Childish Or Adult? Recent Productions in Germany
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European Stages https://europeanstages.org Childish or Adult? Recent Productions in Germany Many theatre festivals in Germany make headlines in the national and international press. The biennial Augenblick mal! (a rough translation might be "Just a moment!"), whose program this year not only featured top German productions but also workshops, seminars and other artistic gatherings as well as two international guest performances from France, is sadly not one of these. The reason is simple. It's a festival of theatre for children and young people. Just a moment! Don't skip on to the adult plays in this review but take the time to read more about four truly remarkable shows, some of which would put adult theatre to shame. Theatre for Young People (TYP for short) in Germany has long since left the realm of fairy tales and freckled youngsters larking about in harmless comedies. Quite the contrary, the range of shows during the festival covered a huge amount of socially and politically explosive themes not only in the form of spoken drama. For example, Flight of Fancy, or Why Cry? (for eight to eleven-year-olds), was a one-hour dance show. At the start of the performance we see four clearly demarcated spotlit circles on a bare stage. A disembodied voice calls out an order: "Fit in and don't make such a fuss!" And on command the four dancers (two men, two women) slip into their individual worlds and the roles adults expect of them. Which of them can be cleverer, quicker, more attractive, best behaved? Contrasting with adults' desires to harness children into the competitive world of "success" and "failure" are the children's natural spontaneity and creativity. What's wrong with showing your emotions, turning ink blots into octopuses, running around, being ridiculous and making a noise? Do children's lives always have to conform to adult wishes? Does everything have to be down-to-earth and organized? Or is it possible—even preferable for a child—to soar through the air as these dancers do in flights of fancy? Even at the risk of falling on your face? This brilliantly conceived show throws up the questions in an ever-changing sequence of serious and humorous situations. But the choreographer Beate Höhn, from co>labs in Nuremberg, does not restrict herself to pure dance. Instead, she introduces trampolines, drawings projected onto overhead transparencies, a flying fish, and oversized clothes that the children are forced to wear and which restrict their movements (a wonderful metaphor for the problems shown here), from which they liberate themselves by dancing around inside them and turning them into surreal shapes. The show ends with a visual plea to both children and adults to take things a little more easily. Life needs order and discipline but a life without fantasy and the freedom to create new worlds is only a half a life. "If dealing with your own life is a problem, how much more difficult is it to save the world?" This is the question asked by a fast moving comic show called Trashedy (ages eleven and up), presented by Performing Group under the direction of Leandro Kees, who also played one of the two roles alongside Daniel Mathéus. The first thing we see onstage is a series of animated projections of someone drawing cartoons. This defines the approach to be taken: for animated cartoons go on to play a major role in explaining such global problems as pollution, unrestricted consumerism, and exploitation. But do not underestimate the achievement of the two actors, whose brilliant clowning, juggling and lunatic dance numbers are combined with quick-fire dialogue and a crazy quiz show. Light and sound also play a major role in this prodigiously detailed rundown of a complex subject. This is one of those shows which are simultaneously highly entertaining, highly instructive, highly political, and deeply human. Not for nothing is this prize-winning production being quickly booked by venues throughout Germany and abroad. They even have an English-language version. 1 / 16 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Trashedy directed by Leandro Kees. Photo credit: Torsten Arendt. If you think global problems are an unsuitable subject for children's theatre, then what about homosexuality in football? Stand Your Ground (age thirteen upwards), presented by the "boat people projekt"—a fringe theatre group from Göttingen whose main areas of interest are refugees, migration, and movements on the fringes of society—is a solo show featuring a football fan, Matthias, in the changing room of a stadium. The audience/fans are sitting on benches to the left and right of a small area covered in artificial grass. At the start of the show some of them are given football shirts and sworn in as fans. Matthias confronts them with a statistic: if ten percent of all men are homosexual, there must be around 500,000 gay men active in German football. Who are they, asks Matthias, and where are they? How do we recognize them? By their deodorants, their fashionable hairdos, or even by the pink football boots that seemed to be the current favourites amongst many major stars? And what about all that heavy body contact during the game? There are claims that the "hardest" players are the closeted gays who are trying to assert their masculinity. Then again, is the mass hugging and kissing to celebrate a goal purely a ritual or does it conceal some deeper erotic overtones? If so, asks Matthias, so what? The play, which includes documentary film excerpts with football fans, ends when Matthias holds up a folded piece of notepaper which he claims contains the name of a gay footballer currently playing in the German national team. As he leaves, he places it on a stool in the middle of the audience. It is a tribute to the show that at the performance I saw no one was interested in looking inside. This educationally enlightening and socially courageous piece of work has already been invited by several professional football clubs to be shown to its fans. The wider the audience, the better. 2 / 16 European Stages https://europeanstages.org The boat people projekt's Stand your Ground. Photo credit: Reimar de la Chevallerie. One of the notable features about this year's festival was the high proportion of so-called "projects" to scripted theatre plays, and when I first saw the program, I was more than disturbed to see how few dramatists' texts were amongst the selected shows. The trend in adult theatre in Germany is now being clearly reflected in TYP. It was all the more gratifying, therefore, for me to confirm that the most impressive production of the many I saw was indeed a written play. David Paquet is a young Canadian playwright based in Montréal who writes in French. His play 2.14. AM/FM (14 years upwards) is by far the best of the plethora of theatre pieces I have seen to date that deal with students who run amok on killing sprees in schools. Like Stand Your Ground, this highly impressive prize-winning production from 3 / 16 European Stages https://europeanstages.org the Theater der Jungen Welt in Leipzig also featured a stage area running downwards like a broad ramp between two sides of the audience; another creative visual metaphor, since all the characters seem to be on the slide. Indeed some of the situations border on the surreal. There is a girl who eats worms to try to lose weight, and a teenage boy who falls in love with a seventy-seven year-old woman with an addiction for vodka. The teacher feels so uncomfortable with his life that he has a constant taste of sand in his mouth. All of them are faced with the question of what to do with (the rest of) their lives. From the outset, the audience can guess how the play will end because the stage is marked by silhouettes of bodies lying on the floor as in a crime scene. Thus, from the very start, the grotesquely humorous accounts of uncertainty and inadequacies are imbued with a tragic end, even though it is difficult to guess who the killer might be. David Paquet intensifies this even further by inviting us to empathise with all the characters, who are impeccably portrayed by a very talented ensemble under the direction of Ronny Jakubaschk. Book your seats for the next edition of Augenblick mal! in Berlin in spring 2017. 4 / 16 European Stages https://europeanstages.org David Paquet's 2.14 AM/FM. Photo credit: Tom Schulze. Staying with Franco-Canadian playwrights for a moment, one of this century's outstanding and most relevant plays has to be Scorched (original title Incendies) by Wajdi Mouawad, first produced in Quebec in 2003. The play begins in a lawyer's office in an unspecified Western city where the siblings Janine and Simon have been summoned to hear the last will and testament of their mother, Nawal, to whom they have not spoken a word during the final five years of her life. In her will Nawal says that she will only be able to rest in peace after the two have delivered letters to the brother they did not know they had, and the father they thought was dead. Reluctantly, they set out on a journey to the Middle East in search of their entangled roots. A flashback takes us to an unknown country in the Middle East, probably Lebanon—the playwright was born in Beirut—but the precise setting could be anywhere where civil war is raging.