The Schaubühne Berlin under Thomas Ostermeier

Reinventing Realism

Peter M. Boenisch

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350190702
• eBook ISBN: 9781350165809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

On the 20th anniversary of artistic director Thomas Ostermeier's time at Berlin's Schaubühne Theatre, this important study reflects on the contribution the theatre has made to contemporary theatre, not just in Germany, but around the world. Ostermeier has kept extending and refining the important notion of German Regietheater (directors' theatre) with the Schaubühne Theatre being its internationally famous birthplace under the previous artistic direction of Peter Stein. Through doing so, the work produced at the Schaubühne has transgressed established divides of text-based and devised theatre, and blurred the borders between theatre and dance. Combining scholarly reflection with interview material, this essential collection investigates how theatre has been reinvented by the Schaubühne under Ostermeier's tenure, bringing together international theatre scholars such as Erika Fischer-Lichte, Marvin Carlson, Jitka Goriaux Pelechova, Benjamin Fowler, Ramona Mosse and Sabine Huschka. This study also considers productions by some of Ostermeier's past and present collaborators, such as Katie Mitchell, Falk Richter and Sasha Waltz. This edition also includes the first English translation of Schaubühne's original manifesto "The Mission" (1999); a contribution from Ostermeier's long-term co-director Jens Hillje; a contribution from Hans-Thies Lehmann on Falk Richter; and an interview with Thomas Ostermeier by Clare Finburgh Delijani.

Part One

The Schaubühne Berlin under
Thomas Ostermeier:
Reinventing an Institution

1

The First Season: The Mission (1999)

Thomas Ostermeier, Jens Hillje, Sasha Waltz and Jochen Sandig

This manifesto was originally published in the Autumn of 1999, in the programme brochure introducing the Schaubühne’s first season under its new artistic directors Thomas Ostermeier, Jens Hillje, Sasha Waltz and Jochen Sandig. They opened their joint artistic tenure with a double premiere of Sasha Waltz’s choreography Körper (Bodies) on 22 January 2000, followed by Lars Norén’s Personenkreis 3.1 (Human Circle 3.1), in Thomas Ostermeier’s direction, on 24 January 2000. This document is here published for the first time, in its full version, in English, with kind permission from Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz.

Theatre-makers in Germany have lost their mission. After two hundred years at the spearhead of enlightenment, theatre today bemoans the loss of its importance as a critical public theatre situated at the centre of German states and cities, a role it had once more regained in the wake of 1968. Nowadays, it finds itself within a society that is entirely apolitical, from the remote pub to the Kanzler’s office. The context of clear ideological frontlines and the thinking in alternatives has given way to an encompassing loss of orientation. An excitable polemic that suits media headlines cannot hide the fact that we are living in a diffuse unease, without any political consciousness.

We have got to start all over again.

The wish for a different life – to live together in true liberty beyond the laws and values of economic efficiency dictated by neoliberal capitalism – does still exist. Without a consciousness of the possibility and the necessity to live a different life than this – both as individuals, and as a society – the conditions cannot be changed. Theatre can be one of these places where attempts to comprehend the world in a new way intensify into a shared, common view of the world, and into an attitude. Theatre can therefore be the place of realization, and thus of repoliticization.

For this purpose, we need a theatre that is properly contemporary, that makes the attempt to tell stories about the individual and the existential as well as the wider social conflicts of human beings who live in this world. Dramatic conflicts that spring from present-day reality, and not from the class society as in Schiller’s Luise Miller. In the present historical situation of maximum freedom of the individual within a system of total submission under the laws of the market, this is the only chance for theatre in order to continue to be able to ask the question: how should we really live in our world?

We need a new realism, because realism works against a ‘wrong consciousness’, which today tends to be a comatose un-consciousness. Realism is not the simple depiction of the world as it looks. It is the view onto the world through an attitude that demands for change, born from pain and injury, which become the reason for making art in order to take revenge on the world for its blindness and stupidity. It attempts to comprehend and to express these realities, and to refigure them. In the very recognition of the familiar, realism wants to provoke surprise and astonishment, and it wants to tell stories, and that means insisting on the fact that actions have a consequence. This is the relentlessness of human life, and when this relentlessness is brought on stage, drama comes into being.

Theatre is connected to the world through the authors. In a time when the German drama of ideas keeps revolving around exhausted ideas and our fathers’ anti-modern excrescences keep flourishing, or when it remains plainly tame in its intellectual self-reflection and its narcissistic love of language that lacks any idea or concern, we need authors who open their eyes and ears for the world and for its incredible stories. The explosion of many different realities, which results from the collapse of the great ideologies and of the old political camps, can only be reflected by the different ways of seeing and imagining the world offered by a diverse range of different authors, both in dance and in drama.

The ensemble

Under the artistic direction of Sasha Waltz, Thomas Ostermeier, Jochen Sandig and Jens Hillje, the Schaubühne aims to be a contemporary theatre.

For us, the utopian moment of theatre is the idea of the ensemble. Almost forty actors and dancers have agreed to reject, for an initial period of two years, any other jobs for film, radio and television, in order to work, with choreographers, directors, playwrights, musicians, set and costume designers, dramaturgs, assistants, prompters and stage managers, for equal and transparent pay, developing a shared idea of theatre and bringing it to life on stage. This is the starting point and the aim of co-determination [Mitbestimmung]. The Schaubühne repertoire will be created through a constant, issue-based debate between the artistic direction, the dramaturgy department and the ensemble, and in an exchange between dance and drama. The Schaubühne sees itself as a laboratory, which works on the development of a new theatre language in dialogue with other disciplines such as architecture, visual arts, music, literature and film.

Dance and drama

The decision to bring together dance and drama as equal partners in one theatre is unique in the German theatre system. Contemporary dance, which has established itself over the past decades across the world as innovative and trendsetting theatre form, will now play a leading artistic role at the Schaubühne.

Attempts to appropriately represent on stage the complex perception of our present reality hit their aesthetic limit in the form of straight drama. A physical and sensory theatre – whether drama or dance – is able to approximate this reality more closely. By telling its stories through the body, dance manages to make palpable a world of experience beyond language, which defies the dominant logic of the Logos.

A new generation of artists have started to go beyond a hermetic, aesthetically highly developed, yet with regards to its content, empty style of dance. They want to tell stories, which bring to light the abyss of human existence, and which tackle existential questions of life.

The research

The co-determination of programme contents is based on an aesthetic and sociological research, which is undertaken by the entire ensemble, in order to confront through art one’s own life and the reality of today’s society. New writing and contemporary forms of narrating are the principal interests of the new Schaubühne. We start by commissioning playwrights, and jointly develop plays with dramaturgs, authors and actors. In addition, all submitted plays are read and discussed.

The dramaturgy department introduces the plays and projects to the ensemble. They are then read and discussed together. The ensemble has the right to reject an idea for a production proposed by the artistic direction, thus to reject a play, a playwright or a director. The ensemble has the duty to present an alternative proposal. This right to a constructive veto has been formally introduced in order to function as an ‘emergency brake’, and as a positive catalyst for a focused and engaged discussion about the development of the programme for a theatre season.

Thereby, after three heated meetings of the ensemble and after controversial debates, the ensemble fully shares the risky decision to open the new Schaubühne with Lars Norén’s Personenkreis 3.1 as its first drama premiere. Thomas Ostermeier’s suggestion to stage a Feydeau piece was rejected following a read-through and discussion. Instead, the ensemble tasked the dramaturgy department with finding a contemporary comedy of equal calibre to Feydeau’s, or to commission the writing of one. Another risk.

The objective

All this serves the aim of attracting, in addition to the traditional Schaubühne spectators, new audiences who no longer attend the theatre because of their commitment to the bourgeois value of education and erudition [Bildung], but who instinctively look out for well-presented stories, and therefore mostly decide to go to the cinema. It has got to be the ideal objective of every contemporary theatre to attract this audience for the strange experience of a theatre evening, and to connect them to the social space of theatre. If these different groups of spectators, old and new, were to mix and mingle in the auditorium without conflict, in order to watch together new plays – then we would have achieved, not only for Berlin, a small revolution.

Translated by Peter M. Boenisch

2

Between Philosophical and Sociological Theatre: The Political Regietheater of Peter Stein and Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne Berlin

Erika Fischer-Lichte

Having served as artistic director of Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre for twenty years in 2020, Thomas Ostermeier exceeded the time his most famous predecessor spent in office: Peter Stein held this position only for fourteen years, from 1970 until he left after the 1983/84 season. During their respective artistic directorships, and not least with their own productions, both directors have won the Schaubühne much international fame. The company came to be regarded in many parts of the world as the epitome of contemporary German theatre. While this might suggest a certain continuity of their approaches, such a claim, even if not outright wrong, must remain debatable and call for further substantiation. Theatre is an ephemeral art – as Schiller already pointed out in his preface to Wallenstein, ‘Posterity will weave no wreaths for actors’ – and a performance comes into being here and now, emerging out of the encounter between actors and spectators. Therefore, it can only be experienced in this very presence, however well documented it might be on film, video or in another medium. This means that any theatre production remains inextricably linked to the time of its coming into being, in all possible respects. Therefore, it would be pointless to discuss the theatre aesthetics of different directors without taking into consideration the overall historical, political, cultural, ideological and artistic conditions in which their productions were embedded – without, of course, suggesting that this context alone determines the work. Yet, to relate Thomas Ostermeier’s work at the Schaubühne to that of Peter Stein only makes sense when keeping in mind these differences. In this chapter, it will be shown how they each developed a very different theatre aesthetic, and, even more importantly, how their work was embedded in such distinct historical, political and cultural contexts.

Peter Stein: New theatre for a time of transformation

Peter Stein (b. 1937) was appointed artistic director of the Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the end of the 1960s – a crucial period for the German Federal Republic, marked by radical changes within as well as by an increasingly tense relationship between the two German states. On 13 August 1961, the wall separating West from East Berlin was built; the so-called Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart) that cut r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: Twenty Years of the Schaubühne Berlin under Thomas Ostermeier: Ambitions, Achievements, Transformations
• Acknowledgements
• Part One The Schaubühne Berlin under Thomas Ostermeier: Reinventing an Institution
• 1 The First Season: The Mission (1999)
• 2 Between Philosophical and Sociological Theatre: The Political Regietheater of Peter Stein and Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne Berlin
• 3 The Schaubühne’s Civic Mission in the Age of Globalization: An Imaginary Island that Probes Society
• 4 ‘Audiences Know Their Cause will be Treated’: Making Political Theatre at the Schaubühne
• Part Two Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne: Reinventing ‘Directors’ Theatre’
• 5 Socialist Realism, Capitalist Realism, Ostermeier Realism
• 6 Thomas Ostermeier’s Shakespeare Productions: The Mise en Action of Canonical Plays
• 7 Hamlet Out of Joint: Variations on a Theme in Thomas Ostermeier’s Production, 2008–20
• 8 Sensing the North: Thomas Ostermeier and the Schaubühne in Brazil
• 9 Confronting the Present: Thomas Ostermeier’s Post-conceptual Regietheater
• Part Three The Schaubühne’s Experiments Across Forms and Borders: Towards a New Realism
• 10 Theatre Towards the Liberation of Thinking: Experimenting with Realism(s) at the Schaubühne, 2000–10
• 11 Re-scripting Realism: Katie Mitchell and Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne
• 12 Encountering the Rage from the South: Latin American Theatre at the Schaubühne’s FIND Festival
• 13 Performing Bodies as a Scenic Playground of Social Realities: Choreographic Theatre at the Schaubühne Berlin
• 14 REST/less EXHAUSTION, SEMI-CALM: Some Notes on Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk’s Trust
• Index
• Copyright