Dear Berlin,

Not so long ago you said “Let Them In!” and opened your arms to immigrants seeking refuge.  You stood there like Lady Liberty, the America of Europe! But then the sky darkened with fear. And here in New York we are biting our nails as a fascist future arrives. Berlin, we need your solidarity.

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Radical budget cuts in the cultural sector of the Netherlands have caused disquiet and debates about high culture even in Germany. However, do we really need what the German punk poet Rainald Goetz once sneeringly called “Kulturverteidigung” (“defence of culture”)? Or should we rather develop a whole new concept of culture? A new term that is guided by questions of production and cooperation, rather than antiquated needs of representation? Such questions are asked by independent theatre maker Alexander Karschnia in his article on protests in the cultural arena in Italy and Holland. His performance group andcompany&Co. has resided in the Netherlands for many years. Together with Dutch and Belgian collaborators they developed a new piece on the topic:

CULTURAL COUNTERREVOLUTION GAINING GROUND

“Through car-free streets I walk to the Odéon. A young man in the centre aisle of the theatre is leading the discussion. An amazing experience, still: Someone is speaking from one of the golden boxes, handsome and serious faces, finally no longer bored, turn into that direction, arguments are streaming back and forth in the world’s longest dialogue, which has now been going on for days around the clock. (…) Never again, not even when this will be past, will this theatre be a ‘normal’ theatre for me, because this scene is unforgettable.”

Paris, May, 1968, described by Cees Nooteboom for a Dutch newspaper. For several weeks, revolting students had occupied the Théâtre de l’Odéon and used it as a gathering place. Rome, June, 2011, a similar scene: Rome’s most ancient extant house, the Teatro Valle, was occupied by Lavoratrici e Lavoratori dello Spettacolo (male and female workers of the theatre: actors, directors, designers, stage callers, light board operators, sound engineers) demanding to preserve the famous theatre house. Founded in 1727 as a concert stage, it saw the first performance of Pirandello’s Six Persons are Looking for an Author 90 years ago. The play’s experimental dramaturgy laid the founding stone for a new era of Italian theatre. For 60 years, the theatre had been controlled by the national authority Ente Teatrale Italiano (ETI), which had ultimately opted for privatisation, prior to its own dissolution. In June, it was taken over by its staff: “All of them together keep a theatre going which has not had any official managing director since the beginning of June,” Spiegel online wrote. Protests were voiced by more than 8000 citizens and international theatre makers, including Thomas Ostermeier from Germany. In the course of summer, nearly the entire cultural establishment of Italy joined the protest: it is ironical that precisely on the 150th anniversary of Italy’s national unification, a theatre that would be eminently suitable for a ‘national theatre’ is for sale. Occupants and their supporters demand a publicly funded house with transparent operating structures, dedicated to developing contemporary dramaturgies and to teaching and training, which is capable of realizing international co-productions, like the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Theatre de la Colline in Paris or Berlin’s Schaubühne. An ‘ecological principle’ is wanted, “between small and big productions, training and guest performances; fairness of wages, including fixed minimum and maximum wages; an affordable and progressive policy with regard to admission fees; independent supervisory bodies, transparency and legality through online publication of balances; drafting an ethical codex as a model for all theatre houses and groups in Italy.” And – hopefully – beyond!

Italian civil society had already rejected nuclear power as well as the privatisation of water and the legal special treatment of politicians this year; now Roman theatre workers declared culture a ‘common wealth’, and “free access to culture, knowledge, freedom in distributing ideas and the strengthening of critical thinking an essential component of civil rights.” In principle, we may agree with this, yet we need to ask whether the theatres they mention as examples really achieve this. The Art Workers’ Document by another group of Italian curators, artists, and activists goes further. Attempting to analyse their situation within the framework of general transformations of the welfare state, which after all was also a ‘cultural state’, they warn against the widening gap between the public sphere and the sphere of cultural production. Their demand to reform this state goes far beyond the demand for state-funding and de-privatisation: it is this cooperative and collective dimension of their work which must be respected and actively protected, instead of mechanically reciting the neoliberal harangue of self-responsibility, creativity, flexibility, and mobility. This is precisely what is happening at Teatro Valle every night, when its doors open for meetings, discussions, and performances, partly by prominent artists such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Nanni Moretti, and many more, who declare their solidarity. Occupants were delighted during the summer: “Already, we are over Berlusconi…”

This is what occupants of the Odéon were thinking back then, too: after many nights of fighting on the barricades, overwhelming mass protests by students and workers and a wild general strike, which had brought the country to a halt for almost a month, nobody would have imagined that the ‘General’ (de Gaulle) who had fled the country would score this high in the elections a few weeks later. But the points of departure in France, 1968 and Rome, 2011 are very different: while l’Odéon was chosen as a meeting place during a whole series of occupations of universities and businesses, the occupation of the theatre house in Rome is a singular event. An event, however, that could be the prelude to a new social cultural movement – in all of Europe and beyond. For the field of culture is as fiercely contested as never before. We are indebted to the Italian Antonio Gramsci for his concept of ‘cultural hegemony’, which implies – in short – that the (non-material) superstructure has its own dynamics, which acts upon the (material) ‘basis’ (relations of production). While the activists of 1968ff. followed this realization with Mao’s slogan of a ‘cultural revolution’ and Situationist phrases on their lips, today, however, we are facing a ‘cultural counterrevolution’ – where the basis immediately affects the superstructure: anywhere in Europe, whether in England, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia or the Netherlands, cultural expenses are slashed. The Netherlands are an extreme example: a right-liberal minority government, which can only remain in power with the support of extreme right-wingers, decided budget cuts by 20% of 200 million Euros (from 900 to 700 millions). The performing arts are hit especially hard: here, the cuts amount to more than 50%, in dance, music and fine arts over 40%. While big, representative houses and groups are protected, funding of the middle sector is dropped completely: free production houses and alternative festivals no longer figure in the governments’ calculations. Usually, such scenarios are familiar only from economy or hostile takeovers. Or from wars. Irony of history: not until German occupation was state-funded theatre introduced to the Netherlands.

The government’s culture struggle is not directed against the model of German theatre, but against the model which emerged from the protests against the former – by two tomatoes being thrown: Actie Tomaat was the name of a student campaign against a performance by the Nederlandse Comedie in 1969. More tomatoes followed, as well as a stink bomb and three months of heated discussions after – and sometimes during – performances. Successfully: the minister of culture back then reacted with reforms, and immediately changed the funding system. From then on, not only big, existing institutions were supported, but also groups and theatre collectives such as “werkteater” which closely collaborated with young dramatists such as Judith Herzberg. During the following four decades, a completely distinct cultural landscape evolved, with independent ensembles, free production houses, new university courses, and an institutional infrastructure that had given rise to the “miracle of Dutch theatre” (Hans-Thies Lehmann). Thanks to this campaign, Dutch theatre came to be the model for all “iconoclasts” of the stage/theatre ? – a structural reform Germany is still waiting for! As every independent theatre maker knows: the municipal theatre of a small provincial town has a larger budget than the so-called ‘independent scene’ in Germany. Only during the past few years, cautious steps were taken towards a convergence of the ‘independent scene’ and the system of municipal and state theatres.

In Germany, the revolt of ‘68 led, above all, to the establishment of a so-called ‘director’s theatre’ (‘Regietheater’), where directors in their productions emancipated themselves from the idea of a ‘faithfulness to the original’ as well as from the author’s ghost. The Netherlands, in contrast, saw the emergence of a series of collectives creating their own repertoire. Thanks to state-funding and public recognition of their work, these groups were able to operate for extended periods of time, some of them for more than thirty years.

In Germany, such independent groups usually disappeared after a few years only. They were either dissolved or absorbed into the existing system. The latter remained an exception, for the municipal and state theatres are part of a closed system caught between nationally recognized educational establishments, hierarchically organized institutions with a large number of unwritten laws, and an extensive bureaucratic administrative body. The Dutch theatrical landscape is now heading towards just such a closed system. Thus, already in 2009 – exactly forty years after the first tomatoes being thrown – BIS (basic infrastructure) was created, connecting eight theatre houses with eight training institutions. If it were for the government’s plans, this infrastructure would be the only thing to remain of Dutch theatre. Those 21 independent production houses which saw the rise of an extremely heterogeneous, innovative and, above all, a productive theatre and dance scene, should no longer have a place in this cultural landscape, which is merely concerned with issues of representation. (In comparison: all of Germany has only one-third of Holland’s number of comparable independent houses, one-third of which are in the neighbouring county of North Rhine-Westphalia).
This is an irony of history, too: while the German system of municipal theatres is struggling for reforms inspired by the Dutch model, the Dutch system is being restructured according to the German model. At the same time, the big shining lights of German municipal theatre are Dutch and Belgian, respectively: Johan Simons (director of the Munich Kammerspiele since this year) and Luk Perceval (director of Thalia Theatre, since last year) – both of whom owe their artistic careers to this very model. Many prominent artists of the German state and municipal theatres have pointed out this fact in an urgent letter to the Dutch minister of cultural affairs.

Worlds turned upside down! However, haven’t relations between the Low Lands and Germany always been – let’s say: complementary? Or how come one country succeeds in revolution, while the other only produces classical drama about it? I am talking about the Eighty Years’ War, which in the rest of Europe is known only as the Thirty Years’ War (since it lasted only thirty years everywhere else apart from the Netherlands, because the Dutch had taken up arms against the Spanish superpower fifty years earlier). And about Schillers Don Carlos and Goethes Egmont. While Germany was completely devastated and depressed after thirty years of war, the Dutch were finally independent and autonomous after eighty years of war, as the first country in Europe! Later the Dutch rejected Greater Germany’s generous offer to revert those 400 years of error which had caused both countries to grow apart from each other, when they decided not to gratefully integrate into the “Thousand-Year Reich” as blonde blood brothers. They merely examined and took over the fully finalised funding plans for theatres, which Germans had left on the desks of their office of culture and propaganda – and were firmly resolved to ward off any exertion of influence on the part of the state: season tickets, permanent positions for actors, social insurance etc. The social protection of artists in the Netherlands was on a level that performing artists in Germany (like ourselves) can only dream of (Berlin is currently trying to reinforce minimum wages).

And yet: in the Netherlands, we nowadays frequently hear that an entrenchment of theatre, i.e. a cultural mandate, had never existed in the consciousness of the people here as it did in Germany. On the contrary: people prove to be quite receptive to the new populism. Obviously, art and culture are considered “leftist hobbies”, not only by the extreme right-winger Geert Wilders. According to Johan Simons, artists are met with “downright hatred”: “there is an atmosphere where you better don’t mention that you’re an artist or have read more than 100 books.” The slashes in culture have not diminished but rather increased support for the government. And thus, even the Raad voor Cultuur (Dutch Council of Culture, the government’s independent advisory body) had to acknowledge that it was not about necessary limitations – Noodgedwongen Keuzen – but about something entirely different. All constructive suggestions proposed to the government of how to arrive at savings in the least harmful way were wiped off the table (a singular event). Instead, a Cultuuromslag (cultural turn) was pronounced: ‘Cultural Counterrevolution.’ This clear-cutting of culture is part of wider campaign. The government has discovered artists as a new social group to back up populist politics: “subsidy-eater” (analogous to the “petrol-eating” car) is one of the kinder terms which are presently heard on the part of the government. The horrified liberal public helplessly speaks of a ‘new vandalism’ – a new “iconoclasm”. On the part of the government.

The tragedy that is currently unfolding in the Netherlands should be a lesson to the rest of Europe: in the motherland of liberalism, its Janus face appears, i.e. the ugliness of the second face now becomes all the more visible. The process is reminiscent of the changes in migration politics. Within a short period of time, the previously most tolerant immigration country became the most repressive. All of a sudden, the so-called ‘Holland-Test’ consisting of a list of perfidious questions which each immigrant has to pass, became a model for all authoritarian right-wing parties in the EU. By and by, all liberal achievements are collected: artists are only good for gentrification (such as the dissolution of the red-light district in Amsterdam), foreigners are no longer permitted to buy soft drugs in coffee shops (only if they present a European passport are they allowed to buy hash), while residents can buy them only in prescribed amounts. Once more we can see: the slim state is the string state – and neo-liberalism is the real-existing anti-socialism. Many artists are waking up only now that their own lives are affected. Why have we have refused for such a long time to show solidarity with other social groups who do not have job security either, the authors of the Art Workers’ Document are wondering? After all, we could perhaps be the ones to develop a new model that would help to overcome the antagonism of freelance vs. permanent position in favour of a completely new structure that is simultaneously creative and cooperative. Theatres have always been excellent gathering places: OCCUPY A THEATRE IN EVERY CITY, Italian cultural workers are calling out to us. On November 11, this call was followed by Greek practitioners (Mavili collective) who occupied the deserted EMBROS theatre in Athens. To be continued…

P.S. In 1977, Noteboom wrote: “Sometimes, when I walk past the Sorbonne or Théâtre de l’Odéon, I can hardly imagine that May 1968 happened right here in front of my eyes, – the masses of people, the tension, the banners, the sense of humour, the hopes and disillusionment.” Finally, once again, the theatre had become what he had not considered possible anymore: a ‘normal’ theatre. What Nooteboom felt was – nostalgia, “not about barricades or police attacks, not about interminable explanations and political chicaneries, not about all the excitement, the news that happened right in front of one’s eyes, or fulfilled prophecies of doom, but about that inexplicable tingle in the air, the almost tangible expectation, everyone’s complete, touching openness towards everyone else, the mixture of hope, naiveté, strategy and honesty, all of that which has become invisible now that the world looks like the world.” What we do need are neither monologues of power, nor dialogues between power and those who claim to represent us, but a dialogue – amongst each other: Brecht called it “the Big Discussion”, which was the precondition for the ‘Big Production’. Cultural workers of the world – unite! Let fantasy rule! (written on the walls of the Sorbonne).

Radical budget cuts in the cultural sector of the Netherlands have caused disquiet and debates about high culture even in Germany. However, do we really need what the German punk poet Rainald Goetz once sneeringly called “Kulturverteidigung” (“defence of culture”)? Or should we rather develop a whole new concept of culture? A new term that is guided by questions of production and cooperation, rather than antiquated needs of representation? Such questions are asked by independent theatre maker Alexander Karschnia in his article on protests in the cultural arena in Italy and Holland. His performance group andcompany&Co. has resided in the Netherlands for many years. Together with Dutch and Belgian collaborators they developed a new piece on the topic:

CULTURAL COUNTERREVOLUTION GAINING GROUND
“Through car-free streets I walk to the Odéon. A young man in the centre aisle of the theatre is leading the discussion. An amazing experience, still: Someone is speaking from one of the golden boxes, handsome and serious faces, finally no longer bored, turn into that direction, arguments are streaming back and forth in the world’s longest dialogue, which has now been going on for days around the clock. (…) Never again, not even when this will be past, will this theatre be a ‘normal’ theatre for me, because this scene is unforgettable.”

Paris, May, 1968, described by Cees Nooteboom for a Dutch newspaper. For several weeks, revolting students had occupied the Théâtre de l’Odéon and used it as a gathering place. Rome, June, 2011, a similar scene: Rome’s most ancient extant house, the Teatro Valle, was occupied by Lavoratrici e Lavoratori dello Spettacolo (male and female workers of the theatre: actors, directors, designers, stage callers, light board operators, sound engineers) demanding to preserve the famous theatre house. Founded in 1727 as a concert stage, it saw the first performance of Pirandello’s Six Persons are Looking for an Author 90 years ago. The play’s experimental dramaturgy laid the founding stone for a new era of Italian theatre. For 60 years, the theatre had been controlled by the national authority Ente Teatrale Italiano (ETI), which had ultimately opted for privatisation, prior to its own dissolution. In June, it was taken over by its staff: “All of them together keep a theatre going which has not had any official managing director since the beginning of June,” Spiegel online wrote. Protests were voiced by more than 8000 citizens and international theatre makers, including Thomas Ostermeier from Germany. In the course of summer, nearly the entire cultural establishment of Italy joined the protest: it is ironical that precisely on the 150th anniversary of Italy’s national unification, a theatre that would be eminently suitable for a ‘national theatre’ is for sale. Occupants and their supporters demand a publicly funded house with transparent operating structures, dedicated to developing contemporary dramaturgies and to teaching and training, which is capable of realizing international co-productions, like the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Theatre de la Colline in Paris or Berlin’s Schaubühne. An ‘ecological principle’ is wanted, “between small and big productions, training and guest performances; fairness of wages, including fixed minimum and maximum wages; an affordable and progressive policy with regard to admission fees; independent supervisory bodies, transparency and legality through online publication of balances; drafting an ethical codex as a model for all theatre houses and groups in Italy.” And – hopefully – beyond!

Italian civil society had already rejected nuclear power as well as the privatisation of water and the legal special treatment of politicians this year; now Roman theatre workers declared culture a ‘common wealth’, and “free access to culture, knowledge, freedom in distributing ideas and the strengthening of critical thinking an essential component of civil rights.” In principle, we may agree with this, yet we need to ask whether the theatres they mention as examples really achieve this. The Art Workers’ Document by another group of Italian curators, artists, and activists goes further. Attempting to analyse their situation within the framework of general transformations of the welfare state, which after all was also a ‘cultural state’, they warn against the widening gap between the public sphere and the sphere of cultural production. Their demand to reform this state goes far beyond the demand for state-funding and de-privatisation: it is this cooperative and collective dimension of their work which must be respected and actively protected, instead of mechanically reciting the neoliberal harangue of self-responsibility, creativity, flexibility, and mobility. This is precisely what is happening at Teatro Valle every night, when its doors open for meetings, discussions, and performances, partly by prominent artists such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Nanni Moretti, and many more, who declare their solidarity. Occupants were delighted during the summer: “Already, we are over Berlusconi…”

This is what occupants of the Odéon were thinking back then, too: after many nights of fighting on the barricades, overwhelming mass protests by students and workers and a wild general strike, which had brought the country to a halt for almost a month, nobody would have imagined that the ‘General’ (de Gaulle) who had fled the country would score this high in the elections a few weeks later. But the points of departure in France, 1968 and Rome, 2011 are very different: while l’Odéon was chosen as a meeting place during a whole series of occupations of universities and businesses, the occupation of the theatre house in Rome is a singular event. An event, however, that could be the prelude to a new social cultural movement – in all of Europe and beyond. For the field of culture is as fiercely contested as never before. We are indebted to the Italian Antonio Gramsci for his concept of &lsquo

AN ALIEN

“Are you doing too much? Am I a bad example?“ was a short email I got from Mieke Bal immediately after I sent around the newsletter from my performance-group andcompany&Co. And what a good bad example she is – especially for travellers: between theory and practice, art and science. And since theatre-people were always considered travelling people, this is what we did: We bought a red VW-bus to travel from Amsterdam to Istanbul and back again – just to cross the bridge over the Bosporus between Europe and Asia (Minor): “A bridge gathers as a passage that crosses.” europe an alien was the name of the performance which premiered at the Gasthuis (today: Frascati WG) on November 3rd, 2005. One could say that it’s a practical example of Mieke Bal’s theoretical concept of concepts “as a territory to be travelled, in a spirit of adventure.” The territory we travelled was Europe – but what does this mean, we asked at the beginning of the evening:

Hello, tonight you’ll accompany andcompany&Co. on a trip to the European outer-border.
But where does Europe end, where does it start – that’s the question to ask, when you go South-East, for example if you go to Greece over land, driving, walking or riding a horse. EXIT and re-ENTER the EU: On the way there you cross countries that are either soon-EU, No-EU or New EU. If we look at Europe from above, the claim to be a continent is quite absurd. This shore, which we used to call Western Europe, is nothing but a bump on the Asian West-Coast. One look at a world-map reveals: ‘You’re Asia, baby!’

“And off we went” – this is how the story goes: departure, passage, arrival. But isn’t this also a very European concept of travelling? The Spirit only goes out in the world to return to itself. The contrary concept to this kind of travel is the trip. This is also the fundamental difference between two kinds of literature: Johann Wolfgang Goethe vs. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. While Wilhelm Meister wanders through the world, joins a theatre-troupe only to find himself and to return home as a stabilized individual, Lenz wanders through the mountains to get away, to find an exit. The wandering lost soul is the European nightmare, a figure that keeps haunting a continent searching for itself: The European Spirit has gone out in the world on its ‘colonial adventures’ (as Frantz Fanon said) and the question remains if there is a place to return to? Or from the perspective of those left behind: What does return from ‘there’? EURASIA, EURABIA EURAFRICA EURAMERICA EURAUSTRALIA OCEANIA. SOUTH-EAST ASIA. Maybe meanwhile the Spirit has changed into a ghost – the German term Geist is open for both meanings (thus the Humanities in the German tradition of Geisteswissenschaft also).

He got up and left and came back and said it again, spoke it out loud, spoke it out in the world, putting the word from the O, from OROPA. Or from U: You are (UR): UROPA.
But this time it wasn’t new, but it was old.

The movement of exit and re-entry also reminds us of the theatre: “Exit and re-enter ghost” is a famous stage-instruction from one of the most famous European tragedies: The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Thus Mieke Bal also connected her concept of concepts to the mise-en-scène or as she’d prefer: mise-en-pièce(s). The concept of theatricality allows concepts to travel through the mine-fields of false polarities and to transform from a container of content into a stage to make us see – that’s the affinity between theory & theatre (rooted in the ancient verb theasthai for seeing, viewing which is neither active nor passive, but in-between). In turn, it is important for practitioners of theatre to take this concept very serious, since it shows us that a stage is never just ‘there’, but has to be created first. In other words: one has to have a concept of a stage – hopefully a ‘working concept’: “a concept to work with and a concept that works” . In our performance, we wanted to work on exactly that: we wanted to stage a journey as well as the stage itself to travel: “We set the stage to show you how they crossed from there to there.” Thus the players entered the stage on mobile stations – an occupied zone, limited by an invisible ‘4th wall’. The stage became a land- and soundscape, the movements of the players were captured with pick-up microphones, alienated live and transmitted back into the room as acoustic spectres. But the players never left the stage, the system of entrances was abolished, instead we were interested in playing with being on or off on stage:

We are not there yet; we are here
or rather we are not here yet,
but back there and want to re-enter Europe.

The story of a great journey, of a daring departure, a difficult passage and a final arrival was interrupted before it could be told. The story was washed away to start again in a decaying landscape that was always changing and rebuilt: Boundary posts became trees, trees became boards and boards signposts that sent the performers into the desert. Or on a trip across the Styx – to ‘the other side’. The area that we crossed was the ancient Thrace, whose territory today belongs to Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. The border between the three countries is a river with three names: Marica in Bulgarian, Evros in Greek and Mehric Nehri in Turkish. It is the same river that Orpheus’ head was floating after he was ripped in pieces by the maenads.

Stranded between night and day,
we were standing between two countries between two continents
at the border where there is neither war nor peace
and that’s the reality of this place.
But it’s not a real place, it’s the end of the land: no-man’s-land.
NO MAD LANDSCAPES ANYMORE!

This mythological story has an uncanny resonance in the political presence: While Bulgaria had cleared all mines after the fall of the iron curtain, Greece keeps a death-strip: The Greek river bank is still a mine-field (against EU- and NATO-law). Crossing it frequently ends deadly for refugees & migrants who try to enter EUrope here: 10 adults drowned forced to swim, 3 men drowned, 1 woman body found, 1 man 1 woman drowned, 2 in minefield near river, 3 men 3 woman 3 children drowned near island, 1 man beaten to death, 1 man hanged at detention centre, 32 drowned, 1 body found drifting in boat, 2 men 1 pregnant woman drowned, 9 decomposing on island, 1 found floating by beach, 3 children frozen in truck, 15 forced to walk back and forth over border, 1 skeleton found in minefield, 1 man liquid forced into lungs by police, 2 burned alive in car, 1 woman frozen in mountain, 5 drowned, 1 youth died of cold and exhaustion, 1 man beaten to death not having transition visa…

At the same time this area harbours more than 366 different kind of birds: The delta of the river is a resting & nesting place for all the migrating birds on their way to & fro Africa: Little Grebe, Great Crested Grebe, Continental Cormorant, Eurasian Spoonbill, Greater Flamingo, European Honey-buzzard, Egyptian Vulture, Eurasian Griffon, Vale Gier Eurasian Hobby, Common Coot, Eurasian Oystercatcher Black-winged Stilt, Eurasian Thick-knee, … This species classifies as vulnerable … as nearly threatened … as critically endangered …
This leads to the absurd situation that ornithologists from all over the world travel there to watch birds, while on both sides of the river soldiers are watching each other. With the theatre-scientist Maaike Bleeker one could ask: Look who’s looking? Maybe the fundamental question that theatre can raise undermining the distinction between stage vs. auditorium, actor vs. spectator. But only if the theatre has a concept of theatricality, of the meaning of staging as an activity that is neither active nor passive, but both at the same time: theasthai.
Don’t count on me, people is a plural:
Not he, she, it IS but they ARE. ALL of THEM!

The themes of migration & escape did not only form the content of the play, but also blasted the form. The concept of travelling concepts implies that form & content are not stable, eternally given categories, but have a dynamic, historically changing relationship, which includes the possibilities that a change of content could implode the form. The reality of mass-migration is such a change in content that can not leave the form of drama untouched. We should not forget that the high time of drama was the time of the nation-state, of the national theatre in which the travelling theatre-troupes were made to settle down and become a standing ensemble of a playhouse. Today the theatres have to refuse to play their role as providers of national identity builders, of reassurance that we-are-we.

Stop this
WE are YOU and YOU are WE.
Because: we are not.
We are not nothing, but we are not.
We are neither WE nor WHO or WHAT.
We’re just there.
And that’s were we ARE.
And there we’ve been for quite some time
A long Hello for a short Good-Bye.

In our performance the European outer-border became the limit of representation: The stage was treated as a room under a spell, which enabled the perception of the ‘invisible fourth wall’. Because borders are not always walls, fences or a mine-field, but consist in a complex mechanism of in- & exclusion. The theatre-situation as such has to be put in question taking into account what Bertolt Brecht had said about modern audience-members in 1936: They don’t only come into the theatre “as customers, but also like refugees.” In that time, Brecht had already been a refugee for three years. The antifascist emigrants like Brecht, Walter Benjamin or Hannah Arendt are the avant-garde for a development that had just begun then according to Giorgio Agamben who links the disintegration of the nation-state (and thus the production of millions of state-less people) to his concept of homo sacer. This figure originated in ancient Rome for a group of people without rights, travelled through modern times until it became a fitting description for people imprisoned in nazi death-camps. Important to note is that this condition of ‘bare life’ is not a state of nature, but a condition produced by technologies of power. Or as is said in Brecht’s Refugees’ Talks: “The passport is the most noble part of a person … like a patient is important for a medical doctor to carry out his surgery.”

You’re not a number, you’re not the mechanical holder of a passport.
You are a blind passenger between night and day. You’re Asia, baby!
Where you’re crossing two continents are kissing! You beautiful
BRIDGE!

We also became refugees in the course of the travel: While we tried to re-enter Europe over a tiny post in Greece, the computer-system (SIS – Schengen Informationsystem) made an alert. The temporary passports of two of our travel-companions were reported as stolen refugee documents. We tried to explain them that we were all European citizens and these only temporary passports, but in vain. We had to camp at the border and stay overnight until the issue was cleared: It was a mistake by the federal printer, the temporary travel passports had the exact same number than a set of documents for refugees for temporary stay which were stolen a while ago! So the situation was serious: the group could have been split and the two deported back to Turkey: “In Istanbul their options were either a false Dutch or German passport and one-way plane ticket for $8,000, or a passage by ship to Greece or Italy for $4,000 per adult or $2,000 per child, or walking to Greece, crossing the Meric River on the Greek-Turkish border for $1,500 per group of six to 15, payable in Athens.”

You are not alone, you are not at home, you are not you.
You are you are you are you are your own I am, your own I am.
I am too an I am or am I mad just like you too?

Instead we had to travel to an embassy and get new passports in order to be allowed to continue our travel. If anything this shows one thing: the return, since Homer & Hegel the main movement of the European spirit, is not as easy as the tradition says it is. In the course of the travel, one might has changed, might have become an alien. That this travel, this alienation might be worth it, this is the message of Mieke Bal.

I AM AN OTHER
Another one
I am one
All but one
I am alone
Long gone home

For the fourth time media activists and net artists met in Amsterdam for a “tactical media lab" (11th –15th of September). The highlight was the showing of the new film of the US-american video-collective "Big Noise" called "The Fourth World War.” The celebration of this film with standing ovations at the closure of the four day event I read as a severe symptom of the de-politication of the worldwide resistance to global capitalism: Movement of movement – how low can you go? What has happened to the digital multitude? Actually, a lot has happened since the last Next 5 Minutes (12th –14th of March 1999): the Kosovo-War, Seattle, Prague, the outbreak of the second Intifada, Genoa, 9-11, the war against Afghanistan and Iraq… The world has turned upside down in the mean time. Still, many of the visitors seem to feel that they are on the frontline of a new militancy, that they are "part of something really cool that is about to change the world" (quote from the final discussion). This is charming, but where does this optimism come from while bombs explode every week killing civilians and a new kind of war has been launched that puts the world in a “state of permanent exception” (Agamben)? I am very sorry not to have brought this argument forward during the 5 Minutes, but I was really shocked by the naivity not only of the comrades from the US, but the general attitudes there. I write this down now because I am honestly concerned about what is happening within the ranks of activists that I counted myself a part of until now. Now I am afraid that the same people I expected to put forth a new view on the world are degenerating into a dangerously antimodern movement that fuels a fire that should be extinguished – by "us.” I am afraid that Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider are incorrect with their statement that the choice between Bush and bin Laden was none for us – and so we will proceed on our own path of globalization from beneath. I want to urge everybody very strongly to reconsider if ‘business as usual’ can go on in the anticapitalist movement – or if things have changed too dramatically since 9-11. Maybe Genoa was the peak of this ‘general mobilization’ of a worldwide crowd and now this ‘million men march’ of the global masses should be interrupted – or even demobilized?

In the preparations of Genoa the propaganda from Berlusconi and the other G8-leaders about the anti-globalisation-protestors as potential "terrorists" and the threat of an Islamist attack seemed like pure paranoia from the side of the emperors. Just a month later it DID happen. And this is where things have turned another way. During n5m4 I got the impression that a lot of people treat this incident as a propaganda trick from the evil George W. Bush in his crusade. Or even turning it around into an image for the potential triumph over global capital, the fall of the Empire, the death of the Beast, the crushing of Babylon… A good example for this was the film of another US-video-collective that subverted parts of "Lord of the Ring", turning the gathering of the heroes into a gathering of the contemporary anti-capitalist forces. A really funny piece, I loved it, I laughed a lot, but at the end when the evil twin towers are mentioned in the actual story there is a cut – and the approaching terror-planes are shown. Got the picture? It is dangerous to play with the images of terror, it is nothing less, than in retrospect giving truth to the statements of Berlusconi & Co. prior to Genoa turning the movement of movements into an "anti-glob-mob.” Some people associated with the movement like Naomi Klein sensed this and urged a change in symbols. I think that at least some people at n5m4 had some trouble with “The 4th World War” -one of the organizers interviewed "Big Noise" and asked about Naomi Klein’s intervention. Unfortunately this suggestion was not taken up. The "Fourth World War" was presented: "Welcome to the war!" (Or: "Are your ready for the war.") The question is if this is just a rhetorical rather than radical gesture, ‘radical chic’ – or if this is a serious symptom. I left the room after the first ten minutes, because I couldn’t stand the way everything was mixed together and labelled as this “new war”: “Argentine, Mexico, South Corea, Palestine…” The original idea of Subcommandante Marcos to call the Cold War the "Third World War" and corporate globalisation the fourth had some charm to it – before 9-11. To apply it to the "war on terror" is dangerous. More than that, I would label it a reversed Bush-ism, the re-affirmation of the “state of exception”. It is the same political mistake as repeating the declaration of war against the Empire, that the Tutte Bianchi made before Genoa. After 9-11 it is very questionable if the movement should use the word “war” with positive connotations. Also it would be necessary to reconsider the reality of terror. I couldn’t believe how one could compare the armed, but defensive militancy of the Zappatista Army with the second Intifada: it is not the old Intifada of kids throwing stones against soldiers, this time it is kids throwing stones, but behind them are Palestinian snipers shooting at Israeli soldiers – so you have the picture of the kids for the TV cameras and when a kid gets in the fire line this also produces an image (we will get to that later). This time it is an Intifada of terror, suicide-attacks, “martyr”-murderers. It is not only unarmed people against a military machine, it is also a terror apparatus against a civil society. But in the “4th world war”, everything is getting stirred together: the mourning for disappeared family members during the Argentine dictatorship – a Hamas burial that is actually a hate rally. However deep the differences about the Israeli-Palestine-conflict are: Does anybody seriously believe that the Israeli Army is doing its military operations to bring free trade to the Palestinian territories? Can’t we at least agree that this is not part of the frontline of globalisation, but another kind of conflict?

Probably we cannot agree on anything related to that conflict, because the new militants really depend on the picture of the evil Israeli for a black-and-white-picture of the world. Even more, it is needed to pump oneself up with "aggression against the aggressors". The question really is, if it is the moral outrage over injustice or if within that outrage something else kicks in: the energy of a very old resentment. This seems to be a problem I have with probably the rest of the world’s left. As paradoxical as it is, it almost seems as if only in the German and Austrian Left, the countries where Nazism developed, there has been a debate about antisemitism on the side of the left (in leading left publications like KONKRET or Jungle World). Since the Gulf war in 1991 there was a strong thematization of antizionism being a cover-up for antisemitism and in the last years a left radical pro-Israel-attitude developed. On the eve of the war against the Baath-regime in Iraq the left was deeply divided. Ever since the so called Al-Aksa-Intifada started in September 2000 many political initiatives have broken up and many friendships have been shattered. I came to Amsterdam hoping to get away from this highly polarized atmosphere. I was – inspired by the Munich Volksbad Declaration of the make-world-congress – hoping to meet some people with a horizon beyond the question of pro and con, but searching for a New World that transcends territorial disputes (even if it is the "Holy Land") and that looks beyond "national liberation" as an emancipatory strategy. So I was really disappointed: by Next 5 Minutes as well as the makeworldpaper # 3, that was distributed there by Florian and Geert. I will start with this: "A complicated affair" by Herman Asselberghs and Pieter van Bogaert is a sad example for me of a misguided solidarity, one-sided and wrong. I liked the approach of talking about the everyday-life, about the conditions of artists in the Palestinian territories and their strategies for (artistic) survival, but I lost my sympathy when they mentioned a "suicide attack on an Israeli target" – knowing that these targets are all (in the language of the military) "soft targets": civilians. They seem to put the word "terror" in quotation marks when they write: "CNN has proclaimed a ‘day of terror’ for the Israelis due to a bomb attack on a hotel in Mombasa, a failed attack on a flight from Kenya to Tel Aviv and a suicide squad in Jericho." I would argue: this IS a day of terror for the Israelis, no matter what CNN says. Mentioning CNN in this respect could all too easily suggest that it is only CNN – the US-American media (and you know how a lot of people think who controls the U.S. Media…) – that phrases it this way, as this was an act of propaganda. It is propaganda NOT to call this terror: this attack on Israeli people outside of Israel – as far away as Africa. This incident showed the deeply antisemitic character of the terrorists who want to make clear that no matter where Israelis are they could be attacked. I perceived this incident as another stage of escalating what anti-antizionist leftist came to call "the new anti-Jewish war" (since the massacer during Passach on March 27, 2002 the antisemitic character has been very obvious).

It would be very necessary to transfer the debate of antizionism-as-antisemitism into the forum of the world’s left, but at this point I want to adress one specific aspect: media politics around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because here the old myths of media activism fall to pieces. Asselbergh and Bogaert mention the TV picture of the shooting of the young boy Muhammed al-Durra "around Christmas 2000.” Although this connection of the Palestinian riot and the Christian advent had often been made (one can speculate why) this specific incident actually took place on the second day of the outbreak of the second Intifada, on Septembre 30. It seems that the authors are just as uninformed as most of the other blindly one-sided people. Maybe they did not have a chance to see Esther Schapiras documentary "The Red Quadriga: Three bulletts and a dead child" about this incident (it just won a media-price in Moscow), but it has been shown in other countries too. But they could recently have read James Fallows article in "The Atlantic Monthly" (also: Zurich "Weltwoche" 29/30, also see the last issue of KONKRET, as well as No. 12, 2000). In their research the incident at the crossroad was closley investigated with ballistic measurements etc. and it comes to the conclusion that it was not possible for the Israeli soldiers in the fortress tower who were attacked by a mob to have shot the kid. There are a lot more strange circumstances: the father and the boy arrived at 15h, the burial shown on TV was on 13h. Also the boy that was buried had a deep stab wound in his stomach. The documentary does not answer how this boy could have been killed, others like Nahum Shahaf who was involved in a lot of the research done in Israel ask questions like: Why is there not more film material than only these two minutes of the killing (while the camera team was there far longer)? Why does it look as if the boy moves in the lab, although he is said to be dead. Why is there no blood on the fathers clothes? Why does the camera man shout: ‘The boy is dead’ before he is hit? For Shahaf this scene was enacted for TV, the journalists leave this speculation open. But the question remains: was this part of a campaign? If it was, it was very successfull: this picture was not only deeply engraved in the collective memory, it became a post stamp in a couple of Arab countries, billboards were placed, a main road in Iraq and a park in Marocco were named after the boy and in Palestinian schools the kids learn to say: “We are all Mohammed.” His father said that he would also sacrifice his other kids… But let’s go on: Asselberghs and van Bogaerts text really is a good example for the media politics involved in this conflict, because they themselves mention that many Palestinians work as camera men for Western news stations (the man who filmed the al-Durra-scene was Palestinian and worked for France 2 for example.) One could argue that these camera men are "embedded journalists" of the Intifada. And one could argue, that the news management from the Palestinian authorities is a powerful weapon: pictures from the hot spot of world conflicts are an expensive commodity in the media economy, as we all know. But what most of us don’t want to know is how effective this news management from the Palestinian authorities can be. Another example: when at the end of the year 2000 two Israelis were lynched by a Palestinian mob, because they took a wrong turn and drove into a Palestinian village, the picture of one of the murderers, who holds his bloody hands out of the window to show the mob that they ripped the two men in pieces, was circulated around the world. It was shot by a small Italian TV team. A major Italian media corporation that didn’t capture these pictures officially sent an apology to the PA because they were threatened not to be allowed back in the territories – a serious threat for a big media corporation in one of the hot spots of the world! That should make every media activist think twice about their black-and-white-view-of-the-world. Is it really the independent media activists that go into the territories to show the truth versus the censorship of the militaristic Israelis? Or are the pictures that this "alternative CNN" brings to us the SAME pictures that we see on TV? In this respect the indy-coverage really is “parasitic” on mainstream media – they merge. Don’t the critical media-acitivsts realize that they are reproducing the media? Or is this a contradiction nowadays: to be critical and activist?

One last thing to Next 5 Minutes: That you only got a Palestinian filmmaker instead of an Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is probably not your fault, but simply impossible right now. But why as media critics do you not have a critical view on the way reports come in from the Palestinian territories? Why do you lose your criticism when it comes to this particular struggle? After 1999, when we have seen the Kosovo-Albanian seperatists succeed in internationalizing their conflict and using the NATO air force for their own purposes we should be very critical and look closely at what happens. It is not only the leading industrial countries that organize the military action to expand the reach of the EMPIRE, there also is effective lobbying and media work from small ethnic groups that want to redraw the world’s map! There is a collaboration of ethnic seperatism with the expansion of EMPIRE. Israel is in danger to become a second Jugoslavia, a vicitm of the New World Order. This danger comes from the politics of the EU (we’ll come back to that). Second: I was specifically disappointed that there was nothing at n5m4 on Iran. we have a massive student uprising there, the population supports it now, it is a pre-revolutionary situation there, but you seem just as desinterested in this as the rest of the European mainstream media. And there were a lot of things in the Net: the Student Union SMCCDI (movement for the coordination for democracy) has an Internet portal, there are webcams like www.Teheran24.com, there used to be female sites like www.Iraniangirl.com or the website for censored music www.teheranavenue.com (see: www.jungle-world.com, 35/03), – I mean, there is the chance for a peaceful regime-change from within, without the use of war from the outside – but the Europeans don’t care and their governements keep supporting the Mullahs and all the other Arabic despotic regimes. Ask Persian people in the diaspora what they think about the Europeans these days… And third: there was a lot of talk about EMPIRE, but most people seem not to have read Negri/ Hardt, because it is definitely NOT the old US-imperialism. What was completley missing was the other side of the picture: the EU, the free trade partners of Saudi-Arabia, Syria and Iran and the main financer of the Palestinian Authority – and maybe the terror (see the work of the dissident German green Ilka Schröder against the uncritical EU-support of the Palestinians: www.ilka.org). And why was in the tech-debate on n5m4 not one critical debate about the Galileo-project. A couple of months ago the EU told the public, it was just civilian – now they admit, it is for military purposes. It is a competition to the US-Army, because the Europeans got shut off during the Kosovo-war. What do you need this for – except to be capable of making your own war – or to even wage a war against the US. This makes one very skeptical of this new axis of peace (Germany-France-Russia-China). To speed up the military union of EUrope is not a path of peace – or do you agree with most of the Europeans, that this is a good thing – just because it is against the US? This is not the EMPIRE, this is a new imperialist conflict and who wants to take sides in that? Isn’t it the duty of leftists of all countries to first fight their own goverments (like Liebknechts old slogan: “The main enemy is within the own country!”) Even worse I think is that the Antiglob-movement celebrating the global masses on March 20th sides with the mob in Jakarta and Egypt, burning US and Israeli flags – the “small” and the “big Satan”. Solidarity with the people in the Islamist countries should not be uncritical, supporting hate rallies, antisemitic resentments. Take as a counter-example the Iranian students movement’s paper "Leave Israel, what about us" in which they said they didn’t want to hear the governments antizionist propaganda as explanation of all ills, being the ill itself: the theocracy. So fourth: I really missed a debate on terror. Why didn’t we address the question of networks of terror like “al Kaida”. This is a truly dystopic sci-fi-scenario: the EMPIRE striking back against an autonomous network, a PC in a cave in Afghanistan. This brings me back to the beginning: this war has to be ended by us – and by “us” I mean those people who have thematized networking, the media, the new world of communication etc. Of course, it is the souvereign who defines the state of exception (Carl Schmitt). But it is up to us to intervene in this discourse! Neither by re-affirmation of the “war”, nor by ignoring the reality of terror or posing the question as Bush vs. bin Laden. It is about a re-definition of peace. The EMPIRE used to be defined as EMPIRE that brings about permanent peace (like the Pax Romana). Since 9-11 peace seems like a promise, like an eschatological goal, like the beginning of messianic times. Peace surely has nothing to do with the EU taking up arms against the US – it is about the multitude taking over the EMPIRE. But the multitude is not the new masses on the march against global capital and it’s definitely not the mob raging against the US and Israel! The multitude is a promise – like peace, the coming community (Agamben): MAKE WORLD. PEACE! (27.09.2003)

published as: Stadttheater als Beute. René Pollesch Resistenz-POP. Spoken Words. In: H. Kurzenberger, A. Matzke (Hg.): TheorieTheaterPraxis. Theater der Zeit, Recherchen 17, Berlin 2003.
Ursprünglich als Vortrag auf dem 6. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft in Hildesheim gehalten am 08.11.2002. Zuerst im Internet publiziert unter:

> part 1: Diskursanalyse in der 1. Person (published at www.liga6000.de 2002-12-07)

> part 2: Keine Aha-, sondern AAAAH-Erkenntnisse (published at www.liga6000.de 2002-12-15)

ZUM ZEITVERTREIB ZWISCHEN KRIEG UND FRIEDEN (German, PDF, 156 KB)

published in: Alexander Karschnia, Oliver Kohns, Stefanie Kreuzer, Christian Spies (Hgg.): ZUM ZEITVERTREIB. Strategien – Institutionen – Lektüren – Bilder. Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2005, S. 33 – S. 46.
 

BRECHTBEATZ (PDF, 139 KB)

published in: Patrick Primavesi, Olaf A. Schmitt (Hg.): AufBrüche. Theaterarbeit zwischen Text und Situation. Festschrift für Hans-Thies Lehmann. Theater der Zeit, Recherchen 20. Berlin 2004. S. 208-214.

Alexander Karschnia – Nicola Nord&Co. Interview by Irene Moundraki from the National Theatre of Athens for the Magazine “Highlights” in 2005

You two have been working together as an ensemble. How does this function?

Alex: We are co-founders of an artists’ network called andcompany&Co. We have both studied theatre-, film- and media-studies at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. I discovered practice out of theoretical curiosity; Nicola discovered theory after having been involved in practice for a long time.

Nicola: I made the conscious decision against acting schools and joined the university which also became my artistic education through different mentors, but mainly the teaching of Prof. Hans-Thies Lehmann who opened a whole new world for us beyond traditional theatre, who introduced us to an ‘other Brecht’, an un-orthodox reading and understanding of his theatre and how it is still unconsciously influencing new theatre makers, even performance art today.

• How is your experience in DasArts, this very pioneer institute? How do you work there?

Nicola: DasArts is a very unique place in the landscape of theatre and dance education. It is rather difficult to describe DasArts, and that already tells a lot about it, because it is always changing. Every artist I met who has been to DasArts, experienced a different DasArts, because it is truly a mobile art school, movable in its own methods and themes. As a post-graduate school for makers (theatre, dance, visual art and others) they constantly try to re-invent themselves in order to keep a dynamic educational model. They redefine their program twice a year, having so called ‘group-blocks’ with different mentors and themes from different artistic fields, during which 12-14 students meet to engage in a process of discovery, exchange and challenge. I participated in three of those blocks; in the second I wrote part of the script of our new piece: europe an alien and was able to invite andcompany&Co. to work on it. I just finished my third block with an Individual Trajectory, an intense study and research period, which ended in the solo-work: little red (room). I will finish DasArts in 2006 with my final project. DasArts is a place where connections are made – between theatre and society and theory and practice, and is therefore an ideal place for me as theatre-maker dealing with those issues, as well as for our group andcompany&Co. that also benefits from the great network, which DasArts has built over the years. The goal of DasArts is to constantly expand the vision what theatre might be, they keep on pushing boundaries without being afraid of taking risks, and are therefore a great and inspiring think- and do-tank in my work.

• What do you think about theatrical education?

Nicola: There is nothing like DasArts in Germany, if you want to make theatre, there are still not much more choices than to apply at a director’s school or at an actor’s school. Most of those schools are state-schools, connected to state-theatres, and even if the education might be technically excellent, the carrier of those who make it is preprogrammed: You end up in an ensemble of a state-theatre, if you are lucky you get to play bigger parts and this allows you at least some possibilities. We chose a different way, because we want to choose who we work with. I think that workshops, scenic projects or summer-academies are a great way to get ahead and to try out new forms. The workshop I gave last year for theatre students in Frankfurt, where we worked with the original sound material of the Frankfurter Auschwitz-Trial, had a very strong impact on my work in general. I believe that those intense periods of dealing with each other can have a deeper effect on someone, than years of common art-education. Brecht said that talent meant interest – and getting people interested, that is what I like to do when I give a workshop.

• What are the purposes of your company?

Nicola: We believe in collaboration as the very essence of theatre and also that theatre will cease to exist if it’s not searching for new collaborators from other fields (fine arts, photography, videomaking, etc.) But instead of a Wagnerian “Gesamtkunstwerk” we’re looking for a loose artistic association based on the idea of networking and the art of conspiracy. We work preferably with artists from different artistic fields, the other two co-founders of our company, Sascha Sulimma and I. Helen Jilavu, are a musician and a photographer. In our research period all of us work in our own fields and inspire the process, but at the end we do theatre together, putting everybody on
stage. The most important is to make all participants visible, even the technicians. For every production we invite new artists, for europe an alien there will be the graphic designer Louise Kolff and the Greek dramaturge Alexandros Efklidis, for our last production: for urbanites – nach den großen Städten, we invited a German filmmaker, an inventor of game shows and a theoretician, writing a dissertation about computer games. But the “&Co.” does not only include other artists, but also the members of the audience whose co-presence is the specific quality of theatre, who cofabulate (Brecht) and also co-produce a theatrical performance (Heiner Müller).

Alex: We want to undermine the distinction between actor and spectator and encourage the “spectator” to come out of the closet. For us the “stage” can be anywhere, a street, a club, an empty house or ruins of industrial culture, it doesn’t matter, what matters is that there is a place in society that is marked by quotation marks: “theatre”. We shouldn’t forget that in ancient Greece and in Elizabethan England plays were performed during daytime: the Erynnians as well as Hamlet’s ghost appeared in bright sun-light! (End of quote)

Nicola: That’s why we prefer theater without a roof.

• You have chosen to work a lot on political issues (p.e. refugees, exiles). Why do you choose them?

Alex: The crisis of liberal democracies because of mass-media has not become less since the early 1920’s, the triumph of the radio, it has become worse. The ‘theatricality of politics’ is a problem that is not to be solved by a new form of ‘authenticity’ or ‘purity’ of the political realm, but by staging a critique on the stage of theater, of using ‘theatricality against theatricality’: spy vs. spy.
Nicola: But that doesn’t mean, that our theatre is political, because of the issues we choose, rather we want to make theatre in a political way. Collaboration is rule nr. 1 for this project, nr. 2 is the way we deal with issues, for example the question of exile and refuge: We don’t use them as topics that are put on stage, but rather as challenges that question the whole idea of “stage”, “theatre” etc. Like Brecht said in 1936: “The modern audience member comes into the theatre as a customer but also like a refugee.” Rather than actors talking about refugees we want to work with this situation of theatre as refuge and actors as exiles, exiled on stage.

• Do you believe that theatre can have a serious part on facing and dealing with these problems?

Alex: Only very indirect, today theatres can probably only help facing problems by refusing to play their part, their role of ‘enlightened entertainment’, of cultural education and identity building. The idea of we-are-we has to be challenged, to fight with the invisible fourth wall that separates the stage from the audience is also a fight against the territorial border that keeps refugees outside – and sometimes citizens inside. And it is a never-ending fight, which is the first lesson, the most important one. We think that the question of borders and transgressions is a, maybe the central topic of today and we should start to face the fact that we are dealing with very new borders that are very flexible and very rigid at the same time.

• What do you believe that the theatre of today is? Do you think that you are working on a new kind of theatre?

Alex: The crisis of the theatre today is the crisis of the nation-state. We need a theatre for the global village, a theatre that cuts off its roots and starts to wander around again: Actors used to be migrants, they were traveling people, and it was a nomadic artform. The whole idea of a standing stage, of theatre inside a house was the dream of nation-builders, of artists-as-statesmen, cultural leaders (in Germany Lessing, Goethe & Schiller). We don’t believe in ‘world-theater’ in the sense of “the whole world is a stage” (Jacques in As You Like It), a ‘global theater’ as a some sort of Über-nationaltheatre, but a minor theater, a small stage, a theater as fluid as financial flows that materializes itself from time to time somewhere to mark a space with quotationmarks. QUOTE–UNQUOTE.

• Do you think that theatre has lost its autonomy and has to contribute with all other arts and with new tendencies?

Nicola: Sure. Theatres often remind us of deserted temples or empty churches. Instead of asking the believers to return we should change the religion and use the houses in the meantime for something else, for festivities, for gatherings, etc. The actors should go on strike together – in order to do something together, to finally find out what they could do if they collaborated. I believe that theatre-people already have a dream of how they would like to work, and they only have to wake up to make the dream come true. Some other artists could help to wake them up, they are already knocking on the doors of the theatres. Because there is a promise hidden in theatre-making: the
promise to do something together.

Alex: Actors are workers, the theatres today are sweat-shops, and they operate as agent of alienation, of alienated labor. But while the factories are dissolving and the work-force disintegrating, actors are still kept inside the walls. We have to fight alienation (Entfremdung) with alienation (Verfremdung): the A-Effect!

• Do you believe in the power of text? And how this power can be transformed in worldwide theatre language?

Alex: We take pleasure in text, we believe in text-theatre, but that’s something completely different as literature-theatre. Unfortunately theatres still believe in literature instead of in theatre, that is to say: in drama not only as a form, but as the norm. That is the spirit of the 19th century, but what was still well and alive in the 20th might change in the 21st. By looking beyond the dramatic theatre there is a lot to discover: we are living in a world of texts, we read when we are awake, we write while we are asleep. With Heiner Müller we believe that the theatre of the text has not started to exist yet, but we are looking forward to its arrival like others wait for UFO’s.

• Your last project is inspired a lot by Greece. You have returned to continue your research. What is about?

Nicola: Our project is called europe an alien and is inspired by a workshop that we were invited to give by Helene Varopoulou at the 5th theatre summer academy EXILES NOMADS REFUGEES in Soufli. We were fascinated by the sight of the Evros river, such a beautiful landscape, such a tough border: mine-fields like the death-strip that separated East from West Germany. It’s separating not only Greece from Turkey, but also the EU from non-EU or better said: not-yet-EU. This border is the ‘limes’ of the Union that prevents so-called ‘illegal aliens’, refugees and migrants to enter. For them it’s a deadly trap.

Alex: The peculiar thing about rivers is that they connect at the same time that they separate. Probably the days of the Evros as border-river are counted – just like the Rhine. You can already see the Evros-delta turn into a very special euro-region, it will attract many tourists, especially eco-tourists, for sure, which will probably be the end of the great nature which is there today – protected from people because it is a military zone! That’s why it is a natural reserve area, many birds are stopping there to rest from their natural migration routes. Ornithologists watch them with their special looking glass and are watched by soldiers with their special looking glasses…

Nicola: We travelled back to the Evros to find out more about Europe: We came in our bus from Germany to Greece: Exit and re-enter Europe. At the Greek border we had some problems with our passports (see our webdiary: www.andco.de). We crossed seven borders on the way, the last one was the border to Turkey, where the Evros is called Meriç Nehri. And we drove to the Bosporus to cross the bridge to Asia. The tricky thing about borders is that even if they disappear, they are not gone, they just move somewhere else. We want to now: where will the border move this time? And where do you draw the border between Europe an Asia then?

Alex: It seems that for the new Europe there are no borders, only a frontier like in the pioneer-days of the USA. This frontier is not directed towards the West but towards the East, but it is also facing ASIA as its ‘other’. Our play is alienation in itself, it is not bound to the real territorial border, but to an idea, an idea called “Europa”: europe an alien.
 

May 2004. Frankfurt’s “Theater am Turm” is closed down: “dead city, dead theatre” – thus sounds the swansong of the avantgarde. Five performers dance a silly exalted Sirtaki, the dance of letters around the tower. It is the first major project of andcompany&Co., “for urbanites – after big cities,” short-circuiting TAT’s history in the neighborhood of Bockenheim with Brecht’s gold digger city, Mahagonny: when there is no more gold, i.e. culture, the gold-diggers move on.
The international artist collective andcompany&Co first moved to Amsterdam, then to Berlin, where they are currently artists-in-residence at Hebbel-am-Ufer (HAU). Their performances were staged at Brussels KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS (2007), steirischer herbst in Graz (2007), Wiener Festwochen (2008), Theaterformen (2009), Festival Impulse (2009), and Dortmund’s festival favoriten 08 – Theaterzwang (2008/10), where “little red” won the cultural award of North Rhine Westphalia and in venues all around world.

andcompany&Co. was founded in Frankfurt/Main in 2003 by Alexander Karschnia (author, performer and theorist), Nicola Nord (singer, performer) and Sascha Sulimma (musician and DJ). The name is programmatic, as it creates openness on both ends: it is understood as an open network of collaboration between artists from different fields – so far, for example, with author Bini Adamczak, visual artists Noah Fischer, Hila Peled, and Jan Brokof, composer Thomas Myrmel, MAE ensemble for contemporary music and Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung.

Part of the game is that collaborators are onstage as performers. In their laboratories, so-called &Co.LABs, andcompany&Co. develop small, fast projects together with variable partners. They are conceived as a test set-up for a collective artistic future. Their plays are storages of 20th and 21st century history: beginning with Mahagonny through the foundation of Europe (“europe an alien”, 2006), to a ‘trilogy of a reencounter with the 20th century’ about the history and end of communism (“little red (play): ‘herstory’”, 2006; “time republic”, 2007; “Mausoleum Buffo”, 2009) and the Hamletian drama of the hesitant prince (“showtime. trial & terror”, 2008) to the Native Americans’ fatal last summer (“West in Peace”, 2009), a ‘brasilianised’ Brecht (“FatzerBraz” 2010), an updated Lenz (“Pandämonium Germanicum: Lenz im Loop” 2011), a new version of the famous post-war-comedy “Aren’t we wonderful” with the Ensemble of Deutsches Theater Göttingen, an “Ark B.” with 20 kids and a historical Schiller-work on the coming insurrection in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

andcompany&Co. rummage our collective memories with an offensive strategy of associative bricolage. The pieces found in our culture’s attic create meaning only in connection with each other: The fall of the Berlin wall and the Beatles, Erich Honecker and Dagobert Duck, John Lennon and Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and Karl May are knit into a thick referential system, a repartee of citations indicating genealogical connections. Thus, a polyphony of yesterday’s undead philosophical, political and pop cultural ideas haunts a theatre for the present moment which operates with networks and ‘dotcoms’, but without copy protection. Anything unearthed during research is reworked according to the musical principles of sampling and remix: cardinal directions indicating ideologies and utopias are sent through the shredder, are displaced and put into new contexts. Any play by andcompany&Co. is like a ride on the ghost train through the dumps of collective memory, and in repeating and disputing yesterday’s hackneyed philosophical and aesthetic ideas, utopia suddenly becomes possible again, if only in rags. Long forgotten phrases harbor new promises, and the power of language, i.e. its potential to create realities, is reexamined in post-postmodern fashion: “How to make Ernst with words?” (How to get serious with words), the 2006 Lecture-Performance “Kriegserklärung” (declaration of war). How can citations become serious, and acting-as-if turn into action? Thus, the very conditions of performing are put up for negotiation.

Their collaborative approach is closely related to the objects of negotiation. The artistic process practically produces utopia: it claims heterogeneity and openness, many collaborators have left their traces in andcompany&Co.’s theatrical language – and vice versa. And yet the trademark is always recognizable. Empty stages are textual landscapes and spaces of memory, where actions of performers sediment. They are playgrounds, collections of material and a wasteland of research results, where (almost) everything is handmade. The block lighting set consisting of bulbs and the like is managed by the artists, the complex sound system consisting of gongs, a children’s piano, singing telephone receivers and pre-produced remixes are controlled on stage: the stage machinery is performance. While it is switched on and off, stories are told and history is made. Speaking with Walter Benjamin, the journey leads into the future through remains and traces of the past: looking back forward! Thus, andcompany&Co. present a temponautical theatre with performers as voyagers through time, using timeline as a spring board into the future.