I always work at the theater. And I ask myself the same question every time. Probably this question has been doing this question since the first guy on an Apple’s box has said a poem: What do we actually need more urgent: theater that maintains, or theater that provokes?
Good entertainment!
I was recently able to work under the (male, white) director of a southern German house, which I was very happy about. But soon I somehow felt strange. And then I can do what it was: there was no drama at all and my new gray hair had to give me my other areas of life … Why was everything going so smoothly here? I didn’t know theater work that way.
Soon afterwards it became clear to me: where other directors: in the inside with less prestige with a rushing wave out of distrust, everything remains relaxed and cheerful under the fatherly hand of the house boss. This piece under the Ducethe ladder, the boss, so, so to speak, the calm and the festivity of a Tuscan vacation rushed out and I realized that male authority is calm of their surroundings. Why, no idea. Humanity seems to be used to it.
But for such a smooth succeed, not only the authority figure should feel according to the traditional, it is also beneficial to the general mood if a city has a lot of money and its theater has entered into a barter with its audience: the theater maintains people busy cards – everyone is happy. Nothing Wrong with that!
But is it actually about a relaxed mood in the theater?
A little friction
There are also places, the friction city vs. Theater is completely different.
Swing to Dortmund.
Something has been going on in Dortmund for five years that could be easily regarded as a “test arrangement”: a young, black woman, namely Julia Wissert, is an director and enforced, anti-racist theater.
Incidentally, it was not clear to me that of course all directors: inside Germany know each other because they regularly have such a meeting on the Blocksberg and discuss articles of director. But ISSO. I guess that spectators are primarily compared at these meetings.
Now there is the following problem: Non-white women, no matter where they get there, determines a lot, only please not draw attention to structural discrimination or even on your own racism. That bothers.
Discrimination? We?!
I know my hometown Dortmund quite well and the attempt to make inclusive, anti-racist theater there is, for example, to offer a yoga course in a bad phases in a football stadium during the home game-theoretically, it would make the alcohol-infested lymphs, regulate the breath of breath and the body that has come out of the shape-the plan is practically as a whole acts as a whole rather irritating to those present.
In brain, Wissert (and very few people know that) invented something very clever on this topic years ago. In cooperation with some college: Inside, she created the “anti-discrimination clause”-a fairly revolutionary contract. It obliges theater not to turn discrimination under the carpet or to seek a guilty person, but rather institutional to edit.
An important step for humanity and an overdue legal support – would like to mean people. But not so easily in Dortmund. Here, such a clause whirl up exactly the unpleasant dust, which has been able to lie down so beautifully over the crusted Isms for decades. “We are not Nazis!” Was replied injured.
After such initial starting difficulties, which Julia knew with unbroken passion, fighting spirit and calm, the audience is now increasing in Dortmund, which is a little sensation when people are not in Berlin, where there is traditionally a wide audience for progressive ideas.
In my opinion, this is due to a few strong unique selling points of the house, on which the residents seem to be slowly engaged inside the city.
Once, of course, the productions must be good on average.
The famous inner child
The last good play that I have seen at all was listed in Dortmund, for example. It was called “the demon in you has to find home”. It tells of Mandy-Galadriel, a failed singer-songwriter and parcel shop operator, who is in debt and defiantly denies the seriousness of life. On their 30th birthday, she and her inner child, known from Stefanie Stahl’s bestseller, get involved with a guru, but what begins as an esoteric self -help turns out to be a grotesque journey through the abysses of neoliberal business.
This piece had everything I often miss at the theater: zeitgeist, irony, pace, play of play. I was immediately a fan of this Lola Fuchs, who not only staged the evening, but also wrote it myself. I decided to ask her about how it was for her to be a writing actress and now also a director in Dortmund.
We drank coffee in my favoritema-Mom-Café in Dortmund’s east and talked for a good two hours. I had expected a hardened, perhaps also arrogant woman, I was able to meet a polite, thoughtful, funny and sometimes very doubtful artist, with whom I was able to identify pleasantly well.
Theater. Next generation
From an early age, I am used to adapting the male look. The stage hero: male. The heroine: beautiful. The story: Another thread in the large author macrame, the continuation of a sequel, the quote of a quota, a profession on the great voices of mankind, Shakespeare, Kleist, Büchner. I can’t hear it anymore.
In conversation with Lola, I tried to elicit a similar extraction towards the old masters. But she didn’t agree with me. She likes Kleist, she said and sipped her coffee with a smile. Little by little I gained the impression that she didn’t need to position herself hard. And that exactly begins her poetry where political stencils no longer work sufficiently.
She is 30 years old and observes her generation much more precisely and more playful than male colleagues over 50 would of course be able to do. In their pieces, individual sensitivities are in vain, instead they often exaggerate their characters into the grotesque. The fact that your pieces are still or precisely so convincing proves in a shocking way what times we live in.
As with a new glasses, Lola’s view gave me the clarity with which I could see capitalism again as what he is: as an ubiquitous fine dust in our souls, which eats up to our most intimate areas, in order to make capital even there.
Food in the self-help trap
Of course, I have to take the opportunity here promptly during the conversation and compare whether I also “understood” a piece. So I ask what Lola actually wants to trigger with the viewers? “Joa that you go steeply from such an evening,” she replies after a short thinking and I can confirm that I felt exactly like that after the evening. As if Lola Fuchs had found an overlooked corner in the world, on which she casts a brightly light light, zero moralizing or otherwise boring, but in the form of an extremely funny, multimedia ghost train ride.
The topics that she expires in me, no one else will leave me free in me. Sorry, but what do the agonizing monologues of alkmen and amphitryon approach me? On my part, I vegetate in several, paid self-held traps. And in my life, more and more gaps in meaning arise.
Theater as a political experiment
And slowly, an answer to the initial question is slowly peeling: Theater, which claims relevance for yourself, needs a thematic grip. Where are we here, what’s going on, who is it just how?
Julia Wissert gave her the opportunity not only to stage itself, but also to write, says Lola Fuchs, who was formerly a member of the ensemble in Dortmund’s spectacle.
Last but not least, it testifies to a flat understanding of hierarches to assign two of her own pieces as an actress as a director of an actress to award such opportunities.
The Dortmund Schauspielhaus has become a political experiment by Julia Wissert, which attracts more and more attention and what I and many others pursue with great excitement. Yes, it is now even one of the reasons why I still live here at all and have not already moved on for a long time. Because his game plan wants something from the people in the best sense because it shows them today’s perspective that are suppressed by the same school substance elsewhere. It gives this city topics, texts, pieces and voices of their topicality and radicality other houses in better areas.
Theater often only claims that it is needed – Dortmund urgently needs his current theater.