The 2015 Theatertreffen
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European Stages https://europeanstages.org The 2015 Theatertreffen The international popularity of the annual Berlin Theatre festival, the Theatertreffen, continues to grow, and so does the demand for the limited number of seats, especially when productions are presented in a small venue, or, in the case of Castorf's Baal this year, for a single performance. In these cases press tickets are limited to representatives of major German and international publications, and smaller publications (like this one) are placed on waiting lists. Last season only one production was so limited, but this year it was three out of the ten, significantly reducing the possibility of presenting a comprehensive view of the festival. I particularly regretted missing Castorf's Baal, which stirred up a major scandal when Castorf, as is his custom, layered into the Brecht text a good deal of material from other sources. When the Brecht estate protested, a legal battle ensued, with the result that the production was allowed only two more public performances, one in Munich and the other at the Theatertreffen. The other major disappointment was missing the stage adaptation of the Fassbinder film Warum läuft Herr T. Amok? by the major young director Susanne Kennedy, whose abstract Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt was clearly among the outstanding productions of last year's festival. The third unavailable offering was Judisth Schalansky’s Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen Of course, this still left seven evenings of outstanding theatre, clearly well worth the trip to Berlin, not to mention the opportunity to fill in the free evenings with other selections from the always rich theatre offerings of this city. The festival opened with a new work by the German language's leading contemporary playwright, Elfriede Jelenik, directed by Nicolas Stemann, the director most closely associated with her work. This was Die Schutzbefohlenen, based on Aeschylus' The Suppliants, and first presented at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. 1 / 21 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen at the 2015 Theatertreffen. Photo credit: picture alliance / dpa. The production in many ways reminded me of the stunning Marat/Sade directed by Volker Lösch which came from Hamburg to the Theatertreffen in 2009. Lösch had the ingenious idea of casting the chorus of Marat/Sade from actual homeless street-people in Hamburg, one of Germany's wealthiest cities, and weaving their actual social testimonies into the structure of the production. Jelenik, as she often does, has created a work out of a major contemporary social crisis, in this case the ongoing Lampedusa protests in Hamburg. This crisis, familiar to most German viewers, has been little reported in the United States, so perhaps a very brief overview is necessary. In 2011, refugees, mostly Pakistani guest workers, fleeing the unrest in Libya, were given shelter in camps on the Italian island of Lampedusa. In 2013 the Italian government closed the camps, gave each refugee a small stipend, and sent them northward to find asylum. Most of them were sent to Hamburg, which provided no support for them and left them stranded on the streets. Protest camps, sit-ins and demonstrations, mostly declared illegal by the authorities followed, but so did support for the refugees, leading to ongoing tensions in the city. The deaths of another 390 Lampedusan refugees at sea that October added new pressure to the situation. Jelenick, in Hamburg, worked closely with the organizations supporting the refugees, videotaping their stories and developing with the Thalia Theatre there a presentation on their situation which was presented in September of 2013 at the St. Pauli Church, where 80 of the refugees had taken shelter. This essay grew into the full production of Die Schutzbefohlenden, with eight actors and a chorus of twenty-one of the refugees. The production opens with the chorus milling about on stage, and out of their babble of voices specific figures appear to articulate their story. In a circular screen at the rear of the stage, appears the head of one of the refugee women, being interviewed. Her image will appear regularly through the evening, reflecting (in English) on the dilemma of her fellows, the loss of families, friends and country, and the frightful experiences undergone before and during their exile. The text of the play proper begins to be presented by three white male actors in German with English supertitles, a combination of news reports, Biblical references, suggestions of Aeschylus and continuing meditations on legality and illegality. A major theme of the production is touched upon in these opening sequences as the all-male, all-white narrators are challenged by a black man and two women, one black and one white, but these also are Thalia actors. The refugee chorus does not participate in this discussion, although more and more they contribute physically and vocally to the growing sense of entrapment, desperation, and incipient revolt. From time to time they physically dominate the stage, drowning out the more quiet and measured presentations of the professional actors with surges of mass protest, moving downstage, fists aloft, chanting "We are here. We will fight. Freedom of Movement is Everybody's Right." This is chanted in English, the language almost universally used by the emigrants. Their dilemma is powerfully presented by their presence, the words of the text, and by strong visual images, most notably a huge barbed-wire wall that is pushed in from the wings and creates a sealed-off camp area upstage. Key repeated terms are "legal" and "illegal" and at one point the chorus personalizes this by directly confronting the audience and pointing to individual members, calling out "legal" or "illegal" clearly at random. 2 / 21 European Stages https://europeanstages.org This theme reaches its climax late in the production when we are informed that in fact many of the chorus members do not have legal status and are risking deportation by the very act of this public display. For more than an hour and a half of the two hour plus production, however, material of this sort continues to be repeated, and while the cumulative effect is strong, the repetition begins to weaken it. Then suddenly the production makes a violent shift and moves into vastly more interesting and challenging territory. The shift is signaled by a striking image, quite unlike anything yet seen this evening. A grotesque female figure with a flowing crown and a flowing blue cape dashes onto the stage mounted upon an equally grotesque black figure of a bull. They circle the performers and disappear as they came—clearly a satiric Europa, whose shocking appearance opens the production in a new direction. The same leading actors attempt to continue their theatrical denunciation of the crisis, but their traditional "engaged" theatre begins to fall apart. Individual refugees tug at their sleeves, begging for attention, only to be ignored and pushed aside. Finally one irritated actor pronounces the key line "We can't help you; we're too busy playing you." With that shocking articulation, the frame shifts from the depiction of a social crisis to a question of representation itself, of who is speaking in the theatre, what voices are being silenced and at what political cost. As the Hamburg actors maintain their theatrical distance, their presentation becomes increasingly distanced from reality. The men appear in women's clothing, the black performers in whiteface, and all delivering art songs irrelevant to the situation. Individual chorus members seek to speak out, but are confined to fragments of the texts of others—Aeschylus, the newspapers, Jelenik herself. The singing Hamburg actors attempt to re-establish their authority by displaying a sign: "I an Lampedsan," but it is scarcely presented before it is turned around to reveal on the reverse side stating "I am Pöseldorf" naming an elegant Hamburg neighborhood which has bitterly opposed the establishment of a shelter for the emigrants within its boundaries. In further expression of this opposition, the image of the black Lampedusan woman so frequently seen in the upstage projection is now replaced by a series of white faces, presumably Hamburg citizens, perhaps actors, opposing the disruptive influence of these "others." For the first time in the evening, the actors draw a proscenium curtain across this turbulent scene, in a light pastel blue. Upon it is projected a series of images of refugees in boats and the caskets of some of those drowned when these boats capsized, grotesquely decorated with teddy bears, while a recorded voice sings a chilling "Teddy Bear" song composed by Jelinek. The racist comments of the good Hamburg citizens, the horrifying images, the documentary evidence, all continues to add to the indictment of the failure of this city and of the European cultural tradition to respond in an effective way to this ongoing tragedy, but behind all of this demonstration lies the constantly deferred question of who speaks for whom, and to what effect . Even the official program of the Theatertreffen itself lists the names of the eight Hamburg actors, while the names of the twenty-one chorus members disappear behind a neutral three words—"und einem Flüctlingschor" (and a chorus of refugees). The silencing continues. 3 / 21 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Die Unverheiratete (The unmarried) by Ewald Palmetshofer. Photo credit: Georg Soulek. Palmetshofer's Die Unverheiratete Unable to attend the production of the Kennedy piece, I returned several days later to the Theatertreffen to see the first of two productions invited this year from the Burgtheater in Vienna. The selections of the Theatertreffen jury are always looked to as a suggestion what aspects of contemporary German theatre its establishment wants to call attention to, in addition to the presumed high artistic achievement of each entry.