generations-old Turkish-German arts community and the “post-migrant” theatre it has created.2 The Berlin-based Syrian artists do not fit neatly into the “Sindbad vs. Houdini” typology that Johanna Sellman and I recently proposed within another European context;3 they are neither exotic visitors on tour nor Arab Germans. Iphigenia, a devised play by Mohammad al-Attar (b.1980) and Omar Abusaada (b.1977), is the third in a trilogy of Greek tragedy offshoots with nonprofessional, refugee Syrian female performers directed by Abusaada, the last two written with playwright al-Attar.4 Originally meant for Lesbos, Greece, it ran into logistical problems (the asylum-seeking participants there could not yet legally work in Europe) and moved to Germany, losing its resonance with the specific precarity of many Syrian refugees’ lives in Turkey and then in Greece: in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis...

Integration, Turkish Theatre, and Cultural-Political Interventions in West Berlin: Vasıf Öngören's Kollektiv Theater (1980–82)

Integration, Turkish Theatre, and Cultural-Political Interventions in West Berlin:Vasıf Öngören's Kollektiv Theater (1980–82) Ela Gezen (bio) Introduction The mid-1970s and early 1980s witnessed the development of a very active Turkish art scene in West Berlin.1 Various cultural institutions were integral to this process, especially the Kunstamt Kreuzberg and Neukölln (Arts Council for the districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Artists' House Bethanien, a center for arts and social affairs), the Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft e.V. (German-Turkish Society), and the Türkischer Akademiker- und Künstlerverein (Turkish Academics and Artists Association). Frequently collaborating with one another, these organizations sponsored recurring cultural events, such as ausländischer Berliner (foreign Berliner), the Fest auf dem Mariannenplatz (Festival on the Mariannenplatz), and the Türkische Kulturwochen (Turkish Cultural Weeks). Financially supported by the Berlin Senate, these public events showcased a variety of genres and media, including music, visual arts, theatre, and film; participants and organizers alike aimed to promote Turkish culture beyond folklorization, Orientalization, and essentialization. Particularly prominent among the rosters of participants were Turkish theatre ensembles. A majority of these ensembles, such as the Berlin Oyuncular (Berlin Actors, 1976), the Kreuzberger Türkische Volksbühne (Kreuzberg Turkish People's Theatre, 1978), the Türkisches Arbeitertheater [End Page 301] (Turkish Workers' Theatre, 1979) and the Kollektiv Theater (Collective Theatre, 1968) included professional theatre practitioners who had left Turkey for political reasons.2 In this essay, I will focus on the Kollektiv Theater, an ensemble that was founded by dramatist Vasıf Öngören3 in Turkey. Re-established in West Berlin after his emigration from Turkey in 1980, the Kollektiv Theater contributed to political debates on integration in West Germany through theatre. Rather than analyze specific productions, I will instead situate Öngören's ensemble's theatre practice with respect to efforts by Turkish artists and intellectuals during the late 1970s and early 1980s, discussing the project both as an early manifestation of Turkish self-presentation in West Germany, and, more specifically, as a key part of the formation of a Turkish public sphere in West Berlin. First, I will examine the founding of—and interactions between—the institutions mentioned above, which were designed to promote cultural events. As I will show, cultural practices, and specifically theatre, were understood as crucial factors within discourses on integration (as opposed to assimilation). The Kollektiv Theater's programming and contributions will be read as a current within broader efforts to represent Turkish culture as multi-layered and as essential to political debates on integration. This essay concludes by asking how we may relate Turkish theatrical activities in the early phase of Turkish migration to theatre practices today, such as the postmigrant theatre movement. Cultural-Political Interventions and Collaborations Turkish artists, intellectuals, and academics founded associations in West Berlin throughout the 1970s and 1980s in order to establish institutional settings for the planning of cultural activities, with collaborative efforts presenting a particular priority. Two institutions which I would like to highlight specifically are the Türkischer Akademiker- und Künstlerverein (Turkish Academics and Artists Association) and the Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft (German-Turkish Society), which were crucial for self-advocacy and self-representation through culture as well as for collaborations with local and district authorities charged with sponsoring cultural programming such as the Kunstamt Kreuzberg and Kunstamt Neukölln. Established in 1980, the Deutsch-Türkische [End Page 302] Gesellschaft aimed to foster "mutual understanding between the Turkish and German population" while promoting the "integration of the foreign population by maintaining their cultural identity."4 This entailed efforts to foster the necessary conditions for an understanding of "differing historical, social, political, and cultural conditions, and the awareness of their changeability."5 Integration, here, was understood as realizing and implementing political and social equality while also increasing the willingness of Germans to actively participate in this process. The Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft underlined the bidirectionality of such processes of integration by involving Turks and Germans equally, while foregrounding as a premise the familiarity with changing societal conditions in both countries. In addition to organizing cultural events, its objectives included taking positions on current issues...

The Russian Theater in Berlin (1919-1923): the Experience of Cultural Exports

The paper is devoted to the consideration of Russian theatrical activity in Berlin during 19191923, when Berlin was the focus of Russian theater life abroad, and active creative exchange between German and Russian cultures took place in this connection. The problem of exporting Russian art culture to Western countries is of interest for both domestic and foreign researchers. Among the topical problems on this issue, the Russian theater plays an important role. The study of this issue gives an idea of the potential of Russian culture in a different social and cultural environment. In the center of the research is the process of formation and development of Russian theatrical life in the German cultural environment. The author made an attempt to identify and disclose the main artistic directions of the Russian theater in Berlin in 19191923 and determine their role in bringing Germany to the achievements of national culture. The work uses materials from the memoirs of contemporaries and periodicals. On the basis of these sources it is shown that the theater played one of the fundamental roles in preserving the Russian cultural community and their cultural appearance on the overseas. Russian theatrical seasons contributed to the Wests involvement in the achievements of Russian culture and the establishment of cultural and artistic ties between Germany and Soviet Russia. Thus, the activities of the Russian migr and touring Russian theater in Berlin in 19191923 reflected the high potential of Russian culture in the conditions of a foreign social environment.

Alma Fohström: kansainvälinen primadonna (Finnish) [Alma Fohström: An International Prima Donna] by Svetlana Toivakka

Reviewed by: Alma Fohström: kansainvälinen primadonna (Finnish) [Alma Fohström: An International Prima Donna] by Svetlana Toivakka Matti Huttunen Translated by Dr. John Nelson Alma Fohström: kansainvälinen primadonna (Finnish) [Alma Fohström: An International Prima Donna]. By Svetlana Toivakka. Helsinki: [Helsingsfors Universitet], 2015. [311p. ISBN 978-951-51-0827-2. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/153609] The subject of Svetlana Toivakka’s doctoral thesis is one of Finland’s most successful international singers, the coloratura soprano Alma Fohström (1856–1936). Alma Fohström studied singing, among other subjects, in St. Petersburg, and while young first appeared in Helsinki on the stage of the Finnish Theatre, where in the 1870s they performed the opera classics. Her international career started in the Kroll Theatre in Berlin and continued after that on stages in Italy, London, Bucharest, Russia, South America, and the Baltic States. In the mid-1880s, Alma Fohström took part in a tour of the U.S. organised by the impresario Colonel Mapleson. The tour was not an unequivocal success but it is to be noted that Alma Fohström stood in as Adelina Patti’s replacement on the tour. Adelina Patti was undoubtedly the international singer that Alma Fohström was compared to, as were so many other sopranos at the turn of the nineteenth century. Later Alma Fohström took up teaching and was, for instance, a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire from 1909 to 1918; after leaving Russia as a result of the Revolution she continued as a professor at the Berlin Stern Conservatoire between 1920 and 1928. After this she continued to teach singing in Helsinki until her death. The use of a diverse range of source material covering many languages is one of the most notable aspects of Toivakka’s thesis. Her work is significant and even groundbreaking in bringing Russian sources into the study of Finnish music, which has traditionally focused on Nordic and Central European roots. Hopefully in the future, the results of this research will be made available to an international audience. An important material source has been the Alma Fohström album, housed in the National Library in Helsinki, which contains, among other items, concert programmes, drawings, and poems dedicated to Alma Fohström. This can be compared to many other similar albums of female singers of the period. Alma Fohström’s life and art is reconstructed in the thesis through letters and other archival material, photographs, newspaper and periodical reports, scores, textbooks—especially Alma Fohström’s teacher Henriette Nissen-Saloman’s Singing School of 1881—and some preserved recordings of Alma Fohström. Toivakka’s research adheres to the three current trends in Finnish musicology: microhistory, performance studies, and academic biography. Microhistory’s key and accepted premises (amongst others “exceptionally typical”) are supplemented by Lev Gumilev’s methodological ideas, which emphasise the cohesion between micro- and macrohistory. It has long been the case in Finland that biography is a feature of popular literature. In the last few years, however, [End Page 243] many biographical studies have been published which are, without doubt, academic in nature. Performance studies has been on the rise in Finland in the last twenty years and Toivakka’s research, in this respect, is firmly anchored in current musicological questions. Toivakka is supported by a number of new international studies that have focused on individual prima donnas or more broadly on the prima donna phenomenon. The prima donna concept and controversies are well covered in the text and the author has a solid understanding of singing history and opera literature. Adelina Patti was perhaps the most celebrated singer of her time and, as a prima donna, unique. Sometimes it seems that in Toivakka’s study Patti is too dominant and in some ways portrayed as the ideal prima donna type: Patti’s stature was dominant but, perhaps, because of her fame she was not a typical prima donna. The chosen emphases and chronological solutions in the thesis are in part bold and I missed a little more historical self-reflection, which would have clarified the direction of the study. It is recommended that the readers acquaint themselves with...

Greek Dispossession Staged, or When Street Politics Meets the Theater

Revisiting the historically rich relationship between theater and politics in the wake of worldwide protest movements at the turn of the last decade, this essay examines what theater can still do for street politics. With a turn to contemporary political and transnational theater in Berlin, the 2013 theater production Telemachos – Should I Stay or Should I Go?, written and directed by Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris, comes into focus. As a play about Greek-German relations and the repercussions of the on-going Greek debt crisis, Telemachos not only recharges and re-localizes European politics but also orchestrates a performative cross-cultural encounter that promises to resonate beyond the theater space.

An Interview with Alexander Schroeder

An Interview with Alexander Schroeder Fadi Fayad Skeiker (bio) Alexander Schroeder has been working for the last fifteen years in the acting department at the University of the Arts in Berlin. During that time, he has also been teaching at universities in Salzburg, Leipzig, Dresden, Hannover, Weimar, Stuttgart, Cairo, and other places. He also has been acting and directing in the Berlin theatre scene for the past thirty years. He was an assistant director and member of the Schaubühnen-Ensemble and has worked with Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Andrea Breth, Luc Bondy, Klaus Michael Grüber, Thomas Ostermeier, and others. In 2015 the productions he participated in as a writer and actor won various awards: Jobs in Heaven (produced by posttheater) won the Stuttgarter Theaterpreis award; and Das Projekt bin ich (The project is me) won the German radio award, the Hörspielpreis der ARD. In January 2016 Schroeder started working with refugees at the Tempelhof refugee center in Berlin. Tempelhof is a defunct airport that is now one of the biggest refugee centers in Germany. Set up to host up to 7,000 people, as of March 2015 it housed 2,000 and has 450 employees. The center serves refugees who come mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, fleeing war, hunger, and prosecution. The center’s stated mission claims that the integration of refugees is a challenge that can only be achieved by using all community resources. Therefore it serves as the connecting point between the refugees and other community organizations that are willing to assist them. The German authorities inform asylum seekers that they are supposed to stay at Tempelhof only for a maximum of four weeks before being transferred to other locations, but many find themselves stuck there for up to six months, with no other prospects. This is the community that Schroeder visits once weekly to work with refugees who are interested in expressing their narratives through theatre. The number of refugees who attend his workshops vary between five and thirty. His five core members are refugees from Syria. In addition to leading workshops, Schroeder has also been introducing this core group to Berlin theatre productions. For Schroeder, knowing about these refugees via the media was not enough. He chose to meet them firsthand and to establish a theatre group. Entering a refugee center in Germany is difficult because of the security threat posed by the country’s extreme right-wing faction. Indeed, over a thousand attacks on refugee camps in Germany were reported in 2015. Without having secured official permission, Schroeder managed to get into the center via an emergency exit, after having failed to gain access through the main entrances. After entering illegally, he was granted access by officials only after some serious negotiations. Schroeder himself is the son of refugees. His maternal grandparents are Russians who fled the Soviet Red Army numerous times before arriving in Germany and becoming citizens during the 1950s. His paternal grandfather is from Alsace-Lorraine and had to leave his homeland after World War I when it became French; his paternal grandmother is Jewish and has a long family history of exile. Schroeder’s work comes from his desire to be the “host” he wishes his ancestors could have found when they moved to a new place. He was inspired by his family heritage and belief in the power of theatre to offer a platform for the disempowered to share their stories. He meets with his group in what he calls “open improvisation,” where the refugees talk and act out their personal stories that trace the time from their origins [End Page 351] in Syria (or other home countries), their departures from home, and their arrivals at Tempelhof—with all the experiences they faced in-between. The following interview took place in a cafe close to Tempelhof on 15 March 2016. Fadi Skeiker: We hear a lot about refugee centers in Germany from the media. How would you describe the situation at the Tempelhof center? Alexander Schroeder: It is an emergency center; it is not supposed to be a home for refugees to stay there for months or even weeks. The center...

Artist Organisations International Conference

BERLIN JANUARY 9-11, 2015 The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters. --Antonio Gramsci Margarita Tsomou, artist, performer, and theorist, threw this portentous quote at the audience in her introductory lecture to the panel on Solidarity & Unionising at the Organisations International (AOI) Conference held at the Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) theater in Berlin in January. It was perhaps an inadvertently apt metaphor for the unwieldy and contentious conference organized by Dutch visual Jonas Staal (founder of the New World Summit), Florian Malzacher (curator of the 2012 Truth is Concrete symposium in Graz, Austria), and Joanna Warsza (public program curator for last year's Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg). The AOI conference was conceived to address a perceived shift in the art world from artists engaging in ephemeral project-based work to, instead, artists coagulating long-term structures and that outlive any one exhibition or biennial--hence the title, Artist Organisations International. This title, on the part of Staal, was meant to be declarative, forward looking, and symbolic of a tidal change whereby artists lessen their dependence on institutions and regain agency over the means of production and distribution of their work, no longer puppets of the political agendas or dirty money of high art institutions. However, like many other aspects of the conference, the title was variously misunderstood, debated, distorted, and at times caricatured, becoming itself a bone of contention among the speakers and audience. Was it an adjective? A verb? A declaration? An aspiration? A broken promise of what the event was supposed to become? Did it allude to Leninist-inflected worker solidarity? The conference was, in fact, a three-day marathon of a dynamic constellation of sociopolitically oriented artist organizations of varying levels of institutionality, from Forensic Architecture (Goldsmiths University), a counter-hegemonic research project melding experimental geography, architecture, and the law in order to demystify how normative notions of architecture, human rights, and space enact violence; to Silent University, a nomadic university that militates against the stigmatized condition of asylum seekers and refugees by creating a university where they can teach classes; to Chto Delat, a Russian art-activist collective of visual artists, poets, and philosophers preoccupied with the representation of Russian historicity. The twenty hailed from Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, the Philippines, Argentina, Cuba, Azawad, Kurdistan, and elsewhere. On the first day, as part of the panel entitled Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda, the German performance/intervention group Center for Political Beauty (Zentrum fur Politische Schonheit) presented their Kindertransporthilfe des Bundes project, whereby they purportedly facilitated a federal emergency program that made possible the temporary asylum of fifty-five thousand refugee children from the Syrian War to Germany. This project, however, was an audacious hoax. The program does not actually exist, but the Center for Political Beauty created a website of seemingly impeccable verisimilitude and a comprehensive PR campaign that duped the German public into believing it did. It was a high-stakes strategy to embarrass the German government into admitting that they were not, in fact, going to help Syrian refugees, reminiscent of the hoaxes of the Yes Men and of Krzysztof Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle Project in the 1980s (whereby Wodiczko transformed shopping carts into multipurpose temporary mobile shelters for homeless people and was denounced by New York City municipal authorities for proposing an inadequate solution to the homeless crisis). In a similar vein, the Kindertransport campaign created an intentionally inadequate solution to a society-wide problem, painfully highlighting the inaction and cynical disengagement of the society at large. …

Choreography of Disobedience: Beckett's Endgame

The article discusses Beckett's staging of Endgame at the Schiller Theater in Berlin in 1967. The starting point is the debate between the reassertion of the autonomy of drama, proposed by Christoph Menke's theory of tragedy, and Hans-Thies Lehmann's theory of post-dramatic theatre. The article argues that neither of these positions provides a proper understanding of Beckett's work as a theatre director because his stagings demand the analysis both of the stage materiality, which does not appear in studies on the autonomy of drama, as the elements of epic and dramatic genres, which are hardly discussed by the theory of post-dramatic theatre. The article seeks to demonstrate that Beckett's work as a theatre director, besides its relevance to Beckett's studies, has much to contribute to the debate on contemporary theatre.

Clean Up on Aisle Six: Closing the Gap between Spectator and Performance in Uli Jaeckle’s Discounter

Live Art and Spectator Live Art came into vogue in Britain in early 1960s and has since spawned a multitude of diverse approaches to artistic creation. Central to this diversity is notion that process of making art is just as important as result. Rather than preparing an artistic product to be viewed by an audience at a later time and a different place, typical Live Artist makes art in presence of spectator, in a shared space and coexistent moment of time. In 1970s and 1980s Live Art became an attractive template for making theater because of its open and direct relationship between artist and spectator. There is less distance between two because neither of them is pretending to be someone else--as actor in conventional theater would. Both remain who they are, and act of communication is therefore more truthful, more vulnerable, and more real. (1) This preoccupation with literal and figurative distance between spectator and performance is obviously not something new to theater. From Epic Theatre of Piscator and Brecht, to Artauds Theatre of Cruelty, to Grotowski's Poor Theatre and innovative work of Living Theatre and Augusto Boal's Theatre of Oppressed, relationship between spectator and performance has been scrutinized, reconfigured, and re-envisioned a thousand different ways. It is still in flux today at hands of companies like Punchdrunk, Gob Squad, Rimini Protokoll, and many more, that are relentlessly pushing boundaries of performance and spectatorship. Also seeking to redefine relationship between audience and performer is German director Uli Jaeckle. An artist at forefront of some of most innovative theater in world, Jaeckle started as a painter, and early in his career came under influence of Live Art movement, which has clearly shaped his aesthetic to this day. In his productions Jaeckle often explores and manipulates psychological and emotional distance between spectator and performance, attempting to close gap between two and create Live Art moments in his productions. He is a freelance director who currently holds theater chair previously occupied by Marina Abramovic (at University of Arts, Braunschweig), and lists her, along with Joseph Beuys and Rebecca Horn, as artists who instilled in him impulse to resist any art form based on pretense or illusion. Of Abramovic, Jaeckle says, brings herself into situations that are far away from pretending something. She doesn't create characters. She does art with her self, puts herself into situations that are ultimately beyond her control. She is just reacting to what is happening to her in that space and time. For me, that is poetic moment, moment where art truly happens. (2) Closing Gap For Jaeckle, art involves a never-ending search for the real, as opposed to illusionism of conventional theater. He often uses non-professional actors, everyday people, as he did in his recent production of The Odyssey at Deutsches Theatre in Berlin. Jaeckle believes that using non-actors helps to close gap between spectator and performance. For nonactors most compelling material, and easiest for them to speak honestly to an audience, comes from themselves: stories about their lives, about who they are, who they were, who they want to be. Using specific details of those stories, and an approach to theater devising that he calls Trackwork, Jaeckle creates affecting and rich portraits of human life: I'm always looking for real moment, honest moment. A very small event or action can be a spectacular moment. There doesn't have to be a big crime or big adventure to be fascinating to an audience. Sometimes it's enough to relate a small glimpse of our everyday lives. (3) For spectator, this brief but revealing glimpse into humanity of a performer can have profound emotional and psychological effects, bringing them both into a communal experience rarely bestowed by conventional theater. …

What is to be done?

Milo Rau, originally from Bern, Switzerland, worked as a writer for Neue Zurcher Zeitung and, from 2003, as a director and writer with, among others, the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, Theaterhaus Gessnerallee in Zurich, Teatrul Odeon in Bucharest, and Beursschouwburg in Brussels. In 2007, he founded the theatre and film production company International Institute of Political Murder. His theatrical re-enactments and films have been invited to national and international festivals, including in 2012/13 the Berliner Theatertreffen, Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival in Groningen, Wiener Festwochen, and the Radikal Jung Festival where he was awarded the critics’ prize in directing for Hate Radio. His productions, campaigns, and films include Montana, The Last Hours of Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, Hate Radio, City of Change, Breivik’s Statement, The Moscow Trials , and Die Zurcher Prozesse ( The Zurich Trials ). The Last Hours of Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu and Hate Radio were presented at Festival d’Avignon in 2009 and 2013 respectively, and The Last Hours of Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu was nominated for the Prix de Soleure in 2011.

Was kann ein Kind?

In 1932 Walter Benjamin wrote and read on air the comic radio play “Much Ado About Kasperl”. In March 2011 a Berlin theatre put the piece on stage and invited me to give an interactive lecture about the play to an audience of children aged between 9 and 11. I tried to actively involve the young audience referring to some Benjaminian aspects of the Pixar movie “Toy Story” and inviting them to think about how much we learn by playing games (Roger Caillois’ classification of games provided a useful background for my purposes). Special attention has been devoted to the decisive role played by the “mimetic faculty” in this context.