And indeed, under the musical direction of the conductor Marit Strindlund, the evening begins more or less faithfully to Expressionist opera, barely more than twenty minutes long. In front of an altar, the convent nun Susanna (Cornelia Zink) slowly but surely descends into sexual ecstasy – the entire score a single crescendo – until, faced with another sister’s upraised cross and demands for chastity and obedience, she blurts out: “I am beautiful!” When further nuns rush over for her confession, she refuses with a triple “No!” “Satana!” they shout – but Susanna stands in “untouched majesty.” “So help me my Savior against yours!”

In the background, Holzinger’s crew has long since taken over the action. Where Hindemith, with Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams in mind, had a single spider crawl across the altar as a symbol of repressed sexuality, naked female performers now climb up the stage’s back wall, kiss, and make love in a relief of open lust, a mountain of Venus.

The devil comes, the cross hangs overhead, everything red, with bits of fog and heavy metal – this must be hell. A crane robot holds the eternal light, or sometimes a cross; later, it serves as a wine shower and turns a Popess on her own axis. Half-naked nuns disco-roll in a half-pipe while the sisters’ choir sings “Kyrie Eleison” (Lord, have mercy). There are no symbols to decipher in Holzinger’s work, its celebration of directness completely unencrypted.

Meanwhile, Jesus himself comes stomping through the foyer, bickers ticketlessly through the door, and takes over the action. Quite a Dionysus is this savior (Annina Machaz), a dowdy old hippie who, a sheep thrown over his shoulders and in a strong Swiss accent, eggs on the audience with witty stand-ups: “I love bleeding for you.” Amid all the racket, there are also a few ur-Christian ideas, because if Jesus – stateless and without a place to stay – is not an outcast, then who is? The Messiah revolts, until he finally strangles the lamb entrusted to his care – not exactly someone you can rely on. At some point, though, even that is enough, and with a brief thank you, the time of Jesus-plaining is finally declared over. The neue Menschin (new womankind) is on the horizon.

Was blieb: Dass wir in deinen Aufführungen immer irgendwie zuhause waren. Deine Realität war unsere. Deine Texte waren unsere Identity Monologe. Du warst das Stadtteiltheater unseres Wirs. Dass es diesen Stadtteil so nicht mehr gibt, nicht mehr geben kann, wohl auch nicht mehr geben sollte, ließ deine Stücke immer deutlicher Versuche der Selbstvergewisserung werden. Immer noch so komisch, wie sonst kaum was im Theater, immer noch so schlau und irgendwie so wahr. (Der potenzierte V-Effekt, wenn Wuttke zitiert, wie man das Zitat eines Slapsticks zitiert und das am Ende natürlich super Slapstick ist.) Aber war da nicht ein Hauch von “früher war’s besser” in deinen letzten Stücken?

Vielleicht war dieser Hauch nur im Publikum. Diese leise Melancholie jedenfalls ist nun alles, was uns bleibt. Denn so ist das in diesem Scheiß-Medium: Immer alles Gegenwart und danach nur noch Erinnerung.

Florian Malzacher: You’re a theater and film director, artist, activist, columnist, author… What appeals to you about being an artistic director to boot – first at the theater NTGent and now at the Wiener Festwochen?

Milo Rau: It’s just a different approach. In Ghent, it was simply interesting to say: I’m going to stop with only criticizing institutions – we do that all the time – and instead, I’m going to try to run one. Moreover, I’m going to bring in the things that I lack as an artist, and to implement them in such a way that it becomes the theater, or now the festival, where I myself would like to be. So I am taking more of an experimental approach.

In Ghent, for example, I tried to bring together the respective advantages of the independent scene and the municipal theater. To think at an even more fundamental level: How can you produce differently, tour differently, think of authorship differently, and be more transparent? And then you suddenly get to know the difficulties of institutions from within, their contradictions and their ponderousness. That leads to a certain humility with respect to the possibilities of institutions, which you often overestimate as an independent artist.

The most important thing is to leave at the right time. When I leave, I will have been artistic director in Ghent for almost seven years, and in Vienna, I have a five-year contract. With projects, it’s absolutely mandatory that they have a fixed end point. But institutions have this property of slowing down time, of creating bonds. Power accrues as a matter of course, no matter how much you try to distribute it. And you have to fight that radically – by leaving. If you first come to such institutions later on in life, as in my case, then maybe it’s easier. I’ve always been good at changing gears and starting again, because that’s the logic of both theater and activism.

We’ve really created a tabula rasa in Ghent and built different production structures – it’s a dream of a theater, open to all, and present all over the world as much as it is in the city itself. The changes that are coming now – for example, that there is a consistent focus on diversity in hiring practices, that the buildings are finally being renovated – I can theoretically do those things, but they’re not my original, innermost talents. So it’s quite natural that someone else will now take those next steps.

The hassles of implementing and maintaining standards are not your fortes?

What always motivated me in Ghent was the antagonism. I had to realize that the structure rejects me, that the city has a problem, that Flanders either has to get used to it or that there would be conflict. After a few years, everyone came to love me, and I came to love everyone. I got an honorary doctorate, I am a friend of the mayor. That’s when I realized: Now it’s time for me to go.

It also has to be said that running artistic institutions is not rocket science. You’re surrounded by a lot of smart people who also want to change things. Of course, there are the right-wing politicians on NTGent’s Board of Directors, plus the bourgeois critics, whom you can never quite please – and in Vienna, of course, it’s more complicated yet. That has to do with the size, the money, and the traditions of the city and the festival.

There seems to be a great longing in Vienna for Intendanten who are themselves artists. Is there any truth to this notion? To what extent are you still an artist when you are an artistic director? And what do you see differently from dramaturge-directors, curators, or cultural managers?

I don’t know if such a separation exists, though there are poles, of course. The difference between me and my financial co-director in Ghent is that he really is a leader. He is always trying to mediate, to consolidate, and I’m not a leader in that sense. I always try to build reality according to a collective vision: My leadership model is a permanent revolution. I think that leading institutions means showing why they exist. Of course, that’s also the case in Vienna, where I immediately think: What is a festival, really, and why is there a festival at all – and not, rather, no festival?

I think the classic model of curation – that is, which understands the festival as a vessel for a mixture of products – is outdated. For me, a festival is a collective machine for living, production, and emotion. But maybe I’m more of a sociologist than a theater director.

If you look at what a classical director like Martin Kušej is doing with the Burgtheater, it’s simple: Everything that doesn’t say Shakespeare or Nestroy on it is an academic side program and has to go. He simply wants a lot of screaming on stage, a lot of staging. And that is the danger of the artist-director, that the playbill becomes the playing field of a very one-sided aesthetic. In a city theater or a festival, you need generosity and openness. I learned in Ghent that many productions that are well-received and objectively important are also not the ones I would go to see first. But an ideal artistic institution is total democracy: Not the critics, not the directors, but the city and the audience are always right.

You mentioned before that you are attracted by the possibility of making concrete changes as the head of an institution. As an artist, on the other hand, you can make big, radical demands that you don’t necessarily have to implement yourself. In some respects, the artist Milo Rau has to make fewer compromises than the artistic director Milo Rau. This used to be less relevant in political theater some years ago, because one usually wasn’t accused of the discrepancy between the demands onstage and the reality backstage. That has changed – and you also postulate quite clearly that the institution itself must meet the demands made of it. Is it possible to do both at once: to make maximalist demands onstage while undertaking the slow boring of hard boards?

It goes even further than that: The entire life we lead under capitalism is a false, destructive, and, in the end, apocalyptic life. And yet we demand another one. Pablo Casella, the composer of Antigone in the Amazon (2023), has said: “In this generation, we cannot get out of this performative contradiction.” But we still have to demand another world. When the world ends, it will be better if we have at least imagined a better world.

I think it’s important to play out the necessary conflicts within the projects, to expose oneself to the contradictions, but also pragmatically to try to change things. Take Antigone in the Amazon, for example. We will tour that an insane amount, through one hundred cities in two years. The money from the authors’ rights goes directly to the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil, and they decide what to do with it. That is very concrete. It’s also important to formulate concrete standards against which your own actions can be measured, so that others can also demand them of you.

One of the big problems of our time is that we have a very moralistic, partly paranoid discourse onstage; that we demand a lot, as you said, but that we often don’t know how to break that down and implement it concretely. That’s the reason I decided to do collective institutional work. Nevertheless, I believe one should never stop making the most grotesque and maximalist demands for the good life on stage. Because that’s what it’s there for.

In the end, you are still a white man who is at the top of the hierarchy, however flat it may be. And that in a city where, oftentimes, artistic directors have been considered almost monarchs.

The dramaturges and production managers are autonomous. Only when there’s a really big problem does it reach the ears of the artistic directors, because you simply have to take on certain responsibilities – otherwise, it’s not safe for the team. But this grassroots democratic structure is extremely difficult to establish; it took years in Ghent. In Vienna, I am fortunate to be coming into a very self-confident team of smart and incredibly professional people, to which I am now just adding my part. I try to give direction with a vision and some projects that I do myself. But what idea do I have, for example, about music? Or about Austria?

Milo Rau may be many, but in the end, it says Milo Rau, who not only earns a higher fee, but also gains symbolic capital. Had you considered applying to Wiener Festwochen as a collective? Or is it important for you, in the end, to have the final decision?

Let me first say something about symbolic capital: I’ve already managed to give NTGent this symbolic power, so that, for example, directors like Miet Warlop suddenly have an international career that they didn’t have before. We produced a play of hers, placed one of them in Avignon [One Song, 2022], which was covered by the New York Times – and we do that with quite a lot of artists and activists. In Ghent, we use the theater as a machine to bring peripheral positions right into the center; my name and my network help in that respect, of course. The question with symbolic capital is always: What do you invest it in? That is also my plan with the Festwochen: To create a symbolic power for this festival, and to bring peripheral positions onto the big stage.

On the question of the collective application: At this moment in time, that would have had no chance in Vienna – I was advised against it. That said, while my name clearly comes first, it was still an application from a group, that is, together with the dramaturges and so on. For me, the real collective is the whole team, anyway: all the production managers, all the technicians, the hundred people in the Festwochen, and all of our partners. The so-called “collective leadership” as one knows it in some institutions, which always includes two or three friends, is almost more of a hardening, a strengthening of the top against the base, isn’t it?

The curatorial collective WHW did not have a real chance in Vienna, it seems. [Editor’s note: three members of the all-women, Zagreb-based curatorial collective What, How & for Whom were appointed artistic directors of Vienna’s Kunsthalle Wien in June 2019; the city council announced this past December that their five-year contract would be allowed to expire next summer without extension.]

They simply “failed” because of COVID. We’re doing an exhibition together next spring. They’re anything but failed: In fact, it’s only just getting started with them.

But basically: We Europeans invented the strong individual in the history of mankind and celebrated it over the course of three thousand years. It’s just difficult now to suddenly say, okay, the whole thing was destructive and psycho and a bit toxic, now it’s over. And with Europe, I’m thinking of the whole world that we Europeans colonized. Take Lula in Brazil, for example – he seems irreplaceable.

What are the functions of an international festival today? Such large-scale events are heavily criticized – and for many good reasons, from the attitude of simply shopping internationally for productions, kerosene consumption, and a lack of sustainability, to questions about the colonial, exoticizing view of art and their outdated universalism. How do you deal with this?

In Ghent, we tried to maintain a balance between internationality and localism, between invitations and our own productions. We also invited groups that are absolutely essential locally but unknown abroad, as well as works that we felt were important to show in Ghent. It’s a question of balance.

In Vienna, the size of the city alone means that it’s full of crazy characters, artists, and activists. Vienna is simply an incredibly interesting city. And then there’s its proximity to Eastern Europe! For the last twenty years, I have concentrated on the Global South, which, owing to colonialism, is an inescapable given in Belgium. Now, in Vienna, I suddenly have the feeling that I’ve been looking at the world too one-sidedly.

Vienna is the second-largest German-speaking city in the world, the fourth-largest city in Europe, and such a juggernaut and painstaking apparatus of tradition, while at the same time having this legacy of modernity. I ask myself: What kind of city is this? Because I always work very directly from context. Then there’s the city’s Jewish past, but also its anti-Semitic past, its imperial past, the inward and outward flows of migration, and the fact that half the population immigrated from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. I’m totally up for investigating all of these things.

Since you’re talking about Viennese traditions: There’s also a strange love-hate relationship here with provocation, which you certainly have a reputation for delivering. Isn’t that bringing owls to Athens?

Some cities actually seem better suited for provocations than others. If you look at Christoph Schlingensief in Zurich with the former neo-Nazis performing Hamlet and in Vienna with the deportation container for asylum-seekers, then you have to say: That didn’t work in Zurich. Vienna is a reactive space, and the artists and the audience are geared to the extreme, from Viennese Actionism to Elfriede Jelinek and Florentina Holzinger. A normal city would say: We’ve had modernism, psychoanalysis, twelve-tone music, anti-Semitism, the Habsburg monarchy, Jörg Haider, and Florian Teichtmeister – but that’s enough now. But Vienna asks: Into what hopeless mess may we plunge tomorrow? That will offer me the vital counterpoint I need.

Especially since the political situation is just getting worse.

Austria has decided to dive deep into fascism once again – it’s happening right now in some states, and it will happen at the federal level next year, probably. Then, Austria will again become the laboratory of right-wing populism, which is even more aggressive, which minces words even less than it did in 2000, when Schlingensief came with the containers. I have lived for a long time in Western Europe, which still indulges in certain illusions. But Austria is Central Europe, and Central Europe has done away with all illusions. There is a saying: If the world should end someday, I’ll go to Vienna, where I will still have another fifty years. But in terms of the decay of Western democracy, Austria is always at least ten years further ahead of everyone else toward the end of the world.

MILO RAU is the artistic director of Wiener Festwochen and, until the end of the 2022/23 season, NTGent. He is also the author of approximately fifteen books, the director of numerous award-winning films, and the founder of the International Institute of Political Murder.  

FLORIAN MALZACHER is a curator, writer, and dramaturg, as well as the host of the lecture series “The Art of Assembly.” His most recent book is The Art of Assembly. Political Theater Today (2023). He lives in Berlin.

Das liegt nicht zuletzt daran, dass für viele Lebenslagen etwas dabei ist. Revoluzzerhafter Übermut für Teenager·innen, Kulturgut-Sinnsprüche für Senioren·innen, Sozialistisches für Linke, Romantisches für Verliebte, Analytisches für Theoriefans, grundlegende Handreichungen für Regieschüler·innen. Was Brecht über François Villon schrieb, gilt längst auch für ihn selbst: „Wo habt ihr Saures für drei Mark bekommen? / Nehm jeder sich heraus, was er grad braucht! / Ich selber hab mir was herausgenommen …“ Brechts Gebrauchswert ist unvermindert groß.

* * * * *

Für die Lehrstücke allerdings galt das lange nicht, und noch immer passen sie kaum in irgendwelche Schubladen. Bis in die 1970er-Jahre waren sie als halbgare, ideologisierte, „vulgärmarxistische“ Übergangsphase auf dem Weg zum gereiften Meister verpönt. Erst in einer Zeit, in der es darum ging, vieles anders zu machen, wurde klar, dass die Lehrstücke genau davon handelten: die Welt als veränderbar zu begreifen.

Denn die „Lehrstücke“ sollten vom Publikum – beziehungsweise der Arbeiter·innenklasse – selbst aufgeführt werden und so die Trennung zwischen Parkett und Bühne auflösen, die spätestens existiert, seit das bürgerliche Theater Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts das Licht im Zuschauer·innenraum ausgeknipst hat. Brechts dialektisches Theater, das unterschiedliche Positionen konkreter Auseinandersetzungen sichtbar machte, sollte es dem Publikum ermöglichen, das System dahinter zu verstehen, anstatt sich wohlfeil mit einer vorgegebenen Auffassung zu identifizieren:

das lehrstück lehrt dadurch, daß es gespielt, nicht dadurch, daß es gesehen wird. prinzipiell ist für das lehrstück kein zuschauer nötig, jedoch kann er natürlich verwertet werden. eliegt dem lehrstück die erwartung zugrunde, daß der spielende durch die durchführung bestimmter Handlungsweise, einnahme bestimmter haltungen, wiedergabe bestimmter reden usw. gesellschaftlich beeinflusst werden kann.

Doch die Rehabilitierung fand bis heute vor allem in theaterwissenschaftlichen Seminaren statt – und in der Pädagogik sowie im aktivistischen Theater vor allem in Südamerika und Afrika, wo der brasilianische Theatermacher Augusto Boal mit seinem Theater der Unterdrückten seit den 1970er-Jahren Brechts Idee eines zuschauerlosen Theaters nicht nur aufgriff, sondern die Verantwortung dafür, wie die Performance sich entwickelt, gleich ganz an die „spect-actors“ (Zuschauer·innen, die während der Aufführung zu Schauspieler·innen wurden) übergab. Wie Brecht ging es auch ihm darum, die soziale und politische Lebenswirklichkeit der anwesenden Menschen spielerisch zu untersuchen: „Proben für die Revolution“ mit dem klaren Ziel, diese Realität auch zu verändern. Gerade in Afrika und in Teilen Südamerikas gehören Boals Konzepte bis heute, und in den letzten Jahren gar wieder verstärkt, zu den verbreitetsten und wirkmächtigsten Theaterformen. Dabei gilt das Interesse damals wie heute meist weniger den konkreten Lehrstücktexten als vor allem der Form einer radikalen Theaterutopie, die helfen sollte, eine radikale Gesellschaftsutopie auf den Weg zu bringen.

Denn auch beim Lehrstück gilt: „Nehm jeder sich heraus, was er grad braucht!“ Es ist vor allem eine Aufforderung, das Potenzial von Theater als Medium der Versammlung auszuschöpfen, einer Kunstform, in der es immer darum geht, Menschen zusammenzubringen und ihr Zusammenleben zu verhandeln.

A publication series of the Kunststiftung NRW at Alexander Verlag Berlin.

Rimini Protokoll is, in varying configurations, a company of three freelance directors, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, who without using actors or existing texts produce work on  major stages in important cities such as Hamburg, Vienna, Düsseldorf and Zurich. Since Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp the work of Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel has become unusually successful for a theatre group that does not work with actors, does not stage dramatic texts and does not fulfil the requirements of repertory theatre as it dominates German and most European stages. The members of Rimini Protokoll have been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen twice (where theatre not created from dramatic texts is rarely represented) and recently were awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis and the Europe Prize for New Theatrical Realities. Tours of their new productions typically take place throughout Europe as well as in South America and India.

The reason for Rimini Protokoll’s success is in its presentation of a complex world in which the individual is fundamental and the truth is always a narrative. The company has hit a nerve amongst, somewhat exceptionally, theatre practitioners, critics and audiences alike, with theatre that is documentary in the sense of relating directly to the world as we experience it, an experience that often seems to evade our grasp. War, global market economy, capitalism, unemployment, old age, dying, and death all are Rimini Protokoll’s themes. They stake a claim for the particular, concrete person and against the politically generalized. Their version of documentary is one in which the very notion of documentary is juxtaposed with subjective experiences in which the individual and the social  are combined in a way that expands subjective perception.  While clear-cut theses, messages and opinions are avoided, Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel make, to loosely quote Godard, theatre political rather than political theatre.

Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp was the first collaborative work by Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel, three former students of the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen/Germany. The premiere in November 2000 (before they had even given themselves the name Rimini Protokoll) exhibited almost all of the characteristics that have so unmistakably informed all their subsequent work. These characteristics include using non-professional performers as experts of both their own lives and of the everyday; the examination of the actual performance space and its surroundings (in the case of Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp, an old people’s home next door to the theatre); a text that is simultaneously documentary and literary and blends disparate research material (like old age and the staging of a fiction such as the “Formula 1” race) and bears clear traces of its own production; and, a dramaturgy that, like the text, developed from the material it discovered and  that always simultaneously protects and challenges the performers. Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp was in many respects not only the prototype for a number of major stage productions that followed, but also the starting point for site-specific projects, radio plays, audio installations, small documentaries and short profiles.

Too much

There are at least two kinds of too much. One that annoys by exaggeration, that frustrates because you are never able to cope, that feeds you until you cannot swallow any more. Too much of ‘anything goes’, too much gluttony and mindless consumption. And there is too much as a thoughtful offer of possibilities. Not just accumulation but too much that offers choices, that empowers, that frees even when it is overwhelming. Too much that opens a field of thinking, associating, experiencing. Too much that takes its opposite seriously. Too much as a gesture of invitation and generosity.

Tasks for guests and hosts

It is this gesture of sometimes overburdening generosity that characterises many of BADco.’s recent performances. And even though this attitude can be read as the continuation of a specific modernist theatre tradition aiming to lay out a wide semiotic field by producing an excess of signifiers, this is not the full truth. While the work of their predecessors (most famously the New York neo-avant-garde antagonists the Wooster group and Richard Foreman, or in Europe – even though very different in style – the young Jan Fabre, Heiner Müller or Romeo Castellucci, to name a few) has its roots very much in an urge to liberate theatre from the primacy of text, from limitations by causal, linear narrations, by psychology, etc., BADco. takes it for granted that this prominent fight from the 1980s and early 1990s was won long ago. Not only do they use the booty of these struggles in whatever way they need to – they also add to it the attainments of the parallel, often ignored story of the arts and theatre in (South-) East Europe, and especially the former Yugoslavia.

An audience comes to a theatre perhaps to see something which if they saw it in real life, they may find offensive… Perhaps you’ve come here this evening, because you want to see something you’ve only done in the privacy of your own homes, something perhaps you wished you’d done in the privacy of your own homes or something that you dreamed about doing in the privacy of your own homes. An audience likes to sit in the dark and to watch other people do it. Well, if you’ve paid your money – good luck to you.

However, from this end of the telescope things look somewhat different – you all look very small, and very far away and there’s a lot of you. It’s important to remember that there are more of you than of us. So, if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win.

The audience should not forget that they are in the majority, as Richard Lowdon reminds them – nervously and with a ticking bomb tied to his belly – in the opening monologue of Showtime. For that means: They are responsible for what happens on stage and could stop it if necessary. But: they might also ignore the performance and trample on it.

The trivial fact that in theatre – as opposed to other art forms – the production inevitably takes place within the same space and time as the reception puts the audience in a risky position: that of sharing the responsibility of being a part of the whole. It is this phenomenon that has been of particular interest to Forced Entertainment, at least since the early ‘90s and that has played at least an incidental part ever since. In their works, dying is put on the stage and performers are pushed to reveal their most intimate secrets, fantasies and desires. They stand naked before us – desperately searching for some dignity or happiness – while we look on, the ever-present spectators, witnesses, voyeurs.

The shift in focus from communication that takes place within the play or across the stage to communication that takes place within the theatre itself – between actors and audience – has been a central concern for theatre reformers of all kinds. Such a shift has political ambitions. For it reveals that the theatre situation itself has always been a mirror of social models, be it the polis meeting at the Athenian theatre, the Baroque king forming the centrepiece of the play, or the awakening bourgeoisie building national theatres.

Since then, many fights have been fought with (or for) the audience; they have been shouted at, insulted, engaged, put on stage themselves or even surprised on the street. There is no longer any guarantee that the dramatic convention separating actors from the audience will be honoured. Even though the audience may no longer feel so threatened in their seats, their importance, as observers, has been recognized more than ever, even in mainstream theatres. For the most part, today’s theatre isn’t trying to break down the barriers between actors and audience, but is instead striving to empower the spectator as the “sovereign master over all possible kinds of semiosis”. (Erika Fischer-Lichte)

The audience is asked not so much to act, but rather to see and to think actively. In Brecht’s theatre, the ‘active spectator’ – the polar opposite to the Aristotelian concept of ‘fear and pity’ – was expected to apply what was shown on stage as a concrete model to society. The contemporary audience, meanwhile, is asked to relate texts and images to themselves, to make connections between often disparate elements, to supplement what they’ve seen and heard on stage in order to make their own stories, rather than follow a closed, linear narrative. Thus activated and empowered, the spectator has a peculiar responsibility for what he sees:

You are as responsible for everything you see as you were for everything you do. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, it just stayed stored in your eyes.

It was Tim Etchells himself who in his collection of essays, Certain Fragments, placed this quote from the notes of Vietnam War reporter Michael Herr in the context of the work of Forced Entertainment: “We always loved the idea in this – of one’s responsibility for events only seen“. It is the responsibility of a person who happens to witness an event, an accident, a crime, an injustice, or even a love scene, a scene of reconciliation, or simply an everyday event. It is the responsibility of seeing – and of having an attitude towards what is seen.

Peter Heller spricht über Geflügelhaltung (Peter Heller talks about Poultry Farming) from 1997 is a candidate for the prototypical origin of Rimini Protokoll’s theatre. The idea arose in a student bar in Giessen, around a large table, over beer and schnitzel. Stefan Kaegi, who had just recently arrived in this small town in Hessen from the F+F art school in Zurich, had a real poultry farmer up his sleeve already. He had actually come for just half a year to see whether there was anything to learn at the institute, founded by Andrzej Wirth in 1982. The conservative paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung later described it as “the greatest source of calamity for German theatre” because this was where, amongst others, René Pollesch, She She Pop, Showcase Beat Le Mot and (some members of) Gob Squad emerged to challenge or undermine conventional state-supported theatre. The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies was, and in this respect still remains, the only German-speaking university department to combine theatre theory and practice and above all to dedicate itself to the production of contemporary and experimental theatre forms.

In this context Peter Heller was a quickly produced experiment, a theatrical game designed to irritate those who, through their studies, were constantly having to deal with the irritation of theatre. A theatrical readymade. For Stefan Kaegi and Bernd Ernst (who came to Giessen in the same year as Kaegi), it was the first in a series of inquiries into how powerful the black box is as a representation machine and how far whatever you place in it automatically becomes theatre. But also how the view of the black box is changed through that which is placed in it.

After Peter Heller, Bernd Ernst and Stefan Kaegi staged productions featuring a pedigree Great Dane and a neurotic ufologist followed. In 1999 they named themselves Hygiene Heute (Hygiene Today – in opposition to dusty old German theatre), producing their first full-length show Training 747 for the Staatstheater Darmstadt’s Cutting Edge Festival. The piece was an intricate and playful story about mysterious parallels between two legendary aeroplane landings: the crash landing of Joseph Beuys’s bomber in the 2nd World War and amateur pilot Mathias Rust’s landing near Moscow’s Red Square. At that point their interest in theatrical readymades had already been replaced by the desire to create complex theatrical events.

There are other precedents for Rimini’s origins however. Fellow Giessen students Marcus Droß, Helgard Haug und Daniel Wetzel had been developing performances since 1995 under the name Ungunstraum – Alles zu seiner Zeit (Unfavourable Space – Everything in its Time). These performances worked above all on discarding or explicitly revealing theatrical mechanisms. In doing so, they also repeatedly put non-professionals on stage as “experts” for particular functions.

The three found each other in the context of a scenic project set by the composer and director Heiner Goebbels who was guest professor at the Institute at the time. The basis for the students’ project was Kafka’s story fragment The Great Wall of China and so the 1st Stage of Ungunstraum led us on an imaginary journey from Giessen to Peking. The group subsequently called almost all their series of related performances and installations at the time stages (Etappen). There was no recognisable narrative – actually almost nothing recognisable at all. Factual train connections to the Great Wall replaced Kafka’s text. The performers too disappeared in an installation made from steamed-up panes that could be written and projected on, as well as all kinds of sound and technical equipment. The performer-self (to say nothing of the actor-self) was regarded very critically. “Something had driven us onto the stage but then we hid ourselves the whole time we were there.” (Haug)

The name Ungunstraum came from a brochure about China that highlighted the “difficulty of transporting people and goods in a country with extremely unfavourable spaces (Ungunsträume)”. Droß, Haug und Wetzel wanted their ‘unfavourable spaces’ to demonstrate precisely where for them, infrastructure appeared to overwhelm form and content more than in other art forms: in the theatre. They were suspicious of technical perfection. Their task as performers was to operate and serve the light and sound equipment placed in full view on the stage and not to play themselves. The more polished and carefully built the settings became, the more their own appearance on stage was mistrusted. They wanted to be “professional dilettantes”, – following the only half-ironic maxim: “rehearsing is for cowards”.

The trap of representation (and that was essentially the whole of the German theatre landscape) was to be avoided at any price, and was considered at Giessen, more than anywhere else, the primary cause of all theatrical ills. Everything pleasing, everything that could be accused of trying “to give an audience what it wanted”, everything that concerned “purely visual effects and surface, that was to do with conventional dramaturgy stood under the general charge of non-thinking” (Wetzel).

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of the other place.Susan Sontag

Perhaps the most alarming thing is this: that there is a narrative plausibility even to Christoph Schlingensief’s cancer – as if plausibility had anything to do with life and death. We narrate our lives backwards; in retrospect, decisions seem inevitable, coincidence feasible, and the hand of fate consequential. Just as the Romantics believed that illness and early death were the result of a poetic sensibility. Just as we see an inner logic, a dramaturgy in the lives of famous people and are disinclined to read them as mere products of circumstance.

The neo-romantic Schlingensief has, in his work and interviews, always narrated his life in this way: as an ultimately coherent – albeit circuitous – development. He has expanded upon this narrative onstage and enlarged it via his incursions into public spaces, which in turn were taken up by the media so that they, too, have chronicled his life as it were a novel. And because Schlingensief and the world around him tend to notch things up more than just a little, he has considerably overextended the arc between life and art, as was demonstrated (if not before) in his 2004 production of Parsifal in Bayreuth. If an artist and his interpreters equate the two ends of this arc so strongly, couldn’t it be that the work actually writes the life? That life adheres to a desirable (because plausible, because aesthetically beautiful) logic? And, at some point, it seemed as if this life were no longer being narrated backwards, but forwards. Like a serialised novel or a film or, to cite Schlingensief’s 2008 production A Church of Fear for the Stranger in Me:

Are we perhaps a lie? Are we a film, a film lasting barely a moment? Are we the thoughts of a madman? Are we a printing error? Are we a premonition? The picture that forms in one’s imagination much earlier than the events via which we participate in life occur? […] Are we a future fact that has not yet come about?

Parsifal is Wagner’s final opera, an artistic and ideological legacy replete with religious motifs – from the revelation of the monstrance to the Eucharist. Following Schlingensief’s surprising appointment as the director of a new production of this opera, time and again comparisons were made between him and its title figure : Parsifal the ‘pure fool’ who, as a Germanised figure of salvation, redeems the world through compassion, and Schlingensief – for whom compassion and redemption, albeit often misunderstood as irony, were always central motifs in his work – who tilts in apparent naivety at windmills. Or at Klingsor.

The wider resonance of the Parsifal story was also soon to be extended by the concrete situation of the artist himself. Even with someone like Schlingensief, who has effected so many surprising yet convincing artistic turnarounds, it was difficult to imagine what might follow the supposed highpoint of a production at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The enfant terrible, trash filmmaker, scandalous performer, and TV provocateur had entered the heart of bourgeois culture. It would be difficult for an artistic career to reach a more established or esteemed position than this. The life story appeared complete – catharsis had to follow. Schlingensief, too, did not resist the temptation of ennobling his life and art with the possibility of its early end. In fact he repeatedly mentioned that death could, indeed, follow his production of Parsifal.

Theatre as illness, illness as theatre

Schlingensief’s fascination with illness and death did, however, not begin with Parsifal. Rather, it is a fascination that is also apparent in his early films. Blood is vomited in Mother’s Mask (1988) and Menu Total (1986) contains the eerie white-coats-and-doctors scene that would later be incorporated into the video segment of Mea Culpa: A ReadyMade Opera (2009). For Schlingensief, the motif of illness has various functions and meanings. It becomes a symptom of what society has suppressed, of something (the National Socialist past, incest, rape) that breaks out because it can no longer be restrained. But, in contrast to Antonin Artaud (who likened the theatre to the plague with its grotesquely transformative power), the outbreak of illness in these cases does not mark a turning point, a new social beginning, or a resurrection from the smoking ruins. It does not have a cathartic effect; it merely brings the truth to light, without leading to insight. The truth serum of illness does not heal – even though redemption is another central motif in Schlingensief’s work – perhaps for the very reason that it cannot be attained.

The fact that Schlingensief likes to bring up the subject of societal illness has less to do with the desire to provoke than with compassion, indeed with a vicarious suffering that sometimes lends him a touch of the messianic. The supposition of irony or even cynicism is usually incorrect here – techniques of the inauthentic or of distancing are largely foreign to Schlingensief. Rather, it is primarily the techniques of non-integration and non-resolution that are essential to his work.

Malzacher: Firstly, I should admit that I actually have very little experience as a dramaturg in the way the profession is usually understood in German-speaking countries, with their very specific tradition. This is mainly because the projects I have been involved in have been based neither on a dramatic text nor on common work divisions within repertoire theaters. My work is always in conversation with the realm of postdramatic, devised theater. And one of the most obvious qualities of these approaches is: they tend to be very, very different from each other. And so do the possible roles of dramaturgs in this field.
In this regard, I am mainly interested in how the model of the “dramatic dramaturg” is supplemented as well as fundamentally challenged by a whole range of new or changing job descriptions and job divisions within the field of postdramatic theater, conceptual dance, etc.

That said, I should add that even in more conventional theaters the role of the dramaturg has never been easy to grasp and is often interpreted in quite different ways. The dramaturg is still the most mysterious figure on a theatre’s payroll.
But especially in devised theater (i.e., theater in which the script takes shape through rehearsals and improvisations) the work of a dramaturg is, usually, first and foremost to figure out what the work actually is. What is needed depends on working methods, aesthetics, group constellations, but also on the specific personalities of the artists—which means primarily the directors that are most often the main conversation partners of the dramaturg. The understanding of the role of the dramaturg does not become easier due to the fact that roles in postdramatic theater are always-already in flux—there are all kinds of collective approaches and shifting positions within the artistic process, for instance between being a performer, a writer, a director, a technician, a curator—or a dramaturg. We are part of this game of shifting job descriptions.

Freies Theater.

Allein der Begriff ist natürlich schon problematisch. Er soll so vieles zusammenfassen, was noch wesentlich heterogener ist, als die Stadt- und Staatstheater untereinander. Wenn ich, da ich ja nun offenkundig als Lobbyist dieser schwer definierbaren Szene eingeladen bin, dennoch versuche, ihn für den Augenblick emphatisch zu verwenden, dann sicher nicht als „frei von einem Haus“ oder „frei von Institutionen“. Schließlich arbeiten alle freien Theatermacher, die halbwegs eine Karriere haben, mit Häusern zusammen. Sie werden koproduziert, womöglich dramaturgisch begleitet, haben oft langjährige Bindungen. Nur – und da liegt eine der merkwürdigen Prämissen von der „Doppelpass“-Idee: diese Häuser sind keine Stadttheater, sondern, wie soll man das nennen, freie Häuser? Sie sind Teil der freien Theaterszene, sie bilden zusammen mit Festivals im Wesentlichen die löchrige Infrastruktur dieses Genres, oft nach Vorbild belgischer Kunstencentra entstanden – also in einem Land, in dem die freie Szene nicht ein merkwürdiges Anderes ist, sondern das Theater: Keersmaeker, Fabre, Lauwers, Platel… und natürlich die Generationen danach.

Diese Häuser – wie der Frankfurter Mousonturm, das HAU und die Sophiensaele in Berlin, Kampnagel in Hamburg, der Ringlokschuppen in Mülheim, das FFT in Düsseldorf, PACT Zollverein in Essen und wenige mehr – solche Häuser sind, zu einem kleinen Anteil, aber doch, auch in der „Doppelpass“-Förderung. Und sie machen mit dieser Förderung: Das, was sie immer machen. Oder was sie machen, wenn sie das Geld dafür haben. Sie erfüllen ihren Auftrag. Und können ihn damit ein Stückchen mehr erfüllen. Was natürlich schön ist.
Solche Kooperationen entsprechen den „Doppelpass“-Statuten, sind vermutlich sogar explizit gewünscht. Aber da sie ja business as usual mit etwas besserer Finanzierung sind, bilden sie wohl kaum den Kern des Ganzen. Im Zentrum steht der Wunsch nach Öffnung der Stadt- und Staatstheater für andere Arbeitsweisen, andere Künstler, andere Ästhetiken.

Nun sind die Türen auch der Repertoiretheater ja schon längst nicht mehr fest geschlossen. Star-Regisseure wie René Pollesch oder Stefan Pucher sind seit vielen Jahren komplett von der freien Szene in die festen Häuser gewandert. Andere, wie Rimini Protokoll, sind dort zumindest steter Gast.
Darüber hinaus gibt es diverse Kooperationen mit freien Gruppen – von der freundlichen Gastspieleinladung bis zur kompletten Produktion. Solche Begegnungen können für beide Seiten produktiv sein – oder zumindest pragmatisch sinnvoll. Wo die Ziele klar definiert sind – und sei es auch nur wegen eines gegenseitigen Imagegewinns (Schlagwort: symbolic value) oder aus finanziellen Gründen: Warum nicht.

Aber wenn wir ehrlich sind: Das Interesse bleibt auf beiden Seiten auch in den besseren Fällen letztens höchstens höflich. Die Argumentation auf der einen Seite ist: Das Stadttheater muss eine große Bandbreite abbilden. Darum inszenieren Intendanten Komödien, von denen sie sich im persönlichen Gespräch rasch distanzieren. Und darum gehört es heute zum guten Ton, freie Gruppen einzuladen. Die Argumentation auf der anderen Seite ist meist eher verdruckst: Es gibt halt bessere Bedingungen, man will mal was anderes ausprobieren, ein Stück vom Kuchen und so.

Selbstverständlich gibt es Ausnahmen. Das ist prima, aber: Es ist auch völlig okay, wenn sich ein Stadttheater einfach nur aus Eigennutz für die freie Szene interessiert. Die interessiert sich ja umgekehrt ausschließlich aus Eigennutz für die Stadttheater.
Es geht gerade nicht darum, die eingeübte Gut-Böse-Dialektik zu bedienen. Auch das Klein-Groß-Spiel, die Argumente mit ungerecht verteilten Budgets etc. interessieren mich eigentlich nicht wirklich. Es gibt ja nun genügend andere Bereiche, in denen weit mehr Geld steckt, als dass man eine seltsame „kommunizierende Röhren“-Budget-Logik ausgerechnet innerhalb der Theaterlandschaft entwickeln müsste. Wenn man sich anschaut, was in den meisten Fällen Schauspieler oder Dramaturgen an Stadttheatern verdienen, gibt es nicht sehr viel Grund zum Neid. Für meinen Geschmack braucht es diese Diskussion nicht. Was es braucht, ist Gleichberechtigung. Und das impliziert selbstverständlich eine bessere finanzielle Basis für die freie Szene. Aber mehr noch bedeutet es eine ernstzunehmende inhaltliche und künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit ihr. Ein Ende des Geredes von Nachwuchs, von Reservoir etc. – von all den Bildern, die letztlich Komplimente nutzen, um zu sagen: Es ist eine Phase im Leben durch die manche gute Leute durchmüssen, bevor sie da landen, wo sie hingehören. (So wie man sich beim staatsbürgerlichen „Doppelpass“ kurz nach Erreichen der Volljährigkeit gefälligst für einen von beiden Ausweisen zu entscheiden hat.)

Diese Forderung richtet sich übrigens nicht nur an andere, sondern an die „freie Szene“ selbst. Die ist nicht automatisch der Motor theatraler Innovation. Aber künstlerisch neue Wege werden dort gefunden, wo nicht permanent versucht wird, jemanden auf den alten Weg zurück zu zwingen. Die Institutionsmaschine der großen Theaterhäuser ist da kaum zu schlagen. Doch man darf auch den Konservativismus der Avantgarde nicht unterschätzen, die Verliebtheit in das einmal selbst erreichte.
Die Freiheit, die das Neue braucht, gab es vor etlichen Jahren offensichtlich auch in einem Stadttheater in Bremen oder nochmal später in einem Theater am Berliner Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Und solche Freiheit gibt es theoretisch bei den Gruppen des sogenannten freien Theaters. Nur: Man muss sie halt auch nutzen und ertragen wollen. Wirklich künstlerisch konsequent tun das dann nicht so sehr viele.

Andererseits aber glaube ich auch nicht, dass sich die Stadttheater (sorry auch hier für die Generalisierung) wirklich bemühen, zu verstehen, was bei den „Freien“ wirklich passiert, bzw.: wie es passiert. Warum oft nur eine Arbeit im Jahr (oder gar weniger) produziert werden kann – oder vielleicht im Gegenteil permanent etwas neues produziert werden muss. Warum die vorhandene Bühnenarchitektur (inklusive des Flexibilität simulierenden Black Cube) manchmal nicht einmal mehr für eine kritische Auseinandersetzung interessant ist. Warum man sich Institutionskritik nicht kaufen kann. Warum bestimmte Performer-Stile nicht einfach einübbar sind (so wie man halt in der einen Inszenierung fein ziselierte Psychologie spielen muss und am nächsten Abend ironische Abziehbilder. Heute Bondy, morgen Petras).
Wenn frei im Zusammenhang von Theater überhaupt etwas bedeutet, dann als vogelfrei oder als Kampfbegriff: Frei von Vorgaben, ästhetisch wie arbeitsstrukturell. Devised theatre: Dass jede Arbeit wirklich von vorn anfängt. Vielleicht braucht sie Text, vielleicht braucht sie eine frontale Bühne, vielleicht einen verdunkelten Zuschauerraum. Vielleicht braucht sie Schauspieler. Vielleicht Tänzer. Vielleicht aber auch nichts davon.
Natürlich arbeitet kein Künstler jedes Mal von Null. Aber dennoch: das ist der Anspruch. So etwas könnte „frei“ in diesem Zusammenhang meinen, wenn es einen künstlerischen Wert haben soll. „Freies Theater“ ist kein finanzieller oder struktureller Zustand (diesen status quo gilt es ja eher zu überwinden), sondern ein eigenständiges Genre. Oder, in der Logik der Stadttheater: Eine Sparte.

Von punktuellen Zusammenarbeiten profitieren die freien Theatermacher wie die Repertoiretheater. Sie sollten mehr stattfinden und dauerhaft und ernsthaft. „Doppelpass“ geht in die richtige Richtung, wo es um den Versuch geht, Kontinuität zu ermöglichen und um das Anregen von neuen Begegnungen, Öffnungen, Herausforderungen. Dennoch kann es erst einmal nur um gegenseitige Provokation gehen. Um das sich miteinander Auseinandersetzen und einander Konfrontieren. Um das Aushalten von Unterschieden. Nicht darum, sich auf jedes vermeintliche Gemeinsame zu stürzen. Ein Kompromiss kann am Ende stehen, nicht am Anfang.

Aber dafür braucht man keine doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft. Dafür braucht man höchstens ein Arbeitsvisum. Das mag als Name nicht sehr sexy sein, aber es ist nicht unpassend. Denn so offen sind die Türen der Häuser ja nun auch wieder nicht. Man muss sich zahlreichen Regeln unterwerfen, und da, wo man sie nicht befolgen kann oder will, zäh und oft erfolglos verhandeln.
So gut es ist, dass „Doppelpass“ hilft, kontinuierliche Zusammenarbeit für zwei, drei Jahre zu schaffen: Jedes Theater, jede Gruppe, die wirklich neues Terrain betreten will, wird mehr Geduld brauchen. Nach wie vor gilt in den allermeisten Fällen: Wenn freie Theatermacher im Stadttheater arbeiten, dann entstehen dort selten ihre besten Arbeiten. Warum das so ist – und welche seltenen Fälle es gibt, wo das nicht so ist – das ist genau der Punkt, an dem ein wirklich ernsthaften Gespräch beginnen müsste.
Dieses Gespräch aber wird nicht geführt, wenn beide Seiten im diplomacy mode bleiben. Und da sind sie, wenn sie – knapp bei Kasse – jede Fördermöglichkeit wahrnehmen, die sie nur kriegen können. Aus diesem Dilemma kommt auch „Doppelpass“ nicht raus. „Doppelpass“ wird deshalb so sehr beansprucht, weil Geld dahinter steht. Es ist nicht viel, aber für die freie Szene ist es verdammt viel. Und für die Stadt- und Staatstheater genug, dass man es nicht ignorieren kann. „Doppelpass“ ist auch eine self fulfilling prophecy.

Aber wenn wir in Situationen gefangen bleiben, wo das Gemeinsame so mühsam konstruiert wird und permanent gerettet werden muss, sprechen wir die eigentlichen Probleme nicht an. Die kritische Auseinandersetzung müssten fürs erste andere führen – aber auch das muss Teil von „Doppelpass“ sein. Ebenso wie eine wirklich tief gehende Reflexion im Anschluss. Eine Reflexion deren Ausgang wirklich offen ist und nicht durch künftige Förderaussichten bereits in eine bestimmte Richtung gelenkt wird.

Es braucht keine doppelten Staatsbürgerschaften für freie Gruppen und feste Häuser. (Und – by the way: Warum eigentlich mit Theatern? Die freie Szene zeichnet doch aus, dass sie Genre-Grenzen nicht leichtfertig anerkennt. Warum also nicht Kunstvereine, Biennalen, Neue-Musik-Ensembles, politische Bewegungen, Physik-Institute… Und – by the way: Warum eigentlich im deutschsprachigen Raum? Die freie Szene zeichnet doch aus, dass sie immer mehr international ist?) Doppelte Staatsbürgerschaften unterstreichen gleichzeitig das Trennende und versuchen es zu negieren.
Insofern ist es wiederum gar kein Problem, dass trotz allen Bemühens um Kontinuität, „Doppelpass“ mit vielen guten Projekten letztlich ein „Schnupperpass“ bleiben wird. Sondern es ist genau richtig. Da muss nichts zusammenwachsen. Da muss aber auch nichts in verkrampftem Antagonismus, in alberner Kampfgebärde verharren. Was es braucht, ist ein agonistisches Feld der Kunst und der Kulturpolitik. Ein Feld, auf dem verschiedene Positionen selbstbewusst gegenüber stehen.
Um solche Positionen aber zu definieren und zu bewahren, bedarf es auch der Möglichkeit der Tradierung. Freie Theaterformen existieren nicht von der Hand in den Mund, sie bauen aufeinander auf, sie brauchen ihre eigenen (metaphorischen und realen) Archive. Es wäre gut, auch hier – analog zum Tanzfonds Erbe beispielsweise – dafür zu sorgen, dass die Flüchtigkeit des Mediums keine zwangsläufige Flüchtigkeit der künstlerischen Diskurse mit sich bringt, die allein schon einen Nachteil gegenüber der Tradierungsmaschine der Repertoire-Theater zementieren. Der Ewige-Jugend-Verdacht gegenüber dem freien Theater hängt auch mit seiner vermeintlichen Geschichtslosigkeit zusammen.

Wir brauchen mehr Modelle für Künstler wie für Institutionen. Stadttheater, die wie Künstlerhäuser organisiert sind beispielsweise. „Doppelpass“ klammert ja, wie die meisten Kollaborationen zwischen freier Szene und Stadttheatern, das eigentliche Kernproblem, zumindest in den bisher akzeptierten Projekten, aus: Das Schauspielensemble. Da wird es doch interessant – weil dann oft zwei Ensembles aufeinandertreffen – schließlich sind die meisten freien Gruppen auch Ensembletheater, sogar mit meist deutlich mehr Beharrlich- und Dauerhaftigkeit. Brisant wird es da, wo neue Arten von Stadttheatern gedacht werden, nicht in der Nische, sondern mittendrin. Unperfekte Bastarde. Wir brauchen Orte der Versammlung, der temporären Gemeinschaften. Wir brauchen Theater als öffentlichen Raum. In allen Variationen und absurden Allianzen. Da müssen die Stadt- und Staatstheater einen Beitrag leisten.

Aber dafür braucht es eine tragfähige Grundlage. „Doppelpass“ ist ein prima Zwischenprojekt. Aber es ist kein Modell, das generalisiert werden kann. Die Fusion von freier Szene und Stadttheatern ist keine Utopie. Für keine Seite. Unsere Unterschiede (nicht nur zwischen „frei“ und „Institution“) sind unser Potential. Alle möglichen Verbindungen sollten gefördert werden. Aber sie sollen nicht durch Geld erzwungen werden. Die freie Szene hat Häuser. Sie hat Ausbildungsstätten. Und sie hat Festivals. Die müssen erst einmal existieren können und ihre Arbeit machen können und dadurch den freien Gruppen Strukturen und Plattformen bieten. Gerade die Initiative der Kulturstiftung des Bundes hat gezeigt, wie nachhaltig ihr Einsatz sein kann. Denn nur wenn es die Möglichkeit für freie Gruppen gibt, mit starken eigenen Institutionen zu kooperieren, dann ist die Kooperation mit den „anderen“ Häusern wirklich ein künstlerischer Wunsch und nicht nur finanzielle Notlage.

I have certainly produced work that was deliberately and purposefully developed to attract attention and nothing more. But sometimes that was a mistake because doing that turned out to be completely uninteresting. The best things were those that developed unintentionally, where the work, for example, came into being as a result of an invitation out of the blue. That is even more clearly the case with the three pieces about cancer. They came out of nowhere – out of the shock that came with this illness. And, of course, it turned everything upside down. Suddenly all of my 350 kilometre-per-hour plans – my life at the time was super fast – were brought to a halt. But at the same time I didn’t see any reason to brake because cancer has to do with death and with the limitations of time that one has, but that wasn’t really clear to me at the time. It was actually a massive disruption. Like something that wants to prevent you from doing the work that is pulling at you. When I looked at the X-ray, I suddenly became very hot, as if I had made a huge mistake. The first thing I felt was a certain sense of guilt. In that moment, I probably already sensed: This is really such an insane rupture it is almost impossible to imagine. And then a flood of questions followed: What happens now? Operation? Radiotherapy? Chemotherapy? Will I still exist after the operation? And will I still have a voice afterwards? Because the doctor thought that he might have to remove my vocal nerves. And then you wake up and you can speak – that was really such a relief. Then my appetite returned and I came to terms with the whole situation, so I was optimistic. That is something that has remained with me. That is to say: I always have moments when I think: This is great, things go on. And then I fall to pieces again, you know: A complete nervous wreck, with absolutely no idea about how to cope with it, and I just think: It’s all over. And there is no way of driving a wedge between myself and it, or of flinging open a window.

It was thus pure expediency to say: good, if you have fear, then talk about fear. So the old automatism returned: If you have a problem, don’t think it away, deal with it. Then use it, grab it, and channel your sorrow into a comrade-in-arms. So I had to give form to it, create images, in order to cope with it and at first I thought: We will make a film as soon as I get out of hospital. A comedy about someone who has cancer and who only meets crazy people. Then I thought: That would just be the old sales and suppression strategy, ie. how do I give form to it in a way that people notice that I’m in control – and of course I’m not in control of it at all! It’s the complete opposite. It is probably the hardest experience of my life. In this case, I can stand neither above nor below it. This time I have definitely landed somewhere else. I am in it.

You made notes with the help of a dictaphone…

Yes, even in the first weeks, I recorded nearly every day what I experienced there and what happened when the doctor or the palliative nurse came etc. And in the evenings, I didn’t listen to it again. I did, however, cry and talk into the device, when nobody was there. It wasn’t a speech, or material, at that stage, for a book. It was simply a collection of everything that was racing through my head at the time. And then I had the idea of making a piece out of it – which I began to rehearse in the flat…from an automated bed with a remote control from the hospital. That was immediately a flop because, as a result of the Chemo, I wasn’t able to continue. Aino, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife, tried to reconstruct the material that I had worked on laboriously in the flat, on the rehearsal stage of the Maxim Gorki Theater. That resulted in the first performance of Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Current State of Things] which took place in a very intimate atmosphere with no press allowed. I made it while still in shock. Guests were invited solely via a text message – no other announcement was made. We had sixty or seventy seats for people including neighbours and friends, but also Bob Wilson and Volker Spengler, Werner Schroeter, who has cancer himself, Martin Wuttke…And because it was an evening without pressure and without a discussion afterwards, it was an incredible source of power for me: We pulled it off. Somehow it worked.

At that point I thought: Stick with this theme. And Zwischenstand was further developed into Kirche der Angst [A Church of Fear for the Stranger in Me] for the Ruhr-Triennale, as a sort of requiem or ‘cancer mass’. It was a huge success yet a different kind of success than previously. Something really happened between the audience and us – it was sincere and, to a certain extent, tragic. I also appeared in a short scene at the end of the performance that utilised the liturgy of a Catholic mass. But on the fifth or sixth evening, I thought: That’s enough. I don’t want to make touring theatre, or something, for people with cancer. That can’t be the case and it has no future. And then came the third part in the Burgtheater Vienna and, with it, the risk that people would perhaps think: Yeah, yeah, here he goes again about his illness…But then the situation changed again. The metastasen suddenly disappeared as a result of a tablet, something which, according to the doctors, wasn’t really possible in that period of time. After four or five weeks, I had a CT scan in which none could be found! How does that come about? The third part of the trilogy is concerned with life going on. What do you do, when you step back into reality, but you can’t perceive it as real because you previously thought you were already dead?

When someone dies, it is the loneliest path there is. It is not about hand-holding or whatever: My father smiled at the end. That was, however, a smile that I couldn’t understand. Was it, perhaps, the smile of someone face to face with a secret society that had taken him in? To see that was a heavy burden for me because he also told us that, in two weeks, he would be dead. And in two weeks he was dead. They are exceptional circumstances and we lack the criteria for working through them.

Can one actually grasp something like that in a production?

It can only function via music, and perhaps also via beliefs, ie. individual beliefs. One couldn’t go further with some sort of objective realism. Only through that which is ritualistic, almost sacred can one produce something that is befitting and moving. And the third part Mea Culpa was perhaps the most difficult: an uncertain resurrection, a celebration of life in the face of the inevitability of death.

In the middle of the stage, almost invisibly, I presided over the church, that is, the Kirche der Angst. Within it the ritual continues and someone there celebrates a requiem while outside are the treatment rooms and life follows its normal course… It is once again an argument [Auseinandersetzung] with the realisation that redemption is actually a concept that is completely misunderstood, and which one connects with something great and sublime. But redemption is the most individualistic, small, and awful step that there is. Because he who is done for, who seeks only to be redeemed gives himself over to total loneliness and surrenders everything that makes him who he is. That he is then told that everything will be fine and that he can cope – this is not really what is on his mind…If one has been through such a situation and come through it, one has more interest in people than before. One sees them differently. I look at them as if I were already standing a step outside of them. One looks at them perhaps not more exactly, not analytically, but longer. Humans and human life gain a different value. Everything is no longer taken for granted.

Sometimes of course, I slip into old mechanisms in my work, but they don’t really come through. It doesn’t become a show, because I don’t want that anymore. The distance is greater.

Previously you were always on stage and committed to being involved. It was precisely this lack of distance that defined your work. From the earliest theatre productions on, you had to be able to join in, because otherwise you couldn’t respond to the reactions of the public and the actors’ routines. And now suddenly this composure?

Yes. I already had that with Kirche der Angst, when I simply pull back and my team reconstructs the work. And then I say, let’s put that in for now, and I lean back and look at it. Previously I didn’t permit such a situation. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want anything finished which is why I hesitated until the premiere. I was downright afraid that it would be finished. Now I mould the ‘sculpture’ more in my mind, and no longer believe that I have to work on it with an axe, hammer and a chisel. Now I can turn off more quickly. I am more interested in the total composition, which means that I need to be able to observe everything. And I also don’t fiddle around with the actors’ bodies as I used to and flip out in front of their faces, so that they no longer know how they should act. In the past, I always had muscular pain in the evening, because I actually wanted to play all of the roles. And now I just write the texts and concentrate more on looking. That is my job.

Your previous work was, in part, shaped by a notable paradox: you are, on the one hand, a complete control freak – you can’t leave the actors alone on the stage – and, on the other hand, you produce permanent chaos in order to limit or thwart your own control.  Has control become less important for you?

It could well be. It pleases me when things evolve more from themselves. I have less strength, but I think more. The whole time, I occupy myself with the texts, images and particularly the music. And at night I search for pieces of music, which is something I didn’t previously do. I try to respond when someone doesn’t understand something, whereas in the past, my immediate reaction was: Out! These days, someone will leave rather than me having to say he should no longer be there. But the control is greater, because I see it as an image, as a composition. I have to feel it first. Previously I almost had to catapult myself into a trance at each rehearsal.

The musicality that I have with opera is now more and more important. With theatre, one thinks a lot, und that is something that one can make great use of, but the structure is easily lost. The opera has more stability and provides a framework which is organic and not compulsive. A singer has to accept that he sings, he can’t just jump around. And for that reason, we don’t do a lot of theatrics with them, they should simply sing. I don’t believe them anyway when they start to introduce their pretence of naturalism.

So more the image of the whole – there is still control, but less getting tangled up in the details, in order to see the larger arc…

… and to also accept that this is simply how it is now. And not, as in the past, change something in the last few weeks and cut the text, so that the whole production dies in the process. I don’t do that anymore, because I really fight hard for the subject matter. And even if the text is, at first, a jumble of words, the music clarifies what is happening.  I now think in a very musical way. When you are lying in bed, there are not a lot of alternatives…I thought a lot while I was in bed, spoke a lot, read a lot but also listened to a lot of music. In terms of your question about rhythm, it is also interesting when you are simply lying there with an embolism. You simply do not have any chance of producing rhythm.

Is the work then more disembodied? Less physical?

Yes, I believe so. … In the past we pulled viewers onto the stage, bound them, and then smeared them with Nivea cream; a latent form of rape or something. It was, in any case, so corporeal that people went out and cried, because they couldn’t handle the violence that had befallen them during their visit to the theatre. We found that pretty great and exciting. Although at times we also had a bad conscience. That I hurt people because I pulled them onto the stage was, perhaps, justifiable at the time, but, at the moment, I have no connection to it, even a certain sense of disgust. Because that type of act makes the arrogant claim that: We are the ones who see through everything and will show you that we are breaking the rules and acknowledge no taboos. This attitude has become rather alien to me now. One can also employ theatre as a place where one can think. Back then, however, I couldn’t do that, because I felt virtually compelled to get into fights on the stage. We only enjoyed it when there was a ruckus. I don’t want to say that that was completely wrong – there were indeed great nights. Often, there were metaphysical moments as well. But people change.

The explicitly and concretely political work that emerged in this period – Kühnen 94, the party Chance 2000, the Vienna Container-Project Please love Austria, the Hamlet production with the Neo-Nazis in Zürich: How did these projects develop? Your work in film had often sought to draw mythical, historical connections…

At the age of eight – 1968 – I made a super-8 film with my father’s camera, where a farmer had to wave flags and three children in go-carts knocked him down and ran away. There was also a shootout or something similar. I don’t want to say that that was political, but something is captured in that image. During my school years, I would always have rows with the teachers because, for me they were too political, one-sidedly political. I once started a row with a teacher and had to leave the classroom, because I said that she only approached things from a left perspective, and that was too boring for me. The Oberhausen Short Film Festival also didn’t give me much pleasure because to my mind it was only pseudo political. People were invited from the eastern block to show their boring films. And then our worst filmmakers would show their films in Leipzig or somewhere else.

My father always received telegrams from the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] camp. I partly learned their contents by heart so that I – as a sixteen year old at the SPD [Social Democratic Party] voting stands – could use it in an argument against them. Simply as verbal fireworks. I did, however, always read those telegrams. And in Oberhausen, where very little information circulated, I also played around with statistics that they couldn’t rebut. Or I worked together with the KPD-ML [The Communist Party of Germany/Marxists-Leninists] because they claimed that an egg should only cost two or three pfennigs. At first I thought it was a great idea until I realised: the chicken doesn’t get anything out of it. So it was quite clear that I hadn’t really become political at all – it was rather something like an overarching need for recognition.

Later as a student in Munich, I began to develop a sense of antipathy toward the Film Academy. At that time I became interested in the films of Werner Herzog, because they were so detached. They were so strange. Even Dwarfs Started Small was the kind of film I liked. I found it political. In contrast, I found these explicitly political films by Reinhard Hauff, Margarethe von Trotta and others to be no good at all. I also felt, in part, extremely aggressive towards Wenders: reproducing stupid crap from America, but so badly. But I liked The American Friend, and I thought Alice in the Cities and The State of Things were great. I liked, in a sense, their avowal that someone had failed. That one can’t leave the city. Or that one has cancer and wants to rescue the family.

I actually felt at home with Werner Nekes for whom I worked as an assistant, and I gathered ammunition from experimental films that could be used against mainstream cinema. ie. Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol. For me, that was political enough. My work only became politically explicit with Menu Total – that was in 1986. In this film, Helge Schneider – who was unknown back then – ran around playing a young boy who wanted to become Hitler, and who wiped out his family. And later they all rise again and are redeemed….

Schließlich existiert die Kritik nur im Verhältnis zu etwas anderem als sie selbst: sie ist Instrument, Mittel zu einer Zukunft oder zu einer Wahrheit, die sie weder kennen noch sein wird, sie ist ein Blick auf einen Bereich, in dem sie als Polizei auftreten will, nicht aber ihr Gesetz durchsetzen kann. Michel Foucault

Ein schwarzhäutiges Zimmermädchen in der großen Marmorbühnenbox wischt den Boden, wischt und wischt, ihre Bewegung wird langsamer, wird Zeitlupe. Dann, nach einer Vorhangpause voll laut dröhnendem Rauschen: absolute Stille. Als wäre aller Ton weggedreht. Und in der Stille, im grellen, nackten Marmorraum, sitzt allein ein Baby, gerade mal ein paar Monate alt, sitzt und guckt ungläubig. Langt zögernd, ohne den Blick von den Zuschauern zu lassen, nach einem schwarzen Becher, stößt ihn um, und drei Würfel rollen über den weißen Boden. Ein surrealer Traum, eine Filmszene vielleicht, doch mit elektrisierender physischer Präsenz. Und das Publikum traut sich kaum zu atmen, um ja das Kind nicht zu erschrecken. Um das Bild nicht zu zerstören. Um keine Verantwortung auf sich zu laden.

Wie fasst man Präsenz in Sprache? Nach welchen Kriterien bewertet man den Auftritt eines Babys? Dürfen die das? Welche ethischen Prinzipien gelten für Kunst? Was beschreibt man, wenn es keinen Plot zu beschreiben gibt, keine Schauspielerleistung, keine Dialoge? Und wie wahr ist die Erinnerung?

Dass das Theater sich immer weniger damit zufrieden gibt, einen Text mehr oder minder behutsam oder gewalttätig auf die Bühne zu hieven, zu interpretieren, zu bebildern, zu beleben – das hat den Job des Kritikers nicht gerade einfacher gemacht. Kriterien für gut oder schlecht waren in Kunst und Leben immer schon Konstrukte, ein schwer auseinander zu klamüserndes Gemenge aus relativem Diskurskonsens und Privatmeinung. Aber immerhin: Solange klar ist, dass es darum geht, ein Drama einigermaßen gewinnbringend zu inszenieren, solange der Text immer an erster Stelle kommt und alles andere ihm folgt, solange der Schauspieler (egal ob psychologisch oder manieriert, ob sehr physisch oder sehr ätherisch, ob ästhetisch überhöht oder dienend) eine einigermaßen klar umrissene Rolle spielt, solange er überhaupt eine Rolle spielt, solange hat man beim Schreiben genügend Fäden in der Hand, denen man je nach Bedarf folgen kann. Und wenn man dennoch mal ratlos ist, kann man sich noch immer als Handwerkskammer betätigen: Wo alles nichts hilft, bemängelt oder lobt man halt die Aussprache des Hauptdarstellers.

Text, Bewegung, Raum, Ton, Licht, whatever

Das waren noch Zeiten. Inzwischen kann man froh sein, wenn überhaupt ein Schauspieler beteiligt ist und der Kritiker nicht stattdessen die performativen Leistungen (und die „Präsenz“) von komplett gelähmten ALS-Kranken (in Schlingensiefs „Kunst und Gemüse“), von alten Frauen, arbeitslosen Fluglotsen und indischen Callcenter-Mitarbeitern (alles: Rimini Protokoll), von lustvoll spielenden Profi-Dilettanten (z.B. She She Pop oder Showcase Beat Le Mot), oder eben – wie in der eingangs geschilderten Szene aus dem vierten Teil von Romeo Castelluccis „Tragedia Endogonida“ – von neunmonatigen Kindern zu beurteilen oder zumindest zu beschreiben hat.

Die kritische Haltung gegenüber der Arbeit des Schauspielers und seiner Rolle ist eines der augenfälligen ästhetischen Symptome gegenwärtigen „experimentellen“ Theaters. Es resultiert auch aus einem Misstrauen gegenüber traditioneller Schauspielkunst mit ihren oft berechenbaren Tricks, aber es wurzelt tiefer: Das „Als ob“ des konventionellen theatralen Paktes (also die Bereitschaft, dem Schauspieler seinen Hamlet für die Dauer eines Abends zu glauben oder zumindest als Denkkonstrukt zuzulassen) ist für viele Theatermacher keine brauchbare Ausgangssituation mehr. Die Repräsentationskritik, hier vor allem des psychoanalytisch geprägten französischen Poststrukturalismus und seiner Spielarten, hat zwangsläufig auch die Repräsentationsmaschine des Theaters problematisiert. Das, nennen wir es der Einfachheit halber weiterhin „postdramatische Theater“ will oft keine andere Wirklichkeit mehr zeigen, sondern in erster Linie, wie Jens Roselt sagt, „eine Situation schaffen, die selbst wirklich ist“. So zerfließen die Grenzen zwischen Schauspiel und Performance, zwischen Repräsentation und Präsentation – und mit ihnen zerfließen auch viele der handelsüblichen Analyse- und Bewertungskriterien. Wo der Text nicht mehr zwangsläufig das erste Wort hat, kann jedes Zeichensystem in den Vordergrund rücken, um Aufmerksamkeit heischen, Ausgangspunkt auch für eine Kritik sein. Bewegung, Raum, Ton, Licht, whatever. Vielleicht sogar: Präsenz.

Was aber bedeutet das für die Kritik? Zum Beispiel, dass sie mehr denn je darauf angewiesen ist, die Kriterien einer jeden Aufführung erst einmal aus der Aufführung selbst zu generieren. Was sind die Spielregeln, die behauptet und verwendet werden? Wie werden sie erfüllt? Aber natürlich auch: Hält man diese Spielregeln für sinnvoll, brauchbar, interessant? Denn eine Performance, ein Tanzabend, eine Theateraufführung ist ja keine self fulfilling prophecy. Sie steht in Kontexten, die man lesen können muss. Sie ist – wie schon immer – Teil von Diskursen, bezieht sich auf andere Arbeiten, auf Theorien, Auseinandersetzungen, Freunde, Feinde. Ohne Kontext ist ein schwarzes Quadrat nur ein schwarzes Quadrat, ein Pissoir ein Pissoir und schlechtes Schauspiel schlechtes Schauspiel.

Langsam haben sich Ansätze einer Sprache entwickelt, die für gegenwärtige Theaterformen brauchbar sind; Hans-Thies Lehmanns „Postdramatisches Theater“ beispielsweise hat durch seine für ein Spezialisten-Fachbuch immense Verbreitung viel dazu beigetragen, dass die Notwendigkeit einer solchen Sprache einer etwas breiteren Zuschauer- und Kritikerschaft bewusst wurde. Auch die neuere Tanzkritik, die längst schon gewohnt war, ohne Handlung, Text und Psychologie auskommen zu müssen, hat einiges beigesteuert.

Selbstverständliche Skepsis

Wo fängt das Drama an, wo hört es auf? Für die Freiluft-Inszenierung «Braakland» der jungen holländischen Regisseurin Lotte van den Berg ist die Prosa J. M. Coetzees zwar ein Ausgangspunkt, aber viel mehr als Motive und etwas Atmosphäre ist davon nicht geblieben. Kein Wort, keine klar benennbare Geschichte. Immer wieder begibt sich van den Berg mit ihren Arbeiten auf das diffuse Grenzland des Genres Theater. Schauspielerisches Agieren, Sprache, Narration reduziert sie auf ein Minimum – und schaut dabei doch in eine andere Richtung als noch die Generationen vor ihr, die sich vom Drama erstmal befreien mussten. Derzeit kehren etliche junge freie Theatermacher zurück an die Grenzen, die längst überschritten sind, und überqueren sie aus entgegengesetzter Richtung für kurze Exkursionen. Das Misstrauen gegenüber dem Repräsentationssystem des Dramas haben sie verinnerlicht; aber dieses Misstrauen braucht keine Kampfansage mehr, keine Provokation, keine Demonstration. Es ist selbstverständlich geworden.

So ist in den letzten Jahren im nicht-dramatischen Theater eine skeptische Sympathie für die Ränder des Dramatischen entstanden, die grundlegende Zweifel aber eher betont als vergisst: Wie viel Narration erträgt das Theater noch, an wie viel Kausalpsychologie können wir noch glauben, wo wir doch seit über hundert Jahren lernen, dass wir nicht die Herren im eigenen Haus der Psyche sind?  Und wo das Kino doch ohnehin viel besser ist im Behaupten großer Geschichten – weil es perfekter lügen kann als das Theater, das bei aller Technik immer durchschaubar bleibt: viel mehr Medium zum Denken als zum Glauben.

Das Misstrauen gegenüber dem dramatischen Theater gilt nach wie vor in erster Linie dem “Als ob” des konventionellen theatralen Paktes (also der Bereitschaft, dem Schauspieler seinen Hamlet für die Dauer des Abends zu glauben oder zumindest als Denkkonstrukt zuzulassen): Die Repräsentationskritik, vor allem des psychoanalytisch geprägten französischen Poststrukturalismus, hat zwangsläufig auch die Repräsentationsmaschine des Theaters problematisiert. Als Reaktion darauf entstanden Bühnenformen, die nicht primär eine andere Wirklichkeit zeigen, sondern vor allem selbst eine Wirklichkeit sein wollen und dafür eine eigene, nicht unbedingt verbale Sprache entwickeln. So zerfließen die Grenzen zwischen Schauspiel und Performance, zwischen Repräsentation und Präsentation. Im Mittelpunkt solcher Auseinandersetzungen stehen zwangsläufig der dramatische Text und der Rollen spielende Schauspieler.

Es geht auch mit Text: das Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Dabei ist nicht-dramatisches Theater keineswegs notwendig ein Theater ohne Text und ohne Schauspieler: Die New Yorker Off-Off-Broadway-Truppe des Nature Theater of Oklahoma ist derzeit auch deshalb bei einem breiten Publikum so beliebt, weil hier Leute mit solider Theaterausbildung auf der Bühne stehen. Die sprechen, dass man sie bis in die letzte Reihe versteht, die tanzen und singen und spielen, dass es landläufige Qualitätskriterien erfüllt. Mit etwas Offenheit kann man erkennen, dass das schlecht Geschauspielerte hier gerade deshalb so kunstvoll ist, weil die Truppe ihr Handwerk beherrscht und doch etwas wagt, das über Könnerschaft und Dekor-Trash, wie er längst zum Inszenierungsrepertoire des Regietheaters gehört, hinausgeht.

Denn hinter der klamaukigen Fassade steht der dreieinhalbstündige Theaterabend No Dice zwar sehr eigenwillig, aber doch mit beiden Füßen in der Tradition epischen Geschichtenerzählens. Der zuweilen schwer greifbare narrative Strang basiert auf über einhundert Stunden aufgezeichneter Telefongespräche der Akteure, die im Gespräch mit Freunden, Verwandten und Kollegen letzten Fragen von Kunst, Religion und Arbeit ebenso auf den Grund gehen wie ganz persönlichen Sorgen: „Sollte ich vielleicht weniger trinken?“, „Werde ich gefeuert?“ und „Wie kommen wir an das große Hollywood-Geld?“. Das Textmaterial, das die Performer über Kopfhörer zugespielt bekommen, wird dabei mit Dialogen eines Amateur-Dinnertheaters kontrastiert. Zwischen geradezu transzendenten Höhen und ziemlich albernen Abgründen entsteht so ein durchaus literarischer Text, den man in seinem künstlichen Realismus auch fast in der Nachfolge des Naturalismus sehen könnte. Mit einem wesentlichen Unterschied: Die Geschichten des Nature Theater behaupten keine geschlossene Wirklichkeit.

Gisèle Viennes Spiel mit Imagination und Wirklichkeit

Auch die junge französische Regisseurin Gisèle Vienne arbeitet in Jerk mit einem Text: Ein fahler junger Mann mit Emo-Frisur (Jonathan Capdevielle) – nicht unsympathisch, aber eindeutig Typ Schwere Jugend – hockt zum Greifen nah auf einem Stuhl und erzählt, anfangs unsicher und verlegen, als würde er es selbst nicht glauben, von sexuell aufgeladenen Gewaltverbrechen, an denen er als Teenager beteiligt war. Eine imaginierte Rekonstruktion der tatsächlichen Verbrechen eines Serienkillers, der mit der Hilfe zweier Kids in den siebziger Jahren in Texas mehr als zwanzig Jungen zu Tode folterte. Eine Geschichte, die auf Fakten basiert und doch nicht wahr zu sein scheint.

Weil das eigentlich gar nicht zu erzählen ist, spielt der junge Mann es vor mit Puppen oder lässt die Zuschauer minutenlang still in verteilten Textbüchern weiterlesen. So zwingt er das nicht Vorstellbare in die einsame Vorstellung jedes Einzelnen. Am Ende liegen die Puppen reglos vor seinen Füßen. Ebenso reglos spricht er den letzten Monolog ohne jede Mundbewegung. Gisèle Viennes Theater – das sie zur Zeit gemeinsam mit dem umstrittenen White-Trash-Autor Dennis Cooper entwickelt – spielt virtuos und radikal mit den Grenzen der Möglichkeiten theatraler Repräsentation, jongliert mit den Rezeptionen und lässt den Horror der Fantasie und den Horror der Wirklichkeit ununterscheidbar werden.

Text als Summe der Theaterzeichen

Doch anders als in Jerk und No Dice ist Text im nicht-dramatischen Theater meist nicht vorgängig. Er wird entwickelt im Prozess, hat mal zu folgen, mal schubst er an. Und meint ohnehin mehr als nur das geschriebene oder gesprochene Wort, das eben nicht isolierbar ist von dem, was es umgibt. Text wird definiert als die Summe aller Theaterzeichen: Körper (ihre physische Eigenart, ihre Bewegung, ihre Stimme, ihre psychische und soziale Konnotation), Raum, Licht, Ton. Jede Gewichtung ist möglich. Und jeder dieser Ausgangspunkte eröffnet wiederum weitere künstlerische Optionen. Auch deshalb waren viele Arbeiten vor allem der 90er Jahre in ihrem Wesen selbstreferenziell: Erst einmal muss man sich vergewissern, was die Fragen sind, bevor man sich ans Antworten machen kann.

Inzwischen steht diese Selbstbeschäftigung weniger im Vordergrund – aber das Bewusstsein um die Bedingungen des eigenen Mediums ist eines der wichtigsten Merkmale avancierten nicht-dramatischen Theaters geblieben: René Polleschs Stücke handeln oft vom hierarchischen Theater-Apparat und dem neoliberalen Kulturmarkt, in dem sie entstehen (z.B. Hallo Hotel), Rimini Protokolls Dramaturgien sind wesentlich von den Bedürfnissen ihrer Performer bestimmt, Forced Entertainments Arbeiten handeln fast immer auch vom Verhältnis zwischen Zuschauerraum und Bühne, die slowenisch-kroatisch-serbische Gruppe Via Negativa beginnt Viva Verdi mit einer ironischen Anklage des Regisseurs darüber, wie das Eurokaz-Festival in Zagreb mit dem Produktionsauftrag auch den Inhalt bestimmt habe, Jérôme Bel ließ sich von seinem Kollegen Xavier Le Roy eine Choreografie in seinem Sinne schreiben, die er als seine eigene signierte – und in Xavier Le Roys Projekt ist die Sichtbarmachung von Arbeitsstrukturen der ganze Inhalt: Die Performer spielen drei Ballspiele gleichzeitig in drei verschiedenen Mannschaften; und wer noch in einem Spiel Verbündeter ist, ist im anderen schon der Gegner.

Gegen das Aufgreifen dieses Motivs durch Dana Schutz regte sich schnell Protest schwarzer KünstlerInnen: Eine weiße Künstlerin habe nicht das Recht, sich dieses Bild anzueignen und davon symbolisch und vielleicht auch finanziell zu profitieren. Die in Berlin lebende Künstlerin Hannah Black forderte in einem offenen Brief nicht nur die Entfernung, sondern gar die Zerstörung der Arbeit.3

In Deutschland hat vor allem die Überstreichung des von Student- Innen als sexistisch empfundenen Gedichts «Avenidas» (1954) von Eugen Gomringer an der Fassade der Berliner Alice-Salomon-Hochschule 2017 für große Aufregung in den Feuilletons gesorgt.4 Aber auch weniger schlagzeilenträchtige Diskussionsabbrüche, schnelle Eskalationen in Facebook-Kommentarspalten, hier und da abgesagte Vorstellungen und Vorlesungen zeigen: Das Diskursklima ist auch in Kunst und Theater rauer geworden und bringt einige Verunsicherung mit sich.

Dabei ist die Vehemenz, mit der im Umfeld von Black Lives Matter, #MeToo und anderen analogen wie virtuellen Bewegungen alltägliche Diskriminierung, Belästigung, physische, psychische und symbolische Gewalt diskutiert wird, nicht wirklich überraschend: Was sich über Jahr- zehnte, Jahrhunderte aufgestaut hat, entlädt sich nicht immer präzise oder wohldosiert. Das Vertrösten darauf, dass sich alle Nebenwidersprüche (wie Rassismus, mangelnde Gleichberechtigung von Frauen oder Umweltverschmutzung) schon von allein auflösen würden, wäre erst einmal der Hauptwiderspruch (zwischen Arbeit und Kapital) beseitigt, war allzu lang Teil linker Argumentationsfolklore.

Versuch über das Sterben (2019) ist ein Monolog über den Tod von Nikitins Vater und, darin verwoben, eine Reflexion über das eigene Coming-out als schwuler Mann zwanzig Jahre zuvor. Darüber, wie das offene Bekenntnis zur eigenen Sexualität, erst vor sich selbst und dann vor anderen, nicht nur zum Wendepunkt in seinem Leben, sondern auch zu einer zentralen Metapher seines Arbeitens wurde: “Das Leugnen hat auch bedeutet, nicht zu verstehen, dass die Realität anders sein könnte, als sie scheint – und dass man selbst die Macht hat, sie zu verändern.” Dass Realität nicht fixiert ist, dass es nicht nur eine Realität gibt – und dass das aber kein Grund zu relativistischer Resignation ist, sondern im Gegenteil erst die Freiheit eröffnet, überhaupt zu handeln.

PROBEBÜHNEN

Im Sommer 2001 zog Boris Nikitin mit einundzwanzig Jahren aus seiner Geburtsstadt Basel nach Berlin, um Assistent des Autorenregisseurs René Pollesch zu werden, dessen diskursiv-spielerisches Theater zwar bereits eine eingefleischte Fangemeinde aber noch nicht den Mainstream-Appeal späterer Jahre hatte und der gerade zum künstlerischen Leiter der Nebenspielstätte Prater der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz berufen worden war, die unter der Intendanz Frank Castorfs auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer Strahlkraft war – eines der einflussreichsten und meist-diskutierten Häuser weit über den deutschsprachigen Raum hinaus. Seine erste Spielzeit stellte Pollesch ganz ins Zeichen des Gießener Instituts für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft (ATW), einer Keimzelle des aufstrebenden “postdramatischen Theaters”, einer experimentellen, sehr international orientierten Strömung, die den performativen Künsten nicht nur das Primat des dramatischen Textes, sondern vor allem auch ihre Liebe zur psychologisierenden Repräsentation austreiben wollte. Pollesch selbst hatte dort studiert und u. a. durch die Begegnung mit Gastprofessor*innen wie John Jesurun seinen eigenen Stil gefunden.

Passend zum WG-geprägten Low-Budget-Ambiente vieler Gießener Produktionen baute der Bühnenbildner Bert Neu-mann eine Wohnfront als Einheitsbühnenbild in den Prater (sieben Zimmer, Küche, Bad), das von unterschiedlichen Künstler*innen, alles ATW-Absolvent*innen, nach nur je vier Wochen Probenzeit bespielt wurde: Pollesch inszenierte die Prater-Trilogie, Helgard Haug und Daniel Wetzel steuerten – noch nicht unter dem Gruppennamen Rimini Protokoll –  Apparat Berlin bei, She She Pop erzählten in Homestory die Geschichte sechs einsamer Frauen und eines Mannes auf der Suche nach seiner Katze …

Over the past few years independent theater in Austria, Germany and Switzerland became part of a very international network and established a sophisticated discourse on art. Impulse is perhaps the most significant platform and at the same time the most powerful lobbyist of this scene in the German-speaking countries. The festival challenges the independent performance-based art forms to make use of their fundamental freedom. It challenges them to amplify, to try, to strain and overstrain the freedom of theater as medium; the freedom to start from scratch again and again; the freedom to create structures, hierarchies, stereotypes, processes, and collaborations in a way appropriate to each artistic endeavor – and not the other way around.

Independent theater provides impulses for an idea of theater that does not remain trapped in particular spaces of thinking and staging. It provides impulses not to simply accept the boundaries of genres set by the logics of grant applications, markets, and marketing. It provides impulses to reclaim theatricality in art, music, literature, film, and theory as theater. It provides impulses to think differently about theater as art. The task of independent theater is not to be the low-cost repertoire by the up-and-coming. It is not a special path as the German-speaking theaters and funding structures would suggest. It is an explicit alternative in its art as well as in its work structures.

From 2013 – 2017 the festival was curated by the artistic director Florian Malzacher. The thematic orientation for each edition was supported by an advisory board consisting of experts from academia and arts. Alongside the program of selected visiting productions, an open call extended the focus to works beyond the beaten path. The festival was accompanied by theoretical and socio-political debates as well as by an online collection of material that took up specific questions of independent theater and put them up for discussion.

Artistic Director: Florian Malzacher
Dramaturgy: Dominik Müller (2017), Felizitas Stilleke (2017), Nadine Vollmer (2015-16), Stefanie Wenner (2013)
Artistic Assistant: Charlotte Hesse (2017), Dominik Müller (2013-16)
Production Manager: Emily Keller (2015-17), Anne Schulz (2013)

This bilingual publication is the first in-depth attempt to address the group’s haunting and original work from the outside; combining essays with academic and artistic reflections on their multi-faceted output in a single volume.

With contributions by Patricia Benecke, Tim Etchells, Matthew Goulish, Adrian Heathfield, Judith Helmer, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Florian Malzacher, Annemarie Matzke, Andrew Quick, Anke Schleper, Gerald Siegmund, Astrid Sommer. PhotOs by Hugo Glendinning.

Definitely the most charming and clever birthday present for the 20th anniversary of the cult group from Sheffield. APA

Very nicely presented, versatile and comprehensive. Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Required reading! tip Berlin

Behind the heartbreakingly beautiful cover, which shows an exhausted actor wearing an oversized, sad plush horse mask in front of glowing orange show-biz glitter, there are 12 word contributions, numerous production photographs, a bibliography and a complete catalogue raisonné. … For all those who see the existence of Forced Entertainment as a great fortune, this book is at least a small one. Theater Heute

Not Just a Mirror maps a movement of artists from all over the world searching for the political theatre of today. A theatre that wants to engage with society both in its contents as in its form, creating a contemporary community in which social and political actions can be deployed and in which societies in their — actual or possible — varieties are played out, performed, expanded, tested, or even invented.

Not Just a Mirror is comprised of eight essays, two interviews, and 15 case studies of political theatre makers, and investigates the performing arts as a political laboratory of the present. It explores how theatre, dance, and performance reveal their essential agnosticism, provoking the potential to actively change society rather than merely serving as a cover-up for the dysfunctions, fractures, and wounds of society.

With contributions by Julian Boal, Boris Buden, Matan Cohen, Annie Dorsen, Galit Eilat, Monika Gintersdorfer, John Jordan, Alexander Karschnia, Hervé Kimenyi, Beatrix Kricsfalusi, Bojana Kunst, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Judith Malina, Florian Malzacher, Tala Jamal Manassah, Oliver Marchart, Carol Martin, Lloyd Nyikadzino, Giulia Palladini, Roman Pawłowski, Jeroen Peeters, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Christian Römer, Sylvia Sasse, Francesco Scasciamacchia, Michael Sengazi, Vassilis Tsianos, Margarita Tsomou, Benjamin Wihstutz and Franck Edmond Yao.

Not Just a Mirror offers a multitude of perspectives on the complex relationship between theatre and politics… Juxtaposing thought-provoking contributions from practitioners, critics, and researchers from diverse fields, thereby providing a remarkably rich variety of concerns and contexts for this investigation with an explicitly international outlook, the book… offers a kaleidoscopic overview of current strands in political theatre… By offering fresh and provocative perspectives on contemporary performance, politics, and culture, [the book] will certainly stimulate critical discourse in the field of twenty-first-century theatre and performance. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

With contributions by Ulf Aminde, Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Ellen Blumenstein, Andy Blunden, Boris Buden, Phil Collins, Gesine Danckwart, Ekaterina Degot, Chto Delat, deufert&plischke, Nikola Duric, Thomas Edlinger, André Eiermann, Christian Filips, Christine Gaigg, Monika Gintersdorfer, Gob Squad, Adrienne Goehler, Barbara Gronau, Herbordt/Mohren, John Jordan, Alexander Karschnia, Alhena Katsof, Chris Kondek & Christiane Kühl, Bernadette La Hengst, Richard Lowdon, Florian Malzacher, Oliver Marchart, Markus & Markus, Khadija Merzougue, Antanas Mockus, Monster Truck, Chantal Mouffe, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Boris Nikitin, Ahmet Öğüt, Dan Perjovschi, Sibylle Peters & Hannah Kowalski, Alexandra Pirici, Hendrik Quast & Maika Knoblich, Frank Raddatz, Milo Rau, Damian Rebgetz, She She Pop, Gerald Siegmund, Mårten Spångberg, Veit Sprenger, Marcus Steinweg, Nora Sternfeld, Swoosh Lieu, Theater im Bahnhof, Vassilis S. Tsianos, Margarita Tsomou, Lotte van den Berg, Dries Verhoeven, VIERTE WELT KOLLABORATIONEN, Arne Vogelgesang, Beatrice von Bismarck, Julian Warner & Oliver Zahn, Stefanie Wenner.

With contributions by Eva Behrendt, Diedrich Diederichsen, Miriam Dreysse, Heiner Goebbels, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Florian Malzacher, Annemarie Matzke, Tobi Müller, Martina Müller-Wallraf, Priyanka Nandy, Matthias Pees, Rimini Protokoll, Kathrin Röggla, Jens Roselt und Gerald Siegmund.

A book for connoisseurs, enthusiasts and those who want to become one. nachtkritik

The great, also emotional, attention to everyday life on the one hand and the enthusiasm for it borne by academic discourse and theoretical figures on the other: this is what makes this book as much as the projects of Rimini Protokoll. Katrin Bettina Müller, die tageszeitung (taz)

A successful work protocol that makes you want to see and hear more from the Rimini Trio. Die Deutsche Bühne

With an introductory essay by Florian Malzacher, conversations by Dirk Baecker, Joy Kristin Kalu and Christine Wahl with Boris Nikitin, original texts, numerous colour illustrations and an up-to-date catalogue raisonné.

The series Postdramatic Theatre in Portraits is dedicated to the development of a new theatre aesthetic since the 1990s. The history of actors of postdramatic theatre in the German-speaking world is told for the first time in the form of monographs. The editors of the series are Florian Malzacher, Aenne Quiñones and Kathrin Tiedemann.

DASS ist das erste Wort: dass etwas entstünde! Das Versprechen, eine Wüste wachsen zu lassen. Dass das da nie ganz voll sein wird, dass irgendwo in der Tiefe hinter diesem Vorhang eine unerschöpfliche Leere herrscht, die immer wider Platz schafft, eine Lücke in der Republik, wo wir hineinpassen. Dass das da nicht damit enden dürfe, dass man sagt, dass man etwas machen müsse, sondern dass etwas gemacht worden sein wird, bevor es zu Ende ist. Dass das also jetzt zu geschehen habe, jetzt. Dass dieses jetzt und jenes jetzt eins werden müsste in diesem Moment, im Moment des jetzt, der gerade dadurch, dass er gegenwärtig wäre, Vergangenheit und Zukunft kurzschlösse im Moment dieses jetzt. Und dass man sich so wie diesen Moment die Revolution vorzustellen habe: kleine schwarze Löcher ins Bild der Welt zu schießen, is sich die herrschende Unwirklichkeit selbst auffrisst. PANDÄMONIUM GERMANICUM: Lenz im Loop (2011)

Es gibt eine Tonaufnahme der letzten öffentlichen Rede des alten Brecht, 1956 vor der Sektion Dramatik beim IV. Deutschen Schriftstellerkongress der DDR. Launisch und genüsslich provozierend spricht er über “kleine, wendige Truppen und Trüpplein”, schnell agierende “Theaterchen” im Geiste des Agitprops, die nötig seen, um den schwerfälligen großen Häusern auf die Sprünge zu helfen. Dort gäbe es zu viele alte Intendant*innen und überhaupt eine große Trägheit. Dagegen setzte Brecht auf Eigeninitiative, auf “Selbstzündung”.

“Theaterchen” als Einsatztruppen performativer Kunst. Dieses Motto gefiel Alexander Karschnia, Nicola Nord und Sascha Sulimma, schon lange bevor sie sich den Gruppennamen andcompany&Co. gaben. Brecht Provokation interpretierten sie als einen Auftrag ans Freie Theater. Und vor allem an sich selbst. Nicht zuletzt gefiel ihnen, dass der alte Meister das Theatermachen in die Nähe des Aktivismus rückte und dabei doch auf Seiten der Kunst blieb. Die geforderte Wendigkeit ist eine politische ebenso wie eine ästhetische. Die Notwendigkeit, sich immer wider neu zu erfinden, neu zu positionieren. Beim englischen Begriff “devised theatre” schwingt eine solche Definition mit: Jede Arbeit ist neu zu entwickeln, beginnt am leeren Tisch, fängt mal mit einer Idee für das Licht an, mal mit einem Monolog, mal mit bestimmten Performer*innen, mal mit einer konkreten Frage. Theater kann vieles sein, wenn es nicht immer vorher schon weiß, was es ist. Und das sowohl auf als auch hinter der Bühne: Die prinzipielle Freiheit, die Möglichkeiten als Medium auszutesten, zu strapazieren, zu überstrapazieren, zu erweitern, gilt auch für Strukturen, Hierarchien, Rollenzuschreibungen, Abläufe, Kollaborationen. Kunst findet nicht im luftleeren Raum statt, sondern inmitten sozialer, politischer, aber auch privater Zusammenhänge.

The great Theatre of Oklahoma calls you! Today only and never again! If you miss your chance now you miss it for ever! If you think of your future, you are one of us! Everyone is welcome. If you want to be an artist, join our company! Our theatre can find employment for everyone, a place for everyone! Franz Kafka, Amerika

Only today, for one time only! The Great Theatre of Oklahoma! Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška had been keeping the name of the immoderately ambitious touring troupe from Kafka’s Amerika in mind for a long time – for the day they would found their own company. Not only because the unfinished novel had served Liška as a kind of instruction manual to his new homeland after emigrating from Slovakia (the same part of the world that both Kafka and Amerika’s protagonist Karl Roßmann are from), but also the grandiose gesture of the poster and the mind-boggling dimensions of the dubious-sounding Nature Theatre of Oklahoma held a powerful attraction for the two unknown theatre-makers who, with a combination of modesty and strength of will, had no doubts that they had something substantial to offer as artists.

In 1991, at the age of 18, an obscure job offer suddenly gave Liška, who had grown up in a small town in Slovakia, the opportunity to move to the USA. He had never been abroad before, spoke no English, and was actually supposed to join the Army – but instead, a few weeks later, he ended up in Oklahoma. He learned the language at night (when he wasn’t working) to be able to follow his classes in Philosophy and Writing at college during the day, constantly afraid of losing his student visa if his grades weren’t good enough. After a year in a rather desperate work and life situation in Oklahoma he transferred to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he met Kelly Copper in a seminar on Dadaist performance (a remarkably unpopular course with only three students in attendance) and the two became an inseparable pair. Copper graduated in 1993 and moved to New York.

While Liška was visiting her over Christmas that year they had seen Frank Dell’s the Temptation of St. Antony by The Wooster Group, Reza Abdoh’s Quotations from a Ruined City and Richard Foreman’s My Head was a Sledgehammer – in a kind of crash course one after another – and their entire concept of theatre was turned upside down. Liška, who was busy directing one of his own plays at college, came back and immediately told his fellow students: “that we have been doing it all wrong, and have to change everything. These three shows I saw in New York really made me realize what theatre could be.”

Since then Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, who have called themselves Nature Theater of Oklahoma since 2004, have themselves created some of the most remarkable theatre works to be seen in the former capital of the avant-garde in recent years: unmistakable in their combination of conceptual rigour, an idiosyncratic mix of modernist art strategies (at times closer to the visual than the performing arts) and exultantly theatrical performance that refuses to shy away from apparently trashy surfaces while uninhibitedly poaching from all manner of theatrical traditions.

Even if their greatest success has come in Europe, their theatre remains unmistakeably North American – not least because in their works they draw on typically Anglo-American genres such as dinner theatre (in No Dice), musicals (Life and Times – Episode 1), show choirs (Episode 2), vaudeville mystery theatre (Episodes 3 & 4), Western movies (Pursuit of Happiness), Hollywood classics like Citizen Kane (Episode 7), North American landscape painting (Episode 8) and gangsta rap (Episode 9).

Most of all, however, they have been influenced by their home city of New York. Most of Nature Theater’s idols live or did live in Manhattan: Marcel Duchamp the inventor of the readymade; Andy Warhol, who turned the everyday into art; John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who made chance a protagonist; Ken Jacobs and Joseph Cornell and their filmic compositions of found materials; The Wooster Group with its fascination with technical perfection and information overload; and not least the unique Jack Smith, who celebrated trash and camp as original aesthetics – all of them have influenced Nature Theater, that consciously and enthusiastically roots itself in these traditions.

Among theatremakers it is first and foremost Richard Foreman and his handling of props and the audience that has left the most evident traces. Pavol Liška joined the legendary director’s team in the mid-1990s and helped on several productions: “It was the most formative experience for me, and sometimes I feel like I learned everything I know about directing from Richard Foreman.” Foreman was also the one who gave them the chance to show their first work in New York at his theatre in 1996. “Our first 3 or 4 shows in New York were an attempt to imitate him.” And even later, long after they had found their own highly individual artistic path, Foreman remained a mentor and role model: “I learned from him to shape every small unit of time, to be rigorous, and never make compromises. His shows were built like sculptures out of words, gestures, movements, props, scenery. He built perfectly constructed worlds, and we struggled to do the same. Richard Foreman is never too far away from my mind when I direct.”

Now the couple live in Long Island City, Queens – Manhattan with its famous skyline is now more distant but remains in view (at least for the moment) until the crush of constantly expanding skyscrapers will hide it finally from sight.

This first monograph on Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s work offers a lively insight into its broad artistic practice. Essays by critics, theoreticians, fellow artists and participants in the various projects are accompanied by a series of contributions from Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška together with numerous colour illustrations and a comprehensive index of works.

With contributions by Elfriede Jelinek, Joris Lacoste, Florian Malzacher, Bonnie Marranca, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Claus Philipp, Tom Sellar, Karinne Keithley Syers, Pieter T’Jonck.

Guest appearances by Jérôme Bel, Romeo Castellucci, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Liesbeth Gritter, Richard Foreman, William Forsythe, Faustin Linyekula, Rabih Mroué, Meg Stuart, Mette Van der Sijs, Sarah Vanhee.

The lovingly designed book is a successful mixture of analysis, biographical material, and voices of artist friends. Karin Cerny, Profil

It was high time. Now, however, the first monograph on the New York City-based theater group is finally available. Der Standard

A beautifully designed monograph. Arnd Wesemann, tanz

The texts in which Copper and Liška have their say and reflect on their artistic methods resemble a veritable cornucopia of insights and ideas. nachtkritik.de

In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong definition of the political and for a theatre that is not content merely to reflect the world’s ills, but instead acts to change them.

Elegantly written.The New Yorker

There is much to learn from Malzacher’s approach to political theatre. Peter Eckersall, PAJ – Performing Arts Journal

A knowledgeable foray through the landscape of political theatre. Shirin Sojitrawalla, taz

A very good overview of current postdramatic events, bringing together a great deal of empirical material. Simon Strauß, FAZ

An important book, one that every theatre scholar should read and make use of in their seminars. Twenty years after Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre, it is almost just as indispensable as a reference point for current approaches. Peter M. Boenisch, Aarhus Universitet

A stimulating book that brings you up to date with the latest discursive thinking without overwhelming you with theory. An ideal side effect. Karin Cerny, profil

Florian Malzacher revitalises the concept of ‘political theatre’ at exactly the right moment. An exciting read! Matthias Lilienthal

Rarely have the pitfalls of representation as the cornerstone of theatre been explained so elegantly. Berliner Zeitung

A clever analysis, enjoyable and accessible even for the theory-shy. A briefing on the state of the discourse and a declaration of love for theatre. Suzanne Zahnd, WOZ

Volume 3 of the Postdramatic Portraits roams through the genesis of the collective and its particular artistic signature and way of working.

With an introductory essay by Florian Malzacher, an extensive conversation by Luise Meier with andcompany&Co., a contribution by Alexander Karschnia, original texts, numerous colour illustrations and a complete catalogue raisonné.

The series Postdramatic Theatre in Portraits is dedicated to the development of a new theatre aesthetic since the 1990s. The history of actors of postdramatic theatre in the German-speaking world is told for the first time in the form of monographs. The editors of the series are Florian Malzacher, Aenne Quiñones and Kathrin Tiedemann.

Relaxed, knowledgeable and analytical. Ralf-Carl Langhals, Mannheimer Morgen

Together with Armen Avanessian, the author discusses central theses in his book and presents examples from the performing, visual and activist arts (from Christoph Schlingensief through Anta Helena Recke, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Rimini Protokoll, Lotte van den Berg, Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, Pussy Riot, Jonas Staal, Public Movement to Milo Rau and many more) as examples for a theatre that insists – in a way that is simultaneously playful and serious – on its own, specific capabilities between the poles of representation and participation.