Berlin Theatertreffen: “Above all Glipfen its clock”
The two metal rods pierce the dancers' flesh. The audience at the Berlin Volksbühne in Florentina Holzinger's operatic performance "Sancta" was able to watch the piercing act on video screens at a length that was excruciating for sensitive souls. Last year, during the premiere weekend in Stuttgart, 18 people complained of nausea, and three even required medical treatment. And now the two dancers are hanging from the rods in their backs on long metal cables, swinging across the stage. It's painful just to watch. It got even more intense, with real human flesh sizzling in a pan, but more on that later.
"Sancta" was one of ten plays presented at the Berlin Theatertreffen over the past 16 days. The performance ended on Sunday evening, with more than 21,000 spectators, according to the host Berliner Festspiele, attending the theaters. The occupancy rate was 98.4 percent. Interest in the theater hasn't waned yet.
This year, the seven-member jury once again selected the ten "remarkable productions" from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and invited them to Berlin. The Scholz government was still in office at the opening on May 2. In one of her final appearances as Minister of State for Culture, Claudia Roth said that during her time at various theaters, she had learned that "art can heal and yet sometimes has to hurt."
What predominated during the Berlin theater days, healing or pain? In the opening play "Bernarda Alba's House" at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, the death of the father of five daughters and husband of Bernarda Alba left a deep void. In Federico García Lorca's 1936 play, the women cannot feel liberated; the daughters suffer – to varying degrees – under the now emerging matriarchy of their mother. She condemns the girls to eight years of mourning.
Cramped conditions: The actresses Bettina Stucky (from left), Sachiko Hara, Henni Jörissen in "Bernarda Alba's House"
Source: Thomas Aurin
The only man who plays a halfway relevant role in this play is young Peter, who keeps appearing at the property fence to meet with Angustia's eldest daughter, as well as her youngest, Adela. Katie Mitchell's production highlights the extent to which toxic power structures can prevail, even among women. Nevertheless, the subject matter feels a bit dated, with purely Catholic rites like eight years of mourning and lines like the only man women are supposed to look at in church is the pastor seeming out of date. Nevertheless, the production was a good opening thanks to the focused performances of the actresses, including the outstanding Julia Wieninger as Bernarda Alba and Bettina Stucky as Grandmother María Josefa, as well as the set design by Merle Hensel, who designed a house full of small prison cell rooms.
The second piece, from the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, however, is a small theatrical miracle. On stage, four actors and one actress stand in a somewhat outdated-looking machine with levers and large push buttons. In a ninety-minute verbal acrobatics show, they dissect Goethe's famous poem "Above all the peaks / There is peace, / In all the treetops / You can feel / Barely a breath; / The little birds are silent in the forest. / Just wait! Soon / You will rest too." Repeatedly, instructions from the "control" (Sandra Gerling) come like: "Change the order. Reverse!" and the four machinists recite the poem from back to front. Or she commands: "Doubling!" and it says: "Above all the peaks, peaks, there is peace, peace..." Or, when transposed loudly: "Above all the glimpses / its clock / in all the winged worlds / you feel..."
The pace of French author Georges Perec's play "The Machine" is breathtaking in director Anita Vulesica's production. Language is dissected into its component parts, reassembled, distorted, stripped of its logic, and much more. Here, theater becomes witty, pure entertainment. The audience laughs freely and sustainably. But it's also a beautiful parable about the absurd idea of making art and culture calculable and quantifiable. Vulesica deservedly received the 3Sat Theatertreffen Prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, for her work.
The dance theater piece "Kontakthof - Echoes of '78" is wonderful in a completely different way. Legendary choreographer Pina Bausch staged the dance theater piece "Kontakthof" in Wuppertal in 1978. Meryl Tankard, who was there at the time, has now built a bridge to the past 16 years after Pina Bausch's death. With eight other dancers from that time, the Australian is bringing the piece back to the stage.
Young and old: The dancers in "Kontakthof - Echoes of '78"
Source: Ursula Kaufmann
The piece from that time is shown as a black and white video on an invisible screen at the front of the stage. In the second half, the historical footage is shown on a monitor at the back. The men and women, now aged 69 to 79, dance the same movements in parallel. It is thrilling to see the older, but still very agile and graceful actors, mostly in sync with their younger bodies and selves. It is moving when, for example, the old recordings show couple dances, but today some of the protagonists have to dance alone – some of the artists from back then are no longer alive.
Like "Kontakthof," the virtual reality play "EOL – End of Life" also deals with death. Victoria Halper and Kai Krösche, the Viennese directing duo "Darum," established the production at Theater brut in the Austrian capital, and it was recently presented at the Berlin Theatertreffen. "EOL" takes VR theater to a whole new level.
The plot is initially quite simple. We're on a mission for the fictional, large software company IRL (Imaginary Reality Landscapes). The fictional "Metaverse 1.0" is to be taken to a new level; we're supposed to help delete virtual spaces that are broken, useless, or ugly. Others, however, that appear beautiful and useful, could be converted to version 2.0. To do this, we have to walk through and observe all the rooms that haven't been entered for at least ten years. So, after an introductory video, we go to a 9.6-square-meter space in the Martin-Gropius-Bau.
The images before our eyes are different: The visitors of the VR piece "EOL" move around on an area of 9.6 square meters each.
Source: DARUM
There, we put on the VR headset and shortly thereafter find ourselves in an elevator that transports us to various locations. At first, it's quite simple: The first room appears rocky, dark, and unattractive – we press "delete." The second room, on the other hand, is full of natural beauty. And even though there's a dead fish floating in the small pond, we decide to be transported to the new digital world.
And what about a father's touching last message to his son? Which the son hasn't accessed in ten years? Delete it? Keep it? Difficult! And so it goes on. More than once, a talking paper clip tempts us to break through walls, something the AI woman accompanying us in the elevator has expressly forbidden. But curiosity wins out. Thus, ever new worlds open up to us, imaginatively designed by the duo Halper/Krösche and their team.
Accompanies visitors at “EOL”: An artificial intelligence gives instructions.
Source: Fabian Schellhorn
Then it's about death. Anything else can't be revealed because it would ruin the production and the plot. Only this much: The focus here is also on the question of how our digital legacy can be preserved and what of it must not be preserved under any circumstances. What about the personal rights of real people in the digital space? A real problem, because in the US, people can already chat with AI bots programmed to play their deceased loved ones. After these moving 90 minutes, which are more like computer animation than a play, the virtual characters in our heads continue to ask questions for a long time.
In Bertolt Brecht's rarely performed play "The Rifles of Mrs. Carrar," audiences will discover topical references to current war debates. The play is set during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. In an Andalusian fishing village, forty-year-old fisherman's wife Teresa Carrar desperately tries to keep her two sons away from the front. She has also hidden her husband's eponymous rifles—there is said to be no weapons shipment from their house. Carrar's brother and the entire village oppose this, repeatedly asking why the two men don't go to the front like everyone else. "I don't want my children to be soldiers. They're not cattle," says their mother. After a death, however, her perspective changes.
Current topics in "The Guns of Mrs. Carrar / Choking Lead": Oliver Stokowski (from left), Barbara Horvath, Florian Jahr, Pujan Sadri
Source: Sandra Then
Luise Voigt stages the first half of the play like a work of art from the early 20th century. It crackles like an old film, the voices sound slightly tinny, the faces are painted white like in "Nosferatu," and the actors roll their r-notations dramatically. A few days later, at the celebrations for the 125th birthday of her grandmother, the actress and Brecht partner Helene Weigel, Brecht's granddaughter Johanna Schall will say that the actors rolled their r-notations like Weigel in the production, but she doesn't know why. The first half is very coherent. However, the second half, which is dominated by the "Carrar" continuation of "Wütendes Blei" (Angry Lead) by author Björn SC Deigner (born in 1983), becomes a bit tedious. The stage set collapses with a loud crash, the modern text falls short of Brecht, and the acting largely shifts to pure recitation.
This is unfortunate, because this play, along with the Gorki Theater's production of "Unser Deutschlandmärchen," is the one with the greatest connection to political reality. These two plays best answer the question "Why theater?" posed by theater critic Jakob Heymer in his book of the same name. He states: Essential to this "why theater" and a renewal of contemporary stage acting is "an engagement with our time. Anyone who wants to judge what happens on stage must know the world they live in. For the crisis of theater is an expression of the crisis of this world and its social order."
And what about the sizzling human flesh on stage? Florentina Holzinger's performance, often described as a "scandalous opera," takes the question of the tension between sexuality and the church to extremes. In her radically feminine productions, Holzinger mostly features only women and transsexuals, all of whom are naked. The basis for "Sancta" is Paul Hindemith's opera "Sancta Susanna," in which the nun Susanna discovers her sexuality and is ostracized by the other nuns.
With Holzinger, this becomes a grand performance of obviously unstaged lesbian sex, wild rides on a rollerblade ramp, and memories of horrific encounters with the church and its dignitaries, marked by rage, despair, lust, and power. Finally, one of the artists has a small piece of flesh cut out of her with a scalpel, filmed live and in close-up by a video camera. The scars on her upper body, all shaped like the cut-out piece, are a testament to the previous performances. You think carefully about whether you want to watch. However, no one in the steely audience of the Berlin Volksbühne fainted.
Always naked: The actresses in Florentina Holzinger's opera performance "Sancta".
Source: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
Later, she will fry her piece of meat in a small pan with oil, and a colleague will swallow it. In its radical physicality, this is the toughest production the Theatertreffen has to offer this year. Whether the radical and often provocative elements of "Sancta" can also establish an emotional connection with the audience is ultimately something each individual must decide for themselves. The voices in the foyer afterward allowed for different conclusions. But this production leaves no one cold and indifferent. Which is not always the case with contemporary theater.
Some of the individual plays are still being performed at their respective theaters. "EOL – End of Life" will be shown from June 6 to 9 at the "Festival Perspectives" in Saarbrücken, from June 18 to 21 at the "Impulse Theater Festival" in Mühlheim an der Ruhr, from July 3 to 6 in Düsseldorf, and on yet-to-be-determined dates in October at the "Festival Politik im Freies Theater" in Leipzig. "Echoes of Kontakthof '78"
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