I have paid close attention to German theatre—their repertory model, generous funding, and powerful shows that seem to prioritize directors—since I was introduced to it in university. It was antithetical to everything I was accustomed to in America, and I was intrigued. My latest trip to Germany, with the Goethe Institut to attend the Politik im Freien Theater Festival in Munich in November 2018, gave me an even better idea of it, in terms of its strengths and weaknesses and its independent scene.
The festival name translates to “politics in the free theatre” and it features the most important work happening in the independent scene in German-language countries. “Frei theatre” in Germany refers to independent productions that aren’t produced by the country’s 140 state and city theatres—the latter of which received generous subsidies.
That said, many of Germany’s world-famous theatre artists are from the free scene. And if the work shown at the Politik im Freien Theater Festival is any indication, the free scene seems better suited to address pressing issues in Germany today than its state theatres. The state theatres are big ships: in a country of eighty-five million, thirty-five million theatre tickets are sold to their shows yearly. Yet, most of their ensembles are white, most of their directors are men, and their leaders are politically appointed. The free scene is more diverse, isn’t politically bound to a constituency that has a conservative idea of how to interpret the classics, and has a more bottom-up funding structure.
Theatre in Munich
The Politik im Freien Theater Festival is run by a governmental organization called Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (BPB, or the Federal Office for Civic Education), whose focus is on teaching democratic values to its citizens. (This focus fulfills a mandate in the German constitution written by American officials during World War II). The triennial festival is hosted each time by a different city’s artistic and educational institutions, who also select a theme. The organizers pull no punches in stressing the political nature of the festival. In 2011, in Dresden, the theme was “fremd,” which translates to “strange” with connotations of “alien”; at the time, the city was an incubator for the nascent xenophobic, anti-muslim group Pegida.
The theme of the most recent festival in Munich was “reich,” which translates to “rich.”
Munich is the home to many of Germany’s major corporations, such as BMW, and multinational companies like Google have their headquarters in the city. Unlike much of Germany, Munchners have a reputation for their outward displays of affluence; a walk through the city center is a walk through a bizarre site of globalized wealth. In the half mile between the city’s two state theatres, most store windows contained at least one item pushing a thousand euros.
The festival was co-presented by the Münchner Kammerspiele, a state theatre led by Matthias Lilienthal, who has been on the cutting edge of German theatre for a very long time and who has integrated aspects of the free scene within the neoclassical repertory, bringing shows from the scene into his theatre’s programming.
The theme of the festival, reich, plays on Lilienthal’s tenure as artistic director. Munich doesn’t have much of a free scene, and, with its inaffordability and fairly conservative demographics, it’s unlikely it could. Yet Lilienthal’s decision to hire prominent free-scene artists into the repertory is a powerful statement on where he believes German theatre should be heading.
The Postdramatic Theatre
A newcomer to the German theatre scene may be surprised to see how few of the plays at the festival feature story, narrative, or characters. Instead, many of them are more interested in bending the rules of theatre. Rather than depict the world as it is, this type of work explores the ways in which we create, see, or interpret theatre in order to create a play where the content and form are one in the same. (If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is.)
In the German-speaking world, the lead scholar of this type of theatre is Hans Thies-Lehmann, and its most well-known practitioners are a stable of collectives that have risen to prominence in the past twenty-five years. Three of the premier groups from this school, Gob Squad, Rimini Protokoll, and She She Pop, were featured at the Politik im Freien Theater Festival. All of these groups also happened to be founded at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, where Thies-Lehmann and Andrzej Wirth taught. Performers of this school create texts in inventive ways, sometimes turning audience members into performers by having them work through games or prompts, or working with non-professionals who tell their own stories on stage.
This type of theatre is rarely produced by the state theatres, and artists and collectives working in this manner have access to only a fraction of the cultural funding made available by the German government. Yet the post-dramatic collectives like Gob Squad and Rimini Protokoll, who make the most politically and socially consequential work in the country, are in high demand worldwide. The shows they presented at the festival help illustrate their importance.
If the work shown at the Politik im Freien Theater Festival is any indication, the free scene seems better suited to address pressing issues in Germany today than its state theatres.
Creation (For Dorian) / Actors Who Don’t Get Applied Like Paint
Gob Squad’s Creation (for Dorian) features three members of their ensemble and six guest artists—three of whom are a generation or two below the ensemble, three of whom are a generation or two above. The piece explores the act of treating actors like objects meant to be deployed for aesthetic purposes while exploring powerful provocative questions around image and beauty, like: “Have you ever been told you were too thin for a role?” or “Have you ever been told you were too old?”
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Great article! Were all the plays you saw in German?
Hey! Thank you for reading it Kitty.
No. Plays that were in languages besides German had German surtitles. Plays that were in German sometimes had English surtitles. Plays that were sometimes in German sometimes and English sometimes often had no surtitles.
I heard the curators also had an interest in keeping 30% of the festival "international." I don't know if that means international apart from the German speaking world, or apart from Germany itself. The only piece that was performed at the festival that was created outside of Europe was Mare Nostrum by Laura Uribe, which was co-produced by Teatro en Codigo in Mexico City and the Universidad de Antioquia in Columbia. My understanding is that this was presented previously in Munich, the curators saw it there, and decided to bring it back for Politik im Freien Theater.