The same every time, yet different

The same every time, yet different. A theatre balancing act between architecture, art, structure and audience

A difficult legacy
It’s a Friday evening in spring last year. As I ascend the wide steps of Anhaltisches Theater Dessau for a première of ‘Hamlet’, I am surprised to see only seven people waiting outside. Maybe it’s because things are only just getting back to normal again after the pandemic, I wondered. That same evening, a quick Google search tells me that Dessau loses a few hundred of its inhabitants (currently 79,000) every year. This is despite having merged with the neighbouring municipality of Roßlau in 2007, despite Bauhaus tourism, despite the pharmaceutical and automotive industries and, yes, despite its multi-genre theatre. The imposing building with a façade of twelve angular columns is the only theatre to have been built during the National Socialist era. Opened by Goebbels and Hitler, it was destroyed during the war (Dessau was home to the Junckers factories, which were vital to the war industry) and subsequently rebuilt. In 1950, it served as the stage for the first political show trial in the GDR. Today, with its 1,070 seats and the largest revolving stage in Europe, it is far too big for the town.

Dessau theatre director Alexander Kohlmann takes an assertive artistic approach to the spatial conditions. Only operas, grand dramas and lavish productions seem to work well on the big stage. For Philipp Preuß’s production of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, set designer Ramallah Aubrecht puts a very long table down the middle of the stage, with a mirrored wall extending it infinitely. The audience, seated exclusively in the gallery, looks down on the table, which serves to organise the power structures while also evoking images of the Kremlin just before the Russian invasion. At times during the performance, I feel as though I’m peering directly into Hamlet’s nightmarish, ghost-summoning consciousness. This highly atmospheric production was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen this year. However, it faced a tough audience at its local première: About half of the spectators left the auditorium when, after about two hours, the production re-started from the beginning, replaying the first half an hour as if caught in a time loop. Some even returned to demand the end by clapping furiously.

The art of conflict
‘Do you want change???’ actress Aysima Ergün shouts into the audience. There’s a buzz in the air, a strange energy. What is fake and what is real? What will happen next? So far, almost every twist and turn of this evening has taken me by surprise. We are in the middle of the première of Sivan Ben Yishai’s ‘Stage Abuse’, which makes explicit reference to its commissioner, the Maxim Gorki Theater. But the question ‘Do you want change?’ isn’t even in it. In the first part of the evening, the five players parody themselves as attention-seeking divas and hard-working circus horses, while breathlessly discussing the difficulty of openly dealing with conflict in their theatre and the challenge of what Ben Yishai terms as breaking away ‘from the script’ of ritualised routines. But in the second part, when Ben Yishai cruelly but hilariously gets three members of the audience to talk about their chronic fatigue in the theatre, the ensemble under Sebastian Nübling’s direction takes the author’s cue and goes beyond the script, initiating what turns out to be a partly staged interrogation of the audience: ‘Who among you is in therapy? - Please stand up! Who thinks they should be? Who among you earns more than 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 euros?’

However, as theatres have become more productive, the expectations of what theatre can achieve have also grown: The days when theatres were ‘only’ expected to provide a wide variety of high-quality art – like repertory theatre does with its daily alternating programmes – are long gone. Theatre is now also expected to reflect and critique society, prevent antidemocratic tendencies, reach diverse audience groups and keep pace with digitalisation. Institutions are expected to embody sustainability, diversity, participation and non-discrimination and provide working conditions for their staff that are not at odds with what is preached on stage. But all of these things also cost (more) money. Often, it is the theatre-makers themselves who draw up these lists of virtues to reaffirm their own social relevance, but also because they recognise an urgent need for reform within patriarchal structures.

When Shermin Langhoff and (until 2021) Jens Hillje took over the smallest of the five Berlin theatres in the 2012/13 season, they quickly made the Gorki Theater a pioneer of this transformation. The movement has since been embraced by many other theatres and is being further promoted by associations and foundations with federal funding. Not only was Shermin Langhoff the first non-academic with Turkish roots to lead a city theatre in Germany, but the ensemble, directors and writers at the Gorki Theater also had and still have Turkish, Israeli, Russian, Moldovan, Palestinian, Iranian, Croatian, Syrian, Ukrainian, Swedish or German backgrounds. On stage, different languages are often spoken and translated into at least one or two others through surtitles. With this naturally cosmopolitan mix of people and material that openly addresses racism, refugee experiences, social conflicts and discrimination, the Gorki Theater has not only attracted a younger, queerer and more multilingual audience than other theatres but has also sparked structural changes far beyond its walls.
And yet, even at this ‘better’ institution, things haven’t always been rosy. Several allegations of abuse of power by Shermin Langhoff were reported to the Themis trust centre against sexual harassment and violence, which was established in 2018 in the wake of the #MeToo movement. An accusation of wrongful dismissal was brought before a labour arbitration court – the Berlin Senate ordered mediation and coaching but decided against parting ways with the artistic director. The details of what had really gone off were not publicly clarified. Presumably, the very fact that the only female artistic director of a Berlin theatre had achieved so much for the Gorki Theater made it difficult for the left-wing cultural scene and politics to conduct a transparent inquiry of events.
Nevertheless, artists associated with the theatre are addressing the situation. Along with in-house director Yael Ronen, these include Sivan Ben Yishai, who won the Mülheim Dramatists’ Prize last year and will be honoured with the Theater Award Berlin this year. The structural debate about theatre becomes part of theatre art itself. The Israel-born author, who writes in English and works with the translator Maren Kames, examines the institution – which can also be applied to other forms of human-made organisations – from various perspectives: the highly reflective perspective of theatre employees, the exhausted perspective of the audience (in which I, as a critic, also recognised myself) and, finally, the poetic perspective of the theatre as a building abandoned at some point in the future. Like a decaying corpse, it comes alive again before ultimately being consumed by global warming. The fact that the ensemble, led by Sebastian Nübling, doesn’t merely reproduce the text but openly attacks it may serve to compensate for the obscured real conflict – but above all, it creates a tense situation, even if only fleetingly, in which the potential role that theatre and human-made institutions play both for and with us can be critically considered.

Realism
Last summer, I took a brief glimpse into a theatre of the future. Together with around forty other people, I find myself pedalling behind the poet Stefan Wartenberg through the shrunken industrial town of Bitterfeld in Saxony-Anhalt. We start at the Kulturpalast, built during the GDR era, cycle through the still-active Chemical Park, and stop next to furniture stores on the trading estate, in front of soot-covered houses and at the overgrown railway embankment. Coal was mined in Bitterfeld, which fuelled the electrochemical industry. In the 1980s, due to extremely contaminated soil and heavily polluted air, the GDR environmental movement emerged here. At each stop, the poet hands one of us a book or a printed poem to read aloud. Many of them are workers’ poems or ‘post-mining poetry’ from the GDR or West Germany’s Ruhr area.
We reach the final stop-off in the no man’s land between the railway tracks and noise barrier, where the landscape is criss-crossed by power lines and wind turbines, parched by the high summer sun. This time it happens to be my turn to stand on an old concrete pedestal and recite a poem by Volker Braun while the wind rustles through the yellowed grass. Of course, this isn’t theatre. But some aspects are still reminiscent of it: We, a group of strangers, are seeing these surroundings, which have been heavily impacted by human activity and the extraction of fossil fuels, as a stage set. Everyone can be a spectator or an actor if they wish. The poem from the post-reunification era becomes a part of the complex layers of time and aesthetics that are perceived by everyone present. We are a mobile post-growth team, practising a different perspective for an hour or two, confronting the aesthetics of the Anthropocene.

Shrinking blossoms
Does this mean that theatre will only exist as a loose convention without structures, hierarchies and permanent buildings in future? Not at all. Behind the bike tour through Bitterfeld there was also a publicly funded structure in the form of the ‘OSTEN’ festival – and the curatorial idea of reviving the ‘Bitterfeld way’ that was proclaimed during GDR times. From today’s perspective, the attempt by GDR cultural policy to eliminate the ‘alienation between artist and people’ by promoting amateur art and developing a ‘socialist German national culture’ is not only historically outdated but also highly problematic from an ideological standpoint. But what if there were a focus on overcoming alienation without socialism and nationalism, not imposed from above but practised voluntarily from below?
Existing theatre buildings do not have to decay before they can be filled with life again in the future. Fortunately, the German-speaking world offers enormous possibilities to deal with the very different structures in different ways. It would be fatal to seek a one-size-fits-all solution. Nevertheless, the question about what comes after growth is one that also arises in theatre. Could culture still blossom during periods of stagnation or even decline? Theatres have been attempting to answer this question for a long time already. Near the former Tempelhof airport, in the rainwater retention basin where the activist group of architects ‘raumlabor berlin’ built a network of wooden walkways and islands a few years ago, the ‘Floating’ association invited artists and the public to the ‘Re-edocate me’ festival in 2022 to be inspired by sustainable practices of Japan’s Edo period from the 17th to the 19th century. Sivan Ben Yishai also recycles an idea from the Far East in her ‘Stage Abuse’ production: For 1400 years, the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan has been rebuilt exactly the same yet different in a new location every 20 years. Although expensive, this has its benefits: Cultural competencies do not die out but are instead passed down from one generation to the next, allowing the same thing to be created anew each time.

Eva Behrendt