Festival Politics in Open-Air Theatre | Pasolini's Heirs

Festivals represent a cultural state of emergency. An overabundance of art and spectacle presents visitors with a difficult dilemma: How am I supposed to watch it all? Or maybe I shouldn't even? Because, as festival veterans know, beyond the official program, it's also about taking in some of the atmosphere, that special festival atmosphere that I, too, am looking for here.

Leipzig, which hosts the "Politics in Open-Air Theater" festival this year, makes it easy. The deeply unpleasant October weather practically drives you to the theater. Venues can be discovered in every corner of the city. On every walk, you stumble across events from the supporting program as if by chance. Guided tours of the district with artists and exhibitions, video art, and panel discussions round out the theater offerings. The other festivalgoers are easily recognizable by their colorful scarves, a promotional accessory of the organizers, which these days they proudly display like a football fan.

"Politics in Open Theater" has been organized by the Federal Agency for Civic Education since 1988 and takes place every three years in different cities. But don't worry, there's no state-supporting censorship ensuring a strictly educational or supposedly politically balanced program. You can expect art.

The festival's name sums up the agenda—and yet raises questions. What is "independent theater" supposed to be? In the 1980s, the independent theater scene played a clear role in the former West Germany. It represented a contrast, also politically, to the sometimes dusty municipal theater scene. Here, experiments were dared, habits were broken, and audiences were challenged.

These days, independent theater may not be so free after all. The large production houses of the independent scene, like municipal and state theaters, are mostly financed through public subsidies. This gradual institutionalization also contradicts the cultivated anarchic image. Municipal theaters are not all that staid, and the independent scene is less wild than one might expect. And cross-border artists have existed between these two worlds for decades. But there is still one constant difference: works in the independent scene are developed without a permanent ensemble and without a repertoire. In this way, the festival helps some productions to receive unexpected revivals and introduces Leipzig audiences to entirely new theatrical experiences.

The other difficult term in the title is: politics. While some believe that as soon as someone steps on stage, it is a political act, others believe that a party platform must be read out for it to be considered political theater. The selection jury has opted for a middle ground. Racism and the challenges of a highly technological world, community and identity, war and social participation are the keywords that could be used to describe the guest performance program, which includes 16 productions.

The guest performance program also includes "[EOL]. End of Life" by the artist collective Darum, a production that is currently being passed around from festival to festival and was also shown at the Berlin Theatertreffen. Equipped with headphones and VR glasses, you embark on a trip that has only a limited connection to theater. It is an event without actors, where you are the only audience. Highly technologically advanced, you become the decision-maker about whether virtual worlds that once served as private places of memory and are now orphaned should be considered data waste and thus deleted. Narratively, however, the wired excursion reaches its limits, and what remains is an attempt to take the participant into moral custody.

Joana Tischkau's so-called pop ballet "I'll Take Everything Away From You" is also performing in Leipzig, more precisely at the Theater der jungen Welt, Leipzig's municipal children's and youth theater. Tischkau shows us the ugly face behind the permanent grin we know from the pop music business. Roberto Blanco and Marie Nejar, Roy Black and Billy Mo return to the stage undead. "I am the blackest Bavarian in the world," the pop song goes. "The hazelnut is black-brown, and I am black-brown too," it says elsewhere. Using the cheerful world of pop music as a backdrop, Tischkau shows us the open racism of West Germany, which continues today in a different form. It's delivered with wit and accuracy, but as a revue of numbers, it turns out to be less harmful than it really needs to be.

One of the highlights of the program is undoubtedly "Work Body," which will be shown in the discotheque, a subsidiary of the Schauspiel Leipzig. The 80-minute evening is the brainchild of Viennese performer and choreographer Michael Turinsky. After the audience in the empty auditorium has gradually found their seats on the floor, the physically disabled performer enters with a hand pallet truck – and stirs up a section of the audience. Soon, Turinsky is making his rounds with the vehicle, and no one is standing or sitting in one place for long.

He meets us in blue overalls, pursuing his mission, pushing back and forth, building his stage, and taking the space to do so. As if in passing, he raises questions – about our image of work, about meaningful employment, about efficiency. We like to talk about tolerance in our open society. Turinsky wants to know whether there is room for a person with a disability even in the capital-governed world of work.

After a short while, he returns to the heated room with a wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow full of ice, containing non-alcoholic cans of beer. Enough for everyone. Yes, that must be it: the festival atmosphere that overcomes you during this performance, and which has now taken over me too.

Film icon Pier Paolo Pasolini, Turinsky tells us, wrote a poem entitled "Gramsci's Ashes." Gramsci was physically disabled, he claims. But he didn't identify as disabled, but as a communist. Isn't it easier today, the performer asks, to identify as queer or disabled than as a communist?

And if you leave the performance a little overwhelmed, you might also have a better idea of ​​what political theater means, or at least what it should be: an intelligent and at the same time sensual exploration of social issues that will keep you captivated for quite some time.

The twelfth edition of the "Politics in Free Theater" festival concludes on October 25. www.bpb.de/pift2025/