2024-09-20 13:21:17
“We are looking for someone who is experienced, courageous and enthusiastic”: Berliner Volksbühne has publicly advertised the position of its long-time artistic director and is starting a new season without a leader – with a bloody concert. Where does all this lead?
Several months after the sudden death of René Pollesch, the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz remains without a management. On the outside he appears unimpressed. “No one cries,” read the theater’s new posters, which can be seen all over the city. Director is probably the most difficult stage job in the country Advertising, from 2027. Berlin’s Senator for Culture Joe Chialo has announced that he will present a solution for this fall term.
“The Volksbühne sees itself locally and internationally as an avant-garde, rigorously interesting theater and a place for artistic discussion in all genres,” said the announcement. “We are looking for an experienced, confident and enthusiastic person or a team with visions to lead one of the largest collective studios in Berlin in the 21st century.” You also need “the courage to take risks”. Courage as a key qualification is something that is rarely read often in a job profile.
How dare he publicly announce the management of the Volksbühne is questionable. It is certainly unusual that both the failed curator Chris Dercon and René Pollesch were chosen by the traditional policy without much process. Now a committee of unnamed experts will examine the materials that will arrive at the Senate’s control at the end of October. It will be interesting to see how many people are brave enough to get the Volksbühne truck back on the road.
The new season even surprises with a posthumous Pollesch show in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in October: the article “I don’t know what a place is, I only know its money” played there will be taken from Zurich . To open the season, “The Family” by Constanza Macras was shown on Thursday evening. he is in demand in Hollywood.
Bones and all that
In “The Family,” Macras let his company Dorky Park make the novel “Stranger Testimony” by the Argentine writer Juan José Saer. In it, Spanish pirates are attacked by cannibals and eaten, with one exception – the witness. With DAF you can say: dance to the cannibals – and now the colonizer! But Macras does not dwell on the romanticism of cannibalism in vegetarian times à la “Bones and Whole”. There is no long cooking, chewing or digesting involved here.
In Macras, the novel’s plot is reduced to a very beautiful TikTok composition with a funny sound. And before you know it, you’re already at the next stage – inspired by the many extravagant outfits of Slavna Martinovic on Simon Lesemann’s mirrored stage – which is about the killer trends on social media. Or about tables and exchange values in Marx. Or marriage. And so it goes on and on and on.
What is it about? “the family”? In short: by and large, there is no passion for the images of the present. Unlimited flow of TikTok, Instagram & Co. that stages everything: cat and food videos, porn, dance games, these snippets. It is bitterly ironic that people binge on videos of people bingeing – until they don’t know. Time and time again, challenges on social media end in death, in a fierce competition for clicks and likes.
“I bet you’re good on the dance floor” is what Arctic Monkeys promised in the first stage: the curtain rose on the endless self-presentation and marketing that led “Saturday Night Fever” to many shows talent to YouTube and TikTok. In the beginning, TikTok was also about dance. While Macra’s “Drama” last year has been inspired by shows, variety shows and reviews to make a calculation with the theater, “The Family” is going into the abyss of social media.
“The Family” is almost two hours of cognitive dissonance, self-examination and elimination of images. It’s just slower than TikTok, where the action only burns into the retina for seconds, a short kick in the algorithmically optimized world of short kicks. Macras has to use the full range of parody in order not to double what is shown. The question remains: a TikTok parody danced in slow motion, is that really needed on stage?
Or to put it another way: Do social media images or can they go away? Almost 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin described confusion – as opposed to acceptance – as a new modern aesthetic paradigm, as a series of “phenomena” (supported by Charles Baudelaire, the endless philosopher of the great city). Today the culture center is further than Benjamin’s time: everyone has their own stream and shock manager, the personal algorithm makes it possible.
“The Family” shows how this society can do itself in and with social media. Philosopher Nancy Fraser also talks about “cannibalistic capitalism”, an “omnivore”. Macras brought a slow-motion version of TikTok to the stage for newcomers who were excited by the educated middle class, but it remained unscathed – despite the slides in the colonization of beauty by the economy. It can feel very contemporary and culturally relevant at the same time, but not much more.
Spend half of your life Jacob Hayner in the theater. In 2020 he published the book “Why Theatre. Crisis and renewal,” he has been writing for WELT since 2022.
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