The mysterious decline in audience
Status: 12:25 p.m
Distance dummies in the theater
Quelle: picture alliance/dpa
For two years the theaters were empty or loosely occupied. But even after the pandemic measures, the halls are filling up only hesitantly. Are visitors afraid of viruses? Or have the corona rules worn you down?
Nfter this year’s Berliner Theatertreffen came to an end at the weekend, one topic will remain: the dwindling audience. Not that the theater industry has given too much attention to the audience in recent years, whose absence is now loudly lamented. You can also talk to yourself, preferably about yourself.
Now you don’t have to look after the people who flock to the theaters and thus leave a little of their freely available lifetime to theater artists. Taking her seriously would be enough. This includes treating the audience not just as an object of instruction and agitation or all-round carefree identity maintenance, but as a social entity of people with their own interests, dreams and desires. And with your own mind, which may also be brought into play. The viewer is capable of more than baby food art: pre-chewed and easily digestible.
But in view of the loosely occupied halls even at premieres, the obvious gaps in the subsequent performances, the lack of sales of sticky pretzels and stale sparkling wine during the breaks, the question of the reasons for this arises with some urgency. Is it the fear of the virus? Or from the shortness of breath caused by industry-standard particle protection masks?
Bodily co-presence
After two years of bans on physical contact, infantile diagrams with virus clouds and centimetres, fear of fellow human beings as potentially dangerous virus carriers, the theater folk can now call for “physical co-presence” as often as they like, but it has something in vain.
It is not art that determines the order of the body, even if it can serve as a reminder that there is usually more going on between living people than AHA rules and the paradox of prevention. However, the theater did not necessarily deserve it in this respect. When the stubborn Frank Castorf opposed the gesture of state-controlled and supervised hand washing, in theater circles that was not seen as a legitimate attempt at self-assertion, but as an untenable blunder.
You can’t shake the impression that you sometimes struggle with your own art form in the theatre. The hope for the “digital formats” also hits an objective limit when you find yourself in direct competition with large streaming services, whose products also reflect that the budget of a German municipal theater is quite puny compared to a global corporation. Quite apart from the fact that a monthly subscription to Netflix is often cheaper than a ticket to the theater and the evenings there that – as the saying goes – tear you out of your armchair have become rare.
The dwindling audience has been there for years, it was poorly concealed by an ever-increasing number of events, by more and more premieres and additional events. But now the problem can no longer be ignored. Merely invoking one’s own relevance against appearances will not be enough, artistic suggestions are needed.