Theatertreffen 2013 (review)

Theatertreffen—Berlin’s annual gathering of German-speaking theatres showcasing productions chosen as the season’s most “remarkable” by a multigenerational jury composed of seven critics—turned fifty last May. The jubilee was celebrated with an anniversary monograph, eulogies, parties, and a special birthday bus tour around vernal Berlin that took the audience past the city’s theatre houses, while showing them video fragments of productions from the festival’s past. The diversity of theatre forms presented by Theatertreffen has increased significantly in the last ten years, since it started including independent troupes, documentary theatre, and performance art. Last year’s festival, however, was criticized for being rather placid, with many of the productions praised merely as confections displaying admirable craft. Concurrently, metatheatricality, theatre’s deconstructive self-mirroring, has been one of the most remarkable features of Theatertreffen’s last two decades, and the 2013 selection showed that German theatre-makers are still fond of making theatre itself their primary subject matter.

Jérôme Bel, one of the groundbreakers of “conceptual dance,” remains faithful to his principle of challenging the dogmas of representational theatre. In Disabled Theater, he worked with the actors of Zürich’s Hora Theater, one of the few professional theatres to produce plays with mentally challenged persons (established in 1989), on devising strategies for them to try their utmost at playing themselves. Eleven of Hora’s actors, aged between 18 and 51, engaged in a series of tasks onstage, none of which provided the safety of a role: enduring the silent confrontation with the audience for a minute; introducing themselves with their name, age, and occupation (they all describe themselves as actors); announcing their disability; showing a choreography they created for a song of their choice; and, finally, saying what they thought of the experience. Despite all the wonderful individuality that Disabled Theateradvocated and put on display, it did not pretend to conceal the performers’ desire to belong to the normative majority that they seem to reticently acknowledge. With some of the disabilities professed to be of the learning kind, there was an especially pronounced, self-reflexive way that this production, in each reiteration, risked losing its original unaffectedness and becoming a mere drill, thus threatening to disrupt Bel’s self-proclaimed quest for imperfection. For her “immense strength and frightening tenderness,” Julia Häusermann, an actress with Down syndrome, was conferred the Alfred Kerr Prize for the outstanding achievement of an up-and-coming actor.

Mumbling, an activity that usually produces anarchic effects, was meticulously orchestrated in Murmel Murmel(Volksbühne, Berlin), a strangely literal scenic transposition of a play of the same title written in 1974. Murmelis the only word that the Swiss Fluxus-, Action-, and Object-artist Dieter Roth (1930–98) used in various graphic constellations in the play’s 176 pages. In director Herbert Fritsch’s physical theatre reconstruction, multicolor and multilevel legs and borders were pulled down and slid in to create passageways for a dozen scatterbrained characters that trampled around and, in a dead-serious way, swallowed down, spat out, recited, or collectively chanted the eponymous word. Pronounced umpteen times, it gathered an unexpected richness of form. From Roth’s poetry, Fritsch developed a theatre that is “simply” a concrete treatment of sound, and thus exposed the theatre as an art with multiple means, all potentially capable of becoming autonomous objects of aesthetic experience.

Director Katie Mitchell furthered her method of simultaneously showing the live action of the play and the filmed “making of” it. Night Train( Reise durch die Nacht; Schauspiel Köln), based on Friederike Mayröcker’s 1984 novella, depicted a nocturnal ride from Paris to Vienna, with the protagonist recalling her traumatic childhood, bemoaning the losses brought by aging, and reenacting her alienation from her husband. Visible from both outside and inside, designer Alex Eales’s train compartments served as both the setting of the speechless live action and as miniature film studios where actors and film crew shot the traveler’s memory scraps, which were transmitted...