2024-10-25 11:43:00
Berlin’s culture should be scraping by, but the federal government is generous towards its cultural institutions. But with what and with what result? Impressions from the “Performing Arts Season” of the Berlin Film Festival which has just begun.
Once upon a time there were Berlin Festival Weeks. A long-term festival, generously subsidized by the federal government, with the cultural autumn at its core, which has always given the frontline city of the Federal Republic of Germany wonderful guest performances of the performing arts. All the greats were there, from Callas to Zadek, from Bernstein and Horowitz to Chéreau and Wilson. There were live impressions aplenty.
It’s been a long time. The festival – which also includes the music festival, the jazz festival, the theater meeting and the literary festival – has become increasingly smaller financially. In 2001 the Gropius Bau, once used for highly successful exhibitions, came under the same roof as a further cost-cutting measure, so to speak: compared to international exhibition venues it offers an insider program which, for financial reasons, can hardly boast noteworthy audience numbers. The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija currently exhibits there, and also enjoys organizing collective cooking events.
Seasons of guest appearances have become shorter and less significant, sometimes more contemporary, sometimes classic again. They were called “spielzeit’europa”, “Foreign Affairs”, “Immersion”, “Circus”, “The New Infinity”, currently – edited by the Japanese Yusuke Hashimoto, not very present in the city – “Performing Arts Season” (until January 25, 2025). And Hashimoto now offers mostly oldies. But also goodies?
In Berlin, of all places, the strangest city in the world full of drag queens and trash fags, there was now a four-hour non-stop sing-along of tuff boys at the opening. With “Bark of Millions,” Taylor Mac and his colleagues sang 55 self-penned songs about barely recognizable gay and lesbian icons, unknowns and villains as a “rock meditation on queerness.” The costume-intensive nonsense quickly became boring, and even the community left – which they were allowed to do – the home of the Berliner Festspiele, the underused former Freie Volksbühne. And most of the time it didn’t come back.
The second joke came from regular guests, the Flemish company Rosas of its 64-year-old founder Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, which recently came under fire for bullying accusations – ignored here. In Berlin he presented “Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione”, a dance piece developed together with his former Moroccan student Radouan Mriziga which is slowly gaining momentum. In Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” a male quartet performs minimalist, macho things: hunting, field work, stomping dances. The slowness of this should clash with the lively baroque colors of the music, but too soon it seemed transparent and opaque.
How do you want to capture the audience of the future? But there are still other legends from the day before yesterday: in the dance industry, Lucinda Childs (84 years old) and the Trisha Brown Dance Company, whose founder died seven years ago, as well as the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company again after 16 years of absence.
All familiar, like Thorsten Lensing and Philippe Quesne in the theater sector. It’s not really fun, but it still costs money. And while Berlin culture is threatened with 10% cuts, which would brutally limit the variety of programs, the federal government continues to pour out the watering can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring much creativity to bear.
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